John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Steve Stockman. He’s a producer, writer, and director of over 200 commercials that’s probably gone up since he wrote that web series films, music videos, and TV shows. He wrote, produced and directed the award-winning MGM feature film Two Weeks with Sally Field, and he’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, how to Shoot Video. That Doesn’t suck. So Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve (00:37): Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate it.

John (00:39): So you probably don’t have empirical data on this, but you probably have some anecdotal data. How long will somebody watch a video? That sucks?

Steve (00:48): Oh, that sucks. Three seconds. We’re very attuned to good video versus bad video. If you remember the buttons on a radio, because I used to be in radio, it took a while to understand that it takes about three seconds for someone to decide they don’t like what you’re doing, and that’s true in video as well, I think.

John (01:12): So let’s talk a little bit about what are some of the things that make a video hard to watch, which essentially probably fits it into the category of sucks.

Steve (01:20): Well, the first thing that makes it hard to watch is, oh, let me back up philosophically. The thing that makes video hard to watch is when you don’t feel comfortable that it’s going to a place that you’re interested in. So what I mean by that is that it’s kind of like turning the pages on a book about marketing. If you’re reading the first couple pages and you go, this person doesn’t know what they’re talking about, this is not for me. This book is badly written. I don’t understand the language, the points are nonsense. You’re going to stop reading that book in about three pages. And there are things that we do as people who produce videos that clue people in the same way that we have no idea what we’re doing, which makes sense because until 10 years ago, nobody ever asked normal human beings to make a video.

(02:11): They called people like me and said, can you come in with your crew and make a video? But now we carry around our cell phones and we are expected all day to be shooting video. And the truth is that we grew up on video from the time we were born. So we understand how it works, but we don’t speak it very well. So the shorter answer is that the minute somebody shows you that they don’t know anything about how to light a scene or that they’re pointing the camera in a way that’s unattractive, or their camera is shaking or their audio is terrible, or they cut between two things that make no sense to you, basically the minute that happens, we lose faith that you’re taking us on a journey and instead go, oh, this is terrible. Is it over soon or can I go? And then we click to one of 300 billion other things that we could be watching instead of your video.

John (03:08): So the book title is How to Shoot Video, which sort of implies, oh, you get out your camera and you turn it on, right, that’s the shoot. But there are many component parts, right to go to make a video that is something somebody’s going to watch. How do you think in terms of even preparing before the camera?

Steve (03:26): Well, I think the term of preparing is surprising to some people, especially because we’re used to, for home videos, we just pull out our camera and point, or we get to the Niagara Falls and we go, oh, that looks cool, and we go click and we roll for a couple seconds. But in truth, preparing is probably the biggest difference between what a professional does and what an amateur does. And so any preparation is good, but the key thing is to think about what you want to communicate to your audience, and you need to think about that not in terms of, oh, I want to promote a big sale that I’m having. You need to communicate that in terms of what’s in it for the audience to watch my video. Because a video that doesn’t get watched is like a tree that falls in the forest with no one around, right?

(04:19): It’s like nobody hears it. If you do a video that’s so bad that you drive people away, you might as well not have made it. And in fact, you would’ve been better off not spending the time or the money or calling in the favors or whatever you were doing to cause that video to come into existence. So the first thing you need to do is think about what your audience wants from you and what they want from your video. Seriously consider how you might deliver that to them. Video does some things really well. It does motion, it takes you on a trip or it does emotion. It makes you feel or laugh or cry or whatever. So motion and emotion are big things. Marketers often get hung up on information delivery and video doesn’t do pure information delivery particularly well, which is why commercials are never Hondas are on sale. Go buy them in big letters on black because if it were that easy, everyone would do it, right? Video just doesn’t do information. We won’t sit still for it without a story or without some emotion. And so your prep of what you’re going to say to people that they’ll value and how you’re going to deliver it is the first most important thing for you to do.

John (05:34): So in marketing copywriting specifically, there’s all kinds of advice that spend 90% of your time on the headline because you’ve got to get people interested in reading the rest of the copy. You see a lot of videos, especially on YouTube that are essentially an ad and you’ve got five seconds because I can click away after five seconds. So what’s the similar approach to the headline? I hear people talk about a hook. You have to get somebody really intrigued in five seconds. Do we overdo that? Does that make sense?

Steve (06:08): Yes and no. First, let me completely agree with the premise. Intrigue is the most important thing that you can supply to your audience, but if you make films or television shows or commercials, you quickly realize that’s true. Every single second of all two hours that you’re making that is intrigue is making the audience want to know what happens next. And in the hooky kind of YouTube first five seconds world, people tend to go for something sensational in hopes of intriguing. But there again, it’s not that easy. Car crashes are intriguing, but once we know it’s a car crash, we drive by, right? YouTube videos are the same. Once we know you’ve used some schlocky, come on, then you’re kind of in the neighborhood of those clickbait headlines like Elon Musk opens up about his feelings about something and you click on that once and you go, they don’t know anything about Elon Musk that I don’t know. And then you go look at something else, right? So trying to do a hooky opening that’s based on cheating the audience or grabbing them with a car wreck, it doesn’t pay off in the long run for you because trust is the most important thing you can provide to your audience. Yeah,

John (07:30): They feel cheated. They feel cheated, right? Yeah,

Steve (07:32): Exactly. But intrigue is saying to them, Hey, I’m going to show you something and let me show you the beginning of it, and now let me show you where this is going, and I want you to think about how it could all end up. And that’s really storytelling in a true sense.

John (07:50): I wouldn’t ask a lot of people this, but just in the time we’ve spent together, I think this is going to make a lot of sense to you. What’s the difference between narrative and storytelling as far as what you just described, the common movie where they start with the car crash, but that’s because that’s where the protagonist ended up, and now we’re going to go back to how they got there and tell the story. Am I making sense there? I mean, do you bring this idea of narrative into your story?

Steve (08:18): Yeah, even in commercials, story form is very important in video. So a story has a hero, a beginning, a middle, and an end, right? Right. And if you get that wrong in a commercial, then the end of the commercial is very dissing. And if you get it wrong, if you don’t set up a good beginning where you have a hero who has some sort of dilemma or problem or question or is in a situation that becomes very not intriguing, in other words, we need to immediately care about a character and where they might be going. And if we do that, then we are in a story. And I would argue that all marketing video needs to be storified skillfully. So let me give you an example of what I mean. If you have a, I don’t know, a guitar shop, one of a big music store where you sell guitars and other musical instruments to kids and people in your community who buy those things, and you’re known for antique guitars, not antique a hundred years old, but you’ve got the classics, the Stratocasters, and all those things that are like the ones that the rock stars played in the olden days, and maybe you even have a few of those around the shop and you’re known for that.

(09:37): There’s two ways that you could do a marketing video to put on your website. One way is to show, look, here’s a Stratocaster, and it was once played by somebody in Chuck Berry’s band and it’s $1,500 and then here’s another one and it’s $670. And your audience would basically be gone in about that three seconds. But the other way you could do it is you could think about what your audience loves about your store and how they love the fact that you have these vintage guitars. And you could tell a story of a high school girl who comes into your store and wants to buy the same kind of double barreled guitar that Jimmy Page played on Led Zeppelin Stairway to Heaven. And you could show in this video how she comes into the store, tries the one that you have draws a huge crowd with her virtuoso playing, loves the guitar, plunks down her 1500 hard earned dollars, this antique guitar, and then fast forward to her debut recital at high school where she’s playing with her band and killing it. That’s a story about what people love about your store that is way more intriguing and gets across exactly the same message as showing a picture of a guitar with a sign. The difference is nobody’s going to watch the pictures of the guitars with price tags, and everybody’s going to watch the story of this amazing young woman. And so by thinking in terms of story and delivering a story to your audience, you’ve vastly elevated the kind of marketing video that you’re doing.

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Steve (12:30): Yeah, exactly. And also giving them something of value so that entertainment is of value to them, that emotion that they feel is of value to them. The chance to be with the hero of your story, this young woman and see her have a goal, have a way to get it done at your store and then succeed with it. People love that. I mean, that’s what we pay to go to the movies for, that we buy our subscription to Netflix for is those kinds of stories. So if you can do a real story that your customers will be interested in, that’s gold.

John (13:06): So let’s talk a little bit about the technical aspects. I know that we could spend all kinds of time unpacking all kinds of equipment and whatnot, but there’s the camera itself, there’s sound, there’s lights. I mean, there’s a lot of things that need to be considered, especially since a lot of my audience are amateur, so to speak. They’re producing video that they need as content, let’s put it that way. What are some of the most important things to consider as you consider the technical aspects?

Steve (13:32): There are two super important principles of learning to shoot video better from a technical aspect. One is that your smartphone shoots better video than Alfred Hitchcock could shoot with a crew of 150 mid 20th century. So it is smarter and more adept at lighting. It does focus beautifully. It does 4K video. It looks amazing, and you can shoot a movie on it. And that’s important because if you go on YouTube and you get all these tips about how to shoot video, you’re going to see a whole bunch of stuff that’s about three point lighting and framing and all that stuff. And that’s good information, but it’s not the information that you really need to create an effective video because in truth, your camera will light for you. It has algorithms in it that make it very hard to produce a picture. Not impossible, but hard.

(14:37): The only thing cameras don’t do particularly well is sound or cell phone cameras. And for that, if you’re doing a marketing video that you expect your customers to watch, you really need to get an external microphone or two and make sure that everything sounds really great, but looks-wise, your camera will do it all. And the reason I start with that is because amateurs especially get hung up on, well, what equipment? I need equipment. It’s like if you think about if you’re a golfer, if didn’t go out and buy the $25,000 golf clubs day one of your journey to the first lesson, what you did was you probably either rented or borrowed some clubs. And the reason you did that is because when you’re a complete amateur, you don’t know the difference between the $25,000 golf club and a $10 golf club. You’re learning that. And so learn with what you have.

(15:36): So most of us have smartphones, which are terrific if you’re going to shoot your own video. Some of us have DSLR cameras that also shoot great video and maybe have better lenses. If you’re a photographer, a skilled photographer, you will notice the difference between the lens of a really nice DSLR and an iPhone. But what you want to do is find a piece of equipment that’s easy for you to use so that you can focus on getting the message that you want to cross and telling the story you want to tell without having to worry about how the equipment works. And as you practice and get better, you’re going to realize that the $10 golf club is a piece of crap and you’re really going to need to upgrade. But you’ll learn that that’s part of your learning process, and you’ll learn what you like to shoot on. And you’ll get frustrated with, the phone doesn’t do this or this, and I really wish it did, so I’m going to upgrade to a prosumer black magic camera or Sony or something. But you don’t need to worry about that until you’re really good at video. People worry

John (16:40): About, yeah, you might learn that. You might learn that you just need to hire somebody that you don’t like doing it.

Steve (16:45): Yes. And there’s no shame in that, right? I mean, for example, I’m a director and I love video, but I don’t actually shoot it. I hire people who love to shoot video to work on my crew, and they make the pictures beautiful, and I look at them and go, could you tweak that a little here? Or Could you point a little more this way? Or We missed that part of the shot. That’s my job, but I don’t handle the camera because it’s not my thing. And the same with audio. I mean, I would never do my own audio, but I know a guy who’s brilliant and can mic 27 people at once and capture everything they do perfectly, and he’ll never make a mistake on the set. And he comes to all my shoots because he’s great at that. So yes, I think it was one of my favorite philosophers of the 20th century. Alf, do you remember Alf, the puppet prime alien life form? Sure. Yes. Alf said, the secret to happiness in life is to figure out what you don’t do and then don’t do it. So I’ve always tried to live by that.

John (17:53): So true. This is a silly question, but I have to ask it because everybody asks me, how long should a video be?

Steve (17:59): Video should be long enough to tell the story you want to tell in an interesting way, not a second longer. So if you think about it, if I have very good luck and a very skilled cast and crew and a pant load of money, I can make a movie like Marvel Avengers, and it will last three hours, and you will sit there through the whole thing and enjoy all of it. If I’m a bad videographer, 30 seconds will make you want to chew your leg off like you were caught in a bear trap and run, or hobble, I guess, if you chewed your leg off. So you definitely, it’s really all about the story and the skill of the storyteller, and not at all about the length of this should be. We used to think that the web wanted short videos, and sometimes it still does, but YouTube encourages its creators to do 10 or 20 minute videos on a regular basis. TV shows have always been half an hour or an hour long, or really 22 minutes and 46 minutes long with commercials. Movies have always been about two hours. They were an hour and a half maybe in the forties, and now they tend toward three, but they’re in there somewhere. The question is how long is it interesting? And what real estate do you need to tell the story? Because the minute you waste the audience’s time, they’re gone, right?

John (19:25): Yeah. When we were starting off air, you told me you have a video course that actually accompanies the book or that has supplemented the book. You want to tell us a little bit about that?

Steve (19:34): Yeah. I wrote the book 10 years ago and it’s been updated since. So the current version is very current and how to shoot video that doesn’t suck, doesn’t really talk about equipment. It talks about this communication, how to take your audience on a journey, how to think about communicating to them with video. And over the years, people have written me and said, why isn’t this a video course? Which I always thought was kind of funny. I always figured it as a book. And then the audio book did really well, and none of it has much to do with pictures, but people asked for it. And so I thought about it and it sort of became an opportunity to add things that weren’t in the book. So I did this video course that you can get at my website, steve stockman.com, and it’s 22 lessons, 22 short lessons with exercises that cover most of the key things from the book and then a bunch of other things.

(20:28): There’s a whole separate section on marketing video and how to do something that your customers are going to love to watch and that will help them understand more about you and make them feel good about working with you. And then there’s a whole bunch of other stuff, and you get the exercises, and I demo the exercises. And so different people like to learn different ways. If you like reading books, the book is there, and if you would rather have somebody show you for a couple hours how it’s done that you can break up into little bits and do on your own, the course is there as well.

John (21:03): Awesome. Well, Steve, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Bonnie Wan. As the head of brand strategy for the storied ad agency, Goodby and Silverstein, Bonnie Wan has helped the world’s most iconic brands align with their essential virtues using a tool called a creative brief. So when she found herself on the precipice of her own deep dissatisfaction and doubt, she turned the same tool inward. And we’re going to talk about that because she talks about it in her book Life Brief Method, how to Recenter goals and values in your life for bettering Your Workplace. So Bonnie, welcome to the show.

Bonnie (00:48): Thank you for having me, John. It’s an honor to be here.

John (00:52): Well, so let’s start with you talk about the book being kind of a tool for people navigating life’s crossroads. So would you say that’s who this book is really written for? Somebody who feels in transition or maybe stuck?

Bonnie (01:05): I think that’s the reason some people will want to come into it because when we feel stuck, we suddenly are grasping and opening our minds and hearts to new approaches. But at the end of the day, I think the book can be useful for anyone across all the various parts of their lives. And in the 14 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve met people using this practice across everything they’ve written briefs for everything from parenting to relationships to their careers and their side hustles.

John (01:40): Awesome. Well, we’ll talk about some of those examples, but first I guess I want to hear a little bit of your story. I mean, I said in the bio in your intro that some of this came out of your own searching. So I’d love to hear a little bit about how this practice has maybe transformed your life or at least your process of decision-making.

Bonnie (01:59): Yeah, so it originated in a moment of personal crisis for me, a crisis of meaning in my marriage. Back in 2010, I’d already been doing brand strategy for decades, so I was very practiced in it for business, helping companies get really clear about the essence, who they are, what they believe, and what they want so that they could be as innovative and creative as. So when I found myself at the crossroads myself, I thought my husband was the problem. I thought my marriage was broken, and the same stories were swirling in my head. And again, at the lowest darkest point it was either I was going to move ahead and fracture this thing we had created or I was going to try something new. And in that moment, a reflex popped up, which was my strategy reflex. I recognized the confusion I was facing and the urgency and need for change.

(03:06): So instead of operating as someone who was troubled in their marriage, I put on my strategist hat and I dropped into what is at the essence of what’s going on here. And I started writing because as a strategist, I like to say my job is to find meaning in messiness. I look at a company, the problems are in how their category is changing. I help them find the way through by dropping into what’s essential, not all the noise. So that’s what I did right there in my childhood bedroom, I dropped in through writing to, the essential question for me is, what do I want? Not what does my marriage need? What do my children expect? Not what my parents want for me, but what do I want? At the end of the day, and after a couple of hours of writing, I stepped back and I looked at what had come out onto the page, and what I realized was my first big aha, which is, oh, my problem isn’t my husband, my problem is my relationship with time.

(04:17): Because everything I had written about was wanting more time to be with him, not fighting, negotiating, debating more time with my children, more presence and facelessness for myself. And once I was able to see that, and I could only see that because I had the distance of writing it was on a page and I could be in relationship with it, only then did I get that aha that took me into a different direction in terms of calling forth what my solutions could be for the real problem at hand, which is where I was aiming my attention, how I was prioritizing my time.

John (05:00): I want to dive more into that, but I feel like I’ve gotten a little ahead of myself. I know what a creative brief is, but maybe listeners, that analogy that really underpins the entire book, maybe we ought to back up a little bit and explain what that is and how you use that as an analogy from your professional work.

Bonnie (05:18): So the name kind of says it all right. It’s a brief meaning a distillation of creativity. So it’s a creative briefs are a sharp and sticky distillation of what a brand stands for, what a company stands for, and where their ambition is. And that brief is a single-minded single page document that culminates in a single idea about where we’re going and aligns everybody on a team to get onto that singular strategy. And that is usually expressed in a way that is explosive creatively, meaning once you read it, boom, you have so many ideas. And that’s what creative briefs do. Not only do they distill to the essence, but they expand your sense of possibility. A life brief does the same for people. It’s a clear and concise declaration of what you want expressed in a way that just tattoos onto your mind and into your heart so that every decision, choice, action you take starts and emanates from that place.

(06:37): So for instance, my marriage brief actually was handed to me from my husband. It was the second time that life briefing saved our marriage. It’s called Mad Love. And now the brief itself has five sharp declarative statements about what our partnership means to us. But it’s summarized in that phrase mad love because he asked me the question in the middle of a really everyday fight, are you still madly in love with me? And I was completely taken aback that was not what I was expecting to come out of his mouth, but once it came out of his mouth, an answer came up in my throat. And luckily I didn’t let it out in that moment because it was no, I am not madly in love with you. But it did stir stirred with me for weeks when I then had to unpack for myself first and foremost, because the life brief is a private practice of permission.

(07:38): I had to sit nakedly honest and think about do I want mad love? And that was hell, yes, I’m too young to not experience mad love ever again in my life. And then the harder question, do I want mad love with my husband? After 17 years of marriage, four kids, three moves, four moves maybe at that time. And eventually it got to the answer, yes, I do want mad love. And from there, once I declared it for myself, this is the private practice, it’s not for anybody else, but once I got to the exclamation point declaration of Yes, I am ready to be madly in love with my husband again, my action showed up automatically differently the next day.

John (08:24): This is probably not, well, maybe you’ve had this question, but as I go through the parts of this, I feel like this book is actually a really great primer on how to create a creative brief as well. Have you ever gone backwards instead of just you, your experience created the analogy, but now it’s like this is maybe the best book on a creative brief I’ve ever seen.

Bonnie (08:48): Thank you for saying that. It’s funny, writing the book made me a better strategy for sure, because my editor’s mantra to me was, so much of this is intuitive. Your job is to walk the blind horse down the mountain to water through your words. So I had to really translate everything that was so intuitive to three decades of doing this work and spell it out for somebody in some state in some suburb or rural farm who had never even heard about creativity, creative briefs, advertising, et cetera. So I really had to explain to a listen. And so it made me a better strategist. And then I just had one of my industry heroes read it and he said, what’s in here is a really great strategy book. So I honored, I felt honored that it has dual purposes.

John (09:48): Alright, so staying on that track a little bit, but I’ve done for 30 years myself, marketing strategy for small mid-size businesses. And one of the things that I struggle with the most, or I have to get people over is that in business in life, we are hobbled by a lot of limiting beliefs. And a lot of times people won’t do the bold thing in their business that the creative brief obviously screams to because they believe something that’s true or not true. So in life, that’s really the first step, isn’t it? I mean, what are some ways that a lot of times these limiting beliefs are very powerful or have a very powerful hold on people? So would you say that in some ways is the first step is understanding what these limiting beliefs are and the hold that they have?

Bonnie (10:32): Yes. The writing practice that this invites helps call forward those limiting stories or beliefs, and I hear them all the time in my workshops applied to personal lives and often they’re adopted or inherited from as young as childhood. I had a woman at a retreat say to me the first day of the retreat, my parents told me never to ask for what I want. It will always lead to disappointment, but it’s so great as you said, to be aware, oh wait, that’s not my story. At least it’s not built from my own experience of life. But that was something I was told and well-intentioned by people who love me and want to keep me safe, but now that I’ve created awareness around it and I can see it in writing now, let’s play with it like clay. What if it wasn’t true? What would I replace that story with?

(11:33): What evidence do I have that belief is true? What evidence do I have in my own experience of life or business that demonstrate the opposite of this belief is true. The other limiting belief that I think we all share culturally is that there are only ever two choices in life or business, yes or no stay or go this or that. Whereas growing up you and I in creative industries, marketing is a creative space in the world of business because you have to look beyond what is today and imagine what could be. And being in that creative space, having spent so many years in it, I see such a range of possibility beyond yes or no, stay or go, but we have to train ourselves. And that’s why I call it a practice. We have to practice imagining some really bold and brave what ifs. And only when we expand our minds that way can we start to pursue new sets of realities for our businesses and our lives.

John (12:48): I’m glad you mentioned the word practice because that’s where I think you diverge from. The idea of a creative brief is a lot of times for a creative brief, it’s more of a plan that we’re going to act on or we’re going to create goals around, whereas you call this a practice, and I think that’s where it really, I think it really diverges from the analogy a bit. What we probably ought to do is dive into what the practice or the approach looks like. You talk, there’s the three stages that you go through. So maybe start unpacking that a little bit.

Bonnie (13:19): Yeah, I’ll step back for a minute and just say, creative briefs are not quite plans, but they help us get to plans and actions. I see creative briefs as springboards because they don’t tell you the ideas nor how to execute on those ideas, but they do tell you a very sharp and potent starting place to think about how to solve business problem or a brand problem. And it is the starting point from which everyone, creatives, then producers, then makers, they all leap from that place. So it’s not exactly a plan, but it is the spark and catalyst for us to get to great ideas. And then the plans for those ideas. When I talk about practice, it is the practice of getting messy, then getting clear, then getting active, which are the three parts of the life brief and the book and getting messy is the part that we like to skip in this really fast-paced business culture we all work in, right?

(14:28): Everything’s urgent, everything’s a fire. But the important step is to step back and reflect and get clarity on your strategy before you invest a lot of time, energy, and money in the actions. If you don’t have the clarity of where you’re going to go, then you’re going to have a lot of U-turns. You’re going to have a lot of waste of expenditure. If you’re talking about a business, right? You’re going to be throwing spaghetti at the wall. So if you take a moment, it’s not a long time, but just to get messy, meaning getting all the ingredients out on the table so that you can make meaning of it. So you can sort it and separate it and then get really clear on what matters and then express it in a powerful, inspiring way. Now all your actions are going to sing, they’re going to be smart investments because you started from that place of clarity, and that takes practice. We still have to unwind all those years of behaviors that we have in terms of acting first and then apologizing later.

John (15:34): A lot of times when we work with brands, they bring us in as a third party outside, we can see things they can’t see or things that they just take for granted anymore. Right. So does this as a practice, is it hard to do yourself? I mean, do you need a coach to do this? Do you need a team of people that know you well to help get some of this out?

Bonnie (15:53): Great question. Well, if you’re going to do it solo, it does work solo. That’s why the writing is important, because when you write things down, you create distance between you and your feelings, you and your anxiety, you and your fears. And once captured and parked in writing, you can now look at it from a lens of curiosity and distance that is less fraught. But people do love life briefing together. And so in the earliest days of this practice, people loved attending the workshops. People loved buying my first thought starter. Workbooks that the agency printed could be silver senior partners, they’re so wonderful partners on this practice, but people would buy them in bundles of three or multiple bundles of three for their work team, for their girlfriend weekend as couples, as families. So I think there’s some elevated sense of permission and inspiration when people life brief together.

John (16:55): So particularly when we’re talking about somebody in transition or stuck and they go through this, is there sometimes a tendency to want to say, I’ve got to do something really big. I’ve got to quit my job, I’ve got to move across the country. That’s the only way to change it. When you actually talk about lasting and meaningful change comes more often from a daily flow of micro movements. And do you sometimes have to help people resist that? It might just be a slight change or a slight different way to think about, or even like we’ve had brands we worked with where we just changed the wording in their promise and it made all the difference.

Bonnie (17:30): That’s right. We often think because of the urgency of the fear or the feelings or the high stakes world of competition, right? There’s no time we have to go big or go home. I found the most dramatic changes happened in a series of tiny steps, just like you said, tiny inflections and shifts that made all the difference, that created ripple effects that led you to big change. So you yourself, don’t have to leap, burn the house down, quit your job, get a divorce, quit your children up for adoption, make your pet. It might feel that way. But if you have the clarity, again, you can start by the smallest singular step that is irresistible and inexcusable, and then see what unfolds from that small shift. And often no one else in your life notices that shift, but you and the internal shifts are actually the ones that are most powerful. And as soon as you shift how you show up in a meeting, how you show up with your spouse, how you show up with your kid, suddenly they might not even notice it, but they start to shift because it’s this interrelational dance that happens between how we show up and the world we’re in.

John (18:59): So you’ve, over the years of doing this, you’ve probably worked with people in different ages, different places in their life. Do you find that people approach it differently? Do you find that it applies almost the same way regardless of where people are? Or is there a perfect time in your life to do this?

Bonnie (19:18): There’s no perfect age, time or way, but I find the thing that is shared for people who really get into the process are unlocked by the practice, is that they are open. They come into it and open-hearted. If you’re resistant, this isn’t going to work because this is a self unlocking book and practice. You have to be open. And so seekers, people who really want to be bettering themselves in their business, in their work, in their relationships, it’s that openness that is shared across the demographics. So like we say in marketing, it’s more important to understand the mindset and what unites your audience than what makes them different. And this is a practice that cuts across all ages, stages, and types of moments and types of people. What makes it potent is if you come in open to trying something new.

John (20:26): Absolutely. Well, Bonnie, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You want to invite people where they might connect with you, learn more about your work, and obviously pick up a copy of the life brief.

Bonnie (20:35): Yes, the life brief.com is where you can find everything. The Life Brief book launches on January 16th, and it can be anywhere. You can buy a book, Amazon, bards and noble bookshop.org. Thank you John for having me.

John (20:52): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Speaker 1 (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and it’s another solo show. Today I want to talk about trust, and that sounds like a big fat hairy topic, doesn’t it? So I’ll be more specific. As a service provider, I want to talk about the idea of becoming the trusted advisor for your clients. I’m going to go into the benefits. I’m going to go into how to do that, but I’m guess let’s start with what I mean by trust in the context of business. Trust shows up in a lot of ways. It shows up in your reliability. Can somebody count on you to do what you promised to do? Comes out in credibility. I mean, do you have proof? Can you show that you’ve gotten results for other people that seem to have the same problem that I have or that your client or prospect has?

(01:02): It’s an element of intimacy. We deal with a lot of private information with clients. I mean, we get into their business so deeply. Sometimes I feel like we’re providing therapy, and I think that is a level that is wanted, but it also requires a level of vulnerability on their part, and that’s certainly something that you have to earn. There is an element of what’s a good term for it? Orientation and trust, meaning that a client comes to believe that you have their best interest at heart rather than just your own to make money. And how these elements that I’m defining as trust come about is varied. I mean many ways, but let’s talk about some of the dimensions of trust. And I made a list, so I’m going to kind of read from it. Competence, you build trust by demonstrating your capability and proficiency in your field.

(01:56): A lot of the way that we do that is by actually showing a proven system, installing a proven system for us. Consistency. We’ve been at this 30 years, so there’s a trail, a long trail. We hear it every day from people who come to us as you’ve been around for a long time, you keep doing this. There’s nobody saying anything bad about you. I mean, those are things that lead to the dimension of trust care. I mean, a lot of times people will think of trust as I can trust you because you care about our results. And that’s very true character that shows up every day in every word, in every meeting, even in your marketing. I think character shows up as a dimension of trust and then communication, certainly owning up to mistakes, being honest about what somebody can expect, celebrating the wins with folks.

(02:48): I mean, that’s all part of it. And then a level of commitment that you can show that you really are in it to win it, in it to help your client get the results or the value that they’re after. So those are all things that have to come into play in your marketing, certainly in your fulfillment to be a trusted advisor. So far have built up just what it is, maybe the definition of it, just for this context. I mean, I think we all growing up we’re taught what trust meant and what it didn’t mean. But in the business context, I think there are special elements that go with it. However, now I’m going to talk about the value of trust on top of it, creating what I think are much more fulfilling relationships with clients is far more profitable. Let’s just be honest. You can charge a lot more money if you have a reputation for trust, if people believe that what you’re, I mean, if you can prove that you’ve gotten results for folks, people are going to pay more for that.

(03:50): You think about the example of a referral. If somebody is referred to you quite often, I mean, we still need to ask what the reasonable price is going to be, but quite often price goes down the list. It’s not the number one component because there’s risk, particularly in service providers, right? I mean, you’re selling air, so there’s risk in engaging anyone. And so the reason prices is such a consideration is because we don’t trust that there’s going to get a result or we’ve never worked with you before, so we don’t know. So the idea that somebody who I already trust you allows me to borrow that trust, that’s why referrals are so, such a potent way really to build a business, word of mouth, such a potent way to build business because there’s a level of trust that is extended with that relationship. But I think that it’s also important for you to build that level of trust through your marketing, but also through your fulfillment.

(04:53): One of the things that we do is we offer strategy, but a lot of agencies just offer retainers. So you come to ’em and say, okay, it’s whatever amount per month the rest of my life, hope you can get the result. We have a process we call strategy first, and everybody goes through that process first. We don’t sell a retainer. We have to develop the strategy before we can really even develop what a plan or retainer engagement would look like. And what we found is that certainly that attracts a certain type of client, an investor client, which we have found to really be for our services, the best type of client. But it also gives us the space and the ability to develop a level of trust where we become a trusted advisor. So I encourage you, regardless of the industry you’re in or the business you’re in, can you have a way to have a, it’s really a trial in a way, a project or engagement or offering that would allow you to develop not only a level of trust in the results, but just a trusted, high level, trusted advisor relationship that is really going to allow you to then recommend maybe without much pushback what needs to come next and what needs to come next.

(06:13): And I think that if you have any issues with clients that they’re just not a good fit, they push back on things. They don’t take your advice, they hired you to consult, but then they won’t let you consult. A lot of times, well, one of the reasons is because they’re not the right fit. So that certainly happens. But the other element of that is they don’t trust you enough, and sometimes that’s on them. Sometimes that’s on you because you haven’t done whatever the step is that will allow you to build that. So let’s talk a little bit about, now kind of switch gears a little bit to how do you build trust with clients? Well, trust is one of those things I suppose that can be repaired, but it’s certainly one of those things that first impressions matter. I mean, how they see you, how they experience you, what leads them to even want to have a sales conversation with you.

(07:01): That’s a level of the customer journey. That trust building is going on completely. I talk all the time about the marketing hourglass stages. For us, the customer journey is no like trust, try, buy, repeat and refer. And that is a level of guiding people that have to come to know about you. But then the first impression makes a huge impression on whether or not we want to even spend our time and energy to go any farther. Obviously, we’re not going to engage somebody at any level without a level of trust. And then as I talked about, the try for us is really almost our first engagement. We are being tried there and we are putting everything into building that relationship and that trust there. Communication and transparency. Tell people what you’re going to do and do it. Stick to it. Communicate over. Communicate frankly, is a way that we build trust.

(07:53): A client will tell you, a prospect will tell you, that’s enough. I don’t need that much. I got it. Just give me the highlights, and that’s fine. You can always dial it back, but it’s much harder to dial it in from a communication standpoint and from a transparency standpoint, here’s what we’re doing and why. Delivering on promises obviously and promises are funny because they’re really, in a lot of ways, they’re just expectations, right? I promise that this will be done by Friday, sets an expectation that’ll be done by Friday. And so you either meet that expectation or maybe you exceed it, but if you miss that, you’ve broken up promise. And so that’s really be careful what you promise to some degree. But breaking those promises is really going to erode or withdraw from the trust bank pretty quickly in terms of establishing yourself as a trusted advisor.

(08:41): Some of that is demonstrating your expertise, being able to communicate what you’ve done for others. But I think it’s also, I know one of the things people say to us all the time, I’m just very interested in all the new tech and AI and all the things we’re about, and that to me is a level of people trust us to bring them the next thing when they need it, not because it’s the next thing. And I think that continuous learning that adapting what we do based on what we learn is certainly a marker, a great marker of trust and something that people come to rely on. What you do in the community, how you network, those are all who you know, your network members of your network. I mean, those are all elements of the trust puzzle in terms of maintaining and growing trust takes work.

(09:29): You think of any relationship, right? I mean, you ignore a close relationship and it will start to erode. You put in work, you continue to build that relationship over time. In fact, some people are so focused on new client acquisition. We’ve kind of forget about retention and the long-term benefits of really having those clients that have worked with you for years that love you, that trust you explicitly. Mistakes happen, challenges happen. Those are all part of doing business, trying to scale business. We’re all human. We all make mistakes. Obviously, how you respond to how you respond to challenges says a lot about whether or not somebody can trust you. I’ve seen that many times over the years that people will forgive you for making a mistake, but for lying about it, for not owning up to it, for trying to push blame off on somebody.

(10:25): That’s where you really cut into a trusted relationship. So how do you measure trust levels for us? Retention and referrals and even engagement. The level of engagement. Now we have so many digital platforms that we’re on today. In some ways it’s not an exact science, but in some ways that goes greatly into are we putting in the time? Are we nurturing the relationships? Are we having X amount of conversations? Are we retaining clients? Are we getting referrals from clients? Those, to me, are obviously pretty significant markers of trust. So kind of a non tactical topic today, but there’s so much value in becoming a trusted advisor, seen as a trusted advisor in your industry. Certainly seen as a trusted advisor with your clients. There’s financial value, there’s relationship value. It’s just more fun to do business in that environment than it is to constantly have that tug of war with clients because you haven’t put in the time and not even just the time.

(11:37): I mean, the systematic approach to onboarding and to communicating. Those are all elements that will eliminate a lot of the back and forth struggle that you might have. The other tip I would give you is create that systemized, repeatable process that you can do on the front end that really focuses on developing that trusted advisor relationship so that whatever your work is beyond that will go much smoother. Alright, that’s it for today. Again, love those reviews on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcasts. If you’ve got ideas or thoughts that you want to share based on what I shared today, feel free to send me an email at any time, john@ducttapemarketing.com. All right. That’s it for today. Hopefully we’ll see you on these days soon. Out there on the road.

(00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Chance. My guest today is Jim Vaselopulos. He is a C level business advisor with a proven record as a leader, strategist, rainmaker, and new business development expert. He’s the founder of Rafti Advisors, LLC, where he helps early stage companies get off on the right foot growth stage companies push through plateaus and mature organizations with strategic shifts and complex challenges. He’s also the author of Clarity, business Wisdom to Work Less and Achieve More. So Jim, welcome to the show. Yeah, thank you for having me, John. Appreciate it. So I do with that very Greek name. You did great. You did great. A lot of people just don’t even give an attempt, so I really appreciate it. Most people go by Jim V, you look at my name, it’s spelled very, A lot of conson is crushed together, so I know a lot of people struggle with it, so I make an attempt to get everybody’s names.

(01:09): So I’m always curious about names being of names, business names. So Rafti advisors, what’s the rafti? Well, seeing as I’m Greek rafti is, or Rafti actually in Greek is a small town in the mountains of Peloponnesian, Greece where my dad was from and where I hearken from my relatives. And that pays homage to my heritage and from which I gained a lot of the, I think, wisdom that is ever present in the book I just wrote. Awesome. Well, I’m glad I asked that. Alright, so give us a little lot of times when people write a book, they’ve had a long journey that brought them to that point. Give us a little bit of your business background that led you to where you are, but maybe also give a sense of what kind of experience you were able to gain that, let’s face it, allowed you to write a book to tell people how to do stuff.

(02:00): Yeah, I mean, I’m one of those guys that probably needed to learn lessons the hard way and I think sometimes that’s the best way to learn. But I’m writing a book, so not everyone has to learn the hard way, but I’ve been very fortunate to have a lot of great mentors and people along the way guiding me, nudging me, giving me advice. I was always just very mindful of those moments that you could almost recognize in your life that were kind of pivotal. I just wanted to capture all that. I had a pretty successful corporate career, started as an entrepreneur pretty early in my life, in my early twenties, and then I’ll tell you, it’s been wonderful, but it hasn’t been something I did alone. It was always with the help of other people and I wanted to kind of credit many of those folks that were known benefactors of mine and some of them that I call in the book momentary benefactors, people who played an outsized role, they didn’t even realize it, and I think that’s important in life.

(03:00): That’s interesting. A lot of entrepreneurs, I’ve read thousands of books, certainly when I was getting started, I leaned very heavily on people like Peter Drucker and Seth Godin, who’s become a good friend, and I always tell people that they were mentors to me. They didn’t know it at the time. Certainly Peter Drucker was not even alive, but I think probably most entrepreneurs have that collection of people that we sometimes just forget really played a role. Yeah, I mean I think it’s important to be intentional and one of the great joys actually, and I just sent a batch out of books today, mailing them to some of these folks, just I wanted ’em to have a copy of say, listen with a nice little note inside saying, you really helped me and you may not realize it, but you had an outsized impact on my trajectory.

(03:47): And I think that level of gratitude and is important to having a good life where you feel fulfilled and it also moves the needle forward and makes everyone else in your sphere feel maybe an inch taller as well so that they feel like, Hey, I didn’t realize I had done something good. That’s always a nice thing to do. I’ve written a number of books and I occasionally hear from people that have little stories, big stories about the impact. And I will say that you’re right. Sometimes you write these books and you think, is anybody even reading these things? And then you hear a story from somebody and it made a difference. That’s why I do this. Yeah, exactly. Break down both parts or a number of parts of your introduction, but going to the book, it’s interesting clarity a, I think if you went to business owners, I know that I do it all the time.

(04:34): I don’t think a single one of, well, I shouldn’t say most, would not say my greatest challenge is I don’t have clarity. They know something’s wrong, they can’t figure it out. They’re doing what they’ve thought is the right thing to do. That word clarity, have you come to discover that when you can get people to understand that they realize that is the most significant thing missing? It’s one of those things that I think as you said, people don’t go looking for it, but they typically are looking for something they don’t know what it is and they feel confused or burdened or just overweight with just all kinds of stimuli that are coming at them. And really it was my clients that told me that’s what they valued in the beginning. I thought they would’ve said like, oh Jim, you’re wise and we value your wisdom.

(05:24): But they really didn’t value the wisdom. They valued the results of the wisdom, which was clarity. They said, I feel like less encumbered. I feel like I know what to do next. I feel like some of the worries I had are muted or at least put on the side because I know that which matters most right now is in my sights and I’m going to go after it. And so clarity was the word that came up time and time again for my clients and I thought, wow, that really is what people value. And if I’m going to write a book, let’s put that right front and center. This is what people value. So why do you suppose that it quite often, most often takes a third party from the outside to come in and give you clarity? I mean, why is business owner the person that’s in it day to day, not able to see that’s the missing piece?

(06:14): Well, I mean because human, I think it’s really hard to kind of sit through your own head trash sometimes. And we have so many filters that we put between us and reality. I mean, the first part of the book talks about from a business sense of what goes on with business problems you’re trying to deal with, but really as you get deeper into it, it gets very much more into the kinds of things that distract us, how easily distracted we are with assumptions and is let astray by our emotions and to try and understand how to peel back those layers of the onion. It’s always easier to see a fault in someone else’s golf swing or in their tennis stroke, but it’s hard to see it for yourself. And so these are the kinds of things that getting objective partners, and it doesn’t always need to be someone who has more experience than you.

(07:06): I will tell you I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and business leaders who are, I believe far more accomplished than I ever was, but they’re human and so it’s easier for me to see something going on than for them to see it themselves. And so I think there’s a partnership there between a player and coach that can be productive when people lean into that relationship. I’ve had examples over the years where I’ve had a 10 or 12-year-old look at a website that we had designed for somebody and we thought was perfect, and they’re like, well, how do I make it do this? And you’re like, all these experts looked at it and they didn’t have that question. I think you’re right. Sometimes it just takes somebody who’s not involved in a way that could show you something. You work with businesses in numerous stages and I’m curious, do you find that they come to you with very similar characteristics?

(07:56): So the startup phase has similar characteristics, somebody who’s plateaued as you talked about, they’ve got the same challenges, almost all of ’em, somebody who’s now a mature business. Talk to me a little bit about what you see as the characteristics at each stage, because I’m guessing also there’s a level of lack of clarity that maybe changes at each stage. Yeah, I think one of the dirty little secrets having been a consultant for many years is that most businesses actually face very similar problems across the board, even spanning industries and sizes, et cetera. I mean, they’re very similar. No one wants to hear that, but that’s the truth. If I were to say though, some things that tend to be more, I’d say popular with smaller companies, I think a lot of times smaller companies get sequencing wrong. They know all the things they need to do, they tend to do ’em in the wrong order.

(08:47): They might obsess about operations and efficiency when they really should be focused on sales. And it’s not that both aren’t important, it’s just one might not be as important yet. And so I think that plagues smaller businesses in bigger businesses. I think you get in a lot of time management issues around delegation and accountability and trying to come up with systems that allow you to manage the broad scope of things because it’s too big for any one individual to try and get their arms around. And it maybe was easier 30 years ago when we had a lot of layers of middle management, but now that we’ve got pretty flat organizations, those problems become a lot more severe, more quickly. And so just getting the structure right on how you’re going after things and sometimes that just is getting a focus on what to do much about that from a management standpoint, it’s about saying no, management isn’t about approving things.

(09:45): Management is about saying like, Hey, this is what we should not do. Or if I approved, this is the implicit no, that goes with it. So let’s make it an explicit no. Yeah. And now a word from our sponsor. Work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing, there are a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator, and we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better now. Professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com, mention the referral code DTM podcast and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months.

(10:54): That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. That’s interesting. I often tell people that all the time that half the job I do in developing strategy for people is selling ’em what not to do because I do think that’s a real challenge for most businesses. They’ve got everything. Everybody’s telling them they need this idea and this idea, and it’s really easy to get scattered. We fall into this trap where we say, oh, this is a good idea or this is bad idea. Most of the ideas tend to be pretty good. I mean, it’s just a matter of it’s not good now. And I think putting things in the context of time, we can’t do it all, can’t do ’em all. This is a good one. This is probably the best one to do now with the limited resources we’ve got, whether it’s time, money, people and then say, it’s not that the other ideas were bad, it’s just not yet.

(11:45): And so when it comes to strategy, strategy is about the sequencing of all the tactics, all the initiatives we want to put together, and I think we frequently kick people to the curb with their ideas and have them think their idea was bad. It might be a perfectly great idea, just not yet. You talk about in the book the idea of business symptoms being like or medical symptoms. Talk a little bit about how they are the same and maybe how they’re different. I often talk about a business comes to us and they have symptoms of not having a good strategy and they’re trying to cure the symptoms. Talk a little bit about your view of that. The reason I compare ’em to medical symptoms is because I want people to kind of internalize this in a way that makes sense to them. And so accountability is a huge problem most businesses face.

(12:33): And I kind of talk about how it’s kind of like having a fever, it’s really common, but just because you have accountability. I mean you might treat a fever with aspirin, but there’s a root cause behind that. There’s a reason, there’s a fever. The fever isn’t the problem, the problem is an infection or something else. And so we always have to dig deeper. And what I like to help people realize is that the symptoms are always outcomes. An outcome is if you have misalignment isn’t the problem. That’s an outcome of other issues. And so you want to be really careful with that being too busy or having conflict with the organization. Those are outcomes. Even culture, probably the most controversial symptom I have in my book is an outcome because I always talk about that like the immune system of your body. It’s not that you have a bad culture or a good culture.

(13:25): You’ve got a culture that is sometimes weak and sometimes strong, and the culture is really a manifestation of the actions you take on a daily basis. It’s an outcome. What are the things driving those actions? Well, that starts getting you closer to the ground truth and where you can really have an impact solving a problem. And I love that analogy because there are definitely a lot of businesses out there that are just trying to treat tactics or treat what they see as a problem with the tactic, the tactic of the week, and that they really just end up creating another problem. A lot of times you talk about making time your friend probably the greatest challenge. Certainly small businesses face how I’m sure listeners are waiting. How do you make time your friend part of it’s focus saying no to things, being very intentional about stuff.

(14:13): I think one of the other great ways to make time your friend is to really understand, take the time to think through what matters most. There’s so many things we do that we don’t need to do. Okay. And you just need to really think about that, make a little bit of time to evaluate what you’re doing on a daily basis, on a weekly basis, on a monthly basis and just say, did that move the needle? Why do I keep doing that? Who’s telling me I have to do that? Is there a reason? Is there a discussion? I can have to stop doing that. And in my career, I was able to do things that formally or took me 40 to 60 hours a week to get done and get that down to four to six hours a week. And everyone says, oh, that’s crazy. But I really just applied some of the same thinking that Tim Ferriss had in his book, the Four Hour Work Week.

(15:02): And I just said he always just threw the rule book out the window and just said, let me question everything. And that’s really a good practice. Then I think there are a couple other little things I’d add to that mentality. One of them is timing, sequencing, timing in patience. Really those are really powerful things that can make time your friend knowing the right order to do things and then timing the same amount of energy goes in hitting a foul ball versus a home run. It’s just a matter of hitting the ball at the right time. And so understanding your timing and knowing what the right time is and are you spending a little bit of extra time here and there to really figure that out. Because when you figure that out and you start Hint home runs all the time, well guess what? Work gets really easy and then you build up more time to learn and improve.

(15:50): So it’s like this self-fulfilling prophecy if you just spend a little bit of a time trying to figure out the right timing for things, the right triggers for things. And that is a process I really call conscious competence, which is do you know why you do things? Do you know why this particular phrase or this particular process works so well at this time? And if you know the right things to do at the right time, work gets easier, time becomes your friend, and you get to invest way more time getting even better at it. So the promise of the book really shows up in the subtitle, work less, achieve more. How do you get to that point where you actually can experience that as a reality? So literal this really busy world, we’ve all got a million things coming at us and whether it’s from the internet, tv, our clients, our email, I think it gets down to stripping away layers of the onion and getting to that which matters most is so you can have the most impact with the least amount of work.

(16:47): So I’m inherently a super lazy guy. I’ve had a lot of success in my life, but I’m always going to take the leap path of least resistance. So I’m like water, I’m going to find the easiest way to get through something. And so the outside layer is don’t focus your time on symptoms, recognize symptoms, peel them back, understand where the problems are. Once you understand the problems, peel those back and understand what’s clouding your perception of those problems. Because it’s the little things that cloud our ability to kind of see the world clearly and cleanly that slow us down. And so you peel that away. Then I kind of add in this kind of emotional aspect of trying to see other things that affect our demeanor, our temper, our perspective. Then you get into sequencing, timing and patients. I have a clear view, but now I can order things and organize them in the right way so that I can have the most impact and start hitting home runs instead of foul balls.

(17:42): And then as we get further into the book, it says, and here is the process you use and it’s really this conscious competence and working with other people to help them feel empowered to get to a point where you’re getting a lot done, you’re working a lot less and you’re achieving your goals much more because you’re not wasting a lot of time on stuff that doesn’t matter or move the needle and it can be done. And I just wanted to share that with folks because I mean, literally at the end of my professional career before I got into coaching and advising, I was doing the work that other people were taking 60 hours to do in less than a day. And it got to the point where it was annoying people. They’re like, well, how do you do that? And I said, well, this is the recipe.

(18:28): This is how you do it. Awesome. Well, Jim, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to connect with you and obviously pick up a book or find, I got a terrible last name. It’s hard to find on LinkedIn and everywhere else, so I tried to make it easy for everyone. Business wisdom.com. If you go to business wisdom.com, you can connect with me on LinkedIn and you can see information about the book and about my business and everything you need is right there. Awesome. Well, I appreciate it again for you taking a few moments and hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road.

John (00:08): Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz, 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 might do a couple shows in a row. Who knows? This first topic I want to 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, 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.

(01:25): 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 there’s something easier about saying, Hey, this isn’t working out. It’s not an employee, it’s a vendor almost. 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 desire to really start with strategy. I mean, it’s been my mantra for 20 years strategy before tactics, but I think people are finally getting it right.

(02:23): And so this idea that they would hire a C-suite type of role where the implication is that that person’s going to be strategic, that person’s not going to write copy necessarily or do social media posts. They’re going to really develop the grand plan for how you’re going to go from where you’re today to where you want to be, certainly from a marketing standpoint, but they’re going to get involved in the dollars and cents of it, the objectives overall for the organization, maybe a little deeper relationship than you would think of your traditional marketing agency, but we are finding that both business owners are really embracing this idea of hiring us or somebody as a fractional CMO. And certainly a lot of consultants, agencies, coach implementers I’m finding are really drawn to this idea of maybe having a handful of clients that they are very deeply involved with and have a seat at the table for making or helping make big decisions, and obviously orchestrating the tactics, the implementation, maybe in some cases the team that’s already been assembled.

(03:31): So just the textbook definition, what is a fraction 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 I just described there, 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 you can acquire, or at least the idea you can acquire for much less. 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. Everybody says they want customers, but a lot of the CEOs, 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.

(04:31): And I think that that’s a big part of what you get by at least taking this strategy approach and by bringing in somebody that is very strategic to help you get those customers. And the role of a typical CMO in an organization is strategic planning, brand management, obviously the marketing campaigns, analyzing data, helping develop and use a budget, and maybe even managing team players. And frankly, what most people do is they hire somebody just to do marketing campaigns and all those other things are left by 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 208,300 75,000.

(05:29): And that really doesn’t include any kind of implementation or other people that you might hire to actually supplement that. The typical average fractional CMO probably costs somebody 60 to $75,000 a year, plus a lot of the implementation now is done on demand. It doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to hire those people as full-time people. Your CMO fractional CMO is going to bring them in as needed from a consultant or an agency standpoint. If you do the math on what the average is working with five or six clients, that can be at the top, the absolute top of the CMO chain. So it really works for both parties as far as I’m concerned. And so what the typical sort of agency project-based path looks like. You put out free content as a marketer, you get a sales meeting as a business owner, you then ask for a proposal project gets worked on, or maybe a handful of projects get worked on, and then everybody starts over again.

(06:33): And 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 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? 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. What is your customer journey look like? What should it look like? What could it look like? 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 going to evolve our marketing.

(07:22): It’s going to grow. We’re not going to simply just throw another tactic at everything and see if it works. Some of these concepts, the idea of developing strategy, in fact, we have a set, I’ve done 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. 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.

(08:26): You’ve heard me talk about things like the marketing hourglass for years, our approach to the customer journey that has seven stages, no, like trust, try, buy, 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 intentionally focusing on those stages. 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, hiring a fractional CMO who is going to become a senior, you’re not going to pay them as such. They’re not going to be their 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 really can address or engage or embrace this idea.

(09:27): So that’s all I had for today. I wanted to introduce this idea of the 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 why you’re always getting beat up on price and getting tired of just doing the tactics that are demanded of you lead with strategy and that will change completely change the relationship you have with your clients. 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 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.

John (00:52): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Russell Henneberry. He is a digital marketing consultant, speaker and co-author of Digital Marketing for Dummies. He’s the founder of the clikk an email newsletter about digital marketing. Russell also consults and trains employees of companies through his digital advisor program. So Russ, thanks and welcome to the show.

Russell (01:20): Hey, thanks for having me on.

John (01:22): It’s an honor. So do you go by Russell or Russ or Depends on who you’re talking to.

Russell (01:26): It doesn’t matter, but most people call me Russ, but Russ.

John (01:29): Okay. There are

Russell (01:30): Several people.

John (01:30): I just jumped right into it. Alright. I mentioned that you have a successful newsletter called The Click, so I thought we’d talk about newsletters. Newsletters have been around for ages. I’ve been putting one out at least for 20 years myself. How have, and I know that you’ve studied, we are alluding to some of the old timers before we got on the air here, how have you seen newsletters evolve? Because I think they were in sort of phase one of digital marketing. They were kind of a standard tool, but then social media came along and other stuff came along. They fell out of favor. Now they seem to be really back in favor. What do you see happening in the space in general?

Russell (02:10): Well, what I see right now is a return to email newsletters. They’re hot right now, and I think of email as this intersection of content marketing and sort of direct response promotion. Email is still a great place to make and probably the best place to make a direct call to action, which is sort of frowned upon most of the time in social. But when you can take the email and turn it into content so you’re not just continuously pounding your email list with promotions, you can get this sort of best of both worlds where you get that engagement that you get from content marketing plus the bonus big bonus of being able to make direct calls to action.

John (02:58): Yeah, I mean I started mine to share, educate, build, trust, all those things. But let’s face it, it was a way to build an email list. I literally remember people 20 years ago saying, oh, I got your newsletter. I’m so excited. I that was before we got tons and tons of email every day. So in terms of how, I mean I think I look at your newsletter, I subscribe to your newsletter and it is pretty classic format in terms of education. There’s not any new crazy technology necessarily that’s showcased there, but I know it works. I mean, just looking at some of your statistics, I know it works for you, but before we go into that, LinkedIn has newsletters now there are people putting newsletters behind paywalls. Do you see those as approaches that will be with us for a long time because it’s very curated content or do you think the classic approach that you take is still valid today, obviously?

Russell (04:00): Yeah, absolutely. And I’ve looked at moving my newsletter over to things like substack or moving into LinkedIn and publishing there. Personally, I want to be able to control that technology because I want to be able to do some other things with it, and I’m not afraid to mess around with that technology. But I think the barrier to entry into starting a newsletter because of things like substack and then the competitor, their beehive is also something to look at. If you’re looking at starting a newsletter, the guy who I believe was in charge of list growth at Marketing Brew or Morning Brew started beehive. So there’s some really great out of the box options there. I like to have more control over everything, so I end up with sort of that patchwork of tools. But yeah, I mean, getting into the newsletter business is easier than ever today.

John (04:51): Yeah, so getting subscribers is one piece of it, but then keeping them, because it’s worth reading is obviously a huge part of this. What’s your editorial strategy? I’m curious, how do you decide? I’m sure you don’t wake up on Monday and go, here’s what I’m going to write about.

Russell (05:11): Yeah, well, so the content marketing side of the editorial strategy, I’m always in all the top of funnel content and sort of mid funnel content that I produce. I’m looking to either educate, inspire, or entertain, and I do try to get a little bit witty inside of there, and I have some editors that do a pretty good job of helping me not tell too many dad jokes in there. But yeah, I mean my goal when I talk to my editors when I think about my own stuff is that I want to give you something educational, but I want to do it with a spoonful of sugar and that’s that entertainment don’t take myself too seriously angle. I think we see a lot of that because competing against other publishers like say Digiday or Adage or something like that, that are probably a little bit more buttoned up. And so if you like my style, then you’re going to read my stuff and you’re going to anticipate my stuff coming into your inbox.

John (06:12): So you didn’t say it as directly to this, but I mean I think certainly a best practice would be have a voice of some sort that’s going to either repel people or attract people.

Russell (06:23): Right. Yeah, I think a good way to think about this is an exercise you can do when you’re looking for a voice is you can say to yourself, I want to be the blank of blank. So if you know what niche that you’re in, let’s say you’re going to be creating a gardening newsletter, you might say, I want to be the

John (06:43): Seinfeld of gardening newsletter,

Russell (06:45): Jerry Seinfeld of gardening or whatever, of gardening. And that can help you start to box out what maybe you’re looking for from a voice perspective.

John (06:53): Yeah. What would Jerry say? So you threw out the terms top of funnel, middle of the funnel. Maybe explain how you differentiate your content based on maybe where somebody is in a potential buying situation.

Russell (07:08): Yeah. Well, and we were talking about this before you hit record. We were talking about newsletters are a great way to build trust and they’re a great way to connect with people. You’re right there in their inbox and you do that consistently over time. You’re going to build that know and trust, but it’s still making a really high ticket offer. It’s tough to do in an email. So I’m typically looking to get people to engage with my content and then I’m going to ask them to do, so. For example, last week I ran an article and then I said, if you’d like me to shoot you a little video to expand on this and show you some examples, click this link and I’ll tag you in my system or whatever. And so then I shot a Loom video and I sent that out just to people that were tagged and had asked for it. And then inside that video, I make a call to action for a service or a product or a horse or whatever that I’m looking to do, but I only want to do that with people that are really engaged strongest parts of my list. It’s sort of that whole, don’t ask somebody to marry you on the first date type thing. Where we want to kind of build up that know and trust with people over time.

John (08:20): And you make a great point because I think a lot of people they have, you just said a high ticket item, let’s guess at a price $9,700 thing. And the idea that somebody’s going to read a newsletter mean if they’ve been following you for years, they’ve decided time’s, right? But the idea that somebody’s going to click on a button and buy something like that, it really needs to be much more of a dance to get their, doesn’t it?

Russell (08:42): For sure. Whenever I’m talking to anybody in my consulting work about what they’re selling, I try to immediately put it in one of two buckets. I’m putting it in, I can close this deal on a webpage bucket or I put it in, I got to get this person on the phone bucket. And if it’s a phone bucket, which if you’re hitting that 10 K mark, that’s phone bucket for me, you’re going to need to get somebody on the phone. There’s going to need to be a sales process and so forth. You might be able to close that online depending, but probably not. And so those kinds of calls to action are difficult to make in a newsletter. And so what I like to do with that is you’re trying to nurture people towards a phone consultation, and that takes a lot of touch points

John (09:27): Unless you over promise something you can’t actually deliver.

Russell (09:32): There’s always that.

John (09:34): So we’re waiting into monetization. How do you think, actually, let me back up before I ask that question. I want to ask a broader question. Was there a point in time where you said, I’m going to go all in on newsletter, this is how it’s going to fit my business model? Or did it start more as, yeah, this is a normal standard digital marketing tactic?

Russell (09:56): So I kind of did go all in. So we are email first. So I like to think when I’m thinking content marketing, I think about where’s the genesis of this content going to be? And I think podcast, by the way, are a wonderful place to create original content and that’s where it’s born. And then you can hand that out to writers, for example, and have them chop that up into pieces and go out to social with it and cut the video up and different things like that. And my newsletter is that for me, so I produce original content only there in that newsletter, and then that stuff is then chopped up and cut up and put into different places. So the reason I did that is because I was spending a lot of time thinking, well, how am I going to get this person from social media onto my email list and how am I going to get this person from listening to this over here?

(10:43): And I’m from this YouTube video and from my website, and I said, well, why don’t I just start there? Why don’t I just start with them on the email list and focus all the attention there and then I can move them out from there. So just like you could do with a podcast, just like you could do with a YouTube channel is just where are you producing that original material? And then you can then kind go and do what you want with it from there. And a lot of times you can hire somebody to go do a lot of it from there.

John (11:10): So again, now as I alluded to monetization, maybe I’ll just let you much as you’re comfortable sharing about all the ways you think about monetizing, and I know there are some very direct ways that you do it, but I’d love to hear your theory on that.

Russell (11:27): Well, I like to keep it diversified because things go up and down. So for example, I sell advertising and it’s very easy to sell advertising in the fourth quarter because everybody’s fleeing Facebook and Google for cheaper clicks elsewhere because of all the retail ads are cranking up prices and things like that. For me, advertising can be kind of seasonal. So I also sell trainings and courses. I use it to fill my consulting work. If I need a consulting client, I’m going to start working towards that through that list. And so yeah, it’s advertising, it’s consulting, and some info products like courses and so forth.

John (12:14): So if I’m a potential advertiser, I’m guessing top of funnel ads, like list building ads, give away a great resource ebook, lead magnet kind of ads are really what work in a newsletter like yours. They,

Russell (12:28): I think it’s, when I speak to advertisers, I advise them to try to move people from my list onto theirs because people that are reading my newsletter have shown that they use email as a source of information. So it’s smart for them, in my opinion, to use a lead magnet offer or a webinar offer or something like that can move them into that person’s email list because that person is an email reader. But we do get a lot of advertisers that know we want to go straight for free trial or we want to go straight into an offer or something like that. And we’ll do that too, but absolutely love the, and we see great response from people that give out a solid high value lead magnet to my list.

John (14:57): Let’s talk about metrics. Again, going back to when I started, I remember 83, 80 4% open rates. Those days don’t exist for anybody today, but what are some of the metrics that, not just that you should be tracking, but that show you’re doing things right?

Russell (15:18): Well, so when you start to get involved in buying traffic to get subscribers, it becomes pretty important that you’re buying subscribers that are opening because especially if you’re selling ads, because think about it, you might be measuring, for example, your cost per lead and it might be let’s say at a satisfactory $4 per lead, but then you’re finding that these leads are only opening at 30%. Well, are they really only $4 leads when you’re only getting three out of 10 to open? So it really is important to be watching the quality of the subscribers that you’re getting and whether they’re opening, and it might be worth paying six or $8 for a subscriber that will open. And so I do love the idea when you’re running a newsletter of advertising and other newsletters, because again, that person’s shown the propensity to read newsletters and use email as a source of information. So yeah, I mean, it’s the classic ones. Open rates, click rates, cost per lead if you’re buying traffic. I also look at sort of the virality. How can I take any subscriber that maybe I’ve bought right at $4, $6 or whatever and turn that into 1.5 subscribers so I can get them to spread the word and get me. And that cuts. If I can get one every one person to bring somebody else, then I cuts my lead costs in half. And there’s some cool tools out there that can be used to do that

John (16:48): Referral tool. Yeah,

Russell (16:51): Up viral is a cool one that works really well to get people to share and using a unique link and then you can reward them with more content, things like that.

John (17:02): Let’s talk about list building then. Obviously a lot of your success, a lot of your ability to sell ads, a lot of your ability to have reach is that you’re getting subscribers. So what’s kind of your approach or what approach might you recommend to somebody to build a list?

Russell (17:21): Well, so when I started out, I said I want to build a list that advertisers will find attractive. So that’s kind of where my brain started. So that comes down to your ad targeting that you’re going to use when you buy traffic. So I was looking to build a list of people that are doing marketing work for other people. So they’re either agency workers or freelancers, because software companies and service companies oftentimes find these people very valuable, A software company especially where they can roll, if they can get an agency to adopt their tool and roll it to all their clients, that’s a big client for them. So we set out to build that list and that’s on this list, and it’s all comes down to your targeting. And that particular subscriber might cost you more. You might be able to go find other people that would want to read the same content for cheaper, but is that what your advertisers want? And I think if you’re going to sell advertising, you need to be thinking about building a valuable list, not just any old list.

John (18:26): Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Well, and also if the diversification you want to sell to that list, they should be people that are obviously interested in what you’re selling. So you do recommend buying subscribers, so to speak, or buying at least traffic that you hope to turn into subscribers?

Russell (18:43): Yeah, I mean, if you want to advertise, I think you need to hit that 10 K subscriber mark before they start getting interested. You got to remember that you’re dealing with advertisers that could just go into Facebook and access a limitless, nearly limitless group of people. So there’s an unlimited scale, in other words, inside these other platforms. And so you got to have at least some scale in order for them to take a look. So I do like the idea if you’ve got your advertising packages in place and you’re able to do it, but I don’t recommend that you start there. So with advertisers, your monetization model, I would encourage people to, especially if you’re just getting started to sell services or information products, until you can get to that because you’re going to want to, unless you’re funded and you’ve got a giant dumpster of cash that you want to burn, you’re probably going to need to be r oi if you’re buying traffic and you need to be r oi it a little bit faster. And so you can’t just sit here and build up until you hit 10 K and then start selling advertising. So I would recommend that you sell either even physical products, but physical products or info products or services until you hit that 10 K mark. Then you can add that, start adding in that advertising revenue.

John (20:00): So over the years, I actually sell sponsorships. It’s just kind of a package with our podcast and things like that. But I’ve always felt like, well, now I have a personal relationship with my subscribers. They really see it as me, and a lot of that is on the trust that I don’t try to shove stupid stuff down their throat. So do you sometimes find yourself really having to, we’ve turned away sponsors because we’re like, no, and I mean, they’re obvious ones, but even sometimes where we just don’t feel like that’s a very good tool or a very good resource, we’ll say No. So do you feel like you have a different relationship as an advertiser because of the relationship with your readers?

Russell (20:43): Well, I turn people down all the time, and it’s because it’s just, I’m the end decision maker on all that. But I can see how larger publications must have a battle between editorial and monetization, right? Because you do get people that want to just put your stuff in front and you could just take their money and put it in front of people. But I know that’s not the good long-term strategy for my business, is not to just shove things on their throat. And I can always, if I don’t have an ad to run that, I just run my own stuff. This is sponsored by this course or this whatever, this event that I’m going to or whatever.

John (21:22): Yeah. All right. So I’m going to end on the question that we could have spent the whole time talking about, but I’ve been throwing this into pretty much any conversation, especially about content, but ai, how has that impacted your thoughts about producing content?

Russell (21:42): Well, obviously things are shifting daily with this, so check the date on this podcast because it depends. But what I’m seeing now is every tool that I use is overlaying on top of chat GPT. And so I am using AI every day. The way I use it for content creation is typically for things that would’ve maybe taken me a half hour. For example, I, I won’t go into why, but I needed to have the details of Dwight Eisenhower’s career for a little article I was writing, and I just popped it into chat, GPTI was like, give me a bulleted list of Dwight, and it was done. And because it wasn’t completely crucial, that was even correct, a hundred percent, I just popped it in there. I didn’t even check the information. It all looked pretty, right. So I popped it in there, and if somebody would’ve come back and said, actually, he didn’t start the highway program or something, he did this, I would’ve been like, well, that wasn’t really the point of the article, but I’m using it for stuff like that.

(22:50): I do come down on the side right now that if you are, you’re not creating content that’s better than what CHATT PT can put out. You shouldn’t be creating content. You’re probably not getting any traction anyway. It does lack voice now. I mean, you can get some pretty incredible stuff out of it, but still, in fact, at the top of my newsletter, what I’ve been doing, just to be sort of cheeky, is today I just finished it up and I said, this newsletter was written by a human with real arms and legs and everything. And I do see a world where it’s going to have value for you to state that you’ve chosen to continue to write or produce your content yourself. I think there’ll be other places where people are going to be tolerant of what, I don’t care if that’s a bot that wrote that, or a person, but other places where we are going to find a lot of value in the fact that someone is writing this is a real human with experiences and memories and thoughts and all those things.

John (23:52): Yeah. Well, I’ve definitely am telling people that if you can’t ignore it or you won’t be able to compete, but we’re definitely a long way. In fact, I don’t even think it’s artificial intelligence. I’ve been kind of jokingly switching it around and calling it ia. It’s informed automation is what I really think it is. And just as your example, I mean, imagine if you were trying to come up with a killer headline and you had three or four people sitting around and you all brainstormed it. Well, that’s the way that I use Chad GPT is, it’s like, make this headline better. Give me 10 ideas. And it’s like, there might be one word that I go, yes, that’s the word, but that’s really how I use it almost as a research assistant.

Russell (24:31): Yeah, I mean, it’s open on my desktop right now, and I can’t see myself going away from using it anytime soon. It’s here to stay, so it can’t be ignored. But you and I have both been doing this a long time, so we’ve seen people try to take things like this and look for a shortcut built. I’m sure there’s people building giant content filled websites with AI content in them, and I’ve been doing it long enough to know that in the long run, it’s not going to be a sustainable business model.

John (25:05): Well, and what I love is the Make Seven Figures as an AI consultant courses that are being sold right now, too.

Russell (25:13): Yeah, they’re everywhere,

John (25:16): But such is life. Right. Well, Russ, thanks so much for dropping by and kind of sharing some of your knowledge on the newsletter. The Click we’ll have how to subscribe in the show notes, but certainly anywhere you want to invite people to connect with you,

Russell (25:31): Well, yeah, just come over to the newsletter, the click, CLIK k.com and the subscribe and say hello. You can always reply. I read all the replies to my emails, and then if you want to connect me on social media, I’m Russ Henneberry on LinkedIn.

John (25:46): Awesome. Well, again, thanks for taking a moment out of your day to share with our listeners, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Russell (25:53): Yeah, it’s been my pleasure. Thank you.

Speaker 1 (00:57): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Amanda Holmes. She is the CEO of Chet Holmes International, which is worked with over 250,000 businesses worldwide. At age 24. She inherited her father’s multimillion dollar enterprise, which specializes in helping companies double their sales. A lot of their work’s based on the bestselling book, the Ultimate Sales Machine, of which they have a new edition coming out. Amanda’s name will be all over the new edition as well. And she has merged her father’s proven process with her own forward-thinking Ideas to connect the old school sales process with hybrid, online and offline, instant gratification and short attention span that we see in consumers today. So Amanda, welcome back to the show.

Speaker 2 (01:47): Thank you so much, John. It means so much to me that you interviewed my father and then you interviewed me so many years ago, and here we are again. It means a lot. Not a lot of people interviewed my father either.

Speaker 1 (02:00): I was going to say, I might be one of the few podcasters who has interviewed you both.

Speaker 2 (02:06): Yes, I have never heard it from anybody else, and I’ve done hundreds of interviews, so you are the only one.

Speaker 1 (02:12): That’s funny. That was about 29, 20 0 9, 20 10, something like that maybe. And podcasting was in its infancy at the time, but somehow I’ve stuck with it.

(02:24): So we also have another shared connection. My daughter has actually worked for me for about 12 years. She is our chief operating officer, so I really kind of have to go there. You didn’t work in the business as a family member, you really brought, came into the business. I would have to think in some ways that was a pretty tall order. In fact, I think you were studying music in college and not necessarily preparing for a career as a CEO. Right. I guess I was going to ask you what’s like working with family, but that’s not really, it wasn’t really your experience. So what was it like really? And I know you’ve told this story many times, what was it like basically being thrust into an ongoing organization, but as a family member?

Speaker 2 (03:11): Yes. Well, it was hard because me and my father were very close. I was actually born on his birthday. We shared the same birthday February 13th, and it was as if just the stars aligned. And so losing him was like losing air. It was like I didn’t know where up was or down was. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t sleep. So getting all of that while at the same time, I can remember just days after his funeral. And the only reason why I remember that, because all that time is such a blur, but I just remember all of these flowers around my room from his funeral, and I was sitting there and they had just sent me the PL of all the companies, and it was the first time I’d ever seen it, and it just felt like this p and l was never ending. I kept scrolling and scrolling and I just broke down.

(04:01): I was like, how is this possible that, so my father battled with cancer for a year and a half before he passed, and he spent 352 nights in the hospital, and never once did he spend it alone. So it was me, my mom, and my brother. We rotated spending all nighters with him. So I spent easily a hundred all-nighters with my father in the hospital. Never once did he say, Hey, Amanda, let me explain to you what my businesses are. Let me explain to you who runs them. Let me tell you about where I’d like this to go. We never had that dialogue, and there was time, and I speak on that because I think it’s critical that more parents take responsibility for the fact that there are other people that if you leave this world without a plan, you’re hindering them. So I do talk on that every once in a while.

(04:57): So it was utterly shocking and it really is. I look back and I think it’s a miracle that we’re here today based on the fact that I knew nothing. I was trying to get over the loss of my father while couple hundred staff, this crazy enterprise, but here we are. I stepped in and it took me two years to step in because it just looked like, this is crazy talk. I don’t know why I ever would. But then over time I fell in love with our clients. I recognized that there was something that was really beautiful about what my father had built, and it could be carried on. It just needed that heart in the center of it to make it all work. And yeah, I increased our leads by 1176% the first year I stepped in and doubled our coaching clients multiple years in a row, and this year we’re up over 300%, and that’s without the book releasing just yet. So it’s a lot of wonderful things. My father had a great system and a great framework for how to grow organizations, and I had to learn it from his books and his training programs instead of him explaining it to me. But nonetheless, I think I am probably one of his greatest success stories just because of that. Right.

Speaker 1 (06:13): What was hard for you? I mean, you obviously made some changes. What was hard for you to change? I mean, not necessarily resistance, but just really hard for you to even wrap your head around changing.

Speaker 2 (06:27): So we had never processed an order online. My father was very strict around every sale should come from a salesperson having a conversation either over the phone or in person. So I could remember the first time that I put some pricing online and I took a moment and it was like, I’m so sorry, dad. I know you said this, but times have changed and I have to do it. I have to put some of our stuff online. So that was a big turning point in learning how to do digital marketing was critical in selling things online. And then also a huge change was for me, the people that I surround myself with, a lot of them were very different than who my father surrounded himself with. So I find that the culture that he thrived in is different than the culture that I thrive in and making that distinction, because at first it was anybody that my father respected, ultimately they would say, well, your father said I was the best in the planet on this.

(07:30): And I’d go, okay. And I’d put them up on this pedestal of who was the best, right? Because my father said he was the best, even though I started realizing that everyone said that my father said they were the best. So then I started reading through his emails to try and figure out what he really thought of them. That was the way that I would find out. And then the next level was okay, just because my father said he was the best, now I have to discern, is this somebody that I can work with? And there were quite a few of them that did not work with me very well. And that’s okay. It’s just a little bit of a different modus operandi, but still the strategies are the same. So it was interesting to see that culture shift.

Speaker 1 (08:10): So shifting gears a little bit to maybe a more positive, less of a challenge, what’s been the most fun for you?

Speaker 2 (08:17): The marketing and sales part. Oh my gosh. Oh, you’ll appreciate this, John. So I just, I’m in this whole book tour thing going on right now. I just went to all these different trade shows. I spoke at HubSpot’s inbound. That’s where I saw that you’re in HubSpot Network. Congratulations on that. That’s awesome. So I went there with a four foot billboard strapped to my back. I was looking for a way for people that my father teaches, the first thing you need in a trade show is to get noticed. And I was googling like, oh, maybe we’ll do a backpack and we’ll design a backpack or something. And then I found, I typed in human billboard and this huge thing, it’s a backpack that straps and it lights up. It glows a billboard sign. So I’ve been walking through all these trade shows with this four foot billboard on my back. I call her Bessie now because I’m very fond of her. And on the last day of trafficking conversion, actually they shut me down because I was creating such a buzz and generating so many sales that the sponsors, the booths were getting jealous. But that’s been a blast, and just being really creative about ways to get attention and then converting that attention into sales and leads and sales, that’s a ton of fun for me.

Speaker 1 (09:39): Would you say that your, and I know this is going to sound sort of stereotypical, but would you say that your music background, your arts background, has brought a level of creativity that maybe didn’t exist?

Speaker 2 (09:51): Absolutely. So the new addition of the book, the foreword, instead of saying, dear Reader, I instead said, dear dad. And that was something that Julia Neeson, my book coach at the time, had suggested I do. And when I wrote it, everyone that read that majority of grown men that read it would cry reading it, and they thought out of every page, every sentence, I made sure that it was some way to double sales. But that letter to my dad, everyone said, lead with that because that’s going to touch more people than just doubling sales techniques. And I put that into a video, actually, and that’s been what I’ve been using to promote the book. So to me, that video is a music video. I wrote the lyrics, even though I’m not singing them, they’re written. But everything that I had as a songwriter, I put into that video. To me, that’s the single that came out with this new edition of the book, which is kind of funny to think about, but man, it is hitting people in a completely different way that I never expected, and it was the most nerve wracking thing on the planet to put that thing out. I really thought that. I didn’t think that people would like it, but everybody kept saying, I love it. I love it. You should put that out. And it’s been such a loving response. So yeah, that songwriter in me, I think helped

Speaker 1 (11:16): Describe who CHI, Chad Holmes International works with. Who’s your typical client?

Speaker 2 (11:22): Yes. Okay. I’ll answer that by asking you a question, and you probably know the answer to this. What percentage of businesses do you think make it to a million in annual sales?

Speaker 1 (11:32): I don’t know the exact answer other than it’s relatively small. The numbers, yeah, you have to guess. I’m going to say 9%.

Speaker 2 (11:40): Okay, that’s close. It’s close. 5% of companies make it to a million of that 0.08%, make it to 5 million of that 1.5%, make it to 10 million so it gets a little bit better. Then 0.004%, make it to a hundred million and beyond. So what we teach is how to get from a million to five, from 5 million to 10, from 10 million to a hundred million and beyond, because it’s actually not about our product or service, which majority of entrepreneurs think, yes, if I just tweak this a little bit more, then I’ll get more. Right? If that was true, wouldn’t be the number one grossing hamburger joint in the world. Right? It’s a terrible burger skills it takes to grow the business and skills can be developed. So we assist entrepreneurs to grow from that one to five, from five to 10, from 10 to a hundred million and beyond.

Speaker 1 (12:34): One of the core concepts, I have actually not seen what you’ve done in the second edition yet, but certainly in the first edition, and I know it’s a core concept of your coaching, is this concept of the Dream 100. I wonder if you could describe that. I know that’s a big E for you.

Speaker 2 (12:49): Yes. It’s the fastest, least expensive way to double sales. This one strategy has doubled the sales of more companies than any other. My father invented it working for billionaire, Charlie Munger, co-chairman of Berkshire Hathaway. So he doubled the sales of nine different companies for Charlie all within 12 to 15 months, and several of them multiple years consecutively. So he realized that he had a system for doubling sales, and it went something like this. So he was given a list of 2200 potential prospects, and they said, okay, go cold. Call these 2200. But when he did some research, he realized that only 167 of them purchased 95% of the space. So instead of going after 2200, he led an intensive Dream 100 to just those 167. Now, it being in their face, in their place, in their space, what can we do to provide the most value for them?

(13:41): For him, back then it was direct mail, cold calling and faxing. So twice a month, he was doing direct mail. Four times a month he was cold calling and following up with a fax in an email every once in a while. And he did that for months. For the first four months, he got nothing and talked around the office, what is this? Why is this expert in sales? And he hasn’t generated a thing. But in the sixth month, he closed the largest contract that the industry had ever seen, and then subsequently after that doubled and doubled and doubled. Now. So by definition, there’s always a smaller number of better buyers than there are all buyers. That means that marketing and selling to them is cheaper than marketing and selling to all buyers. And I’ve even, as I look at this, and what you’ll see in the new edition is so many people get, they see the Dream 100 and they go, oh my gosh, how do I do direct mail?

(14:31): How can I make this work with direct mail? And how do I get a hundred people on my list? You’re missing the point if you’re super focused on just those two things, because we have so many marketing mediums in our use today, I show how I used a dream. One, I focused on one potential dream client, and I followed up with them every single day using social media. Every time they post something on social, I’d comment with something of value. Every time they posted another thing, I’d add another piece of value and another comment, and another, for every single day, for three months, I commented on every single thing that this person said, and three months in, they came back to me and said, Hey, I’d like to buy 650 books of the Ultimate Sales Machine. I’m still reaping the benefits of that three months of pigheaded discipline and determination.

(15:19): Today, they bought another thousand books. Actually, it was the CEO of ClickFunnels. So Dave Woodward I did this with. So the point is, it’s about picking who’s one person that could completely change your world, and then can you multiply that even by, you could have four, you could have 10. I’m calling it the Target 12. It doesn’t have to be a hundred, right? The whole point is just to get laser focused and follow up with pigheaded discipline and determination, whichever medium that may be. If you want to use direct mail, that’s great because it will land doing direct mail. But if you want to do it on Instagram dms, that’s where I did it to get that client right. It could be on LinkedIn, it could be on voice drops, on cell phones, or

Speaker 1 (16:03): All of them. Or all of them. Or all of them, right?

Speaker 2 (16:06): Yeah. If you only have a hundred, right? And if you’re doing Facebook ads to them, if you are sending them text messages, if you’re arriving at their door, they’re like, you are everywhere. It’s like, yeah, I’m only everywhere to the select 10, select a hundred. So they’re just amazed, right?

Speaker 1 (16:21): Yeah. And I think what’s so important about that lesson is you can now afford to spend money and time and energy that is going to just swamp what anybody else is doing to that same person, because they’re spraying it 10,000 people at a time.

Speaker 2 (16:39): Absolutely. We had a client, so I’ve created these bootcamps, and a client went through the bootcamp. They went after four people that had already said no to their services. It was a hard, no, I’m definitely not interested. And then he led with an education to those four. After he gave the presentation of an education, he closed $8.4 million worth of sales in just six weeks. Six weeks, and the average sales rep would sell 8 million in an entire year. He did it in six weeks. He targeted his dream. He only needed four, dream four to generate 8.4 million.

Speaker 1 (17:17): So one of the challenges, you kind of alluded to this, we’re so focused on digital right now, you have yourselves firmly in what you’re calling old school processes, but they really, in some ways, some of the old school processes are working better than ever. They

Speaker 2 (17:36): Absolutely, I mean, take what I just did at trade shows, it’s shocking how many people at trade shows have no idea how to have a face-to-face conversation. I’d walk up to a booth and 90% of them had no idea how to start asking questions. I’d ask, what do you do? And they have no idea. They look starstruck. Like What? You’re talking to me in real life? I don’t know what to do. It’s so bizarre how we’ve lost the frameworks and the basic foundational principles. Everyone thought, oh, a billboard. Yeah, that’s brilliant. But then I also had a QR code there so that I could collect people that were taking pictures. Anyways, the first few days they were taking pictures of me. They thought it was hysterical, but then they didn’t realize that now I’m converting them because they’re clicking on that I’m getting their email, and then they’re buying.

(18:25): So it’s blending of the two. My funnel online got me the sales, but me walking around with a four foot billboard on my back in a trade show got the attention and the press, and now I’ve taken video that I got from influencers in the space that were recording me. They thought it was hilarious. And I’m using that in my ads and I’m repurposing it. So there’s so many different ways that I think in person too. I was just at a mastermind with Grant Cardone two weeks ago, and there were 80 people in the room, all of which would’ve loved to talk to Grant Cardone. He walked out of the room and nobody followed him. And I’m looking around the room going, are you kidding me? That’s a billionaire. I’d love to talk to Grant Cardone. Why not? So I run out there and I start to have a dialogue with him. It’s as if we only can communicate through a text or in a social media aspect. He was right there live and breathing, and I handed him the book and I said, you should watch Dear Dad. It’ll make you cry. I’ll send you a book. And he’s like, I will definitely cry from that. I’m sure I will. I love that. Thank you,

Speaker 1 (19:26): Amanda. Thanks for dropping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Tell people where they can find all the work that you’re doing and certainly get a copy of the new book or the revised, updated, fully updated book.

Speaker 2 (19:37): Yes. Ultimate sales machine.com is where everybody can pick up the book. It’ll give you a bunch of extra bonuses that you wouldn’t get on Amazon. And then if you want to online, I’m a lot of different places, but I spend more of my time on Instagram. My name Amanda Holmes was taken, so I’d use my salsa name Manita Holmes, so you can find me on Instagram at Amanita

Speaker 1 (19:59): Homes. Alright, awesome. Well, great having you back on the show again, and hopefully we’ll run into you again. One of these days out there on the road.