John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Fields. After a nine year marketing career at Glaxo Smith Klein, David transition to consulting, becoming a partner at a boutique firm before co-founding Ascendant Consulting, specializing in helping large corporations enter new markets. He introduced a general contractor model focusing on winning engagements, ensuring quality and managing relationships while subcontracting expert work. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to touch on a little bit today, the Irresistible Consultants Guide to Winning Clients. So David, welcome to the show.

David (00:50): Thank you. Wow, that intro goes way back. Of course, I haven’t had sending consulting even for eight, nine years. So my firm David, A Fields’

John (00:59): Group, I don’t know where we got that then.

David (01:01): I’m sure my group provided, or a came from somewhere, it doesn’t matter. But yeah, I came out of marketing and then co-founded a firm co-founded consortium, but eight, nine years ago we transitioned almost exclusively to working with other consulting firms, with advising firms on how to grow. So we haven’t had corporate clients in probably at least eight years.

John (01:22): Nice. Alright, well, as we were talking about off air, we have similar models and I think similar beliefs. In fact, let me throw a really hard question at you, or maybe you’ve got a perfect answer for this already. If you’re going to describe your point of view about consulting or what it is you bring as a consultant, do you feel like you have a unique point of view

David (01:42): For our group or do I think consultants should have a unique point of view?

John (01:46): I think you personally,

David (01:47): Yeah, I think that’s an

John (01:49): Interesting question. Going to start with a hard question.

David (01:51): Yeah, it’s an interesting question. Do I have a unique point of view? I think I have a point of view, which is people tend to say, oh yeah, that makes sense. I don’t know that it’s unique as much as it’s kind of a reminder of what people know deep down. So the most fundamental principle we teach is what we call right side up thinking, which means consulting is not about you. And this is the same for all professional services and probably all businesses, but I say consulting is not about you, it’s about your clients, it’s about your prospects, it’s about them. So we call that right side up thinking and it’s really easy in concept and people tend to say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course in practice it actually proves to be quite difficult.

John (02:39): It’s interesting, I work with a lot of startup consultants. I mean, they’re jumping out of corporate or something. They’re going out and telling people, here’s what I charge. And I will say that what you just touched on right there is probably one of the hardest things at first because it’s all about what do I know? Do I know enough? Am I an expert? Am I worth whatever amount I’m charging? And what you’re talking about is actually how you overcome that, isn’t it?

David (03:03): That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right.

John (03:06): So one of the things that we teach a lot of, I’m sure you get this all the time. There are definitely people that are good at delivering consulting. They get very good at sharing their expertise, bringing third outside view to the world. They’re not so great at getting clients necessarily. And part of that is they see so many bad examples of what people are doing out there and they think they have to mimic just for consultants. If you’re going to say, here’s the three things every consultant should do or could do and now have all the clients they need,

David (03:39): Wow, you’re right. People really struggle. And in part I think it’s because they approach consulting. You need to sell it, and they try to be salespeople. And consulting is not sold, consulting is bought. You can’t sell someone a solution, a consulting solution to a problem they don’t have. So all you can do is approach people and be out there in the world in the right ways for the right people so that when they have a problem that you can solve, they’re thinking, Hey, you know what? I need to call John, John can help me solve this problem. So consulting is bought. You don’t sell at consulting, which is why being right side up is so important. Listening for most folks that are small that are under call it $5 million, and especially for startups, their biggest challenge tends to be that they’re too broad. That they make this crazy ironic mistake of saying, well, but I need to keep my market as broad as possible so that I can win business. And it’s the exact opposite. I mean, I’ve got all the evidence in the world, and even though it’s really hard to do, you have to give up 90% of your possible audience so that you are exactly right and attractive and credible for that 10% or 1% that will then say, oh, you are the person. Your firm is the firm and up to about 25 million. You find the larger the firm, the more specialized they are.

John (05:18): I think that’s hard, particularly for people getting started. That’s hard because it means saying no a lot, right? And nobody wants to say no to what they think could be an opportunity. And that the challenge.

David (05:28): Yeah, well, you don’t necessarily have to say no. You can still be opportunistic. What we tend to tell people is be narrow in your marketing and broaden your capabilities, which means especially if you need to keep the lights on, if you need cash, and at the beginning you need cash. If someone comes along and says, Hey, I’m willing to pay you 25,000 or a hundred thousand or whatever to do something, it’s okay to say yes. However, in any of your marketing, in any of your discussions as you’re telling people, here’s what I do, you want to be very narrow resonates and narrow is memorable. Does that resonate with you

John (06:06): Or Yeah, I love that too because also, yeah, no, absolutely. And one of the things I love that you said was about taking the a hundred thousand dollars because frankly that’s how you develop your experience. Sometimes you go figure out something you don’t know how to do and you end up deciding, Hey, we’re pretty good at that. Absolutely. Or we develop an expertise to do that.

David (06:24): And also it would be crazy if you decide what I’m going to do is I’m going to focus on water bottles and you get 12 requests from, I don’t know, people that want you to advise ’em on how to build chairs. I’m on water bottles. It’s like, dude, listen to the market. The market is telling you something. So just listen to the market.

John (06:47): I want to back up a minute to something you said that you can’t sell somebody who doesn’t have a problem. I essentially sell strategy. Most businesses we work with don’t ever wake up and say, I’m going to go buy strategy today. So how do you sell something? And I know you’ve written about this, how do you sell something to somebody who has the problem? They just don’t know they do.

David (07:08): So I don’t know if you’re going to like my answer to this one because what we typically tell people is don’t, and we have a whole thing we call fishing where the fish are, and your prospects are either aware they have a problem or don’t or they’re not aware. And also, so that’s one way you can think of them. Another way you can think of ’em is if they have a problem, how urgently do they want to solve it? They want to solve it now or maybe in the future or no urgency at all. And we highly recommend you target people who are aware of the problem and want to solve it now. And the reason is they’re really easy to win business from trying to convince people they have a problem. That’s hard work. You can do it. There are ways at it, I can tell you some ways at it, but I would much rather just go after the people who are saying, oh yeah, I want to solve this problem you’re talking about. It’s just easier.

John (08:01): And I guess probably what ends up happening, or at least for us is they don’t wake up and say, I want strategy, but they wake up and say, how come I have to compete on price all the time? How come my competitors show up in search results and I don’t show up? And it’s like, well, those are strategy problems. And so it’s really selling. It’s understanding the symptoms. Right.

David (08:22): That’s exactly right. That is a hundred percent right. And again, we run into this all the time. Consultants at least like to talk about themselves, these big terms, general terms, but that’s not how clients are describing their symptoms.

John (08:35): Yeah, absolutely. Do you believe that consultants need, I guess this is a yes or no answer or this might be a depends. Do you think they need a framework? Do you need something that’s repeatable that you can take out to somebody and say, here’s our framework,

David (08:51): Yes, there’s my yes or no answer. Yes. Would you like more behind that? Yes. For two reasons. Two reasons. One, unless you have some sort of framework repeatable approach, you have nothing scalable. So you cannot scale a hundred percent bespoke. And second, a framework, a view of the world creates credibility. It shows that you understand this problem, this challenge, and that makes you a more reliable solution. You don’t need to be different, you just need to be credible. And the framework creates credibility.

John (09:29): I also find that you get better at it. I mean, if you’re practicing the same process or methodology, you get better at delivering results. Right,

David (09:37): Exactly. Like I said,

John (09:38): Three. Okay, let’s throw another one out then. Projects, three reasons. No, go ahead. We have a little delay I think in our thing, so I’m stepping on you a little bit there. Yeah,

David (09:47): I not sure why.

John (09:49): I’ll throw out another one. Projects versus retainers, tuck that one through

David (09:53): Just different types of, so you’re talking about different contract structures or what happens frequently is this conflating of contract structures, meaning how you get paid and work structures. And it’s understandable that they get conflated because certain types of projects or work fits better with certain fee structures, project work. By and large, you want to be paid a project fee, which can be determined in front or advanced variable or fixed advisory work or ongoing work tends to be better set up as what we would call a stipend. We don’t really talk about retainers. Attorneys get retainers, which is a lump of money them, and then they draw against it hourly. A much better model is what we would call a stipend, which is a periodic payment. You don’t draw down against it, it’s just a payment. And that keeps you available to give advice or what have you, or work on the client’s issues for a month or a quarter or a year. If you can get a decade long stipend, that would be good. So matching the right contract structure with the right type of work helps. That’s one that’s complex enough. I would advise folks go and grab an article or look at it like my second book or even my first book to see different pricing structures.

John (11:19): The one that we’ve fallen on for years, you and I, again, we’re talking before I hit record, but is we like to deliver strategy upfront. So that’s like everybody buys that product. You don’t pass go without doing that if you’re going to retain us. And then it’s like, well, for the next year, how much could you pay us on a monthly basis and we’ll check all the boxes quarter by quarter. You actually gave that a name that I had not called it. So you want to describe that in your words.

David (11:47): Yeah. Well, we call that Colorado pricing, where you ask the client basically what fee would you feel comfortable paying on a periodic basis pretty much forever, at least for the next couple of years or three years? What’s going to feel comfortable paying monthly or paying quarterly, paying twice a year and whatever that price is, we will figure out then how do we create value within that. And if at any point you feel like you’re not getting your value, you let us know or we’ll cut it off. We call that Colorado pricing.

John (12:23): So one of the things that I discovered early on is to do that pricing model, you have to have a very high level of trust with a client because you’re essentially saying, trust me, you’ll get the results for this price. So how do you develop that level of trust, particularly early on?

David (12:42): Yeah, so you develop trust. That’s a big topic. There are ways to develop trust quickly. What anybody will tell you is the way you develop trust is by being trustworthy. And that means a lot of things, no question. So we talk about trust as being a trust triangle. There are three points in the trust triangle and in the middle is me. But from this client’s point of view, client client is always thinking me. They’re thinking, there’s three questions. The client is thinking, do you have my best interests at heart? Are you thinking about me? And the client is thinking, are you going to help me? And separately, it sounds similar, but it’s actually different. Are you going to hurt me? And so very quickly you need to demonstrate that you’re putting their interest first. For instance, by not saying you can do things that you can’t actually do by recommending, perhaps they find a different expert for certain things that shows you’re putting their interest above yours.

(13:43): You show that you can help them by showing your credibility, by case studies, by pointing out the value of working with you, but also really important. And this is even more important in certain cultures. When you get outside the us, you just show you’re not going to cause harm. That can be a little bit harder to demonstrate, but it can come across in your emails and how you phrase things. And if you’re ever in a meeting where there’s your client and multiple people, you go out of your way to make sure even if someone says something dumb or wrong, that you never embarrass them, that you help everybody look good. And if you can do with those, you can focus on that trust triangle, then you can fairly quickly build the kind of trust that allows you to create these relationships where you do Colorado pricing. Of course, you can also start out and say, let’s give it a three month trial.

John (14:38): Yeah. I’ll tell you one that I’ll throw into there, and it’s maybe because of who we’ve tend to work with over the years and my point of view about systems demonstrating that you have a process really goes a long way towards building trust.

David (14:53): Yeah, I agree with that. I think that’s a really

John (14:55): Good point. I think a lot of people have been burned by consultants who were winging it. Let’s face it.

David (15:02): Yeah, I agree with you. I do think that’s a really good point showing you’ve done it before, showing results. That’s all part of the credibility. And you can help me bucket being able to say, yeah, we’ve got this thing all mapped out. Here’s our 25 step diagnostic or 25 point diagnostic on this. Yeah, that makes a big difference.

John (15:22): We’ve gone 15 minutes and 32 seconds into our interview, and I’ve not mentioned AI yet, so I’m going to do that now. How do you see it changing the industry from the consulting industry?

David (15:36): Yeah, John, my point of view is anybody who prognosticate on this, anybody is setting themselves up to be wrong. We all know it’s going to affect the industry and however we predict it is going to be wrong. It will have a massive impact where exactly how clients will use it and how consultants will use it. Boy, it’s hard to tell. I’m seeing so many fascinating applications of ai. I mean, it’s just extraordinary things I wouldn’t have imagined. I will tell you, I would not like to be an entry level consultant in today’s world because entry level analysis, I can interview a dozen of my clients, the end customers to get feedback, run it through AI and have one hell of an analysis in no time as opposed to paying what was a junior consultant to do that kind of thing. But where it’s going to go, gosh, I don’t know. Where do you think it’s going to go?

John (16:38): Well, again, I wasn’t asked really to look futuristic as I’m with you. I mean everything will change next week, but I’m seeing immediate impact right now. And you just mentioned one of them certainly on entry level, but I think in a lot of ways what it does is I think it makes the informed consultant actually more valuable because there is a lot of misinformation, there’s a lot of misuse, there’s a lot of misunderstanding. And I think that somebody applying the tools appropriately is actually going to become more valuable.

David (17:10): And since AI hallucinate, I think is the term right, they just make things up. Unless you’re informed enough to know and be able to recognize the hallucination, AI becomes quite dangerous. And yeah, I’m not terribly concerned about AI replacing consulting. I think what’s more interesting is going to be how consulting firms effectively use AI to create more value for clients. And again, I’ve seen some pretty wild and fascinating attempts at that already.

John (17:43): Yeah, I mean, I know from our standpoint, we are expanding some of our deliverables because we can things like trend analysis and threat analysis and opportunity analysis. There are some things that can be added that I don’t know if they immediately add a lot of value, but they certainly add more substance to the deliverable for

David (18:05): Good, bad, and indifferent. And it’s good thought starters. We have clients who are building experts for their clients who are saying, look, you have a question. What we’ll do is legally we will load the top 10 books on this particular topic. We’ll create a custom bot for you, and it will just tell you, if you were to ask these top 10 authors what they think, here’s what they would say. And that’s handy. I mean, that’s an interesting piece of tech.

John (18:35): Yeah, you and I have been writing online, so a lot of our content has been consumed by these learning models. So I think that we’ve actually been using it to repurpose some of our own original content, which I think it’s actually very good at Currently. It’s not good at producing original content, but it’s good at consuming and understanding original content.

David (18:58): Yeah, it’s pretty interesting. I was a little freaked out the first time I went on the chat GPT and said, write an article on the style of David A. Fields. And because I published books and I published something like 400 odd articles, it was like, okay, and it knew who I am and it’s not graded original, and it did an okay job, but it’s a little freaky.

John (19:22): Yeah, it is. David, again, I appreciate you stopping by and the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Talking a little bit about marketing and consulting, where might you invite people to connect with you, find out more about your work?

David (19:35): They can always go to david a fields.com. So David a is in apple fields.com or check on LinkedIn. We run a 15 minute q and a every Monday, consulting best practices q and a on LinkedIn. And of course, I would encourage ’em to take a look at the book that you mentioned at the top, the Ible Consultants Guide to Winning Clients. It has done very well and well received, and I think most folks will find it quite helpful.

John (20:00): Yep, absolutely. I concur. Well, again, thanks for stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and hopefully we will 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 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.