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Transcript of Developing Important Entrepreneurial and Leadership Qualities

Transcript of Developing Important Entrepreneurial and Leadership Qualities written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Gusto, modern, easy payroll benefits for small businesses across the country. And because you’re a listener, you get three months free when you run your first payroll. Find out at gusto.com/tape.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jack McGuinness. He is a co-founder and managing partner of Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on helping great leaders build great leadership teams. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack McGuinness: Thanks so much for having me, John. I really appreciate it.

John Jantsch: So full disclosure, you and I’ve worked together, our firms have actually worked together, so I do know a little more about your story than maybe some folks. But why don’t you start by kind of giving a little bit of background on you and your journey as an entrepreneur and maybe tell us a little about your work.

Jack McGuinness: Sure. So my journey started, sort of my entrepreneurial journey I guess started in around 1993. I was looking for a job, just got out of my MBA program and I got very lucky and got connected to a guy that was about 15 years older than me from Deloitte who was starting his own management consulting firm. And I really wanted to get into management consulting field. So I helped, I was one of his first employees and wound up becoming the chief operating officer and running part of the firm and we grew at our peak to around 50 people or so. And it was great from a number of perspectives. Number one, it helped me, I got experienced both learning how to be a good management consultant but also had the opportunity to learn how to build and manage a consulting practice as well. It’s relatively small business, but I had a big part in helping build the infrastructure for the firm and hiring people and kind of the whole business development side and just really helping a firm grow. And it was a great experience from that perspective.

Jack McGuinness:It was also very informative for the type of work I do right now. But a lot of the people that we hired in after me had organizational development backgrounds and PhDs in psychology, master’s in organizational behavior. So, my partner, my boss had a strong vision for what he wanted the firm to look like. And in order to compete against the big guys, the Deloittes, the McKinseys, the Accentures, our niche became large scale change projects, anything from mergers and acquisitions to large scale system integration work. We rode the re-engineering process, re-engineering craze in the 1990s, but we did it from a change management perspective. So how do you bring the people along?

Jack McGuinness: So I feel like, through that experience, not only did I learn how to become a good managing consultant and help build the firm, but I also learned another part of I’m an engineer with an MBA. And it’s sort of a right and wrong way of doing things and that way of thinking and sort of a linear way of thinking. It’s kind of a simplistic view, but kind of that’s where my head was. And so I learned really this whole new dynamic of how to bring people along and how to lead large scale change efforts, which has really been informative for the type of work that I do right now.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So give us a little taste of that. What’s a typical engagement for you as a management consultant?

Jack McGuinness: Sure. So right now, we call ourselves executive or leadership team coaches. And to be honest with you till a few years ago, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a leadership team coach. But what we do is we work with executive teams at growing companies, say, anywhere from 15 to $150 million in revenue to help them build the structure for the team to be able to be productive and build the relational dynamics for them to be more effective in terms of how they work together. And so we call it two sides of the same coin. It’s like there’s a structural side of building a great team and a relational side of building a great team. And what happens often times with growing companies is they get out of sync. Everyone would be pulling their weight and rolling their sleeves up when they’re young with not a lot of process, not a lot of structure in place. And then relationships sort of get out of whack because people are stepping over each other or whatever and then you put new structure in place and the people don’t necessarily trust the structure.

Jack McGuinness: So what we do to start is really help leadership teams figure out where they’re out of whack structurally and relationally, help them move to some commitments collectively and individually to make the changes they need to make to strengthen how the team is operating to get the results they’re looking for. And what really it is, an accountability model of leadership team coaching. We help teams help themselves, hold themselves accountable to the commitments they make. Again, really what we’re very much focused on, how does this team become as good as it possibly can be to face the challenges what environment demands from them?

John Jantsch: Your firm is how old?

Jack McGuinness: We’re about 10 years old now. Yeah, we started in late 2009, so a little over 10 years old. Yes.

John Jantsch: Do you remember why you started your business or why you decided to have on your own?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah. There’s a practical and then there’s sort of a visionary kind of part of it. In 2008, after working for that management consulting firm, I owned a contract packaging firm. It was an entrepreneurial venture but we bought it with two passive partners. I bought a family-run business and we made some great strides to turn that around, bought some new equipment, brought on some customers like Unilever and Hershey and Godiva and did some great work. But then the financial crisis hit and we got our butts kicked with that whole thing. A lot of our customers brought their packaging back in-house, there wasn’t as much demand.

Jack McGuinness: And so some great lessons from that as well. But I was looking for my next gig. I thought I was going to get back into management consulting because that’s what I knew and had a pedigree in. And I reconnected with a classmate of mine from college that I had stayed in touch with. But we sort of put our heads together. He was getting his PhD in leadership at GW University, which is near me in the DC Metro area. And we sort of just put our heads together and said, “What do you want to do for the second half of your career? What unique contributions do we think we have to offer businesses?” We knew we wanted to do some sort of consulting work and we settled on… We thought we had some interesting things to say about teams in organizations. So when we started we were more broadly leadership development, team development across organizations. Right now we’re much more over the last five or six years, frankly with your help, much more focused on a narrow target market of working with the executive teams of growing companies.

Jack McGuinness: So circumstance certainly drove it, but also a passion for teams and we felt like we had some interesting things to say about teams. And it’s really come to fruition because I have to say in the last five years, this is the most fun and most lucrative. So both, we’re doing well both financially and professionally and personally because we love the work that we do and we think we are having some really good impact with the firms we’re working with, the companies we’re working with.

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John Jantsch: So since you’re having so much fun, what’s the hard part about doing what you’re doing as an entrepreneur in your view?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah, so a hard part is, like a lot of firms, you think you got a great Rolodex to start. And so frankly business development and selling is maintaining consistency of pipeline and it was the hardest part of our business. We started off with Gangbusters in 2000. It really got our stride in 2010 and had some great clients and big clients. And then the Rolodex runs dry a little bit and then you have to like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do now?”

Jack McGuinness: And so, I think I read your book, Duct Tape Marketing probably in 2011 or ’12 because I was just really doing some soul-searching about how we were going to make this thing work. And I came across your book and used it for a few years and then I was just like, “I got to dive in.” So I called you, you did one of your assessments for us and then I hired you for, well, I don’t know how long it was, maybe 18 months or off and on for two years. So the hardest thing was business development and building a strong rhythm of marketing and selling.

John Jantsch: Well, so let’s talk about marketing specifically.

Jack McGuinness: Sure.

John Jantsch: Professional service providers are essentially selling air to some extent. Management consultant, I mean, what does that mean? That can be very broad in general. What have you done, particularly as you kind of mentioned that you felt like your pipeline was good and your rhythm was good? What’s been the most effective way for you to market your business?

Jack McGuinness: So a couple things. First of all, you’re right, selling professional services and selling leadership development or leadership consulting, it’s a very crowded space. So getting targeted and narrowing our focus was, I think, the first thing that your book’s helped us with, but then when we started working with you, you really helped us with this, you can’t be everything to everyone. You got to narrow what you do and you got to be able to tell a story that’s compelling and that connects with them, that doesn’t talk at them. And the work that we do is very much an unrecognized need in many cases. There’s not a lot of CEOs just sitting around saying, “My team’s really dysfunctional. Let’s hire someone to help them.” But I guess some of them do, but we weren’t getting calls all day. So I guess that’s one way of putting it. But I guess the first was really narrowing our focus and getting a more narrowly-defined target market.

Jack McGuinness: And then the second thing that really has helped us is becoming thought leaders in the work that we do. Now, we’re not Marshall Goldsmith or anyone like that, but we have developed a lot of content in the last three years and we did that with a lot of discipline. You call it a content plan, I think. I can’t remember the term, but we had a content plan with a schedule and the types of things we were going to use, LinkedIn, writing for magazines, doing webinars, speaking, those types of things. And until you get disciplined at that, and frankly you have to write something before you can do much of anything else. And then re-curating other people’s content, re-curating our content, words that I didn’t even know what they meant frankly. And so I think those two things, targeting and becoming thought leaders in a very disciplined, organized way has been really instrumental for us.

John Jantsch: So a lot of folks, I mean I think a lot of people hear that advice that they need to be doing that. But when it really comes down to it, as you alluded too, it’s a lot of work or can be a fair amount of work. So when did you kind of realize, “Hey, you know what, this might be paying off?”

Jack McGuinness: Well, it wasn’t too far after, probably six months after we put our content calendar together and started writing for Chief Executive Magazine. We started getting some calls. So a couple of our biggest clients now are from the writing we’ve done for Chief Executive Magazine. And so I’d say within less than six months we definitely saw some benefit. And then you guys helped us. You and Jen have really helped us figure out how to track our Google and our LinkedIn and Facebook numbers as well. And using SEO and using just simple things like having better titles. And it is a lot of work, but we have seen the impact. I mean frankly, nothing’s perfect, but our first five or six years, it was up and down every month, particularly in the first quarter of the year really. At the end of the year we haven’t had a good year pretty much. And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do now?” We’re looking at each other trying to get the next sale. And we don’t really have that anymore.

Jack McGuinness: Our sales, our pipeline is much smoother or robust, I guess you would call it. And our monthly revenue is smooth out, so we don’t have those peaks and valleys anymore. Knock on wood. You can never rest, that’s for sure, running a small business. But I feel like with a lot of discipline and targeting, it’s really paid off.

John Jantsch: So let’s start a little bit about family life and owning a business. In your time before, and obviously your life has changed the 10 years you’ve had the business, but how do you manage? Because a lot of times running a business, it’s like, there’s always more to do.

Jack McGuinness: Right.

John Jantsch: So how have you managed kind of the elusive balance of trying to do all of this but also trying to enjoy a rich personal and family life?

Jack McGuinness: I’m fortunate from a couple perspectives that I have a wife who is a partner in a big law firm, so that certainly helps from an earnings’ perspective. But I think we were all over the place when we first started in terms of marketing. We would go to conferences, we’d go to networking events, we just did a lot of stuff that really just didn’t have… And handing out business cards was a useless construct to be honest with you. And so with the discipline came a much more productive way of managing what we do. Particularly as it relates to marketing because we don’t do those events or those pay for play things anymore. I have like three different breakfast groups that I formed with people that are like-minded, that are selling to similar people, that are willing to give to each other. I do writing, webinars.

Jack McGuinness: So everything’s very targeted and pretty disciplined so that I don’t feel a need to just go do lots of activity. So I feel like it’s been much more focused. Because frankly, as a small business owner, we’re both marketing ends selling and delivering the work that we do. And so the delivering takes up a lot of our time and it’s what we really like to do. So that one you can’t mess with, but you can mess with how you generate your business and get much more discipline there.

John Jantsch: Anything on the horizon for 2020 that you think is opportunity for relationship impact?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah. Again, through your advice and counsel, I’m very slowly and methodically putting together… I have an outline for a book that I’m planning on when my youngest daughter heads off to college in the fall. I will have even more time to focus and just go every couple of weeks and start the process of writing a book on how to build a great executive leadership team.

John Jantsch: Well, obviously I applaud that because, I mean, that’s the next logical kind of step in your content platform, if you will, that you were talking about. And Marshall Goldsmith, beware.

Jack McGuinness: Yeah, that’s right. Thank you for that. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. My aspiration is to meet him. I love that guy. But I think that’s the other thing is too, you pushed, you guys were really encouraging me to do more video and I made some attempts at that and it just didn’t feel right. So I hired a firm that does video and I did my first shoot last week. A couple of days worth of both customer, partners and me. And they have a lot of micro clips, some larger videos. So I’m starting that whole process this year. It took me a little longer than I wanted it to, but that’ll be a big push this year as well.

John Jantsch: Well Jack, thanks for stopping by and talking a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and relationship impact. You want to tell people if they want to check out your work where they can find you?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah, please. It’s relationship-impact.com and lots of rich content in there, all focused on how to build a great leadership team. John, I can’t tell you thank you enough for having me on your podcast and for the great partnership and advice and counsel that you’ve given me over the years and will continue to do so. It’s just been… I really don’t think that Gil and I would be in this place without you.

John Jantsch: Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate you sharing that and hopefully we’ll bump into you soon out there on the road.

Jack McGuinness: Thanks, John.

Transcript of Using a Framework to Create Inventive Content

Transcript of Using a Framework to Create Inventive Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr CMS. It’s a modern cloud based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. You can find them at zephyrcms.com, more about this later in the show.

John Jantsch: Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Melanie Deziel. She is the Founder of StoryFuel, and the author of a book we’re going to talk about today called, The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas for Marketers and Creators.

John Jantsch: So Melanie, welcome to the show.

Melanie Deziel: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Is this your first book?

Melanie Deziel: It is my first book.

John Jantsch: Awesome.

Melanie Deziel: It’s very exciting stuff.

John Jantsch: It’s very exciting. Have you got finished copies, yet?

Melanie Deziel: I have not, they are in the mail. I’m waiting, the bated breath, checking the mail a little obsessively. Any day, now.

John Jantsch: It’s a pretty awesome feeling, I will tell you.

Melanie Deziel: It will be really nice, to see them live and in person.

John Jantsch: I’m going to ask you lots of really easy, nice softball questions, but I’m going to start with kind of a hard one.

Melanie Deziel: Okay.

John Jantsch: There’s a lot of books about stories right now, so what’s your focus?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah.

John Jantsch: I’m going to use that word again … for this book, that’s going to make it different from the other books out there about story telling?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, you’re totally right. Storytelling is a bit of a buzzword at this particular moment, everyone’s trying to figure out their story and how to tell it.

Melanie Deziel: My approach is a little bit different in that I’m not coming at you, talking about your brand’s story as a whole, right? This is not who you are, as a company. This is, very specifically, how do you take that message and bring it to the world? The framework that I’m sharing is something that I learned in my background as a journalist, which is also, probably, a different perspective than a lot of the storytelling books out there. Just sharing, how do I sit down and come up with content on a recurring basis? There are so many platforms, and you have to update all of them so frequently, you run out things to say.

Melanie Deziel: So, the goal of this book was really to say you don’t have to be this amazing, magical, prolific content creator to have something unique to say routinely. And that if you have a system behind how you choose what to say, you’ll actually be able to fill those platforms with ease. You’ll have hundreds of ideas, rather than this writer’s block of what should I post today? That’s the question I’m trying to eliminate.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting you said that because, my experience working with a lot of journalists, now that we’re all producing all this content, is that this idea, the training really was a system, because a lot of times you got assigned something you knew nothing about. Your system had to kick into place, to allow you to structure it, format it, get it going quickly, on deadline. I think that makes a ton of sense.

Melanie Deziel: 100%. The other thing I always say is, you never see a newspaper that says, “Sorry, we decided not to do a paper today, because there was nothing new to talk about,” right? That deadline pressure is real, so you become very skilled at always finding a new angle, a new perspective, a new approach, something that you can say. So that even if it’s yet another school board meeting, or whatever else you happen to be covering that day, you’ve got some new way to talk about it that’s going to engage people.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Unfortunately, that also produces the stories of the doctor who talks about more people having a heart attack in Kansas City, during the Super Bowl, because they had to fill space, right?

Melanie Deziel: It’s true, it’s true. Well, you never want to make content just for the sake of content, so hopefully this will help you come up with a lot of ideas, and then choose the best ones to bring to life.

John Jantsch: We can drill into some of the elements, but I guess it might be helpful if you have the one minute version of the global picture, of what the framework is?

Melanie Deziel: Absolutely. The framework proposes two things.

Melanie Deziel: One, that every piece of content you’ve ever created, loved, or consumed is only made up of two things. It has a focus, in that it’s about something. Maybe it’s about people, or history, or data. And it has a format, so it’s brought to life in some way, like writing, audio, like we’re doing here, video, et cetera. As long as you agree with that, that every piece of content has a focus and a format, then what I’m proposing is if I can give you a tool belt of these are some focuses, and these are some formats, you can start to come up with new and novel combinations of those things, that allow you to tell similar stories in new ways.

Melanie Deziel: The idea being you could tell a story about history through a timeline, instead of just through a written piece of content. Or, instead of just through a video, or instead of just through an infographic. So, talking about new and different ways to combine all these different focuses, and formats. That’s really what we’re trying to do, is give you a go-to system, and a language for talking about, and thinking about content creation, so that you’re not just trying to grab things out of thin air.

John Jantsch: When I hear you talk about the focus piece, are you saying every piece of content has to have one focus? Your business has to have an over-arching focus? I mean, drill down on the focus idea?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, absolutely. I think that you can certainly combine these focuses, but the idea is if you were to think about a particular piece of content that you really enjoyed, like maybe the Serial podcast. We all remember Serial, that was a big one, we went crazy for it. That was a story about people, and it was a story about the history of that particular case, right? It did combine both the people and the history, as the focus. And it was told through audio, so that’s the particular combinations of focuses and format, there.

Melanie Deziel: You can imagine a world where that was a really long, investigative written piece, and something like the New Yorker instead of being just audio. That would be a different focus. It could have been told through an interactive timeline, where you scrolled through, and you got to listen to audio clips, and see photos. It could have been a map. I think they did, actually, include a lot of supportive content online, there was a map at some point, where you could look, here’s the cell tower, and here’s where the body was found, and plotting out all the different story elements on a map, instead.

Melanie Deziel: Every piece of content you’re trying to come up with … If you have a new product launch, or an event coming up, or you’re trying to just promote your business in general, thinking how could I tell this story through the lens of history? The history of our company, the history of this product. Or, how could I do it through data? As we talk about our company, how many people have we helped, how many products have we sold, how much revenue have we made? It just gives you different prompts, so instead of going back to the same tired stories, maybe you’re approaching things in a new way, or bringing them to life in a new way.

John Jantsch: That makes a ton of sense. Is there a finite collection of focuses? Like, here are the top … I know you talk about 10, but is there ultimately only so many of those that you should try to? I’m sure that certain industries, you could go crazy, but for the most part, would you say that there are a handful of tried and true focuses?

Melanie Deziel: Definitely. I think when it comes to focuses, and formats, I’ve picked 10 because it seemed like a nice, round number that would include some that were familiar, and some that would stretch you, to think and create in new ways. I probably can’t create an exhaustive list. At least, probably not in the timeline that it would take to create a book, there’s limits on our life. But, I did try to present some of the tried and trues.

Melanie Deziel: In terms of focuses, I think people is always a really good one to go for, we relate to stories about people very well. Basic and details, those are two complimentary ones. Basics, approaching something with just the very basics of what you need to know, really educational content. Then, details being more of an in-depth dive. You could do the same story, but approach it in both of those ways, as basics and details. I think process content is really having a moment, the last couple years. So, that’s anything that’s instructions, or DIY, recipes, we’ve seen a lot of that type of content. Those are some of the really common, tried and true.

Melanie Deziel: But, I think this also present some that you may not have thought of. I don’t know how many people are doing opinion content, as a brand. I give some examples in the book of how you can do that, without feeling like you’re going out on a limb, or getting in the middle of a debate. That’s not the goal, we’re not trying to create drama or divide your audience, we just want to express that someone has made a choice in creating this content. Maybe, “My favorite podcasts for entrepreneurs,” as opposed to just, “Here’s 10 random podcasts for entrepreneurs.”

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, those are some of the favorites. Again, like I said, a balance of hopefully ones that are familiar, and ones that might challenge you to think in some new ways, too.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think the structure, one of the beauties of this … I do think the challenge for a lot of people is they’re busy, doing all kinds of stuff, and then they sit down at a blank piece of paper, a blank screen, and they’re like, “I need some ideas.” This is almost like the little candy box, right? Just go grab one out of there, and start?

Melanie Deziel: Exactly. That’s the idea. If you can select from this list of focuses, here’s the eight or 10, or more that feel good to me, here’s the five, or eight, or 14 formats, that are within my resources, you could come up with 100 plus combinations. You’re obviously not going to create 100 pieces of content, maybe about the same thing, that would probably be excessive. But, like you said, it gives your brain somewhere to focus, that you’re not starting with a blank slate. You have some prompts, if you will, to think of ideas, and then you can select from those. Okay, these three are probably the most realistic for my budget, for my timeline, for my skillset.

John Jantsch: I can see a role, even … When I say content, so many people hear blog posts, and that’s where they stop. This could be your social media calendar of things, and obviously we’re going to get into some of the formats. In fact, maybe list your 10 formats, just quickly? Then, we can come back and talk about some of my questions on those.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, definitely. The formats, this could be an almost unlimited list, because new formats are coming out all the time, new platforms are launching. So, I tried to come up with a decent combination, here, and pick 10 that I thought would be most applicable.

Melanie Deziel: Writing is first. Like I said, that’s the default for all of us. Infographics is another one, a visual way to represent our information. Audio is really having its moment, as we were talking about. Video is another big one, that obviously always creates such deep engagement. Then, I added live video as a separate one, so not bunching them together but actually thinking differently about how you might create live video.

Melanie Deziel: Number six is an image gallery, so that could be a collage, it could be a slideshow, any way you’re assembling images together. Seven is a timeline, so presenting things chronologically. Eight is a quiz, which I think is super underrated, it’s a really fun way to test knowledge, and present new information to your audience. Nine is a tool, so this would be anytime you’re helping your audience achieve something, make a calculation, convert something. You’re letting them input information, and then having a custom output of some kind. Then, 10 is a map, which again, I think maps is one of the things that we don’t use as often as we should because it feels really intimidating to create a map, but it doesn’t have to be. There’s a lot of really easy tools out there, that can help you do that.

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John Jantsch: Maybe expand on that map one, because I’m thinking, oh, I need to get to Des Moines tomorrow, I’ve got to pull out a map. But, that’s not necessarily what you’re talking about, is it?

Melanie Deziel: It doesn’t have to be, no. I think anytime you think of a story, you’re trying to convey … You’re doing an interview with someone and they’re mentioning different locations from their history, you’re talking about a particular story that has multiple geographic points, you can create a map, an optional, additional, or the only way to explore through that content.

Melanie Deziel: One of the things that I always remind people is that location doesn’t have to be, as you said, going to Des Moines, it’s states, and Interstates, and highways and things. You could have a map of a home, a blueprint is essentially a map of a home. If you’re doing some sort of real estate or renovation type content, you might want to have a map of home, to show where things happen. A map of the body is another option, right? If you’re doing any healthcare content, you’re talking about yoga positions, or pressure points, then a map of your body showing where different things happen may also be a really useful way to bring that to life.

Melanie Deziel: Just thinking about, if there’s any sort of placement or geographic element to what your talk about, then a map may be an option.

John Jantsch: Right. Not everybody who listens to my show has a content team. One of the things that I hear all the time, and I’m sure you’re hearing as you go out and talk to people is, “Okay, what’s the best format? If I can only do one, what’s the best format?” I’m going to let you answer that, but I’m going to throw the follow-up, too, is that is there a way to approach content creation, in format, that maybe is more efficient? Then, allows you to maybe do lots of formats?

Melanie Deziel: It sounds like the real challenge that a lot of us have, especially if you’re a content team of one, or if content is just one of many things you’ve been tasked with, is there’s only so much time and money for us to do these things. So, how do we make the most of our time and money?

Melanie Deziel: My recommendation, if you have the means, is to start with video. The reason for that is video can be repurposed more easily than any other format. Video has visual elements, so you can use short video clips, you can use stills from that video. It has the audio, so you could create audio clips from that as well. Then, that audio can be transcribed, to be come blog posts, articles, snippets for social media.

Melanie Deziel: If you’re starting with any of the others, writing, or infographic, or just audio, that’s still wonderful. If you can create one thing very well, consistently, by all means, do that. But if you are trying to create the illusion of more resources than you have, video is a really good starting point, that you could break down into many smaller elements, without too much extra work.

John Jantsch: Well, I think one of the challenges we face today is that there’s a whole lot of behavior in consumption, that we have to be addressing. I mean, some people listen to books. When I write I book, my audio book doesn’t come out the day the other book comes out, I hear from people. It’s like, “All I do is listen to audio!” Then, there are readers, then there are more visual learners.

John Jantsch: To some degree, we kind of have to cater to all of them, or at least to as wide as swath as possible, don’t we?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah. I talk about, everyone has their first content language, the one that your most comfortable creating in. For me, I’m a writer, that’s my background. I would rather sit down and write 100 blog posts, then have to edit two videos, it’s just the way my mind works. I’ll probably do it more quickly. Some people are different, and writing might give them anxiety, and they’d love to just hop on live video, and talk freely.

Melanie Deziel: Figure out what works for you. What are you most comfortable creating? Then, make sure you go that extra step, like you said, and see, what does your audience like consuming? Because there could be a gap, there, and even if you make the most amazing podcasts in the world, if your audience doesn’t listen to podcasts, you’re wasting your time. You want to make sure there’s some alignment, there. If there isn’t alignment, find someone, or a tool, that can help you bridge that gap.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I’m glad you threw in that idea, of something you’re good at, or you enjoy, or it’s your preference, because this stuff’s hard work, and if it’s something you really just hate doing, you’re just not going to stick with it, so great point.

John Jantsch: So, you mentioned in your book, and I loved it, “focus before format,” which I’ve been saying strategy before tactics for years. It’s kind of the same thing. I guess, you can just clear this up, then. You’re saying somebody should say, “Okay, I’m going to write about this. This is my focus, now let’s figure out all the formats it could go in.”

Melanie Deziel: Exactly. Ask, what’s the story you’re trying to tell? Then ask, what’s the best way to bring that specific story to life?

Melanie Deziel: So, a lot of times we do the opposite, just like you said, we go for tactics. We’re like, “I need a viral tweet.” But, about what? Then, you end up with a lackluster “about what.” So, we want to start with, what is this story about? Then okay, does it have visual elements? If so, maybe it would make a good video. If not, we’re probably going to have a very boring video, if there’s no visual elements to this whole story. By starting with your focus, and then asking which format is best to bring this to life, you ensure that you’re going to have some good alignment there, between the two.

John Jantsch: How closely should your focus be aligned with, say, business goals?

Melanie Deziel: I think, at the end of the day, all the content we make has to, in some way, help our business goals. So again, that’s one thing I always try to underscore. I’m not advocating that you make every possible piece of content you could with this system, or that you create every single interaction, or combination of the focuses and formats.

Melanie Deziel: But, if you know that your overarching goal is I want to create deeper relationships with this type of audience member, or I want create awareness around this event that we’re throwing, or I want to help people better understand a particular topic, then that helps you choose from amongst the focuses and the formats.

Melanie Deziel: So, for example, if your goal is, “Look, our customers really misunderstand this particular area of what we do, we need to do some education.” You’d look at that list and say, “Well, telling them about our Founder, doing a people focused story, that’s not really going to clear up that matter, so we’ll skip that for now.” But maybe a history, helping them understand the history of that particular issue, challenge, area, that might be helpful. Process would almost certainly be helpful, help them understand the thing that they maybe misunderstand, how it comes to life, what’s right and wrong there.

Melanie Deziel: Then saying, “Okay, if we’re trying to show a process, is the best way to do that process through writing? Maybe it is, but maybe we need to show that process, so we should try an image gallery, showing each step, or a video, or a live video, so that they can watch it happen.”

Melanie Deziel: As long as you start with your why, and then your big business goals, then asking, what sort of focuses make sense for that? Then, what sort of formats make sense, with that?

John Jantsch: Yeah, to your story of the viral video, so many people created ones, that got millions of views, that actually didn’t cause any business objectives to be met. It’s kind of like, well, is that worth the time?

John Jantsch: You have … and I’m imagining you, in workshops, almost playing Tic-Tac-Toe, with the boxes of this, and filling it in. You have some visuals, of the framework. Can we post those, in the show?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, we’ll see what we can throw up there. Actually, I have a little cheat sheet, that includes the focuses and the frameworks. Maybe what we can do is we can include the link, and then a code to download that, for your listeners? That should be easy. Yeah, we’ll definitely do that.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, it’s absolutely a fun little game. A lot of times, what I do in workshops is we’ll actually use a 10-sided die. Have you ever seen 10-sided dice? We’ll roll them, to come up with random combinations, and just see what we can come up with.

John Jantsch: That’s actually really cool, because that’s probably as accurate as somebody just picking.

Melanie Deziel: Yeah. Yeah, it’s just a good thought exercise. Like I said, sometimes, you get a combination that, “Okay, this doesn’t align with our goals.” Or, “We could do this, but it probably wouldn’t be great.” Again, at least you’re not a blank slate, and that will sometimes spur an idea for something related, that is actually a much better strategic fit.

John Jantsch: I have never seen a 10-sided die, I’m having trouble wrapping my head around what that would even look like.

Melanie Deziel: It’s quite an odd shape.

John Jantsch: It must be. It can barely sit on its side.

John Jantsch: So Melanie, where can people find out more about The Content Fuel Framework, and of course, the work that you’re doing?

Melanie Deziel: Yeah, you can learn more about my team and my company at Storyfuel.co. So, Story F-U-E-L.C-O.

Melanie Deziel: The book, if you want to buy it, is at IWantMelaniesBook.com, nice and easy. But, you can learn more at ContentFuelFramework.com, as well. There’s even instructions there, if you want to make that 10-sided die game, if you want to see what the 10-sided die look like, and make that game, there’s instruction cards there. You can try it out yourself.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well Melanie, thanks for dropping by. Are you in New Jersey, New York?

Melanie Deziel: I am.

John Jantsch: New Jersey?

Melanie Deziel: I’m right in Jersey City, so I pretend to be both.

John Jantsch: Okay. Well, I was picking up just … I have a client that lives in Northern New Jersey, and you sound exactly like her, so I was pretty sure that’s where.

Melanie Deziel: That makes me happy. I’ve not lived in Jersey my whole life, so that means I’m starting to sink in.

John Jantsch: Oh, happy. Yeah, it’s starting to get to some of your phrases.

Melanie Deziel: There we go.

John Jantsch: All right Melanie, thanks for dropping by. Hopefully, we’ll run into you soon, out there on the road.

Melanie Deziel: Definitely. Thanks for letting me share my story.

Transcript of Creating a Podcast as Part of Your Prospecting Process

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John Jantsch: Hey, marketing today has gotten harder. There’s so many new platforms. How do you reach the right audience? Fortunately, there’s a simple way. LinkedIn can help you speak with the right professionals at the right time.

John Jantsch: Hello. Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Steve Gordon. He is an author and founder, CEO of Unstoppable CEO. He’s also got a podcast by the same name, and we are going to talk about that today, podcasting and more specifically podcast prospecting. Using your podcast not just as a way to create content, but as a way to actually create clients. So Steve, thanks for joining me.

Steve Gordon: Hey John, great to be here.

John Jantsch: So I, my first question was Unstoppable CEO. You want to unpack the meaning behind that name of your company. I know that doesn’t have anything to do with podcasting, but I’m just curious.

Steve Gordon: Well, it doesn’t, and of course when we started we weren’t doing much of anything with podcasting when we started about 10 years ago. But that came out of a conversation that I was having with a buddy and when I started the business, he was asking like, “Who are you really trying to be a hero to here?” And I started describing him, it’s the business owner that sort of started with the dream and then they scratched and clawed and built it to the point where they really could have a business that sustained their life and then, wham, the world hit them with a curve ball and then they crawled back to the top of the mountain past that and they got hit again and they just kept going and going and going. And he said, “Oh, they’re unstoppable, you mean.” I said, “Wow, that’s it. That’s who we’re going after.” So we named the company that because that’s kind of our way to stay focused on who we’re really serving.

John Jantsch: No, that’s awesome. Certainly, resilience is a key ingredient to doing this as an entrepreneur because you will get knocked down. So it’s just the ones that get up and learn from it are the ones that succeed ultimately. So does everybody need a podcast? I’m going to sort of be facetious a little bit and kind of throw out what I hear and I’m sure you hear all the time, “Oh there’s so many of them out there already. It’s over-saturated. It’s yesterday’s thing.” So I’m playing devil’s advocate for you.

Steve Gordon: Well I heard Seth Godin say that everybody needs a podcast, so I’m going to believe Seth. Yeah, I think everybody needs a podcast in business. And it used to be that we’d say everybody needs a blog. You need a way to kind of communicate with your prospects, your clients, your partners and all that. The problem that I found, John, over the years and, and maybe you’ve run into this too, is that most business owners, A, are really, really busy and B, they weren’t born natural writers. And they seem to be kind of allergic to having to sit down with a blank screen and write something. And one of the things that I think is magic about podcast, one of the many things that I think is magic about it, is all you got to be able to do is have a conversation. And I have yet to meet a business owner that couldn’t do that.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah. Or, as you said, you ask them to write 200 words describing their business and it’d be the scariest project you’d give them, but then they would talk for two hours about their business.

Steve Gordon: Absolutely. And easily so. Happily so.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ve actually used that as a technique to get content produced for a lot of business owners, particularly in an industry I didn’t know anything about. I wasn’t going to be able to write any content, but I would just interview people, capture the interviews really before we even thought about using the audio content. But I would actually then transcribe that and turn it into a blog post or into an about us page or something. It’s so much easier.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, absolutely. Well we’ve really started thinking about about podcasts as kind of the foundational layer for the marketing at a business because of what you just described, you can do so many different things with the content and you can repurpose it in so many ways. So if we start with that as the foundation, it gives you this really great capability to do two fundamental things that I think are important. One is it’s a great platform for building relationships and two is the byproduct, you get this like great content out of that that’s a byproduct that you can just send out to everybody that you ultimately want to do business with and nurture them and keep them interested in you and keep you top of mind.

John Jantsch: Yeah. When people had the same sort of pushback with blogs, I don’t know, 10 years ago I was telling people, stop calling them blogs. It’s just content. It’s just content that your customers, your prospects need, search engines need, all these things. And I’ve gotten to calling podcasting just audio content because I really think that’s maybe a fuller way to look at it.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, think so. One of the things that I really didn’t fully understand when I first got into it was that you’ve got this platform that you’ve created and people will listen to it. Even if a lot of people aren’t listening to it. Let’s say you’re a small business, a local business, and all you’re doing is recording these conversations and you’re sending them out to whoever is in your local community that you want to stay in touch with. Even at that, it is so easy to invite someone on and get them to happily say yes and then begin to build a relationship with them. I started actually my first podcast, I took inspiration from you back way back in 2012. I was listening to John Jantsch on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and thought, “I need one of those.”

Steve Gordon: And we started one and I went and interviewed 50 marketing and business experts all over the world. People I would never would’ve been able to meet otherwise. But because I had a podcast, they were open to sitting down and having a conversation with me. And that worked really well. We got new business out of it. Big mistake I made is I didn’t have a team behind me. So after 52 episodes I got busy and couldn’t keep up with it.

Steve Gordon: But those relationships are probably some of the most valuable relationships that I have still to this day in business. In fact, when I wrote my first book in 2014 I went back to that group of people, 15 of them. So small percentage, 15 of the 50 said, “Yeah, I’ll help you promote the book.” And that took that book from nothing … I mean, we had a tiny little email list of a thousand people and within short order, that book was in the hands of 5,000 people that I never knew.

John Jantsch: Yeah. People who’ve listened to this show for any length of time, know that I call it my dirty little secret. I started podcasting, not because I wanted to build some podcasting empire, it just gave me an excuse to have conversations with people I wanted to have conversations with. And what I found was that we talked off air about … or maybe that was on the recording already about my friend Seth Godin, who has been just a great ally and promoter of all things Duct Tape. And he was one of my first interviews. And I guarantee you if I sent Seth an email even 10, 15 years ago and said, “Hey, can we get on the phone for about 20 minutes so I can pick your brain?” It’d be like delete, even as even as nice as he is.

John Jantsch: But when you send an email to that same person and say, “Hey, I see you have a new book coming out, I’d actually like to interview you and promote that book.” Well, all of a sudden you get a lot more attention. You’re a member of the media. Even now that podcasts are so mainstream, people still react that way, so I would keep doing this just because I get to have great conversations with people like you.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I tell you, it’s my favorite thing to do in my day when I go to work. If I see that I’ve got podcast interviews it’s great because I know number one, I’m going to have fun doing it. Two, I’m going to make some really great relationships and when we’re coaching a business through this process of strategically how to use their podcast, we usually will tell them, “Look, you want to have two kinds of audiences that you’re thinking about here. You want to think about, from a a referral standpoint, who are the relationships that you want to nurture or start where they’ve got influence over your potential clients? And go out and invite those people and interview them.

John Jantsch: And then I think a strategy that’s under utilized is to look at who are the clients you really want to do business with, maybe those strategic clients that would be really hard to reach any other way. They’ve got all of the gatekeepers up and all that. Well, if you’re kind of approaching it as … we call it being a success journalist for the industry. So you go to an industry leader and say, “I’m interviewing all of the industry leaders about how they’ve become so successful. Would you like to share your success story?” You’ve just parachuted over all the gatekeepers.

John Jantsch: That’s right.

Steve Gordon: And now you’re going to build a relationship with that person without being a salesperson, you know?

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I’ve gotten pushback over the years with people kind of saying that, “Oh yeah, well you’re an author and you interview these people that are authors and whatnot, but my little business that doesn’t make sense.” And you just hit the nail on the head. I mean, if you want to work with mid market size company CEOs in your town, start interviewing them because, hey, it’s great content. I mean if that’s the market you’re in, you may actually have a conversation with somebody who says, “Well gosh Steve, tell me about what you do.” But even if you don’t, their peers are going to see that content, they’re going to want to promote that content for you. So it just has so many really positive marketing elements, doesn’t it?

Steve Gordon: Oh, it does completely. And it’s really fairly easy we found to take the interview that you have and at the end of that, you usually have some time scheduled once the recording stops and extend the conversation a little bit. And so, John, you’re familiar with Strategic Coach, right? Dan Sullivan?

John Jantsch: Oh sure. Yeah. [crosstalk 00:10:16].

Steve Gordon: So you’re probably familiar with the Dan Sullivan Question, right?

John Jantsch: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Steve Gordon: So it’s a great little book. If you’ve never read it, go get the Dan Sullivan Question. And at the end of a podcast interview-

John Jantsch: Takes about 10 minutes.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s a 10 minute read. The question sounds something like this, “Hey John, if we were having this conversation three years from today, what would have to happen for you to feel happy with your progress?” And then you just be quiet and you listen to them and they’re going to tell you what their goals are in the future.

Steve Gordon: And if you’re talking with a referral partner or with a potential client, they’re basically giving you the roadmap for how you can come and add value to them. And so you need that raw material and then usually what we’ll say is something like, “That’s really great. You know, I interview lots of people on this podcast. I bet that if I think about it a little bit, I’ll have some connections that can help you get to this goal that you just told me about. Would you like to get together on Tuesday for 20 minutes and I’ll have some connections for you?” And they always say yes.

Steve Gordon: So now you’ve got a second meeting and you come back with those connections and with some ideas and if it’s a prospect and you’ve really thoughtfully targeted who that prospect is, chances are I’ll bet one of those ideas might be working with your company. And it’s a real easy thing to say. It’s just, “Hey John, I’ve been thinking about all those things. You told me that goal you had and I think we might be able to help get you there. Would you be interested in talking about that?”

John Jantsch: Yeah. I want to go back to one of the things you said is that in that conversation they will tell you ways that you might be able to add value. You did not say ways that you might be able to sell to them. And I think that’s a really key distinction, because a lot of people just go in, sell, sell, sell, and they don’t listen to “How can I add value?” Because you’re right. That in the end is all people care about, is receiving that. So I think that’s an important distinction.

Steve Gordon: Oh, it’s really critical. I mean, selling is all about friction, I think. And adding value, they pull you along. There’s no friction.

John Jantsch: Do you know there are over 62 million decision makers on LinkedIn? Yeah. And even small and medium sized businesses are making the most out of LinkedIn ads. They’re using LinkedIn to get their voices heard and their messages to resonate with the audience. And it’s not just about awareness either. LinkedIn ads are driving traffic and engagement. If you want to check it out, try for yourself. LinkedIn is offering a free $100 LinkedIn ad credit to launch your first campaign. Simply visit linkedin.com/ducttape. D-U-C-T-T-A-P-E. That’s linkedin.com/ducttape. So there’s some terms and conditions that may apply, but I urge you to go check it out for yourself.

John Jantsch: So, not intentionally, but you jumped ahead to one of the questions I wanted to ask. So let’s back up a minute and maybe let’s just break down the steps. We’ve kind of made it sound really simple, but let’s break down the steps for people. So we talked about why they would need a podcast. How have you found in today’s world is the best way to find prospects. So let’s say they know who their ideal client is. They have decided they’re going to do a show focused on that ideal client. How do they find those prospects?

Steve Gordon: Well, chances are they probably already know who they are. Most business owners have an idea. So you start with the list you have. And then when we’re working with a business to kind of go through this process, we help them really get clear on who their ideal client is and kind of create a profile there that’s not anything revolutionary. That’s kind of marketing 101, but then from there we take that and we’ll help them build out that list based on that profile. And we call it the target 100 process. And so we want to have a list of around a hundred people that’s always a working list that we’re inviting to to come and be a guest on their podcast.

John Jantsch: All right, so what if I don’t know all those people. I mean maybe I’ve got a couple of clients, I’ve got a little bit of a network. I’ve been in an a BNI group or something like that, but I want to go bigger. LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Are you a fan?

Steve Gordon: Yeah, it works great. We use that. We use the web. One of the secrets, if you want to go bigger and level up is to go look at other people’s podcasts and see who’s been interviewed. And those people you know are going to be interested. They usually have an audience, so if you’d want to sort of level up … We’ve got one client who’s doing this right now. He’s had a local virtual CFO business and wants to take it national and so he was actually an officer in his BNI group. Well that will only get him in his town. It won’t get him beyond his town. So he’s now going through and we’re getting guests booked who have audiences and looking at who’s been on other podcasts to do that. And it’s just so easy.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ll tell you another benefit that once you’re doing this for a while and interviewing a lot of people for awhile, at least in my case, I had a book come out recently, and I just went and looked at everybody I’ve interviewed the last three years. And I sent them all an email saying, “Hey, will you help with the book?” Well, lo and behold, 75% of them have a podcast now. So it kind of filled up my podcast schedule just from people that I had booked. And I think that that’s probably something people can expect as sort of that reverse kind of strategic partnership arrangement almost.

Steve Gordon: Oh, it absolutely works. You mentioned something earlier, in the beginning you said, kind of being a little devil’s advocate that, “Aren’t there too many podcasts? Isn’t it’s saturated at this stage?” One of the really interesting things that we’ve discovered is that there are an awful lot of podcasts listeners, particularly business owners, and so many of them are curious about how this whole process works. And when you ask them for an interview and they don’t have a podcast, but they’re a podcast listener, they are suddenly fascinated by it. And they’ll jump at the chance and then they want to ask you everything about how it works. So you really become a leader to them in a really interesting way.

John Jantsch: I record this show in my little office in Kansas city and I have a full glass front on my office and people walk by and they they’re absolutely convinced I must be a radio DJ or something. So they sit there and stare. All right, so I’ve got my list of prospects, I know what my show’s going to be about. I’m really pumped to go out and start spreading the world. How hard is it to set up a podcast?

Steve Gordon: That’s where everybody tends to fall down. Now it’s getting easier. So there are services where you can kind of go and get it set up and they take care of a lot of the basic technical details. But our recommendation is that you build a team to do it because your job as the business owners just to show up and talk. You want to be able to engage with the person that you’re trying to build a relationship with. That’s the fundamental reason you’re doing it. And you’ve got other things to do. Most business owners I know don’t have any extra time. And so you becoming an audio engineer and a copywriter and the marketing tech person and all of that is I think kind of foolish. So get a team, whether you get an internal team to do it, whether you get a bunch of freelancers that you want to manage to do it, whether you get a team like ours or one of the many others that is now in this space. But do yourself a favor and get, get support.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And when you say team, a team can mean somebody that gives you three hours a week. It doesn’t have to be, “I need to hire these five different individuals.” I mean my podcast is just that, I do generally invite my guests, I do the interviews and once I hit stop, I don’t touch it anymore. But the person that takes it over is in New York city and does all the work virtually and in about, I want to say, two hours an episode. So I mean it’s relatively inexpensive and as you said, your time is probably better spent going in, cutting another deal for your business, as opposed to doing this.

John Jantsch: But the benefits long term are worth the investment of that time. All right. You touched on this, but I want to hit it just a little bit again because I think when I talk about this idea of it being a great prospecting tool, there is a danger in somebody getting somebody on the phone and then just immediately selling to them. And so I’d love it if you’d kind of go over again, so we’ve done the interview, it’s been a great conversation. How do I sort of elegantly make that transition to talking a little bit about what I do or asking them about what they need, because I think I could see people fumbling that.

Steve Gordon: Well, yeah. I think that’s probably the one spot where you could make the biggest mistake with it. I have this principle. I learned it from a good friend of mine who’s very, very successful in the life insurance industry, probably one of the top guys in the country. And he talks about this idea of purity of intent. And so anytime I’m approaching anything that’s related to marketing or sales, I’m kind of getting myself in this place of purity of intent. And for me what that means is being 100% focused on the person that I’m with and how do I add value to them? That’s critical.

Steve Gordon: So you have this interview, you’re already adding value to them because you’ve invited this business owner on to promote themselves. Okay. And you’ve ended the recording and now it’s really easy to say, “Wow, John, that was amazing. I learned so much. I had no idea you were into all those things. I’m really curious, where do you see yourself in three years? What has to happen between now and three years from today for you to feel really happy with your progress?” Which is the the Dan Sullivan question we talked about earlier. And they’ll tell you where they’re going and then you just need to listen and say, “Wow, I could help. I could help him get there quicker or I could help him get there easier.”

Steve Gordon: And it might be making connections. It might be you can help them from a business perspective. But I always like to give space. So I said before, I said the thing we always teach our clients to do is just say, “Hey look, would it be okay if we got together on Tuesday, or pick whatever day, for 15 or 20 minutes. I’d like to think about it a little bit.” And that way you get some space so that it doesn’t feel like you’re suddenly turning the tables. And if you’re coming from this place of purity of intent, it works.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So you have written a book on Podcast Prospecting that you want to tell us about it and how people can perhaps get that. And of course, as always, we’ll have any links in the show notes.

Steve Gordon: Yeah, absolutely. So, John, we’ve put up a page just for Duct Tape Marketing listeners where they can get … this is my newest book. It’s my fourth book and the title is Podcast Prospecting. So if they go to unstoppableceo.net/dtm, there they’ll be able to get a free copy of the book. And if anybody wants to talk with me about podcasting, I’d love to brainstorm a little bit how they might be able to do that in their business.

John Jantsch: Awesome. And as I said, we’ll have that in the show notes and I know a lot of people that would love to get that, and I appreciate the gracious offer to our listeners. So Steve, thanks for stopping by and spending a little time talking about Podcast Prospecting and hopefully we’ll see you soon someday out there on the road.

Steve Gordon: Thanks, John.

Transcript of Spotting Inflection Points in Your Industry

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rita McGrath. She is a globally recognized expert on strategy, innovation and growth, and also the author of a fairly new book called Seeing Around Corners: How to spot inflection points in business before they happen. Rita, thanks for joining me.

Rita McGrath: It’s a pleasure. Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch: I’m guessing I won’t be the first person to ask this, you’re far more educated than some of my other guests. But, what is an inflection point? Let’s start there.

Rita McGrath: An inflection point is some change in the environment that creates a 10 times impact on your business, whether for good or for ill. As an example, the advent of digitization has created inflection points for sectors as wide varying as television, media, advertising. And content distribution.

John Jantsch: I know that obviously the first part of the book is, how do you see one of these coming? How do you decide what to do about it? I think the fact that’s exactly the way the book’s broken up, and how to bring your organization with you. But let’s start with, I mean, I don’t think these things come knocking on the door, right? How do you, sort of see them sneaking up on you?

Rita McGrath: Well, I think the first thing to remember is that they don’t happen instantly. They feel instant when you are experiencing their effects, but if you think about just the digital revolution as a case in point, we’ve had this thing building up since the early 90s, when we had the first friendly web browser, and the seeds of it go back even further back than that. The inspiration is really a bit like the line in Ernest Hemingway’s book, The Sun Also Rises, one character asks another, “Well, how did you go bankrupt?” And the response was, “Well, gradually and then suddenly.” I think the first thing to remember is you can spot the early warnings long before these things are at your doorstep demanding that you respond to them.

John Jantsch: What do you say to that company that, and my whole business, really the last 30 years that I’ve been in my business, I’ve seen all of this digital transformation for sure, but what do you say to that company that says, I see this coming, but to actually respond the way that we think we need to is suicide. I’ll give you a great example. I used to, because I’ve had a marketing business, I used to run a lot of ads in newsprint. In fact, we used to run a lot of classified ads for certain things. That was a huge revenue. In fact, I think the classified ad business was half of the ads that newspapers got, and that went away one day completely. They certainly could have seen it coming. They saw what Craigslist was doing, for example, but to do something about it meant that they were going to gut their business.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, I think a stellar example for that business specifically, is the Norway based companies Schibsted, and their head of operations said in the early 90s, he said the internet is perfect for classified ads, classified ads are perfect for the internet. What they did, which a lot of newspapers didn’t, is they incented their leaders, whether you were part of the digital division, or whether you were part of the print division, what mattered to your bonus and compensation was whether you kept that client for Schibsted, however they wanted to do business with you. What you find most of the newspapers did in the early days of digital was they just messed that completely up, because they put the digital division and the print divisions basically at war with each other. And so you ended up with the digital division not getting the resources that it needed to make a smooth transition. Today Schibsted, is I think, one of the top three, maybe even the top two classified advertising providers on the planet.

John Jantsch: Well, I think what you also saw was a lot of people kind of sticking their head in the sand saying we’re just going to ride this out. I’m a 62 year old CEO, and I’ve got a board and to make some giant change that is going to save us in 10 years from now. That’s a hard decision isn’t it?

Rita McGrath: It is, and it takes a lot of courage. I think this is where I really want to have boards take a more forward looking view because you can’t expect that, that 62 year old CEO who’s bonus and comp and retirement is going to depend on short term performance in the next two years to do this. But the boards have a fiduciary responsibility to their investors, and as the business round table has recently pointed out to the larger communities that organizations serve, and I just think far too many boards roll over and play dead and don’t take that responsibility seriously enough.

John Jantsch: Are there certain gauges that people, and obviously I’m sure it varies by industries, but are there certain things that people should be checking in on a couple times a year, or to start spotting some of these, maybe they start out as trends before they overwhelm an industry?

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative). One of the most effective things companies can do, is make sure that they’ve got some budget, some resource set aside for experimenting with what I call options, what some people call little bets. These are small investments that you make that give you some insight into what could be changing in your world. They’re not big, bet the company, huge commitments, but they’re small experiments.

Rita McGrath: Let me take an example, just because that’ll make it more clear for people. Nike for years, felt that there was an opportunity to have some kind of direct connection with their consumers. In the late 80s they invented this horrible thing called, I think it was called the Nike motion, which was like you strapped it around your waist, and it had little sensors in it, which could peer at the ground and tell you how fast you were going and all that sort of thing. It was kind of kludgy and it caught on with a niche, but it really didn’t get anywhere. But they never really dropped the idea.

Rita McGrath: The opportunity for getting close to customers revived again after Apple introduced the first iPod. We forget, we think this is ancient history, it was 2001, I mean it wasn’t that long ago. What they did was they partnered with Nike, they invented this sensor, which became part of the Nike plus system, and today Nike plus the website, 20 years later, has something like 135 million members on it. That digital inflection, they were experimenting with it all along. When it finally came to be, as is the case now, that companies are discovering the power of going direct to consumer, Nike was already perfectly positioned.

John Jantsch: Some people might assume, and I’m prepared for you to bat this right back at me, but some people might assume that smaller organizations, small companies actually have an advantage when it comes to kind of changing direction or innovating. Would you say that that’s true?

Rita McGrath: Well, yes, they have fewer assets to mess around with. Back to our newspaper guys, if you were running a major newspaper back in the 80s, I mean the stuff that was on your mind was not classified ads, it was union contracts< and truck driver [inaudible 00:00:07:51], the price of paper, and did you get reliable ink supply? When you go to a digital footprint, all those assets become kind of irrelevant. I think it is easier for a smaller firm if they decide to shift direction, because they don’t have all those assets that have to be written off and dealt with in otherwise navigated.

John Jantsch: A company that you use as an example in the book is Adobe –

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: – and of course a lot of software companies, we all bought the CDs, and boxes, and that kind of stuff, and we no longer do that anymore, but Adobe really went all in didn’t they?

Rita McGrath: Yes they did. They burned the bridges.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I remember buying a PageMaker in a box, which of course they bought from Aldus, which was kind of their flagship, which of course obviously now is much roomed into hundreds and hundreds of titles. But do you, in your research, is there something that other than them, maybe what appeared to be taking a big gamble, is there something that you believe made them sure that this was the inflection point?

Rita McGrath: I think it actually has its roots in the great recession. The problem with buying shrink-wrapped software, is if you run out of free cash flow, it’s very easy for you to decide to hang onto whatever you’ve got for another year. Adobe really had a big setback, and you often see this pattern where something happens that suddenly causes people to say, hang on this time is different. I think what that got them thinking, the fact that they had that shock, got them thinking very hard about the future of their business, and how could you do a couple of things. Firstly was ensure a more stable revenue stream so that you weren’t depending on people making an discretionary purchase.

Rita McGrath: But the second one was, as you looked at how technology was evolving in that kind of 2006, 2007, 2008 period, something we have again forgotten is that that was really when Cloud took off as the business model, and Salesforce led the way with this idea of monthly recurring revenue, but it was starting to be real. I think what Adobe realized, was not only were they vulnerable to buyers suddenly deciding they didn’t need to spend that kind of money, but that a new competitor could come in and use these new technologies and knock them off their perch. I think it was kind of two revelations over time that caused them to make that decision.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I think it’s one of those that was a tough decision, but it was an inevitable one, I guess. But it was, I think, tough because the technology wasn’t quite there yet and the online versions were not very good initially.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: I mean, now they’ve certainly caught up, but I think they were basically not only changing their business model, they were creating an experience for a customer that maybe wasn’t as good.

Rita McGrath: Right. One of the things I thought was smart about what they did was they said, look, the online version has to have different attributes than the version that lives by itself in your desktop, and our initial online customers are going to be people that really value that. One of the things for instance that they did that was different was, you used to have to pay a ton of money for Adobe, and so the only people that could afford it were either very much in that space or larger institutions. Well today you can be an Adobe customer for $7.99 a month. If all you want to do is have their password protection capability on your PDFs, you can do that very inexpensively. They really opened up the market to a whole lot of users who couldn’t afford to be part of their universe before.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and you’re right though, the model changes so much in terms of distribution, and assets, and hard costs, that it really allows for that kind of innovation, doesn’t it?

Rita McGrath: It does. Yeah.

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John Jantsch: Are there any industries that you look at right now and think, boy, they’d better be watching out?

Rita McGrath: Oh absolutely. Any industry that’s been stable for a really long period of time, and hasn’t really had to deal with much disruption. Examples are the construction business, the guys that make roofing tiles and that kind of thing. I think insurance is very interesting how stable it’s been, even though it sells a digital product by and large, definitely retail, we’re already seeing retail going through a major revolution.

Rita McGrath: I do a monthly newsletter and this month, the situation I looked at was holiday shopping and how that’s changed, and just some really interesting trends in the way that we deal with customers. I mean, for example in marketing as you know, the traditional gold star was you thought about the marketing funnel, and so you sort of had leads coming in the top and money flowing out the bottom, and in between where these hapless customers, which we tried to celebrate from the cash in their wallets, and right now what we see is this really immersive set of customer experiences where we’re constantly in contact with customers at any possible point in their journey. It’s really a radical transformation.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I would say another thing that I see, is that we are sometimes not in contact with them at all when they are going on the journey, that they’re in control of it and when and how they engage is totally up to them, or how they do their research, and a lot of times we are surprised that we even get a customer, if that makes sense?

Rita McGrath: Oh yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: What about the grocery industry? That’s one that’s always kind of puzzled me because people have been talking about grocery delivery, like the Amazon of groceries, for a long time.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: And while I think some inroads have been made, and certainly with Amazon’s purchase of Whole Foods, that gives them some sort of platform to come from, but it seems like that one, nobody has been able to crack.

Rita McGrath: Well, yeah, I think so, because buyers fall into very, very different customers segments when it comes to food. One of the things I predicted that these meal kit companies, the Blue Aprons, and those kinds of companies, that the supermarkets were going to do to them, what they did to Boston Chicken. I mean, you may remember how hyped up that was years ago. What ended up happening was all the supermarkets said, hang on, we can do rotisserie chicken. You must be kidding. Shortly after Amazon bought Whole Foods, I was in our local one, and lo and behold, there are Amazon meal kits ready to be picked up and taken home.

Rita McGrath: To come back to your major question though, I think one of the reasons groceries is so hard, is that there’s always going to be a segment of people that really want to pick out what they consume. I also think that the better grocery retailers, and here I’m thinking of Wegman’s and Kroger, they’ve actually made the shopping journey better, it’s more up to date, you go in and you’re surprised, because don’t forget, a lot of people don’t know exactly what they want to buy when they go in the store right, they’re going in to see what looks fresh, or what do I feel like, or is it pasta salad tonight? And you can’t really replicate that experience online.

John Jantsch: Yeah, no, I totally agree. You’re right though. I think some of the better retailers, Whole Foods has a restaurant and a bar, it’s become a community place where they actually have live music on Fridays –

Rita McGrath: Wow.

John Jantsch: – so they’re really trying to do, I think they are trying to, as you to your point, change the experience.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: I think actually that’s a great point because I think some businesses that were kind of old school-ish, I’m thinking the local bookstore that, for all intent and purposes got put out of business by first, the big boxes, and then the online. But the ones that have hung in there have changed the experience-

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: – and that’s what’s kept them, not being about the books but being about the community for example. I think that’s a small scale example, I think that that people could look at too, is as you’re getting ready to get put out of business, then what is the experience change that could happen, that would then sort of make the big box or whoever you’re competing with kind of irrelevant.

Rita McGrath: Mm-hmm (affirmative). I agree. I mean a stellar example of this is Best Buy. Best Buy was given up for dead 15 years ago because everybody was talking about show-rooming, oh you just go in the store, you do all your shopping, right, and then you order online for cheaper. What Hubert Joly said was, wait a minute, there’s things we can do because we have a brick and mortar place that nobody in ecommerce can match, and so we have the Geek Squad, and we have the Home Advisor program, and he basically said to the Sony’s and Microsoft’s of the world, you want to be in a Best Buy? Great. You pay rent for the privilege, I’m not buying inventory from you people. He really changed, I’d say the power dynamics among that kind of retail.

John Jantsch: That probably goes into your example, of kind of what to do about it, right? I mean that it’s not just merely a matter of saying, okay, we’re going to muscle up and fight this thing, it’s actually to make a fundamental shift, isn’t it?

Rita McGrath: Yeah. I mean, I think the thing people often overlook is something that Clay Christiansen who recently passed away, called the jobs to be done. What we forget is nobody gets up in the morning and buys a product or service because they want to right. In very rare cases, they buy it because there’s some problem or goal that they want to meet in their lives. What we forget is that my consideration set for how I get that problem addressed could involve many things across many industries, and so people get so wedded to this is how we do things, and this is how my industry’s always been constructed, that we forget that, and we don’t pay attention when customers flee for something else.

John Jantsch: Gosh, I preach that all the time. A company that, say cuts down trees or something in a local market, the problem they actually solve is that they show up when they say they’re going to and they clean up the job site. Everybody assumes they can take the tree down, and I think a lot of people forget that that’s what people are actually buying.

Rita McGrath: Absolutely. A great example is the whole batch of direct to consumer companies, such as Dollar Shave Club as an example, or Casper, or Wayfair. The product itself may not be as good, I mean I would imagine Dollar Shave Club doesn’t have all the advanced technology that a Gillette would have, but you know, you don’t have to go to a store, you don’t have to deal with the fortress where the razors are locked up, you don’t have to run out. It’s just all these other parts of the experience are so much better. We might even be cool with an inferior product.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny you say that because I have millennial children and they’re all in love with Casper, and I don’t think it’s as much about the product as it is the convenience, and they love their marketing, they love their message, they love how fun they are.

Rita McGrath: Yeah.

John Jantsch: In some ways I’m not even sure that they’re analyzing is this a better mattress?

Rita McGrath: No. Well, and the other thing that companies like Casper have done is, conventionally a mattress was something you lived with for 15 or 20 years, so it was a really high risk, high involvement purchase. What Casper has done is brought the price and the risk down low enough that we’re like, all right, if I use it for three years and buy another one, I’ll just do that. So this trend of sort of using things very quickly and then replenishing them is something that they’ve played into, I think.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and if you live on the 11th floor of a New York apartment, they found a way to get a mattress inside a little box.

Rita McGrath: Right, right.

John Jantsch: Is there one inflection point coming that anybody who’s in that industry, you would like to tell them they need to do something about it?

Rita McGrath: Well I’d say this is one that cuts across all industries. You may remember the years, at the end of the 90s when we were transitioning from dial-up modems to always on high speed internet. What that allowed was the emergence of ecommerce as we know it today, it allowed the voice on demand services that we take for granted from companies like Netflix and so on, it allowed blah, blah, blah. It did completely change the game in terms of how people related to digital offerings.

Rita McGrath: I think 5G is going to have a similar inflection-y kind of effect. Because if you think about it, if you have true 5G the way it’s being talked about, and it’s probably going to take longer than everybody thinks, but when it comes right, you’re going to be getting rid of limited bandwidth, you’re going to be getting rid of modems, you’re going to have more real time responsiveness, fun, all kinds of devices. I think it’s going to be that kind of change, like the shift from dial-up to true, always on internet. It’s going to be the same as the shift from sort of wifi, and routers, and 4G, to this 5G world.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I where people sometimes miss that, is that once people start experiencing that, then they expect it from everything.

Rita McGrath: Exactly.

John Jantsch: And that’s where people get caught, isn’t it?

Rita McGrath: Well, look at all those dead internet service providers and the modems that they used to dial up.

John Jantsch: Yeah awesome. Well Rita, thanks so much for joining us. Where can people find out more about your work and pick up a copy of Seeing Around Corners?

Rita McGrath: Oh, I’d love them to do that. Well, so my website is RitaMcGrath.com, I know hugely inventive name. So it’s RitaMcGrath.com, and there you can check out my upcoming events. I have a newsletter archive, I have a monthly newsletter that I do every month, and what I do each month, if your listeners are interested in inflection points is I take a different sector of the economy each month and write about what I see as the trends that they should be paying attention to. This month is about holiday shopping and how it’s changed. We’ve done construction, we’ve done advertising, we’ve done a number of industries. You can find the whole archive collection on my website.

John Jantsch: We’ll have a link in the show notes.

Rita McGrath: Terrific.

John Jantsch: Rita, thanks for joining us and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Rita McGrath: That would be great. See you then.

Transcript of Finding Happiness at Work

Transcript of Finding Happiness at Work written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Bruce Daisley. We’re going to talk about his new book, Eat Sleep Work Repeat: 30 Hacks for Bringing Joy to Your Job. So Bruce, thanks for joining me.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you. Thank you so much for having me.

John Jantsch: So, I’m sure you’re familiar with the Eat Sleep Work Repeat meme on Reddit?

Bruce Daisley: I’m not, in fact. Get out of here. I chose the title based on a musical record, but go on.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say then, if you weren’t familiar with that then you’re probably not familiar with the song by the Ghost Years, I guess? Is that?

Bruce Daisley: No. So mine was based on, we was a attract by the EDM artist Fat Boy Slim that Calvin Harris, the other EDM artist remixed, and it’s an interesting one. It’s sort of got along winding lyric that’s like a story, and it’s about a gentleman who finds himself constantly out at the club. And the song is called Eat, Sleep, Rave, Repeat. So that was going through my head on one long commute and I changed it to Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat for my podcast, and then subsequently my book.

John Jantsch: Well there’s actually a song by that name, Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, by a little known band, I’m guessing called the Ghost Years. So, now you’ll have to look all this stuff up. I’ve given you lots of homework.

Bruce Daisley: Amazing. Am I going to be looking at a lawsuit here? Like the Ghost Years are hitting me with a writ?

John Jantsch: I suppose it depends if they’re still together.

Bruce Daisley: What a way to start my day. Suddenly, I find myself in litigation. Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch: So Eat Sleep Work Repeat was not all you’ve ever done in your life. I know it’s been a few years for you, but this is actually a bit of a departure from your previous career, isn’t it?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, that’s right. I’ve just, this second, just a couple of weeks ago left, I was a vice president at Twitter for eight years, and then prior to that, I worked at Google, at YouTube for another five years. So yeah, I was sort of a senior exec at technology firms before turning my hand to this.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I may have this wrong, but this book, depending upon when people are listening to this, is coming out towards the end of February in 2020. But this is actually a retitle of this book, right? It was originally called or The Joy of Work.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, it was The Joy Of Work, in the UK and I zinged up with far fewer parochial English stories, and I’ve added some exciting US stories. Because it did quite well in the UK. I see it as like a cookbook for anyone who wants to improve their workplace culture.

Bruce Daisley: So say if you’re sitting there and you’re thinking, “There’s just something not quite right in my team”. And it might be that you’re the boss, or that you might be someone far more junior, but you just want to get things right. When I had that same curiosity, I discovered there were books and books and academic papers of research, done into how we can improve work. And yet, strangely none of it reaches any of us in jobs. So, became my focus. What could any of us do to use the science and the research available to improve our jobs? So that’s it. It’s a cookbook to improve the dynamic in our teams.

John Jantsch: So, I hear a lot of people blaming technology. You worked for a couple of those technology companies, that’s adding to some of the stress and disruption and whatnot. Do you think that, that’s really the case or is that just an excuse? Have things really gotten worse?

Bruce Daisley: Well, the unavoidable truth is that irrespective of whether technology is to blame, and I think the answer by the way is partly, but irrespective of whether the technology is to blame the technology we now have is the technology we need to deal with. It’s a little bit like, we’ve just joined election season and people say, “Oh, well I preferred it in this era, when this happened. I preferred it in this era and when this happened”. Sadly, we don’t pick and choose the era we live through. And so, the technology and the way that people are using the technology around us is just now something that we need to deal with. We can’t romantically imagine a more simple era because, simultaneous with us transplanting ourselves back to 19th century Britain, and imagine ourselves working in these archaic environments that we might see in a film. Simultaneously, there were a lot of other problems.

Bruce Daisley: So, the place we’re in, definitely technology contributes to the way that a lot of us feel overwhelmed by odd jobs. No doubt.

John Jantsch: Yeah. We don’t have to build our homes and kill our food, do we?

Bruce Daisley: Exactly that. And we’ve got antibiotics, we’ve got penicillin, we’ve got all manner of things. So, let’s count some of our blessings at the very least.

John Jantsch: A lot of organizations, especially in Silicon Valley, it seems, one of my kids actually works out in Silicon Valley and her job title is one of these, like head of hugging or something like that. I’m just teasing her. But a lot of these companies are getting these people that are in charge of the culture, for example. And I think there’s actually an era of personal accountability to your book, that sort of says, and I think you actually blatantly say culture is kind of a myth.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. Well certainly I believe company culture is a myth. I believe that the idea that you can get a consistent feeling between the Chicago office, the Denver office, the New York office, and for it to be precisely the same, mandated on PowerPoint slides. Sadly, it would be wonderful if that were the case, but it’s simply not the case.

Bruce Daisley: So company culture is something of a myth. Team culture is far more realistic. And the truth of that is that people can find themselves working in adjacent teams in the same office, and have a very different experience at work. You might occasionally chat to someone in the lunch hall or on the way home, and you’ll say to someone “How’s it going?” And their experience can be completely different to yours.

Bruce Daisley: So I think generally, when we discover these good working environments, they generally exist at a team level. That’s not to say that companies can’t aspire to these things, but they need to be realistic in terms of what they can control.

John Jantsch: Yeah, because most employees, especially at larger organizations, their experience of the company is their boss or their team leader or whatever. So, that’s probably who’s dictating more about the culture than anyone else in the organization to that person.

Bruce Daisley: Very much so. People say when you try and identify if people have a good job, the fundamental thing that determines whether people think they have a good job is whether they have a good manager. So, managers have a huge bearing.

Bruce Daisley: Now, you might work for a company that’s giving you free perks and benefits. They might be providing you with a free smoothie, one Wednesday a month, but if you’ve got a wretched manager, then generally you think you’ve got a bad job.

John Jantsch: Yeah, for sure. You pick on another one, that I think is a falling out of favor. But there was a period of time when everybody was building these 200 people in one room, all sitting across each other from a table, and now we’re all going to be able to communicate better. Most people I know that work in those environments spend a great deal of their time trying to find some peace and quiet. You take on the open plan office as one of, maybe worse than social media, as far as a distraction?

Bruce Daisley: Well, more than anything else, I think a lot of us recognize the experience of thinking that we go to work early to get something done, or we feel like we can never get anything done because we’re beset with all these never-ending interruptions and meetings and emails and the open plan office … The day I discovered, sort of a veteran work, but the day I discovered that the science of open plan offices was so atrocious, it just was this revelation to me. So let me share with you John, the secrets of open plan offices.

Bruce Daisley: Number one, the biggest change that happens when organizations move to an open plan office is that the ratio of people who hate their colleagues goes up by 75%. So, if you’ve ever found yourself driven to distraction by the woman who sits behind you or the guy who sits next to you, then you’ll know that, actually that’s a regular occurrence with open plan offices.

Bruce Daisley: The strange thing about open plan offices is normally when we’re sold into them, people paint these beautiful pictures of accidental conversations and creativity, people sort of spontaneously coming up with new ideas. And in fact, what you discover is the next biggest thing that changes, is the volume of email goes up by two thirds. So really strange. That feeling where you’re emailing someone who sits three desks away from you, simply because we have so many more interruptions in those environments than we ever did in smaller offices.

John Jantsch: Yeah. It’s almost like taking employees and making them roommates at the same time, because they’re on top of each other all day long.

Bruce Daisley: No. Look, I’m pretty sure that will never escape open plan offices. But the organizations who seem to be making the best go of it are the ones that seem to be saying, “Okay, maybe you’ve got a laptop, we’re going to allow you to have quiet spaces where you can go and work”.

Bruce Daisley: In fact, if you chat to people who work in coworking spaces, the people who run coworking spaces so that people spend more time in their in the anonymous social sort of coffee bar style spaces, than they do at their allocated workstation.

Bruce Daisley: And it’s a good reminder, actually, we’re not uncomfortable with a bit of noise around us, but we hate it when that noise constantly interrupt us.

John Jantsch: Yeah. It’s funny, I, like you have written, actually, I’ve written six books. And I have written the book of them in coffee shops. I actually enjoy the noise. But to your point, nobody speaks to me. It’s just the noise around me. Some people can’t do that at all, but there is a difference, I think.

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John Jantsch: All right. Let’s talk about, since your book has a number in it, 30 hacks for bringing joy to your job. Let’s talk about a couple of them. The very first one is one that I’ve done for years, and it’s a this idea of monk mode. So do you want to unpack that one?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. The idea of monk mode is that, strangely, we seem to find that, firstly the whole of work is something of an illusion. The idea that maybe we’re going to work 40 hours a week, that each of those 40 hours is as equally productive as each other. We imagine that we’ve got a five by eight grid of those hours, and that each one of them will be equally valuable. And what we discover when we actually plunge into measuring what people work and what they achieved is that these are not equally as productive.

Bruce Daisley: So what you discover then is that our secret is unless we’re going to work longer and longer, and that seems to be one of the unfortunate mistakes that a lot of us make, but if we’re not going to work longer and longer, working out when the good stuff is, it seems to be a pretty vital component. So when are the sociable hours? When are the productive hours? And it seems that for most of us, our most productive hours are in the morning.

Bruce Daisley: So one of the one the hacks that a number of people have found real benefit from is almost carving out a time before we open our emails, a time before we turn our podcasts. Maybe twice a week where we carve out, I met one guy who called it his most important thing, he called it his MIT, and he would write on his board every day, what was his MIT. And he wouldn’t do anything else until he’d finished the 90 minutes that his MIT had taken him.

Bruce Daisley: But this monk mode morning, this idea that like a monk, we have no interruptions and we focus on something, is one of the hacks that I’ve seen to be most effective. And the strange thing about the monk mode morning is that we can accomplish in uninterrupted time, far more than we ever realized.

Bruce Daisley: So one of the things that I’ll be guilty of is I know that I’m going somewhere in three weeks and an I need to write a presentation, but I’ve known this for a long time and it’s sat at the top of my to do list. And yet, when I come to actually do it, as long as I don’t have 50 other browser tabs open, as long as I don’t have too much other distraction, actually, a really productive hour can make a big dent in that. And so, that’s the idea of monk mode, removing these distractions, removing these punctuations and actually getting to focus our energies on something seems to be one of the best ways to get more out of our time.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I suspect we all underestimate how much weight that presentation that you had to make was actually causing on the rest of your thinking and the rest of your focus because you were putting it off. You knew you had to do it, it was causing stress. I think that’s probably a really underestimated element of that.

Bruce Daisley: Yeah. You know that thing that’s sort of dogs your to do list? That you see sitting there. I promised I’d get back, I promised I’d get back, I promised I’d get back. And over time, it’s becoming more and more of a burden on you. And that’s it. Sometimes to say, right … I’ve seen a couple of people who say, “I can’t carve out 90 minutes every day, but I’m going to do 60 minutes, twice a week”. So it’s finding whatever works for you, but what you often discoveries those 60 minutes, twice a week, can be the most productive gaps on your calendar.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I think if we’re all being honest, and we did assign a dollar value to each hour that we spent every day, that probably the 80% of our money is made in 20% of our work, or the old saying.

Bruce Daisley: Absolutely. Well here’s the strange thing. How I found myself self doing this. I’m not sure if you identify with this, but I was coming home, I used to have a day, on Mondays, which was laden with meetings. I had seven hours of meetings on Monday. And I would come home and my inbox would be creaking because of all of the email, and I’d feel, “Wow. It’s the start the week and I’m already hours behind”.

Bruce Daisley: And I used to sit every Monday night at my kitchen table, sometimes with a cup of tea, sometimes with a glass of wine, always with some sort of music playing or TV playing. And I once took stock of the fact that I’d spent three or four hours, sitting at this kitchen table and I took stock of how little I’d actually done. And I thought, after an exhausting day, you’ve added to your tiredness by sitting at that table for four hours. You should have just switched off, watched some TV, gone to bed early. Instead you sat at that kitchen table for four hours. So tomorrow, you wake up even more tired.

Bruce Daisley: I think that’s the critical thing. Being more honest about what we’re actually doing and what we’re giving ourselves the illusion we’re doing is an important step on fixing these problems.

John Jantsch: So one of the hacks that I wasn’t going to cite, but since you mentioned it, sleep. Better sleep, more of it is a hack, isn’t it? That we need to adopt?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, very much so. The reason why I feel so strongly about it, I set off, I had this maybe sort of patriarchal desire to make the people who were working for me happier. Whether it’s my responsibility to make them happier or not, I don’t know. But, they looked so miserable that I was intent on trying to bring some smiles back to their little faces. And I set about trying to make people happy.

Bruce Daisley: And what I discovered when I was doing extensive reading on happiness was that there are two things that make us happier, full stop, period. There are the two things that make us happy. And so I thought, well, okay, let’s at least cover these. The number one thing that makes us happier is to sleep more. And sleeping seven and a half to eight hours sleep a night makes us more happy.

Bruce Daisley: In fact, if you were to measure this, Prozac achieves a a 1.8 shift on the 51 point depression scale that this created. A good night’s sleep moves us eight points. So, a good night’s sleep, be sure of four or five times better than Prozac. So sleep is by far the best thing that any of us could do.

Bruce Daisley: The second, I’m not sure how helpful this is, but the second way to make yourself happier is to spend time with happier friends. And the more we spend time with happier people, it does appear to have an impact on our own happiness, our own psyche.

Bruce Daisley: So, that old mum wisdom that used to be sort of surround yourself with positive, happy people. There seems to be some clear benefit to what your mama told you.

John Jantsch: So, you’ve broken up the hacks into personal and team and then leader. I’ve written a book recently that has has 366 separate pages, thoughts. It’s a day a page. And so, I always get the question in my interviews, what’s your favorite one? And I’m like, you want me to pick one of those as my favorite page? But you only have 30, so I’m going to ask you. Did you have a favorite hack?

Bruce Daisley: Yeah, very much so. So here’s what I set about doing. I set about thinking, how can I make work better? How can I make these miserable souls I’m surrounded with look like the less burdened. I wanted them whistling on their way to work. So what I discovered very quickly is that there are a lot of things that companies do wrong, and some of the things that companies do wrong intentionally and some of the things that companies do wrong unintentionally.

Bruce Daisley: But I found myself reflecting on all of the management, all of the advice I’d ever got. And there was one image that was indelibly in my head, and it was the sanction, it was the scolding of a former boss, who’d said to me once, “Now’s not the time to be seen laughing”. And we were in a particularly unfortunate time, things were tough at work and he said, “Please don’t be seen laughing when the big boss walked past”.

Bruce Daisley: So it stuck in my head. And as I was there thinking, right, this is the time to research what’s the rights and wrongs of work, I thought, well, I must investigate this one. And truthfully, I was thinking, I was just going to lay out the science of why he was right, and then get back to the other things that we could do. And what I discovered was that the science of laughter is far more emphatic in what it advises, and it points very resolutely in the opposite direction to what he said.

Bruce Daisley: So he said, “Now’s not the time to be seen laughing”, which I guess suggests, in bad times we don’t want to be frivolous, we don’t want to be distracted. We may be don’t want to be unfocused. But if we look at people who have prevailed in difficult times, very often it’s humor that characterizes their behavior.

Bruce Daisley: If we wanted to go back to Churchillian maxims, “Keep calm and carry on”, and the whole blitz spirit that my country men had, was very much anchored on sort of an irreverent humor. But we also see through army deployments. Servicemen will characterize their time as being filled with laughter. Firefighters often describe the laughter that fills some of there really intense moments. And so laughter seems to have this incredible capacity to reset our resilience, for sort of helping us to feel more able to deal with stark problems that we’re faced with.

Bruce Daisley: So anyway, I found myself really charmed with the science of laughter.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And that ends up as a hack in … I probably won’t be able to find it. It’s just called Laugh. Okay. There you go. Awesome.

John Jantsch: So Bruce, tell us where we can find Eat, Sleep, Work, Repeat, and more about you. I know you have a podcast by the same name as well.

Bruce Daisley: Exactly that. So I’ve got a podcast, you’ll find it’s eatsleepworkrepeat.com, if you go to that podcast, I’ve tried to interview some of the leading psychologists, neuroscientists who’ve done work in this field. So, any of us who maybe find ourselves trying to build the culture in our kid’s soccer team or in our own workplaces. Or maybe we’ve got our own company and we want it to be the place that we always dreamed of working. That was my mission. How could I make this into 30 very simple interventions that are proven to work?

John Jantsch: Well, Bruce, thanks for joining us. And we’ll have a links to the book and links to Bruce’s podcast and website in the show notes. So hopefully, I’ll run into you. I assume you’re going to spend some time in the States, promoting the book.

Bruce Daisley: I am. Yeah. I’m in New York in the last week of February. I’m in SF and then Austin in early March, and then back in the summer. So yeah, absolutely. All my events on the website.

John Jantsch: Well, thanks for stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road, Bruce.

Bruce Daisley: Thank you so much for having me.

Transcript of Navigating Small Business Legal Issues in the Digital World

Transcript of Navigating Small Business Legal Issues in the Digital World written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jamie Lieberman. She is an entrepreneur, speaker, and practicing attorney, and founder of Hashtag Legal. We’re going to talk about legal stuff today. We’re not going to talk about marketing, but sometimes these things intersect.

John Jantsch: Jamie, thanks for joining me.

Jamie Lieberman: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Let’s hear your story. How did you get here to being the founder and CEO of Hashtag Legal? I suspect there’s a journey.

Jamie Lieberman: Isn’t there always a journey?

John Jantsch: So true.

Jamie Lieberman: I’ve been a lawyer for about 15 years. The first half of my career was very traditional law practice, big law in New York City, federal government. It was everything you think it was, not being that positive.

Jamie Lieberman: About seven years ago, I decided I think it’s time for me to figure out another way to practice that fit more me, so I left my job and started freelancing to try and find my way. I had had seven or eight years of legal experience and felt comfortable enough to go out on my own but wasn’t quite sure what I wanted to do. At the same time, I myself was a blogger so many years ago. I had a blog about living in New York City when I was much years past, pre-kids, and it got really popular.

Jamie Lieberman: When I stopped working at the government, I started up a blog again because I thought it might be kind of fun. At that time about seven years ago, bloggers were starting to make a little bit of money. The word influencer didn’t even exist yet. I started working for a company that ran conferences for bloggers. They asked me, about six years ago, “Hey, do you think you may want to give a talk about legal issues for bloggers?” I thought, “Yeah. That’s kind of interesting. Now let me figure out what those are.” I did, and I gave the talk, and that’s actually where Hashtag Legal came from. I started working with bloggers, now influencers, and that quickly expanded into creatives and entrepreneurs, service professionals and marketers.

John Jantsch: Yeah, so I’m guessing the name Hashtag and then thrown together with Legal, there is a focus on the online world. Would that be accurate?

Jamie Lieberman: Yeah, definitely. We absolutely have a large number of clients who live and work in the online world.

John Jantsch: All right, so what’s unique about Hashtag Legal in terms of… We’ve talked a little bit about who you serve, but is there some way in which you serve them that is different than me going to the small law office down the street here?

Jamie Lieberman: Yeah, sure. We are also entrepreneurs and creatives and people who understand what it’s like to run that business. I often think many of my clients are what I call reluctant entrepreneurs. They’re really good at something, and legal usually isn’t what they’re interested in focusing on, so they kind of avoid it. Some people don’t avoid it, but they sort of don’t want to deal with it, and some people actively avoid it.

Jamie Lieberman: We try to make legal accessible and not scary by talking about it in plain language so that it is approachable, it’s easy. We are an all-female virtual law firm. We do that on purpose because, many of our clients, that’s how they are. We come to the clients and communicate with them as best as served for them versus most lawyers who communicate the way they want to communicate and don’t really think much about how comfortable or uncomfortable their client may feel with that mode of communication.

Jamie Lieberman: I got clients who are Slacking me and Messengering me and, yeah, they’re in my DMs. We move it to the proper channels, but I’m open to that. I like to give a lot of information, so we’re really transparent. We just like to work in a way that feels comfortable and more accessible than, say, your average lawyer who is oftentimes… Many of my clients have said they feel like they don’t even understand what they do let alone being able to advise them on how to protect and grow their businesses.

John Jantsch: I think a lot of people are used to hiring an attorney when something bad happens. They get sued, somebody doesn’t pay them, whatever those things are. Are there some things that you think that more small business owners, more entrepreneurs need to be thinking about, in terms of legal, and locking down just as a matter of course?

Jamie Lieberman: Absolutely. I actually think if more people did those company audits, had a really good lawyer as a partner in their business, that there’d be less non-paying clients and less fearful calls, so I think it’s really good to sit down.

Jamie Lieberman: Every business is different, but depending on what your business is… particularly, for example, if you’re a service professional, you live and die by your contract. I don’t mean the Frankenstein contract that you got from your friend who got from their friend who then pulled seven things offline or the template you bought. I mean a lawyer who actually sat down, understands what it is that you do, and created a contract that works for you, and that’s flexible, and that can move as you need to move because everybody’s business is different. Contracts are a big one.

Jamie Lieberman: Intellectual property, particularly if you are a creator or a creative, understanding what it means when you create for others or if you are putting information out into the universe, what that means in order to protect the information that you’re creating is important. That’s your intellectual property.

Jamie Lieberman: Also your trademarks, your names. A lot of people pick a cool name and then, couple years later, think, “Maybe I should look into this and see if I can use it or register it for a trademark,” and then somebody else has it or… There’s a million stories. Those are some good examples of ways that you can get around the, “Oh, my gosh,” scrambling phone call.

John Jantsch: Particularly since you talked about working with creatives, in a lot of cases, they just… A hug is a contract. Right? Again, I know I’m being facetious, but I mean contracts can actually not be very customer-friendly or not feel very-customer friendly. I mean how do you balance that? I mean the traditional law firm that you used to work for probably had contracts that were basically 100% one-sided to screw anybody who signed it. I mean, unfortunately, that’s reality. How do you balance the, hey, this is good for all of us?

Jamie Lieberman: I think that’s how all contracts actually should be written. I find it really frustrating and unnecessary when they are so one-sided for no reason. I read a lot of talent agreements or book deals. Book deals, ugh. It can be the bane of my existence, particularly for a first-time author, because they are often incredibly one-sided, and they don’t need to be.

Jamie Lieberman: I find that, when sitting down to talk to a business owner about their contract, I talk to them about, “What are your deal-breakers? What are the ones that you cannot give on?” We make those the ironclad… We’re not going to negotiate those, but there are some other clauses, to that particular business owner, that may be a little more flexible. Maybe we can make them a little bit, I’m not saying one-sided, but we may be able to negotiate them with clients who care about that particular position, or maybe we just make it straight down the road.

Jamie Lieberman: Contracts don’t have to be these awful documents that make you want to throw up when you have to look at them with two columns and font six, and it’s a single-spaced, and it’s 75 pages long. It’s overkill and unnecessary, and there’s no reason for it. We just try to create contracts that our clients understand and can read themselves and explain to their clients so that they understand why they have that clause. There’s no unnecessary language.

John Jantsch: Do you find that there are certain, I don’t know what we want to call them, but certain places where small business owners get tripped up, I don’t know, gotchas or something that come back and maybe bite the majority of people in the… that don’t address them. Are there certain things that you definitely ought to be a little worried about as a business owner?

Jamie Lieberman: That’s a great… You mean within the context of a contract? I-

John Jantsch: Not necessarily a contract, so just-

Jamie Lieberman: Oh, generally.

John Jantsch: Just legal in general.

Jamie Lieberman: Yeah, sure.

John Jantsch: What are the ones that, if you’re going to have trouble, here are some of the ways that [crosstalk 00:09:02]-

Jamie Lieberman: [crosstalk 00:09:02]. Non-paying clients is a big one. That’s a tough one. The scope of work is also a tough one. The TBDs that everyone likes to put into contracts and then nobody actually TBDs it, so they’re just vague. Revisions when you’re creating for somebody else. Those are the common ways that I see that there starts to be an issue.

Jamie Lieberman: Not having clear boundaries around termination. How do you terminate? What happens when a contract gets terminated? Because the fact is not every relationship is going to be perfect, and there may come a time where you either one-sidedly or mutually agree, “You know what? We just need to part ways. This isn’t a fit.” That’s okay. It’s business. It’s not personal. Having clearly written out guidelines for what that means in terms of ownership of work product and payments and refunds, that’s a big place that I see, a lot of ways, if it had been done well upfront, there would be nothing to argue about.

Jamie Lieberman: Partnership agreements is another one, partners that come together and don’t put agreements in place. Everybody’s really happy when a business starts, but when a business ends, it is probably the number-one most expensive thing that can happen in a business is when two partners split and can’t amicably resolve it. Those litigations can go on and on, and they are so expensive.

John Jantsch: I’ll tell you, in the online world, I would also say kind of the opposite. We were talking about a business owner protecting themselves in dealing with folks, but I can’t tell you how many ridiculous agreements I’ve seen that small business owners have signed for their website, which [crosstalk 00:10:44].

Jamie Lieberman: Oh, gosh, yes.

John Jantsch: It’s like, “No, we’re going to get a new…” It happens all the time because my company comes in and helps them fix their website, and then we learn that, “Nope, that company owns it. If you’re not going to pay us anymore, everything’s ours. You signed that deal.” It’s heartbreaking.

Jamie Lieberman: I’ve seen so many of these SEO companies that come in, and there are these hidden clauses that essentially give them an ownership piece even after termination. I’ve seen some crazy stuff in some of those contracts, and a lot of people don’t. In my opinion, it is so rare that you would actually ever sign the first draft of an agreement. There’s always a back and forth. There should be a negotiation. So many small business owners don’t feel like they have the power to do it, and so they don’t. I definitely agree. That’s a great point.

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John Jantsch: We haven’t talked about employees. Again, I know you’re working with maybe a lot of solopreneurs, but so maybe if it’s even the virtual, part-time employee, where do you see employee issues coming up in the legal space?

Jamie Lieberman: It’s funny. We have clients that have as many as 80 employees and some as many as they’re just their own, so we see a wide range of employment issues. In this space, in particular, virtual workforces can get really complex the larger you become.

Jamie Lieberman: I have a client who has employees in, I’d say, 40 states, and so we’re navigating 40 different state laws for employment issues. That can be really challenging.

Jamie Lieberman: The other thing that really comes up in a lot of people, particularly now with California’s new law, is contractors versus employees, people who want to pay someone as a contractor when, in fact, they probably are an employee. I’ve seen clients rack up crazy fines from a state for a mischaracterized employee. That’s another issue.

Jamie Lieberman: Theft of clients, not having an employment agreement in place when you do, either a contractor or employee, to make sure that you don’t… It’s not a non-compete, because a lot of people think, “Oh, non-competes are not enforceable.” That, as a blanket rule, is actually not true. There are ways you can make, in certain states, enforceable non-competes. Where you can really protect yourself is non-solicitation clauses, meaning you can’t solicit my clients, you can’t solicit my employees, and you can’t solicit my contractors.

Jamie Lieberman: There’s ways that you can protect yourself. I think a lot of employees’ employers are either afraid to approach it because they don’t want to lose talent or they think they just can’t when, in fact, you can.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s get really geeky. Are you dealing with any GDPR and CCPA issues?

Jamie Lieberman: Privacy laws, my friend. Yes, we do a lot. We spent a ton of time on CCPA. I mean we still are.

John Jantsch: Maybe unpack that a little bit. There’s a lot of scary-sounding things about being… billion-dollar fines. Where is the typical small business who has a website, does email marketing to their clients. I mean where are they really exposed in that?

Jamie Lieberman: Really, you have to look at whether or not it even applies to you. That’s going to be looking at numbers. The 50,000 residents is usually… If you’re selling data, which some companies do, then there you go, but sale of data doesn’t necessarily have what you think of as a lay person. It means something different under CCPA. Digital ads are sale of data, and so if you run a website that creates content and has digital ads, then you are likely involved in the sale of data, so it is important to understand.

Jamie Lieberman: This is what I say about privacy in general. It terrifies people because there’s about 1,000 laws that could potentially apply. There’s no one law, right? When we have to pay our taxes, we go look at the tax code, but for privacy, there’s like 50 laws. Some of them may apply, some of them may not. States don’t agree with states, and California does everything first. Federal governments, they’re not involved. They have some stuff.

Jamie Lieberman: Really, my recommendation to every business owner who collects data of any kind… That is email addresses. That could be IP addresses. That can be the heat map that’s on your website if you’re using certain plugins, if you have lead pages, for example, things like that. Do an audit. Sit down and look at the back end of your site and really understand what every single plugin and provider is doing, and what data they’re collecting, and what permission you’ve given, because as the website owner, as the business as defined under CCPA, it’s your responsibility to tell your users what data you’re collecting, if you’re selling it, and what you’re doing with it. That’s not a bad thing to know that about your business.

John Jantsch: Yeah. The first thing you need to do is breathe, though. Right? There…

Jamie Lieberman: Yeah, take breaths. There should never be panic. There really shouldn’t. Everybody freaks out. I’m like, “No, just take a breath. You’re going to spend two hours. You’re going to time block on your calendar. You’re going to take two hours. You’re going to look at your plugins,” or find someone who’s a good privacy lawyer and have them do it for you.

John Jantsch: There’s a whole subset of just privacy technology people that understand what is happening when your website [inaudible 00:16:53]. That can be another place to look.

John Jantsch: I remember when GDPR had this deadline. I mean people were like [inaudible] sleep. Like you said, I’m glad you said that first. In a lot of cases, it didn’t really apply to them that much.

John Jantsch: All right, let’s end up with I have some podcasts listeners, and I suspect that there probably are some legal issues that podcasters, little old people like myself, should be thinking about. What are those, in your estimation, that apply to podcasters?

Jamie Lieberman: Podcasters have the same… Naming is a big one in the podcast world, whether or not you’re going to, one, pick a name that you can use or, two, you want to trademark protect that name.

Jamie Lieberman: Releases from your guests. If you ever want to repurpose the content that you’ve created, getting a release from your guests when they join is much easier than having to go back to them and say, “Hey, I’m writing this book, and I want to include you.” That’s often a place that podcasters overlook. I do a lot of podcasts, and most people don’t ask for them. It’s fine, but sometimes they come back and they’re like, “Can I use that?” Then they have to go down the route. It is helpful to have releases from your podcast guests.

John Jantsch: Yeah, which, on that note, if you’re going to try to use it in a book and you have a mainstream publisher, they’re going to ask for it anyway, so get it ahead of time. Fortunately, I work in the marketing world, and all the people I talk to are thrilled if I write about them, and so it’s like it’s usually-

Jamie Lieberman: Right, exactly.

John Jantsch: But, but-

Jamie Lieberman: But not everybody-

John Jantsch: But not everybody is.

Jamie Lieberman: … has a marketing podcast. Music is a big one, a really big one, and use of just anything of someone else’s. When in doubt, get permission. Make sure you have a license. Make sure the license that you have allows you to use whatever it is that you’re using of someone else’s in the way you want to use it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I wasn’t going to ask this, but you just reminded me of the stock photo sites-

Jamie Lieberman: Ah, yes.

John Jantsch: … that decided that they couldn’t sell photos anymore, so they were going to go extract fines. If you get that, “Oh, gosh. There’s a picture from some stock photo site on my website, and they’re telling me I owe $700,” what do I do with that?

Jamie Lieberman: There’s a few things that you can do. One, you want to investigate whether or not the company that is sending you this letter has a copyright registration. If they have a registered copyright and you used the photo without permission or you used the photo without a license in some way, then you may be on the hook.

Jamie Lieberman: However, my recommendation is, anybody who downloads images, just save the license next to the image in a folder. That way, if someone comes back to you a couple years later, you can say, “Oh, I downloaded it, and here’s the license that I had when I downloaded it.” Then, if you have that proper license, they’ll go away. If you don’t have a license, if you took it from somebody’s website because, five years ago, you didn’t know any better, you may have to pay a fine. Try to negotiate, though. You don’t have to pay the first thing.

Jamie Lieberman: Most places like [Picsy] and a lot of those places, they’ll negotiate down with you. They aim high expecting you’re going to pay less, but if they have a valid copyright registration, if you’re infringing on it, there’s not much you can do. It doesn’t matter how many people saw it, if you made money off of it. There’s pretty strict liability when it comes to copyright infringement, so don’t do it.

John Jantsch: Well, totally. I think it’s really more the people that get that surprise letter. I’ve seen 10… No. I think the highest I’ve seen is somebody wanted like $1,500 when you could go license that same image for eternity for $4 on the site.

Jamie Lieberman: I’ve seen six figures.

John Jantsch: Oh, wow. Yeah. There, again, I think that’s one. I mean I may be wrong, but it looked to me like they weren’t really trying to protect their copyrights so much because those pictures really had no value anymore. They really were just trying to extract a new revenue stream, but again-

Jamie Lieberman: Yeah. There’s many websites that do that. I think that, from a policy perspective, copyright laws, the way that it is for a reason, but it also allows people to exploit it. That stinks, honestly. Sometimes I get these letters and it’s just… There’s photographers that do this for a living. They take a lot of photographs, they batch register them, and then they put them up, and then they do reverse Google searches. They have lawyers who are on contingency who just send letters and letters and letters and letters.

Jamie Lieberman: We came across one. They ask for a minimum of $10,000 if not more, and the lawyer doesn’t care. He’ll file lawsuits. They’ll go, and they’re very difficult to deal with and very hard to negotiate with. It’s unfortunate, and it’s true.

John Jantsch: Sorry I took us down that rabbit hole. Let’s end on a happy note, shall we? Tell people where they can find out more about Hashtag Legal and the work that you’re doing, Jamie.

Jamie Lieberman: Sure. Our website’s hashtag-legal.com. I also have a podcast. My podcast is The FearLess Business Podcast. We talk about all the stuff everyone’s afraid of in their business but shouldn’t be. We try to make it easy and accessible. We’re on Instagram, hashtag_legal. You can contact me directly. Jamie is J-A-M-I-E@hashtag-legal.com.

John Jantsch: Awesome. I appreciate you stopping by and, hopefully, we’ll run into you someday out there on the road.

Jamie Lieberman: Thanks.

Transcript of Living Life By Your True Values

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John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dr. John Demartini. He is a world renowned specialist in human behavior, a researcher, author, and global educator. One of his most recent books is called The Values Factor: The Secret to Creating an Inspired and Fulfilling Life. Let’s talk about values. Shall we? Welcome, John.

John Demartini: Thank you for having me. Thank you. Appreciate the time.

John Jantsch: I read the official stuff that you do, but let’s give people a little bit of background. How’d you get here to where you are today?

John Demartini: Well, I started when I was 17 actually. I had a dream to travel the world and to teach and I set out to do that at age 17, almost 18. By God, I just didn’t give up on it and it just kept emerging..I had a learning problem as a child, I was told in first grade I would never be able to read, never be able to write, never be able to communicate, never amount to anything, never go very far in life. I was a high school dropout and was living on the streets for many years.

John Demartini: But then I met this amazing teacher named Paul Bragg when I was 17 that made me, during his talk for the first time in my life, I thought maybe I could overcome my learning problems, someday I can learn how to read and become intelligent. I’ll tell you what, that was the most inspiring night and the turning point in my life and I never gave up on it. I had to first learn how to pronounce words and spell and practice speech and things. I had a speech problem and I just never gave up on it. I just, and this is the thing I just love doing most.

John Jantsch: At 17, you were still not reading or even speaking well?

John Demartini: I didn’t read my first book till I was 18.

John Jantsch: Was it ultimately neurological or psychological?

John Demartini: Well, when I was very young, I had a speech impediment so I had to go to a speech pathologist very young. And then when I got into first grade, I had what they define now as dyslexia and apraxia. I wasn’t able to put it all together. The only way I made it through school is by asking smart kids question. When you really, really, really, really want to do something and there’s no turning back on it, you can turn your life around. That’s what happened to me. I just had such a desire to win.

John Demartini: I never thought I’d ever be intelligent. I had a desire to be intelligent and man, when I went out on the pursuit of that, it was a relentless pursuit that I had, with the help of my mother, I had to read 30 words a day and pronounce them and spell them properly and put them in a sentence and say it, and I couldn’t go to bed until I had 30 new words a day when I was 18. And my vocabulary grew and I eventually took a GED and a high school equivalency test and a college entrance exam. I went on and then I ended up being a scholar. I just never gave up on it. I’ve read now over 30,000 books and I just love reading, I just love learning.

John Jantsch: And you, people might’ve heard me introduce you is Dr. John Demartini, so you now have even achieved an advanced degree.

John Demartini: Yeah, I did 10 years of college, almost and yeah, I just want to be a teacher, a philosopher and healer. I full-time travel around the world today, researching and teaching and have students all over the world today, every country. I’ve been quite blessed. Been to 154 countries, in this January will 154.

John Jantsch: And you reside, you were telling me before we started recording, in a somewhat unique home.

John Demartini: I live on a ship called The World when I’m there, most of the time I’m traveling. But my residence for the last 18 years is on a condominium, probably condominium ship that travels all over the world and I get off and on as I travel. It’s just a place to write.

John Jantsch: I mentioned that the name of one of your core works is called The Values Factor. I wonder if you could define that term, values factor.

John Demartini: Well, every individual, regardless of gender or age or culture lives moment by moment by a set of priorities, a set of values, things that are most important to least important in their life. In this hierarchy is a set of values that they hold, things that are most important to least important. This set of values is unique to them and it determines how they perceive, what they decide and how they act. Their perception, decisions or actions are dependent on these values and whatever’s highest on their value. They spontaneously are inspired intrinsically to pursue, and this is where they’ll excel and fulfill and expand.

John Demartini: Whatever’s low in their values, lower in the priorities, they’ll require extrinsic motivation to get them to do it. They’ll need a punishment if they don’t do it, reward if they do kind of thing in order to get them to do it. And this is not where they excel, this is where they hold back. Finding out what’s really truly, truly most important in people’s lives and structuring your life through prioritized action and delegation to pursue that is extraordinary in its capacity to build momentum and go on to greater achievement as an entrepreneur or as anybody in any field really. I’m fascinated by that and that’s what the values factor is. How do we get people to live congruently and align with what they value most so they can be inspired?

John Jantsch: Yeah. Let me make sure I’m hearing this right. You’re suggesting that people have these values, even if they haven’t really associated words or names with them, you’re saying that they make decisions based on them and part of the job is to figure out what they are?

John Demartini: Well, if you ask somebody what their values are, they’ll tell you social cliches and ideologies and idealisms that are injected and inculcated from individuals like mothers, fathers, preachers, teachers, conventions, traditions, and morays of the society that they’re subordinating and conforming to. But I’m not interested in that. I’m interested in what their life demonstrates. I look at it and I have 13 value determinants to help look objectively at what their value determinants are.

John Demartini: How do they fill their space? Because things are really important to them they fill their space with. How they spend their time? They find time, make time, and spend time on things that are truly valuable. What is it that energizes them? When they’re doing something behind their values, their energy goes up. When they’re not there, their energy goes down. Where is their money being spent? Look carefully at how they spend their money. It tells you what the priorities are.

John Demartini: Where are they most organized and ordered? Where are they most disciplined spontaneously? What is it that they think about, visualize and affirm inside, internally dialogue with themselves about how they want their life that shows evidence of coming true, not fantasies? And what do they converse with other people about most, about what they keep bringing the conversation to? What inspires them and brings a tear of inspiration to their eyes? What exactly is it that consistent, persistent goals that they’ve been pursuing that are actually coming true, not the ones that are fantasies that are self defeating? And what is the thing that they love studying about, reading about learning, about listening to? I look at those value determinants to get a clear understanding of what their life is truly demonstrating, not their fantasies about what they hope it will be.

John Jantsch: However, would you suggest also that there are a lot of people that 50%, 60%, 70%, 80% of their lives, they’re living outside of those things that you just described?

John Demartini: Exactly. Most people are comparing themselves to others, putting others on the pedestal, minimize themselves into the pit, living vicariously through other people, paying high dollars for other people’s brands instead of building a brand around themselves. And they’re basically doing what Emerson warned not to do, envying and imitating people, which is sort of a death sentence to their self worth and their empowerment. The key is to giving themselves permission to not subordinate to the world on the outside, but to let the voice and the vision on the inside direct their destiny and take command of their life. As Ernest Becker says, “Instead of conforming to the collective heroist, you want to be the individual hero within”. In the process of doing it, most people don’t give themselves permission to do that. They live in the shadows of others instead of on the shoulders of giants.

John Jantsch: If you’ve asked, and I know you have worked with a lot of folks trying to determine these, what gets in the way of people connecting with what their real values are? Certainly articulating what their true values are? What gets in the way of that?

John Demartini: Well, again, this subordination and injected values of others. If you walk in a mall and you see somebody you think is more intelligent than you, you’ll minimize yourself to them. Try to inject their values. You think they’re more successful than you. You think they’re more wealthy than you. You think they have a better relationship than you. You think that they have more social savvy than. You think that they’re a better fit. You’ll think they’re more spiritually aware. The moment you minimize yourself to them and put them on pedestals, you automatically inject their values into your life and cloud the clarity of your own calling, your own mission and your own highest priority. I’ve watched people, I asked thousands of people, sometimes in front of tens of thousand people, and I asked people, how many of you want to be financially independent?

John Demartini: And they all put their hands up, thousands of people. I said, how many of you are? And they all put their hands down most of them. I said that’s because you have a higher value on buying consumables that depreciate in value and you want the lifestyles of the rich and famous instead of actually buying true assets that put money in your pocket and build an accumulated appreciative wealth. And as long as you do, you’ll fantasize about wealth building, but you won’t have the values that will actually make you make the decisions that are actually accumulating over the long term values. You’re letting immediate gratification, consumerism of other people’s brands interfere with the long term mission and vision of building wealth so your money can work for you instead of you working for money all your life.

John Jantsch: All right, so I think we’ve defined the challenge. How do you help people define those in a way that’s actually going to be a guide for them?

John Demartini: Well, I developed this method, it’s being used around the world, it’s a value determination. I have it online for people if they’d like to go online. It’s complimentary. It’s free, it’s private. What it does is it’ll take them about 30 minutes of their time on my website, DrDemartini.com. And what they can do is just go in there and answer it and I’m almost certain the first time they answer it they’re going to write down a bunch of idealisms. They’re going to write down what they wish it would be and fantasize about it and what they used to be and what they hope it will be. But stop and make sure you’re as objective as possible and look at what your life demonstrates, because the integrity of your answers will be reflected there.

John Demartini: And if they do that again a week later, and about a month later they’ll see a pattern and they’ll get an idea of what they’re really life is showing. Because your life to shows your values. It dictate. Your life is revealing it. You can say all kinds of stuff, but I’m not interested in what people say, I’m interested with their living. Their actions speak louder than their words. I go in there and I have them do that. There’s 13 questions or value determinants, they’re free and online and they’ve helped thousands of people and I know that it can make a difference.

John Demartini: Universities are using it for guidance. Counseling corporations are using it. One company went up 1.47 billion dollars when they incorporated into the company. Uniqlo Corporation out of Japan. I’ve used it in governments. I’ve used it in healthcare. It’s a very useful tool to assist people in setting really congruent goals that they have an increasing probably achieving. Because many people set up fantasies for themselves and don’t realize they self-defeat that way.

John Jantsch: Well, is there anything wrong with aspirational values? I want to be kinder, for example. Might be something that somebody would say, “Well yeah, that’s a value to me, but gosh, I’m not doing it. Can I work on that?” Is there anything wrong with that type of value identification?

John Demartini: It’s not a moral construct. Because if I came up to you and I said to you, you’re always nice, you’re never a mean. You’re always kind, you’re never cruel. You’re always positive, you’re never negative. You always up, you’re never down. You’re always peaceful, never raffled. You’re always giving, never taking. Always generous, never stingy. Always considerate, never inconsiderate. Your bullshit meter would go off and your intuitive sense would say, “Wait a minute now. That’s not exactly true. I’m not always that way.” And if I went to the other side and I said, you’re always mean, you’re never nice. You’re always cruel, you’re never kind. You’re always one sided. Again, your bullshit meter would go off and your intuition would say “No, that’s not it”.

John Demartini: But if I said to you, sometimes you’re nice, sometimes you’re mean, sometimes you’re kind, sometimes you’re cruel, then you would immediately go, “Well yeah, that’s certainty”, because you have now an objective. Objectivity means even minded. To set a goal that is fantasy or one sided and pursue it can be self-defeating. But to embrace the reality that we have both sides in our life and not try to get rid of half of ourselves, to love ourselves is liberating at least and very poignant, as far as achievements, because you’re going to have both sides in your life.

John Demartini: When somebody comes up to you and is really, really, really supportive of your values, you can be quiet and nice and very kind to them. But if somebody comes up and says, “I’m sorry but your flight’s been canceled and we booked you in economy even though you paid first-class and you won’t be able to fly this week”, you’ll probably bring out the other side of yourself and you got to know that you have both sides and you have the capacity for both sides and know when to use both sides and love both sides if you want to have mastery in life.

John Jantsch: Do you know there are over 62 million decision makers on LinkedIn? Yeah, and even small and medium sized businesses are making the most out of LinkedIn Ads. They’re using LinkedIn to get their voices heard and their messages to resonate with the audience and it’s not just about awareness either. LinkedIn Ads are driving traffic and engagement. If you want to check it out, try for yourself. LinkedIn is offering a free $100 LinkedIn Ad credit to launch your first campaign. Simply visit linkedin.com/ducttape. D-U-C-T-T-A-P-E. That’s linkedin.com/ducttape. There’s some terms and conditions that may apply, but I urge you to go check it out for yourself.

John Jantsch: You’re not really suggesting some sort of alignment that you’re trying to live, it’s more recognition of here is how you are living and that actually demonstrates, communicates who you are, what’s important to you?

John Demartini: No, what happens is when you’re living congruently in alignment with your highest values, you’re most objective and you’re most poised, you’re most present, you’re most purposeful, you’re more prioritized, you’re more objective. You can see both sides. Can you see right now, with the impeachment of Trump today with the Democrats and Republican, can you see very obviously that both sides are very biased?

John Demartini: Between Fox News supporting Donald and CNN supporting the Democrats, there’s a high degree of subjective bias, which is an amygdala response in the lower brain regions compared to an objective view that every human being has got two sides. We’re human beings. When you’re living congruently, you’re not trying to live in a fantasy of one sidedness, you’re embracing life as it is. And you’re embracing that in other people. The one you’re married to, they’re going to want to be loved for who they are. They’re not going to be loved for just this one side you expect them to be.

John Demartini: And if they’re expanding it, you’re expecting it, you’re going to be let down, you’re going to feel betrayed because you projected an unrealistic expectation on people. But when you expect them to live according to their values, you are more grounded in your expectations and the same thing for yourself. See, I’ve looked at myself and look, you did. I have both sides. I went through 4,628 traits in the Oxford Dictionary and I found out I had every one of them in my life.

John Demartini: And I found out that that was revealing because I’m not always a nice person. Sometimes I can be really assertive and aggressive at times and I’ve got to love all that. I can’t just try to get rid of half of myself and expect to love all myself. I think it’s wiser for us to appreciate people for who they are and not the fantasies we impose on them and on ourself. And that’s why the values factors is helpful to setting realistic expectations on people because you’re going to feel betrayed if you have a false expectation, fantasy projected all the time.

John Jantsch: Let’s go there and try to help me understand, how would a person who goes through the value determination then use that as a guide?

John Demartini: Well, once they determine what’s really that, let’s say the top three values. I’m a firm believer and I’ve been involved in this now 47 years. I’ve been teaching 47 years. And I’ve helped many, many thousands of people, millions of people pursue what they dream about. And whatever’s highest on the value, that is what they are most likely to be consistent, persistent and focused on. That’s where they’re spontaneous. That’s where it’s like a young boy who loves video games. You don’t need to remind me to do his video games. You may have to remind him to do his chores, his homework, and clean his room, but not as video games.

John Demartini: Once you find out what this highest value is, it’s wise to every single day to ask, what is the highest priority action I can do today that can help me fulfill what’s deeply most meaningful today, that makes a contribution to others on the greatest scale, that I can do that is deeply meaningful and transactional, so I could potentially have my vocation, vacation be the same and I can delegate the rest away and give job opportunities to other people to do the things they would love to do that I would like to delegate so I can liberate myself from things that depreciate me and get on with the things that are deeply meaningful and inspire me to make the biggest contribution in the world and to set an example for what’s possible for other human beings?

John Jantsch: I’m guessing because you work with organizations, you mentioned this corporation in Japan, is this something that you feel leaders can actually lead with to empower people by helping them understand this so that the whole team now maybe works better together?

John Demartini: Absolutely. No one goes to work for the sake of a company. That’s the fantasy people have, even in companies that have high reputations. They go to work to fulfill what they value most. And if they have a high value on children, if they can can fulfill what they want for their children working there, there’ll be engaged. If they have a high value on business and they want to rise up in the corporate ladder, as long as they have a place to go and a way of getting there, there’ll be inspired. But nobody’s engaged in something unless they can see how the job duties that they’re doing daily is helping them fulfill what’s deeply most meaningful. And they’re not going to be engaged if they can’t see how the mission, vision, primary objectives the company is helping them fulfill what’s most meaningful.

John Demartini: I’ve developed training systems. I just got back from Japan training consultants and managers and leaders on how to master the hiring process, the inspiring of teams, the leadership, the management, negotiation, sales according to values and respect people to communicate in their values and consider those values when we’re articulating the mission and vision and the objectives we have for our teams.

John Demartini: When we do, amazing things happen in companies. Instead of autocracy and dictator or tyranny that creates revolutions and what do you call it? A social kind of constructs, though the unions and things, you end up caring about another human being to have a fair exchange, to help them with equitability, to do what they love and they help you do what you love. And I’m absolutely certain it works. I’ve been doing it a long time and it’s very inspiring to watch people become on line, engaged, doing something they love doing at work.

John Demartini: And I train people on how to hire people and screen people. I can screen somebody and know if they’re going to be productive before they ever get on the job. And if they’re going to be, as theory Y or X people as McGregor used to say, they’re going to need internal, if they’re going to be driven from within to do the job and be accountable are you going to have to micromanage people and put them uphill and have to remind them with external motivations all the time? That costs the company. But intrinsic drive is very, very powerful in engagement. I specialize in maximizing engagement companies really.

John Jantsch: Because you’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m sure that your knowledge and your experience has evolved, but do you see changes in generationally, in the workforce or in people’s challenges because of technology making this even harder? How has this evolved for you?

John Demartini: Well, the basic principles haven’t changed. Human beings want to fulfill what they value. I can go back to Aristotle and he talked about the voids determine the values of human beings in his time. And he found the highest value was called the Telos. And the study of that was Teleology, which is the most meaningful and purposeful thing an individual can do. It’s not new. I’ve gone down through the great philosophers and synthesize the works and summarize it and explored the brain and physiology of this.

John Demartini: I’m certain about the impact it has. I’ve got plenty of evidence for it. It’s just a matter of not … the technology is a way of expressing the same principles and they give us a way of doing it. We may have now instead of delegating through pieces of paper, we’ll delegate to a communication device and instead of prioritizing on a piece of paper, we’ll prioritize on a device and keeping metrics on a device. But still the principles are the same. I don’t think they’re going to change. I think that’s human behavior.

John Jantsch: Some of the works that you cited, even Emerson 150 years ago was saying some of these same things and you’re right, it’s certainly stood the test of time.

John Demartini: Well, that’s it. I’ve been very steeped in the Greek philosophers and all the philosophers through time. I’ve studied some of the greatest minds I’ve been able to get my hands on and I feel pretty certain that we can reproduce an effort. We can go in and take people that are uninspired and make them inspired. And their inspiration is not because of any external thing. Their inspiration is the second they feel that they can get what they’re really, really deeply inspired by to be fulfilled.

John Demartini: And they come online. As Drucker said many years ago, if we can care enough about a human being to find out what their naturally inspired that competitive advantage that Ricardo would describe in each individual, it’s always an expression of what they value most. And making sure we hire people that are matching the job description so they can maximize that expression, that’s honoring them.

John Demartini: It’s making our company. We win, they win. Not accepting less than that and making sure that we care about people. Equity between ourselves and others and equanimity within ourselves and our customers and our employees goes far. Because if we try to exaggerate ourselves and try to get them to be doing what we want as an autocrat, eventually we get humbled and we get fallen. I think we saw that today. At the same time, if we minimize ourselves, we’ll sacrifice our profits. But having fair exchange, sustainable fair exchange with equity and equanimity, has stood the test of time. And that’s the mastery of communication, our values in terms of other people’s values. That’s what communication really is in a loving relationship, a child relationship, a business, a customer, employee or vendors.

John Jantsch: Speaking with Dr. John Demartini. He is the author of The Values Factor. We’re going to have a link to his website for this determinator quiz. Tell people where they can find you and more about your work, John.

John Demartini: Well, if they would like to find out about what I’m doing, just my website, DrDemartini.com. D-E-M-A-R-T-I-N-I.com. DrDemartini.com. D-R. And on there, it’s just a plethora of educational information for people, hundreds of radios, television. I mean, I’ve done probably 8,000 interviews. There’s a vast amount of information that can keep people busy on there. Just learning and helping them in whatever areas. It may not be just business, it may be in their relationship or maybe health areas, but I’ve been interested in helping people maximize all seven areas of their life and that’s what my website’s for. Because any era of our life, we don’t empower people over powers.

John Demartini: If we don’t empower ourselves intellectually, we’ll be told what to think. We don’t empower ourselves in business, we’ll be told what to do. If we don’t empower ourselves financially, we’re told what we’re worth. If we don’t empower ourselves in our relationship, we’ll be trapped in something we feel uninspired by. If we don’t empower ourselves and social status, we’ll be told the propaganda, as we see on the media. If we don’t empower ourselves physically, we’ll be told what drugs are take and what organs remove. If we don’t empower ourselves spiritually, we may subordinate to something that may be dogmatic or an antiquated. We have to care enough about ourselves to walk authentically and integrally in what we value most and make a contribution to the people if we want to exemplify what’s possible for other people.

John Jantsch: Well, I suspect occasionally you get some pushback on some of your thoughts, but I say that they are more than just interesting. They are inspiring and I think you’re absolutely right. No matter where people come down, they need to make the decision for themselves.

John Demartini: Well, the thing is, if they don’t, somebody else does. And empowerment comes from within, not without.

John Jantsch: Well, thanks John for stopping by The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast and I’m going to have the links for all the things we talked about and hopefully we will get to spend more time together.

John Demartini: I look forward to it and thank you so much for the opportunity to share and anytime I could be of service or it might fit into your podcast, let me know and I’ll be glad to help out in any way. Thank you so much.

Transcript of Creating the Right Morning Routine To Transform Your Day

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Amy Landino. She’s the bestselling author and award-winning host of Amy TV, but today we’re going to talk about her latest book. Good Morning, Good Life: Five Simple Habits to Master Your Mornings and Upgrade Your Life. Amy, thanks for joining me,

Amy Landino: John. Thanks for having me on. I’m a fan of yours, so this is just a pleasure.

John Jantsch: Well, thank you. I’ve just been around a long time, so that’s, that’s all I can say about that. So why morning? Why is morning so important?

Amy Landino: Honestly, I just think that it’s really easy to let moments process by very, very quickly if we don’t pay attention to them. So what better time to start doing that then when you start the day? I really believe that if you can, even if it’s just 15 minutes, if you can take ownership and own and really feel like you have done something on your terms to start the day, you’re good. It’s going to be a little bit easier to take on the curve balls that come throughout the day, especially when you get better at anticipating them. Which I just think more self-awareness and time with your own thoughts can help you accomplish. So yeah, I think mornings are something everybody has. Even if your morning doesn’t start until one in the afternoon because for whatever reason you work a night shift or something along those lines, it’s your way of starting the day. So how are you doing that?

John Jantsch: So I know a lot of this is, is your own personal experience that you’ve put into this, but have you done any, I’m sure there’s some scientific research out there about like our rhythms and what’s the best time to do some of this? I mean, did you study any of that or are you aware of any of that kind of research?

Amy Landino: Yeah, a little bit. I mean I definitely researched it in terms of like sleep because even though the book was about morning routines, a lot of people get the wrong idea that it’s this means it has to be a certain way and at a certain time and everyone is completely different, and not only that, the majority of the time, those of us who are trying to perform a little bit better lack in performance in other places and they take away from sleep when they do that. And so I think sleep is really important. Making sure that you’re getting the amount of sleep that’s right for you is important. That might be six hours, that might be seven hours, that might be nine hours. Obviously we hear the recommendation is seven to eight but everybody’s different. And noticing that about yourself and just knowing that that’s got to happen is important.

Amy Landino: And then I also think that there are people who just genuinely cannot fathom getting up before the sun and they very much are thriving off of that connection with light or any vitamin D that they can get. I’m not one of those people, but maybe if you live on the West Coast and you’re just so used to thriving off of the sun that that’s how you would want to wake up. That was sort of the research that I looked into is just how people are different and the problem is that a lot of people wouldn’t even know that because they haven’t taken time to notice it about themselves. We’re too busy consuming content about how it should be without actually really taking stock and what’s important to us and how we genuinely feel about it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that’s a good point and particularly for entrepreneurs, there seems to be a lot of literature, a lot of writing of late about the these morning routines and almost more coming at them as like hacks, which I think is actually not terribly healthy. However, I do think that people can establish routines and habits that do serve them. So I’m sure I’m not the first person to ask you what’s your morning routine look like?

Amy Landino: Oh, thank you for asking. And I’m so glad you said that because that’s really the motivation behind the book was that there’s just so much of this going around where it’s like this is the exact process and it’s not. It’s about a habit becoming a habit because it’s habitual. And that can only happen if it’s natural to you. So what’s natural to me is lately I’ve been waking up between 4:30 and 5:00 I think that’s a little bit crazy. I’m not going to lie, but I also just absolutely love going to bed and I know I am not productive at night. So I reverse engineer what time I wake up So I get at least seven hours of sleep every night. I’m not worried about staying up late. I’m not a night owl. I don’t thrive off of watching 10 episodes of something on Netflix.

Amy Landino: I just don’t. So I would rather wake up and make the most out of the next day once I’ve sort of hit my point. So that’s waking up. That first half hour I just let myself figure out how to be awake. That’s typically just washing my face, doing a skincare routine, preparing some lemon water to sip on when I start trying to use my brain at some point and getting the coffee going. And so that’s sort of like the first 30 minutes, letting the dog out. These kinds of things that are super easy going and not making me do anything to stress myself out. After about being awake for about 30 minutes, I’ll sit down and just brain dump is a little a methodology I learned about from Julia Cameron in the book the Artist’s Way. She talks about morning pages. I think she ended up writing like a spinoff book about this too because it was so popular.

Amy Landino: Essentially the topic is you just allow your brain to offload anything on it first thing in the morning for three pages of stream of consciousness writing. And by doing so, you write some of the crummiest stuff you’ve ever written in your life, but it allows you to break through all of the gook and nastiness that you’re waking up with. Grudges from the day before, any bad sleep, you got a bad dream or just any stress that you’re thinking about. It gets it off your mind a little bit and puts it into the real world in a journal I guess. And then you can kind of do more creative work because you cleared the way for that. So that’s the first thing that I do.

John Jantsch: I will tell you, I am a little older than you, so I read that book when it first came out 25 years ago and have been doing that practice ever since. And I unfortunately, I just kind of like write it all down like garbage almost and throw it away. But do you know Dean D’Souza? Is that his name? How do you say his last name? He’s been around forever. He’s in Australia and I was talking about journaling and he sent me a picture. He’s got like this, well first off he’s a really great artist as well, but he’s got this amazing like bookcase full of all of his journals from 20 some years of journaling and they’re all illustrated and they’re gorgeous. And I was like, I bet you that is pretty amazing to dive into.

Amy Landino: You know what, I hope to have a bookcase full someday. But I will say that I have been keeping, they’re paperback journals, they’re always paperback journals. I order a different colored one different themed one every time I need a new one. But I have been using a label maker on the side of them and keeping track of the dates. This became more important to me. My brother passed away in the last couple of years and so I realized maybe at some point in time as judgmental as I am about what I’m writing in those pages every morning later down the line it might be interesting for me to look back on a couple of moments to see where my headspace was. So yeah, I’ve actually been holding onto them in the last couple of years.

John Jantsch: So I, I interrupted you at your journaling practice.

Amy Landino: Yes, of course. So after morning pages, I like to look at my goals and that’s just because I have the memory of a pea and also I get shiny object syndrome. So I have to remind myself every day, what are the goals of the company, what are my personal goals and what should I be really focused on? Because it makes it a lot easier to go throughout the day and say no to something when it’s supposed to be a no. And we talked a little bit, I think before we went on the air. I’m a big fan of Ryan Holiday’s book, The Daily Stoic. I’m rereading it for the second year in a row and it’s just a page a day read that kind of just gets me outside of myself. Things can get petty and complainy very quickly all the time. And so I just feel like starting the day with a little bit of wisdom that’s far beyond my years is a really good way to go into the day. So those are sort of just some basics.

John Jantsch: Well for balance I would suggest that you add The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur to your daily reading because it is a little, I tease Ryan about this. It’s a little less bro-ish. Just saying that.

Amy Landino: All right cool.

John Jantsch: So let’s talk about the habits that subtitle the book, five simple habits, decide, defy, rise, shine, and thrive. Do you have way to kind of thread all that together for us?

Amy Landino: Absolutely. They were. They rhyme, which is super fun, but they all have a really good reason. So for the decision being in the habit of deciding, I think you’d probably talk about this in The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur because this is so important. Being able to make decisions easily, even if they are difficult ones to make, especially when you’re in business is important. And so taking decisions off of your plate that are less important is good too. But the decision that you should really be making with your morning is like, why do you even care to get that time for yourself? And it could be that you’ve realized you’re caught on the hamster wheel of business and you’re not big thinking and you’ve lost your creativity and that could be a good reason why. But really knowing why this time is important to you, so that you’ll stick with it is big and I think that this resonates a lot with people who are trying to look for different morning routines that they should try because they work for other people and that’s not going to be good enough.

Amy Landino: It’s not sustainable, it’s not your reason why. So the habit of making the decision is really big and it certainly plays a role from the first moment you step foot on the ground. Defy, also an entrepreneurship thing, but very important in the mornings. We know what it’s like to hit this news and not wake up on time. We know what it’s like to have car trouble. We know what it’s like for the kids to mess up our plans a little bit, and knowing how to defy the obstacles that are going to come is a really good way to make sure that you still get your morning routine and make the most of it. It’s not about, is it going to be perfect? It’s about when is it going to get disrupted and what are you going to do in that case. So learning how to defy the obstacles.

Amy Landino: That is a huge habit that has to be in place. You should be expecting it as they come. For the rise habits, that’s that big sleep thing that I was talking about before. We’re all adults. We know how to wake up in the morning, but it’s not necessarily fun and we know for a fact that the majority of the time the less fun that it is it probably has to do with the amount of sleep that you’ve got. And are you really getting restful sleep? What does that look like for you? Have you even experimented with the fact that maybe your shade should be drawn or your plugs should be in? Are you really setting yourself up for success to get the amount of sleep that you get?

Amy Landino: I often find that people don’t really think about the period of time before you’re meant to be asleep as a fall asleep period where we take our eyes off devices and we get away from computers and from TVs and we really start to shut down the mind so that we have an easier time falling asleep. Falling asleep is sometimes the hardest part for most people and really trying to figure out what that looks like for you is a habit to be in. It’s not like I like bragging about going to bed super early. I just know I feel at my best when it’s by a particular time and that’s a habit I have to stick with in order to have the habit of a morning routine.

Amy Landino: Yeah. Particularly us Midwesterner you know where at five o’clock, it’s dark.

Amy Landino: It’s so dark. It’s like exciting for me now because I’m like I feel I get to watch the sunrise and that’s can be very beautiful but I know that that’s an acquired taste, genuinely why are we waking up in the dark? That’s a whole situation. You’ve got to go back to your decision that you made on this, what is your why? The shine habit is all about what that morning routine is and this takes time. You have to just try things out, see what feels good to you. Sometimes things that don’t feel good to you still need to become a habit and that becomes getting clarity around it and finding what those things are. I decided that it was morning pages and goal writing and my skincare routine, lemon water and you know, get into my mastery for the day, which is usually eating the frog of my business.

Amy Landino: Whatever that big task is that I’ve been procrastinating on or I know I won’t get around to in the afternoon when I’m much more skirmish and looking for things to do in the afternoon. So you don’t really know what your morning routine is until you’ve figured out what it is for yourself. And so that’s really what that shine habit is about. When you figure out what those things are sticking with them so that every single day, making the time to do them will pay off in a much bigger way. And then you need to thrive. And that’s a habit too because we’re living a life and not just a morning. So what you do to be productive in the morning, you can really learn a lot about how you can execute that throughout the rest of the day. And I talk about things like calendar blocking and time batching.

Amy Landino: Can we be making better use of our time by doing similar tasks all at once? For instance, I’m doing a couple of podcast interviews and they’re all happening today and not every single day this week. Just things like that that make more sense for us as entrepreneurs when we have to play so many different roles in what we have to do to make the business stay afloat. You know, when are you in marketing mode versus when are you in accounting mode or when you’re in whatever mode can you do a better job of compartmentalizing that and truly thrive throughout the rest of the day and then start all over again tomorrow.

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John Jantsch: What role in your view, do your kind of core beliefs come into establishing your routines to bringing them into today? Like you said, I mean it’s so easy to get knocked off center, through things that happened in the day that were maybe not planned. So what role does kind of having an understanding and kind of holding onto your core beliefs play in your routine?

Amy Landino: You know, that’s a really good question. I think it pops up so much more.

John Jantsch: It must mean it’s a hard question.

Amy Landino: Yeah, is it because it’s so true. I know what it feels like to answer that question, but it sounds different for everybody. For me I know how often I disappoint people now. I’m much more self-aware of it. But the difference between myself as an entrepreneur today versus 10 years ago when I was really just getting started, is that I know I’m disappointing people and I’m okay with it when it’s my core belief that you think I should be doing something that I’m really clear I shouldn’t be. It’s a not right now thing. And also that sometimes we get so wrapped up and excited about certain opportunities, we think that they’re going to put us over the edge and make us big, bad and amazing. And it’s like, I really don’t believe that. I think we’ve been swindled on that so many times for so many different reasons and shiny objects come in and it’s like, wow, this is going to make everything better.

Amy Landino: That’s not true. It’s the little things every day that you work at that make a tremendous difference over time. So I just know at my core that if my gut is telling me something isn’t quite right, that I have to go with that because I’ve been right most every time. And the best part about that is the habit of deciding. When you are really good at just making a decision and going with it you don’t spend a lot of time in regrets. Say if you made the wrong call every once in a while you just move on to the next thing. You learn the lesson, you go forward. And I don’t know if that answers the question, but that’s where I feel like it is for me in terms of my core beliefs and where they play a role.

John Jantsch: So do you ever feel like, and I know this book hasn’t been out that long so maybe you haven’t experienced it much, but do you ever feel like, Oh God, I’ve written this book now I have to like be amazing and on every morning now or somebody’s going to see that I’m a liar.

Amy Landino: 100%, you have no idea. I specifically set aside, I took the summer off like I did all my content in advance and then I had set aside three weeks in August to write the book. It was all in my head ready to come out. But in July, June and July we took three weeks to go to Italy and I just had so much imposter syndrome coming back because I was like I didn’t do my morning routine a single day while I was in Italy, I barely did morning pages. I barely had any lemon water. Like actually I had some of the best lemons on earth because I was in Italy. But still I was so disappointed in myself.

Amy Landino: But I still wrote the book and it’s because I know that a habit is a habit because it’s habitual and I’m going to come back it, things happen. We go through seasons of life, we make these different changes and things just, it’s okay. Like at the end of the day it’s okay if it’s really a routine that’s customized to you, you will get back to it. So yes, trust me, I love to just judge myself when I miss it. But yeah, that’s life.

John Jantsch: So one of the things I’ve been talking about a lot lately, and it probably has something to do with the fact that I’ve been doing this 30 years, that I look back now and I, and I see so clearly the mind, body, spirit connection in involved in what we’re doing now. Not everybody is willing to go there, but I think that if we’re trying to have impact, if we’re trying to make a difference, I think we have to recognize the connection. First off, physically doing this is hard. It certainly, from a mind standpoint, mentally it’s draining. But I think also I work with too many entrepreneurs that are getting the life and joy sucked out of them doing this. And so is there an element of that sort of self-work that you’re conscious of?

Amy Landino: Yeah, I think especially, I don’t know how long you’ve been doing this, but I definitely feel like I’m in a different season of life than I was when I started. When you first start its sort of like, especially if you’ve been lucky enough to find a passion, which I do think that it’s a very fortunate thing these days. It’s like find your passion. And I talk about it on my channel all the time. It is a luxury when you find it, but it also becomes a job if you really do something with it. And so at the beginning its sort of like on never going to get sick of this. And now it’s like, all right, I don’t, I’m not sick of it. But like it’s a job. Like it’s not like its sunshine and rainbows all the time. And so I think the self-work for me and just being aware is that the space away from it is just as good as the space with it and being more aware of when that happens.

Amy Landino: And because I’m so good at planning, if I’m really that good at it Amy, you need to plan to have the space away as much as you’re planning the space in it because it’s just too easy. Especially in my situation where my husband and I co-own a company together, work/life balance does not exist. It is just everywhere. And that’s okay because that’s the life we wanted and that’s the life we got. But you also need to respect yourself that this isn’t who you are, it’s just what you’re doing to be who you are. And so being able to have a little bit of space is really important. And I think I’ve observed that more recently than ever before.

John Jantsch: Yeah. For me, and this could just be my personality a little bit, I get bored with things, just about when they’re done. And so I’m constantly looking for new things and I think that can be okay. People talk about shiny object and you know, getting distracting going to the next thing. I think the key is finding a thread that runs through everything that you do that brings you joy. I mean, I talk about in my book Seasons of the Entrepreneur and I think that a lot of entrepreneurs when they stick with this thing will go through multiple seasons.

John Jantsch: Not just seasons, but come back and start over again multiple times. I think you’re probably experiencing that at the point that you’re in. And I think the longevity for a lot of people comes by staying true to kind of here’s the difference I want to make in my life and my family’s life and the people that I come into contact with. And I think when you have that, and I’m just throwing that as an example, but I think when you have that kind of thread that that continues to run through it, you can do anything you want and still find joy.

Amy Landino: I completely agree and I think I experienced this in terms of outside feedback and in terms of me staying true to that. When I made a pretty big pivot in my content in 2018 and I think that’s, that was the moment I realized like, yeah I know what I should be doing. That even though I need time and space, sometimes everything has to do with the same vision that I started with. It’s just that maybe at one point I was speaking about a little bit more of a niche topic and now we’ve gotten to a bigger space. And then soon enough it’s going to be in another space. It’s amazing what happens when the book comes out on something. It’s like suddenly I’m like, okay, what’s next? But I don’t know what it is.

Amy Landino: The book is the cap on everything I guess. I don’t know, but that’s definitely true. And I remember getting a lot of feedback like, Amy, what are you doing? Like you used to do this and now you’re doing that. And I’m like, but my community and like the people that I truly help on the deepest level, they get it. And quite frankly that’s all that matters because they’re who I’m serving. So I’m sorry you don’t get it, but we get it and so it’s fine.

John Jantsch: How much did you have to fight through that though a little bit. Because you probably had people who were not just confused. They were afraid you were leaving them. So how much did you have to wrestle with that? To be okay with it?

Amy Landino: I think I grappled with it, but I don’t see it as a person that existed before that I’m abandoning. I feel like I’m just sharpening more skills as I go.

John Jantsch: I’m not saying you, that’s just a lot of what you ended up having to deal with.

Amy Landino: Yeah, absolutely. So it was kind of, it was really funny. Some of it was really vanity and some of it was a little bit confusion of brand because at the same time that I made a pivot in my content I also changed my last name because got married. So there was so much stock in like, wow, you really made a name for yourself before. Well, I made a name for myself because I present value, not because I had a certain last name or because I talked about a certain topic. There were people watching my videos about making videos that never planned to ever make a video. They just enjoyed spending the time with me. And then I got to the core of that and it turned out that it was just about how do we manage our time better? How do we do something that’s bigger that would merit making a video or doing anything else?

Amy Landino: And so I just took, I just went broader with the people. But yes, the audience I felt like I was leaving was more, they were never truly the target. They were never truly the perfect person. The perfect viewer as I would usually call them in my first book, they were not really the perfect person. So it’s not that I’m leaving them, it’s just that we’re going down a different path. And I also believe you graduate from certain schools. There may be people who were in The School of Duct Tape Marketing 10, 20, I don’t know how, well, I shouldn’t say how many years it’s been, but it could have been 10 years ago, right?

Amy Landino: And then maybe they’ve fallen off of you and they might come back and go, “Oh my God, this is so cool. I used to follow you back in the day and now I’m following you now,” that it’s like, Oh that’s, that’s really crazy. But that’s okay. I graduated from the schools of certain thought leaders who I found long time ago and then maybe we make ourselves back. Or maybe you just set the tone for me at that stage that I really needed and I’ve grown from you. I accept that. I’m super good with that. And I don’t think somebody has to be a lifelong fan for me to make a lifelong impact on them.

John Jantsch: Yeah, Seth writes beautifully about that very topic in his book Tribes, I don’t know if you have read it or remember reading it.

Amy Landino: I have. I actually reread this year already so it’s funny you say that.

John Jantsch: Yeah because I think he touches on that very point about people go I’m going to go over here now because I think what’s happening over here is cool. Then I think a lot of people do that. Well Amy this was great catch up with you. I probably need to have you back on again just to talk about your whole video production because it’s kind of off the hook but we could do a whole ‘nother show on just how you do that and approach video. So let’s do that at some point.

Amy Landino: I would love that.

John Jantsch: Awesome. So Good Morning, Good Life, Five Simple Habits to Master Your Morning and Upgrade Your Life. You want to tell people where they can find you Amy?

Amy Landino: Absolutely. You can check out more details about the book at goodmorninggoodlife.com or you can just kind of tune in, see what I’m all about at youtube.com/amyTV.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Amy, great catching up with you and hopefully we will run into you next time I’m out on the road.

Amy Landino: Good to talk to you, John, thank you.

Transcript of Changing the Game as an Entrepreneur

Transcript of Changing the Game as an Entrepreneur written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Greg Meade. He the CEO and co-creator of business and let’s just face it, a sport called Crossnet. So Greg, thanks for joining me.

Greg Meade: Yeah, no problem. John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: So I guess we ought to start with the two minute summary of what is cross net? Explain the game.

Greg Meade: Yeah, so cross net is a recreation of a childhood game. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with four square box ball. It’s a old middle school, elementary school game. You’d play in the ground, you bounce it, you’d have four quadrants and you’d always want to be the king and usually you want to stay in that four square. By the time recess ended or whatever lunch was coming. And so that’s the whole objective of that game. And then we ended up bringing it back to life. And it’s in the air now. So it’s four square in the air that’s cross net. So you play two 11 and you can only score in the king square, which is also the foursquare.

John Jantsch: So, so there’s an element of volleyball to it, I guess.

Greg Meade: Yeah, absolutely. You don’t have to be good at volleyball though. So I mean, obviously if you’re better at volleyball, the better you’ll do. Me and our founders, we actually aren’t volleyball players at all. We play basketball, soccer, everything else besides volleyball. So we have a little taps creation of it. And we’re athletic. So it, it works out well.

John Jantsch: So I’m envisioning this, I know when I was growing up, we used to do this. I’d get together with my friends and we’d make up these games and our own rules and it may be involved to baseball at a bat, but you know, other than that, we had our own rules. I’m envisioning you guys sitting around drinking one day. Okay, this is just my vision. Drinking beers one day and you said, “Let’s do this”. I mean is that the origin story of cross net?

Greg Meade: Similar, yeah. So my friend Mike, our co founder and partner, he graduated from Northeastern and he called me up one day. He’s like, “Greg, I want to do something. I want to invent something with you.” He knew I was in the marketing and entrepreneurship so he’s like, “I don’t want to be an engineer nine to five let’s go do something.” So I was like, “All right, come over right now.” So he came over, it was probably like two in the afternoon. We sat there all day on the couch watching ESPN highlights over and over, just thinking of ideas, jotting them down on notes pad on our phones. We came up with a list of 50 products. It was a wall charger, another speaker, and then cross net. And we were like, okay, we have to do this. We wanted to bring the element of sports to the next level.

Greg Meade: So we decided to go with go cross net. And the next day we went out to Walmart target and we bought two badminton sets. We ripped one apart and put it against a tree in my mom’s shed and the other one was normal and we ended up calling some friends over, we played it and it was a fun time. Then we actually produced it and made it official.

John Jantsch: So is this one of those things where you just making up the rules as you were going and eventually after enough trial and error landed on what seemed to work?

Greg Meade: Yeah, so we wanted to incorporate the normal foursquare rules. You know, you mess it up, you go to the back of the line. But normal foursquare, you don’t play to a points system. It’s more of like, whoever is in there the longest wins in a time period. We play basketball, play a lot of pickup basketball. You played 11 you win by two. So we implemented the score to 11 and you must win by two and if you mess up, you go to the back of the line still like Foursquare and you keep your points.

John Jantsch: All right, so you’ve got the idea, you’ve played enough, you’ve played with some friends to maybe people tell you, “Yeah, this is fun.” I mean, how do you take it to the next step to make it a real thing?

Greg Meade: Yeah. So we knew it was going to be a hit. So what we did was we outsourced it, we manufactured it, and we made it a playable game and a presentable game so we can bring to the beach, to a grassy area, and we got people’s reactions and they loved it. If you set it up right now, you go to the beach, you’ll set it up and there’ll be a line of 20 kids sometimes. And people taking photos, videos, asking what it is. It’s surreal.

John Jantsch: In some ways you have to create the demand, right? If you’re going to go to Walmart or Scheels or somebody like that and say, “We’ve got this great idea.” I mean they’re going to want to see people want to play it, right? I mean, so did you have to go out and I don’t know, for lack of a better term, expo and to create some demand where people are like, “Yeah, where can we get this?”

Greg Meade: Essentially. Yeah, when we go out in public, we play and then like I said, people would come up to us and end up playing. But we did a lot of marketing online, social media, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram. Really got social presence out there. We’re pretty good at that stuff. And then my brother’s also a lead sales man. So he picked up the phone and he got some deals done for us. We’re in Scheels right now.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I looked at your locator map and found a few of those. So what has been the biggest hurdle to this entire, I mean, obviously you’re not done, but so far what’s been the biggest hurdle to this entire idea or adventure?

Greg Meade: It would definitely be keeping up with demand. Last summer we got hit big time with a wave of orders. We weren’t anticipated for. I think we skyrocketed by eight times our sales. Our inventory depleted overnight and we had to make our customers wait a month for the product, which is, it’s unfortunate. We don’t want to keep running into that issue and that’s something we’re still actively trying to fix on this team. But we keep growing at a faster pace than we actually anticipate. So next time around we’re going to anticipate times 20 so we’re ready for everything.

John Jantsch: Is there a season to this? I’m guessing anytime you can do stuff outdoors that’s probably better than, say winter?

Greg Meade: Yeah, for sure. Summer is our Christmas. It’s hot everywhere, but when it comes to Christmas time, winter time, it’s still crazy off the charts. People are buying it for the summer or they’re just buying it because they live in hot locations. California, Texas, Florida.

John Jantsch: Yeah, where they can play year round.

Greg Meade: Some people play in the snow too, which is cool.

John Jantsch: Yeah. We have a little game that my kids and I play and it’s actually more fun. We’ll take it on a hike or a camping trip or something. It’s actually more fun in the snow and involves a little net and a ball as well. So what’s your marketing look like and how has it evolved? Or it simply just been word of mouth?

Greg Meade: It’s been definitely word of mouth after our initial marketing I would say. So we definitely scaled Facebook ads drastically over the last two quarters. We’ve found out our target market, which was essentially mom and dads. More than the typical volleyball player or the typical 20 year old kid that would be competitive at this. Obviously those people still buy, but our arc market is more towards the moms and we’re going to scale that and grow it and get them more involved essentially as that’s our main market right now.

John Jantsch: So they’re buying it more as a family activity.

Greg Meade: Yeah, that’s what it seems like for now.

John Jantsch: So have you made anything that you look back now and go, “Oh that was a mistake. I wish we hadn’t done that.”

Greg Meade: I would say the development of the actual game in the beginning. We rushed it. Well, we didn’t rush it. We’ve had a bunch of different prototypes. We never really had that product that was the final product until recently. So I wish we went back and more in like just really went through each material, each process of playing the game. And from when it ships out of our warehouse to delivery to the people setting it up and actually enjoying it. So I would say that was a hurdle.

John Jantsch: Have you sensed there’s a competition to what you do?Are you having to teach people about the game before they have an interest in playing it? Or are other established games keeping you out of places? Have you sensed where your competitive pressure is?

Greg Meade: Yeah, I would say when people start seeing it, they always ask questions. How do you play? What is this? A lot of them understand that it is Foursquare and they just need to know the rules on how you actually keep points, win, and stuff like that. So that is a hurdle. We have actually implemented a nice rule book. So when people do get the game, they understand how to play, how to set it up. So you just read that, quick five minutes and you actually understand it. It’s really simple once you play once or twice and you really get the hang of it and it gets intense.

John Jantsch: So was there a moment when you were doing this and everybody’s like, “Is this is going to work? We’re putting a lot of effort in it.” Was there a time or something that happened where you said, “You know what? I think this is going to work.”

Greg Meade: Yeah. We have always had a good faith in it and we knew it was going to take off. It’s just a matter of time. I don’t think there was ever a moment where we had a relapse or whatever thinking that it wasn’t going to work. I think it was more of we hit Scheels, right? And we were like, “Okay, let’s really take this to the next levels. So yeah, we got into some good shot stores really quick and we knew that it was possible.

John Jantsch: Would you say the chain store purchase was a big break?Because sometimes a lot of people think, okay, I’ve got this product, it’s really profitable, we sell online, one at a time we make a lot of money and then a big retailer comes along and all of a sudden it’s like, “Yeah we want to buy a thousand of them” or whatever the number is, “but we also want it for 75% off of what you’re selling.” I mean, so sometimes there can be some like, do we really want to go that route? Did you ever have a moment where the type of distribution for a Scheels, even though it felt really great, felt scary too?

Greg Meade: Yeah. When it comes to Scheels, we just wanted to jump on that right away and get a feel for the retail side and we got a good deal with them. Moving forward though, like some future companies like Dick’s and all that, they work a little harder. So we do want to make sure we’re on the positive side of it things. And every place I’ve gone and we’ve been satisfied and have a good relationship with them. So I would say just make sure you’re risking it and make you’re being smart about it too at the same time.

John Jantsch: There are horror stories, and I hate to pick on Walmart, but there’s one that I know for sure where, went to a small company and so we’re going to buy 50,000 units and we need this price. And they basically were almost break even. And then they sent half of them back. So all of a sudden it’s like, yeah, this great deal that we got with Walmart sunk us. That that can be a scary time, I think.

Greg Meade: Yeah, for sure. And then we’re not going to face that difficulty, I don’t think. I think we’re smart enough and we’re above our market and we know what to do and what not to do. And we know our.com sales are very important to us. And we know people will go there regardless to buy.

John Jantsch: So are you starting to feel the pressure to expand? In other words like, okay, we have one hit, now let’s make another one.

Greg Meade: Yeah. As in terms of products or?

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well the products or really any fashion. But I guess I was thinking the typical way a lot of people expand is they, they get a hit, they get a little reputation, they’ve got some distribution. All of a sudden now it’s easier to go back to the well.

Greg Meade: Yeah, for sure. So we want to definitely expand to different countries now in 2020. Get more involved in Australia, South America, and countries that love volleyball. We’ve had a lot of love from different countries, over 30 countries. So we want to expand on that aspect, set up some tournaments. In regards to new products, we actually have an indoor model coming out in about 27 days and that is for the gymnasiums, physical educations, concrete so you can tailgate with it. It’s really good for gyms, schools in classrooms. So they can get it into the curriculum, which we’re all for.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that’s a, that’s a whole different sales channel isn’t it?

Greg Meade: Yep. And that means we need more manpower.

John Jantsch: So you started hinting at some tournaments and things. Do you ever see in your wildest dreams that cross net becomes, I’m trying to think of the right word, but a sport that has leagues and that has summertime sign ups for things and maybe even becomes a sport that has maybe levels of competition?

Greg Meade: Yeah, absolutely. We’d love to get it on ESPN, obviously, sports center and get it into a professionalist sport, I guess we can call it. Definitely. We do definitely see that in the long run. We have to grow our brand first and make sure it’s, what we want it to be and go down that route. If we want to make it a competitive side or makw it more fun side. But I think we have leverage to do both. Our first tournament actually was a few months ago in San Diego. We thought it would be 15-20 people. We ended up having 50-60 people come out and it was a hell of a time.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I hate to dwell on anything negative, is there ever a sense that this would be something easy that somebody else could knock off?

Greg Meade: No, we’re patent protected and we have a good legal team so I’m pretty confident in anything they try to do we’ll be able to back our end.

Greg Meade: Good. The reason I asked that is because I think a lot of times people pass over the need to do that in a situation like this because it costs money. It’s expensive to have a good legal team. And so I applaud you for taking that a longterm investment. So Greg, tell people where they can find out more about just the game, how it’s played, and obviously acquire the equipment that they might need.

Greg Meade: Yeah, you head over to crossnetgame.com and you can also buy it on Target, Walmart, Amazon, eBay, all that. If you go to our website though we’ll give you a pretty good description of how to play. You’ll see some videos. You can go to our YouTube channel, Instagram, Twitter. We’re always posting organic raw photos and videos to see how people play and stuff.

John Jantsch: Great. A small business success story. I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, Greg, and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Greg Meade: Sounds good. Thanks John, for having me.

Transcript of Learning to Become a Leader

Transcript of Learning to Become a Leader written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Ryan Hawk. He is a keynote speaker, author, advisor, and the host of his own podcast, The Learning Leader Show. We’re going to talk about his new book called Welcome to Management: How to Grow From Top Performer to Excellent Leader. So, Ryan, thanks for joining me!

Ryan Hawk: John, it’s great to have you, and I have to say at the top, before we even get into it… I’m not trying to hijack your show, but you gave me one of the most thoughtful gifts ever, a significant sum of money to Donors Choose, and because of you, I got to sit down with my daughters and choose incredible classrooms to donate that money to because of the very thoughtful gift. And all I did to earn that was just simply be a referral source for a speaking gig. And so, I thought you went…

Ryan Hawk: I still remember, it was probably over a year ago now, but above and beyond, gift-giving wise, and certainly created a cool experience for me with my family. So, I’m very appreciative of that, man.

John Jantsch: Well, and I’ll just take the opportunity to let other people know. You made a tremendous referral to me that was very valuable in terms of revenue and connection, and all that kind of good stuff; you had the trust to do that. But also, it took me five minutes of research to realize that that was going to be a gift that touched your heart because of the things that you’re into, and I think, I’m not patting myself on the back, I’m just saying, a lesson for people trying to create better experiences. It’s so easy to find out what people are into today and personalize things, and shame on us if we don’t do that.

Ryan Hawk: It was a fantastic, fantastic gift. Very thoughtful, so I’m very appreciative and have… The cool thing, too, is it has a ripple effect because not only does it impact the people that we donated the money to, but also it gave me the idea to give that gift to others who have similar values, and so more people have received that gift because I didn’t even think of it as an idea until I received it. So, thank you, man.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I actually like to support that organization, and what I love to do is go find teachers that are requesting specific books that I think are awesome, that maybe…

Ryan Hawk: Oh.

John Jantsch: Like For Whom The Caged Bird Sings or something like that for a classroom, and it kind of lets you support… even though that author’s not alive anymore, it really kind of lets you support the work, as well. I kind of have fun doing that.

Ryan Hawk: I love it, love it.

John Jantsch: All right, we’d better get into this topic here. A lot of times when I have people on my show, it’s like, “Here’s your new book!”, and everybody’s like, that’s the starting point of Ryan Hawk is his new book, right? How did you get here? Give us a little backstory.

Ryan Hawk: How much time do we have, man? No, I think that… My background, John, has been in athletics my whole life. And so, when it comes to leadership, I learned to lead as a quarterback of a football, and the point guard of a basketball team, and I pitched and played shortstop on a baseball team. Was fortunate to earn a scholarship to play in college, I played quarterback in college initially at Miami University; ended up trying extremely hard to be the starting quarterback but getting narrowly beat out… I say narrowly, but it probably wasn’t, beat out by another pretty good quarterback named Ben Roethlisberger, who later went on to, or is still doing it now, Superbowl MVP two-time winner with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Ryan Hawk: And so, I transferred and finished my collegiate playing career at Ohio University, graduated and then played in the arena football league professionally for a few years, before then making my way into the profession of selling, and I worked with a great go called Lexus Nexus with fantastic training, and I learned and grew and was able to then do well enough to get the opportunity to get promoted into a management role, then a director role and then ultimately, I was a vice president of North American sales for that company before I elected to leave. And the reason I left is midway through my career there, I had earned my MBA, I was considering going back to school again because our company gave us tuition reimbursement…

Ryan Hawk: And as I was looking at another graduate degree, I was very fortunate to have a dinner set up with a guy by the name of Todd Wagner. Todd Wagner is Mark Cuban’s business partner, and Todd, I got to dinner a little early and so did Todd, and we sat down one-on-one before anyone else got there, and I was peppering him with all of these questions about building broadcast.com, which is what he built with his business partner, Mark Cuban, until the final moment where he’s sitting across from the leaders at Yahoo!, and this is back when Yahoo! was like Google is now. Sitting across the leaders from Yahoo!, and he says, “Look, you’re going to either buy us or you’re going to have to compete with us. You decide,” and they walked away with 5.7 billion dollars.

Ryan Hawk: And I was just blown away by the intricacies of his story, and deconstruction of success and excellence; I was fascinated by it, and I thought, “I would much rather go directly to the sources of that knowledge, people who live the lives of that, as opposed to going back to school.” And so, I elected to create my own school, and that school now became known as The Learning Leader Show, which is my podcast. And now, five years later, 350 episodes, amazing opportunities come to you when you follow your curiosity and obsessions with great rigor. And I think that’s a big part of my story, that that’s where books come from, and keynote speaking, and I was able to leave corporate America two years ago, more than two years ago now, to do this full-time podcast, speak, consult, write books.

Ryan Hawk: And it’s pretty cool. It’s a pretty cool opportunity that I feel very fortunate to get to live in this manner.

John Jantsch: So, let’s talk specifically about the new book. The title, and even subtitle, suggests that this is for somebody for whom a management role might be new, or that might be an aspiration. Would that be an accurate statement?

Ryan Hawk: It is, John. I’ll tell you the reason I wrote it, and the title actually came… I would imagine it’s probably a mutual friend of ours, I had a number of early readers who were podcast guests of mine, and one of them was Liz Weissman, the author of Rookie Smarts and Multipliers, two incredible books, and she runs a fascinating, really helpful company out west. And Liz… because it was going to be, like, The Learning Leader, or Learn to Lead, or along those lines, and Liz says, “The title of this book is Welcome to Management, and here’s why,” and we walked through it.

Ryan Hawk: And the reason is the focus of the book is the time in my career when I went from individual contributor to manager for the first time. The purpose of the book is to help people who are going through that, or who will be going through that, to make far fewer mistakes than I did. And so, it’s a combination of stories and science from my life as well as the lives of the people I’ve been fortunate enough to interview for my show, and I combined all of that together, and fortunately, when I wrote the proposal, the great people at McGraw-Hill decided they wanted to buy it and publish it. So, that’s where we’re at now.

John Jantsch: So, I’ll stick with, because of your background in sports, I’ll stick with a pretty common sports analogy. The managers of particularly baseball teams are rarely the star center-fielder shortstop. They’re always the catcher.

Ryan Hawk: Right. Or the backup quarterback, yeah.

John Jantsch: Or the backup quarterback, right, yeah. So, is there a message in that?

Ryan Hawk: Well, actually, I would say… and that’s a great point. I would say the great ones seem to have that makeup, John, of the catcher or the backup quarterback, right? Because they had to grind so hard just to survive that they needed to understand the game at a deep level, and because of that, they were able to teach it to other people, whereas the star player, it’s a little bit more, in some cases, natural or intuitive, and they’re not as good at explaining it. I’ve had math teachers like that, that they were gifted and intelligent when it comes to doing the math problem, but they couldn’t explain it very well.

Ryan Hawk: What the issue is in my profession I grew up in and in the profession of selling is, typically when there’s a management opening, the leadership teams look at the top of the sales stack rankings and they say, “Those top three or four people, we’re going to interview them for the job,” and then just hire one of those people. And that’s exactly how I got the job.

Ryan Hawk: And unfortunately, what it takes to be great at a role of leading and serving other people has almost nothing to do of what it takes to be great as an individual contributor in the role. There’s a little bit, but not much. And so, that’s why I wrote about the mistakes and the learnings that I made myself in that role, that I just wasn’t prepared, I didn’t have a clue of what it took to lead a team of people when it came to the business world, and I had a lot to learn.

Ryan Hawk: And so, my hope is that people can read this work that I’ve put a lot of effort into, and not make the same mistakes that I made. They can learn from the mistakes of other people, and I think we call that wisdom. That’s my hope is what happens with this book.

John Jantsch: Well, I think I know how you’re going to answer this, but a lot of people would suggest that leaders are kind of born, that there’s certain makeup, certain mentality, certain level of patience, that not everybody has. But I’m guessing you are going to suggest that, while there may be people that are more suited naturally, anybody can learn this.

Ryan Hawk: What do you think? Not like, what do you think I think? I’m curious, what do you think?

John Jantsch: I think anybody can learn anything they’re willing to learn.

Ryan Hawk: Including leadership?

John Jantsch: Well, I think there are experiences in leadership that probably teach you a lot of things, but I think your own sort of self-evaluation and awareness is what you’ve got to learn first.

Ryan Hawk: Yeah. I think, much like many areas of life, the answer is not black and white. I mean, the world in general, I don’t love the thought of having to pick one or the other in anything. In anything, including politics. I just don’t identify that way.

Ryan Hawk: And I think when it comes to leadership, certainly there are inborn, innate traits you’re born that could help you, but when it comes to, do we all have the capacity or the ability to learn and grow and improve, and lead in our way within our personality? Absolutely!

Ryan Hawk: I’ve been fortunate to speak with people on all ranges of personality traits and assessments that you could go through, on all of them ranging from one end to the other end, and yet, they’ve all had that one thing in common is, they have found a way to sustain excellence. So, yes, I certainly believe it is a learned skill if you desire and if you want to do it.

Ryan Hawk: But, yeah, there may be bits and pieces, when it comes to I think there are some people who have… Like Jocko Willink told me, he’s like, “Well, you didn’t get to choose to have the voice, literally the sound of your voice…” Sometimes in the military, in his case, as a Navy SEAL, that is helpful. That’s not everything; that doesn’t make you a leader. But it is helpful to have a voice like Jocko’s to lead as Navy SEALs.

Ryan Hawk: So, there are little things that certainly can help you, or that make it harder for you, but for the most part, yes, it’s a learned skill.

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John Jantsch: Let’s talk about, a lot of people, especially since you are suggesting Welcome to Management, a lot of people, their only guide has been how they’ve been managed.

Ryan Hawk: Yeah.

John Jantsch: So, do you find that sometimes that there’s sort of a need to un-learn?

Ryan Hawk: Well, when I was a rep and a new manager, I had a great mentor, and he was a senior VP of our group; his name’s Rex Caswell, and Rex said, “I want you to keep a notebook. On the left side, write all the great things that your manager does that helps you, that inspires you, that makes you perform on a high level. And on the other side, write all the bad things. Because someday, you’re going to become a manager, and I want you to not do the bad things, and only do the good things.”

Ryan Hawk: And as you can imagine, I still… growing up in that age, I didn’t have any terrible bosses, but that right side was still far bigger than the left side. And so, I think the problem, even something like an example of how you run a meeting, or how meetings are done, there’s a lot of bad things out there about meetings. You just follow what your manager does, for the most part, because you don’t know any different. You don’t know any better. And that happens in across all aspects of management, and leadership is… especially if you’re like me, you don’t really have any other experiences so you just follow what the person before you did.

Ryan Hawk: And unfortunately, that can be bad. And that is why it’s so impactful and why I chose to focus on this specific area for my first book, is because you have so much… and I mean this in a good way, but you have so much power, and I want people to use that power and influence for good because if you do all of these, if you understand how to do all of this part of the job well, think of the impact you’re going to have on people because the people that report to you, they’re going to follow you. They’re going to act like you act, and so, you are creating more leaders, more managers in the world, as a good one, so let’s use that power and influence for good. And that’s my hope with this.

John Jantsch: Do you think, even over the last few years, cultural changes… companies seem to be not quite as hierarchal, generational changes… Have those things, those dynamics, brought kind of new attention to this type of manager as a top performer, perhaps, or as a leader? And again, I suspect every generation says the same thing. “Oh,” you know, “This next generation coming up has to be managed differently.” Is that just the human condition, or are we living in a time where the change is more dramatic?

Ryan Hawk: I think there is a lot more awareness and knowledge when it comes to this. There’s so much written about all of this, so I do think there is more out there about it. The problem…

Ryan Hawk: So, I did some informal research as I was writing this book, John, and I spoke with… I work with leadership teams in companies of all shapes and sizes, from the Salesforce.coms to small businesses here in Ohio where I live, and all over the world. And the one question I asked anyone who was in a leadership role was, “Tell me exactly and specifically the process of your training when you got your first promotion. What was it? What did you do? Remind me.”

Ryan Hawk: And I was blown away because the overwhelming majority, and these are even some that are at world-class companies that you read about, the overwhelming majority was extremely underwhelming, meaning there may have been a half-day boot camp, or a binder, or like, “Hey, go to this virtual meeting.” And some actually had nothing. So, that tells me…

Ryan Hawk: And some of these were years ago, so I would imagine some of these companies have gotten better, but for the most part, I was amazed at the lack of training and preparation for people as they make what I think is the biggest leap in their career.

John Jantsch: You, and hopefully I’ve set this up enough, I mean, you present a framework for how to do this. Is there a way for you to briefly describe to people what a framework for being an excellent leader looks like?

Ryan Hawk: Well, one of the frameworks I think, when it comes to behaviors on a daily basis, that I illustrate and I think that I’ve built for myself based on learning from so many other incredible leaders on my show, one is just to have a mindset of, “How am I going to behave on a daily basis?”

Ryan Hawk: So, for me, and I call this… what Charlie Munger might say, of how you build your learning machine. It’s really four parts. The four parts every day when it comes to, I think good, good leadership, as far as how you disperse information. So, starting with…

Ryan Hawk: I think we all need to be consumers on a regular basis. You need to create an intake engine of information, of knowledge. So, read books, listen to podcasts, watch TED Talks, have one-on-one conversations with mentors. Do that on a regular basis.

Ryan Hawk: Two, you can’t just be a learner. You also need to be a doer. Experiment. Put some of your learnings into action, actually put them into play, see what happens. Have an experimental mindset. Third, we must take time to step back and reflect on what we’re learning and what we’re experimenting, what we’re doing. Whether it’s, for example, a new way to do a one-on-one with a person, or a new way to run a meeting, right? Let’s take time to reflect and analyze on how we’ve done, why it worked, why it didn’t, and what we’re going to do moving forward.

Ryan Hawk: And then fourth, the best leaders that I’ve found in my life were fantastic teachers, and the reason why teachers I think develop so much knowledge and wisdom is because the process of preparing to teach somebody is the essence of learning. What you’re forced to get… just like you know; you’ve written six books, right? When you’re forced to write it down with the thought of teaching it or sharing it with somebody else, that’s when all of the learning happens. So, I think regularly putting yourself in positions to be a teacher, whether it’s in written form or speaking or both, is really helpful. When you see these incredibly smart professors or keynote speakers who’ve been doing it for a while, they really know their stuff. Why? Because they’ve regularly got clarity of thought.

Ryan Hawk: They’ve regularly sat down to think about, “What do I think? What do I believe? I have to add value to the lives of the people I’m getting ready to teach. I need to know my stuff!” Right? And so, that takes a lot of time and effort to put that together, and I think that four-part process, for me, has been extremely helpful as I’ve implemented it over the years.

John Jantsch: Do you have a personal kind of… whether it’s morning or evening, routine to kind of get your head right, and before you go out there and do whatever it is you’re going to do? Do you have kind of a practice or ritual?

Ryan Hawk: I have to be a morning guy. I know morning routines are spoken about far too much now, but I think for me, that is a big deal because… married, we’re raising five daughters; I need time to myself to prepare for the day, and so that usually happens before everybody wakes up. So, I am a big morning routine guy when it comes to writing, reading, getting my mind going, stretching my body, moving my body. A big morning workout guy. It gets me in the mode to do work, to create the stuff that I create, or to prepare for a podcast or a speech.

Ryan Hawk: So, I do a lot of that hard work early in the morning before my family wakes up, and then to get them off to school, and then it’s time to get to work for that day. So, as trite as it sounds and as overused as this is nowadays, for me, though, that’s a big deal. And so, I have created a ritual around what I do first thing when I wake up, and it’s been very helpful for me in order to get the rest of the day going.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I actually… kind of the same thing. When my kids were small, I started that ritual, and I’ve just never given it up.

Ryan Hawk: Really?

John Jantsch: Now, they’re off grown, and…

Ryan Hawk: What do you do?

John Jantsch: Well, I get up about five o’clock, and meditation’s one of the first things I do, and then I read, and then I journal, and I exercise just about every day.

Ryan Hawk: Wow! Do you use a guided meditation app, or…

John Jantsch: I’ve been a big fan of Deepak Chopra for a long time, and he does have a guided meditation app that has… something new shows up in it every single day.

Ryan Hawk: Wow! Nice! Nice.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I don’t want to turn this into a commercial for me, but my most current book, recent book, is actually a daily meditation guide, so to speak, almost. But written in the context of entrepreneurs. So, I kind of wrote the book that I wanted to have with me every morning.

Ryan Hawk: Love it! I love it, man. Yeah, that’s good stuff.

John Jantsch: One last question I want to… Culture’s a really hot kind of almost buzzword these days in business. A lot of what you are writing about seems to really be the essence of culture in an organization, isn’t it?

Ryan Hawk: It is. I think there are really two different types of cultures. There are more, but I’ll talk about two of them. And I’ve worked in both. And the saying that I really believe in is that compliance can be commanded, commitment cannot.

Ryan Hawk: And I want to work with leaders, I want to help leaders build committed organizations, committed teams. And so, that takes the leader acting in a manner in which somebody wants to follow, right? We all can picture right now, if you pause for a second and think about that boss or coach or leader that you were so committed to, you loved following that person; he or she was fantastic at helping you see kind of the vision, and helping you add your part in order to achieve whatever that mission or goal is.

Ryan Hawk: And so, for me I think that’s why my book starts with leading yourself, and that’s the first section because you can’t really build a committed organization, a committed culture until you take the time to lead yourself first, and then you can build that and continuously lead it. So, really, it’s packed full of kind of the actions, the thoughts, the behaviors, the commonalities among leaders who have built sustainable, excellent businesses, cultures, teams to say, “Okay, let me learn from them to say, what could I, again, test, implement into my world to see what works best for me.”

Ryan Hawk: That’s the whole purpose of doing it. And then, obviously, it gets tactical as well because there are some tactical aspects of the job that I just wasn’t aware of when I got promoted, that I’m hopeful to help with, too.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I’m sure you’ve interviewed a lot of folks on your show, and probably a resounding message comes out that it has to be intentional, that you have to practice it, that you have to keep it top-of-mind because it’s really easy to slip into bad habits. And so, good leadership habits are something you practice, aren’t they?

Ryan Hawk: 100%, yeah. I mean, it’s really… We have a phrase, “You’ve never arrived. You’re always becoming.” It’s just an iterative process that is always taking place, and I think the people who really… the comparison game is really just comparing yourself versus your previous self, and that’s hard, but I think a very valuable way to view leadership, to view life in general, is to be in a constant comparison with your previous self to say, “Am I getting better? Am I growing?” And that’s been a big, big mindset shift for me that’s been helpful.

John Jantsch: So, I’m visiting with Ryan Hawk, author of Welcome to Management. Depending upon when you’re listening to this, the book is available January 28th. You want to tell people where they can find out more about you, Ryan, and your work?

Ryan Hawk: Absolutely! If you’re listening on your phone and you don’t want to go to a mobile website, you can text the word “learners”, L-E-A-R-N-E-R-S, “learners” to 44222. So, text “learners” at 44222, or if you want to see just about everything that I do, you can just go to LearningLeader.com and all of my podcasts, books, everything I do is at LearningLeader.com.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Ryan, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully next time I’m in Ohio, we can connect up in real life.

Ryan Hawk: I’d love it, man! Thank you so much, John.