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Remote Work Revolution: Drive Sustainable Growth with Virtual Teams

Remote Work Revolution: Drive Sustainable Growth with Virtual Teams written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Scott Cox. Scott brings a wealth of experience in the ever-evolving world of sales and marketing, with a career spanning over a decade. Scott is best known for founding Social Reach in 2017, which is a marketing agency that caters to small business owners in varying industries.

Today, he provides business coaching, where he helps business owners grow and scale their businesses from 6 to 7 figures by implementing the right systems and processes, as well incorporating Virtual Assistants.

Key Takeaways

Scott shares insights into leveraging remote work for sustainable growth. He highlights the importance of embracing virtual teams, navigating growth challenges, and balancing automation with human interaction. Scott also discusses the potential of integrating AI technologies to enhance productivity and creativity. By building resilient businesses through remote work and technology, entrepreneurs can thrive in today’s fast-paced world.

 

Questions I ask Scott Cox:

[00:59] What made you decide to exit the agency world and become a coach?

[03:22] How do you help your customers stay ahead with the changes in Marketing?

[06:58] How do you see the world of virtual assistants giving small businesses a competitive edge?

[10:47] What are some of the hurdles that people have to overcome in order to effectively engage remote workers?

[13:51] Do you screen, place and train virtual assistants for your clients or do you just show them how to do it?

[15:57] How do you balance automation with the human touch when working with virtual assistants?

[17:55] Where can people connect with you, and learn more about your work?

More About Scott Cox:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Scott Cox. He brings a wealth of experience in the ever evolving world of sales and marketing with a career spanning over a decade. Scott’s best known for founding social reach in 2017, which is a marketing agency that caters to small business owners in varying industries. Today he provides business coaching where he helps business owners grow and scale their businesses from six to seven figures by implementing the right systems and processes as well as incorporating virtual assistance. So Scott, welcome to the show.

Scott (00:45): Thank you so much for having me, John. Really appreciate the time and happy to bring as much value as I can to you and your audience.

John (00:51): So let’s start first, I work with a lot of agency owners and there are challenges with that business model. There are challenges in every business, in every industry. What made you decide that I’m going to get out of the agency world and become a coach?

Scott (01:04): Oh, that’s a great question. I don’t get asked a lot. For me, it was, as an agency provider, you’re busy providing services, you’re busy managing a team, and especially if you have multiple clients and if you’re across different industries, it’s just marketing and agencies are a chaotic world. There’s just so much going on and to really do it right. And so I had typically been working with small business owners, so this is maybe mid to high six figures to low seven figures. My niche was helping those mid to high six figure business owners get to seven figures and the low seven figures get to multiple sevens and scale through those processes and all the challenges that come at that level, which are many doing. Working with that audience, there was a lot of need for my clients to solve challenges in their business that were coming from growth that were not directly related to the marketing.

(02:08): They were challenges caused because the marketing was working and bringing in new leads, new customers, new business. But then my customer was, Hey, great, but what I don’t have systems. I don’t have processes. I need to hire people. And so there was so many bottlenecks that these clients of mine, these small business owners had. And so I really just saw it as a massive opportunity to bring value in a different way. And honestly, I was just burned out from the agency life after doing it for a long period of time. And I just felt a more natural calling to saying, Hey, I can help business owners build these teams within their own businesses, solve these problems as they grow, focus more on just that and actually help them reach more success and not just, Hey, hire an agency and get some marketing, but then hit some other hurdles and have to stop because they aren’t doing what they need to do in their business.

John (03:05): I guess this is the point where I should say that marketing is everything. That’s how I view it. I’ve been doing this about 30 years and obviously marketing’s evolved. There’s new platforms, new technologies, how do you help? I will say that’s probably the biggest complaint I hear from business owners is like, how do I keep up with all of it? How do you keep up with the changes in marketing, and then how do you bring those to your customers to help them stay ahead?

Scott (03:29): Yeah, I think it’s really important to stay focused on the basics, right? There’s fundamentals of marketing that will work regardless of the platform you’re on, regardless of the medium that you have and everything like that. And so I think making sure that you’re focused on the fundamentals first, doing the core marketing tasks and objectives that need to be done to create a good effective message, get it in front of the right people, and then give them an opportunity to convert. And then it comes down to just your personal style and brand. And if we’re specifically talking about small business owners, you as a small business owner are pretty much going to be the driver of content in your business for good long time. So if you like recording videos, maybe you have a YouTube channel if you like writing copy, maybe you’re on LinkedIn if you like making funny gif, maybe you’re on Instagram.

(04:21): Obviously your audience is a big dictator of what platform and medium you use. But I think you should also be looking at your own personal skillsets and what kind of fits into your workflow. Look at how many businesses, small businesses specifically are on TikTok just recording what they’re doing in their business. They’re making stuff and they’re just recording it and they’re having a ton of success. An agency can’t just sit here and record their process. So you have to look at those core things like what is your business? What kind of content does it lean towards? Where’s your audience? What kind of medium and content do they want to absorb? And then what specifically fits to you and your style, your skillset, and how you communicate best.

John (05:04): So when I go out and speak, I’ll give people the seven ways to do blah, blah, blah. And then inevitably somebody comes up and says, okay, that’s great, but what’s the one thing I need to do? Because everybody wants the simple magic pill. But have you found that there are, I don’t know, a handful of tactics that when it comes to sales and marketing, pretty much every business needs to understand and do?

Scott (05:27): Yeah, every business needs to get as much exposure as they affordably can. They need to stay in front of that exposed audience as consistently as possible, and they need to craft a really good message. And look, we have the Alex from Moeys of the world who’s absolutely brilliant in marketing and explaining terminologies and how these different concepts work. But if you have a business where you can create an irresistible offer, obviously that’s going to make a massive difference. But even just having a message is effective and effective means connects with your audience, leaves them with a good impression of how their life is going to be different after they’ve interacted with your business. That is the core things you need to do. Exposure, stay in front of that exposure and then have a really good message that leaves an impact with people.

John (06:18): I mentioned in your bio that you help place and figure out systems for working with virtual assistants. My organization’s been like a lot of companies I think has been virtual probably for 15 years. Many of my team’s been distributed. I haven’t tell you the last time I sat in a client’s office, it’s been at least 15 years ago. It’s a pleasure, right? For the pandemic, certainly. Yeah, exactly. The pandemic certainly accelerated that for a lot of folks that hadn’t even considered it, it’s now the norm. Talk a little bit about how somebody might, and I know we’re recording this, it’s morning for you or it’s morning for me, it’s later in the day for you because you’re in Thailand. Talk a little bit about how you see the world of virtual assistants connecting with small business and how we can go into some other one. Let’s just talk about how you see that connecting right now.

Scott (07:09): Yeah. There’s all kinds of small businesses out there. There’s virtual businesses like ours, and then there’s brick and mortar, there’s local businesses. And look, I think at a fundamental general level across the board, utilizing remote workers, virtual assistants gives you a much larger talent pool to choose from. When you’re looking to hire and source talent for the business, it gives you a much more affordable resource to find that talent. And look, I’ll tell you, a big part of success for small businesses is if they can understand that there’s multiple ways to grow your business, and there’s definitely an avenue and a medium where you should have an agency come in and help your business grow. But there’s also a way where you can hire your own core team to do some of your core functions and affordably scale to the point where you actually can utilize, really, truly utilize what an agency can do for you, but have this core team in place and have the consistency in your business and in your marketing to, I talk a lot about this in my videos.

(08:26): One of the biggest challenges that small business go through, especially when they’re going from six to seven figures, is the cyclical effect, right? It’s just the ups and downs of business, the high seasons and the low seasons. And what most business owners do is when their busy, they tend to spend money on marketing and they market, but then when things get slow, they tend to stop spending money on marketing and stop marketing. And really what you need to do is you need to just be consistent throughout. So that means don’t overload the marketing when you’re busy. And that means don’t cut off the marketing when you’re slower. Pick a strategy and a budget that will allow you to market consistently. And remote workers are a massive part of that because if you can lower your overhead as far as human resources, then that’s just going to allow you to do so much more for so much longer.

John (09:18): And now a word from our sponsor, work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing, there are a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle-free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator. And we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better Now. Professional is 2350 per month, and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit, work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months.

(10:17): That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. Yeah. I talk to a lot of business owners that you’re not the first person to talk about remote workers, right? That’s been something people have been talking about for 10 years offshore, they used to call it, I don’t think they call it that so much anymore, but the idea of there are actually places you can get remote workers for much less than say a US wage would be for various reasons. But what are some, I’ve also talked to a lot of people said, yeah, I tried that and I couldn’t make it work. What are some of the mistakes or the hurdles that people have to overcome in order to effectively engage remote workers?

Scott (10:55): So a lot of mistakes just come from employee management in general. And so I think a lot of it’s as small business owners, we’re not trained on marketing, we’re not trained on sales, we’re not trained on business operations, and much less are we trained on employee and people management. And so I think you just have a lot of general mistakes from lack of systems and processes. So having a way to organize your projects, your tasks, your notes, all of those communications, lack of training, method, process, resources. And then I think honestly, a big part of it is just expectations. I think as people, we have a lot of expectations of, oh, I’m going to go hire this person. They say they can do this thing. I just trust that or expect that they can do what they say they’re going to do, and then we give them tasks and they fail at it for one reason or another.

(11:46): And so then we go, oh, that didn’t work. I’m never going to do that again. And so there’s a lot of things that come into play and lot of reasons why these failed. But those are some of the big things that’s really honestly just lack of understanding of how to manage people. And when it comes to remote workers specifically in VAs, these systems become so much more important and crucial because you’re not with that person, can’t just, there’s a difference when you’re working with someone through the computer versus if they’re in your office, there’s a comfortability there where they can come talk to you, they can see your facial expressions, your body expressions, all that. And honestly, we have video chat now. So a lot of that stuff is not a moot point in my opinion, but it’s just different. And so even more so with remote workers, you have to really have these systems in place because ideally, you’re not going to be sitting with them eight hours a day, right?

(12:43): You’re a business owner, you have stuff to do. Having these systems in place to manage them effectively, giving them resources to be able to reach out, get support, SOPs, standard operating procedures, how long have employees been around? When businesses still don’t use standard operating procedures, they don’t even know what they are. A lot of these, again, it’s just fundamentals, but we’re not taught and trained small business owners on these things. And so we don’t know. We don’t implement them. And then we hear about, oh, you can go hire a cheap $3 an hour copywriter and just expect to be able to write copy and it can work. It does work. Just doesn’t work the way the marketing people who are trying to, I don’t know, sell your freelancer or something or saying it. So I don’t know. I love the market. It’s beautiful, but it’s also still one of the last wild west of the world. Anything almost goes in marketing.

John (13:37): Yeah. Yeah, that’s too, and a large part too, the fact that a lot of business owners don’t really understand marketing. A lot of marketers don’t really understand marketing, and you get a lot of this, oh, I just have to take what they say. Talk a little bit. Do you screen and place and train virtual assistants for your clients, or do you just show them how to do it?

Scott (13:58): Yeah, so I do both. I’ve got programs from where I can build out. I have an audit that I do that to the first interaction, one of the first interactions with me besides a one-on-one consultation, I do an audit where I’ll come work with business owners and we go through a checklist and highlight all of their, Hey, these are where all your gaps missed opportunities are. Here’s what you can do to fix it. And then, yeah, one of my services, again, besides one-on-one consulting or doing a preset program of, Hey, you need to hire sales person, let’s take you through that process. Where are the SOPs, the job description, all that. But yeah, I actually am able to work with my clients on saying, Hey, I need a marketing team. I need a sales team. Great. I can actually come in. I can help you source, vet interview, and then train and get your own internal team set up for that.

John (14:49): Let’s talk a little bit about technology and automation is great. I think a lot of people lean on it maybe too much. You see some of these AI chatbots now that are more frustrating than helpful. So how do you balance the fact that there is a lot of automation that can create some efficiencies, but then you lose the human touch, which is I think probably people are craving more than ever. How do you create that balance,

Scott (15:11): The rule of automate everything you can that isn’t human interaction, and then when you have human interaction, make that human to human as much as possible? Obviously, we’re going to automate things that are like emails or maybe text messages or marketing campaigns, but if you’re going to have a chat system, if you have the volume, if it makes sense for your business, having a live person respond to that, it’s not convenient, but it makes a difference. And I think something, especially in a country like the US or in a lot of other Western countries, I think what small business owners have lost sight of is the fact that as small business owners, the way we can compete with large corporations is by offering that really amazing personalized service. And that’s really the only way. We can’t compete on cost. We can’t compete on fulfillment. We can’t compete on refunds and warranties and exchanges and all of that.

(16:11): The big corporations are always going to beat us out on those things. Where small business owners can win is that human to human look. We have systems and processes, but we’re not a large corporation where you have a unique situation. And look, we just have a system and a process. So that’s it. You just have to, we are small business owners. We can make exceptions. We can really work with people and give that really specific touch. And that’s been my model when it comes to what should you automate and what should you leave human to human? And I’ll just say on a note of tech and ai, I think one of the most undervalued or underutilized pairings right now is using AI with remote workers. So a lot of people talking about remote workers, a lot of people talking about ai, but maybe where three years ago I had to pay a remote worker copywriter 10 to $15 an hour to get a decent English speaking or English writing copywriter.

(17:08): Now maybe I can hire a three to five. They’re not as proficient, but they can use something like chat, GPT, Grammarly Hemingway, and they can actually produce really quality copy. And again, I’m lowering my overhead and using the software to, even if you have a really quality remote worker, and let’s say you’re paying them a little bit more than the average, you’re going to enhance the quality of work they do, the speed of the work that they can do, and the creative output. And when it comes to tech, a big focus of mine too is saying, Hey, let’s pair the AI and these enhancing tools, which I think is a really cool perspective to think about them with your team and just make your team more productive, more creative.

John (17:51): Awesome. Scott, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you want people to connect with you or find out more about your work?

Scott (17:59): Yeah, you can find me on pretty much any of the social media channels, mainly Instagram, Facebook. I have my YouTube channel, nomad Talk N zero Mad Talk, and my website STO. You can go there and find out about my consulting and my programs for VA sales and marketing, and you can send me an email or shoot me a friend request on Facebook or Instagram and we can chat.

John (18:23): Awesome. Again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Navigating Failure: The Science of Failing Well in Entrepreneurship

Navigating Failure: The Science of Failing Well in Entrepreneurship written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Amy Edmondson, the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. Renowned for her research on psychological safety and author of several acclaimed books, including The Fearless Organization, and the Science of Failing Well – winner of the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the Year. Amy shares her insights on the science of failing well in entrepreneurship.

 

Key Takeaways

Amy Edmondson challenges the conventional view of failure, advocating for a shift towards intelligent risk-taking in entrepreneurship. By emphasizing the importance of clear goals, informed hypotheses, and systematic risk assessment, she guides listeners towards embracing failure as a catalyst for growth and innovation. Amy underscores the role of organizational leaders in cultivating a culture where intelligent risk-taking is encouraged and celebrated, empowering teams to experiment, learn, and adapt. Through reframing failure as a natural part of the entrepreneurial journey, Amy inspires aspiring entrepreneurs to navigate challenges with resilience and optimism, unlocking their full potential in today’s dynamic business landscape.

 

Questions I ask Amy Edmondson:

[00:51] Why do a lot of business gurus promote the concept of failing?

[02:58] How do we create a methodological approach to failing?

[05:21] Explain the gap between rhetoric and action when it comes to failure?

[08:11] What are some of the characteristics of smart failure versus just failure?

[10:39] Do you ever run the risk of people sort of preparing to fail on purpose?

[11:45] Does expecting failure to a certain degree a mentality?

[12:59] What are some of examples of ROI an organization can start to see by well designed failure experiments?

[15:43] How do we empower our managers and team leaders to give people permission?

[17:35] What are your thoughts on thinking big: 10x vs 2x. Could it help people fail faster?

[19:15] Where can people connect with you, learn more about your work and pick a copy of your book?

 

 

More About Amy Edmondson:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Amy Edmondson. She is the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School, renowned for her research on psychological safety for over 20 years. She’s the author of the Fearless Organization and Teaming, and a book we’re going to talk about today, right? Kind of wrong, the Science of Failing Well, which was a winner of the 2023 Financial Times Business Book of the year. So Amy, welcome to the show.

Amy (00:41): Thank you for having me.

John (00:43): Alright, so I’m just going to toss this up and let you bat it out of the park because it’s a softball question. But there’s a lot of literature lately, a lot of gurus online talking about how entrepreneurs have to fail and fail fast and fail often. And frankly, I don’t like failing. So why are you telling me I have to do it?

Amy (01:05): So I don’t like failing either, and that’s why I wrote this book because actually really it’s a book about success, but success in an uncertain world where we cannot prevent all failure, it turns out we can prevent an awful lot of failure. We can prevent unintelligent failures, we can prevent the kinds of failures that happen when you mail it in, you don’t do your homework and you fail the exam. Those are preventable. And I think the reason why there’s all this sort of literature or sometimes happy talk about failure is that we recognize it as a necessity for progress in any field. And if you’re a startup, by definition, you’re doing something that doesn’t yet exist and you’ve got a hypothesis that it might work. In fact, don’t do it if you have no confidence that this could work at all, stay out of the game, but you have a sense that this could work.

(02:03): In fact, you’re probably pretty sure it could work, but because it’s new territory, there is a possibility that you were wrong. That with all the effort, all the brains, that this thing might not work. That would be what I would call, especially if you’ve done your thinking and had good reason to believe it would work, that would be an intelligent failure. And that is the kind of failure that the Silicon Valley talk, fail, fast, fail often is implicitly referring to, but often they’re not explicit enough. And it sort of sounds like they’re saying, yeah, go ahead and fail at everything. No, nobody wants to fail.

John (02:42): So not doing your research and not understanding if there’s product market fit, that would be silly failure, right?

Amy (02:50): Right. Not doing your research to find out what we know, what we don’t know, and what’s worth trying next.

John (02:58): So how do we make this a science that obviously implies that there’s a very methodical approach to it. How do we make that a science?

Amy (03:07): Well, I think it is really the science of assessing risk thoughtfully. And of course there’s technical work on assessing risk thoughtfully, but in a more colloquial way, I offer three, four criteria that are from first principles really. But any scientist is either implicitly or explicitly using them. So first of all, do you have a goal? Is there somewhere you’re trying to get, whether that’s a new business or a new invention or a new relationship, you have a goal. And second, there’s no way to look up the answer that it’s in new territory. And third, you’ve done, as we’ve talked about before, your homework, you’ve found out what is known, what isn’t known, and you have a theory or a hypothesis about what’s worth trying. And then fourth and importantly, the risk you’re taking is no bigger than necessary. You do not bet your entire net worth on this new company that may not work. You borrow as much as you can afford to borrow, you bet as much as you can afford to bet, but you’re mitigating risk because there’s uncertainty. And that is true whether you’re starting a company or developing a new product in a company or going on a blind date, you mitigate the risk. You don’t agree to go off for a weekend with someone. You agree to meet for coffee and you

John (04:39): Tell a

Amy (04:39): Friend. Sense what I’m saying?

John (04:41): You tell a friend to text you and text you in 10 minutes,

Amy (04:45): Got to go. So we all know, we know how to mitigate risk when we’re thoughtful about it, but sometimes we’re not. We just don’t think systematically. So the science part refers to the fact that you can be a very logical, very systematic, very thoughtful about the risks you take. In fact, I advise it.

John (05:05): Yeah. Yeah. So there with your reference to the date, there was actually a rom-com movie. I don’t know if you know that that was titled the Right Kind of Wrong.

Amy (05:15): Oh, I didn’t, and I dunno it. That’s terrible. It’s a

John (05:20): Terrible movie. But you talk in the book about the gap between rhetoric and action when it comes to failure. Can you elaborate on that gap?

Amy (05:29): Yeah. So the rhetoric is, I think my challenge with the rhetoric is it’s a little glib. When you see fail fast, fail often, or celebrate failure, it sounds like it applies to everything evenly. All failures are the same and all failures are not the same. And I think the last thing you want to do, and of course the last thing you would do is celebrate preventable and occasionally tragic failures. Go into a manufacturing company and tell the plant manager to fail. Often she’ll just look at you, what are you talking about?

John (06:07): Get people

Amy (06:07): Killed. We’re going for six s signal. Yeah. Yeah. That’s not what we do around here. We’ve got a really good processes that are in control and capable and you say applaud. And similarly, scientists who fail, which they do all the time are not, you don’t want them failing because they mixed up the chemicals that they were supposed to be using in the experiment. You only want failures that are truly new tests in new environments that haven’t been done before. So the rhetoric is just a little sloppy and a little non nuanced. Whereas the reality of failing well is thoughtful risks in new territory are to be applauded whether they end in success, which we hoped for or failure, which we didn’t hope for, but we still must welcome the new knowledge and in familiar territory for which there is a recipe or a protocol or a process, we should use it and use it thoughtfully.

John (07:09): Yeah, I think about all the times I’ve heard the cliche Edison, 10,000 failures was just giving him like 9,999 that were of the wrong answers. And I think a lot of people really look at it that way as you’re eliminating wrong answers when it’s more, this was a hypothesis that had some thought behind it and

Amy (07:30): We

John (07:31): Either made it or didn’t, right? Yes,

Amy (07:32): I love the Edison quote, but it is right. It gives the wrong impression of scattershot. And I think because the 10,000 is probably not a scientific number, but a kind of poetic number. What he’s saying is, I didn’t mind all of the false starts on the way to the phonograph or the electric light bulb. I understand that’s a necessary part of being an inventor, not scattershot,

John (07:59): Right? So I think you’re actually calling this smart failure, but you may have already said that already, but I know it’s in the book Smart Failure. So in the context of say, an organization, what are some of the characteristics of smart failure versus just failure?

Amy (08:16): Smart failure is anything that’s legitimately in new territory in pursuit of a goal and with a hypothesis and no bigger than it had to be. And that literally could be a formal r and d project, a clinical trial, or it could be a salesperson making a call on a potential client and trying an approach, a script, a way of describing the product that hasn’t been tried before and it falls flat. And that’s a smart failure as long as some thought has gone into it. So I think in companies day in and day out, depending on which part of the operation you’re in, which tasks you have, there’s ample opportunity for smart failures, but they are more numerous in r and d than in execution of operations. But even in operations, let’s say you have an idea, a hypothesis about a way to speed up the line a little bit and you test it in a small way and it doesn’t work, right? That’s an intelligent failure in a routine setting, but it’s a very small one indeed.

John (09:31): And now a word from our sponsor. Work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator. And we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better Now. Professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code, do you ever run the risk with a lot of emphasis on failure? Do you ever run the risk of people sort of preparing to fail and so it’s like, yeah, we’re going to try this thing, it’s probably not going to work, and so then it doesn’t, right? Does that ever crop up?

Amy (10:51): I haven’t actually thought of that. I haven’t seen that. But I love the question and it would be worth keeping an eye out for it. I think most of the time that risk is counterbalanced by our very human desire to do well. Even when we know we’re in novel territory and there’s a real risk that it might not go well, we’re still hoping that we’re going to be the ones who gets it right? So even a scientist who, like my husband who says 70% of the experiments in his lab fail even there every day, every scientist, every young scientist is sort of hoping that they’re the ones who are in the 70, not in the 30 that day. So I think of course, motivation can be missing. You can have a place when people aren’t, are apathetic and don’t really care. And then it would be a bigger risk.

John (11:44): I think of a lot of venture capitals that often talk about, they bet on 10 companies kind of almost with the hope that one’s going to be a unicorn, knowing that seven are going to fail. And that probably becomes a bit of a mentality. It

Amy (11:59): Can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because, and this goes back to the old research on teachers where if you start to expect this one’s a winner and this one’s not a winner, you’ll start to unconsciously do things that help the winners and toward the losers. And so you do have to be honest with yourself and thoughtful about how am I thinking about this company, this project, this person? And if your honest answer is, I don’t think they can make it, test that, think a little more carefully if you really think so. Maybe it’s time to pull out now, maybe you’re wrong. What are you missing? Have an honest, difficult conversation with them or with the executive team. It’s always important to step, be able to step back later and say, I think I did everything I could.

John (12:50): Yeah. So it’s very common. People will say it was only a failure if you didn’t learn something from it. What are some of the, other than learning from failure, what are some of the other return on investments that an organization can start to see by, well-designed failure experiments.

Amy (13:07): It’s mostly learning. And learning means learning’s a pretty encompassing category. It means a lot of different things. It can mean very technical things that now we know to do this and it’ll work. Or it could mean just, Ooh, when we don’t try hard enough, we don’t get the results we want. So there’s lots of things we can learn and those are really important dividends from any failure. But I think we also, the other positive output from a failure that we take the time to learn from is that we learn, sorry, I used the word we discover that we didn’t die of embarrassment or something else. So our failure muscles become a little strengthened. We learned that we’re still okay. And so that’s a kind of confidence enhancer, even though it was a failure. There’s a little bit of a more robust and healthy ego as opposed to unhealthy ego.

John (14:06): I don’t know if you have any examples of this, but there are some people that tried something as a hypothesis experiment, it didn’t work, but they accidentally created Velcro or Right. Like that mean, so are there some potential benefits of by trying more stuff, you’re going to accidentally, right? That was the one I was trying to think of. Yeah, this guy, right?

Amy (14:28): Yeah. Post-it, the epitome of that story. But penicillin was an accident in the book I described oyster sauce, which was a small failure of overcooking the oysters, and they burnt and turned into yucky goo. And then it turns out, if you taste that yucky goo, it’s delicious. And there was born a multi-billion dollar industry from that young chef more than a hundred years ago. So yes, I call that the happy accident failure. And those are not the dominant category, needless to say. So if you’re sort of hoping that your screw ups will always yield like wonderful dividends, that’s probably not the best strategy for failing. Well, but if you don’t take the time to pause and taste or dig into the failure, the glue that wouldn’t stick properly and think deeply about and create the conditions where other people can team up to think deeply about the implications of that failure, then you stand no chance of a real success at the end of the tunnel.

John (15:36): I know a great deal of this work is targeted at the decision makers, strategic thinkers, but down the line, how do we empower our managers and team leaders to give people permission? Because part of it, we’re not going to try stuff that we think will work better if we don’t. Culturally, it’s not acceptable. So how do they bring that environment?

Amy (16:01): I wish more than anything to speak to the team leaders, to the managers, to anyone in a project or people management role, because they’re the ones who are shaping the climate far more than executive leadership. They matter, but it’s the local interactions that are really shaping our mental models about what’s possible, what’s acceptable, what’s not. Okay. And if you get that message either explicitly or implicitly that ever coming up short is not okay, then you’re going to either hide when the news isn’t good, or under undershoot specified targets or goals that you know can make rather than ones that are a stretch and bring a risk, and you don’t want people doing that. So I speak, I think primarily to all of those sort of leaders in the middle who are responsible for setting the stage, for describing the world in which we are working as one that brings necessary uncertainty and necessary human fallibility. And when we accept that, those two things like uncertainty in the world around us and fallibility of ourselves and our teams, then and only then are we well set up to actually do our best because we can be honest about it. We can be as ambitious as possible about beating the odds, but we can be honest about when things aren’t working.

John (17:35): There was a book I had the author on recently, and the premise of the book was that it’s actually easier sometimes to think in terms of doing something really big. 10 x is actually how he defined it as opposed to just two x, which is basically like 20% more. We can probably just do a little of what we’re doing harder, but 10% or 10 times growth. We truly have to innovate. We truly have to take big risks. I’m curious of how your thoughts on that mentality. That’s

Amy (18:02): Interesting. Okay, so my first thought when you said that was, well, that’s kind of crazy. I don’t mean that in a bad way, but we’re not going to just do 20 x or 10 x next year. We can’t. But I thought so that might by saying, so that might lead people to kind of go, okay, it’s not discussable, but that’s nuts. As long as it’s actually an explicit exercise, then I think it’s brilliant because then the idea is we won’t think differently if we just say, okay, this piece. But if we say, just for fun, let’s imagine 10 x, what would have to be true? So it’s a way of unlocking our team’s thinking rather than a kind of new ogre who’s come in and said, you must do 10 x, which would be crazy.

John (18:53): Exactly.

Amy (18:54): But as a thought device to get us to think out of the box as it were, I think that’s really fun.

John (19:03): You’d have to have a whole different set of hypotheses, right, for that. Right.

Amy (19:08): You couldn’t just do more of, you’d have to

John (19:11): Do different. Exactly. Yeah. Well, Amy, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace that you would invite people to find out more about your work and obviously find a copy of right kind of wrong?

Amy (19:22): Sure. So the book is for sale everywhere, I think, more or less. But if you go to amy c edmondson.com, there are links to the book, which I really hope you’ll read, and also to other papers and articles, and even some fun little videos here and there. Awesome.

John (19:40): Again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to speak with our audience, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Unlocking Your Leadership Potential: From Hero to Human Leader with Empathy

Unlocking Your Leadership Potential: From Hero to Human Leader with Empathy written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Hortense le Gentil, a world-renowned executive leadership coach, speaker, and author. With over 30 years of experience across various industries, including media consulting and advertising, Hortense guides CEOs and senior executives on their journey from hero leaders to human leaders.

Key Takeaways

Join Hortense le Gentil on a transformative journey as she discusses the evolution of leadership in today’s world. Learn to identify and overcome mental obstacles, embrace authenticity and vulnerability, and lead with empathy. Gain actionable insights into unlocking your true leadership potential and thriving in both your personal and professional life. Whether you’re a seasoned executive or an aspiring leader, Hortense’s expertise will empower you to inspire and connect with others on a deeper level, driving sustainable growth and success in today’s rapidly changing landscape.

 

Questions I ask Hortense le Gentil:

[01:08] What is a mind trap and how does it impact us?

[02:06] How is a mind trap different from a limiting belief?

[02:48] Tell us the personal case study of when you were stuck 15 years ago?

[04:46] What do you do when you can’t trust that inner voice?

[06:41] Explain the concept of transforming from a hero leader to a human leader ?

[08:58] What does the process of unlocking yourself as a human leader look like?

[13:54] How does a leader help their team adjust to their embracing empathy?

[16:25] Is there a level of self awareness needed to embrace empathy as a leader?

[16:56] Do you get some pushback from experienced leaders who deny the relevancy of developing their consciousness?

[17:47] What is the one tip you have for beginners looking to start unlocking their leadership potential?

[18:45] Where can people connect with you, learn more about your work and pick a copy of your book?

 

More About Hortense le Gentil:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Hortense le Gentil. She’s a world renowned executive leadership coach, speaker and author. She guides CEOs and senior executives on their journey. From hero leaders to human leaders guided by 30 years in business, working across industries, including media consulting and advertising. And as an entrepreneur, she’s the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, the Unlocked Leader, dare to Free Your Own Voice, lead with Empathy, and shine your light in the world. So Hortense Bienvenue.

Hortense (00:49): Thank you for having John. Happy here.

John (00:52): That’s all of the French that I’m going to attempt today, but I nailed that one, didn’t I?

Hortense (00:57): Oh, you did great. You just love this one.

John (01:01): Alright, so in the book there is a concept called you call Mind Traps. That’s a big part of the book. So let’s start there and let’s define what a mind trap is and how it impacts us.

Hortense (01:14): I’d like to say that the mind trap is, it’s a mental obstacle that is on your way to move forward. This is something that holds you back. It can be something that you used to be, for example, like I used to be perfect or to try to reach perfection. It was a driver for me, but now I feel like it doesn’t work anymore. So when you feel like something is hold you back, holds you back, and you can even feel unhappy and satisfied, you cannot be completely yourself and journeys happen to everyone. I dunno if it happened to you, but every moment, a lot of moment in our life, it happened to us and it happened to me and I remember it was more than 15 years ago.

John (02:04): So let’s get into that. But I want to clarify how is that different than excuse, than a limiting belief? I’m not good enough to lead or something. How is it different from that?

Hortense (02:14): So let’s say that can be cousin. They can be cousin because mine trap is really for me, it’s where you are stuck. So limiting belief when you think I’m not enough, for example, yes, that could be because this is a consequence, let’s say because you are trapped somewhere and then you begin to think, okay, why do I think like that? What is behind that? The scene. So behind the scene you will find the real reason, and this is what I call the mind trap.

John (02:48): So let’s use your example that you were starting to bring up there from 15 years ago to maybe even help clarify that further.

Hortense (02:54): Okay, yes, no, I just wanted to explain that. 15 years ago I felt completely lost and stuck in my life, personal life and professional life. And then I was lost, John, I didn’t know what to do. And then of course everything went south and I went stuck in bed for months. So I had plenty of time to think. And then at that time I had the dream. I had the dream. And my grandmother, it was a grandmother that I just loved and she came back in my dream and she told me something very simple. She told me, you have to find the bus of roses. And I had no idea it was a pass of roses. So I asked her in my dream and I said, okay, where is that and where is it? Because more important, where is it? I want to find the rose.

(03:46): And she said, you just look at me and smile. And she said, you know where it is. And then I woke up. Of course I was furious. She didn’t give me the answer, but I will understand later what she meant was very important. She meant that I had to listen to my inner voice. And very often this is why we are stuck somewhere because we are not listening our own voice. We are not confident enough because it can be risky, it can be difficult. You need to be courageous to take sometimes difficult decision. And then this is what I learned and when I began to listen to my own voice, yes I could do that. Yes, I could change my life personally and professionally. Yes, I could do that and that this is what I did and I began to free myself.

John (04:35): Alright, so what if you can’t trust that inner voice? I mean there’s a lot of things that we call an inner voice that are telling us things that aren’t together altogether positive. I mean, how do you tell the difference between yeah, that’s the right guidance as opposed to that’s just continue to keep me locked.

Hortense (04:51): Interesting. Okay, listen. So what we know, I think it’s more a feeling. So when you want to take a decision, whatever the decision is, I think we know the decision. And when it’s a hard decision to take, we need someone with who that shares this decision. And you’re looking for someone who say yes, do it. But sometimes you can wait a long time before anybody is like, I agree with you. So I will say that this voice is the one that you feel. So we all know exactly what we should do and sometimes we are not ready. But one day when you are stuck, it’s time to face that and to listen to that voice. So what do you really want to do and not the voices behind that because of course when you are stuck somewhere, you need to track the source. So who said you that, for example, who said that you cannot be a CEO, for example. I had a client like that and who said that it was a professor, it was a teacher years ago, this professor was told that young person that you will never be a CEO because I can see all the emotion on your face.

(06:12): And so it was so surprised. So we are making association because we are living with the voices that the community authority, whatever the voices around us and also our brain is cooking voices for us because we are looking for meaning. Okay, why? Yes, I should do that. No I don’t all the time. So silence,

John (06:38): I think I read it in your intro, but it certainly shows up in the book, this idea of taking people from the hero leader to the human leader. Explain that concept.

Hortense (06:49): You know that we need to free ourself from those mind trap to become human leader. And what should we become human. It’s because the world has changed and the expectation has changed. Also, people now they want to connect with you. They don’t need another hero like said, no, we don’t need another hero. We need someone with who we can relate, we can understand, we can connect. And the only way to do that is by being human, by using your secret weapon. That is the empathy. And you need that. And I think that every leader know that because a lot have been said about why we should lead with empathy. But when it comes to the how do we do that and you need courage to do it, it’s very courageous because you have to unlearn what you learned. But it’s another dimension I would say. So now you have to inspire and take care of people. It’s completely different.

John (08:00): And I think a lot of leaders fall into the trap of believing I have to have this strong front that I’m in charge of everything, I have all the answers. And that’s probably an aspect that right or wrong holds a lot of people back, doesn’t it?

Hortense (08:14): Exactly, exactly. Because we are raised like that. Your education at school, I’m sure everyone was telling you, oh don’t show your emotion, right? And how all the answer, but who has all the answer? John, tell me. Who could predict a pandemic? Who can predict every, can we say that we are living in a crazy world today, every day something happen? How can you alone have all the answer? That’s absolutely not possible.

John (08:48): So the core concept of the book of course is unlocking yourself as a leader. What does that process look like? Obviously it’s very drawn out in the book, but give us the high level. What is the process of unlocking yourself as a leader look like?

Hortense (09:01): So it’s going to this process of, okay, be aware that we are locked and okay, are we ready to start this journey? Because it’s a journey, it’s not a destination. And how we do that. So we face our fears first because we are afraid. Maybe we are used to do another way. You need to change. And then we go to, okay, where am I trap? Where I am stuck? And you track the source like who said? And then when you track the source, you found the source. Then you go to what I call the mind shift. So you change your mindset and with some questions, powerful questions you ask yourself. Okay, so you track the source and you said, is it true? Is it relevant? Is it helpful? What I’m thinking right now? And then you’re let go and then you are free yourself and you are able to write your own story.

(09:57): But maybe let me share very quickly an example. So I have this client, he was considered to be the next EO of the company. And so he went through a process in front of a panel of their leaders in order to be the next CEO. And then out of nowhere, out of the blue, his behavior changed and he became very talkative. He was talking all the time, didn’t listen, he changed completely. So he was surprised. Everybody was surprised. And of course he didn’t get the job. Then we had this conversation and he told me, I don’t know, I don’t know what happened, tto, I don’t know. I said, okay, so let’s figure out. And then revisiting his life, he remembered that years ago he had to pass an exam, not to pass an exam, it has to be in front of a panel of teachers.

(10:54): And then one of the teacher didn’t let him talk. So he was shocked. It was a trauma, one of the cos when what is behind it became a trauma. And then it was the same story that I shared before. This teacher told him, I don’t know what you’re going to do young guy, but you will never be a CEO because I can see all your emotion on your face. Young guy, very smart, begin his life thinking that you don’t have to show your emotion. And second, he was not aware. He forgots his conversation, but his unconscious didn’t. And the way the day, the first opportunity that unconscious has to remember that talk in order to not have the same situation that he had before. So going through this process of you track the source, where it’s coming from, it was coming from there. In this case there were trauma and voices.

(11:58): So they are the two main families, the source of your mind trap. So he found the source and then I asked him is the three question, is it true? Is it relevant? Is it helpful today that you cannot be a CEO and you don’t have to show your emotion? He said, no, I know. I said, okay. So we let go. So we walk on, let go. And then you begin to write your own story. What is important for you? How you want to be? Remember, how do you want to show up as a leader, what difference you want to make in the world or around you and all that? What have your values? And you begin to write your own story because you don’t. You live your own life. You don’t live the life that someone wants for you.

John (12:48): And now a word from our sponsor, work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle-free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator. And we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better. Now professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit, work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. So after you’ve worked with somebody or somebody goes through this process and they are embracing empathy, they are becoming maybe more human, but that’s not how their team has experienced them to date. Is that a bit jarring? It’s like, where’s the old John? Or does it just take consistency and proving that you mean it

Hortense (14:16): So good? Of course, but what I recommend very often is it’s difficult to change how people think about you. So what I always recommend is to share with your team. So at fun point you say, okay, my name is, and I want to work on being a better leader and connect better with yourself and have more empathy, whatever it is, or communicate better with you. And then your team or your environ is aware, oh, oh great, she want to change, okay. And you ask for help and say, and I need help. And then everyone wants to help you. No worries about that. And then they say, okay, so let’s do it together. Then it’s faster for two reasons. First, they’re aware that you’re doing something and they appreciate the fact that you want to be better. Then you give the tone so they can also be, okay, I can walk also to be better.

(15:17): It’s all right to not be perfect. Then you set the tone and also they help you because you are in the middle of a meeting and things like that. And after you maybe you ask for feedback and said, what feedback do you have for me? Maybe not every day, I mean, but when you feel it or when you decide and then it’s all together that you’re going to work on that. So on your side you do your homework of unlocking yourself and in fact of telling, be sure of the message and vision that you have and really who you are. Connect with yourself because empathy begin to start with yourself first. You have to connect with yourself. Who am I? What do I want? Can you really say how you are to yourself? Can you say that? Who are you? And then when you are very clear on that, because that is a personal walk, when you’re very clear on that, you’re ready to practice, you’re ready to do it. And after, again, it’s a journey. It’s not a destination. So every day we learn something and every day we evolve and then it’s, it’s wonderful because it changed everything.

John (16:25): I imagine a level of self-awareness, or at least a desire to uncover some self-awareness is really the starting point for all this, right? I mean you can’t really do that. You can’t do the work you’re talking about unless you discover some level of self-awareness. Exactly. I mean, would you say that’s accurate

Hortense (16:41): If you don’t know where to start? Yes, that’s absolutely accurate, right?

John (16:45): So a lot of the leadership I have, a lot of people have written books on leadership. I speak with people that have development programs and a lot of them really try to focus on competencies and skills. Do you get some pushback when, I mean you’re literally telling people that they have to develop their consciousness. So do you get some pushback from people that feel like, how is that relevant?

Hortense (17:08): Not that much in fact, because I think if we are honest with ourself, all of us, we know where we have to evolve and we know that part is very hard and we don’t know where to begin when to start, as I said. So no, I don’t think so. And because most of the leader that I know, they know after you need courage to come and to ask for that. So if you’re not ready, if you, but most of the leaders, they are courageous so they can do it, but it’s because you did courage.

John (17:42): Alright, so I’m going to invite people or ask you to invite people where they can connect with you. But what’s one thing, if somebody came to you and said, give me one thing I could start doing today to really unlock my leadership potential, what would that be?

Hortense (17:56): The first thing I think

John (17:57): Everybody always wants the one tip, right?

Hortense (18:00): I know. So the one tip would be, okay, reflect and do the three colon exercise in your life, personal, professional, whatever, both of them is even better. And do first colon, what do you want to keep? What is good in your life? What gives you energy? Second colon, what do you want to drop? What you drain? You don’t want that anymore. And third colon. So what do you want to add to live to your life today? And then begin your journey. What is the first step? Look at that and begin your journey to the process of maybe unlocking yourself.

John (18:41): Love it. Well, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to connect with you, learn about your work, and obviously pick up a copy of The Unlocked Leader?

Hortense (18:51): So I have a website, so it’s my name, Hortenselegentil.com. And also we can on LinkedIn, everywhere. On LinkedIn, on social Instagram. So I try to be active.

John (19:05): The book is, we’ll have a link to your website in the show notes, but the book could be purchased pretty much anywhere people purchase books. Again, I appreciate you taking a moment or dance and hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road.

Mastering SEO in the Age of AI

Mastering SEO in the Age of AI written by Tosin Jerugba read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Stephan Spencer, an acclaimed SEO expert and founder of net Concepts, an interactive agency specializing in search engine optimization. Stephan is also a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and host of two popular podcasts, “Get Yourself Optimized” and “Marketing Speak.” With a wealth of experience in the field, In this episode Stephan and I uncover the evolving landscape of SEO in the age of AI, sharing invaluable insights and strategies for success.

Key Takeaways

Embark on a transformative journey with Stephan Spencer as he discusses the intersection of SEO and artificial intelligence. Learn how to leverage AI to optimize your website for search engines and stay ahead of the competition. Discover the importance of adapting traditional SEO tactics to accommodate the advancements in AI technology, from content creation to technical optimization.

Unlock the secrets to mastering SEO in the age of AI, and position your business for sustainable growth and success in the digital realm. Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or a business owner looking to enhance your online presence, Stephan’s expertise will guide you towards achieving your goals in the ever-evolving world of search engine optimization in 2024.

 

Questions I ask Stephan Spencer:

[00:58] What are the highlights of the new edition of The Art of SEO?

[04:45] What are some of the core tactics that are still proving effective in 2024?

[07:57] How would generative search impact SEO tactics?

[13:37] What do we need to prepare for and come to expect from voice search?

[15:08] What new updates have come to light concerning local search?

[17:41] What are your favourite AI tools for optimizing content?

[22:10] Where can people connect with you and grab the latest edition of your book?

 

 

More About Stephan Spencer:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Stephan Spencer. He’s an SEO expert founder of the Interactive Agency, net Concepts and bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, life hacker, podcaster, and contributor to Harvard Business Review and Adweek. He also host his own podcast, in fact, two podcast shows, get Yourself Optimized and Marketing Speak. He’s the author of three books, including one we’re going to talk about today that is now in its fourth edition, the Art of SEO, mastering Search Engine Optimization. So Steven or Stephan, welcome to the show.

Stephan (00:48): Thanks for having me.

John (00:49): I have a brother that spells his name that way, but it’s Stephan, so forgive me if I say it wrong. It

Stephan (00:55): Happens all the time.

John (00:57): I bet it does. So I guess if there’s a need for a fourth edition of a book as big as the art of SEO, it must be that some things keep changing. So what are the highlights? We’ll drill down into them, but what are some of the highlights of this new edition?

Stephan (01:13): Yeah, was so much. I mean, it was pretty much a rewrite from the bottom up. So actually the previous edition, the third edition was a thousand pages, and so we had to cut down quite a lot because the more material in a book, the fewer copies that sell it gets a little bit ridiculous. Who wants to read a thousand page book?

(01:33): So there’s a whole chapter now on AI that wasn’t present in the third edition, and that’s using LLMs generative AI to create everything from keyword strategies and processing your keyword lists into different kinds of use cases, categorizing and grouping keywords together, everything like that to doing the more technical stuff like writing blocks of Etre Lang tags. I’m getting a little geeky here. I don’t want to make this full of acronyms and buzzwords and so forth, but there’s a lot of technical stuff that you can do the heavy lifting using AI now and not have to do it the old fashioned way. So there’s a lot on that. There’s material on things like page speed and core web vitals or three different metrics and core web vitals. That’s a Google innovation that’s coming out of Google. They want you to have a fast loading website, and that relates to what they call their page experience update.

(02:41): So there’s material on that. There’s material on the helpful content update, and that’s actually a series of updates. They want to ensure that people are not creating a huge RAF of content using LMS AI that will fill the internet with a bunch of croft things that are not really that valuable or are not properly fact checked. There’s already lots of issues with AI creating and just making up facts, references, studies and that sort of thing. So if you’re putting out AI material as if it’s handcrafted, you could end up getting by the helpful content updates or by other algorithmic adjustments from Google or a manual penalty even. So you got to keep up with the times.

John (03:28): And there’s a few things you mentioned. Again, I’m getting off of the order of my questioning here that I’ve had prepared, but there’s a few things you mentioned that I’ve seen immediate impact. I mean, we’ve had a couple websites that for whatever reason got really slow. They fell off the core web core vitals threshold and just immediately started seeing results tank when you fix ’em and they come back. So there’s no debating that that’s a ranking factor, is there? So

Stephan (03:59): Maybe let’s, yeah, actually sometimes less is more. So there’s this tactic or this approach in SEO called content pruning, which means you actually take old obsolete content off of your website, or at least no index it, so it’s not part of Google’s search index anymore, and that can actually help your overall website perform better in the search results.

John (04:23): Yeah, we had a 2000 page site that we did just that to 1400 pages and immediately lifted their results. They had a lot of stuff on there that just was probably just not relevant anymore to the reader. So let’s talk about, maybe if we can categorize what are some of the core tactics that are still proving effective in 2024?

Stephan (04:45): So it’s important to understand that the tried and true techniques and tactics of SEO still apply in terms of identifying good keywords, topics that resonate or relate to your audience. So we don’t want to lose track of these tried and true things, optimizing title tags and the body copy and all that sort of stuff, doing proper keyword research, optimizing the technical underpinnings of your website, doing all the configuration of your server and so forth using Yost SEO plugin for WordPress. These sorts of things are still applicable, but now with the advent of ai, we need to find ways to differentiate your website to make it seem like it’s handcrafted, it’s fact checked, it is authoritative and trustworthy. So there’s this acronym from Google Quality Rater Guidelines. It’s EAT, it to be EAT. This is a Google acronym, and it stands for experience expertise, authorit and Trustworthiness.

(06:05): And AI does not have any experience. It cannot write about its experiences, learning how to downhill ski or how to basket weave, or how to, I don’t know, train for an Olympic sport. So that’s where the experience of a human really differentiates. And if you can prove that to an algorithm at Google, that’s going to be very important. So it’s not just about showing your credentials of the different degrees, diplomas that you’ve earned and all that, but actually having the experience displayed in a way that looks super legit. It’s almost like you’re going to look super credible. And this idea of being super credible, I am going to steal a page from Peter Diamandis playbook, and that is that when he announced the xprize, he did not just, and it’s a $10 million purse, so the winning team would get $10 million. Well, guess what? He didn’t have the money. So he announced it without the funding, but he had super credibility because he had on stage with him making the announcement, multiple NASA astronauts and the former deputy director of nasa, it was super credible. Nobody asked him, do you have the money? So for years he didn’t have the money until finally he found the donor, the patron. So if you can show yourself as super credible to an AI and a human visitors and do that in a way that doesn’t look like you’re being bragga, braggadocious, whatever, that’s really the winning formula.

John (07:55): I mean, just from a practical business standpoint, would you say things like case studies of real life, examples of doing the work that you’re describing, or even FAQs, I mean things like that, does that add another level of experience

Stephan (08:08): Potentially? Yep. I would say if you can provide, let’s say a testimonial that’s not just a written testimonial with a person’s first name and the first initial of their last name, but you actually have all their details, their full name, their title, their company, their location. You have a video of them, you have a headshot of them that looks really quite credible, and if you can even better get them to talk about what didn’t work or why they almost didn’t sign up with your service or buy your product, that’s really quite compelling. So anytime that you can augment your and your assumptions with hard data and with real world examples, screenshots, charts, graphs, stuff that helps build your case and substantiate your claims, you’re going to be in much better shape.

John (09:10): You know what I think is always funny is over the years, what you just mentioned, that’s how you are more credible to a potential buyer, even without search. I mean that just comes to your website, sees the data, sees the proof, and it just feels like with every change in SEO or optimization techniques, it’s really just getting it closer to what would be good for a human period,

Stephan (09:34): Right? That’s right, yeah. But on top of that, you have considerations now that you are writing for ais as well as for humans. You’re not going to write primarily for an ai. You’re not going to try and keyword stuff. Your article. I hope that’s been done in the past and it’s never worked well and it won’t work in the future. But if you are keeping in mind a core audience of ais as an audience, reading your quote, reading your article, I think you’re going to end up with a better outcome. So that includes things like how do I interlink these different pages together? How do I lead people on a story arc or a hero’s journey? Because leading the AI through that hero’s journey too.

John (10:22): So you mentioned AI’s reading and playing a part in search, so this might be a good time to ask about the whole concept of generative search and how that’s going to impact probably two things, not only SEO tactics, but certainly search

Stephan (10:38): Behavior. That’s right. If you go to search generative experience, SGE from Google and you start asking it questions, you can get some misinformation from it, just like with any ai, because remember, we have hallucinations. Those are not going to go away in the future. Those issues of it’s essentially an auto complete, it’s an auto complete on steroids, what’s the next word? What’s the next word? What’s the next word? And if it doesn’t have an answer ready and available, we’ll just make it up. So there’s going to be a lot of fact checking and gatekeeping to make sure that wrong information isn’t served up, especially when it relates to financial matters or with medical advice or anything like that. So I personally don’t anticipate search generative experience being the primetime kind of answer engine that people have been touting it to be because of those risks.

(11:37): I mean, think of the liability for Google. If it tells you to take some sort of pharmaceutical and there’s a contraindication or some sort of side effect, lawsuits will abound. So I think that it will be more of an add-on feature for who knows how many months or even years. But I do see it as the future, and we’ll be talking to our computers and our devices more than we’ll be looking at them I think, in the future. So it’ll be like Star Trek computer, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And if your website has that future in mind when you’re creating content, then you’re going to be in a much better position. You’re going to lead competitors when they’re just writing for today. You know the Wayne Gretzky quote, skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is at.

John (12:29): And now a word from our sponsor. Work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle-free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator, and we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off each dedicated and full-time work better now, professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code. So you led really right into my next question. We’ve been talking about voice search probably since Syria came around. So where do we stand in voice search? You just talked about talking to our computers more than viewing them. So where do we stand today in that? What do we need to be prepared for? Because again, it’s one of those things I feel like we’ve been talking about for 10 years and

Stephan (13:56): We’re still talking about it. It’s still coming when you have a result that is less than awesome. When you’re asking, for example, your Amazon device, I’m not going to say the word begins with an A and she’s listening right now for it’s wake word and it’s going to start chiming in on this conversation. So that device, when you ask it simple questions that Google would just nail on the first try and it completely gets it a hundred percent wrong or just doesn’t give you any answer whatsoever and say, I don’t know the answer to your question, that’s frustrating. And it makes people just not want to even try this. There will be a tipping point though, where you get much more than just, or a recipe or a timer from your Amazon Echo. And that is the point. That tipping point is where this will completely take off. And if you are not prepared for that, you’re going to be chasing after a train that’s left the station. So plan on this being an eventuality because it is an eventuality. It’s just a matter of the timing.

John (15:06): So talk a little bit about, I know you cover local search, obviously there are a lot of businesses that they’re only trying to people in their town find them. So what are some new realities, if you will, in that kind of business that’s the remodeling contractor that just wants people to find them?

Stephan (15:23): Yeah, there’s been a lot of innovations with local search, and if you’re familiar with that world, there’s this kind of a blending of paid search and local SEO with LSA

(15:40): Local search ads. You’ve got these tools that I just can’t imagine not using them for local SEO, like local Falcon, which will show your physician in Google Maps results, the three pack, the local pack and the Google results. If you are, let’s say even 10 miles away from your current location, your headquarters, your local results could be markedly different. And how are you going to know without VPNs or traveling around town and doing searches from your mobile phone? You need to use a tool like Local Falcon. It’ll show you a grid of whether you’re in the top three positions and what position you’re at, and it’s kind of like a heat map sort of thing and across a whole metro area. So you can see, oh, I’m really strong in this part of town, but not at like I’m invisible in this other part of town.

(16:41): Maybe I need to start up a satellite office by appointment only. Not a sketchy thing like a UPS store location, but a real legit office there. And you don’t have to pay a fortune for that. It might be under a thousand dollars a month for an office that has signage that is really a real office, not a PO box, and that could make a world of difference. And now you’ve got two locations and now you’re really strong in that other part of town that you were invisible for. How are you going to know this and track this without a tool like Local Falcon? So yeah, you need different tools and strategies for local search than just regular SEL.

John (17:27): You said 10 miles. I’ve seen half a mile in a very competitive, like I live salon, a hair salon or something where there’s one on every corner. Really, geographic proximity is tough. You mentioned tools like Local Falcon. What are some AI tools, business people who are trying to optimize their content, create new content, be more efficient in creating content? What are your favorite current tools? I know tomorrow I’ll ask you and it’ll change, but what are they

Stephan (17:55): Today I’m going to start with the tried and true obvious AI tools, and that would be Chat g, pt, and Claude, which I would think I consider to be, it’s it’s big rival or Arch Enemy. Anthropic is the creator of Claude, and Open AI is the creator of Chat, GPT. And some of the folks, some of the top leadership at Open AI left and started Anthropic and created this competing Claude AI tool. And it’s amazing. It’s got a hundred thousand at this point in time, a hundred thousand token limit on input, meaning that you could upload an entire book and have it use that as part of your input. So you could upload, let’s say a manifesto or how you think and operate in the world and your values and philosophy on life and business or whatever for your industry. You have that manifesto, you upload that and you ask Claude or chat GPT questions based on your understanding of my company, my brand from this uploaded manifesto, come up with a voice and tone guideline for me, come up with a social media strategy for me, come up with an editorial calendar for my blog for me, and it will do incredibly well.

(19:19): And that is so much better than just typing in a prompt. I mean, yeah, you get sophisticated with prompts and do your prompt engineering, but why not upload something that’s really representative of your company, your brand, your unique differentiating point of difference, and then you let the AI come up with all sorts of different things, social media posts and draft blog articles and strategy documents and positioning statements and so forth based on its understanding of you from that kind of cornerstone piece of content that you’ve uploaded. So there’s that. There’s using super prompts, which are prompts, the input that you type in. It’s on steroids because everything has been thought through, and you don’t have to think through all these things yourself. You don’t have to come up with like, please ignore all prior prompts. I want it to not be influenced by a whole series of previous questions that I asked.

(20:23): I want it to create, let’s say a table marked down table. So it’s nice pretty formatted table. I want it to not display any kind of narration or explanation around why it’s outputting particular things. Just want the output file of whatever my editorial calendar is that I don’t want to explain. Its thinking as it’s going along. So all these things baked into what’s called a super prompt, which might be 250 words of stuff. If you can paste somebody’s super prompt, whether it’s on creating a keyword strategy or on even creating other super prompts or on writing a blog post or something, you are going to end up with such better output because the old adage from the programmer days of garbage in, garbage out still applies. If you write a lousy prompt, you’ll get lousy output. So that’s the difference maker right there. And you don’t have to go to all the fancy new tools, which may not exist in six months. They might go out of business. So if you’ve got a podcast, you could be using, let’s say, cap show or Cast Magic or decipher without, it’s like decipher without the E at the end. It’s just R without ER. So these tools are awesome, and who knows which ones will exist in six months from now chat, GPT, that’ll exist, Claude will exist, Google Bard will exist. So you get masterful at those. Wow. You’re going to be definitely leapfrogging your competitors.

John (22:05): Yeah. Awesome advice. Well, Stefan, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to connect with you, learn about your work? Obviously pick up a copy of the latest edition of The Art

Stephan (22:16): Of sel? Yeah. In fact, if let’s say, if Handful, I’ve got the publisher is O’Reilly, and so I can’t just give away copies of the book, just add infinitum. But I did get permission from my publisher to give away a handful of copies. So if somebody wants to email me@stephanspencer.com and just say they want to kind of put themselves into the lottery for a free art of SEO fourth edition digital copy, I’ll send some of them and actually everyone can get a copy of Google Power Search, which is in its third edition, which I do have a hundred percent of the rights of. So I can send that to everybody who sends an inquiry. My personal website’s, stephan spencer.com and net concepts.com is my agency. And you mentioned at the beginning my two podcast shows Marketing Speak, which you’ve been on, john marketing speak.com, and then get yourself optimized, which is get yourself optimized.com. Not an SEO podcast may sound like one, but it’s actually personal development.

John (23:20): Nice. Awesome.

The Future of Remote Work: Navigating the Talent Crisis, Harnessing Diversity & AI Upskilling

The Future of Remote Work: Navigating the Talent Crisis, Harnessing Diversity & AI Upskilling written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Rob Levin, a seasoned entrepreneur and co-founder of WorkBetterNow, a company specializing in providing talent from Latin America & The Caribbean for US-based businesses. Prior to that he started and built a media company serving small businesses in the New York area. Rob has served as a CEO and CFO of several fast growing businesses and began his career as a CPA.  Our conversation dives into the future of remote work, addressing the challenges of the talent crisis, the need to harness diversity, and the role of AI upskilling.

Key Takeaways

Embark on a transformative journey with Rob Levin as he talks about strategies for navigating the talent crisis, harnessing diversity, and implementing AI upskilling in remote work environments. Discover the importance of accessing a wider pool of talent, integrating remote team members into company culture, and investing in continuous learning initiatives. Whether you’re a business owner seeking to optimize your remote team or exploring opportunities in the remote work sphere, Rob’s insights will empower you to build a thriving business that stands the test of time.

 

Questions I ask Rob Levin:

[01:03] How was WorkBetterNow founded?

[02:48] What did you learn from the difference between your first and second assistant?

[04:33] Why the decision to focus on talent from Latin America?

[06:50] What have you observed trend-wise in the virtual assistant industry?

[12:21] What is Upskilling and how do you apply that as a value at WorkBetterNow?

[16:53] How important are documented processes in WorkBetterNow?

[20:02] How does AI come into play in the smooth running of your business and the efficiency of Virtual Assistants?

[21:25] Where can people connect with you?

 

More About Rob Levin:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Rob Levin. He’s a co-founder and chairman of Work Better Now, which provides talent from Latin America for US based businesses. Prior to that, he started and built a media company and serving small businesses in the New York. Rob has served as the CEO and CFO of several fast growing businesses, McGann’s career as a CPA. He lives in New York City plays guitar, has seen over a thousand concerts and even promoted Big Rock Xmen in college. That’s new to your bio, but Rob, I didn’t know that about you, but welcome back to the show.

Rob (00:46): Thanks, John. It’s new to the bio, but it actually happened quite a long time ago,

John (00:50): So let’s just talk about music then.

Rob (00:52): Sure. Let’s do it

John (00:54): Actually. So I’m curious, going from your media business before then, starting a placement for all intent and purposes company, what’s the origin story of how you got work better now going?

Rob (01:06): Yeah, I hired my first assistant in 2013. First assistant didn’t work out. It was part-time, which I don’t recommend except it, except if it’s really necessary. The second assistant just changed my life, actually. The first assistant was pretty good, but the second assistant changed my life because I was now free from so many things. I can’t believe I didn’t think about this sooner. It was free from so many things that were keeping me from the things I like to do and the things that really added value not only to my business, but even to my personal life. And as time went, and as you know John, I know a lot of business owners like you do, and everybody was asking me, and this assistant was from El Salvador and everybody was asking me constantly, where’s your assistant from, et cetera. And I was referring them to another company. So what happened over the years is I just realized that the assistance that my friends were getting from this company just weren’t as good as my assistant.

(02:02): I said, you know what? I think I can do this. I was on the west coast on a business trip and a friend of mine from college joined me and I was saying, I’m going to start this business. And I was telling him every business owner should have an assistant. And he goes, I’m in. And I said, what do you mean you’re in? He goes, I’m doing this with you. And I said, okay, well, you’re going to do all the work and we’re going to split everything 50 50. That was 2018 actually about six years ago, February, 2018, and we started the business and we were providing assistance by the end of the year. And then I think as then, I’m not going to say we pivoted, we evolved into not only providing executive assistance for business owners, but providing over 40 different roles for small and mid-sized businesses.

John (02:47): I’m curious, did you learn anything, or maybe in hindsight you learned something like why the first assistant worked? Second one, I’m sorry, didn’t work out as well as the second one worked? I mean, was there some dynamic in either what you did or who they were or did you learn anything from that?

Rob (03:04): Yeah, I did. In this case, the first assistant I had was part-time and she ended up taking a full-time gig with the other client that she had. So there were two reasons why I decided that I don’t really like this part-time option for not only for me, but for anybody. Number one for that reason is that they’re going to have another client and they’re probably want the security of full-time work. And number two, well actually three reasons. Number two, what I also realized after two months is you think you only have 10 hours a week for an assistant, and then that gets blown out of the water very quickly, and before you know it, you’re well over 40. There’s plenty of work for them to do, and you even think about hiring another one. And then the last one is, and this one’s really important, I want somebody who’s dedicated to me. So when they’re working from nine to five or whatever it is, I want them just thinking about me and my business.

John (03:55): Yeah, that second point that you made I think is a really valuable one because I’ve talked to a lot of business owners and I’m telling ’em all that’s the first hire you should make is get yourself out of the grunt work so that you can focus on marketing or sales or client fulfillment. And a lot of ’em say, well, I just wouldn’t have that much for ’em to do. And I think you’re absolutely right. Once you actually started experiencing somebody taking some stuff off your plate, you start thinking, oh, well they can do this and this. I hadn’t even thought of. We’ve done the same thing. I mean, we’ve hired part-time folks, and fortunately some of ’em have worked out and grown to full-time roles because we realized that you have particularly focused on finding assistance in Latin America. I’m wonder if you could talk about is there something unique about folks that come from some of those parts of the world that make them such a great fit for us businesses?

Rob (04:47): I think there’s a few things. Let’s see where to start. So number one, there’s great talent in Latin America. They have great experience, they have incredible attitudes. People who just show up ready to work, they’re focused on your mission and just dedicated to helping you and with a smile on their face. Also, if you compare it to other parts of the world, the culture is a lot more similar in Latin America to the US as it is compared to other parts of the world. And then I think their English, there’s plenty of people with fantastic English. And then the last one, which a lot of people don’t talk about is time zone alignment. And that’s really important because in other parts of the world, either people are working when they should be sleeping or they’re working at a different time than you are. And our clients, they kind of embrace the talent that we provide to them, the professionals we provide to them as part of their team, they just integrate them in part of their team. And it’s hard to do it when either A, they should be sleeping or when they’re not working at the same time.

John (05:51): Yeah, I know over the years, many years ago I hired an assistant out of the Asia area and the only way to align, as you said, was that they were going to work overnight. It was like, that’s part of the culture, that’s what everybody does here. And I was like, I’m not sure I want to make somebody work overnight, like you said, when they should be sleeping. So I think the time zone alignment is huge, especially if you’re going to have them start doing things with clients and things like that. I mean obviously they’ve got all aligned that way. Before I go any farther, listeners should know that we actually employ to work better now full-time folks on our staff. And I think some of the things you mentioned are very true. We have fully integrated them into our meeting rhythm on Slack and our standup calls and our culture building type of activities. And I think that if you were to ask them, they feel like they are a part of the team as much as really anybody on our team. So it’s definitely very, very doable.

Rob (06:50): Happy to hear that. Let’s

John (06:51): Talk a little bit, yeah, let’s talk a little bit about the landscape in general remote work. I mean, there’s some pretty obvious things that have gone on, but is there anything that you’ve observed from a trend standpoint right now?

Rob (07:06): Yeah, so it starts first with what’s going on here in the United States, and this applies to Canada as far as we can tell as well. And we have been and we will continue to be in a talent crisis. What do I mean by that? I mean several things. Number one, productivity of the US workers actually dropped despite all of the technology that is out there. Number two, there are more job openings than there are people looking for work. So just the numbers are not in the favor of the smaller mid-size business. By the way, I don’t know if big companies are in a talent crisis. Quite frankly, I don’t care. My world is small and mid-size businesses, companies seem to be laying off people, and yet small businesses can’t seem to hire small and mid-size businesses seem to hire the salary expectations here in the states are way up. And the time it takes to hire somebody is according to LinkedIn is like six or seven weeks, which in the world of a small business is years. So there’s a challenge finding exceptional people. And as you know John, in a small and mid-sized business, you can’t get somebody who’s just good. You’ve got to get somebody who’s exceptional because every single role counts. So you have

John (08:16): That and they got to wear a lot of hats

Rob (08:19): And wearing a lot of hats and just somebody who says, Hey, whoever it is you need me to do, I’ll do it. And at the same time I, I do think having had talent from Latin America now for over 10 years, I can start to see an inflection point. So if you think about it, large companies were offshoring, I don’t know, 30, 40 years ago they started. And that trend has picked up small and mid-size businesses have started to do it. I would say maybe 10 years ago, slowly in different parts of the world, Asia was really big. But now we’re starting to see a trend of two trends. Number one, more small and mid-sized businesses being open to offshoring. And I think that all happened in the pandemic when they got comfortable with remote because after all, going offshore subject, a couple of things, going offshore is really no different than going remote. And those couple of things are if you hire directly and you have your own payroll, that can get a little complicated. But if you use a talent provider, companies like work better now. That’s no longer your problem. And then we’re now starting to see trends of more companies wanting to hire from Latin America. So it’s a combination of all of those things happening. And I’m really knocking on wood, happy to say that we got a little lucky with the timing starting this business in 2018

John (09:37): When everybody all of a sudden realized, hey, maybe this remote work thing might actually be something to it.

Rob (09:44): It’s really about access to a wider pool of talent. It’s about access to the wider pool of talent which businesses need today.

John (09:51): And I think most people, you’re absolutely right, have realized that if I can get somebody that can do X, Y, Z, it really doesn’t matter the world we live in where they are. Talk a little bit about some of the cultural diversity that it brings. Again, large organizations have HR departments that help create diversity in the organization, right? Small businesses, I mean, again, that may be a goal that may be part of something they believe in, but much harder to achieve as a small business. Have you felt that at all? Did bring some diversity actually to the organizations?

Rob (10:27): So it’s a really good question, John. I think when it comes to small and midsize businesses, as I mentioned earlier, every position counts. And I think what’s most important to business owners is how can I find somebody amazing for this role who’s going to help me deliver a better customer experience, who’s going to fit in with my culture and is going to help the company achieve its goals? That’s how I feel that we are helping people. Yes, they’re from Latin America. They speak in at least one other language, which is sometimes advantageous. But I really think that what business owners are trying to do, whether they’re working with us or in general and not working with us, I think that everybody really just knows how important it is to get the best talent they can at any given time.

John (11:15): And now a word from our sponsor, work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest hassle free. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator, and we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off each dedicated and full-time work better now professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit workbetternow.com, mention the referral code DTM podcast and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months. That’s workbetternow.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code, you mentioned the word offshoring or outsourcing, but I’ve also heard you talk about a term that I don’t hear too many people saying, and I think it has an implication of something bigger and broader and that’s the term upskilling. You want to talk a little bit about how you apply that idea?

Rob (12:40): Yeah, upskilling. So upskilling is a trend that I think over the next five years you’re going to start to see a lot more of, right upskilling. The way we look at upskilling is you are looking for somebody with certain types of experience, certain types of skills, and you might find somebody that has most, but maybe not all of them. And what the smart employers are doing, and a lot of our clients are doing this, is they’re saying, alright, I know I needed A, B, C, D and E. This person only is A, B, and C, but culturally they’ll fit within our company. We’ll hire them and then either we will train them or we’ll use some outsource training, whether it’s LinkedIn or any of these other training platforms to acquire some of those other skills that they need. That’s a much smarter approach rather than trying to find that right person, which might take six or 12 months, which will have a huge negative impact on your company.

(13:38): And there’s another part to this too, which is with the talent that you already have. So the pace of change in business keeps increasing when you’re running a smaller mid-size business. To get good, you have to be better at so many more things today than just five years ago. So where is that expertise going to come from? And if you follow the who not how principle of Dan Sullivan and Strategic Coach, it should’t all be on the business owner. So the idea is you have really good people, get them trained again, whether it’s internal training or external training, and then they can bring those new capabilities into your company. And by the way, when you do that, you’re accomplishing two other goals, which is today’s workforce wants advancement opportunities and they’re also looking to learn more on the job. And so it’s like a triple win. You’re getting the capabilities you need, you’re keeping your employees really happy because they’re advancing and they’re acquiring new skills.

John (14:43): So particularly somebody who’s listening to this and hasn’t hired maybe remote at all, but certainly hasn’t hired an assistant, what are some of the things where I could ask this the negative way or the positive way, but how do you get them started or obviously what are the things that you’ve seen that have really made it not work for people?

Rob (15:05): Well, okay, so let’s start with what works really well and then what doesn’t work well is actually pretty short list. What works really well is really good onboarding. So we assist with that. We have a whole onboarding program. Some clients need it more than others. Other clients, they probably onboard better than we do. So it starts with really good onboarding and then it starts with something I alluded to earlier, which is integrating your remote professionals, whether they’re in Latin America or anywhere else, integrating them within the company, they’re like any other team member. That’s definitely a best practice. What tends not to work well?

(15:49): Oh, let me just add to one other thing that works well, and this probably goes for anybody that you have working in your company, which is clarity on communications in terms of how we communicate in the company, clarity, how we work, what are some of the cultural norms in the company, and also clarity on what if you do your job well, this is what it looks like. A lot of people can skip that step. And of course, on the contrary, what doesn’t work well is not setting up your remote professional for success, not being clear on how we communicate, not integrating them into the company, not explaining to them what success looks like and not also empowering them with just enough training so they understand in this remote world where you don’t have somebody next to you, where do you find, who do you go to when you have a question? Because when you start, you’re going to have questions. So really what doesn’t work is just the opposite of what works,

John (16:51): Right? Right. How important are documented processes? I know a lot of companies are big on here’s our user manual or here’s all these documented process, but that also that can be a distraction, that can be maybe a lot of work that isn’t really that valuable. How important do you think that is for getting a remote person going?

Rob (17:14): Yeah, so I’ll start with, I think the first thing, the most important thing that a company needs to do is establish its core values. And I’m going to explain why. Because you’re thinking like process core values, what do they have to do with each other? The core values, which shouldn’t only be just a list that’s up on a wall, it should be things that are actually adhered to and appreciated throughout the company day in and day out. When you start with those, what good core values do is if somebody doesn’t know what to do and they don’t have somebody to ask at a time that they have to make a decision, they should be able to turn to those core values for the right answer. So that’s where you start. As far as processes go, we’re big on with our team of about 30 or so people, most of which by the way are in Latin America as well, almost all.

(18:01): And what we’re really big on is processes. In some cases they have to be very detailed in terms of how to use HubSpot, for example, the way we’ve set it up. But in general, what we do, we don’t want to over go crazy with the details on the processes. We want to just basically say, here’s a general idea of how you do it. That’s enough enough for somebody who understands the core values and has some talent and the experience that you want to follow that and then do what they need to do. But I’ll take it a step further too.

(18:37): We still provide executive assistance in addition to those 40 other roles to people. And a lot of business owners, when they’re getting their first assistant, they’re like, Hey, I have to try to, I don’t have a manual, right? Well, one of the things we always do is say, that’s great, and I know you don’t want to create one because you’re a business owner. Last thing you want to do is create a manual, have your new assistant do it, and they will just have them document as they go along. And that’s very handy. First of all, the first few times they can go back to the documentation where they’re doing a task, but if they’re out for a maternity or paternity leave, somebody else can then just pick up that process manual. Very important on the executive assistant side, yeah,

John (19:20): I’ve become pretty obsessed with using video tools like Loom and stuff to just go through it. And I’m doing it. I just recapture myself doing it, and it’s a lot easier to create a process out of that. The other term that I read one time that I thought really made a lot of sense, a lot of times we’ll give people, here’s what done looks like. This is the definition of this being done. And then a lot of times they can go, oh, okay, well how I get there probably doesn’t matter to some degree. And I think that’s a great guidance too. So looking ahead, crystal ball, right? What’s up for maybe something you’re actually working on or watching? Obviously every show, I think in the last two years I’ve said the words ai. I don’t know if that comes into play into your business, but what’s the future look like for work better now?

Rob (20:11): So I have two answers to that. The first one is we trying to become a talent partner for our clients, and many of our clients now see us as a talent partner. What that means is if they have a job that can be done remotely and it’s not too specialized, let’s say like a software developer, they just start us. And that’s exactly where we want to be and we’re constantly orienting ourselves to do that. But getting to your AI question, we just launched a pilot of what we’re calling the WBN Academy, and that’s going to be a continuous learning program for our professionals so that they can expand the capabilities of our clients. And AI is obviously one of the core elements of that academy. We should be rolling that out to, all right now we’re up to about 330 or so professionals working for our clients. We should be able to roll that out to them by the end of the year, and we’re really excited about it.

John (21:07): Yeah, that’s really, when you think about it, you look at resumes and they say, oh, I know how to use Word in Excel or whatever programs. I think today it’s going to be, I have a full understanding of AI prompts. That’s just going to be a pretty mandatory skill these days, I think. Is there anywhere we’ve mentioned work better now? Several times work better now.com, but is there anywhere else you’d invite people to connect with you

Rob (21:34): On LinkedIn? Rob Levin, Rob Levin, work better now. There are a few Rob Levins, but if you type in Rob Levin work better now. You’ll definitely find me and you can also reach out to me through the website work better now.com.

John (21:49): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by. I think if you actually mentioned, you heard this on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast, I think that Rob might even give you a special offer of some sort. I believe so. Keep that in mind.

Rob (22:03): Yeah, thanks for, I totally forgot about that. John just mentioned Duct Tape Marketing and you get $150 off for each of the first three months for each professional that you

John (22:13): Hire. Awesome. Well, again, it was great catching up with you and hopefully we will run into you soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Lifting the Founder’s Curse: Unlocking Business Value Beyond Yourself

Lifting the Founder’s Curse: Unlocking Business Value Beyond Yourself written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Ryan Deiss, a serial entrepreneur, author, and the founder of digitalmarketer.com. Our discussion begins with his latest book, “Get Scalable: The Operating System Your Business Needs to Run and Scale Without You.” and pivots to invaluable insights on breaking free from the Founder’s Curse and unlocking business value beyond yourself.

Key Takeaways

Embark on a transformative journey with Ryan Deiss in this Duct Tape Marketing Podcast episode, where he unveils strategies unlock scalable business growth, gain insights into the power of value engines, strategic rhythms, and high-output teams. Learn the art of overcoming founder indispensability, mapping value creation flows, and implementing a meeting rhythm that actually works. Whether you’re a seasoned entrepreneur or just starting, Ryan’s actionable insights will empower you to build a thriving business that stands the test of time.

 

Questions I ask Ryan Deiss:

[00:50] What is the founder’s curse?

[01:44] Would you say that what you developed in your book came from the mistakes you made along the way?

[04:05] How does the operating system viewpoint apply to business owners?

[05:54] Would you say focus and priorities are the main benefits of value engines in business?

[07:42] How many value engines are needed to run a business?

[09:07] How do you recognize opportunities that add value to the engine?

[11:48] Tell us about the high-output-team approach and how it aids recruitment, onboarding, and performance ?

[16:29] What is Meeting Rhythm?

[20:12] Where can people find your book, the tools mentioned and connect with you?

 

More About Ryan Deiss:

 

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

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Work Better Now

Visit WorkBetterNow.com mention the referral code DTM Podcast and get $150 off for your first 3 months.

 

John (00:08): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Ryan Deiss. He’s a serial entrepreneur, author and investor, and the founder and CEO of the scalable company digital marketer.com, and a founding partner at Scalable Equity LLC. He’s also the founder and host of Traffic and Conversion Summit, the largest digital marketing conference in North America. Today we’re going to talk about a new book called Get Scalable, the Operating System. Your Business Needs to Run and Scale Without You. So Ryan, welcome back.

Ryan (00:44): Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

John (00:46): So I want to start right off the bat, and actually you do in the book start off with this idea of the founder’s curse. So it sounds so evil. I think we ought to start there and have you kind of unpack what that is and how that impacts so many entrepreneurs.

Ryan (01:00): It kind of is evil. I mean, the founders curse states that the more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is. And that is one of the harshest truths for any entrepreneur to have to come to face to face with because most of us got into this game. We were independent minded and we had our specific idea and we wanted to do it our way and we sort wanted to stay that way. And it can, as long as your business stays small, but your business, if only, if you’re always the most valuable person in your business, then your business will never be that valuable. I don’t care how awesome you are.

John (01:30): So a lot of authors come to things on their own and discover things on their own, and when they write about them, they almost become a little bit autobiographical. I have heard you talk at length about some of your challenges in your business. I mean, would you say that some of what you’ve developed in this book came about from all of us, the mistakes that you made along the way?

Ryan (01:51): Absolutely. This book was one part trying to write the book that I wish I had when I was scaling my business in two parts therapy because go back to 2016, and I don’t know how much your listeners will know about me, but in general out there in the world, I’m known as a marketer, I’m a growth guy, I mean founder of digital marketer.com, traffic and Conversion Summit. In general, when I speak, I’m talking about marketing. That’s how you and I got to know each other. But in 2016, I had to learn the hard lesson. That growth isn’t everything. That year I had three different companies within our portfolio group that all grew enough to hit the ink, 500 or 5,000 lists of those three companies, one of ’em went on to experience really great success. It had a profitable exit, and the remainder of that business is still very profitable and successful today.

(02:38): One of those businesses failed after a number of years because our partner in the business, the CEO, wouldn’t get out of his own way. And that business kind of went flatlined, trudged along and a couple years ago was sold to a competitor for basically nothing. The other business failed spectacularly. And within about three months of appearing on the list, we had to lay off 180 people and within another six months the business was fundamentally bankrupt. That business was the one that grew the fastest. And so the lesson I had to learn there is that growth isn’t everything. And that same year that all that was happening, if somebody were to look at from the outside in, they’d be like, oh, you’re very successful. Businesses are growing. You must be doing well. I wasn’t. I was making less money than ever because money was getting poured back in. I was working longer and I mean, I was missing family dinners. I was missing dance recitals. And it wasn’t until I came home after midnight one night, my wife was like, Hey, look, you can keep doing what you’re doing. I know who I’m married, but you can’t pretend like you’re doing it for us anymore. We just want you, this is ridiculous. That was kind of the wake up call that I had. And so yeah, man, it all came from pain.

John (03:42): So this book is, I mean, you have sort of a linear fashion to the stuff that you build and the frameworks that you’ve built here. And this book is literally we could go chapter by chapter and you’d say, yeah, that’s next, and that’s next and that’s next. Which obviously makes it really easy on my standpoint to just kind of break it down that way. But let’s start with probably the basis of the entire book is this operating system viewpoint. So talk a little bit about that and how that applies to anybody trying to build a business.

Ryan (04:13): Yeah, the fundamental thing that every business has an operating system, the problem is that in most businesses the operating system is the CEO. It’s a UOS, right? So if you’re the ceo EO, if you’re the founder, you are the operating system and the operating system is you. So what we’re trying to do through the book, going back to the founder’s curse, is to make the founder less valuable to the business. It doesn’t mean they don’t still add value, that they aren’t still important, but we got to get it to a point where if they’re not there, the business can still go on. This is not a new concept. Plenty of books have been written on this very concept where I think all the other books either got it wrong or just it was incomplete, is they started from the perspective of goal setting. So if we’re going to build an operating system, we first have to decide what is this business going to achieve and then how are we going to do it and what are the projects and the people and the meetings and all that stuff.

(05:02): I’ve tried that it doesn’t work. What works is answering the question, how do we create value in the marketplace? How do we capture and create marketplace value? And that’s just not just a question to answer broadly for us. We want to answer that question visually. And so the very first step that we do when working with customers or clients after we acquire a business, what I talk about in the book is to map what’s known as your value engines, your business process maps, how do you get customers and clients and what do you do with them once you got ’em, how do you serve ’em? How do you sell ’em? How do you serve? And we want to visually map that in flowchart form. Then we can start building an operating system around that. So we don’t give people an operating system and say, plug your business into it. We don’t say, what are your goals? And then give you a meeting rhythm as though that’s an operating system. We start from how your business creates value and build an operating system around the value creation process.

John (05:54): And I think what I love about that too is it automatically creates priorities, creating those value engines. A lot of people talk about mapping processes and things and they go down this rabbit hole of, okay, well we got 670 things here that we do, let’s map them all. And when you really break it down to those two value engines or those two categories of value engines, it sort of focuses the attention, right? I mean, that’s the only thing to focus on if those aren’t done, none of that other stuff matters. I mean, would you say that’s an accurate assessment of what value engines do to a business?

Ryan (06:28): Absolutely. And that is the goal. The goal is to get, as businesses scale, they get more complex, and as systems get more complex, they start to break down. So I think one of the biggest things that we’re looking to do is to thatcomplicate this stuff. And the way you do that is by asking first principles questions. And so a question of, okay, how do customers happen? Just how do they happen? A lot of businesses could generally explain it, but can you show me? And so if you can show me in flowchart form, okay, well, they see an ad on Instagram or Facebook, and when they do that, then they go to this landing page and then if they opt in, then this happens. And if they don’t, they get put on a retargeting list and then they go through this whole process and then eventually down the road they give us money.

(07:05): Great. Now what you can do is you could say of these different processes, what are the ones of these stages within this value flow? What do we want to make sure that we get right every time? Okay, now we can build an SOP or a checklist or what we call playbook around just that, not everything, just that. You can also ask the question, who is uniquely responsible or accountable to each of these stages? That’s going to define your hiring plan and job descriptions. You can say, how do we know this stuff’s working? That creates your scorecards. All of these things combined are what form a company operating system. But the foundation of all of it is just answering the question, how do we capture and create marketplace value?

John (07:42): So break it down again. You’re essentially saying there’s two value engines like fulfillment and how we get a customer or are there

Ryan (07:51): Two, I wish we were always that areas, each area. So for most businesses at scale, let’s say you’re over 10 million in revenue, you’re probably going to have two, maybe three growth engines. Maybe you’ve got a growth engine where you’re doing online media buying, and then maybe you’ve got another growth engine where maybe you have an outbound sales motion or maybe you have one where you’re doing trade shows and it just is a different flow. Customers happen differently depending on the entry point of the, you might have fundamentally different value in growth engines for your different products in your product line. But I’ll tell you, John, I mean we run really large companies, mid eight figure businesses. I say really large by small medium sized business standards figure businesses. It’s rare for them to have more than three or four growth engines. It’s rare for them to have more than a couple fulfillment engines. It’s just rare. Most of them will map, they start to look the same. Most big successful businesses are actually pretty simple if you pull all the crud away.

John (08:48): So let’s drill down into a business of yours that I’m somewhat familiar with, digital marketer. So essentially that started one type of offering, and that was if you’d done a value engine for that, you’d have mapped out the fulfillment of that offer, but then you decided, oh, we could have this kind of thing or we could license agencies to do different, how do you add things when you realize there are other opportunities? Then I mean, do those just become new engines?

Ryan (09:13): So usually when you add new products to your product line, they become new squares on the existing growth engine. So somebody will come through and you’ll say, well, what happens when somebody buys this? Let’s just say when they become a member of Digital Marketer Lab, let’s say they become a member of Digital Marketer Lab. That’s kind of our main membership at Digital Marketer. Once they bought that, we’ve sold ’em everything that we can sell, we’re done. Well, wouldn’t it be better if we kept selling ‘EM stuff for all involved? Okay, well, what else can we sell? Well, there’s a lot of agencies who are joining this program who they would like to license this. So what if we had a certified partner program? Now that doesn’t, but in the beginning stages, it probably doesn’t have its own fulfillment engine. What we’re probably going to do is market this program to our existing clients so it becomes another stage, and now it’s after somebody’s bought this, let’s try to sell ’em this. If they buy it, then they go into a different fulfillment engine. If they don’t, then that’s that. And then once it exists and they’ll say, let’s give this its own dedicated growth engine. It’s almost always going to have its own dedicated fulfillment engine though.

John (10:21): And now a word from our sponsor. Work better now. Work better now provides outstanding talent from Latin America, hand matched to your business with over 40 roles across various industries, including marketing. They’re a reliable partner for consistently finding the perfect fit for your business. Simply tell them what you need and they’ll handle the rest. We have two work better now, professionals on our team, a marketing assistant and a marketing coordinator, and we’ve been blown away by their abilities, responsiveness, and professionalism. They’ve really become an essential part of our growing team. And to top it off, each dedicated and full-time work better. Now professional is 2350 per month and there are no contracts to schedule a 15 minute consultation with a work better now rep and see how they’ll support your business growth goals, visit work better now.com. Mention the referral code DTM podcast, and you’re going to get $150 off for your first three months.

(11:20): That’s work better now.com. And don’t forget that DTM podcast code, right? Because something has to happen when somebody says yes, right? I want to buy that right now. I’m going to skip around a little bit, but this is probably everything you’re talking about. A lot of businesses need to build, but I would say if you were going to ask a hundred businesses, the place where they say they struggle the most is with people, teams getting output, getting productivity. So you have a very somewhat systematic approach to really not only the recruitment and onboarding of folks, but how to make sure that they’re actually performing. You want to unpack the high output team approach.

Ryan (12:02): Sure. So I’ll say that the two mistakes that most entrepreneurs CEOs make, number one, they find a problem, a challenge, a constraint in a business, and they just hire someone and they basically hurl ’em at that problem. So we’ve got this issue, we’re going to hire Bob, we’re going to throw Bob at it. And the problem with this is number one, Bob doesn’t know how to solve that problem day one, and number two, you don’t have the time to teach him and you might also not know how to solve it either, hence the reason it’s not solved and you need Bob. And so we’ll hire people to solve problems that we don’t know how to solve. They don’t know how to solve. And so we get frustrated with them. We say, I don’t know why I hire all these people, I should just do it myself.

(12:39): The other challenge that mistake that we’ll make with people is we’ll go to individuals and we’ll ask them, Hey, what do you do? I want to make sure that everybody’s on task and I want to make sure that we’re measuring your performance. So what do you do and how do you think? What are the metrics that you believe we should track you by? And we do this at an individual level that doesn’t work. Okay, here’s what does work. Go back to the value creation flow, the value engine that you mapped, and don’t start with the individual and say, what does this person do? And don’t start with a problem and say, who can we get to solve this problem? Go back to your value creation process and say, okay, back to step number one of this flowchart. Who or whom are uniquely accountable, responsible for getting this one done the right way?

(13:23): Then based on that description, you would put, we call it a critical accountability bullet. You say, okay, well we got Jim, and Jim is our media buyer, so Jim needs to run and optimize Facebook and Instagram ads. Got it. Okay, we’re going to keep going. What about this next one, the landing page? Okay, well, that’s going to be Fred. Fred is going to build and track landing page conversion rate. Got it. So we don’t start with the person and ask what do they do? We start with the value creation process and ask, who does this? In doing that, you’re essentially building job descriptions in reverse, and now what you can do is you can ask the person, how do we know that all this stuff is working? Now we can begin to build scorecards again, not based on an individual’s performance, but based on the flow through one of these particular value engines.

(14:06): In doing that, if you start with the value creation process and work backwards to the individual, you figure out a couple things. Number one, you figure out the people who are overwhelmed with a lot of work and very often as the founder’s, ceo, EO, it’s you who’s responsible for this? Me? What about the next step? Me? What about the next one me? And you’re giving yourself all these critical accountability bolts, but now you can look at it and say, who can I hand these off to? Or who can I hire to bring this in? So it’ll inform your hiring plan. If you don’t have the people or who needs help on your team, whether it’s, you’re also going to find some people who are superstars, but they don’t have a lot of work, and you can diamonds in the rough. You’re also going to find people on your team who they talk a good game, they’re good at politics, but they really don’t do anything, and this uncovers all of that. And so yes, don’t start with the person asks, what do they do? Start with the value creation process and ask who does this? You find out who your real players are.

John (14:58): You get more than about 10 people, and people can start hiding. They, I mean in terms of what actually gets done and we fill up the time, so it seems like everybody’s busy, but when you really do map ’em to those critical things, it’s like what are you busy at? And I think that’s a really key

Ryan (15:14): Metric, and that’s the other piece to that point, once you’ve done the value engine audit and said, who’s responsible for all these things? Now you can go to individuals and you can ask ’em, what are you currently doing that isn’t reflected on this? And you’ll just find that they’re doing all these things that just don’t matter. And sometimes because they thought that it mattered sometimes because some manager two years ago told ’em they should do it, and so they just kept doing it what they were told to do.

(15:40): And you can find all these things that people are doing that are either disconnected from a value creation process that you can plug in. I’ll give you an example. We had a content marketing manager who was producing five to seven pieces of content for one of our websites for one of our blogs every single week. Exactly. None of those content pieces was directing back to some type of lead capture mechanisms, none of them. And so it was this orphaned activity that it didn’t come up when we were auditing our growth engine because nobody opted in for anything. As a result of this, we were able to say, well either stop doing this or we got to get marketing to come over and start adding some of these things. It didn’t make any sense. It wound up being a whole lot of free leads that we had missed and got back.

John (16:24): So you mentioned it a couple times, everybody’s least favorite thing, and that is meetings. You have a fairly particular take on meeting rhythm, so you want to unpack that one?

Ryan (16:35): Yeah, so one thing I really don’t like doing is having some kind of 10 year big, hairy, audacious goal for small, medium, medium-sized businesses. You have no idea where you’re going to be. If you want to set a company purpose, I love that. I think every company should have a core purpose. If you want to call that a vision or a mission, fine, don’t nobody ever agrees on what those things are. So we just say, what is your company purpose? And that should be something that really doesn’t have a timeline. So that’s as big as we get when we’re doing goal setting. We’re going to set a three year target. I love three years. It is enough time to do something really big and meaningful, but not so long that you can’t imagine it. So that’s kind of meeting number one. About every three years we’re going to set a three year target.

(17:16): Pretty simple. Now we take those three years and we break ’em up into 1290 day sprints, 12 quarterly sprints. There are obviously four quarters in a year, three years, four quarters, 12. And so every quarter we’re going to do what we call our quarterly sprint planning meeting. And this is where we look at our three year target and we ask the question, what needs to be true that isn’t true today? What are those actions, these key initiatives that need to be completed to get us closer to that goal? And so we’re going to usually come up with three to five of those. We’re going to assign tasks and responsibilities. We’re going to get clear on the metrics that we really want to focus on optimizing. We’re going to set up a goal for that quarter, and that’s a one to two day deal. So every 90 days we got a one to two day planning meeting. By the way, if you’re planning every 90 days, you don’t need to do an annual plan. So that isn’t a part of my planning process.

John (18:05): Do a three year target. The annual part just flies by the next quarter, right?

Ryan (18:09): It’s amazing. It’s going to show up about once every four quarters, and that’s important because so many people do annual planning in December when you’re the most optimistic, the most hopeful. It’s like going grocery shopping when you’re hungry. It’s just not a good time to do it. By the way, I’m fine if you want to do an annual financial performer, fine, but in terms of your strategic plans and what are you going to get done, do that on a 90 day planning rhythm. Now, once we’ve done that, we have a monthly business review. And so each month we’ll get together and look at our scorecards, and then every week each team, including the leadership team, is going to have a scorecard meeting. Now, that may sound like a lot of meetings, but in reality, if you’re meeting to look at scorecards and we got a rule, no scorecard, no recurring meeting, so we’re meeting once a week at the leadership level, and then the teams are also meeting to discuss their scorecards to see are they doing the things that need to get done?

(19:06): Are we achieving the metrics? Are the projects we’re doing having an impact? Is that happening? If it’s not, then we can schedule an ad hoc meeting to discuss how do we improve, how do we optimize? It’s amazing when you have a regular meeting rhythm, you actually have less meetings. You don’t need as many ad hoc. The next one’s a week away. You know that you’re going to have an opportunity to discuss any necessarily pivots and tweaks to the plan at the quarterly business review, I’m sorry, at the monthly business review. And then at the next quarter, you’re going to reset plans and priorities. So somebody comes in with, we need to do this now. Do we really? Or can that wait until next quarter? And so that’s our planning rhythm, weekly scorecard meetings, monthly review and pivot meetings, quarterly strategic planning meetings, and every three years we’re set in our targets.

John (19:54): And I like the term rhythm because that’s really what it ends up feeling like once you get into it, right? It’s like, no, this is just humming along this way, this whole process, the book, everything that you do is very tool driven. You’ve got a few tools that you give away. So I guess this is the point in the show where I’d invite you to lead us to where we need to go to find the book, to find the tools to find out more about connecting with you.

Ryan (20:17): So you can get the book at Amazon or anywhere. Books are sold. Mostly Amazon though. But if you were to buy the book and open the book right there inside the flap, there is a link to get scalable.com. And what this gives you is all the tools that we use internally to create our own operating system. And so it is the same tools that we use. Now, I want to clarify something. These tools aren’t always overly fancy. We’re talking Google sheets, but they’re what we use. So our scorecards are all manual, and that’s by design. We want people to manually input their numbers so they know their numbers. We want them to manually decide is this red, yellow, or green so that they’re the ones own it who are objectively thinking, are we ahead of schedule? Are we behind? What do I think? I want people to own their stuff, but yeah, what we’re giving you is here all the exact same tools that we use internally. The book is going to teach you how to use ’em, how to deploy ’em, how to install ’em, but we’re not upcharging or anything like that for the tools themselves. I thought about it, the marketer in me was like, Ooh, let me have a book that tells ’em how to do it, but it tells ’em what

John (21:19): To do, not how to do,

Ryan (21:21): Yeah, exactly what, that’s what the marketer in me want to do. But I said I wanted to write the book that I wish I had and I didn’t want to leave anything out. And so we just went ahead and gave you all the tools.

John (21:31): And I’m sure when people get the book, they’re also going to find out that this is something they can hire a coach for as well, right?

Ryan (21:37): Yeah. Obviously if you want our help actually building out the operating system in your business, we would love to do that. We’ve had plenty of clients though, self administrate and you certainly can do that as well. But yes, if you want help, we do have a team of people behind the scenes that would love nothing more than to work with you and actually getting this implemented. The tools are good, the setup is good, but that last little bit of figuring out how do we specifically implement this into your business, some one-on-one help can be useful there.

John (22:07): Yeah, absolutely. Well again, appreciate you stopping the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

The Human Mind And What Drives Our Decisions

The Human Mind And What Drives Our Decisions written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Michael Liebowitz

michael-liebowitzIn this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Michael Liebowitz. Michael is the CEO of Magnetic Mind Studio. Magnetic Mind Studio is a laboratory for clear messaging and deeply felt value articulation founded from Michael’s passion for understanding how the human mind works to drive our decisions.

Key Takeaway:

Being able to effectively communicate your value and connect with your audience starts with understanding how and why people make decisions the way we do. The truth is: people don’t want your thing; they want what your thing means to them. In this episode, I talk with Michael Liebowitz about how the human mind works to drive our decisions, and how we can align our messages with how the brain is wired to feel trust.

Questions I ask Michael Liebowitz:

  • [1:23] Can you talk about the basis of your work around the idea that survival is a key driver for decision-making?
  • [3:01] Is the human survival decision you’re referring to “I have to feel like you like me” or “I have to feel like you understand me”?
  • [3:29] We obviously make far fewer life and death decisions today in comparison to the ancestors that you’ve referenced – so why haven’t our brains evolved?
  • [6:10] Does this idea suggest that our marketing should become more tribal in our communication, messaging, design, etc.?
  • [7:33] A line on your website says – People don’t want your thing. They want what your thing means to them. So how do we make that distinction?
  • [10:33] So at what point does the approach of influence turn from being truthful and authentic to manipulation?
  • [12:20] What kind of messages are the best at creating that attraction and desire that you’re talking about?
  • [17:50] Oftentimes the main outcome of what people desire isn’t what they say it is or we make assumptions about what it is – how do you know or uncover the main outcome of what people are after?
  • [20:59] How can people find out more about your work and your masterclass workshop?

More About Michael Liebowitz:

More About The Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network:

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

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network gain grow retain is built to inspire SAS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about grow, growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to gain, grow, retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Michael Liebowitz. He’s the CEO of magnetic mind studio, a laboratory for clear messaging and deep. We felt value articulation founded for Michael’s passion for understanding how the human mind works to drive our decision. So, Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Liebowitz (01:13): Thank you, John. This

John Jantsch (01:14): Is gonna be just some light and fluffy stuff. We’re not gonna get in anything very deep at all.

Michael Liebowitz (01:19): Darn it. Cuz I had a whole treaties on the meaning of what I’ve all prepared. Oh, well,

John Jantsch (01:23): All right. Well let’s uh, dive right in. I think you contend that most of our decisions or key driver of many of our decisions is survival. I mean that’s a little bit of what your work is based on. So maybe I’ll just let you start there.

Michael Liebowitz (01:37): Sure. You know, between making a sort of a rational decision or a survival to decision, well, guess what wins every single time, right? We make survival decisions. I always say to, um, when I get my presentations, you know, all of us are the very proud descendant of some long ago. Ancestor who, when walking on the across the planes did not turn to the right and say, oh, I wonder if that line is hungry. No, we, they ran away. Survival decisions win every time. And the core thesis of my approach to messaging is that one of the primary ways, if not the primary way, our neurology is set up to maintain survival is to make sure we surround ourselves with like kind people who are like ourselves are considered safe. And anything that is not considered like kind is to this neurology considered to be a potential threat to survival. So in messaging, the name of the game is how do you present yourself as like kind so that you get them to that safe zone from which in business, by what you’re selling. Cuz if they’re in not like kind survival safety mode, no matter how much they need, what you’re offering, they will not buy it. Cause there there’s a part of their brain saying if we do this, we will die.

John Jantsch (03:00): So is it, I have to feel like you’re like me or is it I have to feel like you get me, are those two different things.

Michael Liebowitz (03:08): Those are two different expressions of the same root that we are like each other. And therefore the quote unquote finger quotes, logic of part of the brain goes, I don’t want me to die. Therefore things like me probably don’t want me to die either. So let’s go hang out with things like me.

John Jantsch (03:28): Why, you know, obviously we make far fewer life and death decisions than these ancestors that you, uh, referenced. So why haven’t we evolved? I mean, picking the wrong toothpaste, uh, shouldn’t be a life or death, uh, decision.

Michael Liebowitz (03:43): Yeah, that’s an excellent question. So even though this neurology is going on the way it gets operationalized is not necessarily an actual life or death decision, it really comes down to identity the like kind, this neurology, which I call the critter brain, the light kind, the critter brain is looking for is, does your identity match my identity? And so when it comes to toothpaste or a spatula, whatever, what we do is we choose the one that is presenting itself in a way that matches my identity. Because what if someone sees like an actual person or the, of judge cosmic judges, whatever’s gonna notice if we associate ourselves with the wrong identity. Oh no, right then we’re gonna get punished or whatever. I mean, this isn’t literal this sort of like a metaphor for what’s going on in, in, in the mind. But uh, we want to, we want to choose the things that reinforce and match our identity.

John Jantsch (04:50): So, so in some cases, maybe we could soften it and say, it’s not necessarily life or death, but maybe it’s safer feeling or I, or I,

Michael Liebowitz (04:57): It all

John Jantsch (04:58): Comest make a mistake if I make this choice. Is that more like that? Probably

Michael Liebowitz (05:03): The critter brain doesn’t think in those terms, it does only two things. It does survival and it does emotions. All right, this is why there’s that saying? Like all buying decisions are emotional, but no one ever said, what the hell they’re talking about or which emotion, right? Well, this is the core of it. It just does survival. And it, it communicate it’s in the language of emotions. This is safer, not safe, gives all these good feelings, not safe, gives all the bad feelings and safer, not safe is determined. Like, is this match my identity? Or doesn’t it. Now these signals get picked up by the human brain, all the logic and all the other stuff that we associate with being human. And that just interprets it to, in the words that you just said, right. That, so the critter brain gives off a signal of, Hey, it’s like kind the happy juices go off in the chemistry, human brain picks up and says, oh, I like this because, and it just fills in a story around a rationalization really around why it is that we like it, but it was the critter brain making the real decision.

Michael Liebowitz (06:06): Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:07): So does that suggest that we in our marketing should become even more tribal than, you know, in other words, real trying to appeal to a certain, you know, you’re like me and you know, in your ads and your messaging and your choices about design and everything.

Michael Liebowitz (06:26): Yeah. The word tribal is now getting a bad

John Jantsch (06:28): Name. It is, it is these days.

Michael Liebowitz (06:30): However, the term I use and actually part of my process, working with clients is we, the belonging traits, what are the traits that signify belonging and belonging is a baseline state in all human beings. It is without belonging. Life is not survivable, quite literally not survivable. We will all find ways of belonging. This is where you see confirmation bias and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s old motions of trying to find belonging. It’s also what Seth Goden was pointing at when he is talking about tribes. Right. He’s really just talking about belonging. So how do you signal belonging is, is the answer to that question is like, and to me, if you can dial that up to 11, you are

John Jantsch (07:14): Good. Just know your market is as, as narrow as you focus. It’s probably big enough. Yeah. So I have, for years been saying, people don’t want what we sell. They want their problem solved. And I read a line off your website that, uh, gets at the same point, but maybe a little more subtle than me. People don’t want your thing. They want what your thing means to them. So how do we make that distinction? Yeah. We don’t talk about our thing for right.

Michael Liebowitz (07:41): Well, yeah. It’s better to talk about what your thing means rather than what it’s at least yeah. Human beings. It seems our brains are designed for, to do two things above all else. Number one is to filter out most of reality. Yeah. Right. There’s too much to pay attention to. So it filter most of it out based on our belief systems, which tell us what is important to notice. And the second thing is to attach a meaning, to nearly everything meanings, help us make sense of our world. Right? They give us context for understanding. They help us figure out the relative value between things, right. And really when anyone buys anything, what they’re really buying into is the meaning. It holds in their world big or small or even micro, right? It’s like when I work with someone, the first movement we do is we figure out what’s the belief systems underpinning the business.

Michael Liebowitz (08:41): And I like the pressure’s off your belief system does not have to be profound. The heavens do not have to part. And there’s this universal cosmic knowledge that is imparted upon the, upon your customers. Like no beliefs do not have to be profound. They just have to be true. And when you target your messaging towards beliefs, again, what your beliefs are and your goal is to find other people who believe the same thing. That’s the combination of light kind, right? When you’re clear on that. And you’re clear on what that means to both you and the, and the customer, that’s the, the, the magic, the secret sauce fill in whatever metaphor you want that really gets the brain excited. And it says, and that’s what creates the, and if along the way, you can identify the problem and solve it. Excellent.

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John Jantsch (10:30): I had Robert chill Downey on this show a few years ago, author of influence. And he had told a story that he actually wrote that book so that people would be armed with the knowledge to not be influenced. And of course it turned actually into the Bible of influence of, you know, how to influence. So at what point does this sort of approach turn from being, you know, truthful and authentic to manipul obviously in the wrong hands, of course we’re

Michael Liebowitz (10:55): Talking about, but yeah, exactly. It’s tent and focus on what you, if you focus on what you believe to be true about why you do what you do, the beliefs underpinning the business and just say, Hey, we believe X, Y, and Z either explicitly like that, or implied by other ways of, of turning a phrase, it can only result in sort of like the white hat version of it when it comes from a place of, of honesty and introspection and, and truth to answer, like what happens when someone uses it for bad intent? I don’t know. I don’t go there. And if I sense a someone wants to hire me who in that space, it just doesn’t happen. But I, I tend not to attract them and they self select like, oh, this Michael Guy, he’s definitely not going there because I’m so clear about my belief system and the meaning behind it, that the wrong customers actually self select out of my system.

John Jantsch (11:56): Well, we could go very far down the, the, the rabbit hole of certain tribes being, uh, conned, uh, into, uh, believing that they’re hearing, uh, the truth, but we won’t go there. So let’s get let’s all right. Hopefully we’ve kind of percolated up, you know, the value of what it is you’re talking about. So now let’s kind of get practical. Like what kinds of messages, you know, are we talking about being kind of the best at creating that attraction and, and desire that you’re talking about?

Michael Liebowitz (12:25): Yeah. There are only from my perspective, there are only two things your audience needs to hear first and foremost, everything else, you is a supporting cast member to these two main players. And in no particular order, number one, what’s the main outcome I get from working with you. And for the sake of your listeners, your outcome may or may not be the thing you deliver. Yeah. Right. There’s an old saying. I, I, I forget who coined it, it, it may have been Leo Burnett or some other, a golden age of marketing person, but the paraphrase is people don’t want a drill. What they want as a hole in the wall. Right. It’s like it’s classic and everyone knows it. Like the outcome is not, I purchased a drill, the outcome I’m looking for as a whole, right. So what’s the main outcome of what you do, what this does in orient your audience in what I call space and time when it relates to marketing, which is, am I in the right space with you right now?

Michael Liebowitz (13:28): Right? What’s the context that we’re in together. And is it the one I want? So when you clearly communicate the outcome, come, you help them answer that question quickly. Now, most businesses, I mean, this makes sense, right? It’s like, you gotta tell ’em what the outcome is. Of course, that makes sense. To me, it’s logical. And most businesses do some version of this. Not many of them well do it well, but they do some version of it. The second thing almost no one does. And to me, it’s more important than the first one, which is, so number one is, what’s the main outcome I get from you. And the second question they’re asking is, do we share the same beliefs? Cause this gets back to that safety. If we share the same beliefs, you’re safe, I will not quote unquote die. And therefore I can buy from you.

Michael Liebowitz (14:17): And if we don’t, oh no, all the red flashes start going off. And by speaking clearly about your belief system, you take the question mark away from your audience, cuz trust me, our neurology is looking for it. Do what do you believe? Do we share the same values or whatever term you wanna put on the, are you like me? And if we give vague or sort of like indeterminate answers to that question, it freaks our brains out. We start going, you know, you’re giving me something but not enough. So that’s where babies come from a foot. You’re like kind a foot and you’re not like kind. And we’ll usually default to no cuz why risk it? But we just wanna know, are you safe to be around? And the way you do is another word for this is called trust. Of course. Right? And the fastest way to trust is simply to share what you believe like the fastest

John Jantsch (15:18): And that’s to me, that’s why storytelling has, you know, has become a standard element of marketing today. I, I remember when I started telling people 30 years ago, you know, tell ’em what you believe, tell ’em your story. They’re like, no, they don’t care about me. Yep. You know, they wanna know what they, what they get. But now it’s, you can’t pick up a marketing book that doesn’t have some aspect of storytelling

Michael Liebowitz (15:40): It.

John Jantsch (15:41): Um,

Michael Liebowitz (15:42): Yeah. Yeah. It is. You really? I mean, there’s two. What seem to be opposite facing pieces of advice. Don’t talk about, you talk about your company, tell them what you believe. Right? It’s like, wait, isn’t that about me? It’s like, well, yes, they definitely wanna know what you, what your business believes. Now, if you’re a, so operator that’s you specifically, if you’re in a business where there’s multiple people, it’s the collective here’s leadership. Here’s what we believe. Once they know that the safety system just calms down. It really does.

John Jantsch (16:18): But there’s really a lot of demonstrating that though, too. It’s really easy to say, you know, here’s our tagline. Here’s what we believe. But it’s how they see you respond to complaints on Twitter. It’s, you know, there’s so many things that really go into to really proving that you like saying, trust me,

Michael Liebowitz (16:34): There’s two parts to that. One part is from a very early age, we become excellent BS detectors. And what I mean by BS is actually belief system from a very young age, we can Mrs. Morris, when someone is saying something, they don’t actually

John Jantsch (16:50): My kindergarten teacher. Okay, go ahead.

Michael Liebowitz (16:53): Yeah, exactly. And it comes out in how we communicate you. We can get a sense for disingenuous communication, right? When, back in the day, when Ford was saying quality is job number one, and yet you could tell it’s kind of not right. It’s like, okay, you can talk all you want about quality, but you’re not embodying it. Not just showing it. You’re not embodying it. And the rest of everything you’re telling me. So that’s a moment. We are excellent BS detectors. And number two. You’re absolutely right. When you say it, it’s a promise and you have to follow through on that promise various different ways in, you know, how you communicate. And to me, everything is communication. Not just the message. Everything is

John Jantsch (17:44): Communication. I wanna circle back to one of the things you said earlier, because I think this is a real challenge for a lot of people I work with. Anyway, you talked about what’s the main outcome I’m gonna get. And I think a lot of times we don’t know our customers actually don’t always know or they, or you’re making assumptions and they’re making, you know, like people come to me as a marketer and they tell me they want leads. Well, half the time they just want control over their marketing. You know, they say they want leads. And if we promise ’em leads, we had, you know, were saying, here’s the main outcome. But when you get in there and work with a client for many years, you realize that’s not actually what they were after. I mean, it kind of was, but it wasn’t the, it wasn’t the emotional driver.

Michael Liebowitz (18:27): Right? I’ll answer that by you. An example of a previous, a past, uh, client of mine. This is a client. They make, uh, cooking gadgets and they were marketing like, Hey, cook your meal fast and always Mo or whatever. Right? All the buzzwords. And this also gets back to beliefs. Don’t have to be profound. So the first movement is to find the belief and it turns out after much digging and my background being behavioral neurology, this is actually a therapeutic technique. So I’m actually doing therapy on the, the C-suite during the whole thing. Finally comes out from the CEO. He says, you know, I know this is gonna make me sound superficial, but I love that moment at the dinner party when everyone eats what I, I created and they just look at me like, oh my God, I can’t believe you made this right.

Michael Liebowitz (19:18): And digging deeper. The belief was simply, it’s fun to show off, right? Like fantastic legit. It’s fun to show off. That’s the closely held belief underpinning this business and why these people started this business in the first. Well, now you can ask another question, which I, which is the meaning behind the belief. All beliefs have meaning connected to them. Meanings, give context, which is then you ask. Great. So what good things come to you when you’re able to show off dig a little deeper turns out well, because everyone deserves to feel valued. Oh my gosh, what’s the main outcome of this business. It’s not fast, moist, blah, blah, blah, food. It’s feeling valued through the creation of foods and such like that. Well, now, you know what the real outcome is. This turned into a message of, do you wanna be the star of the dinner party? Because what circles that square is like, I like get to show off and I get to feel valued from showing off. So now they’re talking about dinner parties and these are tools you can use to be the star of the dinner party and notice being the star of the dinner party as an identity, you can say, I am, if anything that starts with I am can be formulated into identity. I am the star of the dinner party, but you can’t say I am moist fast cooking.

John Jantsch (20:43): What?

Michael Liebowitz (20:44): Yeah. Does it

John Jantsch (20:44): Make sense? Plus, I’m guessing that you charge more now for which is even better, right? You have first, I’m gonna invite you to tell people how they can find out more about your work. We’ve obviously scratched the surface, but I noticed you have a, like a two hour kind of masterclass workshop, you know, to everything that you offer monthly. And I, I will have a link to the website and, and that opportunity, because I’m guessing that’s probably is easier way to, to dip your toe in the water of, you know, what my, what Michael teaches.

Michael Liebowitz (21:11): Absolutely. Yeah. The thank you for bring up the workshop. The first half is put this in finger quotes for everyone listening is my Ted talk. I haven’t actually been on the Ted stage. I just wanna make that clear, but it is that kind of talk about how our neurology is wired up to receive and respond to messaging and the whole psychology and neurology behind the whole system. Well, now that you learn that stuff, how do I apply it to my business? Well, that’s the second half is we actually apply what you learn to your specific business in the workshop. So I love learning on opportunities. It’s even better when learning opportunities get, turn into, like, how do I apply this to my business right now? So that’s what we is really

John Jantsch (21:56): What everybody wants. Yeah. And that’s at

Michael Liebowitz (21:58): You come out with a better message than you had coming

John Jantsch (22:00): In, and that’s a mind magnetizer.com. Right? Awesome.

Michael Liebowitz (22:04): Correct. Yeah. That’s the website and you can go register there and all month through the rest of the year is, is you get able

John Jantsch (22:12): To sign up for, and those are small cohorts or

Michael Liebowitz (22:16): My max me cohort is 10 people.

John Jantsch (22:18): So a little bit of interaction. Yeah.

Michael Liebowitz (22:20): So everyone can get individual attention. When I first started this, I had 15 people in the room and that was a lot of work. So I limited 10.

John Jantsch (22:27): Awesome. Well, Michael, thanks for taking time. Stop by the, a duct tape marketing, uh, podcast. And, uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Michael Liebowitz (22:35): Thank you, John. It’s been a pleasure.

John Jantsch (22:37): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system, your clients, and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your clients’ tab.

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Is It Too Late To Start A Podcast?

Is It Too Late To Start A Podcast? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Dan Franks

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Dan Franks. Dan is the Co-founder and president of Podcast Movement, the world’s largest conference and trade show for the podcast industry. He is a CPA and was formerly the Business Manager and Director of Live Events for Midroll Media.

Key Takeaway:

It seems like everyone today has a podcast. You might be wondering if it’s too late to start yours – the short answer? No. It’s not too late. The market may be more crowded than it once was, but people are still listening to podcasts at a growing rate. Podcasts are and will continue to be an amazing marketing tool that gives you a way to build a community and gives you a platform to advertise your products and services. In this episode, Dan Franks shares why podcasting isn’t dead and advice on starting your own.

Questions I ask Dan Franks:

  • [1:11] Can you give me a little bit of the history behind Podcast Movement?
  • [1:55] What does Podcast Movement look like today?
  • [3:26] What’s been your history, and how did you get into podcasting?
  • [5:12] If you were talking to someone who was thinking about starting a podcast, would you tell them now it’s too late?
  • [11:31] What you’ve seen people doing to make podcast guesting just as effective as podcast hosting?
  • [13:03] Have you seen any really out-of-the-box uses for being a guest on a podcast?
  • [14:32] Companies today are coming up with different uses for podcasts – what kind of trends along those lines are you seeing?
  • [15:56] If I’ve got my show going, how do I get more listeners?
  • [18:44] What’s the best starter set up for somebody who wants to get going on a podcast?
  • [20:54] What’s your current podcast setup?
  • [22:52] Where can people find out more about your work?

More About Dan Franks:

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Salesman Podcast, hosted by will Barron brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell or just peek at the latest sales news. Check out the sales podcast where host Will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and in big business in effective and ethical ways. One of my favorite episodes lately, how to personalize your sales outreach at massive scale, who doesn’t want to do that, listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dan Franks. He’s a co-founder and president of podcast movement, the world’s largest conference and trade show for the podcast industry. And he’s a CPA was formerly the businessman manager and director of live events for mid role media. So Dan, welcome to the show.

Dan Franks (01:07): Thanks for having me, John I’m super excited.

John Jantsch (01:10): So, so give me a little bit of the history of podcast movement. I guess let’s start there. The trade show that you run and known.

Dan Franks (01:18): Yeah, so there was four of us who were big time podcast fans and podcasters ourselves. And, uh, this would’ve been 20 12, 20 13, somewhere in there and quickly realized that it was a, a somewhat lonely space sitting in closets recording, you know, your own voice and maybe having a guest. And at that time it was trying to figure out how to record people on Skype. And it was really just a very impersonal, medium to be a creator. And so getting together, we thought it would be really neat to create some kind of environment where we could get together with other creators and learn, you know, learn from each other, but meet each other and really just kind of bring some personal connections to this creation side of things. And that’s where we started in 2014.

John Jantsch (01:56): So, so I guess now tell me, what does it look like today?

Dan Franks (01:59): Yeah, so at that time it was, you know, kind of a community gathering. We about five or 600 people at that first year event, which is, was really big way bigger than we thought it would be. We actually launched it on Kickstarter. So really just kind of throwing it against the wall to see if anyone else was out there. That thought it was a good idea. And since then, it’s grown to a twice a year event where each event gets, you know, somewhere between a thousand and over 3000 attendees each year, and then a Facebook community with 70,000 members, that’s super active, the largest Facebook community for podcasters. So really just grown to, you know, a lot of other things too. We’ve got a daily newsletter, that’s got over 25,000 subscribers. That’s all about, you know, podcasting and news and tips and tricks and all that. So really grown from just that, you know, idea of a game gathering to now, this living, breathing kind of media machine, all for people who create podcasts,

John Jantsch (02:50): You know, it’s funny, you mentioned that about it being kind of a lonely space. I actually started mine in, in 2005. So I, I may be one of the, the old school oldest school, particularly of continuously running because you know, a lot of people that started when I did, I think it was hard to do. It was hard to get people to listen because there weren’t, you know, we didn’t have the iPhone, you know, app that, uh, came, you know, delivered with the iPhone. And so I think a lot of people did give up on it because they really weren’t building any audience or didn’t see any point in it, uh, no, necessarily, but then obviously once it became much more mainstream, probably around 2012, 13 is when it really probably took off again. So, so what’s been your history. I mean, you said you were a, a CPA, uh, that’s not necessarily an industry that jumped into podcasting early on. So, so what was kind of were, was that a real differentiator for you as a CPA or was podcasting just a side gig?

Dan Franks (03:41): Yeah, so, I mean, it started as a CPA sitting, you know, working 80 hour weeks behind a computer, just kind of, you know, plugging and chug chugging numbers and trying to figure out what to do to pass the time. And podcasting was from a listening standpoint, something that really filled that gap. And then from there, you know, just kind of thinking, Hey, maybe I should try this. A lot of people do with while listening to a podcast, it’s very common thing. And yeah, ended up connecting with a coworker who had similar thoughts. We were both accountants. We, at that time were specializing in, they call it outsource, uh, CFP. So we were kind of helping small business owners with their financial, not just taxes, but a lot of their financial planning and book keeping and situations like that. And we thought it would be real cool to kind of talk about small business, best practices and interview small business owners and that kind of thing.

Dan Franks (04:28): Yeah. And now that’s like one of the most common niches in podcasting, a small business, but you know, 20 12, 20 13, it was still a little bit more of a, of a open pond, so to speak and yeah, just started that way and really kind of immersed ourselves into that creator community. And like I said, the one thing led to another and we just really enjoyed being creators ourselves and getting no other creators. And that led to us kind of putting together that, you know, curating that community and, and led to a podcast movement as it is today.

John Jantsch (04:56): You know, you mentioned that. I mean, it was such a great differentiator right early on. I mean, it really kind of raised a lot of people to the ranks of authority, but you have a lot of people now that’re saying, you know, the world doesn’t need another podcast. I mean, there’s too many of ’em. I know the answer to this, but I’m gonna ask you if you were talking to somebody thinking about starting a podcast and they had a good idea and a good platform, would you tell ’em now it’s, it’s too late?

Dan Franks (05:19): No, it’s not too late, but it’s definitely crowded and whatever you can think of that you wanna find a podcast about for the most part, there’s a podcast out there. So really the approach, you know, back then, wasn’t, you know, back then we could say, is there a podcast on this topic? There’s a good chance. It isn’t. So you can dive in and be the one and kind of, you know, have that, that early first to market, uh, effect so to speak. Whereas now there’s pretty much ever everything out there. So, you know, what’s the angle is that you’re going to do it at better quality. Are you gonna tell better stories? Are you going to have better guests? Are you going to bring a different angle of ex your experience to the table? Are you representing a brand that hasn’t ever had that outlet to speak to its customers or its potential customers? So what are you doing that’s different that would just make somebody who’s searching your topic in the iTunes, you know, apple play store or in Spotify searching your topic and come across yours and make you pick yours versus the other one that has to do with, uh, you know, a similar topic.

John Jantsch (06:14): Yeah. And I, I think the good news is yes, the market is crowded, but there’s also, you know, millions and millions of more people listening to podcasts. So, so every niche that you could think of has got a pretty good size audience, I suspect.

Dan Franks (06:28): Yeah. And it’s, you know, it’s exciting now because back even five years ago, really to be a successful podcast, a lot of people saw it, meaning you get over 10,000 listeners and you start to be able to sell ads and have advertisers on your show and you make money with the podcast. Whereas now there’s so many different definitions of success when it comes to your podcast. It could be, yes. I want to get a whole lot of listeners and sell advertisements, or it could be, I have this product or service that I’m trying to start on the side. And the podcast is meant to be a funnel for that or, or, you know, some, so, so in that particular instance, okay, success, isn’t 10,000 plus listeners and being able to sell ads it’s can I convert one of my 100 listeners every month to being a customer?

Dan Franks (07:09): And then that’s way more, you know, way more profitable for you if that’s your goal than just trying to, you know, fight for advertisers. So, you know, now I think there’s so many, any more opportunities and with tools like Patreon and all these, where you can kind of, uh, launch these additional add-ons for your listeners. Now, you don’t necessarily, again, need those thousands and thousands of listeners. You just need either listeners who are gonna convert for you or your business, or who are going to kind of support you as a creator from that, you know, crowdfunding type standpoint, that premium offerings type standpoint. So just so many more ways now to define success.

John Jantsch (07:44): Well, and I’m, I’m glad you touched on it too, because I tell business owners all the time, you know, think of it as a potential lead generation, uh, tool as well. I mean, if you’re, I’m a consultant, if let’s say I’m targeting, you know, midsize company CEO as well, I’m gonna do a show, getting best practices of mid-size company CEOs, and I’m gonna have ’em on my show. It’s gonna be great content, but at some point some of them are gonna go, oh, I’ll take your phone call now and listen to what you know, you, I mean, so you’re not using it to sell necessarily, but you’re using it to get access to a potential target market. I, I think that one of the most underutilized, you know, aspects of podcasts, you become a member of the media.

Dan Franks (08:25): Yeah. And, and another thing that kind of, that, that reminds me of is one of the things we see a lot now are like professionals. You know, we talked about the accountant thing, but professionals who are almost talking shop amongst themselves, and it’s not meant for the customer, it’s meant for other people in your position. So for instance, you might be some sort of specialized surgeon that there’s only, you know, a thousand of you in the world, but if you’re doing a podcast just for, you know, you and your fellow colleagues and you start listening, everyone else starts listening to the show. Well, then you’ve got these super high dollar advertisers who desperately want to get in front of that particular type of doctor, you know, people aren’t reading magazines anymore. And, you know, there’s limited ways to get in front of just that targeted audience.

Dan Franks (09:05): But if you have a podcast where, okay, it maybe only has 150 listeners an episode, but 150 of ’em are the exact type of doctor that you’re trying to get in front of for your, you know, piece of medical equipment or whatever it is. There’s hardly any other way to get in front of that group in such a targeted way. So again, like there’s, we see that type of thing start popping up or dentists in a lot of it’s in the medical, but it just becomes such a, you know, such a targeted way that you can, you know, create content and get in front of those advertisers that become super profitable. And some, I talked to one doctor who started taking less and less shifts to put more and more focus. And you know, the starting salary there is already pretty good, but the podcast is doing better. So it’s pretty exciting.

John Jantsch (09:45): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, whether you’re looking to sell your business in the near future, or just wanna make it more scalable and profitable Work Better Now, as virtual assistance can help you get there. Adding a virtual assistant to your team can help you focus on high value activities like business development to boost your bottom line Work Better Now, clients say that their virtual executive assistants have made an impact on their business. Well beyond their expectations for only $1,900 a month, you get a full-time assistant who is 100% dedicated to your business. There are no contracts, no additional cost based in Latin America with incredible English, proficiency and business experience work better. Now assistance undergo a rigorous screening and onboarding process work better now is currently offering duct tape marketing readers and listeners $150 off per month for three months, just mentioning duct tape to learn more, visit workbetternow.com.

John Jantsch (10:42): So let’s flip the mic around. Um, a lot of times when people talk about podcasting, they think, oh, okay, I have to start a podcast to use podcasting. I actually started an entire company called podcast bookers, sorry, there’s my ad podcast, bookers.com that that our whole intent was to actually get people on podcasts as guests. And I think a lot of times, certainly a lot of people like to be on shows, but actually making that a very intentional part of your marketing, uh, activity to get on the right shows to get the exposure, you know, to get maybe the scene as well. You know, an expert you’re gonna get content, but the little dirty little secret is, I dunno about you Dan, but when somebody comes on my show, I promote the heck out of that show. I promote the heck out of the links that they mentioned, you know, on the show. So it’s the greatest way to get back links today. So talk to me about, you know, your idea or what you’ve seen people doing to make podcast guesting, just as effecti as podcast hosting.

Dan Franks (11:38): Yeah. So, I mean, obviously there’s services like the one you provide that kind of curates what shows would be best for you as a potential guest, but you know, that’s something and you would say this too, that someone, if they wanted to, you know, roll their sleeves up and put in the dirty work, they could do that themselves. And I think there’s a lot of value that goes into finding those right fits for you as a guest to be on. I, I like to say like, look at the longevity of these shows that you’re potentially sure looking to get on because quite honestly, a lot of people do get that shiny object syndrome, right. And start their own show and you might get pitched to be a guest on that show and it looks good because it’s this fun idea and you go back and check it out after your episode is released.

Dan Franks (12:14): Like six months later, you check it out and the show’s, you know, sunset and no one’s gonna ever hear your show again, because it’s gone it’s off the air. So yeah, I think, you know, as you’re, if you’re looking to be intentional about being a guest go, you know, research shows spend some time find those best practices or again, you know, work with someone like you, but yeah, just getting in front of those audiences. And again, like I said about those people that can, you know, buy advertisements on very specialized shows, that same approach can be taken to being a guest. You can find very specialized shows that are the exact right audience that you’re looking to get in front of. Yeah. And if you bring something compelling other than just a pitch for yourself, but something compelling, you know, an expertise that maybe some, one else couldn’t provide or that, that show was never featured before, you know, you can be as much of a value add to that show as, you know, getting that value in return.

John Jantsch (13:01): I had a client tell me this one and I’d love to hear, you know, if you’ve seen any really out of the box uses that he actually went and found shows that other guests were kind of his profile of who he was looking for. He’d go beyond the show. And then he would go through the list of guests and contact them, say, Hey, I saw you were on this show too. You know, I really loved your episode. You know, maybe, you know, I’d love to, I’d love to meet you and hear more about what you do. And he, he actually uses it as a somewhat aggressive lead generation or lead mining approach.

Dan Franks (13:32): Yeah. I mean, I think there’s a couple different angle there where being on podcasts or hosting podcasts really kind of put you in connection with people that otherwise you wouldn’t be able to. So I know a lot of people who host Joe’s and bring on guests who otherwise, if they had just cold emailed this person, they’d never make this connection, whether it’s a famous person or an influencer in their space, same thing goes with that. If you have that, that, like you said, that, that commonality, Hey, we were both on this show and I, I really enjoyed your episode. Like, can we connect that’s, you know, one, a foot in the door that you otherwise wouldn’t have had that to be able to relate to people. So yeah, a lot of different ways to skin the cat in terms of leveraging podcasts and guesting and being a guest and having guests, you know, to further, you know, your personal or your professional brand.

John Jantsch (14:14): So in the end, we’re really just talking about content, audio content, right. And so a lot of people think in terms of it as a broadcast out to the world, but I’m in, I’m seeing one trend I’m seeing is increasingly companies are using it, you know, even internally or communities are using it internally, just as a communications means what kind of trends along those lines are you seeing?

Dan Franks (14:35): Yeah. We’re starting to see a lot of, like you said, companies who are not necessarily replacing, but supplementing that weekly, you know, company update with an audio version of it, or maybe they’re interviewing whether it’s executives or just interviewing other employees of the company to where you can kind of, you know, learn the stories of the people that you either work with, or that are maybe in other departments. So really just kind of bringing a little more personality to what otherwise would be that weekly team update email. Yeah. I’m also seeing yeah. Municipalities and cities and counties use both YouTube. So video style, but also podcasts for those weekly, you know, updates that the city might send out. You know, don’t forget trash is getting picked up, you know, late this week cuz of the holiday. And that sounds super boring, but there’s a lot of people who, Hey, I just want to hear that, you know, three minute update from the city and I’m more likely to listen to the podcast than read the newsletter. So that’s a super exciting trend we’re seeing. And then, you know, a little bit in a similar way, we’re seeing these, you know, companies use it a little bit more for content marketing and, and communications with customers or, or potential customers. So in a similar way of, you know, disseminating information as, you know, municipality or a company with it for internal communication, we’re seeing a lot of that for external as well. So a lot of kind of newer developments in extensions of what podcasts might be.

John Jantsch (15:51): All right. So a, I know you don’t have the silver bullet answer to this, but I know you also get asked this question a lot. So I got my show going, how do I get more listeners?

Dan Franks (16:00): Yeah, no, that is, and you mentioned in, you know, 2005, it was hard to find listeners because you know, there weren’t that many of them to begin with the limited shows, but limited listeners. And now it’s the opposite problem. Lots of shows and lots of listeners. Lot of what we see working really well are, is cross promotion between shows, right? I know, you know, on some of your episodes, you have, I think it’s paid sponsorships, but it’s podcasts advertising on another podcast and new shows can do that, have that same effect on one another, just by finding shows, maybe in a similar niche or that might have complimentary audiences and really help each other promote like, Hey, if you like my, this other show you should check out. And we know it works because we see the big, the biggest networks in the world cross promoting their own shows on their own shows.

Dan Franks (16:41): So that’s a great way. Just once you’ve got a show going, you’ve got a track record, reach out to similar shows. We also see something called feed drops done on a somewhat regular basis. And that’s when you find those same shows, maybe develop that rapport with them by by cross-promoting. And then you actually drop one of your episodes on their feed and they’ll drop one of their episodes on your feed. So you’re not just telling them about, you know, telling your audience about this show and you might record a custom intro on the front end and say, Hey, you know, this week we’re taking off, but we’ve got this special bonus episode of a show that I think you’re really gonna like, and then the, they listen to it and then they’ll seek it out and subscribe. So a lot of kind of ways like that, where again, everything we do is community focused. Yeah. Um, at podcast movement and that’s a community focused type way to help yourself grow and other people as well.

John Jantsch (17:27): I tell you what I’ve done a couple times and it’s been really fun, especially when I have like a new book coming out or something like that. So I have a reason to be very promo emotional myself is I’ll actually have a guest host. So I’ll actually have somebody come on my show, who does a show and interview me on my own podcast. And now obviously it gives ’em an opportunity to, or, or she to promote their show. So another kind of fun twist.

Dan Franks (17:50): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there’s all kinds of things you can do. And that’s the fun thing about podcasting and, and YouTube and blogging and anything else where, you know, there’s not really anyone telling you what you can and can’t do. You can just come up with ideas like that, try it. And if it bombs, don’t do it again. But if it works, which a lot of times it does, then, you know, you know, it might go after and do it again.

John Jantsch (18:10): So let’s, we a geek out forever on this. So I’ll try to keep it short. You know, let’s talk just a moment about the tech for podcasting. When I first started, I actually recorded phone calls. I had a little device that I bought from the FBI. I think that plugged in, it was almost like tapping the phone and then it would go into an external recorder and, and I would have to upload that file. It was a mess. It was a lot it’s, it’s why a lot of people quit early because it was so much work. Now, of course, we’ve got where you and I are recording this on Riverside. You know, there’s all kinds of tools to transcribe, do all this stuff at a minimum. What’s in your opinion, the best kind of starter set up for, you know, somebody who wants to get going on a podcast.

Dan Franks (18:51): Yeah. I think the best starter set up is to get a basic USB microphone. There’s several out there that you can research and they’re, you know, 50 between 50 and a hundred dollars. It’s an investment for sure. But it’s not a gigantic one, right. Plugs directly into your computer or your laptop. Uh, they dynamic microphones usually. So they’re pretty good about canceling out external noises. Right. And yeah, so like from a technical setup, like bare bones, USB microphone, the two that we really like are the audio Technica, uh, 2100, I believe is the current model. And then there’s a Q2 Q2 U by Sampson. Those two are very good. They come with little Mike stands. So really those plugged into your laptop and a semi quiet environ, we’ll give you pretty good results just to start. And then there’s all kinds of like hosting companies out there that’ll provide free service.

Dan Franks (19:37): Anchor is the most known one, but some of the really good ones out there red circle is one. I really like, uh, that is free hosting. And you can, yeah. You know, put a, get a podcast ready to go for somewhat minimal investment. Now I don’t necessarily think you should just like get on there, plug the microphone in record, publish a podcast. Definitely think there’s some, you know, planning and, you know, mapping out what you want this show to be and getting some episodes under your belt before launching. But you know, at bare minimum, it’s not a giant investment. We were talking before getting on the air, I’m in a room with a road caster, which is a giant mixer with fancy lights and a bunch of mic microphones all over. Those are cool to have, but definitely think people should, you know, get started, make sure they like it. You know, my parents used to always, you know, we’ll buy you, you know, something small and make sure you like it. And then we’ll get you the expensive bike. If you actually, you know, show us, you actually wanna ride the bike on a regular basis. Same thing with this. Like you can definitely go more expensive, but make sure it’s something you wanna with before spending too much.

John Jantsch (20:34): Okay. My current every day, Mike is as sure what’s this one S SM seven B, I think they call sure. SM seven B into a cloud lifter, which lifts the gain into a two mix mixer channel that, or it’s actually a four mixer channel. I just use two channels. That was probably a hundred dollars. So, I mean, all, all in all pretty professional setup, you know, under a grant. And what’s your current setup,

Dan Franks (20:56): Dan? The one I’m using here in this little, uh, studio at my coworking space, it’s as sure SM seven B the same microphone. Yeah, probably one of the, the, the better high end microphones there. But like I said, the roader a mixer, which it’s a great mixer. It’s really good if you’re recording three or four people at once in the same location and

John Jantsch (21:12): Like the Eagles are there and they wanna perform. There

Dan Franks (21:15): You go. There you go.

John Jantsch (21:17): Cause it could handle that.

Dan Franks (21:18): Yeah, for sure. But yeah, I mean, it’s, you know, like I said, most, a lot of people would not notice the difference between the listener. When I say, say people, the difference between the a hundred dollars setup and the thousand dollars setup, a lot of it is how you use it, what your recording environment is like, if you’re, you know, got the window open and there’s someone mowing the lawn outside, it doesn’t matter how expensive your setup is. It’s still gonna sound like the window’s open and someone’s mowing the lawn outside. But you know, everything from, uh, I, I know people, I know very large podcast who record in their closet because, you know, close everywhere and really dampens the sound and creates a really nice recording environment. I know someone who’s a, a college professor who wears his graduation gown kind of throws it over him as he records. And again, it’s like a little recording booth. So, uh, a lot of the podcasters you listen to on a regular basis, they’re making due with whatever they can in the house. I mean, that’s something that anyone and everyone could figure out kind of a solution for

John Jantsch (22:12): One of my first guests early on was Tim Ferris, right after the four hour work work week had come out and he was on a mobile phone walking on a windy day. So you can imagine what that sounded like.

Dan Franks (22:24): Yeah. And you know, a lot of people now, the iPhone microphone and the, in the AirPod microphones are not horrible, not recommended, but you know, just technology as you, you were referencing earlier has gotten so much better even on those handheld devices again. Yeah. Maybe don’t walk down the streets of Chicago on the phone for, for a podcast recording, but you know, if the best you have is your, you know, your iPhone phone, it might make due for that, you know, some of those test episodes.

John Jantsch (22:53): So Dan tell people where they can find out more about your work and certainly, uh, check out the next and maybe tell us when the next podcast movement is.

Dan Franks (23:00): Yeah. So, uh, podcastmovement.com. We’ve got all of our daily newsletter up there, all kinds of, uh, tips and tricks and advice for new podcasters, as well as, uh, existing podcast and industry professionals and podcast movement right now happens twice a year. So the end of March, 2022 is our next one. And then our flagship event is this August in Dallas. So two big events, hopefully getting back into in person event action this year and yeah. Looking forward to continuing to grow.

John Jantsch (23:27): Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks for stopping by the duct tape, mark marketing podcast, Dan, and, uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days at a podcast movement or on the road somewhere

Dan Franks (23:36): Looking forward to it. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (23:38): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in, feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the Certified Marketing Manager program from Duct Tape Marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

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

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

 

 

 

Whether you are looking to sell your business in the near future or just want to make it more scalable and profitable, Work Better Now’s virtual assistants can help you get there.

Work Better Now clients say that their Virtual Executive Assistants have made an impact on their businesses well beyond their expectations. For only $1900/month, you get a full-time assistant who is 100% dedicated to your business. There are no contracts and no additional costs. Based in Latin America with incredible English proficiency and business experience, Work Better Now Assistants undergo a rigorous screening and on-boarding process.

Get $150.00 off per month for 3 months just by mentioning “Duct Tape”. Learn more here.

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How To Build A Winning Coaching Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Marc Mawhinney

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Marc Mawhinney. Marc is a lifelong entrepreneur who helps coaches get more clients without paid advertising. He achieves this with his coaching programs, his podcast Natural Born Coaches, his Facebook group The Coaching Jungle, and his exclusive print newsletter – Secret Coach Club.

Key Takeaway:

There are certainly a lot of people jumping into the coaching profession. Building a successful coaching business isn’t rocket science, but it does take following proven steps and building things properly from the ground up. In this episode, Marc Mawhinney and I walk through how to cut through the noise today and what it takes to build a profitable coaching business.

Questions I ask Marc Mawhinney:

  • [1:37] How long have you yourself been a coach and where’d you get started with your training?
  • [2:59] How do you find that you’re able to cut through that noise that you mentioned?
  • [4:27] How do you get clients without paid advertising?
  • [6:12] If I’m just getting started as a coach and need to get clients, is there a channel that you would tell people is a great place to get a jumpstart?
  • [7:38] When you are working with coaches, what’s the thing they get wrong most often?
  • [9:38] How does somebody who doesn’t have a reputation already go about building a reputation of influence or expertise?
  • [11:45] What are some of the practices that you see that top-tier coach coaching businesses do?
  • [13:52] What do you see successful coaches doing to actually stimulate referrals?
  • [16:07] Is there a delivery mechanism you see that works best for coaching nowadays?
  • [19:21] Are there any trends that you see in coaching right now you think people ought to be paying attention to?
  • [20:18] Where can more people find out about your programs and your work?

More About Marc Mawhinney:

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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast is brought to you by the Salesman Podcast, hosted by Will Barron brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Look, if you work in sales, wanna learn how to sell or just peek at the latest sales news. Check out the sales podcast where host will Barron helps sales professionals learn how to find buyers and in big business in effective and ethical ways. One of my favorite episodes lately, how to personalize your sales outreach at massive scale, who doesn’t want to do that? Listen to the salesman podcast, wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Marc Mawhinney. He’s a lifelong entrepreneur who helps coaches get more clients without paid advertising. He achieves this with his coaching programs, his podcast, natural born coaches, his Facebook group, the coaching jungle and his exclusive print newsletter secret coach club. So mark, welcome to the show.

Marc Mawhinney (01:15): Well, uh, thanks for having me, John, and I should let people know, uh, what a good guy you are. I messed up our original meeting last week where I didn’t up at our time, uh, scheduling snafu. Totally my fault, but you’re very gracious and here we are today. So it’s embarrassing for me, but thank you for not, uh, blocking me and kicking me outta your

John Jantsch (01:33): World. Now you’ve done your public penance there. So all all is right. So, so how long let’s talk a little bit about your journey. How long have you yourself been a coach and kinda where do you get started your training? Cuz there’s, there’s certainly a lot of people jumping into the profession and I’d, I’d love to hear kind of maybe how your, your approach or your point of difference.

Marc Mawhinney (01:54): Yeah, so I officially started March, 2014, so we’re around eight years now. And at the time I thought I was too late to the party of I was crowded and uh, I waited too long and here we are in 2022 and it’s 10 times noisier and way more coaches. So the more of the story, there’s never a perfect time. Just jump in there and do it. Now. My background’s actually real estate. You know, I spent about a decade building up a large real estate company and throughout my twenties, and then everything collapsed in 2009. Right. And basically I went through a rough period of couple years where after nonstop success, it was just a couple years of struggle and everything. I touched, turned to crap instead of gold. And I was held back to my feet by several coaches. And that’s how I found out about coaching. What eventually led me into start my coaching business in 2014,

John Jantsch (02:41): You made a use the word, no, uh, noisy. Mm. And I think that I too have, you know, I work with consultants and have for many years. And when I started my program maybe 10 years ago, I don’t know that there were too many people out there now everybody’s selling some sort of training for digital agencies. And you know, how do you find that you kind of cut through that

Marc Mawhinney (03:01): Noise? Well, I like yourself. I mean, you’ve been at it longer than me and there’s that consistency, you know, since 2014, I’ve released 751 episodes as of today for my podcast, you know? And I’ve gone on a lot of shows like this. I I’ve been doing daily emails to my list since 26 steam and haven’t missed a day there. So it’s not always a sexy superpower consistency. Yeah. Cause everyone’s looking for, you know, the magic bullet, but it’s just showing up every day and then you’re gonna outlast those people that we’ve all seen. They jump into it and the, and they, uh, burn themselves out. You know, they, they don’t make the million bucks in the first month they get frustrated and then they’re gone. So a lot of it was just me showing up every day. Like, was it Woody Allens it showing up half the battle or something? I don’t know. I’m not a big Woody Allen fan, but for his movies. But I think he said that,

John Jantsch (03:49): So let me get this straight. You’re saying you work really hard for a long time. That’s the secret.

Marc Mawhinney (03:53): Yeah. Go figure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:55): Who wants? I like that.

Marc Mawhinney (03:57): I’m an optimistic person, but uh, what to things like business, I’m also realistic. So I say I’m an optimistic realist. Uh, so I’m not the type, uh, you know, when you plant a seed and you, uh, sprinkle some water on it and stuff, you don’t expect it to come up outta the ground until the next day, I just assume it’ll happen. So yeah. I mean, everything I do is with that in mind that, Hey, I’m just gonna do my best job possible, gonna hang in there. And then the results usually come, but I don’t beat myself up if I don’t get a bunch of money coming in on day one to trying something. Right.

John Jantsch (04:27): So in the intro, you mentioned that you do marketing, uh, for coaches or teach marketing for coaches without, uh, paid advertising. So I’m guessing somebody listening to this show, I go, okay, how do I, you know, get clients without paid advertising market?

Marc Mawhinney (04:42): Well, we just touched on it. You gotta roll up your sleeves and do some work. Yeah. Uh, so when I got started in 2014 coming off of bad business closure where I lost everything, you know, went belly up. I didn’t have the benefit of having a big war chest. Like I had back in my real estate days, cuz I used to do a ton of now we’re talking about the stone ages, you know, the early 2000, but I did a lot of postcard mailouts and radio advertising and print advertising and so on and all. And then when I start coaching, I’m like, oh man, I don’t have that. I can’t be spending tens of thousands of dollars a month on marketing. Uh, at the time I thought of negative looking back now there was a silver lining there cuz it forced me to really hone my message.

Marc Mawhinney (05:20): I had to do it all or, and put that work into it. And so I do find a lot of times people try to shortcut the process of this coaching. Let’s say they’re coming from corporate America, they got their golden parachute or they’re sitting on a bunch of money and they think I’ll just hire some, uh, funnel expert or guru and spend 30 or 50 grand and that’ll handle it. But yeah, that, that’s how coaches can do it is just by rolling up your sleeves. I know it sounds like common sense and just doing it.

John Jantsch (05:48): So, you know, I talk about that as, as well. And I talk about, you know, the various channels and you know, ways that we can reach our clients and inevitably somebody, you know, comes up like I’ll, I’ll, I’ll do a talk to seven steps to, you know, marketing, small business marketing success or something. And at the end I’ll always, somebody will come up and say, that’s great. There’s all these things we gotta do. But like what’s the one thing, right? So, so if I’m, if I, if I’m just getting started, say as a coach and I really, you know, I do need to get clients. Is there a channel, is there a place, is there an activity that you would tell people? Well, as you’re just getting started, here’s, you know, here’s something you should at least do to maybe kind of jumpstart.

Marc Mawhinney (06:28): I mean there’s more than one way to skin a cat, right? So there’s certain ma uh, platforms that I prefer you and I chatted about this. When you came on my show, a good example, you with blogging. I mean, that was a great way that got your name out there, put you on the map and everything for me podcast really have three pillars, podcasting. That’s my show. But also going out on shows, I like this. There’s a Facebook group, really community building. Uh, so I have the coaching jungle group and then the third ways with daily email marketing. So what I would say is, um, the, your three pillars or a couple things may be different than mine, but find, uh, one or a couple things that you enjoy doing and that you can get results from and then consistently do it instead of trying to spread out and do every single thing that’s out there. Cause you don’t have the time to do that. So it’s like trying to start a fire with a magnifying glass. If you’re moving it around, it’s not gonna catch on fire. Uh, you gotta keep in one place. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:19): Great. Uh, point, I remember doing that as a kid all the time, um, laying

Marc Mawhinney (07:23): You with the little army figures, it goes Bart Simpson, one of the episodes of the Simpsons, he was melting the little green army guy.

John Jantsch (07:30): Um, I, I think you kind of answered this already, but I’m gonna, I’m gonna pose it to you directly and you could say, well, yeah, that’s what I meant by that. But when you are working with coaches, what do you see that they tip? What, what’s the thing they get wrong most often?

Marc Mawhinney (07:43): Well, especially with new coaches, uh, they assume that they’re gonna spend, uh, roughly 80% of their time coaching. And then, oh, the other 20% maybe finding clients doing a little bit of backend paperwork and stuff, but the majority of their time will be spent coaching. Yeah. Anyone who spend any time the business and is that it’s a flip side of it. And actually it wouldn’t even be 20% of your time. Coaching is probably even less, but the, the vast majority of your time spent, uh, doing the things to, to find clients, which some people don’t like because they do the coaching, right. That’s why they’re getting into it. And they, they think, oh gee, I don’t wanna be selling it. I don’t wanna be posting content marketing or whatever, but that’s what you have to do. You’re gonna be a, uh, well kept secret. If you’re not willing to get out there. I’ve often said if I had to put my money on one of two coaches, if there’s a mediocre coach that has amazing advertiser marketing and, and skills, but then there’s this incredible coach best in the world, but sucks at marketing. I’d put my money in the mediocre coach. Unfortunately. Uh, that’s just the way the world is.

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John Jantsch (09:38): You know, you’ve been doing this for a while. You’ve put lots of time and energy into building a bit of a reputation. There’s no question that has value, right? I mean, people, uh, see you, they begin to like you and trust you and they’re willing to pay a premium perhaps to work with you because of a reputation. How does somebody who doesn’t have that go about building, uh, a reputation of influence or in expertise without, you know, without having that kind of long term, uh, success?

Marc Mawhinney (10:09): Well, I mean, I think, uh, one great way to do it’s podcasting and you’re a fan of podcasting too. I started my show in November of 2014. So I was still within that first year of being in business. The podcast got me in touch with some really, uh, great people. You know, some were big names, uh, some weren’t so big names with their interesting people. Well, connected got my foot in the door with others. And then when people went to check, they’re like, oh, gee, he’s, you know, host a podcast. He’s had these people on, like for example, I rich Lipton and Steve Chandler on my show fairly early in the run, they wrote the prosperous coach and they’re well known in, in coaching circles. So people say, oh, Jay mark knows rich. And Steve, you know, now we’re not best buddies or anything like that, but we talk from time to time with both those guys. And they’re great. So I think podcasting, especially where there’s little to expense to do it, or it’s peanuts, that’s probably your best bang for your buck. As long as you’re patient with it, you don’t expect to make the million dollars in the first week or anything like that.

John Jantsch (11:08): You mentioned the real estate industry and you know, it’s most people, I don’t know if most people know this or not, but probably about 20% of residential real estate, eight agents make any real money. Uh, the other, you know, run around it’s part-time job. They get in it, get out of it. There’s some similarity. I think in coaching, you know, it’s very easy to get into coaching, you know, call yourself a coach. I think the, the top 20% are probably people that treat it as a real business that are very successful. Now I’m not disparaging the industry. I’m just that, you know, you can go industry by industry and that’s probably the case. So, so having said that, what are some of the things practices not necessarily marketing, but what are some of the practices that you see that, that top tier, uh, coach coaching business do?

Marc Mawhinney (11:51): Well, I’m glad you mentioned about the similarities, cuz I’ve said that often before too, I catch myself, instead of saying coach, I might say agent or something. Yeah. First you think, well, there’s not no similarities between the two, but actually there is, I just actually wrote an email the other day about this. And I said, one of the things I noticed that successful, uh, coaches don’t do versus unsuccessful is complain. You know? And what I mean by that, I, everybody complains, you know, human or whatever, but they, they, they’re not spending their time griping about, well, well, here’s an example which I noticed in real estate, and this is why I love coaching in real estate. I was in a, a small, I say small market in Atlantic. Canada’s 300 agents in my marketplace and everybody talked crap about everyone because they would, if I got a listing or John gets a listing, then O GE John took food off my, uh, table.

Marc Mawhinney (12:38): Right. He got that commission. I just talked to that homeowner two weeks ago. I should add it. Yeah. You know, or stuff like that. So in real estate, uh, the agents are all 364 days of the year, stabbing each other in the back. And then at the Christmas party for the real estate board, they’re hugging it at each other, like their best friends. Then it’s back to normal with the coaching world. What I like about it is it’s not like that because, uh, it you’re in, uh, Colorado. Right? I am, I am. So if, if you’re in Colorado, you get a client I’m not grumbling up. You’re like, oh geez, John, that bugger, he got that, you know, whatever, it’s billions dollars a year industry. And it’s just not saying everybody loves each other all the time. There’s of course feuding and things, but, but yeah, I’ve find the successful coaches. They’re not looking at the complaining or, or bringing other people down. And I see some coaches on social media, especially that some of the stuff they’re posting, uh, about is, uh, it’s kind of depressing. I’m like, I don’t think I’d want to work with that person. They’re just complaining that much. So there, there would be one thing that would differentiate to,

John Jantsch (13:34): So

John Jantsch (13:36): Coaching is one of those businesses, like a lot of professional services where a high level of trust really needs to be established with clients. So I’m guessing Nile, I know this, that referrals are a really big part of, you know, how a lot of coaches probably acquire new business. So what do you see success coaches doing to actually stimulate that? Obviously doing good work, being trustworthy. You know, those are things that are gonna make referrals happen, but I see a lot of businesses that get a lot of referrals, but they don’t do anything to try to actually stimulate them. In fact, I, I, I sure one statistic and then I’ll show up that, that their firstly, a Texas tech, the university did a study in, they found they interviewed 2000 consumers and, and 86 or so percent of them said there was a business they loved so much, they would refer. And then the flip side of that was only 27% of them actually did. And so, you know, I often say there’s gotta be some real money in that gap. You know, it’s not enough to just have happy customers. You’ve gotta do something to stimulate that, that referability I think,

Marc Mawhinney (14:38): Yeah. I mean, one thing, it sounds kind of funny to say it, uh, you have to ask for referrals, which I don’t think that’s being done nearly enough. I’m probably guilty of that too. Yeah. You know, full disclosure. One of the things I do in this might sound a little, uh, craft, but I, I think it does help if somebody refers business to me, whether it be a client or good joint venture partner or something, I sounds bad. I’ll pay them. Yeah. I’ll pay for the referral. Yeah. I know some people say, well, you shouldn’t do that cuz it, you know, or whatever, it’s my way saying, Hey, um, I appreciate you keeping me in mind. And I would pay all day long if someone’s handing me a good client on a silver platter. I given referrals to people. It’s not that I’m doing it just for, you know, money or monetary gain, but sometimes I’m not even getting thanks, uh, from people, uh, before, which is, I’m like, wow, that’s kind of silly if somebody’s referring you business and a really good client, one person I know, you know, not to, not to complain cuz I just talked to complaining, but uh, I gave them a five figure client, a really good client or whatever.

Marc Mawhinney (15:33): And I got a little, uh, nut basket or something in the mail, you know, like a $20 basket, which is fine. Like, you know, I’m not a big nut fan or whatever, but yeah, if somebody’s given me a client worth 10,000, $50,000, I’m gonna give them a nice gift.

John Jantsch (15:49): So let’s go back to, uh, delivery on coaching. So, you know, a lot of coaches, a lot of consultants, a lot of businesses in general, understand the value of having kind of this maybe starter offer and then a core offer and then, you know, group offers and, you know, big, you know, scale program. Do you, you know, is there a delivery mechanism that is, um, you know, is probably the best for coaching now or should every coaching practice have a variety of maybe price points even as well as, uh, delivery mechanisms?

Marc Mawhinney (16:21): Uh, well it’s tough because there’s different ways to do it. Yeah. You know, uh, some people or a lot of people like the latter approach, uh, where you start with the low price or low ticket thing and then work your way up. I know some coaches at that don’t want to get into that. They swear by the no, you start with the big ticket thing. And that’s what you’re focusing on. The one thing I will say with mine is with my ladder. So to speak, my offers go anywhere from a, a base. I have a print newsletter that’s $97 a month, 9 97 a year. That’s my, uh, most affordable offering. That’s how people can get into my, they they’re allowed to pick my brain by email subscribers there. Then it goes all the way up 10,000 to not, but I don’t play in the world where, um, a lot of people are like, Hey, let’s have a $7 e-book to get people in there and stuff.

Marc Mawhinney (17:05): And I, I just prefer to, uh, have that as a base $97 a month. And if you’re not able to do that or not willing to, then that’s fine, but you gotta pay to play or have some skin in the game, uh, that way too. So you could do it any number of ways. My suggestion though is not to have too many. So a true story. I had a client, uh, years ago, this was probably five or six years ago. And when we started working together before our first call, I’d want to get as much information as possible, get a feel for his business. And he said, oh, I I’ll send over a spreadsheet with my offers to show you what I’m doing. And oh my God, there’s like 36 different offers of different, uh, lengths of time frequency for sessions. And I said, how do you keep track of this? Like, you know, he was even confused with it. So you shouldn’t need a spreadsheet to track your offers, keep it, you know, keep it simple. Nice and

John Jantsch (17:54): Easy. Plus how do, how do you ever explain all those offers to somebody, as you said, without them coming, just going, I don’t know what to depend.

Marc Mawhinney (17:59): They’re caught like a, the cot headlights. There’s been different studies too showing, uh, one that comes to mind, uh, Joe showman. But yeah, he was doing some work with the Swiss army people. They had a Swiss army with that they’re selling and he went in to meet with them. And I guess there were three different types of that Watchers. Uh men’s women’s and the children’s models. And there were three different colors for each. I think it was camouflage black and a different color. And uh, he, they wanted him to have all nine of those models, three times three on the full page ad we, which he did not want do, but they said, no, you know, no, we want do it. He want to run with just the men’s black model with it and he couldn’t talk them out of it. So he agreed, okay, we’ll do a AB split test. We’ll put my ad simple one choice versus your ad and see which one does better. And um, pretty sure that his simple one watch ad pulled like four times better or something like that. Yeah. And, uh, so a lot of people think, oh, well there’s more selection. You’ll get more sales. It’s actually the other way, it’s more selection confuses the buyer and then they end up not opening their

John Jantsch (18:58): Wallets. Yeah. You certainly see a lot of good, better, best, you know, where people’s like, you know, and it’s really almost more way of helping somebody make a decision cuz it, you know, always the middle choice says most popular, you know, kinda psychologically sells them the one thing, but also says, oh, it’s not the most expensive, you know? So it’s, there’s a lot of psych psychology and pricing isn’t there. So, so let’s close up on, are there any trends that you see in coaching right now or trends in delivery models or trends you knows like membership programs where big, you know, for a while, I mean, are there any things that you see coming, uh, in the future that you think people ought be paying attention to?

Marc Mawhinney (19:36): Well, I think a trend that we’re and I already saw this the last few years, but I think it’s gonna be even more pronounced going forward is coaches are gonna have to deliver on what they’re promising. So, you know, gone are the days when you could, you know, put up a fancy sales page or what make all these big promises but not deliver and then still expect to stay in business. I, I think the customer clients are becoming more sophisticated, maybe more jaded too. Yeah. They’ve been Burt by one or two of these bad apples. Uh, so you’re gonna have to do better there and that’s good for people like us at weeds at the bad actors and keep doing, you know, the good people will profit. So that’s what, what I would see that coaches are gonna have to, you’re not gonna have to, uh, not just give the sizzle, but the steak as well, I guess. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:18): All right. Mark, tell people where they can find out more about your natural born coaches program, the coaching jungle, all the things wherever you wanna send people. Yeah.

Marc Mawhinney (20:24): Well the central hub has the podcast, the access to my daily emails, all that that’s at natural born coaches.com and uh, you are a guests on my show. So hopefully your show will be up by time. They go over and check it out. But natural born coaches.com the Facebook group, like you mentioned, the coaching jungle, there’s 22,000 coaches in there. Lots of great discussion. That’s at dot coaching jungle.com.

John Jantsch (20:45): Awesome. Well, mark, it was great. Uh, having you come by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll, uh, run into you, uh, one of these days when I’m up in, uh, Canada again.

Marc Mawhinney (20:54): Yeah, come on over and double go skiing or something. Wintery sounds Awesome.

John Jantsch (20:59): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in. Feel free to share the show, feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also. Did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

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

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

 

 

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How To Truly Embrace Change And Build Long-Term Resilience

How To Truly Embrace Change And Build Long-Term Resilience written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Adam Markel

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Adam Markel. Adam is a best-selling author, keynote speaker, and resilience researcher. He inspires leaders to master the challenges of massive disruption in his upcoming book, Change Proof: Leveraging the Power of Uncertainty to Build Long-Term Resilience.

Key Takeaway:

When we think of resilience, we think of being able to “roll with the punches” and “bounce back” after uncertainty or change. But resiliency expert and bestselling author Adam Markel encourages you to aim higher. This kind of resilience—thriving versus surviving—is a skill you can cultivate, both personally and professionally. In this episode, we discuss how to truly, actually embrace change—to find the creative opportunity in uncertainty, as opposed to simply riding it out or reacting to it.

Questions I ask Adam Markel:

  • [1:33] How would you define resilience?
  • [2:36] Is resilience often confused with perseverance?
  • [5:40] What does “Change Proof” mean in the title of your upcoming book?
  • [8:23] Are you suggesting that stress needs to be a part of our daily practice in some way?
  • [13:39] How do you embrace hope when you’ve been mentally drained from the last couple of years?
  • [19:42] You talk a lot about how you can’t think big without having your basic needs met and one of the tools you talk about is gratitude for helping people – would you dive into more of what you mean by that?
  • [24:16] Where can more people find out about your work and pick up a copy of your book?

More About Adam Markel:

More About The Certified Marketing Manager Program Powered By Duct Tape Marketing:

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

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

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

 

 

Whether you are looking to sell your business in the near future or just want to make it more scalable and profitable, Work Better Now’s virtual assistants can help you get there.

Work Better Now clients say that their Virtual Executive Assistants have made an impact on their businesses well beyond their expectations. For only $1900/month, you get a full-time assistant who is 100% dedicated to your business. There are no contracts and no additional costs. Based in Latin America with incredible English proficiency and business experience, Work Better Now Assistants undergo a rigorous screening and on-boarding process.

Get $150.00 off per month for 3 months just by mentioning “Duct Tape”. Learn more here.