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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Melissa Kwan. She is the co-founder and CEO of E webinar. She’s also spent 12 years in startups and built three successful companies without venture capital backing her previous startup a real estate tech company was acquired in 2019 as a revenue driven founder, specializing in sales and business development. She has learned how to build companies with very few resources, something a lot of folks listening can appreciate by automating what she could outsourcing whenever possible and inspiring talented people to join her team with shared focus and enthusiasm. So Melissa, welcome to the show.

Melissa Kwan (01:29): Thanks John, for having me.

John Jantsch (01:31): So I feel like I gave a little taste of it there, but I feel like we should just have you kind of say here’s been my entrepreneur journey. We’re gonna talk about your most current undertaking, but where have you been to get you to here?

Melissa Kwan (01:45): yeah. Great question. So I spent over 12 years in, in startups. UL runs my third company. My first two was in real estate tech. The last job that I quit was at SAP and then previous to that was in real estate. So I kind of just like put the two and two together and created software for real estate. First company was a product company towards agency and then the second company was a SAS product. It was like an open house sign in software. So having done so many live webinars, demos, onboarding trainings for a consistent five years, sometimes five back to back for my previous company, I had just dreamt of a product, a magical product that would do my job for me. Yeah. While I go and have fun. And that became E webinar after that company was sold in 2019.

John Jantsch (02:32): So, so let’s, I guess let’s ask the, you know, what is E webinar? Just give us the like really quick, you know, view of that so we can kind of break it down then a little from there.

Melissa Kwan (02:41): Yeah. So E webinar, the concept is simple. We save people from doing repetitive, boring webinars over and over again. So you can imagine sales, demos, pitches, onboarding, training, product updates, customer interviews, you know, things like that. Right? So you might be running them on zoom right now, or you might not be doing them because you don’t have a person to run them. We turn any video into an interactive webinar that you could set on a recurring schedule or join on demand. So people can consume that content whenever they want.

John Jantsch (03:09): Yeah. So webinars have certainly been around for, you know, ages, internet ages, I guess, you know, 15, 20 years peop marketers have been using them, certainly live, but recently eight, 10 years ago, it seems like this platform of going and signing up and sort of watching a live , but it’s recorded. You know, that, that technology, there are half a dozen, at least you probably know ’em all, you know, people that are doing that. What’s when people say, oh, how is this different than blah, blah, blah.

Melissa Kwan (03:40): Yeah. I mean, so first of all, we don’t do any live webinars. Yeah. Right. We don’t, there is no live audio. There’s no live video. Like enough people are solving this. Yeah. Like down to like Facebook live Instagram live, like everyone in the world is trying to solve this and it really solving it and doing a great job. So what we wanted to solve was the next phase of that. How do you scale a live webinar or a presentation that, you know, works for you? Yeah. Like if you’re doing, you know, a lead gen kinda customer interview type webinar, once a quarter, how, what kind of impact would that have on your business if you made that available every single day. So that’s really, that’s the space that we’re focusing on. And if you, if anyone that’s listening to this right now thinks to themselves, Hey, I’ve seen those before.

Melissa Kwan (04:25): Right. But it’s a little bit scammy. You’re right. And that’s why we exist. I was also in my previous life looking for something that would do this particular thing and everything I found was almost like designed to deceive consumers, to trick them into buying something or create false scarcity, which isn’t what sales and marketing is about. It’s not what branding is about. Right? It’s about delivering a beautiful professional, authentic experience that reflects your brand, but also an experience that allows your customer, your prospect, your attendee, to connect with you. It’s not a video on YouTube. A webinar is where you can go and engage and ask questions and get a response back. So what E webinar does differently is we made the investment to build an asynchronous chat system. Just like your Intercom, your Zend desk, any chat bubble that pops up on a website. When people ask you questions through chat, you can, if you’re there hop into respond live, but if you’re not there, it’s totally fine. Cuz when you respond later, they still get your response on email. And I would say no other automated webinar company had actually made that investment to build up that system.

John Jantsch (05:33): Yeah. I mean, there, there’s certainly a place for on demand because you know, you and I are talking it’s 10 o’clock at night for you when you’re talking. It’s uh, dunno what time it is here. Two o’clock for me. I mean, so the, there is a, you know, there is a need in the customer journey to allow people to get the information they want when they want it. So I think the case for having those makes a lot of sense, but the point that you also made is that so many of ’em are trying to fake their live and that there’s pre-canned chat and it says there’s 27 people on right now. and I think everybody realizes that’s all just a scam, but I think we put up with it because it’s like, well, everybody does it. So how did you take on that idea? Or did you just make a decision in the very beginning? We’re not going to be, you know, spammy or scammy like that.

Melissa Kwan (06:22): The thing is John, like the last thing I would want is to build a business that facilitates a behavior. Yeah. That’s the bottom line. Yeah. So very early on, we looked at all these players and we thought, okay, like there’s a reason why they have that because people ask for it, the customers ask for it. Yeah. But what I care about and what gives my business longevity is if your customer likes you, not, if you like me. Right. So in a sense, we’re building for the, a attendee, like that’s the first experience we’re building for. And it’s almost like kind of what Steve jobs does, right? He’s like, well, you can’t have this. It has to look like this. Even if you ask for this is the better experience you have to update your OS. And I think like when you’re specing a business or a product like this, you have to make those decisions to think what is the audience you wanna attract?

Melissa Kwan (07:09): Because the market’s big enough. Yeah. So we wanted to deliver a product with integrity first, which means we had to constantly not put in features and not build features that create that kind of fake scarcity. Right. So we have no simulated chat, no fake sales notifications, no fake counter. Everything is real. You can put in sales notification, but it’s based on your conversion pixel, there is a counter, but you could choose live or accumulative, but it’s real. Like everything’s real. And our chat is one on one between the attendee and the moderator, like none of that fake stuff. Right. So we just made a decision early on to say like, this is just not a business that like, we wanna track those kind of people. And we said like, we came to terms with the fact that it would take us longer to get off the ground. Cause we couldn’t, we wouldn’t be able to win people that already on the other platforms, but that’s okay. Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:59): Well I, let me push back there a little bit because I was on the other platform and I saw this as a, uh, you know, I was on those platforms because I wanted on demand and I just put up with the other stuff. Right? Yeah. But what I want to have with my customers is a long term relationship. Not a short time, I sold you something, uh, relationship. And I think that’s maybe why people put up with those is because they do work in a certain way, but not for the long term. And I think that what you’ve built is for somebody, in my opinion, is for somebody who views their relationship with their customers as a long term relationship, as opposed to I sold you something.

Melissa Kwan (08:38): Well, I would say because we delivered the product in this way. Yeah. Like it is, we mimicked our branding and how we want people to feel to MailChimp. Yeah. Yeah. Right. We wanna be fun. We wanna be a startup, but we wanna be established. Yeah. Right. We want to feel like this is a company they can trust. And that goes down to, you know, the product and integrity. Right. And the features that you have. So I would say like before this year, maybe last year, cuz we, the product’s been line for two years, you would not see companies like Zillow on automated webinars yeah. Or fresh works or catalyst. Right. Like none of those like real established companies would be on there. The people that have been leveraging, those are like a lot of solo entrepreneurs, a of coaches, a lot of like internet cash marketers, but like real companies have never automated what their webinars for this reason. Like they might have a gated landing page or they might have a video with CR YouTube, but that’s not a webinar experience.

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John Jantsch (10:17): I, I tell you that one of the features that, that I really love is because one of the things we really want is somebody not just sitting there mindlessly watching, or maybe like having your webinar in a different, you know, different screen while they’re working. And they’re just listening to it is the amount of engagement.

John Jantsch (10:32): One of the things that’s very built in is you have a lot of built in features and templates for getting people engaged, for finding out who they are for creating, you know, a reason for them to say more about the who they are and what they want and what they’re trying to accomplish. And I think that maybe some of the other platforms have that, but I think you’ve really cracked that part. And to me, not only getting rid of the stuff we’ve been calling kind of scammy, I think that to me is probably your best feature.

Melissa Kwan (11:00): Yeah. So we call them interactions, right? Yeah. Um, and I was, when I was coming out with this product, I was also thinking like, okay, let’s face it. Webinars are boring. Yeah. Right. It depends on like how fun it is and how engaging it is. A lot of times if depends on the speaker. Sure. And let’s face it like topic obviously. Yeah. And not, everyone’s a great speaker. And then during live webinar, there’s lots of interruptions. People ask questions, there’s housekeeping. Maybe your connection is bad. Like none of that happens on an automated webinar cause it’s based on a video. But I was thinking like, what is it that you could deliver then put out there that can get your, a attendee to stay till the end so they can take that action. Yeah. If they don’t stay till the end, even if you deliver your CTA, they’re never gonna see it.

Melissa Kwan (11:42): So we, we have these thing called interactions, which are like programmable polls, questions, resources, sales, alerts, you know, things that allow the, a attendee to participate right. In the experience with you. So it’s not like I come in and you’re talking at me for 45 minutes and I’m playing on my phone and you’re losing me to Instagram. Like when you ask me a question, something pops up and I’m actually able to engage with it. Maybe I can see the results and things like that. But on the host side, we actually gather all that data and we deliver it to you in a beautiful, actionable and understandable report. So you can actually see like where are people hitting a thumbs up? Because within any webinar you can hit a thumbs up. It’s more of a consumer experience. Where are people dropping off? Are they answering this question?

Melissa Kwan (12:26): So you can imagine in the past six months I’ve ran my demo. I don’t do live demos. It’s all in new webinar. Of course. All right. I ran it 1500 times. And my first question is, how did you hear about us? Yeah. And about 60 PE like 60% of people will answer that question. So from a marketing perspective, that is such valuable information. Yeah. And the more I run it, the better data I’m getting to, whether it’s helping my business or helping me make a better presentation. Next time, all of that is, is very useful.

John Jantsch (12:55): And I can say, this is not exactly scientific, but we have run this same webinar for many years. And you know, we’re always tweaking a little bit. I will say that our completion rate has significantly increased since moving to ewe R now I will give one caveat because of all the interaction we’ve actually changed how we’re presenting this information BA you know, because we’re, we feel like we have all these engagement tools now. that? Yeah. So, so it’s changed a little bit about how we’ve presented the information, but I can tell you that, you know, 35 ish percent higher rate of completion than using another platform.

Melissa Kwan (13:35): I mean, we have a customer that took the exact same video. Yeah. And put it into E webinar and their engagement and completion rate went up by 50%. Like they did nothing at all. So that’s why, like, we, we encourage people to just give it a try. I think that one of the biggest pushback we have is like, well, if it’s a video, then why don’t I just use YouTube? Yeah. Yeah. And it’s just the mindset of it, isn’t it? Yeah. Like, yeah, you get a registration page, you choose it time. There’s reminders, there’s follow ups. And then it starts at a certain time. Or you can watch it on demand. Like, I, I know earlier you said like there’s a place for, on demand for webinars particularly, but like, it’s so interesting how in our everyday lives, like as consumers we expect on demand video content.

Melissa Kwan (14:18): Yeah. Like when was the last time you didn’t watch something on apple TV or Netflix or Amazon, like I expect to go there and press play and watch it at my own time. However, for some reason, for B2B content, you have to come to my show right next Tuesday at 11, my time zone. So there’s a bit of a disconnect, right. So I think it’s not only like there’s a place for on demand and B2B content. I think it’s already here. And the people that understand that will be able to use that as a differentiator in their business.

John Jantsch (14:50): Yeah. That’s such a great point. I think again, it’s one of those things where we just get used to it. It’s like, well, that’s the way we get to, you know, consume this content. But a lot of behaviors, especially buying behaviors and things really do get influenced by the way that we behave every day in life. And just your example of the streaming, you know, programming, I mean like TV guide, what’s that right? I mean, I just go and I, yeah. You know, I watch the program when I feel like watching it. And I think that kind of behavior or habit that gets developed really should be something that we’re looking at and saying, that’s how everybody wants to shop now. Or that’s how everybody wants to get their content. Now.

Melissa Kwan (15:28): I mean, another great example is like texting, like who calls now? Like maybe your family member, you’re like, Hey, I’m outside or I’m downstairs. Or, you know, if you’re in your car, like maybe you’ll call on a headphone. And we have some people that are looking at E webinar. Maybe they’re moving from zoom, cuz they’re like just absolutely exhausted from running these live webinars and they just have to scale. But one of the questions they have for us is, well, if you don’t, if I can’t answer people right away or using my voice, are they gonna be mad at me? Like, does that mean worse? Does that mean worse customer service? Because I’m used to doing this live thing and I’m used to making people feel, feel special by calling out their name or answering the question. But my response is always just give it a try because I think your customers, like you’d be surprised at how your customers would prefer tech space and how much more manageable all that Q and a is. If it is text space

John Jantsch (16:28): To, to totally agree. And just going back to E webinar, another thing that I think people will enjoy, you talked about trying to make it fun. I think the interface itself is actually, um, easier to set up and easier to, to operate, uh, and get a webinar going than a lot of the other platforms as well. So you’ve think you’ve conquered a number of the things that competitors aren’t doing. I do wanna talk a little bit about just the business of building this as well. You know, from a text import first, I should have asked you in the beginning, are you an engineer or programmer yourself or

Melissa Kwan (16:57): No, I wish I, I wish, yeah. I wish I was an engineer cuz otherwise it would be feature complete by now. so nothing would be ever wrong with it.

John Jantsch (17:06): So, so what’s been the hardest part from a tech sample.

Melissa Kwan (17:10): Oh my gosh. Like I, it is a constant battle every day, but what is the hardest? I would say the one thing, I mean, of course the first thing is just scaling. Cuz as you build a business as like, you know, people start having a thousand people in a webinar. Yeah, yeah. Or you have two of those and now there’s 2000 people and everyone’s sending a chat. Right. And then, but you can’t test for that scenario until you get there. right. So the first six months was like acquiring these customers, but then what do you do? Yeah. What do you do when everyone has it on Wednesday or everyone has it on Tuesday. Right? So we’ve kind of solved that. But believe it or not, one of the most difficult things to solve is just the flexibility, like offering complete flexibility and scheduling and also the ability to track all of those things in a report, right?

Melissa Kwan (18:04): Like all the chat and all the interactivity, like we’ve worked that kind of stuff out. But right now, give, give you an example. People are asking for the ability to pause. So say I’m running a workshop. I wanna say, okay, I’m gonna let you pause for five minutes. You can finish this worksheet and then you can press play or it’s gonna start on its own. I still don’t understand this, but apparently it messes with the timeline of the video and then it messes with all the analytics. Yeah. so it’s just little things like that, that like me and you may never think about that. We’re very happy that they’re engineers for.

John Jantsch (18:36): So, so I was gonna ask you what your most requested feature is. New feature is, and that maybe you just revealed it.

Melissa Kwan (18:44): We have an ongoing wishlist of features, but definitely what you’re gonna see next is a full facelift of our attendee experience. So what we have right now is I think it’s two, three times better than what’s out there. But what you’re about to see is something that will be 10 times, 20 times better than what’s out there because we wanna really deliver an experience that’s less businessy, like less zoom and way more consumers. So what we’re taking inspiration from is not the webinar solutions that are out there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re taking inspiration from like Twitch or gaming companies or you know, apple TV, like those kind of things and see like how people actually wanna consume interactive video because this is what it is, right. Call it in a webinar automation software, but it is interactive video. So how do people wanna engage and consume that content and feel like, you know, they learn something and that and feel delighted. Right. I think delighted is the word.

John Jantsch (19:47): So are you one of those people that I could say, you know, what’s the vision for this company three years from now? Or are you really still trying to, you know, wrestle with the momentum of the moment?

Melissa Kwan (19:58): The only thing I care about right now is getting to profitability. so as a business owner, you probably understand that. Yeah, absolutely. So I would love to not be, you know, burning money, but I just want, I wanna see maybe not even the three years, like, like next year, I really wanna see people’s mind shift away from like Mo moving away from doing repetitive live webinars and just understanding that there’s a better way. Yeah. Cause all it takes is a flip, right. Cause right now this is what, you know, you’ve been doing it for 10 years. Webinars is have actually been around for 20 years. Yeah. But there is a new way of doing things that is not just better for you. Right. Freeing up your time. So you can, you know, spend more with your friends and family, but it’s actually better for your customer. Yeah. To have access to that information when they can consume it. Like the average attendance rate for all of our customers is 65%. Yeah. And that is outrageous. Yeah.

John Jantsch (21:00): Well, and I think I love about it and I think people need to, you know, customer journey, we can design the most perfect customer journey. People are gonna go through ’em the way that they’re gonna go through them. And I think that’s what, you know, a lot of times, if they can go through three or four stages of the customer journey one night, because that’s what they were really , you know, amped up about. I think that, I think we, as marketers have to realize that we just have to offer that flexibility.

Melissa Kwan (21:24): Um, yeah. I mean, I’ll leave you with one stat that I love from trust radius. 87% of buyers prefer to do their own research sure. Through their buying journey. Yeah. And 57% already make a purchase without talking to a salesperson. Yeah. Yeah. So you can actually make transparency and access to content your differentiator. If your competitor is gating everything, making people book a call, not making their webinars on demand and making it just difficult for people to get the information they need to make a decision, then they’re gonna go somewhere else.

John Jantsch (22:02): Absolutely. Melissa advi tell us where people can find out more about the product and connect with you.

Melissa Kwan (22:11): Yeah. If you wanna connect with me, LinkedIn is best. So my name is Melissa K w a N. And check out E webinar. If you’re curious how it works, there is, uh, an on-demand demo of course, delivered through E webinar in a very meta way. And it’s exactly as it sounds, ewe.com.

John Jantsch (22:25): Awesome. Well, Melissa, it was great. You know, I’m a fan. I, you know, love the product itself and answered something we were looking for. So we were happy to find it. And hopefully we’ll appreciate you stopping by the, take some time on the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you out there on the road one of these days.

Melissa Kwan (22:42): Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (22:43): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessmentdotco.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

HubSpot Podcast Network is the audio destination for business professionals seeking the best education and inspiration to grow a business.

Everybody’s online, but are they finding your website? Grab the online spotlight and your customers’ attention with Semrush. From Content and SEO to ads and social media, Semrush is your one-stop shop for online marketing. Build, manage, and measure campaigns —across all channels — faster and easier. Are you ready to take your business to the next level? Get seen. Get Semrush. Visit semrush.com/go to try it free for 7 days.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=1414

July 15, 2022/by exposure

How To Get More Done By Doing Less

How To Get More Done By Doing Less written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Mike Michalowicz

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Mike Michalowicz. Mike is the author of ‘Get Different’, ‘Fix This Next’, ‘Clockwork’, ‘Profit First’, ‘The Pumpkin Plan’ and ‘The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur’. His books have been translated into 10 languages. Mike is also the founder of Profit First Professionals. The Profit First Professional organization is designed to support accountants, bookkeepers, and other financial professionals to substantially differentiate themselves in the market.

Key Takeaway:

If you’re like most entrepreneurs, you started your company so you could be your own boss, make the money you deserve, and live life on your own terms. But the reality is, you’re bogged down in the daily grind, constantly putting out fires, answering an endless stream of questions, and continually hunting for cash.

In this episode, I talk with entrepreneurship expert Mike Michalowicz about his latest book, Clockwork, Revised & Expanded, where he shares his improved step-by-step method for getting more done by doing less – making it easier than ever to have your business run itself.

Questions I ask Mike Michalowicz:

[1:51] If I’m that person who already owns this book, why I should go out and buy another copy?
[4:38] What’s been a big aha moment for you when it comes to the way you think about your business?
[10:04] What’s hard for you now that maybe didn’t use to be?
[12:18] What’s been your inspiration in terms of the development of your own time management?
[15:55] A big concept in your book you talk about is the 4 D’s: Doing, Deciding, Delegating, and Designing, and you’ve added a 5th now: Downtime. Can you unpack the 5 D’s now?
[20:08] How do you get the right balance when trying to implement this concept?
[21:39] Would you say clockwork, particularly for people out there who are familiar with the principles of EOS, would you say they work pretty well together?
[22:56] Where can people find out more about this book, catch up on any of the books that you’re working on, and all of the various programs that you have?

More About Mike Michalowicz:

His latest book — Clockwork, Revised and Expanded: Design Your Business to Run Itself
Clockwork.life
Mikemotorbike.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by business made simple hosted by Donald Miller and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network business made simple, takes the mystery out of growing your business. A long time, listeners will know that Donald Miller’s been on this show at least a couple times. There’s a recent episode. I wanna point out how to make money with your current products, man, such an important lesson about leveraging what you’ve already done to get more from it. Listen to business made simple wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike MCIT. He’s the author of get different fix this next clock worth profit. First, the pumpkin plan and the toilet paper entrepreneur. He is also the founder of profit first professionals. The profit first professionals organiz organization is designed to support accountants, bookkeepers and other financial professionals to substantially differentiate themselves in the market. We are gonna talk about one of Mike’s old books because he’s come back and revised. It really added a lot of new content to it. Evergreen important topic of getting more done managing your time. So Mike, welcome to the show. This is at least your third or fourth time here.

Mike Michalowicz (01:32): Yeah. Awesome. To move back with you, John. Thanks. And thanks for the pre-show conversation. I was fine. Oh yeah. We had to get around and start recording some of this didn’t we so clockwork.

John Jantsch (01:41): This is a question I always ask people when they revise books, you know, David Meerman, Scott’s been on this show. I think he’s on like the eighth version or ninth version of his oh, the new rules, new the book. So I was like trying to tell people, I know there’s a whole lot of new stuff. We could go down a laundry list of it, but if I’m that person that already owns this book, like convince me why I should go out and buy another copy.

Mike Michalowicz (02:02): Yeah. So it’s 60% brand new. Wow. And 40% of the original content has been adjusted. So for fluidity, basically there’s two reasons why I do a revising expanded it’s so only the second time I’ve ever done one, um, is if there’s growing demand on the topic. So do I see the book there’s continuing and growing demand for the book?

Mike Michalowicz (02:21): And there is in this case, secondly, is there regular points of confusion? So I’m really fortunate to get emails from readers telling me what’s working, but also what’s not working. And there were, was a few significant sticking points under our belt for the last, I think the prior book came out four or five years ago under our belt. We have now thousands of implementations, we have a training institution or school or whatever you call those things, training curriculum that our, uh, readers can choose to go through. And we’ve now over a thousand student, over 2000 students, I’ve gone through that program. And so we get feedback, oh, this is what’s working. This is, what’s not working. This is why I’m confused. And my goal with a book is that no one needs to ask a clarifying question that every ounce of content’s in there, cause unlike a speech or a class or a workshop where student can raise their hand, say, can you give me more details?

Mike Michalowicz (03:12): Or another angle in a book, you get one shot the sentence it delivers or not. So it was stripped down to the bare bones infrastructure of the book reorganized and I rebuilt it out. So I think it’ll be easier, faster, better. You know, one of the things that I think as an author, you know, you’ve maybe taken your past and you put some examples and things in, but you know, 2, 3, 4 years down the road, you’ve heard from lots of people, you’ve got all these like rich treasure stories of stories. Right. And I think that’s, you know, don’t, you wish you had those in the beginning, right? I mean, that’s what really makes you write your first book. You, when you write your first book, you don’t have much practical experience. At least for me. Yes. I have people that I teach on the side, you know, is it my side hustle to my author business on how to do this.

Mike Michalowicz (03:57): And we had our workshops running for a year in advance, but there’s something different once the book is out, because you hear back from people that never go through any of those experiences, just read the book, telling you what’s working. What’s not those become good stories. And of course people have gone through it. So I, I mean, I’m biased, but it’s a markedly better book I believe.

John Jantsch (04:13): Yeah. Well the, the good news is you had a lot of experience with toilet paper when you wrote your first book. So that helped. Right?

Mike Michalowicz (04:19): that’s all right. Go straight for the potty humor. Shall we? No. Yeah. A little punch guy. Oh, all right. So you know, it’s really, uh, it’s really popular. I think for, you know, hosts like me to ask questions. Like, so what’s been your biggest learning, but I know that as you continue your write books, you are so engaged with the people that you work with.

John Jantsch (04:37): I think it’s fair to ask you. What’s been like a new learning for you. Like what’s been a big aha that you’re like, I don’t know why I’ve never considered this, you know, but this is, you know, this is now how I think about my business.

Mike Michalowicz (04:49): Yeah. So, okay. So I had a call. This is not in clockwork. I’m working on another book called all in I’m like, this was the defining moment for this book you ever have you ever have that moment where you’re like, God, I can’t find any good employees. And I’m saying this rhetorically, but that’s how I felt. You know it, some employees are great. Some are not a fit. And the feedback is higher. Slowly, fire quickly. If someone’s not working out, you gotta get rid of ’em fast. Right. And I’m like, gosh, how can that always be true?

Speaker 1 (05:15): Cause it seems like there’s always this churn of firing and you clean on a few good people. I got a call from this place in Texas. It’s a barbecue. It’s called Kings smokehouse or Kings barbecue smokehouse. And the owner, his name’s actually Stephen King. But not that Stephen King called up and said, I took, I bought this place. Which first of all, I’ll never buy a restaurant. yeah. Secondly he said, I took over and he goes, uh, these employees, many of them were just not a fit. They were bad employees. I had to fire his people. He goes, but I couldn’t afford to fire people particularly post COVID. Right?

John Jantsch (05:47): Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (05:48): So instead he goes, I tried this thing, I gotta tell you about it. He employed. He didn’t even know that there’s a technical term out there called psychological ownership. And he goes, I employed it without knowing what it was.

Mike Michalowicz (05:59): And so I’ve been researching this. There’s an interesting phenomena. You gotta check this out called psychological ownership. What it is, the feeling of possession without legal possession necessarily. Right. And ironically legal possession does not constitute the sense of ownership sometimes actually generates the opposite. So ownership to defining that is where we are all in on something. We, this is important to us. It actually is defining of ourselves as part of our purview, I guess. So when you hear someone say, this is my company, they’re showing a sense, psychological ownership over as opposed to this is John’s company. That where there’s a detachment. So what’s interesting is that I, the analogy I use is like renting a car. When I rent a car, they give me responsibilities care for no scratches, fill gas. When I leave that place. After the hundredth ID check I’m in that freaking OCN, I’m crunching down on the gas pedal, I’m hitting the brakes.

Mike Michalowicz (06:52): I’m hitting the curbs. I don’t really care about this car because I’ve been assigned some certain responsibilities to adhere to. I don’t have a sense of ownership. Now, the irony or the interesting thing is when I do own something like I own a car at home. That one I don’t mess around with, but here’s the ironic part. I don’t really own it. I’m making my payments to the bank that they’re the legal owners. I just have psychological ownership. So with this guy, Steven told me, he’s like, oh, I started to give people ownership, which is slightly different, subtly different, but significantly different ones. Outcomes than responsibility. Responsibility is clean. The clean, the inventory room, stock everything correctly. So there’s this one guy Joel’s a long answer, but there’s one guy, Joel, who I interviewed subsequently who was by all definitions, a horrible employee showed up late to work.

Mike Michalowicz (07:39): Steven hired Joel because his friend asked him to do him a favor, which is the worst way to hire someone. He was a mechanic, not an employed mechanic, but he’s working on his own card all times. So he was covered with grease and he was supposed to be a new waiter after one week. Steven’s like, I gotta fire this guy. He calls his friend, says, I’m. He says, give him one more week. Steven acquiesce is and out of a, kind of a hail Mary Steven goes to Joel and says, Hey man, it’s really, all this stuff is really difficult. I wanna give you ownership over something. Use those exact words. And there was this little box of straws on the bar. You know the one, when you pulled the one straw out and all the other straws kind of falling out, he goes, I wanna give that to you.

Mike Michalowicz (08:15): Meaning your job is to maintain that. Anyway, you sit, see fit. We’re gonna call it Joel’s straw box, maintain it. And Joel started doing a good job with it for the next few hours in the next day. And then Steven says, well, Hey, you’re doing a great job with that. Do you wanna own the bar mat? This guy Joel says, okay, starts controlling it fast forward. He starts this cascade effect fast forward. Now this is two years later. Joel’s his best employee. He does anything for the company. He goes above and beyond. What’s asked of him when he sees an opportunity to fix something, he fix it cause he acts like an owner. So I called Joel. I said why? And he says, listen, he goes, you don’t know anything about my background? I had a horrible background. I was abused as a child. I was told I could never own anything.

Mike Michalowicz (08:59): And that was the first time in my life. I was given control over something. The ownership, he goes, I’ll do anything for this company. And as I was wrapping up the call, I said, Joel, I heard that you’re into repairing cars. Tell me about that. He says, yeah, he goes, I love repairing cars. I wanna be a race car driver one day. That’s my dream. And I said, dude, the way you’re going, I think this is gonna happen. I said, it’s gonna be such a loss for the barbecue house. And there was this long pause and Joel looks back, we’re doing over zoom. He looks right in the camera. Like he’s a pro. And he goes, I’m never leaving the barbecue house. I’m gonna be a professional race car driver and still work there. I was like, no, how do we find people? Like you?

Mike Michalowicz (09:34): He didn’t have to find the a player. Yeah. He simply started mastering there’s many elements to it, but he started to master assignment of ownership and Joel’s behavior and other people’s behavior, radically changes. I know who his first sponsor’s gonna be right on the car. Right? Big, big barbecue patch on his. Exactly. Right.

John Jantsch (09:53): All right. So that was a great answer. I have a flip sort of side of that one. I asked you kind of, what’s been a new aha for you. What’s hard now. And we are gonna talk about the book I promise, but I just wanna take the advantage of the years of experience from you. What’s hard now that maybe didn’t used to be okay. So here’s what I didn’t expect is my goal was not to run all these different, I didn’t wanna run businesses besides selling books. Like I’ve done that.

Mike Michalowicz (10:26): It’s okay. It’s I have nothing against it, but I wanted my primary business to be books. But now as a business has grown, we’ve always partnered. It’s the challenge is ensuring that every partner is served to the level they wanna be served. So instead of me owning all these different businesses, like we started a business for this new book, all in this that’s two years away. Yeah. I gotta take care of that partner and be a service to them. Clockwork new book has a partner and I gotta be a service to them. And I didn’t really anticipate the challenges there of catering, but catering a way that there’s balance that everyone’s represented fairly. And the interesting thing is sometimes they raise their hand and say, but I’m not being treated fairly. And it’s like, we have to show the documentation. Like we’ve done the exact same thing for everybody else.

Mike Michalowicz (11:08): What we’re trying to do is rise. The tide and your boat will rise, but you know, the licensee fairly enough. But what about my boat is always, you know, their boat and not the, which from my perspective, I can’t worry about the boats. I gotta worry about the tide. So that striking that balance is a delicate court is necessary. It’s important. It’s just a little harder than I thought. I thought the boat, the tides rising, we’re all good. But uh, I gotta watch for the boats too with them.

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John Jantsch (12:08): All right. Let’s, let’s talk a little bit about clockwork. There’s a lot of ideas in here that, you know, maybe have been incorporated in some fashion in some other books, some other courses, some other people writing. Sure. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about really what’s been your inspiration in terms of your own. I mean, essentially this is a time management, you know, book approach. What’s been your inspiration for developing that. Yeah. I mean, I think the inspiration is, I think it’s not time management, but that’s the benefit. Yeah. To the owners. I think what it really is empowerment team empowerment and building processes and systems, which then brings back time management so we can hone in what we wanna do.

Mike Michalowicz (12:46): Yeah. So I think that’s the starting argument I make. I think one of the big parts is team empowerment. So one of the kind of pinnacle tests of the book is what I call the four week vacation. And in, in my research of the companies, I analyze 90 X percent plus identified that if the owner was away for four weeks, that the business was experiencing all the elements of its business cycle within those four week periods. So in theory, if I could leave for four weeks, I could leave into perpetuity because everything’s happening during four weeks and these monthly cycles. Yeah. Yeah. But then the fear was like, oh, if I leave for four weeks, my employees make, oh, you’re making money off of my sweat. Mike goes to the beach and or the mounds with John and all I do is work. So that was the fear of what I found and why, including the book.

Mike Michalowicz (13:32): And there’s actually now every chapter has a section for employees is that this is actually an empowerment opportunity. We, as business owners act like superheroes. Yeah. We swoop in can fix anything. Cause we know everything about the business, but we lead this wake of damage behind us, or we interrupt someone’s ability to take true accountability over something because we swing and take it. When I left my business, I’ve been doing this for five consecutive years. Now when I leave my business each year for four consecutive weeks, I come back and my employees consistently say, oh, I feel even more empowered. I’ve taken on these responsibilities. Yeah. And then the interesting thing too, I, including this book, we tested our own business three years into this. So two years ago, every employee started taking four vacations. And it’s not, it is a benefit to my teammates, my colleagues here, but the real benefits back to the company, because if Jenna or Jeremy or Izzy, or one of our teammates leaves for four weeks in their absence, we have the cover for them.

Mike Michalowicz (14:27): So there’s this backup and redundancy that’s being trained. And, and the final assessment’s this everyone’s leaving for a period of time at some point. Yeah. Because they retire, maybe illness, an accident happens, life events happen. So this for vacation concept is something that I think the entire company should be doing to prepare for the inevitable and to strengthen the company.

John Jantsch (14:47): I had three employees go out on maternity leave at the same time. One time, you know what 10, oh my gosh. But it is reality. So I think we can prepare for that. I actually, the, just this year took myself and my director of operations were both out for 10 days at the same time. And we were actually on lake Powell, which we have no signal at all. So there, there was zero ability. Cause every now and then, you know, you’re like, well, let’s just make sure there’s no disasters.

John Jantsch (15:13): Right. But there was no ability to, and you’re absolutely right. People, we came back and people were like, let me tell you what I did. Right. I mean, it’s pretty cool. Yeah.

Mike Michalowicz (15:21): Yeah. You know, you know, the biggest interrupt to that. And I read about it in the book too is for, at least, for me was my own ego. Yeah. When I was away after like day two, I’m like, oh my God, I need to check in. Right. Like what are they doing? The place is burning down. And then I need to SWO in. But then when I came back and they said, they don’t need me. I’m like, oh, you don’t need me. And like, the tears were welling up inside. Like I’m not needed. Yeah. But it was once I started really understanding that this is a form of empowerment that I again, then kind of got my ego back in check and said, okay, this isn’t just about me.

Mike Michalowicz (15:50): This is about my teammates and elevating them. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:53): So, so there’s a big concept in the book, the four DS doing, deciding, delegating, designing, you can unpack that a little bit, but I was happy to see. And it makes total sense that you had it a 50, which is downtime, which we’ve been talking about a little bit. So go ahead and maybe do your quick spiel on unpacking the five DS.

Mike Michalowicz (16:09): Now I, yeah, so there’s, this is there’s four stages of a business and the business has to be serving all these. But when I say stages, we as an entrepreneur can elevate to the fifth, the fourth stage and, and implement the fifth. So the first stage is doing is the activity that a business must do to generate revenue, to be a service to clients. But it’s also the structural work that needs to be done.

Mike Michalowicz (16:29): So I create furniture that I sell the clients, that’s a doing activity, but also the invoicing, all the administrative work behind that is all doing work. A business, an optimized business will spend 80 to 90% of its time there. The next level up is deciding is necessary, but only in short spurts, it’s kind of like that adrenaline kick. It’s good for you until you have a heart attack. Yeah. And so deciding is where the manager, or in many cases, the business owner themselves is making decisions for other people. So, and so goes off to do the work. I TaskRabbit. They come back a second later and have a question, oh, do I sort invoices by first name or last name? And I think about it and I give them a decision. I call it colleague, it’s an Indian goddess with one head and eight arms.

Mike Michalowicz (17:08): The vast majority of small business lives in the deciding trap. One person being the brains for the entire organization. And it limits it to about three people. Four people max can work there. Yeah. To get past that with the move to the next D, which is delegation or delegating, delegating is not the assignment of tasks. That’s what we think it is. What delegating truly is the assignment of outcomes. It’s about that empowerment. You know, we agree you and I’m your employee. You say, here’s where we need to go. Mike, do you agree? And do you understand why? Yes. Here’s what my thoughts are. Guess the outcome, we have a best practice, you know, way we’ve historically gotten there, but your job is to get there no matter what. And if there’s a disruption or a better idea, take that. And you know this, when I come back with a question, say, Hey, John, I have a question.

Mike Michalowicz (17:47): The response is no questions. I hired you for your brain. Mike, go and figure this out, get to that outcome. Yeah. So that’s true empowerment of employees. And that moves us, the owner to the ultimate stage, which is designing, designing is visioning the goals and outcomes for the business and then strategizing ways to get there. This is the hardest work yet. We think it’s the easiest. We think doing’s the hardest. That is the easiest. It’s easier to dig a hole than it is to solve a Rubik’s cube for most people. Yeah. So most people would rather just sit there and sweat it out, digging a hole than thinking we’re making great progress, but we got to get the puzzle aligned in the right direction to move our business forward. So get out of doing and start envisioning where your business needs to be. The last part is downtime.

Mike Michalowicz (18:27): There was a study came outta the UK. This is a new addition to the, they identified that the average knowledge worker produces 3.2 hours per day, regardless of hours work, you work eight hours, you’re producing 3.2, you work five, 3.2. We need to recover. So intentionally give your colleagues downtime. And we do it through breaks or interns. We hire a lot of part-time employees. In fact, the vast majority of our staff is part-time. So downtime is on their own time. We give our part-time workers, eight hours of project work, traditionally eight hours of work, they get done in four or five hours. So clearly eight hours things. It’s kind of a ruse. It’s really about the project output. And we do the sabbaticals all to recover emotionally and physically with through downtime.

John Jantsch (19:08): Yeah. There’s a lot of, a lot of companies actually like a number of countries studying that whole idea of the four day work week.

John Jantsch (19:14): And you know, the fact that people are getting as much done because we just, you know, we don’t fill it up with silly meetings or acting like we’re working.

New Speaker (19:21): That’s right. We, we were trying to hear we’re small. You know, my, my author office were 10 employees and we cut it to a four day work week, two years ago, partly cuz of COVID kind of forced it. And so we, no one works Fridays except for me. I choose to. And my gosh, the output is the same. It’s not higher. And people come so refreshed on Monday. There’s I asked employees a few days ago. I’m like, how does Sunday night feel? I’m excited. It’s a change up again. I’m coming back to work where before it was like, oh my God, the weekend flew by, do I have to go back to work?

John Jantsch (19:50): So one of the, I am totally on board with, you’ve gotta get outta doing and get to designing. There are some people that just, well, Mike, let me just say, I think you’re a doer. I mean, you are like an action taker. You like to like funnel with the stuff. Right. So does that make, and I think a lot of business owners are that way. So how do you get the right balance? I mean, especially you bring in people to do the doing and you do, you know, so, so not, I mean, you’ve got some people that 80% of their work is doing right. And you’ve got, obviously the business owner should be spending more time designing, but how do you get them to let go? Because I think that’s probably,

Mike Michalowicz (20:25): yeah, you gotta go into what’s called collective. Yeah. It’s a big challenge. You gotta go into what’s called collective design. Yeah. So it is not the natural tendency for a lot of people.

Mike Michalowicz (20:33): In fact, most people who are doers today start a business because they say I’m already doing this. Right. I might as well continue to do it on my own, which is basically a freelancer. So we don’t have the natural 10 or perhaps capability. Yeah. But when you bring in your collective team, then you can do brainstorming and strategizing and the collective brain can be of service. I suggest of doing that. If you do that, don’t have the meetings in the office where the regular routine is kind of distracting, overwhelming, get outta the office once a week or once a month, just for a few hours and say, here’s the biggest challenge we have. What’s everyone’s ideas. The other thing is if you get bigger, you may even want to bring in a person that is a designer. Yeah. Someone that can work on that strategy.

Mike Michalowicz (21:11): Yeah. The risk for owners though, is, you know, it’s a big blow to the ego. In certain cases I’ve seen owners take on who they thought were next level designers, executives from these large corporations and stuff. And there’s a total disaster. Yeah. Because small business ownership, you get your hands dirty, big business, you know, you’re kind of pulling strings. And sometimes there disconnect between the pulling of strings versus actually designing in the trenches.

John Jantsch (21:34): So I noticed you had Geno Wickman, the author of traction and created dos system. Right. New forward for the book. Would you say clockwork for, particularly for people out there who are familiar with the principles of Vos, would you say they work pretty well together? Yeah. Yeah. And I think that’s why Geno wrote the forward. So Geno talks about there’s different phases of the entrepreneurial journey versus just the idea starting up.

Mike Michalowicz (21:56): He actually wrote a great book called the entrepreneurial leap. Yeah. It’s a great book on like, should I do this? Should I stay? Or should I go, as the song goes, listeners, go back and you can find my interview with Geno on, on when he came out with that book. Go ahead, Mike. . Yeah. Yeah. And that’s a, it’s a fantastic book. Then when he wrote EOS or traction, the entrepreneurial operating system, it really requires that first level of management, second level of management to be in place. It’s not just one person doing it cause there’s a lot of components. Yeah. So he’s like, there’s this bridge here and clockwork fails it. Clockwork is designed from that few employees, a handful of employees up to 25, 50 employees. We have some people that have a hundred employees doing it. And then clockwork has run its life.

Mike Michalowicz (22:35): Once you get past that 50 employees, there’s this level of sophistication that starts kicking in where EOS is idyllic for that, it has rhythms and so forth. Clockwork is not about that. It’s about bringing a non-efficient business to a, a pretty proficient level of efficiency, proficient efficiency. And then Geno’s book takes a little bit further. So he wrote the forward cause he saw this as the bridge between his two books.

John Jantsch (22:57): Mike tell people where they can find, I know you’ve got a number of places, but obviously find more about this book, catch up on any of the books that you’re working on. And obviously all of the various programs that you.

Mike Michalowicz (23:08): so clockwork.life. Cause we, I believe is a lifestyle. clockwork.life is where you can get stuff on this book and me, you can go to my site, no one can spell MCIT. So while Mike MCOW exists, the shortcuts Mike motorbike.com because I used to have as a nickname, it’s only grated nickname I’ve ever had.

Mike Michalowicz (23:24): So the other ones were not usable on the web. So Mike motorbike.com and uh, you’ll get stuff on the books and clockwork.life for the books was, oh,

John Jantsch (23:33): you and I have been hanging out so long that my spell check knows how to spell MCIT. So got that.

John Jantsch (23:37): That’s a victory. That’s a victory. Mike, always great catching up with you. And uh, hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road again soon.

Mike Michalowicz (23:45): Oh, that’d be great.

John Jantsch (23:46): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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

July 14, 2022/by exposure

The 4 Corners of Digital Marketing

The 4 Corners of Digital Marketing written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

The Agency Spark Podcast, hosted by Sara Nay, is a collection of short-form interviews from thought leaders in the marketing consultancy and agency space. Each episode focuses on a single topic with actionable insights you can apply today. Check out the Spark Lab Consulting website here.

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Leonard Scheiner on the 4 corners of digital marketing.

Leonard Scheiner has been helping law firms, solo attorneys, and business owners for the past decade with a focus on developing their brand, marketing for new clients, and predictably growing the revenues and online authority for his clients.

One firm achieved a 300% increase in revenue, while others have earned millions of dollars worth of new business driven from Leonard’s frameworks and tactics.

Today, he’s the CEO at Geek Haus, a law firm marketing agency based in Los Angeles.

More from Leonard Sheiner:

Geek Haus

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Termageddon, a Privacy Policy Generator. Any website collecting as little as an email address on a contact form should not only have a Privacy Policy but also have a strategy to keep it up to date when the laws change. Click here to learn more about how Termageddon can help protect your business and get 30% off your first year payment by using code DUCTTAPE at checkout.

July 14, 2022/by exposure

The Way To Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers

The Way To Raise Your Prices Without Losing Customers written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jeb Blount

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jeb Blount. Jeb is the CEO of Sales Gravy and the author of 14 books including Fanatical Prospecting, Sales EQ, Objections, Virtual Selling, and his brand new book — Selling the Price Increase: The Ultimate B2B Field Guide for Raising Prices Without Losing Customers.

Key Takeaway:

A lot of small business owners struggle with charging enough, and that price increase conversation is something many people avoid. The payoff for increasing your prices and retaining your customers and clients along the way is massive. But the problem is, price increase initiatives bring forth fear and anxiety in both your salespeople and you as a business owner — especially if you’re the one who has to communicate that message to your customers.

Yet, when you approach the initiative effectively, customers gladly accept price increases, remain loyal, and often buy even more from you because they see your value. In this episode, CEO of Sales Gravy, Jeb Blount, reveals the strategies and tactics that allow you to successfully master price increase initiatives.

Questions I ask Jeb Blount:

[1:21] A lot of small businesses I work with aren’t charging enough — would you say that’s an idea in their head that they don’t think they worth it?
[3:18] As a business owner, how do you move past that idea?
[5:50] What’s changed in this current climate when it comes to pricing and everything almost seeming like an emergency?
[12:01] What’s your advice for people for setting the table for price increases?
[16:59] How do you suggest a salesperson handle a price increase when there’s no particular rationale or reason for it and it’s happening simply because the company can?
[18:48] Could you talk about your DEAL framework and system you’ve created?
[21:12] Where can people find out more about your book and your work?

More About Jeb Blount:

His brand new book — Selling the Price Increase: The Ultimate B2B Field Guide for Raising Prices Without Losing Customers.
JebBlount.com
Salesgravy.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jeb Blount. He is the CEO of sales gravy, the author of 14 books, including fanatical prospecting, sales, EQ objections, virtual selling, and his brand new book. We’re gonna talk about today, selling the price, increase the ultimate B2B field guide for raising prices without losing customers. So Jeff welcome to the show.

Jeb Blount (01:15): Well, thank you so much for having me back. I always love to be on your show. It’s one of my favorite podcasts.

John Jantsch (01:20): Thank you. Thank you so much. So, you know, one of the things interesting, I know a lot of the book, you talk about a salesperson that has an account that has to go out and you know, it’s like, oh, we’ve had this cost come. We have to raise prices, but I will tell you working with so many small business owners, they’re not charging enough right now. And one of the things I tell them all the time is you’ve gotta go raise your prices. So a lot of that’s kind of in their head, isn’t it? I mean, it’s like, I don’t think I can get this, or I don’t deserve this or whatever it is.

Jeb Blount (01:49): Yeah. You know, there, there is the, I don’t deserve it. And I think that’s, I think that’s a very common feeling with small business owners, especially when they’re dealing with bigger companies. And I know that as a small business owner, as you know, a company that’s growing I’ve, I’ve often felt the same way that maybe I don’t deserve this and that to somewhat some, you know, some extent is something that is totally in our heads, right? That it’s a lie that we tell ourselves. And I mean, there may be some cases where we don’t deserve it, but in most cases we do. But on top of that is, you know, the constant fear of the business owner that if I go ask for a price increase, I’m gonna lose my customer. I’m gonna lose the orders. Maybe they’ll throw in my face. Something that went wrong in the past and well, there’ll be conflict. And, and of course there’s a potential that they just say, no, and I get rejected. Yeah. And that makes me feel really bad. So, and those fears by the way, are things that we make up in our own head that we have to get past. And some of those fears could be true. I mean, you could go in and create a lot of problems if you haven’t been taking care of your customer and then you go ask for a price increase.

John Jantsch (02:51): Right. Well, and so, so the sales rep of course like a business owner, a lot of times I tell them, you just gotta, you gotta understand the value you bring and go ask for the money. But a sales rep, a lot of times, I mean, somebody told them, go tell the client, the right is going up. Right. It’s not, you know, it’s not my fault, but I’m the one that has to deliver the bad news. And I might lose that commission. Right. Because they go somewhere else. So, you know, how do you, I mean, be in that particular instance, you know, how do you get over that kinda head thing? It’s like, it’s not my fault, but I gotta deliver the news.

Jeb Blount (03:23): Yeah. Well the, with the salesperson, the same fears are in play. So the, one of the biggest problems for salespeople is the boss says, you gotta go get a price increase. Right. When I, it wasn’t uncommon. You know, when, back when I was working for a boss that they would come in, bring you your accounts and say, we need 6% across the board. Go figure it out. Right. And you know, you’re sitting there like rolling the dice on which customer are gonna take the price increase too. And very much like when we were talking about, you know, the business owner says, well, I kind of don’t deserve this. I think salespeople get the same thing in their head. We don’t deserve this. Or in a lot of cases, they feel like they’re doing something to their customer versus doing something for their company. And by the way, that’s, that is exactly true for the business owner as well.

Jeb Blount (04:03): Sure. So for me, you know, the, I, you know, I just like everybody else, I’ve experienced the anxiety of having to do a price increase as a salesperson. And I’ve experienced the anxiety of having to deal with price increase as a business owner. And one of the things that helped me really get over that hump is understanding the power of a price increase. So there’s a reason why you tell your clients, you gotta go get a price increase. And one of those reasons is that a price increase is almost pure drop through to the bottom line. Now forget about a time that we’re in right now, where we’ve got inflation or, you know, there are supply chain issues. Whenever you get a price, increase the drop through on a price increase versus going out and getting a new piece of business is about 400% higher to your bottom line.

Jeb Blount (04:47): That’s a big number. So what I had to do as a salesperson and later on as a P and L owner, is to really understand what the purpose of a price increase is also it’s important. And this is also important for business owners who have salespeople working for them. And you gotta go tell your salespeople to go, to get a price increase is understanding how that new profitability helps the health of the company. And for, especially for, you know, for the group of people that pay most attention to you at duct tape marketing, you know, there’s nothing in the world that is more important than free cash flow, right? And a price increase is instant cash flow in instant revenue increase. And that is by the way, as long as you keep your customers, you may have to get the price increase and keep your customers and keep your orders. And essentially that’s what the book is all about. Yeah.

John Jantsch (05:34): So you mentioned the current climate we’re in, you know, it used to be like the annual price increase, but obviously people are dealing with weekly and monthly. I had a remodeling contractor give me a bid on something. And he said, this proposal is good for 24 hours because I don’t know what it, you know, the door’s gonna cost tomorrow. Right. So, so what’s changed in this current client about, you know, the approach. I mean, because some of it’s just like emergency, right?

Jeb Blount (05:58): Yeah. You know, there, when you start thinking about approaches or you’re thinking about is messaging, right? So there are, there’s essentially a couple of different ways that we deal with price increases. One is a price increase that we just give to our customers and then we defend it. So we tell our customers, you’re getting a price increase. And then we deal with the objections. We message it. We talk about it, but we give everybody the same price increase. And typically you do that when the risk of losing your customers or the orders is relatively small against the gain that you get on the price increase. And typically the price increase itself is gonna be small relative to what your customers are spending. The other is when you, the price increase may be negotiable or there is some risk. You may either present the price increase as if it’s non-negotiable, but you’d be willing to negotiate.

Jeb Blount (06:43): Or you go in and you ask your customers. So for example, if you’re a small business like mine and you’re dealing with big multinational fortune 500 companies where the risk of losing that company to my company is really high. Then I’ll typically go sit down with my customer and I’ll message it. Like I’ll build a business case for why I deserve the price increase. And that could be based on past value I’ve delivered. It could be on some future value that I’m going to deliver, but in a time like this often it’s an economic fairness message. In other words, what I’m doing is I’m laying out to them where my costs have gone up, where I’m getting impacted. So for example, in my world, because we fly all over the place, it’s travel, you know, the cost of travel has gone up exponentially over the past few months.

Jeb Blount (07:25): So we have to go to our customers and say, we’re raising the price on what we charge when we travel someplace. And this is why, and the good news is that because most people, this is humans. Okay. So most humans have an innate sense of fairness when you can articulately lay out the case, the economic fairness case for why this should give the pricing increas. In most cases, the probability is relatively high. They’re gonna say, yes, you just have to be able to make that case. And in a time like ours, where it’s, it is an emergency in some cases, and it is a moving target. What you really have to be prepared to do is to deliver that message. So you wanna sit back, practice that message. And by the way, deal with any objections you might get and have rebuttals for those objections. So

John Jantsch (08:10): One of the cases I make sometimes where we’re getting people to raise their prices to, to a level that might be fair is that they actually might be better off losing some of the clients that leave for that. I mean, you talked about the bottom line, right? If, you know, drop 20% to the bottom line, but you lose, you know, 3% of the customers doing it, right. You’re better off. And in some cases, not always, but in some cases, in my experiences, that’s a client that you probably didn’t have a great relationship with anyway, and that may be your fault, or it may just be that it wasn’t a good fit anyway.

Jeb Blount (08:42): Yeah. I use, uh, to analyze where, which customers I’d like to lose. I just use a, basically a four quadrant. I call it a fit matrix. And at the very top right hand quadrant is, it’s a, it’s easy to work with. Yeah. And high profit. Yeah. And right below, that would be easy to work with low profit. Yeah. On the left hand side, it is hard to work with high profit. And on the bottom left hand side, it is hard to work with low profit. Yeah. It’s the hard to work with low profits that I typically go after. And this is, you know, me as a small business, I had a fortune 100 company that we were working with. We had closed a deal. We celebrated it in about a year into it. We realized that we made a grave mistake. They were killing us.

Jeb Blount (09:23): They wanted so many of our resources. You know, they had 20 people for every one of my people and they would just had this endless just line of requests for us. And my whole team said, we gotta fire this customer, cuz we were really hard to work with. We weren’t making a lot of money. And so I didn’t wanna go burn the bridge because I just felt like it would be a bad thing just to go tell a big company like that when I’m a little tiny company, just go away. So I went in with a 300% higher price than I had previously given them when we signed the deal in the first place. And I expected them to throw me out the door. And when I gave it to them, the buyer simply the person that I was dealing with with the contract and procurement said, how can you justify this?

Jeb Blount (10:04): I, then I explained it. I said, you guys are really hard to work with. Were a small company. You asked for all these things. A lot of the things you ask for are off contract and we feel obligated to do it for you because you’re, you know, you’re the big gorilla and you know, your team needs things done right now. And the only way that I can keep serving you is I gotta hire more people in order to come in and do this. And the procurement person just, you know, they just looked down at the contract for a minute and looked at me and goes, you’re right. We are really hard to work with signed the contract. And then we were good again, like it felt, I mean, I felt like we didn’t resent them. They signed up for more, which was a good thing for us.

Jeb Blount (10:38): And I found that happens often that in a lot of cases, you’re undervaluing yourself. Yeah. That’s the first thing you and I talked about. But if, if you can, if you can put your customers in segments like that, it’s a lot easier when you look at it and you realize I’m not making any money at this, it doesn’t make a difference how much revenue you’re making. If you’re not dropping to the bottom line, you have no cash flow. You have no cash flow, you’re dead. So you can at least look at it and go, okay, that gives me the courage to go in and have a conversation with them cuz I’m not making any money. And oh, by the way, if a few of these went away, I could probably spend those resources right on the easy to work with high profit customers and make them even more profitable and sell more things to them.

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John Jantsch (12:02): So one of the things you, uh, mentioned already also was this idea of relationship building. And I think it’s like a lot of things you get that next sale or that price increase months before it actually happens. Right? Yes. And so, you know, what’s your advice to folks to say, look, it’s inevitable. You’re gonna have to go ask for this. How do you set the table?

Jeb Blount (12:23): Well, if you think about price increases in the suite of things that we sell, price increases are on the expansion side of the, of the equation. In other words, I already have the customer, I need to expand the relationship. So price increases should not be, as we think about this time that we’re in right now, something that we’re thinking about right now, price increases are something that we’ve gotta be thinking about forever because we’re always looking to expand those accounts. And when we’re in that boat, it’s in our best interest to make sure that we’re managing our accounts in the book. I just break down something really simple, but I just tell you the truth. And that is that about 70% of the time when you lose a customer, it’s because of neglect. Yeah. And that would be true is if you go in and you ask for a price increase or you present a price increase and your customer gets mad at you is probably because you weren’t taking care of them.

Jeb Blount (13:13): So the easiest, fastest way to get price increase is just manage your accounts. You just take care of them, do the things that you’re supposed to do as a business, delight your customers, deliver a great customer experience, make sure you’re constantly solving problems. And if you’ve ignored an account for a long time, and that happens in business and it happens with salespeople as well in their portfolios, if you’ve ignored it, don’t let the first conversation you have with that customer in six months, be about a price increase, put yourself together, a campaign, go in and set the stage, go solve some problems, do an account review, rebuild a relationship and then come back in with a price increase. But the biggest problem that we, you know, that we see in with price increases across the board is that because they’re unpleasant for both parties, the, the party that has to bring the price increase to the customer has a tendency to put it off.

Jeb Blount (14:03): Yeah. So they end up dropping a price increase in the customer’s lap, but don’t really give them any time to deal with the price increase. Yeah. And if you’re just, if you’re a business, you know, you’re and you buy things from other, from vendors, like most of us do, you can imagine that what, that the sort of, what that would put you in terms of a, you know, a bad spot or how it might back you into a corner. If one of your vendors came with you as came to you with a price increase at the last minute, and you didn’t have time to figure out how you were gonna absorb it or pass it on to your customers or deal with it. And that typically happens because we, we just don’t want to confront our customer with the truth.

John Jantsch (14:40): Yeah. It’s funny too, because nobody likes change. It’s really funny of any kind. I mean, I swear there have been times when I’ve tried to give somebody something for free and they were, you know, suspect. I hadn’t told him why I hadn’t said because. And I think that’s, you’ve been talking about this price increase. Like it’s just a unilateral kind of price sheet kind of thing. But as I listened to you, describe this. It’s almost like you can, if you have the right conversation, you can actually come to an agreement together on what’s the right approach. Can’t you?

Jeb Blount (15:09): Yeah. I mean, if you’ve got a great relationship with your customer and in, in the book, I give you eight different narratives, right? That can be woven together in ways that allow you to have that conversation with your customer. But if you’ve got a great relationship with your customer, and I think, you know, that most of us do what I found is that the thought of going in and having the conversation about the price increase is way worse than the actual conversation itself. and it’s a lot better. If you can go in and you can make your case, just build a good business case and sit down with your customer and work it out with them that in most cases, because human beings are inherently fair to each other, that you’ll be able to work something out without a lot of objections. And it’s also important.

Jeb Blount (15:53): I think that you start thinking about how do you set the stage? Because what you talk about is you don’t really like change. Nobody likes change. If you spring it on someone, you’re likely to get a really tur response or you may get pushback. If you start setting the stage forward, if you start talking about the marketplace and your price is going up and you know, I’ll even say to someone, you know, we’ve been raising our prices on our other customers right now, we’re holding the line with our existing customers, but there’s a pretty good chance that we’re gonna have to come to you with a price increase sometime in the near future. I didn’t actually put a price increase in their lap, but I began to get them accustomed to the fact that it’s gonna happen. Yeah. And they’re thinking about it. So, and that typically makes it a little bit easier for them to absorb the price increase in our conversation or notice, I guess probably a better way of saying that.

John Jantsch (16:41): All right. What about the sales rep that’s faced with the situation? We all know there are companies out there that, that do this where the real reason they’re raising the price is because they can. Right. And so now the sales rep is faced with that’s their only, I mean, they’re obviously not going to go in and say it. That’s why we’re raising the price, but that’s their only real talking point. So, you know, how do you suggest somebody handle that when they really don’t have a great rationale?

Jeb Blount (17:04): Well, first of all, you wanna make sure that you are being professional and you’re being nice and that you don’t walk in already defensive. I’ve had that happen where I’ve had a salesperson come with a price increase and they’re te and they’re, you know, they’re cold because of their own emotions rather than mine. Yeah. And you don’t wanna do that at all. And certainly right now, if you’re in a situation where you can raise your prices and drop more money to the bottom line, you absolutely should. I mean, as a business, that’s your job to make profit. And by the way, there’s a difference in, you know, doing that. And then, you know, shoving something down someone’s throat and doing, you know, doing something that, that lacks in the integrity. I’m just talking about. Yeah. The regular course of doing business, you’re in a situation where you can drop more profit in and continue to serve your customers.

Jeb Blount (17:47): You should do that. So you start off with again let’s so let’s start setting the stage. Let’s build a campaign, let’s start, preframing the price increase early. Let’s be professional. Let’s be super nice. And then go back to our narratives. One of the narratives that you want to use in a situation like that is past value. Here are all of the things great that we have done for you. Yes. You’re gonna be paying more for the same thing you were getting before, but look at all the things that we have contributed to you and your business over the years. And, and when you use that approach, most people will accept the price, increase most business people, especially people that you know, that are in the B2B world, right? They get it, they understand what’s happening. They don’t like it. And they’re not gonna be, you know, jumping up and down and, you know, bringing in a bras band to welcome your price increase in, but they understand and they get it. The key is the way that you approach it, relaxed, assertive, professional confidence. It wins the day. Every single time

John Jantsch (18:48): You have a framework and I’ll just kind of tease it and you can talk about as much as you want, but obviously it’s a big part of the book and that’s, so there is actually a system, you know, for going out into, and you actually call it deal, you know, an acronym for that, that has four parts. So I’ll let you just kind of take that as far as you want it to.

Jeb Blount (19:05): Yeah. The deal framework is simply a framework for negotiating a price increase. So in, in some cases, especially with your higher risk customers, and there’s also a risk profile matrix inside the book that allows you to take your accounts and drop ’em into that risk profile, to make a decision about how you want to approach them with the price increase. But the deal framework is simply the process of if you begin negotiating and they, you typically sounds like this, John, they’ll say something like, um, Jeb, like, like I totally get that. You gotta give a price increase, but we’re, we can’t pay this much. We haven’t, we don’t, we’re not budgeted for that. Okay. Well, that’s great. So you’ve accepted the price increase because you said I get it, but I’m not paying that much. Now I gotta work out something with you. So I wanna get onto the table what their issues are.

Jeb Blount (19:52): So I, I don’t wanna negotiate before I do that, then I want to give them, you know, my point of view. So, so I want to, I wanna explain the price increase and the reason why I’m doing the price increase and the business case behind it, even though if I’ve already explained it before typically a negotiation, people get amnesia. So I wanna come back and explain it again. And then what I wanna do from there is I want to get to a place where we can both agree. And for me, the one thing that I wanna protect during a price increase negotiation is my points. So let’s say I’m doing a 10% price increase. If I give up five points, that’s 50% of my price increase. So the way that I do that is I try to find things like funny money. And what funny money is something that I have that I can give my customer’s valuable to them, but really doesn’t mean that I’m giving up anything on my end.

Jeb Blount (20:42): So for example, let’s just say that I’m a business and I offer training for my customers and I’m giving a price increase to a big customer and the training typically they have to pay for, and they don’t, they haven’t paid for it. I might say, I’ll give you the training in exchange for the price increase. Well, the training’s probably online. It’s not costing me a whole lot of money to, to run it. And I didn’t give up my price increase points. Cause you gotta remember those price increase points. Those are, you know, those are gonna be adding up. Those are they’re they’re, they’re, they’re, you know, they accumulate over time. So giving up five points over months and months of time can be a really big number for you. So I, compoundings the number of the word that I’m looking for, but they compound over time.

Jeb Blount (21:22): So, so you want protect your points at all costs. And so that’s typically what I’m doing. So, so deal is just discussing the issue. It’s explaining my, you know, my situation or my business case. It’s aligning on an agreement typically a little bit of give and take. I want to give away things that don’t cost me anything while I’m protecting my points. And the L just stands for locking it down with a handshake or an agreement or a signed contract or money in the bank or something that, that symbolizes the fact that we have come to an agreement.

John Jantsch (21:55): So I know you work with a lot of sales managers who are tasked with coaching, a group of people around doing this. And so you do finish off the book with a nice section for those folks as well. And I, so if you’re a salesperson sales manager, there’s gonna be something in, in you in, in this book for everyone, J Jeb, you wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work at sales gravy, and then obviously all the books and, uh,

Jeb Blount (22:18): Yeah, absolutely. Well, the best place to find out about books is go to Amazon Barnes and noble, wherever you buy books. And you’ll be able to find selling the price increase there and my other books. And then if you wanna learn more about me, you can go to my website, jlu.com. My last name is spelled B L O U NT, or to sales, gravy.com, where you can check out all of our resources that we have for sales and sales people and anyone who is customer facing.

John Jantsch (22:44): Awesome. Well, Jeb’s great to appreciate you taking some time to step stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days soon out there on the road.

Jeb Blount (22:53): Yes, sir. Thank you.

John Jantsch (22:54): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not .com .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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July 8, 2022/by exposure

10 Key Areas That May Be Holding Your Business Back

10 Key Areas That May Be Holding Your Business Back written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I’m doing a solo show. I’m going to break down the 10 key areas that may be holding your business back.

Key Takeaway:

If you’re a long-time listener, you know that my point of view is strategy before tactics. In this episode, we’re going to focus on the 10 key areas that may be holding your business back. These aren’t just 10 tactics — we’re going to dive into on these key areas and how you can use them as pillars to help you build a systematic approach to marketing and growing your business.

Topics I cover:

[2:44] Number one — narrow the focus to an ideal client
[4:43] Number two — develop a core message that allows you to communicate and promise to solve the greatest problem that your ideal client customer is experiencing today
[6:55] Number three — build a total online presence that meets people where they are and that helps build trust and demonstrates your expertise
[8:56] Number four — building a steady flow of incoming leads
[10:34] Number five — how to convert leads into customers
[12:12] Number six — how to use content as the voice of strategy along the customer journey
[13:53] Number seven — retaining customers is how you build momentum
[15:23] Number eight — generating referrals and building strategic partner relationships is essential
[16:25] Number nine — using metrics to understand what works and what doesn’t – if you don’t have a plan to measure, you’ll be guessing
[18:02] Number ten — you have to have a marketing plan you are working from

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:45): Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and no guest today. I’m just gonna do another solo show. It’s been a little while. So hopefully, well, I hear from you guys sometimes that you do appreciate these solo shows, give you a little different flavor, mix things up a little bit today’s topic, or let’s give it even a title for the show is going to be 10 key areas that may be holding your business back. That’s right. I’m gonna break each of ’em down. Now, if you’re driving or out walking the dog or on a treadmill or something, don’t worry. I’ve actually created a tool that will allow you to assess your business on each of these 10 areas. So you don’t have to write them all down. Just remember this URL, marketing assessment.co not.com.co. You can go there and actually answer a few questions and it will assess your business, give you score on these 10 areas.

John Jantsch (01:46): And then it will also give you a really slick report on how to address these areas. What to fix, what to focus on. If you score low in certain areas. And even if you score high, actually, one of the things that I’ve discovered over the years is that people that score really high on this assessment are actually businesses that are really getting ready to take off. There are some foundational things that many businesses need to fix. You get a handle on these 10 things, and this is when your business really takes off and little warning. It’s not just gonna be a list of 10 tactics. There is a lot of strategy involved in this because that’s how you get it done, right? Obviously, if you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time at all, , you know, that’s my point of view strategy before tactics, but let’s focus on these areas and build a systematic approach to marketing or growing your business.

John Jantsch (02:41): All right, let’s get into the 10, shall we? Number one, you’ve got to narrow the focus to an ideal client. In my last book, the ultimate marketing engine, I actually went as far as saying the top 20% of who you’re doing business with today probably represents your ideal client. I mean, you can’t serve everyone not profitably anyway. And you’ve probably realized that if you go and look at your current client base today, there’s certainly a percentage that, that you would probably say to yourself. Boy, I wish I had more clients like that. So let’s understand who they are. In fact, the simplest question I can ask you is, let’s say I wanted to refer tons of business to you. I would ask you the question, how specifically, I mean, as specifically as possible, would I spot your ideal client? That one person, not only demographics in the ways you would describe them, but what’s the behavior.

John Jantsch (03:43): What’s the problem they’re having. What’s what’s what describes a person or a business that you can deliver the most value to the fastest. What does that look like? And it doesn’t mean that by defining this, you’re going to never attract or go after any other kind of business. It just simply is a recognition that if you want to stand out, differentiate your business, you have to tell people here’s who I help. And here’s who I don’t help. It’s as simple as that’s actually, even though it might seem frightening to say here’s who I don’t help. That’s actually how you’re going to build momentum. All right. Number two. And these are so completely linked that when we work with clients and by the way, that’s another way that at the end of this, if you take our assessment that you can find it marketing assessment.co and you decide, Hey, why don’t we have John and his team build all this for us.

John Jantsch (04:36): We have a process called strategy. First. We’d love to run your business through, to build out a great deal of what I’m gonna talk about today. Okay? Back to number two, you’ve got to develop a message that allows you to communicate and promise to solve the greatest problem that your ideal client customer is experiencing today. It’s kind of boils down to a core message. It’s a thing that should go above the fold on every website on the homepage, right? When somebody comes to your site, bam, they need to be hit with a message that says, I understand you. I get the problem you’re having. We are uniquely suited to solve that problem. Don’t tell me what you do. don’t tell me what your business is. Don’t tell me how long you’ve been in business promise to solve my greatest problem. That is how you are going to stand out.

John Jantsch (05:32): That alone. In many cases is going to allow you to differentiate your business example. I use all the time is a tree service that we worked with that, you know, we interviewed their clients. And by the way, great way to get to what this core message is. Your clients, your customers know the problem, know the value you bring probably more than you do. So look through those Google reviews interview, your, and what you’ll learn is going back to this tree service, every single one of their clients, almost every single one of their customers said, Hey, what we really love about them is they show up when they say they’re going to and they clean up the job site. Nobody mentioned they cut the tree down perfectly. Nobody mentioned, oh, it was great. They’re a local owned business. I mean, those are all nice things. those are all important things, but what they were, the problem they were really solving is nobody else shows up on time.

John Jantsch (06:23): Nobody else cleans the job site up when they come to work in our home. So that’s a core message that allowed them to stand out. Now it’s not enough to just print that on a business card and phone it in. Obviously you’ve gotta live that too. So, you know, having your on time guarantee, creating your 37 point checklist to clean up a job site that you use, and part of your marketing materials, you, you develop strategy and then you fulfill strategy. You it’s not enough to just promise. You have to actually show how you’re going to deliver on what you promised. All right, let’s move to number three today. I, you know, everybody talks about all the changes in marketing and they’re not significant, but the thing that’s probably changed the most is the way people choose to buy today. No matter what your business does, no matter how your transaction occurs, there’s a good deal.

John Jantsch (07:13): That a, that there’s a good chance. I should say that most of the customer journey has been completed by somebody checking you out online, maybe without your knowledge at all. So we have to today build a total online presence that meets people where they are, that that gives them an experience, builds trust when they go and they look at our website that gives them the chance to dig deeper. That shows them social proof that you know, other people think we’re great. The reviews, the case studies, I mean that we can demonstrate that, that we’ve actually done what we’re promising to do for you today. You know, that that element, you know, some of it starts in social media, certainly reputation, as I mentioned, content, which I’ll get to in, in point number six. I mean, those are things that we have to focus on. Even if most of your transactions are across the desk from a, another human being.

John Jantsch (08:09): I’m not saying that we have to all be eCommerce businesses and sell all of our products and services, but just know that when somebody is beginning, their journey searched to find you or a business like yours, they’re doing it online today. And so a focus on your online presence or a lack of focus on your online presence might be something that’s holding you back. And I see it every day. Many people look at their website still as a brochure for their business, or as a way for people to contact them. Here’s an interesting statistic that, uh, 86% of people who visit a website for the first time do, are there to do something other than make a purchase or contact that company. Right? So if that’s the case, then our website, our online presence has a lot of jobs to do, and we have to understand how people are using it.

John Jantsch (08:55): All right, let’s go to number four. This is where people start getting excited, but this is really something that holds a lot of businesses back. And that’s just a lack of steady flow of leads. I mean, lead generation is something that, that obviously we want customers, but if we don’t have leads, we obviously can’t, uh, don’t have that pipeline to really convert some percentage to customers. So once you narrow your ideal client focused and you really get solid on that core message, you know, now you have the ability to take that message into places where your ideal customer hangs out. And now all of a sudden your ads and driving people to your website and the content that you produce will be on target. it will have a lot more people saying, I wanna know more. They’ll fill out your forms. They’ll ask for free consultations.

John Jantsch (09:43): And that’s really where lead generation starts is by connecting with the right people, with the right message.

John Jantsch (09:49): Hey, eCommerce brands did you know, there’s an automated marketing platform. That’s 100% designed for your online business. It’s called drip, and it’s got all the data insights, segmentation, savvy, and email and SMS marketing tools. You need to connect with customers on a human level, make boatloads of sales and grow with Gusto. Try drip for 14 days, no credit card required and start turning emails into earnings and SMS sends into ch Chans, try drip free for 14 days. Just go to go.drip.com/ducttapemarketingpod. That’s go.drip.com/ducttapemarketingpod.

John Jantsch (10:33): All right, jumping into number five. Obviously we’ve gotta turn some of those leads into customers cause ultimately nobody wants leads. They want customers, right? so how do we do that? Well, the up the thing that most people do is they wait for somebody to, to raise their hand and then they try to sell them.

John Jantsch (10:52): And truly, and I know you’ve heard this before, but today, you know, nobody wants to be sold. They wanna be educated. They wanna learn why making the decision to buy from you or to hire you is gonna be the right decision. So that simply is a process. That’s a system of continuing the education, continuing the customer journey so that you become the logical conclusion. So whether that is in a presentation that you’re able to make, that really gets at the heart of understanding your customer’s problem, that you’re going to solve. That gets at the continued materials that you send them into a, you know, some sort of a try, you know, a great deal of what we do is actually have lead conversion meetings where we just continue to teach. We continue to use a process, the marketing hourglass process to help people understand not just what we’re going to do, but why it’s so important, why the, why there are areas in their business that they just have failed to address.

John Jantsch (11:50): So don’t think of it as selling, think of it as educating, continuing the education process. All right. Number six out of 10. And again, I’ll remind you that if you want to assess your business in these 10 areas that I’m describing today and you can do so by just jumping over to marketing assessment.co not.com.co, all right, number six, content, you know, so many people, content’s probably the biggest creator of stress for most marketers, because it’s a lot of work, especially now because you know, it used to be, you could produce anything and put it out there and you were ahead of the game, but now content is expected. In fact, it’s the to play in marketing today. And because of that, it has to be good. You can’t just occasionally put something on your website and call it content. All of the, a great deal of the customer journey when somebody’s assessing whether or not you’re somebody they even want to bother spending any time with or learning about they’re going to be reading your content.

John Jantsch (12:52): They’re going to be going in depth, frankly. It’s a, it’s one of the ways that many businesses get found today. I mean, if we’ve got some problem we’re trying to solve or trying to understand, we turn to search engines. Well, if you are not producing content, that is significant in terms of consistency and in terms of quality and in terms of addressing the actual things people are searching for, then you’re not gonna going to be found, um, maybe doubly true for a local business where somebody’s just trying to find, Hey, is there an X kind of business near me? If you’re not showing up in those map results or the three pack or, you know, your Google business profile page is not being optimized with proper content. Then in some ways you’re invisible. If that’s the only way people are finding businesses today, and that is one of the primary ways, then it’s, it could be a real challenge.

John Jantsch (13:46): So content’s gotta be part of your strategy. It’s not just another tactic that you hope to get to. All right, number seven area. That’s holding people back, okay. Now we’ve got leads coming in. We’re converting. Those leads to customers. Retention now becomes really the biggest part. And what I mean by that, of course, is whatever that means for your business, whether it is recurring monthly revenue, it is repeat purchases. It is buying the next other thing. Or maybe taking that person. That’s buying your starter model up to somebody who wants to now join a more expensive program. Retaining customers is how you build momentum. If you’ve got customers that are going out the door, , you know, as fast as they’re coming in the door, obviously you can see it’s gonna be very difficult to grow or build that business. But if you’ve got the right customers, I can tell you right now, most businesses have customers that some percentage, a small percentage, it might be 10 or 15% that would pay them three times, 10 times as much.

John Jantsch (14:53): If you could discover another thing to sell them or another program to elevate them or ladder than ’em up to. So have you focused on a, creating a great customer experience, onboarding, fulfilling, communicating, setting the right expectations. That’s the key to retention quite frankly, but then are you focused on what more you can do discovering what more you can do the next stage. You can take your customers to, that’s all part of it. All right. Number eight referrals. I mean, if you’ve got happy customers, you’re retaining those customers, then you can make lead generation really simple. by not only being referable, but amplifying that referability having three, four, maybe five different approaches to generating referrals from all of your customers, or certainly from those champion customers, creating strategic partner relationships that are going to introduce you or allow you to get in front of more ideal customers.

John Jantsch (15:57): This is something that, that, you know, most businesses tell me that they get some percentage of referrals, but they’re just happy accidents. But if we focused on this area as a significant part of our marketing, uh, all of a sudden that fact that you are referable, I mean, it’s hard to get more referrals. if people aren’t happy, but if you’ve got happy customers, if you are referable, then it can be a pretty simple trick or tactic I should say, to really ramp that up. All right. Number nine metrics. Okay. This is one that quite frankly I struggle with, maybe that’s why it’s number nine. that a lot of businesses struggle with, but I’ve certainly seen over the years, the value of understanding what works and what doesn’t work, understanding who’s coming to your website, what they’re doing on your website, you know, setting up some simple key performance indicators, tracking referrals, tracking, retention, tracking, number of leads, tracking percentage of those leads that convert, you start getting close to those numbers.

John Jantsch (17:02): You, you will quite often see some surprises, things that you didn’t know, you know, maybe a great deal of your traffic or a great deal of your actual traffic that turns into customers is coming from one place, not knowing that’s has you shooting in the dark. And in many cases, wasting your efforts, you know, not tracking things, allows them to slip quite often. And all of a sudden you look up one day and you wonder why you’re not generating leads because you haven’t paid attention to where, you know, some of your metrics were off. This can, you can overdo this. We have the ability to track and access so much data today that it can be mind numbing. So the key really is to come up with maybe five or six at the most numbers that are very telling for you, that you can go to work on, that you can actually impact and make impact by attaching some of your tactics and your campaigns to all right, then the final one.

John Jantsch (17:58): And this one, maybe this could be first , but for number 10, this is one that I think is really interesting. And that is that you have a marketing plan that you are working from. Now, let me first say that if you Google marketing plan, you’re gonna find all kinds of templates and, and documents and examples of marketing plans, even software that will allow you to create marketing plans. And the problem with most that I’ve seen along these lines is kind of just academic exercises. It’s like here, create the executive summary, then create the table of content and it’s like, oh, is house this gonna move my business forward? There are a lot of also on the flip side of that, you know, things like the one page marketing plan, Alan, Deb’s been on this show. It’s great book. The one page marketing plan, the point is having at least a set of intentions, a marketing plan to me can be as simple as saying, here’s our ideal client.

John Jantsch (18:56): Here’s our core message. , you know, here’s where our ideal client hangs out. Here’s what we’re gonna do this quarter. You know, these are our top three priorities because we want to grow X percent, you know, in the quarter, or we wanna, we want to get X new customers in the, the quarter, or we want to have X new products launched in the quarter. Just simply having a plan that that says here’s our intention. And maybe it’s for the year, maybe it’s for three years, but breaking it down into quarters. What I find is it, first off, it allows you to say, well, we can only do a couple things this quarter. So here’s our priorities. And then instead of trying to do a million things poorly, we focus on two or three things, holy and they get done and they move the needle.

John Jantsch (19:40): Or at least we believe they’re going to, or we wouldn’t have put ’em on the list. So working from a plan that you revisit often, as opposed to something that you dread and you spend six weeks creating and documenting to, to the point where it then does, you know, good because you don’t ever look at it again. The idea behind a plan is that it becomes an ongoing project plan for what you intend to do. And just as important, what you intend not to do for that quarter, because that’s, to me then backs up into everything. Here’s what our content has to be. Here are the campaigns. Here are the ads we have to run. Here’s how we’re gonna focus on retention or referrals or whatever it is. You create those priorities cuz you can’t fix. Most people. Can’t fix all 10 of the things that I’ve talked about, the key areas and not everybody needs to fix all 10.

John Jantsch (20:34): You know, hopefully I’ve stimulated some ideas today where you’re thinking, well, gosh, we’re really not doing anything on number five or number eight that John talked about. The point is of all of this is that, you know, marketing’s not an event it’s never over this is something that these 10 areas, quite frankly, are something that, you know, we might work with you and fix a little bit. And then we’d say, now let’s go to the next level. Now let’s take this, you know, foundation that we’ve built and really turn it into something that’s going to consistently generate ideal customers. That’s going to consistently generate monthly recurring revenue. That’s going to consistently improve our revenue and our profit and our, you know, customer experience. All right. So that’s it today. Those are 10 key areas that maybe holding your business back, figure out where you are in all 10 of these and figure out which are your priorities to go to work on.

John Jantsch (21:24): Just take our little quick assessment@ marketingassessment.co takes you about five minutes and you’ll get a free report. You’ll get a PDF that you can download that based on your answers is going to tell you exactly where you need to prioritize and what you need to do. All right. Take care of everybody. And uh, hopefully, uh, we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road. Write to me, John at duct tape, marketing.com. Tell me what, what you think of this show, what you think of the assessment, or we’d love to visit with you. If you’re in a position where you’re like, we need help with this. I’d love to work with you on have my team work with you on building a strategy first for you. That would address all of these areas. All right, everybody take care.

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

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

Did you know there’s an automated marketing platform that’s 100% designed for your online business? It’s called Drip, and it’s got all the data insights, segmentation savvy, and email and SMS marketing tools you need to connect with customers on a human level, make boatloads of sales, and grow with gusto. Try Drip free for 14 days (no credit card required), and start turning emails into earnings and SMS sends into cha-chings.

Did you miss our previous article…
https://www.sydneysocialmediaservices.com/?p=1064

July 7, 2022/by exposure

The Hidden Dangers of Complacency

The Hidden Dangers of Complacency written by Sara Nay read more at Duct Tape Marketing

About the show:

About this episode:

In this episode of the Agency Spark Podcast, Sara talks with Len Herstein on the hidden dangers of complacency.

Len Herstein has over 30 years of experience in business and brand marketing.

Prior to founding his marketing and events company (ManageCamp Inc.), Len innovated, managed, and grew brands for major consumer packaged goods marketers, including Campbell Soup Company, Coca-Cola, and Nabisco.

Since 2015, Len has served as a reserve deputy sheriff with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office in Colorado. Learn more at lenherstein.com.

More from Len Herstein:

www.lenherstein.com
Be Vigilant!: Strategies to Stop Complacency, Improve Performance, and Safeguard Success
LinkedIn

This episode of the Agency Spark Podcast is brought to you by Monday.com, a powerful project management platform. Monday.com helps teams easily build, run, and scale their dream workflows on one platform. I personally am a user and big fan of Monday.com – I start my workday pulling up the platform and spend my day working within it for everything from task management to running client engagements. Learn more about Monday.com at ducttape.me/monday.

July 7, 2022/by exposure

How To Build Great Leadership Teams

How To Build Great Leadership Teams written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jack McGuinness

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Jack McGuinness. Jack is a management consultant with over 35 years of experience. After serving with the U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division, he helped build a successful boutique management consulting firm where he served as COO for 13 years. In 2009, he co-founded a new firm, Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on working with CEOs to unleash the potential of their leadership teams. He has a new book called — Building Great Leadership Teams: A Practical Approach to Unleashing the Full Potential of your Teams.

Key Takeaway:

Leadership teams have an enormous impact on their organizations. Dysfunctional teams hold their organizations back but great leadership teams accelerate their health and productivity. In this episode, I talk with the co-founder of Relationship Impact, Jack McGuinness, about what a great leadership team looks like, how it feels to be part of one, and what it takes to build a great one.

Questions I ask Jack McGuinness:

[2:45] What is this book going to bring to the leadership genre?
[3:40] Why is being a leader such a challenge for entrepreneurs sometimes?
[7:31] How do you start looking at who should be on the team?
[10:47] When you see teams break down, what’s the single greatest factor in the demise?
[12:13] Do you think that it’s a good idea for teams to intentionally seek diversity?
[13:23] Is what you’re talking about just as much a retention and recruitment tool as it is a productivity tool?
[15:30] What is the leader’s job in a team?
[17:52] So if I’m a leader or I’m on a team, and I’m thinking I need to pick up this book, what am I going to find in the book?
[18:59] Where can people find out more about your book and your work?

More About Jack McGuinness:

Relationship Impact
More about his book — Building Great Leadership Teams

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by Doone Roison, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan, Dr. Lisa Cravin shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jack McGuinness. He is a management consultant with over 35 years in the business. After serving with the us Army’s 10th mountain division. He helped build a successful boutique management consulting firm where he served as the chief operating office served for 13 years in 2009. He co-founded a new firm with west point with his west point classmate called relationship impact a consulting firm focused on working with CEOs to unleash the potential of their leadership teams. And today we’re gonna talk about is newest book called building great leadership teams, a practical approach to unleashing the full potential of your teams. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack McGuinness (01:36): Thanks so much for having me, John. It’s good to see you again.

John Jantsch (01:39): So the 10th mountain division, did you learn to ski when you were, uh, yeah,

Jack McGuinness (01:43): No, it was roughly cold. I, we were, it was an upstate New York on the foot of lake Ontario or tip of lake Ontario. And it was people from the sixth infantry division used to come in for, for cold weather training. It was that cold, but it used to used to be in Colorado

John Jantsch (01:58): And, well, that’s what I was gonna say. That’s in fact, there’s a whole system of huts and things that they’ve kept up in the mountains and refurbished, and now you can, you know, cross country ski and hiked to ’em and, and ran ’em out in the winter. And, and I just BEC I’ve gone to a couple of them and I read a pretty fascinating account about the, that division’s, uh, role in world war II and heck pretty fascinating.

Jack McGuinness (02:18): Pretty fast. Yeah. In, in Italy, I think they have

John Jantsch (02:21): Yeah, exactly.

Jack McGuinness (02:21): A big role. Yeah. And they played a huge role in, in the first Gulf war too. Is that right? For sure. Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:28): So I have to start on the cynical side first from a questioning standpoint, there are a lot of leadership books of late. It seems like more and more of late for dysfunction of a team who moved my cheese, you know, turn the ship around. You can all these kind of pop titles that are out there. So I I’ll let you tell me why does a world need another leadership book? What, what is this book gonna bring to, to the genre if you will. That makes it significant.

Jack McGuinness (02:55): You know, I think the reason I actually wrote it, cause I agree with you. There’s a lot of good stuff out there too. It’s not just flaky stuff. There’s some flaky stuff too, but there’s some really good stuff out there. There’s not a lot on building leadership teams. There’s a lot on teams. There’s a lot on, you know, leadership in general, but on building leadership teams, not so much. And so that’s really why I, I, I, I felt like I had something to say after doing this for 14 years,

John Jantsch (03:25): You know, a lot of entrepreneurs, uh, start a business and with an idea and then it grows up and all of a sudden they find themselves being a manager leader right. Without maybe without any desire to be so yeah, but also, you know, kinda realizing that’s the only way to make this thing bigger. So why for particularly for that group of people, is this such a challenge?

Jack McGuinness (03:47): Yeah. So, so it’s, it is a challenge for them. No question about it for, for a lot of them, but it’s what, what I found is that it’s a challenge for those that have, you know, started in a managing training program and grown up the ranks in a mid-size company and building a leadership team is hard. And it’s, it’s, you can’t just throw a group of talented individual players that are good at their individual function, sales, marketing, CFO, operations, you can throw ’em together. And that’s what most firm companies do. And some have a lot of success with it. And others often struggle with the dysfunction that re results from not stepping back and really thinking through what does a leadership team need to be doing for this organization at this time in its journey?

John Jantsch (04:44): Well, I imagine one of the challenges is that as a comp, particularly as a company grows and they start having teams plural, it, it really, you know, it’s not like somebody sat out and said, let’s poof build a team, right? I mean, a team sort of assembles and doesn’t that make it, doesn’t that dynamic alone, make it difficult to have everybody get along. so much

Jack McGuinness (05:04): It does. It, it, it absolutely does. And that, and thus the premise behind the book is very much leadership teams are critical for the health and productivity about an organization, because everyone looks up to the leaders in the organization to see how well they’re working together and holding each other accountable, not so much how much they like each other, but how they’re holding each other accountable. Right. And in order to do that, well, you have to have a good structural foundation for your team, like blah, the blocking and tackling things that are elemental for, you know, running a meeting. Well, for example, a bit, you know, the most basic of things that often are, is not well done. And you have to really set up the right relational dynamics and just step back and say, Hey, look, all of us are different. We’ve all come from different places, journeys.

Jack McGuinness (06:00): And that’s great, but what do we need from each other at this particular juncture in this organization’s journey? And, and if you don’t step back and do that, you put structure in place that sometimes causes some relational strife, right? We’ll put, you know, and, and, and not necessarily intentionally even, but we’ll put structure in place like that. We’ll define roles. And we’ll assume that everyone knows what the marketing Del, you know, delivery focus folks are supposed to do. And the sales folks are supposed to do. And it’s the gray areas between those roles that gets teams in trouble and then bleeds down to the rest of the organization as well sometimes. And so it’s really that Def helping, you know, build the right structure and just talk about what the structure should look like. It, it, it, it saves so much pain on the back end because we’re not pointing fingers at as much at, at each other for stupid things. Look, people are gonna argue, people are gonna, you know, get into confrontations. And that’s a good thing if they’re fighting about the right stuff.

John Jantsch (07:17): So one of the very first steps, of course, which makes a ton of sense, but probably people don’t think about it enough is a lot of times we think in terms of, oh, we have to fill this function or this job on the team, as opposed to who would be the right person.

Jack McGuinness (07:31): That’s right.

John Jantsch (07:32): So, so how, you know, how do you, and I’m, I’m guessing it’s different for every company cuz every culture’s different, but you know, how do you start looking at who should be on the team?

Jack McGuinness (07:43): Well, of course, you know, the functional business unit leaders are, you know, are the natural, you know, people that people, you know, that CEOs point to. Right, right. And that’s fine. It’s a great starting point. The challenge is we have to step back and say, what are the unique capabilities that these individuals need to have to be a really good leadership team member? Things like the ability to think beyond today to, to think beyond today’s problem or the next three months and help the organization help the team think a little further out than that. And not, I’m not talking about a strategic planning effort. I’m talking about just the foresight necessary to how you know, what’s going on in my environment. That’s gonna, you know, gonna impact how we’re operating today. It’s things like managing complexity, you know, can do we have the ability to deal with all this stuff that comes with rising in an organization.

Jack McGuinness (08:43): And now I’m not just a functional player, but I have more things thrown at me, more discussions I’m having about broader issues. Can I take that, those things in and deal with the complexity and make sense of it and more importantly, help the folks under me make sense of it and perhaps more important than anything is, do I have the innate capability to have a, an organization focus or what we call a greater good focus rather than a functional focus. Right? And so we, we know that not every leader has those innate characteristics to start, right, but identifying that they need to have some development on those characteristics is very important and it’s a missed opportunity. We find often.

John Jantsch (09:29): And now let’s hear from our sponsor, you know, as a business owner, you eventually realize you can’t do everything yourself, but hiring is complicated. And what if you only need part-time help your job is to be the visionary. But instead you spend countless hours on tasks that could be done easily and arguably better by someone else. And that’s where the powerful multiplying effects of delegation are mission critical. Our friends at belay can help. Belay is an incredible organization, revolutionizing productivity with their virtual assistance bookkeepers website specialists and social media managers for growing organizations to help you get started. Belay is offering their latest ebook, delegate to elevate for free to all of my listeners. Now in this ebook, you’ll learn how to reclaim time to focus on what you can do by delegating to download your free copy. Just text tape to 5, 5, 1, 2, 3, that’s T a P E to 5, 5 1, 2, 3, accomplish more and juggle less with belay.

John Jantsch (10:40): I should just ask you this, but I know the answer to it already, but yeah, when you see teams break down, uh, what, what is the, what’s the single greatest factor?

Jack McGuinness (10:51): Oh, it’s the, the greatest factor is the inability to have tough conversations about or productive conversations about the most important things that they’re facing, not about trivial crap focus on what’s most important. And what that means is that we have to disagree with each other sometimes because we come at things in from different perspectives and the

John Jantsch (11:15): It’s, it’s tough to, it’s tough to disagree if you don’t trust. I mean, that’s what I was really,

Jack McGuinness (11:19): You know, so, and so the relational dynamics here are really important is do we trust each other enough where we can have those tough conversations without being judged, without being shut down without having my colleague go talk to the CEO after the meeting and tell ’em how, what a stupid idea it was. And then ultimately, you know, we’ve never really gotten to this, but we aspire every team we work with. We, our aspiration is that they are able to hold each other accountable without just the power accountability in their room. Now that’s a heavy lift. That’s a hard thing to get to for any team, but when you can move towards and move the needle towards it and even be spastic as you’re getting towards it, that progress really helps build the fibers amongst the team members.

John Jantsch (12:11): Do you think that it’s a good idea for teams to intentionally seek diversity? And I’m not just necessarily talking about race or ethnicity, but I mean, diversity of ideas, diversity of backgrounds. I mean, do you think that plays a role or does that make it harder?

Jack McGuinness (12:26): I, I, it makes it harder. It makes it harder for sure. No question about it, but it it’s absolutely crucial. Like we, we see often CEOs that will hire people or promote people that are just like them. Right. You know, she grew up in the organization very similar to I did and a sales role and then went to a marketing role and she’s got a very, you know, people oriented approach to her. So I’m gonna put, I’m gonna bring her up and that’s great, but not everyone can have the same or shouldn’t have the same way of thinking. Look, it happens. And, and that’s fine, but you have to compensate for it. You have to ask yourself questions. Like, what are we missing here? Because we all think about this the same way. Right, right. It’s just, it’s the step back type of things you have to do.

John Jantsch (13:20): So the hiring environment, even retention environment right now of employees is, is as we, we all know is, you know, a much top talked about topic in the news. So how do you, I mean, is what you’re talking about is much a retention tool and a recruitment tool as it is a productivity tool.

Jack McGuinness (13:40): Well, I think, you know, there’s no question about it because a look, the CEO’s job is a big one and it doesn’t matter what size of the organization. Obviously it gets more complex and more, you know, as the bigger you get and the more span of control you have, but the CEO’s job is really to create the conditions for his or her team to build a productive and healthy organization. And those things are always, not always, but often in conflict with each other. And, you know, and, and it’s a hard job, but when you do that, well, the downstream effects on the people that are mid-level managers and below is dramatic because they’re like, look, the leadership, team’s not perfect, but man are, they are really, they got our backs and they’re pushing us. They’re pushing whole, I’m working with a bank right now started by a construction guy about 17 years ago.

Jack McGuinness (14:46): And it’s, you know, it’s grown like crazy. The, this is a great place to work and it’s not perfect. There’s chaos. They, you know, they attack problems with, with vigor and it leaves a trail of dust behind them sometimes, but they’re able to repair because the intentions are there that they’re trying to build something really cool. And while they’re doing it, they do take care of their people. It might be after the fact, but they do take care of their people. And, uh, I think that balance of PR product productivity and health is really important.

John Jantsch (15:22): Most teams of some sort of a, maybe it’s a rotating, but it’s an appointed leader. W would the analogy of a sports team kind of be the same where the, the leader of a team’s job really is maybe more like a coach? Or let me just ask you directly, what is the leader’s job of a team?

Jack McGuinness (15:40): Yeah. I mean, ultimately, um, ultimately, and if you, if you go back to the, the, my aspiration, our aspiration of the teams, we work with that they hold each other accountable. When you’re working towards that CEOs naturally evolved to be being more coaching oriented than directing oriented and much more oriented to be working with the, their leadership team to set the picture, to set the foundation, to identify what the most important priorities are, and then let people go now, again, that’s a Nirvana state too, you know, no question about it, but if you’re aspiring to get to something like that, much more likely to have greater success. So the CEO, you know, we started this thing again 14 years ago and our aspiration was like, you know, teams are really leadership teams are so important that it shouldn’t matter what the CEO’s role is on a team.

Jack McGuinness (16:45): And boy were we abused of that, that notion, you know, it’s critical, it’s absolutely critical the role they play. They have to model a whole bunch of stuff like the values that are espoused, the, you know, the, how the, he, or she wants the team to operate. And they have to have a strong role in set in, in establishing directing direction. And sometimes they have to play a heavy hand role, but most often what they have to do is push back when the lobbying happens. And I know that sounds like a trivial issue, but we see it all the time. Like you’ll have a great meaning, see, meeting a seemingly great meeting about an important issue. And then the CEOs getting calls, getting knocks on his door, telling him or her why those ideas were such bad ideas and why these ideas are good ones. And so, and the ability to say, Hey, wait a minute, we had this conversation, go talk to Jerry, go talk to Bob, go talk to Sue and figure this stuff out, and then let’s have a conversation about it, but I need you guys to figure this stuff out. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:50): So if I’m, uh, a leader or I’m on a team, maybe even, and I’m thinking, I need to pick up this book, what am I gonna, is there a road? Is what am I gonna find in the book? Is it gonna be a roadmap, you know, start here, do then do this UN unpack it in the two yeah. Two minutes or so we have

Jack McGuinness (18:06): A few things it’s it really does. I think it does a pretty good job of talking about why a leadership team is so important in the impact it has on an organization. Number two, it talks, um, a lot about the structural and relational foundation necessary to build a good team mm-hmm and then it get, it does provide a bit of a roadmap on what are the things you need to do to either repair or to build. And, you know, I’m pretty proud of that. Part of it. It’s pretty practical. There are a lot of other books out there there that are, that I believe are really good and inspired me in the work that I do. But I think what we did was got into another level of how do you do this? Yeah. And why is it so important?

John Jantsch (18:55): Much, much needed. So tell people where they can find, uh, the book and find out more about your work, Jack.

Jack McGuinness (19:00): Yeah. So, so relationship impact.com is my website for my firm, but, uh, great leadership team. book.com is the books, companion website that I stole from you. I stole the model and this is my first book. So I’ve never done this before. And I was like, wow, I gotta get one of those companion sites.

John Jantsch (19:23): awesome. Well, jacket was great catching up with you. And, uh, hopefully, uh, we can run into each other one of these, uh, days out there on the road. Next time you’re visiting your son in, in Colorado.

Jack McGuinness (19:33): I will do that, John. No, no question, Matt, thank you so much for, for the opportunity. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch (19:38): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not – dot com – .co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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June 11, 2022/by exposure

Why Great Leadership Starts With Open Hearted Conversations

Why Great Leadership Starts With Open Hearted Conversations written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Edward Sullivan

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Edward Sullivan. Edward has been coaching and advising start-up founders, Fortune 10 executives, and heads of state for over 15 years. His clients include executives from Google, Salesforce, Slack, and dozens of other fast-growth companies. He holds an MBA from Wharton and an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School. Edward is CEO & President of the renowned executive coaching consultancy, Velocity. He also has a new book launching on June 21, 2022, called — Leading With Heart: 5 Conversations That Unlock Creativity, Purpose, and Results.

Key Takeaway:

Right now, workplaces are struggling to build high-morale and connected cultures. How do you retain and inspire your team? By leading with heart and sparking authentic conversation.

After thousands of hours of interviews and coaching sessions with leaders of many of the world’s most prominent firms, authors John Baird and Edward Sullivan found that top leaders don’t adhere to simple formulas and performance hacks. Instead, they discovered that these leaders help people unlock their creativity, purpose, and results by having conversations that make them feel productive, safe, and appreciated. In this episode, I talk with Edward Sullivan about why great leadership starts with open-hearted conversation.

Questions I ask Edward Sullivan:

[1:33] What’s the opposite of leading with heart?
[1:53] Is leading with ego how a lot of people have been taught or led?
[2:40] What does it take for someone to say that they are a leader?
[3:58] You did some pretty exhaustive research to come to the conclusions you did in your new book — could you explain your research process?
[5:24] Would you say that the great resignation is a bit of an indictment on leadership?
[7:23] It’s challenging to be a leader until you clean up your own house, and I think that starts with self-awareness — do you agree with that and if so, how do you balance that?
[9:14] What are the five questions that you talk about in the book?
[10:31] How do you start creating a culture of this openness if it has existed before?
[11:51] Is there an approach that works better in the workplace when it comes to the setting in which you talk about these questions?
[13:13] How do we actually help people understand what their needs are and what their fears are?
[14:20] How could you bring this work in earlier into an organization for say a new hire?
[16:03] This work is more than the five conversations, it’s daily consistent work — could you talk a little bit about the tools you give folks inside of their organization to use to help with this?
[17:57] What’s the balance of being able to use the framework and use it appropriately?
[20:29] Can you repair trust?
[21:19] Where can people find out more about your work?

More About Edward Sullivan:

Leadingwithheartbook.com

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the female startup club, hosted by dune Roen, and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. If you’re looking for a new podcast, the female startup club shares tips, tactics and strategies from the world’s most successful female founders, entrepreneurs, and women in business to inspire you to take action and get what you want out of your career. One of my favorite episodes who should be your first hire, what’s your funding plan? Dr. Lisa Keven shares her top advice from building spotlight oral. Listen to the female startup club, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Edward Sullivan. He’s been coaching in advising startup founders, fortune 10 executives and heads of state for over 15 years. His clients include executives from Google, Salesforce, slack, and dozens of other fast growth companies. He holds an MBA from Wharton and an M PA from the Harvard Kennedy school. He’s a CEO and president of the renowned executive coaching consultancy velocity. And he’s also the co-author of a book. We’re gonna talk about today leading with heart five conversations that unlock creativity, purpose, and results. So Edward, welcome to the show.

Edward Sullivan (01:31): Thanks so much great to be here.

John Jantsch (01:33): So let’s start with leading with heart as opposed to leading with what’s the opposite.

Edward Sullivan (01:41): Well, leading with heart is when you’re being open and curious, and I guess it’s leading with fear leading with ego is how a lot of people go about it, unfortunately.

John Jantsch (01:50): Yeah. And in your research, of course, I’m, I’m guessing that unfortunately that’s how a lot of people were taught or that’s how a lot of people have been led. Isn’t it?

Edward Sullivan (01:57): Well, you know, I think a lot of people when they don’t know better, yeah. They go back to maybe what they saw when they were coming up. And I think a lot of leaders today came up in the eighties and nineties and a lot of high pressure environments. And they were led by people who led by fear, who led with ego and they’ve learned to do the same. So our research indicated that the leaders who actually get the best results out of their employees lead with heart. And we explored that in the book,

John Jantsch (02:28): You know, a lot of entrepreneurs maybe didn’t go through any kind of formal leadership program or were mentored or . I mean, they just started a business and like, poof, now you have to lead people, right? I mean, what does it, what does it take for that person to start saying, oh, I’m a leader now, what do I do? Yeah,

Edward Sullivan (02:45): You’re right. A lot of our, our clients come to us because they’re really good developers. They’re good engineers, right? They’re good product designers. And they built something. People liked it. And now suddenly they have to build a company around it and they never took that class at school. You know, the how to lead people class. And the first in instinct is to try to control everything. Yeah. When you’re the founder, this is your baby. You know, you wanna control everything from the font to the color, to the, how people talk about it, to potential customers. And we’ve learned that people need a little bit more freedom than that. They need to feel some, some sense of owner. Should they need to be able to show up as themselves at work. And it’s really incumbent upon leaders of these firms to give people that freedom and give people that support. So they do feel themselves.

John Jantsch (03:37): Yeah. And I tell you just personal experience as a leader, it’s exhausting trying to hold onto everything. You’re trying to think you have all the answers. Right. And so I, I think it could be very freeing once people go, oh, they actually did it better. Or nobody died here. Right. I mean, so exactly it really. So, so tell me, I mean, leadership books, that’s a huge category of books, probably growing every year. You did some pretty exhaustive research to come to the conclusions you came to. You wanna explain that research process a little bit?

Edward Sullivan (04:05): Sure, sure. So my business partner and I are practitioners, we’re executive coaches. We run velocity, it’s a firm with 25 coaches around the world. We’ve got hundreds of clients. And over our combined 40 years of, uh, working with top executives, we were kind of performing the research on along the way. Right. We didn’t even know it. So our research process was actually going back through our notes, going back through files and saying, what is it that really ties all these great leaders together? What’s that common? We’re not journalists, we’re not researchers by trade. We’re more practitioners who backed into doing some research about this. And we found that there are five core conversations that great leaders are having, that enable them to lead with heart that enable them to have these connected conversations. And they’re conversations that we’re not used to having in the office. Yeah. Right. Because they’re about what do we need as people? What do we need to feel creative and resourceful? What fears might be holding us back, right. It’s about what are the, uh, desires that we have that really motivate us, but can also derail us if we take them a little bit too far,

John Jantsch (05:10): We also talked about, I was just gonna say, I wanna unpack those each or the five conversations I, I kind of wanted to, I wanted to frame it a little bit though, in, in what’s what’s very topical right now is, you know, we’re calling it all kinds of things, a great resignation and whatnot. I mean, is that a bit of a, is that a bit of a, an indictment on leadership? I mean, are people leaving because they’re not getting these things or because they’re not getting, you know, even basic respect.

Edward Sullivan (05:36): I mean, that is exactly right. And research has been done recently that showed that we think people are leaving because they want more freedom or they want more money. They want more equity, but 10 times more important is that they’re leaving toxic work cultures. Yeah. Right. They feel burned out. They feel unappreciated. They feel unseen. Obviously doing all of our work over zoom. Hasn’t helped much in the last couple of years. Right. But there are things that leaders can be doing to create this, these connections with people, even over zoom. And they’re simply not doing them. We get on a call and we say, great, what do we have to talk about today? Let’s do our work. Okay. Enough. And then we get off the call as quickly as possible. Right? Yeah. We’re not creating that connective tissue anymore. And that’s what people are missing.

John Jantsch (06:22): Yeah. I, uh, we have a client that, you know, like a lot of people are trying to hire people and, and trying everything, you know, running ads in all the places. And, you know, we just, we actually we’re testing ads and they add that. We ran that today for two years now has been by far and away the winner, it just, the, the title just says respect wow. And then it says, are you getting, you know, are you getting the respect you deserve in your current career? And I, we can’t beat that ad you know, so it really does say something doesn’t

Edward Sullivan (06:50): I’m gonna write that one down here

John Jantsch (06:52): Do, go for it. So, so you started to unpack the five conversations and you talked about, you used words, like what people need, the fears that are holding them back. We’re gonna get to the P word purpose eventually. Yeah. Here’s the thing that not enough people say is that I don’t think you can do those things as a leader until you clean up your own house. I mean, you get rid of your own fears. You get, you understand your own purpose. Right. And I think a lot of books try to a lot of books, try to say, here’s the roadmap, you know, but not enough say, uh, self, it starts with self-awareness. So, you know, how do you balance that, that thought? Or maybe you disagree with it?

Edward Sullivan (07:27): No, don’t I, I don’t disagree at all. I fatally agree. Yeah. In fact, we, we call the book basically a, a 250 page coaching conversation with one of us, right. With both of us, because really in Le in reading the book, we’re asking you these questions, you need to do all the work yourself. Yeah. And be comfortable answering these questions yourself with your employees, to be able to have those conversations. You can’t just go into it into a room with someone and say like, what are you afraid of? right. that doesn’t really make someone want to open up. But if you start the conversation and say, you know, I don’t know about you, but I’ve been feeling a little bit triggered into some fear recently. There’s a lot of uncertainty in the market. Things are happening abroad where, you know, we’re the country, the world’s at war right now. Yeah. Um, times of uncertainty make me feel a little uncertain, make me feel fearful. What’s coming up for you. Right? Yeah. Suddenly the leader has opened up themselves, created that vulnerability, the V word, right? Yeah. That allows other people to feel comfortable being vulnerable as well.

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John Jantsch (09:15): So let’s, let’s just pretend that the person that’s reading this book has, uh, dealt with that themselves. You know, just give me maybe gimme the 32nd. Here are the five, and then we can kind of come back and go, well, how do you do that?

Edward Sullivan (09:27): Yeah. Yeah. So the five questions that we found in our research and you’ve, you’ve outlined them as well are around needs. What do you need to be resourceful and creative? Yeah. Fears, what fears might be holding you back desires. And this is like, what do you really want out of life? And how could those core desires potentially derail you? We also talk a lot about gifts. What are the gifts you have that are unrealized or unexpressed in this current role? And then once we’ve had those four conversations, we’re ready to have the conversation around purpose.

John Jantsch (10:00): Yeah. O obviously I shouldn’t say obviously in many cases, uh, people have had that relationship. Maybe somebody’s been there for a long time. I mean, they just know each other they’ve unpacked over the years, but a lot of times somebody’s just, you know, managing somebody, they do, they get their 30 minutes a week, you know, with them. I mean, how do you really start getting into areas that maybe both parties are uncomfortable with, but probably the, you know, the superior, you know, perhaps seen as the superiors less uncomfortable with, I mean, you know, how do you start? How do you start creating a culture, I guess, of this openness that has maybe if it hasn’t existed.

Edward Sullivan (10:37): Yeah. You know, we talk a lot about culture and our work and in the book and it is, it is a great challenge. And it’s also an incredible opportunity. Yeah. Um, if you have a culture that’s really shut down where people don’t share anything about their personal lives coming out suddenly and talking about everything you’re fearful of yeah. Will be, will come as a shock, right? Yeah. You need to build up some, some trust there, right? Yeah. You need to approach some of these topics slowly. You need to build an environment of safety where people feel like we’re starting to connect to human beings as opposed to colleagues. And that feels pretty cool. Right. And it’s that connecting that, learning about each other, where you come from, what have you done, what’s going on at home? Do you have siblings, all those basic questions that we kind of take for granted with our friends, we often don’t know anything aside from like the names of spouses and maybe the names of children with our, our colleagues. Right? Yeah. We start having those baseline conversations, then we can go, go a few layers deeper. Yeah. We can start getting into what are you really? Maybe what you’re fearful of. Right. It builds upon itself. Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:40): Yeah. Trust is what we’re talking about. Really trust .

Edward Sullivan (11:43): Yeah. I mean, yeah. It all comes down to trust when people say like, what’s the two second summary of this book, it’s how to build trust in a work environment. Exactly.

John Jantsch (11:51): So, so do you advocate making, you know, like a lot of people will hear this and they’ll go, okay. Uh, we got 25 minutes, I’m gonna spend five minutes asking you about yourself and then we’re gonna get into it. I mean, is that the approach or do you actually want to have like, let’s have a company lunch once a month and we’re not gonna talk about work. I mean, which approach is better

Edward Sullivan (12:13): In your, uh, it’s actually both, right? Yeah. You need that regular drip of like connecting, uh, just like, Hey, what’s been going on. Yeah. And as opposed to just like the cursory what’d you do this weekend, right. We also want people to be giving the giving each other, some praise. Yeah. Like, so we start in our company, we start all of our meetings with shout outs. Mm-hmm and we say like, does anyone have anything great to say on anyone else on the call? You know? And it’s like, I really wanna thank Mike for, you know, in this meeting we had last week, he did this. That was great. Public praise makes people feel good. Yeah. We don’t get enough of it. Right? Yeah. We might get praise, um, privately or over email, but you really wanna be sharing that praise in real time. And as, as much as you can in front of other people,

John Jantsch (12:59): How much of the work, like, I, I, I would venture to say that if we filled a room up with 50 people and said, please explain your purpose, you know, about, yeah. Two of them, you know, could come up with anything that they thought really resonated. So how do we actually help people understand what their needs are, what their fears are, because I think that’s a lot of the challenges they don’t know. We could ask somebody, what, what are your fears? But they don’t know.

Edward Sullivan (13:26): They don’t know you’re right. You know, we try to explore some different themes in the book of needs that we’ve seen. Our clients have fears. We’ve seen our clients have to give people a language, but it’s really through the conversation that we start exploring. I don’t even know what I might be fearful of. Yeah. Right. You know, do I get to say that I’m fearful in this office environment hate to say it, but like men especially are trained to be fearless. They can’t show any fear and to work in a, in, in a, in a tough work environment, women then show up and think that they can’t show any fear either. And it’s this creates this really negative feedback system. So we’re trying to break that by saying, it’s actually, it’s not just okay to have these conversations. It’s better if you do right. You actually get better results. If you’re able to talk about these things and have that connection,

John Jantsch (14:20): How, how could you bring this work earlier, uh, into somebody? So somebody joins an organization. Could this be part of the hiring process to some degree, or is it just too hard to do that? Because there’s no relationship because you know, when you start talking about people’s desires and gifts, mm-hmm

Edward Sullivan (14:36): ,

John Jantsch (14:37): That might actually direct the path , you know, that, that they would go or the role that they would fill, you know, how could you do this without, you know, the relationship part? Or can you,

Edward Sullivan (14:47): Yeah. I mean, some environments, some organizations have a culture where as soon as you walk in the door, you feel at ease. Yeah. You feel relaxed. You can tell people genuinely like each other. Yeah. Right. And in those companies, and we, we, we’re lucky enough to advise a handful of ’em that are like that you sit down for the interview and you already feel at ease with this person. You already it’s like, we, we we’ve been friends for a long time. Right? Yeah. So the people who are just coming in are almost inculturated into this idea of it’s cool to just be yourself. It’s cool to show up as you are and bring your gifts to the table, bring your needs and fears to the table and we’ll work with that. Right. Cause it’s very human to have needs. It’s human to have other environments you walk in and it feels cold. It feels like, you know, they’re giving you like an intimidation interview. I don’t know if you’ve ever had ever interviewed at McKinsey, like they’re famous for the intimidation interview where they try to see how you respond when someone’s almost really rude to you in an interview situation because the client might be rude to you someday. Yeah. Yeah. That’s fine. And all, but how about have that conversation about, you need to steal up and be ready for people to be an asshole towards you rather than just be that way towards them in the interview.

John Jantsch (16:04): So talk a little bit about some of the tools, because obviously you do this work with organizations, you teach people, you give them tools to, to train the, you know, folks inside their organization. So talk a little bit about the work, I guess that is that, you know, that’s more than just, you know, five conversations it’s daily work.

Edward Sullivan (16:22): Right. Right. I mean, our work is predominantly one on one conversations, like coaching conversations. And then we facilitate a lot of conversations for our clients. So you might, uh, not be surprised that right now with everyone starting to go back to the office and COVID feels like it’s mostly over, everybody wants to have a team offsite. So we’re just completely booked out through the summer in dozens of team offsite for people who wanna have these conversations. Right. They’re they wanna buy the book and have everyone that will have a workshop about the book or they just wanna get together and have a joyful experience of learning about each other. They’re they learned half of our employees. No one’s even met before. Cause we hired them in the middle of COVID. Yeah. What’s your name? You know, don’t tell me what you need yet. Just tell me what your name is. and in, in those facilitated experiences that we engage with clients, that’s where the real work happens, right? Yeah. It’s one thing to like play the games and do the trust falls and these kinds of things. It’s another thing to have a facilitated, really hard open conversation that gets people cracked wide open and gets them sharing things that they never thought they’d be able to share, let alone, I mean, with their friends, let alone in an office environment and suddenly it feels very natural.

John Jantsch (17:39): I suspect one of the tricks to this work is that, you know, even though you’ve got a nice tidy framework, you know, people are, people are all different. Sure. Some people respond differently. Some people love to talk about how they feel. some people, some people that’s like the worst thing that could, you know, that could be involved in the day. Exactly. So, you know how what’s the art or what’s the balance of being able to use the framework, but use it appropriately, I guess. Yeah.

Edward Sullivan (18:07): I mean, the important thing with all of this work is to start where people are, right. We can’t have forced vulnerability. Yeah. You know, people need to feel safe. It needs to feel natural. And it should often, it often comes after the leader has created an opening for it. You know, the leader who calls a meeting and says, great, everyone’s gonna share their most painful childhood story. starting with you. Right. Doesn’t really work. Yeah. Right. But if over time we’re building rapport, we’re making people feel safe. And the leader is the one who is handing out praise, making people feel good, making them feel psychologically safe. Yeah. Right. And that’s definitely a term of art in that when people give feedback, when they have ideas, when they push back against the conversation and what we’re doing, and the leader says, that’s really interesting. Tell me more. Yeah. You know, so really creates

John Jantsch (19:04): So really in a lot of ways, you’re, it’s not, there’s actually a risk in proclaiming. This is how we’re gonna do it or mandating, this is what we’re gonna do now, as opposed to just doing it.

Edward Sullivan (19:13): Yeah. Sometimes you just do it. Yeah. And you say, there’s no obligation to join the conversation. There’s no obligation to share something. You don’t feel comfortable sharing, but we’ve learned in this organization, whether it’s through the book or through it’s following the research that teams and organizations that share what’s really going on for them. Yeah. Build trust. And then ultimately have more honest conversations about the work itself. Yeah. Right. It’s this virtuous cycle. If you tell me what’s really going on for you and I build trust, then when I push back against you on an idea when we’re debating, you know, we’re really trying to get to the truth of the matter. Or we’re trying to get to the best idea. If I can’t push back against you, we might ship a flawed product. Right. I mean the, the, the challenger exploded because a scientist wasn’t able to say, oh, this O ring might be bad. Right. Things go wrong because people don’t feel safe pushing back. And I

John Jantsch (20:09): Think this

Edward Sullivan (20:10): Whole artist is about up in the build that safety.

John Jantsch (20:14): Yeah. I was gonna say, I think you make a really great point. I mean, some of the best organizations are ones where people feel, uh, enough trust that they can argue that they can, you know, debate things like that. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to feeling like, oh, well doesn’t matter, you know, , I’m just gonna go. Exactly. Can you repair trust? Do you think? Because I’m thinking there are a lot of organizations out there that they just were, the leader was being who they were being and, you know, woke up one day and realize this isn’t working, you know, is that something that you can repair or is it again, just one of those things where you’ve gotta demonstrate through your actions, that things have changed,

Edward Sullivan (20:49): You know, they say trust comes in on two feet and leaves on a horse. Yeah. Right. So it is something that is earned slowly and can easily be destroyed. That said humans are naturally forgiving people. Right. We can always earn trust back. We just have to do the work. Yeah. And we have to be consistent.

John Jantsch (21:11): Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Lots of work for lots of us to do so, Edward, thanks for, so by the duct tape marketing, uh, podcast, you wanna tell people where they can find out more about your work or anything else you wanna share.

Edward Sullivan (21:22): Absolutely. The book is@leadingwithheartbook.com and thank you so much for the opportunity.

John Jantsch (21:29): Yeah. Well, again, as, as I said, thanks for stopping by, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Edward Sullivan (21:34): Hope so. Thank you much.

John Jantsch (21:37): Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not dot com, dot co .check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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

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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June 10, 2022/by exposure

How To Harness Your Unfair Advantage

How To Harness Your Unfair Advantage written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba. They both are award-winning authors and entrepreneurs. Despite not going to university, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of a unicorn startup – Just Eat). Hasan built a successful startup from his bedroom with nothing more than an online course and a yearning to escape the ‘rat race’. They are now international bestselling authors, coaches, and keynote speakers. Their latest book is – The Unfair Advantage: How You Already Have What It Takes to Succeed.

Key Takeaway:

Behind every story of success is an unfair advantage. Your unfair advantage is the element that gives you an edge over your competition. In this episode, I talk with Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba about how to identify your own unfair advantages and apply them to any project in your life. We talk about how to look at yourself and find the ingredients you didn’t realize you already had, to succeed in the cut-throat world of business.

Questions I ask Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba:

[1:44] The book starts out with the premise — life is fundamentally unfair. Could you break that idea down?
[3:37] What you would call an unfair advantage that people tend to recognize?
[6:46] Would you characterize this book as a business book or a self-help book?
[9:43] What are some of the places that are less obvious unfair advantages that people don’t even realize they have?
[11:41] Some people are purely lucky, but I would say a lot of entrepreneurs have come to the realization that they make their own luck, and that’s something that is earned as opposed to something that’s an unfair advantage. How would you respond to that notion?
[13:52] What are your unfair advantages?
[19:13] What do you say to that person that feels that they don’t have an unfair advantage?
[22:57] Where can people find out more of the work that you’re doing and grab a copy of the book?

More About Ash Ali and Hasan Kubba:

Follow Hasan on Twitter: @startuphasan
Follow Ash on Twitter: @ash_ali
Learn more about the book: The Unfair Academy

Take The Marketing Assessment:

Marketingassessment.co

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

Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the MarTech podcast, hosted by Ben Shapiro and brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network with episodes you can listen to in under 30 minutes, the MarTech podcast shares stories from world class marketers who use technology to generate growth and achieve business and career success all on your lunch break. And if you dig around, you might just find a show by yours. Truly. Ben’s a great host. Actually, I would tell you, check out a recent show on blending humans, AI, and automation. Download the MarTech podcast wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:50): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan and my guest today is Ash Ali and Hassan. Kuba gonna, I have two guests today. They’re award-winning authors and entrepreneurs, and despite not going to university, Ash became a serial tech founder and the first marketing director of the unicorn startup just eat Hassan built a successful startup from his bedroom with nothing more than an online course and a yearning to escape the rat race. They’re now international bestselling authors, coaches and keynote speakers. And we’re gonna talk about their latest book, the unfair advantage, how you already have what it takes to succeed. So Ash and Hasan. Welcome.

Hasan Kuba (01:34): Hello. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Hi.

John Jantsch (01:37): Awesome. So the book starts out with this premise and we could probably do the whole show without me asking another question, but here it is, life is fundamentally unfair. Who wants to take that doop of hope?

Hasan Kuba (01:50): I’ll take it. I’ll take it going. So life is unfair. Yeah, that is the under underlying principle behind cuz that life is not fair. And sometimes when you get into self-development like I did and still, I still enjoy a bit of self-development Mo you know, you learned that, you know, what you got in life is what you deserved. You know, you built the life that you’re living now, you designed it. Your decisions led to the moment you’re in now and all these kinds of quotes and beliefs and mental models to make you take responsibility for your life, which is a very useful tool, but it’s limited because it’s not actually that accurate. So one of the ways to look at well, when we talk about this in the book is it’s, it’s all about mental models. So there’s one extreme, which is to think that all success is based on hard work and, you know, merit.

Hasan Kuba (02:37): And the other extreme is to think it’s all luck and unearned. And the reality is squarely in the middle, right? There’s a lot of serendipity in life. There’s a lot of luck of births and genetic lotteries. And there’s a lot of things that just happened because you were in the right place at the right time. Yeah. But at the same time, you can, you know, stack the deck in your favor. You can make the right decisions. You can be consistent in how you think and how you behave and the decisions you make to lead towards success. So it’s a mixture of both. Life is unfair and ultimately, you know, we’re so lucky and we should all be so grateful for everything that we have going for us. And at the same time, we can also exert our own agency on the world. We can also take best on responsibility. We can also take control of our lives to an extent

John Jantsch (03:21): Yeah. Cuz it, it is interesting. I mean, we all know people have had everything handed to them, all the funding, all the backing, all the mentors, all the, you know, whatever. And they’ve still found a way to piss it away. Haven’t they . So it really is kind of that combination.

Hasan Kuba (03:35): Exactly.

John Jantsch (03:37): So, so let’s maybe start out by defining, um, what an unfair, maybe some examples of what you would call an unfair advantage that people tend to recognize.

Ash Ali (03:49): Yeah. So I mean, an unfair advantage is something that’s unique to you based on your circumstances and also based on your background and who you are as an individual. There’s so many books out there that talk about strengths. But what we do is talk about your strength, but also about yourself as an individual, as a unique person. So we talk about, you know, life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, but sometimes when life is unfair and it’s not a level playing field, some people can grow up with a victim mindset and a victim type of thinking, say, I didn’t have this, I didn’t have that. But actually what we say in the book is actually, how do you turn that around? How do you make that stuff that you, you felt was unfair growing up in poverty or growing up in an area that wasn’t great.

Ash Ali (04:29): How can you turn that around and make it part of your authentic story and use it to an advantage? So an example for me would be, I grew up with little money and when I start companies now, and I know a lot of listeners are listening here who will run small businesses when you don’t have a huge amount of money for marketing budgets, for example, I’m the perfect person to come in and work with you because I know how to be resourceful cause I had no money. Right. So my mindset is always based around being resourceful. That’s just an example of something that you could use, uh,

John Jantsch (04:56): Straight. But again, I, you know, to the flip side of that, I guess we all know people who had everything and should have made it, you know, there, we, we all probably know at least somebody, or at least you’ve read their story of somebody that sh never should have you know, like you said, they didn’t have the education, they didn’t have the backing, they didn’t have the money. They didn’t really have seemingly you know, didn’t seem that smart, you know, mm-hmm but you know, they’ve, they’ve made themselves successful the way we defined that. So, you know, what are, you know, I guess to Hasan’s original point, it’s kind of somewhere in the middle, isn’t it?

Ash Ali (05:30): It is somewhere in the middle. It’s interesting because you know, like I’ve got a daughter now who’s growing up in privilege and I look at her and I look at my life and think, okay, you know, does she have the fire in the belly? And what can we do to help her have the same mentality of working hard and trying to achieve things in life? And one of the things I found was that interestingly is that constraint does kind of foster creativity. And if you just live, give everything to your children, for example, straight away, then they’re not gonna, um, uh, feel grateful for it straight away. And unless they’ve worked for it. So con sometimes having constraints, uh, does make you more resourceful, more creative. And that’s just an example of something. We live in an abundant world now where everything is available quickly, you can audio takeaway quickly, you can order your cab quickly. And, you know, they’re growing up in a different environment compared to us where we had to wait for something, but we had to have some patience around something. So it’s understanding what constraint is and how to manage that, I suppose.

John Jantsch (06:27): Yeah. I, I, of course it’s so cliche now, but you know, I like to tell even 30 year olds, you know, about, uh, dialup, um, internet and, uh, yeah. Things of that nature. Can you, you imagine that now, you know, it might take 10 minutes and we had to take turns who could use it right. Only one person could be on at a time and pretty crazy. So I think what would you classify or would you characterize this book as a business book or a self-help book?

Hasan Kuba (06:53): Yeah. Good question. It really is in the middle because what we’ve done with our book is we’ve. So the origin of the book let’s get into the origin. We did this book because we were getting pitched by loads of startup for funding. And it was just like shock tank, essentially. That’d come in and, and pitch us. And we thought, what is the difference that makes the difference here? You know, when we confirm we ourselves, we’re like, what is it with some people that we’re like, you know, even if we didn’t believe in them, they’re not gonna close out their funding ground. Nobody else is gonna believe in them. And they’re gonna really struggle here. And what is that difference? And we started thinking about this and really diving into it. And we decided to write this down. This idea of the unfair advantage is essentially a sustainable competitive advantage for a big business.

Hasan Kuba (07:35): It’s kind of the type of thing Warren buffet talks about in value investing. You want a business that has the economic modes, the defense ability that it’s gonna sustain. And it’s the same thing for individuals because at that early stage of a business, when you don’t yet have a product, even sometimes when you don’t yet have, um, customers, you don’t yet have traction in sales, how are you gonna judge it? Well, you’re gonna judge it by the team, by the co-founders. And when you’re judging it by the co-founders that’s when you have to try and decide, okay, what have they got going for themselves? What do they have? That’s gonna allow them to push through, do they have a track record? Do they have something that gives you the idea that they’ll be able to get into this? Do they have the unfair advantages? Yeah.

Hasan Kuba (08:15): And essentially that was the idea behind the book. And that’s what made us think about like how we can help people to gain that kind of self awareness. Yeah. To know what kind of business to go for, to know what kind of strategy to go for. Should you raise funding? Should you bootstrap? Who should you partner with? These are the kind of decisions we wanted to help people with at that early stage. So we’re just bringing it back to the individual. So that’s why it’s in between a business book and a self development. Cause it’s about the early stages of a startup. Yeah.

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John Jantsch (09:27): So I think there are some unfair advantages that, that are pretty obvious that people could identify. But if I’m out there listening, you know, what are some of the, what are just some of the places that you go looking? I know you have a framework, you call the miles framework so we can kind of go, you know, letter by letter for the acronym. Uh, but, but what are some of the places maybe that are less obvious that you’ve said, Hey, you know, these are unfair advantages that people don’t even realize they have.

Ash Ali (09:53): Yeah. So the miles framework is, uh, it stands for money, intelligence, location, and luck, education, and expertise and status. And it sits on top of mindset. And we talked earlier about why it’s important for people to understand their unfair advantage in the context of business, because business is all about people. And most investors invest in small startups and early stage startups because of the people not because of the idea itself, it’s the founders themselves. Yeah. And so if you can identify your unfair advantages and then amplify those in your pitch, in your message to hiring people to your cus or getting customers, it will help you get your early traction, which is what starts a business. So coming back to the miles framework, it’s about understanding within each one of those miles frameworks in each one of those acronym letters, what you have, that’s going for you.

Ash Ali (10:42): Right? And one of the big ones is insight. For example, when you’re starting a company, right? If you have insight into something that nobody else has, and you are starting a business around, that’s a very powerful, unfair advantage. And there’s so many case studies in our book around that, um, about specific insights around that another one is being in the right place at the right time, right. The location. And look, you know, if, can you find the right co-founder, can you find the right, um, uh, customers who are close to you potentially who can, who can become customers straight away status is another one, you know, your network. And here, you know, when you are starting a business, if you know how to raise money quickly, and you have a network, that’s an unfair advantage. And if you need to go out to the market to raise money from ground zero and have nobody, no network, it’s much harder to do much harder to do. Right. And we know how that’s, how investment generally works. So there’s lots of little examples in different places for different types of projects or businesses. It depends where you wanna apply the framework itself, whether it’s a project, whether it’s your career, whether it’s a business itself.

John Jantsch (11:41): Yeah. Let me, I wanna come back to insight in a minute and have you share some examples, uh, to, to help clarify that one, but let’s talk about luck. Some people, some, some people are purely lucky. I mean, they run into luck in your right place, right time, like you said, but I would say a lot of entrepreneurs have come to the realization that they make their own luck and that, that that’s almost something that’s earned as opposed to something that’s an unfair advantage. How would you respond to that? A notion?

Hasan Kuba (12:09): I, I totally believe in making your own luck as well. So we talk about luck and we talk about the fact that it’s overlooked and luck exists. Hey, luck does exist. Talent does exist. You know, that all these books has become trendy to say, there’s no such thing as talent, just work super hard and get the 10,000 hours in. And, and that will be that’s enough. These things exist tiger woods, or was like, could swing a, could swing a golf, could swing a club before he could walk. Like, these are the kinds of things that, that is, is like pure talent. Oprah Winfrey was like giving speeches to whole congregations at church when she was three years old making. So these things exist, but making your luck also definitely exists. Yeah. We talk in the book about how you can actually increase your luck. There have been some psychologists who’ve studied the phenomenon of people who think of themselves as lucky versus people who don’t and how the fact that they think of themselves as lucky just makes them more proactive, makes them more observant to opportunities that come up and it’s been literally proven in studies.

Hasan Kuba (13:06): So it’s quite interesting that you can make your own luck. We say, put yourself out there more. Yeah. Increase your surface area to luck and maybe more lucky things will happen. So it’s essentially like rolling the dice. Just keep rolling it. No, one’s counting how many you’re throwing the dice. How many times you’re throwing the dice. If you keep rolling, you’re more likely to roll the double six.

John Jantsch (13:23): Yeah. I actually, I started my blog in 2003 that I talk about being in the right place at the right time. That was luck to spot that technology. But also it, you know, it led to my first book four years later, but that point I had also written a thousand blog posts. So , you know, I always talk about really, that was a lucky decision on my part to go that route. But then I, I do think, you know, you, you have to, you, you can also then turn that luck into something that is very fruitful.

Ash Ali (13:50): Yeah,

Hasan Kuba (13:51): Absolutely.

John Jantsch (13:52): So what’s your unfair advantages. Yeah. I’ll let you both answer that one. Go on. Cause I, for example, as you mentioned, you didn’t go to college, so we’re,

Ash Ali (14:04): I’ll

John Jantsch (14:04): Stop the college degree from Oxford off the table, right.

Ash Ali (14:07): yeah. That is, that can be an unfair advantage if you know how to use it. Some people don’t know how to use that as well. You know, we see people coming to us and like, oh yeah, I went to caught Oxford in Cambridge or wherever, and it’s just pass a it’s normal for them. But actually that could be an unfair advantage if you know how to use it properly, an unfair advantage. You know, there’s several different things with strength. There can be double edged swords as we call them. Right. So having something and not having something. And we talk about constraint earlier on, I’ll go through it from my perspective, which is kind of like the double edged sword version of it and how someone will go through it from his perspective. So from my perspective, I had no money growing up. So now when I’m building startups, I’m really shrewd and very lean and I can build things very quickly and I’m very resourceful.

Ash Ali (14:47): And, and actually what it does has done to me has made me more creative. So one of my high skills is creativity, um, intelligence, um, and insight. I have lots of insights with businesses because I’m doing things all the time. I’m always taking action. So I’m seeing opportunities and getting insights and different things and intelligence, there’s different types of intelligence. You know, a lot of people said to me, Ash, you’re really cool. You’re the glue amongst your friends. So I’m good at bringing people together and doing things together, which is cool. And I like to be, I don’t like to be the smartest person in the room. You know, I’d rather not be the most intelligent person in the room, but I can learn from other people quickly. So as well as that’s the, the eye side location and luck, you know, I was born in Birmingham, which is like the second biggest city in the UK and automotive retail industry kind of community.

Ash Ali (15:27): And the tech industry was booming in London. So I moved to London at the age of 19. If I didn’t move, I wouldn’t have had the same opportunities. Wouldn’t have been able to join companies like just eat and do the IPO and luck the IPO, you know, how many companies, IPO for and view between it once again. And there’s the luck factor behind that and the right timing of that. And then seeing how that would work out, education excluded. I didn’t go to university, so I didn’t feel entitled, you know? So that’s what made, that’s why I kind of did everything in anything. And I built my expertise up in deal to market. So I was, and the time when everyone wanted to know how to do SEO and online marketing, I was there. And in status, you know, like a, you know, and your role ATEX of contacts, you know, like, I didn’t know many people, but now I know lots of people. So if I need to do anything now, for example, I can open my black book of contacts, LinkedIn network connections, and make things happen because of my status of having connections that I’ve built up over time. Yeah. So that’s become an unfair advantage.

John Jantsch (16:17): What’s interesting, as you said, you know, the degree from a prestigious school used to really mean a lot. It feels like in the, particularly in the entrepreneurial space, it’s more about what were you doing for your summer job? , you know, than what degree you got or your side hustle or whatever. It seems to actually hold more weight than, than, you know, college. And I think a lot of it’s because people realize college is great for making connections, what they teach in a lot of like a marketing course in college will have very little application to what it’s like to market in the real world. And so that, you know, that education, the actual learning classroom education is probably not that valuable.

Ash Ali (16:56): Yeah. I mean, if you want to learn,

John Jantsch (16:57): So, so Hassan, how

Ash Ali (16:59): Then the fastest way to learn is reading blogs like yours, John. And if you wanna learn about marketing, you can learn a lot more from reading blogs and marketing books can get old very quickly. Right? What happened, you know, some time ago, timing wise might not work now. So it’s keeping fresh and, uh, up to date with knowledge, I think that’s really important. And we talk about this in a book about this there’s three aspects of university, but I’ll let, has Sam talk about a miles favorite from his side and what his advantages are.

Hasan Kuba (17:25): Yeah, yeah. So, so for me, look, so it, it’s easier to simplify to what is your unfair advantage? Well, the reality is we’ll have a set of unfair advantages and a unique set of them. And that’s why Ash goes through so many well, you know, for Ash, I would definitely say his creativity is, is just one of the top things about him and the fact that he just gives things a go, he just goes for it. So for me, I would say that it’s my ability to learn really fast. So I think I have that kind of the intelligence where I pick things up fast and then I’m able to communicate them. So one thing that really helped me to get my initial clients and start to develop and get referrals is the ability to build rapport and build trust very quickly. So I think that’s partly just from my ability to absorb information and knowledge in a space that’s so new and like something, I was one of the main things I was doing was SEO.

Hasan Kuba (18:15): I was doing branding and website stuff, but SEO and getting people to the top of Google was, was huge. And so the fact that I was able to explain it to local businesses, built connections with them, build trust. I think that massively helped me. So that was huge for me. And then you can go further back and just say, listen, I was born in Baghdad, Iraq. And I came to the UK in London when I was three years old with my family to escape the war and all of that. So I, my unfair advantage is we moved to, to the UK when I was a baby. And I grew up here in London. If you imagine, if I’d come when I was 20 years old and I’d have the thickest accent and I’d have so much difficulty in terms of just how I come across the status side of it in terms of building rapport, building trust. So this is so lucky. So you can kind of go into the genetic lottery of it all you can go into where you grew up and what kind of schools you went to. You can go into your ability to skill, skill stack, and build your skills and expertise and learn things quickly. So I think that learning side is kind of the massive piece for me.

John Jantsch (19:13): So, so I suspect as you’ve both gone out there and maybe given talks on this or, or webinar done webinars on this that, that, you know, ultimately somebody comes to you and says, look, this is great, but I don’t have any unfair advantages. You know, what do you say to that person that that feels, especially since mindset really sits on top of this, what do you say to that person that, that has that mindset?

Hasan Kuba (19:38): So I would say that essentially this idea and ashes touched on this idea of double edged swords. What you think is a disadvantage. You can turn into an advantage and I’ll give you an easy one. So we have a few examples in the book of people who had a, kind of a classic disadvantage. So a classic disadvantage is a woman entrepreneur, right? So a woman founder, the example of Sarah Blakely, founder of spans mm-hmm . Now, if you think about it, what was her unfair advantage? Okay, well, it was tough. She had no idea about how to raise funding. Nobody would believe in her. She had no connections in that space, et cetera, but what did she have? She had an amazing insight into a problem based on her status as a woman, which is that this idea of like shape wear and, and spanks turned out to be spanks.

Hasan Kuba (20:24): She would cut off the feet off tights. Like, man, wouldn’t have come up with that. wouldn’t have had that insight the same with Tristan Walker. Who’s another example in the book, he’s a, he grew up in the projects in, I think he was the Bronx maybe, or if I’m remembering correctly, Queens actually Queens in New York and really poor. His dad was murdered when he was young, but Hey, he was smart. He got scholarships. He got into good schools. He spent a long time thinking about what his big idea is in the end. His insight was that black men need a different shaving system than other people do because they have more ingrown hairs. And so he developed this single blade, shaving system. He used different rappers who also from his location. So the rapper NAS grew up also in Queens and then he promoted his brand.

Hasan Kuba (21:09): And then eventually he was acquired by Proctor and gamble for 30 million. So it’s like, what seems like a disadvantage you can use to your advantage. If you grew up poor, then you have an insight into how poor people live. What, what needs they have, what mass market products you might be able to create, let’s say, or if you grew up as whatever, like you grew up from another country or you’re learning languages, or you’re, there’s all these different aspects to everything. So it’s all about your mindset. If you have a growth mindset and we call it, we talk about in the book, the growth, uh, the reality growth mindset, because we wanna root it in some real reality, then you can grow and you can turn what seems like a disadvantage into an advantage. And listen, if you’re listening to this podcast, if you’re able to read this book, you probably have a lot to be grateful for. So you just need to kind of do a sort of an audit and gratitude is one of the underlying themes of our book.

John Jantsch (21:59): Yeah. And it’s interesting too, because as we grow up, a lot of the things that drive our parents are teachers crazy, you know, ultimately come out as an advantage. You know, we were told they were a negative, for example, I, you know, I, my parents used to always joke about how curious I was and always getting into things because I had to teachers, same thing, you know, I was told for a long time that that was a problem that has served me extremely well in my professional life. And I think that’s, uh, sometimes we just have to overcome, you know, the, what, what society has told us is a negative don’t we?

Ash Ali (22:29): Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When people focus on your weaknesses more than your strengths, that’s when you start to misunderstand really what your unfair advantage is because we’ve all got strengths. And what we, the idea of the premise for the book is to double down on your strengths rather than focus too much on your weaknesses and then plug those gaps where you can appropriately and understand that we work in teams and people is about businesses, about people. So it’s not just about you as an individual.

John Jantsch (22:55): Yeah. So, so Ash, uh, Hassan where tell people where they can find more of you more of the work you’re doing, and obviously grab a copy of the unfair advantage.

Hasan Kuba (23:05): Yeah. We’re all, all over social media. So I’m at startup Hassan. Uh, Hassan is spelled with one S and Ash is, is it Ash Ali, UK Ash, for most of your socials, you can find us. And our website is the unfair academy.com.

John Jantsch (23:20): Awesome. And the book is, will be available in, I don’t believe there’s an audio version. Is there, there,

Hasan Kuba (23:25): There is.

John Jantsch (23:26): Yeah, there is. Okay. So an audio and then, uh, in E ebook format, as well as, uh, hard cover and available, depending upon when you’re listening to this available, everywhere that you buy books.

Hasan Kuba (23:37): Yeah. It’s available now, cuz it’s at the time of recording, it’ll be released tomorrow. So it’ll be available by the time

John Jantsch (23:41): It comes up. And I should have mentioned this, but the book has been awarded. I don’t have it written here. Tell me the best business book in the UK in 2021 or something, you could do it better than I just did. Tell me, tell me what the award was.

Hasan Kuba (23:55): So, so we were surprised and happy to learn that we’d won our category of the startup category of the business book awards. Yeah. And then it was like 12 different categories and then it turned out we’d won the whole thing as well, over all the categories. So we’d won the business book of the year 2021. It was actually it’s based in the UK, but it’s an international award as well. The only country that the book hasn hasn’t come out yet until now is in the us and Canada in north America. So yeah, it’s done really well. It’s really popular on good reads. It’s on YouTube. It a lot viral videos on YouTubes took summarizing it. So if you want to check it out a bit further, you can see some summaries on YouTube. You read all the reviews it’s it’s doing it’s thankfully it’s spreading by word of mouth. Cause people are loving it. Yeah.

John Jantsch (24:39): Awesome. Well, thanks so much for stopping by the, the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you both somewhere out there on the road.

Hasan Kuba (24:46): Thank you, Joe. Thank you, John. I’m big fans of duct tech marketing by the way.

John Jantsch (24:49): Appreciate that. Thanks so much. Hey, and one final thing before you go, you know how I talk about marketing strategy strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the marketing strategy assessment. You can find it @ marketingassessment.co not.com.co check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

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June 10, 2022/by exposure

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