12 Fundamental Business Model Secrets – powered by Happy Scribe

Boston Cage is a weekly podcast that releases the origin stories of business owners and entrepreneurs as they become uncaged trailblazers. In each episode, our host, Essay Grant and guests construct narrative accounts of their collective business journeys and growth strategies, learn key success habits and how to stay motivated through failure. All while developing a Boston Cage mindset. Break out of your Cage and welcome our host, Essay Grant.

Welcome back to Boston Cage. So this is a bonus episode. And as things progress with Boss and Cage, I always want to kind of keep everyone in the loop and kind of post these updates. So moving forward, when I do these individual bonus episodes, they’re going to be more like micro courses. And what I want the listener to do is to listen to this and take notes, take actions on what I’m about to present to you. Because the goal is part of the whole Boston Cage story. And Boston Cage brand is to help entrepreneurs help business owners on their journeys. So this particular one is not the first one that I’ve done. It’s going to be the first one I’m going to do in this particular fashion. And I really want you guys to really take heed to what I’m about to say. So I’m going to kind of just talk about the topic. The topic is The Twelve Fundamental Business Model Secrets to Help with Your Growth Strategy. And so, as the story goes, when I first got introduced to business modeling, becoming a consultant, becoming a strategist, I’ve been doing this thing for about 20 years.

So about maybe ten to twelve years back, a friend of mine by the name of Scott Wise had introduced me to the lead in Canvas. And I’m sitting there and I’m building my business. He was building his business. And he presented to me this book and I looked it over and I looked at the content. I’m like, it makes it very transparent and very simplistic enough so you can kind of really comprehend the components of any business that you need to have to make that business run effectively. So when you start to break down like the Canvas, you have to think about it more. So from a standpoint of a single document versus multi page document, like a standard business plan, obviously both of them could be utilized, both of them have their places in business. But it’s so much more easier to kind of fill in the blanks for a business model and then use that to then jump off of business and use that to then start developing into your business plan. If you do decide to go down that road, if you’re looking for equity or if you’re looking for capital, stuff like that.

So here we go. Twelve, right? So the first one is going to be Value Proposition. And what I want you to understand about Value Proposition is every business that is created, you’re essentially creating that business to apply value to a particular customer segment, right? And that value should be associated with some kind of monetary value or in some shape or form. So value proposition is more so like a promise that you’re going to deliver value or deliver a solution to a client. In the case of Boston Cage, I kind of give you guys a little insight to what our value proposition is like. We’re here to help entrepreneurs and business owners grow their businesses through the storytelling of other entrepreneurs and other businesses, what hurdles they have overcome over the years. And in addition to that, as Boston case has grown, we added the book club. And the book club is essentially a value proposition to help people learn and read and get more insights that other entrepreneurs are reading. In addition to that, we’ve added the Boston Cage Academy, which is probably, I think, the first time I’m really making the announcement of it.

It was kind of like behind the scenes things I was working on. But the Boston Cage Academy is definitely active and is live, and you can definitely check it out at Boston Cage comACADEMY. So the value proposition of that particular platform is what we’re doing right now, taking videos like this and breaking them down to smaller buckets so people can really comprehend exactly what they need to do, how to do it. In this academy, we record videos, we do step by step tutorials, we do Facebook groups, we do Q and A. So that way, if you’re an entrepreneur and you want to leverage marketing strategy, or you want to level funnels, or if you want to leverage email marketing, not only do you have access to what platforms that I’m using, you may have access to what other platforms other people are using, you’ll have access to multiple different platforms, right? So you may have a lifetime deal, you may have a free deal, you may have a pay to play deal, or monthly subscription deal. But the goal is here is to explain these platforms, do live tutorials, explain exactly how to use them, why they use them, what the results should be when you use them.

And that’s what the Boston Cage Academy came to be. So that’s the value proposition for that. So the takeaway from number one that I want you to do is what is your value proposition? And I want you to look at it from the standpoint. You know, if I’m talking about branding, there’s multiple different sectors to branding. There’s an individual brand, right? There’s a business brand, there is a product brand, and there’s a service brand. What I’ve just done is just tell you about maybe one of our services, right? So like one of our products, like, that’s the story behind the Boston Cage Academy or the story behind the Boston Cage podcast and what those value propositions are for each one of those particular sectors. So you want to look at your products and services and figure out what is your value proposition, what is the value that you’re delivering to your customer segments and how are you delivering. So that’s number one. Number two is the unfair advantage. And the unfair advantage is one of the things that people always say that there’s so much competition in the market. No matter what market sector you get into, there’s always going to be competition.

But even with that competition, there’s an individual or individual business that can step up and shine because they have an unfair advantage. A good example of unfair advantage would be trademark, right? Having a trademark allows you to kind of own a particular brand or a particular name that no one else can use. So let’s say your name is a functional name. Let’s say your name is Ladders or Windows and Doors’right. Let’s say that’s your name. Well, if you can get that trademark, which would probably be impossible for Ladders indoors, but if you can get that, then nobody else in that industry could particularly use the ladders indoors, or they can’t use Windows and Doors because you have a trademark on that. And if they infringe on it, then you can legally then say, hey, you need to cease and desist. So that’s an unfair advantage for that sector. In addition to that goes back to the branding. If you look at your four products, right, and I’m seeing you as a product, your company as a product, your product as a product, and your service as a product, if you look at these four different individual brands, each one of them could have their own unfair advantage, right?

So me, as SA Grant, like, I’ve branded myself to where I have an unfair advantage, that there could be another Essay Grant, but there would not be another Essay Grant that’s associated to Boston Cage. So you can see how this compounds together. Like, Boston Cage by itself is a brand, SA Grant by itself as a brand, but the union between the two becomes a fair advantage, becomes a variable. So Essay Grant may not be trademarked, could become Essay Grant, but Boston Cage is going through and becoming trademarked so that I have that leverage to say, okay, you know what? You can’t be Boston Cage. You could be SA Grant, but you can’t be both. That’s part of our unfair advantage. In addition to that, like, my story and what I’ve developed and what I’ve created and who I’ve interviewed also cannot be replicated exactly the same way I have replicated. It cannot be delivered the same way I’m delivering it. Even if someone studies the way I’m doing it and practice it, they’re still going to be uniquely different than I am. So that’s the unfair advantage. That’s just like the tip of the iceberg.

But you want to figure out what is your unfair advantage, because you could be in a market sector with hundreds if not thousands, maybe even millions of competitors. You just have to figure out what your value proposition and association to your unfair advantage works best for you and works best for your customers and makes you stand out more than anyone else. So the takeaway for this is like what do you have that your competitors cannot copy or replicate, right? Again, it could be systems, it could be processes, it could be automation, it could be logos, it could be identity, it could be brand, it can be so many different things. And I think people just kind of like they hear unfair advantage and I don’t have unfair advantage, I’m just like everyone. But no, you’re not like everyone else. Everyone is uniquely different and what you need to do is figure out what’s that unique factor and play to it. Number three is customer segments and relationships. So this is like kind of goes without saying, anyone that’s in sales or any admin level person or any C level person, they understand customer service and customer relationships, right?

So again, this is just top level stuff, but you have to kind of figure out who your customers are. In the beginning of this podcast, I was talking about who my customers are. So I’m talking about small business owners and entrepreneurs that are looking to get a leg up on marketing, business strategies, growth strategies, and brand development, right? So anyone that’s in that sector space, I can talk to them and talk to their pain points and give them solutions because not only have I done it before, but I’ve done it for other people as well. So I’m talking to that customer segment. Now, the type of relationship that I have with those people, it can be variable relationships, right? You can have a B to B relationship, right, which is business to business. So prime example, Cerebral 360 is my marketing agency. That company could then partner with another company to help them create a website or to help them rebrand or create a logo that’s more of a B to B play, right? Or you can have B to C, which is more so like the solopreneur to the business. So I have my corporation and then someone contacts us and they say, hey, I like what you’re doing, I like your podcast, I need you to help me with some growth strategies.

And I had a call like that recently, like the name of Sir Evans. He was actually on the episode, I think it was season one. And he contacted me, he was like, hey, I just want to talk to you about some branding, some brand development, some brand strategy. How could I work with you? Okay, so that’s more of like a B to C, but it could then easily grow into a B to B as we develop that relationship and we develop his brand and get that platform that he’s standing in to grow and prosper in addition to that, there’s like POS point of sale to where you don’t really communicate with your client. They just kind of find your product, they’ll purchase it, and they’ll just kind of keep moving forward. And I’ll look at that more so as like Amazon now, obviously Amazon has customer support, and they probably look at it more as a B to C business to consumer. But in reality, it’s just point of sale. I’m pointing at something on the screen and I’m purchasing it. The customer journey is there, but the reality is there’s no real person to person contact.

There’s no real communication. For me, to them, it’s essentially a bot to a person or algorithm selecting the products for that person based upon what they’ve done before. So just understanding that, okay, if I’m going to create a business, I’m going to create my value proposition, I’m going to establish my unfair advantage, and then I’m going to talk to that customer’s segment and I’m going to build a relationship with them. And I would say, probably more than likely you want more of a B to B or a B to C play, right? So the takeaway for this one is like, who are your customers and what kind of relationship do you have with them? Is it A B to B? Is it a B to C or a POS? And keep in mind, these are just three of them. There’s many others, but these kind of give you like an overall viewpoint to kind of establish the first line to say, okay, you know what, I’m more of a BTB or more of a BDC. And then from there, you can kind of dive in a little bit deeper. And there’s times where we can kind of go into deeper roles and talk about that in more flushed out manner.

Going into number four channels. Now, channels is probably one of my favorite out of the twelve because it’s the way you communicate, it’s the way you contact individuals. It’s where do you develop your content, what platforms are you on? So this one could be everything and nothing at the same time, right? You can be talking to anybody or talking to nobody. And it goes back to figuring out who your customer segments are and what relationships do you have. So for me, obviously, I have a podcast so that’s one of my channels. I’m communicating through my audience, through a podcast of individuals that essentially need this information. They want this information. This information is definitely helpful and useful for them because I’m talking directly to them about problems they may have had or by people that I’m interviewing or telling them stories that they may have had or they’re experiencing right now. And they’re figuring out how to if you could overcome this and you became successful three years after that or five years after that. Well, let me get a little notebook and write down some notes kind of take heed to what that person is saying, because that little nugget, that one word, that one sentence could change the way you’re thinking.

Because if you’re thinking internally again, you need to bounce those ideas off of someone else. And that’s the philosophy behind communicating on channels. So there’s Facebook, there’s LinkedIn, there’s Instagram, Tik, Tok, Twitter, email, YouTube. I can go on and on and on all the different platforms that you can communicate your value proposition through. What you have to figure out is where is your customer segments? Where is your customer avatars? And a lot of you, you may have Facebook, you may have Facebook pages, you may have Instagram, you may have Twitter, but you’re not looking at the analytic data. You’re just creating content with the assumption that you know who your target audience is. But in reality, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, even Pinterest, they’ll tell you exactly who your community of people that are actually on your products or on your page are. They may not give you their name, but they’ll tell you their sex, their age, and their region. That’s more than we’ve ever had access to before where we are in technology today. So think about that. If they’re giving you all this information, then all you need to do is apply this information to your communication channels to talk to that audience, to make it a little bit more transparent, a little bit easier for you to start converting.

Okay? And a good example of this is saying that, okay, let’s say I’m talking about hearing AIDS, right? Let’s just say that’s my general product is hearing AIDS, and I’m communicating on Facebook and Instagram, and I’m making it hip, and I’m making it kind of like more postmodern, and I’m doing a little bit more edgy. Well, the reality is that communication vehicle and that device and those language and those terminology, I just use them more so to like, Gen Xers and YGens. It’s more of like a younger generation up until maybe like late 30s, early forty s. And keep in mind that entire generation, let’s say from 18 to 40, they don’t use hearing AIDS. So then why am I communicating to them on that particular channel in that fashion? And hence why you probably don’t have any conversions because you’re talking to the community, but you’re talking to them in the wrong language. So then you want to kind of figure out, okay, if I’m talking to more so people that were essentially born in the 60s or born in the 50s or essentially born in the 40s, then I need to speak to them.

I need to look at the need to look at the need to think about their psychological aspect of when they grew up. What did they see? You have to think about it. It was more black and white than this color right now. So putting things in perspective to look at old TV shows, right? Listen to old radio spots, look at old ads, so that way you can kind of touch into their psyche and communicate with them on a level to where it’ll bring them back to when they were younger. Because ideally, people as a whole want to live forever, right? That’s part of creating legacies, and you always hear the story. But when I was younger, I used to all of that comes back to them going back to the youth. So you want to pull into that psychological aspect and communicate to them on that channel based upon those principles. The takeaway for this one is, what channels do you use to connect to your customers right now? And I want you to list them out, like, create a list of these channels, because then you can kind of see what’s the value that you’re getting back in return.

If you have ten channels, are you converting on ten of them? Maybe you’re converting on one. Okay, so if you’re dividing up your time between ten channels, then you probably need to figure out which channel is really working for you and put some more time, more bread and butter into that channel. Communicate a little bit more, a little bit more. Focus on that channel, make that channel work, and then step into other channels as well. You can have all the channels up and running, but if you’re not really putting time into them, I think we all know by now the algorithms are not in our favor, right? They’re in the favor of conversions for their ad platforms. Number five customer challenges. So this goes hand in hand with everything we’ve been saying, right? Customer challenges, like your value should deliver a solution for a customer’s challenge. So identifying the customer’s challenge, we’re just talking about hearing AIDS, for example. So if I’m saying that, hey, it’s hard for you to hear, what is that challenge that you’re going through? It’s difficult for you to play with your grandkids. It’s difficult for you to hear somebody on the phone call, what’s this FaceTime thing?

I can’t really hear what’s going on. If you’re talking to that community of people, identify those challenges, make a laundry list of these challenges, and then apply your values to figure out which one of your values to solving that challenge for them. And then you’re connecting those dots. Okay, so what I’m doing is I’m doing a live consultant with you going back to that story with me and Scott. We used to do these literally for dozens of clients. We would set them up and say, okay, where’s your business? That we would do an entire consultant call back then was in person, right? And then they would buy and purchase a lean model canvas from us that we will build out for them and fill in all the blanks and all the components of their particular business and say, okay, this is where your holes are. This is what you’re missing. This is what you need to do more of. And then they would have a game plan to move forward and they could take that game plan and either work on it themselves or they could hire us as an agency to then develop and fill in those voids.

For them, it was a win win for both us and for the client, right? So think about it from that standpoint. What’s the problem? And then we’re going to talk about number six, which is the solution. But before we get to that, what I want you to do for takeaway for number five, for customer challenge is what are your brand and customer challenges? So you’re talking about the customer, what’s their challenge? And for you, for your brand or your company brand, or your product or your service brand, what’s the challenge? Right? And you want to put these on a sheet, like two columns and list out all your challenges for you personally for a brand or you personally for your company. Your problems may be leads. You may not have enough traffic, you may not have enough conversions. So then you want to figure out, okay, how do I fix these? Like, what am I doing actively on a day to day basis to make this work or to make modifications to make changes? Do the same thing for your customers. If you’re a plumber or a roofer, well, you know, by default, part of your problem is to keep people safe, right?

Part of your problems is to keep people dry in their houses. So going that basic and then putting on the obvious on top, obviously there’s roof maintenance, right? There’s plumbing maintenance, there’s all these different things to keep your pipes working, to keep your roof from leaking. Those are essentially challenges that people will be presented with year round. So then you can say, okay, here’s my solution for that. Maybe you can kind of create a video course and say, hey, you want to buy into like active solutions to how to maintain your roof, how to maintain your plumbing. Or maybe there’s a service that you can set up and say, hey, twice a year, three times a year, once a quarter, whatever it is, we can come out to your house and check your pipes or check your roof. That’s solving the problem without having to sell. You’re just identifying the issues that they have been presented with in their life or they may be presented with at some time, or you’re using case studies to say, hey, other people have been presented with the same exact issues in your area because you have the same house, the house was built in the last 2030 years, and this is what happens with a 30 year old house.

Blah, blah, blah, blah. Here’s all the problems and here’s the solutions that we have and here’s the price to go with those solutions. And you kind of see how this starts to form together to make your life a lot easier because you’re using growth strategies to create a system to keep your pipelines full. Number six, customer solutions. So we kind of talked about that a little bit with the customer challenges, but with the customer solutions, you have to fine tune them, right? And it just kind of goes into honing into your audience and understanding what their problems are and then applying the right solutions. Okay, we talked about roofers, for example, but imagine a roofer that just focuses on gutters, right? He does not really install roofs, but what he does do is install gutters to roofs. So he is piggybacking on the roof market by fixing the gutters. So he’s applying to a real solution, right? He’s saying, hey, if you do not want to spend ten to $30 to $40,000 on a new roof, one of the things that we do to help save your roof and maintain your roof outside of touching the roof, is making sure you have gutter guards, right?

That’s like a sub niche of that same spectrum. But by having a gutter guard by default, what are you going to have? You’re going to have less rain that’s sitting in the gutter, which could potentially help with less mosquitoes, less leaks, because again, it leaves back up. Then they’ll end up on the roof. So you can kind of see how you can kind of depict this story. You want to be able to tell them the story about what can happen, what has happened, and how you could then prevent that from happening. In addition to that, then you can say, okay, in addition to the service of the gutter guards, what we also do is we do leaf blowing from your roof, right? That could be an additional service in addition to the gutter guards. So you’re protecting the roof by two external services that’s going to maintain the roof. But you’re not even doing anything with roof. All you’re doing is blowing off leaves and you’re maintaining and updating gutters, right? So you can kind of see, like, this solution could definitely plug into that market, but we’re not installing roofs. So you have to get very clear and very precise with your solutions based upon the customer problems.

And you have to think outside the box to figure out what variables can I do that’s cost effective and have enough margins to apply. All right, let’s go down to number seven. This is another one of my favorite ones, right? And I’m doing it right now. So you can look at my clock. It just turns 07:00 A.m.. I think I woke up around 06:00 and I was like, I’m going to do this video. I was amped up. So I was like, I’m going to come out here and I’m going to drop these twelve nuggets, right? So number seven is key activities. So in any business, you have to understand you just can’t set it and forget it. Even with automation, even with systems in place, you’re going to have to kind of have someone touch and maintain the systems. Because the prime example with systems is like a lot of times they’re connected through APIs or they’re connected to plug ins or software talks to software. Things break all the time. Facebook may have an update that may block out your automation, right? Your email campaign may be, oh my god, we’re not getting more leads because your funnel is disconnected from.

So keep in mind you always have to kind of maintain double check and a lot of email reminders will do that for you. If you have those email reminders set up for those systems that you’re using to say, hey, if something’s broken, if something’s not working, at least notify me. So that’s a key activity that I know, that I do pretty regularly and I have my VA’s look at as well. But generally for any business, like whatever your value proposition is and whatever the problems that you’re solving for the customers, each one of those need to have key activities. So if you’re driving a truck, right, let’s say you have a truck company and you’re moving around, you’re doing logistics and you’re delivering well, the key activities for that is maintaining the truck, maintaining the wheels, maintaining the oil. Those are things that you cannot go without not doing. You cannot pay attention to that because if a truck breaks down, then essentially your business breaks down. It’s the same exact principle whether you’re in a physical business or whether you’re in a remote business, whether you’re a solopreneur, there’s maintenance for any business. So you have to maintain whatever it is that you started, whatever it is, is making you money and keep maintaining that for forever, right?

So then you can put people in place to maintain it for you. You can put systems in place to maintain it for you. You can put automation in place to maintain it for you. But you have to understand that the key activities, it’s a key activity for a reason. The key takeaway for this one would be what key activities are you currently doing to expand your value proposition? And I want you to really process that question. What key activities are you doing to expand, not to maintain? What are you doing to expand your value proposition? And I gave you an example of that earlier, talking about the roof, talking about the gutter guards and what’s the key activity that they can use to expand. We talked about leaf blowing off the roof, right? So that’s essentially a new service that they’ve added on. But there’s maintenance that comes with that new service. You’re talking about leaf blowers. With those leaf blowers you’re going to have new employees possibly. You’re going to have to probably have new insurance possibly, right? You’re probably going to have to maintain those machines, whether it’s oil whether it’s gas machines break down, you have to have a cost overhead to buy a new machine.

So those are all key activities that you’re going to have to look at when you’re looking to expand into that new value proposition. So you can kind of see how these compartments can start to connect and start to build a clear puzzle. So number eight, key resources. Key resources is I look at key resources and I’m just trying to figure out the easiest way to explain them. Key resources could be software, right? Going back to your systems, like utilizing software to maintain my value proposition could be associated directly to a software platform. QuickBooks, for example, is a key resource. Like how am I sending out invoices? Well, if I didn’t have QuickBooks, then I would have to create an invoice or somebody on my team to create an invoice or an accountant or CPA would have to create an invoice email or mail. Imagine mailing an invoice. Imagine the debacle that would cause the lag of payment, right? So just think about that. If I had to mail out my invoices, you’re looking at essentially give or take whatever state or whatever country, somewhere between three to ten days for that check, for that invoice to be delivered.

Once it’s in the mail room or at that mail location, someone has to check the mail, which people don’t check the mail every day, right? Then once they get that, then they’re going to have to look at it and then they got to process it. Now you probably heard of net 30, net 60, net 90, even before because again, the further up the food chain, the larger the companies are. They have their own processes in place, so all these things come into factor. So again, you may not get paid for 120 days just because of how long it takes for that invoice to come in, come into the system for someone to open it up, someone to review it, someone to approve it, someone to then release the funds, then someone to submit the funds. It’s a damn nightmare. So think about QuickBooks. QuickBooks kind of solves that problem, right? Or venue, for example, solves that problem. Or obviously there’s PayPal as well too. I wouldn’t recommend using cash out, but obviously there’s all these different new services that are key resources that you process payments a lot faster. Stripe is another good example for like course graders.

So now you don’t have to worry about waiting for someone to get a check or waiting for someone to essentially open up their email, like right then and there they can make a payment and you can process the payment. So think about that at scale. I’m just talking about the money. I’m just talking about cashing out. But if you’re using a key resource, it could be for anything, right? It could be for any aspect of your business. Something that if you do not have access to it. It would probably be a nightmare or take manpower or take time away from you doing something that’s more important, like building your business or making more money doing these steps and procedures. So these key resources help to compound time, make things easier for you and your corporation. And they also plug into your system that you’re creating and developing to make your company run. The takeaway from this one is like, what are your key human resources? What are your key financial resources? And what are your key intellectual resources? And your human resources essentially is your employees, right? And you’re not trafficking people. I’m just saying humans could be a key resource as well.

Like, my VA is a phenomenal VA, right? And it’s a team of VA, essentially like five to ten of them at any given time based on projects we’re working on. That’s a key resource for Boston Cage. So that’s my key resource. My key financial resource, I give you an example of that would be essentially QuickBooks. And the key intellectual resource, we talked about that, right? It’s books and practicing. What I’m doing is creating all these different content. So essentially, I am that intellectual resource behind the boss of Cage brand. And again, my key activity, I want to be able to maintain these. So how am I maintaining my key? Humans will have to make sure that they’re happy, make sure that they’re paid, make sure they have things to do right, and make sure that generally they’re all going the right direction and they’re growing. And my financials, I have to look at my numbers to make sure that my software is working right. Payments are being made. That’s a key thing that I need to do to make sure that key resource is up to par to where it needs to be. And on the intellectual side, I need to continue to keep learning, continue to keep educating myself, continue to keep interviewing new people, hearing new stories, hearing new inspirations.

Because again, much like the listener, I’m actively learning as well. We’re all learning for different reasons. But for me, it’s like I’m plugged in to the data that I die. I want to be able to touch and communicate with as many people as I possibly can until my last breath. So that’s part of my maintenance. I’m going to be doing this so I have no teeth missing the leg and gimping around, just to be straight up and be honest, right? So let’s just go into number nine, key partners. So we talked about the key activities, we talked about key resources. And number nine is key partners. Key partners is a goal. Mine. Because like I said earlier, if I didn’t have that partnership with Scott, would I be having that conversation with you all now about something that I learned 1012 years ago? So that partnership opened up my eyes to new philosophies, new theories, new processes new systems, right? In addition to that, you could have partnerships like affiliates, like Prime Example, like Tycoon. He’s the Kindle cash flow king. That’s his thing. He’s been doing it forever. He’s been doing it before, since Kindle started.

So being able to be an affiliate to his program, well, obviously I can create my own program to talk about Kindle, but why would I recreate something from 100% from scratch when I can kind of give an overview and say, hey, if you want more detail, more insight, here is a partner of mine that has dozens and dozens of courses, from audio courses to not just audio, but like how to create audiobooks, how to create physical books, how to create Kindle books. And he has all the information about that. Then I would then say, hey, after I teach you what I need to teach you, which is the bare basics, then if you want to take it a little bit more advanced and take what I’ve taught you and scale and grow and magnify it even more, then I would recommend you take this course. And here’s why. This is what this course has done for me. I know this guy, and I’m going to tell you the story and I’m going to tell you what has done for me. And then you’ll be able to go over to him. So that’s a key partnership.

And obviously if it’s an affiliate deal, then every time I send someone to him, I would get payment as well too. So it works for me, it works for him, and it’s the best interests of that particular student at the same time. So that’s what you want to have key partners with. Going back to the roofers example, well, if I am a roofer roofer, and I’m doing installations and doing roofs, I may not do drains, I may not do leaf blowing. So now this new sector of this new key activity for this new value proposition for this new company, instead of them being competitors now, they could essentially be partners, right? So you have one company that’s installing the roof, and then you have another company that they’re going to refer you to that’s going to maintain your drains and your gutters and blow the leaves off your roof at the same time. It’s a win win situation. So they give you a brand new roof, and then they have a maintenance package for your roof as well too. So they’ll then give the referral to the maintenance company. They probably get 20%, 30%, maybe 50% of that revenue.

But then that company is getting new leads from the roofer every time the roofer installs a roof. And that’s what that key partnership should look like. There should be push and pull back and forth, much like networking. If you’re going into a networking group, which I’m a part of as well, through Success Champions, I tell everyone, all the members all the time key partnerships goes back to my statement about Triangulation is that you need to figure out where you are in a triangle. If I’m a graphic designer, who would a graphic designer work well with? Graphic designer work really well with a web designer. And who would these two people work really well with? Well, these two people work really well with a videographer or photographer. So once I talk about networking, I want to bring these three sides into my networking group. There could be other triangles going on at the same time, but my core triangle is going to be these three people because I’m a graphic designer, that’s a web designer, and that’s a photographer. And all three of us are sharing equally minded, equally particular clientele’s. But there’s no really overlapping or stepping on feet.

We’re all sharing the same referrals. So then you become an ecosystem. That’s what key partnership is really about. So my takeaway for this one, I want you to think about it like, do you have key partners? And if you do, who are they? And if you don’t, then you need to start thinking about, okay, how can I scale or grow if I had an opportunity to have a key partner in a particular sector of my value? If I can add on additional value without adding on additional cost, that’s where that sweet spot is. So you can take your business from here to here overnight just by plugging in two additional key partnerships. Number ten, cost structure. So call structure kind of goes back to what we talk about with key activities. With the financials cost structure, you have to kind of figure out what’s your overhead. I don’t say you need to go extremely anal, but you have to kind of understand, like, what’s your overhead, right? You have to understand if you’re a work from home person, like, what’s your overhead for your electricity? And you don’t have to do this every single day, every single month.

Just look at, like, an annual review, get an average and figure out, okay, this is what my annual cost is for my general expenses, whether it’s going to ship something out, whether it’s creating something, whether it’s paying for VA, whether it’s buying software, licensing softwares, or subscriptions, add all those numbers up and then you can kind of see, okay, you know what? Per year I’m spending, let’s say $30,000, right? My annual revenue is $35,000. So you’re only really bringing in $5,000 because you’re spending $30,000 to make that 35, right? So you just have to understand, okay, how do I scale that? Like, you want to scale that because you don’t want to be at 5% out of you don’t want to be 5000 out of 35,000. This just makes sense. So you have to figure out, do I bring in new key partners to add on additional services so I can then get referral fees or affiliate deals, right? Or do I add on new offers that essentially I already have access to. It just goes back to a question that we had in a network group. I have all this content. I have all these ebooks that I’ve created, or I’ve had all these written documents or the blog posts.

What do I do with them? But that’s a good thing for you to take all that information and bundle it up and tell a story and put it into a course, or put it into an academy, or put it into a group, a paid group, like something behind a paid wall. That way, all the content that you’ve accumulated over the period of time could then be reused and recycled for a whole new target audience. But now you have all of it in one sitting versus being diversified on all these different platforms. Follow me on YouTube, follow me on Facebook, follow me here, follow me. Take all the best of the best, collage those suckers together and put them in one environment. And that’s one thing that you could definitely do that has a lot of value behind it, because there’s years of content, years of information, and apply a cost to it. So understanding your cost structure is essentially understanding your value. What’s your return, what’s your margin like, what’s your overhead? The first thing I want you to do is for the takeaway is, what are your monthly operational expenses? Just start at the monthly level.

And then you can either go micro, you can go down to the daily level, or you can go up to the annual level. But start at monthly. Look at your monthly reoccurring costs. Look at that. And then say, okay, this is my monthly recurring cost, and this is how much money I make per month. And then the difference in between, like, that’s the money in the bank. So you have to figure out, okay, if my money in my bank is not outweighing the money that I’m spending, how do you fix that? And this model could essentially get your mind to wrap around where you have holes. Next, of course, we’re talking about money. So your revenue streams. So you’re figuring out your cost structure and you’re figuring out your variables of, like, what about my monthly reoccurring costs look like versus what I’m making every month. Then you have to figure out your revenue streams. And I just gave you guys like, a really good one, which is like, take the old content that you have sitting around that has a lot of value, that’s still evergreen content, and collagen together and make a course or make an academy or make it behind a paid wall.

That’s an additional revenue stream, right? So we’re talking about company revenue versus product revenue versus service revenue. Well, that’s why I was talking about multiple brands before, all brands under one umbrella, much like Amazon, right? And then you have just Beto, and then you have prime and then you have the echo dot, let’s just say like that’s one, linear of those three variables of product, service, company, person. So for you, think about your business and see where you are currently. Right? Now if you’re just a company and you’re not a personal brand, my question would be, why not become a personal brand? Especially if you have a storefront. Storefronts are like built and designed for personal branded people. Especially if you’re local, okay? You’re like the local hero. You walk around, you shake hands, kiss babies. It’s almost like you’re running for office, right? So you have to make yourself into a brand to help your business grow. In addition to that, in that business, figure out what your products are and figure out what your services are. You usually have one or the other, but the likelihood of having both is where the real money comes into play.

So you figure out, okay, if I’m selling coffee, coffee is my product. My coffee store is my company brand. I am the owner is the brand of the coffee company. But the part that you’re missing is maybe add a subscription service for the coffee. It didn’t cost you anything to really develop that, right? So now you have all four of these elements. It’s as simple as that. You’re adding on a subscription and say, hey, you guys are local people. You come in here so regular, not only will we give you a discount, not to say punch cards, but you can do a digital at this point in time, right? You can have someone scan a QR code or scan a barcode to get their cup of coffee. Maybe they have unlimited cups. Maybe they have one cup per day, maybe two cups per day. Maybe you could have different price plans. You could have one cup per day versus unlimited cups per day, right? That’s basic versus pro. And there are people out there and companies right now doing these things because they understand the principles behind these four different brands. So just adding on that additional service then now you have all four of them, much like we talked about with the roofers.

And again, if you don’t want to be the additional service, then partner with someone. That’s where your key partners come in. You want to pull those key partners in to say, okay, you know what, I am the company, I am the individual brand and I have a product. But you have that service brand. Let’s pull that service brand in. And now you have all four without having to create it, right? So with revenue, you want to think about the key takeaway for this one is, does your value proposition create a revenue stream? In addition to that, where is your missing of the four components of four brands? Again, company brand, individual brand, product brand, service brand. If you have all four, great. Now only thing you have to do is figure out how to scale and monetize and make sure that that system works. If you don’t, then you need to plug in either a key partner or create that additional brand to get that ecosystem to work, much like the example I did earlier with Amazon. Another example of that would be Apple. You have Apple, Steve Jobs, iPhone, itunes, or any other variables of their many other products.

And you can kind of do this over and over again. It’s like if you did a chart and put the four columns, you can start figuring out multiple different brands that have this thing that I’m talking about with all four brands and then going into number twelve. Last but not least, I’ve titled it Envision Goals. And it’s kind of like goals are one of these things that you kind of set, but goals are always updating, changing and modifying what vision does as well too. So I’ve kind of combined these two to say, okay, the result of achievement toward the effort is directed towards the result. Sounds crazy, but the reality is, if I have a goal, does that goal and stay in alignment with my vision? If my vision shifts, my goal should shift, right? If I’m aiming for 10 million and I have this one envision for my company, but then there’s a fork in the road and I have a dual envision and they’re both working for themselves. Prime example, I’m adding on a new service to my products and my brands. Now I have a dual vision. Well, the goal for this particular vision, which is on the right hand side, that goal could still be met.

But now this new vision, what’s the goal for that one? It could be a similar goal, but again, if I have two separate products and service, there should be an alignment. They should be differently parallel, but the end result should be the same. But again, the goal should be uniquely different for each one of the platforms. That way you can isolate and figure out your problems at hand. And a good example of this would say, okay, my goal for Boston Kate podcast is that I want to get 1 million listeners. That’s my goal, that branch. But my goal for the Academy is I want to get maybe 10% of that 1 million right? Because again, not every listener may need the academy, but the end result of both the Academy and Boston Cage podcast is to essentially help entrepreneurs, help business owners. Some people love just listening to free content and they’ll learn through that. Some people love listening to free content and they need an extra push. They need a community of people. They need step by steps. They need checklists, they need show notes, they need videos. They need to be able to ask someone questions.

Well again, the results could be the same, but the goals and aspirations of both these branches are uniquely different with the same end result in mind. So that’s something that I want you to think about. So the walkway for this one is like, think about what I just said about the envisions and think about the goals and see if your vision and your goals all lined up with your value proposition. So just to recap, the twelve things that we’re talking about today, and the fundamentals are value proposition, unfair advantage, customer segments and relationships, channels of communication, customer challenges, customer solutions, key activities, key resources, key partners, cost structure, revenue stream, and envision goals. So obviously, with everything that kind of throw up, everything I just threw up on you guys, I want you to kind of relisten to this. Take notes, take action, at least on one of these, right? If you’re missing one of these twelve components, figure out which ones you’re missing and then fill it out, start to answer those questions. And obviously, if you need more help with that, I would say this is where I would plug in the Boston Cage Academy.

If you have personal questions, step by step, if you want me to kind of create more content just on a particular section that we talked about, then I would just say go and look at the Bostoncage Academy, which is at Bostoncage comACADEMY. You will be surprised how cheap the cost can be for something as simple as setting up a subscription to help multiple different peoples. But you can definitely sign up for that, take a look at it, see if it will benefit you. If you have any additional questions, feel free to reach out to me. All my communication devices are always out there in plain and simple, right? Last but not least, in closing, something else that I was talking about recently was reviews. So as I start to do more and more of these videos and more and more of these trainings and these micro courses, as I’m going to call them, and continue to build up the Boston Cage Academy in conjunction with Boston Cage Podcast, I need insight from our listeners. I need insight to is this content helpful for you? Do you want more of this content? Do you want more insight?

And I’ve seen some comments here and there. I’ve seen some reviews that have come up on Apple reviews, but I know we have way more listeners than we have reviews. So my next step is I want to start getting more insight from you, the listener. I want to know what you want, how you want it. If you have any referrals for somebody that you want me to interview, I want to interview them. I want you to hear their stories. I want you to take action on their results that they’ve gotten, that you can do the same once you hear how they’ve done it. If you want more insight on these individual podcast episodes, I want to hear that as well. So in the show notes, on this. I think this is on YouTube live and on the podcast. There’s going to be a link. I’m going to tell you what the link is. It’s called Learnacademy bostoncase. Comreviews. That’s L-E-A-R-N-A-C-A-D-E-M-Y. Bostoncage. Comreviews. Take 30 seconds, 60 seconds. Write a quick review or leave a video review so that I can create more content to effectively help you on your journey to get you to where you want to be, which without doubt, you want to be a boss on Cage.

Again, this is SA Grant. I appreciate you guys. I love this stuff. I love this information. Hopefully you love what I’m delivering as much as I love delivering it to you. Essay Graham, over and out. Thanks for tuning into another episode of Boss on Cage. I hope you got some helpful insight and clarity to the diverse approach on your journey to becoming an engaged trailblazer. Don’t forget to subscribe, rate, review and share the podcast. If this podcast has helped you or you have any additional questions, reach out and let me know. Email me at ask@sagrant.com or drop me your thoughts via call or text at 762-233-2677. I would love to hear from you. Remember, to become a Boston Cage, you have to release your inner beast. SA Grant signing off.

Listeners of Boston Cage are invited to download a free copy of our host SA Grants site e book, Become an Uncage Trailblazer. Learn how to release your primal success in 15 minutes a day. Download now at www dot boss. Uncaged.com forward slash free book.

S2E55 Jonathan Baldock.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Alright. Three, two, one. Welcome. Welcome back to another episode of Bosson Cage podcast. Today. We have Jonathan, and I think this is going to be a very special treat because we’re going to talk about marketing. We’re going to talk about software and kind of just give you guys a little bit in and out some different strategies. So without further Ado, Jonathan, why don’t you tell our people a little bit more about yourself?

Very good. Hey, thanks so much. I appreciate you having me on. So a bit of background. I worked at LinkedIn for almost ten years, and I spent quite a bit of time with their big corporate customers globally. And so first few years was all around social media, recruitment, marketing. So building their recruitment strategies, if they needed to hire 20 or 30,000 people, they would come to us. And we kind of help them figure out how to do that with the LinkedIn network. And then the final four and a half years was all around social advocacy and employee advocacy platforms.

And so we had one for LinkedIn. And so really it was helping companies in four different ways, really around the topics of brand reputation, social selling, marketing and telling acquisition. And so I was with LinkedIn up until the end of June of 2020. And then with the lock down and all the other stuff that happened, I was actually supposed to transfer with them over to Singapore, but international travel was banned and all that kind of stuff. So that opportunity came and went. And then since then, I’ve started doing some consulting work with a software company.

I live in Toronto. So this software company is also based in Toronto. So I’m helping them out. And they’re called Social HP, and I advise them on how to build their business and what not.

So let’s just dive into your history a little bit because, I mean, you gave a lot to our audience to kind of chew on a little bit.

Right.

So as a kid growing up, I mean, when did you know that you were going to go into technology? Was there something in particular that happened during your life that said, hey, I love technology and I’m going down that route.

No, I had a zero plan to do any of this. And I think some hard work kind of got me to where I am. So I just have a high school background. And I had planned to go to University at College, but I took a year off and that ended up turning it into the rest of my life. And so actually, when I took the year off, I got a job and just started working. And that particular company just kept promoting me. I was working super hard.

And the harder I work, the more opportunity they would give me. And then such a good learning experience. And so after a bunch of years of doing that and I was managing a pretty decent sized team and working with a lot of great people. I realized, though, that probably my opportunity long term would be a little bit limited, just only working in retail. So what I ended up doing was I found some of my friends had moved over to recruitment and head hunting, and they were working way less hours and making way more money.

And so I thought, oh, I should probably do that. They’re really killing it. And so I eventually convinced them to hire me. It was 13 interviews and including the owner, because that was the first guy they had ever hired that didn’t have a post secondary education. And then I did. Well, there too. They gave me lots of opportunity. And I stayed there a bunch of years. And then that kind of recruitment was technology recruitment. And so that’s how I sort of first started to get my feet wet.

But to be honest, I’m not a technical person. I know I understand the technical terms. I know what they mean, but I can’t code, I can’t build systems and whatnot I know what they are. And I know how it all kind of works together. But I’m not the guy that’s doing it, so I can talk about it. But that’s kind of the end of it. And then I left that industry. And I was, actually, to be honest, spending my time doing comedy and acting on the side with friends and just really kind of building out that creative side.

And while I was doing that, maybe a couple of years in a friend of mine said, hey, you know what? You should work for LinkedIn. And at the time, LinkedIn was much, much smaller. So they had 80 million members and they had 600 employees. And so I thought, okay, cool. I’ll have a conversation with them. And then very quickly I realized, actually, I should I should probably try and get a job at this place, like it’s going somewhere, and it’s got really cool stuff. And the people were great.

And again eventually convinced them to hire me. Same thing. They kind of put me through the Ringer because I didn’t have that educational background. But I did have some good experience. And so they gave me a shot. And ten years later.

Here I am, definitely definitely an interesting journey. So you alluded to a couple of times about the education side of things, right? It seems like that was kind of a hurdle that you had to overcome, because obviously you could do the job. But the credentials of having the diploma behind you wasn’t there at the time. How did you juggle them? I mean, obviously you could have went back to school, but your experience should outweigh your education to a certain extent. And what’s your viewpoints on that?

Yeah. Well, first off, I have a few one is like I never had an issue with the fact that I didn’t have that education. I was willing to work hard. I was pretty smart car. I figured I could get the job done. It’s just really it’s kind of like, what’s the barrier at that company, what’s their thinking? And I will say earlier in my career, it was a little bit more stringent. Like, you don’t have a degree, you can’t work here like that kind of a thing.

And then which is why they would just always add extra interviews. But I knew that was the deal. Like I knew I didn’t have that education, and that was what they needed on the piece of paper. And so I would just eventually convince them. And to be honest, I just try and win them over. Kind of tried to be engaging, and I was enthusiastic, and I wanted to be there. And fortunately, some people gave me the shot, and I convinced them to give me that opportunity.

But personally, my actual belief on it. And you hear, Elan Must talking about this a lot, which is education isn’t necessarily going to pave your way. I think it’s hard work. And so there are a few companies that still like it’s a mandatory requirement. They will not even consider you if you’re not have certain credentials. And then there are certain organizations that won’t even consider you. If you’re not from a particular school, I will say you can’t teach attitude, and you can’t teach someone to be a good person.

So if you find, like, a fantastic person and they don’t have the skills, if the skills are learnable, then give them a shot. Because I’d rather hire great people that can learn the job than someone that’s amazingly good at the job. And they’re just not a good person to work with. They become painful and they really drag the morale of the team and the company down. So that I would say, is my opinion on that’s been my experience. And I’ve been involved in a lot of hiring decisions.

And I’ve made serious recommendations passing on people that have all the right stuff on paper, but they’re just terrible in person. And then other people that look like they were missing things, but they were just such a fantastic person. I’m like, you definitely need to get that person to shop. They can learn this.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s definitely inspiring itself to kind of understand behind the scenes because I think a lot of times people they have that struggle with, okay, they’re asking me for these requirements, but I know I can do the job, and I know I have the mindset to move forward, and then that becomes a hurdle to where they won’t even apply because they don’t think they’ll be able to get hired because of that. So I think you kind of open that Pandora’s box up a little bit.

So I would say just a little bit more on that because I’ve spoken to some youth group where they’re coming from homes that they don’t have access to computers. And they’re not at the very best school. Even like local schools, some high schools are better than other high schools and so on. And so they’re coming from an underprivileged area, underserved areas. And some kids they would go through, like a technical training program or whatnot. And then they got to visit LinkedIn. And so I would chat with that whole group.

And so these kids, they don’t have University, and a few of them did. But most of them didn’t. A lot of them, their belief was like, I shouldn’t apply for that. Or I can’t apply for that. Or they’re never going to give me a chance. And I would tell those kids, don’t listen to anybody. If you want to do something, you got to figure out a way to do it. And if they put hurdles in your way and then just get over those hurdles, sometimes those hurdles are pain in the ass, and you got to work hard to get past them.

For example, they might say, hey, okay. I want to work at LinkedIn. Okay. Well, maybe they tell you you need to have two years of this kind of still experience, two year kind of sales. If you want to work there, get two years of experience doing that. You got a whole lifetime to go after your goals. You don’t have to hit your goal tomorrow. So they don’t get that job getting that kind of experience. And they tell you, you need this kind of experience before you can do that, then go get that experience.

Just keep knocking down those hurdles until eventually they just give up and go, you know what I told you? You need two years of experience. And two years later, here you are with exactly what I asked you for. Yeah. Like, you’re a go getter or you’re going to get it done. And it’s that kind of enthusiasm and that kind of commitment that pushes people forward.

Nice. I think you have hell of tenacity, right. You have a lot of energy. It kind of shows, right? Just by in that last five minutes of this conversation. So if you could identify yourself with three to five words, what would your three to five words be?

I mean, over time, that’s probably changed. I’d say right now, outgoing, confident, engaging. And I try and be thoughtful as best I can. We all struggle, right? Sometimes. But as we get older, I think our perspective changes and we realize there’s a lot more people out there that have done just ourselves. And so that’s certainly been a good awakening for me over the last little while, especially over this last year.

Great. So go to the next question. I mean, obviously you’ve been through LinkedIn, which is essentially like Corporation level at this point, right. But you have the entrepreneurial side to you as well in your current business model. Is that business set up as an LLC, an S Corp. C Corp. How is it structured?

And just to give you a caveat, I’m Canadian. So we don’t have LLC here, but we have corporations and probably the same thing. So the place that I’m consulting for their Corporation, they have their company set up and they have employees. And then I have had side hustles. So I’ve owned my own camera rental company, which was a Corporation. And I just launched an app last summer and that’s tied into my Corporation. And that was a whole experience just trying to build an app because I can know what the technology is, but I can’t do any of it.

So I had to get the right people and get a bill. Now, of course, I’m working on trying to monetize it. Yeah, I’d say. So my hands are sort of in both sides. I’ve got some familiarity of running a business. And then certainly I’ve got some familiarity of being an employee at a business got you.

So lets talk about your app a little bit. I mean, what is your app and what does it do?

So it’s called Glimp social. And the first use case. What I released it for was if you’ve ever used ways to be able to drive and get somewhere ways tells you what’s the best way to go. My app is designed crowdsource information, but my app is designed to tell you what it’s like when you get there. So, for example, is there a big line? Is that stuff in stock? Is there room on the patio at that restaurant so you can drop pins on anything around the world and ask questions, and then people at the other end will get a notification and give you the answer.

So that was the first use case. And then second use case was the election in the the presidential election. So what I did was I dropped a pin on every single polling location in the US, and then it allowed people to be able to basically drop a pin on the polling location and say, hey, how long is the line? Because some polling locations, there’s none, but others there could have been 12 hours. So I wanted to help people out. So they knew what they were getting into when they were voting.

And then still, right now, I’m working on trying to help people if they want to get vaccinated. So trying to get all the locations to wear vaccines once it becomes generally available, drop a pin on all the vaccine locations so that you can find out, do they have it in stock? How long is the line? Because it could be a four hour wait. And then if you’ve got five places to choose from and one’s got a 30 hours wait and one’s got a four hour wait.

I think I’ll go to the one that shorter lines. That’s kind of the idea behind it. And then now I’m working into how to monetize it, which would be around sporting events. So for example, if you want to go to a College football game, maybe which entrance the line is fastest. Interviews with the players and coaches. How long is the line to get beer behind the scenes stuff and setting up the field, et cetera. All that would be available through the app. And there would be custom pins depending on if you’ve got a player interview and they’re interviewing the quarterback before the game and it’s not televised, but it’s just for the app.

Then they can interview that and you would get a VIP pin that would show up. That would show you a player interview, et cetera. So that and working on it for shows like music events or even just like conferences and trade shows.

So I would think with that push notification will probably be a serious add on if it’s not there currently right now. I mean, obviously to know when the line is short and when to run to the line. Is that already built into the app currently?

Yeah, you can get alerts, you can decide when and where you get alerts, you can follow different things. So the next version is just about to be released. With the next version, you’ll be able to say like, I’m following this team. I’m following that venue, I’m following this event. And then these are the kinds of notifications I want to get. And then in a perfect world in the future, if you see hypothetically, let’s say we’re both in New York City and we want to go to a restaurant every night.

It’s busy there. And so we want to go to a restaurant. You try and phone and you don’t know how busy it is. You go on the scheduling tool and it’s telling you you got 3 hours to get a table. We could just drop a pin on three different restaurants and then they all fire back answers, saying, oh, yeah, there’s room over here. The patrons are telling you it’s a good scene. There’s tables or no. It’s jammed and people are lined up at the door. Then we know, okay, we probably don’t want to spend 30 minutes standing out in front of the restaurant.

Let’s go to the one that’s not as busy. And then that would also give the other restaurants the opportunity to be able to advertise to you to win your business. So it would be like real time and ten based advertising, which is kind of the goal of where it would head to.

It’s pretty in. Jesus, let me just regurgitate that translation. So you pretty much took the functionality of Way speed trap to say, hey, there is a speed trap ahead, and you converted that into, like, first person user basis. So if they’re going to store, they go into a concert, going to the bank, going to pick up anything. Now they have access to Noel ahead of time. How long is going to take them before they even leave to go to that location.

Exactly. I’m going to Costco. Is there a line to get in? And is that thing I want is that flat screen TV that they had on sales or any left? I want to know that I don’t want to drive all the way down there, get there, going to line up, get in and find out if not even there. It’s like, okay. Well, that kind of sucks. So that’s how it’s designed to work.

Obviously.

Next goal is to try and get as many people on it and get people helping each other. And that’s really how it would work is that when you have the masses on it and they’re sharing information back and forth, it’s everyone’s lifting everybody up. So it’s really about providing information what you need when you need it. Yeah.

I mean, the reason I went down that road is kind of like I think you brought us full circle and let me just kind of pull that together for everyone is obviously you created an app that does what you describe that you do. But you’re also working with another company that’s more socially aware. So the combination between the two, it’s a gold mine. I mean, it’s obviously it gives you an opportunity to kind of figure out the marketing strategy and the branding of the social awareness of what people are looking for and how and then you have an app of support to deliver on the results.

So you’re juggling both points.

Yeah. I’m trying to work it on both ends. Yeah. Absolutely.

Yeah.

I learned a lot working at LinkedIn, and I’m doing my best to try and provide something that I think could be valuable to a lot of people where also you can kind of turn it into a way to make money. And then I want to be able to donate some of the proceeds to system good. Not for profits.

Nice. You’re definitely Frank. You’re socially aware on all aspects of it, and it kind of goes back to you, like your word choices. Describe yourself. Right. All of these things are shining through in this moment. It also shining through. Or you could have picked any app you want to develop, really and truly. But you picked an app got to fit your personality, which is definitely ingenious. I mean, something that I think that you love to do, and you would continue to love doing it, moving forward as well.

Yeah. I’m pretty passionate about it. I appreciate you saying so.

Yeah. Definitely. So let’s just talk about time frames like somebody may hear this podcast and. Okay, Jonathan seems to be someone that I want to mimic. So I want to get some insight from him, and it seems like he’s overnight success. This app just popped up out of nowhere, and he’s working with these other companies. But the reality is, how long have you been on this journey.

I mean, from a technology standpoint, I think the technological awakening was probably me spending time at LinkedIn because I saw growth from 600 employees to 13,000 employees in ten years. I thought go from 80 million users to 750,000,000 users in the same amount of time. And so when you see that kind of scale and you see what’s involved and obviously there’s a lot of very smart people there and a lot of professional level engagements. And, of course, the companies that I got to work with, I’m working with some amazing Fortune 50 Fortune 500 kind of companies and very senior level folks at these organizations.

So one is great experience. And I learned a ton and I’ve got to see new functionality and new technology being implemented every day at our own company and various other companies. But I will say, I think would also help is that sometimes we put people on a pedestal. Sometimes we put the CEO at this or the senior executive at that. And then we’re afraid to talk to them because they’re this sort of glorified person. They’re all people. They’re all trying to move forward depending on what their goals are and their objectives are in my experience, through all that really help me to understand that not necessarily everyone’s, like reachable and you can call up anybody but nobody that is necessarily better than anybody else.

They’re all just at different stages of their journey. And so it’s being able to connect with the right people and kind of move your story forward. I don’t know if that sort of answers the point, but that would be my take on it.

Definitely. So I’m just thinking about, okay, you have a cool app, the name of his glimpse. Right. So if I say this app had time travel associated to it, right. And you had an opportunity to go back in time and you could get a glimpse into the future of the Forks in the road ahead of you. Right.

Sure.

What’s one thing that you would want to do differently if you can time travel backwards?

That’s a good question. I don’t know if I have a great answer for it other than I should probably have had a better understanding of what it takes to actually build the app, because there are a lot of hurdles with that one, the requirements to launch an app on Android versus with Apple very different.

Yeah.

Like apples like, you know, a 40 story climb upstairs and then Android everything’s on the first floor, so way harder to do it. And then I kind of went in with sort of heart and passion. I would say, like the direction of where things head and listen system. I listen to some good podcast. One of them that I listen to is how I built this. And you will hear very regularly when you hear those interviews, like the business started this way, and then it evolved into this, and then it changed into that.

And then now it’s this, and I am definitely experiencing that where I’m like, this is what I want the app to do. But how do I get it to do? How do I get everybody using it? Well, I mean, I don’t have billions of dollars to be able to just run ads indefinitely and tell everybody about us, so they all download it and it does what it does. So how do I get people to use it? Well, maybe I use it through sporting events and shows or concerts or maybe, etc.

Etc. So it’s finding different ways to provide value so that you can still reach your end goal and being creative and trying to come up with that is good. So I would say probably what I would have done is build a strong network of smart people around me to provide advice, because as I meet people that are awesome and provide great advice, I’m like, oh, wow. Can we keep that conversation going? Your feedback so awesome. Like, I really appreciate it next time I come up with something about it.

If you give me your opinion and finding those different experts that can help you through your journey because you there’s no way you know everything and you’ve got to learn so much and you’ve got to accept the fact that you you’ve got a long way to go and you need a lot of help. You know, it’s kind of like if tomorrow I said, I want to be an Olympic sprinter. First of all, you’d laugh. You’d be like, good luck. But but I need a ton of coaching.

Now. First, I have to have some talent, which I don’t in that area, but I need a ton of coaching, and I’d be relying on a lot of people. And yet, for some reason, in business, so many people think like, I just like, I got to do it on my own and I can’t ask any questions and what not. And the answer is, if anything in life, we need coaches, we need support. We need a good network. So that’s my ramble on answer.

Yeah. I think you definitely hit it on the nose. And to your point, about the Apple versus Android, it is a complete because I’m working on an app right now as well. I’m working on two separate apps. One app I’m working on is essentially for the entire Boston Cage network of different tentacles to have one portal to say, just download the app and you have access to everything just makes it ten times easier. And in that journey, obviously, Apple cost more just to buy in. You have to go through all the dim requirements and specifications versus Android.

You kind of just sign up for the account where you upload the app and it’s live and like, 2 hours.

Yeah. Thumbs up. Good luck.

Yeah. Pretty much. So. I definitely appreciate that answer with your tenacity and your entrepreneurial spirit that you currently have did that come from like a family member, any ancestors and your family have that entrepreneurial hustle.

I’m not sure my family doesn’t have a lot of entrepreneurs in it. But I will say when I was a kid, I always had a little bit of hustle. So I was always looking to try to figure out a way to make a bit of money. And my first job, I was delivering Flyers when I was eleven years old. Nice, because I could make I think it was like one or two cent per flyer that I delivered. And so I was like, oh, wow, great, because I want to be able to buy stuff.

And so my motivation was to get stuff. But I was like, I want that whatever. And that pair of shoes or whatever. And so how do I get the money? Well, my parents aren’t going to give it to me. So I had to figure out a way. So most of my household, to be honest, just came from me wanting material things when I was younger. And then now most of my Huckle comes from just wanting to be passionate about something that like finding something I’m passionate about and then really wanting to do it.

And then in that it evolved a lot because as you get older, you also care a lot more about helping others and and providing some value. And so I think that’s a great way to do it.

Nice. So I think it’s safe to assume that you’re a highly passionate individual. And I think once you sink your teeth to something like your laser focused on the end result of getting that thing mission accomplished, correct me if I’m wrong.

Well, you’re mostly right. You’re certainly right on probably what you’re hearing. But I do have a lazy side, which is that can wait till tomorrow. I have some natural built in procrastination, and but I’ve been doing everything I can to try and crush and get rid of that and try and squeeze it out of me. And so to kind of building really good habits around how you live. And so I work on that every single day, trying to just make sure that I’m using my time the best way I can.

So that kind of leads me into my next question. Like, how do you currently juggle your work life with your family life?

Well, I have the good portion of sitting at home so that works. And then my kids are about. But they’re not little. So they’re kind of independent. And so evenings we socialize and spend time together and try to spend time with some friends when and where we’re allowed, depending on the nature of the world as it stands, because I’ve got irons in a few fires. What I do is I just have to have a pretty organized view of what’s the next conversation and make sure my mind is ready that I’m prepared to have that conversation.

So I think that’s helpful planning things out is good and then making sure that I’ve got gap that I use them. So like, I’ve got a dog waiting for me to walk her on my next gap in the day, and it gets me outside, which is great. And then I do all of my working out before I do anything. So I get up at 06:00 a.m. Or 630 every day, and I do all of my working out right away. So that way I get that done.

But I’m pretty, like routine based, so work is just kind of like fits in. And then if I have a 1 hour gap during the day and I need to get groceries, then I use that. I go get the groceries and then I come back home. So to be honest, I think when evenings hit, I actually don’t have a ton of stuff to do other than to try and be social with family and friends.

Nice. So I think you kind of stepped into my next question, which is like, you know, like, since you’re so habit oriented, like, what is your morning ritual? Your morning routines look like right now.

Over the last few months, it’s been wake up at six or 630. I do a yoga class, I lift some weights, then I do a spin class. I’m fortunate enough. I got a peloton bike a couple of years ago, and so it’s in my bedroom, literally, my workout gym is at the end of my bed. I have a yoga mat on the floor. I have kettlebells and freeways, and I have my Pelton bike, and I just do all that stuff. And I’m not a guy that likes to go to the gym.

I like to just work up by myself and even the commute to the gym and back. I’m like, oh, that seems like a total to. Yeah. I mean, first of all, yeah, it’s dead. So just as soon as I wake up, I find yoga is like a great thing to do because it starts getting me moving around, start stretching me out, starts getting me limber, and then I get all the workouts done. I shower, I take the dog for a 45 minutes walk. Then I get home, and then I start making breakfast, which right now is oatmeal and some berries matched into it because my doctor told me I had high cholesterol, so I’m eating more fiber.

And you’re walking more often as well, too.

I get two or 345 minutes dog walks in a day. It was a little bit worse because I’m in Toronto through the winter. It kind of sucked. It’s cold and windy, and so I had to get a really good quote for my dog because she gets a cold in the winter and shakes. So I got her a nice park, which she seems to appreciate interesting.

So coming into the book segments. Right. And I got a live book club that every time I have an opportunity to talk to someone like you, I always ask them what books inspired you on your journey and what books are you currently reading right now that you want to recommend.

So I listen to books rather than read them. And I think that’s just because I like to listen to podcast and and use my time. So like, while I’m walking the dog, I’m listening to a podcast or I’m listening to a book. So recently I finished a book called Lifespan by Davidson. Claire, I’m very try to be as health conscious as possible. I want to eat healthy. I want to put good stuff into my body. And I want to be as active as possible. And so this book is really cool because it talks about the technology, of how its evolving around our health and how technology will help us reverse aging.

So it won’t be like going to the place to get plastic surgery will be more like going to the place to get your certain kind of shot or take a pill. And it’ll kind of help to roll back the clock. So understanding how that all works is very, very cool. And then I’m actually a super huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell. His commentary, social commentary is just amazing. And so the most recent one was Talking to Strangers. I’m not sure if you’re familiar with that book, but it’s pretty fantastic.

I really enjoyed it. And then the audio piece was really kind of excellent. And then food and health wise, there’s one on it’s called Breath, which is all about breathing through your nose rather than through your mouth. There’s like a pile of health benefits there. And I could keep going on, like, sort of the food and health side. I’ve got a whole bunch of them that I listen to.

Yeah. It’s always funny to me when I ask that question is always like, I open up Pandora’s box. And at the point, I probably do a whole podcast, just one book at this point.

Sure.

I mean, they fill up a lot of people’s lives, and they give a lot of ingenuity to how to achieve your next goals and your next aspirations. So, like, what do you see yourself? 20 years from now.

I would like to see myself with a boutique hotel on a beach somewhere. I own the hotel, live in it, have it, make some money, but have access to the nice restaurant, have some drinks. And I constantly have friends coming in and out and meeting people on their journey and lives when they’re on vacation. That would be a pretty ideal situation for me.

Sounds like a Casa Blanca kind of situation.

Yeah.

So coming into, like, software, right? I mean, obviously, you’re building apps, you’re working for software companies. You worked for LinkedIn tools or software applications. Do you currently use right now that you do not see you doing what you do without.

Well, from a marketing and communication standpoint, the one that I consult for right now is pretty key. So that basically figuring out how to get your message out at scale and without paying because I don’t want to have to pay make a buck in order to be able to do that. This is designed for business owners that have employees. And so if I give you the example of LinkedIn LinkedIn, you’ve got a company page and then your employees like, I work there. And so you’ll have people that follow the company page, which means if you do an update company page update and it works the same for Facebook and others.

But you do a company page update, it’ll reach all the followers. Well, the reach of your employees is way, way, way bigger than whatever your company page followers are. So to give you a quick example, the average member on LinkedIn has 800 connections. And so if I have 50 employees, a company of that size might have a thousand followers. So if I do a company page update, a thousand people will see that if my 50 employees share that out, it’ll reach 40,000 people. So the reach of my employees is amazing.

And then who are my employees connected to? Well, they’re connected to my customers and they’re connected to my future customers. So if I get my employees to commonly, like, regularly share out stories that help bring value to the company and also help them bring up their professional profile, elevate them, then that’s what that’s what is a good thing to do. And so versus spending a whole bunch of money. Paid campaigns are exceptionally targeted, and they’re very, very valuable. But usually people don’t have deep pockets to be able to keep running those kinds of targeted campaigns.

And so utilizing a channel like employees is a great evergreen strategy. And it’s a great equalizer, because then a company of 50 people can have the same power and reach as a company that has 2000 people.

Let me bite into that a little bit because I mean, obviously marketing is one of the things that makes my heart beat right in that depiction that you just clearly outlined something like that. Let’s say you have a company of 50 people, and let’s say I do a monthly sweepstakes for my employees, and I’m tracking, like their shares how many times they share, how many times they communicate with additional target audiences based upon what we do at the company. Then, like you said, it’s an evergreen situation that I could say I put $100 into gift cards or hardware or whatever I think my employees would tangibly want would be ten times or 100 times cheaper than spending 100,000 or 10,000 an ad spend.

And that’s pretty much what you just outline. Is that correct?

Exactly. It. So to give you a quick example, a small paid campaign on LinkedIn would be ten grand, and that could last a few weeks. If I have 50 employees for under five Grand, I can communicate through my employees for an entire year.

You’re definitely right.

With a pay campaign, I run one ad where I’m like, Please click on this and buy my stuff. If I can communicate through my employees for an entire year, I could tell that story in so, like, such a nice way, a little bit about the company, a little bit about thought leadership, a little bit of how we participate in the industry. Here’s our perspective on this. And instead of just like, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch. Now I’m building an awareness of us. I’m building an awareness of our employees.

I’m raising everyone’s profile. Now we’re thought leaders in the industry. All of a sudden, the conversation is different. We’re no longer a company that’s just pitching. Now we’re a company that’s adding value. And then periodically we talk about ourselves and talk about our products and services. But we’re not in any kind of rush because with a pay campaign, you’ve got a stuff in people’s faces, whereas with an evergreen channel like that, I I can tell you this story over the course of months because decisions don’t get made usually don’t get made in the moment.

It’s not like I see an ad and go, oh, gonna go by Bentley. I just saw that commercial and made me want one. If I’m in a position to buy something or even as a company, we’re going to buy some software. We’re going to take a while and a bunch of people are going to be involved. So if you build that awareness with me over the course of eight months and all of a sudden, now we’re in the market for that product immediately. You’re top of mind.

Well, we definitely need to talk to those guys. They’re smart. They’re adding value, and they’re in that space. We need to get their opinion on what we should be doing. And I wonder what their product is like. So that’s how you change the conversation through the employees channel. And so tools like who I consult for and what LinkedIn hat before, which was Elevate, which was their social sharing channel, and a product that was designed for that. It was a fantastic platform. They’ve since sunset that platform.

And so now I invest my time with social HP, but Benet of it is, you know, you can really drive a lot of value. The hard part is trying to convince people to do it regularly.

Yeah, that’s why I threw in the sleep steak sticking it. I want everybody to listen to this last ten minutes. I want you to kind of rewind it back and listen to it again, because the Nuggets are definitely falling from the sky right now. Right with that. So pretty much I want people to really understand is that if you have a tribe you could weaponize your tribe with the right Spears to go out and Hunt for your right clientele by just giving your tribe initiatives on a routine basis, which is significantly going to be cheaper than running ad campaigns at a shorter period of time for a higher cost.

And that’s pretty much what he’s saying, which is golden when you really think about it. It’s so simple. But the reality that not everyone’s doing that, not everyone’s doing it well, almost nobody’s doing.

Some big companies are doing it, but they’re on the bandwagon early, and they’re adopting technology at a pretty fast rate. Smaller companies, definitely not midsized companies. There’s a few, but not a ton. And then I will say, I’ll add to this, which is software, especially either consumer based software or software that you would give to employees. It’s hard to get them to do it unless it’s like they’re going to get fired unless they don’t do it. If it’s an opt in kind of thing, most people will say, yeah, but then they forget real quickly and they opt out.

And that software is a service. That’s the number one problem is usage. And so with most tools that curate and bring in all of this amazing content for you to be able to share, to try and convince your employees to regularly go in, you can contest and you can Starbucks cards or whatever, like a gift card. You know, that kind of thing that will definitely make a difference. But it’s not on. Some people aren’t motivated by that. And if they’re not motivated by that and then they’re not motivated by the greater good, then they’re not going to do it.

And so my experience when I was at LinkedIn is that about of your employees will actually regularly go in and share and won’t. And so with the company that I’m supporting now, which is social HP, they build some technology, which is basically where your employees are like, look, you guys, the marketing experts, I individually am not going to be a social media marketing manager, and I don’t want to become one. So why don’t you guys just do it for me? And that’s what we built. We built to do it for me functionality, which is basically like, hey, why don’t you share for me four times a month?

Share good stuff that makes me look great, makes me look smart and helpful for the company. Get up. And then I just give you permission to do that for me. And then now everyone can share and they don’t ever have to log in. They don’t even have to touch it. And then they’re sharing all the smart stuff so that their networks are like, oh, wow. Like, hey, Sarah, that was amazing that you shared that. And they’re like, cool. I didn’t literally have to do anything.

Who’s going to eat the cost of that? I mean, essentially, you’re talking about a software that’s going to have API integrations into individual social media platforms. All of that information is going to be regurgitated to reflect positive on the mothership company that these employees work under.

Correct?

Who’s paying the cost for that?

So the mothership company buys the software access. The employees don’t pay anything, but that software is cheap. That’s the thing. Like one paid campaigns. Ten grand that’s offer for 50 employees is under 5000.

So 5000 monthly or annual or no for the year. Oh, shit.

It’s like it’s cheap. You’re giving it away. Can you share a LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter? You can share all the platforms. The employees decide which tools they want to connect, which of their networks they want to connect. And then you can just take care of it for them. So they literally just go, yeah, I’ll connect my stuff. That sounds great. Thanks for making me look smart. I’m happy to promote the company. I’m proud of the place where I work. We’re going to talk about how we do in that charity run or how we’re doing this good community work, too.

Amazing. I want to talk about that. And the employees don’t know where to find those stories. And if you could profile an employee, like, say, hey, like Cassandra is been working here for three years, and we’re just so proud of her. And here’s the great work that she’s doing. The rest of the employees don’t know where that story is posted or located. It’s on their corporate blog. They’re never looking at the corporate blog. Is it on the Internet or is it on our website? Where is it this way?

One administrator just pops it in, delivers it out. And then Cassandra gets a visibility of 40,000 people Super Super fast.

So who is developing and creating the general content? Where is that content being sourced from?

So the tools like this pull in from third party. So you can pull in from, like, any third party publishers, whether it’s like Harvard Business Review or industry stuff. Like, if you’re in the legal field, then it pulls in all the law journals, anything like that. If you guys have a corporate blog, it’ll pull in from the corporate blog. It’ll pull in from your corporate, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn account. It’ll pull in from your marketing tools. It’ll pull in from any source you want. You can even do Google keyword searches if you like, every time we’re mentioned in the news or anytime this topic is mentioned in the news, then it’ll pull in all those stories, and then the administrator just basically select which ones, and when they get shared.

It so human me here for a second. I’m listening to it and we’re diving in the convention, and I’m enjoying this conversation.

Right.

So that particular software is a sexy as hell when it comes down to corporations. But I see an alternative use for it as far as like, if I’m a corporate individual and I want to sell a particular product. Everyone’s familiar with influencer marketing. Could I not then say, I have 15 influencers that are my employees.

Yeah, of course.

We should give the system.

Yeah. You can invite anybody on you want not only that, let’s say you have customers. So let’s say I’m in a retail business, and but my customers are passionate about me. So maybe I have an email list of 2000 people that have all bought for me, and they’re all like, hey, keep you posted when stuff comes up. Normally, what I would have to do is write out an email and whatever. I could literally just take a story, click a button. It creates an email and it’ll send it out to all of them.

One it’ll allow them all to read it to it’ll, allow them all to share.

It nice.

So they can share as a guest so I can invite in my own employees. I can invite in my own influencers, and I could share content to the masses and have them amplify it for me.

Yeah.

Literally. Within 10 seconds, it would take me to do that. Yeah.

Definitely. It’s sexy. And it gives it its kind of manipulating the organic side of things to scale. Like you said, it’s all about scale. So you’re scaling organic. It’s going to, like, final words of wisdom. Let’s say 20 something year old. And I’m listening to this podcast, and I’m hearing all this information, and I’m like, this is great. I love this. Like, what words of insight would you give to me to continue on this path?

Well, I mean, definitely the more you know, the better you are off. Right. If you’re headed in a certain direction, figure out in this case, if it’s social marketing, figure out what kind of platforms are going to be the most valuable to you. And then learn about what technologies that you can use that will help to amplify your messaging. And then from that standpoint, I’d say, there’s so much out there right now that you can do for such a small amount of input, like, small amount of dollars in and you can generate a ton of value out.

So rather than hiring like a company to run your social channels, I had a friend do that recently, and they were paying $500 a month for whatever it was like, six posts, like, good for them for being able to charge that. But it shouldn’t cost that kind of money to do that. And if you don’t have the expertise, I think you just need to invest a bit of time. Doesn’t mean you have to be an expert, but you just need to invest enough time to figure out what you should be doing.

And if you don’t want to have to handle it, then that’s when you have to build out your advisor network. I’ve got an advisor. That’s an expert on marketing. I’ve got an advisor. That’s an expert. And these are like my advisors aren’t trying to sell me something. My advisers are like legitimate experts that they have no incentive to tell me what they’re telling me, because if they have a reason behind it, they’re giving you this information and then you go, oh, yeah. Yeah, that makes sense.

And then like, okay, cool. So you should buy my service. That’s not really an advisor. That’s the sales person that will give you good advice. But they’re definitely trying to sell somethng. So I would say build a really good network of people. If you’re a young entrepreneur and you want to grow your business, reach out to people that can help you in every area that you touch and every new area that you find. You got to get those right people on board.

I definitely insightful. So how can people get in contact with you? I mean, what’s your online handle? I would think by the fault you have a LinkedIn profile, how people get in contact with you.

Yeah, LinkedIn is probably the best way to reach me. So it’s just my name Jonathan Baldock. So that’s the URL as well. So LinkedIn. Com. My name Jonathan Baldock. And you find me. We’re happy to answer any questions.

So going into the bonus route, right. What is your most significant achievement to date outside of your kids, outside of your family? Just as far as business goes?

Good question. To be honest thing I’m most proud of is being able to launch that app because I was like when I went into it, I knew zero about how I would go about getting that done. And I owe it all to the people that help me get there. But I pushed hard and invested the time and got that done. I know it’s recent, but I’m very excited to have done that.

Got you. Well, I definitely commend you on. I’m in that space right now as well. And I’ve been with other people that’s built apps, and I think a lot of people from the outside and looking in, they think it’s kind of like building the website and it’s as simple as that. And in reality, there’s a little bit more that goes in behind the scenes to actually start an app. You got to stay away from the feature free ups and then executing the app. And then once you get the app done, that’s not the end of the journey.

You have to have people use the app to give you insight to let you know what’s wrong with the app so you can fix it and make it better than what it was when you originally came up with it.

So totally you could have the best app in the world. That doesn’t mean anyone’s going to use it.

Yeah, you’re right about that. So if you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why.

Yeah. Okay. Alright. I think I would choose Robin Williams. I think that guy was just such a comedic genius. I had the good fortune of going on set the day after Robin Williams is there. I never met him, but I went on. He was in those night Museum movies, and I was on set the day after he was there. And the director showed me his dailies, which is basically like his takes from the previous day. And they never gave him a script. And every single take was a completely different scene with completely different dialogue from him all made up on the spot.

And every single one was like, the best take I’ve ever seen in my life. Like, I could not believe the director said. He goes, I could literally pick any one of these ten takes, and it would be the best take I’ve ever seen. And they were all unbelievable. And so that’s I would say, like, Robin Williams was just such a such a charismatic. I loved all this movies. He had such range and like, I love movies. I love TV. I love all that stuff. And his storytelling really had an impact on me.

I thought he was just so genuine and then hearing how just wonderful he was, because when I was there the next day, they were like, oh my gosh. She was like, the nicest guy and just so thoughtful and approachable me was a huge star and, you know, had all the money and all that kind of stuff and just was like, the nicest guy a lot. What a great person. I would love to spend some time with him.

Yeah. I could definitely see that to your point. As funny as he was, he was also as dynamic and great as a drama actor as well. I remember, like, 1 hour photo was like one of those movies that was kind of like it creeped me out just enough to be like, Holy shit, he wasn’t funny, but he was jest as organically, dynamic in that role as he wasn’t Morkan windy. So I definitely you get two thumbs up for that.

And. All right. Thanks. I appreciate it.

So going into closing, man, obviously, we had a lot of different ups and downs in this conversation that we jumped around to different ports. Right. So any questions that may have came up on this journey that you may want to ask me, this is the time to go ahead and ask.

Well, you know what you mentioned, the apps. So one you said you’re building for the boss encaged suite of services, but it sounded like there was more than one. Yeah.

So I mean, one essentially to me, it’s using myself as a case study.

Right.

So in the space of entrepreneurs, in the space of podcast and also in the space of just authoring books, because I’m an author as well, I wanted to kind of try out this platform to see. Is it possible for me to make it easy enough to pull all these octopus tentacles into one system to deliver to a target audience, and then taking that and then thinking about the database behind it, I was like, okay, what’s the easiest database that I could think of? An Excel spreadsheet. So how can I create this portal on the front end for Boston Cage and on the back end, turn it into a resource for other podcasters and other authors to simply have an Avenue to plug in information through not necessarily iframes, but through Excel data sheets and pull it all together to create a finished product.

That way they can update it on the fly, deliver to their target audience.

Cool. Cool. That sounds great. How close to finish are you?

So with the first one I’m at about, I could finish it literally, probably next week. But you know how it is when you kind of squeaking. And this one feature didn’t work exactly where I wanted to work. And I’m trying to think about Usability, so that’s where I’m at with that one. And the other one is essentially in still in schematics. Still again, just one app needs to be done in order to get data back to create the other app. I don’t want to create them independently without having some data from one to the other.

So it’s a two part thing. So the first one, I should be able to release it in the next 60 days.

Well, that’s awesome. Well, good for you. I will tell you, I thought my friends were so sick and tired of me telling me, like me telling them when my app was going to launch, because every two weeks I would say, I think I’m about two weeks away, and I did that for six months and eventually at the end. Okay, I can’t say two weeks anymore because you’re all throwing me on the fire. So I eventually had a switch. And I’m like, you know what? I think it’s like a few weeks, but it could be longer.

I really don’t know. And it just took so much longer than I thought. So you’re very, very close, which is very exciting. I’m super happy for you.

Yeah, I appreciate it, man. It is one of those things because this year I had promised I was going to deliver my season one as a book, and it was going to be kind of this episode would have been in the book. And we’ve been talking about software and the great takeaways just kind of like what you said earlier about Guy Roses podcast. And he created a book to complement that podcast similar in that fashion. And then I hit a cross road to where I had some other things came up, and then the app just became more of a necessity.

It was just like, you get on the phone with somebody and you have a conversation like, oh, I didn’t know you had a store? Yeah, I have a store for, like, twelve months. Oh, I didn’t know that you had a book club. Well, the book club just launched. I did all the marketing for it, and you’re in my card. How the hell did you not see it? So I was like, I need to have one thing that I could just market. That one thing and everything else would just come through that one portal.

Yeah, that’s good.

I definitely appreciate your time. I think you definitely like I said earlier, I mean, you made it rain. A lot of Golden Nuggets and a lot of insight, a lot of information, a lot of passion. And I think our audience will definitely if they haven’t. I would say this is an episode you have to listen to more than once to kind of, you know, pull it apart and get the pieces that you need and take action items on what you’ve heard, to get the results that you’re looking forward to.

So again. I mean, John, and thank you very much.

Thank you for having me on.

I really appreciate it as they grant over and out.

S2E54 Mark Pooler.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Okay. Alright. Three, two, one. Welcome. Welcome back to Boston Cage podcast on Today’s show. We have a special guest way way on the other side of the world from UK coming to us live and direct Mark. So I’m going to name you Mark. I always give my guest kind of a nickname. And because of the topic we’re going to be talking about, I’m going to name you the press boss. And obviously you’re going to tell people a little bit more while I’m calling you to Press boss right now, who are you?

My name is Mark. Steven Pooler essay, and I’m known as a global profile builder. I’m really happy with the name you have given me as well as the press boss. I quite like that one. And I’m a PR expert essay, and I support high profile, high value individuals to be seen, heard and get noticed with worldwide digital media to become known globe believe.

A lot of weight on your shoulders to say the lease, right. So if you could define yourself in three to five words, what words would you choose for yourself?

Three to five words to define myself? I would say honest, trusting, loyal, resilient and hardworking.

I think the person that you may go hand in hand with PR. So let’s dive into like, er, a little bit because obviously there’s multi different levels of PR and there’s press kits and there’s e releases and you’re talking about on a global scale, not just a localized scale. So kind of just tell us a little bit more about that PR thing that you specialize in.

What I do for my clients. Say, I helped my clients to build credibility and authority really, really quickly. Just a few years ago, I had no profile. I had to make a name for myself, and I made a lot of mistakes. I spoke all over the UK for free to build my profile. And it can be a really, really hard journey. And that what gives me pleasure. Now, looking after my clients, I can help them to build their brand visibility really, really quickly. I help them with written credibility articles, expert positioned radio and Web TV interviews and also press release and major publication features.

So I help them to gain brand exposure. Brand visibility that leads to building that leads to attracting clients and also a great, great benefit to what I do as well is really helping my clients to dominate Google Page, one of Google, also Google News and also YouTube as well. What I always tell my clients as well. And a lot of clients do ask what is PR and I misunderstood in many different ways. I always say to my clients what PR will do for you. It will give you the brand visibility and exposure very, very quickly.

And it also gives you third party credibility. So rather than you singing your praises and selfpromoting, it’s a third party singing your as for you. Also, it gives you celebrity endorsement because a lot of my clients want positioning so I can position them next to brand leaders, some of the biggest names in business, personal development and celebrities as well. So you are piggybacking off news outlets that have had many years to build their reputation. So it allows you to build your reputation really, really quickly. Also, the Google footprint is really, really important.

If you’re out there and wanting to attract opportunities, anyone looking at your name or business name, you need to be searchable on Google. And when people are looking to give you a job opportunities, speaking opportunities, they will Google your name. And I always am very honest about what PR isn’t as well. If my clients are coming to me and saying, I want hundreds of people to sign up to my email list, or I want hundreds of people to join my program, I would say that is the wrong approach to look at PR.

Go down the route of Facebook ads with conversion ads. If that’s the kind of thing you’re looking to achieve, what PR does do, it gives that trust, which does over time leading to attracting clients. And it gives you that social media presence and great tools to use on social media to share with your own platforms, share with your email list, share with your network. And that is what PR is.

So we can dive into that a little bit. And I think you gave a very detailed definition of what PR is. So let’s structure it a little bit. Right. So if I’m coming to you and I’m saying, hey, I need some PR. Majority of people may think that you’re just going to pretty much write a Press kit and that press it could be for a new product or a new service, but that’s not exactly how you do it. How does your business actually take someone to say, a speaker, a motivational speaker, and give them a body of work to then imply that in an environment that PR could be useful.

So Firstly, there are a few things that I need from the client in order for them to be PR ready. So it’s important that they have professional photos so that they look professional because it’s my reputation as well. And once they have professional photos, I would also need either a short or long bio. Also, they would need some kind of website don’t overthink this part, though, because many clients hold back on having PR because they don’t think their website is ready as long as the messaging is good.

And you have a basic website that has some kind of gift or some kind of sign up page that is efficient. So don’t overthink that part of the process. Just a basic website. So they need photos, the basic website, a short and long bio. Once they have some kind of product or service or launch, that is a great time for them to come to me to get the coverage that they require. You don’t need a product or service. You may have a story or a story or something, a message that you want the world to know about.

So it’s not only for products and services, but that is mostly what clients do come because they have a product service or a launch that they want to promote. And then we can get working on building their global profile. So I would do things like interview them on radio or outsource them to radio and podcasters to get let them see, noticed and heard the way I do the radio interview. It’s really done in a way to spotlight them and their success and to really talk to their target audience.

So then the radio interview is not something they just share once it’s something that they can reshare many times on their platforms to their email list and add to their website so that it’s talking to their target audience. So it becomes a marketing piece. The radio interview then is ranked on Google, so it’s giving them that Google search ability. I would then take them and do some press or major publication features. Now I have my own publishing platform, MSP News global. Com, and that is a real great site to posit in people because I’ve got some of the biggest names in business, personal development and celebrities.

So I can then publish their articles next to these leaders and then they have got great tools again to share on all of their platforms, showing them next to those celebrities and big leaders giving them that celebrity endorsement part. Credibility articles are really effective, and it also gives them those marketing tools to share. Again, my own platform has around over 200,000 region, USA, Canada and the UK. Because of the promotions, the ads that I do to the site and also the press releases I do to the site.

I can also get them into hundreds of different publications depending on the clients budget and the clients need. So I outsource publications as well if they want more exposure. Another great tool. What I do for my clients. I’ll do the digital cover of MSP News Global, putting them on the cover of a global news outlet. So it looks really impressive as social proof, showing them on the cover of a business outlet, business magazine and then press release. They’re so effective. I will do a national press release that will then get release two places like Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS, affiliates, financial feeds, industry news sites and newspapers.

What makes my press release really unique? It also gets published to independent news platforms, on top of all those other places that I mentioned giving the press release even more visibility. Again, this gives my clients the you that they want. It gives them the brand, Association and credibility of piggybacking off those big names like Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS. It gives them the marketing tools. Another big advantage of a Press release SA the clients think can take advantage of logos like as seen on Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS that they can use on their marketing branding on website.

If they require the great thing about what I do, everything is done for the client. They don’t have to worry. They fill in a questionnaire, provide the photos and give me a little bit of their time for the radio interview. I promote it everywhere. The client has marketing tools to promote it. So in answer to your question, that is how I support my clients and give them that exposure really, really quickly. They build the exposure, build the credibility, the authority that leads to building trust that leads to building attracting clients.

It gives them the Google footprint. They dominate Google, and they’ve got hundreds of tools to really take advantage of on their social platforms as well.

I mean, that’s definitely some insightful in detail that I mean, especially the one stop shop for their marketing needs to kind of get them out and also to build trust with that. You kind of talked about celebrities. Is there any way that you can kind of name drop a couple of celebrities that you’ve worked with in the past?

I would love to. So I have been fortunate to have done media coverage and interviews on most of the original cast of The Secret Movie, which is the lower of a Traffic movie, which is really, really popular. So I have interviewed and an articles for Joe Voy. Tally is a very well known name. Dr. John D. Martini is a very well known name. Marie Diamond, Dennis Watley. I was really, really fortunate recently to have been gifted the opportunity to do an article for Ronda Burn, who is actually the person behind The Secret Book and The Secret Movie.

She has a Hollywood movie out at the moment that is quite recent. Anyone wanting to check out these publications can go to www. Dot. Msp. News global. Com. I’ve also done media for Forbes Roley, who is a very well known name in the USA. I’ve done PR and supported events like Grant Cardone Jack Canfield to help them promote their events. Also, another great name is Dale God Boldo, who has a great presence in the USA. In Hollywood, he was on the OJ Simpson documentary was like a series A in the USA is also heavily involved in the Mickey Mouse Club in the USA.

There’s just a few just to name drop for us.

Yes. I mean, I think definitely this is the time travel a little bit, right. So, I mean, obviously you’re established now you have access now you have all these systems in place and you have all these brand opportunities to help your clients. But where does your story start? Like, how did you even get into PR?

So I will go from the beginning, I was always a guy at school that got bullied about the way I looked and also about my sexuality, even at first school essay before I knew my own sexuality. So every day for me was big in big years. Guy, you name it. I was called it. That led to me not taking great care at school and learning. I started to play out because of my low self esteem, my low insecurities. I left school at the age of 15 with a really bad education and I started drug taking.

It started with soft drugs to start with things like cannabis amphetamine. By the age of 21, I was addicted to crack cocaine and heroin. I went out on a part in I Take with friends, tried a new clubbing drug having the time of my life. 1 minute. The next minute I woke up in hospital, I had just collapsed and died. Bruises all at my arm where adrenaline had been pumped into me to bring me back to life. A shaven chest where shop pads had been used on me.

I was living a bad life that was going nowhere. I always was a worker throughout my addiction and I worked in top name hair. So here in the UK. So I was used to dealing with celebrities from a young age as a hair stylist because of the salons that I worked in, but my addiction was out of control. So I just like to share. That’s why I always say to my audience, fans, clients, friends, my network. It doesn’t matter where you are. It doesn’t matter if your past or present circumstances, you can create a whole new reality.

It starts with having positive empowering, belief systems, making great choices, repetition and action. Any new reality can be created so fast. Forward to my early 30s, I had had enough of working for other people, making loads of money for them and not making a lot of money for myself. And I set up as a freelance hair stylist. That was the start of my entrepreneurship journey. I then joined the network marketing company for two years. That was really the start of me working on my beliefs, working on personal development and self improvement.

I learned great skills like branding, building your network, social media entrepreneurship and I built a team of 50 recruited into six different countries. I wasn’t following my passion essay. I used to watch the motivation or inspirational speakers on stage at network marketing events and I thought that’s what I want to do. I want to share my story and inspire others. So I left network marketing around four years ago and jumped in the deep end to become a public speaker. I spoke all over the U, released my first book, Tips to Create the Life You Desire.

I then released my second book, which became a best seller in the UK, USA and Canada. And that was called Step Into Your Brilliance, which is an entrepreneurship guide for those that would like to speak, using the power of positive storytelling and social media to position themselves as an expert. I spoke on the same stage as Jack Canfield in Toronto. And then I was interviewed on a radio show in the USA, and it was to an audience of 3 million. And then they asked me to co host the show.

That was only around two and a half years ago, and that really put me into the spotlighting to what I do today with press media. And and it’s been a great journey over two years, I’ve launched an agency, Temp Agency, which is a premium media and PR agency, and launched MSP. News Global. Com. So within two years, say, I’ve really created a great, great platform for me to serve others and help them build their global profiles.

Yeah. I think it’s definitely a hell of a story and kind of like the near death experiences and anybody that I’ve interviewed and including myself, when you have a near death experience, it kind of changes you dynamically, like whatever you were doing before that near death experience and what you did afterwards, it’s kind of like that is the real start. The real you, the new you comes out of that. Once you recover from whatever it was that happened, you become a greater person. You become more insightful and you want to give back, and then you challenge yourself more and you become more streamlined.

So I definitely commend you on that journey from getting from being addicted to particular drugs and then becoming the success that you are currently. So think about it from the standpoint of somebody looking in. They’re listening to this podcast, the hearing you speak, and they’re like, wow, this guy recovered from drugs. He figured things out. He started a company and the perception is kind of like it’s an overnight success. But in the reality, how long did this journey really take you to get to currently where you are?

So the age of 21 was when I really started to use the thoughts in my mind. I read my first Law of Attraction book, but I was just working as a freelance hairdresser. I would say wasn’t until the age of 31, I really started to work on myself and my own personal development. So in answer to your question, I feel the bigger turning point in my social media entrepreneurship journey has been around the last six years. So anyone looking at me, no. Seeing all the success I’m creating, it has been a really hard journey.

For the first couple of years, I didn’t make any money. I put a smile on my face, kept showing up with determination. It’s been six years essay. But also, I still feel like this is just the start. I still feel like I’ve still got such a long way to grow myself as well. Yeah.

Yeah, definitely. I think the fact that you figured it out early enough and it’s kind of like, goes back to the statement is usually made. Most millionaires are essentially made in their 40s and 50s, and you’re at that cost before that age group. Right. So you’re kind of figuring it out a lot earlier. Even though you made mistakes earlier on, you had enough time to fix those mistakes, correct things and getting alignment to that way. You’re in a Bull market and you’re running north and everything you do from this point on, it’s just essentially growth strategy at 100%.

Oh, I was just going to say I’m 40 in September this year. So what you have just said is great. And don’t tell anyone I’m 40, though. It’s a big one, which I’m dreading.

It’s not that bad, man. I just turned 41 last year, so it’s not that bad.

I’m quite looking forward to 40, actually, I think in your 30s, you’re a little bit better than your 20s, a little bit more creating success. But I feel my 40s can be one of the best decades ever. I am active. Hi, Eli. Sorry, kids in embracing the time. Just hiking.

Yeah, I can see that. I can see that definitely in you. So let’s just say, hear me for a minute. If you could time travel backwards and change one thing on that journey, what’s that one thing that you would want to change if you could do it all over again.

I would say if I could change one thing, it would be believing in myself because as a 21 year old, I didn’t have those belief systems. I didn’t have that mindset. And I was insecure about the way I looked when, in fact, I didn’t look that bad. But all those years of being bullied, it was like the scars are healed, but the wounds were very much still there. If I’ve said that correctly, and I didn’t have that belief in myself, and I didn’t feel good enough. So it would definitely be to believe I’m good enough just the way I am.

Wow.

Wow. Definitely powerful stuff. So, I mean, obviously, you have tenacity. You have the hustle of a Fortune 500 executive. Like, does this come from an entrepreneurial background? Anybody in your family kind of led you in this direction, Mo.

Close relatives. To be honest with you, I’ve always been really, really hard workers. So my mom always worked as a nurse. My dad always worked as a painter and decorator. My stepdad’s a painter and decorator as well. And I did have an uncle who was really successful, made a lot of money, very entrepreneurial. I’ve also got a cousin who’s made it chameleons, who was very entrepreneurial. But I would say no, my family really never had loads of money, but they always had really good, strong work ethics that were serving others.

So I would say no, say they’ve always a great worth ethics, but not really entrepreneurial. They’ve always been about service and working really, really hard to make ends meet.

Interesting. So let’s fast forward to today. Right now you have things rolling. Everything you’re doing is growing and is multiplying. But how do you currently juggle your work life with your family life?

This is a good question, actually. Essay. And it’s really important to get this balance correct. And I would say it’s only the last twelve months when we hit the global pandemic, I realized that I wasn’t getting the work life balance correct. So I was just building, building, doing all the work focused on business. But I wasn’t really taking time for myself. It’s really important to get that balance right. So what I do, you know, most of the time weekends, I take off Saturdays and Sundays on my free time to get that balance correct.

Spending time with family members, friends, close relatives is really, really important. You can’t create success that will be lasting. Just getting that balance wrong. You really have to do make sure you’re looking after your health. Wellbeing, family, friends, business, make sure you’ve got that balance right. And I feel the global pandemic through all the negative that it’s creative. I do feel there’ve been a lot of blessings as well to really look after our time. It’s so important. Slow down a little bit. You will get to where you want to by slowing down just that little bit and taking time for yourself as well.

Wow. Definitely. Definitely powerful, powerful, powerful insights. So let’s talk about your morning ritual, your morning habits. Do you have any in a socially like, what time do you usually start up to start those rituals?

So a sweet spot for me is around 07:30 a.m. To quarter to 08:00 a.m.. I find when I get up at that time, I get a lot of work done really early, giving me more free time in the evening. My records that are really important to me. As soon as I wake up, I put in an audio and meditate for around 20 to 30 minutes using selfhypnosis. I also use a great technology called Hemi sync, where it syncs the two parts of your mind together so that you think better.

So that’s my first ritual that if I don’t do it, I don’t get as good results. I don’t feel as good and I don’t show up as well in the world. So first is meditation on an evening gratitude. Before I’m falling to sleep, I go through all the things in the day, even the little things like the air that I breathe, the shirt on my back. I go through all of my gratitude for the day. Also, visualization. I do bits of visualization. I don’t spend too much time in the future.

I let it go because everything happens in the present moment. So gratitude, visualization, meditation. Also, I do eat well, eating lots of Greens, drinking fresh water. It’s important to think so important to put great things into the body because that is what is going to fuel you forwards and a little bit of exercise those on my things that are really important in my rituals.

Definitely. I’m just recapping what you said in my head, and it’s structured, but it’s organic in his nature, which kind of seems that fits your personality. And I can see kind of like in the morning you wake up and you do this and then after that, you’re blowing and it allows you to get through your day. And then in your evening time, that gives you enough time to kind of settle down and start over again. So I definitely like that because of this podcast, I had opportunity to create a book club.

So this is the question that I love asking because every answer will be uniquely different. And what motivated you on your journey could be something that could motivate someone else. So what books have you read that helps you get to where you are that you want to recommend. And what books are you currently reading or audio books, for that matter? So.

A book that changed my life has to be the Secret. There is a new version there, which is called The Greatest Secret. But even The Secret book is absolutely a life changer for the way you can create your own reality. It’s absolutely incredible. Another great book that has inspired me is Jack Canfield Success Principles. Very, very good book. And I’m more of an Audible audio guy. I prefer listening to books, and I haven’t read it yet, but I know it’s a fantastic one because I recently interviewed them on my television show is called Ask by Mark Victor Hanson and Crystal Dwyer Hanson.

And I am about to dig into that one very, very soon.

Nice. Nice. So where do you see yourself and your company? 20 years from now. So.

I have very, very big goal, I say. And I had dreams of being a sixfigure owner. And then as I grown, that went to being a millionaire. And then that went from being a millionaire to a multi millionaire. I have got huge, huge goals, a huge vision. And yes, they’re big. And to some people, they may not feel on, they might feel unbelievable. But I am about having huge visions and huge goals. So now my goal in 20 years, I have to look at visualizing a hundred million.

Why not? If not me, why not? Someone else got you. If not me, it could be someone else. So have big visions. And if you don’t reach it, at least you’ve had that vision and you’ll get close to even where you’ll get closer to where you want to be by having bigger visions.

Yeah, I definitely think. I mean, most people don’t realize that once you get to a certain point and you have things figured out, you have your systems in place and you’re not working harder. But things are working for you harder. Then you kind of could multiply. So like, your 100 million could easily be 2 billion. It’d just be a matter of five years from now. You may figure out some system or software that does what you do in addition to what you’re doing to where you can multiply that overnight and then you scale it and you’d be 100 millionaire in five years.

Correct. And also it does have to kind of feel believable to your own belief systems. So I’m not quite ready to visualize that millionaire billionaire status at the moment, but her 100 million, it can be achieved like you say, with the right systems, with the right team, with the right support and 20 years is a long time to get to that goal. Anything is possible.

Yeah. I like the fact that you just brother use like, it kind of goes back to the laws of attraction, the rules of attractions like you’re asking for the 100 million and you’re working towards 100 million. But you’re gonna shoot past that. But in reality, in the next 20 years, five years, that 100 million could easily scale to a billion, because then you’ll be ready to receive that billion versus now you’re not ready. So you have to put things in place to be able to receive that billion when that time comes.

So I definitely commend you for being well aware of where you are versus where you’re going to be.

Definitely.

So what schools or software do you use that you would not be able to do what you do currently without.

So I think tours are so, so important, and it takes a while to get the right systems in place. So I would say for me, things like my website is the biggest asset and tour, and it’s a great one. Msp. News global. Com. That is a great, great asset. My simple one page landing page is a brilliant tour with all my social media platforms. That’s contact Mark me. It’s got a schedule, your meeting, it’s got things like all my social media channels, my email contacts, and another great tour.

Also, my email list and a mail chimp is something that I use a lot. And that is something that I really, really couldn’t live without. Social media platforms are great, great tools. You put me on the spot here. I should have done a bit of research about all the tools I’ve used. I’ve gotten many, which I couldn’t live without, even things like Zoom five, which I really take advantage of. So to answer your question, there is a few, but there are lots more, which I just can’t think of right now.

Yeah. I think it’s funny that you brought that up because, I mean, a diversity in software in today’s world versus ten years 20 years ago is 90 day different. And there’s always, like, a lot of times I’ll think of something and I’m like, okay, let me see if this already exists before I try to create it so I can kind of get a leg up and nine out of ten times if I do the research. And if I play with the algorithms on Facebook, sure as hell there is a software to do that little thing, and there’s always that one little thing that you need, something created for that you’re not willing to put the effort to develop it for.

So I mean, to your point, there’s a million different softwares out there, and I think people need to understand the value of software could help you systematize what you’re doing to your point. To get to 100 million, I’ll get to a billion a lot faster.

Yes. And tools. I do use a lot, which I forgot to mention, and they are quite gamechanging. Some bots are incredible. Some engagement tools for social media I couldn’t live without as well. So some of these automation tools and engagement tools, they’re absolutely incredible and really help to scale and grow. Just as you mentioned, it definitely.

So let’s go into words of wisdom, right. And I think particularly for you, let’s just talk to an audience of 18 to 35 years old. They may be going through some life changing event. It may be drugs, it may be death. It may be. They hate their job, whatever it is that they’re going through, I want you to talk to them and give them some words of insights to push them from where they are to move forward and grow.

My word of wisdom would be never suffer alone, never suffer in silence. The first step is to admit yourself that you have a problem, because before you admit yourself before you admit it yourself, no one else will be able to support you. Reach out to a friend, a family member, a mentor, a teacher, someone that you can trust and confide in and never suffer alone. It doesn’t matter where you are now. It doesn’t matter where you have been in the past. Any future reality can be created with positive empowering, belief systems, making better choices, repetition, taking action, get it down on paper, write down your goals and take little steps every single day towards your end destination.

Don’t see a big mountain in front of you. Little tiny steps every day will get you to your goals.

Wow. Wow. I think you’re a living, breathing example of the laws of attraction. And it’s kind of like I think most people think in the laws of attraction, right? Is that you just have to think it and it becomes a reality. But I think they missed the one component of you have to take a lot of damn action and believe in yourself and do both of these things simultaneously to get the results that you’re looking for. So I think what you just said kind of gives a little bit insight to who you are as a person and who your company is going to represent as well.

In my next question, right?

Yes, I agree with that.

Great. So my next question is, who’s your target audience? I mean, kind of like price point wise, do you have different packages and what do those packages look like?

So my starting level that I work with clients is $500, and that would be for something like a radio interview and a Press release. My services go right up to $10,000. My medium package is around $3,000. So if there is someone out there that does want to be seen, heard and get noticed, it is around a minimum budget of $500, way up to the premium clients that I work with up to $10,000, my target audience and people that are a perfect fit for what I do would be bestselling authors or authors that want to become bestselling authors, real estate investors, real estate brokers, keynote speakers, inspirational speakers, coaches, creative entrepreneurs, but not just only those.

Because the PR I work with is business. It’s very, very broad. I have also done people in the medical industry artists. So if you have a business, I could support you. If you are in business. I do offer a free PR consultation, or people out there need to do if they’re ready and want to get seen, noticed and heard, and they have the budget of $500, they can schedule a free PR consultation at www. Contact. Mark me that’s contact Mark me and they can just schedule a meeting.

And Al most social media platforms are there as well. If people would like to connect with me on social.

Yeah, I think definitely. I mean, I’m just recapping what you said in my head. And one thing that that stood out to me because obviously we’re in the marketing space, we’re in the broadcasting and podcasting. And a lot of times people are always trying to figure out how to monetize a podcast. So one thing that you said for the $500 gives you opportunity to do some promotions, but also do live radio is that live radio considered to be like a podcast. And is that an alternative way of monetizing podcast?

The radio network that I am on is Web radio. It’s on the Business Innovators Radio Network, which is a USA based radio network, and it gets syndicated to all the hot radio block, talk radio, Spreaker, YouTube. If my clients did want a real radio on FM radio, I can outsource that and have many contacts who would happily have you on their shows as well. Also, my TV show is on the E 360 TV Network, which gets broadcast to Rocko, Apple, TV, Fire TV, Android TV, and many, many more.

It goes across all social platforms that has an estimated reach of it gets to millions of homes, up to billions of OEMs. It’s on millions and millions of devices. So if people are looking for exposure, I can support them with their needs, their requirements either on my own shows, my own platforms or other people’s platforms as well.

Wow. Wow. So I think with the TV side of things, I mean, considering that you only been in this space for, like, less than a decade, like somebody may be asking, like, how the hell did you have opportunity to create your own TV station? Like, what was the journey would that look like?

So it was me first having the radio show growing the radio show, then it was building my publishing platform, MSP. News global. Com. It’s not my television network. I have a show on there, and I will then introduce to host a show on that network in 360 TV. The show is called Brilliance Business TV. It can be viewed at MSP. News global. Com as well. Just go to the section what says TV and you’ll find all my TV interviews there as well.

Wow. Wow. Definitely. So, I mean, you kind of put a couple addresses out there. How can people find you on social media? Like, what’s your handle?

The best way for people to find me on social media is www. Contact Mark May Gotcha.

So you have essentially, it looks like it’s like a microsite landing page with all your links on there.

Yes, that’s correct.

They great. So let’s just go into some bonus questions, right. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone better alive, uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be? And why?

That’s a big question. And there’s so many people that inspire me is the question that you think for sure it would have to be Oprah Winfrey purely because she’s a media mogul, and that’s something I’m passionate about. She’s also passionate on authors and books, which I’m passionate about. She’s a guru on television, which one day I hope to be at that level with her and just her story. She’s come from dreadful past and what she is achieved and how she serves others, it would have to be Oprah him three.

Yeah, definitely. I think anyone that’s in this space at one time or the other has to look to her as the pinnacle example of how you can go from being an underdog to being a champion, not of just yourself but champion of multiple diverse individuals. So I definitely appreciate that. So another bonus question for you, what is your most significant achievement to date?

I feel I’ve made a lot of progress just over the last six years. I’ve had lots of big achievements. I would say the biggest achievement to date is really making my business work and growing my own global platforms and creating my own global brand. The global Profile Builder with MSP. News global. Com really serving others? I really enjoy serving others. A no, I am fortunate to be doing that on bigger scale. And that was why I started this whole journey was to inspire people that you can create a future reality no matter of your past.

I’ve created that NEM and that’s my biggest achievement I can think of.

I think definitely. I mean, just having you on the show, and this is kind of one of the reasons why I have this podcast is to interview people like yourself. Kind of I have my own achievements. But then I listen to you, and I’m just like, there’s obviously more than I could be doing. So you definitely inspired me today. And I definitely appreciate you coming on the show. So in closing, I always give opportunity to whoever I’m interviewing opportunity to ask me any questions that may have come up during this particular episode.

I would say, Firstly, thank you so much for the opportunity. I’ve really enjoyed it. Your brilliant toast. You are great at asking questions. It flows so well. You have a great talent. I know you have your own amazing business supporting all your clients with your amazing systems tools, your shows. I haven’t got a question for you because you’re coming on to my radio so soon. So I’m really looking forward to having you in my hot seat as well. But I’m excited what we can achieve together. Essay because I think we’ve met for a reason, and I definitely am looking forward to future collaborations.

Yeah, definitely. I appreciate you stating that because I mean, I’m actually the more and more I listen to you, the more and more I hear your story, and that’s the beauty of the media circle that people don’t realize is that you have these opportunities to talk and conversate with someone. And then, like you said, I’ll be on your show. So there’s going to be things that we’re going to learn about each other on this journey as we cross reference and interview each other and make referrals and recommendations to each other to where it could be not only fruitful financially, but it’ll be fruitful internally as well.

So I definitely appreciate you coming on.

I really, really appreciate the opportunity. And this is just the beginning. I can definitely see lots of collaboration for the future.

Definitely. Definitely. Essay grant over and out.

S2E53 Seth Erikson – powered by Happy Scribe

Here we go. All right. Welcome. Welcome back to Boss Uncage Podcast. So this show, I almost guarantee that if you don’t laugh, then obviously our sense of humor is probably going to go a little bit above your pay grade. But I guarantee you, we’re probably going to say some smart shit during this episode. And I was thinking about, how do I name this guess, right. So his name is easy enough. I’m going to name him The Mischief Boss. I really wanted to name them something more related to Marvel, but I don’t like getting a Marvel lawsuit, but I’m thinking more like that character than anything else.

So once you go ahead and tell us a little bit more about who you are and what are we talking about today, Seth?

Yeah. So I am set. Eric, and I’m the chief mischief maker at Story by Agency. And essentially what we do is we work with startups to help them clearly communicate their value to investors and to the marketplace.

Very cool. Very cool. So with that, obviously, reading your bio, I want to start, like, the beginning, right? In your bio. You saying something about in school going head to head with a teacher. So let’s talk about that story so we can establish, like, how we’re going to enroll your story today.

Oh, man. It’s actually a story that that my mom likes to tell, which is that she pulled up to the school. This is basically like preschool. And the teacher met her at the front and she thought, oh, crap. What did my son do? I because I was always doing something. I thought I was in trouble, and she pulled my mom aside and said, Your son is doing something we’ve never seen any other children do. And she said, What’s that? And she said, Well, we kind of have this.

It’s like a little test where you put up three panels and then the kids look at it and they just want to make sure they’re comprehending and understanding what’s happening. So it’s like a rabbit. And then there’s a stick, and then the bear has the stick, and the kid goes, the rabbit gave the bear the stick or the bear picked up. Whatever me. I look at the rabbit. I give them a name. I start creating a back story for the rabbit and then give the bear name, start saying the bears backstory and then explain what they’re going to do later on in the afternoon.

So I’m going way beyond what the quote unquote test is asking for. And the teacher was like, we’ve never seen a child do that. Like they just usually answer whatever questions we ask them about it. But yeah. So I was doing that kind of stuff as a child. And part of my journey is actually realizing that I guess you would say a closet storyteller. I’m masquerading as a designer because I was really skilled at design and people paid me a lot of money to do design.

And I thought I’m a designer and I had to kind of go through this whole journey of kind of going, no, I’m a storyteller. What does that mean? How do I make money as a storyteller? Because I don’t I don’t plan on going to Hollywood and writing scripts or writing a book. Little did I know it was a long journey kind of figure out my purpose, if you will.

I mean, the reason why I wanted to start off with that. I mean, obviously that’s what you do, right? And the thing that I talk about a lot, just branding and storytelling. And these two things have to go together if they’re not working together in the chemistry is completely wrong. So again, if you could define yourself in five words, what would those three to five words be?

That’s a good question. I feel like I’m a pretty dynamic person. So trying to just describe myself in five words, I think mischief maker like, I’m a storyteller and a mischief maker. Those two kind of go hand in hand. Like you mentioned Marvel earlier, I’m probably more low key than I am Captain America or Iron Man. And the reason I say that is because Loki is quite often creating mischief to see what the response is. He’s kind of a scientist in some ways, and often he’s poking people to get them to kind of evaluate their decisions and what they’re doing.

And so I do that a lot for clients. So I don’t think I quite answered your question, but, yeah, I’m a storyteller through and through the fact that you compare yourself a local.

I mean, behind the scenes before I even got on this podcast. And I’m reading his bio, and I’m looking at his profile, and I’m like, I’m about to interview, damn, Loki.

This is.

How do you go from being such a tenacious kid storytelling kid, graphic designer? How do you kind of combine that to create the business that you have right now? Like, what did that story look like?

Well, like I said before I started as an illustrator, I sold my first design to a T shirt company. When I was 14. I thought I’m going to be rich, but that’s like nothing. It was $200. So in my mind, I was going to be rich. And so what I took away from that was like, oh, I’m a good designer. I can make money doing this. I just kind of kept doing it and doing it and doing it until I got to the point where, like, we talked about a little bit before the show, I built a company, had 22 people.

I was making really good money and was very dissatisfied in my job. And the reason I was dissatisfied was that I was not pushing the needle forward for my clients, like they would pay me for design. We won a bunch of awards, blah blah, blah, blah, blah. But I was asking them, like, Are you getting more sales or more people reaching out to you? Well, no, but we’re really happy with the design. And I was like, and fuck the design. And that’s when I kind of had this epiphany of like, okay, I need to get better at something else because this is not working or it’s not working the way I want it to work, which is to help my clients and grow their business and help them, you know, change things for the better.

And so. So a friend of mine in 2015 said, Dude, you’re a storyteller. Like, aside from that, that experience as a child and doing a bunch of crazy stuff in late class. I never thought I’m a storyteller. I just thought this is something I do. I don’t think about it. It’s like breathing. And he goes, You’re a storyteller. He gave me this book called Story Wars by Jonah Sac. I read the book was completely fascinated with it. It was like, I got hit by lightning, and I went on like an Audible binge, like a freaking addict.

Like, I was buying those three credit packs. I was like, Daddy needs another hit. We got to do this. And so I think I raised Audible stock at least 15% in that year. And I read over 50 books. And when I started reading the books, some of the books mentioned the neuroscience stuff, and I was like, Wait, there’s science around this. I mean, I was already sold, right? I was like, yeah, story. Great. And then with the neuroscience stuff, I was like, Well, if there’s neuroscience about this, there’s got to be papers.

And so I went and read another two or 300 papers. They are really fucking boring. So you don’t have to go read them. You can just read my book. I kind of distilled that information down for you. And I was like, okay, so we got the science. So we have some proof here. This isn’t just me trying to blow smoke up your ass and I’m into the storytelling thing. And like I said, the story was booked. That guy was running an agency. So I start kind of going down the marketing path and going, well, do they use storytelling in marketing?

And what I was seeing, it was more being used in the branding side of things. And like you mentioned before, I see story, like, if you’re going to build a brand, story is kind of the caramel new Getty Center that you need and everything else kind of flows out from there. Yeah. So that’s kind of how I got here. And, yeah, it was a lot of change. We had to rebrand the agency. We rebranded a Story Fi, and Story Five just means to tell or narrate and story.

So it’s a very descriptive of what we do and how we help the people we work with.

I don’t speak anything less. I mean, you’re a storyteller. So and that’s why I love the way you’re going to answer these questions. So with that, right. I think this next one is like a gateway for you to be more on the mischievious side. Right. So what is the worst example of the worst case scenario you ever dealt with in storytelling? In your business? It could be the worst client. It could be the worst experience. Like, just tell a story about, like, how did that happen? And how did you overcome that?

Well, I mean, I’ve definitely had some bad experiences with clients. I would say that at the end, I usually end up firing the client. And as entrepreneurs, like, most entrepreneurs are like, fire a client, that’s like a strange concept. Right? The mindset is more like you say, jump. I say, how high, right. But, yeah, I worked with a client one time who paid me $500 and wanted about 100 hours worth of work. And I was making about, like, $2 an hour by the time this thing is done.

And they were calling me at, like, 10:00 at night asking me to make changes and what not. And it took me actually, quite a long time to realize the reason you have bad clients is not because of the clients. It’s because of you. You’re the one who’s accepting them and taking them honest clients, even though you’re completely ignoring your gut and not able to separate, like, yes, you’re getting paid. But you’re going to go through hell, and that sucks. But, yeah, I mean, I’ve definitely had some clients that I’ve had some batter interactions with, and I’ve been mischievous with them where I just start kind of fucking with them because I’m like, I’m tired of your bullshit and they would say something to me and I would take it.

And I would agree with them. But I would blow it up into this completely bombastic, you know, response. Like, yes, I am totally going to create these five new pages that you didn’t pay for. Also, I’m going to come to your house, I’m going to clean it. I’m going to wash your car, I’m going to put your kids to bed, and then maybe later I’ll pick up some groceries for you. That’s what I’m going to do.

That’s hilarious. And I’m sure without naming names, those clients, if they do listen to this podcast, they’re probably sitting here saying, this son of a bitch, right?

They were saying that before they saw the podcast. So it’s okay.

So let’s just talk. Obviously, you’ve had a career with multiple different things. And I think that we talked off air. We talked about the commonalities between our histories. I mean, there’s so many different things that both of us have done, and you’ve kind of taken all these things and you’ve streamlined it into where you are right now. So the perception for the average listeners, like, okay, this guy, he’s telling clients F off. I wish I had a client, right? He has his system in place, and he’s a graphic designer.

He’s done this. He’s done that. He’s on all these different things. But in reality, how long has it taken taking you on your journey to get from where you were day one to where you are right now, 20 years.

Yeah. I guess this goes back to the question you asked before to branding was where I took all my design knowledge and was able to pair it with storytelling and start to create something that was like, oh, this makes sense, right? Because you need good design. But with branding, like, good design is like wearing nice clothes, like the person inside, right? What do they say? How do they act? How do they treat you? What is the experience you have with them? It doesn’t matter if you dress an asshole up a nice clothes, he’s still an asshole.

I just see the design aspect of that is just being one element. But the story is kind of like, how do you talk, right? Like what kind of, you know, like one of the things that we talk with our clients about in the concept of story is what is your brand archetype and understanding based on your brand, archetype, that’s how you need to talk to your clients, right. Like with us. Like I said, we’re kind of Loki. So the book that I wrote is throw in lots of humor, says lots of inappropriate things because that’s on brand with how we are.

But it may not be for our clients. And so we’re always talking about the communication style. Like, lots of companies do this stuff where they just talk in corporate speak or it’s very safe or very bland. And so we work with our clients to go, okay, who do you want to be? Are you the right? Are you the magician, right? Are you the muse? Like, figure that out. And then we’ll start to write the language that works with that, right. The guy just recently showed me a brand called Liquid Death, and they’re basically a water brand.

But they’re like, heavy metal water brand. And I think their tagline is Kill Thirst or something like that. And the whole branding message goes all together with who they are as a company. And I see a lot of businesses who basically don’t even have a brand because they would just vanilla and how they talk, how they communicate, the experiences they give people everything. It’s just it’s all the same. And the basically commoditizing themselves nice to interest about the brand, Archetype.

And I just finished speaking about this. And you can correct me if I’m wrong or you can kind of give me some some insight to what I’m about to say and what your thoughts are on this. And I would say, yes, we got a brand from a perspective of there’s four aspects to any universal brand. The first is the personal brand, the story of the individual or the owner or the executives. Right. And then you have the company brand, which is essentially part of the secondary story of the individual.

And then you have a service brand. And you have a product brand. And I think a lot of times people they don’t really look at their services and their products as individual brands. And I’m just like, well, why not personify them, make them real life, make them have associations, give them psychology behind them, make people attach to them. And the statement that I always say is in your brand for your product or service, stand up in a bar conversation. If somebody going to walk away from that brand because it’s so boring, or are they going to stay there and sit in that bar and have all the communications, all the talks and buy your brand more drinks.

So.

Well, I like the analogy. And I agree with you. I think there is a different story for each one of those elements and and understanding that they are. There are different elements to each one of those stories as well. So people will ask me about personal branding, for instance. And I’m like, so they’ll say, Well, this is my story. And I’ll be like, okay, but when it comes to a personal brand, you need to position yourself as basically the mentor. You have gone through this experience. You’ve learned these things and be able to talk about what have you learned through that experience?

Whereas a lot of people will just tell a story and they’re like, now I’m a CEO. What’s the takeaway? Give me something to work with here. You didn’t just keep working and then end up as a CEO. Like, you learned things along the way. You had trials and tribulations. You overcame things. You went through the freaking hero’s journey. So talk about that. So you kind of have to position it a little bit differently. Whereas the company’s brand, you tend to talk more about, like, or at least this is how we advise.

You tend to talk more about the problem, right? This is the problem that you have as the customer. And I am here to help you overcome that problem. I understand that problem at a deep level.

Right.

So it’s a slightly different story, whereas the products, I mean, services can follow the same kind of model of problem solution that that a brand can use. But products like you said, you can make them have personality. You can tell funny little stories and really interesting stories about how your product goes sky diving on the weekend. You’re just like, creating or scuba diving or whatever. You’re creating fun little quirky things that most people are like, this is my product here’s what’s in it. And it has zero personality.

They’re like, it’s 7oz. It’s made with this oil or whatever. And it’s like, there’s no story so products in particular, I like the idea of creating a personality. Like you said, what is this product to and thinking about it in that way, instead of just being listing all the facts about the product, it’s like it’s not engaging at all.

Well, I think I think it will work. Creep is like the tell tale sign of the scales. Right on one side is all the features. Right. And again, you could look at all the features. It’s a camera and it does 1080p and it does all these different things. And it’s like that’s all the features. But what the hell are the benefits of that camera? And I think if you can tell the start of the benefits, this camera will captivate you while you’re jumping off the cliff doing a back dive without making you look blurry is same as saying it has shock absorbent, whatever, whatever, whatever inside the camera.

So I think to your point, I mean, being able to tell the story and personify it and utilizing those benefits work the features is a hell of a lot more useful than itemizing out all the bells and whistles that the product they have.

Yeah. So I totally agree with how you’re kind of breaking it down and categorizing. It one of the things that I like with branding. If you go Google, what is branding? You’re going to get a hundred different explanations, and then it gets confusing, right? Because this person says this and this person says that Marty New Meyer has a great quote that I really like he said. And marketing is what you tell people about your company. But branding is what other people say about you. I may have butchered that, but, well, we’ll work through it.

And the way that I try to describe it to people is think of your brand as a person. What is the experience you want your customer to have? It’s like, you can think of a friend and is that is that friend fun? Is that friend how do they dress? How do they talk? How do they act? What is the experience you have with them? One friend, you might be like, I love hanging out with this person because they always make me laugh. And we go on these crazy adventures and another friend, you might be like, I love just chilling with this guy because it gets super philosophical or whatever.

We have these deep conversations. They’re not the same. And that’s kind of how I see. Or at least I try to explain branding to people so that they can kind of visualize what they’re looking for and how all these pieces kind of fit together.

Very cool. I obviously I think we went down a Rabbi hole that’s definitely going to e fruitful. Anybody is listening. They hear two people go back and forth like that is definitely interesting. But even more, I want to talk a little bit more about your story, right? So if you could time travel back, we’re talking about Loki, right? I obviously Loki’s all over the damn place. So if you can pop from where you are back in time to anywhere that you can recall, they you have an opportunity to speak to yourself and say a couple of words in your area to change your outcome, where you are to make it happen a lot faster.

When would you go back to? And what would you say to yourself?

Well, I think first I’d have to get over the shock of myself time traveling. I’d be like, how the hell did you do that, dude? I mean, like, what’s going on in the future, man, this. No, you’re not the science guy. I don’t know how this happened. You trip and fall into a machine you shouldn’t have been playing with. Yeah, I would actually tell myself to start investing and understanding storytelling. Like, because like I said, I took it like, a lot of people take it, which is, I just do this.

So I don’t think about it. And what I learned through the process was how to be better at the thing that I was doing. Naturally, I quit it to breathing where it’s like, everybody breathes. Well, everybody tells stories. And with breathing, like, all these really interest crazy things that started happening where people do sports and they’re learning how to breathe to improve their performance. And then we got this guy, Wim HOF, crazy son of a bitch is like sitting in zero degree temperature and keeping his body temperature up through breathing.

It’s like, Holy shit, man, there’s a lot of crazy stuff you can do with something that just seems so benign. And storytelling is kind of the same way. It’s like, now do you want to have a deeper connection with people, get better at telling stories and telling them in the right way? Do you want your customers to remember you, like, long after they saw your website or your one ad or whatever, tell a really good story that will stick with people that kind of stuff when you become really good at it not only helps them remember you in the short term, it helps them remember you in the long term and too many brands and companies.

They have to keep reminding people who they are because they just keep saying a bunch of boring crap, but the story cut through all that. So, yeah, I would I would want to I want to tell myself, like, start learning about story, not just, you know, the concept of story, but how do you tell a good story? What are the pieces that make a good story? What is the hero’s journey? How does that applied to the way that you communicate with people? Because that would have gotten me way further down the path a lot faster.

Oh, very interesting. So, I mean, with that, I mean, I still continuing on the path of unfolding. You know who you are, right? You talked about your mom for a bit there. So again, I mean, you’re a hell of an entrepreneur, but you’re also a hell of a storyteller. This has to formulate genetically, maybe from somebody down that bloodline. So are you coming from an entrepreneurial background? Was your mom? The storyteller was your dad, the entrepreneur. Like, where does this come from that you can kind of look back and think, think about.

Well, Interestingly enough, my father was a very talented illustrator, although he worked in construction because in in his era, it was like, you’re never going to make money doing art like, you need to get a real job. And so that’s kind of what his parents told him. But he still drew lots of stuff. I mean, the guy could, like, literally, you could say, draw me. You could point at something and say, draw me that. And he could draw it in almost realistic, you know, illustration just with a pencil.

But at the same time, he spent all day, like, doing remodel and construction land tile, like pouring concrete, building framing for houses, doing roofs, like, he was kind of an entrepreneur in that sense. But nobody in my family really did entrepreneurship. As far as storytelling, I can’t say that my dad or my mom were big storytellers. My grandfather. I remember sitting with my grandfather a lot when I was young, and he would tell me stories of living through the Great Depression and World War II. And I was always fascinated by that.

Plus, he was a big history guy, so he would always talk about, like, oh, this thing happened. He loved World War II. He was like, this thing happened in World War Two, and this battle happened in this thing, this thing and this thing. I mean, the dude was like, the History Channel junkie. He just, like, flip on. But then he would talk about all the stuff he was learning or the books he read or whatever. So maybe through my mom’s line. But my mom, she’s not wouldn’t be what I would consider a storyteller.

Just, I don’t know. I got the random gene lottery.

So, I mean, contain on the family. Right? So, like, how do you currently juggle, like, your family life with your work life?

It’s a little bit of a challenge right now. I actually got divorced last year. So I’m now doing the single dad thing. But I do have some family helping out, and it’s a little bit challenging. But yeah, as an entrepreneur, I think it’s always a struggle because I find my brain still working on work or problems or trying to solve things after work. Time is over, and it’s a conscious effort to try to be more present so that I’m not like sitting at the dinner table, just staring off into the distance while my children are talking to me.

And so I have to, like, pull myself back to that, like. But yeah, I mean, it’s definitely. And then you get sometimes you get client calls. I don’t get them late, like I used to. But every now and again, somebody is calling at, like, 530, and it’s dinner time, and it’s like, hey, I’ll call you back after I get my kids down. But I can’t talk right now. So I had to start setting some boundaries around that around those things to better manage it because I wasn’t sending any boundaries before.

And it was just the business was running my life. I wasn’t running the business.

Very nice. I mean, it’s crazy that you said that because obviously, I think there’s so many similarities between us and I had an entire decade, plus being an only household, just a son and a dad and just raising him in that environment. So I definitely know what you’re talking about, like having to be attentive having to be there in that space, but also at the same time figuring out how to turn off the other side of you, which is always constantly on, no matter what you’re doing.

And as soon as that kid goes to sleep, you have back on the grid or you’re taking those notes or recording content or whatever it is. So I definitely commend you in that journey, man. I’ve been there. I’ve done that. And I know it’s a hell of a journey, but it’s I think where you are now, it’s probably going to be so compound. It’s going to be so much larger, because now you have this responsibility on your own. It’s going to grow, you leaps and bound for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the last year, there’s just been a ton of growth in my life. And like I said, I had never planned on writing a book. And then one day I was like, I’m writing a book. And it was like, it was weird because it was almost like the book was coming out of me, like I was vomiting. It was just like and it took me two and a half weeks to write the book. It took way longer to get it actually edited. But, you know, I wrote it because it was just like, this shit is just pouring out of me.

I need to put it somewhere. And I realized later after that that I gained all this knowledge and experience, and at some point in the future, it’s going to be gone. So putting it down in a book gives it the ability to live on and potentially help somebody who never met me, never talk to me, never work with me. But I didn’t realize that at the time, I was just, like, crap. I got all these thoughts, and I got to get them out of my head because it’s driving me crazy.

So.

Yeah. But yeah. I mean, it’s just lots of changes.

I mean, with that, I mean, o, obviously your schedule has shifted and pretty much life happens in today. What is your morning routine? Your morning schedules look like.

So it varies. Like, some days I’m doing a podcast like this, at least in this current season to kind of promote the book and whatnot I’m doing client work. I share custody. So some days I’m like getting the kids going and dressed and out the door to school. Some days I’m not I try to go walking for a few miles, three days a week so that I’m staying in better shape. So it’s a mix. And then sometimes it’s just, you know, reading like I am constantly trying to learn and trying to get better.

I’ll fit in a half hour to an hour here and there reading a book. And then once the day is done, I’m back reading again. Like I said, I love Audible. So I’m reading while I’m driving. I’m reading while I’m walking. I’m just constantly trying to learn and get better and go. How do I improve the skills I have? Because if I can improve those, then I can help more people. I can push bigger lovers in their business. And that, to me, is really exciting.

So I think that’s a hell of a segue to my next question. Earlier on, you talked about reading 52 books. And just by being a podcast host, I had the opportunity to ask this question to a lot of different individuals. So because of that, I created a book club. And in that book club, I’m promoting and pushing everyone to read a book per week, much like you read 52 books in a year. So my next question is a three part question. Right? I want to know what books did you read in the first part of your journey?

What books help to get to where you currently are? Second question is, what books or audio books are you actively listening to right now? And then the third part is you alluded to writing a book and having a book. Like, what is that book? And what is that book about? And how do people get access to it? Okay.

Yeah. So like I mentioned, the first book on storytelling I read was by Jonah Sacks. And in there he talked about Joseph Campbell in The Hero’s Journey. So I read The Hero’s Journey by Joseph Campbell. And then I read Story by Robert McKee. I read some Lisa Cron books. I can’t remember the names of all of them. But, I mean, if you look her up, you’ll find those books on storytelling. But I read a bunch of different books. Most of them weren’t about marketing. They were about either how to write a good story or, like Story by Robert McKee, is about script writing, right?

In that you still learn how to tell a good story, like what works, what doesn’t work? Why do you need this thing? Not that thing. What is the order of operations? So those are some of the books that I read at that time. What I’m reading right now is I’ve got actually, hold on, let me just look an audible because I actually have multiple books going at the same time. I’m reading hooked, how to build habit forming products, 100 million offers, and unscripted unscripted. And those are all completely different.

One is about how to make good offers. Unscripted is about living. How do you not live the basic script of life, which I think a lot of entrepreneurs already do. Naturally. Right? Like, they’re not like, oh, I need to get a College degree, then I need to get a job. Then I need to marry somebody. Then I need to have 2.5 kids. I need the wife picket fence house. It’s like the whole concept of unscripted is like, how do you create the life that you actually want that you will actually enjoy and not follow the script of what everybody else does.

So I think that’s a really interesting one. And obviously that kind of appeals to my personality. So my book is called how to Hack Humans Storytelling for Startups, and it’s actually on Amazon right now for pre order until October 15. And then the book will go full price. But if you don’t have a Kindle, you can wait till it comes out on the 15, it will be in paperback and hard cover, which I was like, hard cover. That’s a new feature. And then anybody who’s interested, they can go to story.

Fianc. Com Uncage to download the first chapter of the book for free. It focuses on the neuroscience aspect. So what does science say about this? It’s not me. Just like I said, just making up a bunch of bullshit. Like, the stuff has been researched and we’re learning new things all the freaking time about the brain. And so it’s a really a really interesting topic for anybody who’s interested. Very cool. Very cool.

So I mean, with that, I mean, obviously this is your first book. And I think obviously once you kind of crack the system of creating books, I think you have way more books inside of you. They’re just going to start spelling out like you said, you were bombing out and you were just writing content. Right? So with that, where do you see yourself 20 years from right now?

Well, so I think I can answer this by explaining what the vision of our company is. There’s an often quoted failure rate in startups. I’ve worked with over 100, and I’ve only seen two exits, and one was actually more of a hostile takeover than an actual exit. So I’ve often questioned is like, the accurate number? Or is that just us being positive about a really bad failure rate? But the goal of Storify agency is to work with startups and even small businesses and entrepreneurs to reduce that failure rate by if I look to the future, I want to be able to in 20 years, point back and say, even if we don’t hit it, like, well, we reduced it by, and that made a big fucking dent.

And that helped so many people has ripple effects on the economy.

On.

Companies being able to help their customers employment like, yeah, that’s where I hope to be in 20 years.

Nice. I think to your point, you talk about economy just more of a global economy. That effect, right? You’re trying to help startups, which is essentially the better rock to everything that we’re all working towards, kind of evolve into businesses, small businesses, and then eventually hopefully into large corporations, if that’s the direction they want to go into. So starting from the ground floor up and you’re helping them tell their stories makes them more stronger companies later on. So I definitely commend you for that, for sure. Yeah.

I mean, they got get their story straight, if you will, and build a brand from the beginning. Right? Like, a lot of startups work like they’re building an airplane while they’re flying it. And I get that. But but how you communicate, right? Like, if you take your product to the market and nobody cares and you can’t answer the question the customer has in their mind of, why the fuck should I care about your product, then your debt, you’re dead. And at the end of the day, no matter how cool your tech is, you still have to deal with humans.

And if you’re dealing with humans, you got to be able to talk to them. You got to be able to communicate with them. You can’t place your rates with them or Panama. You got to use words. And often those words are written down on paper on a website in an ad. And that’s how you communicate.

Right with that. Obviously, you’re talking about writing. You’re talking about a lot of different communication devices on the application side. Like, what software would you say that you would not be able to do what you’re doing without having access to it? I.

Guess a dirty little secret is terrible at grammar. So Grammarly is a piece of software that I think Grammarly hates me. Actually, it’s like I hit that button and it just goes here’s all the things you did wrong, you piece of shit. Are you making me work so hard? I use that. I use the Hemingway editor because the Hemingway editor is great at being like, your sentences are just too complicated. Dude, you’re trying to say too much. Get to the fucking point. So those two, I use Google Docs.

That’s how I wrote the book. I wrote it in a Google Doc and then paid a fantastic designer off a fiber of all places to format the book, do the graphics and everything. It was like $35. I was like, you should be getting paid a lot more for this. But I will take advantage of you since you are letting me.

Yeah. That’s hilarious. That’s your software side. So ideally, who’s your ideal customer avatar? I mean, you’re talking about startups, but what’s kind of tell their story a little bit like, who is that person? Is it John? Is he playing golf or is it like, Michael and he’s jumping off a boat, or is it Susan? And she’s going through the store with a kid, like, who’s the ideal avatar for what you guys do?

Yeah.

So.

We’Ve worked actually with all kinds of different startups. Like, everybody usually thinks tech when they think startups. But, I mean, we’ve worked with, you know, nonprofits we’ve worked with, like, currently we’re working with, like, an exercise company. That’s a startup. We’re working with a CBD makeup company. That’s a start up. Honestly, I’m looking for people who want to change their industry or change the world. Some people that I talk to that have startups. I know their goal is making money, right? And that’s okay. But I’m looking for something a little bit bigger.

And so yeah, like I say startups because most people understand what a start up is. But the reason I like startups is because a lot of these founders are they’re the crazy ones. They’re the rebels, the Mavericks that Apple talked about. That like, I don’t know, 1020 years ago, however long it’s been since that campaign came out, the people who want to change things, you find a lot of those people in the startup industry. And those are the people that I want to work with, because I’m I find similarity there with those people.

And so to me, it’s like, I don’t care what your startup is, as long as it’s not about money, it’s about changing things. And that, to me, is the most interesting.

Very cool. So if you had to say the final last words of wisdom to an individual that fits that category of your ideal avatar, what insight would you give to them to keep them motivated on their journey to success?

Motivated? Yeah. I mean, that’s a good question, because, obviously, you know, doing a startup, you have days that like, you’re just winning everything. And then you have days that, like, everything is going going wrong and crashing. So I would say you need a strong vision for your company, because if you don’t have that without it, you’re going to get lost. I think running a company without a vision is like driving a car without a steering wheel, you push the gas, you can hit the brakes. But if the road turns, you may be flying off the cliff.

And the vision help steer your actions, your decisions because you understand where you’re trying to go. And I ran a company without a vision. And I ran that son of a bitch right off the road. And when we rebuilt and rebranded, I came back and I said, okay, I got to figure this thing out first. I need to know what we’re doing, where we’re going. And the reason I that I say that is because, you know, having a vision, it’s a future state. This is where we want to go.

So every action that I take is focused on, how do I get to that future state? But it’s also a story. It’s a story that you can tell to your employees to anybody who may be thinking about working with you. This is where I want to go. Isn’t that great?

Right.

And the other thing is, don’t make the vision about yourself. Like, I’ve heard people be like, well, our vision is to make $2 million by next year, and it’s like, Well, nobody fucking cares, dude, because that vision is about you. I think a strong vision is like building a house that other people can see themselves living in, like, your vision should draw other people in. And when those people come in, they can go. I know how I can help push this thing forward. I know what we’re doing today because I know where we’re going without it.

You’re just getting your car on the road and who knows where you’re going to end up. Make sure you figure that out. I think that’s really important.

Very nice. So the listener does listening right now is probably thinking about, okay. I love this guy. I love his energy. I want to contact them, right? How do someone get in contact with you? Obviously, there’s social media, there’s websites, there’s podcast, funnel them. Where do you want them to go?

Yeah. The main way to get a hold of me is just to go to Story Fagen dot com. That’s just S-T-O-R-I-F-Y. Agency dot com. There’s a there’s a button on there. It just says, schedule a call or something like that. And we can definitely sit down and check. Other than that, you can connect with me on LinkedIn. That’s, like, the platform I use the most because it’s business focused. I tend to kind of like, say, random shit on Facebook and then post an image on Instagram, like, every six months.

So I’m not on those platforms as much. But on LinkedIn, you can connect with me and you can start a chat or whatever, or you just hit the website and you can schedule a call. We got, like, everybody else. We got calendars and all that fun stuff. So it’s easy to do.

Nice. So we’re going into the bonus round. I got a couple of bonus questions for you. The first and foremost, I think, going back to the commonalities that we share, I think indirectly, without you saying, you’re on an adventure, gentlean junkie of sorts. So let’s talk about some of your past times and some of your hobbies.

Sure. So I took a Brazilian jujitsu last year. A great time to take a close quarter combat sport. I have been a scuba diver since 2004, so I’ve done about 150 dives. I’ve been to seven, eight different countries, most of which are Islands. Most people wouldn’t consider countries, but I’ve been to Turks and Caicos, Aruba, Bimini, Mexico, Belize. So I Dove all over and then not necessarily an adrenaline junkie type thing. I do some artwork, and I also produce electronic music on the side, so I keep myself busy.

I think that this one statement, right? I got another one for you.

Right.

And I think it’s pretty interesting with a diverse background. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be? And why.

Who would it be? You know, this is probably going to seem like a simplistic answer, but I think Elon Musk is a total crazy ass, but I would love to hang out with him and just kind of talk about the future, because obviously he’s pushing a lot of things forward. And he also has a very unique perspective on just about everything he does, how he runs his business, where he’s going next. So I think it would be really interesting to sit down with him and just pick his brain and see what he has to say.

And like I said, it may be some crazy ass shit, but some of the things that he’s been doing is, I think, definitely pushing the needle forward for humanity, like creating Tesla, trying to move towards being more electricity focused versus, like, fossil fuels going into space. Like, I read a ton of science fiction, and I, like, in my lifetime, we’re probably going to start having round trips to the moon. And it’s because of what he’s doing and what Bezos is doing and Richard Branson are doing.

They’re pushing the envelope and saying to the point where spaceflight becomes normalized. Well, when spaceflight becomes normalized, then going to other planets becomes normalized, then colonizing other planets becomes normalized. Then people having kids on other planets and growing up becomes a normalized thing. But you got to start somewhere and we’re seeing that right now. So it’s awesome. Yeah.

Definitely. Also, we’re at the dawn of things that we’ve read about as kids through comic books or we’ve seen TV and Sci-Fi. We’re living Sci-Fi now to the point to where people are, like, non astronauts are leaving the atmosphere is kind of like, what the think about that in the 60s, they were just trying to get out outside the atmosphere. And now it’s kind of like we’re just setting up random people into space and they’re going to come back down perfectly fine, considering that NASA has blown up probably more Rockets than what they want to tell us about, right?

Yeah. Spacex the same thing. They’re blowing up rocket. It seems like once a month and it’s like, oh, yeah. Yeah. Can you imagine being o in the 1960s and they’re like, yeah.

Okay.

So we got this ten. Can we’re going to pressurize it and then strap a fucking rocket to it, and then we’re going to hope you make it back. And somebody was like, I’ll do that. Sign me up, please.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like interstellar is like on of my favorite movies is kind of like when you just see it, sell it to. What you’re talking about is kind of like once we figure out the whole time thing and figure out how to collapse time in spaces, we’re into a whole another ball game, man, for sure.

That is a great movie. It’s actually one of my favorite of Christopher Nolan, although I really like, tenant like, man.

Cool. So going into closing, man, I like to give the boss and Cage podcast over to my guests, and the microphone is yours. I show is yours. Do you have any questions that you’d like to ask me?

Yeah. Here’s a question. How would you summarize what you’ve learned from your journey? Because you’ve had so many different kind of roles and you’ve evolved as you’ve gone through those things. Like, what? What would you say your takeaway has been through that process?

I think a way is simple, man. Break a lot of eggs a lot faster. I mean, a lot of people are scared, man. I think fear is such a huge factor to where you come out of College. You’re thinking about, okay, I have to work to provide, or I have to make money to survive or whatever it is. But in those first, I would say probably from ages 15 to 25, like, that ten year break as many eggs travel, explore Dibble dabble if you have opportunity to go somewhere and you’re like, okay, I’m short $50.

Find the damn $50 and make could happen because when you get older, that’s when the responsibility really starts to kick in. So why not live your life as an adventure from day one and take all those things that you learn in a young age and compile them and make them into an experience for someone else? That way you can kind of give back what you’ve learned to educate other people so they can have the same experiences because we travel, right? And a lot of times you’re traveling, you’re looking around and you’re like, on a cruise ship, and you’re like, Everybody on this damn cruise ship is my grandparent right on the point, right?

You go somewhere like you’re talking about Belize, and you look around and it’s like 50% of the flight to be my grandparents because they’re the ones that have lived a life long enough to have the capital, the resources to kind of pay for it. We have to figure out how to do that at a younger age, so we can be 25, 30 years old on a plane right there next to the old guys saying, hey, I’ve done what you’ve done in half the time. Maybe I can help your kids or your grandkids experience with your experience now at a younger age.

Yeah. I totally agree with that. I mean, when I was 26, I just was like, I’m going to London. I did that. Went to South Africa for World Cup, went to Hong Kong, went to Japan. Yeah. Traveling. It also opens up your eyes to see more of what’s going on in the world. Because I think in the US, we tend to be very US centric. And when you travel, you also meet random people from other countries, too. We hung out with some Lithuanians one night in London, and it was a blast.

And it was like, these are people from halfway around the world. We don’t know each other, but we’re connecting. We’re sharing stories. We’re getting to know one another and we’re having a good time. It’s like the same thing happened in Hong Kong and in Japan, like, we met people who were, like, really cool. You know, it’s like, there’s so much more outside of the US, although we have a lot, right. And so that’s why it’s like a lot of people just travel within the US, like, you want mountains, you go to the mountains, you want beach, you go to the beach.

I mean, we have all this great stuff and really great cities and whatnot. But there’s so much more outside of of our country and getting out and experiencing that and seeing how people are, how they think, how they view the world, I think expands your perspective. So I definitely agree with what you’re saying. Don’t wait to travel till you’re too old to go out all night partying in London. It’s I think it changes you when you travel.

I think it definitely does to your point that you made earlier about traveling to space Elon and all these other guys, like Jeff BaseThey Ve done the traveling, and now they’re trying to travel to other planets. So you still got people that are, like, in a state, and they’ve been in that state for their entire life. So, I mean, think about it. By the time you catch up to trying to travel the world, we’re going to Mars and then from Mars, Saturn. Right. So you can kind of have to kind of figure out, where are you on the spectrum.

But you’re so behind the curve. And to your point, like, you may meet somebody in Germany, that’s from Japan, but eventually you’re gonna meet somebody in Mars. That’s from Saturn. So you have to figure out how to kind of expand a little bit more for sure.

Oh, man, when you said Mars, all I could think was Dave Chappelle, Mars bitches. M-A-R-S. Those are one of the funniest kits.

Are a well, if you had any other questions, this is the times. Not then it may.

Yeah. Dude, I could keep going on this. So you leave it open. So tell me about your writing process, because I just was like, I need to write 100 words a day. Right. And I did that for about a week, and I burned myself out. And then I had to take two days off because I could only squeeze out, like, 50 words, and then I got back on it and was good. So what is your writing process like, how long does it take for you to write a book?

So in the beginning, it took me six to nine months. Nowadays, I could essentially write a book per week if I choose to. But obviously, I got other things going on. So I stage my books out, stretch them out a little bit. So my process is like, to your point, writing 500 words a day. I can’t do that. And again, I think physically, writing something takes away so much time. So what I’ve learned to do is capture content. So podcasting, right? Creating videos. Youtube. So part of my podcasting is I’m interviewing individual people.

We’re having this great conversation. This conversation may spark something in my mind, like talking about Mars, talking about inter seller that I may create a video on that. Right. Or I may take a topic about branding, and I may create a video on that branding. But what I’ve done is before I create this content, I go in and I just create bullet lists. Okay. What am I going to cover? I’m going to cover these three core things about branding or brand strategy or about storytelling. And then what of my quick takeaways?

That’s good takeaway? That’s a good take away. That’s a good takeaway. And then after that’s, like, what’s the call to action? What do I want the reader to do? And I’ll do that for all of these particular sections, they become my chapters. Then I record a video, launch it on YouTube.

Again.

You create three or four different videos, 5610 videos, and transcribe those videos, take my bulleted list and compile them together. And now I have my chapter outlines. And I have my core body of content from my own first voice. And then what I can do is take that. And before I clean it up, give it to a ghost writer and say, okay, look, I’ve written out about five0 words. Here’s the topics. Here’s my tonality. Here’s my voice. Here’s my key takeaways. Here’s my call of actions. I need you to fluff it up a little bit.

I need you to kind of do a little bit research. Take an article section from over here. Find me some data from some resource over here. Pull those sources together, and I want this five0 words and now become 150 words. Then I’ll take that 150 words, and I’ll give it to someone to edit. And then that’s a book.

Wow.

So.

Okay. So you’ve you simplified the process or you set up a process that you can follow. But by using the ghost rider, it’s helping you augment. Right. So you’re not spending all the time doing that stuff. Okay. That makes sense. Yeah. Like, I wrote out the topics I wanted to talk about in notepad kind of thing. And then I came back and I said, okay, what are the subtopics to these main topics? And I was like, I was trying to get three to five in each one of those.

And then I and then I sat down with that and looked at that and said, okay, I need to write about this today. And you need to talk about all these different things. But yeah, I mean, the 1000 a hundred words. That was like, somebody going, yeah, I think I could bench £200, 250 or whatever. And you bring it down and push it back up once and you’re like, that was really hard. And then you do it again and you’re, like, not quite getting it there.

It’s like, kind of need to work up to that. So yeah, that’s. Yeah.

So if you’re creating video content or your creating audio content, I mean, the 1500 words, you can easily do that in a few minutes. Right? You can kind of talk to the audience, talk to your clientele, testimonial whatever it is. Just talk. And then again, you’re giving value ad. Just think about the formula of the value add. The formula is my topic. My take away any action topic. Takeaway action. As long as you stick to those three. Whoever’s going to receive that content in a book format for you, they’re going to get value from it.

So that’s my current formula to where I’m writing essentially all my books moving forward. And my first books when I first started, I was kind of like, I want to talk about these 1000 topics, and I’m going to convince them into this one book. And I oh, okay. That’s not gonna happen. How do I take one book and create a series? So then I created a formula for creating series. And then I was like, okay, now I got these series of books. What’s the next step?

Then?

I had to kind of go back in and revise. It was like I had to make sure that every single chapter I have a key. Takeaway every single chapter. I need to have some kind of call of action. And then the extra cherries on top is a quote or testimonial something that visual people kind of look at it and be like, okay, Steve Jobs said that that’s cool. That’s interesting. And they can hold on to that thing. And you put those pieces of puzzles together. Then it becomes very transparent how you can step and repeat creating content or creating books forever.

Yeah. I actually structured mine a little bit differently, but I like the way you did yours because I’m a movie fanatic. I structured it in three acts, and so it’s like, the science. Right. So here’s the proof. And then from there it was like, you go through the proof.

Okay.

Here’s what’s happening. Then I go through and say, how do you tell a good story? I break it all down, give lots of examples to show how you can tell a story and a tagline. You can tell a story in an email all those different ways. And here’s the right recipe. Right here’s the components you need. You need the eggs, you need the flour, you need the butter, you need the sugar, you need the salt. And then the third act. That’s where all the actionable stuff is.

Now here’s how you apply this. And I talk about how to write an email, how to do branding, how to do all these different things. And then I actually added a bonus section, which was like, six or seven chapters that are related, but not they’re adjacent or parallel to, like, I talked about, like, mindset stuff, because if you’re running a startup, you’re going to be dealing with mindset stuff or a small business or you’re an entrepreneur. I talk about vision. I talk about all those other things that while the book is not directly about those, I thought it was important, but that’s why I called it bonus chapters and something else that I did.

I think that you’ll get a kick out of and probably the audience will, too, because I’m such a movie fanatic. I love soundtracks to movies. And being a former rave DJ, I just like music in general. So every chapter has a song that goes with it. And there’s a Spotify playlist and a YouTube playlist so you can listen to music while you read the book. And that each chapter either what they’re saying in the song relates to what I’m talking about in the chapter, or it captures the feel of that chapter.

The first chapter is called The Anti Boring ass introduction, because I hate freaking introductions where the authors are just sitting there fluffing their nuts for what seems like a thousand words. And I’m like, just get to the fucking point, dude. And so that chapter I used welcome to the Jungle by Guns and Roses, and it just kind of kicks off from there. And the music is all over the place. I mean, I got 80 shop, I got hip hop, I got French musicians, Australian musicians. I got all this music.

And so I tried to create more of an experience with it. Yeah.

I definitely love that concept. I mean, to your point, I mean, you’re not just telling the story on the literary side. You’re also communicating through the music side. So anyone that actually reads and listen to music at the same time, you’re already filling in that void for them before they even have to ask for it. So definitely it’s a good, solid concept. I mean, it’s something that if anyone’s listening, you’re writing a book right now, you probably want to start creating some play list to go along with your chapters.

It’s a great idea because I mean, I wish I could put the music in the book, but then I’d have royalty issue, but your codes in a book, right?

I mean, obviously you could say, hey, scan this to go here, and then once they get to Spotify, wherever that you send them to, then they could deal with that on that side.

Yeah. I set the links in the book so you should be able to just click on it and then have it open up. Although I don’t know. Yeah. Like, I don’t know how to or you can just search it. Right? Like, you can search how to hack humans on Spotify right now and you’ll find the playlist. So anyway, just a different, different perspective on how I put things together versus how you put things together. But I like the idea of actually putting the actionable thing in each chapter, not leaving it to the final third.

I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

And it took me a while to figure that out, because again, OK, somebody’s gonna read this book and they’re gonna read the entire book. The I started reading more and more books. I listened to or or audio books, and I started realizing that Tim, as people, we jump around. So if they jump from chapter two to chapter seven and back to chapter four, and then I have the end of the book all this Q and A stuff, and then, like, Anthill miss the items that I want them to really cover.

So splitting it up with smaller bites and giving them smaller steps on the no matter what chapter they get into, then they’ll have access to that. But to your point, what you’re talking. But with those links, I think those links are definitely cool, because in my books, what I use is QR codes. Like I’ll take QR codes and I’ll use them for everything. If I’m talking about a particular product, I’m going to have a QR code in there for you. If you have music, I would say when you get to your physical book to put those QR codes in there and make them trackable so you can kind of say, okay, I have a book.

I have ten songs, and I’m scanning it with a QR code. Then you can kind of say, okay, you know what? This one song song on chapter five. I’ve had 1010 thousand downloads more than anyone else. Then you kind of take that song and kind of utilize that song a little bit more because obviously your audience is more communicated with that one particular item versus a song.

Yeah, I didn’t. Actually, none of my songs are in the playlist because I’m still working on on my EP to get it on Spotify. It’ll be up there at the end of the year, but I don’t have any of my stuff, but but that I like that point because I’m always trying to figure out how to improve. And so that’s a great tip. I really appreciate that.

Cool. Well, I definitely appreciate. I mean, I think you and I, we could probably were much like we could probably sit here and talk for another 5 hours and end up being like a Joe Rogan episode right into it. But I definitely appreciate you coming on the show that I mean, it was definitely well worth having you. And I look forward to reading your book and seeing what else you come up with in the years to come.

Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. And I had a lot of fun, so thank you for having me.

It was great. Essay Grant Over and out.

S2E52 Michelle Thompson – powered by Happy Scribe

This is rolling. Alright. Three, two, one. Welcome. Welcome back to Boston Cage podcast. So today’s episode is kind of like I think I found my kindred spirit person to interview, right. And there’s a lot of commonalities that you guys have been hearing me preach it for the longest about getting a PA, getting a VA. And guess what we have on the show is someone that can tell you more insight and more detail than I ever possibly can about that space. In addition to it, she’s also a fellow stroke survivor as well. So without further Ado, Michelle, the floor is yours. Tell our audience a little bit more about yourself.

Hey, thank you so much for having me on Boston Cage. This is amazing. I’m super stoked to be here. My name is Michelle Thompson. And as you alluded to five years ago, I had a stroke and I like to joke and say that that was the beginning of what started an accidental business. So we’ll kind of get into that. But previously I was a project controlled engineer. I went to school, got my MBA, all that good fun stuff. But I have always had that entrepreneurial bug, and I’m sure we’ll get into a little bit of that, but just super excited to be here.

Great. So, I mean, I think you definitely kind of brought it up. I didn’t start Boston Cage until literally, I was leaving out from the hospital post stroke, so let’s just dive into that a little bit. Let’s back it up and let’s just kind of tell what led you into having a stroke. Is it more like for me, a genetic like my parents, my dad is that all of them have strokes, so genetically I was inclined for it on your end. What was your determinant factor?

Yeah. So mine was genetic too. We had an underlying hereditary blood disorder in our family that we didn’t know anybody had. And I was lucky enough that I got it from both my mom and my dad. So it was kind of a double whammy. So it’s something called factor five. And I have what’s called homozygous factor five, which means I got it from both my mom and my dad. Most people, it’s actually pretty common for people to have heterozygous factor five, which means they only got it from one parent. That doesn’t usually cause any problems. It’s when you get it from both parents in the 50s. They used to call it sticky blood syndrome. So basically, what happens is inside of my veins. It thinks that there’s constantly a cut. And so it’s trying to put a scab on the cut. So it’s constantly making blood clots. And that particular day, blood clot went up into my brain stem. And that’s what happened. But you’re right. It took three years to recover. I didn’t just leave the hospital and boom business.

So yeah. I mean, I think that’s just for the well, obviously I always give whoever I’m interviewing the nickname. So I’m going to deem you the awesome boss, right? The clear records. So, you know, from now on, your awesome boss.

Yeah, I can own that.

Yeah, definitely. Right. So being that you’re awesome in the sense that you talk about it took three years to recover. My recovery was completely different than that. I was kind of like, headstrong and determining to come out, but you don’t always have that control. So what does those three years look like? And in those three years, what made you think it was okay to start a business?

I yeah, honestly, those three years were horrible. And if I’m honest, I was not the most willing patient. When we first found out what the underlying condition was, they basically sat me down into. Michelle, you need to create a power of attorney. You need to create a will. And basically, you need to create your funeral arrangements. What do you want done? Because it’s not a matter of if you have another stroke, it’s a matter of when you have another stroke and you were Super Super lucky the first time, the next time, you’re probably not going to be so lucky. And when I heard that, I decided, you know what? There is no way that I’m going to let myself have another stroke. And potentially, it doesn’t kill me. But I’m just going to sit there like a vegetable and have to suck carrots the straw for the rest of my life. And that is what scared me the most. And to be real honest, sorry, I decided I was just going to end it all. So I was driving home from my neurologist. And let’s be honest, I wasn’t brave enough to actually kill myself. But I figured there’s this really big cliff that’s coming up. And if I just drive my car over it, I’m not going to take anybody else out with me. But chances are I’m not going to survive that’s. That’s not a bad way to go. And I was literally 10 miles from this cliff, and the Bluetooth went off in my car, and so automatically, I just hit the thing. And Ironically, it was my doctor, and she was like, hey, Michelle, I know life’s been really, really crappy the last six months, so I just wanted to check in on you and see how you’re doing. And I literally just started laughing, right? Because she had no idea. And I was like, You’re kidding, right? And she’s like, no, I’m serious. And she’s like, Why do you ask it? Because I’m literally about to drive the car off a cliff. And her reaction was amazing. Like, any other reaction? I probably it probably wouldn’t have changed anything, but she was so nonchalant about it. She was like, Well, okay, that’s no problem. But you can always drive your cliff off a car to drive your car off a cliff tomorrow. So why don’t you just come in and see me and see if we can do something to help and if not drive recall off the cliff tomorrow. No big deal. And I was like, alright, well, that’s reasonable. I know. Right? And she was actually the one that found the factor five. Like, I had literally been to ten doctors before this. And they all told me I was lying. They all told me there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re making this up. You’re totally fine. And she was the one that actually listened and found it. And so I had a very, quite a bit of respect for her. So honestly, just out of respect for her, I went and showed up and and she sat me down and she’s like, you know, Michelle, she’s like, anybody who has gone through this would want to kill themselves. This is normal. It’s okay to want to kill yourself. She’s like, but I think we can make it better. So can we try? I thought, Well, okay. Now, at this point in time, I’m still dragging my right side. I’m still slurring my speech. I still am having seizures, probably three times a day. Very painful. Not fun. Right? So I was like, alright, well, out of respect for you, I will give you two weeks. And she did something incredibly brilliant. She didn’t send me the therapy. She didn’t try to lock me up. She got a hold of my best friend, and she’s like, hey, I can’t tell you exactly what’s going on. All I can tell you is Michelle needs some help. And so my buddy Michael called me and, you know, Michael, it’s like, It’s hilarious because we’re like, Mutt and Jeff, right? He’s like, 6ft, like, 200, like, He’s huge guy. And I’m like, five one, like, I won’t out myself on my weight. He’s like, hey, he’s like, can we go to Starbucks? And I’m like, no, we cannot go to Starbucks. I have seizures. I slur. I can’t walk. We’re not going to Starbucks, right? He’s like, no, no, it’ll be okay. Just come to Starbucks. I was like, okay, fine. We got there and he sat me down and he’s like, hey, he’s like, I know that things have been tough, and I know you’re thinking about leaving. I just want you to know that I’m going to miss you. And he’s like, I don’t blame you. He’s like, if I were in your situation, I’d probably do the same thing. But until then, do you think we could just hang out? Can we just go hiking and I’ll help you hike? I know you can’t walk, but let’s just go do it. And I went, okay, but as long as nobody else is around because I don’t want to be embarrassed. Right? And so we did. And it was so funny because he took me to Rei. And I don’t know if you guys have re where you are, but it’s basically like, this huge camping store and Michael is like, the most never wants to bring attention to himself at all type person. And he got down in Rei and he started putting a tent together in the middle of the store just so that I would get interested in something. And it worked. So I decided, alright, well, I want to stick around a little longer just to hang out with Michael. And then we’ll see what happens. And in that time, my doctor got me to start doing physical therapy and not just physical therapy, but also occupational therapy. So by the time I actually got into a neurologist who listened, it had been six months. So the brain damage that I had was permanent. They couldn’t fix it at that point. And so physical therapy was all about how learning how to live with your new reality. Like, we’re never going to get back what you had. Your MBA is gone. You’re never going to be able to do math above a second grade level, but we can make life livable. And so honestly, I like, bucked against it for, like, two months. And the one day I’ll never forget, I was sitting there and I was like, the grumpiest patient in the world. I totally was. I just didn’t want to be there. I was just miserable. And she just had it. And she sat me down and she’s like, Michelle, she’s like, we can keep doing this. She’s like, Well, you’re not going to get anywhere. She’s like, do you have any idea how freaking lucky you are? And I went, what? I just had a stroke, and you’re sitting here telling me I’m lucky. She’s like, look, she’s like, if you had been born just 40 years ago, I’d never be able to do any of the things that I can do with you today. But because of all the technology that we have, I can teach you how to have a relatively normal life. If you will just shut up and listen and stop feeling so freaking sorry for yourself. And I went, okay, and it was hilarious, because it’s exactly what I needed to hear. Like, I needed to stop the pity party. Oh, my gosh, life is over, blah, blah, blah. And be thankful for what I actually had. And that was kind of the turning point was when she basically had a come to Jesus meeting with me. Right? And that was what started to change at all. We started to learn how to automate my entire daily routine. And so in the house, I live in a very, very controlled environment because I still do crazy things. Like, I think I’m making coffee and the water goes in the toaster instead of the coffee pot, which is usually a bad thing. So I have a Google home in each one of my rooms, and it actually reminds me, Michelle, it’s time to brush your teeth. Michelle, you need to drink water. Michelle, you need to check and see if the dog needs to go to the bathroom. So literally, every single part of my life is structured by a machine. And we got to the point where I could actually live almost by myself. And I could function and create things on my own. And we learned, okay, hey, when you turn the stove on, set a timer. And in ten minutes, when the timer goes off, check to see if you turn the stove off. Type of a deal. And so having the business background from prior, I started rolling this all around in my brain, and I thought, wow, if we can do this for everyday life, why can’t we do it for business, too? And that was when it really started, really started clicking. And I started thinking, I was like, you know what? Now this is three years down the road, right? Fast forward. Three years. And I started thinking, you know what? I don’t know how much time I have left. What is the legacy that I want to leave? And what do I really want to transfer to the next generation when I’m not here? And I realized that I wanted to pair my business knowledge with how I learned how to automate an outsource. And so I started recording videos on how to delegate and delegate. Well, and the way that I did it was really funny. I would a lot of people think it has to be super complicated. I made it stupid, simple, like, okay, if you know that tomorrow you’re going to get hit with a Mac truck. What is the information that you can download into a video today? All those micro decisions that you’re making in your brain so that you could then pass that video off to somebody else so they would know how to do that task. And we just started slowly creating a video for every single thing in my business.

Okay.

And it got so good that I would wake up and in my inbox would be 40 hours worth of work that I hadn’t done at all. And my friends, who are my colleagues were like, what the heck, Michelle? You can’t even function in your house. How are you doing this? And so I started to tell them, and I started to show them, and they’re like, Holy crap, this is amazing. Let’s try it with my stuff. I said, okay, but if it blows up, it’s your fault, right? And so we did. And it worked like, really, really well. And so then what happened was from there just the kind of natural progression was everybody’s like, oh, my gosh, you need to teach this to the world. You need to create a course, right? Because everybody’s making a course. And so I did. I created this course, and we put a couple of people through the beta, and it worked really well. But the feedback that we got was, you know, Michelle, this is great that this is your like, you’re really fired up and excited about this, but I don’t want to learn how to find a VA in the Philippines and train them like, can you just do it for me? And at first, I was very hesitant because I only have about two to three good hours a day. Other than that, I have to sleep. I still have to sleep a lot. And so I was afraid that I was going to take on other business owners tasks, and I wouldn’t be able to deliver. And so I had a couple who I was very unwilling. Honestly, they’re like, Michelle, just try it. And if it doesn’t work, we’re not going to hold you responsible. I said, okay, let’s try it. And so I literally took them through the exact same process that I did myself. And it worked really well. And I realized the missing piece was all I needed was a project manager. And so we hired a project manager. And now the process is duplicatable. And then accidental business was born, which is pretty awesome.

First of all, in what you just said. And this is why I said, we’re like, kindred spirits. I mean, you talked about legacy, right? It’s funny after a stroke that’s, like, the first thing that I’ve learned about myself as well. It’s kind of thinking about, what am I going to leave behind for future people, future generations. You also kind of unraveled something that’s very difficult to deal with when you have a stroke is depression. And I think most people, they may hear us having this conversation right now. I’d probably be like, there’s no way in hell these two people who’ve had strokes, there’s no way in hell these two people’s faces were drooping. There’s no way in hell that their bodies were, like, number on one side. And they’re having this conversation right now. But the reality is that you have to work your ass off to get to the point to where we are currently right now. But on that journey, you get hit with that. I was this now on this. I can never be this again. How the hell am I gonna live for myself? And not to say everyone’s gonna be suicidal. But you go into very dark places and trying to figure out what the light is. So I commend you for not only figuring out the light, but you made the light into a system and you monetized it golden. Definitely. So let’s just time travel back a little bit, like, like, I think something else that we shared as well, too. I mean, you were an insurance as well. Are you still an active life insurance agent and all that as well?

No, actually, I let them lapse, but yeah, I did. I used to. I used to have my series 663 65, and then my life and health crazy because I had my six as well.

And I let that last because I was like, I don’t feel like dealing with Sunrun. I still have my insurance because I was like, okay, that’s kind of low maintenance. I could kind of maintain that. So how did you go from kind of being in that space transitioning into the MBA? Like, how did that happen?

Yeah. When I was a financial advisor and worked for the insurance firm, I was actually hired to run the insurance Department. The goal was for me to become a partner in the firm. And so in order to become a partner in the firm, I really needed to have better credentials. I needed to get my CFP or needed to get my MBA. And we already had a CFP on staff. And so I decided that MBA would be the better route. And so honestly, that’s how it happened.

Got it. So if you could define yourself in three to five words, what three to five words would you choose for yourself?

Determined, patient, visionary. I don’t know how to say this in one word, but never give up.

Yeah, definitely. So you have a business now that’s essentially pretty much self maintained to a certain extent. I mean, I’m sure your hands are still in the business, but you have it so systematized that you’re using your own soup, right? You’re outsourcing. It like, how is your business structure? Is it an LLC? An S Corp. C Corp. Yeah.

So it’s structured as an LLC, but it’s a there’s different types of LLC. So ours is actually an LLC. So it’s actually filed when we file taxes. It’s almost like a sole proprietor, but it is its own entity. And I just didn’t want to bring on more than one partner. So that’s why I had to be enough.

Got you. So you’re a partnership as well?

No, I didn’t want to have to get aboard. I didn’t want to have a dress with that. Yeah. So I set up the LLC, and then when we file taxes, it goes through the S got you.

So listening to this podcast, someone may listen and say, okay, in three years, it took you to kind of overcome and kind of become who you are right now. But obviously, the business that you’re in has just started. But essentially, you’ve been on this journey for a long period of time. So how long have you been on your business journey?

Yeah. I started like everybody did with their little side hustle dabbling in entrepreneurship and outsourcing 15 years ago.

Got you outsourcing. So I guess we just dive into this outsourcing. And obviously, I love this topic because I always tell people that you have to understand that if you could multiply what you’re doing in multiple different time codes, then you could be working while you’re awake, you’re sleeping and things are getting done for you around the clock. So you alluded to the Philippines earlier. Is there a particular reason why you use the Philippines versus other resources yes.

A couple of very specific ones. So first of all, the Filipino culture is amazing. They’re very teamwork driven. They’re very family driven. And so when I wanted to build a business, I wanted to make sure that I was building a team, not just a group of people who just wanted a job. I wanted somebody who was going to take ownership and want to build the company as much as I did. And so I found that culture there another really big reason is English is their primary language. So if you go inside of a hospital or a school or a lawyer’s office, they speak English. Obviously, that’s a huge help versus somebody who maybe that’s their second or third language. The third reason is they are very immersed in our culture. So they love Korean drama. And then they love pretty much everything else American. Right. So they’re watching the NBA. They’re watching March Madness, just like we are. They’re watching the Kardashians. It’s funny because they think we all live like the Kardashians, so they understand our flying. They understand everything like that. So that was hugely helpful. But probably the biggest reason that I went to the Philippines was the US dollar to Filipino peso conversion is very, very favorable in the United States. And when I built the business, I decided it wasn’t just going to be for money. There had to be a bigger why there had to be a reason. And so my goal when I built awesome outsourcing was to actually break the cycle of poverty in the Philippines. And so by doing that, what I do is I pay them the equivalent of about $50 an hour in the United States. I pay for their health insurance, I pay for their retirement, I pay for their they have, like, a loan program. You can’t buy a car or a house without a loan program there. I pay a 13 month bonus, two weeks vacation, and then I pay all the transfer fees. And so what that does is because they’re very family oriented. Not only does that help them, but they’re multi generational. So that’s usually helping their grandparents, their parents, them, their kids. And a lot of times their nieces and nephews and cousins. So what happens is they’ll pay for their kids to go to school, and then they’ll pay for all their nieces and nephews to go to University as well. And so I realized if I can pay them enough that they can provide education for the next generation, we can break the cycle of poverty, one employee at a time, and that’s what we’re doing.

Wow. I’m just trying to listen to what you just said and just breaking it down and just kind of like to be honest, you didn’t have to do that. You chose to do that. So it also kind of gives, like, not only commendable for you, but you’re actually making a difference, which is great, in a sense, so let’s just talk about that a little bit. So you’re not essentially giving away money, but you’re having them work for for a living. You’re paying them a higher premium than just say majority. I mean, I think the Philippines, I could probably get a PA for $3 an hour, $4 an hour. So you’re going essentially 15 F ten fold above that. And you’re doing that to change an entire. So what is your long term plan for that? I mean, what do you see that structure look like 20 years from now?

So the cool part is we’re actually seeing it now. A couple of stories. I had one of my guys who’s still in College, and he was one of my video Editors, and he did such a good job that I gave him a ton of work. And for video editing, I happened to pay per minute of editing. So I paid him $8 per minute video editing. Well, we paid him so well that he was actually able to go into his class and pay for his entire class to have the Adobe suite. And so what that did was they could all then become freelancers, and each and every one of them were able to get a job. And so we get stories like that all the time when they recently just were hit with a pretty nasty typhoon, and they all bonded together and put tons of money into the community to rebuild the community. And so my goal is I hope that five years from now, we have 300 employees and we’re able to do that for 300 families because I’m able to touch each and every part of that. But in addition to that, we’re also going in and we’re putting in Wells, which sounds crazy because it’s the Philippines, and there’s water everywhere. But there’s not clean water. And there are a lot of homeless people in the Philippines. And so what we’re doing is we’re picking the outskirts of not the major but the outskirts where there are these camps of homeless people. And we’re putting in well, so that they’re able to just get clean water and be able to do simple hygiene things. And so as we build and grow, we just keep adding on more and more benefits like that.

Yeah, this is definitely beautiful. So just think about this from a science fiction point of view, if you could time travel back to, say, 1020 years, what’s one thing that you would choose to do differently if you could do it all over again? Oh.

Great question. I. Probably would have kicked myself out of the nest faster. And what I mean by that is I was so afraid to take the leap and so afraid to completely outsource because nobody could do the job as well as I could. And I didn’t really want to give it to anybody because they weren’t going to do it the way I wanted it. And then it was just going to create a bunch of rework and blah, blah, blah. Right. I had all my reasons by having a stroke. I literally couldn’t do the task myself anymore. And what I realized was if I can get somebody else to do that task of what I would have done. So it’s not big freaking deal. Who cares? I freed up my time. I don’t have to do it anymore. I freed up my brain power, and I use this example of social media posting, right? Business owners, especially entrepreneurs. We spend a ton of time learning all the things. Right. So we’re creating social media graphics and we want it to be perfect, right? Because we want our image to be perfect. And yes, that’s all important. But to a certain extent, like if I say somebody else makes the graphic and I would have maybe move the person two degrees to the right and I would have maybe done something slightly different, change the color font or whatever. Does that really matter in the grand, huge scheme of things? Not really, because it’s getting done on social media, which it probably wouldn’t have gotten done as fast anyway, because I would have still been perfecting it. Secondly, is my branding and my message still prevalent where somebody is going to look at that and be able to book an appointment and I’m able to help them then. Yeah. So what I found was the interesting part is by me doing all those tasks myself. I was actually doing a disservice to my clients because I was spending so much time doing all those little things that I should have never had my hands in in the first place that I wasn’t able to help enough people. And so in essence, I was actually doing them a disservice because I was using all my time and brain power on the stuff that I should have been getting rid of. And so if I could do it all over again, would kick myself out of the nest earlier and make myself delegate sooner is definitely very.

Very powerful, because I had to come with terms with that myself as well. Kind of building agencies and building brands and have a graphic design background. So for me to your point about design, you want it perpendicular to the square, you want it down to the Pico and you want everything exact. But the reality is how much time and effort am I going to put into that to deliver something that’s going to go across someone’s feed for 20 seconds or less. And it’s like was my 3 hours of doing that really worth the 20 seconds of time for somebody to possibly convert. So we’re going to a year like your background a little bit, right. So, I mean, obviously you have an MBA, but you say you don’t have it, but I think you’re still an NBA quality person. People that have MBAs that don’t have your tenacity or have your skill set currently. So you come from an entrepreneurial background because it seems like it’s ingraining your DNA.

I don’t at all, actually. Which is hilarious. My family, still to this day, does not understand why I do what I do. But came when I read a book. The very first book somebody handed me was Rich Dad Port At by Robert Kiyosaki. And that changed the way that I looked at the world. And I went, you mean, I don’t have to do the nine to five thing every day for the rest of my life. Somebody handed me that book when I was 22, and I was working retail hours, like, 50 hours a week dealing with customers spitting on me. And I’m like, dude, I could handle getting out of this. Right? So that kind of started a fire in me. And the very next book that I picked up was a four hour work week by Timothy Paris, and that really lit the fire. So I was like, oh, my gosh, this is amazing. I have found the secret. And of course, it didn’t quite work like that. But I did what everybody did. I’m like, oh, great. Let’s outsource something to Brickworks Indy, and then I’m going to turn in a blog and it’s going to make all this. And it’s gonna be awesome. Right. Well, I’m a little older than everybody else probably listening to this. So that’s what we did in the nineties and two thousands. But anyway, so those two books really lit the fire in me. And I started a habit of every month I wanted to read one book that was going to get me better. And I’ve kept that even through it. Now I can’t read anymore. But I refuse to use that as an excuse. So what I do is I buy the book and then I also buy the audible. And so I listen to the book while I’m looking at the words and then I can comprehend. And I think that that’s been like, the difference was the education of myself.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, I’m just listening to you. And it’s like, you’re just preaching that acquire to so many similarities in our stories. And to your point, I mean, about reading books versus audio books. And because of that, I decided to kind of create a book club. And, like, right now in the book club, the goal is to read one book per week. And I’ve kind of created some videos on how is it possible to read one book per week? Which goes back to your statement that you said earlier about using devices like my house. I have Alexa glasses, Alexa to brush Alexa, everything Alexa in the car, so I can seamlessly listen to an audio book no matter where I’m going in my house, it can just transition from device device and 20 minutes here, 40 minutes there. It adds up to where you’re able to read a book per week pretty easily. So just to dive into your family life, I mean, obviously, it seems like you’re completely engaged. And even though everything is outsourced and systematized, I think that the overview arching of the management side of that maybe a little bit difficult. So how do you juggle your work life with your family life?

I am super lucky and that I have a very supportive partner, and she is because a lot of times, even still, I’ll be like, yeah, I don’t want to do this anymore. And she’s like, no, Michelle s like, you have to do this. You are so good at this. And so I have a cheerleader in the background. And so that’s a huge, huge part of it. But I’ve set up a lot of boundaries with my business. And honestly, my business coach made me do that. So I have I work four to 6 hours a day Monday through Friday. I don’t do anything on the weekends, and once a quarter, I go away for a week and a half where I never touch anything. And so the reason for that is when we go away for a week and a half, what we’re really doing is by not doing anything. Not only am I unplugging, but we’re trying to figure out what’s still broken. And so when something breaks, then I know, okay, that’s what I have to pay attention to. And systematize when I get back. What I’ve done is just one piece at a time. I’ve slowly systematized everything. So it literally runs very much without me there. So I really don’t have to do do anything in my business. It really literally runs on its own, which is amazing. And a lot of people are jealous. So I feel kind of bad saying that.

I think it’s commendable, in a sense, that to your point of recovering from a stroke, rebranding rebuilding everything essentially from scratch. It gives everybody else the opportunity to not only admire you, but to follow in your footsteps and understand if you can do it, then why the hell can anyone else do exactly what you were able to achieve? And like you say, you’re running on autopilot. At this point in time, there’s huge companies that would die to be in your shoes. And they’re still trying to figure out how to even process orders.

And I think that was because I made myself grow slow on purpose because I wanted to build the system and then let it break with three clients versus 300 clients. And so I put processes and systems above everything else. And that was more important than the dollar amount coming in, which is really nice to say, some people can’t do that. But at the same time, when you fix that, then you’re no longer fighting fires, the time that you would have been spending fighting fires. Now you can go build something else, right. And there were a couple of super important books that helped me do that. One was Work with System by Sam Carpenter. The other one was actually Profit First by Mike McCalla. Have you ever heard of that book? Okay. And so that forced me to create a business that ran lean and was profitable. And so by implementing Profit first before I did anything else, then I was able to really build the system around it and grow slowly because from day one, we were profitable. It didn’t matter because the numbers worked.

That’s so beautiful. I’m just sitting here in odds. It’s commendable to the extent of anyone that’s listening to this podcast right now, and you’re hearing what she’s saying, and you have an opportunity to stop what you’re doing and to reevaluate what you’re doing while you’re doing and how you’re doing it. Obviously, the results would be more fruitful if you were to stop long enough to realize that there are issues in your current system and there’s opportunities to make them run a lot smoother than they’re currently running right now. So diving into your morning routine, since you’re so systematized and like you said earlier, you was making coffee, but you may have put that in the toaster. What is your morning routine look like?

Yeah. When I wake up, which is 750 every morning, I have a system set up where Google turns on. And it tells me what the weather is going to be like for the day. So I know what to wear. It tells me what the first three appointments are on my schedule, and then it automatically starts a morning meditation for me. Right. And so I actually lay in bed for the first 30 minutes just listening to that to get my brain rate, because when I first wake up, my brain doesn’t automatically just jump out of bed. So I do that 30 minutes meditation to get my brain right for the day, get up, take a shower, and then I have a checklist on my mirror that says, hey, did you floss? Did you brush your teeth? Did you take your medicine? All the things? Right. So then from there, I go into the kitchen and it tells me, okay, feed the dog. So I then feed the dog and open the door where we have a little doggy door so he can go in and out whenever he wants. And then we actually moved everything in our home so that I can’t accidentally put water in the toaster because the toaster used to be right next to the coffee machine. And so now the toaster is on this side of the kitchen and the coffee pot on that side of the kitchen. So just little things like that keep me from making mistakes, because now when I put the water in and I go over, I can’t accidentally put it in the wrong machine. And what’s cool is like when you sit and you think about that, then you think about it for business. What happens if we just move the pot over there? How does that fix things? So anyway, so then make my coffee, come in, I check my email, and then usually I’m on my first appointment by 930 or ten.

Wow. So it almost seems like I’m gonna be Frank. And it’s actually the question. Do you think if it wasn’t for the stroke, you would be as effective and as efficient as you are currently because you have to be right now because of the stroke?

Absolutely not. That’s why I call the stroke my blessing in disguise. It literally is the silver lining on the cloud because I was so distracted by, you know, pushing harder to get to the next level to get the corner office to get whatever it was more clients. I just need that one more perfect client. Right. And so I was so distracted that I didn’t take the time to sit down and really tear it apart. And so had that not happened, I would probably still be spinning my wheels, to be very honest.

Yeah. I mean, it’s not every day that I have a I guess like you to where I’m kind of, like, not stop, but it’s just listening to you and just recapping and just re visualizing exactly what you just said and thinking about how would everyone’s life be uniquely different if they had to go through such a life changing event? What would they come out with at the end? And you’re like the formula for that? You took broken eggs and everything, and you baked a cake. That’s not only a cake for you, but a cake for family generations in the Philippines and for your local family as well, is definitely an amazing story. So I think earlier we kind of drove into books a little bit, right. So before we were talking, you were saying that you also wrote your first book. So I mean, this is the time, usually when I Act for recommendations. But I think you’ve made, like, six recommendations for books. So let’s dive into your book a little bit.

Okay. Sure. Yeah. I am super excited about this. And this will show you the power of outsourcing. So I wrote my first book. It’s called Running On A. It’s called Running On Autopilot, how to Find Higher Train and Remotely Manage a Virtual Assistant. And here’s the cool part about this book. It is literally the A to Z manual. Everything that I know is in this book. But I didn’t write this book. What happened was I took my course that I created, and I hired a writer, and I said, Noriel, I need you to go through all of these videos, and I need you to break them into chapters. And so he went through and he created all the chapters. And then I hired a graphic designer, and I said, okay, Lois, I need you to take the words from the chapter, and I need you to bring them life. I need pictures, I need graphics, I need examples. I need you to put it in design to create the book and all that good fun stuff. And so literally, because I am physically not able to write a book, it’s not possible. But I can talk. And so what I did was I just talked the book out into a video and then I outsourced the book. But I am Super Super proud of this book. You can find it on Amazon, and it literally will teach you from the very beginning infancy stages where to find a VA, all the cultural stuff that you need to know and then how to hire them without having to micromanage. So super proud of it.

And it’s under. I mean, do you have a pen name or it’s under your actual Michelle?

Yeah. It’s under my actual name. Wow.

Great. So I don’t think anyone out there that’s looking for opportunity to even comprehend or understand how these systems could really work for you. I haven’t even picked up the book yet, but obviously, if I wasn’t on this call right now, I’ll be downloading the book right now. Is it audio format as well?

I’m working on it. I’m interviewing somebody to read it for me at this point because I tend to stutter a lot, so it’s coming. So hopefully in the next two or three months, that part will be done. But right now it’s an e book and paper practice.

Great. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I’m giving you a copy, but I wanted to get a signed copy eventually, sooner or later in the near future, at some time or the other. So going into your journey, right. So obviously, I think you talked about legacy. Where do you see yourself and your business? 20 years from now? And I think you alluded to it a little bit, but just go into that a little bit more.

Yeah. Honestly, I hope in 20 years nobody sees me. I hope they just see the legacy that’s left. I hope that this has again. I’ll refer to another book, but Mike Malkit created a book called The Pumpkin Plan, and he talks about being the biggest pumpkin in the patch and how you are just so awesome to your clients that you are making a world of difference in their lives and your employees lives. And so I really hope that we are the biggest Punkin in the virtual assistant space so that we’re able to change that many lives because every single person that we’re freeing up their time and giving them their time back as a business owner means that somebody else has a job. And I’m now breaking the cycle of poverty in the Philippines, and that is what I hope. I hope nobody sees me. I hope everybody just sees that.

Got it. I think to my point that I made earlier, it was comical in statement, but the reality is your MBA is working live and well, you definitely understand business structures and the point of wealth management as well. Like, the further away you are from your clients is the more money and the more of an Empire you would essentially have. So you’re definitely on the right track for that.

And it’s back to that profit first. Right. Once we systematize everything, it’s just numbers. We know we’re profitable, right. The systems are already there. The more people you put into is more money than it makes. It’s a very beautiful equation.

Like I said, your MBA is live and well. Okay. Are you talking about these systems? Right. So I think for some people, they’re like, what kind of systems is she using? I understand there’s people and that’s somewhat of an organic system. But what software technologies are you using that you would not be able to do what you do on a day to day basis without.

Yeah. So there are a couple of things that I do. I automate as much as humanly possible. And so I decided to use almost like a business in a box type deal where all of my landing pages, my email, any tracking, my CRM billing. It’s all in one house. And I actually use entreport for that. And I actually hired somebody who is an automation specialist. And so the cool part is that literally, from the time that somebody clicks on a Facebook ad, it brings them into the system, they have the appointment, it sends them a thank you card. It sends them directly, like, literally the entire process from start to finish goes without me touching anything, which is amazing. And I probably did a really bad job of explaining that, but it’s like, super cool. But then on the other side, the social media side, I don’t want to spend any of my time doing that either. And my VAS are honestly too valuable to be spending their time doing that when a piece of software can do it really well. So what I do is I try to create a hybrid. I figure out what kind of software is going to get us 80% of the way. And then how can my VA come in and use their expertise to get it the last 20% of the way? So what I use is a program called Social B, and it’s just a social media scheduler. There’s nothing special about it. It’s like buffer sweet. And some people argue because they’re like, oh, it throttles your traffic. Well, yes, that’s true. It does throw out your traffic a little bit, but 70% of people seeing my stuff is a whole lot better than 0% of people seeing my stuff. So I’m okay with it. Schedule once is a tool that I use all the time, because inside of there not only does that give them access to my calendar and my sales reps calendars, but also there are forms in there, and there are lots of different ways that you can do this. But the cool part is when somebody schedules it and schedule once, I never have to prep for an appointment, because inside of there is my Zoom link, and they’ve already filled out all those questions. So all the information that I need is right there. I just click on the button, it pops the thing and I’m ready to go.

Nice. Nice. I think Social B is one of those platforms, and I found Social Be through. What was that? It was one of the not affiliate programs, but it was like when they first started out actually was a Sumo.

Sumo. Sumo Sumo.

I could sit here and talk about a Sumo day in and day out because it gives us an opportunity not only to get in on the ground level, but to actually talk to the developers and manipulate their applications for our needs and our requirements because they’re so brand new in the market space. So with social media, it’s kind of dive in that a little bit more. I mean, obviously anybody that’s familiar with, like, Hootsuite and all the other platforms. I like Social Be because it’s simple to use, and it makes it very transparent to use versus all these other, like, for example, you kind of have to drill down and you kind of have to figure out like, okay, how do I install this? How do I set this up? But social media is so kind of, like, clean and simple that you could just drop a CSV file in there and have a year’s worth of content ready to go automatically done for you. Are you using it for that same premise, or are you using any other hidden bells and whistles of social being?

Yeah, I have mine segmented by, so I don’t necessarily just drop a year’s worth of general content. I have each bucket have a specific reason, and I keep all my stuff evergreen in there so it can just keep cycling through. And so what I try to do is I try to do three value posts and two sales posts. Right. So one is just dropping value. One is a call to action, and I shouldn’t say call to action. Every post that you have should have a call to action if you’re being a smart business owner, but one is actually just delivering value. And, hey, we could help you out. The other one is, hey, I’ve got this thing. You need it here’s where you click. And then I have in addition to that, every time I use case studies and testimonials like, crazy, I’m constantly filtering those through, too. So the nice part is each bucket is I am so sorry. I thought I closed all these and it’s like, okay, I don’t know if you could hear all the dinging that’s one of the super cool parts is because as you build the system, Social Be is flexible enough that it can move with your marketing goals, and you can then set it up where it’s like evergreen. It’s literally set it and forget it. And so that’s the part that I love about it is the really simple, simple graphic user interface. It’s just drag and drop. And here you go. Have a nice day. And it’s less expensive than, like, hot, sweet, and buffer. So I don’t know if I answered your question. I feel like a time.

You definitely did. You definitely did. I mean, it’s point blank, period is a great, great, great application. And obviously, again, I’ve said it many times before. Are you not familiar with AppSumo? Just put AppSumo on your list to do before the night out, and it’ll probably change things for you drastically really quickly. So this dive into final words of wisdom. Let’s say someone 2030 years old. I had some kind of crisis in my life. Maybe I had a stroke, maybe I have cancer, but now I have an opportunity. I’m at the fork in the road. I can subside to the depression side and kind of give up and quit. Or you’re my voice of reason. What are you going to say to me to make me lean more towards the voice of reason and achieve something for my life?

Yeah. Going back and thinking at that point in my life, I was in so much pain and I was literally laying in bed all day just in so much pain. You literally just want to escape the pain. And I think if I had to tell myself, it would be, it’s okay. It’s not going to be like this forever. Just keep going. If you can just get better, all you have to do is just just brush your teeth today. That’s all you have to do. And as we slowly build on those blocks, you’ll realize that life can become better. And it doesn’t. Is it going to be the same way that it was? No, no, it never will. I’m a shell of what I used to be, to be very honest, but that doesn’t have to stop you. That if you can find the courage to dig inside of you and pick yourself up and keep going, you will find a way to make it work and just don’t give up. There’s going to be crappy days, and it’s okay to have crappy days, but just don’t give yourself the excuse every single day that today is a crappy day. I’m just not going to do it.

Definitely powerful stuff. So how could our audience find you now? I know eventually you’re planning on disappearing and letting the system run. Right? But how can they find you on social media? Like, what’s your handle website?

Yeah. So I primarily hang out on LinkedIn and Facebook so you can find me on Facebook under Diakonos 23. So that’s D-I-A-K-O-N-O-S 23. And then on LinkedIn. It’s just Michelle Thompson. Also, I think if you just type in awesome outsourcing, our business pages will come up from there. And obviously, awesome outsourcing. Com, you can send me an email there.

It doesn’t dive into your services a little bit. Who is the part question, right. Who is your ideal target audience? And what kind of price point buying from my range? Can they come in?

Yes. So we are looking for entrepreneurs who are at six figures looking to scale the seven, but they’re wearing too many hats, and they just can’t seem to grow because they can’t figure out how to get those hats off. That is where our superpower really comes in, because we can sit down and we can tear apart all those hats and figure out. Okay, this one, you have to keep this one. We can delete this one, we can get off your plate. And so we work in bucket of hours. So it’s either 20 hours a week or 40 hours a week. And we make it pretty simple. It’s 1675 an hour for the work. We also do lead generation. So if that’s where your point is, you’ve got the system set up, but you need to turn the pipeline on. We can do lead generation on LinkedIn or Facebook, and that’s 1200 a month. And if you go to awesome Outsourcing. Com services, all the pricing and all the details is is right there for you. I’m not too worried about anybody stealing my stuff and duplicating it.

Yeah, but I think you have it so honed in. It’s kind of like someone is chasing behind you and you’re well ahead of them. It may take them a longer period of time to figure out your nuts and bolts versus just hiring you to get the job done. So only makes sense. Let’s go to some bonus questions. Right. Bonus question, bonus pression. So if you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be? And why.

Henry Ford? And the reason I picked him was he was the master at hiring people who were smarter than he was and then building a system around it. And I would love to pick his brain on how he was able to take people who were so much smarter than him and fit them in the system and turn it into what he did.

And I mean, you got to think about that, too, when he did it, it was well over 100 years ago, and it was just kind of kind of I guess it was like the Industrial Revolution timeframe, but how he created a system in that time frame and knew that that system was going to last as long as I mean, we still have parts of that system now. It’s kind of ingenious in itself for him to even have that much foresight. Crazy. Yeah. Definitely crazy. Last bonus question. What’s your most significant achievement to date?

Not giving up. I know that’s kind of a cop out answer, but like, if you could have seen the three years of struggle to get to hear, it would have been really easy to just give up. And I’m sure you have the exact same story. There were days when I like, like, how I want to go to physical therapy again. And honestly, I think that being able to take such a horrible thing, like a stroke and turn it into something positive that’s actually giving back to people. I would have to say that’s probably my greatest achievement to this point.

Definitely. I mean, I think obviously in life, there’s many achievements that you could come across, but just hearing your story and being inspired by your story, I could definitely commend you and tell you that I 100% agree with you. I think that is not just an achievement, but it’s your scale, your achievement. It’s not just about you. It’s about so many other people. It’s remarkable that you have enough insight to not only do it, but you’re doing it and you’re doing it well. So I definitely appreciate that going into closing, right. As we had this conversation. I mean, maybe you’ve had some questions that came up that you may want to ask me. So this is the time that the microphone, the floor is yours. Are any questions that you’d like to ask me?

What was the first thing that you delegated that you didn’t feel like you had to micromanage first thing that I delegated it.

I didn’t feel like I had to micromanage. I think it’s three things off top my head. One was editing this podcast. I found someone that was just a great editor, and I had opportunity to kind of give him some piece mail. And, you know, at that point, it was a system. At that point, he could do the job without me having anything twice about it. In addition to that, it was another VA that I hired, and originally, he was just a regular VA. And I’m really big on accident the questions of, like, okay, you’re a VA. But what is your background? What is it that you really want to do? And in that conversation, I found out that he was more of, like, a developer, more software, more web. So I was like, okay, dude, I don’t want to waste your time giving you PA work when you are like a developer and you want to code, and that’s what you love to do. So it gave me an opportunity to pull them from that space and bring him into the development space. So, like, now he’s kind of running that behind the scenes for me.

Nice. That’s awesome. So did you feel like it was sorry. I know I’m not interviewing you, but I feel like it was easier to hand off tasks that you didn’t know anything about for stroke.

Hell, no more stroke. Everything was mine. I was walking around with these barrels of jugs, and I’m holding on to all this weight, lugging it around. Probably one of the reasons why I had a damn stroke to begin with, right. And then after that, it was just kind of like, well, how can I scale if I’m do anyone doing anything? How could I multiply if I’m doing everything kind of like where you were? I’m kind of in that space now to where I’ve opened up, to where I got an outsource. Everything I possibly can. I have to create a system for everything I possibly can. If someone sends me an email, I wanted to automatically respond back with this. I want to automatically send them this before I even had a time to even open my email to even think about giving them a response. Yup.

That’s funny. We both have the exact same story, which is kind of why I think sometimes people have such a hard time delegating, right? Because we were forced to and they’re not forced to yet. So it’s harder for them a lot of times.

Yeah. And it’s kind of like what we was talking about earlier. I think everything happens for a reason. Even you and I crossing our path. If I didn’t have a stroke, I wouldn’t be doing this podcast. Potentially, if you didn’t have a stroke, you probably wouldn’t be doing what you’re doing, and our lives probably wouldn’t have overlapped down the road. So everything happens for a reason. And it’s kind of like I said, I feel like we’re Kendra spirits because we have so many similarities in our stories. And the return of that investment is we’re helping other people, and that’s the best thing you can do to create a legend. It’s like, how can I give people something that would help them? Because I can do it. And then I could teach someone else to do it. And again, I’m teaching them how to fish. I’m not just delivering fish to them for quote of all times.

Yes, I love it.

Well, I come to clothes, and she I definitely appreciate your time. I definitely commend you for what you’re doing. You’re definitely inspiration to people that have strokes of people that don’t have strokes. You’re just inspiration in general. And I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me on. This has been a blast. I really appreciate it.

Definitely. As a grant over and out.

S2E46 Mickie Kennedy.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Here. All right. Three, two, one. Welcome welcome back to Boston Uncaged podcast. On today’s show we’re going to have an interesting conversation. We’re going to talk about eReleases and some of you may or may not know what e releases are. But after our guest kind of defines and tell you what he does and why he does it, I think it’ll be very transparent of how effective he releases can be for you or your business. So without further Ado, Micky, the floor is yours, man. Who are you?

I’m Micky Kennedy. I’m the founder and President of eReleases. I started it a little over 22 years ago. We’re based in the Baltimore area, and I started it largely to help small businesses, startups and authors get access to the media, including the news wire distribution.

Great. So I think I’m going to deem you the eReleases boss, because obviously you’ve been in the game for 20 something years. And so just to dive into that, so people that don’t really understand what an eReleases is, why don’t you kind of tell us a little bit more about that?

Okay. So about 24 years ago, I was in charge of sending releases for a telecom company, and my job was programming a Fax machine with 100 numbers, because that’s all it could hold. And I would hit send. And it would take about a day, a day and a half to send. And then I had to delete all those numbers and start over because we had about 190 some sources to send to. And so it was like two or three days wasted. And we started getting calls with journalists saying, hey, we really like the numbers and statistics that you’re publishing, and we’d like to see if you could just email it to us as Microsoft Word because we can copy and paste a lot of that data. And so I came up with the idea of email. It would completely replace this faxing service. And it’s not a news wire. So it’s a lot cheaper to disseminate through email directly to journalist. So I spent about a year contacting journalist. And I think when I launched, I had about ten0 journalists who had subscribed and signed up for the service. And it just has grown from there. Over the years. PR Newswire reached out to us and said, We’d love to work with you. And I was able to negotiate a national distribution, custom national distribution that we do for all of our customers. That goes over PR Newswire, and they charge about $1,000 to move a Press release nationally. And we’re able to include that. And our prices are $300 to $600, so substantially cheaper.

Got you. So I think you kind of dropped some terminology there. So this is to find that a little bit for our audience. What is the news wire exactly.

Okay. So News Wire is basically an electronic dissemination of news can be articles or press releases. There’s two different types of news wires. There’s the ones that publish articles that they’ve written UPI. Associated Press, Reuters. They move those types of stories along. It’s all been written by them, and then they license it to newspapers who, rather than pay someone in house to write an article, they’ll just pull it from the AP or Reuters or something like that and pay a licensing fee, rather than having to use their own staff to write every breaking news story because there’s only so many ways to tell a national story. The press release Newswires are similar and that they’re disseminated the same way directly into newsrooms and to journalists directly. But they’re sending out just press releases. So they’re not articles. They can be similar to articles, but they’re largely just objective third person stop file announcements where you’re just trying to get the meat, the who, what, when, where and how of the news that you’re wanting to send out and putting it on a piece of paper, or, in this case, electronic dissemination that goes out to all the different journalists and things like that. So the largest new news wire or press releases is pure Newswire. And in the US, there’s two other companies. There is Business Wire, and then there’s Globe News Wire, which is sort of co branded with the Entrada brand there. So I think they’re trying to decide what the direction of what you call that it’s going to be in the future. But it’s a powerful way for relatively small amount of money to get your message to as many people as possible possible. They tag it to the appropriate industries as well as tag it to your local news. So they know that if you’re a Chicago based, it’s going to be relevant for Chicago media, even though you’re sending it out nationally, and you might be predominantly music and entertainment as your industry of target, as opposed to something else, like sports or something like that. So these get tagged, they’re available. The journalists usually look at them by headlines according to the industries that they sign up for, and they can also do some editing as well. I’m not interested in anything that mentions classical. It’s music, but not classical, so they can put exclusions and inclusions to try and capture certain stuff and make it very specific for them. But they look at the headlines. If it appeals to them, they’ll click on it and drill down and the rest of the release. So that being said, your most important part of the press release is going to be that headline, because that’s where you win them or lose them. And then the next thing is the opening sentence and paragraph. Does that get them to move along in the story and read and really feel that you’ve got something there that they want to share with their readers.

So that was a very defined detail. And I think obviously, this is why I’m calling you to release, boss, because, I mean, you know, this thing hands now you don’t have to think about it twice. You can kind of spit out these answers when I was thinking about it. So let’s just do, like, a user case analysis, right. Let’s say I’m a podcaster. I’m new to podcasting, and I hear about these e releases, these news releases. What would that transition look like? I’m coming in. I’m saying I have a podcast. Like, what’s the next steps on that journey?

So if you’re looking for us to write the release, which we can do, you would just place an order. We have a little questionnaire that we asked to sort of get people started. Sometimes people are just like, here’s my website. That’s all the information that I really want to provide. So we’ll work based on how you want to work. Some people prefer a phone call with the writer. It just depends on what works for you. If you’re really busy, you may just want to send us a link and just say, write a release based off this. And then we put a release together in about three business days. We send it over to you to review, go back and forth, depending on if it needs some more information or there was something that you weren’t happy about. And then we can schedule it for distribution as early as the following business day. So the writing and distribution, I always say allow a week. It usually takes less than that. But if you have a release that’s already written, you can send it out for as early as the next business day, as long as everything’s there that’s required. And generally the news wire requires standard stuff, like a headline, a Dateline that usually as a city and state. It’s usually where you’re located. It doesn’t necessarily confine you to only that area, because some people sometimes feel like I don’t want to put a city or state down because this is national news. And I was like, but that’s true. But even Microsoft puts Seattle or Redmond Washington on theirs, because that’s where it’s originating from. It doesn’t get discounted for that. Then you usually have a few paragraphs and you can have a boiler plate, which is an about section you see usually at the end about and usually it’s a summary of your company or organization, or in this case, they have podcast about you, and that can be recycled and used again again. In all of your press releases. You can update it as you need to to include awards or anything else is worthy putting there, and then a Press contact, and the news wire requires a phone number as a Press contact. I recommend an email address as well. But one of the things that journalists don’t like is it always happens when they’re going to print. The managing editor says, I need a clarification on this. Did you mean to word it like that, and they’re like, yeah, but I’m not sure. Let me go back and contact them. So they really like that phone number, because if there’s a Press issue, they can contact you and get that resolved really quickly and it can still go to print.

So in another segment that you just kind of as a segue to with distribution. So I’ve dealt with some press releases before, and they’ll say they will guarantee 300 distribution channels, 600 distribution channels, and including in those distribution channels. Maybe it’ll include The New York Times and other well known brands. So what does your distribution channel really look like? Like what’s the span of range and what’s included in those distribution channels.

So it really depends on your industry targeting when you set up the release of how large it’s going to be. PR Newswire has in its database over 1.7 million contacts. So no one’s going to all 1.7 million because it just wouldn’t be relevant. So if you’re picking a technology and software as categories or something along those lines, it’s going to go out nationally to tagged for those people. And so if you’re sports or if you’re tagged with something else, you’re not really going to see that it’s available for you. If you if you’re a journalist and you scroll over to a different feed and pull up a different feed. But most people are looking at feeds that are relevant for them. And so it varies in size. There’s also this thing called syndication that happens with press releases. And that’s really complicated. But the PR Newswire doesn’t like it, and it’s slowly going away. And it’s basically when you issue a Press release, it gets replicated on a bunch of websites, and some of them are well known, like Yahoo Finance and maybe Market Watch and things like that. So it looks really nice if you’re a CEO or someone. You appeared on all these little Fox outlets, ABC outlet, little TV stations and stuff like that. But no one wrote an article about you. And that’s what caused the confusion that Pierre Newswire is starting to remove that. In the early 2000s, it was like the Cold War, where each news wire was trying to get more syndicated sites than the other one. And so there was a point where you could issue a release and get 300 or more links to all of these press releases that you have on all these different websites. It doesn’t really help you from an SEO standpoint because they’re all no follow tag, and Google doesn’t hate them. But Google just says we’re going to just discount duplicate content. You don’t get a penalty for it, but it doesn’t really help you. But a lot of PR professionals don’t like it because they’re having to explain to the people that are paying their bills. This isn’t the goal of a Press release. We’re actually looking for The New York Times to write an article, so we don’t want the press release on someone’s website. We want a distinct original article to appear, and that’s the ultimate goal.

So I mean, with that, I think you definitely define the differences between the standard news releases and syndication. So in that space, right. So you guys are essentially creating content that could then be picked up by an editor or editor in chief to use sections of that to then release it as a New York Times original piece. Is that kind of a goal?

Yeah they might recycle bits and pieces of the press release, but predominantly, they write the article, and it may not necessarily be what you announced. I remember where Microsoft announced they were getting rid of bulletin boards, and they said, We’re doing this because we want to provide safety on the Internet, and we find that this is a place where children can be preyed upon. And then the article that the New York Times wrote is Microsoft is getting rid of bulletin boards because they could never properly monetize them. They say that they’re interested in child protection, but they’re doing nothing with chat and all these other new tools where they’re there’s real stuff going on that’s really putting children in jeopardy. They expose the truth behind it. The press release inspired the article, but the article doesn’t really bear exactly what the press release is. That’s a wild example, because publicly traded companies are always trying to position themselves with the best foot. But for small businesses and stuff like that, a lot of times, what you issue is sort of the framework by which it gets turned into an article.

So recommendation wise. I mean, obviously, if you have a syndication, I’ve seen some of them out there to where their subscription based syndications that give you maybe three to ten articles in syndication per month versus what you guys doing, essentially creating original content. Is there a gift in using both, or would you just recommend using one versus another?

I don’t see any real benefit from the syndication side of it. You’re not getting the SEO benefit. There’s very few end users looking at the syndicated content, even though it appears on some of these websites, it’s usually a hidden section on the website. Go try to find press releases on Yahoo Finance. It’s a varied section on there. So my take is Yahoo Finance gets a lot of traffic, but very few of them are going to see your press releases. I said, if you get an original article written about you from you say The New York Times, you’re going to get a lot of traffic because that commands a lot of eyeballs, both in print as well as on the Web. And a trade publication is another example. It may not be a lot of traffic, but you might get a few hundred really targeted industry visitors going to your website. It’s very specific, and I feel like that’s probably a lot more important because those are the people that generally turn into potential customers or partners, or sometimes suppliers and vendor relationships get started that way. And it’s also a big credibility boost rather than automatically appearing on a website, actually having a journalist craft an original article about you that says something about you. And when people see that and click through to a website from an article, they’re much more likely to buy rather than open a new window and price shop. They’re like, oh, I want to do business with this company. I read about them, and now I feel excited about what I read, and I want to give them my dollars. I don’t want to open a window and go to Amazon and try to find it cheaper. So they tend to be more loyal customers that come from original articles or earned media, which is used interchangeably. And they also happen to come back again and again because they have that warm experience from the article that big credibility boost that they get that that continues with the life of the customer. So my customers have found that the people that they get visiting their website from articles are probably the most profitable customers that they get, and they work really hard to try and do that. And again and again, and it’s hit or miss with PR. It’s not unusual to do a few press releases that result in nothing and then you get a couple that just really go really well. And it’s a learning process where you’re trying to figure out what works, what doesn’t work, and if it works, can it be replicated? And that’s where strategy is probably the most important aspect of press releases, not how it’s written or how well written it is, but what’s the press release about. And strategically, did you come up with the best possible press release for your company right now?

Got it. It makes perfect sense. So let’s just time travel back. I mean, obviously you’re knee deep in this space currently right now. But in your background, I mean, how did you get into this space? I mean, were you, like a kid running around with a notebook, taking notes, journaling things? I kind of looked at your background. You’re also a poet. Like, how did you get into this space?

Right. So I pursued a Masters of fine arts and creative writing in Northern Virginia. And I’m originally from North Carolina, and that’s where I moved up to the DC area. And I realized I am not built for waiting tables. And that’s what a lot of other poets and writers were doing. And so I found a corporate job. And I liked being an editing and writing and PR because I was using my creativity and my skills. And so that’s sort of how I transitioned into PR. And it is definitely the creative part is the most important part. And it’s the one that’s taken for granted from a lot of people. So I recently put together a mastermind class of just PR strategy for my customers just because I’m really tired of customers not getting media pickup, and they’re sending a Press release on a new hire. And they don’t realize that strategically, that’s not very important. The readers of newspapers and trade publications are only about this interested in a new hire. But if you’re writing about your take on a new trend within your industry, and maybe you’re saying something different than everybody else, that’s a little bit wider. And that gives you a much better chance of getting some media pickup. And so that’s the part of the whole press release thing that I love is taking that strategy and that creativity and trying to figure out where the holes are in your industry. And can you address it with the press release? And is that an opportunity?

So I think you brought up another really solid point. Using of a Press release based upon what you just described essentially is not to say, hey, we have a new product or a new service is to talk about a particular topic that’s essentially trending. But giving a different point of view, is that correct?

It can be one of the things I talk about with strategies is there’s lots of different approaches. And if you have a new product or service that’s like a milestone topic, it’s good. It could do really well. But for a lot of people, they’re not issuing new products and services every day. So you may only be introducing a new product or service once every two or three years. So that’s where you have to make your own news. And it might be you conducting a survey or study within your industry. It could even be of your customers, your leads, and then publishing that to your industry. As long as it’s 100 a sample of 100 people or more generally, all they’re going to cover it or be interested in it, especially if you asked a lot of intriguing questions. I always say take the questions that you feel a study should have and then add two or three oddball questions, little quirky questions. And those are the ones that generally get picked up. When I see an article written, it’s generally the headline of that surprising quirky little question that gets mentioned there. And you see it in Cosmopolitan going back decades. Where on the cover, it’s like 17% of all men do this in the bedroom. Page 58. Everybody’s stumping through what the heck is on page 58. And the same thing works across lots of different industries. It doesn’t have to be as sensational as that, but it can be really intriguing or interesting. Sometimes it could be a questionnaire and you just have an open ended question with a field that says, What’s the one weirdest thing that someone left in a car when when they traded it in and someone just list a few things, and that can result in here’s a roundup of the ten craziest things left in a used car that was sold at the dealership. And people like to read those types of things because it’s like a human interest element to it.

Yeah. I think it’s definitely interesting because, I mean, anybody that understands marketing is always the psychology of the individual reader at the end. So to your point, you’re kind of peeking into their psyche, catching their attention enough, then hit them with a solid headline, a solid by line, and then hopefully by doing those two things, you get them to read the content and then convert or get to the pitch line and then move forward to the action that you want them to do, which is essentially buy a product or buyer service or at least sign up for something. So it’s definitely interesting the way you’re doing.

Yeah. Thank you.

So in addition to that, you’ve been doing this long enough to where you probably had some really out of this world kind of crazy stories. Like what’s the most interesting or crazy story in your business that you’ve ever been presented with?

Well, we did a Press release for somebody who created a foam that you drop on a Hurricane or developing storm off the coast. And supposedly it reduces the severity of the storm. And that person got the government involved and they went down to the Gulf and they tested it. And needless to say, it didn’t do what they wanted it to do, because that was as far as it went. It said that they didn’t see any measurable decrease that they wouldn’t think would otherwise be there. But I thought that was really interesting, and he got picked up by a lot of different places. He got asked to be on Good Morning America chose not to be because he said, I need to be in the Gulf with the government for the next few weeks, so I can’t go to a taping of Good Morning America. But he did get a lot of pick up, and it was kind of quirky. I also had a customer in 2006 who created Hypoallergenic Cat, and it got picked up as Time magazines, Invention of the Year and probably over a couple of hundred publications picked it up. Discover Magazine, Newsweek, The Economist, Financial Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal. Everybody covered it. It wasn’t all favorable. A lot of it’s like, Should we be playing God? Should we be making animals in a laboratory? Have we gone too far? That being said, they did millions and millions of dollars of reservations where people were paying a deposit towards having a Hypoallergenic Cat created.

That’s definitely pretty bizarre and crazy at the same time. But I could definitely see it’s kind of one of those things negative versus positive with either one media media. So there’s going to be a fall out of some positivity by default, just the rule of numbers. So I think in that you named a couple of big names in researching you a little bit. You had an opportunity to work on Squatty Potty from Shark Tank as well, right?

Yeah. We work with probably about 30% is what I see. About 30% of the people who appear in Shark Tank use us. The producers of Shark Tank advised them to do a Press release before their episode errors. And afterwards. And they mentioned he releases by name. Usually I can’t say that on my website. I can say that here, but I did reach out to him, and I appreciate it. But they said that no. If you wanted to mention Shark Tank by name, you would be paying a lot of money to be able to do that. So that’s the unfortunate thing. But yeah, manscape Squatty potty. There’s just a long list of them who work with us. Squatty Potty does a lot of releases occasionally with us. They sort of go in cycles, and when they do, they do a lot of releases and they’ll take a little time off and come back. Landscape tends to be a little more strategic where they do at least two or three a year as well as everything else they do. They both do a lot of viral advertising and a lot of social media as well.

So with your particular service, I’m thinking that if you have clients on this magnitude and they’re reoccurring clients, that there should be a peak result after you do what you do. And is that something that you have enough case studies to back up?

Right? Yeah. We actually have a higher end program where we handle the strategy, and we developed the stuff for the customer. And everyone that enters the program gets a level of media success by usually month six and always within a year, we had a client come in that does carpet in New Jersey, local carpet company. I told them point blank. I don’t think this is going to work for. But they said we’ve got the budget and I’ve been told to do it. So they did it. And on month five, we were touching base. We had done five releases, nothing. And I just asked him. I said, Who’s your real enemy expecting it to be? Another local carpet company. And it was Home Depot and Lowes. And they said the big box home improvement stores are kicking our butt. They say they put mediocre carpet in. They put terrible padding in, and they use pickup contractors, and it’s never the same person. It’s whoever is the cheapest at the moment who just shows up at your house and installs it. And so we did a Press release about them as a local carpet company competing against the big box home improvement stores. We didn’t mention them by name, but we talked about the difficulties of that, sort of like a David and Goliath approach, and they got phenomenal pickup floor and trading publications. I didn’t know existed, came out of the woodwork and covered them. And one of them said that they got more positive feedback from readers on that article. Then they’d gotten over the past year on everything. And so it turns out that marketing was a vacuum in their industry. Nobody was really talking about marketing, and nobody was talking about marketing against these big guys and how difficult it is because they win so many of the bids. And so they got local media pickup. They got some national media pickup, and they got a lot of floor trade publication pickup, which they continue to do so. And after a while they would go into a job and say, here’s a book of all our press clippings, and they would just have the person thumb through it. And they’d say just to let you know, we’re not going to come in as the cheapest, but we use quality padding. Our people are career people that work here. The same person who puts down your flooring is going to be putting down floor, probably in five years, unlike the other guys. And we pay health insurance and retirement benefits. And we stand behind our product. And we recognized nationally. And nobody else around here can say that they used to try to come in under Home Depot and lows. They used to try to come in as the lowest, and they started winning more bids being 20% higher. And that was like a huge burst for them. And a real positive way to use those media clippings, because appearing in a floor in trade publication doesn’t help you with your customers because your customers aren’t there. But you can package that and share that with the customers the way they do. And they call it brag book, where they just sit and go through page after page of all these media mentions that they have.

It seems like that’s a whole another business like sub unit itself. I mean, you guys can essentially say, take all these clippings, all the articles that you ever been publicized in, and you can kind of create a brag book for them. It’s kind of going to be like a line add on item to kind of sell and promote as Ironically.

If we try to do that, we get in trouble with Copyright. But if the end user himself does it or we help them by pointing out where the links are and have them correct it. It sort of more falls and fair use for you to grab it for yourself. But that is something that we’ve learned over the years where we’ve been contacted by some people about clippings that we have and things like that.

So that’s weird. I mean, it comes into the copyrighting segment of it once it’s the least of the public and all you’re doing is resourcing the service. How does that Copyright infringement?

Because they believe that they control the Copyright and you should only be able to view it on their website. You shouldn’t be able to take a picture of it and share it with someone that now they don’t get the benefit of the ad they don’t get and stuff like that. So it’s not too bad in in the UK, it’s horrific. Everybody who shares Clippings and if they put them on their own website have to to pay a licensing fee to an organization that is in charge of just licensing for every media outlet. So if you got picked up in a UK publication and you put a screenshot on your website, you will just get a letter in the mail saying you now £1500. And here’s how you can license it in the future and only pay £400 a year for as long as you keep it up or something like that.

That’s definitely crazy. I mean, just going inside the legalities a little bit. I mean, like, what kind of business structure do you have? Are you an S Corp. C Corp. Llc.

And I’m an LLC, but I elected S Corp. For tax purposes. That was something that I was advised over the years to do. So I think this is predominantly like an S Corp from a tax standpoint.

So with that, I mean, obviously there’s many tentacles to just publication in general, and you’re in a particular niche publication. So what systems do you have in place to help manage your clients and manage the distribution of the channels that you’re working with?

So we use Help Scout as sort of a ticketless system working with the customers to the customers. It looks like we’re just responding through email, but on our end, it’s all through a ticket system where each editor gets assigned a customer and they’ll only see that person going back and forth. So it allows them to have an individual experience where they’re working with one person during the duration of an order. And then we send everything over electronically through PR Newswire through our special channels that we have and APIs that we have with them, and then they do their distribution. And then we also do our email sends online through a portal. And we have someone who just specializes in doing that.

Nice. So I think you alluded to this earlier and we always hear about someone being perceived to be an overnight success. Somebody may hear this episode and like, Where’s this guy been? Like, did he just pop up on the map? And it sounds highly successful, but in reality, it probably took 20 years to get there. How long did it take you to get to currently where you are?

It took me probably. Well, right now I’m on track to do 6 million a year in revenue. Last year was about 5.7 million in revenue. The first five years of my business, I didn’t make enough to live off of it. So I was working another full time job, the telecom company for a couple of years and then I had another business that I had started that was an email delivery. So he releases was part of that. But I did email delivery of email newsletters on all different types of content. I had Poma day, I had horoscopes, I had all this stuff, and then the dot com crash happened and that business was doing about 500 $1,000 a month in advertising revenue, and it went to zero. And at that point, I had e releases, which was doing about 3000 a month in revenue, and it continued. So the consumer side of the newsletters dried up completely. But e releases had some life to it. So I just focused all my energy on it for the first time. And I took almost every dollar that came in and reinvested in advertising, promoting, doing blogs just hustling. And it grew. And at a certain point, I knew I needed an employee, but I was afraid to hire an employee business go down and then I have to lay them off because it was like it didn’t seem very fair. So when I finally did hire an employee, I really should have already had hired them six months before, but I was slow to it. And then we started adding more staff as we continue to grow. It was very with most years, we only grew about anywhere from ten to 17%. There was one year that we grew like 25%, but it’s mostly been incremental and small like that. And we’re still growing at that clip about 10%, I think right now. So it comes with a headache for someone who started a business because they wanted to have some independence. You lose that as you start adding staff and employees and procedures and things like that. But it’s your creation and you’re drawn to it. And I love it. I love the excitement of it like something I’ve created has a life of its own, and it has to be managed a little bit. And I feel like I’m up to the challenge of doing it and getting in there. I love the marketing of it. That’s my real thing, the marketing of it and the strategy of trying to make my customers do better. And that’s why the PR strategy that I’ve been working on lately. I’m really excited about because I really feel like it solves a problem with my customers who don’t see positive results because they’re not really doing the strategic stuff that they need to do and analyze their market and find the real opportunities that are just sitting there.

I mean, that brings me the two additional questions. I mean, one of them, you were saying that you got to 5 million and you jumped to 6 million, and anybody that gets to the 5 million point is kind of like one of those kind of with hangers, right. You kind of get stuck at 5 million. And then once you break past the 5 million and 10 million, 20 million and so forth.

For me, it was 2 million. I got stuck at I got stuck at 2 million, and I think I went from 2 million to 1.9 to 2.3, and it just seemed like I was just treading water there for a little bit, and it took a while to get to 5 million. But I feel like things have been progressing. I definitely I felt like I was turning at 2 million, and that was really difficult. And actually, I think I was considering even selling the company then because it just seemed like I couldn’t find the answers to get me to grow out of that space. But eventually I did. And some of the things that I did was try to examine. I’m a new customer of releases. How do I convince you to do a PR campaign and not just one press release? Because at one point of my new customers only did one press release, and that was it. And we talked to them and they say, yeah, I gave it a try. You seemed like a good company, but nothing happened. And I’m just like, yeah, but that’s not a PR campaign. So we send suggestions to customers on what their next press role should be. That was one of the things that we do for all new customers. We say here are some ideas that we came up with analyzing you and your industry a little bit. And so we give them that that idea for what might be a compelling idea for a Press release and something that’s a little more strategic. And then we give them some advice on how to better write and just make ourselves available to them. And we’ve increased it before. I think around 20. Some percent of customers will use us repeatedly. And that’s what moved us out of the $2 million range. It doesn’t seem like a lot. That’s still a lot of people that are not using us more than once. But I just come to recognize that when it comes to marketing, there are a lot of people that are looking for the one hit wonders. And they’ll go and they’ll say, I’m going to learn Penter today. I’m going to give it a try for a couple of weeks, and then if it doesn’t do what I wanted it to do, I’m just going to move on to the next shiny object. And so that’s where press releases for a lot of people fail because they don’t commit to a PR campaign. They just try one single release, and it’s quite possible that they could get some real meaningful media coverage and have a meaningful outcome. But they just got to put that strategy in there and try a few different approaches.

Very, very, very interesting. So in what you just said, right, if you can travel back in time and change one thing on this journey, obviously, you had the 2 million struggle, then you got to the 5 million, and now you’re on upward climb. What’s one thing that you would change in that formula to do everything all over again?

I think trust my employees sooner. I spent four years, and I really felt like I came close to having a heart attack with hiring employees, trying to have the best employee micromanaging every phone call and saying, this isn’t how I would have handled it. And I had an HR professional in the UK who specializes in hiring, who is in a mastermind of mine. And she spent some time with me and analyzed everything. And she says, Mickey, I’ve interviewed all these people. They’re very competent, they’re very smart. And she says, but they’re afraid of you. They’re not happy here. So they’re not going to be around very long. We had a very quick turn over. Most people stayed one to two years, and she said, you need to just trust that they’re going to get the job done, and they’re not going to handle every conversation the way you would handle it as the boss. But they’re not going to handle in a way that you’re going to lose business. And so I I just got up one day and told the staff I wasn’t coming into the work anymore and that if they needed me, I would be available at home. And that was in 2015, and it was the best thing I ever did. The business just grew really strong after that. And the same staff that were there when I left are still there. And so some are going on eight years, and they’re happy and they’re able to do their job without me breathing down their neck, saying, That’s not the way to handle it. You should have used this closing statement. You should have done this, that and the other. So it’s just real people doing real experiences. And I found that, you know, I’m not surprised that I’m a bad boss because I went in business because I didn’t like being told what to do by other people. But I do feel very fortunate that I finally woke up and realized that I don’t need to be in the day to day operations of that business. I put someone in management who’s a warm mother like figure who gives encouragement and somehow finds a positive way to make corrections and get stuff on track completely different from my style. My style is to be a little bit more critical and just upfront. And so that’s the big thing I would have done is save myself a lot of grief, save my staff. A lot of grief. I think of all the people I lost over the years, the were probably great employees, and I just sort of rushed him out the door. That’s a big acknowledgement for me that as great as a businessman as I am, I wasn’t a good employer. And so that’s something I wished I had learned, because I definitely feel that you’re only as valuable as your staff because they keep the lights on. They keep things running. They save you from a lot of the headaches. They allow me to focus on marketing. They allow me to build out the master classes for strategy. They allow me the ability to focus on what I want to in my business, and they’re handling the day to day stuff.

I mean, some of the elements of what you just sounded like you was kind of describing Steve Jobs to a certain extent, right? Trying to find that balance and equilibrium between being an overhanging boss and being more of a subjective boss. So my next question is kind of like, obviously, like you said, you’re a great business person like you’re, very business savvy. You’re very well aware of your business. Did that come from an entrepreneurial background? Any family members in your history? You’re an entrepreneur?

Yeah. My grandfather was always running businesses, and he would get tired of them and move on to something else. He had a restaurant. He owned an ice house where he sold ice to grocery stores. He had a clam house where he bought and sold clams. He’d get a little bit of everything and he would do it for a few years. He’d lose interest, he’d sell it and move on to something else. He had a Marina and a motel. This was a guy who I just was enamored with because it just seemed like he was always doing cool stuff. And as soon as it got tiring, he would just move on to something else. I guess I’m a little bit different because I like the challenge of growing the business and I want to keep seeing it succeed. And I’ve had ebbs and flows over the years, one point where I considered selling the business, but for the most part, I feel energized by it, and I keep wanting to get in there and make things a little bit better and improve the bottom line and just grow.

It’s very interesting. How do you currently juggle your work life with your family life? Your work life balance?

Well, I generally try to give myself off on the weekends and make myself available for family there. And the same thing with evenings, usually at 07:00 or sooner, depending on how tiring I am, I will just take a break and go watch TV and hang out with family and stuff like that. It’s hard because I am a 60 hours a week kind of guy, so I am up and working usually from six or seven in the morning until around 07:00 at night, at least Monday through Friday. And occasionally I’ll have a project that I’ll work on on the weekend, but it’s one of those things that I have to fight and carve out time for. I’m a poet, so I still tried to write of four or five times a week. I like to meditate. I use an app called 10% Happier I tried meditation over the years. It never worked. And then I tried this one and it gives you these introductions and they walk you through it. And they basically explain, you’re never going to have that calm place in your head where you’re just going to an out for ten minutes. You’re always going to have bots that invade you. But the thing is you just have to channel back to the breath and get back on focus, and it’s like a muscle. The more you, the better you get. And so those are the types of things that I do. I need to exercise more. And that’s one of the things I keep saying I’m going to work on. But every time I get started, it’s always a back injury or knee or something like that that prevents me.

it’s funny that you broke up because just just hearing you speak and just getting to know you a little bit better. It just seems like we share the same commonality. It’s kind of like going to sleep is only something that we do because we have to do, not because we want to do it. So to kind of turn off your brain, I would think would be really difficult for you to do that at any given time in that what is your morning habits? Your morning routine look like?

So I get up and I start brushing my teeth and running a bath. I love a hot, warm bath. In the morning. I put all the soaps and good Smellies in there and then I make a cup of coffee and I take it in and I just sit in the bathtub and just then out a little bit. It’s not really meditation, but it’s pretty close to it. I just feel like I I’m settling into being awake and also in a way, just blending in with the heat. There’s just something magical that happens there. After that I get up and I usually either meditate or write, depending on how I feel. Some mornings where I’m feeling really good, I’ll meditate and then all right. And then after that, I’ll go in and check my Google ads, and then the next thing I chose, 5 hours have passed.

I was say, after you take a hot bath early in the morning, not at night. I mean, how could you even continue your day after that? Like you just don’t want to use one lounge at that point.

It’s not me. I feel like I’m ready for the day. I feel like I will wake up and I feel refreshed. But I don’t feel really relaxed. And so the bath really just anchors me for the day.

That’s definitely the person I’ve heard. It is definitely interesting thing that I’m about to try.

That being said, I am known for also taking an evening bath on occasion. So I love taking a bath or something about water that I just love nice.

So you’re into publications you’re into literature, poetry without assuming anything. I would then say that you’re a pretty average reader as well. Is that good assessment?

It is. I don’t read books as much as I should, but I do read a lot of stuff. I subscribe to the Apple News app and signed up with all the publications I want, and I follow Inc magazine and Fast Company and also stuff. I have some interest in science. So I’ll follow some science publications and things like that. I’m not really interested in current events because I kind of feel like the stuff that you read that stays with you and is timeless is not the stuff that’s generally part of current events, and people get drawn into that, and they agonize over politics and stuff like that. I just try to try to stay away from some of that got you.

So with that question on this podcast is giving the opportunity to kind of create a book club. And I’ve always asked this question. It’s kind of like, well, on your journey, there must have been some book that inspired you, and it must be some book that you may want to recommend for entrepreneurs following in your footsteps. So I’m gonna actually the same thing. I mean, what books have you read on your journey to help you get to where you are and what books would you want to recommend now that you are where you are?

Well, one of the books that everybody recommended a long time ago was Dell Carnegies How to Make Friends and Influence People. Something along those lines. I read that I really liked it and that sort of led into Napoleon Hills Think and Grow Rich. And I thought it was a little it didn’t resonate with me, but I felt like over the years I appreciated it more after the fact. Maybe it was the style of the writing, but I just didn’t connect with it. But I found myself keep going back to it over the years saying, oh, yeah, that reminds me of that. And so I do think it was a little bit more influential than I gave it credit for initially. And there’s been a lot of stories in Inc magazine, especially, I thought does a really good job of describing the startup experience. I found myself reading stories about people working out of the garage and stuff like that for me. When I started my business, I didn’t have any real money. And so I paid $120 for a domain name for two years through Network Solutions. I paid for a web host that was $6 a month, and I pay $29 to something called multi cards that would do credit card processing for you and that was it. And the rest was just me, my database of journalist and me going on to bulletin boards and talking about my products and services. And then I started advertising. Pay per click became a thing. And I think at the time, it was go to dot com or Overture and that opened a new Avenue for reaching people. But it doesn’t take a lot of money to start a business. Sometimes we’ll get a phone call from someone and they’re like, I got a small business administration loan for $25,000 to create a gift basket company. And I just gave $5,000 to a merchant company to do credit card processing. And I’m just like, you don’t have to do that. And they’re like, and I’ve got these lawyers set up to turn me into an S Corp. Or an LLC Corporation. And I’m like, you really don’t have to spend that kind of money. I didn’t bother incorporating until my business was, like, five to seven years old because I didn’t have anything before that. I was broke, and it’s like someone sues me. I’m just closing down the business and filing bankruptcy. It wasn’t much I could do. And it was only about five to seven years were in where I felt like this is something that I should start protecting myself. It’s beginning to generate some real money. And I always advise people don’t get seduced into feeling that you have to do all these crazy things to start a business. You can just sort of just go out there and put your shingle out there and get started without spending a lot of money.

Yeah, definitely. I definitely agree with that. I mean, at this point, I mean, obviously you have a lot of systems in place, right? So what software are you currently using in your company that you would not be able to do what you do without?

Well, it’s a custom program back in that we have we have our ordering system, that’s all custom program and allows our Editors to log in, pull releases all the materials together. And so it’s a custom solution. I wish something off the shelf would have worked, but we looked at some shopping cart solutions, and it just didn’t do what we needed to, because there’s some complicated stuff that has to go on. We have to do a word count when you upload a word document to determine because the news wire charges based on words and stuff like that. It’s a little complex, but it works. I mentioned before Help Scout, which is a great ticket list system. I recommend that really strongly for anybody who wants the appearance of just responding email, personalized email back and forth without having a ticket number at the top. It’s really cool to have this ticket list system, and it just everything is handled in a platform that’s scalable. So as you add additional people, you just add them to it and they become part of the process.

That definitely sounds like a very solid system, but it seems like you have a kind of duality system, like you have some custom software, and then you have some off the shelf stuff working together. So I take it. You have a lot of API integrations going on as well.

There is a bit yes.

Nice. So final words of wisdom. Let say I’m an entrepreneur and I hear this story and maybe I like writing poetry. Maybe I just want to get into some kind of form of writing. And I’m hearing what you’re saying. I want to follow in your footsteps and they say I’m 20 years old. What words of insight would you give to me to influence me to continue on this journey?

Well, I would say learn a skill and back it up with writing. I think that I’ve recommended some people in the past. Search engine optimization is an opportunity where you can learn, use your writing as well as adding some strategy behind it so that you’re helping people develop content, that it should be relevant to the search engines. And you’re looking at things like keyword density and you’re wanting to appear natural. But you’re not necessarily trying to game the system. And also there’s the opportunity for getting links on other people’s websites by providing them an article or something like that. I think that just writing as a writer, it’s really difficult to make a living because you run the risk of being a commodity. We have press release riders that we use, and we pay about 50% of what we used to pay. And the reason for that is over the years, the market has said that people are willing to write press releases for less money. And so we were constantly being introduced to writers saying, I’ll write a Press release for you for $125. And I’m just like, wow, we’re paying someone $200 to write a release, and they’re not as good of a writer as you, and it’s come down even a little bit more than that. You do run the risk of the commodity if you’re just a straight writer. So I would say, add something to it. What makes you a little bit different? You might be a funnel writer. You help write content for funnels, pick a niche and pick something that fits with your personality and be the writer in that space because I think that those are the people that people aren’t going to go for. The lowest price person. They’re going to say this person are really funny. Nominal traffic funnel content writer. And as long as it seems reasonable, you’re going to use them, you’re not going to say, Well, I’m going to try and find someone who can do it for, like, 20% to 30% less. The same thing with a really competent SEO guy. If you have a really good track record for helping improve someone’s SEO, then you’re going to get business and you’re going to continue to get business.

Nice. So I’m going to pull one of your pre generated questions. And I’m picking this question because I think my audience would get a lot of value from it. And it was number four on your question sheet about how to get regular local media coverage without spending a dime.

Right. So we get inquiries all the time saying, I have a release or I want to get a release out locally, and we always tell them as much as we love money, we don’t want to take your money. In this case, in a local media market, there’s probably less than ten people who would write about you. And I’m, including TV and radio as well. So figure out who they are. It’s probably a local newspaper might be a minor newspaper, maybe one or two business, public locations or business magazines. And then there might be a couple of radio or TV programs that occasionally interview or profile or spotlight a local business and then figure out how to reach them. And for a radio and TV, it’s a Booker or a producer. And for the journalist, it’s usually the writer themselves. And you can just call the newspaper and say, I’d like so. And so’s email address 90% of the time. They’re going to give it to you. If you feel a little shot or you don’t want to do that, there’s sites out there that you can go to. That if you have the person’s name and the organization, they’ll tell you the email address, and they’ll usually give, like, ten or 20 emails free a month or something like that for doing something like that. And like I said, once you have those ten contacts, you don’t even have to write a Press release. You can just reach out to them and just say, hey, my name is so. And so I’m with this local company. I’m doing something that I feel is really relevant to your readers because and then just share it with them. And in addition to that, if you see a trend in your industry or you follow a competitor in a different city and you see a story about something that’s a cool angle. You can then circle back to them and say, hey, I’ve been seeing a lot more activity about this subject in my industry. I thought you may want to cover it. Whether it’s you that gets covered or not, you can be valued as an asset to them, so that when you do next have a newsworthy event, they’re much more likely to cover it. And we’re talking about sending four to maybe eight emails a year to these people. So it’s not a lot of work. And I always say for local media, you’re going to do the best job because you’re a human being, and it’s easy to form a personal relationship with someone who’s local, you know, the same sports teams. You know, what’s really going on in your city, and you can actually read their stuff and say, hey, I really like that article I saw that you you did about X, Y and Z.

Nice. I think that’s definitely an elegant way of just reaching out and making it more of a person to person versus a B to B situation. Yeah, an online, obviously, you’re a big marketer and you have multiple different platforms. How can our audience find you on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and so forth? Yeah.

Just look for e releases as Twitter releases. I think if you do a search for e releases on Facebook will come up same thing with LinkedIn, our websites, releases. Com and I have that free mastermind class, the video training on PR strategy at Releases. Com plan that’s P-L-A-N and again, if you have any problems or questions or you want to talk to someone, just give us a call. We have no sales people. It’s all Editors, and they don’t get a Commission for trying to upsell you. So if they feel like press releases aren’t going to work for you, they’re completely empowered to say so. We only want to work with people that we feel we’re going to be able to do some real success with with that last statement that you made.

I mean, if you had to paint a picture of your ideal customer, what would that demographic or that individual look like?

Startups? I think that’s why so many Shark Tank people work well with us because they understand they have a really good understanding of what’s compelling and interesting. A lot of startups are generally doing something a little bit different than everybody else. That’s why they’re on Shark Tank. They’re not like the same sort of cookie cutter business. They’re doing something a little bit different and startups because they’re having to differentiate themselves. They understand how to get that across to the media. And they also understand that one press releases in a PR campaign. So they’re more committed to doing a series of releases, understanding that some are going to work and some aren’t going to work.

So you’re talking about just general PR campaign. What consistency of releases? I mean, are you talking about every 24 hours, every 72 hours every week?

No I think for small businesses, if you can afford it, try to do one release a month, and if you can afford that, it’s not in your budget. I would say, at a minimum, try to do one a quarter. And I have some people that loosely follow that the average three or four releases a year, and they do see results as a result of it. The more you get out there and the more industry trade publications see your name in a headline when they’re looking, they’re more likely to say, oh, yeah, I remember them. I saw them a few months ago, but this one looks a little more interesting. I’ll finally click through and learn a little bit more and then hopefully that could result in an article.

Nice. So going into, like, a bonus question, right. If you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why? Well, with one of those questions that you kind of like all the other questions, you just you just know the answer and this one, you just kind of have to think about it a little bit.

I would have to say, I’m going to be honest here. And it’s like I would like to spend 24 hours with my father. He died when I was young, and I have a lot of good memories, but I would love to talk to him as an adult and just have a natural conversation and talk with him. I would be curious what he thinks, how my life turned out and how things are going. And I was leaning towards a celebrity. But I was like, personally, that was who I was drawn to when you first asked.

Nice. So going into closing, I mean, on this journey, this conversation questions may have come up on your side that you may want to ask me. So I always give whoever I’m interviewing opportunity to interview me is any questions that you would like to ask?

Well, marketing, what do you feel is the future or trending right now in the marketing area, I’ve been told by a lot of people that I need to get into video and YouTube and stuff like that.

Yeah. I mean, to answer that, I think video is not new, right? It’s been around television and advertising has been around post radio, so that’s always going to be here. But it’s figuring out new alternatives to video secondary to that, something else that I’ve been looking into, and I kind of I thought it would have been a little bit further along by now, but it hasn’t really peak, because I think people haven’t learned how to really utilize it. And that’s kind of voice like talking about Amazon devices, Google Devices, Siri. And having these devices kind of market for you based upon what users are using them for. An example of that would be if I’m constantly asking Siri or Alexa to do something in particular by default. The algorithm then should present an Advertisement. Who me based upon what I do now, what I have heard on these devices lately is, hey, your printer is running low on ink. That’s kind of like the ongoing marketing. We realize through our network that your printer has been running prints for a certain period of time, and they’re low on ink and time for you to buy a replacement. But how can we take that and expanded more into what you’re doing? How could you and say, hey, here’s a general update of your reach this week or the day the last 24 hours we put this newspaper article out. This is your reach. This is your staff. This is your analytics that should be delivered verbally instantly just by talking to a device. And I’m thinking that’s the next generation we just got to get people used to talking to a device talking to an artificially intelligent individual.

Very cool.

Well, I definitely appreciate your time. I think you definitely delivered a lot of Nuggets and a lot of insight for somebody to kind of really think about, like, not necessarily the cons, but all the value add that delivery and e newsletters and giving people a definition of what you do and how it can be fruitful into your credit. I mean, you’ve been working with people with Shark Tank, so it’s definitely proof in your pudding, and I definitely commend you and thank you for coming on the show today.

You’re welcome. Thanks.

Great essay. Grant. Over and out.

S2E50 SA Grant – powered by Happy Scribe

Welcome. Welcome back to Boss on Cage podcast. So today’s show is a bonus episode. I like to do these bonus episodes. It just kind of give you guys some insight, like, behind the scenes what’s going on?

Not only with Boss on Cage, but just kind of like tips and tricks of the trade and to kind of help entrepreneurs and bosses like, you get ahead. So first and foremost, I just want to go ahead and make a quick announcement. Earlier this year, I had reached out and I would just say, okay, guys, we want to hit ten0 downloads. And it was just kind of like the dawn of the compounding effect of when you reach out to your community and you talk to individuals and you started marketing.

So I just want to kind of give you the side effect of that.

Right. So I think it was like, maybe April. I don’t remember the exact date. So maybe March, maybe April. Earlier this year, we hit that 10,000 so fast forward a couple of months.

And I think back then I was being a smart ass and I had made this comment about, yeah, next time I’ll do this, we’ll be at 50,000. So that kind of came and went, and I kind of forgot about it and just kind of moved on with the other things. So today I’ll just check, like, our download stats. And from then until now, we just hit 60,000 downloads. And I’m just kind of like, well, you get to 10,000 to me was like a major milestone to get to 20,000 was interesting.

But the fact that we’re going into the final part of 2021 and we’re scheduled to essentially, we potentially could hit 100,000 downloads before the years out is definitely a mind blowing compounding effect. So I just want you to kind of take that heel. When you start something in the beginning, you will start rolling slow, much like a snowball effect. It’ll start slow. But as it bills and bills and bills and you get more of an audience and you start communicating to your people, you start delivering more value, the compounding effect will start to happen.

And obviously, Boston Cage as a brand is demonstrating that live and direct. So today’s episode we’re going to talk about, well, not necessarily how nine effective interviewee tips on how to be a great podcast guests, not a host, but a guess. So the reason why I’m doing this, because earlier this week or last week, I did kind of like a workshop, and we were talking about this topic, and I think I spent maybe five to ten minutes on the topic to kind of go over these quick tips.

So obviously, on my podcast, I will get to dive a little bit deeper and give you a little bit more insights of why I’m asking for you to do these particular things as you become a guess, not just a guess. On Boston Cage but a guess on any podcast.

These are just the rules of the trade, but they should help you on that journey. Right. So first tip number one. Right. And I’ve titled this one like the pre show checklist.

First and foremost, I know there’s a lot of a type personalities type personalities out there, and we like to control things, and we like to have things done the way we want them to be done. But we have to be mindful there. We’re going as a guest on someone else’s show. And when you do that, you have to understand that it is not your show. It is the hosts show or the co host show.

So first and foremost, you have to follow the leadership of that host cannot take all over that show or take over their systems because again, they have tweaked it and modified the system not only to work for them, but to work for their larger audience. They’re more than just one guest for multiple different guests, and they’re fine too. And they’re making these tweaks. Right. So you want to follow the steps that are provided to you.

Some people may give you a form if a form is given to you, fill out the form, right. Because that form is going to give that host information that’s going to allow them to market you, market and promote your promotions is going to help them to talk to you about what you’re doing right now is also going to help them communicate with their audience to say, okay, this is why I have this person on the show. Not only do they have a product or a promotion, but they are great at what they’re here are some examples of what they’re doing, right.

In addition to that, social media is a big thing nowadays as well. So for me, I always ask any one of my guests that come on my show to fill out this form so I can get all their social media profiles.

So as I then start to market that particular episode, then I could link them back to the show. It’s great marketing for Boston. Cage is also a great marketing for that guest. So if you’re going to be a guest and someone is asking you for your social media profiles, you want to list them all out. Because again, podcast is nine out of ten times.

We usually have more than one social media platform. We may have Facebook, we may have Instagram, we may have YouTube, we may have LinkedIn, we may have ticktock, we may have Twitter, we may have all of them. Why not leverage that again, that’s why you’re coming on podcasts, right. So that’s number one. Remember that it’s not your show and you want to follow the leadership of that particular host.

Number two, you want to use a booking method right now, some of you may have booking methods like you may use calendar for Boss, in case we use book like a boss. But again, following the leadership of that host, what you want to do now, keep in mind if that host does not have a booking mechanism or a booking system by all means, then integrate yours into the play. But you have to be mindful that if you’re going on someone else to show that you want to use whatever booking system that they have.

Okay, so if a book like a boss, what I’ve done with that is that it automatically sends out reminders. It sends out, I think, four to five reminders over the span of the time.

So you may be able to book out six months from now. It’s going to send you a confirmation reminder. Right? The day of is going to send you a day of reminder five days before is going to send you. Hey, don’t forget, you have a podcast in five days a month out.

It may say, hey, you have a podcast episode with say, granted, Boston Cage in 30 days. Now, you may think this is overly redundant, overly done. But I’ve been doing this podcasting for a minute now, and I’ve seen that where some people, even though you send out five or ten or 20 or even three or even one email, they may not show up to the podcast, right? They may. Oh, my God, I didn’t get it.

Oh, my God, it went to my spam. Oh, my God, something came up. Life happens. But again, you want to send out reminding emails not only to yourself but also to your guests. So as a guest, you want to at least check your junk folder to make sure that there was a confirmation when you booked an appointment.

Number three is completing the preshow question question. And that’s why I was talking about the steps of filling out a form a questionnaire because you can get so much information in the questionnaire to help that host know who you are. Like, on my questionnaire, I ask for a bio, I ask for a picture, I ask for social media profiles, I ask for titles, ask for company, ask for all these general information, because again, in the early days, what I used to do is have some book an appointment to become a guest on the show.

And then I would have to kind of go back in, like maybe an hour before the show to find them on social media, find all their profiles and keep in mind, like with Instagram, it doesn’t have to be that person’s name. It could be any variation of the name.

So trying to find that personal Instagram could take 1520 minutes sometimes, then to find them on Facebook. It’s the same problem. The only platform you can usually find someone by their first name and their last name is LinkedIn. Right. But then YouTube and all these other channels, so it becomes a task.

So filling out this questionnaire makes things a lot easier and simpler, not only for you, but for the host and for marketing your particular episode. Right. Alright. So number four, read all the provided information that might be provided to you. Some hosts may provide you additional information, a different additional FAQs.

All of these things are structured again for systems being in place to make that episode way more easier for you and for the host. So that way you’re not thinking about anything. The host is not thinking about thing. The only thing you should be focusing on on that particular episode is your marketing, communicating and branding who you are in reference to the questions that are being asked from the host. So if you have an opportunity to read the information beforehand, a lot of times, the host will tell you exactly what to expect.

So on my forms, it redirects you to a welcome video with me telling you exactly what to expect, my style of questioning. But below this video, there’ll be some sample interviews. There’ll also be FAQs it’s all this information. Again, if I’m putting that information there because you’re probably not the first person to ask these questions, you’re probably not the first person to hit this hurdle. So again, any host that takes the time to create this content, then you want to kind of go through it because the more you go through it, that information is going to be way more beneficial for you.

Once you’re sitting in front of the camera and you’re being interviewed by that host, not only that, but you get to see who this person is. A lot of times you may not even have listened to their podcast. We’re going to talk about that as we move through these checklist items. But ideally you want to kind of read the communication in that communication is tell you step by step on how to do everything. And again, if they don’t have that, then you just want to follow their leadership.

And eventually they probably will have something like that. Then going into after reviewing all the provided materials, then follow up with any questions that you may have missed. So before you ask a thousand questions up front, go through the content, that’s what FAQs are for. Frequently asked questions. That’s what.

Hey, check out this video. My welcome video. Again, questions will be answered in this content and anything that’s not answered then hey, if you had ten questions, maybe eight guys answered, then you have two questions left. It makes it a lot easier for someone to kind of respond and say, hey, yeah, we do this. No, we don’t do that.

Hey, you can do this so you can do that. Whatever those questions are, become very transparent, a lot easier and simpler. Then number six and seven is just relax and get excited. Because again, if you’re going on a podcast nine out of ten times, you’re marketing something. If you’re not marketing yourself, you’re not marketing your company.

You’re not marketing your service, you’re not marketing your product. You’re probably marketing one of these things, something, something that you’re going on this podcast, you’re going on to market. So keep that in mind. You just want to relax, be yourself, be 100% natural and kick ass. Right.

So that’s the general preshow checklist. I know that sounds long, but it’s a preshow checklist. These are things that you need to have in order before you even decide to get on the show. Right. So let’s go into tip number two.

Tip number two, I think, is very, very valuable in the sense that you need to listen to at least one to two episodes. So that way you can know the style of the interview and the interviewers and what’s going on. And how does the chemistry work? Did that host get sidetracked with something? How did that host recover?

It has that host interview, someone similar to you before? How do they deal with that person? So you just want to at least listen to one or two, not just one, because one could have been a bad day. And if it was a bad episode, then you probably want to check another episode out to see if that’s the reoccurring fee. Right.

So that’s the first thing, right. Number two, is that, if possible, reference a keynote from an episode during your interview, because that’s going to show the host that not only did you do your diligence and do some research on your end, but you at least know what the show is about. The last thing you want to do is pick an episode or pick a podcast to be on. And you’re not 100% familiar with what’s talking about hard to communicating, or can you curse on that show, for example, every time I get that question at last because I’m like, hey, it’s it’s my face.

You can definitely curse on the Boston Case podcast.

I mean, I don’t really care about your language. I care more about your story. Two different things. Right. Then going into number three would be read the reviews on the podcast, much like if I go to Amazon and I want to buy something, the first thing I’m going to do is look for the SARS, right?

I’m going to look for the reviews. Same thing with cars. People do reviews for everything. So if you’re going to put your brand on a particular show and you’re going to present your product and your service to a community of individuals, then you probably want to do some research, see what kind of reviews they had. Obviously, five stars is the criminal Crim.

Four stars is great. But if you’re going on a podcast that has one star and all the reviews are saying that, hey, the host didn’t show up. The host didn’t know anything, and it’s like, all negative stuff. It’s probably not a show that you want to be on to be associated with your brand. Just keep that in mind.

All right. So let’s go into tip number three, do a little research about the host. So you do a little bit of research about the show. You watch the episode of two. Right.

But I’m not saying to stalk them. I’m saying to get to know them a little bit better, learn how to pronounce their name correctly. Right. That I can go up and down and sideways about S stands for Shanal. And how many times I’ve heard that name completely jacked up.

Hence why I branded myself essay. It just makes it so much simpler. But again, anyone that if you listen to my show, you may have some people say essay, and every once in a while you have somebody that says China, right. And they pronounce it nine out of ten times they pronounce it. Right.

Because usually someone that I’ve known for a period of time, someone that that’s known me throughout life. Right. And again, that’s appreciated to pronounce the host name correctly, much as the host needs to practice the guest name as well. Number three would be use the host name. So once you figure out how to pronounce the name, then use the name as you’re talking again, as you’re being interviewed, you want it to be like a conversation.

If I’m sitting down talking with Oprah, I’m going to be like, Oprah, let me tell you something. And I’m going to say her name, because again, that’s more of the psychological aspect of interviews is like the communication there. The bond starts to build when you talk to someone and you’re mentioning that them by first name and then follow up the show and the host on social media. So if there is a Facebook page, if there is an Instagram page for the host, click Join share like subscribe to all of them.

Right.

Why would you not? Because again, as that host then creates your particular episode and the episode goes live, it only makes sense that you have opportunity to know when it goes live. Now, some host may send you email. Some hosts may share your content on social media and then share it to you. That way, there’s different ways of doing it.

But why would you not become friends or like or subscribe to the Hostess platforms or the podcast platforms? That way, you can kind of see what’s going on. Then you could also figure out when your episode is going to be released, and then you could look to see what else is being released before your episode as well. It’s a win win situation. So just to recap that you want to learn their name, right?

You want to use their name and then you want to kind of connect to them on their platforms. Right. All right. Let’s go into number four. Better promote your product or services to better promote them.

The first thing you need to do is create an affiliate offer or a referral program. Now, some people may say I don’t have time for this, but look at it this way. If I’m going on to a podcast and that podcast that has 3000 or 10,000 or million downloads per month, it would probably be very valuable for that host to not only market your service, but to then market your service and get kicked back. And then they can keep on marketing your service for a period of time.

Right.

That’s one of my questionnaire that I ask everyone that’s on my show. Hey, do you have any affiliate offers? Because again, you’re putting out that content out there. You’re leveraging your community. And as a guest, you want to utilize that community that it only makes sense that you share in some of the profits.

This is more of like a pro tip behind the scenes. But as a guest, you want to have that value add for any host that’s looking to interview you as well. Right. Number two, you want to create a call of action to the listeners. All right.

So if you’re promoting a particular product, and again, this goes back to the questionnaire. This goes back to the FAQs. You want to make sure you have an opportunity to promote whatever product or service that you’re going to promote on that particular podcast. So part of that is that you want to make sure that you have a very clear call of action. You want to tell them exactly where to go, what to do, and what will they get?

That’s the three things. It’s like a lot of times you may hear a podcast in La. Yeah. They could just search for my name and find me anywhere. No.

Because again, that leaves room for mistakes. That leaves room for this spelling of your name. That leaves room for them to add Lib. You want to have a distinct URL and a good way of making URLs would be a URL that has the podcast name in it. Right.

So, for example, if I was on another podcast and let’s say that podcast was like Boss in Prod, whatever it was, then I would probably make a look link that says Boston Cage. Com Boss Enterprise. So that way, the people that are listening to that particular episode, as I’m a guest on it, then they understand it. Okay. It’s Boston Cage. That’s what we’re talking to you right now. And we’re on Boss Enterprise, right. It’s easy for them. Now. They can put the parts together and just type it in completely. mAnd then you can give that link to that host for that episode to put in the show notes as well. And if you’re doing anything on the technical side, you want to track that URL to see how much traffic is coming from that episode, how many conversions have happened from you being on that particular podcast and the more podcasts you’re on, then you can stack them up and see, you know what here’s 20 podcasts have been on, but these particular two, I’ve gotten conversions, I’ve gotten leads, I’ve gotten callbacks, I’ve gotten emails on these particular two.

Then you may want to contact that host and be like, hey, I would love to come back on your show right again. It’s all in the data. Alright, so let’s go down to number five is a one sheet of requirement. I would say to be honest with you, no, but you should have a bio. Okay. One of the questions that I ask all my guesses. Your bio. I don’t care if the bio is 115 words or 1500 words.

I just need a bio again so I could do my due diligence to know who I’m working with, who I’m going to be interviewing. And then I can take tips and bits of that and create part of my show notes as well. So that’s the opportunity for you to kind of lay out your best foot forward. So you don’t necessarily need a one sheet. But if you don’t have one, then at the bare minimum, you have to have a bio.

Right? And in that bio, a strategy behind that bio was that you want to tell a story you don’t want to sell like you’re not selling yourself. You’re telling your story like I did this and this happened to me and I overcame that. And then that made me jump forward and hot. And I had the awakening moment. You want to talk to the community of people that you’re gonna be talking to because you’re not gonna be able to necessarily see them live and communicate your pros and cons and what you’ve over came because for them they may be listening to you as inspiration. Then you want to inspire them by telling them your story, from how you not necessarily going from rags to riches, but how you went from hitting hurdles to overcoming those hurdles and to where you are right now, how did you get to where you are? That’s part of telling your story through a bio. In addition to that, you want to make sure it’s in the digital format, right? This is not old school.

We’re not faxing emails are cool as well. But again, if I’m submitting a form, you should be able to go to a copy and paste it in that form. Hit submit done. If you don’t have access that quickly, maybe a link. So there’s Google drive, there’s landing pages, there’s PDFs.

You want to make this content and the PDF kind of refers back to a one sheet. Right. So you want to make this content as easy and simple as possible at that way, somebody asks for it, then you can reach for it really quickly and submit it in a form or through social media, through link in messenger or through an email. Whatever it is, you usually want to have access to this file to make it easy to deliver. Right.

So tip number six, half professional headshot ready to go now, this one is like a must, right? You could have the best bio. You could have the best product, the best story, and then people see, and then it’s kind of like, right. You kind of go from high to low really quick. So obviously, on the podcast, you can dress to impress, or you can kind of just be yourself. Whoever you are is what you want to be. But at least with your pictures, you want to have clarity. You don’t want to have pixelated pictures. You don’t want to have blurry pictures. You want to be as Crystal clear with those pictures.

So first and foremost, you want to have a professional headshot. Tip of the trade is go outside high noon. Use your cell phone and do a selfie. The natural light will probably work wonders, and the picture will be Crystal clear. Just think of it from that standpoint. The more light that you have without blowing out the image is the cleaner the image is going to be. Right. So think about that. If you don’t want to spend the money for professional, then at least take your pictures outside versus inside. Then in addition to that, you want to make sure these pictures are much like your bio. They’re easily accessible. So whether that’s Google Drive Dropbox, I use Brand Doc. So Brand Doc is a program that allows me to upload multiple different images, logos, colors, everything. It’s kind of like a brand guide, an online brand guide toolbox. So I could submit the link.

And then when somebody gets the link, as I’m becoming a guest on the show, they have access to ten to 15 different images of me with transparency backgrounds with different headshots, so forth and so forth. And that leads me to number two. You want to have multiple versions, because again, you may not know how that image may be used. Some podcasters they create blog post, and in that block post, they may put multiple images of you, right. Some people may just create it, use it for the cover art for an album. And that album is for the podcast. Some of them may need transparency background for that. So for Boston Cage, you’ll always know when I do an interview episode there’s say ground on the left, and it’s whoever I’m interviewing on the right. Well, all the images on the right, nine or ten, I say probably eight out of ten of them don’t have transparency. So that’s part of my system that we have in place.

It will go in delete the background, clean up the edges to put that image in the cover art. But imagine that every single person that would submit an image already had the background remove it cuts down on time. Right. And then part of that is that you want to have a headshot. You want to have a full body shot.

You want to have a three quarter shot, you want to have a white background and without background, you just want to have a few options. You don’t have to have 100 images. Maybe three to five images would do what you needed to do really going into number seven. Right. And this one is going to be a longer version because I’m really going to break down some things for you guys. So number seven, the ultimate podcast, Showtime, checklist. Right. First and foremost, show up early to your interview. It’s not like you’re getting interviewed for a job. But again, if any questions that you may have that you have not had answered before or you have not had any additional communications because a lot of times Pas are communicating with PA, VA may talk to a PA and the VA may talk to another PA, and they may never even talked to the host.

They may never even talk to the guests. So this may be the first time that you, as a guess is that actually in front of the host and having one on one communication. Again, schedule time. You may have a time set from 10:00 to 1030 or from 10:00 to 11:00 to record the episode. You should show up about ten minutes earlier.

Right. And the reason why I’m saying five to ten minutes early because a lot of times the podcasters are doing sound checks, they’re checking out their systems, they’re restarting the computer is checking out their cameras, checking out all the different applications, checking out their soundboard, they’re video switcher all these different things is pretty much the production. Right. So if you show up early and the podcaster is there, then you have opportunity to not only see the podcaster live, communicate, acts in the additional questions, start to build a little family enterprise situation to where you can kind of communicate with somebody off air before you’re on air.

Alright. Number two, hydrate drinking fluids, more so water drinking water would definitely help your vocal course, because again, you may be talking for 30 minutes, 45 minutes. If you’re on Joe Rogan, you may be talking for hours. So the more water you have access to, the better you’re going to be able to manifest what you’re talking about without getting dry out. Number three, use the bathroom before your interview, because again, the worst thing that you want to happen while you’re on air is having to go to the bathroom.

Right.

And I’ll be Frank where this number one or number two, either one of them will make you highly twitchy in front of that host. You’ll be moving around like I move around a lot because I’m an animated speaker. But again, if I’m seeing somebody that’s like this and I see them rocking and they’re holding and they’re doing this and I’m just like, man, I will surely wish the would have went to the bathroom before they got on the show, because again, now the host is probably going to start to read your body language and try to speed up. And an interview is not going to be as good as it could have been. Test your video, right?

If you’re doing a video podcast like Boston Cage, definitely want to test the video out before you get on it, right? You want to test your microphone, even though you just did an interview the day before 3 hours before you still have to do another check another test right then and there. Because again, these are computers. Anything can go wrong. So like, literally.

I think last week I had an instant to where I had four, three episodes back to back on one day. And between every single episode, I’ve always done a sound test and restarted and come to find out, by the time I I got to my third interview, my laptop started overheating and I’m sitting here like, what the Hell’s going on? And I’m checking all these different things, but every time I would launch Zoom, it would freeze up. I mind you, I did two interviews perfectly fine. But it got to the point to where my laptop was overheating all the content information that I’m pushing through it all at once. And I would just like, Jesus, what’s going on? So I come to find out that I had to get a cooling pad to keep my laptop cool on days like today. For example, I’m doing two or three different episodes, right? So you have to understand your computer and your hardware may were perfectly fine on and the next day won’t. So you want to kind of test things out.

You want to turn your phone this bad boy right here on airplane mode, that’s self explanatory. But sometimes you may forget you want to close the door to the room that you’re going to be doing the podcast in. Because again, even when the door being opened, the sound could resonate from other parts of the house and bleed into the room that you’re in. In addition to that, you want a place to do not disturb sign on the door. You want to let people know that.

Okay, well, you’re in an interview. You’re doing something that the noise needs to be pretty quiet because again, you’re on a microphone and pretty much anything that happens outside of the room could essentially be picked up on the microphone, which makes the job for the host or the host team for editing that particular episode a little bit or technical a little more difficult, and it could delay your episode as well. In addition to that, you want to get all your pets out the room. And, you know, I’ve been on episodes before where pets are part of people’s lives and whether you love them or you hate them, it doesn’t really matter. Again.

If you’re going to be interviewed on a podcast, you just want to be mindful that sometimes the frequency of animals without shine the frequency of your vocals. Right? Like a cat. For example, a cat could be two rooms over if the doors are open and the cat is going off and talking to itself and it’s making all these different noises, that noise would resonate way louder on a microphone. Then your voice would or it’ll compete with your voice and the microphone would definitely pick it up. So you just want to be mindful of that. And I know this is going to sound funny, but I always say give the cats and the dog some catnip or some animal marijuana to kind of have them just smooth and just chill out while you’re on episode. Because again, the last thing you want to happen is kind of like a cat scratches on your door or comes in the room and you’re trying to shoot them away while you’re live on a camera or doing like a Facebook live or doing a YouTube live with a particular host.

Right. It’s the same thing for your kids.

I’m not saying to give you kids marijuana, but I’m saying if you have another adult in the house, you probably want to let them know that, hey, I’m going to do an interview for an hour. Do you mind watching the kids for me? Do you mind holding the kids back and let the kids know for the next hour? I’m off limits. Alright. Number 13 is as the host if you can also record the episode. So this is like a little secret tip. Right. So if you’re using Zoom, I can record Zoom as the host. But you as the guests could also record as well.

And the reason why I’m bringing this to your attention and making this a checklist item is, well, think about it if you’re on the Boston Cage podcast and I’m saying, okay, guys, we would not be able to air the show until third quarter of 2022, and we’re going into the last quarter of 2021. So essentially roughly nine months to a year from now is when your episode is going to air, there’s opportunities for you to kind of make some things happen to make this episode are life faster, or you could just act to record the Zoom on your end, and then you could release the episode as part of your YouTube channel.

You could release the episode as part of your blog or on your particular podcast. Again, this is just content, right? So when the host releases your episode later on the year and just do a marketing, you release the six months before the whole release six months later.

The content, hopefully is evergreen content. And again, if you’re marketing a product now, that product should still have value six months from now, it doesn’t really matter. The only difference is that comes out to price. And that’s why you want to talk evergreen. You don’t want to necessarily disclose pricing on an episode, especially when you’re thinking about changing the price down the road. You just want to tell them to go to this particular address, like I said earlier, to give them the information where to go, what to do and what they’re going to get. But leave out the details about this offer expires in May 15, 2020. That episode is void at this point. Right? So keep that in mind again. And I just did the next one that I’m going to tell you guys not to do. I have to say you want to replace these particular words with let’s move on to another important conversation. Is it’s one of those things, right, everyone, that’s been on a podcast. Usually I’ve heard at least one or two from pretty much everyone I’ve interviewed. But as the conversation starts to flow and you start to build the communication between the interviewee and interviewer, the s become a lot less.

So keep that in mind. This is one of the things that you just want to keep mindful of. And sometimes some people, they use them for everything. And some people are very mindful of the us. So you just want to be mindful of it generally to not utilize them as much as you may do on a regular basis.

1516 and 17. Right. So I’ll start backwards. Right. So 17 be confident. 16 be passionate and 15 relaxed. Look at this as a communication between you and a new friend. This is not necessarily an enemy. This is someone that’s going to help you market your new product or your new service. So just like your friends communicate with them like that, have a general conversation.

Be relaxed. Be passionate about your content that you’re delivering. And believe it or not, that host is going to be able to feel the energy from you and they’re going to give it back to you as well. Okay. It’s like being in front of a mirror. You just want to bounce it back and forth. I said 17 was less one. Actually, we got two more. Right. Show excitement and smile with your teeth.

Right. This is funny because I just had an episode. We’re talking about fake smiles versus real smiles and talking to my wife about this guy that lives in our neighborhood. And every time we drive by, no matter what time of day, whatever is going on, he always just goes from like this to, hey, Cheese is really hard, like on command, like hits the switch and it’s kind of creepy, but it’s cool at the same time. So again, I’m not going to say go in front of a mirror and practice your smiles because you know that that sounds kind of crazy.

But the more you kind of get into smiling and showing your teeth a little bit is the more inviting you’re going to be on the other side, especially on the other side of the camera. So just keep that in mind and you want to be excited. I mean, again, you’re having an opportunity to sell and market your product and your service on an environment that may talk to thousands, tens of thousands, no, hundreds of thousands of people. As long as that episode is going to be live because it’s going to be a searchable content that will be on the Internet essentially forever. So always keep that in mind.

Smile, showcase. Be excited. Number eight, keep your answers concise. Now, this is a big one for me, right? Because if I have a particular outline script of communication and I’m going to pull out things from my guest and I wanted to go through the roller coaster.

I want to remember when they were a kid. I want them to remember when they made their 1st 10,000 or the first $100 or the first million dollars. These all questions are like Legos. They’re going to stack up and they’re going to build up until you essentially you climax into the end of the episode. Again, we’re telling a story. So if we have a 45 minutes room to tell this story and I’ve only asked one question and that one question that took 20 minutes to answer is not doing you as to guess any justice, because again, you have no clue if you didn’t do the research to realize that this particular host may have other questions or will communicate other factors of your life that you may not even be thinking about. So you have to let them do that. Short answers, precise answers, detailed, but quick and to the point, not extremely long.

Winded is the way you want to go about answering these questions. Right.

And then number two is a podcast. Interview should be a conversation. Right? So if you’re talking to someone and you’re the only one talking right. Like right now, this episode, I’m a Bobblehead. I’m talking talking, talking, talking doctor. That’s why I like to interview format because communication two people. But I like to do the episode because again, I’m informing you. But again, if you’re on a talk show, it’s a talk show. So there need to be two people communicating back and forth.

Imagine me sitting on Oprah’s couch over, ask me a question, and then I answer that one question and then the end credits come up. Well, Oprah and everything. You can get to know who I was. She really didn’t get to communicate and pull out my story. So keep that in mind.

And you want to do some research about that, go onto YouTube and just search episodes of TV talk shows, search episodes of Oprah Late Night With David Letterman, Howard Stern, and kind of see how the banter goes, kind of see how Howard Stern kind of says something smart and witty. And then his guests will interact and say something back. And then somebody else in the background will make like a smart remark and how it will interject, like two or three word comment, and then the guests would respond.

But again, it’s moving around. Right. And if you look at his live stuff, right? His videos versus his audio, the cameras jump between the different facets of the different conversation, which makes it more exciting. All right. So going to number nine after the show follow up checklist. Right.

And keep in mind, I know all these laundries and stuff. And then the show notes in this particular video and on the podcast, all this will be listed out for you guys, so you can literally go through them and checking again. I’m not saying you need to do all of them. I’m just advising you that if you were to maximize and utilize as much as these as humanly possible, you would get a greater outcome of being a guest on a podcast. So number nine after the show follow up checklist.

Right. First and foremost, you you want to send a thank you note or testimonial whether it’s written, whether it’s audio or whether it’s video, because again, much like selling books, much like selling any product, a podcast is the same thing. If you have done a written review of the podcast, then post it on Apple podcast, right. If you’ve done an audio review, then send that via LinkedIn or email back to the host to say, hey, I love your episode. Thanks.

It was special in this way. I really appreciate what you’ve done. I’m looking forward to it going live, right. Or you can create a video testimony and say, hey, look, dude, your episode was crazy. I love being on your podcast.You gave me so much insight, and I feel like I’ve given so much back to your audience. I can’t wait to be on your show again. I’m just a living here. But again, communication is King. Right?So if you send a thank you note or testimonial to a host without a host asking you for it, trust me, that host will then reciprocate some information, whether it’s thank you for communicating to me. I can’t wait to get your information on my website. I can’t wait to put this testimonial on your show notes page, whatever it is, but it gives you more credibility, and it gives you more being a realistic person. That podcast is not just another number, the number two you want to recommend guests.

Right.

So for me, if I want to show, I always look to see if that person that interview me. Ask me the question at the end of her. Is there anyone else that you know that you could recommend or refer to my particular show that you think will be a good fit? That’s something that acts on my show as well. Because if I have a really good interview with someone you know, like minds tend to hang together. So if I had a really good interview with Bobby with Bobby may know Sarah and Sarah, maybe in like minded individual in a completely different field. And I maybe have not interviewed anyone like that yet. If you don’t ask, then you won’t know close out would not get that. And then number three is share and promote your episode. So finding out the link, finding out the cover art, getting all that information.

Again, sometimes it’s automated. You may automatically get an email from that host, or you may have to go to the host website once it’s aired or go to the social media platforms, whatever it is. But once you get access to your content about your episode and your show art, then you want to share that information. You want to kind of move it through the internet. Then after that is then you want to kind of as I’ve given you a referral.

I’ve given you testimonials, and I’m not saying it is a ta. But then wouldn’t you ask for, like, a referral? Are there any other podcast that you would recommend that I should be on right to a street? Number five would be book a virtual coffee. You want to stay connected, because again, if you had a really good interview with that person and that conversation was well done, then potentially, you could probably build a friendship, business, relationship, business partnerships, whatever it is. So you want to continuously communicate with them not every single day, per se, but communicate with them past the show. A good example of that is like me and Damon Burton. I interviewed him earlier this year. We communicated. I went to his 40 birthday party, but we communicate on a regular basis behind the scenes, we crack jokes on Facebook, send instant messages, and we just talk and communicate about different things. If I get a referral, I’ll send them a referral. If he gets to leave something that sends me a lead, begin. We’re communicating. We know we’re busy people, but there’s some commonalities and some brotherhoods in that conversation that we had earlier this year that has built into a relationship today. So going into number ten, right.

So number ten is like the bonus. I know I said nine plus, but number ten is like the bonus. We’re to find podcast, right? Podcasting is one of those things. You can go to Google, and you could type in podcast, right. You can go to Apple and you can type in particular shows. But right now, the best platforms are platforms that are pulling all the podcasts in, and they’re using algorithms to say, hey, you’re a good guess for this show. And again, you’re going to fill out information to say why you’re a good guess and what shows you’re looking for. So the first one on my list, again, maybe of the people that I interview today have come from matchmaker. Com.

I filled out my guest profile, I filled out my host profile, and then I let the algorithm go. They send out emails every single day to new people to say, hey, you know what? I think you’d be a good guess for Boston Gauge podcast. And here’s why here’s the show information. And then I get an email about here’s their information, and then they decide to communicate with me. It all goes through that one app, so it allows me to say, okay, look here’s John, here’s his background, his one sheet or his bio. Here’s what he’s achieved, what he has done. Great. I can’t wait to have them on the show. Connect, right.

Pod matches another version of that. Gusto is another version of that as well. And it’s like, paid and free. There’s also interview Ballet, which is 100 paid. And then the Facebook groups. You can easily go to Facebook groups and think about hosting if I’m hosting a podcast on like, Be Cast, for example, or Anchor FM. Well, all of these platforms have Facebook groups, and these Facebook groups tend to be driven towards podcasters. So if I’m a guest and I want to be on a podcast, I would probably go to these Facebook groups and raise my hand, hey, guys, I’m new to the room. I’m looking to be on a podcast. I’m looking for business podcast.

I want to talk about success, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anybody interested? It’s as easy as that. So again, more you speak up, the more opportunities you would have. So hopefully, I know this was a lot of information and kind of streamlined it to a certain extent, but generally, I’m just going to do a quick overview.

Number one is a preshow checklist on that one. I’m really just talking about let the show host be the show host and you kind of follow their lead. Tip number two, you want to at least listen to one or two of their episodes. Tip number three do a little research about the host. It tip number four better promote your product or services.

And again, that’s mainly towards your call of action. Tip number five, you could do a one sheet or a bio. Tip number six have professional headshot ready to go and make sure that they’re digitally ready to go. Tip number seven, the ultimate podcast show time checklist. And I think that the key takeaway from that one is hydrate.

Make sure you’re in a quiet room, make sure that your kids and your animals are out the way and be passionate. Number eight, keep your answers concise short. And to the point, you don’t want 30 minutes answers for every single question. It’ll make the show long and drawn out. Right.

Number nine, after the show follow up, send a link, send a testimonial, send a review, send a video review, stay in communication, book a virtual coffee. Last, but not least is number ten is where to find a podcast. And we talked about, I think, on this particular list. I mean, there’s a million opportunities, but I would say Matchmaker FM would be a really good platform for any beginning person that wants to become a guest, to get on and start utilizing those systems. And it’ll compound much like anything else.

The longer you do it, the better you get at it and the better it will work for you, say grant over and out.

S2E51 Rich Perry.m4a – powered by Happy Scribe

Alright. Three, two, one. Welcome welcome back to Boss Uncaged podcast. On Today’s show, I have a fellow. How should I say it soon to be a recipient of a World record holder maybe? That’s what we’re working on right here. So I had an opportunity to meet Rich at Podfest Global, and we’re actually working on our stuff right now. He gave his speech last week. My speech is this week. So, I mean, we kind of gotten to know each other over the past month or so. So without further Ado, Rich man tell our audience a little bit more about yourself.

Hey, brother, what’s going on? Thank you so much for inviting me on the podcast. We got a chance to connect to the podfest fan page on Facebook. And then we did the club house thing together. Like, you know, I’m a coach. I’m an author, speaker, podcaster live streamer and just do what I can to make a difference out in the world, you know?

Yeah. Definitely. I mean, it’s funny that you said it. He’s being modest. Like, if you guys think I post a lot, this guy, I post three times more time than I do per day. Right. I post about 100. He posts about 300. So if you could define yourself in three to five words, what three to five words would you choose for yourself?

I would go with my motto, my personal motto, which is lead by example through excellence. It’s what I try and do with everything in life. Lead by example through excellence.

Nice. Nice. So let’s dive into that. I mean, like you were saying, I mean, you’re multiple different things. So, like, what is your business? I mean, kind of just defining it because obviously there’s marketers, there’s coaches and you’re kind of a combination of both things, I would think.

Yeah. So I’m a communication strategist. So I do a lot of coaching, a lot of training, helping entrepreneurs and coaches and people with a message, helping them to craft that message and deliver it to their audience. Whether we’re talking blogging, Vlogging podcasting or just getting out in front of that audience in real life and just sharing that message and connecting with the people that need to hear it.

So I mean, I would think that because I’m in a parallel space and for me, it’s very fulfilling. Is it very fulfilling for you to be in that space to help other entrepreneurs move forward and their progress?

Absolutely. I mean, I love empowering people. I love helping people to find it within themselves and sharing their gifts with the world. So it’s a great opportunity to give them the tools they need to get that message out there and be heard.

So, Just travel a little bit, just go to a parallel universe, maybe go back 2015 years. Like, how did you get on this journey? When did it start?

And I’ve said this multiple times. I’ve always been someone who was helping other people you know what I’m saying? I mean, professionally speaking, I would say it was within the last ten years or so. But if I really give an honest answer, I’ve always been helping people. I was a Boy Scout, I’m an Eagle Scout, and always being out in the community, doing good deeds, helping other people. And I think it just grew. It’s doing little stuff when you’re a little kid. It’s doing bigger stuff when you’re a teenager. It’s doing more community stuff when you’re in College and you’re like, oh, crap. Like, I can do this in real life, you know, as I look at it like just building, building, building and just doing bigger things as I get older.

Nice. So I mean Where you from Originally?

I was born in New York City, but I grew up in the Poconos, which is 2 hours away from New York City. It’s a lot of Woods and stuff like that. Pennsylvania, you know, grew up in the Woods, but, you know, just that’s that man. Yeah.

It’s funny that you brought that up. I always say it’s like a New York chemistry because I grew up in Brooklyn, and in school years, we usually have trips to the Pocono Mountains all the time. So it’s kind of funny. This is the first time I even realize you from New York. So the commonalities are already there. It’s kind of like the magnetic New York polarities that happened. Right. So in your business, right. So you kind of were saying you were Boy Scout, you kind of always been kind of being able to help people. But when in your career did that helping people turn into going more into digital content, digital space, digital marketing aspect.

So I went to school for psychology. So right out of College, I was doing marketing. But then I also was a therapist. And and I’ll be honest, it was after an emotional breakdown because it was one of those moments where I’m like, what and I’m not going to say it on the interview. But I had that emotional breakdown. Like, what am I doing with my life and then a friend of mine? Actually, she and I spoke, and she recommended that I go through these personal development training and just doing a lot of soul searching and bettering myself. So that was when I kind of transitioned into where I am now.

That’s a pretty interesting. Well, it makes sense. I mean, jumping from more of the psyche side to marketing and marketing is based upon psyche. So, I mean, you were building up the Dominos right in this journey to currently where you are right there’s always pros and it’s always cons. And everybody always has their great stories of successes, but in the failures or in the worst case scenarios. So in your case, what’s the worst thing that’s happened to you on this journey?

The worst thing battling those inner demons, man, battling those inner demons of self doubts and here’s something else is that the area that I grew up in in northeastern Pennsylvania in 2014. It was actually there was a University study that named it as the unhappiest region in America. And that was done by two major universities. It was the unhappiest region in America. So dealing with the people that I dealt with, growing up of a lot of limiting beliefs and you can’t do this. You come from a small town. You know what I’m saying? Like, that was breaking out of those breaking the mold and just breaking through those barriers. That was tough.

That’s pretty interesting. So you don’t with, like, a region of the world that was pretty highly. I would correct me wrong and depressed to a certain extent.

Yeah. I mean, when I read that study, I couldn’t believe it. But I was like, no, you know what? I definitely believe that because I remember the people that I grew up with. Yeah. 2014. There you go.

So I guess part of that, how did you break out of it that you see the statement about being a product of your environment, nature versus nurture or you’re a byproduct of your inner circle. But essentially, you’re saying that you were surrounded in the depressional state of region, right. And you always wanted to help somebody. So it’s kind of that sounds like a push and pull. You’re kind of fighting yourself. You’re dealing with depression on one side, but you’re dealing with help, you on the other side. How did that chemistry kind of evolved to where you are?

So, like, for me, it was a lot of soul searching and also, like, I need to remove all the toxicity in my life. And if I was hanging out with these people over here doing these activities over here, I was like, well, you know, I can’t have the example I give is I was putting all this clean water. I was like, purifying the inside, but I was surrounding myself in a dirty glass. You know what I’m saying? Like with these social circles, and you can have all that good water, that Crystal clear water. If it’s in a yucky glass, then what do you have? So I just had to remove myself from those social situations. I’m not going to do these activities anymore. I’m not going to hang out with these people anymore. But these people over here, this is a good positive influence. And these activities over here, good, positive influence. I’m going to spend my time over here, not over here. I broke some hearts and lost some friends and things like that. But that’s what I encourage people to do. Like, hey, what is it about you? And if that’s something you want, if you want to live bigger, you may need to leave those situations. You may need to walk away from those relationships.

solid insight. So getting back into your, like, your business is your business. I mean, you have multiple levels to your business. You have coaching, which essentially is one spectrum, and you probably have additional services. You probably have workshops and all this other stuff. Like, how is your business structured? Is it an LLC? An S Corp. C Corp.

So I have an LLC with the guy that I wrote the book with. I don’t know if you can see it. It’s right there. So we have an LLC together, and then with my solo stuff, it’s a sole proprietorship got you.

So obviously in writing books, I think both of us, we’ve written books. We’re both authors, and we’re both in that space. And I’m finally diving into the space where I’m co authoring one of my books with my wife. So understanding that you co authored the book before, right? Was that a difficult task, kind of taking two separate minds and combining them into one system?

It was an experience, but it was an enriching experience. Okay. So Lawrence Pip and the guy that I wrote the book with like, we have different backgrounds, but we really mesh well together when we’re speaking, when we’re doing seminars together, like, we have that kind of relationship where a lot of times we will finish each other sentences, like, we’re just thinking on the same wavelength when it came to writing. That was its own process. But once we really got into the flow of it, it was a lot easier. And there’s a lot of times and we’ve heard this before from people that have read the book and that know us personally that they couldn’t differentiate who was actually speaking. And that’s the way we wanted to write the book. We wanted to have one voice. Now the only time that you know who the actual author is. Like, who’s speaking is if it’s a personal story, which we did put personal stories in the book, and we would always at the bottom, we would scribe it with either an RP or an LP. So you knew, hey, this is rich as personal story, but for the rest of the book, when it’s actual of content, we wanted one voice, and we managed to do that. I wrote my stuff. He wrote his and then we swapped back and forth, and then I would to his and he would add to mine. So a lot of it just got fused together, which we found to be very beneficial.

Yeah. That’s a solid strategy of swapping the stories and then letting the other author read it and then add on. And it’s kind of like artists, right. If you kind of think about going back into the 70s and you have Basquiat and Basquiat Wild paint something, and then you would have Andy Wall all coming and they would mix and match until they came up with the masterpiece together. So I think that’s definitely a solid philosophy. So on your journey. I mean, obviously you’ve been on this journey for a period of time. You’ve done a lot of different things on this path. We always receive that someone’s successes overnight thing that somebody may hear you talk today and then maybe the first time they earn you. And they were like, Where did this guy pop up from? He’s like an overnight success. But in reality, it probably took 20 years. How long have you been on your journey?

Honestly, I would say since I was a kid, man, I say that I got my start in College doing promotions and marketing and working for my College radio station. And it was like one thing that led to another that led to this job opportunity that led to this thing. So I would definitely say, like College getting my feet wet in marketing and working for the College radio station, putting myself out there and meeting people, learning how to host events, which then it went from music events and cultural events to personal development seminars. But it’s all the same thing. You know what I’m saying?

Yeah. That’s pretty cool. Looking at this general journey that maybe took 20 years to 15 years. If you could time travel back and change one thing, what would it be and why?

I would definitely teach myself better money management skills, better money habits, especially in the high school College years. I mean, we were going out all the time just wasting money. And I built a habit of that. And then when I got older, it was like that. I wish I learned that skill when I was younger.

Nice. So you got a pretty savvy entrepreneurial mindset. Does that come from anyone, a predecessor in your family that had a business growing up? Like, where is your entrepreneur hustle coming from?

Being an early musician and promoter and learning? Hey, if we don’t get the the fans in here to hear this musician, we’re paying out of our own pockets. But, no, I don’t have any business owners in the family.

Okay, so now that you’re obviously older, you’re a little bit more successful. Like, how do you currently juggle your work life with your family life?

So I’m single. I don’t have a wife or significant other. I don’t have kids or anything like that. So it is a little bit easier for me not to say that’s not something that I don’t want. You know what I’m saying? It just hasn’t happened yet. So the juggling is pretty much just what is rich you want to do today and what’s going to make Richie happy and successful and accomplishing things that he wants? I don’t have to check in with anybody. I don’t have to put kids to bed or anything like that. There’s not that aspect of juggling yet.

That’s pretty interesting, because for me, obviously, I’m married and have kids. So my sense of definition of purpose is one part to help somebody. But the other part also to create a legacy. So being that you come from the single side of things. You have one aspect of helping people. Do you have any additional purposes in addition to that?

Yeah i mean. I certainly want to leave a legacy. And I would love to have a family. And I do a lot of community service. I’m active in different groups within a community. So that’s certainly outside of coat I’m talking about. So that keeps me out and doing things and fulfilling my sense of really making a difference at different levels within the community professionally.

So, yeah, it seems like, I think because you’re an Eagle Scout, I was assistant Dean leader for Forever. And my son, he was a Cub Scout, didn’t make it. The Boy Scout kind of gave it up. So I definitely to hear that you’re an Eagle Scout. Most people don’t understand what it takes to become an Eagle Scout. So once you make it to that level, it’s ingrained on. You’re not going to be able to get rid of that spirit.

And the amazing thing is like, I’ve met people, like on LinkedIn or just at professional seminars and things like that. And you have that kinship with other Eagle Scouts because it’s just like, anything, whether it’s a fraternity thing or whatever. You have that bond, you knew what you had to do to get that award. You had to do that big service project, and you’re only 16 years old doing this big project. And so it is that bonding experience. And I’m 39, and I still say I’m an Eagle Scout. No, I was an Eagle Scout. I am an Eagle, you know? Yeah. Yeah.

Definitely. I mean, being that I know what goes into it to your point. Anytime I hear that, it’s kind of like, okay, I know who I’m talking to by default. You know who you’re talking to. I mean, just going through that passage. Next question would be like, you seem to be a pretty systematic guy, right? So what are your morning habits? Your morning routine look like.

So do a little morning workout, a little meditation. I got to have my coffee. And I do listen to a lot of audio books or podcasts right now. The audio book that I’ve been listening to is words that work, which I read it. I listen to it, and I’m listening to it again. And each time I’m still getting those Nuggets, I mean, it’s a phenomenal book, and I recommended it a bunch of times. I need to get my own affiliate link with Frank Lynch so I can start making some money off it. But it’s a great book. That’s what I’m reading right now or listening to. But you know what I mean?

It’s funny that you brought that up. It’s like that particular question. It was like, every time people ask me about the podcast, it was like, Well, how do I come with my questions? It’s like studying people studying their responses. So that question is always a predecessor to my next question. And the reason why I started a book club is that nine out of ten people are going to do what you just did. They do X, Y and Z in the morning and they listen to all your books. They read books. So going a little bit deeper into that road about recommending books. I mean, you have your own book. Obviously, I want you to kind of pitch that book, kind of understand what that book is about and how that book and help someone and what other books have helped you on your journey to get you to currently where you are.

Okay. I don’t know if you can see it. And I got my headphones in. But the one book that I wrote is called Bankroll Your Mind, and that’s the one that I wrote with Lawrence Pipkin. It was a best seller. It is a best seller. Bankroll Your Mind is our sexy way of saying Reprogram your mind for success. There’s a lot of mindset, tips and hacks and strategies in there, a lot of personal development, a lot of leadership development really helping you to reprogram what’s going on in here for optimal performance. Back to your next question, which is what book can I recommend? That was the next question, right. How to win Friends and influence people, how to win friends and influence people. Go and read it. You know what I’m saying? I mean, it’s one of those books having everybody, especially right now with the current state of what’s going on. Go read this book, folks and learn how to relate to people, how to communicate to people, learn how to treat each other as human beings. I mean, the book was written in what, like, 39, and it’s still as meaningful and relevant today as it was when Carnegie wrote it back in, like, 39. How to Win Friends and Influence People. Love it.

So point that you brought that up because in the book club in week three, that’s the book of recommendation. I mean, literally, what you’re saying is literally some of the recaps that I talked about. The six core principles, like remembering someone’s names. You have to remember someone’s name, right? Be interested in what that person is talking about. Just don’t bullshit them. Be interested in that conversation. Is it general principles that are kind of common? But people don’t really understand those six principles and use them on a day to day basis, right?

It’s saying someone’s name, like he says in the book is the sweetest song to the person who hears it. Like you say, someone seems like he’s talking about. He’s talking to me. Absolutely.

Definitely. That’s pretty cool. So, I mean, what do you see yourself 20 years from now?

Hopefully with a family traveling the world, making a difference, training people working, certainly have a few more books under my belt. And obviously I would like to have that family life and stuff like that and just really enjoying, you know, just making the most out of life.

So let’s talk about your services for a minute. Right. So who is your ideal target audience and what service do you have for them?

I really enjoy working with newer entrepreneurs, especially like service based entrepreneurs, coaches, speakers, the people that have a meaningful and impactful message that they want to share, but maybe necessarily don’t know how. Or maybe they’re too timid. Or maybe they don’t have the tools. Maybe the person doesn’t know how to blog or how to like you and I were talking about in the beginning, sharing your message on social media, like I’m supposed to post at least once a day, not just once a week. Those things matter. So working with those people that really warms my heart to see the a difference that they’re making and being able to then make a difference and knowing that I had a hand in that.

Yeah. I definitely agree with you because I mean, when you’re working with that particular audience, the exponential room for growth and that equity to say someone starting maybe they’re at, like, $50,000 annually. Or maybe they’re at $10,000 annually. And then over the next course of two to three years, you could see their growth ten fold, 100 fold, literally, once they understand the principles that you’re putting in front of them. So I take it that you have an online coaching. Or do you have courses online as well?

Yeah.

Great. So in your day to day, what software do you use that you would not be able to do what you do without?

iPhone. Old school and new school schedules. I carry multiple books around with me schedules. And then I also load everything into my phone, too, because you never know if you’re not going to be next to the physical book, the physical schedule. I love scheduling apps like Social Oom for Twitter. I use Hootsuite for LinkedIn and Facebook and Instagram. Yeah. And again, iphone.

iPhone is key. So let’s say I am 20 years old. I listen to this podcast. I’ve gotten inspired by you, motivated by you, and I want to continue an entrepreneurial journey. What words of wisdom would you give to me to help me continue to move forward?

Use every situation, every situation as a learning experience, transfer those skills into those new situations, new opportunities, and take clear, focused action towards achieving your goals.

Yeah, definitely insightful. So how can people find you online? I mean, obviously you’re a big social media guide. Like what’s your handles, what’s your website?

The website is RichPerry.com. So if you know my name Rich Perry, just .com. Social media. I couldn’t secure Rich Perry. So it’s “Coach Rich Perry’ so on across all social media platforms, it’s “Coach Rich Perry” nd the website is just RichPerry.com.

nice nice. So going into the bonus round, right. If you could be a superhero, who would it be and why?

I’m going with The Flash because he’s just a good dude. You know what I’m saying? Like, really just he’s super smart. He loves the science and he’s got a moral Compass, and he’s got a code that it has to be the right. He has a lot of integrity.

Yeah. I can definitely see that. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that he could travel in between multi dimensions as well.

It doesn’t hurt.

So what is your most significant achievement to date outside of your being an Eagle Scout, right.

Okay. I’m an adult, and I still I credit the fact that being an Eagle Scout and learning and also being a black belt. Those two things martial arts and Boy Scouts really made me the person that I am today. And I credit both of them with really instilling good habits, good character traits. If I can’t say either of those, then I would say being a best song author.

Nice.

I’m proud of that, because I know all the work that we put into writing that book.

Yeah. Definitely. So, I mean, you’re a black belt and what style you get to? Nice, good old grappling. Good stuff. Another commonality man. It’s like me and my son. We just take mixed martial arts for, like, the longest on and off. So I train in jujitsu and everything else under the sun. So definitely.

Right on.

So going to my last bonus question, if you could spend 24 hours with anyone dead or alive uninterrupted for those 24 hours, who would it be and why?

This is going to be a non business answer. I’m a huge, huge, huge Star Wars nerd. I would love to sit down with the man himself, George Lucas, and just speak to him about, like, I mean, he created this fantastic world, this Galaxy far and away, far, far away. Like it wasn’t just like a movie, like a one shot deal or. Yeah, he made a couple movies, like he made an entire universe. I would love to just sit down and chat with him about how he created it. And just like, the guys still, like, inspiring Dave Filoni and all of them. Like, now, you know how many years later that’s amazing to me.

Another thing amazing about that is that he is still alive and well and probably attainable. You could probably work through the ranks to get in front of him for at least an hour on a podcast,

right.

Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Sign me up for that one. You get him on your show, just definitely let me hear about that one for sure.

Right right.

Yeah so I mean, this is the time in the podcast. I think you’ve given a lot of Golden Nuggets, a lot of information that’s not only informative, but it’s also kind of motivating in the sense to kind of see you’ve been on this journey since essentially you’re being a kid. So it tells people that you don’t have to start when you’re 50, you can kind of find your way when you’re younger and you just do a little bit every single day to get to that end result. So I definitely appreciate that. So on this journey on this podcast, did you have any questions that you want to ask me? And this is the time that I’ll give you a microphone. The floor is yours.

I do, actually, as a podcaster, what do you love most about being able to sit down and interview people and hear their stories? Like, what is it about it that attracted you to podcasting and just being on the receiving end of hearing people’s stories? I mean, I would love to know.

Yeah yeah. So it’s multifaceted in the sense that you have a Rolodex of people that are all business people in the circles. So I kind of know some of their stories, but when I interview them, I get more pieces of it, and we kind of recap things and commonalities of our path together in business. And then I have someone like you that I’ve just recently met. And then I find out that you’re from New York. I find out that martial arts. I find out that you love Star Wars, and we have these commonalities. But we found each other through podcasting. So it gives me an opportunity to magnify my roller decks, but also magnify my education in life. I’m learning things just by hearing you speak, and I’m like, eager every single day. I’m like, do I have at least one podcast I need to record today? If I don’t, I feel kind of down. I’m like, Damn, I didn’t get to talk to someone new today. I didn’t get to talk to someone old today. I didn’t get to help somebody motivate somebody else or inspire somebody else. So that’s, like, my routine. Every single day, I want to speak to somebody to help somebody else, and also helping myself by learning something new about somebody.

That’s awesome. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Well, I definitely appreciate your time. I think that you definitely, like, developed a situation on this podcast that again, going back to I want people to really think about what you said and rewind and listen to it again. You could start at a young age. It doesn’t mean that you need to be successful right away. You just have to kind of build up and keep growing and moving forward. So I think you definitely delivered that message. And again, I appreciate you coming on the show today.

Well I appreciate you inviting me. So thank you so much.

Great. S.A Grant. Over and out.