TSP062 | Linda Kaplan Thaler – Transcription

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TSP063 | Guy Spier – Transcription
TSP061 | Angela Lee – Transcription

John Livesay:

Today’s guest on the Successful Pitch is Linda Kaplan Thaler, who is the co-author of a wonderful book called Grit to Great. GRIT stands for guts, resilience, initiative and tenacity. These are the elements that investors look for when they’re hearing a pitch because they’re investing in the founder’s ability to have grit and have those 4 characteristics. Linda has great stories of people who didn’t get accepted into school right away like Spielberg but still kept applying or Michael Jordan. There’s so many stories that Linda has about what GRIT gives you, which is this resilience and that really separates you. In fact, even the people who win Olympic medals, typically, it’s not about their potential or their skills, it’s about their tenacity and their grit to make it happen. So, she says, “Love your failures because it allows you to create something even better. So, fail forward. Don’t be afraid of failure.” Enjoy the episode.

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Welcome to the Successful Pitch Podcast. Today’s guest is Linda Kaplan Thaler, who is the chairman of Publicist New York, one of the top agencies in New York, with incredible clients like Aflac and the Herbal Essence. Linda is responsible for all of these memorable famous advertising campaigns, and if you are someone who’s pitching investor, you know the importance of being memorable. So, Linda is definitely the expert in what it takes to come up with something that makes people break through the clutter and allow them to be memorable. She’s also the best selling author of Grit to Great, with her co-author and partner at the agency. Linda’s talents have earned her many prestigious awards such as the Matrix Award, the Muse Award, Advertising Woman of the Year Award. She was the named one of the most of the influential women in advertising. So, clearly, we are thrilled to have her on the show. Linda, welcome!

Linda:

I am thrilled to be here and hello to all of you listeners out there.

John:

Linda, you really walk your talk. In fact, you talk about — you know, you don’t have to have the it factor to be successful. You just need the GRIT factor and you came from the Bronx.

Linda:

I came from the Bronx.

John:

You came from the Bronx so you really are not someone who everyone says, “Oh you have to be this perfect background and be so smart and have this incredible things.” Obviously, you have the GRIT factor. Tell us about your background a little bit about coming from the Bronx, and what lessons did you learn there that allowed you to have the chutzpah to start your own agency?

Linda:

Actually, Robin Koval and I, who write all the books together and started the agency together, we both came from the Bronx. We didn’t know each other then but growing up in the Bronx is a very humbling experience, okay? You didn’t have much else except your wits, and your brains, and your gumption, and your stamina. A lot of people who have sort of made it in their fields – and I like to think I’ve made it mine in terms of advertising – I had a public education.

I came from a middle-class household and I even went to a public college. My parents couldn’t afford to send away me to school, to a private school. I went to the City College of New York, New York but I was thrilled. I got a great education there and ultimately City College gave me something that no Ivy League School could. Namely, an acceptance letter. So, I was very proud of that.

When I got out of college, I got my masters in Music and I wanted to perform in the worst way and I probably did perform in the worst way because I wasn’t getting a lot of gigs. I did a lot off of Broadway work and “Oh boy, is this so far off Broadway.” I ultimately realized that even though I had a passion for performing, I had a greater passion for actually eating at least once a day.

I got into the world of advertising and — I was always very interested in writing songs, especially for little kids. Little did I know that the way I was going to finally get little kids to sing one of my songs is when we pitched the Toys “R” Us account, and I convinced my boss, Jim Patterson, now we know him as the famous mega writer. James Patterson, I said, “Well, here’s a song that we could get for free if I write one myself,” and I wrote this little ditty, which I thought was cute. I didn’t know if it would take off or not and it went, “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us kid.”

I guess it did take off. It’s America’s longest running jingle and those kids who are in that original commercial are probably grandparents by now. It did help me get my start. I worked on the campaign called Kodak Moments which a lot of people might have remembered from the 80s. And then, of course, we created Herbal Essence. We started our agency or Kaplan Thaler Group about 18 years ago with that shampoo with that woman who is having way too good a time in the shower for Herbal Essences. “Yes, yes, yes!” Only an orgasm could sell a dying brand that was about to go off the shelves. It became the second leading hair care in the country within 6 months, and we went on to win lots of business before 2 years or 3 years have gone by.

We had 100 million in billings and we were one the fastest growing agencies in America. We were founded and we were run by women. We used to say, “We have so many women in our agency. We could even make Arnold Schwarzenegger ovulate with all the hormones that were raging,” and we tried to figure out — and, of course, the thing that landed us into the hall of fame of advertising was creating that blustery little Aflac duck, which came about because we realized that we were pitching the account. They had 3% awareness and that their biggest problem was not understanding the insurance, it was understanding and remembering the name of this company. They went from 3% awareness to 96% awareness in under 2 years and they became so popular that when ducks see other ducks. Now when ducks see other ducks, they immediately think of supplemental insurance. So, that gives you an idea. That’s success for you.

John:

That is success. I love it. One other thing I want to ask you about is James Patterson, as an example of GRIT, because I saw the video you have on the Grit to Great website, where you talked about his dedication to work harder than other people. Can you tell us what he did in the mornings?

Linda:

Well, it’s amazing we have a chapter called Ditch the Dream because we tell people, “Don’t spend any time dreaming.” Estee Lauder was famous for saying, “I never once dreamt of success. I just worked for it.” Here was a guy, and I knew him when he was much much younger. I worked for him for almost 20 years. He would wake up every morning at 4 o’clock. He would write ’til 8 o’clock, shower, get dressed, and come in and put a full day as a creative director at J. Walter Thompson.

He didn’t do this for a week or two weeks, he did this for 17 years, and at the end of 17 years he’s still trying to write that bestselling novel, and never giving up. He never took a day off, ever, from writing. He finally said to me on a plane – we were going to a Kodak meeting – he said, “I figured out the formula. It took me almost 20 years, but I figured it out.” So the chapters twist at the end and a compelling character named Alex Cross and that first book, Along Came a Spider. He was finishing on that plane ride to Rochester. He’s now the number 1 bestselling author in the world because he was a man who just didn’t talk about what he wanted to do, he just sat down and did it. He is the epitome of GRIT.

John:

I love that story. It’s so great. What made you and Robin decide to write a book about GRIT? You have other successful books like The Power of Small, The Power of Nice–What was it about this topic of GRIT that you and Robin said, “Let’s get this out there.”?

Linda:

Well, I think what happened is we try to write books that were counterintuitive. You don’t want to talk about being nice in marketing usually, right?

John:

Right.

Linda:

It’s really a secret sauce and everybody looks at the big picture. We were looking at the details and we turned around and we looked at the whole world as sort of celebrating as we talk about the it factor. Everybody seems to feel that success is defined by a gargantuan Mensa IQ, or virtuoso talent, or an Ivy league school education and here’s the reality: of people who were born prodigies in music, and in sports, in physical endeavors, or in IQ, only a poultry minuscule 2% of them ever do anything moderately successful with their lives. It’s almost like things have just come too easy and when they hit roadblocks they get flustered because they’ve never really had challenges.

That’s not to say all people who are brilliant don’t make it, but it’s amazing that the disproportionate amount of people who don’t. Yet when you look at somebody like Collin Powell, C minus student all through college, and somebody that we obviously know, went onto greatness. Michael Jordan, a lot of people don’t realize this – I think he was born with this physical prowess and natural talent – he could not make his high school varsity basketball team the first semester.

John:

Really?

Linda:

He had to work his tail off to get on the team the next year. Spielberg got rejected 3 times from film school. They didn’t think he had enough raw talent and Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, when he graduated from college – talk about somebody that seemed ordinary – he couldn’t even get a job at a KFC as a server.

John:

Oh my gosh.

Linda:

These people made — they were so extraordinary because they were so ordinary growing up, and actually there’s a fabled story about Walt Disney that he got fired from his first job because his boss said he lacked imagination.

John:

Yes, I’ve heard that. I loved it.

Linda:

He went back to the drawing board, so to speak, and created Mickey Mouse and the rest is history. But, this is an example of these people did not have the it factor. What they do have is the GRIT factor and we defined GRIT in our book, Four Tenets of GRIT. We’ve made it into an easy acronym so it’s easy to remember. G-R-I-T, right? Love acronym? Guts, Resilience, Initiative, and Tenacity, those are the 4 things that you need. We even worked with a doctor, Irene Cone, to develop a GRIT quiz that if you go on to grittogreat.com, you will be able to take the quiz. It’s really easy. It only takes a few minutes. It gives you a mark or an idea of where your strong point and weak points are.

John:

Yes. I took the quiz. I found it fascinating. It really makes you think.

Linda:

Well, it does and I will tell you, I hope you did better than I did the first time I took it. I will tell you that recently we’ve looked and 10,000 people have taken the quiz already. It is really going viral and it’s wonderful to see that people of all ages – One of the groups that seems to be incredibly resonant are parents who want to teach their kids the GRIT or college kids. We’re getting a lot of high school and college kids and I speak to a lot of the universities and anybody out there that’s interested in me speaking to — at a corporate event or an entrepreneurial event and certainly at a collegiate event. Robin and I, or Robin or I are always available. It’s a pure joy to do it and to impart whatever wisdom we’ve learned along the way.

The research is just astounding. I mean, if you look at the top CEOs from the Fortune 100, very few of them went to Ivy League schools, and some of the most successful people have gone to colleges you may never have heard of. So, it’s sort of turning everything up ending everything.

We used to be a nation that GRIT defined as an Americans. Just how we got through the Great Depression and two World Wars, and then this thing came along called the Self-Esteem Movement. It started in like the 80s. Bunch of psychologists thought we weren’t raising our kids correctly, that we weren’t empowering them. We weren’t telling them how special they were, how unique they were. We had to do away with winners and losers at scholastic teams. You would see medals like — one that I found during our research just cracked me up, it said, “If you’ve had fun, you’ve won”

John:

Oh boy.

Linda:

Well, I don’t know about any other world but in the advertising world, not only is that not true, but there are no silver medals or bronze medals. You either win the account or you don’t win the account.

John:

Yes.

Linda:

So, it’s been very had for a lot of millennials growing up as they get into the workforce, and we hear this from people who are older and also in that age group of wanting kind of a more immediate satisfaction, leaving jobs more frequently, not in the sense of entitlement because I think, when they get there, they realized you don’t get a bonus for being on time for two months. What you get is called a salary and that’s reward enough.

I do think that the pendulum is starting to swing back with books like ours in a lot of other research that’s saying look — there was one great commencement speech that was made to a high school a couple of years ago and the professor giving the commencement speech said, “Contrary to what your mother, or your grandmother, or some funny purple dinosaur told you, none of you are special. None of you are unique and if you think you’re smart, there’s probably 10 thousand people that are smarter than you are,” and that’s what I tell people in college, “Don’t think you’re special because you’re not and I wasn’t, for sure.” The only reason I made it is because I was very, very resilient because advertising is a series of nonstop rejections every second of the day.

John:

So is pitching for investors when you’re a founder. So, I’d love to have you —

Linda:

Oh my goodness.

Q: Yes, I’d love to have you speak about this resilience. I loved your Spielberg story that he applied 3 times before he got into film school. Most people would quit after the first one, certainly after the second one, but to keep applying the third time, even though you keep getting rejected, that sense of resilience, because you’re so passionate or you believe in yourself so much, what is it that you think makes someone resilient and if they’re not, what could they do to become more resilient?

Linda:

Well first of all, and we’ve heard it a lot of talk about when we call the growth mindset as opposed to the fixed mind set, right? So, a fixed mindset is you call up a client, you’re pitching an idea, the client says no and you do that a couple of times and you go, “Well, I guess the idea really sucked.” A growth mindset would say, “Okay, I’m not getting a response I want. What can I learn from this and how could I make it better?”

I love the best example to me of somebody who is just — you know, they must be in this picture, next to it in Webster’s, the word “resilient” is James Dyson, who invented the vacuum, the bagless vacuum, right? So we talked about him in the book because here’s a guy–you know, you see a brilliant invention, what you don’t see is that it took him 15 years. Imagine for 15 years, all you want to do is create a better way to vacuum the floor, okay? Now that’s what you call focus. He had 5,126 prototypes of that vacuum that totally sucked or, as I’d like to say, didn’t suck and that was the problem. It literally did not suck enough but he said, “I love the failures because if I had not failed so many times, I would’ve created something far more inferior.”

Actually what he had in his head, was something that was an evolution and what he ended up was obviously a revolutionary idea but we need to embrace failure. We call it failing forward in the book, learning from the failures and it’s those people, really, that separate the ones who make it and the ones who don’t.

There was an interesting study that was done with Olympic athletes. Instead of people who win gold medals, you think that that person is one in a million or one in a billion, but here’s the truth: of every person, for every person that wins a gold Olympic medal, there are at least a million people on the planet that have the same potential to win that medal and what is the defining difference between that one person and the rest of us is GRIT.

John:

Love it.

Linda:

It’s the guts, it’s the resilience, it’s the initiative, and the tenacity to never let go. By the way, GRIT can happen in any age, right? Picasso painted for years but it wasn’t until his 80s that he did his best paintings. So, never give up.

John:

Well, that story you told about the inventor of the new vacuum cleaner. I mean, talk about 5,000 prototypes, the ultimate pivot, pivot, pivot, ’til you get something that works, which is exactly what the startups go through until they find something. This whole concept of failing forward, I really like that. We’re going to tweet that out from the show. That’s fantastic. I had the chance to meet Michael Phelps, speaking about gold medal winners. He worked out on Sundays when everybody else took Sundays off. So people just think, “Oh, he won because he was tall and had a physique and big lungs.” No, he worked harder than everybody else which totally supports your GRIT theory.

Linda:

Yeah. I will tell you that I’ve been looking enough to work on 3 presidential campaigns – and talk about gritty people, I worked with Bill Clinton in ’92 and Hillary Clinton in 2008, and I worked with Bill Bradley in 2000, and reading his autobiography blew me away because here was a guy that was — he did not consider himself a gifted athlete or a gifted scholar. I mean, at Princeton, he was the guy who was in the library ’til 3 o’clock. He had no social life because he thought everybody was smarter than him and maybe they were. He would stand – and he’s famous for this – he would stand in the basketball court, after school, when he was in high school. He would stand in one position for 3 hours and shoot hoops.

John:

Wow.

Linda:

Then he would stand there for another hour, blindfolded, and shoot hoops, and the next day he would move one inch to the left and he would do the same thing, and he did that for years, and that’s how he got to be a great basketball player.

John:

Oh, gosh. Linda, I love that story so much because what I talk about all the time with clients is you must practice your pitch, and there’s a great example of practicing it blindfolded, practicing it from the left, practicing it from the right. I mean, you have to know your stuff so well that you don’t rise to the occasion, you fall back on your training, as the military likes to say.

Linda:

Yeah, I will tell you that when we pitch the Wendy’s account, which nobody thought we could ever win because the agency was so teeny tiny at the time. We were 1 of maybe 50 agencies pitching, and we know, like Michael Bloomberg is famous for saying, “I will never be the smartest person in the world.” He was also a C minus student, “But I’ll outwork anybody, and that’s why I always win.”

So we said, “The only way we’re going to win this – because everybody is talented in the business, everybody’s going to come up with a – we just have to outwork them,” and what we did is we not only read Dave’s Way, the book that Dave Thomas had written, the founder of Wendy’s. We not only had strategy, we not only had creative, but we actually went across the country to work in the restaurant to learn how to build a hamburger, learn how to make those Frostys, and learn how to certainly drink those Frostys. There were some perks to the job. We actually had sleepovers at the agency because we were working such late hours and we filmed the sleepovers so the client could see just how hard we were working.

The day of the pitch, the night before, we stayed up all night, and I used to be, as I mentioned in the entertainment business, the art of the pitch, to me, is not just about the ideas, it’s, of course, how you present them. The levels, where you’re holding the storyboard. Are the people on your team looking at you when you’re performing when you’re presenting? Because we want the client to know that everybody in your team thinks you’re brilliant, no matter what you’re saying. How many times they’ve heard the friggin’ speech? It’s like —

John:

New for the first time, right?

Linda:

— not even for the — new for the first time. Right. So, here we were and going over and over again and I’m spending, literally, hours with, “No, you’re not projecting. No, the music is too loud. No, the music is too soft. No, you know what? That end joke doesn’t work. We have to rewrite it.” We worked all night, we finished up at 6 am, the presentation was at 8. I said, “Good, we have time for one more run through,” and we won the business, and we asked why.

We did have great work and we also go — you know, what I do with pitches is I always have the second meeting first. Client asks for an idea, I already show them the commercials. Client asks for some thoughts about the music could be, I’ve already written it. It’s always immediate. We always jump ahead, and the day that we won it, which was the very next day, we asked them why we got it and they said, “You had great ideas, so did the other agency. I got to tell you, at the end of the day, we just were convinced, nobody would work harder on the business.”

John:

Wow. There you go. And what initiative of the GRIT acronym you showed by literally traveling the country and making the hamburgers. That’s initiative and it’s best —

Linda:

That’s right, and it’s also taking — you know, when we created the Aflac duck, it was not in any of the research that they gave us about name recognition. They wanted us to do very emotional advertising, they wanted us to talk about the policies, they do things like cancer insurance, and we went a little bit further.

We were in a pitch mode and we went to the CEO, this wonderful, brilliant man, Dan Amos, and said, “Okay, aside from all this, what actually keeps you up at night?” because, sometimes, when you just fire out a question — you know, I studied improv for a long time. You’re always better when you just react and he reacted, he said, “My own friends and relatives cannot remember the name of my company.”

John:

There you go. What keeps you up at night? What problem are you solving is the number one thing investors want to hear when they’re hearing a pitch, and the same thing is true when you’re pitching for advertising. What a great story. Well, I can’t let you go without asking about your wonderful blog. First of all, obviously, you know how to write great headlines. What you learned after digging through 31 bags of cold, stinky garbage, please tell us about that story because that made me want to open that and dig deep.

Linda:

Oh, well, you know, I think we’re defined – you know that saying, “anything you do is everything you do”, and you are defined by the smallest things, and I had these beautiful pair of earrings that, actually, Robin, my co-author, had bought me as a gift and I lost them. They were wrapped in tissue paper and I just actually threw them out with the dinner when we were finished, and instead of just saying, “Well, I give up,” I went through 33 bags of garbage in my upper east side co-op in the middle of November. I was not going to stop until I found those earrings. By the way, one thing you learn when you dig through garbage is nobody’s garbage is any better than your garbage.

John:

Ha-ha, there you go.

Linda:

And everybody in life has to deal with a lot of crap, and the puns could go on forever. I went through a lot of crap and I found those earrings, of course, in the last — you know, of course, the last canister is where I found those earrings, and I tell anybody they were beautiful onyx hoop earrings that any kind of hoop you want to grab in life is attainable but you may have to go through a lot of garbage to get there.

John:

I love it. Well, the other thing that really resonates with me is the why, right? Because you can afford to buy yourself another pair of earrings. Why would you go through that? Because of the sentimental value that your co-author and co-partner gave you those earrings, right?

Linda:

Right.

John:

So you have to have a why behind your commitment to something.

Linda:

Well, I might have done it anyway because I’m from the Bronx and I’m very cheap.

John:

Got it. Got it. With passion and this lesson you write about, finish what you start. That’s some truth.

Linda:

Oh my goodness. One of the things we talk about is just getting into the habit of finishing what you started, even if it’s cleaning out a drawer. One of the things that was just fantastic is Willy McRaven, who was a Navy SEAL, said the most important thing you can do is make your bed in the morning, and we did a whole piece on CNN about kids making their bed in the morning, and people making their bed. I make my bed every morning, which is unfortunate for my husband because he’s usually still sleeping in it, and he wakes up and he’s a human burrito.

The fact is that it starts your day off with an endorphin boost, right? You’ve accomplished something. You’ve made a beautiful bed, and you come back and even though you’ve had a crappy day, you’ve come back to that well-made bed. No, but it puts you in an organized frame of mind. I don’t know why it works but it just gives you a sense of completion to begin with because if you can’t do the little things correctly, you certainly can’t tackle the big ones.

By the way, break your problems down into little bits. We have a lot of GRIT builders in the book but if you tackle on problems that are too big, you never end up tackling them at all. You have to break them down.

John:

It’s overwhelming.

Linda:

It’s overwhelming, yeah.

John:

Break them down. Well, Linda, how can people follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter, all that good stuff?

Linda:

My Twitter? Let me see. @lindathaler2, and my Facebook, just Grit to Great. grittogreat.com, you can buy the book anywhere, everywhere, download at iBooks, or Kindle. There’s an audio version which, thank goodness, does not have Robin or me because, otherwise, you’ll be listening to two Bronxites talking like this through the whole book. So, we have a lovely actress doing it so…

John:

Wonderful.

Linda:

I do think what we’re finding is that people are giving it as gifts to their kids and to their employees and teammates. So, I think giving the gift of GRIT is one of the best things we can do.

John:

Also, what a great gift to give investors to make yourself memorable after you give a pitch. I think that’s a great idea.

Linda:

I think it’s in an investor’s — yes, I think it’s one of the first and foremost books that they should be reading and getting, Grit to Great.

John:

Fantastic. Linda, you’ve been great. It’s wonderful having you on the show. Everyone go out and get From Grit to Great, and watch yourself succeed like Linda has. Thanks again, Linda.

Linda:

Thank you.

John:

Thanks for listening to The Successful Pitch Podcast. If you liked the show, please go to iTunes and write a review and encourage your friends to write reviews too. It really helps get the word out. You know, people say that the longest distance is between someone’s mouth and their wallet. People can tell you they’re going to invest but when it comes time to write the check, they don’t do it. So how do you get people to say yes and then follow through? Visualize yourself on the left side of a riverbank and you have to cross the river and on the other side of the river is where the funding happens.

So, first, you make up your idea and then you make it real and then you make it reoccur. Once you start dipping your toe into the water to get to funding, that’s where I can help. I get you across that river faster than you would on your own with a lot less frustration than you will get when you hear a bunch of no’s and you don’t know why. So, if you want some help getting funded faster with less frustration, go to my free funding webinar, sellingsecretsforfunding.com/webinar and sign up and get in depth information on how you can get funded fast. Thanks.

TSP063 | Guy Spier – Transcription
TSP061 | Angela Lee – Transcription