Liquid Leadership with Brad Szollose
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Brad Szollose, who is the author of “Liquid Leadership”. It’s all about staying fluid when you’re a good leader following Brad’s tips. He is quite the expert on knowing why millennials don’t want to stay. He said, “It’s not enough to have flexible hours and free food and open areas to work and even telling them what their purpose.” The secret he talks about is that people withhold 40% of their core values and skills even if they feel safe in a work environment. He has really specific ways to get people to open up and do that.
The thing that’s really surprising are the three things that have triggered this generational gap between baby boomers and millennials. Here’s a hint. One, it has to do with a hit science fiction movie. Another is it has to tie in with people playing video games and making mistakes and finding out how to do things intuitively. The third one, I’m gonna leave for a surprise. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Liquid Leadership with Brad Szollose
Hi and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Brad Szollose, who is the author of “Liquid Leadership”. I love nothing more than a nice alliteration. He’s an expert on the topic of generations in the work place. He co-founded K2 Design, which — get this — became the first .com agency to go public. He has all kinds of expertise on how we can talk to each other, depending on what generation we’re from, and what I’m really interested in is about creating high trust, because as you know, that’s the key foundation to getting anyone to say yes to your pitch.
Brad, welcome to the show.
John, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited. My favorite topic, yes is, the generational stuff and everybody I know is tuning in maybe because it’s about millennials, but honestly, I get a little tired of talking about millennials because I see it as a much bigger picture, much broader picture.
Well before we get into the millennials, can you take us back to your own story of origin when you would have been considered a millennial?
I was in my 30s when I started K2 Design. I heard on the news that I was a boomer, a baby boomer. I was furious. Some of you may be listening and remembering that, but back in the 90s, ’94 in around there, they started labeling everybody. This is just marketing terms, because they couldn’t figure out what the heck to do with all of us. We were all spending money differently and doing different things.
And so many of us. That was the other big thing, right? Oh my God. There’s never been so many.
Yeah. I was sitting there, my business partner and I, we had started K2 Design and for the first year we were struggling. We’re in this 9 by 12 office, and all of a sudden, he comes in after a year of struggling because we’re competing against 4,000 other design firms in New York City and we’re a traditional firm. He runs into the office at 8:30 in the morning and he goes, “We have to become an internet company.” I’m savvy and I know you were too at that time, John, and maybe more so than I because I looked at him and said, “What the hell is the internet?”
In 1994, a lot of people don’t realize, I would say 90% of the people I talked to did not know what the internet was. They thought it was email. They thought it was a gray background.
Or something the government did. That’s what I always heard about it. “Oh, it’s some kind of government secret way of communicating.”
Yeah. It was ridiculous. When I first saw it as a designer and a creative director, I thought it was a real step backwards, but I said, “Okay. Let’s see if we can sell this thing.” I gotta tell you, this goes right into The Successful Pitch, we decided to create a laptop that had a self contained demo that looked like you were on the internet, but you weren’t.
Because back then the connections were horrible, so that was very smart.
We bought a laptop, which was a new fangled device at the time. We got Macromedia Director. We made this animated piece. We even created a fake Netscape browser with the pulsing logo and the hypertext links. It fit on a 1.5 meg HD floppy. Remember those?
Mm-hmm.
We would go into these offices and we’d pitch. We’d show our traditional portfolio and end with the internet. Guess what happened? Everybody’s eyes would glaze over. They had no idea what we were talking about. This went on for three months. Imagine trying to sell something for three months and people just look at you like, okay, all right, whatever, guys. We weren’t technology guys but we knew how to sell it. That’s the idea of pitching, especially when you’re in the advertising or you’re in the graphic design industry. You have to paint that picture of what they’re gonna get when they hire you, what you’re gonna do for them.
We kept going around. Most of the places that hired us, actually hired us to create those demos for their sales teams. But at one point, this gray haired older executive stood up and he said, “Hey. Could you guys create a proprietary browser that would be connected to a CD-ROM hybrid that could launch to our end report password protected section of our website? Could you guys do that?” That sounds like common phraseology today, but back then, it was like the dog spoke.
Yes.
We just looked at him and we said, “Yes, we can do that.”
That’s what any good entrepreneur does. We’ll figure it out like an actor. Sure I can tap dance and walk a tightrope. Yeah.
I speak French. We can do all those things. We had MIT grads that we knew could do the programming and all that, but we were really like in the Wild West shooting from the hip. We landed that account, which was JP Morgan Chase’s CD-ROM hybrid for their 1996 annual report. Yeah. That was a $250,000 job. Then from that moment on, we started doing live events. OgilvyOne hired us because they really didn’t know as much about the internet as they pretended to be at that time. They hired us to do the Garry Kasparov Chess Challenge with Deep Blue.
We started becoming the company that did the live events. We did Bring In The Noise, Bring In The Funk, the live cast party afterwards. We hired videographers. We just took off from that moment on because well, we were featured in Advertising Age in 1995, and we were one of 10 companies in the country that could build websites and create web events.
Wow, 10 companies at the time. Talk about cutting edge, huh?
Oh, it was crazy. We didn’t even send pictures of our work, John. I happened to get corporate head shots of us, and sent those instead. Our phone rang off the hook from that moment on. We had 425% growth for five straight years.
You know what’s interesting about painting that picture, and thank you for taking us back, because I love story of origins. Agencies were pretending they knew more about the internet than they really did is what you said. So now, 10 years ago or less, agencies were pretending to know more about social media than they really do. Typical traditional ad agency, yeah, we can do your social media. They’re like, what the heck? And they’re scrambling to figure that out because the client wanted that as part of their bag.
Now, I think, it continues to evolve, and now agencies are being asked to, we want to get into virtual reality and augmented reality, so it never stops.
It never stops. No. It doesn’t. I attended a symposium last week, sponsored by CrossKnowledge and Wiley. It was about the amazing work place. Jacob Morgan was there. He just released a new book and he was giving a big talk. I tried on the virtual reality goggles.
That’s the latest.
I was freaking out, but this is the subject of my Ted Talk, which is, how are we using serious gaming technology, which virtual reality is, to teach and train and get the next generation ready, because it’s gonna happen, whether we like it or not.
Right. Well, that’s a fascinating topic in and of itself because they’re training a lot of the military, I believe, through video games, correct?
Yes.
Yes. Well, your book, “Liquid Leadership”. Obviously you quote Bruce Lee about the need to stay fluid and flexible. How did you decide? It’s the name of your book, but it’s also your company.
Yes.
Tell us what you do at Liquid Leadership. Who’s your ideal client there?
I like companies that are 500 employees and under. What I do is I specialize in customized workshops and training programs that get them to communicate better in a cross generational methodology, because what motivates a boomer does not motivate a millennial and is not gonna motivate generation Z which is coming in.
Oh, got it.
I’ve worked with MasterCard and Dell and Liquidnet. These are big companies but my sweet spot is really when I can take a company that has 350 employees and really help them transition into this new way of leading and managing.
One of my favorite things to do when I help people with their pitch is to say, “Okay. Who do you help and what problem are you solving for them?” So we’re very clear, because you’re so concise and compelling, that you help companies 500 and under, ideally 350, communicate across generations so that they can become better leaders. Take us on a little bit of a deeper dive, almost imagine that you’re pitching an ideal client, because I want people to see what a good pitch sounds like and hear what it sounds like. I’m so visual, I talk in terms of seeing. You can’t see. So describe to us, all right, we know who you help, but what problems are you solving when you come into a company that size?
First, I like to sit with them and create the image. I said, “How many of you are having trouble right now, where you’ve hired millennials and 20 of them have all gotten up at the end of the day and they’ve all left?” The hands go up. Then I ask, “Okay. You’re doing everything right. You have flexible hours. You have free food every afternoon that’s catered. It’s top shelf stuff. You have open areas. Everybody has access to the CEO. And you have a purpose. You’re helping out in Rwanda, let’s say. So why did they leave?” They all look at me.
Most people don’t have two out of those four, let alone all four. I’m impressed that there’s still a problem and that’s what’s so fascinating, right?
Right.
When we try to solve things from the outside in, which that would be, oh, let’s do this. Let’s design our offices this way. Let’s bring in the food. We’ll keep them happy like their our pets or animals or something, right? I’m sure you have a whole different way to keep people.
Oh, yeah. People don’t realize, this is a statistic I just heard, I’m gonna have to do a little more research on it, but they said, “Even when people are in environments where they’re not threatened, they withhold 40% of their core, what they really want to do to help the company.” That’s 40% that they’re not giving over, they’re giving back and things like this. Now, take a look at traditional environments where they can’t do such progressive management styles. So what do I recommend there? I said, “How would this environment look?” Just remember, when you do a pitch, you have to create the image in their minds, so you never say, “I created Teflon back in the 70s. Do you know how awesome I am? Wouldn’t you like to be me?” No. You flip that.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “People withhold 40% of their skills at work”]
I start all my keynote speeches, all my trainings like this, I say, “Imagine for a moment, it’s the morning of your 18th birthday.” Boom. Right away, you’re back in time to your 18th birthday.
Yeah.
You almost have to paint that picture for them and ask the right questions near the end. That’s the clincher. I look at people like that and said, “How many of you had mean bosses?” Hands go up, especially if they’re boomers. “How many of you had bosses that truly mentored you?” Couple in the room. I said, “Do you know how lucky you are if you had mentors?” They look. I said, “Look around the room at those who did not have mentors and had mean bosses. Put your hands up again.” Boom, the hands go up. “What did you promise yourself when you got into the same position, that you were never ever going to treat employees the way you were treated. How many of you are doing that?”
Oh my God, it’s just like what we promise ourselves. I’m never gonna be like that kind of parent, right?
Exactly.
And here I am saying exactly what my dad or mom said to me. Clean your room, or whatever. Yeah. Okay. Got it.
What I help you with is I will help you retain the next generation longer. I will help get them engaged because I will show you the tools that each and everyone of your people managers have to have. I will help you develop your communication skills and we’ll shift out of hierarchy control and structure into support, unleashing that passion, and persuasion. You’re gonna get more out of your people just from some simple tweaks.
Oh, I love it. Well, this whole concept of persuasion is my whole sweet spot. I love studying behavior and what gets someone to say yes faster. Well, one of your areas of expertise are the three things that created this generational divide, so let’s hear what those three are.
Well, let’s go back in time to 1977.
Teflon?
Yeah. Teflon and the pet rock and disco. What was the number one blockbuster movie in 1977?
Oh, man. Saturday Night Live, maybe. I don’t know.
The number one blockbuster movie was Star Wars.
Oh, okay.
Now, you’re probably going, Brad, come one. What’s that have to do with anything? Well, before 1977, major motion pictures were usually detective thrillers, cop shows, romance, horror movies, things like that. Science fiction was kind of made fun of. You could see the wire usually as the ship went through space.
Star Trek kind of stuff, yeah.
Right. Yeah. Star Trek actually took it seriously for the first time and only a few movies stood out, like 2001 Space Odyssey or The Day the Earth Stood Still, but after 1977, if you add up all the top 10 blockbusters films in the last 35 years, seven to eight of them were either science fiction driven or fantasy driven. Dr. Michio Kaku, the theoretical physicist actually said this, “Star Wars initiated a paradigm shift.”
Anybody who’s a boomer knows when Star Wars came out, movies changed the way we looked at things. We had hope. We had belief. This movie interacted on our gestalt in some way, shape, or form that cannot be explained. And at the same time, it showed us a ubiquitous way of using technology in our day to day lives. Now, that’s only part of it.
Star Trek was seen in the industrialized nations only, and usually you were a geek and you were ridiculed if you liked Star Trek. I was made fun of, so I didn’t tell anybody I was a Trekker. Then, guess what? Star Wars was the first movie of its kind, science fiction driven, that was seen all over the world. If you were in Russia or Guam, you saw Star Wars. If you were in Haiti or you were in Australia, you saw Star Wars. If you were in Hawaii or Canada, you saw Star Wars. That had never happened before and anybody listening can Google international Star Wars posters. In order to pitch that first movie into these other countries, they had to fake how the plot was to be in the movie.
If you look at the Scandinavian ones, all the characters have blonde hair. If you look at the Russian poster for Star Wars, they show Darth Vader with his helmet off, and it’s done like an opera, like he’s the dark villain. If you look in Japan and China, C-3P0 is in a ninja pose. Okay.
This showed us how we’re going to live in the future. If you think about it, our brains work in pictures. Here it is, 35, 45 years later and millennials lived within the shadow of that. All they heard from their baby boomer parents was Star Wars, Star Wars, Star Wars.
And Halloween costumes, right?
You got it. When it came out again, they went to see it again. I think it was in 1989. Boom. They went to see it again. Well, what this did is, take a look. 90% of the devices in Star Wars we have today. We have pads. We have wifi networks. We have holograms. They are working on the light saber. What happened is, both Hollywood and business started to realize that science fiction was a serious genre to put money into. That launched this whole need on the screen and in the toys and the interactivity and everything else, this new era where we looked at science fiction as science fact. I can make that happen. So that’s number one.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “Science Fiction is Science Fact”]
Number two is a big one. This one is fascinating to me, but number two, the video game came into the household. Before 1977, we had to go to the arcade and pump quarters in. I had a job as a kid, so I had the money to pump into those machines. I played Pac-Man and Galaga and Phoenix and all this other stuff. But in 1977, I’ll never forget this. I was dating this girl, Robin. I went over to her house and her parents had this Atari station, had the joysticks and all this. They were playing Black Jack. I was like, “Wow, that’s kind of cool.”
We kind of make fun of those first video games, like come on Brad, 1977, those video games coming out. Well, it wasn’t those first games, but we got comfortable with them, so by the time 1984 rolled out, when Atari screwed up as a business, and suddenly Nintendo and Sega brought the video game into the home with more robust multilevel, multiplayer games. Mortal Kombat alone, in 1986 I think it was, or ’87, was a 10 billion dollar industry, the video game alone with the movies, and the dolls and all these things. It was a 10 billion dollar industry, globally.
This exposed the United States and people around the world to a global brand now. Guess what else it did? Guess what else it did? I talk about this in my Ted Talk, it changed the brains of the next generation.
Instant gratification, addiction to constantly the next level and all that stuff.
And guess what? All the toys were interactive from this moment on, so instead of going to your bedroom and being told often, you have to sit and think, now you can play video games. 1984 is when the Apple Macintosh came into the household. So now you had two computers in the household. One was visually driven and story driven and gaming driven, and the other was a business computer in your home that allowed you to reach out into the world. This opened up this expectation psychologically, behavior wise, interactive devices. Everything from millennial and even Gen X to some point, they have to have some interactivity in it.
Baby boomers, if you’re listening right now, this is why when you go home at the end of the day, all you want to do is sit with your wife and watch Dancing With the Stars. You don’t want to Tweet. You don’t want to do anything. This is my wife’s favorite show.
We’re cracking up over this, because once I unhinged and unlocked this code, I started to realize this is why the next generation loves gamification, because all it is interactivity. There’s so many things that you learn. How do you learn in a video game, John?
Oh, when you make a mistake and whether you get better and better. Yeah.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “When you play video games you learn from mistakes”]
Yeah. When I was a kid, you had to read the entire box of monopoly before you could play it.
That’s right.
If you broke the rules, everybody flipped the board and got into fights.
Yes. Or listen to somebody read the rules out loud. That was so horrible. Yeah.
Oh, gosh, yes. Now, you learn the rules intuitively. You jump in. Everything’s peer to peer. You learn the rules intuitively. You learn the politics. You learn who can help you in the game. You look around for the awards. You push against. You test. You fight to discover what the boundaries are within the game.
Boomers were taught, if you make one mistake, your career was over. This generation has been taught, the more mistakes you make, the more you’re going to learn.
Wow, that’s really great. I’ve never heard anybody say it like that. It also makes sense why baby boomers, sometimes find technology so challenging, is because they don’t have the experience of figuring something out by intuition. The kids are not afraid to just, well, I’ll just click around until I find a drop down menu. If it’s not this one, I’ll go to the next one.
Yeah.
Meanwhile, the baby boomers are like, oh my God, I’ve tried. Where are the instructions on this thing? Why is this so hard?
If I handed my dad the iPhone, he’d just stare at it. But if I hand it to my nephew, who I helped raise, he just clicks, clicks and he’s got all these pages open. What it did is, this generation learned to manipulate digital information before they could read, write, and speak in some cases. It’s a part of the medulla oblongata when they go to do something.
Getting back to The Successful Pitch, guess what? When you walk in your room and you’re pitching to millennials or you’re pitching as a boomer to a tech savvy company, you better have a millennial standing to your side, because they’re not going to trust that you even know about technology if you’re my age.
Now, I’m kind of hip and cool. I can get away with it, at least I think in my mind.
Yes, of course.
That guy is crazy. You walk in. I’ve actually helped these insurance salesmen who walk in with the three piece suit on and the tie, you know, they’re clearly in their 60s. I try to explain to them, take the tie off and go in with a millennial by your side or a Gen Xer and stop talking and trying to sell, and start listening. It’s a game to them. If you do the right things, there’s no linear in this world.
Nice, okay.
I’ll continue with the video game, what you learn in the video games. Leadership is rotational as you push against and learn all the rules. Each person within your team has a skill set and you need to use that skill set in the moment when you need it. If someone on your team doesn’t have the right skills, you get rid of them. They eat their young very quickly in these team environments. Yes, everybody has to keep their skill level up. And everything in a video game is peer to peer. That means, there is no hierarchy. You just have to earn your way from level to level to level. By the way, once you storm the castle, kill the trolls, save the princess, disregard most of the information you just learned, because some of it’s going to change, most of it. The rules may change completely at the next level.
Does any of this behavior sound familiar?
Sure. If you’re used to that, then you don’t resent or you’re not afraid of change. If you don’t have that gaming experience, then it pisses you off because you’re like hey, I was taught to play by the rules and now you’re changing the rules on me. I’m out of here, right?
Right. It also explains why when people walk into a corporation, the younger generation may be bored after a couple of weeks. Hey, I want more challenges. I want to move forward, because in the video game world, you want more risk. You want more challenges. And companies don’t quite know yet how to integrate this into the day to day curriculum of the learning cycle.
Yeah, I want to ask about that, tapping this millennial talent for hyper growth so you don’t bore them. But let’s finish the third big thing. We’ve got science fiction is science fact. We’ve got that video games created a difference between people who learn intuitively versus following the rules and learn by mistakes. And the third big thing that causes divide is…
Get ready. Parenting changed. My dad was a chiropractor. He had a PhD in chiropractic medicine and a Bachelors degree in chemistry. When he heard about child centric parenting, he said, “This is a load of crap.” Okay.
Everybody jumped on the bandwagon and listened to the experts like Dr. Spock and they would sit with Mr. Rogers. I don’t want anybody to judge any of this. This is neither right nor wrong. It’s just we shifted into, the conversation used to be, wait till your father gets home. He’s gonna paddle your butt. Now, parents would look at their child, and get down really low and go, “Hey, buddy. Hey, mommy and daddy have a question for you. Do you think the two of us should get a divorce? What do you think?”
Now, you’re laughing, and boomers laugh, and then they start to get, oh, I did that. What we did is, we didn’t know we flattened the hierarchy inside the home, so now instead of mom and dad being up there, benevolent rulers and the kids could just play and not worry about life, now the child was equal, eye level to the parents. The parents began to speak to them differently and became mentors, managers of their time, drove them to karate classes, French lessons, soccer lessons, lacrosse, all these things.
Now, the kid didn’t see their parent as an authority figure to fear once in a while. They were a mentor that they could go to and talk with, interact. Parents would look at their kids and go, “Hey, don’t do what mommy and daddy did. We worked for the corporate man. You follow your passion.” Now, when they went into the school system, the same thing happened. The hierarchy was flattened and they were encouraged to call the teacher by her first name. “Hey, Becky. How’s it going?” They were also encouraged to cherry pick their curriculums.
Now, I add this sometimes, but a lot of the young people going into college now, they’re choosing what I call TV professions. Nobody knew what a CSI investigator was when I was a kid.
Oh, that’s funny.
Most professions you fell into and you went, “You know what I do for a living? You know that spring on the pen. I install that.” You fell into your profession by accident. You didn’t go to college and have a college degree based on what you wanted to do for a living. Usually, got a college degree or you went straight into a job.
As a matter of fact, when I was a kid, being a bank teller was a summer job for a teenager. You didn’t have to be trained. You didn’t have to have skills. You just had to be a straight A student, usually.
The other thing I want to ask you about is this whole thing within parenting that I hear so many people saying, “Parents really did their kids a disservice by saying, ‘You are all winners.'” There’s seventh place, eighth place trophies. The kid never has a sense of failure or not being considered a superstar everywhere, so when they go out into the work force they’re stunned that they’re not the star.
Right. I feel, I don’t want anybody to get too upset with me right now, but I feel part of the reason a lot of people are very upset with how the presidency has turned out is, they never really have lost. So, that can affect you. You don’t like the choice, but half of America chose that. I may not like it either, which I’m sitting there going, I can’t believe he said that. This is tremendous. Basically, this is what’s happened. People haven’t lost ever.
Now, I think, and I’ve talked with a lot of millennials, that they know that the trophies are BS. They’ve now reached a point where they’re like, “Look. We didn’t ask for the trophies.” And in some cases, they’re ashamed. They’re embarrassed that you gave them the trophies, because everybody got trophies so they would feel good. If you have the poor kid in class who never has the right clothing and is always mismatched and you constantly give that person an award for their crappy clothing, they can’t hide anymore. Now they’re a focus of attention. They know it’s nonsense and they’re actually angry at you for giving them this trophy, because they don’t feel good about it. Instead, you put the spotlight on something they didn’t want to talk about.
Well, let’s dive in to this, because this is a problem I hear a lot, which is these millennials get bored easily. They expect to be promoted in six months instead of three years. You have a whole thing on how to tap into their talent so they can have hyper growth. Please share that secret.
Yeah. Everything that we’ve been taught, boomers, throw it out the window, except for the stuff that works. Yes. You have to be on time. Certain things in business are never going to change. But in order to up your game, you have to up the challenge. A lot of times, what you have is an employee that has an amazing amount of skill, and you put them in an entry level position, even though they have a Masters degree, and now after three months, you may not want them to advance because it took you years to move up one notch.
What you do is you get your team to make the decision as to whether they’ve earned the right to do a lateral move within the company. Or maybe their dream job within the company is not to work in the IT sector, but to work in the pitch part of the company. This means, that as a manager, as a people manager person, you have to know a little bit more about your employees than just the surface stuff.
I’ll give you a good example. A friend of mine runs one of the best and largest web development agencies here in Long Island and in New York City and in LA. He came to me and he said, “Hey, I have an employee. We can’t figure it out, but he stands up in meetings. He’s a brilliant IT guy, but he won’t stop talking. He just goes on and on and on. He doesn’t seem to get…” They thought he was autistic because he couldn’t get facial cues that the client was bored.
Oh my gosh. Wow.
Yeah, it was bad. This young man, we’ll call him JJ. He was brilliant. I sat with him once. We were doing a project, and I said, “Can you build a dashboard overnight using this, this, and this?” He said, “Yeah, I can do that.” He had it done the next day, a highly complex dashboard. He made it from scratch. I said to them, “Take JJ out to lunch and find out what he loves to do.” He called me up the next day. He says, “He likes to write.” I said, “You’re kidding.” He goes, “No. His passion is writing.” I said, “Put him on the team to write the pitches, the RFPs when they come in.”
Well, he started writing and helping the team, and guess what? They started training him, ever so slightly, how to give a speech, to stand up, say what you gotta say, sit down, and take questions and learn facial cues. Because of that shift of moving one employee into a different zone based on their skill set, not their resume, they were able to now pitch larger projects. They started instead of winning the under million dollar pitches they were winning, they started to be able to go after four millions dollars, two million dollars, twelve million.
There’s a story.
Yeah. It’s all because they moved one employee. So you have to take the weirdo, take the one person out to coffee that you don’t understand. Just do it, because inside of them, like what I said in the beginning, 40%, they won’t give it to you.
They hold it back. It goes right into the environment if they don’t trust it. Even if they trust that it’s a safe environment, they’re still not trusting that they can be themselves or that anybody cares enough, right?
Yeah.
That’s really what’s going on.
Part of that child centric parenting part and the schooling, what that did is, it made them not see there are authority figures around them, so they are fearless when it comes to walking up to the CEO of a company and saying, “Hey, I’m gonna show you how to run this place.” It makes them fearless to go into a room and pitch a 20 million dollar account when they’ve got $10 in the bank.
Yeah.
That’s the power of millennial thinking that I think a lot of people miss out on.
Nice. Well, Brad, you’ve given us so much to think about, so many great insights, and really great take aways on what we can do to get our best out of our team.
Good.
I really love it. The book is called, “Liquid Leadership”. We’re gonna put it in the show notes. It’s a great book if people can’t engage you one on one to come in and fix their companies with your training, but they can certainly get a lot out of your book, which is really fascinating and a great read on changing the way we run things. Anybody who needs to be a leader, and I think we all are, needs to learn how to become a little more liquid.
Thank you so much for being on.
Thank you, John. I appreciate it.
Links Mentioned
- Book: “Liquid Leadership”
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Predictive ROI can help
Fox 11 News Los Angeles John Livesay The Successful Pitch book
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Getting Investors To Pick You with Jefferson Lilly
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on the Successful Pitch is Jefferson Lilly. He has a Wharton MBA but decided to go a different route than most of his other fellow graduates. And he now runs a fund that invests in mobile home parks. So people are somewhat surprised, as he calls it, this quirky little niche, of why they would ever invest in that versus apartment buildings, for example. So no matter what you’re pitching, you still have to get somebody to understand why you and why now, and really explaining how you’re adding value, and that you’re the right team to make sure that this investment’s going to give them a good return on their investment, not only having a great exit plan, but he also talks about how his investments give dividends to people. He tells the story of exactly all the grit and tenacity that was required to get his business to take off. But now he’s the expert. He shows you how you can become the expert in what you’re doing too.
Listen To The Episode Here
Getting Investors To Pick You with Jefferson Lilly
Hi, and welcome to the Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Jefferson Lilly, who owns a company called Park Street Partners. He’s a self-made millionaire, a mobile home park investment expert, educator and industry consultant. His company owns 16 mobile home parks coast to coast, totaling over $30 million in value. Jefferson’s been featured in the New York Times, Bloomberg Magazine, and on the Real Money television show. We are going to ask him to share some tactical and practical stories of his journey, and it’s all about investing and telling stories, no matter what you’re investing in. Jefferson, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John, it’s great to be with you today.
Tell me, if you don’t mind, I always like to ask my guests their story of origin. So, when you were starting out, you’re maybe getting out of school, and you’re thinking, “I’m going to go invest in mobile homes,” or, “I’m going to become a millionaire.” Tell us, how did you decide, did you start at a young age, tell us what happened.
Well, as I say, John, when I woke up from the concussion, it just seemed like a good idea to be buying mobile home parks. But no, seriously, yeah, I had always been interested in investing generally. I bought my first stock at age 17. I won’t tell you how old I am, but suffice it to say this is back when trade tickets were physical pieces of paper, not anything on the internet, and my dad had to cosign that trade ticket. Anyway, so I went on, I was an Econ major in college, did basically a couple of different tours of duty as an analyst in my 20s, went to the Wharton School of Business for my MBA, and came out of that, and all the while was certainly focused on making money. But honestly, I came out of Wharton and went into high-tech, like so many people back in the late ’90s. I rode the dot com boom up and down.
I just began thinking after that, that personal finance is never quite a question of black or white, but to the extent it is, that basically value investing is what’s right. And sort of momentum high-tech, solar-tech, biotech, silly tech investing was just not going to be what I wanted to do anymore. I had already been a shareholder in Berkshire Hathaway and was well aware of what value investing was and just wanted to do more of that. That led to diversifying away from the stock market and buying value real estate. There’s really nothing better that I’ve found than mobile home parks, as far as just generating good cash flow. Value investing is all about buying a dollar for fifty cents, and typically buying and holding. And so mobile home parks just fit really nicely into that perspective that I now have and continue to have, that really value investing is the way to go, and not chase high-priced other investments.
So you, I would guess, would be someone who’s not jumping into the, “Oh, I need to be investing in Uber’s Series,” whatever letter they’re on now.
No, and I don’t intend to buy Uber on the IPO, and who knows. I may be sorry for that or I may be quite happy, but honestly, to be able to generate the kinds of returns that we do pretty consistently, which are 20-30% cash flows, plus of course appreciation in addition to that, but just the cash alone is in the 20-30% range, to have that kind of annual return really is almost venture capital returns. All the fancy firms up and down Sand Hill Road here in the Bay Area, that go after all those sexy deals and have so many wipe-outs are generating that kind of return, and it’s much more volatile and those are far less liquid investments. We’ve got a far more stable asset that’s more liquid, and again, we make those kind of returns and we’re quite happy doing what we’re doing here at Park Street Partners.
Can you tell me about the concept of what you’ve learned about pitching? How do you pitch to get people to invest with you?
We’ve evolved. We got started just really without specifically pitching in mind. And by that, I mean that, I don’t know, probably seven or eight years ago, before I even had my partnership, I was just getting back into the mobile home park investing community. I was posting online at various blogs, answering other people’s questions about mobile home park investing. Because I was giving back, I got to be reasonably well known. Then when I formed the partnership with my partner Brad Johnson, that was about three and a half years ago, I already had some profile on the web, some awareness, and just putting the word out online, that we had a deal and were looking for investors, got us our first set of investors, our first deal that we closed on that was now summer of 2014. I believe we had six investors. And so I had established some amount of credibility on the web, again, for several years, just kind of giving back into the community.
Then we put together a PowerPoint presentation, and pitched investors, but it varied. Some of those investors had a lot of questions. Frankly, the first guy that we thought that was going to do that deal, when through three or four weeks with us, on and on questions on and on. He looked at the pitch, he had questions, he had more questions, then he had the same questions, again and again. He eventually fell by the wayside. So it doesn’t always work, but again, we had honed our pitch and so then we were able to close that first deal. We raised money, roughly from half a dozen other folks. And that pitch, which just lays out first the marketplace, why is the mobile home park industry such a great business to invest in, that’s in our pitch. And the second part in our pitch then is the individual deal in question. Here’s the mobile home park, the location, the occupancy, the rents currently. Here’s what it should be after 12 and 24 months, higher rents, higher occupancy, et cetera.
Let me ask you a couple questions there, because you’ve given such valuable information. Before we get more from you, I just want to underscore it for the listeners. So what I’m hearing is the amount of preparation is so key, so that when you get asked a question, a) you’re prepared, and b) you’re not defensive.
Yeah.
So I’m guessing that some of the questions that you might get asked, because you, as I mentioned, were in the New York Times, the perception of mobile homes maybe not as sexy as a new high-tech startup. Then people say well, for the people who are in a mobile home trailer park, is sort of their last resort sometimes before they become homeless, but it doesn’t mean it should be your last resort as an investment, correct?
We’ve never said it quite that way, but you’re very perceptive there, John. Yeah, so that’s it. We know that this is such a quirky niche, that a lot of our audience, let’s just call it all of our audience, has never invested in a mobile home park before. So we have to start, we err to the side of caution. So our pitch starts with, assuming ground zero like no knowledge of the business. And again, we start off talking about the industry. We actually compare it to apartment investing. Many investors are familiar with traditional multifamily investing, which means apartments. Mobile home parks are still multifamily, it’s just a teeny tiny niche. Maybe 1%, maybe less, of all multifamily is mobile home parks.
Anyway, we’re able to compare and contrast like, well, here’s how our expense line item for repair and maintenance compares favorably to apartment buildings. Here’s why mobile home parks are better, have lower repair and maintenance. People then get drawn into our story and they understand line item by line item, like why are our rents the way the are, why is our repair and maintenance the way it is, why is our tenant retention, our turnover as low as it is, why is it so much more favorable than apartment building investing. So we just kind of walk our investors through the P & L and do a side-by-side comparison, our quirky little niche compared to something they probably already know. Again, apartment building investing. And that’s how we build our pitch.
Every good pitch paints a picture, and you’re painting a picture, giving them a frame of reference of apartments, so they can have some anchor. And then you’re acknowledging that this might be a little quirky, and I think when you have something that’s an unspoken objection and you bring it up, then people feel like, “Oh, I can trust you because you’re not pretending this is some high rise on Park Avenue in New York,” right?
Right.
The other thing that I think is important in the pitch is to reduce the risk. So credibility and risk, and it sounds like when you’re going through and comparing, when you start saying you know, people like Warren Buffet invest in this-
He does.
And we know he’s very successful and does his due diligence. So you start to have some social proof there, that I would think would be really a big take-away for anyone who’s pitching to get a new client, to get funded, whatever it is, is if you have credibility and you reduce the risk, using social proof, that it really helps get people to say, “Oh, you’re the guy.” And the other thing that I think you’ve really done that everybody can take away is you’ve generated press. You were giving away content, which allows you to be known as the expert, which then of course, if you’re going to invest in this quirky little niche, as you call it, then why wouldn’t you invest with someone who’s known as the expert, but you had to set yourself up as the expert.
Yeah.
The thing I hear over and over again, that you’ve done so well, and why I wanted to have you on the show, is you answered the question why you, right?
Right.
You really are the person that is the go-to person. So if you’re pitching any kind of startup, pitching to get a customer, we all have choices. Everyone has competition or there’s no market. So answering this question, why you, you’ve done really well, I believe. And I think that’s a key to your success and I just wanted to have you maybe zoom out a little bit and say, “It’s always been my strategy,” or, “Here’s a couple tips I would say to somebody who’s starting out,” if you don’t have a strategy on how to do that.
You want to set yourself up to be, as you said, the guy to invest with. You don’t want your prospective investors to get super excited about the concept of what you’re doing, and then go do it themselves, or do it with someone else. So to get folks tied into us, we then, in our pitch, we talk about our background, how long Brad and I have been in real estate, which in aggregate between the two of us is now more than 20 years, and we have some very specific quarter-by-quarter graphs that document how much cash our investors have been earning with us historically, quarter-by-quarter. And suffice it to say, again, it’s better than investing in the stock market or most other forms of real estate. Of course, I’m making no guarantees about any future gains here. But by having that kind of black and white evidence of our historical track record, and again, how many years, more than 20 that we’ve been in the business, that helps us to make the case that yes, we’re the guys to go after this niche with.
We also mention, frankly, that because this niche is so small, it’s not like doing single family house investing or apartment investing. Finding these deals is difficult. It’s not impossible, but it’s difficult. We’ve spent time outreaching to both brokers that specialize in bringing mobile home parks to market, and we also outreach directly to mobile home park owners. We send out some postcard mailers, and we’ve made some follow-up phone calls. So we have a little bit of secret sauce in what we do, in our deal flow. And again, if someone else were to say, “Hey, I’m just going to go buy my own park,” or “I’m just going to go invest with some other partnership,” I’m not saying that wouldn’t work, but again, we make it clear that we’ve got good deal flow and there is something unique about our partnership. This isn’t like just looking on the MLS to just go buy a regular single family house, and flip it. So we add value and we’ve got a good track record.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “Add Value and Show Your Track Record to Get A Yes”]
Nice. So that’s the tweet right there. Add value and have a good track record when you pitch, and the track record could be previous successes, even in other industries if you’ve had another startup, or you have another client, a customer that’s happy, maybe. Have you ever told a story of an investor that was a little skeptical at first and then they put in some money and then they got a return, and so that you give somebody that little story, that hero’s journey, if you will, so that they can go, “That sounds like where I am, and I do want to go and be where that guy is three to five years from now.” Is that the kind of thing you do?
We have not made it quite that personal around any specific investor, but what we do tell folks, is hey, Park Street Partners comes with references, and if you choose to invest with us, we will happily provide a fairly lengthy list of references. We make it clear that we’ve got at least one guy who started with us in that very first deal, three years ago, and he then invested subsequently in our first fund, which was our 2015 fund, and he’s invested in our current fund. So we make it clear that we’ve got investors that are happy with what we’re doing and they are repeat investors with us.
There’s nothing more it sounds like.
That’s how we sell with our investors, so to speak.
Yes. Just so people … I try to anticipate the questions people might have when they’re listening, so what’s the minimum amount of money someone has to invest with you to be part of this?
$50,000.
Got it. Okay. And is there some kind of exit plan, much like an apartment building, do you have to hold onto it for five to ten years before you sell the mobile park, or how do people get their money back?
Yeah, exactly. So, John, as you know, you can’t go to the market, at least we’ve not been able to go to the market with sort of a very open-ended investment and say, “Hey, there’s no exit,” because then of course what people hear is, “Oh, my gosh, Jefferson is going to keep my money forever.” So we put a 10-year life on the fund, so that investors emotionally could get comfortable that at some point, we would be selling off everything and getting them their money back. So that, in a nutshell, that’s the answer. But this is such a profitable niche, we’ve been paying our investors about 12% a year, 3% a quarter. So honestly, just from dividend payouts, they’ll have all their money back, probably in eight years, and then still will have the property to sell at year 10. So, there’s really a fair amount of liquidity.
This isn’t like traditional venture capital, where you write a check and you get nothing for five to seven years, until you have a winner and something goes public or gets acquired. We start paying out our investors from the first or second quarter, while we’re still raising funds. This is just a very strong cash flow business, so investors start to see some of their money back, honestly, probably within 90 or 180 days. And then, again, as we grow the portfolio, as we infill any vacant pads with new mobile homes, et cetera, then the returns tend to improve over time, but they actually start getting money back well within that first year after investing.
And is it similar to investing in a mutual fund where you’re owning multiple stocks, in this case, you’re owning multiple mobile parks across the country?
Yeah, you can think of it that way. Folks invest in our fund, which is a Delaware LLC. It in turn owns LLCs in the states that we have properties, and each of those LLCs owns just the one property, so our deal in Dayton, Ohio, is held in an Ohio LLC, which is 100% owned by our fund. So yeah, investors own a diversified portfolio, geographically diversified portfolio of mobile home parks. We don’t also do self-storage, or apartments, or retail or anything, so they’re focused in mobile home parks, but yeah, they’re buying into a portfolio of 10 or 15 parks nationwide. So that’s the way we do it.
And how do you find your investors? Do you use family offices, do you advertise, networking, referrals? I’m very curious about that.
Yeah, a little bit of all of the above. So we’ve evolved, as I mentioned earlier, from doing just some of those blog postings, and really kind of knowing most of those first half dozen investors, to now, we’ve got our own podcast, which is simply called Mobile Home Park Investors, so we were the first people to do a podcast on mobile home park investing. So we get a lot of listeners. Let’s just say we’re averaging about 10,000 downloads a month right now. And so from that, we get both investors, people will just literally every week, I get at least an email or two, or a phone call from somebody that says “Hey, I’ve heard your podcast. I love the investment thesis. This is a great quirky little niche. Too much for me to do on my own, let’s just talk about me writing a check for 100 grand or a quarter million.” We get inquiries like that most weeks from our podcasts, but also, to a lesser degree, but still important, we also get some deal flow from our podcast.
Last fall, we bought a property in Raleigh-Durham, a great market where 15 minutes from Duke and 15 minutes from UNC Chapel Hill, and that came to us through a couple of, I call them the kids, a couple 20-somethings, that want to get into the business. They heard our podcast and we do pay referral fees for people that bring us off-market deals, and so these guys just called out of the blue, and said, “We’ve heard your podcast. We know about a park in this great market, Raleigh-Durham, and if you pay us a referral fee, maybe we can do some business together. So we’ve done some business together.
So it sounds like hosting a podcast sounds like a great way to find new clients and investors.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “Hosting a podcast is a great way to get new clients”]
Yeah. You should try it sometime, John.
I know it well. But I love that I’m seeing someone else use it in a different format. It’s a great way of extending your expertise and your branding beyond blogs, and you can even repurpose the podcast and take some of the transcripts and turn them into blogs if you want. That’s what I love.
Blogs or books, yes. There aren’t all the hours in the day, but you may see a blog or a book coming out of us at some point in the next year. We’ll see.
Very interesting. So, people who are listening that either want to have their own business, have their own business and are really looking for some life lessons that you’ve learned on cash flow, getting a good team, anything you could share would be great, Jefferson.
To be candid, yeah, nobody needs to have top school, Wharton, Harvard or Stanford type MBA to be successful in the mobile home park business. It’s just not that complex. I mean, I think I was pretty good with numbers, and getting through my business school program I certainly took some real estate finance courses, and some basic marketing courses, those sorts of things help. But really, truly, this has been mostly for me, learning trial by fire. I read every book that I could, I went to seminars when I was getting into the business. I just put the word out to everybody that I knew, that I wanted to buy a mobile home park. I certainly got a number of quirky, quizzical looks, but like one guy from my church just said, “Oh, my dad owned a mobile home park, and that was what sent us, our whole family, to a great European vacation every summer. You should call my dad and talk to him.”
So I built up kind of an unofficial advisory board of about 10 guys that had all owned mobile home parks. I started bouncing deals off them to get their input. And then again, finally found my first park to buy and bought it, and just jumped in. I had learned as much as I could, at that point, without actually owning a park. I had learned as much as I could, and jumped in, but certainly the learning curve continues, but again, it’s been a good business. So again, I just encourage folks that are interested in this business to learn about it. They can hit our website and we’ve got resources there for folks that would consider buying their own park. Learn about it, but like anything, at some point you got to just put your foot, or well, your toe, your foot or your whole leg into the water, and just sort of jump in and go for it, and there’ll be more learning hands-on. But this is a manageable, a very manageable business. This is not rocket science, you don’t need to have a fancy degree to be successful. You just need to have kind of the right attitude and stick to it in this.
Let’s talk about that, because that’s true for everybody. The right attitude and perseverance. I mean, you paint a picture of like, “Oh, this is … I found this, it’s easy to do, anybody can do it,” but I’m sure there’s some challenges in any business you have, whether it’s like competing to get the mobile park, or there’s some unexpected bump in the road. So what do you do to keep your attitude positive when things get frustrating?
John, we hire other people to take the headaches off my plate.
Well, you know what? That’s a great tip. Don’t wear all the hats, right?
Yeah. I mean, I did … When I got into the business, I was literally sleeping onsite, one out of every three weeks in one of my trailers being the general contractor, overseeing the roofer that was rehabbing house number 17, and the guy that was putting carpets in house 24, and the new toilets in 24 and 30, and blah blah blah. Now I’ve hired other people to do that sort of general contracting. But yeah, when I got started, I did virtually all of it. I never actually swung a hammer or hung sheet rock, but I answered the phone, I talked to tenants, I collected rents. I was literally living onsite, one third of the time, for about the first six months, being a general contractor. I put up all my own ads up on Craigslist and the website.
So I’ve outsourced most all that now, and I do a lot less, but I know what those jobs should be, and I know what success looks like, because I did it, and now I can say to somebody, like, “Hey, here’s how you do the job, although we generally tend to hire people that already know. But it does then give my insight if it’s like, “Hey, you rehabbed a house, and it cost how much? Why is that? It never cost me that much when I was doing it.
Yeah. That’s the story of tenacity and grit and doing what it takes, that a lot of people are not willing to do it. It’s so funny, I was talking to a co-founder of Barry’s Bootcamp, which is now global, and she said they started off with one location, and she used to be the one that would clean the mirrors in the gym. So now when she has a team of people doing it, they roll their eyes at her going, “Oh, my God, you’re so picky about how the mirrors are clean,” and she reminds them, “I used to do your job.”
It’s just the way I did it.
Yes. So that’s the heart and soul. I can see why people would put their money with you. Not only are you likable, and trustworthy, but you really care. And that’s really what everybody is selling when they’re pitching anything. Jefferson, I can’t thank you enough for being on the show. Let’s give the website, and twitter handle, anything you want to do, so people can really do a deep dive into what you’re offering.
Yeah, sure. So if folks are interested perhaps in co-owning parks with us by investing in our funds, or if you just want to buy your own park, our website is parkstreetpartners.com. And then, if you want to find our podcast, we’ve got now cumulatively something like almost 30 hours of content. And we’ve got actually the largest group on LinkedIn about 3,500 folks. Anyway, you can find all of that by going to mobilehomeparkinvestors.net, to get our content.
We’ll put all that in the show notes for everybody as well. Thanks again, and congratulations on all your great success.
Great to be with you, John.
Links Mentioned
- Website: parkstreetpartners.com
- Website: mobilehomeparkinvestors.net
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Predictive ROI can help
Fox 11 News Los Angeles John Livesay The Successful Pitch book
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Video Storytelling That Sells with Ian Garlic
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is Ian Garlic, who is an expert at digital video storytelling. And he combines that with his expertise in SEO as well as website design, and allows people to tell their story in a way that’s authentic, and pulls people in. I’m all about the storytelling when you pitch, and he takes it to the level of creating videos that do that for his clients. So you’re gonna really want to listen in on how to do that. He said stories really are what sell, and not so much a testimonial. And that great video storytelling is all about great timing. And he shares the secrets and the mistakes to avoid when you’re doing search engine optimization. You’ll want to be sure to listen in on his wisdom on that and more. The interview begins in 45 seconds, right after this information on how hosting a podcast can grow your business.
Listen To The Episode Here
Video Storytelling That Sells with Ian Garlic
Hello and welcome to The Successful Pitch podcast. Today’s guest is Ian Garlic who is an online video storytelling expert. And as if that’s not enough he has this amazing podcast called the Garlic Marketing Show. And the tagline on that has got to be one of the best taglines I’ve ever heard. “Stories and strategies that don’t stink” with a picture of garlic on it, brilliant. Ian, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much, it’s awesome to be a guest on a show.
Yes because you know, you go back and forth host, guest, host, guest. People say, “Oh, what’s easier? What’s harder?” You know, it’s different amounts of preparation I think is the key there. But let’s start there. What’s your favorite thing to do, be a host or be a guest?
With our agency Authentic Web, I’ve been interviewing people now for about ten years, on video. I love the interview process, I love to talk to people about business. I’m really, really bad at small talk. So the podcast really allows me to just get right to the point and talk to people, and then the small talk comes. What I found out is actually it’s a sign of introversion, that you do small talk on the end.
Interesting.
Yeah. So yeah, I like both. I don’t like talking about myself too much but when it comes to talking business and marketing, I love talking about it.
Got it. Well on your site, which is different than your agency’s site, there’s lots of different ways to find you, IanGarlic.com. Can you talk about your own story and you have of course a video telling that story, your love of stories and how you got there. So because this is an audio podcast and not a video one, can you tell us how did you start to love stories as much as I do? I love that about you.
I always loved film to a certain, when I was a kid I always loved it. I think back and this is probably the first time I’ve told it but I always loved to tell jokes when I was a kid, so there was always that element. I remember when I was like four or five years old telling these horrible jokes. Probably my jokes are still horrible but I think they’re funny now.
But really when I was working in marketing and I was working for a Fortune 100 company. I was doing marketing consulting and we kept doing like kind of the same marketing over and over again, not in a bad way. It worked, it just wasn’t awesome. And I was like, “How do I help these people stand out?” And then one day I realized, I’m like every single one of these people really has a different story to tell, and their stories are so interesting.
When you tell your story then you enjoy your business more because the people that connect with your story connect with you. Instead of just trying to do the same thing as everyone else competing, we all tell a different story, and all of a sudden you’re attracting the people you like to work with and you’re being true to yourself. And that’s where we came up with the name Authentic Web, because it’s really about telling the story. When you do that, you have your authenticity there, you enjoy your business more, it grows better, and you serve people better.
What do you think makes a good story when you’re doing it in a video format?
So for us, what I’ve found is most business owners, most people are not trained to be on video. I love the documentary style, so that’s a first part. We read people’s faces and it’s a universal human trait, it’s ingrained in us. I think, before, you and I have talked about it but it’s like one of those things, it’s one of those traits that’s deep in there, that we can’t get out, just like storytelling. So I think having that authenticity in their face, being able to read someone’s face and seeing that they truly enjoy what they do is important.
I think also making sure that your stories, for the most part, are in the light of the person you’re trying to help. So it’s like going to a cocktail party. I always tell people, you don’t go and tell your story start to finish. You always listen to someone and you tell the parts of your story that are important and can serve them. And I think that’s incredibly important. A great video story is about timing. That’s actually our slogan, our motto at Authentic Web. It’s “the right story at the right time.”
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “Great video storytelling is about timing”]
I love that. Well we’re gonna tweet that out. Great video storytelling is all about timing. So that’s a really great thing to keep in mind. So people need, in my opinion, to have a video on their website now. It’s not enough just to have words and pictures. I think that people are consuming content with YouTube and even Instagram lets you put on videos, it’s just everywhere, and that pulls people in. So they need to hire someone like you, especially if they’re a small business, to figure out how to tell their story in a way that stays consistent and authentic to their brand.
Now you say timing is one big thing about having a really great online video story. Do you have a story of a client that you helped that didn’t have a video story and maybe some challenges you helped them overcome along the way?
Yeah, sure. Because I came out of legal marketing, there was a lot of attorneys to begin with. Now we really focus on larger marketing technology companies, but we still work with attorneys. But one of the attorneys, this is one of the things that we found out right away, was … well we didn’t find out right away, we’d been doing it for a while. So backtrack we did a lot of video SEO, search engine optimization for video. Because it helps with the timing, if someone’s looking for something and you put a video in front of them that answers that question because then you’re the expert. Right? So that’s one of the best timing out there because there’s that intent of search and if you answer it, you become their friend.
We were getting clients to the top of really difficult searches. Legal SEO is probably one of the hardest out there. It’s always one of the top five most expensive search terms out there.
Huh.
Yeah, so it was difficult, and we made good money. I enjoyed it for the most part. So we had these clients, they were getting to the top and what we found was that once in a while one client would make a lot of money, then other client wouldn’t. And you can’t really control what happens after the call as much. I mean we’ve done a lot to develop video funnels and stuff. There’s only so much you can do as the marketer to control the sales process.
But what we learned was, what are some opportunities for me to help sell them more? And I start doing the research and going through websites. I’m good at patterns, I love to identify patterns. I was a hedge fund trader after I graduated from college. So I found that the About Us page is the second most used page on a website.
Oh, okay.
And if you think about it it makes sense, right?
Sure.
So you go to the homepage and then you want to know who is this person I might work with? Who’s this company I’m buying from? But a lot of times people just throw their bio up there, right?
Mm-hmm.
The attorneys are bad about just throwing CVs up there. Or companies, even like something cutesy. And they’re like, “Oh this is fun and it’s exciting.” But I’m like that’s your opportunity to sell because someone’s like, “Okay, I like what you’re selling. Do I like you?”
Let’s just take a second and then really underline that. Whether you’re an attorney, whether you’re an architecture design firm, whether you’re a start-up seeking funding, everybody invests and buys from people they like first. More than your big idea, or your service, or your graphic design, or your architecture renderings. So that’s so important for people, it’s a big “aha” for a lot of people. I think you and I intuitively understand that. But then we get down to, “Okay, I get that I have to sell myself on my website. But I really hate selling myself, and I hate being on camera” enter … Authentic Web.
Yeah. Well enter the idea that we’re not selling ourselves, that you provide enough value through your stories and what you say. How is this part of my story valuable to someone?
Yes. I tell people forget selling and tell stories instead all the time. So that’s really what you’re saying in a way is okay, don’t think we’re gonna put a camera on you and you’re gonna have to go, “Hi, buy from me” like you’re selling a used car. It’s not that at all. It’s like you know what? I found that people I work with have these same kind of problems and I love helping them solve those problems, whether it’s a legal problem or whatever the issue is. And if that’s something that you have, maybe I could help you. That’s a much soft, and maybe even tell a story of somebody you helped, right?
Yeah. That’s the number one thing that people can do is start collecting the stories of the people that they help. And the stories, not testimonials. I always say testimonials stink. It’s not because testimonials are bad, but it’s because of the word testimonial. To most people it means, “John Livesay’s the greatest. He helped us close our biggest round of funding ever.” No, it’s that story of how you helped them, where they were before, where they were and they weren’t able to even articulate their pitch, to how you helped them find it, what their concerns were, what their problems were. And even the problems that they had working with you, because there’s an authenticity to that. It’s not all sunshine and roses. And then the conclusion. It’s that story format that you talk about too.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “Stories sell not testimonials”]
If you collect enough of those stories, you could have the worst website in the world, if you have enough of your clients telling those stories, you will win every time.
Yes. I’m seeing some people who are using video testimonials and their mini case studies and the person’s just on camera going, “Here’s where I was, I didn’t want to” … For example, Stephen Woessner has a company called Predictive ROI that produces podcasts for people who don’t want to produce it themselves. They don’t have the time or the interest or whatever their thing is, right? So these people are saying, “I didn’t want to do it but I wanted to have a podcast and now I don’t have to worry about all the production stuff. It’s grown my business.”
Like when people have worked with me sometimes they’ll say, “John really pushed me. I was so frustrated because I thought I had it down and he said it’s still not there yet. And I’m so glad he didn’t let me just get by with just being average. Now I have a great pitch and that makes all the difference.” When someone’s that authentic in their messaging, saying it’s not gonna be all roses and easy peasy, like “I can fix this in two minutes,” but the outcome is worth it. That’s the journey you’re taking them on, right?
It is completely. And you said something really important there about that story of someone saying, “Oh I didn’t know if I was gonna make it through it. Or how I’m gonna do this. And John pushed me through.” Because I tell people when we tell a good story and we want to sell to them, we have to talk about what they want, and then give them what they need. Most experts just go straight to what they need, which no one drowns out, but we have to tell them what they want. What’s that end goal? What they need.
But then we have to overcome their alibis, their excuses. There’s the excuses of working with you, which a lot of people do a good job, but most people don’t overcome the alibis, the internal alibis. Like people believing, “Hey, am I good enough to do this pitch? Is my company good enough to get in front of these VCs?” If you can have a client saying, “You know what? I wasn’t sure about our company, John made me really sure.” You hit that trigger point that now it’s like, “I believe in myself, let’s do this.”
Well I love what you’re saying there because I’m always seeing people are asking, “Okay, I trust you, I like you,” and then the question is when they’re watching a video that you create for their company is, “Will this work for me?” And I have found, and I want your input and maybe a story, on if I can get someone to not just give a case study, which is as boring as somebody’s CV, right? Letting the person watching the video in your case, that you create, put themselves into the story then they can see it happen, if it worked, because sometimes people will say, “Well I’m sure that worked for Joe, but it will never work for me.” But if somehow you tell the story that they can identify with, “Gosh, Joe sounds a lot like me and he had the same challenges and fears and he overcame them.” That to me is the secret sauce, what are your thoughts on that?
Oh, yes. Developing that empathy is absolutely critical. Empathy, when someone can see themselves in the situation, now they’re completely engaged and you can tell them a story and they’re gonna pay attention. So I have lots of stories around that because the people, oh man, we’ve made so many of these case stories. Over the years I’ve interviewed so many of our clients’ clients. We always spent a lot of time making sure that people connect. But I’ve got two scientific examples.
Ooh, I love it. Let’s hear it.
And they both come from actually from other people who have done the research. So the first one was I had one guy doing funnel optimization. For those of you, you know marketing funnels, it’s moving people along either e-mails and market funnel getting from step to step to step. And at one point on the marketing funnel they had, on a landing page, a picture of a man. And then they realize that their target audience was 75% women. They switched that picture and told the story of that person, told the story of one of their clients. Just switching that picture, that connection, increased their conversation rate 150%.
What?
Yeah.
One little tweak, huh?
One little tweak because when we see someone that we believe is like us, that’s why when you look … I’m an infomercial junkie, I have been since I was a kid because I’m like in, I’m dissecting these always, I’ve always loved them.
Right.
And all the great infomercials have multiple people in multiple looks on there because they want you to connect to the person.
Right, so if Cindy Crawford’s doing an infomercial for beauty products, she’s gonna have a lot of different women, multiple ages, multiple hair colors all on there. So you’re like, “I don’t know if I identify with Cindy Crawford, she’s too pretty, but I identify with who she’s helping.” Right?
Yep. Exactly, exactly. And the second story’s, actually I just did an interview with this guy Paul Zak, who’s an incredible researcher. His studies just always blow me away ’cause I’m such a marketing nerd. Basically he started out taking blood tests of people as they were going through marketing things. But he did this one test with video, and it showed the story of a son and a dad. And then they added the story into it that the son has cancer and is dying, right? And it was this situation that so many connected with, that it raised their empathy level. So what it did, he found out, is it raised their cortisol level and their oxytocin levels. Which those two combined in the right combination increase empathy and are directly related to empathy.
When someone empathizes not only do they pay attention, they feel a kinship. And we know who in the end we buy from, our friends. And they show the marketing response through the roof. It’s just the more than people can connect with the person telling that story, what’s gonna happen is they like that person, right?
Yeah.
And then a transfer of trust to you.
Well I love this concept because for everybody who may not be aware, cortisol is a stress hormone and oxy is what you feel when you eat chocolate or you’re happy, right?
Yeah, yeah.
So it’s this combination of stress and happiness, you think why would that be a good combo? But I’m guessing, and I want, you’re the expert on it, is because the stress part is you’re aware, right? Your fight or flight response is triggered, it gets triggered sometimes when anything’s new, including something new that’s good. Right? “Oh my god, someone’s got cancer. It’s not me but I’m still stressed out watching somebody who has tell the story about have cancer.” Is that what’s going on?
Yes, yes. When we are engaged, you’re exactly right, that fight or flight response is there. We have that oxytocin, that feel good chemical. Really oxytocin is one of the big ones that builds trust. And then there’s that cortisol and they battle, not battle each other but balance each other out so we’re this heightened level of awareness and really that’s what triggers empathy in our brain. It’s that connection because if it’s just all happy, like you know if you’re really comfortable and relaxed and happy-
You’re not gonna take action, right? Yeah.
Yeah. You’re not paying attention. But if you’re completely stressed, you’re also gonna run away.
Yeah.
So it’s that balance. We see it all the time but if you think about all the great stories they start with that little bit of conflict and then you connect with the character. We watch those TV shows where we’re like, “I don’t really get that character so I don’t care.”
Mm-hmm. Well one of the things that really impresses me about what you do at Authentic Web marketing is not only giving the right story at the right time, but I don’t see a lot of other people with this combo expert. You’re like the one stop shop where, if I need a great website design, there’s a lot of people that might do that, but nobody else is combining that with an SEO expert. Because you can have a pretty website and if no one’s going to it it doesn’t matter. And then you take it one step further with, “We’ll create online videos that tell your story, that drives the traffic to the SEO, and the website.”
And it’s just like oh my gosh, you’ve got, in my opinion, the secret recipe that makes everything, as you said just one small tweak, ’cause you’ve got all three of these levers and expertise going. Most people just know SEO or just know website design or maybe they’re lucky enough to find somebody like you who’s an expert on online video storytelling. But what you’ve packaged together I’ve never seen anywhere else.
Oh, thanks. I appreciate it. I wouldn’t say I’m the best at any one of them in the world. Scott Adams talks about it too, he’s like 50% at these three things but when they combine together he has this unique talent. Scott Adams from Dilbert. I’m a heavy reader so I always have these references, sorry.
No, I love it. I’m a heavy reader too. It’s true, but that’s what you want. And I think it’s encouraging for people who think, “Oh, I’ll figure it out myself.” And oh you know what, what does that look like? When people tell me they’re gonna just wing it when they do a pitch I’m like, “Okay, what is that? Let me hear it.” “Um, duh, lalala,” especially with a video, right? And you’ve got the camera on you and if you’re not used to being on camera forget it.
Do you have any secrets that you want to share that most, what’s the biggest mistake you make, I guess that’s a better way to ask the question. The biggest mistake you see people making in SEO, search engine optimization? What is it that people are, when they come to you you’re like, “Oh, there it is again”?
The biggest mistake, and this is, it’s the biggest mistake in marketing. You are not your client. You are not your client. So that means like people say to me, “Well I would search this.” I’m like yeah, but you’re the expert. And you have that curse of the expert because you know so much, you can’t remember being a beginning again. And they’re like, “Well what key words are people searching for?” I’m like, “I don’t know, I can guess.” I’m trying not to guess because I want to find it. I want to have an open mind, a beginner’s mind when I come into this.
So when it comes to SEO thinking that … Well A, that you have to be number one for everything, and B, that you have to get a lot of traffic because of it. But in the end it’s you don’t know the one term that’s gonna make you a million dollars.
I love this. “You have the curse of the expert,” and putting that beginner’s mindset back on it. The more empathy you can show for your customers, the better off you are at solving their problems. But it seems to me like you’re saying it’s not a guessing game, there’s an actual scientific method, proprietary knowledge you have of how to test it, right?
Oh yeah. It is testing, it is testing but in the end, it’s the same thing that you do I’m sure when you’re thinking about a pitch. You’re thinking about who you’re pitching to, what do they want, and as much as you can put yourself in their situation, the better off you’ll do, and answer as many questions as possible in their situation. We buy because of the situation, we don’t buy just because of who we are. And I’m sure there’s perfect times of the day to do a pitch, right? And perfect times-
Mm-hmm.
There’s a perfect timing and there’s a way, there’s probably, one of my favorite things is that David Letterman was always famous for keeping his set cold. He kept it at 50 degrees. What he found was that made his jokes, actually he got the biggest laugh at that temperature. He controlled the situation to that degree. And understanding that situation, the more you can answer like comes back to that value. The more you can think about that person’s situation and how you can you help them. If you can just think about helping that person at that moment as much as possible, and you do it with stories, you can win.
It’s so true. Now you also give keynote talks on storytelling. What are some of the takeaways that you give the audiences when they have you come and speak?
The big ones, I talk about the story process, how to develop a great story. How to develop the About Us page and how to tell your story. Understanding the power of the situation, because we get so taken away from it. And then I really am driving home with people just the power of collecting your company’s stories. The stories of your customers, the stories of the people. Because it’s not just, you have to have an arsenal of stories. You have to because if you, if you’re giving a pitch … And I keep coming back to this because people have asked me about it a lot and I’m like that’s not my thing as much.
Source: Pexels
[Tweet “Have an arsenal of stories”]
If you’re giving a pitch you’re controlling that situation but if you run into that same guy that you’re trying to pitch to in the elevator, you’re not giving that same pitch. You have to be ready with something else to tell him. And we’re all a collection of stories so I tell people to collect those stories.
Well I know you’re also really into … the mindset of how we think, and the neuroscience and marketing connection, so I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you to talk a little bit about neuroscience and marketing because I’m really big on that too. Whether it’s neurolinguistic programming, advertising is my background, all this subtle messaging, what motivates us, what grabs our attention. What are your thoughts on that, neuroscience and marketing?
I talked a little bit about Paul Zak, he’s a great resource, but we have to remember too that our brains are wired to be caveman brains. And there’s triggers in there — triggers that keep us from doing stuff and triggers that make us do stuff. And to think well I’m a human and not an animal, and I shouldn’t play with those in my marketing, and those tricks don’t work. If you have a service that you want to provide, you have to learn all the tricks of the human brain. And if you’re doing something of value for people, which I hope all your listeners are. I hope when they’re pitching their new software or their big new company that it’s providing value to people. You should be pulling out every trick in the book to provide that value to people.
So you need to learn that. There’s the false attribution error which I was just talking about. We believe that people do things because of who they are, when actually we do things because of the situation. There’s a low correlation that we do things because of who we are. It’s because of what’s going on. And there’s all these studies around it too. The Milgram study is a perfect example of it. The example with the doctors in lab coats making people think that they’re killing the person on the other side by turning up the voltage. It’s a perfect example, people in those situations, it’s because of the controlling the situation so that’s just one of them. The other one, I love all of Cialdini’s stuff.
I’ve interviewed him, he’s amazing about persuasion and presuasion.
Yeah. If you don’t go out and learn those six weapons of persuasion you’re doing yourself a disservice, whether you’re in business or not.
Let’s just, if you don’t mind, I want to explain to the audience ’cause maybe they didn’t grasp all the nuances there. So what you’re saying is the perception is we take action based on who we are and you’re saying that’s not it at all, it’s situation-based, right?
Yup, it is situation-based.
So is there another story or example you could give us. Let’s say I’m pitching to get a company to hire me to be their architecture firm, right?
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
So when I had Robert on he was saying well you want to really … paint. It’s what you do before you even start talking is important but let’s talk, and obviously the team slide is important whether you’re pitching for money or pitching to get hired. That’s where I think people start to go, “What are you talking about it’s not a who we are?” Can you explain, and when we have a team slide up-
Okay.
That’s who we are but how does that really … The situation’s more important? You see what I’m saying?
Well no, what I’m saying is not who we are … Who you are when you’re selling your business is very important. What I’m saying is the person you’re pitching to … It’s more about their situation and understanding-
Ahh.
The person you’re talking to, it’s about understanding that moment in time. The simplest example is one I always give to people. I ask them, I go … “There’s a 45 year old woman, she’s a mother of three, she’s a professional and she walks into Starbucks, what does she buy?” And people are like always, almost 90% of the time, I’ll give everyone a second to think about it and say your answer out loud. And it’s usually, most people say a latte. Right?
Yeah.
So then I ask them, “Okay, now it’s five o’clock, she lives in Florida, it’s 95 degrees out and her husband just called and said he’s filing for divorce. What does she buy?” And everyone’s like, “Well she goes straight to the bar.” And I’m like, “Exactly.” We think we’re in control, that she thinks Starbucks is in control of that situation.
That’s such a great example, I’m totally clear now. Yeah, it’s so helpful. So if I’m pitching somebody, it’s not about how great this product is if it doesn’t solve their problem that they have in that exact moment. It’s about whether they … So my example is Airbnb would not have been successful had the economy not been bad in 2008 for people to even consider renting out a room or their home, right?
Yep, exactly.
So there’s an example of if you just asked somebody randomly in 2006, “Hey would you ever consider renting out your home or a room to a stranger?” “No. No, I don’t need the money and I would”, right? But now they’re like, “Oh.” Or before we all had smartphones, can you ever imagine not taking a taxi and just ordering up on your phone? What? No. So they why now is always … So that’s so clear that we respond differently. So you can’t just say, “I’ve got this great thing and it’s good for you 24/7.” No, it’s only good for you if you’re in this particular situation. That’s so helpful.
Now I always have heard, and I want your insight on this, that if I say to people, “Here’s the three mistakes to avoid when you pitch,” or “Here’s three good things to do when you pitch,” that most people, going back to this caveman type of brain, want to avoid making a mistake more than doing the right thing. Thoughts? Thoughts on that?
Yeah, you’re presenting the conflict, right? You’re presenting the conflict and most people do want to avoid the right thing. Because also, in that, you’re presenting the conflict. Now if you had some more specificity and you could take someone, there was a promise like, “Three things to say the perfect pitch in five minutes or less.” Now you have some specificity on that, you might get more attention. But really conflict usually …
That’s why we rubberneck. Everyone hates rubbernecks, right? But we all … No matter how much someone says, “I hate rubbernecking.” There’s not a single person that will not turn and look at that car accident and try and figure out what’s going on. If I walk into a quiet room and clap my hands really loud, everyone’s turning around.
Right.
So that conflict, yes, 100% can control the situation. And to that point, you can prime the situation. Like you could walk into a pitch possibly and put some sort of conflict in so you now put them in, frame that situation, and now you know what mood they’re in.
Yeah. It was so funny I was just talking to a start-up that has an app that can put you in touch with an attorney right away if you’ve been pulled over by the police. And I said, “Oh.” He starts talking about it’s on Android and iOS and it’s a mobile platform and it’s patented. I said, “No, no, no, you’re wasting it.” “Have you ever had the feeling when the lights of a cop car go on and your heart starts pounding fast and you’re pulled over, and you don’t know if you were speeding, had a broken tail light, and God, where the heck is my registration? I hope it’s up to date and hasn’t expired. All those feelings and thoughts are going through your head? Well we have a solution to that.” That’s so much more compelling, right? ‘Cause that’s the conflict and then people can put themselves in that, it’s happened to almost everybody.
Yeah if you want to do it one better, and this might be a little tricky, you figure some way to put that siren and those lights behind that person within an hour before they walk in that room-
Yeah.
They’re gonna remember that.
Oh yeah.
You know that feeling that you just had? Imagine now you always had that solution. And now you’ve put me back to it, right? My three year old has this cop car that we finally got out of his hands. Every time he’d turn it on in the back seat I’m like, “Oh!”
Right. “Oh, it’s just you. Okay, you can’t play with that in the car anymore, it’s too realistic, sorry.” That’s so funny, so funny. Well Authentic … is just an incredible, AuthenticWeb.marketing, we’re gonna put that in the show notes. Your podcast is called The Garlic Marketing Show. And you are the person to get when somebody wants to know about video digital storytelling and what to have on their website about the about page since it’s the second most clicked thing in the world.
So if you want to have all of that combined, great website design, great SEO, and more importantly, in my opinion, the secret sauce of the video digital storytelling that makes it all come to life, what are you waiting for everybody? Get Ian on your team.
Yes.
And so how can we follow you? What’s all your Twitter handle and all that good stuff?
So it’s pretty much everything is Ian Garlic. I had a battle against cooking blogs for a long time, but now you can find me. My Facebook page, if you just go to garlicface.com that redirects you to my Facebook page. The big thing is I want everyone to start making great case study videos. You can do it with your iPhone if you know how to create them. So what I did is made something for your listeners. It’s a checklist to creating the perfect video case study. And it’s 15 steps. You just go to iangarlic.com/livesay and you’ll be there, you can download it, boom, use it. If you have any questions hop on my Facebook page, I love to help people out with this. I tell you the world would be such a better place if we just all collect as many of those stories of helping people. ‘Cause those stories of us helping people helps someone else too.
Nice. Well you’ve just been an amazing guest, giving us so much valuable content on storytelling, on SEO, and mistakes to avoid when we do SEO. I can’t thank you enough for sharing your wisdom.
Oh John, it’s been my pleasure. I love talking to you, it’s been awesome. And anytime you want me back I will be more than happy.
Links Mentioned
- Video Case Study Checklist: iangarlic.com/livesay
- Website: AuthenticWeb.marketing
- Facebook: garlicface.com
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Predictive ROI can help
Fox 11 News Los Angeles John Livesay The Successful Pitch book
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’