Be Unreasonable With Paul Lemberg
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Have you ever tried being unreasonable when running your business? Most people would try to be reasonable and use everyone else’s strategies. By doing this, there’s not much you can do to differentiate yourself from the pack. Learn how to be unreasonable while still finding success in your business. Join John Livesay as he talks to Paul Lemberg about his coaching program that will grant you profitability. Paul is a business coach and author of Be Unreasonable: The Unconventional Way to Extraordinary Business Results. Paul’s goal is to help small business owners and CEOs double or even triple their income. Learn more about his Formula 5 Hyperdrive program. And discover how to trust and work with your intuition. Try being unreasonable today!
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Listen to the podcast here
Be Unreasonable With Paul Lemberg
Our guest is Paul Lemberg, the author of Be Unreasonable and he has a Formula 5 Hyperdrive way to give you a system to get your business revenue soaring. He said, “Part of what we have to do is realize we need to generate a 2nd sale after we have made the 1st sale. Our intuition is a muscle we need to use and work out on a regular basis.” He helps entrepreneurs become wealthy.
He has consulted with Fortune 100 companies like Cisco, Adobe, IBM, Goldman Sachs, but his real passion is helping small business owners and CEOs double and even triple their profits sometimes growing companies more than 10X. Over the last few years, Paul’s one-on-one small business clients who range in size from brand new startups to companies with around $20 million in sales have profited by more than $450 million in bankable put-in-your-pocket cash, which is what everyone’s looking for.
He has been an entrepreneur most of his life. After a three-year stint as a software programmer in Corporate America, he launched his first company with $3,000 worth of credit card debt and sold it for $9 million in less than three years. He has published three books, including one published by McGraw Hill called Be Unreasonable. He is a speaker and a trainer.
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Welcome to the show, Paul.
Thank you, John. It is great to be here.
Our mutual friend, who has been a guest on the show, Sam Morris, connected us and those warm introductions bypass so much of our brains that need to filter, question and make a decision, don’t they?
They do, especially as they are coming from you. Not me.
Let’s dive in a little bit to your own story of origin here. You can go back as far as childhood or school. You got into software but nobody probably grows up thinking, “I’m going to be an entrepreneur. I’m going to be an author.” How did that all come about?
I sure did not. My parents were working people, and between the two of them, have no entrepreneurial bone in their bodies. I was an art student. I went to art school mostly because I had ADD, and it was the only way I was going to get a college degree but I forgot. I thought I was supposed to be an artist. I came out of art school and I tried to be an artist, and all that stuff you hear about starving artists is all true. You have to make a decision about whether you are willing to starve for your work and I was not that good as an artist. I had forgotten about why I was at art school. I concluded that it was not going to be worth starving for me.
Somebody told me to become a computer programmer. It seems like I had the mind for it. I was amazingly lucky that I got myself a job at the time because they thought that artists and musicians made good programmers. I ended up with a job. I did that for about three years. I was great at it. I was like, “Programming was a natural gift,” if it could be that way.
[bctt tweet=”Our intuition is a muscle that needs to be exercised.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I did not want to stay in Corporate America. With a guy who is a client of mine, we started a software company that ended up writing software for gigantic worldwide banks. I did that. It was great but we ended up selling that company. It is not as exciting as it sounds. We were basically on the verge of bankruptcy and in the Federal Government about $1 million of somebody else’s money and all your taxes. Don’t ever do that. That’s a tip. Do not ever spend your employee’s taxes on your business.
Rather than going to jail, we ended up selling the company for a whole batch of money, which was a fantastic thing. I had not taken a couple of years off because I had a non-compete. I ended up starting another company doing the exact same thing. We sold that company to a big German bank and through a couple of career changes, I ended up one day, I woke up and the voice in my head said, “You are not doing your life’s work. You would better get busy.” I was like, “Who said that?” All I did was hear that same thing again. It is like, “There is something that I’m supposed to be doing,” and that was helping entrepreneurs.
In 1996, I hung out my shingles to coach. I made the biggest guarantee that anybody could possibly make. Coaches don’t do this, by the way. Coaches don’t guarantee results. I guarantee that you worked with me for a year and you will earn more money faster and with greater satisfaction than you ever thought possible or I will give you your money back. I still offer that guarantee. People said to me, “How can you do that? Nobody does that.” I took this straight out of Tony Robbins. I tapped myself on the chest and said, “I am that good.”
You have to own it, especially for charging something that has a premium price associated with it. We talked before the show about a way you have of bypassing the need to develop a rapport with somebody over weather where they live or whatever. Can you share with us what that is?
I absolutely can. Rapport is not about talking about the things that you have in common with somebody. There is about establishing a bond, which is based on commonality but those are not the same things. I’m a bit of a magician and I don’t mean stage magic. It is like manipulating energy and the world.
What I do is before I’m going to meet with somebody, whether I have met them before or not, I go into a little meditative state and I imagine our connection and our meeting, whether it is on the phone or in person, the warmth and the communication between us and everything are going well. As a sales trainer, when I train people, I say that the most important thing you do is to provide somebody with enough information to make a clear decision.
That does not mean it is going to be yes. It means that clear decision that’s with their best interests at heart. I imagine all of that in my mind happening and I found that when I meet people, I automatically have a rapport with them. This is not a strange thing. This is magic that we build rapport energetically, which is all you ever need to be able to communicate with somebody at that level of depth.
Be Unreasonable: Before going to a sales call, go into a little trance and imagine your connection with them. Provide them with enough information to make a clear decision with their best interests at heart.
I talk about that all the time that literally money is energy and action. People are buying your energy. I remember when I got hired as a keynote sales speaker, the bureau said, “Congratulations. They picked you over the other speakers they were interviewing. They liked your energy.” I thought, “There it is in writing. Rarely is that clear.” You think they liked your sizzle reel, your book and what you said, but they said later to me, “You made us feel good on the call. We figured you would do the same for the audience.”
Even if you are not selling yourself as a speaker, whether you are selling a very expensive tech product or anything, it is still selling yourself first, which is that energy of, “I care about you. I have got your back,” and things like that. You have something here that I’m fascinated about, Formula 5 Hyperdrive. I happen to live in Austin near Circuit of The Americas. That concept is very visual for me. How did you come up with that name and what system is this?
Formula 5 is a system that is guaranteed to allow you to double your business and then potentially double it again if you keep going. People say, “You can grow your business ten times.” I don’t know anybody who has a clue as to how to grow a business ten times, but I do know how to double it and double again, which is about as close to 10X as I want. It is actually 8X but it works like this.
I was trying to create a program that would give people the benefit of coaching without having a life coach and what that meant was that it would have strategies and tactics which produced results every single time that were simple to execute and that it would keep you motivated to keep executing. Those, to me, are the things that a coach should give.
I built a system that was based on five different principles and the strategy is that you make small changes in each one of them and that small changes pile up. If you can make a 5% change and another 5% change, it does not take too many of those to make a lot of money. I found that my biggest failures were my biggest ideas and the things where I was swinging for the fences. I lost $1 million here and I lost something else there.
When I do things, which are incremental, fair and easy to do, you get results if you keep doing them. The five things are simple and they are also obvious. The first one is lead generation. How do you get more leads? I give people simple strategies that are not based in whatever the current technology is, then how do you convert more? Which is not about becoming a great salesperson. It is about testing and figuring out what works and what does not work so we teach that and again, these are easy changes to make.
I like that because it takes away people’s fear of rejection if you are testing and you are not so attached to whether you get a yes.
[bctt tweet=”Ask for the second sale.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You are always testing and you are not committed to getting some BC. You are committed to their clarity and they are making decisions based on their best interests, then we teach them about margins and pricing. It’s shocking how many entrepreneurs go broke because they don’t understand what their margins are.
I teach them enough about margins and then show them how to double their business by making incremental price changes, which is astounding for people. You can teach them how to make the 2nd sale, 3rd sale, 4th sale and 5th sale. You spend all your energy getting a new customer. It is shocking how many people sell 1 person, 1 thing in 1 time. The ones who don’t have rehab programs, resell programs or don’t have second things to sell on. Don’t have upsells and all those things.
The last one is how do you use your assets and your resources more efficiently through things like systemization and prioritization. Every single thing in this program, I did not invent anything. What I invented is the way to put it together and execute it so that you can keep doing this and grow your business by shocking amounts by making small changes. That is Formula 5. It’s Formula 5 because it was a formula consisting of five things. I’m not a race car guy. I did not even consider that until it was pointed out to me. I use that metaphor a lot.
We talked about energetically connecting before we even talk to somebody or meet them. Is there some specific thing that you can help people tap more deeply into their intuition?
Wherever that stuff comes from, it responds well to usage. If you do ask your intuition for some help and your intuition serves up an idea to you. A lot of people ignore their intuition. They ignore it because they are not sure what it is or if they get an idea, they can’t approve it. They don’t act on it. There are two different things going on here.
One, they ignore it but even if they don’t ignore it, they tend not to act on it. I’m not sure where these things come from. I have my own beliefs that they come from way outside of yourself but even if it is your own other than conscious, that serves up an idea to you and you don’t do anything with it. What does that say?
It’s like, “I’m not respected. I don’t need to get this guy any more stuff because he’s not doing anything with it.” On the other hand, if you start paying attention to your intuition, that little tickle in your stomach that tells you not to do business with somebody and then you do and you kick yourself. I should have listened to my intuition. You start listening and you start implementing whether it’s do something, don’t do something or your idea stinks.
Be Unreasonable: The hardest thing for a CEO to do is to continuously re-enroll their team into the vision of the company. CEOs are the ones with the ideas. They’re the ones who provide that visionary energy to the company itself.
I’m working on a new product. I was thinking that product idea was wrong and it took somebody else to tell me, “Your product idea was wrong,” and I’m like, “I knew my intuition was saying this.” It’s like you get the acknowledgment. The more you use your intuition, the more intuitive ideas that you use you come up with.
That is a great tweet, “Our intuition is a muscle that needs to be used.”
It is a person whose advice you are asking for that you are not respecting by not doing anything with it. You can look at that on a very logical level or on a very outer rule level but it is true either way.
You talk about we all have some superpowers. If somebody does not know what their superpower is, is there something you can help them find out what it is that they could count on all the time?
I think it is easier than it sounds. It is like your intuition. There are things that people do and they do well and they keep doing them, but they don’t realize that it is a thing that they are doing. It is the easiest thing to do and the simplest thing to do is talk to your friends who get you and ask them, “What do you think my superpower is?” If you ask ten people that, they might give you five different answers but amongst those ten answers, five of them will start to coalesce and that is the thing that you start to investigate. If somebody says to me, “Your superpower is creating systems for other people.” That is one of my superpowers.
I knew I was good at this. I have been doing it for a long time but it took somebody to say it to me. What they said to me, all the tumblers dropped into place. Somebody said to me one day in full statement, “You get to be brilliant by creating systems and for other people to use profitably.” I was like, “I do that.”
Once you get an idea of what that superpower is, then you go back and look in your history and you will see how many times that is the thing that you have relied upon. For me, all the way back to my software days where I would talk to Wall Street traders to figure out what they did and then I would create these structures for them and I do it now as a coach. It’s a superpower.
[bctt tweet=”Do not ever spend your employee’s taxes on your business.” username=”John_Livesay”]
A lot of people think that being a CEO or running your own company is lonely. There are all kinds of quotes about entrepreneurship. It can be lonely. Even a big company is “lonely” at the top. Is there some role that you think a CEO should be doing that they find difficult to do?
In my experience with my clients, the hardest thing that CEO and owners have to do is continually re-enrolling their team whether it is their core management team or their entire company, into the vision of the company. In my opinion, what a CEO is more than anything else. The CEO as visionaries. They are the ones with the ideas. They are the ones who provide that visionary energy to the company itself. If I ask your typical small company owner, “When was the last time you rallied the troops and shared your vision with them?” It is like, “I don’t have to do that anymore. I did that years ago, we had a big meeting.”
Several years ago is probably not enough. You would probably want to do that at least once a quarter, if not once a month. They can’t understand it and the reason they can’t understand it is they are already enrolled. It’s their vision. They believe and they buy into it. They don’t do anything to make sure everyone else is already engaged. We talk about engagement all the time. Engagement is the thing.
I have an advertising background. If Coca-Cola did not have to keep running ads, they would not. Big brands constantly re-enroll people on their vision and their branding. You have not heard it before but if you don’t keep reinforcing, it goes away. I completely relate to that. Also, another big thing is a lot of people don’t do it as much as they used to, but when I was in Corporate America selling, it was always like interviews, “What is your 3-year goal and your 5-year goal?” All those things and you had to have some answer or they thought you were not serious or a deep thinker. Why do you think long-range planning is a bad idea?
I want to make two statements about this. Number one is I’m not crazy and it is a good idea to have a long-range point of view, which consists of where are you going and what do you want to achieve? Those are the objectives and the goals. The problem is not the long-range goals but the long-range plan itself.
There is a famous quote from a German General from 1800 named Von Moltke. He said, “No battle plan survives first contact with the enemy.” What he meant by that, which is pretty simple, was if you are about to go to war and you put your men, material, cannons, all that stuff and you placed them, that is the best you can do.”
The best you can do is figure out how to deploy your assets because as soon as they say go, the cannon starts firing, smoke is everywhere and they can’t see a damn thing. They have no control over what happens after that. It’s easy if you are an architect, the building does not fight back. You can plan out how to build the building because the building does not fight back.
Be Unreasonable: The Unconventional Way To Extraordinary Business Results
On the other hand, if you are a marketer, the customers fight back. In other words, they do their own thing. Your competitors do their own thing. Maybe the regulators do their own thing. There are all these human beings who have free will and they do their own thing so your plans don’t survive first contact with the enemy because no matter what, whatever you think they are going to do, they will do something different.
I can relate to that as a storytelling keynote speaker. When the pandemic hit, that is not in my battle plan. I was like, “I never even had that as a contingency of, ‘What if there were no more live events?’ because it never had happened in anyone’s lifetime.” You think, “I have to reinvent myself and become a virtual keynote speaker, not one that can do live events if I’m to survive, and that is going to require a whole other set of skills.”
I ironically created a whole new set of needs, which was clients asking me, “Can you train our sales teams how to look and sound good on Zoom because they are very intimidated being on camera selling?” That never happened to be needed before. Zigging and zagging is key. A lot of people think that there are some obvious truths out in the world, like nice guys finish last. That’s when I don’t believe in obviously. The other one I think is that people buy biologically and then back it up with the emotion. I said, “It’s the other way around. People buy emotionally and then back it up with logic.” Do you have some truths that you think people believe are not true?
My last book is called Be Unreasonable. The core idea behind that book is being reasonable will get you dead fast. Being reasonable will keep your business in the back of it. All the things that you do to become comfortable are killing you. Another way of saying that is that the comfort zone is extremely uncomfortable because it can’t produce any good results from it. The idea of being unreasonable, every time I hear myself saying, “That is not reasonable.” I’m like, “The second tone is good. Let’s explore that.” Reasonable things are what everybody has done before. That is how they got to be reasonable.
It is fascinating because you will sometimes hear that as a negotiating tactic. Be reasonable, which you are asking for.
There is a thing that goes with that, which is the idea of best practices and people say, “The best practices.” I say, “Best practices are not and they got to be best practices because everybody is doing them. If everybody is doing them, you have no sources of leverage. Leverage comes from doing something which is different.”
If people want to reach out to you to explore getting coached for themselves and their business, what is the best place for them to go?
[bctt tweet=”Your biggest failures are usually your biggest ideas. So do small incremental things until you get results.” username=”John_Livesay”]
They can go to my website, which is PaulLemberg.com or they can reach me at my email address [email protected]. P was the shortest thing I could think of so it’s an easy one to remember. Those are the two best ways to reach me.
Any last thoughts or famous quotes you would like to share?
Not a famous quote but people ask me what my favorite business books are and I talked to them about philosophy, history, popular science, all sorts of woo and spiritual things. They are like, “I meant business books.” “I meant business books because reading business books is useful for gaining tactics, but business books are never going to give you the insight about life that you need to be truly successful.”
I would like to leave people with that which is that the greatest things that you can do in your business have very little to do with business. You learn those things way back in the beginning. The greatest things about business are how you deal with your people and how you provide opportunities for your people, and what you even think your people are doing, working for you. If you understand that, that’s the bones of a high-performance team.
Paul, thanks so much. You have inspired us to think of a Formula 5, as well as ways that we can all be a little more unreasonable in our limitations.
I am on the verge of releasing a new program, which is called Entrepreneur Alchemy, and it’s a program that merges some very hardcore, proven and easy to use business scaling strategies, and merges that with what I call magic. It is corralling and using the energy of the world to drive your efforts inside of all those activities and to give you extra leverage. If people are interested, they should go to my site and sign up for the waiting list. We are going to be launching this thing on the summer solstice. I figured it was a very magical plan. We are going to take the Earth’s energy and pour it into everybody’s business.
Thanks, Paul.
Thank you, John, for having me. It is a pleasure.
Important Links
- Paul Lemberg
- Be Unreasonable
- Formula 5 Hyperdrive
- Sam Morris – Past Episode
- [email protected]
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Command Your Brand With Jeremy Slate
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Doing business involves trial and error, and some mistakes are bigger than others, but that shouldn’t stop you from striving for the top. Today’s guest is entrepreneur, media expert, author, host of the Create Your Own Life Podcast, and CEO/Co-Founder of Command Your Brand, Jeremy Slate. In this episode, he joins John Livesay to share what it takes to pave your path to success. Jeremy shares his journey and the major mistake that led him to success. The two also discuss how to grow a business and differentiate public relations, marketing, sales and how these three should interact to help you succeed. Plus, he talks about how he got into podcasting and why it’s the next big thing. Get valuable business insight and life advice as Jeremy shares insight from his upcoming book, Unremarkable to Extraordinary: Ignite Your Passion to Go From Passive Observer to Creator of Your Own Life. Stay tuned!
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Listen to the podcast here
Command Your Brand With Jeremy Slate
Our guest is Jeremy Ryan Slate, who’s an entrepreneur, a media expert, author, CEO, and Founder of Command Your Brand. He studied Literature at Oxford University and is a former champion powerlifter that helps visionary founders to impact the world and better mankind through podcasting and new media to create trust and opinion leader status. He has experienced some of life’s toughest challenges will certainly get into, including a routine surgery that led him into receiving last rights from a priest.
A few years later, his mom had a massive stroke which left her with permanent disabilities. Professionally, he’s tried it all, from teaching and network marketing to selling life insurance but he’s good at creating debt and not paying bills. He had an idea to start a podcast. Rock Your Life was the first one that didn’t do so well.
I love that part of the story because everyone thinks the first thing you try is always going to be a hit. He launched another one called The Create Your Own Life Show, which saw 10,000 listens in the first 30 days, which has led him to speaking to many of his heroes and on stages globally. Jeremy, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. I’m stoked to hang out.
You have done a lot in a short amount of time because your podcast literally took off, and you were named one of the top Millennial influencers by Buzzfeed. A lot of people in that generation are still thinking, “I’m not quite sure what I want to do with my life. I haven’t had my big break yet.” You are like, “I have probably lived three times than what most people have lived.” You also have a book, Unremarkable to Extraordinary, that we want to get into as well. Let’s go back to your own childhood or in college. Where did you get this tenacity? Was it from sports or this concept of, “I’m going to create my own life and not follow everyone else’s path?”
It was more of frustration at the life I had. My parents are both two hardworking, blue-collar people, neither of which went to college. They always thought college was that thing that was always imprinted on me like, “You’ve got to do that because that’s going to help you get that career and go wherever it may be.” For me, I created a lot of debt. I basically became a professional student. I’ve got a Master’s degree in Ancient History. It’s not a very usable skill in the world of getting jobs but I have always loved to learn. I have always enjoyed that. At the same time, it was a frustration with the world we are in.
Interestingly, you mentioned in your intro a lot of people in my generation are still trying to figure it out like, “What does that look like?” One of the main problems with that is they’re not willing to try things and fail at them to find the thing they want to do. You’ve always got to keep moving forward, trying things, and working. There’s this weird idea. I don’t know where it came from. “If you find your purpose, you’re never going to work a day in your life.” The first part of that is key, and that’s to find your purpose.
You’ve got to do some stuff to find your purpose. That’s one of the biggest things that has been a key guider in my life. I have worked hard on a lot of different things. Some were right, some were wrong for me but all of those experiences have helped me to become the person I am now. When I look at being back in college at that point in time, I came out in 2011 with a Master’s degree in Ancient History in a bad economy, which is funny looking at now, this economy. We’ve lost 20% of the value of the dollar of that day versus now.
There weren’t a lot of jobs for coming out of school at that point in time, especially for somebody that has a Master’s degree because it’s like, “What are you working, in a museum? What do you do?” I came out and ended up working for a house painter during the day. This is old school, by the way. We did everything by hand, hand scraping, 40-foot wooden ladders. It was wild.
No electric sanders for you, right?
No, we did all old Victorian homes where everything was supposed to be done by hand and things like that. I did that during the day from 7:00 AM until 5:00. I had come home. I had dinner and showered quick, and I had had to be at the gym at 6:00 where I had worked as the nighttime Manager from 6:00 to 11:00, and then I would be sleeping in between that. I ended up running into a priest friend of the family. He’s like, “The Catholic school I used to teach at is looking for teachers. You don’t need any requirements other than a college degree.” I’m like, “I’m in.” For me, it was going through and realizing like, “This isn’t what I wanted to do with my life.”
[bctt tweet=”PR is the cornerstone to growing your business. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
When my mom had a stroke when I was 24, it made me look at a lot of what I’m doing and realize like, “There’s got to be something more than this. You don’t work and be miserable until you are 65 and then end it. What’s the point?” From there, I took that jump to entrepreneurship and tried a bunch of things. It didn’t work. You’ve got to try some things and find out what you like. That’s how you find your purpose.
One of the things that fascinated me about you when I was preparing for this interview was this wonderful combination of intellect and physical fitness. The two are not known to be going together. In other words, there’s the “stereotype of the dumb jock” or “the nerdy skinny intellectual” that studies history all the time. You, right off the get-go, have blown that stereotype out the window.
That are the diametrically opposed parts of my life. I was always the guy sitting in the front asking way too many questions, unable to fit in my shirt.
The biceps are bursting. The assumptions that people make about you, either way, is interesting in terms of your potential because you are now working on this remarkable, extraordinary. Where are the book and the journey? Are you still interviewing people?
The podcast is still always an ongoing thing. We started it back in 2015. That was where the bulk of the conversations that I have had that are in the book came from. We are launching on June 7th, 2022. The advanced reader copy came in. We’ve got the cover design going. We are setting up media, waiting up to the launch. It has been an interesting experience to do that. I have learned a lot, even in the process of putting it together, even that formative process can change you as a person.
To get people at the level that you’ve gotten to be agreed to be on your podcast, you are having to sell yourself. There’s a lot of trepidation that would be worth going through because as both of us being podcasters, launching and wanting the big names or at least somebody with this incredible story, for me, there was the fear of rejection.
If I asked somebody from Shark Tank, especially at the beginning, when you don’t have a lot of episodes under your belt or the fear of rejection, the fear of failure, nobody listens, and then the fear of the unknown of like, “How do you do all this?” You go to school and learn how to be a good host, let alone all the tech stuff behind it. Can you walk us through your process of how you dealt with those three fears, launching your podcast? It’s relevant to launching anything. The first one is, do you ever struggle with the fear of rejection? If so, how do you handle it?
Command Your Brand: You’ve got to try some things and find out what you like. That’s how you find your purpose.
I sold life insurance for a year. That will solve your fear of rejection. The biggest transformative thing in my life was selling life insurance for a year because you’ve got to make 50 to 100 phone calls a day. When you first start, that phone is heavy. Once you realize that people, maybe, will verbally assault you but they cannot physically assault you through the phone, that’s a big freedom point, frankly. For me, that willingness to keep going, I’ve got a lot of that of selling life insurance.
I feel like anybody that’s willing to go get a commission-only sales job or anything like that will learn so much from that experience. You will become better at accepting rejection because of that. To me, you’ve got to do things where you are willing to fail and realize the estimation of effort. That’s the other biggest thing. A lot of people reach out to 1 person or 2 people, they don’t hear anything, and they are like, “I will quit.”
When you realize you’ve got to reach out to 50 to 100 people, whatever it may be, to get what you want, that’s all the difference. I would say for most people, get yourself a commission sales job and an internship where you are good at. Do something like that, and you will find that rejection doesn’t hurt much when you have been rejected a lot.
For me, my whole thing is I never take it personally. No now is a no forever. I’m not so freaked out by getting a no or rejection, I go into the fear of failure. You touched on that a little bit but it’s a separate fear in other words, “I’m going to keep calling people to sell insurance or I sell whatever it is I’m doing.” In this case, getting a great guest on the show.
I remember for myself, when Larry King interviewed me, I was like, “Game on.” I never dreamed that was ever going to happen. I’ve got to be prepared. I don’t want to blow it when I have the amazing opportunity. When you are interviewing somebody, the kinds of people you have had on the show, that could be a little intimidating for someone. I’m not saying it was for you but how do you handle that? What advice do you have around that?
It’s gradients. When I first started, I was afraid of a microphone. I was afraid of those conversations. The first conversations I had is I took a look at people I knew locally that had successful businesses. I went to their houses, and we recorded it on my MacBook, which I did not know how to do audio mapping or anything at that point in time.
The sound quality wasn’t good but it allowed me to have those first conversations with people I was comfortable with and people I know. That’s one of the biggest things. It’s something that I have talked a lot about in the book. It’s consistency, doing things over and over again, and continuing to do it until you get better at it.
[bctt tweet=”Focus on what you can control when dealing with fear. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s how, for me, how you get more comfortable at either reaching out to a guest or that’s how you get more comfortable with doing an interview with somebody. As you mentioned, being on the other side of the mic, even from somebody that’s well known. You have to have more conversations and be willing to handle that. If you do it on your first time, it may not go as well for you because you need to be get used to that. It is that continue doing it. At first, I started in people’s homes, then I went to doing it on Skype, without video, by the way, because I was too nervous to talk to people that I didn’t know with the video on.
We moved from there to then doing it on Zoom. I’m like, “They can see me now. I’m okay with that.” Now I look at where we are at several years later, we do a full video show on YouTube, Rumble, and all those places. We are talking to some great people but I could not do the show now like several years ago. It had to get through, continually showing up and improving every day.
One of the tweets is, “Consistent practice delivers excellence and not being frustrated that you don’t hit a home run in your first time at-bat.”
There’s an Abraham Lincoln quote around that, too. I don’t remember exactly what it is but it’s something like, “I will prepare my day will come.” That’s one of the biggest things. I’m a huge football fan. One of the things that is a big deal is something I like to call a Mo Lewis moment. Mo Lewis was a former linebacker for the Jets. In 2001, he hit the quarterback of the New England Patriots, Drew Bledsoe. He almost killed him, by the way.
After that hit, in walks a little-known guy named Tom Brady. Tom Brady became the starter of the New England Patriots for many years, won six Super Bowls with them and another one with the Bucs. Had he not prepared every single day for his moment to come? There’s no Tom Brady. What you have to look at is you don’t know when that moment or opportunity is coming but you always need to be preparing in the background.
I also find it fascinating that you, as a professional power lifter, and that is all about being seen, and little clothing usually, that you would still have situational confidence almost. To get in front of the camera with your clothes on is still a whole new trip. That’s why as a sales keynote speaker, I always go on the stage the night or the morning before the audience comes in so that my brain does not say, “We have never been up here before. What’s happening?”
I do that same thing, by the way, because you’ve got to feel the room. You’ve got to be able to sense the back of the room, the front of the room, see how big or small the room is, because at the same time, how you show up in that space is going to be vital to how you understand that space.
Command Your Brand: When you let go of that stress, a lot of good things start happening.
Let’s deal with that third fear that I have experienced. This is so valuable for everyone reading. Try and fail until you find what you love to do. Realize that progress is in steps, not leaps. Where you will be a year or three years from now is not even possible now. Don’t even compare it to that. This almost stopped me from doing it is the fear of the unknown. For my solution, don’t go it alone. I have somebody produce the show for me. Let’s face it, we have all been through a pandemic. There’s so much unknown going on in the world now, even after the pandemic is starting to not be such a threat but the fear of the unknown is not going anywhere.
We don’t know what shoe’s dropping next.
How do you, as an athlete, as a successful business person, and running a team of people and ideally inspiring people of all ages but in particular your own niche, I always think that, “You are old. You figured it out but I’m still going to have ten years of being afraid of the unknown.” Some people never stop being afraid of the unknown. What is it that you do, Jeremy, that you think could help people around that?
The thing to take a look at in this situation is you look at what things you can control. “Can I control what John’s doing? No. Can I control what my kids are doing? Sometimes. Can I control what my animals are doing? It depends how well-trained they are.” The only thing you can control is yourself and your reaction to things. Frankly, the biggest thing that I try to make a major thing that I do every day is making sure my fitness, the way I eat, and the way I go through my routine is taken care of.
At the same time, even looking at situations and saying, “How can I manage myself in that situation?” We’ve got some rough situations. If you come at that situation with a head of steam, you are going to make it worse. The only thing you can control is yourself and your reaction to things. When you do that, you can change the game a lot of times. It’s interesting.
I’m thinking where sometimes you get your stressful days. It is what it is. I had one of those days where you say, “Whatever. What comes, comes. I’m going to continue to prepare and keep going in the right direction.” You find when you let go of that stress, a lot of good things start happening because you are not focused on the stress you have loosened and opened up. That’s what you have to take a look at. You can control yourself and your reaction to things. That’s it.
What I’m hearing is when you have a system in place, a structure, and a routine, we all know our children likes structure.
[bctt tweet=”You’ve got to do things where you’re willing to fail and realize the estimation of effort.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Mine doesn’t.
Even our pets like structure. They need to know where they are getting fed at a certain time. Even if a child says they don’t like structure, they really do. They might fight the bedtime. We have seen a lot of parents struggling with the lack of structure with the kids being homeschooled, totally throwing off the routine of kids, interacting with themselves, and having trouble waking up since it’s just a Zoom call, it’s not leaving the house. All that stuff was stressful on a lot of levels.
You need to keep your fitness up no matter what’s going on. It’s a baseline, let’s say, and then the eating, so that you are prepared for whatever surprises because if you are not rested and on a sugar plunge, you are not nearly as equipped to think clearly. Your success on how you help other people become successful, tell us a little bit about what your business model is.
We believe that podcasting is the next great frontier. It is that place where incredible conversations can happen. It’s the direction the media is going. The incredible thing about it is, it’s user-driven. You look at why people watch Netflix and Prime. It’s because they can decide what they want to watch. The same thing with podcasts. People are making the decision to spend time with us and listen to it, their leisure.
That’s an important thing to think about. It’s because of that we have decided that we help people to tell stories on the podcast medium. We have been doing this back since 2016, where we help people to tell a better story. We find the right podcast for them. We helped them get booked in those shows because we see this as the new world PR play to be telling your story on the podcast.
There have been all kinds of research that the number one thing that sells books for new authors are podcasts. Not TV, being in The Wall Street Journal or whatever. Part of it is behavioral. If you are listening to a podcast on your iPhone or whatever, and you go, “That sounds like a good book. I like what that person said in the interview. I probably would like the book,” you are a click away from ordering the book. Whereas if you are seeing somebody on TV, you are like, “Maybe I should get that book.” You’ve got to go find your phone as opposed to the phone being in your hand when you are listening.
That’s even if you watch TV. I don’t even watch TV anymore. I listen to podcasts and that’s it. That’s where I find everything anyway.
Command Your Brand: Public relations should always be the first thing you’re doing because it should be something where you create that “know, like, and trust” factor.
This is part of my background and one point of your niches, there’s a right combination to public relations versus marketing versus sales. First, let’s do a quick definition for people who might not understand the distinction of paid versus unpaid exposure. Let’s start with PR. Most people have a sense of it but what’s your definition of PR?
Public Relations is how you relate to your public but the public, in this way is a type of audience. It’s the people that you want to know you. You may say, “My public is business owners. My public is CEOs.” It’s basically how you want to be known and seen by those people. There are different types of public relations within that. There could be crisis public relations. “If the ships are burning down, you’ve got to figure out how to bail it out.” There could be an awareness campaign or a launch campaign but it’s how you relate and create a relationship with your public or your audience. That’s Public Relations.
Also, it’s not paid for. Whatever you are creating, the content you are creating is newsworthy in some way, shape, or form.
It’s made newsworthy too because the positioning of it and how you position it can make it seem newsworthy.
Versus marketing, which for the most part is paid advertising. Some things can go viral, and then you get unpaid exposure. Part of PR can be seen as part of marketing. For the readers who are entrepreneurs, understanding one is paid, one is non-paid. Marketing and sales sometimes in big companies can butt heads, and the salespeople are demanding.
The sales guys were like, “Those marketing guys stinks.” The marketing guys were like, “Sales guys can’t close all the leads I’m getting.”
What is the right combination if you are a business owner, do you think?
[bctt tweet=”You don’t know when that moment’s coming, you don’t know when the opportunity is coming, but you always need to be preparing in the background. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s all three. I look at it this way. If your sales aren’t working, you take a look at marketing. If marketing isn’t converting, you take a look at public relations. Public relations should always be the first thing you are doing because it should be something where you create that know, like, and trust factor. You could have a great marketing program but if a lot of people are landing on your site and never heard of you, they are not going to convert. They need to know who you are, like you, and trust you. That’s why I look at it as the combination of things. You always work it backwards. If sales isn’t working, you take a look at marketing. If marketing isn’t working, take a look at public relations.
You can work it back the other way now, public relations create the things for marketing to now promote because they are creating the pieces where that can be seen as trustworthy and create that opinion leader status for you. Now you promote those things, and you get them out there, and either paid traffic, a social media campaign or something like that, to then get somebody in front of you to sell. When you look at it that way, you can work it back and forth, and you can find out what’s wrong in your organization if one of those things isn’t working well.
A lot of people think, “I don’t even need PR. I’m going to focus on spending ads. That should drive people to my funnel, and then I will close them.” You are like, “You forgot a big part of that ingredient there.”
There’s a misconception in that too, John because a lot of people will say, and this happens in sales conversations for us, “I’m going to wait until people find me.” To me, that tells me that you don’t quite understand how the media world works. When you understand how the media world works, they are not looking for feel-good stories all the time because they are more interested in telling you about, “Something on the news at 10:00 could scare you and buy our products.” They are 24 hours a day trying to fill a new cycle of things that do get eyeballs and attention. For you, you have to be the one willing to get out there, tell your story and get it in front of people because they are not going to be looking for you.
Let’s close up our interview with a happy story, not a sad story or a scare you story, of how you were able to make your brand grow 71% in the economy, and what other people can be doing to get those same kinds of result.
Frankly, the biggest thing that we did was the whole COVID situation, we have been a digital company since 2015 or 2016. We had that foot above. What we did is when companies started laying people off, we started hiring. That was the biggest thing we looked at. Now there is a talent pool of people that were not available to me a year ago or a month ago or whatever it may have been. We started hiring because we are like, “You can work from home. You are incredibly talented. We are excited to have you.” We focused on hiring. The next thing we focused on was our training. Our company training was okay but now if we are going to hire all these good people, we need to train them better.
We focused on having better company training. That was vital. The other thing we focused on is better processes. Especially since we are hiring and training more people, you need a better-written process. When we write our processes, we call them hats. It’s the hat you wear to do a job. Within that, it’s, “How should that person be? What should they be doing on a daily basis? What is every single step to what they are doing every single day?” Our job descriptions are like little books. There’s so much to them. Focusing working on our business rather than in it was one of the biggest things that helped us to growth because we were able to locate the right people, put the right processes there, and focus on how can we train them better. When you do that, everything else you are doing works better.
Unremarkable to Extraordinary: Ignite Your Passion to Go From Passive Observer to Creator of Your Own Life
That’s a huge takeaway. Most people don’t spend the time training people. They figured, “I’m hiring you. You should be able to hit the ground running.” We don’t even talk about our culture and whether you are a fit or not.
That’s a huge misconception.
If you don’t have clear expectations or boundaries like we were talking about with children and pets, for the employees, they don’t know. “Is it okay if I come in at 10:00?” “Not really.” “Nobody told me.” I can set up a problem right off the get-go. “Here’s what we do. This is our workday. We are totally flexible. As long as you get the work done, you can come in what time you start.” Everyone is different. That training as a speaker who gets hired to sometimes also train after the keynote and help people get a new skill because the skills you have are not enough. You have to constantly be learning new skills is my experience.
That’s one of the things. If you are not growing, you are dying. You always need to be growing and working on what you are doing. That goes back to what we have been talking about all through this conversation. It’s about incremental improvements and consistent improvements. You have to be thinking about the same thing for your team. They should be training weekly, whether it’s on some sort of new process, some process you have been running for all, whatever it is, they need to be improving as much as you do because that’s how you keep your organization growing.
If people want to listen to your podcast, it’s called Create Your Own Life. If people want to learn how you can help them with their branding, they should go to CommandYourBrand.media.
CommandYourBrand.com or CommandYourBrand.media, either one will get them to us.
Any last thought you want to leave us with?
I would encourage people to go out and grab my book, which is now in pre-order. It’s going to be released on June 7th, 2022, which distills down a lot of what we talked about and brings that into something that you can bring into your life to make some huge improvements and find your extraordinary. It’s Unremarkable to Extraordinary. They can get that over at GetExtraordinaryBook.com.
Jeremy, thanks again for inspiring us all to put a little structure in our life and get some practice in.
John, thanks so much for having me. It’s a lot of fun.
Important Links
- Command Your Brand
- Create Your Own Life Show
- Unremarkable to Extraordinary
- YouTube – Jeremy Ryan Slate
- Rumble – The Create Your Own Life Show
- CommandYourBrand.media
- Larry King – YouTube, Larry King interviews Sales Keynote Speaker John Livesay
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Restoring The Soul Of Business With Rishad Tobaccowala
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
The business world is changing, with AI and data-driven systems becoming more common. With these changes happening all around us, how do we keep the soul of business alive? John Livesay teams up with Rishad Tobaccowala, the author of Restoring the Soul of Business, to gain insight on how businesses can survive and thrive on these changes. Rishad discusses how to use storytelling to sell your services or products and why your vision can’t be captured using just numbers. Tune in for more on using your tools to capture the soul of your business.
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Listen to the podcast here
Restoring The Soul Of Business With Rishad Tobaccowala
This episode’s guest is Rishad Tobaccowala, the author of Restoring the Soul of Business. He talks about when you combine the spreadsheet with the story, you have success and how your vision cannot be captured in a number. Enjoy the episode.
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This episode’s guest is Rishad Tobaccowala, who is an author, speaker, teacher and advisor with decades of experience specializing in helping people, organizations and teams reinvent themselves to remain relevant in changing times. He specializes in unleashing talent and turbocharging productivity by delivering perspectives, points of view, provocations and plans of action, but no PowerPoints.
His bestselling book, Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data was published globally by HarperCollins and focuses on helping people think, feel and see differently about how to grow their companies, their teams and themselves in these transformative times. The Economist Magazine calls it perhaps the best book on stakeholder capitalism and Strategy Magazine named it among the five best business books and Marketing Book of the Year. His weekly Thought Letter, The Future Does Not Fit into the Container of the Past, is read by over 25,000 leaders every week. I’m one of them. Welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. It’s great to be here.
You have such an impressive scope and understanding of data and generosity. I call it the toggling back and forth of soft and hard skills. I find it very rare that one person is an expert in both. That’s one of the reasons I was so excited to have you share these abilities to connect dots in a way that I haven’t heard anybody else do it before. Before we get into all the wisdom that you have and your wonderful book, let’s go back in time a little bit to your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, school or wherever you want. How did you get into this concept that someday, you’re going to be a thought leader on the soul of business?
The good news or the bad news is I had no clue when I started this journey and where it would end up. If I had started saying, “I’m going to be a thought leader on the soul of business,” my sense is people would have put me in a crate and shipped me in an inhabited continent saying, “What a mad person.” I grew up in Bombay, India, which is now known as Mumbai, India. I got an undergraduate degree in Advanced Mathematics. I came to the University of Chicago to get an MBA in Finance and Marketing, which is a quad school. I joined Leo Burnett, which was an advertising agency.
I love that agency. I knew them well in Chicago. They would have apples in the lobby.
I joined them in 1982 and worked there under the Leo Burnett name until 1994, and then, for the first time in their history, I convinced them to take the name off the door to launch a new type of company which they own 75% of. I remained a Leo Burnett employee until it was called Giant Step. It was one of the first interactive agencies and then, based on that, I also helped spin-off their media company into a company called StarCom. We merged with a couple of other companies and then in 2002, we got bought by a publicist group.
For the next 15 or 17 years, I did a lot of different things inside various companies. We purchased big companies like Digitalis, Sapient and Razorfish. We merged different companies and ended up having at the end of this journey about 80,000 employees, the United States’ largest media buying and planning company.
Some of the most forward-looking digital assets include Epsilon, big creative brand names and in the last few years, I ran strategy globally or some combination of those two. I then started a second career where I had always wanted to be a writer when I was young, but my parents suggested that I needed to have something to say. They were not exactly sure a writer could make any money, so they said, “Go do something else.”
[bctt tweet=”Your vision can’t be captured in a number.” via=”no”]
I started a second career, which led to my book and I started this writing, speaking, educating and advising career. I’m fortunate that one of the companies I advise is my whole place of work, where I’m still very close to which is the Publicis Groupe. I work with a lot of other companies, a lot of startups, a lot of private equity, a lot of young entrepreneurs and now, a company of one. I’ve gone from a company of 80,000 to a company of one.
It’s exciting and interesting in its own way, but in many ways, what I’ve done is I’ve combined the two things. I’ve combined what I call the spreadsheet and the story. The spreadsheet is the digital, the data and the left brain. The story is, which you understand only too well, which is the sale is in the tale, is that you win people’s hearts and minds with stories and then you use the numbers to justify what they did.
Most people want to lead with the numbers and I think that’s a mistake. People buy emotionally and then back it up with logic.
It’s the only way to share your vision because your vision can never be captured in a number. If you think your vision is captured in the size of an addressable market, that’s not a vision. That’s numeric.
You’ve given us two great soundbite tweets already. Combine the spreadsheet and the story and your vision can’t be captured in a number. Every once in a while, I still have to convince people of the power of opening with a story. I would love your take on this. I was consulting with a group of architects who were pitching against three other firms to win this big renovation. They were only given 45 minutes and eight of them had to speak.
I recommended and worked with them on a 30 to 45-second story of origin like, “I was eleven years old. I played with Legos. That’s what got me into this.” One of the engineers who wasn’t even presenting in the room said, “We’re wasting time. We’re talking about ourselves.” I thought, “In order for us to get picked and to explain our vision, they have to know, trust and like us that we can all do the work or we wouldn’t be in the final four. Now, it’s about giving a little flavor of who we are. It’s not a waste of time at all.” The people who brought me in agreed. I stayed in, but I thought, “Wow.” I was so shocked that I still have to justify that sometimes.
The issue is this. Many of us are very proud of all the work we’ve done to create an answer and we often believe that the way we work is what is the differentiator. I believe it is not the way we work. It is who we are and what we do, but we are confused by thinking it is the way we work and what we have. It is the way we work and what we have.
Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data
Many companies talk about their history, not the individual’s history. They talk about the history of the company. They talk about their tools, methodologies and techniques. I remind people that it’s like trying to explain how your colon works. When people want to see cool stuff, don’t talk to them about how your colon works. Show them the cool stuff.
They always say, “You’ve got a few minutes to make a first impression.” I think it was Jerry Maguire in You Had Me at Hello. The reality of it is, in many cases, a pitch is won or lost in the first ten minutes. The first ten minutes have to set up an intrigue. Intrigue is also not something that mathematics can set up. You have to set up two things. You want to intrigue and you want a sense of inquiry. It’s a sense of like, “What is this?”
“Tell me more.” We have a Q&A session after that. I was doing the very same thing. I was using the concept of an open loop in a story. Plant the seed like, “Be sure to ask us about this in the Q&A for more details because you don’t have enough time to get into it all,” and they said that worked well. In the actual presentation and Q&A.
What you want to do is in the beginning, you want to set up with intrigue where they say, “Who are these people? What are they saying? Why are they saying what this is?” That’s intrigue about you and then inquiry from them. Those are what I call the two first Is. It’s intrigue and inquiry in the first ten minutes. They say, “That’s interesting.”
Then, you very quickly follow with three other Is, which are ideas, insights, and imagination. You provide them with insights about either their market or themselves. You provide them with the imagination of what is possible, and you provide them with specific ideas. That eventually ends you with the last two Is, which is they get inspired and you ask for an invitation.
Those are my seven I processes. You start with the two Is. The whole stuff is like, “These people are intriguing. Therefore, I would like to inquire more.” That’s getting you at hello. Very quickly, you’re starting to show your cool stuff, which is ideas, insights and imagination. You end with inspiring them so that you can get invited back.
Many times, especially when you’re pitching for funding, it’s about the second date or getting back. In this particular situation, they had already made all the final cuts, so this was the last chance. The invitation’s going to be, “We picked you.”
What happens is you simply say, “What exactly do we want to be invited to?” Sometimes it’s, “I want to be invited to the next meeting.” Sometimes it’s, “To win the pitch.” Once you do that, you notice this is all about storytelling, but along the way, you’re bringing in the math and the numbers to support the facts that you are stating. To me, the math is like the spinal cord of what you’re doing and nobody gets attracted to spinal cords unless you’re a dinosaur where a spinal cord is all that’s left of you.
How did you come up with the title of your book? I know as an author myself, that’s a lot of ideas and also what the image is going to be, especially from you coming from a media buying agency and working with so many big clients, Staying Human in the Age of Data is so strong.
What happened is I did not come up with the combination of a title. When I wrote my book, I wrote my book under the working title of The Story and the Spreadsheet, but when I wrote my book proposal and everything else, I was fortunate that I got myself an agent. My agent got HarperCollins as well as Penguin Random House interested. I talked to them. HarperCollins said, “We think this is a great idea. We are going to give you an advance, but we would like to tell you that we do not buy the title at the current time, so we are going to work with you to brainstorm titles.”
[bctt tweet=”Too much math creates too little meaning.” via=”no”]
What we did were brainstorm titles. They ended up with a title, which had Restoring the Soul of Business. I had something about human and data somewhere. They combined it and a few other titles, which included my own, which was The Story and the Spreadsheet. Because they’re a big company, they did research. They put out the titles with different people. What came back strong was this combination of Restoring the Soul of Business and Staying Human in the Age of Data.
There’s an unspoken fear for most people, and some people have spoken about the fear of AI taking over.
At that time, there was all that AI taking over, etc. For me, it was like, “It’s not anti-data. It’s not that the world isn’t becoming data-driven, but how do we include the human into looking at an extracted meaning from the math.”
A lot of people may have a great title, and then sometimes, the chapters are not intriguing. I can see why your book has gotten such rave reviews because, as someone who loves this topic of integrating soft skills and hard skills, Too Much Math, Too Little Meaning is one of the best sound bites I’ve ever heard. I have to give you so much kudos.
Thank you. In fact, there were two other things that we did which were very unusual. When someone reads my book and they start with the opening, they say, “It’s very interesting,” where I say why should you read this book. It’s because you are going to be spending the most amazingly valuable asset you have, which is time. I make the case, but then I say, “I’m going to make this easier for you. The book is not a book of essays because there’s a connecting spine as such, which is the story and the spreadsheet, the math and the meaning, but you can read any chapter in any order you want because they’re all freestanding.”
People love that.
You can go to what you want to read, and then, each chapter stands out with titles. Like Too Much Math, Too Little Meaning, there’s a chapter called Have More Meetings.
I was going to ask you about that because it’s so counterintuitive. The last thing people want is another meeting.
There’s also a chapter called How to Upgrade Your Mental Operating System or another chapter that is everyone’s favorite is The Turn on the Table.
It goes back to what you were saying about don’t talk about your colon. Let’s talk about the schedule more meetings. I’m so intrigued because again, this is such a great takeaway for everyone reading this. When you say something, write something and present something, your brain goes, “Wait a minute. I thought the opposite was true.” For example, as a sales keynote speaker, I often find myself saying, “Whoever tells the best story gets the sale and not who has the best product or the best price.” Most people go, “What are you talking about? That can’t be right.”
Soul Of Business: You win people’s hearts and minds with stories, and then you use the numbers to justify what they just did.
It’s the reverse. This book was written before COVID. My belief is I say the reason we don’t like meetings is that most of the meetings are not meetings. They’re stereothons. What we do is we go to a room and we look at a big screen with a PDF or an Excel spreadsheet while also then looking at a laptop or a tablet on our desk while we are surreptitiously looking at the other one, which is our phone on our knees. We have that as a meeting, which is I’m in a room staring at screens. My basic belief is a meeting is when you look at somebody and you have no technology involved. You have a sheet of paper if you need numbers and you talk to each other and interact. That’s a meeting.
You have four wonderful workshops. There’s more than that, but the four that grabbed me, I’m guessing those are also the subject of a keynote if someone wants to hire you just to talk and not a workshop.
You hear something about words and selling, which I think your audience will find particularly intriguing and why you’re right that the sale is in the tale. I first created four things where I could help people learn. My original four were simply called, The Future Doesn’t Fit in the Containers of the Past, which is how to think about the future, How to Manage Change, so it Sucks Less, How to Upgrade Your Mental Operating System and How to Lead with Soul. Those are things that came from my book. I call that learning and that was the tab on my website.
One fine day, I changed it. Instead of calling it learning, I call it workshops. I then ran counter to all these masterclasses and I said, “This is live, interactive, customized and not taped one way and completely non-customized.” This is much better than any masterclass, especially now when people do not want to watch. They need something live and interactive when they’re sitting at home or spread out wherever they are.
It took off like a rocket by changing that, the workshop and reframing it. The next four became much more about doing versus even thinking. One was simply called and as we’re talking about selling, it’s How to Sell Better. That’s about writing presentations in different ways. I also had one, which is how do you manage talent and how do you motivate talent in this particular area that we live in? Those became very popular.
I want to double click on the selling one and the other one about managing change, so it sucks less. Coming back from the talking workshop I gave, it was the first time these people have been in a room since COVID. Nobody has been in the office. There were people in a conference room, which used to be the norm, but now, everyone’s like, “My behavior of sitting this long in a conference room, brainstorming and practicing something is out of whack.”
Even the simplest things like, “Where’s the whiteboard and the easel? The markers have run out of ink. They’ve dried up over years.” There is also all this dusting stuff off. Regardless of where you are on the whole concept of vaccines, there’s still a lot of anxiety about coming back to the office. I would think that this managing change workshop would be so huge because it’s a big change to come back.
I’ll give you an idea and it’s very odd. I’m starting to travel again, which I was doing in October, November, December 2021. There were less of it and it’s back again, but I’m doing two presentations and they’re more or less on the same topic. I have 1,000 to 2,000 people in an organization on How To Manage Change So It Sucks Less and then across the continent of Africa to 3,000 people on How To Look Ahead and Not Look Behind.
I know you have four questions about how things change. Is there a little snippet you can give us or a little hint of one of the takeaways from this workshop for people who are reading and don’t have the privilege of hearing you talk about it in detail?
Absolutely. Here’s a very simple thing. The big thing coming out of How To Manage Change So It Sucks Less is to recognize that there are six things that everybody has to do in order for their company to succeed in changing, but most of us only do three of them and because we don’t do the other three, we have a problem. The three we do is put together a strategy for change. We then either go buy a company or hire additional talent to fill in things we don’t have. The third is we reorganize around either that company or the talent we purchased or got. That’s what I call the strategy reorganization in M&A/acqui-hire parts.
[bctt tweet=”Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face.” via=”no”]
At that particular stage, we put out a press release, “Make balloons and have a party.” It doesn’t work because I remind people like Michael Tyson supposed to have said, “Everybody’s got a plan until they get punched in the face,” I believe that every leader and every board has a plan until people get in the way. I have 4, 5 and 6 are these questions. Number four is why it is good for the people. Don’t say, “Why it’s good for the company?” Number five is how will you change their incentive plan so they will change their behavior. The last one is how will you provide them with training so they can learn how to do the new things you’re claiming they need to do.
We forget. We don’t invest in training, changing incentive plans or communicating why it’s good for them and then we’re surprised when these things don’t happen. That’s fundamentally there. I then go deeper down into including solutions on how people can solve what is called the biggest disease of all, which is IDD. IDD is Inner Dinosaur Disease. Each of us has this inner dinosaur disease inside us and how to approach it. That is what that presentation is about.
You got so much good stuff here, but let me jump to the other one because this is my wheelhouse. I happen to be an amateur photographer and collect it as art. When I saw that you’re helping salespeople solve problems by leveraging photography, I thought, “I have hit the lottery,” because I’ve never seen anybody do that.
I love the concept of lenses, how you’re zooming out or jumping in and all that good stuff. What are we focusing on? The world that you’ve taken us into this concept of filtering things with quality control. I remember when I took Photo Journalism in college many years ago, the professor said, “Photography is painting with light.” “I can’t paint, but if I can paint with light with pictures, I’m in.” Give us a little snapshot of how the photography analogy can help salespeople.
The reason I use the photography analogy is that now, every one of us is a photographer because of our smartphones. Therefore, I’m using terminology that every one of us does. The reality of it is regardless of what equipment you use, I’m an amateur photographer but I’ve done a lot of it. Over time, what happens is there are three key things that matter and everything else doesn’t or matters very little.
The three things that matter is how do you frame and what do you look at. That’s the B to C in framing a picture. The way you frame makes a very big difference. The second, as your professor said, it’s about light, which is how do you illuminate and expose. You framed and you’ve taken the picture with the right light. The third one is about how you edit the solution, which is cropping, filtering and all of those kinds of things. In effect, I remind people that if you’re going to sell, what you’re selling is a solution. People don’t buy products and services. They buy solutions. If you are selling a solution, wouldn’t it be great if you could help someone frame the problem?
Framing is important. You frame the problem and that’s by focusing on what the problem is and making sure that the problem is discreet enough that your product or service can solve it. That becomes framing. The second is how do you illuminate and expose and that is everything from how do you bring in data because data is a form of light.
That becomes the second part of it. The final thing is how do you edit the solution. How do you make sure you don’t say too much in a meeting and say what’s necessary? You customize it. How do you filter it? How do you display it? One of the displays is how you do the seven Is to display what you did.
I remember one of the things when taking photography class was changing the angle whether you’re shooting down on something and standing on a table or you’re crouching down if you’re shooting animals like a dog running and you get down to their level.
In each of these, I mentioned three things that everybody can understand. You have to focus on the right problem. What you mentioned is my second one, which is points of view are incorporated. Points of view mean looking at things from a different point of view like you did from up and below as well as getting different people to look at the problem.
Soul Of Business: We often believe that the way we work is the differentiator. It is not. It is who we are and what we do.
My whole premise is, “Whoever describes the problem the best and shows empathy and can describe that, then people think, ‘You get us. You expressed our problems in a way that’s even clearer than we do internally, so you must have our solution if you understand our problems that well.’”
Most of the people who are reading this being successful as they are will recognize they have done this one particular thing, but they may not know that they did it, so I will tell them what they did. Often, all I do is reveal to people their own brilliance, and as a result, they think I’m smart, because, in effect, they say, “That’s what I did. You must be smart,” which is what they’re saying is, “I’m smarter. You figured it out, but because you told me, I think you’re smart too.”
It goes full circle to your expertise in advertising and marketing. When a marketer can put a headline or a commercial that says what people are thinking and they feel like, “You’re in my head, so this must be the right fit for me.”
Why that happens is even now, when I do some advisory work, a lot of people will call me and say, “Do you think you can help me with this problem?” I remind people, one, I’m limited in time and I’m not going to try to solve problems that I have no clue on how to solve. In some particular cases, they say, “Can you learn how to solve it? We would rather have you learn how to solve it and share how you’re learning how to solve it than get somebody who claims they have the answer.”
I’m not putting it as a pause on the future of the internet, so I know how to describe what’s going on with Web 3.0, metaverse and crypto better than most people because big companies asked me to study it for them and explain it to them how I was studying so they could understand what was going on versus me coming like a huckster and saying, “Buy an NFT. Do this. Do that.” As a result, they said, “Show us what you’re doing and how you’re doing it.” I was paid to learn to teach.
It’s like, “I can give you a fish, or I can teach you how to fish.” They were like, “We’re going to pay you to teach us how to fish.”
They’re also like, “We like the fact that you’re learning how to be a fisherman.” I told them, “I’m not even a fisherman and you’re asking me to teach you how to fish.” They’re like, “Go learn how to be a fisherman because nobody knows, and then teach us what you’re learning, including who else we should go and learn from.”
You’re curating everything for them. They trust you.
They trust me, so it allows me to say, “I don’t know.” It allows me to go to lots of world-class people and bring them in. I’m not competing with anybody, so I’m saying, “I’m trying to work on this project.” In effect, what many of your audience will find is often a client may ask and say, “Can you help me solve this problem?”
I sometimes say, “I’m going to turn your question around like this,” and often, I’ve been hired because I changed the question. I said, “I don’t think you’re asking the right question. I think this is what you’re really asking.” I have a piece that turned the opposite part, which is the problem of asking the wrong questions. I wrote a piece called The Problems of Asking the Wrong Question.
[bctt tweet=”People don’t buy products and services; they buy solutions.” via=”no”]
There’s so much good content. Thank you for sharing this incredible framework of the Is, the concept of photography and framing things from a sales perspective and combining the spreadsheet with the story is the way to get through all the noise that’s out there or, as I say, get out of drowning in a sea of sameness. If someone wants to find out more about you and hire you as a consultant, workshop or keynote speaker, the best place to send them is to your website, which is your name.
It’s RishadTobaccowala.com and there, you will find pretty much everything, including what my workshops are. If you click on where it says Thought Letter, you’ll find a lot of the stuff that I’ve talked about. As any good salesperson does, I give away the crack for free, so hopefully, people will buy the cocaine.
My Sunday Thought Letter, which is what you read and which is now read by 25,000 people, including entrepreneurs and CEOs, is completely free. That’s Rishad.SubStack.com. A lot of that content is on my website under Thought Letter, but instead of you having to go there every Sunday, it can come to you and it’s completely free. Not only is it free of no charge and no upcharge, but it’s also free of advertising, affiliate marketing and data harvesting. It’s a gift because, as I wrote, you build goodwill through generosity.
There are visuals that go with it, so you’re not just reading the text.
Also, each Sunday, I introduce a new artist, new sculptor or new photographer. There’s a new artist, sculptor, and photographer every Sunday. It’s a read that shouldn’t take more than five minutes of your time and the idea is that at the end of that five minutes, you will see, think and feel differently about the topic.
Especially generosity, that’s one of my favorites. The book again is called Restoring the Soul of Business. We certainly need that now more than ever. Thank you so much for writing the book and for putting out all of your knowledge and for inspiring all of us to be a little more human in our interactions with each other in the business world. Thanks again.
Thank you very much and thanks to everybody who read this.
Important Links
- Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data
- RishadTobaccowala.com
- Thought Letter
- Rishad.SubStack.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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