TSP063 | Guy Spier – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

Hi, and welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is Guy Spier, who is the author of The Education of a Value Investor. Guy went to both Oxford and Harvard, and had lunch with Warren Buffett. He had to spend $650,000 on a charity auction to get that lunch with Warren Buffett, which lasted 3 and a half hours, and totally changed Guy’s life, his attitude, and his network of people. Guy has a whole philosophy about life. He said, “Generate more value than you take and be humble with everyone you meet.” Guy is full of fascinating information. He currently lives in Zurich. You’re going to really enjoy hearing what Guy has to say about life and investing.

Are you a founder struggling with your investor pitch? Do you need warm introductions to the right investors to get your startup funded? Do you need a funding road map to get you there fast? All of this and more can be found in Crack the Funding Code. Join host, John Livesay and Judy Robinett, bestselling author of How to Be a Power Connector and board member of Illuminate Ventures, on their free Crack the Funding Code webinar. Simply go to judyrobinett.com – that’s J-U-D-Y-R-O-B-I-N-E-T-T dot com – and click on the webinar tab to see how to tap into their network of investors from around the world. There’s a link in the show notes as well. You’re only one click away from getting funded fast.

Welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. Today’s guest is Guy Spier. Guy has run the Aquamarine Fund for the last 17 years. He is an ardent disciple of Warren Buffett. He launched the fund with $15 million in assets, very closely replicating the structure and approach of Buffett’s original partnerships. Guy has received his education at Oxford University, where he was a tutorial partner of the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, and came top of his class in economics. As if that wasn’t enough, after his stint in management consulting, he attended Harvard Business School, and then worked as an investment banker before starting his own fund. He’s a regular commentator in the media, and has appeared in CNN, in Bloomberg Television, as well as many other important places. So we’re obviously very thrilled to have him. He is also the author of an amazing book called The Education of a Value Investor. Guy, welcome to the show.

Guy:

John, it’s such a pleasure to be here. Hey, that Guy Spier sounds pretty cool. Can I meet him?

John:

Exactly. Isn’t it interesting when we hear our bio sometimes, you’re like, “Oh, I did all that?”

Guy:

Exactly.

John:

So you’re taking to — I’m in Los Angeles and you are in Zurich, which is fantastic and cool that we get to have this bicontinental conversation. I almost spit that out properly. What I love to always ask my guest is take us back before you went to Oxford. Did you have a personal passion for economics and investing as a child? What got you interested in all this?

Guy:

Oh, that wasn’t the case for me at all, John. The only time that I heard investing related, funnily enough, I remember the stock symbol. We were living in Iran. My dad was working for a German chemicals company, and my father had opened up a brokerage account with Merrill Lynch in the United States, and he was following IBM. He would pick me up and I would sit next to him, and he’d make me look in the newspaper to find out what IBM share price had done on a day-to-day basis.

But, other than that, I had no contact with the stock market until, really, my final year at business school. Then, actually, funnily enough, the guy who was interested in it was a classmate of mine that I was doing a project with, whom I write about a little in the book. He’s now really well-known. He’s the CEO of Zinger. He wanted me to go in with him to buy Philippine Long Distance, a Filipino telephone company, and I was like — yeah, that was the first time that I started talking about the stock market with somebody at business school.

So, it was really in my last year, and after I’d already seen Warren Buffett speak in my first year that I suddenly said, “Oh, I want to go into finance.” Now, I have to tell you, John, that it’s not like I started — I was like 26 at the time, so I wasn’t — you know, Warren Buffett was like a whole decade or more younger than me when he got going with investing the stocks. And I, in a certain way, it was, at the time, I wouldn’t have admitted it to anyone, but it was all about greed. I fancied myself as a little Gordon Gekko, and I’m not proud of that.

John:

Well, you transformed yourself, so that’s fine, right?

Guy:

Yeah, it’s easier to talk about it when you’re something different. That’s true.

John:

Well, one of the things that I really want to ask you about is this fascination of where did you find the money? Did you find it was a good investment? And tell us about how you were able to, I believe, pay a fundraising charity event to have lunch with Warren Buffett, right?

Guy:

Well, you know, John, my story, I think, is far less inspiring in that regards in comparison to this other guy that I write about a lot in the book, this friend, Mohnish Pabrai. In my case, I’d gone to this investment bank, D.H. Blair, and it really ruined my reputation, because it was an unsavory place that was ripping off orphans and widows. It would be the short way of talking about it. And I really ought to have left within five minutes, but I actually stayed 18 months.

So, when I left, people did not want to offer me a job, and I went two or three rounds in a number of interviews, and then people just shut down, and I knew it was because they could see that I had those stain. I saw that in my book. I toyed with calling it a stain. A bloody stain like Mrs. Macbeth. It felt horrible to me. It felt like I couldn’t wash it off me, and nobody wanted to hire me.

In my case, my dad – don’t ask me why he did it – he decided to gamble the substantial portion of his life savings on his son, and he came along and he said, “Look, I think you should try and start a business and I’m willing to be your key client to do it,” and it took me, actually — I think that I’m quite an entrepreneurial type, but with my dad and the proportion of his net wealth that I knew he was investing with me, unless he had something stashed away somewhere else that he hadn’t told me about, I knew that I couldn’t mess this up, and I was once in awe of his willingness to trust me, and at the same time, I was scared stiff. And I still, to this day, don’t fully understand why he did that.

But then I think, John, the thing is there are so many difficulties in life. What I realized now – I didn’t want to accept it then – but if you should take the help from wherever it comes, and there’s so many people who are using whatever advantage they have, and I realize now, in many ways, I had all sorts of disadvantages. I was an immigrant into the UK. I was kind of an immigrant into the United States. There are many people who had deep-rooted family and other kinds of connections that they were using.

So if my dad was going to help me, that was perfectly legitimate and that was alright, and I think it’s something that I didn’t realize at the time, but your listeners, and you guys out there who are starting businesses, do not accept help from close at hand if that’s the help that’s available. Believe me, the woman who’s beautiful is not going to dress herself up ugly, and then try and win the spot in the movie, or try and get that modeling spot. So, you take what you have and you use it.

But, what I would say, John, is that I think the fact that that was my original source of money delayed me for about five or six years in terms of really learning how to sell myself. I didn’t really understand how to do that. So, it came with that kind of disadvantage, if you like. It got me going, but then I didn’t know how to scale from there.

John:

Interesting. I love that insight. We’re going to tweet that out. “Accept help from wherever you can get it, and don’t be embarrassed about it.” So, tell us, one of the things describing your book is you had to spend a small fortune in $650,100 to have one meal to meet Warren Buffett? How’d you find the money and what’s that story?

Guy:

You know, that happened in the late — it was before the financial bubble burst, so I had two or three very, very good years. So I wasn’t spending money that I didn’t have, and it’s important that I was one-third of that sum, so I had this Indian friend, Mohnish Pabrai who came up with two-thirds of that, and I’d gotten to know him and he came up with this idea. Like you, I was like, “You want to do what? You want me to participate?”

And this is the thing, John, how can something that can sound so ridiculous, suddenly when you listen to the right person talking about it and their clearheaded thinking becomes actually something that’s quite obvious, and quite straightforward. My reaction was the same as yours, and then Mohnish Pabrai, at this breakfast at the Mandarin Hotel overlooking Central Park takes me through why it’s a really smart thing to do.

Before we can get into all the reasons why, but I can tell you that in terms of return on that $650,000, if you like, the people that I’ve gotten to meet. It’s not just you saw that photograph of my wife with Bill Gates, which is really wonderful. I can’t say we had a long conversation with him, but even just that photograph with Bill Gates is very special but below that, there are dozens of people that I would have never gotten to meet had I not gone to that lunch with Warren Buffett. It’s not that Warren Buffett introduced me to them, it’s that there are just a lot of people who wouldn’t mind meeting the guy who paid $650,000 to have lunch with Warren Buffett.

So, what I understood beforehand — and this was the saying that Mohnish Pabrai had explained to me, and it comes down to the very special personality of Warren Buffett. So, it wasn’t just a sort of, “Let me meet you for half an hour and then I’ll run off.” He’s hung out with us for about 3 and a half hours. He came determined in a degree. It was unnerving actually.

I mean, here’s a guy who’s the world’s richest man, or second richest at the time. He doesn’t have anything that we could give to him, and, utterly, all he wants to do is serve us. All he wants to do is make us feel like we got so much value for it. That came afterwards. we showed up in Omaha one year early for the Berkshire meeting, and he invited us up into his office. He gave us a tour of his office. We hang out. Then he introduced us to Tracy Britt, who is now one of these 30 under 30 women. She’s a rock star. She’s very heavily involved in the next generation of Berkshire Hathaway managers, and he kind of says, “Tracy, why don’t you just come for lunch with us?” So, he’s been delivering value, and he invites us to this brunch every year, where you get to hang out with people. I mean, one year, Charlie Rose was there. Bill Gates is there every year.

So, I think when you pay up to hang out in the presence of a guy who just wants to send so much love out into the world — and you know, I’ll tell you something else. First of all, he delivered enormous amounts of value, and it’s changed my life, it’s changed my network, but also just to witness that what does it say to you and me, and a whole bunch of other people that if Warren Buffett, at his level of success is humbly trying to deliver value to some guy who won a charity auction with him, can you imagine what he’s like with his friends? It’s not like I’m in his inner circle or anything, but I don’t think he’s any different, and so that really taught me that I had to have tremendous humility with all sorts of people, not just because it’s a good way to be, but because it’s incredibly rewarding, but it’s a smart business. I mean, look at what I’m doing now. I’m taking minutes and minutes just to talk about Warren Buffett.

So, here’s the ultimate. It just gets me so excited to think about it. The ultimate in being immense, being a good person, which will generate massive business rewards is to do stuff for people where there’s no way they could ever thank you, you know? Because it’s the kind of thing that they could not reciprocate.

So, I’ll just give one very short example. So, a guy writes an email to me. I was giving a talk a couple of weeks ago to the CFA society, and he asked me if he could come by and get my book autographed, and I said, “Sure,” except I didn’t realize that he didn’t mean at the CFA talk, he meant that morning in my office. So, I get a knock on the door at the office, and I had some other things going on, but I realized that weird crosswise and he actually wanted to come in the morning. Inspired by Warren Buffett, I said, “Alright, fine. I’ve met him. Now, I’m going to take half an hour. I made him a coffee, I took out of the office. I did the Warren Buffett thing.”

This is like an 18-year-old student from Oslo, or northern Finland, and it was the same motivation. I wanted to make him feel like he got just that surprising amounts of value asked of me. I hung out with him at the library, I took photographs with him, we hammed it up a little bit, and I know that he’s grateful to me, and he’ll talk about that, and I took photographs of it actually.

John:

It sounds like, to me, that you’ve passed on what you learned from Warren Buffett to the next generation, and we’re going to tweet that out. “Be humble with everyone you meet, regardless of who they are.”

Guy:

So, I would argue that the returns to the lunch with Warren Buffett, just the network that I got to be exposed to, but then seeing him up close and seeing some things that were really surprising that I didn’t really expect.

John:

Such as?

Guy:

Like that total humility, but then the other side of it, which was really quite hard for me was that, John, in spite of all this fake humility that I’m giving you, I have a certain ego, and I feel like I’m quite a smart guy, there was some part of me that thought, “I’m maybe as smart as Warren Buffett.”

Sitting with him, I just knew that I wasn’t. I knew that he had a clocked speed that was higher than mine, and it was painful to experience that, and as this friend of mine, William Green, says, “Weirdly liberating,” because it freed me up. I was investing a lot of energy in trying to be something that I was not, and it is a waste of energy, and I knew I couldn’t do it anymore. So I gave up that version of myself.

John:

Well, just the freedom to not have to be the smartest person in the room all the time, I would think, would be very liberating.

Guy:

Yes, it absolutely was, and not just liberating, I think that you use up brain cells. You use up brain cycles that could be better used doing something else, thinking about whether it’s your and your wife’s anniversary, which it was yesterday, I didn’t do very well with that.

John:

Well, we won’t let that ruin everything. You know, what you said to me, Guy, reminds me of this statement that I heard once, which is, “If you focus on being interested in the other person, as opposed to trying to be interesting to them, you’ll have a much better conversation.”

Guy:

Yes, yes, and you know that Disraeli quotes on that. I don’t remember who it was, but a woman meets two men. One was, I think, Isaac Newton who I believe lived the same time as Benjamin Disraeli, who was the British Prime Minister, and very Jewish by the way, and a very close confidant of, I believe, if my history’s not mistaken, Queen Victoria. Anyway, so this woman meets Disraeli and, I think Newton, and she says of Newton, she says, “Newton made me feel like he was the smartest guy in the room, but Benjamin Disraeli made me feel like I was the smartest person in the room.” It’s not how you feel. It’s how you make other people feel. Can you make other people feel good about themselves?

John:

That’s so useful for the audience, who is probably in the position of going to pitch investors that if you make the investors feel good about themselves investing in you as opposed to you trying so hard to impress them with how smart you are. You have to come across confident but not arrogant, and I think that’s really what you’re saying here. Let me ask you about the preparation you did. If you’re going to spend that kind of money, over $650,000 to have lunch with somebody, and I’m talking to my clients all the time about the importance of preparing and practicing their pitch before they get in front of investors, I’m imagining that you put some thought and effort into the kinds of questions you were going to ask Warren during the lunch, right?

Guy:

This is the funny thing, John. So, this is me to Mohnish Pabrai, who is way wiser than I am, and way smarter as well. I said, “Mohnish, shouldn’t we prepare? Shouldn’t we reread all of the publicly available information?” and he kind of said, “You know, Guy, we’ve been studying.” I mean, at that point, I’d been going to the Berkshire meeting for 10 years. I was reading every single annual report. At the time, there was one biography that I’d read at least a couple of times and it was like, “Don’t worry. The conversation will just flow.”

So I think what Mohnish did which was really brilliant, and this is something that may be really valuable for the listeners, is it was build us the power lunch, but we made it into family occasion. So, Mohnish came with his wife and his two children, I came with my wife, and Mohnish signaled beforehand. It was very clear in a couple radio and TV interviews we’re just there to say thank you to somebody who’s taught us a lot.

So, these were all things to kind of de-escalate the tension, de-escalate the sense of defensiveness that Warren might have. Here’s something that I just think doesn’t work anymore in a hyperconnected world where everybody can reach for just about anything through Google search, which is that the preparation of the pitch, in a certain way, it should be about saving the other guy time. It’s not about trying to force them to listen to you, because they can find whatever they want. We can all find whatever we want. All of it’s on sale on Amazon at a very low price.

So, to save them time and to think about, “How do I reduce their sense of tension, their sense of defensiveness that will come up if there’s something that’s being asked for?” So, something else that I learned from Mohnish was — well, I guess I won’t go to Mohnish. And this is what’s so wonderful about being around and studying somebody like Warren Buffett is that there are just so many valuable stories to land.

So, this guy Byron Trott, who’s the only investment banker that Warren Buffett deals with. So, this is told in, I think, a couple of newspaper articles. He said it in a couple of interviews. He’s got this one-off meeting with Warren Buffett, and he doesn’t get three and a half hours with him like us. Even better with Alice Schroeder, the author of the second book on him who had unlimited access to him, Byron Trott knows he’s got about half an hour, and he’s flown out to Omaha. So he says this, he says, “Warren, give me a problem that you’ve got that nobody else has been able to solve, and I can’t guarantee that I will solve it for you, but I’d like to try.”

So, here are all the things I love about that question. First of all, it says, “This meeting is about you. It’s not about me. I want to hear what you have to say.” So, it’s offering something. It’s offering your time to listen to what’s on their mind. The other thing that it does is, instantly, without having to go through, it says, “I know that you already have a lot of great service providers. I know that you’ve got a lot of great stuff on your plate, and guess what? I don’t want to compete with any of them because I’m sure that you’re happy. I want your unsolved problems. If you’ve already got people solving your problems, I don’t want to even start telling you that I can solve your problems better.”

I think that Warren Buffett is so brilliant. He heard that question and he knew that he had a guy in his presence that he liked, because this guy was about Warren Buffett and his needs, not about what he was trying to pitch. And Warren makes these decisions and, bang, Byron Trott was in his inner circle, and they’ve done I don’t know how many deals. What Warren gave him, what he said to Byron Trott was, he said, “You know, I’m going to –” I think I’ve got that right. He says, “Please, could you get me a security issues that pays a negative interest rate.”

So we are paid to issue the security. It actually didn’t work out financially. They had an embedded stock option in there that ended up costing Berkshire quite a bit of money. But, again, it got Warren’s mind churning, and it makes me think of one of the — at the time, I was graduating business — no, a couple of years out of business school, a guy got an internship with Warren Buffett. He wrote to Warren Buffett from Columbia Business School, and he asked for a job or for an internship, and then he included the check for his estimate of the amount of time that it would take Warren Buffett to read the letter. I don’t think that Warren ever cashed the check, but what Warren loved was that this guy was thinking in the right way. He was thinking about that Warren’s time was valuable and he didn’t want to waste Warren’s time, and he thought, “A guy who thinks like that is thinking in the right direction.”

John:

Well, it’s a classic case of empathy, isn’t it?

Guy:

Yes.

John:

You put yourself in Warren Buffett’s shoes and you realize how valuable his time is, and you did a gesture that acknowledged that. The thing I love about the story you just told us of how he picked that investment banker, “Give me a problem that you haven’t been able to solve.” That is what everybody wants to hear in a pitch, “Tell me a problem that you’re solving that no one else has solved yet, or that you’re solving it in a way that is unique.” It’s disruptive, it’s going to change the world, make the world a better place. So, on a one-to-one basis, if you can help somebody solve a problem and, of course, on a global basis, if you’re looking for investment. That’s such a great story and so helpful. I really want to dig in a little bit about what you wrote earlier in your book about “the more you understand yourself, the better of an investor you become”. Can you share that?

Guy:

Even before we get to investing, I’m sure that you’ve done it, many of us have done it. I’ve been in small teams. It’s usually people who work for me, and there’s a commitment that they’ve made and then they failed to meet it, and I realized that it’s not for lack of desire. It’s because they didn’t understand who they really were and they didn’t understand, and it’s not that their communication with me was bad, they were being dishonest or not trustful. It’s that they didn’t understand their deepest desires or they didn’t understand their own capacities.

I think that when you have somebody who shows up at work, when I have somebody who shows up, it’s so much nicer to hear somebody say, “You’ve asked me to set up this computer. I’m not very good at it. I’m not sure I’ll succeed, but if you really want me to try, because it’s actually not my strong spot,” that really breeds trust and I think, in a certain way, if we come to investing, it’s the same thing.

If I identify with my rational brain, I’m going to trip up. So I feel like I have these teammates inside me that I have to bring along. So, there’s the rational brain, but then there’s this emotional thing going on, which is raging around all over the place, and that, unfortunately, it’s a member of my team and I can’t — it’s one of those members of the team that you really wish you could lose but can’t sometimes. So, I can’t ignore that person. It’s like you try and ignore that teammate and you try and put them in the corner and shut them up, but then they go and really wreak havoc.

John:

Then they get mad, yeah.

Guy:

Yeah, so you have to find a way to involve them in a certain way, and I think that just being honest with myself, one of the examples I write about is that, unlike Mohnish Pabrai, I have this inordinate fear of loss. I don’t want to have to start from scratch, and I’m more fearful, I think, than many people of losing money. So, I don’t think that it would have made sense to ignore that. I think I had to be honest with myself and with my investors and say, “You know, if I was utterly rational, this is a great investment. But you know what? It scares the shit out of me, and I can’t sleep with that.” So, I’m not going to worry about it, even if it means that my returns will be lower.

John:

Right. Know yourself and then know your own risk. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, you have to be comfortable with your own risk. Risking not having a steady paycheck for a while, and what if your company doesn’t do well or whatever it is, you have to know yourself and your own comfort zone, and I love what you say about thinking of all the different parts of our brain, left brain, right brain as members of a team as opposed to fighting ourselves. We’re all on the same page, we’re all on the same team here, so let’s figure out how we can best work together instead of shutting everybody up.

Guy:

It’s like I think that we’ve all been through these times where we fight with the forces that are arrayed around us in the universel. Like Jacob struggling with the angel, it just doesn’t work very well. It works much better when we align ourselves with those forces. Then, in a strange way, actually, when you talk about — if you don’t embrace the risk or you don’t embrace the fear saying, “You’ll do this, this is great. I’m fearful or you’ll do this. This is great.” It’s like because I see the risks so clearly or because I feel the fear so much, this is motivating me to take all these actions.

So, if we’re not honest with ourselves, if I’m not honest with myself about my fear of loss, or if an entrepreneur is not honest with himself about the very real possibility of failure, we’re not going to be motivated to do everything we possibly can to make it succeed. The strange thing for me is that the times when I’ve been in those kinds of circumstances, on the one hand, I feel utterly alive. You know, actually, writing the book was a bit like that.

John:

I’m sure.

Guy:

And then, on the other hand, it’s like once I’m through it, I’m like, “I don’t want to go through that again.”

John:

I understand. In fact, I wrote a whole blog about starting a podcast and the three faces of fear that I had to overcome. The fear of rejection, the fear of failure, and then the fear of the unknown. For me, identifying those fears into three faces helped me deal with them. So, it wasn’t just any kind of fear. I would go, “Which fear is this?”

Guy:

But there’s something else that I think is so incredibly critical is that – and I learned this from a friend of mine who’s a psychologist – emotions are a call to action, and if we don’t feel those emotions, we’re not going to take the action that we need to take. So, I would argue, I feel like, I felt it as you were saying it that the fears that you were dealing with, it wasn’t that you were just dealing with them, they were motivating you to do stuff. If you didn’t feel that, you wouldn’t have done as good a job in setting up your podcast. The one comes with the other, and if we try numbers, feelings. We tried numbers, emotions, we won’t be taking the course of action, actually.

John:

That’s a great word. Yeah, we’re going to Tweet that out. Emotions are a call to action. I love it.

Guy:

Yeah, and they’re two sides of the same coin, you know. I was just listening to the Brené Brown TED talk with a couple friends the other day.

John:

Oh, love her. Her and Liz Gilbert, yeah.

Guy:

The vulnerability is what gets the healing, is what gets the result and we just can’t have the one without the other.

John:

It’s so true. Now, you and I were speaking before the show started about your sense of liking to help people, especially founders, possibly even get funded so that when they sell their company, they’ll remember you. Tell us a little bit about how that all works in your world.

Guy:

Yeah, I’ll tell you because it’s just amazing the way it started. John, it started out of a really venal place, which wasn’t generous at all. I’d read the Cialdini book, The Psychology of Influence, and it’s got this great story there about these Hare Krishna money raisers who would hand out plastic flowers in airports and the human reciprocation tendency is so strong that even if you hand out plastic flowers, then you still will feel obligated to give something is very effective.

So, I’m like, “Damn, I can use this.” So, I’m in New York and I’m finding all sorts of — I’m sort of giving the doorman a sweet side, carry sweets or chocolates around with me. I’d be giving stuff to people all the time, but I wasn’t coming out of a place of love for humanity or of generosity. I was coming out of a place of pure manipulation. I was like, “Let’s see how I can manipulate people to do stuff for me,” and all sorts of things happened as a result of that.

But, really, what was – and it’s part of why I wanted to write the book – I suddenly found that I actually enjoyed it not because I could manipulated them into doing something, because I realized that people genuinely responded, even to my fake giving. I know, over time, I think my fake giving turned into something which was much, much more genuine.

Then, over time, what happened was that I started wanting to do it on a larger scale.

So I realized that as my network improved — I have a friend who starts medical technology companies in Minnesota, and I suddenly realized that I was coming across people that he would be interested to meet, and it sort of tapped into the same idea of finding a way to be generous because good things come back to me if I’m generous.

Actually, the funny thing is, so I’ll give you a story. So I’m a member of this organization called the Entrepreneurs’ Organization which, by the way, is a fantastic organization. So, I helped start the Israel chapter. Again, this was my idea of wanting to help people but, with the idea that, at some point, these guys — some of them might build big businesses and have money to invest and then they might send some of that to me.

So, one of the members is a woman who’s looking for funding, and actually, you could invite her on, she could talk about it. Her name is Mikhail Lodski. She’s a lovely person that I really wanted to deliver value to the chat car. I wanted people to know that if they join EO, good things happen to them. So, she is looking for funding. I hadn’t even met her.

So I did this. This is hilarious. It’s not hilarious. It’s so much fun. So, I wrote up something, which said, “Dear, First Name, I’m a member of an organization called EO, and EO’s got this — one of the members is somebody called Mikhail Lodski, and she’s got what looks like a great business plan and I would be really grateful if you take a look at it. Then I wrote, “Look, I don’t understand a lot about it, but if you were to at least take a look and see if you can help, it would mean a lot to me, and I would be grateful to you for that.”

So then I went into my LinkedIn profile and I did a search for 100 people who, in some way, were involved in the world that she was looking for funding in. They were either venture capitalists, or they were angels, or they were in that business, and I just cut and pasted that message like I don’t know how many times, and you know what was interesting was unlike if you ask for it yourself, the fact that I was asking for it and they knew me, there was some connection, I’d met them at a conference or something. Even if they had no interest, they could see that I was doing this out of the desire to help somebody, so they accepted it in a way that if she’d gotten in touch with them directly, they wouldn’t have, and then one of them actually took a close look, it was in their space, they liked it. They ended up funding her business.

John:

What a great story. Yeah, you can never underestimate the importance of a warm introduction. It’s everything. It’s been so wonderful having you on this show and hearing your stories and your personal transformations. I want to know how can people follow you on social media and, obviously, we’re going to list The Education of a Value Investor in the show notes for people to click and buy your book. But, what is the best way for people to follow you? What’s your Twitter? All that good stuff.

Guy:

Yeah, so my Twitter account is it’s my first initial and my last name, so it’s GSpier, all one word. So @GSpier, very, very short. I also just started a LinkedIn group called The Education of a Value Investor and I’m actually there, there’s a couple of others there. The Aquamarine Fund has a LinkedIn group and I’m actually really enjoying LinkedIn groups. I think it’s a great place to be. I’m also really enjoying Twitter, I have to say, because I just like the random conversations with all sorts of people from all over the world that show up there.

John:

Now, your LinkedIn group, is it the name of your book, The Education of a Value Investor?

Guy:

Yes.

John:

Okay, got it.

Guy:

That’s the easiest place, and it’s nice of you to do that.

John:

Of course, perfect. Thank you so much. Is there any last piece of advice you have for someone who’s in the world of starting a business, looking for funding, or about life or business, in general, that you want to share as a closing thought?

Guy:

You know, John, the one thing that I need to tell you is that I’m just getting warmed up. You’ve psyched me. I’m all psyched up. It’s 10:15 at night here but I want to go straight to work since you’ve really inspired me. What I would say, and the thing that I feel I’ve learned that is so important is always leave a little on the table, always generate more value than you take, always leave people wanting more. Then, just keep doing that for a decade.

I told that guy who came and did an internship with me, I said, “If you help ten people, you’ve got a few friends. If you help a hundred people, you probably find a job. If you help a thousand people, you can probably start a business. If you help ten thousand people, you’ll have quite a successful business, and if you start being in the range of helping a hundred thousand people, then you’ve got a substantial business. When it gets to a million, you’re like Warren Buffett, and when it gets to ten million, you’re like Mahatma Gandhi.” But that’s approximately the order of scale, and it’s just about having how many people out there just feel grateful that you’re on the planet.

John:

Oh, what a great philosophy. I love it so much.

Guy:

You know, when you do that, good things will come to you. They may not be what you wanted. God might have other plans in store for you, but good things will happen.

John:

It’s just having that as the intention. That will be our final Tweet. “Generate more value than you take.” Guy, thanks again for being on the show.

Guy:

I want to reach out and give you a hug. John, this has been wonderful.

John:

Aw, thanks. Cross the ocean. Alright, thanks again.

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

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

TSP062 | Linda Kaplan Thaler – Transcription

Posted by John Livesay in Uncategorized | 0 comments

John Livesay:

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

Are you a founder struggling with your investor pitch? Do you need warm introductions to the right investors to get your startup funded? Do you need a funding road map to get you there fast? All of this and more can be found in Crack the Funding Code. Join host, John Livesay and Judy Robinett, bestselling author of How to Be a Power Connector and board member of Illuminate Ventures, on their free Crack the Funding Code webinar. Simply go to judyrobinett.com – that’s J-U-D-Y-R-O-B-I-N-E-T-T dot com – and click on the webinar tab to see how to tap into their network of investors from around the world. There’s a link in the show notes as well. You’re only one click away from getting funded fast.

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

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

I came from the Bronx.

John:

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

Linda:

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

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

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

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

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

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

John:

Right.

Linda:

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

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

John:

Really?

Linda:

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

John:

Oh my gosh.

Linda:

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

John:

Yes, I’ve heard that. I loved it.

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

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

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

John:

Oh boy.

Linda:

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

John:

Yes.

Linda:

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

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

John:

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

Linda:

Oh my goodness.

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

Linda:

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

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

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

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

John:

Love it.

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

John:

Wow.

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

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

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

John:

New for the first time, right?

Linda:

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

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

John:

Ha-ha, there you go.

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

Right.

John:

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

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

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

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

John:

It’s overwhelming.

Linda:

It’s overwhelming, yeah.

John:

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

Linda:

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

John:

Wonderful.

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

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

John:

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

Linda:

Thank you.

John:

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

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