Book Yourself Solid With Matthew Kimberley
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When we think of attracting clients into our business, we immediately think of marketing. But not for Matthew Kimberley, the owner of Book Yourself Solid, who believes that marketing does not get you clients. In this episode, he joins John Livesay to explain to us this contrarian idea as inspired by Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid, a handbook for self-promotion that can help you get more clients even if you hate marketing and selling. He discusses the effectiveness of emails and how best to format them, growing a personality-based brand, and becoming a person of value rather than a provider of value. What is more, Matthew then speaks about why your business should be a love story, one that is between you and your business, you and your clients, and you and marketing.
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Book Yourself Solid With Matthew Kimberley
Our guest is Matthew Kimberley, the Owner of Book Yourself Solid. He works with coaches and all kinds of entrepreneurs to do just that. He said, “Marketing does not get you clients.” What an a-ha moment that was for me and many other people. Find out what he means by that. He said, “Your business should be a love story.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is a friend and he is quite fun to talk to. You’re going to enjoy this episode. Matthew Kimberley helps small businesses sell more and sell with sophistication. He spends a lot of time providing strategic counsel to business owners and coaches. He’s got over two decades of international sales and advisory experience and multiple millions of dollars, euros and pounds that he has generated for companies. Now he hides out in the Mediterranean. Welcome to the show, Matthew.
Thank you for having me, John. There is nowhere I would rather be on a wet Thursday afternoon than doing this with you.
Isn’t that the definition of success that you’re with the people you want to be with in the place you want to be and that there’s no anxiety of, “I wish I was doing something else besides this?”
I still struggle a bit. I’ve got young family. I’ve got two boys. One is seven and one is eleven. Like many people who are self-employed and to have young families, I do battle a bit with what gets my attention when, and I’ve got much better at this and I’ll tell you why I’ve got that strategy. I felt guilty when I was at work because I was neglecting my kids. I felt guilty when I was with my family because I was neglecting my business baby.
What changed was confidence that came with time. I proved to myself year after year that business will probably be okay and I didn’t have to stress and to take time off, to switch off from business and spend it with my family. It didn’t mean anything was being neglected. I still get that sometimes. If one of them falls over, gets a booboo, needs a kiss and I’m on a call with a client, but generally with confidence around next month’s revenue and next year’s revenue comes a bit more relaxation and freedom of time. Freedom of time was the ultimate metric of success if you can choose who you spend your time with, where you spend your time, then what else do you need?
I love to ask my guests their own little story of origin. You can go back to school days. Take us a bit on your own personal journey before you got to this place where you do have the freedom to help other coaches get themselves booked. I’m guessing at one point you might have been in that situation where you were struggling to get booked. Who knows?
[bctt tweet=”Marketing does not get your clients.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It was the end of the summer, 1979, Paris. Reverend John Kimberley and his wife, Susan Kimberley, were probably putting their feet up in their hotel room after a long boozy lunch. If I go back too far, this is the conception story. My first self-employed job was selling entertainment in the streets. I was a juggler and a busker. I was a street entertainer. I learned that there was a direct correlation between asking for people to throw money in the hat and people throwing money in the hat. With the benefit of hindsight, I look back and say, “That was probably one of my first introductions to persuasion and sales and being in direct control of the amount of money that you earn.”
I’d go and stand in the street first and balls around and people would walk past, but when I caught their eyes, I smile at them and said, “If you enjoy the show, give me a pound.” They were far more likely to give me a pound so asking for the sale. Fast forward a few years, I’m working in timeshare by accident. This is age 23. It was my first introduction to hard direct selling. I got the job because it was the only job in a foreign country that would employ me without a work permit and because the turnover was massive. We were paid on a commission only basis. It was low risk for them to hire foreigners in the block, but it was a real baptism of fire.
We had daily sales motivation training for an hour, 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. We would be given unqualified prospects and told if you spend 6 to 7 hours with them and followed the system, there’s a 10% chance they’ll buy something, which is exhausting, but true. They will give you an unqualified prospect. They had no idea what they were in the room for, probably the promise of a dolphin show or a winning prize or free bottle of champagne. We’d sit down with them and over the course of seven hours sell them $10,000 worth of vacation ownership. That taught me about direct sales. It taught me about the importance of not leaving anything to chance to following the system of crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s. It was a horrible filthy industry. It was lots of fun, lots of drugs, lots of late nights.
I didn’t want to sell it to my parents. When they came to visit and they said, “Can we come and see what you do for a living?” I said, “No.” If I can’t do that, I probably shouldn’t be doing it. I shouldn’t be selling it to other people’s patterns or grandparents, so I left. I got a job in corporate sales and fast forward again a number of years, I own a recruitment company selling agency services. I’m a 50% owner in a recruitment company that sells agency services to large multinational corporations, agency being, “I need a Java programmer.” I’ve got a budget of €600 a day. I would go and find somebody for €400 a day and take the difference. Huge money, young age, I hated it. I was the other owner. I was getting into work later and later I had a fractious relationship with my business partner.
Although I loved parts of the job like selling and training my salespeople, I didn’t love anything else about it. I didn’t love the structure. I didn’t love the industry. I was bored by it. I could only talk computer technology for five minutes before falling asleep, and here I was talking day in, day out with people who were trying to batter me on price every time I met them. I left and I said, “If I enjoy sales and I enjoy training, maybe I should become a sales trainer.” That’s what happened. I didn’t want to do it my own because of my interest in selling, which had been born with timeshare. I had been on various mailing lists, rather like you are now, John, and everybody reading this. I had a bit of savings from selling my 50% share of the company and Michael Port who wrote a book called Book Yourself Solid, which I’d read and whose mailing list I was on an opportune moment sends a blast out to his list that said, “Would you like to become a Book Yourself Solid Certified Coach?”
Fast forward 12 years, 13 years. I now run the Book Yourself Solid Organization. Michael has retired from operations and I am now the person who trains the trainer how to book their own business to solid, but also how to book their clients businesses solid. It’s an absolute joy there. We all have days which are better than others, but there’s isn’t a day I don’t say I’m not grateful for the trials and tribulations and the journey that I’d been on because now I get to do this. I get to hang out with rock star coaches four times a week. We have mastermind calls, open invitation to all of our licensed trainers and ambassadors. It’s a community that looks out for each other. We’ve got a fantastic piece of world-class intellectual property, which the market is hungry for and the works. Thank you for asking John. Do you want me to fill in the gaps? I should stop talking now. That that story could go on for days.
Book Yourself Solid: Freedom of time is the ultimate metric of success if you can choose who you spend your time with and where you spend your time.
No. it’s good. I find it fascinating too. The lessons learned from, first of all, getting people’s attention on the street much like we all have to do in digital marketing and blog posts and advertisements to not being afraid to ask for the order, is that a big problem for a lot of people. They feel awkward and clunky doing it. Not having a system, a script, a plan in place. Before GPS there were these old maps that we have in California, it was called the Thomas Guide. You’d have to flip pages and then you get halfway where your speed, it’d be like, “Now turn to page 506.” The rest of that particular journey continues. You’d be like, “I can’t look at this and drive at the same time.” That need for a clear, concise roadmap can never be underestimated. A lot of people have been in that situation where, “Can I do what I love and make money?” It seems like they’re mutually exclusive. When you can show people they can do both, that’s where it becomes magnetic. I do have a question about what you’re doing, training the trainers. People are thinking, “Is this for me or not?” If someone’s a coach or a consultant, they probably need Book Yourself Solid. Whether they need to then train other people who is it that decides, “I don’t want to coach anymore. I want to train other coaches.” How does that work?
There’s this sweet groups of people who join our program. It looks a bit like a business coaching franchise. If you are from the outside because our business is the transference of intellectual property. If you want to be a coach, we will give you workbooks, materials and a system that you can give to your clients and guide them through it. That’s where the similarities stop. There’s no territorial exclusivity and no royalty payments made. We don’t take a percentage of your earnings. It’s a flat annual fee and an affordable one. We say that every Book Yourself Solid Coach who’s using the material should make their annual investment back with two clients. We want you to be signing up more than two clients a week, ideally.
That’s where the paradigm is with the franchise, but that’s a close parallel. You’re not tied to it. You can mix and match it with anything else you might be selling. You might be a car salesman who also does Book Yourself Solid on the side or you may offer personality assessments or you might be certified in fifteen other modalities. You might have picked up certifications from Tony Robbins or Mike Michalowicz. We’ve also got franchise owners who are also Book Yourself Solid Coaches because they can use them together. Three groups of people, the first group of people is the existing sales trainer or coach or business consultant who knows that they can flip the IP for profit quickly. John, if I were to say, become a Book Yourself Solid Coach, John, and in three weeks’ time after you’ve had time to study the material, you can hold a workshop for your own clients, charge them $1,500 a pop for a weekend workshop and keep 100% of the cash.
What are you going to teach in the workshop? Book Yourself Solid. Some people see it as a piece of inventory they’re buying retail, they’re selling wholesale. That’s for the experience coach. The experience coach is also interested in masterminding with other experienced coaches. That’s what we do four times a week, which is super valuable. That’s the third group of people. The third group of people are business owners, who are not that interested in reselling or teaching Book Yourself Solid ever, but they want to use Book Yourself Solid in their own business. What better way to learn it than from the source? They can hire a Book Yourself Solid Coach for $3,000 a month or they can join us for a whole year for a fraction of that. That is the 1st and the 3rd groups.
The second group are the pivoters. These are the people who say, “I’ve finished a career in engineering or consultancy or retail or human resources or I’ve got my Psychology degree. I want to try to make a success of being a coach or a consultant.” We say, “Do it with us.” We provide them with comprehensive training and coaching skills and business skills. In the first 6 to 12 months with them, we want them to get booked solid. Whether they’re teaching Book Yourself Solid or whether they’re teaching Reiki, it’s skewed primarily for consultants or coaches, people who deal in intellectual property rather than massage therapist or dentist or anything like that. We’ve got a lot of chiropractors in the group, by dint of the fact that there’s a happy marriage between Book Yourself Solid and the chiropractic community based on some of our influential alumni. They’re all coming at it from the angle, which is, “I want to get my chiropractic business booked solid,” and teach the chiropractors have to do the same. Those are the three groups of people. We support six figure coaches.
What a big need. Let’s say you’re in that pivot group and you’re leaving this career as an engineer, for example, and you want to do something else in your life or you want a side business, you’re not dependent on whether you get fired or not. This roller coaster of income, when you don’t have the plan and you’re like, “I had a great month this month but because I was focused on delivering, I was ignoring the attracting and converting part.” That is a big fear and a big pain point for many people is I’m working for myself but my income is inconsistent. You’re solving that.
[bctt tweet=”Be a person of value, not a provider of value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Consistent income, consistency of revenue being booked solid is not on booked solid in January, but I’m not booked solid in February is perpetually working the system to make sure that your marketing is attracting attention on a consistent basis. That marketing doesn’t mean you’re doing endless calls. I don’t believe in endless content marketing, categorically don’t. That’s an invention of the last several years. I don’t see why coaches have to also be publishers. That’s crazy. What happened to old-fashioned marketing. Book Yourself Solid has been around since before the social media. The first edition of the book came out in 2006, which is before social media was a thing. We have some evergreen client attraction strategies, which you can supercharge with social media use. If you look around your neighborhood, John, at the businesses that are booked solid, often the owners don’t even know how to turn on a computer. They are providing a valuable service to a community who needs it. There’s a market to product fit or market to service fit. They’re doing, over generations, the right thing in order to keep people walking through the door.
We sit firmly in that camp and say, “We’ve got tools that we can use that will help us gain access to the right people.” Marketing doesn’t get you clients. Marketing creates awareness about who you are. We’ve got one of our certified coaches is and I’m glad you said a sidekick. One of our coaches who has got a comfortable six figure income from providing coaching services is a full-time partner in a technology firm. For about 5 to 10 hours a month, he provides services to 5 or 6 clients who have his cell phone number. He will talk to them when he’s walking the dog on a Saturday or Friday afternoon, and they will pay him a retainer of $2,000 to $3,000 a month in order to have access to his insight. He has got $100,000 to $150,000 worth of business for fifteen hours a month.
I love what you said, marketing doesn’t get you clients.
That’s one of the fundamental premises of Book Yourself Solid.
When you say something like that, our brain goes, “Wait a minute. What? That’s the opposite of what I think or was taught.” That’s what cuts through the clutter. That’s why our brain goes, “That’s new information.” I would be totally remiss if I did not ask you and edify your incredible skills at writing emails, nobody does it better. You don’t have to take my word for it. I get highly entertained and watching a master at work when I read these things. I love words. If somebody wants to see an example of your email at work, they can go to MarketingForCoaches.com and get the five things we need to do every morning to get more clients in 60 days. I’m guessing that email is entertaining and informative.
I’ve got a love affair with emails. I still think there’s no better way to build a long-term relationship with people, but most people in our situation who own a transactional email service like a AWeber or Mailchimp or Infusionsoft or ConvertKit, whatever they’re using onto using it. I know this because I’ve asked thousands of them when talking about and selling my Delightful Emails program, that’s always the first question. If anyone raises their hand to be a prospect, I ask them, “Do you have something?” “Yes.” “Are you satisfied, quite satisfied, unsatisfied with the way that you’re using it and the results that you’re getting?” Vast majority say, “I’m unhappy with the results I’m getting.” We tend to poop the bed when it comes to sending out an email to our prospect database, but we never poop the bed when we were sending an email to a girlfriend or a boyfriend or family members or our high school buddies, we say, “I have a special relationship with you. I know that you want to hear from me.”
Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling
The only reason that people have ended up on your mailing list, unless you a spammer, in which case there’s a special place for you in hell, is because they have raised their hand and said, “I want to hear from you. I want you to help me, please help me.” If we don’t email them regularly, then we’re being neglectful in our duty of care towards our prospects if we want to put a hippie slant on it. The other mistake that people make is they can’t get the tone right. When I was in recruitment, people wear a professional hat and people wear a personal hat. The beauty about growing a personality-based brand, that doesn’t mean a personal brand, it means a brand that has personality, is that you get to inject that personality into your emails. Recruiters would always write on LinkedIn. I used to beat them up for it. They would say, “We are currently seeking candidates with the following attributes.” I would say, “Who uses that language? William Shakespeare?”
Are you someone who’s looking for a job? We’re looking for some people who are, it’s how people talk. We got to remember how we talk. We talk to a human being on the other end of the line. We should have a relationship with them where we are the leader. They’re looking to us for leadership, but we can’t, everyone’s got to develop their own voice. I’m not saying one voice is appropriate for you. Everyone’s got to find their own voice. My Delightful Emails program does help a bit in how you find your voice. My preferred relationship to my list is like the head of the family. I want the best for them. I refuse to insult their intelligence. I’m going to nurture their growth. Sometimes I’m going to slap them if they’re being stupid and send them to the bedrooms, and often we’re going to have pillow fights and tickle parties.
We want them to see fun dad and we want them to see concerned dad. We want them to see caring that empathetic dad. It might not be dad. It might be a different role. You have to think carefully about authenticity and vulnerability because people are coming to you for a specific reason. If you start treating them as your therapist, which many personal brands do, they write to their list and they evacuate their spiritual bowels onto the email and start to share every problem because somebody once told them that authenticity is the key to building relationships. Yes and no, but leadership is the key to sales. If you’re going to say to somebody, “I’m a complete mess, my life is a mess. Please join my life coaching program.” You’ve got a problem. If you’re in a hotel room and the hotel is burning down and somebody knocks on the door and says, “Follow me, I know the safest way out of here.” You’re going with them.
If somebody knocks on the door and says, “I’m feeling a bit lost too. Shall we run together and see if we can find a way out?” You’re like, “No. You stay where you are. I’m not coming with you. I’m safe where I am. Thanks you.” You list and looking for leadership. The key thing is value. The concept of providing valuable, actionable content has destroyed email marketing because everybody feels that every email has to be valuable and they’ve translated that into, “I must provide how to content in my email.” Even worse, what they do is they double create. They say, “I’ve written a how to piece on my blog. How to get over your boyfriend? How to get more clicks? How to get on the first page of Google? How to get more followers on Instagram? How to overcome your mental turmoil?”
They write an email that says, “I have written some valuable content for you, click here.” What you’re training people to do is ignore your email because there’s no value in the email. You might say, “Matthew, do I put how to content in the email?” How to content isn’t valuable. It might be valuable for a brief period of time when we ended an answer to how can I get more Instagram followers or how can I fix my washing machine? The minute our washing machine has been fixed, we’re throwing away the manual and we can’t find it next time we need it or we’re going to Google it. John, if your house was burning down or if your hotel room, what are you risking? What is valuable to you?
You’re rescuing your family members, your photos, your record collection and your phone, which is your connection to the outside world on your friends. What about if we could show up in a way that mirrors that? What about if we could become a person of value rather than a provider of value and a person of value makes us feel something. They make us laugh, cry, think and angry. They’re the people that we live with. They’re the people that are always welcome to our kitchen table, which solves the problem of how frequently should I email my list? The answer is, “Would I be welcome to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them? Am I making them smile? Am I making them laugh? Am I making them cry? Am I making them feel something?” Value is where we spend our time and money. Where do we spend our time? What’s your most valuable app on your phone, John? The one that for the rest of your entire life, you have to get rid of all of them, but you can keep one or maybe two. What are they?
[bctt tweet=”Confidence is not enthusiasm.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m directionally challenged, it would be Google Maps so I can get to figure out how to get from point A to B.
That’s it. You’ve got Google Maps on your phone for the rest of your life. You are an anomaly, John. You’re the first person who’s ever said that.
My biggest fear is being late and lost because I was having to go on many cold calls. I am meeting clients for the appointments. I would sweat bullets being lost in Los Angeles in the freeway system and then I would be late and lost. That’s my biggest anxiety. It’s still solving a problem.
Let me tell you what 90% of people tell me, they tell me a way to connect with friends, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger because you can’t live without friends. For me, it’s Spotify. If you tell me that I can’t have music in my ears whenever I want it, when I’m walking the dog, whatever I’m doing, that for me is a fate worse than a life without music. Can you imagine that? Like people say, is it too soon to email the list? If you’re doing it right, it’s like saying, “Is it too soon to release another episode of Breaking Bad?” No, because people want to binge it because they value the emotions that our favorite TV show stirs up in them. They want it. They want more and more of it. That is what you can achieve with emails if you care.
There are many nuggets here, be a person of value, not a provider of value because a provider of value, we don’t need that. We can Google it. The overall arching theme that I take away from listening to you when you and I have had this discussion before is the value of storytelling, which hooks into people’s emotions, whether laughing or crying. A lot of people are struggling with, “How do I tell a story in an email? How do I make my subject line interesting enough to make somebody open it?” All of that is part of a story. During a pandemic, a lot of healthcare companies in particular, salespeople are struggling to get in the door because they can’t see the doctor between surgeries and they can’t walk into their offices anymore and they’ve never had to learn how to request a virtual appointment, an email. If you’ve never had to do it, you don’t have that skill.
There are two different things. One is how can we tell a story in an email? What makes a good story? What makes a good subject line? You’re the expert when it comes to this. If you weren’t writing delightful emails using the person of value approach, you can say anything. It doesn’t matter. If you were dating somebody and you’re in the throes of a new romance, they can send you a message that says, “Babe, I had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast. It was delicious.” That will be the most delightful email that you received that day. Am I wrong? It’s because of who it is from. I do have strategies and techniques for quickly generating stories for emails. The trick is if it comes from someone that you want to listen to, then the content of the story is less important than who’s telling that.
Book Yourself Solid: Marketing doesn’t get you clients. Marketing creates awareness about who you are.
We build that through entertaining content about being a person. The other thing, when you’re talking about these horrible recruitment advertisements, unfortunately, that typically is what salespeople are saying. The corporate speak, I’ve heard, “We use critical thinking to anticipate problems. You should hire us to do this project for you.” I was like, “No, we need to tell a story and show it in the story.” Let’s talk about what is the biggest mistake people make trying to get themselves booked solid?
They believe that marketing gets them clients and that’s backwards. I had somebody talk to me who says, “If only I could get more Instagram followers,” that might be true, but it’s a supposition which comes up far too frequently without any grounding in fact. What would be true is I have a sales conversion process that attracts the right people that gives them incentive to stick around that I can build trust. They can repay their trust by making investments in me and my services that are proportionate to the amount of trust that I have earned. Sometimes that’s financial investment, an investment of time or an investment of data or an investment in spreading the word about you. I have comprehensive systems in place to close the sale when it’s appropriate.
I have literature and information products that speeds up the sales cycle process so that I don’t have to be pitching people one-to-one doing coffee endlessly time and time again. I can tell people I’ve got all of that in place. In short, I know how to close the business. What I also know is that 90% of my customer database has come from my Instagram marketing efforts. Therefore, my hypothesis is that if I could add 2,000 Instagram followers a month to my 2, 000 qualified, targeted, appropriate prospects to my Instagram, then that would result in 500 new additions to my newsletter each month, which would result in five new clients every month. That’s great, but that’s not what I hear. What I hear is, “If only I can crush Clubhouse, then I can make $1 million.”
The biggest mistake people make, and it’s where we always spend the longest is market to service match. I work with coaches and consultants. They tend to stay things like, “I help entrepreneurs find freedom.” “Bob, here’s Elon Musk. What are you going to do with him?” “Here’s an entrepreneur for you. It’s a lawyer. He’s the founding partner in a firm that has 40 partners and 300 employees in six offices around the world. Do you think he needs your solution for finding the perfect virtual assistant?” No. Firstly, we talk about what we do by honing in on a specific target market. “I help goddesses step into their light” is something I never want to hear. “I help women.” No, you don’t. Let’s be serious about this.
The living proof of whether or not you have a business is if somebody will buy your product or service twice. What we tried to do is we think we have resources that we don’t have access to. We think we own a trawling fleet, a fleet of fishing trawlers with an army of 300 fishermen who are going to go out with these nets that are 5 kilometers long and we’re going to catch all of the fish in the sea to become our prospects, but we don’t have those resources. We have ourselves, probably not much money when we’re getting started, and a fishing rod. What do we do? We go to one fishing spot. We dangle one line and we try and catch a nice big fat fish that will feed our family. We don’t say, “I’m going to try a different spot.”
You do your research. You find out where the fish are, and you show up repeatedly and you have something that is highly relevant to them. That’s the biggest mistake people make. They’re afraid, terrified to get specific about their target market. Remember, John, the target market is where you target your marketing. Unless you have squillion dollars to spend on reaching everybody in the world, you better be laser-focused. In fact, you may have zero budget. You may only have time and energy to show up. What do you choose to do? One day you show up in Florida and other day you show up in New York and other day you show up in Minnesota and other day you show up in Texas and other day you show up in San Diego. By the time you’ve done all the states in the world, everyone’s forgotten about you.
[bctt tweet=”For every success story, there are 90 horror stories.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What about if you showed up at the school gates in your zip code every day after school, wearing your yoga gear and start to have the conversations with the mothers who are waiting to pick up their kids and the dads who are waiting to pick up their kids about the fact that you’re a yoga teacher? Do you think you might pick up 4 or 5 clients within the space of three weeks? You would because you’ve chosen your pawn.
What I hear you saying is we’re not Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola has huge budgets and they’re trying to market to everybody.
Even Coca-Cola wasn’t Coca-Cola when they started and Starbucks wasn’t Starbucks when it started. When Starbucks started, they didn’t have the budget. They had enough money to open a single retail outlet in Seattle where they sell dried coffee beans. They said, “We can’t sell to the world. We’re going to sell to people who live and work in this neighborhood.” If somebody came from outside of their target market and said, “I live in Portland but I’ve heard you make great coffee. Can I buy a bag?” You say, “Yes, of course you can,” but you don’t fly to Portland to tell people to come to your store in Seattle. With time, when their resources grew, they were able to offer additional services to their target market. “You know what we can do with these beans? We can ground them up and add hot water and give you a cup of coffee while you’re here.” “We can sell bananas, oatmeal and newspapers. This worked well here. We have the resources. We’re going to open a second store and begin to appeal to a different target market.” That is the mistake everybody makes. They think outside of the resources that they have available to them.
I hear that a lot too. I tell people, “Remember, Amazon sell books first.” People forget that and you’re trying to be what Amazon is now. It would never have worked, it will be too overwhelming.
John, if you want a, if you want a six-figure consulting business, do what our guy did that I told you about, find five clients who will give you $2,000 a month and then you’ve got $120,000, $140,000 worth of business coming in. Even if that takes you 25 hours a week at the beginning in marketing, you are on course for a winner. You might have been sold the idea that online courses are the way to go, maybe they are, but for every success story, there are 90 horror stories. That’s not true for small service businesses who go to a clearly defined group of people and say, “I have a thing that I could help you with.” They don’t see a 90% failure to complete the course rate. What they typically do is they might limp along for a bit, but they’ll get a client in the 1st month, 2nd month, 3rd month and then they’ll start to get traction. Think small.
Also, this Book Yourself Solid works for speakers because I know that’s what Michael Port’s background is. Many speakers wait passively for their speaking agent to say, “Someone saw your website or saw your video on my website.” This is an active way to do it. Speakers say, “I can speak on any topic to any audience.” That’s another same mistake over and over again. I, myself niched down saying I speak to healthcare tech companies.
Book Yourself Solid: When you love what you do and love every minute of what you do, business is a pleasure rather than a chore.
What happened as a result of that?
When I reach out to other healthcare tech companies, they’re like, “You know our industry.” What’s also surprising is I get hired by mortgage companies and insurance companies going, “We’d love to hear what the healthcare tech people are doing. Maybe we can learn from that.” I thought it was going to push them away and it makes them more interested. That’s a fascinating outcome I thought.
I get that all the time. I know you mainly work with coaches, but we like what you do. Do you think you could bring something to our accountancy firm?
That is the biggest takeaway from what we’re talking about here, don’t be afraid to niche. You think it’s going to push away everybody and the irony is it makes you magnetic because who we say “no” to is as important as who we say “yes” to whether it’s in our marketing, our messaging, our emails. Someone was saying to me, “Can you come speak to this?” It was a fast-food chain. The audiences are all the people who work in the restaurant, who make the fries. I said, “That’s not what I do. I speak to audiences of salespeople.” Unless you’re trying to make those people upsell people when they’re buying their hamburger, probably not, but I know someone else. I pulled back, they’re like, “What about if you did a workshop on storytelling then for these people?” I’m like, “That I could do, but I’m not going to try to pretend I can do everything.”
I get that all the time, John, here in Malta specifically because people know that I don’t do any work in Malta generally, but every now and again, someone who owns the company who knows me or knows me says, “We’ve got a Christmas party. Can you come to a motivational talk for our whole company?” I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t do motivational talk, but if you’ve got to say it was your business development team, I’d be happy to come and do a 90-minute workshop with them.” They always say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want.” I’m going to have reputational damage. If I go and do a motivational workshop for the factory guys, they’re going to laugh me out the room.
I know that. That’s not plain interesting. You said something about it’s rare to find someone who truly says it gets to what you love. You also said something which ties everything together from a Book Yourself Solid point of view. There were three pillars that hold Book Yourself Solid out. The first one we’ve discussed, which is that marketing doesn’t get you clients. The second pillar, which is a philosophical pillar, is that business should be a love story. Book Yourself Solid is a love story between you and your business, between you and your clients, between you and marketing, because when you love what you do and you love every minute of what you do, business is a pleasure rather than a chore. The third philosophical pillar that holds everything up is exactly what you said. There are some people who you’re meant to serve and others not so much.
[bctt tweet=”Value is where we spend our time and money.” username=”John_Livesay”]
My last topic I know you’re an expert on is how can people not undersell themselves? What’s your tip on that?
Confidence and enthusiasm are related bedfellows, but they’re not the same. People say, “I don’t have the confidence to do something.” What they mean is, “I don’t feel enthusiastic about it.” That’s a mistake. I’m confident, John, that in the United States and around the world in the next 24 hours, we’re going to see multiple COVID related deaths. I am confident of that. If I was offered the right odds, I would bet my house on that. I am not enthusiastic about it. However, the data shows me that that is likely to be true. Therefore, I can predict with some confidence that that’s going to be likely. The same thing comes to being confident when selling yourself. You mentioned two lessons that I learned in my youth.
The first lesson was if you ask for the sale, you get it. The second lesson was, if you stick to the system, then you’re likely to get predictable results. The third lesson was from my recruitment days, which I didn’t mention, is that these guys had activity targets. I’d never say you have to make three sales this month because you can’t control that, but I did say you have to pick up the telephone 60 times a day. That’s what’s missing from the confidence-lacking entrepreneur. They are predicting based upon no data that the path that they’re about to take or the journey that they’re on is not going to work out for them. Get the data then you can make those predictions with confidence.
How did you get the data? By doing the activity. We’ve all got to say it was that sales muscle. We can have perfect theoretical form. We can attend endless sales seminars, but unless we’d having our at-bats, our muscle is going to be weak. As we’re doing the reps, our muscle is going to be weak. Somebody would come to me, typically a personal trainer back in the day and say, “I haven’t made any sales. Can you help me?” I’d say, “Yes. Why haven’t you made any sales?” “I don’t know.” “How many sales offers did you make this month?” “I didn’t get to make any.” “I see a correlation here. Go to the shopping mall on Saturday,” walk up to 100 strangers and say, “I’m a personal trainer. I’m running a special promotion. I wonder if you’d like to buy a personal training session for $40 instead of $80.” What happens is results walking up to 100 strangers and making an offer?
Ten percent at least, probably.
Yes. Complete Strangers can’t resist the deal. I say, “Great. We’ve got a basis to work on.” It’s because you’ve done the reps, you can be confident that an offer will be accepted by the market. Our job is to refine the offer and refine the market. Go and try more. It’s not for everybody, John. If you’re not prepared to put in the reps, you don’t deserve the rewards.
David gets your six pack and your big biceps, the same thing. I get it. Thank you for sharing this passion, this humor. If anybody wants to find out more about you, we’re going to send them to MarketingForCoaches.com, as well as BookYourselfSolid.com. Get these five things you need to do every morning. I can’t wait to see what those five things are myself. Thank you, Matthew.
Thank you. I enjoyed that much. You’re such a strong interview. You let me have fun. Thank you. It was a huge pleasure.
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Pitch Investors Live With Jonathan Foltz
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Finding the right people to invest in your company, particularly start-up ones, is a pretty tedious and time-consuming endeavor to accomplish. But thanks to Pitch Investors Live, every business can take advantage of this online platform that’s very much like Shark Tank combined with Tinder. John Livesay interviews Pitch Investors Live Co-founder, Jonathan Foltz, to share how he and his friends started this groundbreaking project. He also looks back on his childhood and how his falling short of being a basketball player pushed him to pursue a career in entrepreneurship.
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Listen to the podcast here
Pitch Investors Live With Jonathan Foltz
Jonathan Foltz is a Co-Founder of Pitch Investors Live. What they do is they help match up investors with founders looking for money, much like dating app meets Shark Tank. He talks about his career as an entrepreneur and how he had to overcome the fear of not being good enough after his dream of being a basketball star did not happen. That was his first pivot in life. He’s now gone on to do many other successful businesses and has life lessons of having a passion for what you do.
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Our guest is Jonathan Foltz, who is the Co-Founder and visionary of Pitch Investors Live. He is a futurist, a philosopher and an avid knowledge seeker. He started multiple companies in technology, education, eCommerce and the digital space. He’s built $4 million brands in completely four different industries. He’s also the Owner of an international marketing agency, Digital Age Business, which has worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. He also owns multiple eCommerce brands. He was able to take a business to seven figures a month within its first year. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.
I’m happy to be here.
Before we dive into everything you’re doing and this whole concept of your own story of origin around the PitchInvestorsLive.com, I want to invite you to tell us your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood school. Where did you get this urge to be an entrepreneur? Did you always have a passion for multiple things? Start the story wherever you want.
Like many entrepreneurs, a lot of my entrepreneurial skills came from a necessity as a young kid growing up with my father and everything like that. He was in the oil industry and we traveled a lot. I was born in Canada, then we moved to New York, to Miami, to Argentina, to Columbia and then back to Miami. In between was Venezuela, Peru and the UK. I went to a few different schools when I was in Columbia as a kid. I got used to having to make new friends. That started to build a little of my social skills. As a kid, you want to be liked. I had to go and find brand new friends because I was moving from place to place. It was rough as a kid and you have to figure out the skillsets to make new kids, new teachers and new people in your realm like you. You’re like, “Now I’m in a brand-new environment.” It made me a little bit more confident having to go through so much of that. As time went on, my parents got divorced when I was 12, 13 years old.
Pitch Investors Live: A lot of our entrepreneurial skills came from a necessity.
I was obsessed with basketball. Basketball was my life. I thought I was going to be in the NBA. I had that belief system. I was obsessed. I watch ESPN and played all day. As time went on, I remember when my parents got divorced, I know that my mom had gone through a rough time during the divorce. She started hustling. She started working and doing some stuff with flea markets and stuff like that. The interesting thing about this is that my mom was a hustler. She was good, social, likable and had such a good personality that everyone loves her. She’s a social butterfly. That’s one of the skills that I got from her. That’s where I learned that type of skillset around that time.
Little by little, I started learning. I was able to get a computer. One of the things that I learned quickly when having a computer and a CD burner, which not a lot of my friends had them at the time, I was making CDs for friends. This was in the beginning stages. I was a little kid and people didn’t know about Napster. Every kid in the school was burning CDs. I happened to burn CDs for music stuff that they’d never heard of. I’ll put a cover on it and sell it. I’d made a little $5 here and there. One day, there was a CD coming out. It was called The Marshall Mathers LP, it’s an Eminem CD. Before it was coming out, I got access somehow to the internet as a little kid. This is when the internet was new. I was probably 14, 13 years old or something around the time. This was the early stages of when all this was coming out.
No one knew about Napster and how Napster would take down the entire entertainment business. It was crazy what was happening. We didn’t know what was going to happen from it. I knew that I’m like, “This is a popular CD.” I have early access to it. As a little kid, I have no idea what I’m doing here. I brought that CD to school and this was my first glimpse. I don’t know if they were giving fines for people at the time that were burning CDs and such. I don’t even think that time had come yet. Later down the road, people start getting fines. Their parents were getting $5,000 fines from the entertainment business. I don’t know if you remember that. They were sending out checks like lawsuits against a bunch of people, but little kids didn’t know. None of them knew what was going on. They’re little kids with power of the internet.
That’s what was exciting to me. Nowadays, people call me the Digital Frontiersman. I got my first sample of the power of the internet when you could do these things that were never possible before. When I got my hands on the internet as a little kid, my whole world had unfolded into something that I could never imagine. My first case study of great success. I tried all kinds of stuff. I try some baseball cards. I would open up all the cards and I would never be able to sell them all. That was a failed venture. I sold a little CDs here and there for $5. I was entrepreneurial because of my mom. When I did this The Marshall Mathers LP CD, I knew it was going to be a hit for some intuitive reason. I empty my book bag. I filled the entire book bag with these CDs. I went to school and sold them for $10 apiece. I sold every single one and my mind was blown. I was like, “What just happened?” The next day, every kid in school was selling them too. I saw what happened. It was like I was the first mover in that direction. Every kid in school went and copied the same model that I did and it blew up through the entire school, even so much so that the principals and everyone said, “You guys got to stop selling CDs in the hallways.”
[bctt tweet=”Our values and purpose are built out of voids.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s how big it became in our school, Palmetto High School, which is the same high school that Jeff Bezos went to. That was one of the things, but what put me into the entrepreneurial realm was in the 9th grade. I tried out for the basketball team and I got cut in the first round. For me, basketball was life. When I got cut from the basketball team and I knew that there were people on the team that made the cut that I was way better in, what it meant for me as a kid was I’m not good enough. I went home that night, went to my bed and I’m thinking to myself like, “If I’m not good at basketball, what am I good at?” Honestly, I have no clue what I’m good at. That was deteriorating to me. I had to go through a shift.
This is another reason I got into philosophy. Aristotle had something that he called upon Axiology. It’s a study that he developed and he called something the Telos, which was the purpose. All being the medium in mind and where you’re going in life. One of the biggest things that he talks about is that our values and purpose are built out of voids. Voids are things missing. What was missing to me was I’m not good enough. That started to build a mentality out of me that I wanted to be good enough. When I started to find out a little bit about the entrepreneurial realm, I started making money with these little side hustles selling whether it was sneakers, selling baseball cards or selling the CDs. Early out of high school, I had a pet shop. I started figuring out all these ways. I was like, “I’m good at something.” To me, it was inspiring because that wasn’t my mentality. I thought I wasn’t good at anything at that point when I got cut from the team. That was where the spark and the power came from. It was from me being cut from that team. It became one of my greatest driving forces.
What an inspirational story. That concept of not feeling good enough is something that people struggle with most of their life on a subconscious level sometimes. That’s why people fear rejection. That’s why we get into the imposter syndrome. We’re comparing ourselves to other people and coming up short, “I didn’t go to that Ivy League school. My book didn’t sell as much as theirs.” It’s an insane route. The fact that you were able to pivot at a young age like entrepreneurs learn to do and go, “Basketball is not it. I’ll figure something else out.” Even that earlier story you were telling about the people started copying you. That’s another big takeaway for everyone reading, which is investors are always going to ask you, “What’s your secret sauce?” “What’s your barrier to entry from a big competitor.” You had all that in that story. The awareness of, “Other people are going to think of this too, so I need to get something here that’s going to prevent other people from doing that.” Let’s talk about what void you saw in the marketplace that made you and your team start Pitch Investors Live?
I’ve started many companies. I’m going on maybe 25, 26 companies. I am one of those crazy serial entrepreneurs. I know well how hard it is first and foremost. Secondly, I started learning more about the investment space. I wanted to learn more. I remember reading many magazines and books. I’m like, “One day, I want to have my own venture capital fund. I want to be a venture capitalist. I want to work on multiple projects.” I’m much on the go. I’m a visionary, but I like to go and do it. I love the building process and that’s why I’ve done many different things.
Pitch Investors Live: You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you don’t position it correctly, shift it, and adapt it, it’s not going to get anywhere.
My business partner was the founding founder, if you want to call him that, from the 2UP app itself. 2UP app was a debate app when it first started. That’s how Pitch Investors Live came in and that’s the time that I came in. 2UP itself was an app before Facebook Live existed. It was even before Periscope existed. Before all that stuff came out, 2UP came out. I had met Matt at a startup conference. He was launching 2UP. I was going to help him with marketing. We threw some ideas back and forth together. I was going to join him, but I was doing so many other things. I never joined 2UP. It got traction but it was missing some key components. Later down the road, when I and Matt came together to build Pitch Investors Live, we realized he’s the technical backend innovator and I’m the business dev marketing visionary. I know what can go to market the right way and how to position it. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you don’t position it correctly, shift it and adapt it, it’s not going to get anywhere.
Knowing all these different things and being a huge fan of Shark Tank, when Matt was developing Pitch Investors Live and it was like an older UI, I honestly did not like it at all. I was like, “This needs some major work.” He was trying to hire us to launch Pitch Investors Live. When we started talking about this, I invited them to a house that we were staying at called the Marketer’s Mansion. We rented a huge mansion on the top of a mountain in Arizona. It was five of us internet marketers, e-commerce experts. What we did is we created an accelerator. We had probably over 1,000 people come through those doors. We had a mastermind where there were two giant mansions and there was a jet involved where we went to Las Vegas. It was one of those fun things to do.
As time went on, we had different people come through the door. I remember Matt, he had a significant exit in the tech space. I’m like, “We need to get some high-end people here. We want to have some people that we can learn from and they can learn from us.” I called Matt, “We’re looking for another person. We have an open spot. One of our roommates has gone. What we do here is we collaborate. I’m looking to create some new apps. I know you know how to develop them. I know what’s going to make a whole bunch of money in the marketplace. That’s one of my expertise. Let’s get together and let’s build something.” When he came over, he started telling us about Pitch Investors Live and how he turned 2UP into pitch. He wants to take it to the next level. He wants branding.
There was also cryptocurrency and blockchain involved. To me, that was a massive space that is going to be monumental in the future. Every single big company now in the world is implementing some type of blockchain technology, especially in the financial space. Even the federal reserve and the Chinese are implementing full blockchain into their finance, but that’s a whole different story. That was exciting to me. I was getting the hang of it. I was like, “Let me see what he has available. I am busy but let me see what he wants.” I’m not trying to take clients on. We used to take clients because I had an agency. I stopped doing it and I listened. I was excited with what he had envisioned, but I knew there was more of what it could be and I knew what it took. I went back to him and I said, “I’m not going to take on this project. I’m not going to help you with the marketing. The only thing that I’ll do is I’ll come on as a co-founder to help you build this because this is bad-ass and I know what needs to get done.”
[bctt tweet=”It’s lovely to see people get success from a new technology that has come out that has changed how things used to be.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It needs some complete revamp on the branding side. The app needs to have all kinds of stuff. I was like, “I will come in. I’ll bring my entire team because this is an amazing idea.” It is amazing that I was like, “This has to come to market.” When I saw it, what I thought of and I gave it this interpretation, it was like you make Shark Tank together with Kickstarter, together with Tinder or Bumble, or one of the swipe dating apps together with live streaming technology. That right there is monumental. No one’s ever done that in the startup space or the funding landscape. No one’s done anything like that. We’re going to be the first people to be able to pull this off.
I was like, “That’s what I want to do. I want to come as a co-founder. I will not come in as anything else. You can’t hire me. He was happy. He was like, “Someone wants to join on board. All right, let’s do this.” We were friends also. That was one of the beneficial parts of the whole thing. As soon as I came on, I enrolled my business partner, Umer, into it. I enrolled my other roommates from the Marketer’s Mansion, Damien Coughlan, Lawrence Aponte, and there was this other guy, Odie, an amazing camera guy. We started enrolling all these people and everyone wants to join because it was a cool project. This is going to be monumental with what we could do not just with the blockchain components but also simultaneously, with the faction that what we want it to do is allowing people to invest in companies live. Imagine if you’re able to invest into companies as there’s a live pitch happening. This is a game-changer for me.
You also have Kevin Harrington on your advisory board. He’s also been a guest on this show. What I love about this story is that your dream and part of your pitch is to imagine Shark Tank meeting Kickstarter, meeting a dating app and live streaming. That is no longer like, “Wouldn’t it be nice to have that as an analogy?” One of the original Shark is part of this. The credibility factor goes soaring up. The first of many takeaways for people who are reading is who’s on your advisory board is as important as who’s on your team, especially if they’re active. When investors are looking at what kind of credibility and experience like, who you’re going to when you have questions and get stuck? Imagine all the years and all the deals that Kevin has heard so that he can say, “If I put myself in the shoes of an investor, this is what I’d want to hear and what’s missing from this pitch.”
You and I have discussed why I’m excited about joining with you and promoting this to people is investors I’ve interviewed on this show have told me, “We hear about 2,500 pitches in a year and funded about 25, 1%.” What you’re doing is allowing people to get in that 1% club. The old way of doing this is you had to get an introduction, you physically get in the room, you have ten minutes, and you hope you did a good enough job that you get invited back. I’ve seen that happen successfully multiple times in multiple levels from seed to series A, and all the other stuff that you’re talking about. Investors need to hear pitches. If you streamline this even before the pandemic and people weren’t traveling, think how much more productive it is. I’m only hearing pitches from people who are in Silicon Valley, for the most part. There’s got to be some other ideas out there. You’re allowing people to get heard without them having to move to Silicon Valley to build their network. It’s not that a network isn’t important, but I think this premise is so important. You have no shortage of investors that want to be part of this.
Pitch Investors Live: Every single big company now in the world is implementing some type of blockchain technology, especially in the financial space.
We have a good decent amount of all kinds of investors from VCs, Angels, regular credit investors and institutional.
One of the things I say when I’ve worked with people is don’t talk to an investor who only invests in AI if you’re not AI. You need to do a little homework on the investor’s portfolio and see if they have a competitor or they don’t fund the thing you’re pitching. You’re in the wrong room. You need to get in the right room with the right pitch, which is why this combination of what you’re doing is so smart. I’m guessing there’s some kind of vetting that’s going on so that an investor can see what’s coming up to see if he wants to watch those live pitches.
For anyone that wants to download Pitch Investors Live on both iOS, Android and PWA. We had a lot of people and some older investors that are like, “I want to be on my computer.” We’re like, “Let’s do PWA,” so we created that.
For those people who don’t know, what is PWA?
It’s a Progressive Web App, which means it’s like a website, except it loads much faster. You could use it on a website and you could get on it live like what you do on Zoom. That will be on a web browser. We added some very light artificial intelligence. It’s more like machine learning to allow people to connect. It’s already rolled out, but we’re going to roll it out and implement it in a cool manner. When the investor comes in, we’re going to find out all their information. What kind of projects they like? What’s the funding? What’s their sweet spot? How much money they’re looking to invest?
[bctt tweet=”If there’s something that’s truly inspiring to you, no matter what it is, go after that.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We’ve had some investors that are like, “Our sweet spot has been in the few hundred thousand dollars.” We have a lot of investors that are in the $2 million to $5 million range. They will put the ranges inside there. What kind of companies they’re looking for, if it’s pre-revenue or post-revenue? Some are willing to go into those companies that are early stage. Some are like, “No, I need to make sure that they’re making money.” We vet them in all that type of information. We then have the entrepreneurs answer similar questions. How the AI comes into place is it has a matchmaking service that pulls them like, “You guys are a good link because you’re looking for $2 million, he likes companies from $2 to $5 million. You’re an eCommerce, he likes to get eCommerce entrepreneurs.”
That was exactly the answer I was looking for on how we take the concept of a dating app and apply it to Shark Tank that it screened. The other thing that you are doing brilliantly is your pitch is saved in a library. Any potential investors can see it at any time. That alone is worth so much because if you’re a founder pitching and you figured, “This is my one shot.” If the right person is not there or they’re sick, I don’t get to come back because we’ve already passed on that. We’re looking at new pitches. This fear of, what if somebody doesn’t see it live? It completely goes away. For everyone reading who is trying to figure out how to get people to join their team, having good people, you got to be attractive to them. Once you’ve got that good team, you need to pitch the investors. You also need to pitch to get business clients, the marketing is part of that. There are three different buckets that the storytelling aspect that I teach helps solve that whole thing from start to finish.
The problem is a lot of people think, “If the right person doesn’t hear my pitch, then it’s lost forever.” Now you’ve solved that problem. The big takeaway here is think like Jonathan and his team. Anticipate an objection, whether it’s from an investor or a potential customer, which in this case it would be like, “If I’m going to pay money to put my pitch on live streaming, what if the perfect investor isn’t listening to me at that moment?” You’ve anticipated that problem and you have an answer and a solution for them that creates value. What I’m trying to do is use your model for people to not only say, “I need to get on Pitch Investors Live to get my startup funded,” but also for those people who are reading that aren’t necessarily looking for funding, they can still learn so much from you. They can learn from anticipating objections and answering them in advance, as opposed to being a deer in headlights when you get them from a customer or an investor.
One of the things that we’ve been very excited about is when you do come on to Pitch, you’re not pitching that one investor. It goes live in the app, on Facebook and YouTube. In the future, we plan on pushing that into other genres, stuff and potentially podcasts too. We have a story of a guy named Efren who had a company called Gemini Cyber Securities, it was something similar. He pitched Kevin. Kevin didn’t like the deal but he was like, “This is a good project. I might talk to Robert about it.” I don’t know the backstory on that, but what I do know is that it was saved on YouTube. Efren put on his own LinkedIn. Someone hit him up on LinkedIn because of the video that was online. They didn’t watch it live. They’ve watched a rerun of it. They contacted him. He got fully invested, found two new partners from that live that was prerecorded on the internet. Several months later, we come to find that Efren got acquired. He got the Pitch helped him find his investor, gets two partners and then get acquired several months later. None of that would have been possible or at least in that timeline if he had it on his homepage and then had it on there. It’s lovely to see people get success from a new technology that has come out that has changed things how they used to be.
Pitch Investors Live: Imagine if you’re able to invest in companies as there’s a live pitch happening. It’s a game-changer.
It’s a philosophical perspective on life. It goes back to a metaphysical way we’re talking about in your childhood, which is either you feel like you’re good enough or you don’t. You have to compare yourself to other people or you don’t. Einstein said, “One of the biggest decisions we ever make is if we feel that the world is a safe and friendly place or it’s not.” From that one decision, we then go looking for evidence to support that decision. The same thing is true in the startup world or entrepreneurship. You either believe that you’re going to get good people. It doesn’t mean you don’t do your due diligence, but it’s your mindset. If you have the belief that, “I never know who’s going to be listening to this live pitch on what platform, that could change my life.” If I believe and I’m open to those possibilities as opposed to, “I must know how it’s going to happen, when it’s going to happen, and who’s listening.”
The structure is great but you might want to be an accountant versus an entrepreneur if that’s the way you’d like to think and work. That’s why I love that story you share because the goal is we want other people to see themselves in that story of someone who used your platform and say, “If that happened for that founder, it could happen for me.” That’s what you are creating. You’re walking your talk on many levels. I don’t even know if you realized it. You’re inspiring people with your own passion and your own unlimited thinking of possibilities while also helping other people and making money. That’s the dream.
The social impact aspect of it is the factor that is going to continue to get more and more important. People feel that energetically when they talk to you, when they tuned-in to this show, and when they go to your website. All of that is what I want to leave everybody with. Your brand and your messaging need to be consistent. It is constantly sending out some kind of vibration and energy. It’s up to you to define what your culture is, and define who fits and who doesn’t. When that happens, then you trust and allow the rest to fall into place. You have a good story. You’re in the right room. You’re embracing new technologies and new ways of doing things so you’re not dependent on who your network is at any given time. That’s what I see is your big impact on the world.
I do this because I love it. That’s why even starting Pitch was something that I believed in and I knew how much entrepreneurs needed the support. In the funding landscape, you hit it on the nail how we explained it to people in the beginning stages. We don’t want the entrepreneurs to have to go to Silicon Valley or have to go to New York. The best thing for them is why can’t they be at home and be able to pitch an investor instantaneously from anywhere that they’re at.
Pitch Investors Live: Entrepreneurs don’t have to go to Silicon Valley or New York. They can be at home and be able to pitch to an investor instantaneously from anywhere they’re at.
With the pandemic, your timing is perfect. You’ve been doing this for years. We’ve got it all the kinks ironed up. You’ve got proof of concept. The timing in the synergy of now more than ever, no one’s going and pitching people in person. Any last thoughts or inspirational quotes that you want to leave us with?
One of my beliefs in life is that you have to do something that is truly inspiring to you. If you’re doing things for the money, you’re doing things because of the judgment that you had, what your parents thought or whatever it is, the biggest thing that has been proven even scientifically, to give you more energy and longer life span is being inspired about something. If there’s something that’s truly inspiring to you no matter what it is, if you go after that, it changes the dynamic. You go to sleep with energy. You wake up with energy. Your true genius and potential come out in forms that you can’t even imagine. Any time that you can tap into that flow, that is where your true potential comes from and where you’ll make a great impact in the world. Usually, it’s of service like what you’re doing right here on this show.
I can support what you said because I was hired as a speaker once. My agent said to me, “It was between you and another speaker, they loved your energy and they want to hire you.” We can never underestimate how much passion and our energy is what people are buying. We’ve heard this line a hundred times, “Investors invest in the jockey, not the horse.” The person is the jockey. Jonathan, thanks for your passion, energy, insights, and for creating Pitch Investors Live as a place for both investors and founders to find each other like a dating app while still having a little technology to make sure those matches are good. We all need innovation now more than ever to solve all these big problems we have. You’re the catalyst in making that happen.
I appreciate that. It was great coming on here and being able to speak to you and everyone.
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- Kevin Harrington – Past episode
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Future Proofing You With Jay Samit
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
If your old business ways are not working anymore, it doesn’t mean you need to do a full reset just to try once more. Sometimes, all you need is to start reinventing strategies. When you give a chance to the things you don’t give a lot of love into, interesting outcomes may surprise you. John Livesay sits down with Jay Samit once again, this time to talk about his book Future Proofing You. Together, they talk about how your fears can be leveraged to discover neglected opportunities and how tried and tested tools can be rehashed to achieve refreshing and far better results.
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Listen to the podcast here
Future Proofing You With Jay Samit
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Future Proofing You author Jay Samit. Jay has been on the show before. He talks about the Twelve Truths he’s written about in his book and how he busts through a lot of myths. One is that the world operates as a zero-sum game that if I win, you lose. He said, “That’s not the truth. What is true is that you’re only one click away from having incredible success.” He defines success as going way beyond making money but realizing what your purpose is. When you’re willing to work harder than most people, he says, you have a life that’s better than most people. We talk about the different kinds of fear. The fear of humiliation, failure, rejection, and how to overcome those fears. Enjoy the episode.
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Jay, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Why don’t you fill us in on what you saw and the success of Disrupt You! Let’s take a minute and brag about that huge success. How many languages has it been translated to and the impact that you saw?
I highly recommend it to anybody who feels that they have a book in them to write it. You’ve learned this as well because I’ve run companies with 300,000 employees and offices all over the world. When you’re at the top of a big company, all that you get is problems, fires, and hate mail. When you write a book that changes people’s lives, you get literally love letters from around the world. People who’ve turned their lives around or people that have stopped a suicide people. It’s an amazing transformation. The response was beyond anything I ever imagined. I’ve heard from readers in 140 countries. With COVID disrupting the world, it’s become a hit again and it’s coming out in languages like Icelandic, Urdu, Italian, Polish, and on and on.
Each time when it launches in the country, I suddenly hear from people whose lives are transformed. That being said, it turns out I have thin skin. Once in a while, I get an email from somebody, usually a millennial that said, “This is all motivational, but I could never do this.” That drove me nuts because my whole reason for writing a book isn’t to make any money, I don’t need it. The purpose is to take what I’ve learned and what I feel you’re not learning in school, and you’re not learning in an MBA program of how to get success and it’s easy.
I grew up in a regular middle-class, working-class family and dozens of friends become billionaires and change the world. We’re not smarter, we’re not better looking, we didn’t have connections, we didn’t have capital, but we saw the world differently and that can be taught. I decided to put my reputation on the line and I took a young man who was an immigrant, grew up on welfare, had no connections, no capital, and no entrepreneurs in their family. I decided to take the knowledge that I have and synthesize it down to twelve truths that if you embrace these, you will be successful.
His name is Vin Clancy and I mentored him one day a week for a year. I gave him no money. I introduced him to no one and I didn’t tell him what business to start. By the end of the first month, he made $70,000 and he could have flown to Europe without a plane. He didn’t believe it was possible. I didn’t know if he could keep up that level of commitment. No one says it’s easy but if you’re willing to work one year of your life harder than most people will, you can live the rest of your life better than most people will. He made that sacrifice and spoiler alert for the book, he hit it in less than a year, which was amazing to me. People wanted it to step by step. I went with Wiley as a publisher this time because they’re known more for technical types of books but it’s not a technical book. It’s some basic tricks. I’ll give you an obvious one and you know them. You solved it.
Future Proofing You: Twelve Truths for Creating Opportunity, Maximizing Wealth, and Controlling your Destiny in an Uncertain World
I’ve seen them in action before the transformation. I’ve heard his own personal story. You certainly picked a rags to riches storytelling genre there to come to life.
I’m also a fan of My Fair Lady and the Cockney accent from England so he’s my Pygmalion. Let’s start with a basic premise that people are taught in school that’s wrong. In school, you’re taught to buy an apple for $1 and you sell it for $2. You make $1 but the world is a zero-sum game. The only way for me to make money is to take it from you. When in fact, most of the millionaires and many of the billionaires never made a profit. They didn’t take money. If I start a new company, and I sell you 10% for $1,000, we now have a $10,000 company. I made $9,000 out of thin air. Jeff Bezos lost money for a decade and became the wealthiest man on the planet.
Every 48 hours, there’s the self-made billionaire. What are these people doing differently? Why is it easy when we’re all one click away? I have to be right for a nanosecond. To make money or to change the world and success isn’t about making money. I believe that the purpose of life is to live a life of purpose. What is your purpose and what do you want to achieve? One of the things that I’ve definitely seen since traveling the world for the past few years on endless book tours is that capitalism has to change and is changing to sustainable capitalism. Things that are both good for the bottom line and good for the planet.
This isn’t some hippie-dippy left-wing philosophy. Walmart, one of the biggest retailers in the world realized that their second biggest cost after employees was electricity so now they’re the biggest solar user. Why? It’s because it’s good for the bottom line and it’s good for the planet. There are many opportunities now to leverage the networks and the technology to do things in ways that don’t end life on this planet but help us sustain life. If you look at all these changes, and you realize with each of these changes, what they are new opportunities. There are many new ways to make money that didn’t exist.
That’s what I love about this book, Future Proofing You. It’s almost a continuation of Disrupt You! which you did brilliantly in laying out the premise that you need to disrupt yourself before it happens to you. Many people are afraid of being disrupted in terms of their job ending or getting fired and now the concept of the pandemic, having many people and industries even going away. The need to future proof ourselves is even more valuable than ever so we’re not living in fear. This concept of, “I’m doing my job. It’s a means to an end. I’m not happy, and it could go away at any moment.” That’s not a definition of anybody’s success, is it?
Yeah. To work at a job that you hate, wake up one day and you didn’t trade a day or a week or a year, you traded the only life you’ll ever have. This makes no sense to me. I was a vice-chairman of a company with 300,000 employees and partners retiring at 60. It’s a consulting firm. Since they run their own retirement plans and all that, they know the life expectancy. Here are the wealthiest and most successful leaders in the world. Their average life ends at 66.
Isn’t that shocking?
[bctt tweet=”The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Your average NFL players’ life ends at 55. We’re not making choices that make sense and for those that didn’t believe the disruption would happen to them, 2020 proved my premise. Whether by choice or circumstance, you will be disrupted. That’s one of the things when we’re talking about sustainable capitalism. Whether you believe it or not, governments are going to start coming up with regulations that are going to force the industry to do things for survival.
Do you wait until your business gets told to do something and you’re out of business or do you get ahead of the curve? Do you look at the opportunities that are happening with this change? You mentioned this as a second course. In Future Proofing You, I talked about if this was a college course, the prerequisite would have been to take Disrupt You! 101. This is a continuation. This fills in, for me, the gaps of what people said that I didn’t cover and they didn’t understand how capital is created. Fear is one of the truths that we talked about.
Let’s talk a little about that.
Fear is the greatest thing.
You have a quote that I have given you credit for multiple times over the years, which is, “Fear is feedback. We keep going until we get a zombie idea so great that it won’t die.” Every time I say it and say you said it, everyone laughs and they have this insight of, “It’s true.” If you have anything else to say around fear, I’m all ears and I know that our readers are too.
We have to remember that we’re evolved lizards. We still have our lizard reflexes, fight or flight. Those basic reflexes allow our body to do stuff with us not even thinking about it. We have hundreds of thousands of years since we’ve been mammals dealing with this stuff. Why I say that is, we’re not quite suddenly changing, because we have a phone and a computer. Fear is why you’re here. If your great-great-great-grandfather in the cave wasn’t afraid of the saber-toothed tiger, you wouldn’t be here. Fear kept people alive.
What you’re afraid of is what you have to focus on. People are afraid of failing. People have a fear of being made fun of, fear of rejection, and all these things. Those are legitimate fears. I’m not going to mock you but isn’t the greater fear of wasting your life? Isn’t the greater fear of never having happiness? If you go to any of your grandparents, if you go to a senior citizen, go to an old age home, and ask people their regrets, it’s not something that they tried and failed, it’s something that they failed to try. That’s the first half. That’s your fear.
Disrupt You!: Master Personal Transformation, Seize Opportunity, and Thrive in the Era of Endless Innovation
If you change what you’re afraid of, you can overcome these insignificant fears. I learned this in college, if I asked that girl out, and she turned me down, I’m being rejected, and that’s horrible. If I ask out 100 girls, someone’s going to say yes. I’m in better shape than that I’ve been afraid to ask at any. Businesses are the same way. Here’s the part about fear that nobody else writes or talks about. That person across the desk across the table that you’re trying to sell, you’re trying to get to hire you and you’re trying to impress, they have fears too. If you can understand what fear motivates them, you can better attune what you’re saying. I’ll give a great example because we came off of the election.
It’s a strange scene two elections ago, not a single presidential candidate was spending any money on social media. I wrote this white paper saying social media will pick the next president of the United States and this is in 2010. It was a little early but I looked at the campaign. This was when Obama, McCain, Mitt Romney, and everybody was running. They’re going to spend $2 billion and I happen to have a digital ad agency at the time that I was building up and we took it from nothing to selling it for $100 million in eighteen months.
The way that I worked fear was I looked at these campaign managers and they weren’t spending any money on social. They were older and they didn’t understand it. They weren’t on Facebook. These were the days so I went and let them know that I could only meet with them on certain days because I was going to the other cities with the other campaign managers. I explained why this works, or whatever and they didn’t believe me.
They didn’t understand it but what they did know is if another candidate was using social media and they won, they would never get hired to be campaign manager again. Their career would be over. By the time I did, my circle of the four presidential candidates all four became clients and all four said, “If I hire, you can’t work for anybody else.” I said, “You don’t do that with ABC, NBC, or anywhere else that you advertise.” That’s how we got presidential elections to buy digital ads. Fear.
The fear of missing out.
Fear of getting fired. If you’re dealing with a big corporation, there’s only one thing and I’ve been CEO of NASDAQ companies. I’ve been through the whole thing. There’s only one thing that anybody thinks about and it isn’t shareholders and it isn’t profits. It’s keeping their job. They fought tooth and nail to get to that C-Suite. The life expectancy of a CMO or CEO is about the same as cheese. I’m not talking about some rare Swiss cheese. I’m talking about the kind that stinks after a couple of days. On average, a CEO lasts less than four years in this country. Self-preservation. How is your pitch of you coming in trying to sell them into business? What impact does that have on their self-preservation? Frame it in that and you’ve won.
What’s in it for them?
[bctt tweet=”If you’re not changing your skillset, you’re becoming obsolete.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I know that you pontificate and I mean that in a positive sense, about having to make that emotional connection in that story from the range of emotions that you can play with. Machiavelli taught us 300 years ago that it’s great to be loved but you can’t force somebody to love you, you can make somebody fear you. I don’t mean the fear in the mafia, “If you don’t buy this from me, I’m going to burn down your thing.” It’s the fear of what if your competition uses us and your boss finds out that you turned down this opportunity?
I talked about that. I said, “The new way of doing sales is whoever tells the best story is the one that gets the yes. If your competitors are telling a better story and you don’t even tell a story, you can imagine why you’re going to be losing market share, which goes into and that’s what they’re evaluated on.”
In Future Proofing, I broke down the three fears that drive people in business and how to leverage those for success. The next thing that was new that was an oversight in Disrupt You! that’s in Future Proofing You is there is a myth of the self-made man or woman that somehow you did it on your own. I was part of this myth when I ran music labels with our rock star on the stage alone with that guitar. What you don’t see are the makeup artists, the hairdresser, the production manager, the nine producers on the record, the promotion, the tour roadies, and everybody. It takes a ton of people. It’s the same way, you’re not going to make it to the top on your own.
Don’t fly solo and for each stage of your career, you need different mentors but no one ever taught you how to get those mentors. How do you get millionaires and billionaires to help you and work for you for free? None of us would get here without standing on the shoulders of others. Much of what I did, I did being naive and it worked and now I understand why it works so I teach it. When I was nobody sitting alone in my little five-man company, I wrote to the richest man in the world, Bill Gates. Would he introduce me to the biggest guy in the music industry because I had an idea that would make people playing video games on computers more fun and I have the technology of how to do it?
When the richest man in the world contacts a billionaire, they take the meeting. It goes back to asking girls out. If Bill Gates had not responded, I wouldn’t have been devastated. The fact that Bill Gates did that for me and I’d never met him at that time. Talk about being elated. When you reach for the stars, you may not make it to Jupiter, but you can make it to the moon. You’ll make it much farther than you ever imagined and this is what I did with Vin.
I’m seeing that it’s the same feeling you had from Bill Gates. You gave him when he made his first $70,000 in the first month. It’s a fantastic legacy.
I showed him to reach beyond what he could understand. He thought he knew all about social media and he was trying to do online marketing for people. He was going after people who couldn’t pay him anything because that’s all he knew was his craft and everybody else was doing the same thing. I go, “How do you differentiate? How do you show that you were the best in the world at one thing? If you’re not the best in the world at something, no one needs to hire you.” It turns out, I hate competition because I know there’s always somebody better, brighter, nicer looking, better financed, and knows more people. If you go into an area that nobody else has gone, if you’re the first one doing it, if you’re the only one doing something, by definition, you’re the best in the world. How do you differentiate what you’re doing? If you can’t articulate that differentiation, how do you expect somebody else to recommend you, want you, or use you?
Reinventing Strategies: Work at a job that you hate and you traded the only life you’ll ever have.
Hence the need to have a great elevator pitch so people can understand what you do in a way that allows them to share that story.
I’ve gone into more fields before anybody knew what you were talking about. I’ll give you a great example. Zoom is now worth more than Exxon. Years ago, I was President of a company called ooVoo. It’s the technology as Zoom. They’re the first ones to do multi people used by tons of people but at that stage, the only people who got to use it were teenagers. It had 100 million teenagers using it around the world. It was the number one app with teens prior to Facebook and yet businesses couldn’t understand it and didn’t see a need for it.
Doctors wanted you to come into their office even if it was for something that didn’t involve touching your body. What the pandemic did, it wasn’t changing behavior. It accelerated trends that were already happening. Having a remote workforce is one of those trends that I talked about in Future Proofing You. Since the beginning of time, if you open a business 100 years ago, you don’t get to hire the best people. You get to hire the best people within 5 miles, the best people in your culture, or the best people in your nation and now you can hire the best people in the world. It turns out people who work from home are more productive than people that go to an office.
It’s counter-intuitive than what management thinks.
They’re happier, they stay longer and there’s less turnover. All this had been in studies for years but it wasn’t until the pandemic forced people to change. That’s why I talk about disrupting yourself. If you wait until you’re forced to do something, everybody else is doing it then. To watch a surfer, they don’t wait for the wave to break. They paddle out to where there are no waves so they’re in the perfect position for that one opportunity.
When I was working with Redfin, they were having their customer service onboarding people work part-time from home and part-time in the office. When the pandemic hit and the whole thing about, how do we set people up to work from home for most companies who would never let them do it, they were a little bit ahead of their competitors because those people already had a home office setup.
They put the tools in place and they’re ready.
[bctt tweet=”When you reach for the stars, you may not make it to Jupiter, but you can make it to the moon.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You talk about being early sometimes doesn’t mean you get to be the market leader when the change does come. At that moment in time, you don’t have competition. If we look back at Beta to VHS. Beta was considered a superior quality and yet VHS back in the days when people were recording stuff took off. I’ve read something that I wanted to ask you about with Skype. At one point, Skype had a big hole in the business world. Suddenly, no one was using Skype for video calls. It was all Zoom. What do you think Zoom did right or Skype did wrong that caused that to happen?
When we went after Skype, long before Zoom, we realized that there were more forms of communication than one-to-one. Skype was revolutionary. Turns out, one-to-one communication, ICQ existed back in the AOL days. Nobody had the bandwidth to do video, but the process was the same. Looking at those unmet needs and unmet audiences of where it makes sense. My favorite example was texting. It’s going to sound weird to people that didn’t grow up pre this era that were never used on phones. You could have always done it. Phones were for talking. What happened was your talking minutes were more expensive, your texting was cheaper, and people still didn’t switch. In the hip hop club culture, you couldn’t hear so people were texting each other.
What a great story of origin.
From that approach, I was involved with Nokia back when they were 45% of the global market share of phones. They were one of the first to have a camera on a phone. They thought it was a killer feature. Nobody would use them. Nobody understood. Why would I need a camera on a phone? Nokia hired good-looking models pretending to be a couple in high tourist areas like Times Square, New York, whatever to walk up to a stranger and go, “Would you take a picture of us,” and hand them a phone. It never occurred to people. What I’m getting to is we all calcify. We can make ten million decisions a day so we develop habits.
When I was taking my youngest son to his first apartment, we’re driving around, “There’s a perfect one. There’s a sign. Write down that number.” He takes his phone and takes a picture. That would have never occurred to me. I have a different habit. How can you use the tools that other people have existed to solve a problem with data and focus on? The biggest fortunes aren’t made by the inventors of something new, they are made by those that solve a problem. All success is solving problems.
What you’re saying here is look for ways to use existing tools in a new way.
A new market. New use and you own that market. That’s exactly what Vin did that I talked about in the book. There was nothing that he wasn’t doing before. He was charging $100 for and now he could get a client paying him $35,000 a month to do the same thing that you used to for $100. In the book, I talk about my favorite example, and I’ll bore everybody who doesn’t care about magic. Harry Houdini, the name synonymous with magic, one of the most famous magicians of all time used to work in these little things called dine shows, where you come in and see a bunch of shows. He’d do ten shows a day and he was starving to death. He was making pennies. A guy saw him and thought he had a great talent. He took him out, repackaged that same act, and took it to Europe where he made some money. When he came back to the US, it was like, “Here was the star of Europe who would perform before all the kings and queens in Europe. I want to see that.”
Reinventing Strategies: There is a myth of the self-made man or woman that somehow you did it on your own.
It’s easy to make these changes. There’s nothing in either of my books that you’re going to go, “That’s rocket science. I need a calculator.” You’re going to say, “That’s common sense. Why didn’t I ever do it? Why didn’t I think of that?” One of my favorite stories was about a young man who watched Mad Men on TV and wanted to work in advertising. He got a job at one of the big agencies in New York and used to work in New York. That’s an amazing accomplishment until you show up and you’re an acute doing mindless moving of numbers and charts for execs and there’s nothing creative about it probably for fifteen years.
He was googling around and he realized that the big creative directors of the big Omnicom of the world, the WPBs, none of them want their names as keywords. It was obvious to him that every famous person has to google themselves to say something untrue, bad, or whatever. For $9, the cost of that Frappuccino somebody slurping on reading this, he bought the names of the top five creative directors in the world and said, “I’d like to work for you. Click here to see my portfolio.” Three of them offered him jobs and accelerated his career by hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in fifteen years of time for $9.
What a great story. Before I let you go, I was intrigued and I love an open-loop more than anybody else, when I’m reading about your takeaways from Future Proofing You, you talk about ways to get a piece of the trillion-dollar opportunity that’s bigger than mobile. Can you give us a hint of what that might be to entice people to want to get the book?
That’s one of the truths in this book that I hit on hard. It is hard for people to imagine a world without cell phones. We’re all addicted to them. We look at them hundreds of times a day and we spend hours a day with them. In the next few years, that phone will no longer be coming out of your pocket. You’ll be wearing a heads-up display. Augmented Reality is a fact. My consulting clients are Facebook, Microsoft, and Google, I know what’s coming. The best way to predict the future is by hanging out with people that are coding it. I know I’m right, not because I have a crystal ball I’ve seen and I know their schedules when they’re coming out. Here’s the proof for people that don’t believe or like, “I’m never going to wear crazy glasses.”
In 2020, in the United States, 50 million pairs of glasses were sold that cost more than $150 a pair that came with one app, Hocus. Another 30 million were sold that came with a different app called SAN. If you need to read or you don’t want to be blinded out in the sun, we buy glasses. When the phone came out, when the iPhone came out, what were the top ten bestselling apps the first year? I’ll tell you two of them. The Fart app that makes sounds up farts and a game with cats. There was no OpenTable, there was no go through your ten most useful apps, but each of those became billion-dollar businesses.
Somebody did the hard part and the glasses are all coming out. He saw things that you couldn’t do with the phone. What is that killer app? Here are the obvious ones and the thing that’s hard for people to understand. Google has the greatest business model and makes them a boatload of money. I don’t need to convince anybody that but if you’re no longer looking at your phone or your desktop computer for searching for stuff, they go out of business if they don’t own this.
Apple no longer caring about showing people the new iPhone doesn’t come out of your pocket. Apple goes out of business if they don’t sell this. Facebook, if you’re not using your phone or computer to get the message, this is an existential threat. This is a trillion-dollar opportunity. The big guys, with the deepest pockets, are solely focused on that piece of hardware and the OS around it. They’re not thinking of the millions of millions of apps. They want to get market share that they will use OPM, my favorite money, Other People’s Money, to make your app successful or advertise it because it makes people use their device.
[bctt tweet=”All success is solving problems.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One proof. I’m the old guy on the wrong side of 50 with a gray beard. There was a time when no one ever swiped, now, I can’t imagine. No one knew how to swipe. We know how to use a mouse. We didn’t know how to swipe. Apple, knowing that they were coming out with a tablet, the iPad, wanted to find a game that uses swiping. There weren’t any. They went to any little company that wasn’t successful because the big guys were busy making hit games. Make a game that swipes and we’ll put it in our TV commercial.
There was a company that had 30 failed games and they were on their next one in Northern Europe in Scandinavia that no one had ever heard of. They made a little game of the pandemic of that year. The pandemic that year was because there was swine flu. All of Asia had to kill every single bird because they were catching it. Remember this? H1N1. The birds were angry about the pigs causing them to die. The most bizarre game you could ever say would be it.
Apple spent $100 million in TV commercials for the iPad and everybody saw Angry Birds in that commercial. When you flew business class or coach, it didn’t matter what for the next three years, all you saw anybody doing was playing Angry Birds and buying Angry Birds lunch boxes, birthday toys, blankets, sheets, and $12 billion worth of merchandise. All because somebody else advertised a solution to a problem they had. How much of that ownership did Apple take? It’s zero. There are people that will give you millions. I have had companies give me tens of millions of dollars.
I remember Sony.
Coke or McDonald’s. They’re the biggest brands in the world. They didn’t want any equity. They don’t want to get paid back. They didn’t tell me how to do it because I could solve a problem that they had. Whatever business you’re trying to launch, there’s somebody else that wants to reach that same audience that isn’t a competitor. You can make that person that doesn’t have an idea look smart.
Jay, I can’t thank you enough for coming back on and sharing your wisdom. Thank you for writing Future Proofing You. I’ve got my copy. I can’t wait to share it with other people because not only are you helping us, but it makes an ideal gift. If you know people that are struggling and wondering why can’t I figure out how to get my life going, this is the roadmap.
This is why I write. Nobody’s writing a book to make money. This isn’t Harry Potter. This is taking years of my knowledge and the knowledge of everybody that was kind enough to help me along the way and synthesizing it in a way that is actionable. That’s the keyword. Everybody needs to commit to lifelong learning. The world is changing. If you’re not changing your skillset, you’re becoming obsolete. You’re going to be roadkill in the future.
Reinventing Strategies: If you’re the first and only one doing it, by definition, you’re the best in the world.
We know that we’re not going to get back to a world that doesn’t change or suddenly has all this certainty and stability. It’s up to us to control our own destiny by realizing these twelve truths you’ve written about.
The world is changing faster than ever before. That’s what’s causing so much angst in people. That’s why there’s a generation that is not going to live older than their parents. I love democracy. Democracy only exists with the middle class and the middle class only exists with entrepreneurs creating jobs. Governments don’t create jobs. I don’t care what party you are in. When you solve a new problem, if you’re reading my words now and you have problems in your life, congratulations, you’re halfway there. That’s all that you’re doing and I’ll leave you with one acronym that’s in the book, MOVE. It starts with a Mindset, an Obstacle, finding a Void in the market, and Executing. All you have to do is move.
I love it. It’s a great metaphor on so many levels because we know without action, nothing happens. We need to keep moving our bodies. Why in the world do we think we need to not keep moving our brains to keep learning? Jay, thank you so much. The book again is Future Proofing You. I can’t thank you enough for inspiring all of us to future proof ourselves.
Thank you so much for the time.
Important Links
- Future Proofing You
- Jay Samit – Previous episode
- Disrupt You!
- Vin Clancy
- ooVoo
- Redfin
- SAN
- OpenTable
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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