Rob Nance on Local Investing, Venture Funds, Cryptocurrency, And NYCQ
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Managing partner of CityBlock Capital Rob Nance gets down into the business of local investing as he shares his new venture called NYCQ, a tokenized venture fund for investment into New York City startups. Starting with his origin story, he relays the milestones that led him to his successful career, from his interest of banking to taking on the opportunities to expand with venture fund. He covers topics about blockchain and cryptocurrency in relation to how his tokenized venture has revolutionized investments by digitizing. He also talks about the role of fundraising and the essence of communication.
—
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Rob Nance, the Managing Director at CityBlock Capital. He loves to fundraise and he’s going to share with you his secrets on how he has reframed dealing with rejection, how he is willing to leave after five minutes if it’s not a fit in a polite way and really letting go of focusing on getting to a yes versus getting to know instead. It’s such a play on words by getting to know someone versus getting the no. What he’s doing in the blockchain at CityBlock is going to be really interesting for people who want to know how they can possibly invest in real estate in a way that’s never been available before specifically commercial buildings in New York to start with. He’s got an exciting pre-webinar coming up that you’re not going to want to miss. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Rob Nance on Local Investing, Venture Funds, Cryptocurrency, And NYCQ
Our guest is Rob Nance, who is the Managing Partner of CityBlock Capital, which launched the NYCQ, a tokenized venture fund for investment into New York City startups. CityBlock Capital sources capital globally and it allocates to proven local investors with track records of profitable exits. Rob is also the Managing Partner of Edgewater Equity, a fully invested early stage venture capital fund based in New York City. He manages a portfolio of early-stage companies around the globe. In addition to all this, he advises a diverse group of operating businesses, everything from restaurants to medical cannabis. Rob holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance from Winthrop University and a Master of Science of Law in International Taxation from Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Welcome to the show, Rob.
Thank you for having me, John.
I always ask my guests to take us back to your story of origin, when you were getting your Bachelor’s in Finance or maybe even before that. Did you always know you wanted to get into venture capital? Did you always know you wanted to start your own company? How did all that start to take place in your head?
I spent a lot of time in banking. It was an interesting place to be because I got to work with a lot of wealthy companies and individuals who had been very successful. While I was always interested in the venture, an opportunity presented itself when one of my clients came to me and said, “I want to start a venture fund. Do you want to come to start it with me?” I said, “That would be an amazing opportunity.” I left my career in banking and started Edgewater Equity, which is an early-stage venture fund. We had a bifurcated investment thesis. The first was invested in enterprise SaaS companies. The second was what we coined Consumer Product Technology. Consumer Product Technology is investing in companies that are bringing material science to industries that haven’t seen innovation in decades. A great example would be laundry detergent or the beverage category. I spent a lot of time doing that, primarily investing here in New York City at the Silvertech incubator. Silvertech is owned by the Silverstein family that owns the World Trade Center site. They have an incubator run by several experienced venture capitalists. I was investing heavily into that incubator.
I met Jon Avidor, who is a co-founder of CityBlock Capital. Jon and I were investing a lot of the same deals. We came up with the idea that it makes a lot of sense for us to co-invest and start a fund together for our fund too. It was his first fund as well. As is typical, when you get ready to start your second fund, you go back to your investors in your first fund. You say, “Give me more money,” for lack of a better term. As one of my investors eloquently put it, he said, “Rob, I like you but the average venture fund lasts twice as long as the average American marriage. I don’t want to marry you twice.” I laughed but actually, it’s a problem. It’s a problem because your money’s locked up for eight to ten years in a typical venture fund. Think about the individuals that invested in funds that invest in Uber. That company still hasn’t gone public and their money’s been locked up for eight years or more. The only liquidity that has come through that is when someone like SoftBank comes in and does a secondary offering at a discount. I started to think, “How can we solve this problem?”
What I saw in the market was a lot happening with blockchain, a lot happening with cryptocurrency, and a nascent market coming up within blockchain, which was the security token market. What’s interesting about this market is the idea is simple. You can take a real-world asset and you can take the interests that are held in this asset, which now are typically on paper and you can digitize them. You can issue a token that represents LP interest in a fund. One person has successfully done that and it was Blockchain Capital. I flew out to San Francisco and met with Bart Stephens of Blockchain Capital to learn how they had done this. He was extremely helpful. He’s a very nice guy. From there, I started to go down this road of, “Can I build my own tokenized venture fund?” I started working with Jon. He’s a lawyer. In our business relationship, I’m the optimist and he’s the guy that says no all the time. We worked through this and spent a couple of months developing the legal framework necessary to build this.
Local Investing: The opportunity that exists today did not exist before cryptocurrency was created.
Along the way, we met our other co-founder, Max Goldstein. We said, “Max, we’re going to tokenize our own venture fund. Maybe we’ll build something bigger in the future.” What Max saw was the opportunity here is not just to issue our own venture fund, but to build a platform that allows us to issue venture funds all over the globe. What I mean is the opportunity that exists now that didn’t exist before was created because of cryptocurrency. We all remember AngelList. Their goal was to democratize venture investing. The thinking was, “This would be an amazing opportunity that people all over the globe can invest into startup companies.” From the standpoint of democratizing venture, they weren’t as successful as they would have liked to then. A lot of their investors are family offices. What they didn’t have that we have now that’s interesting are these pipes that were created by bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrencies.
When you look at what has happened, it was hard for someone in Ukraine or in South Africa to conceive that they could invest in startup companies in the United States. What bitcoin and ethereum have done is it’s broken down these digital walls that existed. For the first time, people can comprehend that they can send money anywhere, seamlessly and effortlessly, using cryptocurrency. We’ve seen these pipes that have been created. Going back to talking to my co-founder, Max, he said, “These walls have been broken down. There’s an opportunity to globally source capital from anywhere in the world and then put that in the hands of someone that is an expert investor where they live.” Most venture funds invest about 80% of their capital within about 100 miles of where they’re based. The opportunity here was, “Let’s find a local manager starting in New York City who understands this market and who understands how to invest in this market. Give them capital to deploy.” What we’ve done is we’ve created a model at CityBlock Capital where we work with what we call investment partners in different cities, starting with New York City, who deploy the capital on behalf of the fund into an investment thesis that we’ve established.
[bctt tweet=”Wall Street meets Blockchain = picks and shovels.” username=”John_Livesay”]
For our New York City fund, we’re deploying capital into the intersection of Wall Street and blockchain. You may hear it called picks and shovels. There is this interesting theme that’s developed, an interesting opportunity which is there are lots of assets that are currently built on paper. Whether that’s venture funds, whether that’s real estate and there’s an opportunity to make those offerings digital. The opportunity to make those digital is a huge market. Something like $700 trillion of paper assets exists. You think of all the privately held companies across the US and around the world. What we saw were the opportunities, “Let’s digitize this venture fund. Create tokens so people can buy and sell them.” That’s the market that we see that that’s important. Our fund is investing in that infrastructure that’s been built to support that. Those are the technology platforms that help issuers, like CityBlock Capital issue their tokens. There are the exchanges that will support this new digital infrastructure.
The thing that’s interesting is this concept of curation and having local people in local cities that they are experts in making those decisions as opposed to trying to find one fund or one group of people that know everything about everything. You’re not only digitizing assets, which are allowing people to own fractions of those buildings.
That’s one use case. A great use case is fractional ownership of buildings. In our case, we had these traditional structures. We’re taking those same structures and creating them in a form that is digital, which allows them to be bought and sold online instead of a cumbersome method of trying to do it through a paper format.
You’re making the user experience more seamless and less paper trail is also an outcome of what you’re doing. Is this a security token that you’re offering?
Yes. When we look at the blockchain ecosystem, I think of it as a three-legged stool. The first part of that would be payment tokens, bitcoin, ethereum. The second would be utility tokens, EOS or Filecoin. The last is security tokens. That’s the area that we fit into, which is taking real-world assets, building them on the blockchain, updating an antiquated ownership structure.
That encapsulates what it is you’re doing. Do people need to buy a utility token from you to get access to your platform or they can use any utility token?
You don’t have to buy any utility token to have access to invest in our first fund, which is called NYCQ. People can invest using Fiat currency, which is US dollar or they can invest using bitcoin or ethereum. There’s no special token to have access to our network. It’s just like you would invest in a regular venture fund, but what we allow is instead of having to wire money to us and has to fill out a paper subscription agreement, scan it and send it back. It’s all done through our website in a digital interface.
Are you the first to do this, Rob?
A couple of other people have done this. Blockchain Capital is one. Science, run by Peter Pham in LA, is another. Internationally, we’ve seen SPiCE VC do this. They’re out at Tel Aviv. A couple of people have done this. What no one’s done is looked at it like we do, which is a platform. We’re not trying to issue one fund. We’re saying, “How do we find people with local expertise in each market? Tap that local expertise and use that to deploy capital more efficiently.”
As you all know from reading this blog, and Rob certainly has heard this since he’s an expert at fundraising, one of the questions you always get asked is, “What’s your secret sauce? What’s your unfair competitive advantage?” From what you said, it seems to me that your secret sauce is these customized, city-specific experts making those decisions. Would that be accurate?
Yes. The example is we’re working with CoVenture here in New York City. What’s interesting about CoVenture the firm is that they have three different main areas of business. One is lending, one is venture capital and the other is cryptocurrency. Who better to deploy capital in New York City, which is the intersection of Wall Street and blockchain, somebody that has experience in the venture, and that has experience in cryptocurrency? We worked hard to curate the right managers for this city that understand that theme. A lot of those companies will be here in New York City because it is the financial capital of the world.
After New York City, I know you’re going to be looking at Los Angeles and San Francisco, correct?
That’s correct. To give you an example, when we think about LA, it’s a great tech city. A lot of venture capitalists and a lot of startups are going there. We think of eSports. We think an interesting area perhaps for our LAQ fund would be someone that has expertise in eSports. We would go find an investment manager that has experience, that understands what we’re doing, the likes of what we’re building at CityBlock, and get them to join us as the local investment partner for LA.
[bctt tweet=”Get To Know vs Get To Yes.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When someone buys your token, are they buying each individual city or one token that represents all of the cities?
They’re buying each individual city. We’re only raising our first token, which is NYCQ. We’ll open the other tokens subsequently as we grow. That token represents an LP ownership in the fund here, just like a regular LP would. We have a two and twenty model, which is the standard 2% management fee, 20% of profits after investors have all of their money returned. What’s great is we look at this, let’s say, in three to four years the fund goes 4X. There may still be more to go but in an early stage, if an investor says, “That’s good enough for me,” they have the opportunity to then go sell that to somebody else and deploy their capital elsewhere.
This is where your secret sauce is. I’ve been watching your Telegram channel, which has such great interaction going on and you’re very involved when you’re talking about locking up your money, whether you’re a venture capital fund, even if you’re an investor. I myself have invested as a tenant in common in a shopping center. I had to wait for that to be sold, even though it’s gone up in value. What I’m hearing you say is if that shopping center had been digitized with your token, I said, “It’s been five years. I got 4X. Even if you’re not selling the shopping center yet, I’m going to sell my part of that.” It was difficult to sell your tenant in common, but this will be much easier. Am I on the right track here?
That’s the idea. The idea is that there’s liquidity. Instead of just sell that interest, you have to find somebody. You have to find somebody that wants it. There would be nowhere to list it for sale on an exchange that exists. That goes back to the infrastructure we’re investing in. Think about the exchanges that will be built to sell those interests. If all the real estate comes online, a lot of real estate switches from this traditional paper ownership to digital ownership. It’s a huge opportunity for exchanges to list that and someone to be able to buy it from you.
You love fundraising. A few guests or founders feel that way. What is it about fundraising that you love so much?
When I set out for my first venture fund, what I was most excited about was investing. What I found quickly is that while I liked investing, what I loved was raising the fund. When I think about fundraising, a lot of people you’ll hear things like, “I hate going out and shaking my tin cup. I hate going out and begging for money.” I look at it from a different frame of reference, which is there are people in the world that understand what you do, like what you do and want to be a part of it, whether you’re raising money for real estate, a venture fund or whatever it may be. I’m super fascinated by human behavior. I’m super fascinated by how people make decisions. I’ve spent a lot of time studying decision making, communication and language processing to understand how to get to know as quickly as possible.
When I look at a situation, you hear a lot of these books that are called Getting To Yes. What I learned quickly is that’s a pretty terrible tactic to sell. A much better tactic is to get to know as quickly as possible. In a strictly business sense, no is the start of a negotiation, not the end of it. I work to get to know because it allows people to feel empowered. If they truly don’t want to work with you, it allows you to move on. I use the example sometimes of going to a bar. Let’s say that someone sees an individual cross the bar they want to talk to. They sit there the whole night looking at that individual going, “Should I go talk to him? I don’t know.” They go up after hour three and that individual is not interested in talking to them anymore and walks away.
Local Investing: In a strictly business sense, “no” is the start of a negotiation.
If they had done that in the first two minutes of being in the bar, there were 30 other people they could have gone and talked to. That’s exactly how fundraising is. If I go into a meeting and someone’s not interested, I’ll leave five minutes into the meeting, but not in a rude way, “This is not a fit for us. This doesn’t work.” What’s important is finding a fit, and people are afraid to get that rejection. I try to get the rejection as quickly as possible if it’s there. If it’s not, if they do like what you’re doing, then it’s a matter of finding a fit. What are the sticking points and how to work through that? Human behavior fascinates me, but also it is being comfortable enough to get rejected as quickly as possible when you realize that something’s not a fit.
Get comfortable with being rejected as soon as possible, as opposed to taking it personally. I talk a lot about this when I get my keynote talks on how to become a storyteller. How to pull people in with the vision you want to have. I’ve had Robert Cialdini who’s written a whole book on Influence and Pre-Suasion. He’s all talking about how do people communicate? My observation is that people have to trust you, they have to like you and then they can get to know you. It’s a gut, heart and head thing. A lot of people start off at the head level and start throwing up a bunch of numbers to someone and they’re like, “I don’t even trust you, let alone like you. Even if this is a great idea, I don’t know if I’d want to work with you.”
I totally agree. 70% of communication is nonverbal, 20% is your tone of voice and 10% is what you say. What you say matters very little. The other thing people don’t realize is the part of the brain that makes decisions has no capacity for language. Going back to what you said, you can throw figures up on the board all day long. When you do that, it doesn’t matter. If people don’t trust you, if they’re not comfortable with you, the best numbers in the world aren’t going to make a sale on the end. Part of sales to me is building a relationship. It’s not coming in and asking for the order the first minute you meet somebody. I like to build a relationship with individuals that are going to last decades. The car salesman example, the car salesman doesn’t sell one car. He sells eight cars over a lifetime. That’s how I think about business. That’s how I think about communication.
I’m fascinated that the part of the brain that you said makes decisions has no capacity to process language and no capacity to process numbers. It’s not just language. Numbers are in that same bucket. It becomes an emotional part of our gut. That’s why stories work well, and then it translates from there.
That’s where gut feeling comes from. You say, “I’ve got a gut feeling. I can’t describe it.” It’s because that part of your brain has no capacity for language. You get a gut feeling and you feel good about it or you’re excited about it, but you can’t quantify it. There’s a particular reason for that.
[bctt tweet=”Get the no as soon as possible.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s what they talk about with chemistry with people in a dating situation. Even in business, your co-founders, “Do we have chemistry? Do we like? Do we trust? Is there energy there?” People are investing in all of that chemistry, that’s why people go to the movies if they see the chemistry. There’s no language for it. It’s either there or it’s not. You have a webinar coming up on September 6 that’s free for people if they want to learn more about this new way of investing in commercial property. Tell us about that.
We have a webinar on September 6th. That includes CoVenture, our investment partners here in New York City and Morgan Creek Digital Assets, which is one of the biggest digital asset funds out there. What we’re really talking about is for digital assets and that is who’s working in the digital asset space? By digital asset, I mean security token. What does it mean for investors? Then talking a little bit about how our venture fund, NYCQ, falls into that space. We’re taking a deep dive with some of the best people in the industry, Anthony Pompliano and Mark Yusko, into digital assets. We will be talking about what is being built now and how we’re supporting that digital asset infrastructure that’s being built.
What time is this webinar airing on September 6th?
It will start at 10:30 AM Eastern Standard Time.
How do people find it?
The link will be on our website, in our Telegram group and we’ll have it posted on Twitter as well.
Do you have any last thoughts for our audience on how they can become better at pitching and understanding what people want to hear before they open their purse strings?
I would say the key first is listening and consuming as much information as possible. Lots of people have opinions on what works and what doesn’t work. What you have to find is what works for you. What works for you may be different than what works for someone else. There are lots of great people out there that have great content. I would consume as much as possible. I love consuming audio content, so whether that’s podcast or audiobooks, I do that on the subway. I do that between meetings and at the gym. I would find some people you like that have techniques that you think will be effective, consume that and then practice that.
Local Investing: It’s not enough to take in the information. You have to use them. Every meeting and every interaction is an opportunity to test.
It’s not enough to take in the information. You have to use it, which is a key factor.
It’s beta testing. Every meeting you go into is an opportunity to test it. Every interaction is an opportunity to test it. Whether you’re talking to someone in an elevator or you’re meeting with a potential client, it’s an opportunity to try something that you’ve learned and see what works for you and what doesn’t work.
That also takes some of the fear of rejection away if you’re constantly testing it. It’s feedback and not just something you’re taking personally.
It’s like cold calling. If you’ve ever had a cold calling job in sales, the more calls you make, the easier it gets. If you make 100 calls a day, it’s hard. You make 200 calls or 300 calls a day, it gets a lot easier because you’re used to it. You have to practice over and over again.
What you, Max and Jon are doing at CityBlock is going to be hugely successful. I’m happy to be at the forefront of bringing that out to the world with my podcast. Thanks for being a guest.
Thank you for having me.
Links Mentioned:
- CityBlock Capital
- NYCQ
- Edgewater Equity
- Silvertech
- Jon Avidor
- Blockchain Capital
- Max Goldstein
- AngelList
- Science
- SPiCE VC
- CoVenture
- Getting To Yes
- Robert Cialdini – previous episode
- Influence
- Pre-Suasion
- Anthony Pompliano
- Mark Yusko
- CityBlock Capital group on Telegram
- CityBlock Capital on Twitter
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
One Page Marketing Plan
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Small businesses need a small business strategy that works, and that really comes down to direct response marketing. Allan Dib needed to come up with a plan that was fast, effective, and followed direct response marketing principles very closely that would move the needle for his clients. From that need was born the 1-Page Marketing Plan which is a process that’s easy for clients to fill in and literally a single page divided that into nine sections. Allan is a serial entrepreneur, marketer and technology expert. He has started, grown and successfully exited multiple businesses in various industries. He walks us through how to have a marketing plan with just one page. He said, well, your path to profit isn’t getting referrals and that the marketing doesn’t stop once you get a customer.
—
Listen To The Episode Here
One Page Marketing Plan
The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, and Stand Out from the Crowd
Our guest is Allan Dib, who was a serial entrepreneur, a rebellious marketer, technology expert and the bestselling author of a book called The 1‑Page Marketing Plan. He started and grown multiple businesses in all kinds of industries around telecommunications and IT. One of his previous business where he faced competition from a big billion-dollar company and he was still able to grow this startup. He was later named by Business Review Weekly as one of Australia’s fastest growing companies and got on their Top Fast 100 list. He’s passionate about helping new businesses find new ways to leverage technology and he is a business coach and consultant and speaker and he is here with us. Allan, welcome to the show.
John, a pleasure to be on the show.
I love hearing people’s story of origin. If you wouldn’t mind taking us back to whatever you want, as far back as childhood, high school, college, university where you said, “There’s got to be a better way to market things and what’s going on.” How did you get interested in what you’re doing?
John, I’m not at all from a marketing background. I’ve got no education in business or training in marketing, whatsoever. It came about by necessity, as many good things do. I was a dead broke IT geek. I was good at what I did. I was running an IT business. I would always try and learn the new technology. Our clients loved what I did, they loved my service. They loved my products, they love our team and everything like that. For the life of me, I could not grow this business. It was stuck and any business that came our way was business that either came by referral or by chance or by some other similar means. It grew out of absolute frustration. That put me on a path to trying to learn marketing for the better part of a decade. Long story short, I learned all I could. I discovered direct response marketing and my life was never the same. It sounds like an overnight success story, but it’s certainly not it. It was probably a decade from start to end.
Let’s figure out if we could have the big takeaways from using The 1‑Page Marketing Plan. Usually marketing plans are known for being thousands of pages if not hundreds. There are three takeaways. You’re going to get new customers, which then you make more money. The big one that I want to jump into is how to stand out from the crowd. One of the things you talked about Allan is why getting your name out there is a losing strategy. That’s such a common thing as like, “We’re starting a company and we’re going to get our name out there and get all kinds of brand awareness and spend money on Facebook and social media. Then when we’re ready to open the floodgates, people will know who we are.” Why does that not work?
“Build it and they will come,” is a great movie plot. It’s not such a good marketing strategy. It comes about because people think that, “I can see Pepsi or Coca-Cola, Apple doing this brand awareness stuff. They’re super successful companies. That sounds like a great strategy for me.” If you’re working on property investment, there are property investors who build skyscrapers and they invest hundreds of millions of dollars in their investment. Then there are investors who buy a single small property somewhere out in the suburbs and rent it out. If the guy who’s trying to do the small investment strategy, who’s working on a small scale, if he tries to do the skyscraper strategy where he’s only got enough money to build one level of the skyscraper that’s not going to work. He needs a strategy that’s going to work on a small scale, not a strategy that works on a large scale.
One Page Marketing Plan: Small businesses need a small business strategy that works.
It comes about because of some of the different motivations behind marketing at a large scale and marketing in a small scale. At a small scale, the only thing that matters is can we get a profit? Can we get a client? At a large scale, large companies, they have completely different motivations. Making a profit is somewhere within there, but I would put to you that above that is things like placing the board of directors, satisfying superiors, biases, winning creative awards, things like that. Things that are completely useless for small businesses. Small businesses need a small business strategy that works and that comes down to direct response marketing.
Let’s walk people through each of your nine grids on The 1‑Page Marketing Plan.
It’s a single page. Where this came about early in my business career, I thought, “I need to hire a consultant to help me put together a business plan.” I did. I paid him thousands of dollars that I couldn’t afford at the time, but I thought, “This is important. All good businesses have a business plan and a marketing plan.” He did what most consultants do. He put together a beautiful looking plan. It was hundreds of pages. It had beautiful graphs and charts and projections and things like that. I took that plan, flick through it, put it in the top drawer of my desk and the next time that I saw it was when I was moving out of our office and we were taking all the things out of the drawers. I looked at it and throw it in the trash and thought, “What a waste of time and money that was.”
I did recall that there was one part of that process, the creating that plan that was very valuable to me. That was the part inside it called The Marketing Plan. It wasn’t the plan itself that was super valuable to me, but it was the process that me and the consultant went through to do that. Part of what we did was look at, “What’s the target market that we’re going after? What’s the message that we’re going to go to that target market? How are we going to reach them? How are we going to position ourselves? How are we going to price ourselves?” That was a super valuable process because it crystallized to me the things that we needed to do as a business and how we needed to present ourselves and how we needed to pitch out our product and our service to differentiate ourselves from some of the competitors that were in the marketplace. That was a super valuable process to me. That stuck in my mind for many years.
Then when I became a coach, one of the things that I started to do with my clients, I started to say, “Let’s do you a marketing plan.” That’s when clients would freeze up and they would procrastinate on that. It feels like something so overwhelming, such a big thing to do. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money. That’s where I needed to come up with a plan that was fast, that was effective and that followed direct response marketing principles very closely because that’s the marketing that would move the needle for my clients. Out of that, they say necessity is the mother invention and I certainly found that to be the case.
From that was born The 1‑Page Marketing Plan. I wanted a process that would be easy for my clients to fill in and literally a single page. I divided that into nine sections. The first three sections are called the before phase, the next three sections are called the during phase, and the last three sections of the after phase. What do we do before we were acquired a client, what do we do during the time that we’re trying to acquire a client, and what do we do after we try and acquire a client? Then within those three major sections, we’ve got three subsections.
You don’t have any revenue coming in and you’re trying to figure out what your prospects are. Then after you’ve got that, those three things done. Your next level is, “How do I capture these leads with my sales funnel?” Then the final one is, “Now, I’ve got a customer, how do I keep them and get referrals and all that good stuff?” I always love to give examples with content and structure because it brings this incredible tool to life.
[bctt tweet=”Path to profit is in referrals.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I am a Co-Founder and CMO of a startup myself and we’re using your tool. I’m a testimonial for you on this podcast. We are helping homeowners who have equity built up in their home and want some cash out, but do not want to take out a second loan and besides selling the house the only way they get access to that cash. That’s our target market. We know that there’s a huge amount of people that want this and either can’t qualify or can’t afford to have a second mortgage payment by taking some cash out to remodel or send their kid to college or whatever they want to do with it.
The message to the target market is we’ll give you the cash in exchange for owning 10% of your house and you can stay in the house as long as you want, and then when you sell the house, that’s when we get our money back based on the percent of the house that we own. Then the third part of this strategy is you talked about what kind of media are we going to use? This is where I want your expertise to come to life is we’re using Facebook ads.
We’ve got an explainer video that explains how to do that. We’re going to be running ads to promote that, to build up an email list of people that are interested. We’re obviously doing PR as part of our marketing with the CEO being interviewed on podcasts and that type of things. That’s our strategy. Is there anything within those three buckets under your before section that you could amplify and say, “You’re good here,” not quite defined enough?
I like to get as niche as possible and it seems counter-intuitive to a lot of people, especially when you’re starting out. Maybe you’ve got a startup, you think, “I’ll cast the widest net possible because I don’t want to miss anyone.” What ends up happening is people say, “Yes, of course I can help you. I can help anyone. My product is for anyone and everyone.” That feels logical, but when you say it’s for anyone, you’re saying it’s for no one. It’s funny, you see so many ads that are a laundry list of products and services. “We do this, we do ABC. We do so on and so forth.” They’re trying to cast the widest net possible. The human brain it has so many stimuli coming at it every day, each day, every minute of the day that it has a filter.
The filter is, “Is this relevant for me?” It tries to actively filter out things that are not relevant for it. If you’re coming at people with a very general message, people’s brains are automatically going to filter that out because your brain wants to find things, “That’s relevant for me,” and then hone in on that. That’s exactly what we want to do. I’ll give the example, if you’ve got a knee problem, do you want to go see a general doctor or do you want to see a knee specialist? Let’s say I’m driving and I see a sign, knee specialist, that’s going to catch my attention. Whereas I might drive past ten signs that tell me about a general practitioner or a general doctor. We want to get hyper specific because we want our message to be so specific that when people read it they say, “That’s for me.” It commands attention.
I’ve had that experience myself where even sometimes in an email marketing. I’ll get an email and it’ll be like, “Are you in my head? This is exactly what my problem is.” I like to tell people that the riches are in the niches, which is a summary of what you said. That’s our challenge sometimes actually is we have found our ideal target market, avatar, whatever you want to call them as a middle-class family who has some teenage kids about to go to college and have been in their homes five plus years or more.
The house has gone up in value 30%, 40% where they could take out $50,000 $100,000 and still have quite a bit of equity left. They don’t want to pay interest rates or have a second mortgage on top of their current mortgage to get that money out. The other target market we could help are senior citizens who have paid their house off, but need some cash but don’t want to reverse mortgage. I said from a marketing standpoint, “Let’s pick one niche and focus on them and not try to have multiple messages going out.” Do you agree with that strategy?
I agree with that. The other thing that you can do is when you do have two obvious markets is have a one-page marketing plan for each. Treat them as completely different segments because the people who are retired who have paid off their house have different worries, they have different things keeping them up at 3:00 AM than the young family who have got a little bit of equity. We want to speak to them very differently.
The big takeaway everybody is have a one-page marketing plan for each of your niche markets. That is gold right there. Let’s go to the second stage, which is, “We’ve focused on people. We’ve got people clicking on our ad. They’re opting in for more information.” You’ve got these great things of what is your lead gen capture system, how do you nurture it, and then how do you convert that to sales? Do you have any examples of how you’ve done that either for your own business or one of your clients?
It comes down very much to who your target market is. In your example, for the older people, I would say things like Snapchat and Instagram may not be the best choice. You’ve got to be thinking about the target market, but when it comes to messaging, you want to hit some of the emotional triggers that people have. Some of the major ones that are universal, things like fear, love, greed, guilt, pride. We want to touch people emotionally in our marketing message. What a lot of people do is they list features and benefits, “This is going to be a low interest rate and this and that.” People think that they make decisions intellectually, but that’s absolutely untrue. People make decisions emotionally.
One Page Marketing Plan: The path to profit is in the after-phase, in the repeat and the referrals.
Those are five emotions that your marketing should encompass, fear, love, greed, guilt and pride. Let’s give our audience an example because that’s going to bring it to life. Sometimes, the fear is, “I won’t be able to send my kid to college or if I take out a second loan, I’m afraid that I might lose my house because that’s too much debt.” Then the love is, “I love my kids so much, I want them to get a good education. I’ve got to figure out a way to do this.”
The greed would be, “This is my money and I’m angry that the bank is so greedy and won’t give it to me without charging me a high interest rate. That’s greedy on their part.” The pride would be, “This is part of a movement that I’m proud to be part of that’s helping people get access to their money that they’ve earned without having to pay a fortune to get it.” Then the guilt is, “If I don’t share this information with my friends who I know are in the same situation, I’m going to feel guilty about it.” Is that helping bring those emotions to life within that scenario?
We want to hit on the things that are keeping your prospects up at 3 AM. What are they sitting there wide-eyed in the middle of the night concerned about, thinking about? What are the thoughts that are racing in their mind when they can’t sleep? We want to hit on some of those emotions because as one of the great copywriters said, “We want to enter the mind of the prospect.”
We’ve got these happy customers and you talked about delivering a world-class experience and how you increase their lifetime value and that was fascinating to me. Finally, how do we get referrals? Let’s take each one of those buckets separately, if we could. A world-class experience, even if you’re not selling something hugely expensive, the example I think of is Banana Republic. They wanted to give a world-class experience to people who come to their big flagship stores by offering them the ability to charge their phones while they shop or remembering their birthdays to their top 20% of their clients. Usually somebody like a Neiman Marcus would do that, but they said, “We could do that for not all of our clients, but the top 20%.” Is that what you’re talking about with world-class experiences, even if it’s not a world class price?
Price has very little to do with it. So many people finish their marketing when they’ve acquired the customer. It’s crazy because all of the money is made in the after phase, after you’ve acquired the customer. Very often, to acquire a customer, your cost of customer acquisition will often not even be covered by your first transaction. It depends on what business you’re in, of course. The path to profit is in the after phase, in the repeat, in the referrals, in all of that phase. What you want to be doing is building a tribe of raving fans.
You don’t want to be transactional. You don’t want to be, “Here’s your product and here’s my money and end of story.” That’s where a lot of businesses and their relationship with their clients. Delivering a world-class experience is all about creating a tribe of raving fans. You want people to become fans and people become fans when you’re easy and fun to deal with. When you create relationships for life, when you create a sense of theater in your products and services. If we think of some of the companies that do that like Apple, you walk into the Apple store, it’s an experience. It’s not just a store.
[bctt tweet=”Build a tribe of raving fans.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s interesting because Microsoft has tried to copy that and it feels so sterile and not hip and cool like Apple. It’s a fascinating. It’s like, “You’ve got computers along a wall, but where’s the architecture? Where’s the design of the space to match the design of the product? It’s not even close.” It’s fascinating how that sense of theatrical experience you were talking about is not always easy to even duplicate even if you have money.
It comes down to the DNA of the business and making sure that your marketing is something that’s part of your product. I see this a lot. People will say, “I’ve got XYZ product or this widget. How do I add marketing to it?” At that point it’s pretty much too late. You want to be a thinking about marketing and delivering the world-class experience during the product development phase. You want to say, “This is how we want to end up with a tribe of raving fans rather than clients. How do we do that?” If Apple had already put the store together and then at the end thought, “How are we going to market this thing?” That’s way too late. We want to be delivering a world-class experience and we wanted to have that baked into the DNA of our product and service.
Do you have any tips on how to stimulate referrals? Whether you’re a real estate agent or a company that you know is going to help people get cash out of their home without taking on more debt? How do you encourage those people to refer to their friends? Do you have incentives? What do you think?
A lot of people feel like asking for referrals is like asking for a favor. We feel weird about asking for a favor or we feel like we’re begging for more business or things like that. Certainly, if you’re positioning yourself like that, then that’s going to be a major problem for you. The reason I tackled the last chapter in my book orchestrating and stimulating referrals because it implies something active. It’s not sit and wait for referrals. It’s not beg for referrals or hope that they come to you. We want to plan out how a referral is going to happen in our business. There are a few ways.
First of all, when you’re delivering your product or service you might say, “John, I’m here to deliver you a fantastic experience and part of our business is making sure that referrals are coming our way. I’m going to deliver you a super experienced, but at the end, I’m expecting that you might refer to me to a few friends or relatives or, or whatever.” Making that expectation made upfront and with that expectation upfront, you’ll probably going to be working harder to deliver that world-class experience to the client.
That’s one thing, asking for it. The second thing is, if you think about the last time that you referred one of your friends or family to a movie or to a restaurant that you liked or something like that, were you doing that as a favor to the movie chain or were you doing that as a favor to the restaurant? I highly doubt that. You were doing that because you want to look good. You had a great experience at that movie or that restaurant and you wanted your friend or family to have that same great experience.
Understanding that people are doing referrals for selfish reasons. You want to feed that. You want them to look good and you want their ego to be puffed up or fed. You do that by helping them to understand that they’re going to look good by referring you. There are a few ways you can do that and you don’t have to put a lot of pressure on people. You don’t have to be pushy or anything like that, but giving something of value that they can pass on. An example of that might be a book, it might be a report.
In your case, it could be a free report that tells them how to get cash out of their house without taking out a mortgage. If suddenly hear of a friend who’s saying, “I’m needing cash but I’m struggling to get a home loan or I don’t want to get a home loan because I don’t want to be in more debt.” Then suddenly that’s going to pick up in my mind, ” Hang on. John’s got a report that says how to pull cash out of your home without taking a home loan out.” If I give that to my friend, I’m now helping my friend and I’m looking good.
One Page Marketing Plan: The person with the best pitch, the person who’s the best marketer are the ones who always win.
In case, we’ve created a two-minute video which sometimes people even prefer better than reading a report. It’s like, “Two minutes and it’s a video and it’s animated, I’m in. I can send that link.”
Understanding the psychology behind referrals goes a long way for you to being able to start stimulating and orchestrating those situations that will result in a referral.
Was there any one big mistake that you see people making when they’re doing this one-page? Do you see people getting stuck in either of these quadrants?
Probably the biggest place people get stuck is selecting their target market. A lot of people say, “I’ve got this target market and I’ve got that one and I’ve got that one,” and that’s totally fine. If you’ve got a business that’s got quite a bit of traction and you’re maybe mid-phase in business, that’s totally fine. In that case I would say, “That’s fine. Do a one-page marketing plan for each of those segments, and then deploy campaigns to each of those.” However, when you’re starting out, if you spread yourself too thin, it’s hard enough if you’ve got a single target market, but if you’ve got two or three or four, you’re going to spread yourself too thin. What I say is concentrate on the target market that’s going to give you the most bang for buck and dominate that ad then let’s add another segment and then let’s add the second one, let’s add the third one. First, dominate that target market.
The book again is called The 1‑Page Marketing Plan. We’ve got some great tweets here and takeaways. The path to profit is in the referrals. If you can build a tribe of raving fans by being easy and fun to deal with, some great insights. I can’t thank you enough, Allan, for being on the show. Is there one final thought you want to leave us with?
The last final thought I’d leave you with is become a good marketer. The reason I say that because the best marketer always wins. Many times people think, “I’ve got a great product or I’ve got a great service, so naturally I’m going to make all the sales.” It’s the person with the best pitch, the person who’s the best marketer, they’re the ones who always win. Resolve to be a great marketer in your niche, in your industry rather than being a great technician or delivering the technical thing that you do. The best marketer always wins, so become the best marketer in your industry.
[bctt tweet=”Riches are in the niches” username=”John_Livesay”]
You can even see that sometimes in the entertainment business, “Why is that particular singer more popular than somebody else who’s got a better voice?” They reinvent themselves or they are in the press more or whatever it is. They market themselves better, especially when it comes to technology, you can build the best thing in the world, if nobody knows about it or has an emotional connection to it, Beta versus VHS is always we go back to. How can people follow you on social media, Allan?
I’m on Facebook, @Successwise, and also at my website, Successwise.com. If they want to continue the conversation, just join my mailing list there. You can also get a copy of my book.
Where do you live? Are you in Australia still?
I’m in Melbourne, Australia.
Thanks again, Allan, for being on the show.
It’s a pleasure, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Allan Dib
- The 1‑Page Marketing Plan
- @Successwise – Facebook
- Successwise.com
- book on Successwise website
- www.Quantmre.com
- https://www.YouTube.com/watch?v=rUQezlWp-l0&t=2s
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Are You A Sonic God? With Chris Hayman
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
The most exciting thing ever in entertainment is LA’s creative industry, and that’s largely due to the competition. In LA, everyone’s here for a reason and everyone’s trying to pursue something amazing. Being around that particular level of brilliance that’s abundant in LA pushes you towards the mindset of being the best at what you do, at who you are. Chris Hayman, head composer, producer and founder of Sonic Gods, explores how you, too, can have a stroke of genius. Chris makes it his mission along with his world-class team to create unforgettable music for your next big project.
Chris Hayman is a composer, music producer and creative director with over 12 years of experience creating immersive content. As the founder of both Sonic Gods (music) and Sentient Sky (production/post), Chris has brought together a team of some of the most exciting talent in the world, who have pushed the creative bar for companies such as DreamWorks, Mattel, Warner Bros, Sony, Universal, Disney, Unilever, Lexus, and Ubisoft.
—
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is Chris Hayman who has an amazing story of getting from England to the US and working with big companies like Dreamworks and Sony. His story of how he did it and his secret sauce of how he pitches himself to get hired by big companies is one that’s going to inspire you. He said he learned from his dad the importance of persistence and patience along with a little tenacity doesn’t hurt. He said he came to LA because he saw that this is where the creative capital of the world was. Being passionate about what you want to do and where you need to be is one of the lessons I learned from Chris. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Are You A Sonic God? With Chris Hayman
My guest is Chris Hayman who is a composer, a music producer and a creative director with over twelve years of experience where he creates content for some of the biggest companies like DreamWorks and Mattel, Sony and Universal. He’s the Founder of both Sonic Gods, which is music, and a post-production company called Sentient Sky. He’s brought together a team of people and they are always pushing the creative bar. Chris, welcome to the show.
John, thank you so much for having me.
I always like to ask people their story of origin. I’m sure people can tell from a little bit of what you said that you probably didn’t grow up in America. Can you take us back to somewhere in your childhood where you grew up and when you started having a dream of getting into the music production business?
I grew up in a very small town in England outside of Cambridge, which is the middle of England. I grew up to almost like farm country in a way and locked myself away while I was going to school and got into music. My mother was into classical music. My dad was into ‘70s rock. He would always be listening to records. She would always be listening to classical music. I fell in love with both of them and instead of watching TV growing up, I’d sit with my dad, listening into Dire Straits and Fleetwood Mac and legendary music and artists. With my mom, we would go to classical concerts. I formed a high level of appreciation for different types of music, just music as a whole and shortly became so into it that I started writing at a very young age.
I would say probably around eight or nine years old. That turned into me exploring instruments. I started playing the trumpet. It was my first instrument. I explored that to a pretty decent level until I wanted to expand beyond that. I was sitting at the dinner table one day and this is again very young and my dad noticed that I constantly was drumming on the table, he was like, “You love music and you’ve got this excess of energy, why don’t we go look online and see if we can find a second hand cheap drum set,” which we found one for £20, which is like $50, $40. It was a full drum set and we put it up and to this day I respect my parents for that decision because as everyone knows, drums are not the quietest instrument in the world. I quickly got very into it. I had a great drum teacher.
Through my teenage years, I was obsessed with learning instruments. I started learning woodwind instruments. I got more and more into composition, scoring classical music, and cinematic score type music, like film type scores. I loved listening to film scores and analyze them and rip them apart. Then on the other side, which is I figured is from my dad’s side, I also got into producing music. There are two kinds of different things there. Music composition is where your composing music, and you are doing that a lot of the time solo and then you bring in musicians to play music. Then on the music production side, that’s usually collaboration and it’s usually songs.
You produce something that has a song-like structure that’s maybe three and a half minutes long, four minutes long and a lot of the time it has vocals over it. I was doing both of those in parallel and I produced my first band when I was fifteen years old, my first full album. That led the way for my creative career. From there, it just took off. I went to college and studied music and business. My dad was an entrepreneur and that has played an absolute key part in my life in terms of the way I think. Even from the age of fifteen, I always had this entrepreneurial mindset in terms of what I want to do when I grow up as a musician.
Sonic Gods: My dad noticed that I constantly was drumming on the table, so he was like, “Obviously you’ve got this excess of energy, so why don’t we look online and see if we can find a cheap, secondhand drum set?”
I was going to ask you about that. Your dad was not in the music business, but he was in the entrepreneur mindset?
He was in a very random industry. He was in the building merchant industry. He worked for a company before I was born and came up as this building merchant type individual. He worked his way up at this company called National Merchants Buying Society in England. From there, he started his own company and took a complete left turn, and this is where I learned a lot from him as him being a mentor to me as well. He started a company called Carewatch, which is especially a home care company. If you imagine people coming out of hospital or the elderly and people who need care at home, assisted living basically. He started this company with barely any money, completely from scratch. In fact, I remember when I was young and going to school while he was building this company right from zero. It was hard times.
What do you think is the biggest lesson you learned from watching your dad become an entrepreneur, living that life?
The biggest lesson and even looking at him now is persistence, 100%. At the beginning, in the first year, I was young watching him do this, but it seemed like he was fighting such a huge uphill mountain ahead of him. He started on his own and it’s a fairly big industry, but the people he was going up against were like Goliaths in this industry. There weren’t any small startups that were doing this in England. He saw the opportunity in it. That’s why he did it.
I remember when I was young, we were painting his very first office. It’s very small and we painted the walls yellow. I was thinking like, “This is amazing that he’s taking a leap like this.” At the time, I didn’t understand it. I respect him so much because he put a lot on the line to pursue something that he believed in and he saw a future in and luckily it worked out. Another thing that I learned is patience. It didn’t happen overnight. He’s been building the company now for the last twenty something years.
That’s so important to underline, Chris, especially I don’t care how young or old you are, that patience factor can drive you crazy because you’re like, “By the time I’m 30, I should have accomplished these ten things and if I haven’t, then I feel bad about myself. I should be making this much revenue in my startup and if I’m not then I’m a failure,” and stepping back and saying, “This isn’t necessarily a failure yet, just because it hasn’t hit certain milestones by a certain timeframe.” In fact, another guest of mine said the same thing you said. He’s on the opposite end of the spectrum as far as age. Brian Smith is the Founder of UGG. He wrote a book called The Birth of a Brand where he talks about how it’s like a baby and no amount of rocking the cradle gets the baby to start running before it crawls first. That’s in essence what you’re saying to us.
[bctt tweet=”Key to success are persistence and patience.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The thing is the way I’ve already had my mindset and it’s still difficult to this day for me because like most entrepreneurs, we want to rush to the glory as fast as we can. You have to take a step back. What I do these days is I try and make tiny steps of progress every day and I focused on that. That’s the main thing is as long as I’ve finished the day and I feel like I’ve made progress, even if it’s a small amount then I’m on my way to where I want to be. You’ve got to set realistic expectations as well to not get too far ahead of yourself with rushing to that finish line. To me, it’s all about daily progress and making sure that happens and that works for me.
I’m all about that as well. I tell people, “Let go of being a perfectionist and focus on being a progressionist.” It’s important to celebrate the progress. Otherwise, you feel like you’re looking at what has to be done as opposed to how far you’ve already come. The other key around that is to not compare yourself to other people. Do you find yourself doing that sometimes? You’re just that if you stay focused on your own progress, you win. We all have a tendency to start comparing ourselves. Have you experienced that at all?
I absolutely have and this is one of my big lessons of learning how to grow as a person. When I was coming up as a composer, I was constantly looking at the people that I respected and it’s like I want to be in their shoes one day. Then I would listen to their music and I would think, “I don’t think I’m ever going to be that good and this is going back quite a while ago now.” That was that classic situation of comparing yourself in a way where it’s not helping you. Now, what I learned from that was everybody is individual and unique, especially in the creative industry. You shouldn’t compare yourself to people. You should only take things from them that inspire you. Everybody’s different.
As long as you focus on being a master of what you set out to do in the first place and just focus on your lane and get inspiration from things around you, then you’re going to get to the goal that you are heading towards which in most people’s cases is success. That’s the goal. Whereas if you look at other people and start pulling in the comparisons of like, “I should be doing what they’re doing because that’s where I want to be or they’re the people that I need to be.” That’s the other thing, you don’t want to pull yourself away from who you are, because as a creative, who I am is the whole reason now I even get the work that I get.
How did you get from England to America? The Beatles did it in the ‘60s. There’s a little bit of history there. There’s a very small percentage of people that make that leap across the pond as it were.
I was lucky enough to be working in England, in London. At a young age, I went to college in London. I was making some headway in music in England in my career. I worked with Universal Publishing which as for my age was a pretty big deal for me because everyone else that I knew that was working there was a decade older than me. I then had a moment of reanalyzed the English market in music and I saw that it was very limited in England. There were limitations. The industry was very small. I wanted to see where I can go in the world that wasn’t going to restrict my dreams and aspirations at the time, which was probably music. LA, as I call it now, it’s the creative capital of the world. I set my sights for LA. I actually dropped everything in England. I had a career in front of me that if I had stayed in England, I would have done pretty well, but instead I decided to drop everything, come to LA and basically start from scratch.
Sonic Gods: I loved listening to film scores and analyze them, rip them apart.
Did you know anyone?
I didn’t know a single person. As I moved, I found a place to live in England on the internet in LA. I was like, “I’m going to get an apartment building. I’m going to find a big apartment building.” The idea is so I can meet a bunch of people that are in the apartment building and that will set me off. I found a place on the Internet. I get to America. I go to the apartment building. It turns out it’s in a part of LA called Korea Town. Every single person in my building spoke Korean and not English, not a single person spoke English.
I’m there, l don’t know a single person in LA or in California. Luckily it was just a six-month lease. Let’s say the first six months were a little bit lonely, but that was the start of an amazing adventure, which in a way, I wouldn’t have it in any other way being thrust into a new situation where you’re completely out of your comfort zone. I’m talking like completely. Luckily, I was still in an English-speaking country. Even so I was young, I was twenty and I didn’t have a full cup plan of what I was going to do in this apartment building in Korea Town and long story short, I started building my company from nothing and put my head down and started to meet people.
You start at this company, Sonic Gods. How do you get these major studios like Disney, DreamWorks, and Sony to hire someone so young when there’s so much competition?
It’s been the most exciting thing ever being in the creative industry in LA. That’s because of the competition. LA is such an awesome place because it’s the creativity. Everyone’s here for a reason and everyone’s trying to pursue something amazing and so being around that right off is great. Being around the level of brilliance that’s in LA was a reason right off the bat to have the mindset of I have to be the best at what I do and going back to what I was saying earlier, the best of who I am. That was my mindset. One of the big keys I’ve learned as far as these companies that I’ve worked with is a lot of composers and music producers completely struggle. I started a music academy. The whole basis of the music academy was what I’m about to say, which is you could be the best composer, the best music producer, the best creative in the world, but if you don’t have the right social skills, you are going nowhere. That was it in a nutshell and I didn’t know that right off the bat.
[bctt tweet=”Social skills are more important than creative skills.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Inherently composers and music producers are usually introverts, and a lot of time very introverted, especially on the composer side. Their social skills are not usually the best and for me, I was in the same boat. I was okay, but I had to quickly learn how to be very outgoing and social, more than that, someone that could put themselves out there. Put what they knew and how to do out there. The reason I got all this work with all these people, that all are long-term clients now and they have been for a while, is because I’ve instilled that they can trust me to do an incredible job for them consistently and in a way where they don’t even have to think about it. They know what they’re getting from me.
How do you pitch yourself for the first to get that new client? What is it that you said that made them trust you?
It comes down to going back to being me and not trying to be someone else. That was the thing, I know for a fact that the companies I’ve worked with liked the youth factor of me. Some of these big clients I’ve got when I was 25 years old. My experience in music and the creative industry started when I was fifteen years old professionally. My composition and music production background has led me to have a very unique creative angle on how to create content.
You were helping them speak to the group of people they wanted to target, which was your age group, so it sounds to me like you had an inside track of, “I am the target audience, give me a whack at creating something that’s going to appeal to me that would then appeal to other people of my age.” Is that in essence what you’re saying?
That was it. One of the big selling points for me, and still is today the way I pitch, is when I talk to the company or talk to the marketing department or whoever it is, I say, “What does your company look like in five years? What’s the vision of your company in five years? What I want to do is form the creative for that five years and it’s done.”
Future pace your client when you’re painting a picture, when you pitch. Whether you’re painting to get someone to hire you, painting to get a new client for an existing company or painting a picture for an investor, here’s what’s going to look like five years from now and that’s what we’re focused on. When people can share that future vision with you, then they engage you.
That’s how I’ve been able to score these clients because I bring to life their own vision. They have that vision, but they don’t think about the creative side of it in terms of how to put that out into the world. When I show them the vision of the content with their five-year broad scope in mind, all of a sudden, they get excited about it. They’re saying that they need that thing because to achieve that five-year vision, they understand that they need that creative backing to be where they want to be in those five years.
What better company than my company to do it with the team that I’ve built over the last nine years and have experts in their various fields. We come in and we deliver next level content which is production and post production and music, based on the vision that they have for their company five years out. It’s creating that five-year vision and starting to build it now creatively.
Sonic Gods: We would go to classical concerts… and I just became so into it that I started writing at a very young age.
Since you’re both an entrepreneur and in the music business, are there any similarities between business and music that you’ve noticed whether it’s rhythm or emotionally engaging people?
Part of the pitch is, for example, you have to sit with the director or producer for a film and you’d have to explain to them why you should be the composer for their film or what you’re going to do. It’s very much like creating the score in a way. When you sit down, and you create music or any creative project, you’re making something and you’re forming something that either people see or hear from nothing. You have to do the same thing when you pitched it to someone. When I sit in front of someone, I have to form something that they believe in and they hear a story or they see a story, it’s like an emotional connection through the visual or audio.
I definitely use the same skills I have creatively when I’m either pitching or talking to someone. In fact, the flow of what you’re pitching is like a melody. It’s like the thing that sits above and soars and then the team that you bring in is like the harmony that supports that melody. Everything I do, I always think about it in that creative way, which boils down to running my music brain. Whether it’s talking to people pitching, doing meetings, directing projects, things like that. It’s always using the same core skills I feel like I developed and had in me from a very young age. It always comes back to that core.
Anybody who wants to know more about you can go to SonicGods.net and follow you there. Do you have social media handles on Twitter that you want people to follow?
I’m on Facebook at Chris Hayman and Sonic Gods, and then on Instagram, @SonicGods. I’m about to start a new Instagram, which is going to be a professional content, photography content and that’s going to be @ChrisJHayman.
Any final thoughts for everyone on how to follow their passion and create something that’s successful, and yet still exceeding people’s expectations?
[bctt tweet=”LA is the creative capital” username=”John_Livesay”]
I think this every single day now. To me, one of the most important things is how you are with people. That’s how you get any gig. In my experience, if you’re a person that when you’re talking to someone they feel comfortable around you and they understand you, then you’re more likely to get the gig than someone who’s awkward or whatever it is, even if you have the same skill level. In some cases, even if the other person has got higher skill level than you, if you’re the guy that they have a good feeling about, to be honest, that’s taken me to where I am now. I didn’t know that. It’s definitely not the beginning and it’s an ongoing learning process for me is how to be the best version of myself to other people. Then master everything you do and be tenacious.
People like to hire and work with people or invest in people that they trust, like and know. You’re certainly trustworthy and likable and you certainly know what you’re doing. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for sharing your journey and your secrets on having a successful pitch that allows people to say, “I’ve got to have that guy do my movie.”
Thanks, John. I appreciate you having me.
You’re welcome.
Links Mentioned:
- Sonic Gods
- Sentient Sky
- Brian Smith – previous episode
- The Birth of a Brand
- SonicGods.net
- Chris Hayman – Facebook
- Sonic Gods – Facebook
- @SonicGods – Instagram
- @ChrisJHayman – Instagram
- www.SentientSky.net
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’