The Content Formula, Tell A Story Of Success with Michael Brenner
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Episode Summary:
In the digital world and in its marketing space, consistency is key. And from that consistency comes the ability to tell stories to win clients. But like most speakers who are just starting up, we get butterflies when we speak in front of people. The trick is to not get rid of the butterflies but make them fly in a formation that will work for you. One other technique by Michael Brenner is to tell a story that seeks to help people instead of promoting your product or service to them. He also developed the Content Formula that’s been used by Pixar Movies to tell their stories. Michael shares his stories of overcoming his fear of speaking by speaking in front of many people and telling them great stories.
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Our guest is Michael Brenner who shares the formula that Pixar movies uses to tell their stories, and lets us see how we can tell our own story using that successful formula. He said, “Fear are just stories that we tell ourselves, so if you want to let go of your fear, tell yourself a different story.” He said, “The way to be successful in your communication is to help people versus just promoting. That’s how you get a good return on your investment.” He has specific examples of how to do that with your content marketing, where you are tapping into both the knowledge and the humanity of the people on your team. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
The Content Formula, Tell A Story Of Success with Michael Brenner
Our guest is Michael Brenner who speaks, writes and consults on marketing, leadership, customer experience, and even employee engagement. He’s been recognized as the top business speaker by Huffington Post and he’s a top CMO Influencer by Forbes.
The Content Formula: Calculate the ROI of Content Marketing & Never Waste Money Again
He speaks on leadership and culture, but what he does is he helps companies engage and convert new customers by getting the employees engaged in my favorite topic of all, storytelling. He’s co-authored the best-selling book, The Content Formula. He has written over 1,000 articles for companies like The Economist, The Guardian, Forbes, and many more. He’s championed a customer-centric approach at big organizations and small. He delivers workshops and keynotes for Fortune 500 brands, and now he’s the CEO of a marketing insider group believing that strong leaders are those that champion the teams. Michael, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me. Good to be here.
I always like to ask my guests if they can take us back as far back as you want. You can go back anywhere in your childhood, high school or college. Where did you start to think, “I want to learn how to be a storyteller and a keynote speaker?”
I was always into stories and was a pretty avid reader at a relatively young age. I was an English Lit major when I was in college. Understanding the fine art of storytelling was something that I was interested in. I enjoyed college. I didn’t think it was something that I was going to be doing professionally. I thought I’d get into business and do sales and marketing or whatever, and sure enough I’m now doing marketing and speaking around storytelling. It was something that from a relatively early age, I geeked out about the process of telling a great story. The keynote speaking part is interesting. I talk about this in my seminars when I speak to executives who have a desire to become better speakers, that I had to navigate myself through a tremendous amount of stage fright, physically debilitating stage fright. In my seminars, I go through the six most common fears and how we’re more afraid of public speaking than death and we’ve all heard that. What I help my clients and my workshop attendees try to understand is that we all face those fears, but we can overcome them. Myself as an example, I tell the story that I physically passed out in fourth grade on stage when I had to do a recitation of the Gettysburg Address. I had similarly crazy stories even as I got older. As I became a professional and started working for other people, I realized that my career was going to suffer if I didn’t figure this out. It was a journey. It took me a long time. There are a few tips and tricks and things like that that I try to train people to use that can allow the story that’s inside all of us to emerge. That’s what I try to help people understand.
I love that you gave an example of the vulnerability, a little fourth grade boy passing out. Your system basically shut down. Now as adults, we tend to get butterflies in our stomach, and what I like to tell people is the goal is not to get rid of them, but to get them to fly in formation. That’s my little tip. What tip do you have to help people get over their stage fright?
There were a few very specific things that helped me. The line that I use is “Fears are just stories that we tell ourselves.” When I stopped to focus on that and started realizing that, there’s something inside me, in my head, some knowledge or experience or some story that I need to tell, that the audience I’m speaking to needs to hear, and it could change their life. Maybe it only changes their life in a small way, it will help them do their job a little bit better or whatever, it’s not life-changing stuff, but it’s something that they need to hear. As soon as I started thinking that I was giving a gift of knowledge or experience or stories to my audience instead of making it, “I’m afraid. Am I going to go through the right words?” and all those kinds of things, as soon as I made the focus outward and not inward, my whole approach changed.
[Tweet “Fears are just stories that we tell ourselves. “]
Fears are just stories we tell ourselves, so we can tell ourselves a different story. From the fourth grade boy who got nervous, to overcoming your fears by re-telling a different story, to getting named a top business speaker by Huffington Post, I bet there’s another story in there that I can ask you to tell us. Was it a goal you set? Did it just happen? People are always fascinated by that kind of accomplishment, because obviously people want to get recognized. It’s always interesting for me to hear, “I just did my thing and I was discovered,” or “This is what I did to get there.”
There’s no one story. I never set out to become a recognized speaker. It’s probably around the same time that I figured out that the digital world we live in is something that you can take advantage of if you commit to being consistent about it. Twitter came out and I signed up and got a Twitter account. I didn’t get it for a long time. Then I started blogging and I realized that when you add content, you create to an audience you’ve nurtured on the social platforms, the combination of those two things can be powerful. That led me to being asked to do things like podcasts, webcasts, webinars and things like that. As I overcame my fear of public speaking, I found that I love it. In the digital world that we live in, it’s consistency. I wrote a mission statement for myself that I didn’t want to just sponge knowledge out of the world, I wanted to give back. As soon as I made that commitment, that meant writing and speaking and taking requests from great folks like you to have conversations like this. It emerged and I feel so fortunate to be able to do what I do. The recognition was never something I sought out, but obviously it’s great to see.
What I hear is that the shift from worrying about what you’re going to do and getting it out to the world in your speaking helps you overcome the fear of speaking, and then the same thing is you don’t want to just take knowledge, you want to give it out. Your purpose is what drives you. I hear that time and again from successful people like yourself, who tell me, “My bigger purpose is, and that’s what drives me, and then the results come from that,” as opposed to, “My purpose is to get recognized as X, Y and Z.” Would that be a fair summary?
Absolutely. To the question you asked, I didn’t seek to become a public speaker, let alone a recognized one, but public speaking was an extension of that mission of trying to share what I know and what I love to do with others. Speaking is one of the platforms that I use to do that.
One of the things you and I share in common in addition to both being keynote speakers is we both have been in the shoes of our audiences because you have this background of working for companies, so you know what it’s like to have a quota and meet deadlines and get promoted and all that stuff. That brings a whole other level of credibility and authenticity. For me, my purpose is to help as many people as possible get off the self-esteem rollercoaster of only feeling good if their numbers are up because I was on that rollercoaster and it wasn’t fun. I love what you’re doing of helping people figure out a way to take the content they’re creating and get a return on investment, which leads us to your great book. If you haven’t seen the cover of Michael’s book, I highly encourage you to go to Amazon.com and look up The Content Formula and buy the book. Tell us where the cover image came from because that’s a great image.
I don’t know if there’s any great story behind it. The frustration that led to the book was all around the massive amounts of money that I see companies wasting. There’s not a single company out there of any size that isn’t wasting 40%, 50%, sometimes 60% of either marketing budget or even the time and effort they put into marketing. I tried to dumb it down and simplify it. For your audience who haven’t jumped over to Amazon, it’s an image of a piggybank. It brings you back to those days when you were a kid and you were saving the quarters that grandma gave you in your birthday card. The answer to the question, “How do you stop wasting all that money?” is simple. The frustration that I feel is almost juvenile. It makes me so crazy I want to bang my head against the wall. The goal of the book is to try to shed some light on the simple answers. For example, we’re all storytellers and there are experts inside every company. We had the Super Bowl and you see $5 million spent on a 30-second ad and it’s easy to see why our egos lead us down paths to creating communications in our companies that don’t resonate. Yet, our companies are filled with great people who have real stories to tell, that can help their customers, and we have to expose that. If we do, we can achieve the ROI and the growth in our business that everyone’s looking for.
There are two big takeaways that I have from your book and I’m sure there are many more, but the first one that you alluded to is you can spend a lot of money on a 30-second spot, but how engaged is the audience? That’s the differential between content marketing and just the commercial that puts something out there. Is that a good take away from The Content Formula book?
The main one is that if you seek to help versus promote, you’ll see better results. It’s counterintuitive because almost every executive in the world thinks that, “I work for this company, I love this company, and so I need to tell people all about it.” It’s our natural business instinct to want to tell stories that way. Those are the exact stories that we tune out. They’re self-serving. If you reverse that thinking into, “I have this company filled with amazing, professional, and smart people. If I ask them to tell the world what they know and how they help our customers solve the problems that they have,” that’s how you can, not tell, but show the world how great your company is. We have to put mechanisms in place that allow our brain to think in that different way.
[Tweet “If you seek to help versus promote, you’ll see better results. “]
Let’s talk about two of the commercials that have gotten some buzz, which is one of the goals. If you don’t capture those millions of people at the Super Bowl, the ideal is that there’s maybe some pre-chat before the Super Bowl now, with the commercials being aired on YouTube and getting conversations, as well as post Super Bowl conversations and sharing. The two that I saw and we can maybe have a conversation about is the Amazon one, where they had all these celebrities pretending to be the voice of their Alexa. What did you think of that? Is that engaging? Has it got the help versus promote element to it or is it just entertaining?
It’s just entertaining. What’s the value of that entertainment? There’s another commercial that my family and I, we always laugh when it comes on and then we always talk about it that we forget who the actual advertiser is. Is it achieving its goal? I doubt it. I read in AdAge that the Dilly Dilly Budweiser commercial is the most of viral ad campaign in years, and yet sales of Budweiser have not just gone down, they’ve accelerated the decrease in sales. It’s a great example of having a very entertaining, even memorable advertising experience, but you can’t turn Budweiser into craft beer. It is what it is. I’ve never been one to ask for advertising budgets and I don’t want to necessarily criticize the hardworking and creative folks in that industry, but I choose to focus on content that helps. The book, The Content Formula, shows how in marketing, we don’t always know what the return on investment is, but with content marketing, you’ll always know. Every time I’ve worked with a company that has looked at it, they’ve seen increases in their return on investment by factors of two and three and four. It’s not just visibility to return on investment, it’s significant impact increases. That’s where I choose to focus on.
Do you have an example, Michael, of someone you’ve worked with that’s okay with you sharing or maybe even a great example you’ve seen of content marketing versus the old school of pushing your message out that you hope will eventually get awareness up? Even that it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to translate into sales.
In almost every one of my keynotes, even when it’s not about content marketing, I tell some content marketing success stories for different reasons. I’ll just mention two. One of them is Cleveland Clinic, who’s not a customer or client of mine. Amanda Todorovich runs the content team over there. I have a huge respect for what they’ve done. They went from just as a hospital system five years ago to a content provider today that outranks WebMD and Wikipedia for most of the healthcare search terms that people use. They’re a top fifteen website in the world. They get 5 million monthly visitors. What Amanda has done is she said, “We’re not just a hospital system. We have doctors, administrators, nurses and folks inside our organization that care deeply about our patients.” They have so much knowledge that they could share that, “If we start to share that knowledge, we can grow the awareness of Cleveland Clinic, but we can help a lot of people. Our core mission is to improve patient outcomes.” Their content mission is to improve patient outcomes, whether you could become a patient of theirs or not. Basically, they’re sharing what they know with the world and in doing so they’ve created essentially an online magazine, a healthcare website, that generates revenue in the form of Google Ads. It’s unbelievable that three times a week they interview a doctor or a specialist inside the company, they share some interesting piece of health information, and it’s creating tremendous results. That’s one example.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a company creating content that’s their employees telling stories, in this case doctors, that they’ve been able to monetize. It’s a whole other source of revenue. That’s revolutionary.
My second story is Capgemini. I started working with them about four years ago. I was so overwhelmed by the story. There were three people in their corporate marketing and communications organization who decided, “We’re trying to market our products and services. We’re the number four after Accenture, Deloitte and KPMG. How does a number four player break through the noise?” They started highlighting the knowledge and expertise of their practice leaders, their consultants basically. They created a site called Content Loop. It’s everyday consultants talking about blockchain and cloud computing, the technical stuff that they consult around. They don’t do a lot of branding, there’s no super hard call to action on it. It says, “If you liked this article by Joe, connect with Joe on LinkedIn.” In a program that was only intended to raise the awareness of the folks inside their organization, after a year they found that they generated $1 million in sales via the LinkedIn platform, because people said, “Joe was smart and he wrote a great article that helped me. Then I connected with Joe and when I had a project come up, I thought of Joe. I reached out to him and we sold $1 million.” What’s interesting is when Capgemini realized what they had, they focused on sharing the stories of their people and the humanity of the people that they have. They generated $24 million in sales in the second year by almost doing nothing else but focusing on the connections that their readers were making with their authors.
It’s such a great example of an organization that tapped into the knowledge and the passions and the humanity of their folks inside their organization and generated significant returns. I don’t think any Super Bowl commercial is going to generate $24 million in sales. I asked a bunch of consultants to write an article and they were able to achieve that. That’s that counterintuitive nature that storytelling could be the results that it can provide for organizations.
[Tweet “Tap into the knowledge and humanity of your people. “]
The interesting thing about that story for me, Michael, is that the call to action is so easy and not asking someone to go from first date to getting married. It’s like, “If you liked this, do you want to connect?” It’s very low risk, very easy, “Why not? There’s no downside to doing that.” That starts to build the relationship, so you’re not asking someone to make this huge commitment from reading a blog article. That’s a valuable insight that you shared. The other one is not just sharing your knowledge, but the humanity of the people. On this Content-Loop.com, do you work with people to try and put in some personal story? How do you bring the humanity into the blogs or the content that they’re creating so that it’s not just like you’re reading some boring article?
The analogy I always use when I talk to folks is everyone has that initial fear of “I’m not a good enough writer.” A lot of companies want to over-engineer the editorial process with brand standards and tone of voice and all this stuff. I always tell people, “From a company perspective, you’ve got to let go.” From an individual perspective, the analogy I use is it doesn’t matter if you love cats. You share a story about cats because you love cats and maybe it’s GIFs of cats riding on Roombas or whatever silly things cats do. The interesting thing is it doesn’t have to have anything to do with what your company sells, because there’s a potential customer, employee or investor of your company that might also love cats. When they see, let’s say Capgemini, people writing and sharing funny stories about cats, they’re going to realize, “What a great organization that allows their people to do that, to share the things that they love, no matter how nerdy or funny that might be.” Obviously I’ve never seen anybody write an article about cats or sharing cat videos on a branded content platform, but I try to highlight that it’s okay to be human. It’s okay to even be a little personal. That’s the stuff that we like to read and share.
When I work with clients when they are pitching to get a new client, I tell them, “People hire people they trust and like. You’ve got to tell some stories about you and why you’re so passionate about working here, or how you got to become an architect,” if you’re an architectural firm, whatever it is that makes it so human. People get confused and think, “If I give enough information, then I’ll get hired,” as opposed to people are going to emotionally connect with your stories. If you’re pitching and other people are pitching before and after you, stories are the best way to be memorable. What you’re doing is taking that and putting it into not just the story when you’re in front of a client to get hired, but also when you’re putting your messaging out into the world on websites and blogs, etc.
A lot of people that do keynote speeches, a lot of times you’ll see lesser trained speakers stand up and they might go through ten stats. I always try to tell presenters that stats can support a point, but fear is what drives us. It almost sounds like a manipulative thing to say, but I start almost every one of my conversations with folks in the professional setting by identifying and almost spending too much time on calling out the fears that we all have. We started talking about the fear of public speaking when we started, that I almost passed out on the stage when I was in fourth grade. People feel that fear, and that’s the only way to drive change. It’s okay. It doesn’t mean we have to create fear, it just means call out the fear we all have, that we all face every day and be the solution to it. We call that the villain in the storytelling formula.
Are there any other tips that you have about what makes a good story that you can share?
I’m a big fan and believer in the Pixar storytelling formula. Pixar is now doing a massive online course that I think is for free. It’s an extensive course. I can give you the cheat sheet of it. Pixar, for those of you who don’t know, is owned now by Disney Animation Studios and was bought by Steve Jobs back in the ’80s when he was let go from Apple. He bought it from George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, for a very small amount of money, a couple of $100,000, and sold it to Disney for billions and billions of dollars. It’s the most successful production studio in Hollywood’s history. The reason for that is their storytelling formula. One of my favorite business books is Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. For those of you who are interested in getting an understanding of how to scale creativity inside of business, he does a great job in that book. The answer is leaders that inspire their teams and allow their teams to do the work that they want to do, that’s the trick there.
The Pixar storytelling formula is, “Once upon a time,” and then you introduce the hero. “Every day,” so it’s what does the hero do every day. “One day,” this is the big thing that drives somebody to take a step forward in their life. “Because of that, because of that, until finally.” “Once upon a time, every day, one day, because of that, because of that, until finally.” That’s the Pixar storytelling formula. You could use it like, “Once upon a time, there was a fish named Nemo whose father was scared that he might go out into the open ocean and die. Every day, he warned his son Nemo about the terrors that could happen and the bad things that can happen out in the open ocean. One day, Nemo, because he’s a teenager, decided to rebel and he went out into the open ocean. Because of that, he was captured. Because of that, Marlin, his father, went on a journey to save him until finally they were reunited and learned these great lessons about facing your fears and going out into the world.” Every Pixar animated movie follows that exact same formula. Once upon a time, every day, one day, because of that, because of that, until finally. Write that down and try to think about how you can tell your story or tell your company’s story or even present your product or solution in that storytelling way.
Content Formula: Call out the fear we all have, that we all face every day and be the solution to it.
What I love about it is there was some fear, which you said is one of the things that makes a good story. There’s the fear of “Don’t go out into the ocean, it’s not safe.” That fear element to a great story but into this formula is fantastic. How else can people follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter handle and all that good stuff?
My company is MarketingInsiderGroup.com. If you head over there, you can get a PDF version of my book for half price, The Content Formula. I also offer some training courses and even some free videos there that you can subscribe to on activating your team for success and how to put together a business case for doing content marketing and storytelling. You can find me on Twitter, @BrennerMichael, and also in LinkedIn. Those are my main platforms.
Michael, any last thoughts or bit of advice?
Keep in mind that storytelling is the key to being able to communicate in today’s world. Hopefully, we shared some tips. I love helping people to see the light when it comes to inverting their pitches and resisting that natural tendency to want to talk about yourself. If I can help in any way, please feel free to reach out to me.
Thanks again for being such a great guest.
Thanks for having me.
Links Mentioned
- Michael Brenner
- The Content Formula
- CMO Influencer
- The Content Formula on Amazon
- Amazon Super Bowl Ad
- AdAge Dilly Dilly Budqweiser Commercial Article
- Cleveland Clinic
- Capgemini
- Content Loop
- Creativity, Inc.
- MarketingInsiderGroup.com
- PDF version of The Content Formula
- @BrennerMichael Twitter
- Michael’s LinkedIn
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Creative Storytelling Is Key To Growth with Anton Zietsman
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
The easiest part of the business is having the idea. The more challenging part is bringing life to that idea and finding the right people to help you do it. Director of 3311 Ventures Anton Zietsman adds that a company needs the ability to transition from the founding members to the expansion team that will develop culture and that will promote high and hyper growth. However, before all of these, founders need to develop the ability of creative storytelling as well as developing deep working relationships. Learn how strategic partnerships can provide capital and future leverage.
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Our guest is Anton Zietsman who works at 3311 Ventures as part of the core team finding entertainment startups to fund. One of those companies is Donut Media, which creates video content to entice millenials to be interested in the automotive industry since a lot of millenials are not keen on buying a car right away. He talks about what it takes to be successful both as an entrepreneur and as someone who’s pitching and has the ability to execute he said is much more important than whatever your idea is. You need to have great communication skills, be strong on juggling a lot of different things competing for your time and most importantly keep the quality up in everything you do. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
Creative Storytelling Is Key To Growth with Anton Zietsman
Our guest is Anton Zietsman who is serving now as the Director of 3311 Ventures where he manages the day-to-day operations of that fund. That fund has some unique things that you’re going to want to hear about. Before joining 3311, Anton worked at Homejoy Inc. and Goldman Sachs. He has his degree from Stanford. Welcome to the show.
John, it’s good to be here.
You and I met when I was moderating a panel and you were so well-spoken and able to show a lot of empathy for founders seeking funding that I wanted to have you on the show to share your expertise and your insights. One of the things I love to do is ask my guest to take us back to their own personal story of origin. Someone like you graduating from Stanford has a lot of choices. Did you know right from the get go, “I’m going to go into this world of investments?”
I didn’t. Initially, what I wanted to do and what I was passionate about was politics. That’s why I studied political science and economics at Stanford. The goal was to get involved on the public side of things and ultimately pursue a career in politics, however loosely defined that was for me in the early days. What ultimately ended up happening is I joined a program called Stanford in Washington, which sends students to D.C. for about three months and places us in a government internship while we live and learn and involve in the city. I worked for the Treasury Department for about three months in the Department of International Affairs in the office for the Western Hemisphere. This was about 2010, which is right towards the latter half of the financial crisis where Dodd-Frank was being implemented and a lot of reforms were being pushed through when it comes to domestic finance side of things. I came away with two realizations from that internship. One was that government sector work was probably not for me, a little on the slow side. While there were great people at Treasury Department, I didn’t get that urgency and that piece of work that I was longing for. The second one was that domestic finance was where all the change and all the excitement was, at least at the time of the Treasury Department. That’s when I started to change my focus and started looking at internships on the private side and looking at finance work. That’s ultimately what led me to Goldman Sachs.
Creative Storytelling: Having the idea is almost the easy part of the job.
What was that like? Goldman Sachs is certainly well-known and prestigious and so is Stanford, but they don’t take anybody who wants to work there.
No. For me to go an opportunity to work with a group of likeminded and to work on a faster pace and on subject matters that I was passionate about at the time, which was global economies and the companies operating within them. That’s how I found my way to Goldman, which was an incredible experience from a skill set and personal development perspective. For me, it was a great couple of years learning the tools that I still use today and building a network of pretty impressive people.
What kind of tools did you learn that you still use today?
It’s mostly around the ability to be effective within a corporate or business setting. It sounds a little loosey goosey but what the biggest takeaways from Goldman is the company teaches you how to be effective, how to be a good communicator, how to manage competing workflows, how to manage tight deadlines, and do so while maintaining a high degree of rigor when it comes to the quality and the excellence of your work. In terms of transferability, that’s one of the greatest things that I took away from that experience. On top of that, there’s all the industry specific knowledge when it comes to how companies run and operate, how companies are capitalized, how they raise capital and evolve through their lifecycle. For me, all that was just a bonus.
What I find fascinating is that the ability to communicate well, the ability to deal with competing projects demanding your time and keeping the quality of everything up is exactly what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur as well as what it takes to be successful at a big corporation like Goldman Sachs. Are those the kinds of qualities you’re looking for and the founders that you and your team decide to fund when you hear a pitch?
That’s part of it. The DNA of a successful entrepreneur tends to be very different from the DNA of someone who is going to be a highly successful corporate student. There are certainly aspects of those qualities that are transferable, the ability to be tenacious, the ability to communicate effectively to really paint a vision, the ability to execute is incredibly important. Having the idea is almost the easy part of the job. What’s a lot harder is the ability to go out and bring it to life. What I see as being the main difference is that successful entrepreneurs and the ones that we look for have a big component of rule breaking, of being rebels on some level that you won’t necessarily find at a higher-level corporation. That’s something that’s important. It’s easy to say that the best startups have been the ones that came in and disrupted existing industries and have thought about industries in a new way or created new industries in of themselves. That’s the X factor that differs when it comes to entrepreneurs and something that we try and identify when identifying the companies to invest in.
[Tweet “The ability to execute is even more important than the idea.”]
People get so married to their idea and realize it’s probably going to pivot and it’s your ability to execute that is what the investors like you are looking for. Take us to what made you want to leave Goldman and go to Homejoy.
It was a combination of things. The most important one though is companies like Goldman are successful at what they do because they’ve built a structure in which they’re able to basically churn out junior employees on an annual or biannual basis and maintain their level of excellence. While that may be great for the firm and it may be great for the firm’s clients, what it means is an individual contributor within those companies is that you’re cog in a much larger wheel. Part of what I wanted to do was to be a lot closer to the underlying business. I wanted to be in an operational role in a smaller company in which I was able to come in and impact the underlying operations. That translated into a startup. I was intrigued in the world of high-growth companies, which at the time, a lot of which were in the on-demand space. That’s ultimately the experience that I was seeking. Through a connection at the right network, I was able to land at Homejoy.
What are some of the things that you learned at Homejoy that relates to operations that you think would be valuable for the audience to make sure they’re doing to make sure that their startup is operating at its peak level?
I spent a little under two years there and there are so many lessons learned, so many things that I picked up along the way that would be valuable. Ultimately, part of what was most striking to me is the importance of the team that you build and the culture that you develop over time, particularly when you’re dealing in a high growth or hyper growth situation like Homejoy. One of the challenges a lot of entrepreneurs’ face is how do you scale the team, how do you up level the team at the right time. One of the hardest things to do is moving forward or moving ahead from the founding team and bringing on more experienced executives and timing that in a way that makes sense for the business. That was one of the very interesting lessons and experiences that we had to go through and figure out when to reach out for the right kind of expertise and bring it on board. The second thing is just obsessing about the consumer and the consumer experience. It depends on the business not the industry. It’s understanding who the customer is, why they’re using you and being laser-focused on improving that experience. For us at Homejoy, that was both sides of the marketplace, both the client and the service provider, and understanding who the key constituencies are and keeping them conscious on top of mind throughout the development cycle of the company is critically important.
You’ve got so many other things trying to grab your attention, but if you focus on that, you’re most likely continue to keep them loyal and get new ones. This concept of the culture evolving from just a few people to now realizing, “Is it too soon or too late to hire somebody? Are they a good fit with our culture?” Sometimes the founders might be a little intimidated by people that are coming in with a skill set that they don’t have but need. Do you ever see that in the teams that you’re watching and funding?
[Tweet “Team and culture are the keys to growth.”]
It’s a problem that young companies face all the time. It’s important to get comfortable with that level of unease and on the contrary, seek out that unease and try and be honest about what the skill set of the founder is, what the skill set of the team is and understand what your blind spots are, what your goals are, and going out there and finding someone who is smarter than you when it comes to those things. Who’s going to be able to instantly or very quickly start pulling their weight and educate you and educate the rest of the company when it comes to that domain. It could be anything. It could be sales. It could be marketing. It could be branding. It could be operations. The best founders that we see have a high level of self-awareness when it comes to where they need help and are comfortable seeking out and convincing people to join them that can help them.
That brings us to 3311 Ventures. Do you know the story of origin, by chance, and why the company is called 3311?
3311 comes from the two numbers from our founders’ favorite baseball players. That’s where it comes from. 3311 Productions, which is our parent company, was founded in 2011 primarily as a film finance and production company. Over the years, it grew into a more diversified entertainment company that now does scripted TV and unscripted TV as well.
I’ve interviewed a lot of Angel investors, VCs, family offices, etc. A lot of people are not expertise in funding television, scripted or unscripted or films. That’s the kind of startup you’re looking for or a startup that has something that can help disrupt the entertainment business, is that right?
Our focus and the way we look at the landscape can be summarized this way. We look for companies in which we can not only come in and provide capital but also be strategic in terms of our partnership. When we think about that there are two things that we’re good at as an overall company. The first is storytelling, content creation, video production and distribution. The second is over the course of our existence of the company, we’ve developed deep relationships across the industry whether it’s with talent, agencies, networks, studios, distributors. We look for companies in which we can bring capital to the equation but also leverage one of these two core skill sets in a much more strategic way. In terms of what that translates to from a target company, we do see a lot of companies in the media and entertainment space, but we also see companies in the consumer tech, consumer econ space, in which we have the ability to get involved more in our marketing and branding perspective.
Can you give us a story or an example of someone that you said, “That was a great pitch, we want to go and do business with them?”
We currently have five companies in our portfolio and looking to add a couple more. There’s one example that I can give that will illustrate this well. We invest in a company called Donut Media, which is a millennial brand for car enthusiasts. Essentially, what they do is they create videos and distribute videos across their social platforms in a voice and tone and manner that is obviously compelling to their fans and allows them to grow their audience and establish and develop themselves as a brand and lifestyle brand. The reason why Donut was so compelling to us was through the founder and the founding team who had experience at AwesomenessTV in the capacity of creating, distributing content to this very specific audience and demographic. They also had the Premier Content creators in the car space who had made some of the more successful videos on YouTube what that featured car is. There was this genuine and incredibly authentic passion not only for the space but for their audience coupled with a long track record and expertise when it came to not only building teams and building content teams but also finding ways to distribute and grow that audience. For us, that’s the perfect mix of what we’re looking for and why we’re ultimately convinced to invest.
Creative Storytelling: We look for companies in which we can not only come in and provide capital but also be strategic in terms of our partnership.
The other thing I want to talk about is the importance of storytelling not only in the content you’re creating but also when you’re pitching. What are your tips on that?
Storytelling is not everything but it’s a big part of the process, particularly at this stage that we invest in, which is Series C to Series A. Very early stage companies. At that point, there are so few data points that we can go off and that we can use to do some of the more rigorous analysis that we would do with later stage companies. For example, when I was in Goldman, if we’re doing later stage growth or private equity, you’re ultimately betting on three things, which is the size of the market, the business plan and the team. The team plays a big role in that decision-making process, particularly their ability to paint a picture for what the company is going to look like not necessarily in the next six to twelve months but in the next six to twelve years. Investors can only spend so much time with each company and with each concept due to the volume of deal flow that we look at. The founder needs to do a lot of the legwork when it comes to painting the picture and connecting the dots for the investor and drawing them in to share their vision and see their vision and want to be a part of that process.
Your personal passion, your reason for why you love doing this, understanding who your customer is in the pitch, I have a big philosophy that the more you show an investor like you that you have empathy for the customer and you understand their problem better than anyone else, then someone like you would say, “You’re the right person to provide that solution. We’re going to get in business with you.”
That’s exactly right, especially in content companies and media companies. That has some crossover application as well in other businesses. There are a lot of people who are MBAs and make analytical judgments on opportunities that they think they can exploit. That’s certainly one way to build a business and it’s been successful in the past. When it comes to media companies and new media companies, something that we look for is authenticity and passion. Audiences have become much more sophisticated and much more intuitive when it comes to understanding if the company or the brand they’re interacting with is authentic. That’s a critical part of the equation for us is making sure that the DNA of the founders is in line with the business that they’re trying to create because it will also ensure that they’re in it for the long haul. They’re not just doing it for ulterior motives.
Let’s talk about what do you look for when you hear a pitch. Do you fund producers who want to pitch an idea for a reality TV show?
On the production side of the company, we’ll invest in feature films in the $5 to $25 million budget range. We’re very much film maker driven and chase storytellers. We have a unique voice and a unique perspective across genres. On the scripted and unscripted TV side, we do a lot more development. We’ll take stories. We’ll take ideas. We work with writers to develop a concept and we’ll go out and will pitch that to the universe of buyers whether it’s your traditional guys like HBO or Netflix or non-traditional guys like YouTube brand or some of the new entries in this space. On the venture side, we purely look for companies. We invest in companies that have an existing team and existing products. From that perspective, it’s much less funding productions and much more capitalizing companies to go out and build a media brand for example that itself then create productions to grow its audience.
What are your thoughts on virtual reality and augmented reality as it relates to being impacting in the way we experience entertainment?
[Tweet “Be obsessed and focused on the customer experience.”]
It’s top of mind topic for a lot of investors in this space and even investors outside of the space.You see a lot of the big players up in the Bay Area are starting to spend their time on virtual and augmented reality. My perspective is it’s too early to tell. It sounds like a cop out but the way I see it when it comes to virtual reality in the entertainment space, there’s still some very real concerns that I have when it comes to the sheer ability of the experience, the distribution of devices and headsets that allow people to consume the content around the cost of creating the content, which is incredibly high today. From an investment perspective, the consumer VR space is still earlier than we’d like it to be. That said, there’s no question in my mind that that is a huge growth portion of the industry. We’ve already started to see virtual reality content being created on the gaming side and adopted on the gaming side very successfully. There’s no doubt in my mind that that’s going to happen as well when it comes to other forms of entertainment. There are just a few more things that need to fall into place before we can get excited about it from an investment perspective.
Is there a book that you would recommend people to read when they’re trying to become good storytellers or get their startup funded?
I am a big fan of founder stories or founder autobiographies or memoirs. One of the best books that I read when it came to getting a business off the ground and having the tenacity and the determination to not let yourself fail was Howard Schultz’s autobiography. Howard Schultz, the founder and CEO of Starbucks. He paints a very detailed and colorful picture about what it took him to basically get the funding for his first Starbucks store and the amount of rejection and the amount of resilience that he needed because no one believed in his idea. That’s a great inspiration. It tactically gives you a pretty good idea, a pretty good understanding of how to go to market and how to sell your vision.
Onward: How Starbucks Fought for Its Life without Losing Its Soul
The book is Onward. Is that the one you’re referring to?
That’s right. He wrote two books. It’s either Onward or the one or the one before that.
Any last thoughts you want to leave us with, Anton?
When it comes to pitching, the only thing I would say is that everything matters. What I mean by that is every interaction you have with the potential investor is a data point. Whether it’s showing up to the meeting on time, responsiveness to emails, all of these interactions creates a data bank in the investor’s mind. There are so few data points to go off of in early stage companies that we use all of these inputs as a way to make a decision. Be conscientious about that and present yourself in the best possible way even when you think you’re not “pitching” because everything counts.
I’m a big believer of that. I am so glad to hear you say that because people think, “I can just phone it in. Nobody cares about this detail.” They really do. Thanks so much for being on. You’re a great guest and I am excited to watch you and your career and all the things that your company does.
I appreciate you having me.
Links Mentioned
- 3311 Ventures
- Donut Media
- Goldman Sachs
- Stanford in Washington
- Dodd-Frank
- 3311 Productions
- Donut Media
- AwesomenessTV
- Premier Content
- Onward
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The Culture of Nice Makes Nice Guys Finish First with Doug Sandler
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Gratitude trumps suspicion all the time. Instead of looking for the things that your people are doing wrong, intentionally look for the things that they are doing right and acknowledge it so that trust is built. This is the reason Doug Sandler believes that nice guys finish first. The people inside the organization are more important than the products and services its sells, because being high tech may get you to places but going high touch with the entire team makes everyone see your vision. Doug shares more tips on building trust through a culture of nice and the moments that formed his life.
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Our guest is Doug Sandler, author of Nice Guys Finish First. He said in order to create a culture of nice, if you catch people doing something right and acknowledge it. He has something called a piggy bank moment. Find out what he means by that. Also, don’t compare your beginning to other people’s middle. You’ll never be happy. You need to celebrate your own progress. Another great tip is high-touch trumps high-tech every time, and he has a great story that shows what he means by that. His recipe for success or as he calls it new math, is that success is ability times effort, if either one is a zero, then your results are zero too. He also challenges us to not be normal and let go of worrying about making mistakes. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
The Culture of Nice Makes Nice Guys Finish First with Doug Sandler
Doug, welcome to the show.
It’s great to be here, John. Thank you for returning the favor. Episode 125 was the episode that you were on my show. Thanks for hanging out with me and building that relationship throughout the entire year, John.
That’s really what it’s all about, it’s building relationships. That’s your whole focus when you give a keynote; building better relationships create better business. Tell me your story of origin. How did you come up with the branding of Mr. Nice Guy before you wrote the book? What was it like to be the son of Dave Sandler?
I am the son of Dave Sandler. What’s interesting about what you say, John, imagine walking out of your door when you’re six years old. You’ve got your mom and you’re there and you’re carrying your little woobie, my blanket at the time. I can just remember my mom saying to me so many times, “Dougie, be nice,” as I walked out the door over and over and over again. For me, being nice wasn’t a matter of practice, it was a matter of principle. My mom had said that to me so many times as I was growing up that I was destined to be a nice guy growing up. Later on when my dad, Dave Sandler from Sandler Sales, created that entire sales system, I can recall all of the business principles that he threw in my direction, just as a part of being around him and him growing the system and building the system. The combination of the sales system that my dad created and the principles that my mom had laid out of, “Dougie, be nice,” those two things collided. That’s how I’ve led my entire career. No matter what I’ve done in my life, whatever career path that I’ve chosen, those principles, whether that be the sales system that my dad created or the nice philosophy that my mom instilled in my head, those things have all followed me everywhere I’ve gone.
The whole goal of The Successful Pitch Podcast is to give people little nuggets of how to craft a story that pulls people in. You did a great example. I’m going to break down what you probably did naturally. If you noticed what Doug said there he said, “Imagine being six years old and holding your blanket, and your mom saying, ‘Dougie, be nice.’” Instantly, we’re taken back. That’s great exposition. We know exactly where we are, we can see it, we can feel it. When you talk about your father’s structure combined with your mother’s framework of being nice, they collided. Words like that are dramatic and memorable. I can see why you’re such a great keynote speaker. The challenge is when you’re giving your pitch to get someone to join your team, to get a new client, whatever it is, you need to paint a picture just like Doug did. Thank you for letting me break that down a little bit.
You can always say in emails to somebody, “What an awesome, what a great, what a wonderful.” Those words are so overused. If you say something like, “It was unexpected or what an amazing pleasure it was, and it was a pleasure because of,” and then you list a word, “It brings me back to this time when I was,” it puts you right in the position of having people follow you back in that story. That’s always what I love to do, either when I’m doing a keynote or when I’m just having a conversation with somebody. It’s so much more enjoyable to have a story as a part of your lesson that you’re teaching.
Nice Guys Finish First: Nice Guys Finish First
Storytelling and specifics show you care enough to do your due diligence, your preparation before you get in front of somebody. That has been my key to success and it seems to be yours as well. What would you say was the catalyst for coming up with the book Nice Guys Finish First? It’s obviously a play on our phrase of, “Nice guys finish last.” You’ve flipped that paradigm on its ear. How did you come up with that?
In March of 2013, I was in an appointment that my financial planner that we had set up. He had said, “Just be on the lookout for this next opportunity that may find you.” It wasn’t until about six months later in August of that same year that I met another keynote speaker. His name is Ryan Estis. He was delivering a speech at National Association for Catering and Events conference. Literally, I was that guy that was sitting in the back of the room as he was delivering this speech. When he was done he said, “If you have any information or anything that you want me to know or you want to find out more about me, just come on up to the front of the room.” It must have been the way that I was running from the back of the room to the front of the room with my card hanging out in my hand, flying down the aisles and finally reaching him at the front. He said, “You’re not coming to ask me about my message. You’re probably going to ask me about how to be a keynote speaker, right?” I guess that is a typical approach of someone that comes with as much enthusiasm from the back of the room to the front of the room.
He said the first thing you need to do is hire a speaking coach. When I sat down with Jane through Skype probably about six or seven weeks later, she explained to me that the purpose of being a speaker was to get your message out to the world. The best way to do that would be to have a book. You not only need to have a book, but you need to have a bestselling book. She taught me the principles that I needed to know in order to put together a book. I hired a speaking coach. To make a long story even longer, I hired somebody else in the process of writing my books. She was a speaking coach, not a writing coach. I hired a guy to help me write my book. He said, “You need to write 200 pages in twenty weeks. It’s ten pages a week for twenty weeks. Later, we did it 165 pages and when it came down to editing it, the title came as a part of me being this nice guy consistently. Somebody always says eventually along the process of me either putting this book together or anything that I do is, “How can you consistently be so nice when you do everything that you do in the course of your day?” labeling me as Mr. Nice Guy. I just thought about what would be a good play on words for the title. “Nice guys finish last,” is the saying but I said, “That doesn’t have to be the case in business because I seem to always fall on the right side of things when it comes to business negotiations or sales calls.” I figured, “Nice guys finish first,” would be a nice play on words and then it was adopted.
What I take away from that is you invested in yourself. You’re coachable. Someone said you need to write a book. You hired someone to help you do that. You hired somebody to teach you how to be a great speaker. That whole concept of, “I’m going to be successful without getting people to help me,” is a total myth in my experience. I’ve also done the same thing. I feel that people who are willing to invest in themselves and hire experts to help them become a better version of themselves are the ones that ultimately make it and are willing to do that. As opposed to, “I don’t know if I have the money to spend on myself and learn this skill,” and then you don’t believe in what you’re doing.
It’s also a matter of you’ve got to find where you’re happy is. You have to get down to what is it that drives you and what is it that will make you happy in life? After so many years of a very successful entertainment business, I’m at the tail end of that entertainment career. From an age perspective, I’m in a world as a deejay. As a 47-year-old deejay five years ago, I was in a field that was dominated by twenty-somethings. There’s only so long that a club owner is going to respect you. A 50-something or a 60-something walking into a club is not going to have the same effect. Before my market quit on me, I figured, “Even if they never do, I want to look for an opportunity, something else that I could do in my life.” That’s exactly what it was. I found my happy. Part of my podcast, Episode 362, Mo Gawdat talks about this idea of finding your happiness. It’s such a true statement. You have to find and gravitate towards your happy factor and that is it for me.
Nice Guys Finish First: You have to find and gravitate towards your happy factor.
Nothing is sadder than someone who’s staying on the stage too long whether it’s an actress trying to play an ingénue that’s outgrown the role. We all have to keep evolving and changing. You talk about the culture of nice. Explain to people what that means.
It’s not just a project of the week. Nice is not something that you can say, “This week we’re decided that we’re going to be nice so let’s turn the corner.” You need to tell everybody what does that mean. To different people, it might mean different things. For me, part of it is doing something such simple stuff like catching somebody in the act of doing something right. We’re so focused as managers, we constantly are finding people doing the wrong thing or changing people’s behaviors. How about if we try to go about it and try to find people in the act of doing something right? If you show gratitude, show empathy, be a good conversationalist, be there to support other people, catch them in the act of doing something right. It’s not an action step that a lot of companies have in place. To create this culture of nice does start with the things like gratitude, catching him in the act of doing something right, building trust, building relationships, understanding communication. Those are the things that so many companies focus little on and focus more on the bottom line. If you focus on the people in your organization and not just the products and the services that you provide, you’ll find that your business will be much more successful.
I remember that book, The One Minute Manager, it was the first time I was introduced to the concept of catching somebody doing something right and acknowledging it, as opposed to assuming that they’re just doing the job. That shifts everything. Let’s talk a little bit about your philosophy about the test of trust, since you brought that up in terms of what a culture of nice includes is empathy and trust. What is the test of trust?
It’s a part of one of the training programs that I have. I’m happy to provide this. All they have to do is email me. It’s a very simple 25-question test or quiz that you can give yourself to find out what level of trust do people have in you and what are you throwing out there to the universe. If you’re throwing out to the universe that you’re not a trustworthy person, take this test and you score a B or less, then maybe you do need to work on some of the things in order to be a little bit more trustworthy. It’s not rocket science. It’s things like, “Do you return your calls quickly? Do you show up on time every time? Do you provide more than the value of the sale that you have made to your client? Do you go above and beyond?” If you can genuinely say yes to those, then you are doing a great job of providing trust and being trustworthy of the people in your life.
I resonate with the one that talks about, “I listen to what others have to say.” Do I trust myself to do that?
So many people are so focused on the thing that they’re going to say next that they forget to listen to the thing that’s being said to them right now. Being present as a part of your conversations and a part of your relationships is such a critical part of being trustworthy. It has everything to do and nothing to do with trust at the same time. It has everything to do with relationships.
Nice Guys Finish First: Being present as a part of your conversations and a part of your relationships is such a critical part of being trustworthy.
You have something called the piggy bank moment. Please describe what that is.
I was given this inspiration from my wife as she was moving out of an apartment before we got married a couple of years ago. She’s sitting in her apartment and she has this piggy bank that she’s carried with her since childhood. In the piggy bank was literally, for her at the time, every cent that she had. You open up the piggy bank and you count the money that’s in the piggy bank and she had $129. Financially, she was probably going through a struggling point in her life at that time. She said, “This is that moment. I’ve got this $129. I’m about to move out with my apartment. I’m about to move in with this guy who I love. This is what it comes down to. This is what life is all about.” I always tell people as we have conversations about the things that you’re most passionate about in life, what is that piggy bank moment? What is that moment that you can go back to in your life that you can say, “Things are going to be changed and things are going to be different starting right now?” Take an assessment of your life. Look at where your life is and move beyond where you are right now.
Even if she had $129 and that was all that she had, it was what she had. She did an assessment of her life. She looked at her life going backward and she looked at her life where she’s going forward from there. Take a snapshot of your life. What is that piggy bank moment at that exact time? You’ll see how drastically we think that things move at a creepy crawly pace in life. I look back to my life five years ago. I had no podcast. I had no book. I had no keynote speech. All of the new things that are in my life that have become my career, they did not exist five or six years ago. It’s so great to know that I had my piggy bank moment back then as well. It’s different than my wife’s but look what has happened since then. That’s the wonderful part about it.
It’s all about celebrating our progress as opposed to only saying, “I still don’t have this.” It is valuable to take a minute and say, “What did I accomplish this day, this week, this month?” Our brain craves progress. If we don’t acknowledge it, then we can spiral downward. One of the keys to staying nice and positive and focused is celebrating your own progress and then you can look for it in another people.
[Tweet “Don’t compare your beginning to other people’s middle.”]
One of the issues that we have as people though is we tend to compare our beginning to other people’s middles. We say, “I’m not there yet.” You look on Facebook and everybody’s doing better than you. You look on LinkedIn and Twitter and everybody is at these great vacation spots and they’re doing wonderful things with their business and they close these deals. The things they’re not putting in there are all of those many failures that they’ve had, which we all have but we tend to focus. I have a book on Amazon, Nice Guys Finish First, and I have 105 or 110 five-star reviews. I had one one-star review. Which is the one that I focus on? I focused on that one-star review. I’m like, “What the heck did I do to deserve a one-star review?” Not, “What did I do to garner those or to deserve the 105 five-star reviews?” We tend to focus on the negative things in our life. If we just compare ourselves only to where we were five years ago, you’ll see that you have made huge end roads. If you haven’t, it’s not too late. You start right now and you have your piggy bank moment now and you move forward. You look at all of the wonderful things that you’ve accomplished in the upcoming years as well.
It’s another way of saying focus on your own progress and you succeed. It’s a great example of how to do that which is wonderful. You have a whole page devoted to your website of quotes. I’ve picked a few of them. “High- touch trumps high-tech every time.” How did you come up with that? Do you have a story around that?
I’ve led my entire life that way. In my entertainment business as a deejay, everybody tends to focus on the equipment and 25,000 songs that they bring to their event and the wonderful speakers and all that. I just say, “I only need 60 songs to get your event but I have a year and a half in which to get there, so can we spend a little bit of time talking about what do you think? What’s your vision? What’s important to you? What do you think would be valuable to have at your party? What are the things that you see happening at your party?” I challenge all of my guys that I train in my entertainment world to not focus on such high-tech gadgetry, to focus on the relationship. That’s why I say, “High-touch trumps high-tech every time.”
[Tweet “High-touch trumps high-tech every time.”]
It’s that whole thing that people buy emotionally and then back it up with logic, not the features and benefits, and it’s great. We’ve all heard this concept of new math, kids learning a whole new way of division and all that other stuff that’s different. You have a new math formula for success. Tell us what that is. It’s ability times effort. If either is zero, you get no results.
You have to have the ability and you have to put forth the effort. If you rely upon your ability, then you’re not going to get there. If you rely upon just your effort but you have no ability, you’re not going to get there either. You need to at least show up on both of those. We all think in our mind we have to be the best at everything we do. We have to be the best at social media. We have to be the best keynote speaker. We have to be the best at being a husband or whatever it is. If just show up and you play the game, you’re going to get better. Understand that you’re probably going to be horrible at first, but if you are a zero, if you don’t even show up, you’re not even going to post. That’s my new math.
Now you have this other quote, “Why be normal when you can be WOWmal?”
Since I came up with that quote, I’ve seen that in other places. I thought I was the guy that created that, but I’ve seen that on many different places on social media as well. Maybe they have stolen it from me and they’re welcome to have it or I stole it from them, and if that’s the case, I beg forgiveness. We all can be normal in the process of our day. We can do the things that everybody else does. Why do that? Rock the boat a little bit. Be a little bit wow. Be out there. Be engaging. Be exciting. Be controversial. Ruffle some feathers a little bit of the way as you go through this, as you go through life. It does not make sense to be that normal guy. It makes more sense to be that WOWmal guy.
[Tweet “Why be normal when you can be WOWmal?”]
It makes you stand out and it makes you memorable and that’s the way to break through the clutter. That’s my big takeaway. One of the things you talked about in your book, Nice Guys Finish First, is the mistakes that nice guys should avoid. That intrigued me. Please tell us what those mistakes are that we should avoid if we want to be a nice guy.
There are a bunch of them. I have a little hand out, The Five Biggest Mistakes Made in Business Today. Taking one of them, it’s a failure to care. There are so often times that we are going through life and just go through the motions. Remember effort and ability, if either one of those equal zero, if you don’t show effort, if you don’t show ability, you’re not going to become successful. The failure to care is probably the granddaddy of them all because if what you’re doing in life is not making you happy, if you don’t have any level of passion in the things that you do and you don’t approach life with a, “I can do this attitude,” you’re going to end up with results that are less than stellar. Why would you want to go through life not happy and not caring about the things that you’re doing?
If you’re not happy, you may not realize this, but everybody around you knows you’re not happy. That’s what you’re spelling with your face, that’s what you’re spelling with your attitude and that’s what you’re spelling through your effort. It makes sense to drop back a little bit, do an assessment of where you are, have that piggy bank moment in your life, and determine what is going to be the next step for you to either fix what ills you and fix what the problem is or get out of the situation that you’re in and move on to something else. It is that simple. Some people might say, “I have bills to pay and I got to do this.” It is that simple. You must find something that you feel passionate about, that you love doing or you’re not going to be successful. It’s very challenging to be successful at something you don’t enjoy doing.
It’s so true because your why has to keep you going through the tough times and the challenges to pick yourself back up. Dough, it’s been such a pleasure and an honor to have you on The Successful Pitch. Is there a final thought you’d like to leave people with?
This was a little bit of a lesson that my dad led to me. My dad used to be in the potato chip and snack food business before he started the successful sales franchise business called Sandler Systems. He would drive around the trucks and he would go from store to store. Oftentimes, he would make no sales in the course of his day. One of the lessons that he taught me, which I learned to embrace is it is okay to fail. It’s not okay to quit but it’s okay to fail. If you failed at something, get back up and go for it. Figure out what the next step is, brush yourself off. It sounds so cliché, but the reality of it is just don’t quit. If you continue down the path that you are passionate about, you will be successful. If there are any words that can be left in someone’s mind at the end of this episode, it would be it’s okay to fail.
DougSandler.com is full of great information. Your book is on Amazon. How else can people follow you on social media? Do you want to give out your email for people to email you to get these great mistakes to avoid?
If somebody wants either The Five Biggest Mistakes or any number of different programs that I have, or if you want a little one-sheet on some of the stuff that I do, [email protected]. If you want to go to my website, hit the contact page. If you sign up for any of the newsletters that are on there, those things automatically will be generated and be sent to you. That might be the best way to go.
Thanks, Doug.
My pleasure, John. Thanks for having me on the show.
Links Mentioned
- Nice Guys Finish First
- Doug Sandler
- Episode 125 with John Livesay
- Ryan Estis
- Episode 362 with Mo Gawdat
- The One Minute Manager
- Nice Guys Finish First on Amazon
- Quotes
- The Five Biggest Mistakes Made in Business Today
- Sandler Systems
- DougSandler.com
- [email protected]
- Contact page
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