Backable With Suneel Gupta
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Whenever you’re faced with what looks like a massive failure, you can either be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand or be a peacock and say, “I’m owning this.” That is what Suneel Gupta, the founder of RISE and author of Backable, learned from his experience. Imagine spending your whole career trying to paint a picture of success, only to become a poster child for failure. That is exactly what happened to Suneel as he tried and failed to pitch his idea of a one-on-one nutrition coaching platform to one naysaying investor after another. Put that on top of halted startups, canceled projects, missed promotions, and missed opportunities and you’ve got the perfect person for The New York Times to label as “The Face of Failure.” How does one get back up from that? You’ll be surprised how deceptively simple the answer is. Join in as he shares some of it with John Livesay.
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Listen to the podcast here
Backable With Suneel Gupta
Our guest on the show is Suneel Gupta, the author of Backable. He says that when we focus on seven qualities, anybody can learn to be backable. We go over some of them so you can learn how to be backable. The concept of embracing something negative is an interesting way to look at something and your power to reframe something. Most importantly he said, “It’s not charisma that convinces people, it’s conviction.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Suneel Gupta, who is the Founder of RISE, and is on faculty at Harvard University. Using the seven steps inside this book, Suneel went from being the face of failure for The New York Times to being the “New Face of Innovation” for the New York Stock Exchange. His ideas have been backed by firms like Greylock and Google Ventures. He has invested in startups including Airbnb, Calm and SpaceX. He also serves as an emissary for Gross National Happiness between the United States and the Kingdom of Bhutan. Welcome to the show, Suneel.
It’s nice to be here, John. Thanks for having me.
I’d love to hear a little bit more about your own story of origin. You could go back to childhood or school. It’s always interesting to see what got you to where you are now.
Why don’t we pick a moment that always stands out to me? It is the basis for this book that came out called Backable. The moment was in 2004. I am working as a junior-level speechwriter for the Democratic National Committee. I’m at the 2004 convention, which was being held in Boston that year. I’m backstage. The convention draws the who’s who crowd to be there and give speeches. Backstage, there are the Clintons, the Gores, the Liebermans, the standard faces of the Democratic Party. There was one face that I did not recognize and that was Barack Obama. I didn’t know who he was. A lot of people didn’t know who he was. While he gave his speech that night, that changed his career and I would argue changed the world. I got to watch that speech from backstage.
It was interesting because while it seemed like the world was watching Barack Obama, I got to watch the world. What I saw was this tidal wave of energy just ripped through the stadium. I became one of the millions of young people that night who became interested in his story. I started to dig deep into, “What is this guy all about?” What I realized surprised me. Four years earlier, he had run for Congress, not for Senate, not for president. He had run for Congress and he had lost. He had lost by a big margin. What surprised me more, John, was the way that he was received during that campaign. People described him as boring, stilted and professorial. There was a guy named Ted McClellan, who was a journalist who covered the campaign. He said, “Barack Obama is so dry that he sucks all the air out of the room.” Four years later, in 2004, he is this bastion of hope, inspiration and charisma.
The reason that story stands out for me, not only for my career in the way that I view the world but also this book that I wrote is because it turned me on to the power and possibility of human transformation. We can always change and reinvent ourselves. I have become obsessed and fascinated by how people do that. What happened in those four years between 2000 and 2004 for Barack Obama? What happens when we take the stories of all of the people that we admire who we now are looking at the chapters 14, 15, 16 in their story? If we go back to chapter one, what does that look like? Where did that begin? How do they evolve over time? That’s what makes me tick.
[bctt tweet=”Being #backable is not just for celebrities and CEOs. It’s something that all of us can learn.” username=”John_Livesay”]
In your own story, you were called out by The New York Times, “The Face of Failure.” You weren’t the only one. You and Barack share that similar history of being called something that’s not exactly positive and something that most people would say, “You’re never going to recover from that label.” The face of failure, in this case or in Barack’s case, sucking the air out of the room or the opposite of charisma. What’s the story? What happened? What did you do that caused The New York times to say that?
I was an entrepreneur at the time. I was pitching every investor I could find on this idea called RISE, which was one-on-one nutrition coaching right over your mobile phone. I was passionate about the idea and felt like it should exist. I could not get any investors to say yes. I also had a checkered past in terms of success and failure. I’d been part of a couple of startups that didn’t go anywhere. I’d been on the other side of canceled projects, missed promotions and missed opportunities. One day, I got a phone call from the organizer of a conference called FailCon, which stands for Failure Conference. She said to me, “You have been nominated twice to be a speaker at this conference.”
John, it’s a humbling experience when somebody calls and says, “I’m running a conference on failure. We would love for you to be the keynote speaker.” The reason I accepted that is because I thought, “Maybe there might be some investors in the audience, people who I can get on board with this new idea.” It turned out there wasn’t but there was a reporter in the audience from The New York Times. Fast forward to sitting in my apartment one day in San Francisco, my wife turned to the newspaper. There was a full-length feature story on failure with my story as the photo up top. That article went viral. It went viral to the point where for months you could have Googled just the word failure and you would have seen my face as one of your top search results.
That’s some SEO challenge in there.
I bet it’s still there. It’s still probably on page 1 or 2. When something like that happens, you have a couple of choices. One is you can pretend that it doesn’t exist and move in any direction. The other is you can embrace it. I had spent my whole career trying to paint this picture of success. Now, I’m the poster child of failure. I decided, “What would it look like to embrace that a little bit?” The way that I thought about there were all these people that I was trying to get coffee with and get advice from. I was cold calling them. I was reaching out to them the same way that anybody else would. “I’m living here in San Francisco trying to break through into tech and entrepreneurship. Would you grab a coffee with me?” Most people would say no or disregard the email. Now, I changed my approach. I sent them the article and I would say, “As you can see from this New York Times article, I have no idea what I’m doing. Would you be willing to spend a few minutes grabbing advice?” People loved it.
One bullet breaks through the clutter. It’s self-deprecating and clever. It’s the fact that The New York Times covered it, not just you saying it. It works on so many levels. You could be an ostrich and bury your head in the sand or you could be the peacock and say, “I’m owning this.” This story continues to get better. After all those noes and getting labeled that, you did get some funding. It was eventually acquired by One Medical. The full circle to your opening story about Barack is, in 2016, Michelle Obama partnered with RISE to bring this coaching to low-income communities. Nobody could have predicted the outcome of the story. I love that story. When a story has a twist like this, it is fascinating to hear. We all have the hero’s journey of like, “He’s down or she’s never going to recover from this.” Recovering might have been, “We finally got some funding.” It probably went beyond your wildest dreams when you started it, to get the first lady involved with it.
Backable: The Surprising Truth Behind What Makes People Take a Chance on You
John, you and I both love Joseph Campbell. We both love the hero’s journey. We know that one of the components of the hero’s journey is like, “Along the way, there’s an insight, learning, something that changes your worldview.” For me, through these conversations that I started to have, creativity and persuasion are two different things. Oftentimes, we think about them as one. We all know that you can have a great idea, be a great candidate for a job, have a beautiful product and still be dismissed. We see it happen all the time. That’s what I was feeling. Many of us have felt that way.
One of the stories that always pops for me especially is the story of Alexander Fleming, who came up with penicillin. Penicillin, to date, has saved nearly 200 million lives, yet it took him ten years to get people to buy into it. He got dismissed over and over again. Brilliant, game-changing ideas aren’t always met with a room of people who are going to support them. All of that got me interested in this idea of backable people. These are people who tend to be able to go into a room whether that be an interview, an audition or a pitch and they tend to shine. The trick of it is that, oftentimes, it’s when they aren’t the obvious choice. When they don’t have a fully baked product, we still feel like we want to take a chance on them. I wanted to understand like, “What is that quality? Can it be learned?”
Following up on this New York Times article, I started to have these conversations with people and said, “Let me have more and more.” Eventually, I found myself having hundreds of conversations with backable people from all walks of life including Oscar-winning filmmakers, Michelin Star chefs, military leaders, founders of iconic companies and fast-rising community initiatives. What I found was that being backable is not just for celebrities and CEOs, it’s for all of us. Being backable is not something that you’re born with but it very much is something that you can learn.
Let’s take a pause there. You’re being very humble. I’m going to shout-out. You have this book that has reviews from Reid Hoffman, the Cofounder of LinkedIn and Brian Grazer, one of my all-time favorite Oscar-winning producers of amazing movies. You’ve been able to not only have your own insights on what makes someone backable but figure out a way to grow your network and get out in front of people who are clearly backable and believe in what you’re doing. It’s a one-two punch there that gives it so much credibility much like The New York Times. One extreme to the other that social proof that gets transferred is what you’re demonstrating here in a big way that helps a lot of investors. You’ve invested in some successful companies yourself. I’m sure there are some things you look for in a founder that would be helpful to share that other people saw in you. The basic question is, as an investor, what makes a founder backable besides the idea?
The book outlines these seven qualities. We should talk about them. One of the things that I tried with this book, part of the reason that it’s doing well and a number-one new release is it talks about the stories and the substance but we get into the techniques. I personally love it when you can break it down for me and give me some specific techniques that I can use to bring it into my life immediately. Let’s start talking about some of these qualities. One of the first ones in the book came to me as a surprise. When I first started studying backable people, I thought that I was going to find a certain pattern of communication. I thought that backable people generally were going to end up being gifted speakers. They were going to make use of eye contact, hand gestures and pacing. I did not find that to be the case.
You certainly had backable people who are gifted speakers. It can be very Dale Carnegie-esque or Toastmasters-esque. There are plenty out there that are not. They’re shy, quiet and introverted. They’re not what we think of when we think of charisma. If you want an example of that, take a look at the most popular TED Talk of all time. What you’ll find is a brilliant talk being given by a guy named Sir Ken Robinson. It’s got over 65 million views. Amazing talk but not what you might expect. It’s a very un-TED-like talk. He’s got one hand in his pocket. He naturally walks with a bit of a slouch. He meanders on and off script, yet it was very well-received. What I found is that it’s not charisma that convinces people, it’s conviction.
[bctt tweet=”It’s not charisma that convinces people. It’s conviction.” username=”John_Livesay”]
There we go. There’s a tweet if I ever heard one. Plus, I love the fact that it’s got all those great alliterations. “It’s not charisma that convinces people, it’s conviction.” That’s a great line.
Backable people take the time to convince themselves first. They let that conviction shine through, whatever style it is that feels most natural to them.
Going back a little bit to your own story of origin, you have a relatively famous brother. I’m guessing that there’s a story there of what your parents taught you both. Why don’t you do the big reveal of who your brother is? It’s this concept of environment versus genetics. What causes certain families to produce such high achievers that are not just backable but impactful in the world? I wanted to ask, was there any sibling rivalry? Tell us a little bit about that experience with your brother and who he is.
It’s impossible for me to talk about my family without talking about my mom first. My mom was born and raised in a refugee camp on the border of Pakistan and India. She decided that somehow, she was going to become an engineer with Ford Motor Company. Her parents got behind the vision and dream. She got on a boat to the United States, ended up getting a scholarship at Oklahoma State University, drove to Detroit the day after graduation and went into the interview. When she got into the interview, the hiring manager said, “I’m sorry. We don’t have any female engineers here.” She, at that moment, was deflated. She picked up her resume and purse. She started to walk out of the room. In this last-ditch moment, she turned around and told this hiring manager her story of all the struggles that it had taken to get to this country, to get to Detroit, to get to this room. This guy was so moved by her story that he ended up taking a chance on her. She became Ford Motor Company’s first-ever female engineer. That was in 1967.
That’s the genesis story in a lot of ways for our family. I will talk about my brother here in a moment. We were raised with the refugee mentality even though we grew up in a very different environment than my mom. We had all the stuff that she didn’t have. We grew up in a safe, almost boring suburban Michigan. There’s still this refugee mindset of impermanence and possibility combined. It cuts both ways. With impermanence, you almost feel sometimes that things can be taken from you. You almost have an appreciation sometimes for what you have because you realize it could be gone. There’s the possibility. The possibility is there are no boundaries. Your past doesn’t necessarily determine your future. That’s what we learned simply from her story. She didn’t have to tell us that. It was who we were.
For my brother, he went to medical school and became a practicing surgeon in suburban Michigan. He realized he liked his job but he felt like there was more. He felt like he could be doing more of the type of work that he wanted to be doing. Naturally, he’s a gifted storyteller. He wanted to be telling the stories of patients. I remember I was in college at the time. I came home and he was home as well. We were with my parents. He was like, “I think I’d like to be on television. I’d like to start reporting on healthcare and patients’ stories.” I remember my mom was like, “Go do it. Figure out a way to make it happen. There’s no time like the present.”
Backable: When failure happens, you have two choices. The first one is to pretend that it doesn’t exist. The other one is to embrace it.
My brother, very similar to my mom’s improbable story, somehow gets himself in a room with the powers that be at CNN. This was in the year 2001. He has no Journalism and on-air experience but made himself backable in that moment. There are a lot of the techniques in the book that we talked about that he brought to that moment naturally. One of which is that he talked about his central character. He talked about the patient. Even though he didn’t have the on-air experience, his argument was, “I spend day in and day out with these patients. I understand them at a level that I may not be able to understand them if I wasn’t practicing day in and day out. These are the stories that I want to tell. These are the people I want to connect with.” It worked. They gave him a shot just like a hiring manager gave my mom a shot. That’s how Dr. Sanjay Gupta was at CNN.
One of the things that you talked about in the book, Backable, is this ability to put ourselves in a story that makes it memorable. You are singing from my song book. When people are pitching themselves to get a job, as your brother and mom did, pitching people to hire them, to buy their course and as speakers we have to pitch ourselves. If you can’t say something that makes you memorable during that interview and you’re just pushing out facts and figures or the details of your resume, “I’m a doctor. I went here,” and you don’t have a story to go, what I often do is I’ll tell a story of what happened at a recent speaking event and how that transformed the audience and made the people who hired me looked like heroes, all of those things and the feelings that get associated with it.
Stories are the emotional glue. We’re wired for stories. Few people understand that. You are supporting this so much that these personal anecdotes are what make us memorable. If you put yourself in the shoes of a hiring manager, an investor and the number of pitches that you hear in a year, there’s got to be somebody who says something to you that makes that memorable so that you can tell other people. That’s what people don’t realize. When someone like you, your brother or your mom tells a story or anybody who reads this book, Backable, learns is, “Once I have a story that makes me memorable, it’s not just that person who can remember it. They remember my story and tell other people.” That’s when it starts to grow viral or whatever else you might need it to do for those meetings when people are thinking, “Should we hire Suneel or someone else? Should we hire John or someone else? Did anybody tell us a story that we can tell other people of why we want to pick this person over another person?”
It’s such a good point, John. We’re not anymore pitching people. Hardly ever are we pitching the people who are going to be the only decision-makers. Typically, they’re going to have to sell their partners, other people, their boards, even their teams, on the decision they’re making. We’re not just looking for backers. We’re looking for advocates. Salman Rushdie has this great quote, “Most of what matters in our life takes place in our absence.” We don’t know what these conversations are like when we’re not there. We are trying to have people who are as passionate about what we’re trying to do with our own careers and ideas as we are. I do think stories are such a big part of that.
I remember pitching to Tim Ferriss on my company, RISE. I thought Tim was the perfect investor. When I was doing this one-on-one nutrition coaching right over your mobile phone, he had just written a book called The 4-Hour Body. He was starting to invest in companies. I thought it was the perfect fit. It turned out, he ended up passing on the idea. Along the way, he gave me some feedback that I will never forget. When I pitched to him, if you would have looked at that pitch, I spent the vast majority of my time talking about the market. I talked about the rising rates of diabetes, hypertension, obesity and how many people were out there spending money on trying to get into better physical health.
At the very end of the presentation, I told the story of my father. When he was in his 40s, he had an emergency triple bypass surgery. I still remember going to the hospital, I was about ten years old. I remember going to the hospital and felt like I had seen my father aged 25 years overnight. When we were leaving the hospital, they gave us a piece of paper. That piece of paper said things like, “Eat broccoli. Eat Brussels sprouts.” We were an Indian family. We didn’t eat broccoli and Brussels sprouts. There was nothing on that paper about chicken tikka masala. We struggled to make this diet that we were supposed to have now work. We struggled to make it fit for us. It wasn’t until insurance helped us pay for some time for a nutritionist that we were able to customize our lifestyle into something that worked. I believe that’s the reason that my father lived through that experience. He’s still alive now.
[bctt tweet=”The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I told Tim Ferriss that story. His feedback to me was like, “Why the hell are you leaving that story to the very end? Tell that story upfront.” My response to him was like, “It’s an Indian story. It’s an Indian thing.” He said, “No. It makes it even more important that you tell that story upfront even if the people who are sitting on the other side of the table from you look different than that. Even if they didn’t eat chicken tikka masala, it’s important. What you’re doing especially when you get into the details, is you’re helping them see themselves through the eyes of your central character, the one person that you’re trying to serve with this idea. If they can see themselves through the eyes of that central character, that’s when you hook them emotionally and then you talk about the numbers and the market. It’s the story that brings us in. It’s the substance that keeps us there.”
It brings us in and the substance keeps us paying attention but you can’t open with the substance. You did a beautiful job describing 5 of the 7 parts of what makes somebody backable. It’s drawing people into the story that makes them feel like insiders. I did this with Olympus Medical. I was saying to them, “What are you saying to doctors to get them to buy this equipment?” They said, “This equipment makes your surgeries go 30% faster. Do you want one?” I was like, “There’s no story there. That’s a left-brain analytical data like the market size.”
The story I helped them craft was, “Imagine how happy Dr. Higgins was six months ago using our equipment. He could go out to the patient’s family in the waiting room an hour earlier than expected. If you’ve ever waited for someone you love to come out of surgery, you know every minute feels like an hour. He came out, put them out of their waiting misery and said, ‘Good news. The scans showed they don’t have cancer. They’re going to be fine.’ He turned to the rep and says, ‘That’s why I became a doctor, for moments like this.’ That rep told that story to another doctor who sees themselves in the story and says, ‘That’s why I became a doctor too. I want your equipment.'”
That is your dad’s story with getting out of the hospital. By adding those little elements like, “If you’ve ever waited in the hospital for someone you love to come out of surgery, you know every minute,” that’s what pulls people in. Even if they haven’t had that experience, they probably know someone who has or they can certainly imagine how painful that would be. Those are the details that make me love your books so much. I have rarely seen anybody else talk about how to tell stories that are memorable. I say, “Tug at the heartstrings to get people to open the purse strings,” is what you’re showing us together.
I could talk to you forever. We’re only going to talk about a few things enough. Hopefully, it incentivizes people to run, not walk, to the nearest way to get a book. The last question I have for you is this beautiful cover, gold and blue, the gold egg. We all know there’s a story there about the goose that laid the golden eggs. I know, as an author, how much work goes into a book cover. What’s the story behind the book cover?
I’m glad you asked because I don’t get to talk about this enough. The book cover went through a few iterations. I worked with a great publisher. Little, Brown has been fantastic. I will say that when they sent me their first vision for the book cover, it was not something that I gravitated towards. It was the Facebook like thumbs. It was a cover full of thumbs where all of them were thumbs down but one of them was thumbs up. Same metaphor, it was like, “How do you get the thumbs up?” What I didn’t like about it was it felt overtly negative. It was almost littered with negativity.
Backable: Backable people take the time to convince themselves first. They let that conviction shine through, whatever style it is that feels most natural to them.
The other thing was it was very techy. I initially started writing this book because I felt like I was coming from the point of view of somebody who worked as an entrepreneur. I worked in tech. What I realized was like, “There’s not a single person out there who isn’t trying to make themselves backable in some way. You don’t have to be working as an entrepreneur. You don’t have to be working in tech.” It’s a human problem that we’re dealing with, which is unused creativity. We don’t sometimes know how to take these ideas that are inside us and get other people as excited about it as we are. That’s a human problem, not a tech problem. It’s not necessarily even an entrepreneurial problem.
I wanted to take this metaphor and do other iterations. It was interesting, John. I don’t know what your experience was like. With me, there was a push-pull that you have. We were very collaborative about it. I was super grateful to them for being that way. It reminded me a lot of one of the techniques that you talked about, which is flipping outsiders to insiders. One of my favorite stories from the book is it takes us back to the 1940s where Betty Crocker has introduced instant cake mix to the market. They were excited about this instant cake mix. All you have to do is pour water into a mix, pop it into an oven, and voila, you get this tasty treat. Who wouldn’t want that?
They were surprised when they find out that instant cake mix was not selling. Sales were terrible. They were trying to figure out why. They hired this psychologist named Ernest Dichter to go out into the field and start talking to homes across the country. What Dichter found when he came back with was fascinating. He said, “I think you’ve made the process of making a cake too easy and too simple. You removed the customer from the creative process so much so that when a cake comes out of the oven, they don’t feel any ownership of it.” His recommendation was, “Why don’t you remove one ingredient and see what happens?” They did. They removed the egg. Now, as a customer, you have to crack and mix in your own fresh egg. Sales skyrocketed. Now, when the cake comes out of the oven, customers felt like they were a part of it.
I think that comes back to this idea of we’ve been told that creativity and innovation is a two-step formula. You come up with a great idea and you execute on it well. I think there’s a hidden step in-between. That hidden step is where we flip outsiders into insiders so they feel like it’s their idea as well. In that way, when we show up to the execution, we show up together. These can be early employees, early investors, early colleagues who decided to take a leap of faith in your idea. You can trace every successful project, every successful organization, nonprofit company, political movement back to this hidden step.
There are many wonderful takeaways. Flipping outsiders into insiders. It’s not charisma that convinces, it’s conviction. This whole premise that the stories bring us in but it’s the substance that keeps us involved. The book is called Backable. The website to go read about the book and buy the book is Backable.com. Any last comments or ways that you want people to follow you and read about the book?
Go to Backable.com. I’ll leave you with one thought. I have two daughters, an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old. We do this little game every morning. I ask both of them, “What is the meaning of life?” They say, “To find your gift.” I said, “What is the purpose of life?” They say, “To give it away.” The meaning of life is to find your gift. The purpose of life is to give it away. I wrote this book, Backable, so that we can learn how to give our gift away. Thank you, John. I appreciate you having me on.
Thank you, Suneel. What a gift you are to the world. I’m sure you’re a great dad. I can’t wait for all kinds of people to benefit from learning these learnable insights on letting us all become a little bit more backable than we were before we got to read your wonderful book.
Thank you.
Important Links
- RISE
- Sir Ken Robinson
- The 4-Hour Body
- http://backable.com/
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Discovering Your Inner Purpose With Dr. Benjamin Ritter
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
With so many things happening around us, we tend to lose focus on why we are doing something or what we can really gain out of it. But by understanding our inner purpose in life, we can get a better grasp of our reality. In this episode, John Livesay sits down with speaker, author, and the Founder of Live For Yourself Consulting, Dr. Benjamin Ritter, as he shares how he changed the course of his career from being a government employee to a full-time coaching professional by discovering what he really loves to do and where his strengths lie. Dr. Ben also delves into his Three C’s of Leadership and explains how every workplace should have the ability to redesign itself according to the tide of times – even a global pandemic.
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Listen to the podcast here
Discovering Your Inner Purpose With Dr. Benjamin Ritter
Our guest on the show is Dr. Benjamin Ritter who runs a consulting business called Live For Yourself. He helps people who are unhappy in their careers get unstuck. We talk about that we don’t have to be attached to the path that we are on. Finally, we also talk about that you, as a leader, have to work on clarity, confidence and control. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Dr. Benjamin Ritter who is a leadership, career and empowerment coach. He is a national speaker, podcaster, author, mentor and he’s passionate about guiding others in finding and creating a sustaining career they love. With many years of experience coaching and a background in organizational leadership and adult learning theory, he understands how to navigate any career path you decide you want to travel. Since launching his coaching practice, he’s guided hundreds of professionals towards creating the career they love and impacted thousands through his events and media content.
From empowering young professionals to take accountability and feel empowered over their own job level with satisfaction to guiding senior leadership on how to stand out from the competition, develop executive and discover meaningful work. Ben is an expert in his field and guides people towards truly living for yourself at work and in life. I get to call you Ben because we’re friends as opposed to Dr. Benjamin. Welcome to the show.
Please call me Ben. You can call me Neb sometimes. For some reason, people want to turn my name around.
You and I are relatively new to living in Austin and that’s part of the joy is getting to meet people. We both are also from Chicago. It’s been fun to look at the similarities and our passion for helping people in different ways. Would you mind taking us back to your own story of origin? You can talk about childhood or school and where you got this premise of, “I’m going to live for myself.” I don’t think that’s normally a concept that we think about. I’m sure there’s a great story of origin there.
[bctt tweet=”Being clear with what we can and what we love to do is the first step in discovering our inner purpose.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I never thought I’d be a coach. I still don’t think I’ll be a coach, even though I’m a coach. At every single major turning point and milestone in my life, especially the ones where I felt lost, stuck, underutilized and questioning things, having those existential moments that we all tend to have, coaching popped up. The first time it ever happened, I was training to become a professional athlete in college and I didn’t make it. There were many things that happened to that.
I had my major canceled in college. I had hip surgery when I thought I was going to go abroad and play. I went abroad to play and got told that if I stay there, then I might have a chance, but I only had a semester left in school. There were many different rough points in that separate story. I lacked confidence there. When you set yourself up to achieve something outside of yourself, all you do is focus on achieving it. You hold yourself accountable to that and you define who you are by that, and then you don’t achieve it. Along the way too, you struggle to achieve it. You experienced some tough internal dialogues.
When I finally realized that I wasn’t going to make it, when I realized that I had to make the decision to make this my main priority or take away this priority for my life, I had to figure out how to redefine who I was. Luckily, we had the internet then. It wasn’t still that prominent, but I went online and searched something along the lines of, how to be confident, how to find yourself, what is the meaning of life? All of these keywords that you think you might type if you’re questioning life and searching for them on the internet, which is an interesting strategy, which I don’t think is as interesting nowadays.
What came up was this field of personal professional development. What came up were articles upon articles and books upon books on how to become more attractive, how to become more confident, how to become successful in business. It was never, “This is the meaning of life.” You’re probably more likely to find books like that nowadays than you were back in 2005. In my search engine results, that didn’t pop up. I spent the next 4 or 5 years studying that industry, studying all the material I could find, and not just studying it though, but going out and applying it.
Inner Purpose: Without clarity, you don’t have confidence, so you don’t know what the next step is.
As I mentioned, confidence was a big issue of mine. All of the material that you find on confidence as it relates to men is mainly focused on attraction, dating and being social. I would go out by myself to bars. I would walk up to strangers on the street. I would do things to make myself extremely uncomfortable to ensure that I never felt those things were uncomfortable. I probably lend a lot of those experiences to my stage presence, my ability to walk into a room, to my networking capabilities nowadays. That was the first little pinpoint in my life where coaching became influential and became something important to me.
If you fast forward a little bit, coaching came back when I got out of grad school. I couldn’t get a full-time job for about two and a half years because of the recession. I wanted to work in the federal government and public health policy at that time. I was doing some work for the Illinois Department of Public Health. I thought I was going to keep doing work for the Illinois Department of Public Health after grad school but the world had a different story. It had something else planned for me. I got a job offer from the Illinois Department of Public Health, from the CDC, and from two other health departments, but they were all canceled after I signed them.
It was almost like clockwork into the next day or within three days, they were pulled back due to funding. That was a two and half-year period of time where I was getting a job and then not getting a job. I made it work. I bartended and then interestingly enough, I was out by myself one day being social, because this is a habit that I kept. Someone approached me and said, I know what you’re doing. You need to meet my boss. The next day, I ended up getting hired to run a nationwide bootcamp program for men in relationship to interpersonal dynamics. For the next year, I was leading men on bootcamps in how to be more social, how to be more attractive, and how to have more confidence. At the same time, I ended up getting federal funding for six months of free life coaching for public health professionals. This is hilarious because there was no funding for a job. It was a grant that I applied for through networking, through going off on my own and meeting people.
Coaching again came up. I never thought about it as a full-time job. It was always a way for me to make some side money. It was a way to develop because after working for this guy, I ended up seeing an opportunity starting my own business. I started my own coaching practice but again, as a side hustle, there was demand to make some money. Fast forward another 6 or 7 years, I’m working in healthcare which I got that job because of the networking and meeting someone across the bar. I get selected to become an executive in my system. Because of that, I get the opportunity to receive sixteen months of leadership training from our Director of People who was a coach, who then becomes my coach. All of a sudden, I realized, “This could be a job. I could do this for a living.” I’m sitting here going into work on a daily basis feeling stuck, underutilized and feeling like, “This isn’t the place that I belong.”
[bctt tweet=”Are you truly living for yourself in a way that is positive and proactive towards what you care about and what puts you front and center?” username=”John_Livesay”]
Every job I’ve had up to that point was a reaction to the environment that something I needed to do because I needed to put money in the bank. I needed to create a career journey for myself. I finally felt empowered at that point in time to ask myself, “What is it that I want to do? What are my strengths?” I now have control. I have the ability to live for myself at this very instant. I don’t have to be held in handcuffs to the economy or to what people think I’m able to do or not able to do. I went and asked my coach, “How do I do what you do? How do I do this?” We came up with a little bit of a plan. I went back to my boss. I asked her to be involved in the talent development space. She said, “You can do this. Talk to the department. Get involved in projects.” I had a lot of energy for the first time in probably six years at this job. I felt like I was going to do something that I wanted to do, and then we got acquired. Everything I was going to do stopped.
I’m proactive and action-oriented, so plan B is I’m going to find a job in this field. All of them were about half my salary because I had no resume experience in this other than my side coaching business coaching men. That doesn’t make a resume seem lofty. I don’t have a lot of expertise in talent development and coaching individuals from my side business, at least not on my resume. I’ve been running this coaching practice for 5 or 6 years. I have experience doing this. I know I’m good at it because I got hired to do this in the past and I have a lot of media attention for it. I was writing for AskMen and Men’s Health at that time. I was getting interviewed on a live stream Facebook show with 100,000 or 200,000 people. I can prove it. I was in the Apollo Theater in Chicago as a panelist for The Great Love Debate.
There was stuff that was like, “You’re good at this,” but it wasn’t the industry I wanted to do it in. I’m like, “I’ll take all this knowledge and I’ll start my own business again. I know how to do this, but I’m going to do it in an industry that I’m passionate about, that I care about.” This is always a theme in my business development stages. How do I get seen as someone credible with no experience here? How do I sell myself to individuals? I’m like, “I know how to get media attention, but I’m still 30 and I want to work with executives. How does that work? I want to work with managers. I want to go into organizations. How are they going to believe me? I’m going to get my doctorate. I’m going to get the golden key to open up the door to at least get people to listen to me.” That led to me getting published in this field because I got to do some research in it and I got to speak on it. It did skyrocket my business. It probably sped up the timeline for more than a few years in terms of becoming successful. That’s what I’ve been doing for the past few years.
That’s not an easy feat getting your PhD, but that gives you the credibility. A lot of people write a book to try and get that credibility, but the PhD is at a whole other level of commitment and time. What I hear as a consistent theme is a lot of resilience going on. This awakening that you were stuck in something that you didn’t love and there are many people out there that feel that same way and because you’ve been in their shoes, you know what it feels like. The irony of you can change jobs, but you still have similar challenges if you’re not doing what you love. Would that be a fair assessment?
Inner Purpose: Your purpose isn’t bigger than you because you create your purpose.
Taking what was way too long of a story. I’m distilling it down and saying that I’ve been stuck. I’ve been underutilized. I’ve been overworked and I’ve made decisions for my career that weren’t based on what I wanted and mutually living for myself. They were based on what I thought I needed to do at that time. Instead, I hit a point in my life where I wanted to change that. I dove into what I cared about, what challenges I wanted to face. I plotted the course and I went to take action.
The good news is not everybody has to get a PhD like you did to have credibility and find their dream job or your consulting firm is Live for Yourself, LFY. You have something in there that I wanted to double click on which is The Three Cs of Leadership. This applies whether we’re leading other people or leading ourselves into a career we love. Can you talk a little bit about what those three Cs are?
It was working with clients and I had the Live Framework, which is a decision-making tool to live a much more aligned life for yourself. I was noticing that through working with clients, we were developing core traits within themselves like these pillars. I identify those pillars as the three Cs of self-leadership: clarity, confidence and control. If you have these, you’re able to lead yourself. You’re able to take action towards what you truly care about. Often, when I first start working with clients, they have this pain and they have this desire for change, but they don’t truly know what they stand for, what they care about, and how they’re going to get there. Because they don’t know that, they don’t have confidence in themselves. If you don’t have confidence in yourself, you’re never going to take action. If you get clarity and confidence, all of a sudden, you can prioritize that in your life. You can have control over your life.
I have not heard anybody phrase it like that. Without clarity, you don’t have confidence so you don’t know what the next step is. They build on each other. It’s not like you work on three things simultaneously necessarily. It seems to me like you do one, you get clear, which gives you the confidence to then have the ability to control. That concept of control from your perspective now, having felt like you’re not in control. All of us are experiencing what it’s like to not be in control when a pandemic comes. Let’s say we have some clarity, we worked on our confidence, and then all these other outside things, whether a funding going away or a pandemic. How do you advise people to get a sense of control when there are many things going on outside of their control?
[bctt tweet=”To gain full control of our lives, we first need to figure out why we are doing something and if we really love doing it.” username=”John_Livesay”]
First, if we start with clarity and confidence at least at any given point in time, we know what we stand for. We know what’s important to us. If we have that and outside of us, we’re not able to go along the path that we set ourselves to go on due to a global pandemic or shutdown, anything that can happen because we don’t have control over the external world, we then can reflect and say, “I still want to live these values. This plan doesn’t work anymore,” but those values are still the goal. The goal is not, “I want to achieve X, Y, Z.” The goal is, “I want to live a life that allows me to apply the values and strive towards what I care about in any fashion.” The first step to control is understanding that no matter what happens outside of yourself doesn’t change what you can feel about yourself.
As long as you keep applying your values throughout your life, you wake up and you know what you care about, you feel like you’re making an impact towards what you care about, and you can do that in any way possible. There’s an infinite number of ways for you to apply your values in the world. That’s what control is. It’s noticing what isn’t working anymore and a couple of different avenues that could work that could allow you to feel fulfilled on a daily basis. Just believing that you’re capable of that, that you have the choice and the ability to take action in a new way or a new path that’s still is important, and that your ego isn’t attached to whatever this other path was because the path itself isn’t important. It’s what you’re working towards and how you’re living on a daily basis. That in itself is inspiring and motivating that lends us to take greater control of our life and apply it to our life.
That’s going to be a great tweet, “Outside events don’t change what we feel about ourselves.” That’s a big a-ha. I know for myself, when I was laid off, it was like a kick in the gut, overwhelming and scary. You realized, “I haven’t lost my identity. My job is not my identity.” Getting re-centered around that was a big moment and realizing that if we don’t do what you’re saying, we’re going on l the self-esteem roller coaster. We only feel good if things are going well and bad if they’re not. To reframe that is wonderful. This premise of not getting attached to the path that we’re on, that’s a big one. We tend to like comfort zones and routine. We think, “If I’m doing this, then the outcome is that. I’m staying on this path. I can’t vary from that path.” In your own life, whether it was your athletic career getting derailed or a company getting defunded, you have to constantly be willing to not be attached because you said there’s something bigger than the path which is your purpose.
Your purpose isn’t bigger than you because you create your purpose. We lose sight of that often. There’s this interesting mindset of you need to think that the world is bigger than you because that keeps you motivated and that there’s more. I like to turn away from that and say, “You create all the things you care about.” You’re more than everything else around you. You come first or your health comes first. When you wake up and don’t feel good, it’s okay. Let’s figure out what’s going on in me, not what I have to do outside of myself.
Inner Purpose: An important component to motivate and engage your employees is to help them find their stories – why they’re doing what they’re doing and what matters about that work to them.
If we were able to have that focus and say, “My purpose is important because it’s a tool for me to find more happiness in my life.” All of a sudden the, “I need to do this because it’s my purpose,” changes from, “I enjoy doing this because it brings me happiness and it matters to me.” I give it energy, power and intention. I will define it as my purpose, but only to the point where it brings me a level of happiness. That doesn’t mean that struggle can’t create happiness. Waking up and building a business, figuring out solutions and the stress from that is something that I enjoy. That can be filtered through this lens of, “This is how I’m enjoying my life right now,” but the “This has to happen,” or “I’m not valuable,” that’s where I get lost.
I like to think that we’re the movie director of our own life. We can say cut, we can recast it and change locations as opposed to being at effect of everything that’s coming at us. We’re the thinker thinking the thoughts. That’s the whole concept of we created the purpose, therefore, the purpose isn’t bigger than we are.
I was listening to an interview and the guest said a few things that resonated with me. One of them was, “Are you the actor or the character?” I think in our life, we need to be the actor. The character is who we’re playing at the time, the things that happened to us, but it doesn’t define who the actor is. If we know who the actor is, it all allows us to play a variety of roles.
The other thing that you’re good at and when people hire you to come to speak is helping people find jobs satisfaction and get motivated even if it’s a job that they’re just doing for the money. It’s not necessarily something that they see as a career, but it’s what they need to do now. That could be working at a fast-food restaurant. Companies could bring you in to say, “How do we motivate somebody who is not making a lot of money and the job is fairly routine, yet we’re pressuring them to give amazing customer service?” When you have a client like that, how do you help them keep these people motivated and feel like what they’re doing is meaningful.
[bctt tweet=”Each and every single day, we don’t live in that broader world. We live in that right now.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I was running in Lady Bird Lake in Austin. We were running by this kayak shop and there were already people lined up getting their kayaks. I was like, “It’s a cool scene here.” As I was running, I saw the guy lifting the kayaks up and bringing them to the water, going back, talking to the customers and getting the oars. I had a thought that I have all the time. When I’m in Chicago, watching someone shovel the streets of snow, which I’m happy we don’t have here. I always think to myself, “What motivates them? What gets them going to do this job each and every single day?” It doesn’t connect with me. I don’t know if I would want to do that each and every single day, and doing what I enjoy doing.
You work on this. You find people stories. You help people figure out why they’re doing what they’re doing and what matters about that work to them. That is such an important component of figuring out how to motivate and engage your employees. It’s one of the pillars. It’s what motivates you, what drives you, what brings you to the office? It doesn’t have to be the paycheck. It could be, “My kids get to go to the school that’s a little bit safer. We get to have a special dinner once a week because now, we have a little bit more disposable income. My dad did this and we get to resonate and share stories about what it’s like to give people kayaks and then see the smiles on their faces,” or whatever it is. It’s their drive.
“I don’t have to worry about filing reports or sitting behind a cubicle.” I did that for five years. It could literally be anything that touches someone that sparks somebody. It’s very easy to forget these stories because these are the broader world. Each and every single day, we don’t live in that broader world. We live in that right now. A manager, a leader or a speaker can come in and remind them of those stories. It’s like what you do as well in terms of sales. You remind people of their stories to help them be more energized. You teach them strategies on how to remind themselves of their stories on a daily or weekly or monthly basis.
That’s probably the most important component of all the different things that I’d speak about in terms of job satisfaction. The other two are figuring out what work your employees love to do and what work they don’t love to do. Getting in there as a leader and crafting their work to be more fit to their strengths and likes, and helping minimize the work they don’t like to do, or knowing what work they don’t like to do, and then praising them for that work. It’s figuring out ways to make the work that they don’t like a little bit more enjoyable. It’s maybe giving them some more freedom to say, “You don’t like to do this work you do on Wednesdays, do it from home.”
Inner Purpose: You are literally the center of your own universe. To that point, you are the most important leader that you’re ever going to be.
You can come up with strategies to help someone to enjoy certain aspects of their job they don’t like. The other aspect is the social context of the way that we work. Where is the conflict in your department? Are there conflict between two specific members? Figuring out ways to mediate and solve that conflict, and then also to figure out who are friends at work and try to pair them up more and more together. At least build in time for them to talk not about work stuff, but venting about personal stuff, and being the conduit to positive relationships within work itself.
I think to allow that a lot of people are having to work from home versus being in the office so much, they don’t realize how much value there is in those water cooler moments, catching people in the hallway, “How was your weekend?” a little bit of a download or grabbing a coffee with somebody to vent. Without those release valves, the stress builds up and the sense of isolation that work is more than a paycheck. When someone like you with your expertise can come in and help people reframe that, sometimes those little moments of scheduling people to go on break together that like each other. That little detail showing that you care enough about them can make a huge difference. I love that specific example as well as the example of the person unpacking the kayaks.
There’s one more thing to add because I think it’s important in the remote world. It’s the resources. This goes along with the actual work that somebody is doing. What do they need to do their job? Many organizations sent everybody home and they’re like, “Go for it.” I don’t have a working webcam. Do I have to buy new headphones? Can I get a second screen? I don’t have pens. I don’t have printer paper. I don’t have a journal. I know these are extra expenses, but as a leader, have you ever sat down and spoken with your employees and say, “Think about your workflow. Where are the struggles? Is your computer slow? Is there a program that’s not working? Do you wish you had a different type of program? You have pens? Do you want me to send this stuff to you?”
You think about the level of productivity like, “I don’t have a stapler.” “I can go order one on Amazon,” but it’s like, “I could probably use a stapler.” That’s overlooked because organizations thought working from home was a day off. They thought it was like Fridays at least in Chicago. You work half day on Fridays or you don’t work. Nowadays, there has to be a very different mentality in terms of, do your employees have the tools and the resources they need? Are the same work boundaries also in place, which we didn’t even touch on? That’s just a side.
As you said, it’s the details, whether it’s a break time with someone you like and/or what do you need to do your job? Let’s not assume that you’re going to have it all figured out by yourself. Originally, they’re like, “This might be a month. We’re not going to worry about it.” Now, it’s much longer. The resources become much different. This is going to be a long-term thing versus a short-term thing. I’ve worked with people on basic sound and lighting. If you’re going to be presenting, especially if you’re in a sales role, people need to see your face. You’ve got to be properly lit so they can trust you. That’s a thought you’ve never take into consideration. When you’re seeing people in person, you don’t worry about the lighting in the conference room, but you need to worry about the lighting on a video call at home. Any last thought or a favorite quote you have that you want to leave us with?
If you haven’t noticed, I’m very big in personal empowerment and personal accountability. I think that’s also highlighted through my story, but personal accountability and responsibility that is healthy that is focused on you being at the center of everything. It’s not other things being at the center of everything. You are your own universe. Even in general, you’re preceding the world around you. You’re making that up. Everything you’re seeing is based on your brain and your eyes in how you see the world. You are literally the center of your own universe. To that point, you are the most important leader that you’re ever going to be. Are you truly living for yourself in a way that is positive and proactive towards what you care about and puts you front and center? If you do that, life gets a little bit more enjoyable.
It’s like the oxygen mask on the airplane. You’ve got to put it on yourself first before you could save a child, and a lot of us don’t do that. We put everything else ahead of that, including our career at the expense of our happiness and our health. You are definitely helping other people realize without that, inner happiness is not something sustainable because you burn out in one way or the other. If people want to find you, they can go to LiveForYourselfConsulting.com. Ben, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your own story, your insights that are certainly well-earned and much needed right now. I’m looking forward to hearing how you continue to make a difference in big and small companies.
Thank you.
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Book Yourself Solid With Matthew Kimberley
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
When we think of attracting clients into our business, we immediately think of marketing. But not for Matthew Kimberley, the owner of Book Yourself Solid, who believes that marketing does not get you clients. In this episode, he joins John Livesay to explain to us this contrarian idea as inspired by Michael Port’s Book Yourself Solid, a handbook for self-promotion that can help you get more clients even if you hate marketing and selling. He discusses the effectiveness of emails and how best to format them, growing a personality-based brand, and becoming a person of value rather than a provider of value. What is more, Matthew then speaks about why your business should be a love story, one that is between you and your business, you and your clients, and you and marketing.
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Listen to the podcast here
Book Yourself Solid With Matthew Kimberley
Our guest is Matthew Kimberley, the Owner of Book Yourself Solid. He works with coaches and all kinds of entrepreneurs to do just that. He said, “Marketing does not get you clients.” What an a-ha moment that was for me and many other people. Find out what he means by that. He said, “Your business should be a love story.” Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is a friend and he is quite fun to talk to. You’re going to enjoy this episode. Matthew Kimberley helps small businesses sell more and sell with sophistication. He spends a lot of time providing strategic counsel to business owners and coaches. He’s got over two decades of international sales and advisory experience and multiple millions of dollars, euros and pounds that he has generated for companies. Now he hides out in the Mediterranean. Welcome to the show, Matthew.
Thank you for having me, John. There is nowhere I would rather be on a wet Thursday afternoon than doing this with you.
Isn’t that the definition of success that you’re with the people you want to be with in the place you want to be and that there’s no anxiety of, “I wish I was doing something else besides this?”
I still struggle a bit. I’ve got young family. I’ve got two boys. One is seven and one is eleven. Like many people who are self-employed and to have young families, I do battle a bit with what gets my attention when, and I’ve got much better at this and I’ll tell you why I’ve got that strategy. I felt guilty when I was at work because I was neglecting my kids. I felt guilty when I was with my family because I was neglecting my business baby.
What changed was confidence that came with time. I proved to myself year after year that business will probably be okay and I didn’t have to stress and to take time off, to switch off from business and spend it with my family. It didn’t mean anything was being neglected. I still get that sometimes. If one of them falls over, gets a booboo, needs a kiss and I’m on a call with a client, but generally with confidence around next month’s revenue and next year’s revenue comes a bit more relaxation and freedom of time. Freedom of time was the ultimate metric of success if you can choose who you spend your time with, where you spend your time, then what else do you need?
I love to ask my guests their own little story of origin. You can go back to school days. Take us a bit on your own personal journey before you got to this place where you do have the freedom to help other coaches get themselves booked. I’m guessing at one point you might have been in that situation where you were struggling to get booked. Who knows?
[bctt tweet=”Marketing does not get your clients.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It was the end of the summer, 1979, Paris. Reverend John Kimberley and his wife, Susan Kimberley, were probably putting their feet up in their hotel room after a long boozy lunch. If I go back too far, this is the conception story. My first self-employed job was selling entertainment in the streets. I was a juggler and a busker. I was a street entertainer. I learned that there was a direct correlation between asking for people to throw money in the hat and people throwing money in the hat. With the benefit of hindsight, I look back and say, “That was probably one of my first introductions to persuasion and sales and being in direct control of the amount of money that you earn.”
I’d go and stand in the street first and balls around and people would walk past, but when I caught their eyes, I smile at them and said, “If you enjoy the show, give me a pound.” They were far more likely to give me a pound so asking for the sale. Fast forward a few years, I’m working in timeshare by accident. This is age 23. It was my first introduction to hard direct selling. I got the job because it was the only job in a foreign country that would employ me without a work permit and because the turnover was massive. We were paid on a commission only basis. It was low risk for them to hire foreigners in the block, but it was a real baptism of fire.
We had daily sales motivation training for an hour, 8:00 AM to 9:00 AM. We would be given unqualified prospects and told if you spend 6 to 7 hours with them and followed the system, there’s a 10% chance they’ll buy something, which is exhausting, but true. They will give you an unqualified prospect. They had no idea what they were in the room for, probably the promise of a dolphin show or a winning prize or free bottle of champagne. We’d sit down with them and over the course of seven hours sell them $10,000 worth of vacation ownership. That taught me about direct sales. It taught me about the importance of not leaving anything to chance to following the system of crossing the T’s and dotting the I’s. It was a horrible filthy industry. It was lots of fun, lots of drugs, lots of late nights.
I didn’t want to sell it to my parents. When they came to visit and they said, “Can we come and see what you do for a living?” I said, “No.” If I can’t do that, I probably shouldn’t be doing it. I shouldn’t be selling it to other people’s patterns or grandparents, so I left. I got a job in corporate sales and fast forward again a number of years, I own a recruitment company selling agency services. I’m a 50% owner in a recruitment company that sells agency services to large multinational corporations, agency being, “I need a Java programmer.” I’ve got a budget of €600 a day. I would go and find somebody for €400 a day and take the difference. Huge money, young age, I hated it. I was the other owner. I was getting into work later and later I had a fractious relationship with my business partner.
Although I loved parts of the job like selling and training my salespeople, I didn’t love anything else about it. I didn’t love the structure. I didn’t love the industry. I was bored by it. I could only talk computer technology for five minutes before falling asleep, and here I was talking day in, day out with people who were trying to batter me on price every time I met them. I left and I said, “If I enjoy sales and I enjoy training, maybe I should become a sales trainer.” That’s what happened. I didn’t want to do it my own because of my interest in selling, which had been born with timeshare. I had been on various mailing lists, rather like you are now, John, and everybody reading this. I had a bit of savings from selling my 50% share of the company and Michael Port who wrote a book called Book Yourself Solid, which I’d read and whose mailing list I was on an opportune moment sends a blast out to his list that said, “Would you like to become a Book Yourself Solid Certified Coach?”
Fast forward 12 years, 13 years. I now run the Book Yourself Solid Organization. Michael has retired from operations and I am now the person who trains the trainer how to book their own business to solid, but also how to book their clients businesses solid. It’s an absolute joy there. We all have days which are better than others, but there’s isn’t a day I don’t say I’m not grateful for the trials and tribulations and the journey that I’d been on because now I get to do this. I get to hang out with rock star coaches four times a week. We have mastermind calls, open invitation to all of our licensed trainers and ambassadors. It’s a community that looks out for each other. We’ve got a fantastic piece of world-class intellectual property, which the market is hungry for and the works. Thank you for asking John. Do you want me to fill in the gaps? I should stop talking now. That that story could go on for days.
Book Yourself Solid: Freedom of time is the ultimate metric of success if you can choose who you spend your time with and where you spend your time.
No. it’s good. I find it fascinating too. The lessons learned from, first of all, getting people’s attention on the street much like we all have to do in digital marketing and blog posts and advertisements to not being afraid to ask for the order, is that a big problem for a lot of people. They feel awkward and clunky doing it. Not having a system, a script, a plan in place. Before GPS there were these old maps that we have in California, it was called the Thomas Guide. You’d have to flip pages and then you get halfway where your speed, it’d be like, “Now turn to page 506.” The rest of that particular journey continues. You’d be like, “I can’t look at this and drive at the same time.” That need for a clear, concise roadmap can never be underestimated. A lot of people have been in that situation where, “Can I do what I love and make money?” It seems like they’re mutually exclusive. When you can show people they can do both, that’s where it becomes magnetic. I do have a question about what you’re doing, training the trainers. People are thinking, “Is this for me or not?” If someone’s a coach or a consultant, they probably need Book Yourself Solid. Whether they need to then train other people who is it that decides, “I don’t want to coach anymore. I want to train other coaches.” How does that work?
There’s this sweet groups of people who join our program. It looks a bit like a business coaching franchise. If you are from the outside because our business is the transference of intellectual property. If you want to be a coach, we will give you workbooks, materials and a system that you can give to your clients and guide them through it. That’s where the similarities stop. There’s no territorial exclusivity and no royalty payments made. We don’t take a percentage of your earnings. It’s a flat annual fee and an affordable one. We say that every Book Yourself Solid Coach who’s using the material should make their annual investment back with two clients. We want you to be signing up more than two clients a week, ideally.
That’s where the paradigm is with the franchise, but that’s a close parallel. You’re not tied to it. You can mix and match it with anything else you might be selling. You might be a car salesman who also does Book Yourself Solid on the side or you may offer personality assessments or you might be certified in fifteen other modalities. You might have picked up certifications from Tony Robbins or Mike Michalowicz. We’ve also got franchise owners who are also Book Yourself Solid Coaches because they can use them together. Three groups of people, the first group of people is the existing sales trainer or coach or business consultant who knows that they can flip the IP for profit quickly. John, if I were to say, become a Book Yourself Solid Coach, John, and in three weeks’ time after you’ve had time to study the material, you can hold a workshop for your own clients, charge them $1,500 a pop for a weekend workshop and keep 100% of the cash.
What are you going to teach in the workshop? Book Yourself Solid. Some people see it as a piece of inventory they’re buying retail, they’re selling wholesale. That’s for the experience coach. The experience coach is also interested in masterminding with other experienced coaches. That’s what we do four times a week, which is super valuable. That’s the third group of people. The third group of people are business owners, who are not that interested in reselling or teaching Book Yourself Solid ever, but they want to use Book Yourself Solid in their own business. What better way to learn it than from the source? They can hire a Book Yourself Solid Coach for $3,000 a month or they can join us for a whole year for a fraction of that. That is the 1st and the 3rd groups.
The second group are the pivoters. These are the people who say, “I’ve finished a career in engineering or consultancy or retail or human resources or I’ve got my Psychology degree. I want to try to make a success of being a coach or a consultant.” We say, “Do it with us.” We provide them with comprehensive training and coaching skills and business skills. In the first 6 to 12 months with them, we want them to get booked solid. Whether they’re teaching Book Yourself Solid or whether they’re teaching Reiki, it’s skewed primarily for consultants or coaches, people who deal in intellectual property rather than massage therapist or dentist or anything like that. We’ve got a lot of chiropractors in the group, by dint of the fact that there’s a happy marriage between Book Yourself Solid and the chiropractic community based on some of our influential alumni. They’re all coming at it from the angle, which is, “I want to get my chiropractic business booked solid,” and teach the chiropractors have to do the same. Those are the three groups of people. We support six figure coaches.
What a big need. Let’s say you’re in that pivot group and you’re leaving this career as an engineer, for example, and you want to do something else in your life or you want a side business, you’re not dependent on whether you get fired or not. This roller coaster of income, when you don’t have the plan and you’re like, “I had a great month this month but because I was focused on delivering, I was ignoring the attracting and converting part.” That is a big fear and a big pain point for many people is I’m working for myself but my income is inconsistent. You’re solving that.
[bctt tweet=”Be a person of value, not a provider of value.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Consistent income, consistency of revenue being booked solid is not on booked solid in January, but I’m not booked solid in February is perpetually working the system to make sure that your marketing is attracting attention on a consistent basis. That marketing doesn’t mean you’re doing endless calls. I don’t believe in endless content marketing, categorically don’t. That’s an invention of the last several years. I don’t see why coaches have to also be publishers. That’s crazy. What happened to old-fashioned marketing. Book Yourself Solid has been around since before the social media. The first edition of the book came out in 2006, which is before social media was a thing. We have some evergreen client attraction strategies, which you can supercharge with social media use. If you look around your neighborhood, John, at the businesses that are booked solid, often the owners don’t even know how to turn on a computer. They are providing a valuable service to a community who needs it. There’s a market to product fit or market to service fit. They’re doing, over generations, the right thing in order to keep people walking through the door.
We sit firmly in that camp and say, “We’ve got tools that we can use that will help us gain access to the right people.” Marketing doesn’t get you clients. Marketing creates awareness about who you are. We’ve got one of our certified coaches is and I’m glad you said a sidekick. One of our coaches who has got a comfortable six figure income from providing coaching services is a full-time partner in a technology firm. For about 5 to 10 hours a month, he provides services to 5 or 6 clients who have his cell phone number. He will talk to them when he’s walking the dog on a Saturday or Friday afternoon, and they will pay him a retainer of $2,000 to $3,000 a month in order to have access to his insight. He has got $100,000 to $150,000 worth of business for fifteen hours a month.
I love what you said, marketing doesn’t get you clients.
That’s one of the fundamental premises of Book Yourself Solid.
When you say something like that, our brain goes, “Wait a minute. What? That’s the opposite of what I think or was taught.” That’s what cuts through the clutter. That’s why our brain goes, “That’s new information.” I would be totally remiss if I did not ask you and edify your incredible skills at writing emails, nobody does it better. You don’t have to take my word for it. I get highly entertained and watching a master at work when I read these things. I love words. If somebody wants to see an example of your email at work, they can go to MarketingForCoaches.com and get the five things we need to do every morning to get more clients in 60 days. I’m guessing that email is entertaining and informative.
I’ve got a love affair with emails. I still think there’s no better way to build a long-term relationship with people, but most people in our situation who own a transactional email service like a AWeber or Mailchimp or Infusionsoft or ConvertKit, whatever they’re using onto using it. I know this because I’ve asked thousands of them when talking about and selling my Delightful Emails program, that’s always the first question. If anyone raises their hand to be a prospect, I ask them, “Do you have something?” “Yes.” “Are you satisfied, quite satisfied, unsatisfied with the way that you’re using it and the results that you’re getting?” Vast majority say, “I’m unhappy with the results I’m getting.” We tend to poop the bed when it comes to sending out an email to our prospect database, but we never poop the bed when we were sending an email to a girlfriend or a boyfriend or family members or our high school buddies, we say, “I have a special relationship with you. I know that you want to hear from me.”
Book Yourself Solid: The Fastest, Easiest, and Most Reliable System for Getting More Clients Than You Can Handle Even if You Hate Marketing and Selling
The only reason that people have ended up on your mailing list, unless you a spammer, in which case there’s a special place for you in hell, is because they have raised their hand and said, “I want to hear from you. I want you to help me, please help me.” If we don’t email them regularly, then we’re being neglectful in our duty of care towards our prospects if we want to put a hippie slant on it. The other mistake that people make is they can’t get the tone right. When I was in recruitment, people wear a professional hat and people wear a personal hat. The beauty about growing a personality-based brand, that doesn’t mean a personal brand, it means a brand that has personality, is that you get to inject that personality into your emails. Recruiters would always write on LinkedIn. I used to beat them up for it. They would say, “We are currently seeking candidates with the following attributes.” I would say, “Who uses that language? William Shakespeare?”
Are you someone who’s looking for a job? We’re looking for some people who are, it’s how people talk. We got to remember how we talk. We talk to a human being on the other end of the line. We should have a relationship with them where we are the leader. They’re looking to us for leadership, but we can’t, everyone’s got to develop their own voice. I’m not saying one voice is appropriate for you. Everyone’s got to find their own voice. My Delightful Emails program does help a bit in how you find your voice. My preferred relationship to my list is like the head of the family. I want the best for them. I refuse to insult their intelligence. I’m going to nurture their growth. Sometimes I’m going to slap them if they’re being stupid and send them to the bedrooms, and often we’re going to have pillow fights and tickle parties.
We want them to see fun dad and we want them to see concerned dad. We want them to see caring that empathetic dad. It might not be dad. It might be a different role. You have to think carefully about authenticity and vulnerability because people are coming to you for a specific reason. If you start treating them as your therapist, which many personal brands do, they write to their list and they evacuate their spiritual bowels onto the email and start to share every problem because somebody once told them that authenticity is the key to building relationships. Yes and no, but leadership is the key to sales. If you’re going to say to somebody, “I’m a complete mess, my life is a mess. Please join my life coaching program.” You’ve got a problem. If you’re in a hotel room and the hotel is burning down and somebody knocks on the door and says, “Follow me, I know the safest way out of here.” You’re going with them.
If somebody knocks on the door and says, “I’m feeling a bit lost too. Shall we run together and see if we can find a way out?” You’re like, “No. You stay where you are. I’m not coming with you. I’m safe where I am. Thanks you.” You list and looking for leadership. The key thing is value. The concept of providing valuable, actionable content has destroyed email marketing because everybody feels that every email has to be valuable and they’ve translated that into, “I must provide how to content in my email.” Even worse, what they do is they double create. They say, “I’ve written a how to piece on my blog. How to get over your boyfriend? How to get more clicks? How to get on the first page of Google? How to get more followers on Instagram? How to overcome your mental turmoil?”
They write an email that says, “I have written some valuable content for you, click here.” What you’re training people to do is ignore your email because there’s no value in the email. You might say, “Matthew, do I put how to content in the email?” How to content isn’t valuable. It might be valuable for a brief period of time when we ended an answer to how can I get more Instagram followers or how can I fix my washing machine? The minute our washing machine has been fixed, we’re throwing away the manual and we can’t find it next time we need it or we’re going to Google it. John, if your house was burning down or if your hotel room, what are you risking? What is valuable to you?
You’re rescuing your family members, your photos, your record collection and your phone, which is your connection to the outside world on your friends. What about if we could show up in a way that mirrors that? What about if we could become a person of value rather than a provider of value and a person of value makes us feel something. They make us laugh, cry, think and angry. They’re the people that we live with. They’re the people that are always welcome to our kitchen table, which solves the problem of how frequently should I email my list? The answer is, “Would I be welcome to sit down and have a cup of coffee with them? Am I making them smile? Am I making them laugh? Am I making them cry? Am I making them feel something?” Value is where we spend our time and money. Where do we spend our time? What’s your most valuable app on your phone, John? The one that for the rest of your entire life, you have to get rid of all of them, but you can keep one or maybe two. What are they?
[bctt tweet=”Confidence is not enthusiasm.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m directionally challenged, it would be Google Maps so I can get to figure out how to get from point A to B.
That’s it. You’ve got Google Maps on your phone for the rest of your life. You are an anomaly, John. You’re the first person who’s ever said that.
My biggest fear is being late and lost because I was having to go on many cold calls. I am meeting clients for the appointments. I would sweat bullets being lost in Los Angeles in the freeway system and then I would be late and lost. That’s my biggest anxiety. It’s still solving a problem.
Let me tell you what 90% of people tell me, they tell me a way to connect with friends, WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger because you can’t live without friends. For me, it’s Spotify. If you tell me that I can’t have music in my ears whenever I want it, when I’m walking the dog, whatever I’m doing, that for me is a fate worse than a life without music. Can you imagine that? Like people say, is it too soon to email the list? If you’re doing it right, it’s like saying, “Is it too soon to release another episode of Breaking Bad?” No, because people want to binge it because they value the emotions that our favorite TV show stirs up in them. They want it. They want more and more of it. That is what you can achieve with emails if you care.
There are many nuggets here, be a person of value, not a provider of value because a provider of value, we don’t need that. We can Google it. The overall arching theme that I take away from listening to you when you and I have had this discussion before is the value of storytelling, which hooks into people’s emotions, whether laughing or crying. A lot of people are struggling with, “How do I tell a story in an email? How do I make my subject line interesting enough to make somebody open it?” All of that is part of a story. During a pandemic, a lot of healthcare companies in particular, salespeople are struggling to get in the door because they can’t see the doctor between surgeries and they can’t walk into their offices anymore and they’ve never had to learn how to request a virtual appointment, an email. If you’ve never had to do it, you don’t have that skill.
There are two different things. One is how can we tell a story in an email? What makes a good story? What makes a good subject line? You’re the expert when it comes to this. If you weren’t writing delightful emails using the person of value approach, you can say anything. It doesn’t matter. If you were dating somebody and you’re in the throes of a new romance, they can send you a message that says, “Babe, I had a bowl of cornflakes for breakfast. It was delicious.” That will be the most delightful email that you received that day. Am I wrong? It’s because of who it is from. I do have strategies and techniques for quickly generating stories for emails. The trick is if it comes from someone that you want to listen to, then the content of the story is less important than who’s telling that.
Book Yourself Solid: Marketing doesn’t get you clients. Marketing creates awareness about who you are.
We build that through entertaining content about being a person. The other thing, when you’re talking about these horrible recruitment advertisements, unfortunately, that typically is what salespeople are saying. The corporate speak, I’ve heard, “We use critical thinking to anticipate problems. You should hire us to do this project for you.” I was like, “No, we need to tell a story and show it in the story.” Let’s talk about what is the biggest mistake people make trying to get themselves booked solid?
They believe that marketing gets them clients and that’s backwards. I had somebody talk to me who says, “If only I could get more Instagram followers,” that might be true, but it’s a supposition which comes up far too frequently without any grounding in fact. What would be true is I have a sales conversion process that attracts the right people that gives them incentive to stick around that I can build trust. They can repay their trust by making investments in me and my services that are proportionate to the amount of trust that I have earned. Sometimes that’s financial investment, an investment of time or an investment of data or an investment in spreading the word about you. I have comprehensive systems in place to close the sale when it’s appropriate.
I have literature and information products that speeds up the sales cycle process so that I don’t have to be pitching people one-to-one doing coffee endlessly time and time again. I can tell people I’ve got all of that in place. In short, I know how to close the business. What I also know is that 90% of my customer database has come from my Instagram marketing efforts. Therefore, my hypothesis is that if I could add 2,000 Instagram followers a month to my 2, 000 qualified, targeted, appropriate prospects to my Instagram, then that would result in 500 new additions to my newsletter each month, which would result in five new clients every month. That’s great, but that’s not what I hear. What I hear is, “If only I can crush Clubhouse, then I can make $1 million.”
The biggest mistake people make, and it’s where we always spend the longest is market to service match. I work with coaches and consultants. They tend to stay things like, “I help entrepreneurs find freedom.” “Bob, here’s Elon Musk. What are you going to do with him?” “Here’s an entrepreneur for you. It’s a lawyer. He’s the founding partner in a firm that has 40 partners and 300 employees in six offices around the world. Do you think he needs your solution for finding the perfect virtual assistant?” No. Firstly, we talk about what we do by honing in on a specific target market. “I help goddesses step into their light” is something I never want to hear. “I help women.” No, you don’t. Let’s be serious about this.
The living proof of whether or not you have a business is if somebody will buy your product or service twice. What we tried to do is we think we have resources that we don’t have access to. We think we own a trawling fleet, a fleet of fishing trawlers with an army of 300 fishermen who are going to go out with these nets that are 5 kilometers long and we’re going to catch all of the fish in the sea to become our prospects, but we don’t have those resources. We have ourselves, probably not much money when we’re getting started, and a fishing rod. What do we do? We go to one fishing spot. We dangle one line and we try and catch a nice big fat fish that will feed our family. We don’t say, “I’m going to try a different spot.”
You do your research. You find out where the fish are, and you show up repeatedly and you have something that is highly relevant to them. That’s the biggest mistake people make. They’re afraid, terrified to get specific about their target market. Remember, John, the target market is where you target your marketing. Unless you have squillion dollars to spend on reaching everybody in the world, you better be laser-focused. In fact, you may have zero budget. You may only have time and energy to show up. What do you choose to do? One day you show up in Florida and other day you show up in New York and other day you show up in Minnesota and other day you show up in Texas and other day you show up in San Diego. By the time you’ve done all the states in the world, everyone’s forgotten about you.
[bctt tweet=”For every success story, there are 90 horror stories.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What about if you showed up at the school gates in your zip code every day after school, wearing your yoga gear and start to have the conversations with the mothers who are waiting to pick up their kids and the dads who are waiting to pick up their kids about the fact that you’re a yoga teacher? Do you think you might pick up 4 or 5 clients within the space of three weeks? You would because you’ve chosen your pawn.
What I hear you saying is we’re not Coca-Cola. Coca-Cola has huge budgets and they’re trying to market to everybody.
Even Coca-Cola wasn’t Coca-Cola when they started and Starbucks wasn’t Starbucks when it started. When Starbucks started, they didn’t have the budget. They had enough money to open a single retail outlet in Seattle where they sell dried coffee beans. They said, “We can’t sell to the world. We’re going to sell to people who live and work in this neighborhood.” If somebody came from outside of their target market and said, “I live in Portland but I’ve heard you make great coffee. Can I buy a bag?” You say, “Yes, of course you can,” but you don’t fly to Portland to tell people to come to your store in Seattle. With time, when their resources grew, they were able to offer additional services to their target market. “You know what we can do with these beans? We can ground them up and add hot water and give you a cup of coffee while you’re here.” “We can sell bananas, oatmeal and newspapers. This worked well here. We have the resources. We’re going to open a second store and begin to appeal to a different target market.” That is the mistake everybody makes. They think outside of the resources that they have available to them.
I hear that a lot too. I tell people, “Remember, Amazon sell books first.” People forget that and you’re trying to be what Amazon is now. It would never have worked, it will be too overwhelming.
John, if you want a, if you want a six-figure consulting business, do what our guy did that I told you about, find five clients who will give you $2,000 a month and then you’ve got $120,000, $140,000 worth of business coming in. Even if that takes you 25 hours a week at the beginning in marketing, you are on course for a winner. You might have been sold the idea that online courses are the way to go, maybe they are, but for every success story, there are 90 horror stories. That’s not true for small service businesses who go to a clearly defined group of people and say, “I have a thing that I could help you with.” They don’t see a 90% failure to complete the course rate. What they typically do is they might limp along for a bit, but they’ll get a client in the 1st month, 2nd month, 3rd month and then they’ll start to get traction. Think small.
Also, this Book Yourself Solid works for speakers because I know that’s what Michael Port’s background is. Many speakers wait passively for their speaking agent to say, “Someone saw your website or saw your video on my website.” This is an active way to do it. Speakers say, “I can speak on any topic to any audience.” That’s another same mistake over and over again. I, myself niched down saying I speak to healthcare tech companies.
Book Yourself Solid: When you love what you do and love every minute of what you do, business is a pleasure rather than a chore.
What happened as a result of that?
When I reach out to other healthcare tech companies, they’re like, “You know our industry.” What’s also surprising is I get hired by mortgage companies and insurance companies going, “We’d love to hear what the healthcare tech people are doing. Maybe we can learn from that.” I thought it was going to push them away and it makes them more interested. That’s a fascinating outcome I thought.
I get that all the time. I know you mainly work with coaches, but we like what you do. Do you think you could bring something to our accountancy firm?
That is the biggest takeaway from what we’re talking about here, don’t be afraid to niche. You think it’s going to push away everybody and the irony is it makes you magnetic because who we say “no” to is as important as who we say “yes” to whether it’s in our marketing, our messaging, our emails. Someone was saying to me, “Can you come speak to this?” It was a fast-food chain. The audiences are all the people who work in the restaurant, who make the fries. I said, “That’s not what I do. I speak to audiences of salespeople.” Unless you’re trying to make those people upsell people when they’re buying their hamburger, probably not, but I know someone else. I pulled back, they’re like, “What about if you did a workshop on storytelling then for these people?” I’m like, “That I could do, but I’m not going to try to pretend I can do everything.”
I get that all the time, John, here in Malta specifically because people know that I don’t do any work in Malta generally, but every now and again, someone who owns the company who knows me or knows me says, “We’ve got a Christmas party. Can you come to a motivational talk for our whole company?” I said, “I’m sorry, I don’t do motivational talk, but if you’ve got to say it was your business development team, I’d be happy to come and do a 90-minute workshop with them.” They always say, “Yes, that’s exactly what I want.” I’m going to have reputational damage. If I go and do a motivational workshop for the factory guys, they’re going to laugh me out the room.
I know that. That’s not plain interesting. You said something about it’s rare to find someone who truly says it gets to what you love. You also said something which ties everything together from a Book Yourself Solid point of view. There were three pillars that hold Book Yourself Solid out. The first one we’ve discussed, which is that marketing doesn’t get you clients. The second pillar, which is a philosophical pillar, is that business should be a love story. Book Yourself Solid is a love story between you and your business, between you and your clients, between you and marketing, because when you love what you do and you love every minute of what you do, business is a pleasure rather than a chore. The third philosophical pillar that holds everything up is exactly what you said. There are some people who you’re meant to serve and others not so much.
[bctt tweet=”Value is where we spend our time and money.” username=”John_Livesay”]
My last topic I know you’re an expert on is how can people not undersell themselves? What’s your tip on that?
Confidence and enthusiasm are related bedfellows, but they’re not the same. People say, “I don’t have the confidence to do something.” What they mean is, “I don’t feel enthusiastic about it.” That’s a mistake. I’m confident, John, that in the United States and around the world in the next 24 hours, we’re going to see multiple COVID related deaths. I am confident of that. If I was offered the right odds, I would bet my house on that. I am not enthusiastic about it. However, the data shows me that that is likely to be true. Therefore, I can predict with some confidence that that’s going to be likely. The same thing comes to being confident when selling yourself. You mentioned two lessons that I learned in my youth.
The first lesson was if you ask for the sale, you get it. The second lesson was, if you stick to the system, then you’re likely to get predictable results. The third lesson was from my recruitment days, which I didn’t mention, is that these guys had activity targets. I’d never say you have to make three sales this month because you can’t control that, but I did say you have to pick up the telephone 60 times a day. That’s what’s missing from the confidence-lacking entrepreneur. They are predicting based upon no data that the path that they’re about to take or the journey that they’re on is not going to work out for them. Get the data then you can make those predictions with confidence.
How did you get the data? By doing the activity. We’ve all got to say it was that sales muscle. We can have perfect theoretical form. We can attend endless sales seminars, but unless we’d having our at-bats, our muscle is going to be weak. As we’re doing the reps, our muscle is going to be weak. Somebody would come to me, typically a personal trainer back in the day and say, “I haven’t made any sales. Can you help me?” I’d say, “Yes. Why haven’t you made any sales?” “I don’t know.” “How many sales offers did you make this month?” “I didn’t get to make any.” “I see a correlation here. Go to the shopping mall on Saturday,” walk up to 100 strangers and say, “I’m a personal trainer. I’m running a special promotion. I wonder if you’d like to buy a personal training session for $40 instead of $80.” What happens is results walking up to 100 strangers and making an offer?
Ten percent at least, probably.
Yes. Complete Strangers can’t resist the deal. I say, “Great. We’ve got a basis to work on.” It’s because you’ve done the reps, you can be confident that an offer will be accepted by the market. Our job is to refine the offer and refine the market. Go and try more. It’s not for everybody, John. If you’re not prepared to put in the reps, you don’t deserve the rewards.
David gets your six pack and your big biceps, the same thing. I get it. Thank you for sharing this passion, this humor. If anybody wants to find out more about you, we’re going to send them to MarketingForCoaches.com, as well as BookYourselfSolid.com. Get these five things you need to do every morning. I can’t wait to see what those five things are myself. Thank you, Matthew.
Thank you. I enjoyed that much. You’re such a strong interview. You let me have fun. Thank you. It was a huge pleasure.
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