The Titanic Effect: Helping Startups Navigate Through Icebergs with Drs. Todd Saxton and Kim Saxton
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Hitting icebergs is just part of the business, especially when you are in the startup stage. Nevertheless, it does not mean that you can’t steer away from them because the fact remains that these mistakes can be costly. We double up the insight in this episode as host John Livesay interviews business professors Drs. Todd Saxton and Kim Saxton. Giving us a preview of their book, The Titanic Effect, they help startup founders navigate the icebergs that so often sink startups in the ideation and early stage of development. As they touch on the four oceans that startups have to get across and how they can do that, they also offer great advice on practicing your pitch.
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Listen to the podcast here
The Titanic Effect: Helping Startups Navigate Through Icebergs with Drs. Todd Saxton and Kim Saxton
Our guests are Drs. Todd and Kim Saxton. They’re award-winning professors at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business as well as co-authors of The Titanic Effect. The book is a practical guide to help startup founders, as well as their investors and supporters, successfully navigate the icebergs that often pop up that sink startups in these early stages. They’re going to share their decades of academic and professional experience, business strategy, marketing, venture-funded startups to help you navigate these deck burgs that often sink early startups. Drs. Todd and Kim, welcome to the show.
I’m fine. Kim is fine. Thank you so much for having us. It’s a pleasure.
I’m excited to be here and chatting with you.
Let me ask you to each tell me your own little story of origin before you became professors, married and all of that stuff. I love to hear one of you start and say, “When I was growing up,” you can go back as far as you want, “my dream was,” and give us a sense of how you became a professor. We’ll get into the story of how you started working together and got married.
Here I thought you were going to do the origin story of how we got together, which was already dialing back many years.
I’m always fascinated, especially people who dedicate their lives to teaching the university level. Did you know in college this is what you wanted to do or did you as a young girl know, “Someday I’m going to be a professor?”
If I say what my real childhood dreams were, honestly, my first dream was to be the president of the United States. I went to MIT because at some point in high school I discovered I was good at math and computers. I worked in a debit processing center at the local junior college and got to play with some of the first personal computers that were coming out. By the time I got to MIT I had realized, that whole be the first American female president was going to be a tough way to go and would be fraught with a lot of icebergs even though I didn’t know that term. I thought, “I’m going to go make money instead. That’ll be a lot more fun.” We both got into consulting directly out of college, helping companies identify what they’re going forward, strategies ought to be as what I did. Todd did something some related. Todd started to want to go back and get a PhD and follow in his dad’s footsteps of being a professor. I pulled out my SAT scores and I discovered that what I told the SAT when I took that exam to get into college was that I wanted to be a professor as well.
[bctt tweet=” Practice your pitch on your least likely prospect first. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I can’t wait to hear. Your dad was modeling for you, Todd, what a professor’s life was like?
The academic connections, it’s funny because Kim and I have both been out six years from college and working in business consulting on the East Coast. Circle back a little bit, I’m a Jersey boy. I grew up selling newspapers on the Jersey shore. My mom bought the lawnmower in exchange for me mowing our own lawn for free, which meant I could use the lawnmower to mow our neighbors’ lawns. That’s my connection back to your network.
I can relate to you both well of Kim talking about early computers. I was at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign and we had Plato where you can touch the screen back then. That was totally cutting edge. I don’t know if you’ve ever remembered or heard of those. I also had a paper route, Todd. I would do the entrepreneur thing, knock on the doors, “Do you want to subscribe?” You sell it, you deliver it and you’ve got to go collect it at the end of the month.
If you’re good, you make your money in tips.
Don’t throw it in the bushes.
There are things you throw in the bushes in New Jersey, but it’s not your customer’s newspapers.
Ironically I skipped over that. My early pitching was as a Girl Scout, I went door-to-door. Those times you had to haul the boxes with you. After a little while, you only had one type of cookie left.
You had pushed those. The mints are gone. Now we’re pushing peanut butter or something. I can relate.
You learn how to message pretty quickly so that you don’t have to haul those cookies back to the house.
The Titanic Effect
Let’s hear those story of the origin of how you too wonderful people connected. You can make it as romantic as you want or as academic as you want. The choice is yours.
I’ll share the non-romantic part. Our first jobs out of school were at the same consulting firm in the DC area. Kim was the sixth and I was the seventh person hired. This was a relatively small entrepreneurial consulting firm. For the first few months, we struggled to work together. We did not get along. Kim may ask me to cut this out, for now, just between us, when we started dating and it got serious enough. We were like, “One of us probably has to leave.” Kim went to talk to the founder to say, “I’m moving onto something else. Part of the reason is I’m dating someone here.” He went through every member of the company, including some that were married, the other women, the janitor, the company dog and the only entity left was me. It was like, “It can’t be Todd.”
We got to keep that in. That’s at least likely to be dating. Kim, what’s your version of that story?
It’s pretty much like that. In fact, at that time, I was conservative and he was clearly liberal. There were so many different ways that we should not get along at all. As we tried to work together, that same founder one time said to me, “Would you stop yanking his chain already?” I didn’t realize I was. What ended up happening is that over a weekend thing, we realized that there was some attraction. We thought, “You can’t ignore chemistry so what we ought to do is probably date and get this over with so we can move on to the real love of our lives.”
It’s fascinating because I talk about going from invisible to irresistible in a business sense but also in a dating sense. If you have so much pressure that this has to be the investor that funds my startup or this has to be the customer that hires me or this has to be the love of my life. It’s too much pressure. If you think instead of, “Let’s get through this and we know we’re not going to be a fit, there’s no pressure.” The irony of that, if people could take that away from this show, I’d be thrilled that if you start to hold things a little lighter in your hands, how much that shifts things.
That’s interesting as a way to think about it. I never connected these two before. I counsel entrepreneurs when they go to their first pitch, whether it’s for money or a customer, go to the one you think is going to be most challenging and least likely first because you’re going to screw something up. You’re going to mess up the value proposition or the connection or frame of reference, whatever that might be. You’re going to hit icebergs. Get an iceberg that isn’t your biggest opportunity, whether it came from funding or a customer perspective because you’re going to get beaten up. You’re going to learn something from that and get better. As you get better, you got closer to home and the bigger and better opportunities because you fit some of those icebergs but survived.
He gave me that advice. He’s had to do some cold calling and I said, “Here are my best prospects.” He said, “Don’t call them. You’re not great prospects. Get them out, burn through five or ten of them. By then you’ll be ready for the good ones.”
Practice your pitch on your least likely prospects first, that’s unique advice because you’re not attached to the outcome.
[bctt tweet=”Be accountable as you scale.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Maybe it’s a phone instead of practice. There is a chance to compare it. We’re still married for many years.
Honing and practicing for me. We are rewriting everything already. I know in your book The Titanic Effect, originally, this metaphor was a sideline. It became something that anchored the whole concept. Let’s hear the story of origin for how did you come up with the idea for the book?
It started with the term technical debt, which you’re familiar with and some of your audience, for those that are not when particularly software. Any physical product that you’re trying to build it, you can’t invest enough time, resources, energy to build it all the way into the robust version that you might envision eventually. You have to cut some corners. You’ve got to build your software on some code that might be a little bit flimsy to go out there and get that minimally viable product or that early testable model to get feedback. The challenges, as you start to scale, as you move from that one pilot customer to five customers to hopefully ten, twenty plus, if you’re building on this weak foundation, it’s going to collapse upon itself. That’s from a technical standpoint, from a product standpoint, and that’s the term of technical debt. There are equivalents in our metaphor, these other oceans.
You have the people that you work with, who you surround yourself with, how you allocate equity. You get advice from who helps guide you, who you hire as your early employees. In the human ocean, all of those are important decisions, but also have associated debt with them. As we thought about it was all of these decisions look obvious and easy when you are resource-strapped, and that’s the part above the water. There’s all of this mass below the water that you can’t see or anticipate because you’re making decisions under conditions of uncertainty. That connoted the image of the iceberg, and at least many of us, when we think about iceberg and failure, we associate that with the Titanic. I’m like the superficial naming guy was like, “We’ll call our presentation The Titanic Effect, then something after to make it a little more specific.” They were like, my co-authors, Michael and Kim, “It’s a good idea. It’s catchy. We should probably make sure there is some substance.” I was like, “Substance, that’s your bailiwick. I’m out of here.”
You have images of all the different icebergs and things. I’m a big Titanic fanatic. I’ve been to the museum, the menus, touched the cold ice and watched all the documentaries. You’ve got me in a minute. The research that you showed people that it’s not what icebergs are not all the same, Kim?
We started with that idea originally of marketing debt and human debt. We started thinking, “Let’s name the debts and all that.” We got onto the iceberg. We started doing iceberg research. It turns out that icebergs are super cool. They have such a variety of size from little bergy bits. Imagine a berg all broken up to iceberg islands. It’s huge masses. They have different shapes. Some are downed, tabular and all this stuff. We started getting into it. It was easy to envision these debts as different icebergs. Even since I focus in the marketing area, I have a visual image of each one of the ones as something a little different. In the book, they all look the same. There was too much granularity to try and talk about size, shape and all that. It was pretty exciting. I’m the researchy person to do that background work. I said, “If my very creative co-author and partner here is going to come up with a fancy title, I need to figure out if it has any legs. I started researching it and it turns out that there’s a lot that’s been written about the Titanic.
There are many resources too. We’ve read books, documentaries, online research. The museum has a lot of information too. We started finding thing after thing that matched up. Todd usually tells the story of a change of investors bringing on a new investor caused them to change the shipyard that they use. You can imagine what the ramifications of that are going to be. They have three different segments, this luxurious class and the steerage as we know about. The groups of people are trying to do different things. What was cool is that the first-class luxury passengers were Americans and the third-class steerage was from Eastern Europe. Can you imagine trying to have a successful marketing program that bought those two different groups of people into the same boat?
The Titanic Effect: If you don’t have alternative opinions, you’re not going to be able to aim your product into the market and understand the variety of needs that are out there.
Never were they supposed to interact. The romance went out as it did with your relationship. Did you dance to Celine Dion’s song at your wedding?
Can you imagine doing that in 1912 like share difficulty of that is mind-boggling?
I hadn’t thought about it like that. The buzz of getting the wealthy people, you’re like, “I’m sure everybody wanted the glamor of all that.” The masses, what would make them want to get on that versus all the other ways to get across? One of the things I want to talk about what you have in The Titanic Effect is the four oceans, the human ocean, the marketing ocean, the technical ocean and the strategy ocean. I know you have a whole chapter devoted to each one of those things. It’s such a great incentive for people to start thinking of this metaphor in a way that, “I want to buy this book now because we started dabbling in the marketing ocean there a little bit.” You can each talk about each one or you can split it up however you want to do it. Let’s dive in on what’s the human ocean? What’s the biggest mistake people make when they’re putting their team together?
The human ocean has these different seas within it. I know geographically that doesn’t quite work, but in the metaphor, please forgive us and allow us there that you have your co-founders. The biggest mistake that I see early-stage and first-time entrepreneurs make, and frankly even seasoned entrepreneurs, are allocating all the equity early and equally across co-founders. Your three people go out for coffee or a beer and they sketch out this idea on the napkin. They get all excited. They’re going to start this company. We’ll split everything three ways equally. A few months later, how many times that everyone is completely pulling their waiter or even able to fully contribute? The co-founders, how you allocate equity, whether you have the appropriate mix of people. Those are some of the debt bergs on the human side within co-founders.
The next sea that we talk about are the investors and advisors. Those are the people that you enlist their help, ideally some money as well. You need that feedback, encouragement, support, connections and how you go about doing that. Who you choose, how many you choose and how you interact with them are some also important sources of either resource or in some cases step bergs as well that can limit your success moving forward. Finally, within the human ocean are the employees and who are those early employees that you hire? Do you go after the cheap but enthusiastic interns who may be graduated or aren’t even through college and bright, but don’t know a lot and maybe can’t help the venture as much and spend a lot of time training, etc.? The other end of the spectrum, the giant whale hunter who has had the huge success and demands $250,000 salary and a lot of equity. It turns out they’re a one-hit-wonder and don’t know what they’re talking about. That can also be a huge source of a debt berg. Who those early employees are, how you leverage outside resources, that’s one of the other major elements we talk about in the human ocean.
In the employee sea, Todd, I wanted to add, the iceberg that’s named our debt berg has named the dearth of diversity is one that deserves more attention. We have been working with some incubators and looking at some of their companies. I was struck that out of all of the companies and all of the founding teams, there were four people who did not look like everybody else. Academic research is interesting when you have people who are much like you, more homogeneous, you get along better. Startups are a hard path to go. Getting along better is probably good. On the other hand, if you don’t have those alternative opinions, you’re not as well going to be able to aim your product into the market and understand the variety of needs that are out there.
Let me ask you about advisors within the human ocean. How important are they, is the first question, which they’re very important. What’re the criteria of what makes a good advisor? How often should you expect them to talk with you? What equity do you have to give them over time? I have so many questions about advisors alone. It’s one little grand of sand in the ocean there of human odds. It’s something that you are expertly qualified to answer. I haven’t heard many people talking about that granular level if you don’t mind.
[bctt tweet=”Get an iceberg that isn’t your biggest opportunity because you’re going to get beaten up. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I can’t pretend to have all the answers on that as you suggest. It’s a complex and nuanced question. At some point, it boils down to rapport. The fact that you like working together. It’s going to be a slog when you’re involved in any new activity, innovative activity, new project, and especially a new venture. It’s a long journey and they’re going to be hard moments. You want to be with people that you genuinely like, respect, appreciate and have fun with. That’s an important underlying element. The more objective criteria, I wouldn’t dare call it a rule. I’ll have somebody who documents and shows me, it only took X, but it’s a 50 and five rule that it will probably take you meeting with 50 people having a cup of coffee, a beer, whatever, lunch to share your idea. To get five that you feel are truly in that inner circle that is our trusted advisors that you have a good rapport with that get back to you.
One of the mistakes I see some entrepreneurs make is they try and maintain connections with 50 people and you simply can’t do that. The goal isn’t to make your network as big as possible. You want to be more engaged and activated, but also it takes a lot of networking and searches to find those five, settle with the first five you get. Within those five, you want some people who are not exactly always devil’s advocates in your face, but at least aren’t yes people that do challenge you. That you’re willing to have that and that gets back to that alternative perspective that Kim talked about and having a diversity of perspective is important.
Following that, it is having some diversity in terms of their backgrounds that you have one or two advisors that are more industry experts. You have one or two that perhaps have started a company, have grown one or two that are more on the investor perspective, that’s financial savvy and hopefully, connections that when it comes time to raise money. I think of it as this critical mix of elements that are all part of the stew that or ocean that helped you be a successful startup, but also help you identify different types of debt bergs in different oceans. You want advocates and advisers who can help you navigate that journey.
I wanted to have Kim speak to this one particular thing you said, which is that you’re not hiring a bunch of advisors who agree with everything you say and being comfortable enough to be coachable, to hear other people’s perspectives or maybe even criticism like you’re going down the wrong path or whatever it might be?
Nobody likes to have Negative Nancy around all the time. You have to be tough with yourself and say, “Who is going to be the person who’s going to see all the bumps in the road?” Who’s going to be able to point out those hazards to me and it’s going to tell me 1,000 ways that this isn’t going to work. For some of us and me, if you tell me all the challenges that I’m going to try to cross them, surround them. It’s good from that perspective, but also you want somebody who maybe can see things that you can’t see. There’s this hard thing about being the founder of a startup or the founding team is that you have to be enthusiastic. You have to be persistent. Sometimes you need to go a different path and to be doggedly persistent and not to be able to hear or listen is tough.
The ultimate pivot that everyone ultimately ends up doing. That’s why people invest in the team more than the idea and that awareness is something that a lot of people don’t register with or they feel embarrassed sometimes that they have to. I’ve seen it time and again where you have to be willing to let that go a little bit. We obviously don’t have time to go into all the oceans. I did want to have maybe you talk one little bit about the strategy ocean because some people think, “Why does strategy have its own ocean or its own chapter?”
But before we go on, I’d like to close on one more thought on that advisor side because we frequently get asked to be advisors. In fact, some years we’ve done hundreds of lunches and coffees and things like that. As advisors, we have a talk and a coachability metric that we use. We’ll take the first coffee with anyone and we’ll have lunch sometimes. You go away and if you ask a second time, we’re very likely to take the second one as well if we’ve already given the first one. If you come back in the second one and you have tested nothing that we said in the first one and/or you are doggedly holding to ideas that we suggested negative things about the first time, we recognize you as not being coachable.
The Titanic Effect: One of the mistakes entrepreneurs make is they try and maintain connections with 50 people.
That’s great criteria or excuses of why you haven’t done something yet.
Moving into the strategy ocean, we recognize that we don’t have all the oceans in the book. We pick solutions that were in our sweet spot, our comfort zones. There are regulatory issues and legal issues and all that. The challenge that we see with some startups and probably most startups at different points in time are that because you have these different arenas that you’re moving forward. You’re moving forward the human stuff. You’re moving forward the funding. You’re moving forward what your customer relationship is going to look like. You’re moving forward the product. The whole thing gets unwieldy.
You get something that’s very in-depth on the product side. There’s no understanding or recognition of how this could be marketed or what’s valuable to customers or you get something at the sales and marketing side starts promising something that employees can’t do. That’s why we call it out the strategy ocean because that’s the place to bring the other three oceans together. To remind people that you have to be coordinated, you have to move one piece forward a little bit. The next piece forward a little bit.
That lack of coordination, one department sales promising something that engineering can’t deliver or is a nightmare even at a small scale.
Measurement, what happens, we’ve seen a lot of startups is they get so busy doing and they’re shorthanded, that they don’t even have metrics in place. They know the metrics that they’re going to need to see if they’re going to go do an angel pitch or a VC pitch. They’re not effectively running the business with metrics. We advocate different metrics at different points in time, but identifying what those metrics are and having somebody look at them. The third sea in the strategy ocean is about accountability, which is, we all think we’re heading in a certain direction, but until you put a name to it, it doesn’t happen.
Always be the founder or even the founding team as you grow up a little bit, as you start to scale, that accountability has to start to transfer to others within the organization.
What you’re saying is sometimes accountability is delegating stuff too. It’s not doing it all yourself. It’s been a fascinating look at the Titanic as a metaphor and the oceans that we all swim in, whether we’re starting a business or working in a business and all the challenges that we face. The book is called The Titanic Effect. Is there any last thought or piece of advice you each want to leave us with?
I’ll cut in on one and it comes back to very much the theme of a lot of what you talk about and making sure in your picture, in your story, you know what you’re trying to get out of it and that it is both stage-appropriate and context-appropriate in a very personal sense. We’ve talked about our own interactions with each other. When we’re looking for feedback, I’m going to characterize two different types and try and make this brief. We do a lot of writing. If I have a deadline that I’ve got to get it out by midnight and into a journal for review or whatever, I have to signal to Kim, “I’ve got a tight deadline. I need these superficial and it’s okay if you say, “That’s great, Hon.”
[bctt tweet=”If you’re good, you make your money in tips. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
At the early stages of this project, however, when we were trying to flesh out this metaphor and extend it, we needed to be ruthless with between all three of us. What may have created some challenging discussions, but that early stage, that’s the time to be open to much more discursive conversations about what’s going to work, what isn’t, what is clear and what is not? Understanding where you are in the journey and what you were looking for in your pitch, whatever that might look like is an important part of the process. As you very well know when articulate in many ways, a pitch is not this model with the constructed. A pitch varies a lot by what you’re trying to accomplish, who your audience is, etc. That’s certainly very true as you’re navigating from an early stage of launch and ideation through the later stages of growing a venture.
Keep on sailing, that’s the goal.
If people want to follow you on social media and track the book, what’s the best way for them to do that?
They can check out the website at www.TitanicEffect.com. We have a weekly blog and we email out little tips once a week so we don’t clog your inbox, but it’s fun when people email or text us and say, “I love that.”
Thank you both for sharing your expertise, navigating the waters that we all face.
Thank you so much. It’s been a lot of fun and good luck with your endeavors. To the audience, good luck with your pitch, whatever that might look like.
Thank you.
Important Links
- The Titanic Effect
- https://www.TitanicEffect.com/successfulpitch
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Social Purpose Investing with Joel Solomon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
One good life purpose is to do as much good as you can and leave the world better. Joel Solomon, the author of The Clean Money Revolution, shares that deciding that finance business and capitalism could be a powerful force for good was an awakening for him. Joel is the Chairman of Renewal Funds, a $98-million mission venture capital firm. He’s invested in over a hundred early growth stage companies delivering above-market returns while catalyzing positive social and environmental change. In this episode, he shares a wealth of knowledge about social purpose investing. When we take responsibility for where we are investing, it reveals who we are as a human and what our belief systems, philosophy, morals, and ethics are.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Social Purpose Investing with Joel Solomon
Our guest is Joel Solomon, who is the Chairman of Renewal Funds, which is a $98 million mission venture capital firm. He’s invested in over a hundred early growth stage companies delivering above-market returns while catalyzing positive social and environmental change. He also published a book, The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose and Capitalism. Joel, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
I want to ask you to tell us your own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, college or wherever you want. Where did you start to figure out what you wanted to do with your life?
I think I’ll go back to the pre-Joel roots a little bit and say that I come from two lineages, one of which was a German-Jewish lineage and the other was Russian-Poland-Lithuanian. The one left earlier than the big troubles but came to the United States for the opportunity. The other was shipped away as a ten-year-old to escape conscription and bad conditions in Russia at the time. My grandfather ended up in Atlanta and they had an experience shortly afterward of a Ku Klux Klan march around their neighborhood and moved up to Chattanooga where it was quieter. My father and mother met at the Democratic Party convention in 1952 on a blind date. I grew up in Tennessee.
At eighteen, I went away to university in the northeast and then over the years, my father became a very successful entrepreneur. I spent some time thinking about life. I worked in politics. I started making seed capital investments. I was diagnosed with genetic kidney disease and told I could die soon or live a long time, but there was nothing I could do about it. That led me to think about, “What does the kidney do?” When I realized it had to clean the toxins out of my blood, I started looking at the ingredient labels. That led me into a career in organic food investing along with climate issues that we invest in. A friend gave me her kidney several years ago. I ended up moving to Canada to take some great opportunities here and got to enjoy the Canadian healthcare system, which I never heard the words insurance or money. I get fabulous care and I’m healthy now and all that went well. It did put me into a career of thinking that life’s purpose was to do as much good as you can and leave the world better.
What I love about that story is the awareness of a personal challenge and that’s what I see a lot of great entrepreneurs having is they’ve had some personal problem. They want to solve for themselves and then realize other people have similar problems that they can solve and scale that solution. It generates a lot of ideas. The concept of having a kidney issue and figuring out what it does and then leading into healthcare and into a social impact is quite fascinating.
[bctt tweet=”Vision, Grit and Passion are keys to success” username=”John_Livesay”]
The journey with deciding that finance business and capitalism could be a powerful force for good was an awakening because I’d started in the ’60s with lots of questions and all kinds of things were going on then. I was a bit confused about what’s the best pathway. As I found the movement of entrepreneurs who thought that they could do good with a business, I found that very attractive. It was able to combine multiple sources of myself. My mother became an artistic photographer who shows the underbelly of psychology and emotions of humans on the planet. Combined with the optimistic entrepreneur dad and a serious look at the other side mom, I had a nice combination of critical thinking and enthusiasm for making things happen.
I love anything to do with critical thinking and I’ve heard it used in a lot of different arenas including the healthcare industry where for example, nurses need to have critical thinking skills to not just follow things exactly by the book. If they see something going wrong, they need to be able to respond to that. How do you define critical thinking in terms of entrepreneurship?
First of all, it’s a constant, daily critical thinking in terms of where are the opportunities, where are the challenges, what are we doing wrong and what can we do better? What are the hurdles to there? How do we assemble the right resources in terms of people support, boards of directors, other investors and expertise of all kinds? As an entrepreneur of building, we like to call it mission venture capital, we have to first assess what it is we’re interested in and we think we’ll be successful. Secondly, we want to understand the entrepreneurs and particularly their senior team, but as much about the culture as possible. “These people that are adaptive, can they assess what the circumstances are and make good choices?” You do as much due diligence as you can. You never know for sure well, but you’re making a bet on people and on a fairly long-term relationship. That’s how that pathway led to being an investor.
Let’s talk about what you look for besides having a great team when you hear a pitch.
The basics that you would think of are the core of it. Does the premise make sense? Does it look like there’s a marketplace opportunity? Do the entrepreneurs know what they’re doing or seem to know what they’re doing? What is competition? What’s the landscape? What are the resources? All those kinds of common sense things. What is really important to me is to understand the character and personality of the people I’m getting involved with. Everyone sells well or many people sell. What are they like under pressure? What kind of choices will they make when it’s not so easy?
What about when the plan that was enthusiastically presented doesn’t work? It’s more in the challenge points where you find out someone’s character. We do our best, I don’t have any special tricks for it other than experience with humans. I’m going through a lot of different entrepreneur situations and things like that and all kinds of situations, but I think it’s a lot about the inner skills, the psychological and the emotional. How do you handle conflict? How do you handle the pressure? Do you know what the truth really is and how to be very straightforward with people while still maintaining optimism and strategy?
Investing In Social Purpose: The art of understanding our emotional and psychological being is quite under-trained and under-utilized.
I think that’s fascinating information and choice of that. Wayne Dyer once said that if you squeeze an orange, you always get orange juice. It doesn’t matter what time of day, if you squeeze it in the corner, you still get orange juice. The thing about how consistent are we. If we get squeezed into a corner, does a different side of our personality come out or are we consistently calm and rational or what kind of choices are we making when we’re under pressure? That reminded me of that little analogy there. What is your favorite way to handle conflict that you could give as advice for people who are struggling with that? Many people say, “Let’s avoid it. Let’s bury it. Maybe it will go away. I don’t want to have that difficult conversation.” What advice can you give of how to handle conflict for people who are afraid of it or just try to avoid it?
It begins with my own journey through that myself. I went and sought help. I tried to be open to the professions that are there to help people. You can talk about the psychological and the mental stuff and the study of human nature, that kind of thing, but there’s a whole other level of knowing how to understand what one is even going through. Am I feeling something? What are the emotions I’m feeling and being able to identify them? If you become practiced at understanding yourself, when are you afraid? When are you angry? When are you sad? When you notice that and you learn that you do have the power to just simply by seeing it and acknowledging it, it’s a huge doorway, but then you can gain tools over time. It might be, “I’m going to take ten seconds and take a breath.”
That gap between stimulus and response is something that isn’t talked about very much.
“I’m going to go for a walk. I need a break.” I need to call somebody I trust and say, “I’m having a hard time now. I’m not sure what it is. Maybe it was whatever my wife said to me last night or my kid or who knows what.” I think that the art of understanding our emotional and psychological being is quite under-trained and underutilized. There are no courses in the university. I don’t know if incubators and accelerators have taken this up these days, but an entrepreneur is typically supposed to be an invulnerable hero of super person magnitude and be able to do everything. That is a mistake to try to be that person.
What I want to be is the most aware and conscious person who’s capable of seeing what’s going on in myself and understanding what the choice options are and then making a clear choice. I’ll say one more thing about this. Often if it’s a business situation, I will go so far as to say, “I’m having a bad day and I’m a little grumpy. I’m sad about something that happened or I’m worried about this or something.” It dispels so much to be vulnerable and honest that way. I don’t consider it a weakness. I consider it a strength.
Brené Brown certainly agrees with you. She was giving TED Talks on it and wrote books about the need to be vulnerable but that’s how people connect and relate. This concept of being aware of your feelings. “Am I afraid? Am I angry? Am I sad? What is triggering the anger in particular?” Do you have any experience or tips for people who struggle? We all have our hot buttons and we try to deactivate them to the best of our ability. If someone you find is constantly critical or a little condescending and you’re focusing on the 1% or 2% things you’re doing wrong as opposed to the 80% and 90% you’re doing right, do you have any suggestions on how you would personally handle that? What do you suggest to other people on how to not get so triggered?
[bctt tweet=”How do you use critical thinking?” username=”John_Livesay”]
To be a little more explicit about the professions out there that can help us get better at this, we bring in all kinds of expertise to our companies. One of the last things we’re typically going to bring is HR or organizational development or executive coaching. A good executive coach or those other professions, they have these skills, they’re good observers, they know how to give us feedback about it and they can help us both craft our own behaviors and then a corporate culture. Marketing, sales, finance, there are all kinds of tangible skills that are needed. This gets left off the list.
The EQ, the emotional intelligence, not just the IQ.
We’re in a world that demands more of this than ever before. We are looking at people less mechanistically like we’re machines and robots who are supposed to figure everything out exactly the same way. The modern marketplace and the modern backdrop to that marketplace like social-environmental trends and human trends, labor trends, younger people and how they are going to be in workplaces and what do they want? What is expected of us with a company and our values, morals and ethics? What kind of citizens are we in the world? It’s getting more complex, but at the same time, there’s something very simple in here which is opening to the idea that I can intentionally grow as a human being and as an entrepreneur.
Let’s talk about what inspired you to write your book. I’m always interested in that journey because that is not something that people undertake on a whim because it’s a huge amount of work and commitment. The Clean Money Revolution, what does that mean for people who don’t know?
What Clean Money is about is that I need to take responsibility for what my money is doing, whether it’s in my pocket, whether it’s in a bank, whether it’s invested somewhere. That is my responsibility. It reveals who I am as a human, what my belief systems, philosophy, morals, ethics are. I don’t want to end up invested in things that are damaging people or damaging places. That’s not a sacrifice I want to make. Everything’s imperfect, so I’m not talking about perfect. I’m talking about moving on that scale and taking responsibility. How much plastic do I buy? How do I treat other people through my money?
I got very fascinated with this idea and I had a fairly unique career. You can read about it in the book, but I had a fairly interesting career and I feel like I had a lot of privilege. Some of it had to do with just being in new areas early, which allowed me to be at the beginning of certain concepts or early stages, different business ideas and things. I realized that I’d been exposed to an awful lot and there’s not enough information out there about the moral and ethical sides. We talk about business ethics, but we don’t talk about the ethics around money itself very well. I think that future generations are counting on me to make good choices about my purchases, my buying and things like that.
Investing In Social Purpose: You end up with deep social unrest and serious problems if you don’t think about everyone at some kind of some level.
I wanted to share ideas about that and I also wanted to share that there’s a movement underway. It’s called impact investing in the sector I’m in. We’re looking at everything in society and we’re considering the long-term impacts, the manufacturing impacts, where stuff comes from and who’s affected. I wanted to share about that. The first part is the personal journeys. How did I think this all through and get this way? Second, there’s a movement underway. Here’s a personal taxonomy that I may have seen early stages of a couple of subsectors and here’s how they’ve grown. The third part is to talk about the moral and ethical aspect of this state of the world, the crisis we’re facing on all fronts and how do we be the best that we can be.
When you decide what you’re investing in, do you invest in companies only in Canada or the US and Canada?
We are US and Canada-focused. We can’t do international because it’s too much for us to take on. Our investors are from around the world, but mostly US, Canada. We have one advantage, which is depending on what are fairly big swings and exchanged rates, it might be better to be shopping for investments in one country or the other. That gives us an interesting little bit of diversity that isn’t it as common.
When you talk about social impact, is it only companies that are helping the environment or if you see that someone is creating a product or a service that has a positive social impact on people’s life or their ability to buy a home or something, does that fall under something you invest in? Is it only environment?
One thing I wanted to say, by the way, is that we’re raising money and I haven’t updated my bio, so we’re going to push near $200 million under management, maybe over that. It’s succeeding over time. We’d look at all the factors, but we are primarily focused on soil, agriculture and food and everything to do with the environment technologically, which there’s really a vast world of that now. However, we are looking at social factors, we’re looking at the human beings, we’re looking at what kind of a workplace it is. We don’t ignore that but our first doorway has to do with the environment and climate.
When you talk about reinventing power and purpose, let’s take a dive on how do we reinvent power and is it by the way we spend our money or what companies we invest in? Is that what you’re talking about? Are we giving those people more power by attracting that kind of money?
[bctt tweet=”How Do You Handle Pressure?” username=”John_Livesay”]
What I meant by saying that is that power is distributed in a quite imbalanced way currently on the planet. We have created the benefits to flow to those who needed the least. Tax benefits, access to education, all kinds of things. We are steadily reducing that access for people who have the least. Legislation and all kinds of things keep changing that is going what I consider the wrong direction. You end up with deep social unrest and serious problems if you don’t think about everyone at some level. By power, I’m talking about who gets to have and who gets accessed and who gets to decide. A very few of us relatively speaking, have that power and there are choices to make.
You can be a consultative leader, you can be a dictatorial leader. You can cultivate a safe workplace for ideas and innovation or you can not want to hear anybody ever question you. That’s where power is. I’m using it very loosely there, but it’s deep. If we don’t pay attention to this, I think we’d get in trouble. I was born with less than three billion people on the planet and I could live to see eight billion. How are we going to split up everything and how are we going to take care of each other? What’s going to happen? Who gets to decide who gets what? That’s what I mean by the power in that one.
We often talk about the Ford Foundation committing over a billion dollars in the next ten years to helping people get affordable housing and financial services accessibility. That is where I am really fascinated and the social impact that that has. If you look at Maslow’s hierarchy, until we have some basic needs met and give people access to qualifying or getting some cash without going into debt so much, if everybody’s living paycheck to paycheck then they never get up the hierarchy to start self-actualizing and caring about the planet. If you’re still wondering where your next meal is coming from or if you’re going to pay your rent. I love what you’re doing here. Is there anything from the book that you want to say to somebody, “If you’re struggling with this, you’ll find the answer in The Clean Money Revolution?“
I might offer you more questions than answers, but I’ll tell you a lot of stories in that book. I like the parable and the storytelling. The living example to make the points rather than to overly act like I know exactly how things should be done or people should be done. One of the greatest things in my life is the stories that I’ve been able to be exposed to or be part of. Early on, one of those was Jimmy Carter. I went to work for him in my teenage years when he decided to run for president. I worked through that. Another was after I was diagnosed with kidney disease. I went out on seek and search and I ended up caretaking an island that was an Orca Research Laboratory that was founded by the guy who started Greenpeace’s Save the Whales campaign. I saw two examples between age 18 to 25 or 27 where one individual decided to take on some huge complex task and both of them actually succeeded at it through vision, grit, learning and going for it. Those were very helpful to me and then in the entrepreneur world, I get to see other stories and it goes on from there. It got me in the pattern of stories as the best teaching methods.
You’re singing my song. My whole book is Better Selling Through Storytelling because Plato said storytellers rule society and it’s as true now as it was 2,600 years ago. The more we can become storytellers to get people engaged in caring about a particular issue, I think that’s where it hooks the emotions is storytelling.
I’m so glad we’re aligned on that and it’s the ballgame. You can learn it in a lot of different places, but doing it takes practice. You’ve got to remember.
What’s something you’re working on now that you’re very excited about?
We have 300 investors at this point and influencing those investors, their families, friends and advisers that there is a different way to invest. There’s a different way to make money and here’s a whole bunch of stories that you’re going to get exposed to. That’s one part. The second is proving to the citizenry and to industry sectors and everyone else, that there are better ways to do things and that you need to pay attention to that continual improvement. If there are practices that you’re waking up to and you’re going, “I don’t know if I want to tell my grandchildren about what I did to build this industry or the sector or this product.”
There are increasing ways to make better choices because human ingenuity both do well on greed. Human ingenuity does a great job on accumulation and domination and that kind of thing. My friend gave me her kidney. That’s unfathomable really. We’ve gotten used to this kind of thing and in every different part we look and we don’t like something in the world. We’re in an era. If we can maintain it then don’t blow it. We’re in an era where the possibilities of human vision, passion and caring could make a fantastic future or we could blow it.
Let’s stay optimistic that the vision, the grit and the passion will allow us to not blow it and in fact continue to have great social impact. I can’t thank you enough, for coming on and sharing your wisdom and the insights from your wonderful book. If people want to follow you, where should they go?
Joel Solomon, I’m in the major social medias. That’s one way to find me under my name. The book is available, The Clean Money Revolution out in the world, you can get your bookstore to order it. You could go to your favorite online bookstore and etc. The two websites, RenewalFunds.com is about the businesses we invest in and how we do what we do. The JoelSolomon.org, this podcast will be there and lots of other interviews, ideas, blogs, connections and things like that.
Thanks again, Joel.
Thank you so much.
Links Mentioned:
- Renewal Funds
- The Clean Money Revolution: Reinventing Power, Purpose and Capitalism
- Ford Foundation
- Save the Whales
- Better Selling Through Storytelling
- RenewalFunds.com
- www.JoelSolomon.org
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Think. Do. Say. With Ron Tite
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Our guest is Ron Tite who is hailed as one of the Top Ten Creative Canadians by marketing Magzine. He’s the author of Think. Do. Say. In this episode, Ron shares how to build trust, as well as how do we win the battle for time when everyone is so inundated with things that you have to figure out a way to create content and advertising that wins that battle. Today, he shows us exactly how to do it from lessons learned in his book. Don’t miss this episode to discover a whole process of building trust – from figuring out how to connect with your beliefs and values, how to deliver on those beliefs and values, and how authenticity is the secret sauce to all of that.
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Listen to the podcast here
Think. Do. Say. With Ron Tite
Our guest is Ron Tite who has been named one of the Top Ten Creative Canadians by Marketing Magazine. He has been an award-winning advertising writer and Creative Director for some of the world’s most respected brands including Air France, Evian, Fidelity, Hershey, Johnson & Johnson, Kraft, Intel, Microsoft and many more. His work has been recognized by The London International Advertising Awards and many more. He’s the Founder and CEO of Church+State, a Toronto-based marketing agency and he’s the publisher of This is That: Travel Guide to Canada. He also has a book coming out called Think Do Say. He and I are going to be speaking at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit on storytelling. Welcome to the show, Ron.
Thank you so much, John. Thank you for having me.
I always like to ask guests to tell us their story of origin. You can go back as far as childhood high school, college or whatever it was you thought, “I want to be a creative person.”
When you look at the broader life story, we can break it down in terms of the peaks and the valleys, and the origin story is such a great way to put it. I grew up the youngest child of four in a predominantly single-parent home for the most part and not quite poor. I think that it’s observing being the youngest while everything else was going on around me. I began to be able to observe things right and start to look at that life. I try and pull humor and see the humor in it. Even from being a very young child, not being a class clown, I wasn’t that but I could certainly appreciate the humor in situations and always.
My family is Italian and Québécois background so it’s very loud, it’s animated, the people who themselves were amazing storytellers. As a kid sitting around the kitchen table hearing my aunts and uncles tell stories and how they could just capture a room whether they were emotional stories or funny stories. I think that’s where I really got the ability to tell a story and which would serve me well. I started doing stand-up comedy so I would do that. I went off to university, I was the first of my family to go to university. I did a phys ed degree like most people in comedy and advertising.
You started off in phys ed, athleticism, which doesn’t normally lead to being an expert in creativity and humor. How did that connect for you?
Getting into it, it wasn’t a conscious choice but I don’t know that it was something I was destined to do. Nobody of my family had gone to university. I liked the job that my wrestling coach and gym teacher have and I said, “How do I do that?” I do that and then once you go and you land in the middle of the sea of people who come from this variety of different backgrounds, I quickly realized, “I don’t have to do that. I can do whatever I want. I think I’m smart enough. My head is screwed on tight enough.” I don’t know why and I read a book that changed my life.
It really sought away, but it is not a book that everybody knows. John Irving wrote a book called The Imaginary Girlfriend that was not a biography. It was how he was this very successful wrestler who wrestled in college and discovered his love of writing. He would tell his wrestling coach that he couldn’t attend to meet because he had to go see his girlfriend, but his girlfriend was his writing. When I read that, I realized, “I don’t have to live into this predefined. I don’t have to be a wrestler. I don’t have to be a gym dude.” I realized I could pursue the things that I find interesting, that I’m curious about and that’s when I started. After I read that book, I got a job in the business school at Queen’s University. It was the beginning of the internet and I started doing some tech stuff there. I made my way into advertising and then the second biggest contributor to the story was that I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. I don’t know what that guy was thinking many years ago because it is like, “You do it for money.”
[bctt tweet=”We trust imperfection.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Were you scared? It is one thing if we give a talk to an audience and they have all these expectations that it’s going to be hilarious so they’re not at a nightclub drinking like you’re giving a keynote. You’re usually in front of a business audience, the stakes are still high, but I think getting in front of a crowd that’s like, “You are the next Seinfeld or Ellen DeGeneres, and if not, some people get booed off the stage if they’re not funny.” Was there any trepidation doing comedy for the first time?
No weirdly and when I tell you the extended part of this, you’ll be more freaked out maybe. I’ve always liked to look at something like, “How do I pursue that and explore it?” I don’t want to apply for a job. I want to create a job. Someone told me that the way to get under stand-up comedy was you had to go and do five minutes at an open mic. I went to see that to check it out and I walked away going, “That’s the most demoralizing, horrible experience for anybody I could ever imagine.” I am already better than everybody on that stage. I was cocky about it. I went to a friend and I said, “I’m not doing that. That’s inhumane. What else can I do?” He said, “Why? I guess the only thing you can do is find a producer who’s producing a live show and you can convince them to give you five minutes even though you’ve never done it before.” I said, “Why don’t I just make myself the producer? I’ll make myself the headliner. My very first night of ever performing stand-up comedy on my own, I headlined with a 45-minute set and that’s ballsy.
It also shows that you’re taking something, disrupting it and making it your own.
I started writing and starting the rules to favor my own situation. Once you do 45 minutes, they put a stamp on your face and say, “You’re a professional stand-up comedian now,” and then you used to get gigs. I guess the other pivot out of that, the third most important one, I started to do stand-up comedy. I was touring and doing a lot of club shows and then because I worked in advertising, I started doing corporate shows. I started to see speakers and I was like, “This exists, a career that is interesting.” When I found out that they were making three times that I was making and repurposing the same speech over and over, I thought I had to pivot out of that and so I started bringing in some weird strategy bits into my corporate comedy set and it was weird. I realized the third most important pivot was there’s no market for a comedian who knows about business, but there is a massive market for a funny business guy. I walked away from comedy, struck it from my record, took it from the bio and everything, and said, “I’m a speaker. I’m not a comedian at all. Let them be delightedly surprised by the funny.”
Building Trust: There’s no market for a comedian who knows about business, but there is a massive market for a funny business guy.
When did you decide to launch your own agency? How did you come up with the name Church+State? I love that concept because having worked in advertising myself, they used to say, “The editorial and advertising, church and state don’t even talk to the editors, don’t ask them any questions about a story. We don’t want anything in the edit to be touched by an advertiser’s request.” In other words, if W Magazine is doing a photo shoot, they don’t necessarily want to have Lexus cars in that photoshoot. I’m guessing that’s where that came from.
I was an Executive Creative Director at Euro RSCG and I was at a point where I literally remember the moment I was shooting a TV commercial for Kraft and it was in Montevideo, Uruguay. I am with someone, would step back to take a photo of the crew and all of us from the agency, clients, stuff and I turn to my producer and said, “How are we still doing this crap?” Like, “Really?” We’re flying halfway around the world for 30 seconds and confirmed that no one’s watching anymore. I just quit. I realized I want to do stuff on my own. I thought that the traditional process of getting consumers’ attention was broken. I thought the agency model was a little bit broken and I wanted the freedom to pursue what I was curious about and not have to report that into the head office in New York or Paris. I quit and committed to starting my own thing.
One of the first things I did before I started the agency is I started consulting and I was consulting with a media company that had radio stations. I realized that as the large marketers from big CPGS, telcos and tech, that they didn’t get where the world was going. I also thought the big established media players didn’t see where it was going either. The idea was somebody has to know where media is going to know where advertising is going. We started as the Tite Group and then once we formalized and realized what it was, we pronounced it Church and State but it was this realization that as to your point, that you were banging on with that. It was theirs that we used to claim, the separation of church and state. I firmly believe that when you’re now at a time where we see the unification of church and state and everything, that every ad can be an actual piece of content. If it’s good enough and compelling enough then every piece of content can be an ad. If it’s responsible and authentic enough and it’s really about how do we help people win the battle for time so we do it for big brands? We do it for big media companies and then we do it for individuals too.
How do you win the battle for time and that is obviously having content and advertising be a good story? Am I guessing that pulls people in?
100%, when you go to YouTube and you get the pre-roll video, the pre-roll ads.
[bctt tweet=”How do you win the battle for time?” username=”John_Livesay”]
Everybody goes, “How many more seconds until this stops?”
“How can I skip it? Can I skip it? There, I’m going to skip it.” I think we place that on advertising in a pre-roll one. The skip ad button exists in every conversation we have. It’s like you go to a party and someone’s like, “I’m in data mining.” You’re like, “Can I skip this ad? Can I get out of it?” We used to believe that the content players, that people all wanted to tune in to that and they didn’t want to see the ads and they would skip the ad. If you’re a newspaper right now, every article, every tweet, everything you do, there is a skip button that says, “Do you want to roll pass this because you’re distracted by other things?” Everything has a skip ad button and what it is that makes people go, “I don’t want to skip this. I want to listen to this.” The old like, “People have a short attention span.” “That’s why they’re sitting down and watching twenty-minute TED Talks.” That’s why they’re great big shows on that list. People want great stuff and there’s so much great stuff that they’re willing to seek it out and find it. I don’t care if you’re an ad, a newspaper or a person. Your stuff better be good enough to win the battle for time or you’re done.
Your book, Think Do Say, reminds me automatically of monkey-see, monkey-do and all that good stuff. I love that you talk about that everybody succeeds in the world by figuring out what they think, what they do and what they say is a criterion. Those are some great takeaways from this episode for everyone to think about. When I gave my TEDx Talk, the TEDx coach said, “What do you want the audience to think? What do you want them to feel? What do you want them to do?” It’s very much in line with what you’re doing in this great book. My first question is, how did you come up with the title?
Nobody asked that because they often assumed it was like, “You pick three random words.” This came about because I was doing a TV appearance on a daytime talk show and they wanted me to talk about personal brands. I was bringing in all this marketing language and I was talking to the producer and she’s like, “You’ve got to dumb it down a little bit.” You’ve got to simplify it because these people aren’t marketers. I was out of frustration and I said, “Here’s the simplest way to do it, it’s based on what you think, what you do, and what you say,” in that order and then I did that in the appearance. I was working with Michael Port and Amy Port. I went to them and I was speaking probably 55 times a year. If you ever got to that point, we were like, “This is all great, I’m getting great reviews and the gigs are coming back.”
Think. Do. Say.: How to seize attention and build trust in a busy, busy world
There’s something personally I feel it’s not quite there yet. They came to a speech that I gave and they’re not all ten out of ten. This was a ten out of ten, it was brought and they started the conversation with, “We have some notes.” They said, “We don’t know what the foundation is. What is this about?” It’s a bunch of random stuff. You didn’t stand because you broke it down like a stand-up way and a bunch of it. We explored that, Think Do Say, and then I built the framework before I even thought of the book. Once I decided I want to do the book Think Do Say, for me it was the only title. It was not negotiable.
People don’t realize how important a headline is. In an email, what your subject line is, to get people even to want to open it, a book title to get people to be intrigued enough to pick it up or at least click to read what that means. I also have learned that there’s a craft of speaking and there’s a craft of telling jokes or figuring out what’s funny and that the order of things is critically important. For people to think maybe, “I should think about something and do something before I say something. I normally just say something.” Can you speak to that a little bit, the importance of the order?
It is hard why I was frustrated enough to write the book because you’ve got to be really frustrated to go, “I’m going to take a few months out of my life and sit down and write this.” I thought that far too many people, far too many thought leaders, far too many speakers, far too many businesses, marketing people. We’re all trying to game the system by jumping to the say and that we were getting in the zone where we’re looking at data and saying, “This is the headline that most people respond to and you’ve got to talk about yourself in this way.” We started cliparting communication and saying, “You’ve got to put this word here and that word there, you’ve got to start this way.” One, the creative person in me. My soul dies a little bit every time I heard that but also I was so frustrated to step back and go, “You can’t just say what you think everybody wants to hear without having the actions and behaviors that give you the permission to say it in the first place. You’re gaming the system, it’s a big crock of crap. It’s clickbait and I thought, “We’re losing this ability or this desire to play the long game.” If you were to zero-base at business like, “How do you build it or zero base a person, an entrepreneur and your business is the one person?” It’s the same thing.
The first thing you need to do is believe in something greater. There has to be something that you believe in that allows you or inspires you to do the things that you do. What is that foundation? What do you believe in? The second thing is you have something that you can seek actions and behaviors to tie back to and to reinforce because this was the other thing I saw. My friend Warren Tomlin says random acts of digital where they’re doing stuff and it’s not strategically tied to anything. You need a guide for your actions and behaviors and those are your beliefs. What do you believe? What do you do to reinforce that belief through your actions? If you believe in something greater and you behave in a way and empower your team to behave in a way that reinforces that point, that is worth talking about. If you’re going to talk about it then shouldn’t you talk about it in a really interesting and compelling way? Shouldn’t you use stories to tell what you believe in how you reinforce it to get as many people onside? If you do that and you talk about that stuff, enough of those people will convert to buying whatever it is you’re selling.
[bctt tweet=”It’s our imperfections that people buy because that’s what makes us human.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s talk about how you bring this to life in your book because it’s like, “Let me digest this.” I have to figure out what I believe then I have to take actions based on that belief and not have it be some core belief that I have on a wall and never take actions on. How do consumers get involved with this? Most people are thinking to themselves, “I don’t even know how to connect beliefs to actions, let alone get my customers,” but you have a wonderful story in Think Do Say about how REI implemented this. Would you walk us through the implementation of that so that those steps come to life for people?
REI believed and this kicked off in 2015. The program still exists now and it’s growing. REI, for those readers who may not know, for international audiences, it’s an outdoor equipment retailer co-op. They sell tents and hiking boots and stuff like that. Most people, if they have that business, they would say, “What do we believe? We believe we should be the best outdoor retailer in the world.” That’s not a belief. The other people do that and other people have that aspiration and don’t make you that special. What they did is they believed in something more important. They believed and they state this, “We believe a life lived outside is a life well-lived.” They didn’t say we believe we should knock twenty points off hiking boots. They elevated it to something that people actually care about like, “I get this.” The second thing is they then took action. One of the first things they did was a very symbolic but important gesture, they close all their stores and stopped eCommerce payments and delivery on Black Friday, the busiest retail day of the year. Their line was, “We’d rather be in the mountains than in the aisles.”
Let’s talk about how great that is. It’s visual, it hits you in the gut, it’s so counterintuitive. Normal people who are worried about stock prices or even a privately-held company, worrying about profits because I know retail makes a majority of their money in the fourth quarter. That is what most people would say is an insane decision and it ties to the belief and has a surprising outcome. Continue with the story. I wanted to underline that as such a great concept if you’re going to take a bold step like that. Have an emotional look that is from the mountains instead of the aisles of a store. I’m in a story which is my whole thing, get people in your story.
They delivered this message so that was their do and then the say was that you want to say it in a way that is compelling and interesting for people so they pay attention. They come on your side so they chose a couple of things in these say. One, they didn’t talk about this being an anti-consumerism thing. They didn’t make it about social issues. They’re not anti-corporate. They don’t think the private sector is evil. They didn’t go down that road. They said, “We believe a life lived outside is a life well-lived. We’re going to close our stores on Black Friday and rather be in the mountains than the aisles.” Those are the first things I decide. The second thing was they decided to have this in a slightly whimsical launch spot. The CEO at the time is no longer CEO because the CEO was sitting at a desk out on the top of a mountain. These two hikers come up and go, “What are you doing here?” and he’s like, “Why? I work here.” It’s not knee-slapping funny but it gives a smile and is consistent with the brand. It is a very authentic piece of communication.
Building Trust: Don’t ask for the sale. Communicate your values so you’re connecting right away without your sales bias getting in the way.
This has grown and they’ve got more partners on. What I love and I think what is a point that gets missed in this story is that what are the adjoining pieces of this story? You can say, “They lived happily ever after.” There are some other stories here because by believing in something more important that goes beyond the product and then by saying, “How can we act in a way that reinforces that belief?” They had the one act of closing the stores but that’s not all they did. The actions they took to say, “If we really believed in, what can we do to support that belief that goes beyond the stuff we sell?” They created REI Adventures which is a touring company and they started to diversify their portfolio. They now start REI classes where they teach people how to kayak, canoe, rock climbing and things like that. Not only are they doing more to support their beliefs, they’re diversifying the revenue portfolio by doing it. It’s a great business story and the hook for all the doubters who are reading and going, “That’s easy to close your store on Black Friday.” Two things, one, as Nike said with the Colin Kaepernick ad, “If you believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything,” but REI grew the business, they gained nine points year-over-year by closing business retail day of the year.
I also imagine that it creates brand ambassadors who say, “That’s what I believe in, more family time, less fanatic shopping to save some money where you’re pushing and shoving people.” This concept of if a brand decision and a marketing message can start attracting the kind of talent you want that’s not normally an advertising job. I would think that top talent would look at that decision and say, “That’s the culture I want to work in,” which is to me is another extension of that story.
You are banging on there, as a recruitment piece, it’s incredible, it’s amazing.
You have such great insight in Think Do Say about people don’t know how to trust people. People say that all the time, “How do I get someone to trust me right away whether I’m an ad or I’m pitching to get hired or pitching for anything to sell my product?” Speak to us about how Think Do Say can help us with our trust?
[bctt tweet=”It’s nice when we get to meet somebody face to face. It amplifies the connection more.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We have to look at why people don’t trust others and we have to acknowledge that. We have to acknowledge that there are macro cultural forces at play that have gone into that person’s day and over the past decade. We’ve seen Lance Armstrong lie to our faith. We saw Bill Cosby when going from America’s dad to America’s predator. We’ve seen Panama papers do nothing. We’ve seen CEO compensation go through the roof. We’ve seen Volkswagen with the emission scandals. A long list of all aspects of our lives and internally within organizations like, “Please.” Employees are like, “Great another reorg. I’m sure you have my best interests at heart.” We know that coming into it, people are already completely skeptical and then there are two points to the distrust, I think. If we look at Times Square as this metaphor, that up top you’ve got the big brands who can afford to do the promotion and they put it into glitzy ads with high prices, photography, perfect scripts and everything else. They get so big and they get so perfect that they lose all the semblance of personality. They can’t connect with the common person because they’re saying stuff to be really perfect and nobody is perfect.
We trust imperfection. Like in advertising, we used to fire the director of photography if there was a lens flare on the film and we consciously put them in because people see that as a slight imperfection and they trust it. I got these big brands who don’t want to be imperfect and so we don’t trust them because they’re too scripted. On the other hand, we have these people on the street who are nothing but imperfect and they got someone telling you the end of the world is coming and someone is selling a fake Gucci. They may be authentic and imperfect but we don’t trust them because they don’t have the credibility that the guys have at the top has. That’s why we’re stuck in this zone. That the big established players who have screwed us for years and we’ve got these startups. We’re not exactly sure whether they’re going to be around tomorrow and that’s this paralysis that is in the minds of the consumer.
To build that trust, if you start with a belief and you connect with people on beliefs and values. You’re not asking for the sale. You’re communicating your values and so you’re connecting right away without your sales bias getting in the way and people go like, “I trust this person. I like this person.” If they’re skeptical like, “They only said that they believe,” and then they fall and you deliver on what you told only you’re going to deliver on. Now, I can trust you and then if you talk in an authentic way. I’ll tell you this very quick story.
I was at a gig in Sarasota, Florida and I was talking with a chairman of a global software company that I can’t name. This person was from the Deep South and he was previously the CEO of that software company. He spent some time at a CPG and rose to the ranks of vice president. Once he hit vice president, they sent him on a leadership development course and he realized that the sole idea and purpose of the course was to get him to lose his Southern accent because they didn’t feel he would have credibility on the global stage sounding like a country boy. He looked to me and said, “I quit because I realized my voice is not a bug, it’s a feature.” It’s our imperfections that people buy because that’s what makes us human. If we hide those imperfections through incredibly polished photography, communications and incredibly scripted things that have no sense of personality, if we’re hiding who we really are, what else are we hiding?
I saw the value. It’s almost the concept where you see people spending so much time photoshopping a Facebook post so that there are no wrinkles and their teeth are extra white and all this stuff online. At what point do we not even let a casual photo go up to where we go, “That’s not perfect, I can’t show it.” “We trust imperfection.” I love that line and this concept you’ve given us, a step-by-step. It builds trust by letting people connect with our beliefs and values then deliver it. That builds trust through authentic vulnerable communication and connection. Ron, that is brilliant. I have never heard anybody put it so clearly, that’s why the book Think Do Say is so valuable and a must-read for everyone. How can people follow you if they want to engage you, to come and speak? What’s the best way to do that?
They can go to RonTite.com, ThinkDoSay.com, ChurchState.co or all the social channels, just add Ron Tite.
Any last thoughts or one quote you want to leave us with?
The one thought I would leave you with is I absolutely love our conversation and we’ve never met in person but we get to do so in Chicago. I think that as much as we can connect the people through digital means and it makes it nice when we get to meet somebody face-to-face. It takes those connections and amplifies them even more. I’m really looking forward to that.
Likewise, and remember that if you have a choice between texting somebody, talking to them, Zoom call or seeing them in person, always go for the in-person energy.
Important Links
- Think Do Say
- Ron Tite
- Church+State
- This is That: Travel Guide to Canada
- The Imaginary Girlfriend
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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