Estars – The Future of Esports with Jeff Liboon
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Estars as a platform is definitely the future of Esports. Jeff Liboon, the Co-Founder and President of Estars, talks about how he came up with his business idea, all the amazing things they have at their Las Vegas studio, and how to handle failure and to use frugality as a catalyst for creativity. Jeff explains how they are incorporating traditional to present esports concepts and how they get sponsorships on their games. He describes the kinds of sponsors they are attracting and why this is so much more engaging for them to put their money on versus simply running a commercial on a football game.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Estars – The Future of Esports with Jeff Liboon
Our guest is Jeff Liboon who is the Cofounder and President for Estars. He’s responsible for product and business development, including the creation of the World Showdown of ESports, which is known as WSOE and managing white-label production growth and investments. Estars is an interactive eSports engagement platform that’s launching in Q3 2019. They’re going to provide a viewing experience for eSports fans around the world. He has several years of gaming experience, working with top-rated platforms like Amazon’s App Store, Xbox Live and several top mobile gaming developers in the eSports industry. Before that, he helped create the Amazon mobile eSports team and grew that to eight figures in one year. While at Amazon, he conceptualized and executed the very successful Mobile Masters and Champions of Fire eSports events. He’s been doing a lot of things in social media where he led product development and marketing for DoubleDown and Casino IGT. Jeff, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me, John. I appreciate you.
I am fascinated to hear your own story of origin. Take us back to your childhood or your college days of your first initial interest in gaming or in anything to do with where you are.
My story around my career and professional growth are interesting. A lot of entrepreneurs can probably say the same thing. I was drawn to the entrepreneurial spirit. From a very early age, for some reason, I thought about business a little bit differently. We’re thinking about, for example, starting a lemonade stand. That interested me when I was a very young boy. I was always figuring out ways to, for all intents and purposes, make money. That was always something that I found fun and I was always drawn to. When you start to look at my career as I went to college and even in high school, I was always looking for ways to exercise that entrepreneurial spirit versus getting a normal 9 to 5 job that could make me money in a more traditional way. That meant starting small businesses in high school, whether that was selling basketball cards. All the way through college, we were always looking for ideas and ways with my friend group to figure out small businesses and little hustles here and there to avoid getting that normal 9 to 5 job. A lot of those failed and you learn some things.
I always ended up looking for ways to do that. From a learning and growth perspective, a lot of those lessons rolled over to what we’re doing now. In terms of being an entrepreneur, we hear that a lot. It’s being positive and being able to push forward. I’m dealing with frugality and building successful businesses through bootstrapping and things like that. All of that stuff had an infrastructure that was set when I was young. It’s a very interesting thing. When I was thinking about coming out of college and what I wanted to get into, gaming was something that was always super fun and super entertaining. When we’re sitting around taking the college example, I always knew that gaming was something that I wanted to get into. If you think about how I thought about things, being in my career, it was centered a lot on marketing specifically, but you could go and market anything. You can market cars. You can market used car lots and almost any product in the world, but gaming was always something that was fun. I looked at it as, “Why wouldn’t I do something and get into something that I found enjoyment out of?” That was my first step as to what why I wanted to jump headfirst in gaming way back to the late 2000s.
Estars: It’s interesting to see how the esports industry is developing over time and how big it’s getting.
All my friends that have young boys at home that want to play and spend all their free time gaming, there’s hope that it could be turned into a career.
There is a lot of hope. It’s a newer industry. I’m in my mid-30s but my parents don’t understand what I do on a daily basis. The industry is so young. When you look at like, “Mom, I make a living with producing eSports events or,” back when I was at Xbox on Amazon, “pushing game sales,” they don’t understand it. Traditionally, they think of it as a time-waster. I don’t blame them for that. It is a newer industry that people are starting to even come to understand now. In my core group, I grew up with Xbox and the first Nintendo. Most people, my age and younger, have grown up with that as a staple of popular culture and as an entertainment medium. Now, that’s completely normal that my son loves Fortnite. I don’t think of it as a time-waster. It’s like going to the movies and watching TV. My parents considered it as a normal way to entertain yourself.
In the eSports space, we start to look at if you told my parents that people were playing this playing games for high stakes and a lot of money as a skill-based activity almost like football, basketball or baseball, that would go so far with their heads. They wouldn’t understand a word I was saying. They would think it was ridiculous. I guarantee you with my son’s kids, my grandchildren are sitting in the largest stadiums in North America playing in front of hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions of people watching around the world. That’s not necessarily going to be our generation. They’re not going to understand that. My son is going to think it’s a completely normal activity. It’s interesting to see how this industry is developing over time and how big it’s getting.
You mentioned two words that I’m fascinated with. One is working in startups and business at the beginning is dealing with failure and also frugality. Do you think there are any lessons learned in entrepreneurship that people can learn playing eSports games that are either around failure to teach a little bit of resilience? I know there are a lot of people who buy things for the games. Do they have to be smart on having a limited budget? Do they learn any frugality lessons playing these games?
I worked at Amazon for almost four years. It opened my eyes specifically around how to treat business. They think of it very differently. Even if you look at how people from traditional Fortune 500 companies looked at how Amazon was running their business in early 2010, I think the knock on Amazon on the street and everywhere else is they don’t make money. Nobody really understood that they were investing so much in infrastructure and into different verticals that would pay dividends now. At any point, they could have turned off the faucet and turn down the R&D and stopped investing in new industries. They were getting knocked on a lot by not turning huge profits immediately. Can anybody argue with their stuff? Probably not.
[bctt tweet=”When you don’t throw money at a problem, it causes creativity. ” via=”no”]
One of the core tenets that they love to build around is frugality. It’s where when you don’t throw money at the problem, you tend to find solutions and get much more creative in that respect to find a long-term solution. I believe that is a core principle of being a successful entrepreneur. Before you throw money at something, can you figure out a way to do it without that money? You wrap your brain and sit down and think about that. If you continually put yourself through that test as an entrepreneur, it seems like you will find a lot of solutions that you would never have thought of unless you were put in that situation and frugality right in front of your eyes.
When you don’t throw money at a problem, it causes creativity.
I try to use that in all my businesses. Let’s say, I had $0 to throw at this problem. What would I do? You start there as a baseline and you seem to come up with a lot of different solutions that you would have never thought of if you had a bunch of dollars. In terms of the frugality piece in gaming and gamers in the eSports world, it’s applying right now at a macro level at the industry where everything is so fragmented. In the industry itself, there are so many different moving parts to it. There are a lot of different fragmented ways, a lot of people who make money. Whether it’s meant to do this or not, but the industry is taking this frugal approach to each of these fragmented sectors and figuring out how to build a sustainable business, which is a cool thing to see.
At a high level, the developers have a lot of the power because they own the IPs to all these games. All of the services and the third parties around it is trying to figure out how to make a successful business around this fast-growing and cool entertainment medium. They‘re being frugal and smart in terms of how they can build a sustainable business, which is a cool thing to see. You’ll see creative ways in terms of how people are displaying data, for example. There are some companies out there that are taking in-game data and doing cool things with it, whether that’s with production or broadcast, betting or additional site content.
There are some cool things that are happening there. That’s one example. You even see ways in an industry like sponsorship and advertising. As traditional sports have decades of experience in how to provide value back to an advertiser, an industry like eSports is trying to figure that out right now. There’s a lot of ingenuity, creativity and things that are pulling from traditional sports, trying to apply them to eSports but it doesn’t quite fit all the way. It’s not Apple to Apple with a traditional sports community but people are trying to figure out how they make that work as well in terms of value, both on ROI for advertisers and also community and content. That’s sitting out there. The cool thing is there’s a lot of VC money coming into the eSports industry. I wouldn’t say it’s overloaded yet in terms of how fast the industry is growing already. A lot of companies are being frugal and trying to figure out new creative ways. They’re not just throwing money at the problem which is figuring out how to build a sustainable business.
Estars: Gaming in general has some of the most passionate, rabid fan bases in any genre that you could possibly find.
Let’s talk about what your business is and how you make money. You’re the premier competitive gaming production company in the world. You not only provide the production, but you also offer people a chance to sponsor these events in person. It’s not, “This is just somebody playing a game. This is an actual event.” For those people who maybe haven’t been to an event, can you describe the sponsors you’re attracting and why this is so much more engaging for them to put their money here versus running a commercial on a football game or whatever?
I’ll quickly run through our core main business pillars that we have between Estars, the platform and Estars Studios, which is our production arm. What we have in our portfolio a white-label business. The world’s top game developers will write us a check. We’ll run their eSports events from A to Z. That can be everything from broadcasting, production, stage design, all the way through lead operations, talent management and player management and all of it. We have a large array of the top gaming companies and platforms in the world that we service multimillion-dollar business.
Give us a sense of how many people typically show up in an event like this. Is it like being in a football stadium?
It depends. We’ve done events at this point in LA that had over 3,000, 4,000 people to it. Our own studio holds about 200 people. It depends on what the developer is looking for, the look and the feel you want to do. Traditionally, when you turn on the TV and you see all the excitement around eSports, you’ll see shops from Korea, Asia, China and Europe where eSports is significantly further down the path and much more mature versus in North America. There are tens of thousands of people that show up to some of those events. North America is probably three to five years behind that in general but there are varying degrees of eSports competition and crowds that come in. It’s the beauty of it. There’s excitement that you can generate out at eSports online between two players playing a game online or two players in a room. You can take it to a stadium and have it in front of tens of thousands of people and feel the energy. That’s a pretty unique thing.
If I compare it to people watching chess champions, for example or people coming to watch live sports as they know. This is eSports. The passion is the same if not more from what I’ve seen for this. Would you agree that it’s the same or more? If so, what makes people so passionate about this?
[bctt tweet=”Failure and frugality have valuable lessons. ” via=”no”]
I would say that gaming in general has some of the most passionate and rabid fan bases in any genre that you could possibly find. It’s a function of how engaging some of the content is and how much fun people have in playing some of these games. If you turn it around, it’s almost like finding the most passionate football fans for example.
They wear the colors on their face and paint their face.
The thing about football is the games only run on one day of the week. Their outlet is one day of the week. ESports and gaming, in general, go 24/7. You can imagine having a rabid Seahawks fan have a game they can jump into 365 days out of the year 24/7.
With my background in advertising, the secret sauce is emotional engagement for advertisers, whether it’s the commercials emotionally engaging or there’s product placement that makes you part of a movie. You’re offering this at a whole new level, this emotional rabid fans as you describe them. Their emotions are already revved up. Is this particular target mostly male at this point?
Yeah. I think the last time, I saw it’s roughly 70% male, 18 to 24. However, I do think that what we’ve seen, the female audience is growing quickly. It’s a testament to a lot of big game developers making an effort to make gaming much more accessible. An environment for women to participate in the community is much more accessible, which is awesome. My assumption is as time goes on, it’s going to skew back towards probably a 50/50 type community in all of gaming. If you look at something like mobile games, which skews significantly towards women, I think that will cross over to PC and console as time goes on because it will normalize out based on population and accessibility and all of those things. Right now, it’s skewing towards the younger males.
Estars: Interactive engagement is where basically the viewer is either actively engaging with content that we’re creating or accepting content that’s being created in real time.
That’s a very difficult audience for advertisers to reach because TV tends to skew female. You have a great niche for companies targeting automotive sales or electronics.
With the advertising background, you can appreciate it. You can even see the strategy. I saw a study that said of the four major sports, football, basketball, baseball and NHL, in North America, most of those ages, the median age, is 38, 39 or 40. When you look at what the NBA is trying to do with the eSports, look at it like, “I have this demographic that’s around 38, 39. I can use my eSports league.” There’s a lot of hoopla around the NBA 2K League, which is my assumption is that in the next few years, every NBA team will have a joining NBA eSports team. That’s an NBA 2K League. I can use that league as a way to tie the advertisers to buy the overall package of the NBA. Now, I broadcast digital. That skews older but now I have this group that I can sell for 18 to 24-year-old males. I can sell advertising on that with the eSports league.
That’s the dream audience for a lot of movies like Star Trek and Star Wars. That’s the target that goes to the movies multiple times and they love it. Have you done any sponsorships of particular movies yet?
Not yet, but we’re working hard on that. We’re working to solidify some partnerships there. We love trying to find the right movie-type trailer partner because of the evergreen nature of that content. There’s always a new movie coming out. They always want to reach a younger male audience. There’s always a piece of that marketing budget that’s going toward that in most instances. We love that. We’re looking for the right partner in that respect where it makes sense to integrate into our own offerings. It includes the WSOE in our owned and operated league.
You made the decision to rebrand ESP gaming into Estars. What was the genesis of that?
[bctt tweet=”The industry in general is taking this frugal approach to fragmented sectors and figuring out how to build a sustainable business. ” via=”no”]
We have a production business. In the background, we’ve been building an engagement platform. Estars is the actual platform. The idea of Estars as a platform, I call it as a second screen experience that takes a lot of what traditionally we would say are gambling mechanics or put it in a free to play space that’s unique to our content and our partner’s content. We always knew that we wanted to have a product that was out in the eSports that we felt added value to the viewing experience. If you look at eSports concept, the two main ways to monetize is sponsorships and distribution. What we’re trying to figure out and what a lot of people are trying to figure out are other ways to monetize all the millions of eyeballs that are tuning into this content outside of the traditional way to do it.
We feel that interactive engagement, which is the viewer either actively engaging with that content that we’re creating and/or accepting content that’s being created in real-time are two very distinct ways that eSports as an entertainment medium where it makes a lot of sense for us to take a look and see in terms of investments. If there’s anything unique and creative we can come up with, which we do feel we’ve done with Estars. That was always going to be our big bet. We kept that under wraps for a while. Now it’s out in the wild. With that, the genesis was we initially had launched our production company under the name of ESP Gaming. It made a lot more sense to align the companies, both on the production side and the platform side. We didn’t have to build two brands. We knew that all of our ESP stars studios content would try to encompass Estars as the platform as riding shotgun with all of that content anyway and then vice versa. It made a lot of sense to almost make the companies parallel and build one large brand that encompasses what we envisioned in terms of the viewing experience for eSports.
It reminds me a little bit of your previous employer. Amazon was known for selling books and now they’re known for producing content and selling all kinds of things. It’s an interesting thing. Your Estars Studio is based in Vegas and you have Emmy-winning producers there. To me that begs the question, “How, if at all, do you see this fitting into Apple and Google, competing with Netflix and all of these this huge demand for content?” It seems that you would be producing content that would either be on one of those platforms or have your own channel on one of those platforms. Is that in the future?
We’ve invested heavily in the talent on our production side. We do have fifteen Emmy’s on staff who have won in various live sports. They come from varying degrees of gaming companies as well as MMA companies, as well as live sports and production companies. We invested heavily on that. The main reason is we wanted to differentiate the view of our content on everybody else in eSports that we’re producing, which is hardcore traditional five-gamers or four-gamers type content. We are looking to expand who can consume our content and find it entertaining. Our strategy was like, “Let’s find that’s in the business who do see eSports as the next frontier and combine all of these genres and industries into one high-powered team and go from there.
What you’ll see from us over the next few months is that we’ll start to utilize the team we put into place. That means we’ll keep continuing to run our owned and operated league. The WSOE is what we feel is the best eSports content out in the wild. We’ll continue to do that. You’ll start to see us start creating content that is new and unique that nobody in gaming has done. That could be documentary in the vein of 30 for 30 on ESPN. That could be movies or content that is competitive but not the traditional eSports competitive. That could be talk shows or anything.
Estars: Always look to expand who can consume your content and find it fun and entertaining.
Do you have your own acronym? Instead of calling people broadcasters, you just call them casters. How do you get to be in the top ten? That’s a show waiting to happen. How does somebody become that in the competition? It’s almost like watching somebody at a live auction.
That’s all content that we would be in a very tough position to produce without the studio you referenced in Las Vegas. It’s located in Aria. We share it with our sister company Poker Central, which produces The World Series of Poker for ESPN. They also operate the PokerGO OTT app, which is the Netflix of poker that’s out there. We have this beautiful studio in the heart of this strip where we can produce this content 24/7. It’s a unique advantage that we have and we’re very lucky to have it versus any other sports company in the world.
Is it open to the public for tours?
It is open when we’re filming. You can come and check it out whenever we’re filming either poker or eSports. Whenever you’re down, I’d love to have you.
You’re in the right spot. I come to Vegas quite a bit, giving keynote talks. How can people participate? Everything from going to your website and playing the games to coming to Vegas to watch something being filmed and to if somebody says, “Can I invest in your company? Are you on the stock market?” Give us the whole range of all the opportunities that readers can say, “I want to get into this world. I want to be part of what Jeff’s vision is.”
The easiest way to see what we’re doing is to check out some of the content we created. You can see any of our content on Twitch.com/WSOE. You can see a lot of the stuff we’re doing there. We’ve also signed a bunch of linear television distribution deals. You start to see a lot of our stuff running on traditional broadcast television. What you also start to see in the back half of this year is us with a renewed focus around grassroots type community tournaments. We’re running an event at the end of July featuring the game of Tekken. The cool and unique thing around that is we’re having a lot of live qualifier in California. You can qualify in that specific tournament. If you qualify, you get a free trip to Vegas where you can compete in WFF7 and for the $30,000 prize pool that we’re offering for that live on Twitch. You get all of that cool recognition and experience. The other cool thing on what we’re doing with that is it’s a qualifier for the Olympics. We partnered with the United States eSports Federation and we’re offering that as a qualifier in. That’s a cool thing that we’re doing as well. You’re going to see a lot of online tournaments that we’re trying to put together that will be much more in volume. You can think about how the WSOE relates to the UFC. Our monthly WSOE are like the UFC Pay-Per-View. They’re really big.
This is global. The WSOE is the World Showdown of Esports.
It’s global with really large event series. These tournaments and these communities are operating 24/7. We’re trying to show up in the back half of the year with some of our content schedule is figure out how we service those communities. How we get those people who are playing for fun and are skilled to a stage like the WSOE in the center of the Strip at the Aria playing in front of millions of people online. How do we get them there? We’re trying to figure out programs to do that. It’s almost like in the vein of the UFC. It’s like Dana White’s Contender Series or Ultimate Fighter. How do we take those people who have the skill set? How do we get them into the bright lights and the main stage of Vegas? We’re working on some concepts there. They’ll start to see us develop all of that stuff in the backend and figure out the next phase of how the WSOE will grow.
You remind me of a young Richard Branson and what Elon Musk is doing. You have big visions and big global impacts and it’s been wonderful hearing your vision, expertise and uniquely qualified background to execute this vision. Congratulations on all your success. It’s going to be fun cheering you and Estars on.
Thanks, John. I appreciate the time.
Links Mentioned:
- Estars
- World Showdown of ESports
- Estars Studios
- Poker Central
- PokerGO
- United States eSports Federation
- https://www.Estars.com/
- https://www.Twitch.tv/wsoe
- https://www.EstarsStudios.com/
About Jeff Liboon
Jeff Liboon, Co-Founder and President for Estars, is responsible for product and business development, including the creation of the World Showdown of Esports (WSOE) and managing white-label production growth and investments.
Estars is an interactive esports engagement platform set to launch in Q3 2019, which will provide a new viewing experience for esports fans around the world.
Jeff Liboon has more than 10 years of gaming experience working with top-rated platforms like Amazon App Store, Xbox Live and several top 10 mobile game developers in the esports industry. Prior to his current role, Liboon helped create the Amazon mobile esports team and grew attributed revenue to eight figures in one year. While at Amazon, he also conceptualized and executed the very successful Mobile Masters and Champions of Fire esports events.
Liboon also led product marketing for skill games at DoubleDown Casino/IGT Interactive, including Poker, Video Poker, Bingo and Blackjack, and managed the content management and advertising operations teams at Popcap Games (EA) for several top 25 Facebook and mobile games including Bejeweled Blitz, Zuma Blitz and Plants vs. Zombies.
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The Way Of The Quiet Warrior with Tom Dutta
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Joe Campbell once said that we hear this call to adventure. Many of us ignore it, but some of us answer the call. That’s exactly what Tom Dutta did. He answered the call and went through an eight to ten-year journey going through lot of things in his career and in personal life, and came back transformed. He is now a senior business leader, speaker, and international number one bestselling author with more than 30 years of experience helping build and grow companies in Canada and the USA. Tom shares the catalyst behind writing his book, The Way Of The Quiet Warrior. Explaining in detail each of the four different personalities, he tackles how each salesperson can discover greatness and shares his insight on how you can develop your strength and eliminate things that destroy your relationship with people.
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Listen To The Episode Here
The Way Of The Quiet Warrior with Tom Dutta
Our guest is Tom Dutta, who is the Founder and CEO of his own company. He’s a senior business leader, speaker, and the international number one best-selling author of a book called The Way of the Quiet Warrior. He brings all kinds of leadership experience from financial services and not-for-profit and health sectors and his career includes senior roles in many of Canada’s prestigious companies. He has also been the host of his own Quiet Warrior internet radio show. He received the William Shatner Moving America Forward Awards for his TV show and the 2018 Courage to Come Back Certificate of Nomination for his incredible story. His purpose is, “To Unleash the Greatness in Others.” Tom, welcome to the show.
John, it’s a pleasure to be here.
I always like to ask my guests to take us back to their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, high school, college or whatever was your big a-ha moments of I want to become a quiet warrior. What was the catalyst for that?
I’ve written about this in my book, The Way of the Quiet Warrior. It was an eight to ten-year journey behind that to figure out my story. Let me take you back. Let me, first of all, say that when I was asked in the past to talk about myself, I would say, “I’m a corporate executive. I build and grow companies. You can call me a hired gun. I’ve worked in five sectors across both sides of the border.” I talk like that. We finally did some self-development and started realizing I had a BS story that I was telling. Now I say this. Let me take you back. I was born and raised on a military base and in the United Kingdom. My father was a commanding officer in the military and then we immigrated to Canada. My parents are both from the Fiji Islands. My grandparents are from India. I didn’t have a childhood life maybe you or many others did. My home was full of violence. My father was a sloppy drunk. He became a violent man and a command and control style person.
[bctt tweet=”Get a check-up from the neck up.” username=”John_Livesay”]
He never hid many adulterous affairs in the home. The things I saw and learned when I was a kid, I don’t talk about much because most people couldn’t handle it. The good news is right above my teen years, I decided to leave when the home fell apart and my parents divorced. I lost touch with the family. I went out to Corporate America and there I was. I had mentors at the time and said, “Tom, you should be in business.” I did. I climbed the corporate ladder. I was a manager at the age of 21, a CEO by 31 and I did many things. I took the rules that I learned in my childhood and started applying that into the leadership of other people and into my sales work. I started falling into what I called the leadership graveyard. I had difficulty relating and communicating with people, destroying relationships, sometimes maybe losing the odd job.
It was that moment there were three major things that happened in my life in 2007. One was the loss of my wife’s mom, which is a bigger story. Two was we were victims of a Ponzi scheme. We woke up one day, my wife, Anna and I, we lost everything, our home and all the assets we had worked hard for many years. The third thing was the loss of my job. I was a CEO in a corporate company that was international and they reorganized. I knew it was recombining and my job was eliminated. We woke up in July in 2007 with this desperation and I had so much anxiety and pain inside. As Joe Campbell says, “You’ve got to feel that pain, get angry and decide it’s time to do something different.” In 2007, I went on a journey. I didn’t know where I was going and where I was headed. What do I do with this story and the backstory? That’s what led to creating my company and the book and all the things.
Most people see someone successful and they don’t realize the challenges they had at a young age to supersede that. What was the catalyst for wanting to write the book? Firsthand, writing a book is a big endeavor and it requires a lot of commitment and focus. What made you want to write The Way of the Quiet Warrior?
This might sound odd as an author and a fellow author, but I never read books. When I grew up as a kid, my eyes would bounce on a page. I couldn’t get past it. Now I’m an audiobook listener. I wanted to write a book, but what got in the way was fear. I didn’t know how to do it. I had heard horror stories. When all those things happened in my life, I went on this ten-year journey as a seeker. As Joe Campbell says, “We hear this call to adventure. Many of us ignore it. Some of us answer the call.” I answered it. I probably should have answered that call to go seeking when I was a kid but I didn’t. Through that, I did many crazy things in my career and my personal life, including learning. I came back transformed as somebody different. I was the hired gun, “Tommy Gun,” they used to call me and I came back as a quiet warrior. I’ll tell you how the book came together and try to tell this succinctly.
The Way of the Quiet Warrior: 90 Days to the Life You Desire
I went to Holland, Michigan. I got on an airplane. I was flat broke. This was in 2012. I traveled to see a fellow named John. He said, “I’m going to spend the day with you.” He put me in a room with a whiteboard and he took every ounce of wisdom out of my head. Before that session, which was to figure out what my business model might look like, we had dinner. He said, “What are you doing?” I said, “I’m a leader, a trainer and I’ve built companies.” He said, “What do you really do?” I said, “My mom used to say that people want to be around me. They tell me things. They want to talk to me. I quietly go on my way as a warrior and I help people. I help them see the limitations and greatness in themselves through my experiences.” He snapped his finger. He says, “I don’t know if that’s the title of your first book, but Quiet Warrior might be something.” I left that session going, “What do I do next?”
One of the things you talked about in The Way of the Quiet Warrior is that vulnerability is an undervalued virtue. Can you talk about that?
In my world, I teach some science around personalities. I know what you might be from listening to you, but there are two out of four personalities that don’t usually show vulnerability. Vulnerability isn’t throwing up or getting Kleenex and crying. Vulnerability is a strength. In the high-powered world of business, what I’ve learned through working with others and being a top leader and also being a salesperson, is that some people are wired not to show vulnerability. In other words, there’s no emotion in what they do. I listened to your talk and had you help me understand that the path to getting people to trust and follow you and maybe do something different comes through the heart, comes through emotion.
The last thing I’ll say on that is I’m a big fan of a thought leader named Brené Brown. She did a TED Talk on vulnerability and shame and this is where I learned this. She said, “When you tell your story, you need to tell it to the tribe of people that are worthy of hearing it.” Not everybody is and when you tell them, you get to write the next chapter your way. Being vulnerable can be as simple as posting a picture on Facebook hugging your dogs. Where standing up as a CEO, talking about your vision and talking about when you started the company, your partner stole money from you and you almost went bankrupt. You have to overcome this bout of depression and infuse what you’re doing with your passion for being able to come back and create what you’ve got.
[bctt tweet=”Vulnerability is an underrated virtue.” username=”John_Livesay”]
You alluded there are four different kinds of personalities. Can you tell us what those four are? I think people would find that interesting.
Let me ask you a question to help me out. I ask this in my workshops. What are the three things you can think of that you need to have great relationships with other people? Can you come up with one?
The first one is trust.
This is what I want you to know and I tell people, “I don’t want you to believe what I’m saying. I want to stretch you out of your comfort zone.” I teach and I believe that there are three things you need. Number one is to have an intact personality. In other words, understand your strengths and limitations. In that first one, comes trust. Number two is passion. Find out what your passion is. There’s a great TED Talk done on passion that I watched and it says that most people when they discovered their passion, which comes from the early roots in your life when you’re a child usually, they don’t follow it because sometimes it doesn’t pay the bill. The third one is character. Character is big and I believe that salespeople will be rated more on your character versus your skills.
The Quiet Warrior: Vulnerability is a strength. Some people are wired to show vulnerability.
There are four types of personalities in understanding who you are. I’m going to add colors to these because that’s the way I teach it. The first type is 25% of the world is what we call red people. The second type is 37% are blue, 25% are white and 25% are yellow. Let me build this out a bit. I’m not going to talk about behavior because most of the personality science in the world teach the behavior. If you have an iceberg, you look above the water 20%, that’s what most psychologists teach us is what are you based on your behavior. I found a model based on Dr. Taylor Hartman, and he’s a friend of mine that talks about what’s below the waterline or the why behind the behavior. Wouldn’t it be powerful as a salesperson to understand why your prospect is doing what they’re doing or as a salesperson to understand maybe why you’re doing what you’re doing in your pitch?
The last thing I’ll say on this piece about the four personality types is I’ll tell you the motive. The red personality has a motive of power. They wake up to get from A to B and that’s what drives them. They’re visionary and natural leaders. The blue personality, the 37%, the motive is intimacy. Why I live is to create trusting relationships with other people. My top two natural talents might be quality and service, but here’s the thing. When I communicate, I’m verbose because I infuse my language with emotions. When I write my wife a text message, I can’t fit it on one screen but when she replies to me, it’s usually like, “Okay,” because she’s a red. The third one is white, the motive is peace. The white would be my daughter in this case. It would be lawyers and accountants and maybe doctors or engineers. The motive of peace is nothing fancy. It’s like, “Can we all get along?” If you close your eyes and you visualize puffy white clouds.
I visualize a white dove. That’s easy to remember for peace.
The two top gifts that I know about whites are their clarity and voice of reason. The last one is what I’ll call the yellow people and their motive is fun. The easiest way to explain that is yellows live in the moment. Asking a yellow, “What are you going to do tomorrow?” is painful.
[bctt tweet=”You got to feel that pain, get angry, and decide that it’s time to do something different.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What percentage of people is yellow?
It’s about 25%. Their natural talents, the top two are optimism and enthusiasm. I’m going to make a bold statement here to finish on these four types and I can delve into more as we go along. What if I was to say to you that when you’re making a pitch, whether it’s face-to-face or a small group of whatever you’re presenting as a salesperson, those chances are you’re addressing only 25% of the room? Mainly when we’re born, we only speak what I call one language. We have our own motive. Personality, I’m blue, I think you might be red or blue. That’s what we come into the world with. It never changes, but my mom and dad taught us. I have two brothers, an older brother and younger. They talked to us all the same way and we learned as kids to talk to everybody the same way. I believe sales training doesn’t always address the differences. We go out and we sell to people as if they’re all the same color.
It’s almost for me the visual of all that is you need to talk to all the colors of the rainbow in a way. When you described it that way, if you’re a red and you’re talking to red all day long, you’re missing 75% of the rest of the population. If I heard you correctly, the four colors are evenly distributed across the population. Is that correct? Did you say there are more blues than others?
I’ll give you the numbers again. Red 25%, blue 37% and then white and yellow are usually split. The thing I wanted to say is when I do my training workshops to an executive team, which is a CEO and their VPs. In all the experience I’ve done with hundreds of workshops, if you have ten of these people in a room, you’ll usually find a sea of reds in a leadership team at that level. You’ll find some blue. It’s rare to find a yellow, but you might find the odd one. You have a couple of whites in there, but that’s the distribution. I’ve gone in and talked to sales teams that are completely structured wrong because they’ve got the wrong personalities in the sales roles.
The Quiet Warrior: A lot of sales teams are completely structured wrong because they’ve got the wrong personalities in the sales roles.
If you find yourself being a blue personality, you’re in verbal and you like connection and intimacy, and you have to call on someone who’s red, what are your tips?
I’ll give you the quick dos and don’ts of reds. In developing a positive connection with red, let’s say you’re Mr. Red. What I want to do is I want to be prepared with facts and figures. I want to present the material in a logical fashion. I want to be direct, brief and specific in the conversation. What I don’t want to do is I don’t want to expect you to be emotional and vulnerable. I also don’t want to be slow and indecisive. Here’s the thing and I’d make this statement boldly that I believe 50% on the sales are left on the table with reds because we don’t get that fact that they’re ready to make a decision in a day. You don’t go in with a PowerPoint that’s twenty slides with all the detail. They’re bottom-line driven. They are selfish people, “What’s in it for me? How’s this going to make my company better? Is there a better one out there?” If you say to a red, “Were you prepared to make a decision?” They are.
I remember coaching salespeople and I said, “It’s about taking people on a journey,” and in this particular case, they were showing all the different bells and whistles of something. The client said, “I’ll do it.” He said, “I have two other features to show you.” I’m like, “When they say yes, stop talking.”
I always like to say that if you try to be too emotional with a red, it’s like sticking an ice pick in your eye. When I went back to becoming a character, you mentioned that I believe all salespeople are going to be successful more on their character than skills. To become a character, there are two things I believe that I teach that you need to do. Number one is to develop a strength that’s not innate in your personality. In other words, if you are blue, I’m a blue and I’m not always able to be assertive. In order to be assertive, which maybe means going for the close in a deal, I become character. People notice I should sing from the treetops and celebrate because becoming character is extremely hard.
[bctt tweet=”Have an intact personality. Understand your strengths and limitations.” username=”John_Livesay”]
The second part though is eliminating. I’m not talking about just eliminate, I’m talking about, “Knock it off.” The things that are showing up in the second part of your personality, eliminate things that are destroying relationships with people. For example, going back to reds. One of the limitations of a red personality might be arrogance and insensitivity. If I’m in a sales presentation and that ugly limitation comes out, I’m breaking rapport right away and I’m destroying a relationship. I may never get to the top of Everest. I might sit at a base camp wishing I could get to the top. We need to understand our strengths and limitations. That’s what I mean by an intact personality. We need to develop character at salespeople or as people who are pitching others. That’s where I believe most of the salespeople fail because they don’t understand themselves or how to communicate with the other colors.
One of the things you talk about in your book is 90 days to get a better life. What does that look like?
Here’s the interesting thing. If you can take ten years of a journey like I went on and turn it into 90 days and get to that same place, wouldn’t it be cool? What I did is I developed The Way of The Quiet Warrior. I own the IP and it’s a six-phase process that is the journey I went on to go from wondering why I’m not happy? Why am I not overly successful anymore to that life I desire? I’ll tell you the quick phases. They’re on my website, they’re in the book. Phase one is called the self. I start where nobody else generally wants to start, which is understanding your strengths and limitations. Going inside and looking at your subconscious mind, looking at what’s inside you and how you’re wired.
Once you’ve discovered the self, strengths, limitations, natural talents and all of that, then phase two is the vision. There are lots of thought leaders and teachers, but developing a vision of what the future looks like, what you want to get to and infusing that with passion and with a desire of something you want. Most people don’t know what that is because they haven’t done the self-work. I call phase three, the path. That’s a combination of three things: body, mind, and soul. It needs some work on getting the body physically into shape and understanding to get a checkup from the neck up. I’ve been an advocate of mental health for decades and I can tell you that every salesperson at a higher level, every senior leader will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime. It happens.
The Quiet Warrior: Every senior leader will experience a mental health issue in their lifetime.
Let’s double click on that because we’ve seen suicide and depression. All those things are what people think of when they say mental health issues, but there are other kinds of mental health issues as well. It’s not quite that extreme.
Basically, our brains are an organ of the body. I’m going to tell you that I went in and got myself assessed to look at how unhealthy my brain was working. There’s so much to the brain. There’s the conscious mind, which you know about, which is our current reality or five senses. There’s the subconscious hard drive which stores everything that we take in through all our senses. It’s got billions of bits of data and for a salesperson, you might be in interaction with somebody talking to them or pitching and they appear to be your abusive father. The brain says that thing looks like my dad who used to hit me and beat me. Even understanding in psychology what’s wired into our hard drive, that’s all part of mental health. We also talk about the ability to understand that you can’t create success with a negative thought. Understanding how to control our thoughts and stay focused on the part of the brain that’s positive, that’s part of a mental health picture. The biggest thing is that people think that you have suicide and depression. There are all sorts of parts of mental health.
I’ve spent several years as a volunteer, chair of a board for a mental health organization. I’ve learned that there are many things within that umbrella, personalities, and disorders, in the colors that I teach. We come across sometimes people who are what I call unhealthy personalities. If you’re in a relationship with somebody and you’re always living in the limitations of your personality, then we call you unhealthy or I call you a sick personality. That’s part of mental health. I couldn’t figure all that out.
Anxiety is one of the ones I struggle with. I’ve had generalized anxiety since I was a kid. The thing I want you to know is that everybody has some connection to mental health. I should call it mental wellness. Mental wellness is a nicer way to put it, but you have a responsibility and everybody reading this to understand that why don’t we go to a doctor and get blood tests to look at our lipids or our blood levels, blood pressure. Why don’t we go in and get a checkup from the neck up to look at the health of our brain and how we’re functioning?
Tom, the time goes fast with someone like you who’s got many colors to share with us and textures. What’s one thing you want to leave the audience with?
I want to tell you about a survey that was done in Canada. It’s a Canadian survey of 90-year-olds. They asked those 90-year-olds, “At this point in your life, what are your three biggest regrets?” These were the top three after all the data comes in. The number one was they didn’t leave a big enough legacy. Number two was they didn’t take enough risk and number three was they didn’t reflect enough. I want to encourage everyone to take the time to reflect, what’s the legacy that you’re creating and what’s your passion in life? What are you risking to be better, to go down the rabbit hole and do something different to be a better person? How are you giving back? As you reflect on what you’ve done in your life so far, how does that challenge you as you go forward to do something different for the world?
I love it especially the concept of not taking enough time to reflect so you can have a legacy and not being afraid of risk. The book is The Way of the Quiet Warrior. Tom, how else can people reach you?
My website is Kreat.ca. You can find the media page, the book page and about my services. Even the workshop I was talking about. There is a link to emailing me directly. I’ll give my private phone out, (604) 764-1990. I’m always happy to connect with people directly. The last part of the website on the book page is my media kit. In that media kit is all about my bodywork, my radio show, my TV show and the work I’m doing with the book. Thank you, John.
Thank you, Tom.
Links Mentioned:
- Tom Dutta
- The Way of the Quiet Warrior
- Quiet Warrior – internet radio show
- Brené Brown
- Dr. Taylor Hartman
- Media page
- Book page
- Media Kit
- https://Kreat.ca/
- https://www.Amazon.com/Way-Quiet-Warrior-Desire-Purpose/DP/1683502655
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Martial Arts Leadership Skills with Aslak de Silva
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Leadership skills can be honed from any discipline, especially martial arts. Aslak de Silva, the CEO of Nordic Business Forum, has successfully used his background in martial arts in being a word-class experience leader. Aslak who now speaks about sales, digital marketing, and leadership in general credits this to his early days in martial arts and the lessons he learned from becoming better every day and letting go of perfectionism. In this episode, he shares how he started achieving success and how he learned the value of learning principles. He also illustrates what happens behind the scenes in the Nordic Business Forum and how the audience can also benefit from the immense value that these conferences generate.
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Listen To The Episode Here:
Martial Arts Leadership Skills with Aslak de Silva
My guest is all the way from Finland. His name is Aslak de Silva. He’s the CEO of the Nordic Business Forum. He’s also a keynote speaker. He feels that personal and team development are what makes him thrive. He is a world-class experience leader at C-levels. He has the Nordic Business Forum where he tracks over 10,000 executives a year to visit the conference and more than 20,000 people watched the live stream. He’s an international speaker doing 30 to 40 events a year. He speaks about sales and digital marketing, leadership in general. He also happens to have a background in martial arts. He gets people like George Clooney to attend his events. He’s great on knowing what makes a good talk and how to make a good pitch. Welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me here.
I want to ask you to take us back. You can go back as far as you’d like. You’ve got your degrees in business. You went on to get your Master’s in International Management, but how do you go from that to being the CEO of something as big and exciting as the Nordic Business Forum?
My first big career step was in martial arts. I started to train when I was twelve. I had a Korean master who was a very old school of martial arts. Even if you entered competitions and it didn’t matter who won the medals, it was more than you develop every day. You become better every day that way. The training wasn’t only about doing a particular technique or winning a tournament, it was more than every day you need to be better. It’s a harsh school because you can’t celebrate anything, that you see your mistakes. That got into me and I started to understand that, “How can I make every day better?” It means don’t make the same mistakes today as you did yesterday. Do something a bit better. In the end, it comes down a lot and you start realizing that you can learn a lot every day from anybody you meet or you can decide the way you want to go. If you want to go do yes or no or right or wrong, then life becomes quite simple. Long story short, I trained intensely for fifteen years. I was competing, I won a championship in one particular martial arts. I had about twenty clubs. I was teaching in the Nordic and in different countries: Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark. I had a couple of injuries.
I knew at the same time that you can’t play only one card. You need to have a backup plan. At the same time, I was studying, so I thought studying is a good thing to do because it’s about development. You learn new things and you want to focus on something. I thought in martial arts, you look people in the eyes all the time and you learn how to develop yourself. To me in the end, that was leadership. That’s dealing with people. That directed me to study also International Management. I felt already the international background living in different countries. I was intrigued by learning leadership and international management a lot.
[bctt tweet=”Meet your audience where they are now. ” via=”no”]
Let me ask you a couple of questions there. This concept of becoming better every day, does that help you let go of being a perfectionist and not beating yourself up when you do make mistakes?
Yes, I’ve been reading your book, John. You are a fan of that too. It is true. In the beginning, it’s hard because you do see mistakes and you get frustrated. I remember when I went to the competition, you felt that you could do better, but something is pulling you back in a way that somehow you’re stressful or nervous or you’re afraid of something. Those were the worst feelings. You control yourself and your mind. What I learned was how to prepare myself for the fight in a way that I could do my best. That felt good. If you do your best, you’re happy. It’s not about you’re perfect because you’re going to put yourself down on saying, “I made a mistake.” If you did your best at that time, you learn from the mistakes. You know that next time you will not do the same thing again. That’s a relief for you when you understand that perfection is something that you will never get into, but also sometimes you don’t know what that is, but you can always become a bit better. That’s very motivating for your development, that you know how to become better every day. You’ll know that you’ll be better. Even if now you didn’t win, you know that tomorrow you might win again.
As far as that mindset, because it is how I’m anxious, I’m stressed, I have some fear. I’m big on putting faces on the fear. Is it fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of the unknown and figuring out how to deal with it? A lot of people are afraid of failure, especially when it comes to leadership. If you are a leader, you are like, “I can’t let my team ever see me fail or my team is so afraid of failing, they’re not taking chances.” What are your thoughts on that?
I do remember the times when you say, “Fake it until you make it.” You want to be something that you are not because you put it up in a way that you pep talk yourself that you can do it. You can get far with that and that’s totally fine. It also collapses the moment that you realized that, “I’m not that person.” As long as you’re honest to yourself, mistakes happen all the time. I was talking to my daughter and I was laughing, whatever I do, she says sometimes that I do a mistake. As a father, what do you do? When you realize that she’s unhappy about it or there’s something wrong, it’s just happened. Sometimes she thinks a different way. The same way in leadership also, I strongly believe that because it’s a human attraction that we’re talking about. We are not the same. If you can feel yourself doing your best and truly believe in yourself that you are doing the best you can with the right attitude, right spirits in all way and helping people. The outcome will be good. You’re not perfect. You’ll still make mistakes. If you worry about them too much, you cannot control yourself either and collapse there.
Take us on this journey that you’ve been on. You graduate with this International Management degree. You get involved in selling media. Talk about what that experience taught you. What are some of your secrets on selling?
When I was training martial arts, we did demos to people showing and going through what the martial arts is about. I did about 500 of those in different countries. I performed on TV. You can show physical sometimes, but you need to be explaining something. I learned how to explain. Even if I was exhausted, I’m always talking. People were asking, “How does this differ from other martial arts? What do you learn there?” I’m talking about these things and nuances. I always started in a way that, “What do you know about martial arts?” If the person said, “It’s not too much. Maybe karate or judo,” then I explain with that level that, “This is a bit similar to karate or judo, but maybe train more on your physical side as well.” If somebody was a super expert talking about nuances, “I’m going to mix martial arts training and I know these things there,” then I would talk on that level. I noticed that when I talk with people, you need to be able to talk the same language that they understand. Whereas I noticed that many people and I also, in the beginning, was super excited about what I’m doing. I try to teach everybody everything that I knew. I was talking about this is something that I learned. They’re looking at people in the eyes and seeing that they don’t understand me.
Martial Arts Leadership Skills: If you did your best at that time, you learn from the mistakes.
We have an expression here that’s like drinking out of a fire hydrant. It’s too much, too soon.
I realized that is sales in a way. That’s a conversation with people that you’re trying to teach something there that you love and you know about. You need to level up with the other one that you’re talking with the same language. You clarify for them. I could see that I could sell martial arts class to beginners or even the advanced one. That makes them intrigued about what I know and what we are training. I noticed how to talk with people. The other thing is in martial arts, when you go into a fight, you look at the person in the eye all the time. You’re reacting to what they are doing. You sense the feelings that they have. Are they confident or are they nervous? You can see when are they moving forward, what happened?
I was focused on observing what the other one is doing based on how I move, how they move. The fight in total to me, in the end, was observations of things that are happening. I graduated in International Management. I also thought that I have no technical skills or anything. The only thing I can do is to be with people. I thought that sales is something that you can also have the same attitude as with martial arts that you start somewhere, but you can develop yourself to become better. The results are quite easy to measure. I thought that this is something that I would love. That’s how I ended up in sales.
Sales is a conversation. Meet your audience where they are now. From there, you know exactly how to customize what you’re talking about, not too high, not too complicated. You went into media sales. You got some experience with selling using your martial arts experience. How did you get involved with the Business Forum?
Basically, in sales what happened was that in the beginning, I was not that good. I started with telesales. I remember picking up the calls and selling magazines. That was the first one, subscriptions for magazines and I didn’t like it. I knew that if I get credited in somehow, I can move forward and get a better place to work for. I had no experience of working. I was training and teaching. I thought that it had no value. For summer, I was working on a magazine subscription. I was the sixth-best in the month of July in selling magazines in Finland for a particular company. There were 500 salespeople. I took that diploma and said that the telesales is not going to be a problem. I was going for companies that have a better product that they were talking about content marketing or most solution-based. That’s what I loved.
Being able to talk with people and understand what they want and pitch it back, “If I have something to offer, this is how you work.” I got lucky in sales. There are a lot of books there. I started reading them and taking classes. I got promoted to be a country manager in a company called Mediaplanet in Finland. They’re running twenty people there. I realized that I want to develop my leadership skills as well because when you’re leading people, there you go. A few days later, I run with Nordic Business Forum. It was from the same town that I was born. I had heard about the story and they were bringing these world-class speakers to Finland. They had that time, Al Gore, Jack Welch and Brian Tracy and so on.
[bctt tweet=”Become better every day versus striving for perfection. ” via=”no”]
I was like, “They are coming here. This may be something that I would go for.” I was used to learning from the master. I’m used to listening to people on stage, observing everything that they are saying and I was writing notes. I managed to get into one of those events. I remembered the first speaker was Jim Collins. I have read the book, Good to Great. When he was speaking, I was like, “This is it for me.” I can listen to him live, make my notes and I can even ask questions there if I have some. I noticed that there were people around who were doing the same and I felt that group spirit that this is now the right group to be. Ever since I’ve been a customer of Nordic Business Forum, all the events they had in Helsinki, Sweden and Oslo, also as a sponsor there with my company that I was working before. I thought that was the best place to be.
Now you’re an international speaker yourself. What’s the name of some of your favorite keynotes that you give?
I’m not that good a speaker as you are. I’m not that recognized. I talk about depending on what people want to talk. I talk about sales and marketing alignment like how to work together and how to learn from each other. Lately, people have been more interested in knowing what you can take from martial arts to sales and leadership. I take those learnings that I’ll get in other principles of the old style of martial arts and the principles of lifelong learning, and what does that mean in real life when you work?
I could see that being a TEDx Talk for you, the secrets from martial arts applied to leadership. That’s fantastic. I love the journey of going from selling something on the phone to now you’re the Chief Executive Officer of the Nordic Business Forum. Tell us a little bit about what that is and why people should make the effort to come and experience it, the leadership experience they get. Tell us what it is that people can understand and why people from all around the world are coming?
To start, what Nordic Business Forum is we need to have to go for the founding story because that explains the spirit of how everything is happening. The two founders: Hans-Peter Siefen and Jyri Linden, they met at college when they were studying. Their friends introduced them to themselves. They were both doing some sales stuff in different companies. They had been to seminars and thought that might be something that they want to go for, arranging seminars themselves or conferences. They had their first seminar in 2009 and about 80 people attending $10 per ticket. Already they said, “This is going so well. Why don’t we go for international scope?” They changed the name in 2011 to be Nordic Business Forum.
Hans-Peter had a skiing accident and he was in the hospital. They had to come up with a theme of responsibility. He used that time in thinking the concept where you have one question. He had a question of, “Who would be the best speaker of responsibility?” He was writing down all the answers that come to his head. He came up with Al Gore. He was excited that 2011 that Al Gore was a big thing and talking about these things. He went back to Jyri and said, “Now I know who we will get as a keynote speaker, Al Gore.” Jyri said, “That’s a nice idea, but that’s next to impossible because Al Gore doesn’t come to Jyväskylä to Central Finland. They Googled the name and tried to get his number and find Al Gore’s office number. That was Hans-Peter’s first international call and they got to talk to the team.
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
A few months later, they got the yes from Al Gore. The problem was that Al Gore wants an upfront fee for the speaker to be paid because it’s in Jyväskylä, Finland that nobody knows. They don’t know if they can trust the arranger and the organization as well. They had to sell their apartments and cars to be able to pay the upfront fee. The next problem was when they had Al Gore coming, they were trying to call people and say that Al Gore is coming to Jyväskylä but nobody believed that’s true. Luckily, people started to believe that this happened. They had other speakers. They were building up and selling tickets.
When Al Gore came to Jyväskylä, they were thinking about how to make the experience as good as possible. They called the mayor of Jyväskylä and said, “Since you have such a nice car, could you pick up Al Gore from the airport and bring him to the venue?” The mayor said, “Yes.” That says the attitude that you are willing to put everything because you believe that you can make it happen. For them, Al Gore was the best speaker at that subject field so they wanted to get him there. That gave him the best possible experience also to be there is something. This is what we do in Nordic Business Forum, we want every day to become better and make everything the best possible we know. We have learned lots of things. We made lots of mistakes and the experience passes on. We go through the things we have learned, the things we did well and then say, “What can we do better?” This is how it has grown a lot.
I like the lessons you’ve learned from martial arts, every day getting better so that you get better and better. Much so that you’ve got George Clooney coming to your event this October. How did that happen? I’ve never heard of George Clooney speaking at an event in the States, let alone in Finland? Was that difficult to get him to come?
You have to do some pitching skills as well. The same way we’re thinking that the theme for the 2019 event, which is going to be on the 9th and 10th of October in Helsinki, is growth. We were thinking of different themes of growth and how we can actually teach business owners and see them execute. One part is storytelling because that’s part of growth. You also know a lot about that. We were thinking who made the best stories that made a huge business. George Clooney happened to be in a tequila company that was sold for $700 million or $800 million. That’s a good storytelling skill to build up the company brand.
People don’t realize that besides being a political activist and being an Academy Award winner, he’s quite an entrepreneur. He’s in business with Cindy Crawford’s husband, Rande Gerber and gets paid very well for doing a lot of commercials overseas. He’s very connected to the pulse of entrepreneurship. I don’t care where you are in the world. That is one of those where they call in the business a great get. It sets the stage for why people would come and what they would learn. You have other locations as well that are coming up. Obviously, if people can’t make it this October 2019 to Helsinki, there are some other opportunities coming up both in Stockholm and Oslo. Would you tell us about those?
The Oslo Business Forum is going to be at the end of September. It’s quite close to Helsinki. The 2020 dates will be launched a bit later on. Stockholm is going to be on the 21st of September, 2020. The focus of these events is a bit different on the size and the length. In Helsinki, the main event is two days and a full set up with twelve to fifteen speakers. We only have one stage. Everybody’s looking and listening to one stage. Where in Stockholm, we go a bit longer than a half-day, a shorter term, fewer speakers but a concise package. It can be marketing and leadership in that sense. Whereas in Helsinki, we go broad where we will have some economists or professors also building the big picture. The same way in martial arts, my master used to say the technique is just techniques. The understanding of what you do comes from a bigger picture understanding first. You need to learn the principles.
[bctt tweet=”Sales is a conversation. ” via=”no”]
For instance, in 2018, we were having a couple of lessons on the blockchain. For business leaders, it shouldn’t be technical, what do you do in your business with blockchain? First, you need to understand what the concept means and what it means in the big picture of how it’s going to change the business field in general. Not your industry, not your company but those things. Then you’ll start understanding, “What does it mean to me?” This is the focus of our conferences in general. We were talking about George Clooney. When you learn how he perceives storytelling and what tips does he give? Many will think, “I will never get George Clooney to work with me.” That’s not the point there. You’re lucky if you get, but the point is to understand what he is thinking and you see the best in the world, the big picture. Then you can start thinking about, “What does this mean for my company, my business?”
Let’s give the audience an example of that. I talk about storytelling genres, give examples of a movie and a brand using that storytelling genre to communicate their stories. If people are thinking, “I’m going to come here, George Clooney talks about stories.” Obviously, he’s at the point in his career where he can produce, direct and even decide which one he’s going to star in. He must be able to look at a script and figure out what’s the story genre? Does it resonate with me? From a business standpoint, we can start to look at these genres and say, “Is this what my company is telling the story of?” Stories are what resonate with people and make them memorable. One storytelling genre is a rebirth.
There’s a classic Christmas movie, It’s a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart, of what would have happened if had he killed himself versus staying alive. The impact that we all have. Prudential is a company that uses that storytelling genre. They say, “Your retirement is your rebirth. It’s your third act. It’s not just a continuation of middle age.” There’s a genre, there’s a movie and now I see a brand using it. Another example of that would be leave home, have an adventure and come back and tell about it. If you think of a movie that does that, that’s The Wizard of Oz. If Dorothy had listened to her aunt and went in the cellar, she wouldn’t have gone on that adventure. Expedia, that’s exactly their genre. They encourage people to go book a trip, go to Helsinki, go to Sweden or go to Stockholm. Go have an adventure and go to the NB Forum. Use Expedia to book your trip, come home and tell all your friends about what it was like to hear George Clooney or Seth Godin or anybody else that you’ve got. That brings it to life a little bit about storytelling, genres, movies and how having George Clooney as a storyteller in the movie business can be applied to business.
That was way more interesting to hear than having like a copy text of an advertising campaign. People resonate a lot on that. I truly believe that storytelling in that sense is a skill that every one of us would have to learn.
This has been fascinating. I’ve had the good fortune to get to meet and spend some time with you in person. I was so excited to bring your story to the audience that I am fortunate enough to have around the world in 60 countries. My intent is that people reading this are going to go to NBForum.com. Are there any last thoughts or insights that you want to say about either leadership or having you as a speaker or some encouraging words to get people to consider coming?
The focus of our event is on customers. What we want to do is to be the best in the world in arranging these conferences. Our mission by 2021 is to be the most significant business conference in the world. How that also happens is that the customer experience that people get when they are out there is something different. We have over 100 different places for what can happen. If the audience feels cold, how do we see that you are feeling colder? If you feel thirsty or if you look lost or you’re looking for toilets or if coffee spills on your pants, what do we do? If you lose your Apple pen, what do we do? To experience that because for leaders, especially if you’re talking about growth companies and you want to make it big. You need to understand how you can do that for customers. That’s the best place to see because there are lots of things happening, there are a lot of people at the same place and all that.
Martial Arts Leadership Skills: Storytelling is a skill that every one of us would have to learn.
Often people might feel bad or feel that they are not that special. 7,500 people in one place, there comes lines where you’re waiting. How do we deal with that? That is something also to learn because if you get that as a leader, you know how to be treated as a customer well-enough so that you can take that as well. That is one of the pitches that we use a lot. That’s what we’re famous for. We get even more tweets about great customer service that we offer at the events than when we had President Obama on stage. That tells a lot that even though that was a huge thing for us and for the audience, still people value even more the experience that they get there.
That is fascinating because when I was working with the Banana Republic and Neiman Marcus, they were always talking about the definition of luxury as anticipating a need before you know you even need it. The Banana Republic said, “We can’t compete with Neiman Marcus but we can try.” They offered a place to charge your phones when you were shopping at some of their places, Rockefeller Center or big stores so that you go, “That’s a need I didn’t know. I need to have my phone charged while I’m shopping.” The irony is their sales went up because people kept shopping while waiting for their phone to fully charge. Lexus did the same thing. They said, “We’re going to connect your phone to your sound system so that when you’re blaring your music loud and the phone rings, we’re going to turn the volume down so you can hear your phone ring.”
You didn’t know you needed that but it sure is a luxury. When you’re describing you’re lost, you’re cold, you’re confused, coffee spilled, it’s almost like a top-level Concierge Hotel being willing to anticipate. For that kind of volume, it’s not just intellectually hear somebody talk about it, but to come and experience it, they can take those lessons back to their own life and business and make themselves even more productive. That’s such a great takeaway. What a joy to get to know you. I am excited to read about and watch some of the live streaming for the upcoming events. I’m looking forward to attending one myself again.
Thank you, John.
It’s NBForum.com to find out more about you. Are there any other links you want us to mention?
No, that’s fine.
Thanks again. We’ll look forward to hearing all about the exciting lessons learned from your wonderful events.
Thanks, John, for having me here.
Links Mentioned:
- Nordic Business Forum
- Good to Great
- Mediaplanet
- Hans-Peter Siefen
- Jyri Linden
- https://www.NBForum.com/
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