Selling Your Company For Millions – Interview with Tom Scott
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Episode Here
Episode Summary
Tom Scott emerged as an entrepreneur at a young age when he started selling provisions to people stuck at gas lines in Maryland. When Scott and his college pal, Tom First, tried mixing peach juice and water in a blender in 1989, they did not imagine their little experiment would result in the creation of a multi-million dollar company. Tom discusses his success with Nantucket Nectars and his latest project, The Nantucket Project.
Selling Your Company For Millions – Interview with Tom Scott
Today’s guest is Tom Scott who is the CEO and co-founder of the Nantucket Project and he was the CEO and co-founder of the Nantucket Nectars which started in 1989 and got sold to Cadbury Schweppes in 2002. He has gone on to do so many amazing things, including being a film and television creator that’s won awards at both the Cannes and Sundance Film Festival. He created something called The Apple Pushers with Ed Norton, a documentary on that. He’s an expert in storytelling, and knows all the secrets that go into making a great pitch. Tom, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m glad to be here. Thanks for having me.
It’s my pleasure. I want to first start with, if you don’t mind, because you’re such a successful entrepreneur, taking our listeners back to how you and your co-founder came up with the idea to create Nantucket Nectars and you’re competing against major brands like Snapple and all that good stuff.
Selling your company for millions doesn’t happen overnight.
How did we come about it? We had started a business many years ago that was a floating store. We were doing this in the summers in college. The notion was you had all these yachts that would come in to Nantucket Harbor. In order to get to the land, they’d have to take a launch and it was a pain in the neck. What if you could just bring a store to them? So we did. We started selling coffee and muffins to these yachts in Nantucket Harbor.
Among the things we started to make to sell was juice. I should say that, depending on how old a listener is, in those days, there was no such thing as Tropicana Pure Premium as an example. Generally speaking, not even generally speaking, maybe entirely speaking, if you got a juice off a shelf in a store, it was pretty crappy. What we were making at the time was a fresh juice. It was different and it was more refreshing and it was something special. That’s how we started with the path. Took a lot of different twists and turns, but that’s how we got in the juice business.
I love that the initial problem was that there weren’t good juices and you solved that by creating a floating store to take it out to people who would be willing to pay a premium price for something good.
Yeah. It’s so true. It just didn’t exist. Really what we were doing, and I just, I always feel this is so important, we were making it for ourselves. Simple as that. This was something we wanted.
The passion was authentic. You would drink this stuff. It’s not something you’re really trying to force on people. When you’re telling them about it, it comes from an authentic place. When you’re telling anybody, whether it’s a potential customer or potential investor, what have to offer, that you can’t fake that passion, right?
No. I’m one of those people, and you hear it more and more, if … I think it was Henry Ford. “If I had listened to my customer, I would have ended up making a faster horse.” I’ve always made things for myself. Every part of my career, I’ve been making something I want. I have to be honest, I stumbled into that. But one of the things I’ve come to know very clearly is I’m decent at making something for me, but if I have to imagine the attributes of what somebody else wants, it’s just not who I am. It’s not my makeup. It’s not how I think about business.
[Tweet “Make Your Product Something for Yourself So Your Passion Is Authentic”]
Right. The same thing is true of a lot of other innovators like Steve Jobs and the iPad. If he just waited for people to say, “I need an iPad in addition to my laptop and iPhone,” he probably wouldn’t do it. Just like the Henry Ford example. You guys were selling multiple things. What was it about the nectar, the juice, that made you guys think, “This is what we should focus on.” Because that’s a big challenge for a lot of entrepreneurs, is focus.
It’s true. I’m going to say most valuable to us at that time was naiveté. We didn’t know what we didn’t know. We had a whole lot of energy. Because we had so much energy, you can move mountains. You will aggressively try things that others might think foolish. Some of those things, you’re going to find out probably were foolish. But plenty of those things, you’re going to find out were not. It’s vital. It’s vital. I would tell you that we came to learn and practice incredible focus. But in the beginning, the idea of stepping into such a crazy and competitive field had much more to do with naiveté than it did with anything else.
I’m going to tweet that out from the episode. Energy gives you what it takes to try new things. That’s a great line of that. Of course if you’re drinking healthy nectar, I’m imagining that’s giving you good energy, right?
Mostly. Some of those things … Drinking too much juice is probably not a good idea either, but it’s probably true with most things.
[Tweet “Energy gives you courage to try new things.”]
There’s a happy medium. Yes. You started the business in 1989. You and your cofounder are going along, did you ever need any outside funding or was all the revenue coming in just from sales?
No. More than anything else, again, I’m sorry I’m being a bit of a broken record here, but I didn’t know what a venture capitalist was. In those days … When I was 24 years old, somebody called me an entrepreneur. I thought, what a jerk. This guy is calling me a shyster. I was a relatively well-educated guy. I’d gone to Brown University. I didn’t know exactly what the word entrepreneur meant when I was 24 years old.
The reason I tell that story is, it was a different time. It was a different time. The idea of series A, series B, venture capitalists, Angel rounds, all that stuff is new. None of that stuff existed in the collective conscience of pop culture. So many of those, the pieces of the puzzle that went in to growing the company, we were unaware of. I never would have thought, I wouldn’t have even known where to go to get money. In part because I didn’t even know you need money for cash flow. We didn’t even understand what cash flow was. We did wonder how or why we were always running out of money.
The long story short is, we were very frugal. We had other jobs at night. We did what we could to survive. We therefore ran a very efficient business. Now, I did have to take a loan from my father. In the history of the company, we raised approximately 2 million dollars, which is unheard of today. We borrowed … Eventually we were able to get a line of credit from a bank based on receivables and inventory. It was an asset backed loan. We grew the company into the many millions of dollars exactly that way, which is just very different than I think the way people think about these things today.
Before you’re able to think about selling your company, you need investors; angel or otherwise.
One of the things that’s probably not different is how to build a great team. Whether you are pitching an investor, Angel or otherwise, they all want to know who’s on your team. You’ve obviously created a great culture, not only at Nantucket Nectars but what you’re doing with The Nantucket Project. Can you tell us what you look for when you are deciding whether to hire somebody to join your team? Do you first decide what your culture is and then see if that person is a fit?
It’s funny. I was doing an interview this morning. I’m all about chemistry. I’m all about the chemistry with that person. Are they a good person? Can you riff with that person? Can you trust that person? Can that person place their trust in you? Etc. it’s huge for me. It’s huge. I don’t always get it right. I’ve got to say, nobody ever gets it right. Hiring people is not a, you don’t get 100% on that. Some of the people I’ve worked with at Nantucket Nectars started as truck drivers and ended up as the president of the company. That’s a literal example.
Wow.
There’s been many of those throughout my career. I’m okay with on the job training often. I really just believe the amount of energy and focus somebody puts into something, if they’re reasonably smart and they’re reasonably aggressive and they’re reasonably entrepreneurial, I think you can work with a lot of different kinds of people.
I love that. Energy and focus again. There it is. It just keeps coming back over and over as again, the key criteria for hiring the right people to fit your culture. You’re going along, obviously, you weren’t planning on selling your company for millions at that point. From 1989 to 2002, there was no strategic exit strategy for anybody. What made you decide to consider selling your company and ultimately selling it? Were you worried about what you were going to do after it sold?
Yeah. The answer is yes, I was worried about what I would do after I sold. Here’s the thing. We worked very hard. I think most people who start businesses do. Nothing unique about that. You spend a lot of years on the road, you spend a lot of years selling, staying in lousy hotels, always afraid of making payroll. It’s a tough thing. In particular, I think at our age and we were relatively naïve at the time, it’s fatiguing. I think we had 150 distributors around the country. You got to visit each of them about twice a year. Do the math. That’s a lot of travel, a lot of trips, a lot of sales, a lot of stuff. Because our names were on the label, it was very … People found it critical to meet with us as individuals, Tom and I.
The answer as to why we sold, we never tried to sell the company. We never hired investment bankers. There came a day when we were hotly pursued. In the end, there was probably 7 different companies talking to us. We wheedled it down and ended up making a decision to do what we did with, what was initially Ocean Spray became Cadbury Schweppes, based on the fact that we liked those people, based on the fact that we felt they could do good things with the company in the future, etc.
You asked also, was I afraid? I was a little bit afraid, but I should tell you that I had been so busy for so long. There came a day when I just decided it was time for me to leave. Because after selling the company, they wanted us to stick around. It wasn’t a match for me. I definitely freaked out. I felt like, what in the world am I going to do now? I never considered having to film my days.
You have the opposite problem at the time.
That’s right. That’s the story of how we ended up making that decision.
How long was it between selling your company for millions in 2002 and starting The Nantucket Project? Tell us, was it … and how did you come up with this great concept of having this annual conference? I’m going to let you describe the vision for it because you can do it much better than I can.
You said at some point earlier, I’m paraphrasing, but I’ve been successful in businesses first. I’ve also been unsuccessful. I’ve had a number of misses. Even at Nantucket Nectars, if you took snapshots at different periods along the way, you would wonder, when you looked at some of those snapshots, how in the world this company is ever going to make it? It’s just part of the gig.
I mention that because when we were at Nantucket Nectars, we made our own ads, we made our own radio ads, we made our own printed materials. We had a staff inside that we would do it with. We never used an ad agency. But I loved storytelling and I’ve always loved films. I went to the first ever Aspen Ideas Festival. I think that was 2003. I also was a big fan of TED way back. We used to have a designer who worked with us at Nantucket Nectars and he said, “Let’s go to TED.” I said, “Get us the tickets.” He said, “No problem.” Then he told me the price. I was like, “Forget it. We are not going to that.” We couldn’t afford it.
To me, I love discovery and I love people who go to the front-lines of anything and they come back and they share discoveries with us. I just think there’s something so beautiful about it. Particularly now, it’s like we have such availability of information, which is a good thing. But we also have a massive quantity of noise. There’s just so much noise in the world. When you can get a concise telling of interesting new things right from the horse’s mouth, to me it’s like mental cocaine. I just find it so exhilarating. I think when you mix it together, in other words, when you have a number of people passionate about the same things and sharing similar things, it’s a wood stock of ideas. It’s like a Grateful Dead show of information. That’s how I think about.
[Tweet “Pitch is a concise telling of new things.”]
Tom, you just defined what I like to define as the perfect pitch, which is a concise telling of new things. It triggers our lizard brain. “Ooh, something new, I’m learning.” As you said, mental cocaine. Because we crave that. If you have that when you’re pitching for a customer, a team member or an investor, you can tell a story that engages people, then you’re light years ahead of others who can’t. Correct?
Yeah. I think so. Look, yes, I think the answer is absolutely yes. I was watching the Golden Globes the other night. You’re looking and Jeff Bezos is sitting there and winning. NBC gets zero nominations. You’re thinking, “Oh my God, do we live in a different world!” A show called Mozart in the Jungle. I don’t even know what that is but I thought, “I want to see that.” Just the title feels new. It feels like a discovery.
Here’s the thing, I think oftentimes, if you’re starting something or you’re new in a business, you want to tell that story. Here’s the frustrating truth, if you’re making something, you have to make the thing. I don’t care if it’s a juice or a service or whatever it is. I’ve got to tell you, I think the odds of you making that thing well right away, really low odds. You need to become a master at making something. You can’t skip the time part. You can’t skip the commitment part. You can’t skip the trial and error part. You can’t.
Until you know what that product is because you’ve been on the battle front and you’ve been building it, only then will you know what it is or how it works or how it could be better or why it’s better than everybody else’s. Literally, you’re just not going to know. Only then can you package what it is you’re trying to do. I feel like so many people want to tell a story before they actually even made it and it gets in their way. It just gets in their way. They say, and I’m doing air quotes right now, they say “creative things.” I always say, be creative in your, making your product, then the telling the story would be easy. Just translate. Translate the thing you’re doing to someone so they can understand it. If A, they don’t understand it B, they’re not turned on by it, I’m guessing your thing ain’t all that interesting.
[Tweet “Can’t skip the trial and error time it takes to make something great.”]
I love, we’re going to tweet that out. You can’t skip the trial and error time needed to make something. That’s so important to remember because a lot of people go, “Why isn’t this an overnight success?” Rarely is anything an overnight success, something to keep in mind if you ever want to go about selling your company down the road. You decided to take your storytelling skills from making your own ads at Nantucket Nectars into creating The Nantucket Project, which is this annual conference, and just decided to become a television and film creator and producer.
An event during the Nantucket Project Conference.
That’s an amazing pivot, if you will, as an expansion of your skillset. But a lot of people have dreams of, I like movies, I like storytelling, but they don’t get to do what you did. What was it that allowed you to figure out your way into that world?
One of the things about The Nantucket Project, if you go to The Nantucket Project, you’re going to learn many things. Some of them, you may never hear about again for the rest of your life. Some of them, you may pursue them as a career. It’s not trite to say that Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg share … They probably share several things in common, but they share one really interesting thing in common, which is they’ve never graduated from college. All 3 of them, these 3 cultural business icons didn’t finish college. Now, well, how did they learn all the stuff they had to learn to do what they do? The answer is, they love what they do. They’re going to figure out how to learn the things they need to learn in order to do what they do. I think if you know that … You know that Bill Gates didn’t go to computer school. He didn’t. Neither did Steve Jobs. They didn’t go to computer school or iPad school or touchscreen school. There’s no such thing. They just learned.
I can promise you, they were bad at it at the beginning. I promise. The first day, they weren’t good at it. They didn’t even understand it, the first day. They went one day after one day after one day. I just believe that. It’s that whole thing of, how do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I think one of the things, and I’m going to turn 50 in a couple weeks, I’ve been around a little bit. I’ve been around. The older I get, the more I realize that those silly old things your grandfather said, they tend to be true. How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. That’s the answer. How do you learn how to do, you go from one thing to the next. One step at a time. How do I know for me or for anyone I think, where to go next? Where’s your inner being telling you you want to go next? What are you really in to?
It’s that whole follow your bliss, follow your passion. I definitely want to ask you about, you went from not being able to afford to go to a TED conference to co-directing and co-producing an amazing documentary on your ideal films, on Richard Saul Wurman, who created TED and he’s an architect. He has a line in there that, “Most information doesn’t inform,” which I just thought was great. Can you tell us about what it was like to interview him and what gave you the idea?
Yeah. You mean for the film with him?
Yes.
He is the master. This guy talked about information architecture, information anxiety before Steve Jobs graduated from high school. This goes way back. He’s had a crazy and interesting career but his design mind, and I don’t mean that in the way of just design meaning graphic design or artistic design, but computer design and thinking design and speaking design, he has a design mind.
You asked earlier about, how do you learn this or that? The number of things that he has learned and the way he goes about it and the way he treats the packaging of things he learned or other people learned, it’s just one of a kind. TED is a cultural prize. It’s a powerful brand and a powerful concept. This is the guy who started that. This is the guy who built that. Imagine some of the things he’s seen and done. To my knowledge, I’m going to guess you knew very little of him prior to reading, to seeing that film. Am I right?
You are absolutely right. I pride myself in being pretty up on architects. I have friends who work at Gensler, I saw the documentary on Frank Gehry. But he was somebody I never heard of and his story is just amazing. The fact that you co-directed and co-produced that was phenomenal.
Again, hopefully you see my passion for TED and for him in that film.
Definitely.
It’s a film of a certain kind. It’s probably not going to be next to the Avengers or The Force Awakens in terms of viewership. But for people who are curious about a certain kind of thing, I’m proud of the film.
Yes. What else are you working on now that you are excited about that we can look forward to seeing soon?
It’s funny, last week we had our first 2016 speaker meeting for The Nantucket Project this year. It’s back to the drawing board. What I would tell you is, when we do this, when we face another year and book another year of speakers, it’s more about learning than it is about knowing. What I mean is, you’ve got to stay open to the fact that whatever’s going to be interesting in September probably barely exists right now.
Right. Whether it’s robotics or 3D printing or virtual reality, whatever.
Yes. If you were going to ask me at the moment what am I into, I’m into figuring out what I’m into.
Great.
There will probably be a few films in development about those things that we’re preparing for next year. Listen, this should be a TV show. The Nantucket Project should be a TV show. The TV show is something like 60 Minutes. It has segments something like 60 Minutes, but it’s a show about ideas and each of the ideas are carried out in some form of a film that are really instructive, like the Richard Saul Wurman film that you saw. In success, that’s where this goes.
Also, I think what you’re saying Tom, is give yourself a little permission not to know everything all the time, during the creative process. I think that’s a valuable takeaway. Before I let you go, I just want to ask you a couple more questions. One is, what’s a book that you would like to recommend about business or life or philosophy or as you said, following your inner being? Anything at all, any topic. I would love to hear what inspires you author-wise.
The two best books I’ve read recently, one is Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson. It’s about race in America. I saw him speak a few months back. He was incredible. He was as good as anyone I’ve seen in years. I’m watching him and I’m looking and I’m thinking, okay, the guy is smart, because he’s definitely smart. But his brilliance was in the fact that he’s gone to the front lines of death row and race in the south in America. He’s made observations that are his observations. He’s come back from that front line and he shares with us those observations. I bet it’s easy for him. I could be wrong and I’ve never spoken to him about it. I could be wrong. That’s what comes through in this book. Race is such an interesting topic that I’ve looked at it in a full variety of ways throughout my life. But if I’m honest, in the last several years, it’s been through the TV or through the newspaper. To hear something that you can really get your brain around from somebody like him, that was amazing.
The other one I would say is probably one you’ve heard a few times, is Ed Catmull book called Creativity Inc. on Pixar. I just love it. I love everything about Pixar. It’s really good storytelling. I think it’s interesting to hear, to read a creative book from a science guy because that is hard. He’s much more of an Xs … I say that, he has a science background. He has his Xs and O background, he has a technical background. But he speaks, he writes very well about creativity. I just love that book.
Finally Tom, how can people follow you in social media? What’s your Twitter account? Let’s give out the website for The Nantucket Project.
I am not a social media guy. It’s interesting. It’s not that I’m against it. I like our people to speak for themselves. Maybe I’ll have something to say sometime in the future, but now I let my company speak for it. It’s The Nantucket Project. You can follow The Nantucket Project on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. I think we do a pretty good job. I am really focused on making this TV show I mentioned to you come to life and pray for that to work. Then I think we’ll be able to speak to lots of people in a powerful way.
Fantastic. Well, it’s been an honor. You’ve given us so many great insights on selling your company for millions. I’m very excited to see what comes up next considering your track record, which is always a good predictor of people’s passion and focus over and over again, figuring out how to make something new happen. I can’t wait to see what you bring to us. Thanks for being on the show.
Great. Thank you so much. It was great to meet you.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Nantucket Project Website
Nantucket Project on Facebook
Nantucket Project on Twitter
Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson
Creativity, Inc by Edwin Catmull
Crack The Funding Code!
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The Great Minds Of Investing – Interview with William Green
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Episode Here
Episode Summary
William Green is the author of The Great Minds of Investing, a book that features profiles of famous investors. William interviewed 22 investors for his book, including many billionaires, and breaks down what makes them truly unique and different people from the rest. There are so many great qualities you can take away from these brilliant investors who have made tremendous mistakes both throughout their lifetime and in their career.
The Great Minds Of Investing – Interview with William Green
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch. Today’s guest is William Green. The author of The Great Minds of Investing. William has written for many publications both in the US and Europe including Time, Fortune, Forbes, Fast Company, The New Yorker, The London Spectator and The Economist. He edited the Asian edition of Time while living in Hong Kong, and then moved to London to edit the European, Middle Eastern and African editions of Time.
As an editor and co-author, he’s collaborated on books such as Guy Spier’s much-praised memoir, The Education of a Value Investor. I had Guy on recently and he’s fantastic. That’s how we actually were fortunate enough to connect. He’s also coming up with an autobiography of a legendary art collector. Born and raised in London and received a master’s degree in journalism in Columbia. He’s now in New York. Guy, I can’t thank you enough for introducing us. William, welcome to the show.
John, it’s such a pleasure to be here with you. Thank you.
I always like to ask my guests, how do they get started in the world of journalism, investing, and how did you become passionate about that. Can you take us back to your childhood if you don’t mind?
The Great Minds of Investing
Sure. I grew up in London and I grew up in a very bookish family. My father was a very literary judge. My mother was a writer. Everything really was about words and language and the like. I went to Eton, which was this very posh English school, which was where people like Prince Harry and Prince William went. I was supposed to be this great English gentleman and I thought I’d be a man of letters.
I went off to Oxford and I studied English Literature. So far so good. I leave at 20, 21 thinking I’m going to become a famous novelist. To my surprise, I discovered the stock market. Basically, I had owned a small apartment with my brother at London and we sold it. I had a little bit of money. Not a great deal because in those days land and property wasn’t as valuable.
I needed to figure out what to do with the money. I started to study investing. What I found was really intriguing, was that there was this elite group of investors who were just incredibly smart, who had this record of beating the market over many years. They were these master game players. I think there was a part of me that had always been very lazy and never really wanted to get my hands dirty. I never would have summer jobs where I would do anything really serious and painful. I always had this fantasy that I would just make money by using my brain.
When I was about fifteen, I had become obsessed with horse racing. Again, because I thought, “Here’s a great way of making money without doing any real work.” I think what happened to me when I discovered investing was I thought, once again, “Okay, this is this really cool area where if you’re really smart, you can actually outwit the crowd.” Initially, what happened to me, my interest in business and investing really was born out of my total laziness, my just wanting to make money without having to do a lot of work.
Then as I became a journalist in my early 20s, I had this incredible opportunity to go interview some of these people. I would go off, say, to the Bahamas, to interview Sir John Templeton, who is this guy who had averaged 15% a year returns for 38 years and ends up making $400 million selling his company. I would actually get to see these extraordinary people up close.
What started in a way, is this naughty, somewhat lazy, indolent boy wanting not have to do very much work actually became this intellectual passion. Because I looked at these guys like Templeton or Peter Lynch who I interviewed, or Michael Price who is on the cover of Fortune as the biggest SOB on Wall Street.
I would look at these guys and think, “What do they have that other people don’t have? Why, when most people are going with the flow, doing okay and sometimes doing well, then failing and then being fearful and not really fulfilling their potential? Why is there this group of people who perform extraordinarily well, that they win over the long term?”
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: What do they have that other people don’t have?”]
What I found that’s been an enduring fascinations to me really over the last 25 years, has been this idea that if you want to be more successful, both as an investor and also in life, in business, in your family life, you should really study people who are extraordinarily successful and then reverse engineer them and figure out why they win.
I’d say my interest in these people became a little bit more profound as I got older and ceased to be just about how do you make money and became more about how do you become successful in business, how do you become successful in life? What matters in life, what disappointed them, what fulfilled them?
In a sense, what I’ve been trying to do for the last 20 odd years is to figure out what can I learn from these people that will help me in life. I think, probably, that’s the overarching theme of a lot of my writing and also the speaking that I do. That’s really the question, is how do you actually reverse engineer these people so you can become more successful yourself and hopefully happier yourself?
One of the blogs that you wrote on your LinkedIn profile about Warren Buffett is so fascinating and just full of great quotes. Is there something from there? The one that resonates with me is about taking action. “Predicting rain doesn’t count, building arks does.” Is there one theme that you’ve noticed not only in Warren Buffett but other people you’ve interviewed that are successful entrepreneurs that you can expand on that quote with?
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Predicting rain doesn’t count. Building an ark does.”]
I think one of the things that’s really fascinating about Buffett, one of the reasons why he resonates with people so deeply is because he has extraordinarily values. Here’s a guy who’s unbelievably smart. He clearly has an IQ that’s off the charts. I think the reason when you read something like that piece on LinkedIn that he resonates with you is that he’s actually talking about some fairly deep values.
If I remember rightly, the first quote from him was something where he said, “When I look back at my life and figure out what the reason was why I’ve been so successful,” he said really, the key was the unconditional love that he received from his father.
Great Minds of Investing: Warren Buffett said the key was the unconditional love that he received from his father.
Here’s someone who we think is just going to tell us how to get rich. Actually, he’s talking about unconditional love. I’m looking at these quotes from him like that and I’m thinking, “How do I become a better father?” Because I have a fourteen year old daughter and a seventeen year old son. I’m thinking, “Wow, that’s really interesting.”
Buffett is actually saying that that the reason why he’s become this guy who has $70 billion and has beaten the market over 50 odd years is actually because of the love of his father. I think what’s really interesting with someone like Buffett is that it’s not just about how do you beat the market, how do you make money. It’s about these broader values, these broader ideas of what works in life.
When you look at the way that Buffett runs his business, he has a tremendous emphasis on integrity, decency. There’s a wonderful line from Buffett at one point where he says, “You can’t do a good deal with a bad person.” I actually think what’s really striking about Buffett on many levels is his profundity as a thinker about life, not just about business.
Part of what fascinated me with Buffett is that I figure there were all these people like Robert Hagstrom, these great writers about why Buffett’s such an incredible investor. My fascination increasingly over the last couple of years has been, what can we learn from Buffett about having a more successful life? I think that idea of integrity and honesty that he represents and these values, like trustfulness and authenticity, these are incredibly powerful ideas.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: You can’t do a great deal with a bad person.”]
One of the reasons why he’s been so successful is that he has a reputational advantage. You know that if he’s going to take over your company, he’s going to leave you in place as the CEO, he thinks you’re doing a great job. He’s going to treat you decently, he’s going to let you have some autonomy. I think for a lot of us, we look at the business world and we think if you want to be really successful, you’d have to be at snake. I think what’s fascinating about Buffett is that you realize that’s not actually entirely true.
There’s this other more enlightened way to be a capitalist were actually being decent becomes very powerful. There was a fascinating speech that Buffett gave many years ago where he was talking about his partner, Charlie Munger.
If I remember rightly, he said something like, “When I look back over the last 41 years, or something like that, that I’ve been in business with Charlie, I’ve never seen him take advantage of a single person.” That’s an incredible reputational advantage. I think this is something that applies to all of us. You have to figure out, do you want to get ahead by whacking everyone in the face with your elbows on your way up or do you want to try to do it this other way?
That’s a great quote that you have in your blog from Warren Buffett, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.”
Exactly. These two friends of mine, Guy Spier and Mohnish Pabrai, had a charity lunch with Warren I think it was in 2009 where they paid $650,000 to have that. They won this charity auction to have lunch with him. One of the most memorable things, particularly for Guy, that Buffett talked about was this whole concept of the inner scorecard.
The way Buffett presented it, he said, “You have to ask yourself, would you rather be the worst lover in the world but known publicly as the best, or be the best lover in the world but known publicly as the worst?” His point was, you have to have this internal barometer of how you behave. He said his father was the greatest sort of inner scorecard guide.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Live your life by your inner scorecard.”]
His father was a congressman. At one point, I think there was some change in the salary scale of a congressman. They told his father, “Okay, you’re going to get an extra couple of thousand bucks.” His father said, “No, I was elected a salary of $12.5 thousand and so that’s how much I’ll take,” and he returned the money to the treasury. I think this had a huge impact on Buffett, this idea that you should act in a way where you look yourself in the mirror every morning and you just think, “Yeah, I’m okay with who I am.”
We shouldn’t lionize Buffett or any of these other guys. They’re all flawed just as we are. Buffett had problems with his relationships, with his marriage. He clearly had an extraordinary wife who divorced him and who he continued to adore and remain close to. It’s not like you can look at these people and say, “This is a saint and everything is perfect.”
That’s not to be disparaging about Buffett, who I really do revere. I think it’s just a reminder, we’re all deeply flawed. When you look at people like Buffett, it gives you something to aspire to because you start to think, “There’s a different way to do business that might almost seem naive but actually there’s a tremendous advantage to behaving in an ethical decent fair way.”
What you said about living your life by your own inner scorecard, for me really is just a great reminder that you can’t live your life worried about what other people think about you.
Great Minds of Investing: Templeton had this extraordinary ability to go his own way and to think for himself.
I think that’s really key. This actually, this was one of the very profound lessons I had very early in my career as a writer. When I went to Bahamas to see Templeton, before I had my interview with him, I sneaked behind a tree and was watching him exercising. He would go into the ocean every day and would pump his arms and legs under the water for 45 minutes using the resistance of the water to exercise. I’m looking at this old guy, at the time I think he was 86. His face is slathered with this horrible white goop to protect him from the sun.
Sunscreen.
Exactly, but super thick. He’s got this ridiculous hat on with floppy ears, with ear flaps. As I was looking at him, I was just thinking, “Here’s a guy who just absolutely does not care what anybody thinks about how he looks, how he exercises, how he thinks.” It struck me, it became a metaphor in my own mind, that he had this extraordinary ability to go his own way and to think for himself.
Someone had a lovely phrase to describe it when I was interviewing people about Templeton, where he said, “It was the willingness to be lonely.” I remember asking Templeton, where did this come from? Actually, it was funny because I said to him, “Who were the biggest influence on you?” He said, “Really, nobody. Nobody influenced me.”
I thought this was this incredibly arrogant thing at that time. Then he started talking about his parents. He said that they would go in these road trips when he was a boy. They would put him in charge from a very early age, seven, eight, or nine, of navigation.
They basically left him totally in charge of this. He said there was one occasion, where, finally, after a couple of hours, he realizes that he’s taken them 200 miles in the wrong direction. They haven’t told him. They really were just saying, “You’re free to make your own mistakes.” This, for him, became this enormously powerful thing. He was able to go his own direction.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Go your own direction. Think for yourself.”]
One of the reasons why he became one of the greatest investors of the last century was that he had this philosophy that you would buy at what he called the Point of Maximum Pessimism. For example, during World War II, he made this extraordinary investment when the world seemed to be ending. He bought something like a 104 stocks for under a dollar each. I think it’s something like 36 of them were in bankruptcy at the time. He told me that basically, over the next five years, he quintupled his money. Because the world righted itself and he had the strength of mind to go his own way to think to himself.
I think whether you’re a great contrarian value investor like him or you’re a great entrepreneur, you have to have this tremendous ability to think for yourself, the emotional strength to go against the crowd and the confidence to go against the crowd. It’s not something that many people have I think, to have that degree of independence of mind. I think when you see people like that, it makes you realize, “This is what I have to aspire to, I need to have a little more courage.”
One of the things also that Buffett said to Mohnish and Guy at their lunch is, “If you want to get better at something, hang out with people who are better than you. You can’t help but get better.” Buffett’s partner, Charlie Munger, says, “That includes hanging out with the eminent dead.” You should be reading books about Ben Franklin and whoever, anybody you admire. You’re reading books about them and you’re figuring out, what can I take from Steve Jobs or from whoever it might be that I can use in my life?
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Hang out with people who are better than you”]
I think it’s fascinating that these people like Buffett and Munger who we regard as these titans at the moment, actually, have done exactly the same thing where they’ve been studying people who were better than them and figuring out, what do I learn from them?
Two things you said that I just really like a lot, which is one, not only do we not have to let go of what other people think about us, and you’ve painted great picture of him in the ocean with all that sunscreen and the hat, but we don’t have to wait to be in our 80s before we can let go of worrying about what other people think. Most people think, “When you get to a certain age like that, then you’ll let go of what other people think.”
You’re really inviting us, at any age, to stop worrying about what other people think. That story about how his parents let him get lost and make his own mistakes, to me the thing that really stands out is not only did they let him make his own mistakes, but then they didn’t beat him up and make him feel bad about making it.
That’s an important point. I hadn’t really thought about that. He said this really had a lifelong influence on him, the fact that they allowed him to make those mistakes. I think with all of these people, the ability to make mistakes and then not be crushed by them is absolutely key. It’s very easy when you look at the life of an extraordinarily successful entrepreneur, or tycoon or investor. I’ve interviewed so many billionaires over the years. These are remarkably successful people.
Great Minds of Investing: The ability to make mistakes and then not be crushed by them is absolutely key
You look back at their life with the sense of it was almost inevitable. Actually, when you’re living the life in the present tense rather than looking back at it, there was nothing inevitable about it. There were moments where these people were totally crushed. There was a time early in his career when Charlie Munger lost his son who died. He lost all his money trying to basically pay the medical bills. His marriage ended. Munger is the one guy who most investors regard as even smarter than Buffett.
When you look at him now, he’s 91, 92 years old and he makes these incredible statements, where he just, he speaks like God. Just with tremendous intelligence. It’s as if he always knew the truth. Actually, when you look at his life, these were very, very hard earned lessons. He invested on margin at one point, I think in the 70s, and almost went under.
When he’s talking about how to avoid stupidity, how to get ahead by actually avoiding folly and stupidity. He’s not talking as someone who’s just looking at everyone else and saying, “You guys are idiots.” He’s saying, “I screwed up. I almost destroyed myself through stupidity and here’s what I’ve learned about how not to be foolish again.”
I think that ability not just to learn from your own mistakes but, as Buffett said, “It’s great to learn from your own mistakes, but it’s much better to learn from other people’s mistakes.” To read about someone like Munger getting almost undone by investing on margin and then the world going haywire and him being exposed, those are very powerful things.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Learn from other people’s mistakes.”]
I think these are habits that all of us should develop. This ability to look at extraordinarily successful people and say, “What did they do wrong? Also, what did they do right?” Not to lionize them. To say you know, “Why was their emotional life a wreck? Why did their marriage go wrong?” It’s like with your parents, I tell my kids, “You should learn from the stuff that I do right, but also learn from my idiocy. Don’t repeat the stupid things that I do.”
When we show people our flaws, I think that vulnerability is what makes people be able to relate to us.
David Hawkins talks a great deal about authenticity, about being totally truthful and just not lying.
I think that’s very powerful. One of the people in this book, The Great Minds of Investing, that I wrote, one of the people I connected to most was this guy Mohnish Pabrai, who’s very close friend of Guy Spier’s as well. Mohnish is fascinating because when he stumbles upon a very important idea, he totally internalizes it and makes it 100% what he does. One of the massive ideas that he encountered in life was from this book Power Vs. Force by this guy David Hawkins. Hawkins talks a great deal about authenticity, about being totally truthful and just not lying.
You can see when you spend time with someone like Mohnish that he just … I went to India with him for about five days a few weeks ago. Whatever question you ask him, he’s going to tell you the truth. I think when you spend time with people who are less honest, you start to sense it. Mohnish’s view is that whether it’s intuitive or explicit, you actually sense when somebody’s lying to you or holding something back.
I think one of the things that strikes me as a powerful lesson from these guys like Buffett, Munger, Mohnish Pabrai, Guy Spier, is this idea of becoming more and more authentic to who you are, more and more truthful. One of the things that Mohnish discovered, which I thought was fascinating, was during the financial crisis, he had a terrible time and his fund was down 60 or 70% from peak-to-trough.
He said, he went to his shareholders and he just said, “Yeah, the market suck. It’s been a tough time,” but he said, “That’s not really the reason why our losses were so bad.” He said, “The reason that our losses were so bad was that I made this mistake, this mistake, and this mistake.” He said the amazing thing was that almost nobody bailed out of the fund, because he said really, what people want is for you to tell them the truth.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: People want for you to tell them the truth.”]
I love that. We just have to really play that up so much William, because it’s something that needs to be underlined and bolded, especially for the listeners when they’re thinking of pitching an investor, they must be 100% truthful. They can’t hide anything, because it will come out in due diligence and then the deal will go sour, or they get an investor and things aren’t going well, they need to be able to tell the truth to the investor and own up to the responsibility of what they did wrong and what they’ve learned from it and not do it in order for the investor not to suddenly micromanage them.
I think you’re absolutely right. This really applies to everything. It applies to when you’re running a business, it applies to when you’re talking to your kids, it applies to everything. If you’re going to pitch your company to a venture capitalist, they might not know specifically what you’re lying about, but I think they sense when you’re holding something back. I think there’s something tremendously liberating when you just decide, “You know what? I’m going to tell the truth and we’ll see where the chips fall.”
Great Minds of Investing: When you peer under the hood and you want to see the dirt in there, it’s actually tremendously liberating.
I had this myself because there was a period when my career hit a rocky stage and I got laid off during the financial crisis. For a while, you feel ashamed and you’re like, “Okay, maybe I should hide this and I should pretend that everything’s great.” Then after a while you start to think, “To hell with it, I’m just going to be honest about what’s going on in my life. I’m not going to hide the fact that I’ve gone through tough times. I’m not going to hide the fact that I’ve written stories that got killed by major magazines or whatever.”
Once you start to do that and you start to say, you want to peer under the hood and you want to see the dirt in there, it’s actually tremendously liberating because you don’t have to remember what you’re lying about. I think the extraordinary thing is that people start to look at the truth tellers. This is not to say we’re all super truthful. There are degrees of honesty and dishonesty.
I think people look at investors, CEOs, writers, whatever it is, who are trying to tell the truth, who are pushing towards this level of integrity and honesty about themselves and what they’re doing. I think they sense it. I think of one of the things that’s really interesting that I’ve found in life, people always say, opposites attract. I don’t think that’s true at all, I think like attracts like.
As you start to behave somewhat better in your own life and to be more truthful and more open about your flaws and your failings and the like, I actually think you draw into your life a better quality of person. You might find that if you lie or prevaricate or you conceal a little bit about the problems with your company or your career or your background, that you do still manage to sell, you do still manage to get founders and the like, but they’re probably not going to be the people you actually want to have in your life.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Superpower in life is being authentic.”]
You’re drawing less high quality people into your life. What I found really fascinating is when I’ve seen people like Mohnish Pabrai or Guy Spier who behave in this way where they’re trying to be more decent or more open and more honest about their flaws and their failings, their mistakes. They draw an incredible group of people around them. I think it’s a superpower in life, once you understand this. Exposing your vulnerability and your mistakes, because people sense whether they can trust you or not.
When you take down your mask, which is another way of saying that, and show your flaws a little bit to people and don’t pretend that everything’s always perfect, not only you’re going to attract the right investors, but as a startup you’re going to attract the right quality of people to join your team. Because they won’t feel like they have to be perfect to join your team.
They’re like, “If you, as the founder, are willing to share your flaws and not be hypercritical about them, then maybe that will be a place where I could make a mistake and not feel like I’m going to be fired tomorrow.” That’s what’s going to attract really great people on your team. As we all know, having a great team is one of the keys to being successful.
I think it’s hugely important as a manager. When I look back on my own career, when I look at the best bosses I had. When I worked for people who were bullies and who were not that talented. I couldn’t wait to get out. When I worked for people who were really decent and kind and supportive, I would do anything for them.
You don’t want to sound naive about these things. There are incredibly smart people who get by being sons of bitches. I think there’s this other way where you see people who behave very decently and they attract great people in their lives.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: Decent people attract great people in their lives.”]
I was trying to think about it, who was it, there was someone I interviewed recently. He was a multi-billionaire who is running one of these big funds. He had a partner and he just said to me, “We haven’t argued in 30 years. We’ve never had a difference about anything in 30 years.” That’s an incredible thing to say, where you treat someone, you treat your partner that decently. Actually, I remember it was Mason Hawkins, who’s a close friend of Buffett’s. He runs a firm called Southeast Asset Management. He said to me, “My partner is just the most decent human being you’ve ever met.” What a wonderful thing to be able to say about the person you work with every day?
I can probably bet a lot of money that that’s the kind of person they’re looking to invest in too. They want to only be around people that match their values and their sense of integrity.
Exactly. One of the things Hawkins said to me that was really fascinating was that, he was talking about the type of people who he hired and he had about six characteristics he looked for. Actually, he said that the single most important thing he looked for employees he hired was generosity. He said he look for people who … He knew they were going to have excess income, he knew that we’re going to become rich if they were good in what he did.
Great Minds of Investing: People who shared their wealth had much more longevity in the investment world.
He wanted to know that they were going to be prepared to share some of that wealth. He said the extraordinary thing was that you actually, you discover that the people who were prepared to share their wealth and be very philanthropic had much more longevity in the investment world.
If you were just working for yourself, if it was just about how do I buy a faster car, or a red Ferrari, or a bigger house, or whatever, then that drive at a certain point wanes a little bit. What he was saying is that he felt that when there was a slightly broader cause than just your own ego and getting the best Volvos and toys and the like, you actually did a better job.
I think again, there’s nothing wrong with buying a beautiful car if you’re very successful or buying a beautiful house. These things are all fine. I think one of the things that strikes me with these guys who have been very successful is some of them are really pretty evolved and thoughtful about what the money does and doesn’t buy them.
The ones who strike me as most impressive in terms of models to how you want to live your life are the ones who haven’t lost sight of things like generosity, philanthropy, having a good work environment and the like. The ones who are really just out to dominate the world and prove to their father that they think they were better than he thought, those guys can be incredibly successful but they tend to create a lot of chaos, both to the people around them and also in their own lives.
I think again, when you’re trying to study people that have been very successful, you want to figure out what are their relationships like, both inside their company, with their wives, and the like, with their kids, how messed up are their kids. Look at them be like, “What do I want to be like?”
I had this fascinating exchange with a guy called Irving Kahn, who died at the age of 109 last year and was one of the famous value investors. He was too sick to talk to me in person when he was 108, so I gave him various questions that his grandson, who is in his 30s, went over with him for several days. His grandson came back to me with the answers that he’d written up.
[Tweet “Great Minds of Investing: It’s all family, it’s all relationships.”]
One of the things I said to Irving Kahn is, “When you look back on the last 108 years, what’s the secret not just of a very profitable life or a very long life, but a successful life?” He said, “It’s all family, it’s all relationships.” He said he’s really proud of the fact that he built a company, Kahn Brothers, that has three generations of his family working for it and is really successful and does the right thing by its clients.
It’s that combination of having built something worthwhile, that force for good in the world, his company, and the fact that he has healthy kids, healthy family, and good relationships. I think that’s really striking when you see someone with that 109 year perspective saying, “It’s not that I’m dying with the most money, or the most toys.”
It’s great. It’s full circle to the beginning of the episode where you talked about Warren Buffett’s whole focus on unconditional love from his father being one of the keys to his success. What a great insight you’ve given everybody to think about themselves, how to approach investors with authenticity so that you attract the right investors, and just how to be a happier person through this whole mindset.
That’s why your book has got a great title, The Great Minds of Investing. Everyone’s going to assume, “It’s all about the mindset of how to make money,” but it’s that and so much more. I highly recommend everybody getting that. We’re also going to put the book you mentioned, I believe you said Power vs. Force in the show notes.
Yeah, I think it’s an important book. It is an important book.
William, how can people follow you on social media? What’s your Twitter and all that good stuff?
They’re welcome to visit my website, which is WilliamGreenWrites.com. They’re welcome to find me on LinkedIn and become friends with me there. I don’t tweet as much as I should and so I’m struggling even to remember what my Twitter handle is. Sorry about that.
No worries. We can certainly follow you on LinkedIn and visit you on your website as well. Thank you so much for being on the show today. It’s been an honor.
Thank you so much. A real pleasure of me, John.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
William Green Website
The Great Minds of Investing by William Green
I’ve Followed Warren Buffett For Decades – LinkedIn Post by William Green
William on LinkedIn
Power vs. Force by David R. Hawkins
Crack The Funding Code!
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How To Pitch So Investors Say Yes – Interview with Matthew Pollard
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Episode Summary
Matthew Pollard has five multi-million-dollar business success stories under his name and is the founder of the Rapid Growth Coach. Matthew grew up with a disability and felt like he would never, ever fit in. Despite being extremely introverted at the time, he took a door-to-door sales opportunity and excelled in it by teaching himself the ropes through YouTube videos. Matthew’s story is nothing short of amazing and this is definitely an episode you won’t want to miss.
How To Pitch So Investors Say Yes – Interview with Matthew Pollard
Hi. Welcome to The Successful Pitch Podcast. I’m thrilled to say that today’s guest is Matthew Pollard, who is known as the Rapid Growth Guy. With five multi-million dollar business success stories to his name and the prestigious Young Achiever Award, Matthew’s been characterized as a true differentiation niche marketing and sales system powerhouse. He was honored with the induction into the International Sales Blogger Hall of Fame as well as named in Evan Carmichael’s report as the 43rd most retweeted business coach on Twitter.
Recently, he was a top ten finalist in the Top Sales World Magazine for the number one sales and marketing video. As if that wasn’t enough, he’s been nominated for Austin’s Change Maker Award. He’s a recurring guest on Fox 7’s Good Day Austin. He is also a sought after judge at many of America’s most startup events, including Google Startup Weekend, AngelHack and Microsoft’s 60 Seconds to Startup. He’s a pitch coach that has a ton of expertise to share with us. Without any further ado, welcome to the show, Matthew.
Mate, I’m impressed you got through all of that. I apologize. I should have cut some things down for you.
I stumbled a little bit, but I’m not trying to be perfect. I think that’s actually a big lesson for people, is just be yourself. Be authentic. You don’t have to be perfect. If you say a word wrong or stumble over something, don’t freak out. Just keep going.
100% right. What I find is people that go to all the effort of being absolutely perfect, don’t come across as authentic and come across as obviously, they’re trying too hard, which means if you spend six months preparing to be absolutely perfect for a pitch, what’s going to happen when you need to do things on the instant?
Before we dive into all your awards and all your multi-million business successes, can you take us back to where did you grow up and how did you decide you wanted to become an entrepreneur?
Investors Say Yes: I felt that the world wasn’t going to learn to love what I did and how I did anything..
I didn’t actually decide it, it decided me. I guess the best way I can tell the story is that I grew up in a not a hugely poor area, but not a wealthy area at all. It was a little area just outside of a place called Meadows, which definitely not poor by a lot of standards, but where I grew up, it was considered poor. For me, I really struggled in everything. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life. I had a reading speed of a sixth grader in late high school. I just felt that the world wasn’t going to learn to love what I did and how I did anything because everything in school, I just struggled with.
Give us some context. You’re in Australia, going to school?
Correct. I was in Melbourne, Australia. I was just really struggling and there was some support there. Anyone that’s had a disability, and I had what’s called Irlen Syndrome, which is often misdiagnosed as dyslexia, which basically means you put a pair of glasses on and all of a sudden things start to work again, I just couldn’t read. Except for the fact that you have to start again. I got diagnosed when I was about sixteen and a half and from that point, I then started to learn to read but I had to start from scratch.
For anyone that comes from that far behind, and school was really hard for me, but it took me everything I had … I got into the top 20% of my state for educational school. But it took every piece of energy I had to do that. I just didn’t have it in me to go to University. My parents knew that I didn’t. I needed a break, and in my father’s words, I needed to work out what I wanted to be doing and what my passion was before I could go back to school and do that. Luckily enough, I did find that passion. I won the Young Achiever of the Year Award in 2007 and I then get invited back to do an MBA when I hadn’t done an undergraduate. I got to study and do my MBA without doing the undergraduate degree.
What I then did is I went to a real estate agency and the goal there was to really hide away for twelve months and relax and try and figure out what I wanted to do, but really, the goal was to hide away. Luckily, unluckily, depending on how you look at it, that real estate agency went bankrupt within just a few weeks of me working there and about a couple of weeks just before Christmas. America and Australia are slightly different when it comes to Christmas holiday, because it’s our summer as well. We tend to close down on the 20th of December and reopen somewhere between the 15th and the 20th of January.
Investors Say Yes: I decided to go home and work out a better way.
Getting a job just before Christmas is virtually impossible to do. Here I was where I committed to my family that I was going to support myself and obviously they could have supported me but they would have struggled and that would have been completely my fault forever. I had to go and find a job quickly and the only job I could find was commission only sales. I was really introverted. The reading speed issue created a huge amount of lack of confidence within myself. I really took a long time to warm up to anyone. I struggled to talk to my own friends. Commission only sales, door-to-door, was the only job I could get. Outside of disappointing my family, that was what I had to do.
I went out door-to-door selling with no sales training, they gave us five days of product training, dropped us off and said, “Hey, good luck with that.” I went, “Okay.” The first day, I went to 93 doors. You have to see an image to know what this feels like, to walk down a street of stores that all look like places you’d never want to shop. But, that was the strip that I went down and I had to try make a sale. My 93rd door, I made my first sale, I remember walking out ecstatic, I’d made about $70. It just dawned on me that I had to do this every single day. That was horrible. I got told to get a real job, to get out, I got sworn at for 93 doors before somebody finally said yes to me.
What I then did is I decided to go home and work out a better way. What I did, I was dyslexic and I couldn’t exactly pick up a Zig Ziglar or a Brian Tracy book and read how to do it. I turned on YouTube and I watched YouTube videos and I trained myself how to sell. I first learned the steps of the sale and then I focused on one new step every single day for about a week and a half. Every day, I got slightly better, I got to the next stage, I got to speak to more people, then I got more people interested, then I learned how to close.
Over the space of about a week, I started to get comfortable. Within six weeks, I actually went from a person that had no business being there, definitely not a natural, which what most people say you have to be to be in sales, to the number one sales performer in the Southern Hemisphere. To cut a long story short, about twelve months later, I’ve been promoted seven times and I’ve been promoted to state manager, foreign state and then the head office state for the largest sales and marketing company in the Southern Hemisphere, which wasn’t bad.
Then I transitioned into my own business, which was a tiny little thing above a Subway restaurant that within twelve months I grew to a million dollar concern. Within three years, it turned over $4.2 million and was the largest independent broker firm B2B, business to business, cellphones in the country. Then, going to now, I’ve been responsible for five multi-million dollar success stories from telecommunications all the way through to high level education. I work with people and teach people all over the world and actually, next week, flying to Bangkok, to speak for Electrolux, at their conference, to help them understand rapid growth, and that’s all I do for a living now.
What a story. I love stories. I’m a big fan of being a storyteller to communicate your points. It’s one thing if you just said, “I’m persistent.” But, you didn’t say that. You painted a picture for us of what persistence looks like 93 doors later and with very little payoff and figuring out a better way. That you weren’t that kind of person that could just crack a book the night before a test and wing it and do well. You had to work harder than everybody else. That, in my mind, created the grit that’s necessary to become a successful entrepreneur if you’re willing to work harder than everybody else because you have to, not because you want to. That’s the secret to your success, in a way, I think.
Firstly, you’re 100% right about the stories. If we’re going to be talking about pitching anything, stories is your number one resource. A lot of people say they don’t have stories. They have stories everywhere. Think about yourself at a dinner party when you go out. Tell me you have never once told a story. It just doesn’t happen. Everybody tells stories. They just think when it comes to business, that’s not what they should be doing.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Stories is your number one resource in pitching.”]
Secondly, the working hard thing, yeah, I did work really, really hard and a lot harder than anybody else would have. A lot of the naturals, their skillsets were based on their personality. They just have a fight with their girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife or mama or dad or friend, all of a sudden, they’re not selling today. My skillset was regardless of whether it was rain, hail, or storm, I did the exact same thing and it was fine.
When I had to learn to be a manager or a business owner, all of a sudden I needed new skills, so all of a sudden I went back to my old competency of search and discover the things that I need to know to make it possible. As soon as you do that, then you’re now fantastic at that and then you can go about doing it, and it’s much easier than everyone else. If you ask me, which one would I prefer, would I prefer to work hard for six weeks instead of the rest of my life, or twelve months instead the rest of my life, I choose the former. Most people don’t. Most people choose to work hard every single day, but still clock off at 6 o’clock.
What a fascinating perception. Is that how you came up with your tagline that you’re the Rapid Growth Guy, because you figure out how to do it faster so you don’t have to keep doing the same thing?
I think the Rapid Growth terminology came from a couple of places. Firstly, I’m a big believer on using technology so you can automate things and then move on. If you’ve got lots of automated functionality, then you can be much faster than most other people. If you’re intelligent about how you do that, then you can be much faster and much more effective than most people doing it manually. First, what is rapid growth? Rapid growth can be building up your business to a point where it needs to hire more sales staff, more development people, more everything, because now you’re becoming a bigger business, or it can just be increasing your rates. I’ve worked with, a lot of consultants, ghostwriters, all sorts of different businesses that don’t want to hire staff, they just want to work for themselves but they’re struggling to make ends meet.
I had a ghostwriter that I worked with back in 2014. He earns I think it was $12,000 by the time he called me and $27,000 the year before. Within two weeks of working with him, he’d made $40,000. Within seven weeks, he’d made $80,000. By the end of the year, he’d made $120,000. By the end of 2015, I think he was just shy of $250,000. That’s the difference. But, again, just him, he just increased his rates by using strategies to get busy and then strategies to put your prices up.
Rapid growth doesn’t come from being a great salesperson. That helps, but I’m a big believer of saying that if you start with sales, you’ve already lost. What you need to do is pull all of that back and say, “What is my unified message?” What is the thing that differentiates me from everybody else? Not like a branding person or an SEO person does, because what’s most important, especially for a person that’s just starting out is that that message is congruent with them. Because if it’s congruent with who they are, they will tell it to everybody, where if they find themselves being disingenuous, they won’t.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Craft a message that is authentic to who you are.”]
It’s about really crafting that unified message that draws their specific customer that rallies to what they talk about to them. The second step is really working out which niches of customers are they the most lucrative, they make the most money out of, and that sing their praises out to the world because they deliver so highly on them, and that they enjoy and love working with. Once you have all of that down, you then work out what technology you need, what networking events you need to go to, what podcasts you need to be on.
All the different things, the artifacts of the things that you need to create so that when you start to sell, your customer comes to you pre sold. Or when you go and sell to them, you really don’t have to try very hard and you don’t have to be that hard salesperson. That was never me. I just built a big enough value proposition and told enough stories that by the time we got to the point of talking about working together, I just assumed we were. I’d say, “Do you want a day course or a night course, or would you prefer to start in January or February?” I would use what’s called a double bind close and they generally respond well. If they didn’t respond well, you’d say, “No, I was just asking because there’s more information I need to give you based on whether or not you’re starting in the day or the night or whether you’re starting in January or February.”
Once you have your goals, you can then work out what your unified message is.
Therefore, it’s really, really relaxed. You can’t not be a hardcore salesperson if you haven’t done your homework. Most people don’t know what their goals are, and if you don’t know what your goals are, how do you know where you’re heading. If you don’t know what your goals are, how do you know what’s congruent with you. I’ve got a podcast where I talk about … This is the Better Business Coach Podcast. One of the episodes is dedicated to talking about your goals and working out what they are. Once you have those, you can then work out what your unified message is. You were a member of one of the calls that I was on recently where I outlined a full five step process for really how to work out what that message is. Once you have that, then you can start building the stories around that that help you do an investment pitch or a new client pitch, or a publicity pitch.
I love what you said here. “If you start with sales, you’ve already lost.” We’re going to tweet that out from the show. That’s a great line. It’s memorable and it makes people think and go, “What?” Just to recap what you said, craft a message that’s congruent with who you are, figure out who your ideal customer is that’s going to sing your praises, and then figure out ways to market yourself using podcast and technology that spreads the word for you. Would that be a fair summary?
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: If you start with sales you’ve already lost.”]
It definitely is, but I will make one point. Up until a few years ago, 100% of my business was outbound, and I was doing it wrong. I could have saved a lot of time and a lot of resources, and yeah, my businesses were successful. They just could have been much more successful if I focused on inbound traffic too. Now I also focus on inbound traffic, and I’ve been reported for turning my business 100% inbound within seven months. But that doesn’t mean I hide behind my laptop either.
I think a lot of people in today’s modern world, they want to live behind blogs, email addresses, and that’s their world. I still go to networking events. I still go out and publicly speak. I still do a lot of things out in the world. I think that’s why I’ve been nominated for that Change Maker Award, because I’m out in the world. No one would have given me that award if I didn’t go out and speak to people. The whole process is that you craft this message and then you outwardly focus. You use technology, you go to meet up groups.
But, please, if you’re a PR agent, don’t go to a PR agent meet up group. If you’re a business coach, don’t go to a business coach meet up and call that marketing. That’s you hanging out with your friends. You’re not going to find a person that needs PR from a PR agency meet up group. Go out and speak to different groups where your customers hang out. That’s really the real key focus is. Look, it’s up to you, but if we have time, I can go through a very simple process how you would start to really understand what your unified message is, because that’s vitally important when you’re going to start to craft a pitch, that people understand how to do that.
I would love to have you do that because I think it’s really valuable for our listeners, since you’re judging pitches, you can share what you look for that makes a unified message and then makes you say, “That’s a good pitch that I would fund or not.”
A unified message is really something that’s going to get people to hook. After this, what we can do is we can go through what I’m looking for in a pitch. Because, what I find is a lot of people want to get up in front of me and tell me all about the features of the product and why the product is so cool in the technology. I don’t care. We’ll talk about what I do want to hear because I want to hear stories, but there are specific types of stories in specific orders that I want to hear. But, let’s go through the five steps of creating that unified message. This is simple to do, no one ever does it.
I did this at the National Freelance Conference the other day. This is going back in November now. I had a room of 150 people. We did this as a workshop with me from the stage. More than 70, 80% of the room said that they’d never spent as much time on the marketing as they had with me in that room. The workshop was 45 minutes. These people, a lot of them have been in business for five years. How is that possible?
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Don’t hide behind your functional skills.”]
What I’ve learned is most people want to hide behind their functional skill, which is the skillset that they love to do and have had years of experience doing. It’s fine to do your functional skill. Go and work for somebody. If you want to earn a living running a business doing your functional skill, you have to spend time on other things too. Just like the bookkeeper and the accounting that you have to do, otherwise the tax man comes after you. With the marketing, the business cemetery comes after you. You just shut your business down. You have to market and sell, but make it easier for yourself. Have that unified message.
Here’s what we do. There’s a link that I crafted for you, which was MatthewPollard.com/Pitch, and if you go to that, it will give you a much better outline of what this is and as well as a bunch of other information about how to really craft that unified message, find your niche market, and find your sales system. That’s a specific link that I designed just for your listeners.
The basic process is write down a list, and all I want you to do is write down the names of the people that you get your absolute best results from. If you can’t think of who those people are, think about the people that give you referrals, think about the people that write you testimonials. Think about the people that keep increasing how many hours they spend with you or how much money they spend with you or how much they order from you. Those are the customers that sing your praises.
Now that you’ve got those names down, write down the names of all the people you make ridiculous money out of. People you make fantastic money out of and that every time they place an order, you know that it’s a profitable one. It’s not just cutting costs because you negotiated the price too much at the beginning. Write down the names of all those people.
Now, you’ve got two lists of names. You’re going to see similarities between certain names. What we want you to do is write them into groups. What we’re starting to design here is what we call customer segments. Basically what you’ve got is you had two lists of names, now you should have several groups. Now, what I want you to do now is I want you to pick up two colored pens. I always say red and blue, but it really doesn’t matter as long as they’re two different colored pens. Let’s pick up the blue pen now and I want you to circle all of the customer groups that sing you praises, give you massive numbers of referrals that you know just love to work with you.
Investors Say Yes: Your ideal customer segment is where you want to focus your time.
Then pull out your red pen and circle all the ones you make fantastic money out of. What you’ll notice is some of these circles don’t overlap, but there’ll be a few or at least one where you’ve circled it with a blue and a red circle. This is what’s called your ideal customer segment. This is where you want to focus your time. Now, if you’ve got a couple, what I want you to do is look inside yourself and say, which one of these is more congruent with me? Which are the ones that make me jump out of bed and make me want to work? Because that’s the group. Don’t pick all three or five or ten or two. Pick the one that you love the most.
Now, a lot of people, at this point, will say, “Yeah, but there’s only two customers in there or one name. I only worked with one client.” I had a client in California who owned a language institute and she taught people how to speak Mandarin. When she did this, what we discovered was that there was two clients, only two that were in this customer group. These were people she taught Mandarin but she helped them with other things as well. She helped them understand the concept of galaxy, which is the Chinese form of rapport.
See, in China, they want to go out to dinner with you several times before they talk business. They probably want to see you drunk over karaoke to see what kind of person you are. They want to find all out about your family. Now, you think, from a sales perspective, imagine having several meetings before you even got to speak about your product. For an American, it’s ridiculously frustrating. We want to have one meeting and sign the deal. If not, maybe next week we’ll go back and sign it. We definitely don’t want to go back seven times.
As an American though, we go to China and we try and do this and we fail miserably, and we never get welcomed back. What happens is that this all derived from the fact that we don’t understand their concept of rapport. The reason why we don’t understand it is that in America, we’re signing 12 to 24 month contracts, where in China, they’re signing 50 to 100 year deals. That’s longer than some people’s lifetimes.
Whole different perspective.
They want to know who they’re getting into bed with. That’s the first thing. She also helped them understand the difference between eCommerce in the US and the eCommerce in China. The next thing she helped them understand was the absolute necessity for accent reduction training. See, Americans think they just need to learn Mandarin. They don’t think they need to learn how to reduce their accent. People in China don’t expect you to know and speak exactly like them. They do expect you to try, because in China, it’s all about respect. If you’re seen as disrespectful, you can’t do business with a person.
That’s why they’ll hand you a business card and you have to hold it, look at it, appreciate it, almost bow sometimes, put it in your card case, that’s right, a card case, and show that you’ve incredibly valued it. What do Americans and Australians do? We throw it in our pocket and keep on talking. She helped them understand these three things. She was worried that there was only two people. What I said to her is where there’s one, there’ll be many. You just need to get out there and find them.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: Where there is one ideal customer, there will be many more.”]
Let’s go into the next step. What we then got Wendy to do is write down all of the things she did above and beyond for this customer or these two customers that were outside the scope of her functional skill. Because what she did was she taught people language. The next step was she wrote down all of these above and beyond things, that she helped people with galaxy, that she helped people with eCommerce, that she helped people with accent reduction and understanding the psychology of why that’s important.
Then, what the last step is is we then ask, “What is the higher level benefit of this?” See, for Wendy, the fact that she was teaching people language was only part of the puzzle, and for that, she was struggling to get $50 to $80 an hour. There’s so many people moving into California from other states or from China that were willing to cut their prices to the bone just to deliver the same service, and they were delivering it for $30 to $40 an hour. She was losing market share. For these people though, she didn’t just teach them language. She helped them become successful in China. She couldn’t see this, but by doing this exercise, all of a sudden when I said it to her, she’s like, “That’s right. That is what I do.” From that point, we then transferred her name into the China Success Coach, and she had the China Success Institute.
Oh, how great.
Then we networked to a bunch of, and this is going into niching, we went and spoke to a bunch of immigration agents. Immigration agents are those people you go to to get a visa to go and work in a foreign country. They’d make a couple of thousand dollars at the absolute most to go and do a visa, and then they’d have their time and their costs on top of that. She sold a program that was a $30,000, five week program, that worked with the executive, the spouse, and any children to be as successful as they possibly could when they get relocated to China. Why the spouse and the children? One, you can charge more when there’s more people.
But, secondly, if the spouse and the children are unhappy being relocated, they’re going to act out. The executives are going to be called home. The immigration agent got paid a $3,000 commission for any successful introduction. That was more money than they made off the immigration deal itself and there was no work requirement. Wendy is now ridiculously busy. She doesn’t do any of her own sales. Remember how I said if you start with sales, you’ve already lost? All she had to do was sell a few immigration agents on the idea, and now she’s fully inundated with clients, and not only is the immigration agent ecstatic, so are her clients, and she created the industry. Going back, it’s, what are all the higher level benefits that you deliver to the people that are within that blue and red circle? Then, last, what is the higher level benefit of that?
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: What is the higher level benefit?”]
For Wendy, she delivered success in China. She became the China Success Coach. For me, I’m a business coach, I’m a marketing specialist, I’m a branding expert, I’m a sales strategist, I’m a sales systemization specialist, I’m an NLP coach. It’s so ridiculously confusing and everyone tries to tell everybody what they do. What’s the higher level benefit of that? I help people obtain rapid growth. It’s simple. There’s a lot of other things I do. Like NLP isn’t really about rapid growth, and business coaching is all about setting the foundations for rapid growth. But, if I try and explain all of that to a customer straightaway, then actually I’m going to lose the customer because there’s just too much. It’s taken me a lifetime to learn it. I can’t expect them to learn it in 30 minutes.
It reminds me of that phrase, “If you over teach, you overwhelm.”
Exactly right. There’s a sales term, “Keep it simple, stupid.” The reason why it’s so important is because once you get to work with them on something, you then can educate them while they’re paying you about all the things that you do above and beyond that. I work with clients for six hours. That’s all I do for my initial engagement. That is it. Because a lot of my clients, at that point, have all the tools they need to obtain rapid growth. If I identify that there’s a specific thing that I can help with outside the terms of rapid growth, then I suggest that we continue to work together.
Let me just quickly recap. I love what you said here, we’re going to tweet this out. “Don’t hide behind your functional skill,” and the third tweet’s going to be, “Where there’s one ideal customer, there will be many more.”
Investors Say Yes: We have the ability to be able to go and speak to everybody in the world now.
That’s exactly right because you think about it, I remember seeing in a sci-fi once that they discovered moss, which was like a form of life on a foreign planet. They said when there’s one form of life, there’ll be many more. The truth is that’s exactly the same. With the amount of people in this global economy, and remember now, we’re not trying to find customers just next door or within our specific city, or we don’t have to take horse and cart. We have the ability to be able to go and speak to everybody in the world now. I’m traveling all the way to Bangkok to speak for 90 minutes because they found me on an obscure website. All of these comes from the ability to be able to disseminate your information to the world. If there’s one customer per country, you’re still going to be a very busy person.
Let me just quickly recap for the listeners the five steps to a unified message. Number one, put a list of names together of the people that sing your praises. Number two, put a list together of people who you make the most money from, the profitability customer. Number 3, take two different colored pens, put them into different groups and to different customer segments, and figure out then which of those people make you the happiest to work with. Then the 4th step is figure out what higher level benefit you offer to those people, and take yourself out of just being a commodity. Then, there’s a 5th step that I’m missing, is that right?
In simple terms, it’s step one is write down a list of all the customers you get the most referrals and testimonials from, the people that love working with you, then write a list of all the people you make the most money out of. That’s step one. Step two is seeing the similarities within those and grouping them together into what we call customer segments.
Got it.
Step three is grabbing out a red and blue pen and circling the ones in red that you make the most money out of, and in blue, the ones that you get the best referrals from and all the people that clearly love to work with you. Then, pick one of those that you congruently feel most comfortable working with. The one that you pick has to be the one that has a red and a blue circle around it.
That’s step 4.
That’s step three, still.
Oh, okay.
Step four is saying, “Now that I’ve picked that group, I need to write down all of the things outside my functional skill that I deliver above and beyond for these people.” Now, you’ve got a long list of things that you deliver above and beyond your functional skill. Step five is asking the question, “What is the higher level benefit of that?”
Terrific. Thanks for the clarification. Because there was so much great information there and my left brain wasn’t processing the numbers properly, but now I totally get it and you sent that great link. Let me just repeat that for the listeners, MatthewPollard.com/Pitch just for our listeners today. What great information.
One of the things I will make clear here, and because I think this is an important point. What I did was I talked about a five step framework, but did you notice how I used a story to explain the last three steps?
Yes.
Investors Say Yes: If you tell a story while explaining a framework, even the ones that don’t get it know they want to know more.
The reason for that is whenever you discuss a framework, people are either going to get it or they’re not. However, if you tell a story while explaining a framework, then even the ones that don’t get the framework know they want to know more. The story will engage both groups to say, “Okay, I understand the framework, the story, I want what Wendy has.
I want to be my version of the Chinese Success Coach.
Exactly right. Because of that, regardless of whether they’re going to come and work with me as a client or go to the MatthewPollard.com/Pitch link, either way, they’re going to know what that methodology is because they want, that because they want what Wendy got. That’s what the purpose is.
One of the things you said to Judy Robinett’s group, Crack the Funding Code, that I just love is that when you tell a story, nobody objects to the story because there’s nothing to object to. They also give you more time that you can also use stories to answer potential objections.
You can look at the fact that if we had gone through this five step strategy, we would have done it in maybe a minute and a half. With the story, it took ten minutes. But, nobody minded because they loved hearing the story of Wendy and then they wanted what Wendy had. The other thing that happens is it goes through the logical barrier. See, if I’m giving you a framework, you can decide whether or not you think that framework will apply to you, whether or not you think the framework will work, or whether you think I read a good book last night and I’m now telling you about it today.
If I tell you a story of Wendy, just like when I’m telling you the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears, you have to take, as reality, that bears have beds, that bears eat porridge, otherwise the story doesn’t make sense. That’s why stories are so powerful. Look, I want to make sure that we give people the framework of doing this pitch, and that’s a great lead-in for it.
A lot of people talk about when they first get up and talk about why they’re introducing technology or why they’ve created technology, why they’ve got a great idea even if it’s just a bricks and mortar business. They get up and they start talking statistics or functions of what they offer. That is a huge mistake because that doesn’t get people in.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: People love stories, so why not pitch with a story.”]
Instead, what I do with all pitches is I like to take a bit of a backward seat to this and say, “How does a person want to hear it?” People love stories, so why not do it with a story. What do stories have? Stories have chapters. Let’s look at what chapter one would be. Chapter one would be a story of a problem. You can make the problem sound global, but that’s going to be a real issue, because if a problem sounds global, am I identifying with any one individual? Like, there is world starvation out there. Can you fix world starvation? Probably not. Can you identify with global starvation? Definitely, you can’t.
But, what if I talked to you about the guy, John, that’s down on the corner of the freeway holding the sign that doesn’t look quite as healthy as he did last week? All of a sudden, we want to help this guy, John. When you’re talking about implementing a CRM system, you can talk about moving to a new one or doing an upgrade on an old one. You can talk about the fact that this one specific customer, their life was ruined, or they had this massive ordeal over six months and that’s why they’re giving us negative reviews and it’s our fault.
These are stories that people can get behind. If you’re speaking to a boss or if you’re speaking to an investor, both of these groups, if they can see that this specific person has a problem, they’re going to want to help that person. They’ll believe that it’s worth solving because they want to help John or Sarah, because that person deserves being helped. There’s still a financial element there. They need to know that they can make money out of this too, because they can’t just throw money, otherwise there’d be no world hunger, there’d be no world problems at all. We’d all just be helping everybody all the time. They need to know that they can make a financial return.
Step two, or chapter two, if you like, is taking that story of Sarah or that story of John and then saying, “But there are so many Johns out there in the world or there are so many Sarahs that are experiencing these problems with us and with our competitors that if we change our system to support Sarah and John, they’d come flocking to us.” Or if we created this system, all of a sudden, we’d have first mover advantage in a market that doesn’t quite exist just yet. Do you see the power of that?
I do. You paint a picture because people remember your stories, not your numbers. Then, once they understand the story of one person, you explain how many other people are having the same problem.
Investors Say Yes: Venture capitalists have so many opportunities to invest, they may as well invest in something that serves the social good.
What then happens is a person then says, “Wow. There’s A, a reason I can brag to my friends at the golf course that I’m saving something for the social good.” Because let’s be specific here for a second, these days, venture capitalists have so many opportunities to invest in things, they may as well invest in something that serves the social good because then they’d feel good and make money. If you can hit both of those, then you’re going to obviously do so much better. What we do is we tell a story about a specific person that has a problem, then we talk about the global epidemic of the problem or the company wide epidemic or industry wide epidemic, however you’re going to talk about it.
Then chapter three is you then say, “Imagine if.” Imagine if the problem was sorted. What would the technology look like or what would the service look like or what would the retail space have to look like? What you’re doing here is you’re asking them to use their imagination. Now, the reason why we do this is if you then suggest the technology, again, they can decide whether or not they like the idea or not. But, they haven’t got anything to base it off, so it’s about do I like it or do I not like it? By saying, “Imagine if,” we’re actually incorporating a double bind into our pitch because they’re going to evaluate our idea that we’re about to present them to the idea that they’ve just come up with.
Nice.
Now, what we then do is we then present our solution. We talk about the technology that we’ve created and how it would help Sarah or John. Bring it back to that one person. Now, the reason why this works so well is the venture capitalist will either have had a better idea than you, in which case, what are they doing? They’re thinking about your idea on how that’s a great foundation and how they’d love to bolt on all the things that they had in their mind. What they’re not thinking about is that your idea sucks. If they had an idea that wasn’t as good as yours, then all of a sudden, they’re ridiculously excited about your idea. Either way, they’re now thinking about how they invest in your product or service or your new creation, not whether or not they want to.
The technique shifts it to automatically getting them to be collaborating with you in their head.
Exactly right. What it does is it escapes the logical mind. We ask the imaginative brain to be engaged so the logical brain is switched off. Then we introduce our solution, the emotional brain looks at it, and the emotional brain says, “What I just came up with, this is almost that. Let’s make it happen.” All before the logical mind switches on.
Nice.
Trust me when I say, there’s huge amounts of studies for this, that the logical mind and the emotional brain cannot work at the same time. That’s why when you go and speak to someone about their problem and they buy it, and then all of a sudden, tomorrow, they change their mind, it’s because their logical mind goes, “Hang on a sec, what the hell did you just do?” Now, that’s why there’s all these strategies about getting rid of post-sale dissonance. What we need to do, a good pitch captivates the emotional brain then gets the emotional brain going, “Let’s do this,” and then we need to introduce the logical reasons for why it’s still going to work.
[Tweet “Investors Say Yes: The logical and emotional brain can’t work at the same time.”]
Otherwise they’ll just say, “Oh, I want to think about it.” They’re scared to make a decisions just based on their gut.
What you’re going to find is at this stage, people will offer you money or talk about the fact that they are going to invest in you because they’re still emotionally engaged. But tomorrow, they’re going to call and say they changed their mind or they had a conversation with somebody and they decided. Because what happens is they tried to explain to a friend, a partner, or somebody else why and they didn’t do it the way you did it and there was no logical way of explaining it, and therefore, they’re going to call and say, “Sorry, but no.”
Now, chapter five is this time to really start to talk about the truth of everything else. You talk about the fact that you know exactly where the market is. If there are other people in the market already, you talk about that, but why you’ll place to take over that market. You talk about the risks involved, you talk about how you differentiate from the potential competition and what your advantages are. You come 100% clean, you talk about the entire logical business plan.
Engage them emotionally then back it up with logic so that they feel that you have covered all the bases and that they can go back to saying, “This still makes sense both emotionally and logically.”
Exactly. The emotional brain is engaged still at this point, but when they wake up tomorrow or they try and explain it to someone, they will have all the information to answer. You’ve basically just given them the objection handling list for anyone that says, “What are you doing?”
Including themselves.
Exactly right. Chapter six is you then transition into the ask. You talk about what it’s going to cost or what you need. Then you transition straight into chapter seven, which is the opportunity, how much money can potentially be made, the team, and why your team is the most equipped to take this idea forward.
Nice. Wow, you’ve given us so much. You’ve given us these great five steps through a unified message, which can be found at MatthewPollard.com/Pitch. Now we have seven amazing chapters on how to make our pitch not just concise, but compelling and overcome any objections that people might have after they say yes, which is fantastic information. Thank you so much, Matthew. You’ve been an incredible value resource. I see why you’re getting booked all over the world to speak. How can people follow you in social media, hire you to be a speaker, anything else you want to share with us?
Definitely. Obviously, if you type my name, Matthew Pollard, into Google, you’ll find I take up most of the page anyway. You’ll be able to find me there. But, you can find me at, my Twitter handle is @MatthewPollard_. My LinkedIn is just MatthewPollardSpeaker, and you’ll find me at MatthewPollardSpeaker on Facebook as well. Check out my website. It’s MatthewPollard.com. One of the other great things you’ll see there if you go to the start here link is I list down underneath how to pitch to investors there, what the top three pitching mistakes are as well, and I talk about how to not write a deck.
Those things are really, really handy because a lot of times, people do everything right but then they put out a clanger. I’m not sure if that translates into American. They make a really big mistake and the whole pitch goes south. Getting in front of the right venture capitalist happens few and far between. When I suggest to people, really, really practice and have it honed like I did. Spend the six weeks so that then you don’t have to work so hard after that. You need to eradicate those pitching mistakes before you start.
Fantastic. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. I can’t thank you enough, and we look forward to checking out all your links and all your great insights and listening to your podcast, the Better Business Coach.
Not a problem. It was an absolute pleasure to be here.
Terrific. Thanks for listening. Goodbye for now.
Links Mentioned
J Robinett Enterprises
John Livesay Funding Strategist
Matthew Pollard Website
Matthew on LinkedIn
Matthew on Twitter
Crack The Funding Code!
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