Focus@Will With Will Henshall
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
A great part of what hinders our productivity is our tendency to become distracted and lose our focus on what we are supposed to do. Did you know that music can actually help you solve that problem? Focus@Will is a new neuroscience-based tool that uses sequenced instrumental music tracks to increase your attention span up to 400% when working and studying. The mind behind this incredible invention is Will Henshall, a musician, scientist, songwriter and technology inventor. After a successful seven-year run with Londonbeat, a British-American dance-pop band who scored two number one hits in the early 1990s, Will turned to entrepreneurship, starting a number of startups in the digital recording industry. Listen as he describes the amazing benefits of Focus@Will in this interview with John Livesay.
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Listen to the podcast here
Focus@Will With Will Henshall
Our guest on The Successful Pitch is my friend, Will Henshall, the Founder of Focus@Will. He and his team have created a way for us to find the right music to play at the right time to make us all more focused. Not only does it make us more focused and gets us in the zone faster, but keeps us there longer and makes us happier. We do a whole in-depth conversation around how boredom at work stems from not feeling productive Focus@Will can help you solve that problem.
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Our guest is Will Henshall, who is the Founder of Focus@Will, which is a new neuroscience-based web/mobile tool that especially uses sequenced instrumental music tracks to increase your attention span up to 400% when working and studying. Will is a musician, scientist, songwriter, technology inventor, working with audio to find the right music at the right place at the right time. He was the Founder of the British pop-soul band Londonbeat and had two Billboard number one hit records. He went on to found Rocket Network, a Paul Allen/Cisco-funded San Francisco company in 1995. Afterward, he created a professional audio media transfer system, DigiDelivery, which he sold in 2003. Will has achieved notable global success as a technical inventor. Will, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. That was quite an intro. I was worried you were going to say, “It’s 400 times more productive.”
If your productivity is ten, we get you to 40% or something like that. I have always admired you. We’re personal friends. The concept of having you share your wisdom about entrepreneurship and, more importantly, about life in general. You’ve also had some certainly challenging obstacles, let’s say. We’ll leave that as an open loop. Would you mind taking us back to childhood a little bit? Many people have a dream of being a rock star, movie star, or author. You certainly were able to fulfill, in a big way, one of those dreams. I’d love to hear the story of when that dream started.
For me, it was not wanting to be a rock star. It was about wanting to be a composer and songwriter, and not even wanting to be because I was. I would have been 3 or 4 years old and I can remember sitting at my folks’ piano and playing the black keys. If you play the black keys, it’s a pentatonic scale. It sounded like something from the South Pacific. I remember doing that at the age of four and going, “This is nice.” That got me intrigued with the way that the sounds all fit together.
At the age of 4 or maybe 5, I remember thinking, “If I made each one of these notes go up one, does it sound the same?” I was playing a pentatonic scale in the key of G major. I’m now telling you, but at the time, I didn’t know. That’s what got me fascinated by the math of music. I was always fascinated with getting a sound and looking for a grid and a method and different instruments. I had many instruments as a kid. I got a trombone and I was like, “Here are the partials.” You play octaves. As soon as I learned something, I put it down and not want to do it anymore. Music is in the blood, 100%.
Did you come from a musical family?
No. I have no idea why that happened. I often wonder whether the Milkman was musical or not. My dad plays piano a little bit by ear. There’s nobody else in my direct family that plays. My grandfather on my mother’s side was an artist. He was a technical drawing artist. He wrote books on steam engines and did all of the photographs and pictures. He was a visual artist.
Even though you didn’t have dreams of performing in front of thousands of people, you still found yourself on stages.
I did. Was that a cue to do this? Here’s something I wrote. Here’s one I made. I was the founder and the guitarist in this band, Londonbeat. This was in 1990, 1991. It’s the most played song in the world on the radio by a British writer.
Focus@Will: You can play in your unconscious mind a music that soothes it, that makes it calm. It’s like having the kids in the backseat be quiet so you can concentrate on driving.
You wrote the song. You played the guitar on the song. I’ve seen a video of you singing as part of that.
I wish was. No. I co-wrote the song. I was the main writer, but I wrote the song with the three singers, who are African American living in the UK, in London. I’m playing everything on the record apart from the drums and some of the bass parts. I can sing well enough to do backgrounds, but no one would ever pay me to sing lead. I’m a songwriter. As long as I can go, “Da da da,” someone who can sing can make what I mean. It was an interesting collaboration. The guys were much older than I was. I was in my twenties. They were in their 40s. They were soul brothers from the ‘70s. They were American. I was British. They were black. I was white. It was this fascinating hybrid of British pop music and American soul. It was successful. We were together for seven years, signed to MCA Records and RCA Records outside of the states. We sold a lot of records.
How have you parlayed that experience and success into being successful as an entrepreneur as part of working for a startup that raised a lot of money? Tell us about that experience, some of the challenges, and the highs and the lows.
I tell people that I’ve done seven startups, which is true. The first real startup was the band. The band, Londonbeat, how it works is similar to starting up a startup. What used to happen has changed a lot in the last few years. What used to happen is you write some songs and you’d finish them and you’d demo them. You’d take those demo recordings to a label and then the label, if they’re interested, would either sign you to a development deal to write some more songs or they would sign you and then you would find a producer. They would fund your startup. What happens then is that you run this little intrapreneur business within the major labels.
I’d been running a recording studio in my early twenties. I got a handle on how to survive and pay the rent and to be self-sufficient. Forming the band, I was lucky. I was introduced to the Eurythmics Management, Sandra Turnbull. At the time, Eurhythmics was one of the biggest bands in the world, Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This), and so on. They were signed to RCA Records. I had these songs that me and the singers, Jimmy Helms, Jimmy Chambers, and George Chandler, had written. All four of us had careers where we made a living independently in the business. We understood what mattered. What mattered was being careful with the cash, testing the songs, testing the product, finding the direction. We were the first MTV Unplugged band. We were the number one.
We used to go out all the time with me playing acoustic guitar and these three guys singing and then I join in and do the background. We did that a lot promoting the records that we made. MTV called up and they said, “Would you come and do some of your songs without the band?” We’re like, “Of course, we will.” I said, “Yes, but I want you to make a big huge TV set. I want us to be on TV.” Bless them, they did. They made us this cheesy cartoon-like TV, a big one, and then we stood inside it. It was the early wacky days of MTV. That was with a guy called Ray Cokes, who was in the MTV Europe. Ray Cokes had a show called Most Wanted with Ray Cokes. He was one of the first shock jocks. He used to do a live show to 220 million people every night without a delay on it. No profanity delay or anything.
Let’s talk about that company you’re working with in Silicon Valley and what that experience was like.
After I was in Londonbeat, I got interested in digital recording. I’ve always been a recording engineer and back in the day, it was tape machines going round and round. You would record on multitrack. That was an early convert to digital recording, particularly with the Avid Pro Tools system, DigiDesign Pro Tools. With three other guys in 1995, we created something called Rocket Network, which was an audio collaboration system that allowed you to network recording studios. We got funded by Paul Allen, by Cisco, by a number of other investors back in the early days before there was an internet, and startup scene. It started in London, in the UK, and then moved it to San Francisco in the end of ‘96, early 97. We raised about $50 million. We created the technology, which is available in Avid as Avid Cloud Collaboration, the first iteration of that. We sold the company to Avid in 2003. That was a rapid and vertical lesson on how to manage and how to build and grow a company. I went from being a guitarist and a songwriter to being a Tech CEO almost overnight.
What was the biggest challenge during that? Managing people?
[bctt tweet=”Running a development team was like being in a band with fifteen drummers.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Yes.
Not the tech. That’s what’s always interesting.
It was the fact that many developers are socially awkward and that’s part of the reason why they end up as developers. I’m painting a broad stroke here, but it’s fair to say that most of the incredibly talented developers I’ve met have been atypical. I knew about that because drummers are similar. Drummers are atypical. We have a common friend, Kenny Aronoff, who’s one of the most famous drummers in the world. For a drummer, he’s a good guy. He strings a sentence together and he’s funny, but he’s still a drummer. I should say that many of my musician mates are professional drummers, Mark Schulman, and a bunch of them. They’re atypical. They think about different things. I found that running a dev team was like being in a band with fifteen drummers.
Interesting analogy.
It took me a while to figure that out.
Everyone is on their own rhythm. You have to deal with each one slightly different. There’s a reason the band usually has one drummer as opposed to fifteen. Herding cats, a little bit, could be a reference.
Herding drummers and herding cats are similar.
You’ve started Focus@Will, which is a play on words about willpower and your first name. It’s the story of origin of the company.
It wasn’t my idea to name it. We were looking for a name and one of my investors, Salim Ismail, came back and he said, “Focus@Will, that’s the name.” I was like, “Yeah.” Do you know how he sold it to me? It was not my name. He has a strong spiritual outlook on life, similar to my own, and he said, “Will is Prana. Prana is Will, which is the will to live. It’s the will and it also means universal source. It could mean God, too. It’s that thing that is outside of you.” I was like, “That makes sense because it’s a play on words in multiple ways.” It’s been successful. People like it and it makes sense.
Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder from Childhood Through Adulthood
The big problem you’re solving is that a lot of people have trouble staying focused, especially if they’re students and they’ve got many distractions going on. Most people don’t take regular breaks and their retention goes down the longer they try to retain things. That concept of solving that problem through music, you’re uniquely qualified to run it. What I find fascinating is a lot of businesses have a narrow niche, but this is for anyone who is both creative and logical. It’s not mutually exclusive. It’s for people who are students and entrepreneurs.
It’s not like you get out of college and you’re done, you still need to focus. Even if you’re a tech person or you’re someone who’s an artist, the need to focus on is something that changes throughout. The fact that you’re using science and math with music, which goes back to your childhood story, is something that I found fascinating when I took a deep dive into this. Would you mind describing some of the distractions? People might say, “I get distracted if my doorbell rings or there’s noise outside.” There are many other distractions that we may not even be aware of. Let’s talk about that.
You know how when you’re sitting down at work and, in theory, there’s no chainsaw outside and there’s no one distracting you and still, you can’t seem to get in the groove. You can’t get your flow going. There are two types of distractions. There are external distractions, which are the ones I talked about. By far, we are more limited by our internal distractions. We have two types of attention. We have our exogenous and our endogenous, our external and our internal. I learned a lot about this through the science team we have at Focus@Will.
Evolutionarily, our non-conscious minds pay attention to certain things that are keeping us safe. For instance, right now, if you smell smoke, you’re going to be like, “I need to check that. I need to pause.” If you smell burning, but it’s toast, you’re going to be like, “That’s toast. It’s not burned.” Your nonconscious attention, your exogenous attention, is constantly monitoring your surroundings. Your internal attention, which is me talking to you, you can concentrate and focus on what we’re talking about.
It was described to me beautifully by Dr. Ed Hallowell, who’s one of my science team. He’s a psychiatrist. He has written some bestselling books. Driven to Distraction that’s the one, which is about being distracted at work. He said, “Your nonconscious attention is like the kids in the backseat when you’re trying to drive somewhere and they’re like, ‘Are we there yet?’” What you can do is you can give them a book or put a video on or give them a Game Boy or whatever the kids are using these days. You can have them be quiet so that you can drive the vehicle.
If you think about, “I’m sitting on my computer and I have a spreadsheet. I have a piece of creative writing. I have some coding to do. I have to look at some QA on a science project.” What you want to do is have the kids in the backseat be quiet. What you’ve found you’re able to do is to play specific types of music. It has to do deal with how easily distracted you are, the types of music. You can play in your unconscious mind a music that soothes it, that makes it calm. It’s like having the kids in the backseat be quiet so you can concentrate on driving.
What a great analogy. One of the things you talk about on the website is that boredom is a distraction. If you’ve ever had to try and tackle something that you’re having trouble remembering, you don’t particularly it’s interesting and you’re like, “I’ve read this. I don’t remember a thing I read. How am I going to pass this test?” About blockchain, I was like, “This is not my idea of fun.” If we’re listening to the right music, science proves that even if something is boring to us, it somehow goes down like the Mary Poppins’ Spoon Full of Sugar concept.
There is a fascinating link between boredom and or lack of happiness. We did a survey with 25,000 of our most engaged users. We have a couple of million people on the system regularly. We asked these 25,000 and we said, “What is your single biggest challenge at work?” We’re like, “I know that’s something to do with productivity.” The answer came back from everybody first was happiness, “I am not happy at work. My challenge is being happy that work.” Second question is, “How do you manage that?” They say, “We like to listen to music when we’re working.” You’re like, “Why do you listen to music while working?” “It’s because it allows me to focus and concentrate and that makes me happy at work when I’m being productive.”
If I can turn around your question, is being bored a problem? It’s not being productive is the problem and that often creates boredom. If you’re able to manage this process, which is your non-conscious attention, it’s your limbic system. It’s the fight and flight reflex that’s spin all of our brains. If you can manage that response, what it gives you is this sense of peace and calm. It’s a flow state. Even if you’re doing something that is repetitive and is not particularly rewarding, if you’re able to get into a flow state doing that, you will find that there is a pleasure in it and you will be happy at work. Cue the music.
[bctt tweet=”Boredom is not the problem. Boredom comes from not feeling productive.” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s going to be a great Tweet, “Boredom comes from not feeling productive or not being productive at work.” That’s a big a-ha moment for me, certainly. You also have a quiz that I took and I was fascinated. The question that made me laugh was, “Are you considered ADD or OCD?” I meant to check no and I checked yes and I was like, “I’m not exactly paying enough attention to the answer. That’s the wrong outcome. Let’s start the quiz over.” It asked a lot of different questions that I’ve never been asked before. I thought it was a fascinating process in that premise around distraction and focus and work and the combination of questions. You have twelve different options, at least.
There are 36 different options on the main because there are three flavors of each one.
They said, “You would be most productive listening to Electro Bach.” Since you know me, I thought, “Is that a surprise? Does that seem to be much in sync? Did I answer the questions wrong?”
Electro Bach is a unique channel that we created originally for a TV show called Genius on Nat Geo. It’s about Einstein. Einstein used to play the violin to get himself into a flow state. He had some specific pieces he used to play. The producers of the show said, “Is there a link between the pieces he used to play and the research that we’ve done in focus?” We said, “There is.” If anybody is reading and is musical, you’ll know there’s something called a sixteenth note. If the beat is going 1, 2, 3, 4, a 16th note is dividing each one of those up into fourths. You can see there’s a musician going, “Diga, 2, 3, 4 diga.” That is a pulse. Those pulses have been shown to help put you into a flow state. If you listen to Bach, in particular, any of the things that Einstein used to play, they are similar. Techno music is similar. Let me play a little burst of some of Electra Bach. This is what it sounds like.
Would this be something I would listen to on my phone while typing on my computer?
Yes. Listen to it on your computer while you’re working. Eighty percent of our users listen on their laptop because you’re working on your laptop and your phone is a distractor. I talked about the, “Diga.” There’s a pulse intrinsic in this.
How long does it take for the average person to hear that customized choice of music before they feel like they’re in a flow state?
There’s a timer on the app. Most of our users, the average session length is 80 minutes, which is a long time. That’s an hour and twenty minutes. That’s a long time. If you’re working without music that’s helping you focus, you can usually do about twenty minutes before the internal distractions kick in. The reason why we’re able to say that the Focus@Will system increases your focus state and your productivity by 400%, four times, is because instead of working in a twenty-minute chunk, you can work in 80-minute chunks.
Would it be fair to say that the monkey mind that we’ve heard about, conscious conversations with people, it’s quieting?
Focus@Will: If you’re working without music that helps you focus, you can usually do about 20 minutes before the internal distractions kick in. Focus@Will increases that time to 80 minutes.
It is.
The kids in the backseat are another way of looking at it. It’s the monkey mind of like, “I need to go. Am I hungry? Am I this? Why haven’t I heard back from that person?” Your mind starts going crazy.
All of the things that you’ve talked about are evolutionarily helpful to us as humans. You and I are in a cave back in the day and we’re drawing on the cave wall, doing some pictures of some tigers and stuff and we’re drinking a cave beer. Our backs would be to the entrance of the cave. What happens is there’s this timer in our brain that goes, “I can’t hear anything outside.” Your nonconscious attention is listening to the sound of the forest, the jungle. After a certain amount of time, you have this urge to check that there isn’t anything dangerous outside the cave.
It makes sense because you can’t assume that something safe now will be safe twenty minutes from now.
We all have this timer, about 20, 25 minutes. When that thing, in our brain, goes, “Did I lock the door? I think I left the oven on. I forgot to do that thing.” When you’re wired into a flow state, that timer is running. There is something called the Pomodoro Technique. You may have come across that. It’s a technique where you work hard for twenty minutes and you take five minutes off. Why is it twenty minutes? It’s called habituation. Our brains work with something called habituation and novelty. We’re always getting used to the sounds around us. If you’re interested in this, anybody reading, you can go to the Focus@Will site. There are articles about this.
You created a little bit of an open-loop saying there are three kinds of flavors once you’re inside a choice. What does that sound like?
It’s a little counterintuitive, but it makes sense if I quickly explain how this works. The quiz, that’s free, you can check it out and it’ll recommend a channel or a type of music that works well for your brain type. Our quiz, you said they’re weird questions. They’re based on a standardized psychological model called The Big Five. They’re weird questions. There are double negative questions in them after thinking them through. What we’re trying to do is to figure out, on your brain type, how easily distracted are you.
We’ve all got friends who are easily distracted. They are like hyper monkeys the whole time. Elon Musk, ADD. He’s not a friend of mine. You can see him and you’re like, “That guy is ADD.” Here’s another one, Jeff Bezos. Look at him. Steve Jobs. They’re all tech guys. What about Oprah? She’s got to be super hyper all the time. The more hyper you are, you might think, “I want to play someone some gentle music to calm them down.” That’s not going to work. It’s the opposite. The more hyper you are, the more energy you need in the music to calm you down.
This is similar to the fact that kids with ADD are often prescribed stimulants. You probably heard of Ritalin and Adderall, all the other drugs that kids are doing. Weirdly, if a kid is hyper, it calms them down. It’s to do with the way that your nonconscious mind is active if you’re ADD. The stimulants around you, including the music, are able to have you focus. Perhaps I should play you a little burst of this. There’s a channel on the system called ADHD Type 1. About 5% of our users listen to this and find it relaxing and they’re able to work.
[bctt tweet=”We are soul beings in human bodies.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I would not be in that percent.
Isn’t that crazy?
Yeah.
If you are ADD, that is good. It sets you on a groove and helps you get into a flow state. Most people in our system come up with either the Electro Bach or there’s a downtempo channel called Alpha Chill. Here’s a typical track from that. It’s like musical and easy going.
One of the things that I wanted to talk to you about before I let you go is you experienced a life-threatening heart attack and did a little bit of a recovery period. My first question is, what music did you listen to deal with the pain and the boredom of being in the hospital after your heart attack?
I had never been in a hospital before. In June 2018, I had an out of the blue widowmaker heart attack. I had no idea I was at risk. They said, “Look at your father.” My dad is in his late 80s and still causing havoc. I had this heart attack and then I woke up eight days later. My life was saved by my wife who gave me CPR and then the medics came, but I had no recollection of any of that. I started to regain consciousness over the next 8 or 9 days. The hospitals are noisy, pokey, prody. You can’t sleep. Every three hours, they wake you up. The music is awful, generally. They have music on the TV. I was in a hospital in Santa Monica, in California. The music that helped me was Baroque string music, Vivaldi, Four Seasons, music that I knew as a kid growing up. I trained as a classical musician so I had to learn some of this stuff.
Are you finding yourself more focused not just at work but being more present in life and not sweating the small stuff after this life-changing event?
I’m more still, generally, than I was. I found peace. I died and I described it as I shook God’s hand. There was no white light tunnel for me. Everything went off and I had a widowmaker heart attack experience. I was aware that there is this beautiful and loving energy. I was always coming back to consciousness. Every time you breathe in, you connect to this beautiful loving energy. It’s like loving awareness. It’s like a familiar love you have from your mother. It’s the love you have from people you know. It’s the love you feel when you see something beautiful. You see a beautiful nature scene or you’re in a forest. Every time we breathe, we connect to that. I was taken off the ventilator. You’re on this breathing tube, which is gruesome. The first breath I took after they took me off the ventilator was the sweetest, beautiful breath. I remember connecting to the source, to Universal Power, to God. Whatever you want to call it, there’s this loving awareness. There’s this beautiful, loving energy that we’re all part of. It’s simple. We are soul beings in human bodies.
Music is a way. Focus@Will is a way to get the right music to get us into that state as much as possible. That’s why you’re reinforced and you’re doing the right thing, even before you had the heart attack. It’s even a bigger mission for everyone. Will, I can’t thank you enough. If everyone wants to know more about you and Focus@Will, the website is FocusAtWill.com. Any other last thought you want to leave us with?
Focus@Will: The more hyper you are, the more energy you need in the music to calm you down.
The whole heart attack and coming back to life, it’s made me conscious of wanting to make a difference and be of service. Entrepreneurial Men’s Group based out of Los Angeles is called METAL International. It’s a group of entrepreneurial thinking, heart-centered men. We represent all kinds of men. I’ve become the CEO and co-leader of this group. Since I came back from the dead, a big part of my life has been wanting to serve and to make sure that the elders of the tribe are passing their wisdom down to the younger members who have a fresh and different view on it. Reply with the favor back. Men’s work and leading men’s work is an important part of my life.
That’s where we met, at that METAL organization. Now that it’s virtual, it’s global. It’s another wonderful way to get back and connect and learn. You’re certainly loved and admired as a leader. I’m honored to have some time to ask you some questions and get some insights into what makes you that we can all aspire to be the best version of ourselves.
Thank you, John.
I got a soundbite for you, you know how you’ve got special friends in your life and then any your special friends, you have someone else who accepts you and loves you exactly as you are? These are the special, few humans in my life and you, John Livesay are on that list. It’s a small list. Thank you.
I was honored to speak at your virtual wedding and have to visit me in Austin here. It’s likewise, equally, reciprocal. If you can find friends that become your family, you have a lot to be grateful for. That’s for sure.
Thank you.
Important Links
- Focus@Will
- Driven to Distraction
- METAL International
- Londonbeat
- Eurythmics Management
- Salim Ismail
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Premiere Speakers Bureau with Shawn Hanks
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
Growing up a la the von Trapp family singers, Shawn Hanks has lived with music and performing throughout his life. Now he imparts the knowledge of learning to create a feeling and communicate an idea to an audience among speakers and event partners as the CEO of Premiere Speakers Bureau. Shawn shows us the other way of selling which is to be able to communicate and connect at the same time. He shares some great advice on how you can keep your people loyal just as you do your clients. Shawn also talks about how his merger and acquisitions case became a success, giving tips on how to decide which accounts to target and what to say in your pitch to stand out as a brand.
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Listen To The Episode Here
Premiere Speakers Bureau with Shawn Hanks
My guest is Shawn Hanks, the CEO of Premiere Speakers Bureau, who adds capabilities from several fields to the team. Over the course of his eighteen years in the event industry, he’s gained valuable experience advising corporate associations and non-profit partners. In addition, he provides direction to speakers on the Premiere roster. He’s an avid football/basketball fan and he and his wife survive CrossFit every day together. They are a couple that works together, stays together in Texas. They’re in mid-Tennessee. They have three children and an adorable golden doodle. Shawn, welcome to the show.
Thank you very much. It’s great to join you. Thank you.
Shawn, I love to ask my guest to tell their own story of origin. You can go back as far as you want, whether it’s childhood, high school or college days. Clearly, there’s some journey that you went on to become the CEO of this amazing speaking bureau, Premiere. I’d love to find out where that all came about, your love of communication and connection.
I grew up in a family that was a very musical family. We traveled and performed. Performing, communication, all of those things in my mind are one large path, which is to communicate an idea or create a feeling or an idea in the audience. That was instilled in me from a very young age and I performed most of my life. My wife and I are both from Texas. We’re high school sweethearts. We went to high school together, college together, married after we graduated and moved to Tennessee in 2000. That is the most interesting part as it relates to the Premiere Speakers Bureau. We were in Tennessee for a few months and a friend of mine interviewed for an agent role at Premiere Speakers Bureau. The interview did not go well. That’s a whole other funny story.
As this friend of ours walked out, she turned to Duane, the Founder of Premiere and said, “I think I know someone who might be interested in this in this career. He’s got a skill set that fits this.” I came and interviewed on Thursday, October 12th of 2000. I remember that date well because Duane offered me the job as I walked out the door. I was in a fundraising role. I was doing development for a large nonprofit. I went to my employer who was a great guy, very generous. I said, “This isn’t what I want to do with the rest of my life. I have a unique opportunity with a speaker’s bureau.” He asked the same question that I asked, the first question of my interview, which is “What is a speaker’s bureau?” That was 2000. Google existed, but we didn’t know how to use it yet.
Maybe it was AltaVista, I don’t know, wherever we were using to search at the time. I didn’t do a great job because I had to figure out what a speaker’s bureau was. He was very generous and said, “I’ll give my two weeks’.” He said, “If that’s what you want to do, go for it. We’ll wrap up all your relationships.” I called Duane on Friday morning and said, “I’d love to take a stab at this thing,” and literally started the next Monday. As they say, the rest is history. I’ve been here about nineteen years or will be nineteen years. That’s the genesis of what brought me to Premiere Speakers Bureau. If I’m honest, we’re still answering that question every day. What exactly is this speaker’s bureau? Hopefully, we’ve found some answers along the way.
I want to double click on this musical touring. I envisioned the von Trapp family from the Sound of Music vibe. Let’s hear a little bit of that because there’s a big connection between music and math and communication and music, and the importance of silence and things like that. You’re touring with your family, performing music. You’re playing instruments and singing, I’m guessing?
You got it right. The von Trapps with less lederhosen. I grew up in a pretty good size family of four kids. My mom and dad were both very gifted. My mom is still to this day, she’s 71 years old and still teaches piano every day. She loves it. Early on in life, I remember I would go to school during the week and on Friday afternoon, we would load up. We had a bus. I thought everyone did this as a kid. As I grew up, I realized it was very unusual and possibly weird even. The Partridge family was big in the ‘70s. That’s what everyone related us to, “You’re the Partridge Family.”
In fact, you plugged the instruments in.
It was required in the Hanks family that every child or kid at the time had to learn a musical instrument. You start with piano because that is a great way to learn theory and all those things. That was instilled in me early on in life. I performed all through high school musicals and all that stuff, church musicals. I have Music Ed degree of all things with a focus on performance and then theory as well. Music is like learning a foreign language. There’s a lot of math and algorithms essentially built into it. It’s a great way to challenge kids and adults’ minds. Keeping young and keep your brain working well. Music is a great tool in a lot of ways. It’s got a lot of corollaries and parallels to the industry I live in, which is communicating and people being able to own a room and control emotions and the journey that a group of people is on together for an hour. It’s a very similar process.
[bctt tweet=”Hire people with money, keep them with gratitude.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What were you doing before that fateful day on October 12th, 2000 after the music experience that allowed you to think that this may not be what you wanted to do, but you at least learn some business skills from?
I had worked at a university for several years in a recruitment role and then also a development role. That was at my wife and I’s Alma Mater, Mary Hart and Baylor, a small private school in Texas. When we moved to Nashville, I assumed a similar role with a large nonprofit based here in Nashville. It was a great opportunity for me. It put me in a room with high-net-worth individuals. I had about 30 to 45 seconds to tell them why I would need their considerable donations versus probably the line of people sometimes literally behind me. They would schedule five meetings in a row and come and pitch me on why your nonprofit has more value or specific value to where I want to invest my asset. That gave me an opportunity to hone those skills of being able to quickly define value and make it unique and essential to someone. I did that for probably about six months and that led to this opportunity. That wasn’t what I wanted to do with my wife if I was really honest. I couldn’t answer that question, what do you want to do with your life? I knew I wanted to do something interesting and unique. That’s where I ended up because I had to figure out what a speaker’s bureau was that made it interesting and unique.
That selling experience, why you should give your money here to this nonprofit versus this, must be somewhat similar except you’re more passionate probably about what you’re doing now of why a big company should work with Premiere Speakers Bureau versus another one. Is that accurate?
That’s perfectly well said. We have eleven agents on our sell side. Selling in our world is the wrong term. I’m a big believer in the term advocacy or consultancy because ultimately we are selling a speaker to a large event. They have a thousand attendees. A great salesperson can convince someone, “Bring in this speaker.” If it’s not the perfect speaker to communicate the right idea, the thrust of the event, it falls flat. Our role here is to talk to our event partners. We’re working with about 2,000 events this year.
Our role is as we chat with each one of those individually, most of those, we have existing relationships for years and we can reference, “This has worked in the past. This has not worked in the past,” or we can say, “In your industry, we’ve seen these things work. Here are two or three speakers we think would be great.”
Speaking: Music is about communicating and having people be able to own a room and control emotions.
They’re all professional speakers, John. You know a lot of these folks. They will all do a great job on stage. There’s that understanding what the client’s need is and how we can help fill that need. That’s real art. I feel like what our eleven agents do every day is not selling. It is understanding what their need is. Finding that point where they align with a speaker and the speaker goes, does an amazing job. That’s the real win for us. If that speaker communicates that important idea what that company is trying to get over to a thousand people in a room, the CEO can stand up there and say it all day. If someone unique comes in and does it differently, those thousand people will leave with that lodged in their head in a different and more memorable way.
You said that if someone from the outside comes and says something that’s in sync with the CEO’s messaging, it somehow resonates. It reminds me of parenting a little bit. When your parents would say something as a kid, you’d be like, “Yeah.” Suddenly a teacher says it or someone else’s parents say it. You’re like, “Oh.” How we process information is so key. This concept of selling as the wrong word, I am on a mission to help people stop pushing something, which is what people perceive when they think of selling. This mindset of how can we be storytellers, consult and tell a story of another client, for example, that had a similar situation. When we brought this speaker in versus another speaker, the outcomes were fantastic in terms of emotional involvement that day, the interactiveness, the actual takeaways and the revenue and painting that picture.
Whether you’re calling yourself a salesperson or an advocate or a consultant, that storytelling is the secret way to pull people in. If they can visualize themselves in the story, then it’s a whole different conversation. The mindset of, “I’m here to help serve you,” as opposed to pushing something out to you is keen. You’re in a fortunate position. This is Premiere Speakers Bureau’s 25th anniversary. Congratulations. You’re in a unique position in that you have a lot of existing clients for years. I’m going to ask you two questions. We’ll start with the first one about that. What advice do you have to people who are reading to keep those clients loyal?
Early on and I give credit to our Founder, his name is Duane Ward. Duane founded Premiere. Twenty years ago, I came in five or six years in. We have always had a very heavy focus on customer service. That’s the thing that everybody says. That’s an easy thing to say. We’ve invested significant amounts of revenue in not just service but the things above and beyond, sending multiple gifts throughout the year to our clients who may book one event with us each year, but they’ll get a number of handwritten notes. They’ll get different gifts from us throughout the year, different items. Small things we’ve discovered over the years resonate with people if it’s done from a genuine perspective.
If you send a gift and call the next day to say, “I want to make sure you’ve got the umbrella I sent you. Buy something from me.” No one wants that because that’s called manipulation. Some of these things sound cliché because it said so often, but I think it’s done rarely. If you see it as a partnership, many of our clients we’ve literally worked with for 20, 25 years, they often send us material from our competitors to say, “Look what I got from one of your competitors.” It lets you know when it’s time for us to get to work, which is probably the highest compliment we can receive that they’re receiving offers and invitations to work with others. We live in a friendly, competitive industry. “These are what your competitors are doing. We’re not going to work with anyone else.”
[bctt tweet=”Growth comes from customized targeted solutions.” username=”John_Livesay”]
To some degree when Premiere started, we were small and scrappy. Our industry, there are two big approaches, John. It’s getting a little bit into the weeds. Those that represent a number of visible names who were former world leaders. There’s a confidence that comes with that that my phone is going to ring from a former president of the United States and I’ll take the orders as they come. If I’m transparent, we didn’t have that opportunity early on. Our focus was we need to cultivate client relationships and then help solve their problems by providing great speaker options and speaker opportunities to them versus answering the phone and say yes or no, is the budget there, all those things.
It feels like we’re doing it well. We can always do it better. As we’ve grown and been blessed and seeing lots of opportunities and we’ve added those world leaders to our roster, we’ve always tried to keep that approach of, “Client, we want to serve you first.” There are security concerns and all these things for these world leaders that we represent. We never want the feeling to be, “Client, you now matter less because we have an important name or an important individual on our roster. Client, we’re still here to serve your needs also.” First is if we’re honest, that’s our approach. That sounds like a thin line, but it’s one I think has served us well. That service piece, we take it very seriously. We invest very heavily in real dollars to make sure our clients know that we appreciate the relationship.
Giftology: The Art and Science of Using Gifts to Cut Through the Noise, Increase Referrals, and Strengthen Retention
I love this personal touch. The concept of a personal Thank You note, which used to be a standard thing years ago. When everyone else emails and you still take the time to write a personal note, it stands out and breaks through the clutter. Ironically, I’ve interviewed John Ruhlin, who did a whole book about Giftology and the importance of smart gift giving and how he works with companies to give thoughtful gifts at unexpected times. When I was in sales at Condé Nast, I put Google Alerts on all my clients. If they had a good stock report, if Guess Jeans’ stock is up X percent, I’d send a little note or a congratulatory gift. All the contact is not about selling, but knowing that I was in their corner cheering them on, congratulating them.
Clients, they understand that there’s a transaction to take place. I’m a client of many people in sales. It’s not a pejorative or negative thing when they sell me something. I think it’s Henry Ford. It’s been attributed to many people that nothing moves until someone sells something. The world is going around. It is the feeling of are you only selling me something or can we also have a relationship while you sell something? Again, it feels like finding the narrow path there. I, as a human being, when I am the consumer, I feel that difference. You do. We’d be naïve to think that our customers don’t feel that difference as well.
I always compare it to being a copilot with your buyer. When you’re on a plane and they say, “We’re now landing in Nashville,” nobody stands up and says, “What? We’re landing? I thought we’re running around forever.” It’s the same thing in a sales situation. Eventually, you’re going to ask them, “Would you like to hire somebody? There’s an event coming up.” You do have to pull the trigger eventually. I think that mindset helps. That’s a great insight as to how you keep your clients loyal. A lot of the people reading the blog would like to also possibly know how do you keep good talent because clearly the same authenticity and thoughtfulness and never taking people for granted that applies in relationships for clients, I’m imagining it applies for the team that you’ve built.
I’ve been at Premiere for nineteen years. I’d love to say that all nineteen of those have been doing it correctly. That would not be disingenuine to say that. Some of that was making mistakes along the way and saying, “I don’t want to recreate that mistake.” We’ve worked very hard to create what every company says family. That’s a bad analogy because you never get fired from your family or you never get laid off from your family. That’s the analogy that holds true in many ways. We worked very hard to make this feel familial in small ways. Everyone at Premiere is very blessed in life as they succeed. They see the results of that.
Every Friday we have a staff lunch in our large conference room, we’ll have 30, 35 people in there. That’s a good excuse for everyone to sit around and talk about what was funny on TV. There’s very rarely an agenda. I’m a big believer that you hire people with money, but ultimately you keep people with gratitude. When someone else approaches one of our team members, if I’m honest, it happens regularly. Often, I hear from that employee very quickly that, “A job offer was made.” If the money is ridiculously different I say, “I want you to have the next step and that’s great for you.” Most of the time it’s, “They offered me 10%. They’re going to have to do a lot better than that to get my attention.”
You acquired another speaking bureau. Can you tell us what generated that and what that experience was like?
John, we are in a competitive industry. I say often it’s a friendly competitive industry in the sense that I have many friends that work at the competing speaker’s bureaus. We have International Association of Speakers Bureaus, the association we’re all engaged with. We’re together many times throughout the year and have drinks and meals. There’s a camaraderie there. It also allows us to somewhat measure ourselves against one of the other and see how different people run their companies. I am a big believer in culture. There aren’t many other speakers bureaus that would be a culture fit. In the fall of ’17, Brian Palmer who was the Owner and Operator of National Speakers Bureau, his father had founded it in 1973, reached out to me and said, “Can I come to Nashville and take you to breakfast?” He did that very thing and it was for the purpose of saying, “I’m ready to start transitioning out of managing a team and managing a company day to day, running a company day-to-day. I want it to land in a place where I know it will fit well.”
We agreed that our cultures could mix and mingle and there wouldn’t be any shock either direction. There are always some surprises but relatively few, if I’m to be honest with you. Over the course of several months, we went through the acquisition process. We did everything. We removed ourselves from the process to a large degree, bring in an outside company to handle the transaction, an outside valuation company because I wanted him to feel like it was a win for him. Premiere is an AESOP. I have a duty to all of our employees here who were technically the owners of the company at this point to get a good value on a purchase. We were able to do that. John, I would say over the last months, the acquisition closed in June. They have not only thrived but significantly grown their production, the number of dates and the speaker relationship. It’s been a win.
[bctt tweet=”I am not the hero of your story, you are the hero.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Would you say that part of the reason this merger or acquisition in your case has been successful, is that you’re bringing some new technology and things that they didn’t have in place that allows them to be more productive?
Yes. National Speakers Bureau had existed much longer than Premiere. It has a very strong core base of clients who adore them. Clients that we not spoken to or worked with before, they had chosen our speakers because of those strong relationships like when we spoke about. We’ve invested very heavily on technology. Our competitors would say Premiere is almost a technology company as much as we are speakers bureau. We were able to integrate them into our systems, accounting, the backend services, logistics, air travel, all of those things within a week or two. I applaud our IT team. We have five people on that team. They integrated NSB very quickly allowing the NSB crew to truly go out and work with clients and continue those relationships and not have to worry or stress over all the heavy lifting that we can do because of our backend systems.
Do you imagine almost every company I have ever worked with, no matter how comfortable you are with these existing customers, there’s still an effort to go get new clients? We’ve already covered how we keep these existing clients loyal. We’ve covered how we keep the team loyal with gratitude and appreciation and acknowledgment. We’ve covered why this was a cultural fit for the acquisition. The last thing remaining would be how do you decide which accounts you’re going to target that might want to work with Premiere Speakers Bureau and what is it that you say in your pitch that allows you to stand out as a brand?
That like many industries is very specific to the sector of the business. You have association clients. They get calls from every bureau every day. That’s an exaggeration but probably not by much. Corporate clients, because they’re event planners, are more shielded. Those are a little bit more strategic where it’s attempting to connect through a third party or something along those lines. There are definitely are some commonalities across those sectors. It does get very splintered quickly. Our big approach is we are comfortable in spending to make an impact or to acquire a client or at least the attention of a client. The other side we have the benefit of we’re not solely focused on one, two, three or four products.
We have ultimately the ability if we see a business sector or an area of our industry that we think is underserved, we can go out and find two or three speakers that we feel are very strong on content that works in those areas. That essentially gives us a product to go to those buyers to say, “This product is perfectly designed for you.” That’s a huge benefit in the speaking industry because if you Google motivational speaker, I promise you’ll get tired before you get to the end of the result page. We have a great opportunity and we have to be strategic in what speakers we add because ultimately that that to some degree determines what type of clients are attracted to what we’re offering.
Speaking: To be the hero is truly to add value and to be a guide in some small way that resonates.
A great tweet based on what you said would be, “Growth comes from customized targeted solution.”
You should be a speaker, John.
I love doing it and I love interviewing people like you who got such a great passion and a message for what you’re doing. Is there any last thought you want to leave us with about either a book you want to recommend or a philosophy that has worked for you to become the CEO or be so successful in life that you would want to share?
John, you have a speaker that lives in your space, the story space, a guy named Donald Miller. If you don’t know each other, you should. You guys could blow a dinner parties minds with your thoughts on the story and conveying the story. I saw Don speak years ago. I knew him from some past relationships. His approach is, “Shawn, the sales process is not the hero of the story. I’m the guide in the story.” I felt like for the first time I’d heard someone describe exactly our approach. Premiere Speakers is not the hero in our event partner’s story. We want them to stand on stage and get the accolades and the applause. We have a product and we sell that product or we make it available.
Ultimately, we want them to be the hero. I felt like personal lives, professional lives as I’ve utilized that approach and been intentional about it that I’m not the hero in your story. If I’m here to add some value, I want to do that and I want to elevate this conversation and the thoughts and other people’s minds for the day. That’s not to be the hero. It’s to add value and to be a guide in some small way that resonates. I have literally written down on my desk, I read it 50 times a day. What I love is 20 or 30 years from now, someone says that about me, I’ll take that as a win.
[bctt tweet=”Small things resonate with people if it’s done from a genuine perspective.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What a great way to end this episode. I’m not the hero in your story. You are the hero. It’s such great insights. I tell people all the time, “I’m your Yoda or think of me as the Sherpa helping you get up the mountain, but you’re going to get there with me as your silver hero.” That’s wonderful stuff. Shawn, I can’t thank you enough. People can find you on the Premiere Speakers Bureau. Are there any social media that you want to promote the best way to reach your company?
Premiere Speakers Bureau. Congrats to everyone in this building and the people that have helped build it for the last 25 years. As we celebrate for the next year, I’m thankful for them. You’ll find us on Twitter, @PremiereSpeaker. If you go to PremiereSpeakers.com, you’ll be able to jump to all the different social media channels from there. We would love to help anyone. Please remind us that you connected with us through John. We’d love to know that.
Thanks again, Shawn.
Links Mentioned:
- Premiere Speakers Bureau
- Duane Ward
- John Ruhlin – previous episode
- Giftology
- International Association of Speakers Bureaus
- National Speakers Bureau
- Twitter – @PremiereSpeaker
- https://PremiereSpeakers.com/
- Quantmre.com
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TSP018 | Chris Hanks – 3 Steps To Maximum Valuation For Your Start Up
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Listen To The Podcast Here
Episode Summary
Chris Hanks has owned multiple businesses in the music, ecommerce, publishing, and export industry. He is the co-author of the bestselling book, School for Startups and currently runs the KSU Entrepreneurship Center at Kennesaw State University. Chris is a big advocate for getting out of your comfort zone and tells the audience, ‘when in doubt, go do’. He talks on why it’s so important for leaders to have clarity in their business and if you want to grab an investor’s attention, you have to give them goosebumps when they hear your pitch.
Key Takeaways
- 02:25 – Why does Chris teach entrepreneurship?
- 04:10 – When in doubt, go do. We learn through actions and things that scare us.
- 05:00 – When did Chris decide he wanted to be an entrepreneur?
- 07:30 – What does a business appraiser do?
- 09:20 – Ask yourself, ‘How do I reduce risk in the mind of the investor?’
- 11:15 – You have to be very clear in your milestones with your startup business.
- 14:15 – Chris talks on how he got to know Jim Beach.
- 17:00 – You don’t have to wait for passion or creativity to start a business. Just go out and do it.
- 19:15 – With clarity comes power. Be super clear on what you want for your business.
- 19:55 – What makes you CEO worthy?
- 21:20 – Ask yourself, ‘So what’?
- 22:15 – About 20% of Chris’s students are female.
- 23:45 – Goosebumps always sell. Give your investors goosebumps.
- 26:15 – Chris names all of his pitch approaches after musicians. His pitches can range from the Kayne West approach to the John Lennon approach.
- 27:55 – Instead of telling an investor what you do, tell them what you believe.
- 29:00 – Chris recommends a couple of books every entrepreneur should read.
- 30:15 – You can reach Chris on LinkedIn and through Kennesay State University.
Tweetables
[Tweet “When in doubt, go do.”]
[Tweet “Anytime risk goes down, value goes up.”]
[Tweet “Articulate the future, that’s what a leader does.”]
[Tweet “Clarity equals power.”]
[Tweet “47.9% of all privately held businesses are owned by women.”]
[Tweet “Goosebumps always sell.”]
Links Mentioned
School for Startups by Jim Beach and Chris Hanks.
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
Made to Stick by Chip & Dan Heath
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