How To Be A Winner with Mark Faust
Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments
Episode Summary
Today’s guest on The Successful Pitch is author Mark Faust who has written several books about high growth leverage. His new book is called Winning Strategy. He has a really interesting look at the strategies that happened during the recent presidential election and how you can see what worked and didn’t work and more importantly, how to apply it to your own business. He said there are really three keys to having a great strategy in anything. One is a vision, two is a focus and the third one is something called points of divergence, which he goes into great detail explaining how to double down on what you are already doing to get people to really understand your vision, your focus and more importantly, have the strategy that gets you funded or gets you a new client or gets you to win in any area of your life. Enjoy the episode.
Listen To The Episode Here
How To Be A Winner with Mark Faust
Today’s guest is Mark Faust who’s an author of multiple books. Since he founded Echelon Management in 1990, Mark has consulted with literally hundreds of companies, CEOs and owners. He’s also spoken to hundreds of organizations on how to foster and accelerate growth, which everybody needs. He’s interviewed and worked with Fortune 500 CEOs as well as many turnarounds. He’s referred to as the Doctor of Strategy. He’s one of the nation’s top turnaround and growth gurus. He’s worked with companies such as Procter & Gamble, IBM, Apple and John Deere as well as some smaller held organizations and governments, and even non-profits. He’s worked with an extensive number of family-owned and multigenerational businesses, which had its own set of challenges I’m sure. He’s been the adjunct COO, VP of Sales on many company Boards. He has worked with leaders of successful growth companies, knowing he can raise their bars. He’s also helped those that are struggling. Whether you’re struggling or at the top, you definitely need to read Mark’s books. Your opportunity to heat directly from the Doctor of Strategy is right now.
Mark, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John.
I’m always interested to hear from my guests their own little story of origin. This is your third book, I believe?
Yes.
Before you became an author, you obviously had to figure out what made you so good at figuring out growth. Can you take us back to did you always know you wanted to be an author? How did you get to where you are?
Growth Or Bust! Proven Turnaround Strategies to Grow Your Business by Mark Faust
Actually, it’s an interesting story about how I always had this gut feeling about being a consultant before I even knew what the word was. I’ll never forget, I went to a parochial school where the priest would ask you in sixth grade whether you feel called to the vocation. One particular time he said, “I’m going to talk to you all one-on-one and ask you, so be ready in the weeks ahead.” I thought, “I better think about this.” I never forget going back in to the church to sit down and I was like, “I can’t think of any one business but I’d love to work with a bunch of different businesses helping them grow. It wasn’t until I was literally within a year becoming a consultant. I met my first boss in college. He and all his colleagues were in their 50’s with their MBAs and he was in a class I was in. It was there that I actually got my first and only job. I was a consultant for a few years. Eventually, he helped me start on my own. That was a quick overview from ten years old up to 21 up to here we are today.
I’m always fascinated by that. Some people at a very young age know, “I’m going to be an actor,” then he becomes Jim Carrey or something. “I’m going to be an engineer like my dad.” Something like this is not something that you typically see modeled for you and yet you somehow were able to imagine your future and you’re doing exactly what you thought you’d be doing, which is not always the case for someone. Before we jump into your book, Winning Strategy, which is this whole concept of the turnaround mindset and even looking at other non-business relationships of how do people come up with a great pitch including what happened in the last presidential race even. I want to talk about your other two books as a starting point because I think it’s always again, for me, really interesting whether you’re looking at an artist, and I think of authors as artists, and you look at their early work and how that lead to this, lead to this. Would you take us on that just brief journey of here’s my first book, here’s my second book and now, what you’re going to learn in winning strategy, combines all two or it leaves off where the other one stopped.
The first book proposal I sent out I have four publishers expressing interest which is atypical. The unique angle a couple of them hit on was the turnaround mindset. They said nobody writes about that. I ran with that. It was my first publisher being Career Press and they said, “Let’s accentuate that angle. It will be unique and you’re going to own it.” Another interest was I had several great mentors who were turnaround CEOs. I found the way that turnaround CEOs looked at growing any business to be very unique from any typical consultant’s approach to growing a business. The turnaround CEOs have to deal with the most dire of conditions. When they’re put in the healthy environment, they still use a lot of the same tools.
That built the framework of my experiences and what I would propose to do is interventions with clients, and then eventually the outline of Growth or Bust!. Growth or Bust actually had a little bit of different title. The second title is High-Growth Levers: How to Turnaround Mindset Propels Your Company. The first one is Turnaround Strategies That Can Grow Your Business. Those were the first two books. The High-Growth Levers has just come out here in early 2017 and we’ve had a lot of success with that. Because of the election and I just started to analyze what was being done and what was not being done and what blew my mind. Let’s look at the election with an apolitical view. Let’s try to be as subjective as possible. It’s very hard because our emotions get involved in politics. As a strategist, we have to do this in business.
Emotional decisions are a big factor in whether you win or lose an account. In order to learn, you have to pull back a little bit and just say, “I may not like it or I may be thrilled but I’m still going to see what’s right and what went wrong so I can use it in my own life.”
We saw so little of that, John, throughout the election before, during and after. Especially in the media, they try to analyze, they come up with the reasons. A lot of the political walks come up with their reasons. In reality, and as I was writing the book Winning Strategy using my seven aspects of strategy as the outline, it hit me how excellent and I was seeing this beforehand. I did predict, in fact, I had an article in the Cincinnati Enquirer back in March of 2016 where they asked me as a businessman to analyze the election and make a prediction. I did and I called it. I got some flak for it but I thought objective, apolitical view in a Socratic approach in the article. Bottom line, I saw the elements of a good strategy being at play and I’ll boil it down to three words. Rather than the seven aspects, you could look at strategy as just having three key legs. One is a vision of the future, ideal, improved state. Two is areas of focus or intensification of focus. Three is points of divergence. Especially in that last one, we saw Trump played that element of strategy out better than those anyone in memory.
[Tweet “Vision, Focus and Points of Divergence are key to winning strategy.”]
Let’s digest that. One of the things in your book is, “The best strategy goes undetected,” and this whole concept of things being predicted. Even in the UK, with Brexit. They thought, “How can the polls be so wrong in both countries?” That same thing is true because businesses are always doing research, “Is this product going to sell? Do we need to lower the price? Do we need to change our branding?” Let’s start there with his whole best strategy going undetected. I’m really interested in that. I think that’s a fascinating way to start.
In a war, it’s critical for survival. A lot of generals know about the importance of either a fake to keep it in simple terms or an intensification of focus in a way that throws the opponents off. That’s actually one of the seven aspects of good strategy. My second aspect is intensifying focus. Having an undetected strategy, and I’ll just give you a couple of examples of how Trump did it, when he came out with the most colorizing of comments, let’s go back to December 7th of 2015. People almost overlooked the fact that that was Pearl Harbor and FDR was the president that there were a lot of people in prison camps because of their color of skin. Was there a reason for his choosing that? I leave that up to the reader. It was never really discussed much on either side. The bottom line is that was when he read his statement. That statement pushed people to one extreme or the other. A lot of generals like doing the same thing. They like to choose one side of the field or the other or to bring their troops together so that they can surround, if you know what your next couple of moves are.
Let me just ask you a couple more questions there because you’ve got so much great insight. Before we jump to the next part, my first question here is, do you have any thoughts on why people thought, “He’s not serious. He really doesn’t want to win. He just wants the publicity to start his own network.” Even when he got the job, these rumors still continue, “He doesn’t really like doing the job.” I’ve never heard of that ever happening before for many presidents. Is that part of his strategy do you think?
High-Growth Levers: How the Turnaround Mindset Propels Your Company
Book by Mark Faust
Perhaps. Let me go back in history a little bit, John. I don’t know if you remember Ross Perot running, the businessman. A lot of people forgot that he was at 39% in June and Clinton was at the lower mid-20s and bush was in his teens. He was actually ahead by quite a margin. It was only when he dropped out due to the fear of his daughter’s wedding being attacked by Bush’s minions. That’s literally what he said in 60 Minutes, and he dropped out after two months. A lot of people I think were doubtful of Trump because of the Perot tactic that happened with Bill Clinton’s first run. I don’t know. Again, I’m not a political wonk. I would only guess that would be one reason. Also, the fact that he’s such a showman and a show-off and could say such inflammatory things, I think that’s another reason why people think there’s no way he could possibly, when no politician has ever come off like that and won. I think those are the first two things that come to mind about the lack of people taking him seriously.
Let’s just talk about the strategy to win the nomination. Is it the same strategy to win the nomination as it was than they ultimately won the election or was there a difference?
Strategy is strategy. Yes, I think all the seven aspects were utilized throughout the primary as well as in the election. There are different tactics. Let’s start with the first aspect of strategy, which is identifying your primary source of leverage. There are ten different primary PSLs as I call them when I’m working with a client. It could be that your product is the primary source. It could be your selling approach. It could be the market that you have chosen. Usually, companies were discerning that. For the political realm, I looked at all 10 areas and I gave the pros and con in each one. For example, if it was a market focused PSL, Trump would have focused on the demographics through the Republican infrastructure and he would have tried to snap up as many of those and the market would have been big enough that he could have just won with that one focus.
In reality, he had to actually have a Hannibal-like approach. Hannibal had many different nations that made up his army that was outnumbered but still beat the Romans of the day. That was not his approach. Rather, what I think his primary source of leverage was his marketing and selling ability. I outlined in the book how he out Sunday interviewed, out evening news interviewed, tweeted in drama, not quantity. The Clinton team actually had more tweets but he had multiple followers. He had more power through that venue. If you go back and look through his history in business that he was a showman/salesman/marketing genius. He’d be a top 2% genius in regards to getting as much PR in media in Inc. as any other businessman could. In any event, I think the interviews tweets the rallies were in an aspect of selling and marketing effectiveness. He was able to get big numbers there, so he had that down to a science. Even his messages had an advantage and ability to go into the second aspect of strategy and have an intensification of focus which we can touch upon here.
You talked about the three keys of strategy is having a vision and painting a future. Let’s use a non-political example just so people can compare and contrast this. Do you have a client or company that has a vision that’s very strong, Starbucks, Apple, anybody you want?
Most people love Steve Jobs. I go back to his vision of a computer in every home when literally that was laughed at on the front pages of Wall Street Journal back in the early 80s. Why would we need a computer in every time at home? He saw and understood the future as did his team and he got them to understand if they didn’t, what the value of that and what would have to happen to get there, and that there would be a lot of pain and innovation that would have to happen to get us there sooner. They did it. With me and my best clients, I have a client in the agricultural world. They make application equipment and they went ahead of it. He had a vision, the third generation owner of being the Silicon Valley of the application world. He became that and was bought out by John as a result. Creating that vision, communicating that vision with passion and it’s got to be a vision that people will identify with and have a raise in depth or a higher purpose ideally for a business to really get the most out of.
It’s all about your ‘why.’ It has to be more than just making money. If you’re pitching to get funding, you need to be able to really explain that vision to get the right people to join your team, to get customers and pitching to get funding. Having a vision is critical no matter what you’re pitching. I think business is typically pitched at least to get good talent and good customers, and they may or may not need pitching for funding, but they definitely need the other two. When you’re pitching to get a customer, I think a lot people skip the vision part and just go right in to the features of a product without talking about what the vision for their company is and what makes that culture unique. You’re really missing out in my opinion, when you’re pitching to grow your business with new customers if you don’t explain your vision. What I see really works is when you explain how your vision matches your perspective client’s vision that there are some synergy between the brands. Then, they start going, “Maybe we should consider this.”
His name is escaping me, but the founder of 5-Hour Energy, he’s a billionaire. How is it that they get such great shelf space so consistently? They have a pitch that few people know about but it ties directly to not just a vision but the raison d’être of their company. The raison d’être of their company has to do with giving energy and hydration to the world. He is going to give away 99% of his billions of dollars. Those billions would go to fuel research that will help develop energy sources that go to the poorest and most remote of places around the world. Then the water finding and protecting and purifying innovations will also go to some parts of the world. That’s all happening because we’re buying 5-Hour Energy to keep us awake in our work day or driving. The stores are all the more motivated to give him the best space. They pitch that and they leverage that pitch so beautifully that it ultimately gets the more money, which just helps more people to be better off. What a great pitch.
Reminds me of what TOMS shoes does, that there’s a bigger vision here. For every shoe you buy, we give the shoes to someone who doesn’t. Let’s now jump into this focus part. When you’re pitching to get funded, if you’re not focused and really identifying one problem that you’re solving and trying to boil the ocean, as one investor told me, then the same thing is true when you’re pitching to get a client. Don’t tell me everything you do. Figure out ideally how this solves my problem by really focusing in on one thing. Even if you’re selling a car. You don’t talk about every single feature or a benefit. You figure out what’s important to that person. Is it the speed? Is it the way it feels? Is it the way it looks? Then, focus on that. Within focus on the strategy, what are some of the mistakes you think people make? We can go back to politics if you want. Is it not being focused on one message when you have multiple things to talk about, whether it’s world, international affairs, economy, integration? There are lots of different topics. How do you run a successful campaign when you’re having to solve multiple problems?
Let me answer it on both sides of that coin on how to get money from angels investors, mezzanine, whatever level it may be. I’ve sat on many of those boards, facilitated those boards that are interviewing people, giving their pitch. One of the easiest ways to prove you have clarity of focus on the right market is that you’ve actually pre-sold, whether you’ve been paid or not, that exact market and have lined up those customers. There’s nothing more real, nothing more scientific than people who will sign a contract or actually write a check to give money for something you’re about to build even if you’re in beta stage. That’s the ultimate proof of focus is that you define that ideal customer, you’ve lined them up and you’ve prepped those kids for future sales. That’s on the pitch side there.
The metaphor that we saw in the campaign of 2016 in regards to an intensified focus on a handful of messages could be seen in the areas of safety. You could have as an overwriting theme. Pride is an overwriting theme. Dive down a little bit deeper and that’s when you get into the immigration, defense and security, law and order, jobs, economy and trade. This is going to segue over into points of divergence, the sixth aspect. The crossover between intensified focus of getting some messages out much more rapidly and intensely, that were also messages that are completely different. For example, let’s just take jobs, economy and trade. Trump was able to own the Anti-NAFTA and TPP trade angle because of something that’s traditionally Republican. Trump, many political analysts are now saying has snapped up of working white vote for maybe good because he is so ably captured that. The Democrats are at a lost because they were pro-NAFTA and pro-TPP. Besides Parot from way back 1992 or some outliers like that, there really is nobody should promoted that. It was a sentiment that was in the marketplace and many voters moved over because of it, from both sides of the table. It was an apolitical bipartisan angle.
The other intensification of focus angle on the pride side we could take. We saw both Bill Clinton and Ronal Reagan used the Make America Great Again theme. Now, only Trump was the one to get the service trademark for it legally so he can sell it on tea cups or whatever. The point is, it was a proven theme. It was proven in two big wins with Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan in very tough races where it was a lot closer than people might remember. The point is that theme played well to all sides. That was another intensification of focus angle that Trump so aptly took. He knew how to go on both sides of the political spectrum which something nobody else could touch. For example, law and order thing. With everything from Wall Street to Black Lives Matter, highly controversial topics, people were afraid to touch either with a ten-foot pole but he blew it all apart and set law and order, safety, safety and people resonated at least for enough of the percentage of others that resonated with. He intensified that focus. He blocked it off as a point of divergence and owned a few different facets of topics there that others couldn’t snap up.
It’s interesting because what I heard you saying was if you have multiple things, lump them under one theme whether it’s pride or safety. Then, under those themes comes where all the other things fit in. You’re still keeping it fairly simple with your focus. We’re talking about safety and then there’s lots of topics under that. We’re talking about pride, Making American Great Again and jobs. I think that’s a very clever way to figure out if you’ve got a lot of things to offer, if you’re a company with a lot of different products for example, come up with some themes. If you’re selling dog food, the investors want to see the dogs eating the food and the customers. Customers really like to be the first. They like to see proof of concept and some case studies. Getting that first customer is just as tricky as getting that first investor.
I’ve got to throw you something out here, John. I have friend had a client from a billion-dollar pet food company that thought they had struck a new big cord which was better tasting dog food.
They actually tested it. It’s a Fortune 40 company that did it. It was Procter & Gamble and they know the odds. The bottom line was they knew for a fact dogs love this new flavor better. Problem is, dogs aren’t the customer; the owners are. It was failing miserably in the test markets and it took a brilliant product manager to admit that all their research previous was wrong and they had to pivot. They basically chose to promote healthier and were able to improve some aspects of the product to be healthier. The buyers want a longer living dog, not one that just enjoys its food.
I think the same is true of customers. You’ve got to really tap into who’s the customer here. For example, if you’re selling children’s clothing, is it the children that are telling their parents to buy for them or is it the mom and dad that say, “That’s a cool brand,” and how do you target your marketing accordingly. I think I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask about what impact does it have when there’s a scandal? There’s a scandal with United Airlines pulling a man off the plane. There’s the scandal of Trump being heard, the entertainment show that most people thinking. That’s going to ruin his chances of winning or “The stocks is going to plummet on United Airlines.” Uber had a scandal about the way they were treating women in the workforce and started the whole hashtag of taking Uber off your phone. How do scandals impact strategy?
It depends on the response. In fact, I am waiting what they had brought to see what United does right now watching that video come out. We go back, everybody has heard the Tylenol response when the poisonings happened. They spoke with great candor, simplicity, directness, contriteness, concern, compassion and humility. They dealt very directly, honestly and tactfully with it. They actually grew their market share in the long run and what they lost was made up for by that growth. Similar things happened with other products. Again, I’m trying to be objective here. Politicians, it depends on how they handle it. Do they run from the issue? If we go back to Romney, he ran from the Mother Jones video that got out of him saying whatever percent will never be brought over. He did really deal with it that directly.
[Tweet “Ask Great Questions to Get The Right Strategy”]
Trump is a completely different animal when it comes to embracing conflict and public debate. Actually, I’ve been conducting an unofficial survey asking a lot of people who were either Hillary or Bernie people, “How would you rate Trump on his candor?” I didn’t say honesty, I said candor. He rates extremely high on that. When he has a controversial statement get out, if he addresses it directly, he is able to get out of it in a way that most people cannot. That’s an advantage he has; the bald, fearlessness of confronting the press or an issue. His calmness that he keeps before that storm rustles up. That was actually a part of what I labeled in the seventh aspect of good strategy, the advantageous approach. I think where he beat his political opponents was where he was not your typical politician. The candor, the simplicity, the bold fearlessness, his calmness before the storm, under the umbrella of how he spoke gave him an advantage in his approach that few politicians have.
There are other politicians who have done that. In fact, it was a strength of John McCain for a while. John McCain has lost a lot of his core support because he has whether it’s prevarication or flip flopping or whatever you want to call it. He has been a little bit all over the board. He’s been very anti-immigration. He’s been very in the middle. He’s been very on the other side. It’s another example of the frustration people have with politicians being all over. I was just on the phone with a politician who could answer your question. That’s atypical and Trump is atypical that way. That was one of the ways he could deal with scandal unlike others before him. That was a tactic; the release of a scandal is a tactic, not a strategy and something that politicians don’t realize on both sides.
You talked about the final key of the strategy is the point of divergence and that’s how you’re handling push back or even a scandal is like doubling down on something.
In fact, the temporary ban on Muslims from entering the United States, he double downed that. The use of tariffs, he double downed on it. Renegotiating or withdrawing from NAFTA and TPP, double downed on it, taking the oil from ISIS. These are all divergent points. Building the wall, boldly saying, “Build the wall.” In fact, talking about it being ten feet higher was a doubling down and an aspect of a visionary state that people can see a wall ten feet taller.
How does a business use this? Can you give us an example of either a brand we know or one of your own?
You need to identify all your positioning points of uniqueness, advantage, equality and weakness.
Yes, this was something that our marketing genius has taught us, as well as Michael Porter from Harvard. Strategies, you really need to identify all your positioning points of uniqueness, advantage, equality and weakness as honestly or objectively as you can. Usually, a third party is needed to do this well. Then you need to verify the realty of that by, again ideally having a third party doing the depth interviews that Peter Drucker has always said over a required aspect of the strategy process which a few people do, so they’re really not doing strategy. It’s through customer depth interviews that you confirm what their views of your uniqueness or advantage or equality of the weaknesses are. If you get clear about those and connect those positioning points to a point of benefit and then a point of proof, then you’ve got some power behind those positioning points. Just building that sheet of positioning points is one of the three most powerful pieces of paper that we usually construct with our clients to get them to accelerate their growth or to turn around from a dire situation.
Mark, I can’t thank you enough for sharing your Winning Strategy, that’s the name of your book and for teaching us how we can use this turnaround mindset. Is there any last thoughts you want to leave us with?
Winning Strategy was really written to promote High-Growth Levers, which is the more for explanation and detail on how to build a unique strategy, culture and attitude of innovation throughout your organization. Any company of any size can facilitate that and the key is to involve more people, not fewer and to ask great questions. That’s what all my books have. There are lots of questions that help you facilitate this on your own.
How can people find you on social media?
Twitter is @MarkFaustSR. Then also HighGrowthLevers.com will get you to our site. All our books are available at all the typical outlets.
Thanks again, Mark.
Links Mentioned
- Winning Strategy
- Echelon Management
- Mark Faust
- Career Press
- Growth or Bust!
- High-Growth Levers, How to Turnaround Mindset and Propel Your Business
- 5-Hour Energy
- @MarkFaustSR
- HighGrowthLevers.com
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Fox 11 News Los Angeles John Livesay The Successful Pitch book
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’