Monthly Archives: February 2020

Transcript of Focusing on Gratitude to Build Relationships

Transcript of Focusing on Gratitude to Build Relationships written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Transcript

John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr CMS. It’s a modern cloud based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. You can find them at zephyrcms.com, more about this later in the show.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Chris Schembra. He is a keynote speaker, Broadway producer, sought-after dinner host, an entrepreneurial advisor whose passion lies in facilitating profound human connection in a deeply disconnected world. So Chris, thanks for joining me.

Chris Schembra: John, I’ve been a big fan of yours for so many years, and you bring such great value to the world through your books and podcasts and teaching. So it’s an honor to be here.

John Jantsch: Well, thank you. I do believe that we have a first on Duct Tape Marketing. I’ve never had a sought-after dinner host, I’m certain of it.

Chris Schembra: Well, you know, you’d go back to the Latin origination of the word “company” to begin with, and it’s “companis.” ‘Com’ means together and ‘panis’ means bread. So the ancient folks somehow got it right, that if you want to do good business together, you should probably break bread around the dinner table.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So many people may not be familiar with your story, which is obviously a huge part of this book we’re going to talk about, Gratitude and Pasta. But maybe start by telling us a little bit about 7:47 and how that was formed and what it is you’re doing there. And really your journey to this point, I guess.

Chris Schembra: My journey, the story for this talk starts in July of 2015. At the time, to set the scene, I was a Broadway producer. I had the jail, rehab, suicide, depression on the resume. We were achieving great things, but somehow one day I woke up and realized theater is not. It was July of 2015. We had just come back from Italy after producing a Broadway play over there. And when we got back to New York, I realized I essentially felt four things. Lonely, unfulfilled, disconnected, insecure. Theater was great, but it wasn’t it. So in that dark period of time, I found myself just fiddling with food in my kitchen and accidentally created a pasta sauce recipe and figured I should probably feed it to people to see if it’s even good or not, and we started hosting dinners.

Chris Schembra: And week after week after week, 18 folks would come to our home and we’d cook them some pasta sauce. We’d delegate some specific tasks. We’d empower them to work together, to serve each other, to create the meal, and a ritual began. And what we observed was by getting people to work together, by creating that safe space, by creating the intention of this connection and energy and all that kind of soft stuff, you’d actually set the stage to have some pretty neat conversations. And at every dinner we would ask the same question. “If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don’t give enough credit or thanks to, who would that be?” And we saw people’s stories come alive.

Chris Schembra: So eventually we realized we were damn good at doing that, and so we built an entire company around the idea of producing dinners and helping people build a community. We have a simple metric for success at every dinner. If less than six people cry, we considered it a failed night. And that’s our goal.

John Jantsch: So how intentional was this? You know, obviously with the lens of hindsight, you can look back and say, “We did this and we did that.” But I mean, how much of it did you just stumble onto? Or why did you even give it so much intention?

Chris Schembra: So for the first half a year, from July of 2015 we just started kind of hosting dinners and no real intention other than I was lonely because I’d just broken up with a girlfriend. My boss, who’s kind of like a partner, he had just gotten married, so all of a sudden, I was pretty much alone. And so it just started as a way to help myself, and then I actually realized it started helping others. And so the only real intention started when I finally left the theater job just to say, “What should I do next?” And the first thing that popped up was the dinner table. So we said, “All right, might as well give this a shot. I don’t know what the shot is, but let’s just keep doing dinners.”

John Jantsch: And you did these for a while. Was there a point where stuff started happening, benefits started accruing for you that you started saying, “Hey, this is not just making me not lonely. This is actually producing opportunity?”

Chris Schembra: Well, I think the first thing to not brush over is that it actually saved my life. My greatest childhood insecurity is that I’m always the last one called to the party. My invite is always somehow lost in the mail. It’s pretty much guaranteed. I’m always being forgotten about. So we orchestrated or architected an experience in which we could create the party and the people could come to us, and that single-handedly saved my life. But then we started realizing that we were, God, we were being… Neat people were coming to the dinner table that we would have never thought we would ever meet. We set a pretty specific and intentional rule. The first time you come, you come alone. The second time you come, you bring your friend. After that, you’re eligible to nominate someone.

Chris Schembra: And so a lot of what I learned from your book, The Referral Engine, we put into the dinner table where, yeah, if you’re inviting someone back for a great experience, they’re going to think about who’s the best person in their life that they can invite. So a network was just growing exponentially.

John Jantsch: Yeah. You, didn’t want to bring a dud, right?

Chris Schembra: No. So we were meeting the best people in people’s lives. If they had one invitation to send out, that was going to a superstud.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So gratitude in general, which really these dinners were based on, is really a hot topic, and certainly in business circles. I mean, you know, obviously it’s always had a place on the yoga blog or something. But now you’re seeing it in Forbes and Inc. And I mean, why do you think that that is?

Chris Schembra: I think people are starving for connection now more than ever before, right? We live in a world where 51% of the American workforce reports being lonely in a consistent basis. That’s unfortunately equivalent to the reduction of lifespan of smoking 15 cigarettes a day, seven years off your life. So loneliness and disconnection is quantifiably a multi-trillion dollar health crisis. And luckily, PWC proved that for every dollar you spend on employee emotional wellbeing yields $2 and 30 cents back in productivity. So people realize that we’ve gone too digital, too disconnected, too gobbling up for new clients and all that kind of new stuff, but now we got to go a little bit self, back, we’ve got a self-correct a little bit.

Chris Schembra: So gratitude is important because it’s a subset of emotional intelligence, and emotional intelligence has been proven that top performers have high EQ. You could have good IQ and you could have good technical skills, but none of it compares to the earning ability of having good emotional intelligence.

John Jantsch: So I want to get into the book and structure of these dinners and really the whole purpose of this is. But I’m curious, I want to back up a little bit. When you would ask people, “If you could give credit or thanks to one person in your life that you don’t give enough credit or thanks to, who would it be,” who do they thank?

Chris Schembra: 25.68% of people give credit and thanks to their mothers. A lot of people give credit and thanks to their fathers, to their grandparents, to strangers, to friends. What we, hear our stories… So if you dissect the question, the gratitude question, we’re not asking you around the dinner table, we’re not asking you what’s your biggest fear? What’s your biggest failure? What’s your greatest regret? What are your 2020 goal? Those are what we call stump questions. You know, screw them. We ask this question to get people to think outside themselves to something from their past that helped them get to where they are today. And by asking them, “Who do you not thank,” you’re actually eliciting feelings of regret and shame. “Why haven’t I thanked my dog? Why haven’t I thanked my third grade teacher?”

Chris Schembra: So you hear a lot of stories of people, personal liberation, people overcoming fear, people looking at relationships in a whole new way. Someone will give credit and thanks to their mother where their mother was a bitch growing up. Their mother literally did not help them growing up. But that relationship and the pressure between those two individuals, that gave them the chip on the shoulder to want to succeed. Right? It’s all these kind of different things.

John Jantsch: So you eventually, or over time, perfected your recipe for this and I’m sure it started adding things and even rules, if you will. And so you outline it in the book as almost like a three-act play. I’m borrowing from your theater background, I’m assuming. So can you… Because ultimately, what you’re doing in this book is saying people ought to be doing this, right?

Chris Schembra: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: So can you construct the acts, I guess?

Chris Schembra: Yeah, of course.

John Jantsch: High level version of the acts.

Chris Schembra: Of course. So the thought leadership piece is, if you’re sitting there and relationships is your wellbeing, relationships is your entire life and you’re just bored of the old networking and the old going to conferences and the chicken dinners and all that kind of stuff, let’s do something different. Invite people to your home, get them to cook together, create a safe space for connection, ask some crazy questions, and you’re going to end up knowing more about them and creating more lasting loyalty than you ever have before in your life. So we think of this experience literally as a three-act play, as John said.

Chris Schembra: The first act is just thinking about who you want to invite, why they’re important for your life, where are you going to do it, et cetera. Your work begins the moment they receive the invitation, because it’s very important to keep iterating, reminder emails and details of what they can expect from the experience, so that by the time they arrive, you’ve already done the foreplay. You’ve already done… They come with a bottle of wine in hand prepared to connect, and they’re going to arrive at 6:30 PM sharp. Long gone are the days when you tell people they can arrive when they want and leave when they want. No, you show up at 6:30 PM sharp or you don’t get fed.

Chris Schembra: So act two, you know, act one is the arrivals and the cocktail hour and everybody’s just casually mingling and connecting and all that stuff. Act two begins with the delegated tasks and shared activities. These are actually very orchestrated, very detail-oriented. They get people working together to serve each other, which allows you to sit down and really create a connected experience. And act three begins at a very specific point in the evening. Once you’ve done the work, then you can bring in gratitude. So you ask this gratitude question and that really sets the scene for people to go around answering it popcorn style as a big group format. And that really, really creates some amazing emotion. As we said before, if less than six people cry, we consider it a failed night. It’s all because of that gratitude.

John Jantsch: And the book, by the way, has very detailed, not only what to do, but why it’s important to do it, which I think a lot of people sometimes need. Because I think there’s a background behind, like you just mentioned, the show up at 6:30 sharp. I mean, there’s a very [inaudible 00:14:20] intentional, what you’re trying to create with doing that. So, get the book if you want to know the why behind some of this.

John Jantsch: You know, today content is everything. So our websites are really content management systems, but they’ve got to work like one. Check out Zephyr. It is a modern cloud-based CMS system that’s licensed only to agencies. It’s really easy to use. It’s very fast, won’t mess with your SEO. I mean, it really reduces the time and effort to launch your client’s websites. Beautiful themes, just really fast, profitable way to go. They include an agency services to really make a them your plug and play dev shop. Check out zephyr.com. That is Z-E-P-H-Y-R cms.com.

John Jantsch: Is it your opinion that everybody should be doing this?

Chris Schembra: No, I don’t think… I think that there is well… I’m going to put pressure on it. I think that you can really screw up a lot of your relationships if you do something like this with the wrong intention. If you look at this as a tool to calculate conversion and ROI and greater referrals and than, you shouldn’t. If that’s how you look at life, you shouldn’t look at this like that. You shouldn’t even touch this dinner. This dinner is built for the people who genuinely want to help the people in their life transform. When you can have 18 of your closest friends or colleagues or partners or clients, whatever, come together, put their phones down, don’t worry about what you do, but just come to connect. If you do that with this intention, the rest will follow. So it’s got to be giving first, and then comes the referrals.

Chris Schembra: So it’s not for the people, it’s not for the sharks that are takers. It’s not for the people who just want to walk around saying, “What do you do and how can you help me?” I think networking means the people that you meet have something to give you. Connecting means the people you meet, you have something to give them.

John Jantsch: In the course of doing this I’m sure you’ve experienced a little of everything. I mean, have you experienced some cases where people just weren’t a fit? They weren’t there for the right reason. They didn’t understand it. They were awkward. They were uncomfortable. I’m sure you’ve seen everything.

Chris Schembra: So there are times, now that it’s become a business, there are times when I get to bring people, but the majority of the times are when our clients bring their people. So our clients are pulling together 18 partners or investors, et cetera. And so I can’t always control who walks through that door. Someone could walk through that door after having the worst day in their life. But that’s why we’re such sticklers for people following this model, this system, because it really, if you do it right, it really takes the ego out and it levels the playing field and it allows even the worst chips on the block to come have a connected experience. So we used to focus on curation. Now we just focus in on the experience.

John Jantsch: You mentioned a couple of times, and I know in the book you have even diagrams of seating charts and things of that nature. You’ve mentioned like 18 people. That’s a lot of people that have in one place. That’s a lot of people to feed. That’s a lot of people to seat. In your estimation, is that the number it takes or could you do a dinner for eight kind of thing?

Chris Schembra: You could definitely do any interpretation of this book that you want. And it’s a great question. We found that the size of 18, there is a great power in that community. So you’re a person, you’re sitting at the dinner table with 17 other strangers, and then this short little guy from South Carolina asks you a question about gratitude. Well, if there were only four people in that group and you’ve just already met everybody and you work together, it might be too small of a group for you to be as vulnerable as you want to be. And so when it’s 18, as opposed to 12, as opposed to 24, when it’s 18 is just perfect that you probably haven’t met the people across the table, but it’s small enough that you can share what you want to share and they’re going to listen.

Chris Schembra: And so if you had 24, it’s just a little too big. If you had 24 people, you can’t spend two to three minutes per person going around the table answering that question. So it’s just that perfect number.

John Jantsch: So where are you going with all this?

Chris Schembra: So ultimately over the course of the next 20 years, our goal is to continue diving into the space that taking care of your emotional wellbeing, taking care of the relationships in your life by bringing emotion into those relationships will ultimately be good for personal and professional development. So over the next couple of years, we’re just focusing in on creating experiences. We’re known for our 18 person dinners. We’re known for our 800 person dinners. We’re known for going in and giving keynotes, et cetera. So this year the book comes out, and that’s the first type of product. Within the next two to three years we’ll come out with online courses helping really teach these principles and letting people be part of an online community to mastermind together. Over the next five to 10 years, we’ll come out with executive coaching to really be able to treat these founders on a personal one on one level. But so yeah, it just slowly continues as a little coaching and training company that is focused in on helping create connection, because that’s what’s missing, I think the most in this world.

John Jantsch: I thought for sure it was going to be gluten-free pasta was going to be first.

Chris Schembra: You know what? But the interesting thing is, John, when we have people come to the dinner table who come in saying, “I never eat gluten. I hate gluten,” but they’re not celiac. They just dislike gluten. But when they have fresh homemade pasta, it does more for their heart to indulge and connect than the negative it does for the belly to eat gluten.

John Jantsch: Yeah, yeah, totally. I was just throwing that out randomly anyway. I’m not a gluten hater. So, Chris, where can people find out more? I know there’s a website to Gratitude and Pasta, but where would you invite people to come and find out more?

Chris Schembra: Yeah, gratitudeandpasta.com is the main link, and through there you’ll get to learn a lot about the book and all the press that’s come out. And Forbes Magazine, as of the day that we’re recording this podcast, has just named that as the number two book of 2020 to spark human connection. So you can go purchase it on Amazon and write in with any thoughts, questions, or concerns.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, thanks. It was great to catch up with you again, Chris, and hopefully we’ll run into you soon some day out there on the road.

Chris Schembra: I appreciate it, John. Thanks for having us.

Designing the Perfect Sales Process

Designing the Perfect Sales Process written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Advances in technology and changes in digital marketing have radically shifted the customer journey. Where there used to be clear delineation between the sales and marketing teams’ roles and responsibilities, things are a lot murkier nowadays.

Prospects are able to do more initial research on their own. So it’s sometimes unclear where marketing ends and sales begins. That’s why designing a modern sales process that integrates well with your marketing efforts is critical in today’s landscape.

Here’s how to craft the perfect sales process that never loses sight of your customer and their needs.

Begin with Education

Whether you’re reaching out to prospects proactively or they’re discovering your business online, education is the first step in the sales process. It’s how your prospects come to understand what you do, why your work matters, and how you can help them.

When it comes to these early education stages, how you educate dictates who you attract. This is true in terms of both the format and the content of your educational materials, and the two are inextricably linked. If you choose to build out your social media presence on Instagram instead of Facebook, what does that mean for the type of audience you’ll attract and the content you’ll create?

Instagram skews younger than Facebook, so the demographics of the audience you’ll reach will be more Millennials and Gen Zers. Plus, Instagram is a visually-based platform, so your content there will primarily be photos and video. Facebook has a wider appeal with folks across all generations, including Baby Boomers. Plus, the platform allows you to create a variety of content, including long-form written posts.

Find Your Ideal Client

In order to hone in on the best format and content for your educational materials, you must start by defining your ideal customer. Once you have a clear picture of the type of person you want to do business with, you can settle on the right content platforms and messages to attract them.

Take a look at your favorite existing customers. These are the people you love working with, who are just as excited about you. What commonalities can you find among these customers? Are there certain traits, behaviors, or actions they all possess or take? And these don’t have to be directly related to your business: For example, I find that I love working with small business owners who are involved in their industry and local community.

If you know exactly what your ideal clients look like, you can craft the right educational message to attract them to you. Plus, you know what channels to trumpet your messaging on, where you’ll have the best shot at interacting with these folks.

Move on to Discovery

Once a prospect has found your educational materials and decided that the products or services you offer are of interest to them, it’s time for you to get to know them a little better.

In the discovery phase, ask your prospect to tell you about their wants and needs. But don’t let this be an open-ended question. Instead, create a form, survey, or other piece of material that can facilitate a conversation with these interested prospects and guide them to share the type of information that’s most valuable to you.

By collecting information about the prospect’s current situation and desired outcome, you give yourself a jumping off point to prove that you understand the problem that they’re facing. From there, you can demonstrate that your approach offers the perfect solution.

This form can be available in a variety of channels. Consider including a more comprehensive contact form on your website, so prospects who’ve encountered your business via inbound means can let you know they’re there and interested. Then, when your sales team follows up, they’re not going in blind.

Similarly, you can include the form in drip campaigns with warm leads who you’re nurturing with an automated email process. If this form comes at the end of an informative email series that proves your value, it’s a great way to encourage prospects to tell you more about themselves.

Craft a Killer Presentation

By now, you’ve gotten to know your prospect a little better. You’ve shown them the broad strokes of how you can help them solve their problem. The sales presentation is your opportunity to give an in-depth look at how you can change your prospect’s life for the better.

The first step to a great sales presentation is personalization. Take what you already know about your prospect’s business and concerns, and use that to shape your pitch. Things like using case study examples from other similar customers can help your prospect feel like you get them on a deeper level.

While you should certainly have some things prepared, it’s just as important to be able to ask questions and go with the flow in your discussion. You have the chance to sit down with your prospect one-on-one; what a fantastic opportunity this is for you to come to really understand the challenges they face.

Rather than making it a presentation where you discuss what you bring to the table, focus on them. When you ask questions to better grasp their needs, you should acknowledge how they feel and provide a solution you offer that can address this specific hurdle.

Creating compelling leave-behind sales materials is the final step in a great sales presentation. These materials provide your prospects with something to remember you by. They’re what keep you top-of-mind long after your pitch is over.

Finish Strong with Your Proposal

Coming out of your successful presentation, you want to follow up with a sales proposal. At its core, a proposal is a simple restatement of your already agreed-upon plan of action. You should have taken notes during your presentation that reflect your prospect’s needs and expectations. By following up with a proposal that outlines the discussion, you’re giving the prospect another opportunity to review the proposed course of action and consider any modifications.

This might be the point in time where objections start to crop up. A proposal is one step closer to a real commitment, and sometimes prospects start to get cold feet. Overcoming objections is an important part of moving past the proposal to the sale.

Listening is at the heart managing and overcoming objections. Just like during your presentation, your prospect wants to feel assured that you understand them and their needs. They want to feel certain your solution is the perfect one for them. Listen carefully and ask questions that get to the heart of the objection. Don’t take “we’re worried about cost” or “my boss doesn’t think it will work” at face value. When you dive deeper, you can address the real issue head-on and get to the close.

By creating a clear sales process, you’ll hopefully start to see more prospects become customers. It’s important to remember, though, that the sale is not the end of the customer journey! How you onboard new clients matters. Their experience with your product or service will shape whether they become repeat customers. And their experience after the sale also dictates whether or not they’ll refer you to friends.

By creating a strong, integrated sales and marketing process from start to finish, you establish an environment where you can build long-lasting customer relationships.

The Future of Small Business Marketing is In-House

The Future of Small Business Marketing is In-House written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

In a recent blog post identifying marketing insights for 2020, I mentioned the idea that more small business owners should and are taking basic marketing tactics in-house.

Now, that may seem like an odd trend for a marketing consultant to promote but let me tell you a story about a typical small business today in the world of digital marketing.

Years ago I started working with a small remodeling contractor helping them transition to the digital age. We helped them narrow their ideal client description, create a core message that helped them stand out, and basically updated their brand identity and promise.

We also made their website more useful, added a blog (possibly the first-ever for a remodeling contractor), went to work on their SEO, introduced them to social media, and started running ads that attracted leads. Pretty standard stuff today.

And boy did it work . . .

They doubled in size and then doubled again, and again. Now, while I like to take credit for all of this success, the fact is they do great work, they treat their customers right, and they have a strong culture of service.

But as they grew rapidly it became apparent that they could grow even faster with an even stronger marketing effort that included community relations, public relations, referral programs, even a focus on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest.

But, at the time, I was their entire marketing department and what they really needed to go to the next level was to start building an internal team. I introduced this idea to them and it went nowhere.

Here’s why – they had tried this in the past before engaging my services and it failed miserably so they were gun shy.

When I pressed this idea they eventually conceded that it failed because they didn’t really have the ability to train, manage, and direct a “marketing manager” so the person they hired had no real plan and ended up working on things that were not relevant in the big picture. (In truth they did like so many businesses do and found a young, inexpensive hire that they thought knew how to do social media.)

A new approach

I had a great working relationship with this business and wanted to continue to help them grow so I proposed an innovative solution.

I would help them hire, train, and ultimately direct a “marketing manager” with them. I had already created a repeatable marketing system and a training curriculum so I knew I could make this work for them.

Well, work it did. We were able to help them find and completely level up a relatively inexperienced marketing manager to the point where they now have a potent internal resource and are on the verge of adding more team.

Oh, and did I mention their business is now 10 times the size it was when I first started working with them. (that’s what the next level looks like.)

Now, the point of this rather long post is this. I think this is a model whose time has come.

Certified Marketing Manager training is coming

I’m currently working on a hybrid coaching model for businesses who need to level up their marketing with an internal resource or team but either don’t know how to do it or know that they would benefit from an outside resource helping them build a complete marketing system, structure, and plan – with their internal marketing resources.

We are calling this program the Certified Marketing Manager powered by Duct Tape Marketing and I’m in full swing creating the training and tools needed to make it as useful as possible to any business determined to take this path.

This training and coaching will be perfect for:

Organizations who want to hire a marketing manager
Organizations who want to level up their current marketing manager
Organizations who are committed to personal development for their team
Even business owners who want more clarity and control over their own marketing

Not another course

The details of the program are still being worked out but let me say this emphatically – this is not a course. Courses have their place, but let’s face it, few of us take action using self-guided courses. (C’mon you know I’m right about that.)

This will be personalized training based on your business, not on theory or generalities. You’ll have a coach who will help you train your team, map out a marketing plan, and help you create marketing structure and process.

And, you’ll have your very own proven marketing system.

That’s what you need to go to the next level!

All I ask today is that if anything about this idea sounds interesting click the button below and tell us you want to be one of the first to get the details.

Yes, this sounds amazing

Thanks for reading and let close by saying I believe this is the future of marketing for small business, check it out!

Weekend Favs February 22

Weekend Favs February 22 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

WMS Everywhere – Track your website ranking in SERPs with this Chrome plugin.
InVideo – Create captivating video with drag-and-drop ease—no editing required.
Vetter – Test your email content to see whether it will land in inboxes or spam folders.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

Storytelling Around Disruption and Innovation

Storytelling Around Disruption and Innovation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Michael Margolis
Podcast Transcript

Michael Margolis headshot Today on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I sit down with Michael Margolis, CEO and founder of Storied.

Storytelling has become a business buzzword of late, but there’s a lot of complexity behind the term. Margolis’ focus is specifically on storytelling as it relates to disruption and innovation. It’s often hard to tell stories about change—audiences grow wary or defensive—but Margolis helps leaders in Silicon Valley and other hotbeds of innovation make that change feel exciting and achievable.

Margolis is also a keynote speaker and the author of Story 10X: Turn the Impossible Into the Inevitable. On this episode, Margolis and I discuss his book and talk about what great business storytelling in the modern era looks like.

Questions I ask Michael Margolis:

When did you realize that story is a tool you could and should use?
What are the parts of the undeniable story?
Does every person need their own individual story in business?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

The big difference between storytelling in business and storytelling in novels or Hollywood.
How to talk about the future in a way that’s difficult, if not impossible, to reject.
Why Margolis believes in Truth with a capital T when it comes to storytelling.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Michael Margolis:

Learn more about Michael Margolis and Storied
Order your copy of Story 10X
Follow on Twitter
Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Klaviyo logo

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. If you’re looking to grow your business there is only one way: by building real, quality customer relationships. That’s where Klaviyo comes in.

Klaviyo helps you build meaningful relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, allowing you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages.

What’s their secret? Tune into Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday docu-series to find out and unlock marketing strategies you can use to keep momentum going year-round. Just head on over to klaviyo.com/beyondbf.

How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media: Mathew Sweezey on Marketing Smarts [Podcast]

Mathew Sweezey of Salesforce offers tips and insights from his forthcoming book, ‘Context Marketing Revolution: How to Motivate Buyers in the Age of Infinite Media.’ Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Transcript of Storytelling Around Disruption and Innovation

Transcript of Storytelling Around Disruption and Innovation written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

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John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Michael Margolis. He is the CEO and founder of Storied, a strategic messaging firm specializing in the story of innovation and disruption. He’s also the author of a book we’re going to talk about today, Story 10X: Turn The Impossible Into The Inevitable. So Michael, thanks for joining me.

Michael Margolis: John, thank you. It’s an absolute thrill for us to connect today.

John Jantsch: So when did the Story come into your life? I mean, we all have stories, childhood stories, but when did you start realizing it was a tool that you could or should use?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, what a great question. So for me, like it is for many of us, I came to Story and my sense of this path out of huge failure and disappointment.

John Jantsch: Which is a story by itself, right?

Michael Margolis: It always is, right? And it was … And for me specifically, it was at the age of 23 after my first career, I’d been a social entrepreneur. So I came of age at the birth of the internet economy and co-founded a nonprofit, had very quick fast success working on poverty, race, the digital divide, complicated stuff, right? It’s not like selling cupcakes. And despite all the quick success that we had within a couple of years, it all fell apart.

Michael Margolis: And I remember sitting there after it all kind of crumbled and there was this sense, John, that something like was missing from the conversation. Like I knew it intuitively, but I didn’t have the language for it, specifically how to tell the story of innovation, because when you’re dealing with innovation, in this case, this was social innovation, like culture change, much less business innovation. But when you’re dealing with innovation, by definition, you’re overstepping, doing something you’re not supposed to be doing. It’s heretical, it’s taboo, it’s off limits, it gets lost in translation. And it was really that struggle and frustration that set me off on the journey that’s been now 20 years of mapping and decoding and developing narrative frameworks that we deliver and teach inside some of the biggest companies in the world today.

John Jantsch: So storytelling, books about storytelling, are quite hot right now. So in your estimation, what does Story 10X kind of offer that maybe carves out its unique spot in the storytelling realm?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, absolutely. So what people have described it as is actually the world’s first book on storytelling for disruptive innovation. So one of the things that we often forget is that when it comes to storytelling, which is universal. I’m a cultural anthropologist by training. I’m fascinated with the universality of story and its use across time and history. But storytelling is contextual to the format or the medium.

Michael Margolis: So for instance, if you are writing a screenplay that’s for a film, that’s a very different format in which you’re going to construct and tell a story than a thousand page novel. Well equally, there’s a completely different context, not just for applying storytelling to business, but applying storytelling to innovation and disruption in the context of business. Because it’s, if you think in the traditional storytelling terms, John, when someone sits down to watch a movie or read a book, in a certain way, there’s a contract with your audience, which is they’ve agreed to suspend disbelief to go on a journey with you.

Michael Margolis: And now we live in an age of Netflix and like ADD attention span, so that that window is shorter and shorter before you go, “Ah, I’m going to go watch something else.” Or, “Ah, I don’t like this book.” But nonetheless, your audience is willing to suspend disbelief to go on a journey. Now when you walk into an executive board room or you’re leading a town hall with 5 thousand employees, or you’re in front of investors, pitching them on your next series of funding, I promise you, nobody’s giving you that benefit of suspending disbelief.

John Jantsch: I suspect the opposite’s true, right? You have to wade through the I don’t believe you.

Michael Margolis: Yeah, and that’s the paradox. So what are we taught to do, John, is we’re taught to lead with data and conclusions. But if you lead with data, the story is dead on arrival. So that’s the paradox, because we often forget our audience doesn’t have context, they don’t see the big picture. And they also don’t have emotional self identification. So instead you’re presenting the data that doesn’t mean anything to them. And what you’ll usually hear back in response is, “Well, how’d you come up with that data?” Right? Or, “I don’t know if I agree with that conclusion.”

Michael Margolis: So this is what we describe in the book. It’s actually a three-step narrative framework, which helps people to understand that people have to see it and they have to feel it before they can believe it. So data is a critical part of the story, but it’s the third step in the sequence. And when you actually address getting people to sort of see it, capture their imagination and see the possibilities and get people to empathize and emotionally identify or relate, then they’re going to be begging you for the data that supports what you’re selling. But that one shift makes all the difference.

John Jantsch: It’s almost kind of like they have to be bought in, they have to realize the problem, and then it’s like, “Okay, well then tell me how this is going to work for me.” I mean-

Michael Margolis: Exact … Well, yeah, and to your point about the problem, how often are you in front of an audience that you don’t have shared problem definition? Or how often is that audience complicit if not responsible for that problem? So of course, where you go presenting the problem, they’re going to get defensive.

John Jantsch: Yeah, I mean think about how many products have gone out there and failed because they were solving a problem the audience didn’t know they had. And I think that that’s … But that’s, it’s not necessarily a big leap, but it takes some skills sometimes because of just what you said. I’ve gone out on stages before and said, “Well, you need to do this and you need to do that.” And you can immediately see the arms cross. It’s like, “You don’t know my business. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Michael Margolis: That’s exactly it. And we don’t see, we have this blind spot. So people like you, people like me, and many of your listeners, those of us who are the innovators, the change agents, those who carry the torch where we’re like, “I see the future, I see where things are going, I know what we can do.” We get so passionate and enamored with the new story that we forget that the moment you present the new story, anybody that lives in the old story is likely to feel wrong, bad, judged, stupid, or defensive. And then we’re like, “But what’s wrong with people Why don’t they see what I see?”

Michael Margolis: And like the old saying, John, we teach what we need to learn most. So a lot of this storytelling stuff for me was I’ve always been someone with a strong point of view and sort of get ahead of my own britches sometimes. And I used to struggle when I was younger of like, “What’s wrong with people? Why don’t they see what I see?” And that frustration of feeling like I’m hitting my head against the wall. And I started to realize, “Oh, well there were actually ways I could adjust how I frame and convey my ideas to create more of a receptive feel to make it more relatable and accessible.” Because disruption, innovation tends to trigger fear. It’s the unknown, it’s the unfamiliar for folks. So it’s been a humble learning process for my own.

John Jantsch: So you have an entire section of the book on this framework called the undeniable story. So you started to allude to it and I think I interrupted you. Do you want to kind of say like, here’s part one, here’s part two, here’s part three?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, for sure. So, as you said, undeniable story. So the very premise of this is how do you talk about the future in a way that’s difficult, if not impossible to reject? Because remember, the biggest thing we’re up against? Disbelief. So how do I talk about this way? And again, we do a lot of work in Silicon Valley. We work with heads of product and heads of design at places like Facebook and Google and Hulu and Tesla and the like. And then we also work with a lot of Fortune 500s that are trying to be like Silicon Valley and lead digital transformation and all of this kind of change. So leaders are often having to present this vision about where we’re going and what’s next. And inevitably, they’re up against the VP of no. And so from that perspective, how do you, again, get people to see it and feel it before they believe it?

Michael Margolis: So those are the three steps. Step number one, see it, is actually all about naming the change. So this is actually the most critical step of the three, John, where we often take for granted that people can locate themself in our story. And that also that we’re giving them directionality. See, story is like a GPS. So it’s a location device. Like where are we? And story’s also a transportation vehicle. It takes us places. And the question is where is it taking us and do we want to go there? So part of what we have to do when getting people to see it is we have to frame a context that people can see and that speaks to how the world is changing. So this is one of the storytelling hacks that we figured out here, which is when the world changes, you have to change your story to reflect that new world. It’s a way to externalize the change or the conflict so that you don’t put people on the defensive, but that did something wrong.

John Jantsch: Is there simple way for you to give an example of that?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, for sure. So it’s everything, like inside big companies, it’s things like predictive analytics, and/or things like AI, automation, like pick any of them that are these big trends, and then help people understand, “What can we do now that we couldn’t three or five years ago?” Because of the forcing functions of technology, economics, culture changes, there are all these forces of change that are creating new opportunities and possibilities. And we take it for granted, but like the things that we can do.

Michael Margolis: I was just on a call earlier today with one of our clients that is a Fortune 100 in the insurance and financial services space. I was speaking with their chief digital officer. And one of the things they were pointing out is, “Look, you know, we pay out $40 billion in claims every single year.” So when someone, someone dies early and unexpectedly, or there’s a car accident, or property damage, so on and so on. Well, what if actually through our predictive analytics, we now actually have the ability to identify signals and indicators that we could do, for instance, monthly screenings in different ways that actually would help to identify breast cancer earlier in the lives of of a middle aged woman for instance?

Michael Margolis: Now that’s something that’s completely outside the traditional remit of this company, but they’re realizing as an insurance company it’s like, “Okay, how can we get further ahead in the curve of that customer experience based on the commitment we have to our customers, but let’s actually like create the interventions earlier on.” So that’s the kind of example and obviously this guy is a real visionary inside his company and he has to then be able to convey, communicate this within a broader enterprise that’s going through transformation. Does that help?

John Jantsch: Yeah, it does. I was afraid you were going to say that they had with AI and predictive analytics, they were going to be able to tell who was going to die. So I’m glad you didn’t go there.

Michael Margolis: Sadly, I have a feeling they can figure that out too.

John Jantsch: Pretty darn close, I bet. Wanted to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers. And this allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation email auto-responders that are ready to go. Great reporting. You want to learn a little bit about the secret to building customer relationships? They’ve got a really fun series called Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docuseries, a lot of fun. Quick lessons, just head on over to Klaviyo.com/beyond BF, Beyond Black Friday.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about personal stories. So obviously a product needs a story and you need to ways to simplify concepts and information. But does everybody need their own personal story? I mean obviously speakers are very well trained to go out on stage and some sort of connection device. I mean, but is that become sort of standard fare now for anybody that, whether whatever you’re doing, whatever your career is, you should have your story?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, well the answer is yes, absolutely. And it plays out. Sort of, let me give two quick examples. The real simple one for everybody listening is before any business meeting you’ve been Googled. Which means that people are experiencing your story online before they experience you in real life. So let that sink in for a moment cause that’s an existential, “Oh fuck,” for just about every single one of us, right? Because it’s like, “Oh God, does this website make me look fat?” It brings up every insecurity and inadequacy, and we all have it in some form or another.

Michael Margolis: But your LinkedIn profile, your about page. I mean John, you and I have so many mutual friends in common, but as we were introduced, I’m sure before our call today, you Googled, right? Like you followed up on some of the other things that, I forget who introduced us, but it was a wonderful friend. But in follow up to that, it’s like you follow the breadcrumbs. We all do.

Michael Margolis: And so that’s the first place. And we actually even created an online course for this called The New About Me. It’s our bestselling online course, which is like how do you talk about yourself online without sounding like a wanker? And like writing that about page using storytelling principles. So that’s a basic, everybody has to do it. And even if you are working inside a company, your own personal brand, it shows up in many different ways as you’re building your reputation and your expertise and so on.

Michael Margolis: So that’s the basics. We spend a lot of time working with senior leaders inside companies. And so for instance, we just three weeks ago were with another Fortune 500 client. And we did a leadership summit for the CEO and their top 200 leaders. They were presenting their vision and strategy for the year, big transformation they’re leading. Every single one of those 200 leaders, SVP and above, over the next month were all going to lead town halls for all of their direct reports down the line.

Michael Margolis: And so our session was all about how do you personalize and humanize the larger company vision? And we often forget it’s tough because many of us, I know you’re very passionate about servant leadership. So many of us who have this servant leadership mindset, we go, “But it’s not about me. I’m here to serve others.” And so part of what we point out in support though is you can’t separate the message from the messenger and that by helping people understand your own personal backstory or why do you care about this vision? What is it about this new go-to-market or the three pillars of transformation that somehow connect to what you’ve gone through before in your life or how you’ve had to lead a transformation somewhere else.

Michael Margolis: People need that personalized emotional connection. And we had leaders share. We had one leader share story about how their first job was delivering cakes in like a delivery truck and like all of the comedy of errors that would happen and trying to balance like five layer cakes and making sure that they didn’t show up turned upside down. Or another one of the senior leaders told this story about her first job working at a dry cleaners and the things she learned there about customer service that were these humble lessons that inform how she applies the work today. So you’d be amazed at how these little personal vignettes will go to humanize you as a senior leader and help people connect with that.

John Jantsch: Okay. You ready for the tricky question?

Michael Margolis: Oh yeah. I love tricky questions.

John Jantsch: How much of your story has to be true?

Michael Margolis: Great question. I’m a big believer … I live in Los Angeles, so there’s the old Hollywood adage, based on a true story.

John Jantsch: Yeah.

Michael Margolis: So, what I often-

John Jantsch: They really play around with that one too. Sometimes it’s like based on some things that could have been true.

Michael Margolis: Well, so I’m a big believer first and foremost of truth with a capital T. So truth with a capital T is you better really be speaking to something that is fundamentally true about yourself, about life in the world. And then it’s understanding, just like a good Hollywood screenwriter, is that if you’re taking a book like Lord of the Rings and you’re adapting it for the screen, you have to make choices that are going to serve your audience.

Michael Margolis: Sometimes you have to simplify the story. Sometimes you make slight zhushes because it’s just not going to translate otherwise effectively. So I do think sometimes, there is a little creative flourish and sometimes you’re editing, but you have to always ask yourself, “The choices that I’m making, am I doing it in service to my audience or am I doing it in service to my ego validation? Or am I doing it in service to somehow fundamentally deceiving and misleading people on something of material fact that somehow negates or warps?” Would they feel truly betrayed if they found out about the adjustments that you’ve made. So that’s the subjective line that I counsel clients around.

John Jantsch: So people have used story to manipulate. The classic sort of, the one that I see that if I get a pitch from somebody that starts with how he or she lost everything and they did this and did that and now they’ve overcome and they’re doing whatever. The essence of that pitch is, “You’re broke too. And like I used to be, and now you can be rich like I am.” And the essence of that pitch really rubs me the wrong way. How do you see that being an issue of … And I’m not saying all of those are trying to manipulate people, but there certainly is a manipulative aspect to that.

Michael Margolis: Yeah, that’s a great question. And I’m trying to think what’s a simple way to answer that. Because we could spend the next hour unpacking that, John. But so here’s what I think. I think that we are increasingly living in an age where our audience is getting smarter and smarter, is getting more and more discerning about whether I can believe this story or not. It’s because we’re asked to process and analyze.

John Jantsch: I’m sorry.

Michael Margolis: Yeah, go ahead.

John Jantsch: I’m sorry, I hate to interrupt you, but I should have interjected a political joke right there. I’m sorry. Go ahead.

Michael Margolis: Oh, we could.

John Jantsch: About our audience believing the truth and getting smarter. But I digress.

Michael Margolis: Well, no, no, no. Look, well and I our political environment right now is a great morality tale around manipulation of story and truthiness and post-fact era and all this other kind of garbage. I still fundamentally believe at the end of the day that because of the age of transparency that we’re in, that at the end of the day, the half life of a lie is shorter and shorter and shorter. The truth comes out and we do pay attention to the clues and markers of, “Do I trust this? Do I believe in this? And most importantly, how does this story make me feel?”

Michael Margolis: And we’re more and more skeptical of stories that make us feel like crap. This is a big part of the premise of the book Story 10X, which is something that Jonah Sachs, another colleague of mine in the world of storytelling wrote the book Story Wars. He talks about this, that for the modern marketing from the 1950s to the last about 10 years ago was this era of inadequacy marketing of basically selling and preying on our fears and insecurities. And I think we’re becoming more and more resistant to those kinds of messages.

Michael Margolis: So if we feel something is heavy-handed, we have a sense of it, people are going to react. I think those strategies are less and less effective in this era where we’re looking for authenticity, where we’re looking for … We’re trying to figure out who can we trust and what can we believe? So there’s no simple, clean answer to it, John, other than I think that that character matters.

Michael Margolis: I think that natural authority comes from being able to talk about, “Here’s what I know or here’s what my gift is. And you know what? Here’s where I’m a work in progress. Here’s the stuff I’ve struggled with too.” And the key to it is to make the journey be an open loop. Basically you’re inviting people to join you in the unfolding journey as opposed to back to data and conclusions, the end, the story is over. I’ve wrapped it up in a pretty little bow. And so that shift in mindset I think is the paradigm shift for all of us to think about because you have to invite people into a story where there’s more chapters to be written, if that makes sense.

John Jantsch: Yep. Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely. Become a part of the story. So Michael, thanks for dropping by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast to talk about Story 10X. Where can people find out more about you and your work?

Michael Margolis: Yeah, absolutely. So you can find Story 10X on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and all your local booksellers. You can also go to our website, GetStoried.com, that’s G-E-T-S-T-O-R-I-E-D.com. And if you go to /Story 10X, you can actually download the first 70 pages of the book. And feel free to reach out to me through social media. I’m especially active on LinkedIn. You can find me there, Michael Margolis.

John Jantsch: All right. Thanks, Michael. Hopefully we’ll run into you soon one day out there on the road.

Michael Margolis: I would love it. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it.

Developing Important Entrepreneurial and Leadership Qualities

Developing Important Entrepreneurial and Leadership Qualities written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Jack McGuinness
Podcast Transcript

Jack McGuinness headshot Today’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Jack McGuinness.

McGuinness is the co-founder and managing partner of Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on helping great leaders build great leadership teams.

After finishing his business degree, McGuinness landed the COO role at a new management consulting firm. He was a member of the team for 13 years. And as the business grew, he gained experience as both a management consultant and an entrepreneur. He took on roles in diverse growth-focused areas, including business development, hiring, and infrastructure.

When he left to become CEO of a contract packaging company, he became fascinated with change management and developed a passion for tapping into the leadership capacity of teams across an organization.

In 2009, he partnered with Gil Brady to form Relationship Impact, where they now help businesses build a structure for leadership teams to be more productive and effective in how they work together. In this episode, McGuinness shares stories from his own entrepreneurial journey and discusses what businesses need to focus on to embed great leadership into their organizations.

Questions I ask Jack McGuinness:

What’s a typical engagement like for you as a management consultant?
Why did you decide to start your business and go out on your own?
What’s the hardest part of doing what you’re doing as an entrepreneur?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How to overcome some of the hurdles innate in the professional services field.
Why sales and marketing are a long game, and how to know you’re on the right track.
Why creating discipline around your sales and marketing leaves you more time to focus on growing your business and spending time with your family and loved ones.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Jack McGuinness:

Learn more about Jack McGuinness and Relationship Impact
Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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Gusto is making payroll, benefits, and HR easy for modern small businesses. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team.

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Transcript of Developing Important Entrepreneurial and Leadership Qualities

Transcript of Developing Important Entrepreneurial and Leadership Qualities written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

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John Jantsch: This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Gusto, modern, easy payroll benefits for small businesses across the country. And because you’re a listener, you get three months free when you run your first payroll. Find out at gusto.com/tape.

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jack McGuinness. He is a co-founder and managing partner of Relationship Impact, a consulting firm focused on helping great leaders build great leadership teams. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack McGuinness: Thanks so much for having me, John. I really appreciate it.

John Jantsch: So full disclosure, you and I’ve worked together, our firms have actually worked together, so I do know a little more about your story than maybe some folks. But why don’t you start by kind of giving a little bit of background on you and your journey as an entrepreneur and maybe tell us a little about your work.

Jack McGuinness: Sure. So my journey started, sort of my entrepreneurial journey I guess started in around 1993. I was looking for a job, just got out of my MBA program and I got very lucky and got connected to a guy that was about 15 years older than me from Deloitte who was starting his own management consulting firm. And I really wanted to get into management consulting field. So I helped, I was one of his first employees and wound up becoming the chief operating officer and running part of the firm and we grew at our peak to around 50 people or so. And it was great from a number of perspectives. Number one, it helped me, I got experienced both learning how to be a good management consultant but also had the opportunity to learn how to build and manage a consulting practice as well. It’s relatively small business, but I had a big part in helping build the infrastructure for the firm and hiring people and kind of the whole business development side and just really helping a firm grow. And it was a great experience from that perspective.

Jack McGuinness:It was also very informative for the type of work I do right now. But a lot of the people that we hired in after me had organizational development backgrounds and PhDs in psychology, master’s in organizational behavior. So, my partner, my boss had a strong vision for what he wanted the firm to look like. And in order to compete against the big guys, the Deloittes, the McKinseys, the Accentures, our niche became large scale change projects, anything from mergers and acquisitions to large scale system integration work. We rode the re-engineering process, re-engineering craze in the 1990s, but we did it from a change management perspective. So how do you bring the people along?

Jack McGuinness: So I feel like, through that experience, not only did I learn how to become a good managing consultant and help build the firm, but I also learned another part of I’m an engineer with an MBA. And it’s sort of a right and wrong way of doing things and that way of thinking and sort of a linear way of thinking. It’s kind of a simplistic view, but kind of that’s where my head was. And so I learned really this whole new dynamic of how to bring people along and how to lead large scale change efforts, which has really been informative for the type of work that I do right now.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So give us a little taste of that. What’s a typical engagement for you as a management consultant?

Jack McGuinness: Sure. So right now, we call ourselves executive or leadership team coaches. And to be honest with you till a few years ago, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a leadership team coach. But what we do is we work with executive teams at growing companies, say, anywhere from 15 to $150 million in revenue to help them build the structure for the team to be able to be productive and build the relational dynamics for them to be more effective in terms of how they work together. And so we call it two sides of the same coin. It’s like there’s a structural side of building a great team and a relational side of building a great team. And what happens often times with growing companies is they get out of sync. Everyone would be pulling their weight and rolling their sleeves up when they’re young with not a lot of process, not a lot of structure in place. And then relationships sort of get out of whack because people are stepping over each other or whatever and then you put new structure in place and the people don’t necessarily trust the structure.

Jack McGuinness: So what we do to start is really help leadership teams figure out where they’re out of whack structurally and relationally, help them move to some commitments collectively and individually to make the changes they need to make to strengthen how the team is operating to get the results they’re looking for. And what really it is, an accountability model of leadership team coaching. We help teams help themselves, hold themselves accountable to the commitments they make. Again, really what we’re very much focused on, how does this team become as good as it possibly can be to face the challenges what environment demands from them?

John Jantsch: Your firm is how old?

Jack McGuinness: We’re about 10 years old now. Yeah, we started in late 2009, so a little over 10 years old. Yes.

John Jantsch: Do you remember why you started your business or why you decided to have on your own?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah. There’s a practical and then there’s sort of a visionary kind of part of it. In 2008, after working for that management consulting firm, I owned a contract packaging firm. It was an entrepreneurial venture but we bought it with two passive partners. I bought a family-run business and we made some great strides to turn that around, bought some new equipment, brought on some customers like Unilever and Hershey and Godiva and did some great work. But then the financial crisis hit and we got our butts kicked with that whole thing. A lot of our customers brought their packaging back in-house, there wasn’t as much demand.

Jack McGuinness: And so some great lessons from that as well. But I was looking for my next gig. I thought I was going to get back into management consulting because that’s what I knew and had a pedigree in. And I reconnected with a classmate of mine from college that I had stayed in touch with. But we sort of put our heads together. He was getting his PhD in leadership at GW University, which is near me in the DC Metro area. And we sort of just put our heads together and said, “What do you want to do for the second half of your career? What unique contributions do we think we have to offer businesses?” We knew we wanted to do some sort of consulting work and we settled on… We thought we had some interesting things to say about teams in organizations. So when we started we were more broadly leadership development, team development across organizations. Right now we’re much more over the last five or six years, frankly with your help, much more focused on a narrow target market of working with the executive teams of growing companies.

Jack McGuinness: So circumstance certainly drove it, but also a passion for teams and we felt like we had some interesting things to say about teams. And it’s really come to fruition because I have to say in the last five years, this is the most fun and most lucrative. So both, we’re doing well both financially and professionally and personally because we love the work that we do and we think we are having some really good impact with the firms we’re working with, the companies we’re working with.

John Jantsch: Everyone loves payday, but loving a payroll provider, that’s a little weird. Still, small businesses across the country love running payroll with Gusto. Gusto automatically files and pays your taxes. It’s super easy to use and you can add benefits and management tools to help take care of your team and keep your business safe. It’s loyal, it’s modern. You might fall in love yourself. Hey, and as a listener, you get three months free when you run your first payroll. So try a demo and test it out at gusto.com/tape. That’s gusto.com/tape.

John Jantsch: So since you’re having so much fun, what’s the hard part about doing what you’re doing as an entrepreneur in your view?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah, so a hard part is, like a lot of firms, you think you got a great Rolodex to start. And so frankly business development and selling is maintaining consistency of pipeline and it was the hardest part of our business. We started off with Gangbusters in 2000. It really got our stride in 2010 and had some great clients and big clients. And then the Rolodex runs dry a little bit and then you have to like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do now?”

Jack McGuinness: And so, I think I read your book, Duct Tape Marketing probably in 2011 or ’12 because I was just really doing some soul-searching about how we were going to make this thing work. And I came across your book and used it for a few years and then I was just like, “I got to dive in.” So I called you, you did one of your assessments for us and then I hired you for, well, I don’t know how long it was, maybe 18 months or off and on for two years. So the hardest thing was business development and building a strong rhythm of marketing and selling.

John Jantsch: Well, so let’s talk about marketing specifically.

Jack McGuinness: Sure.

John Jantsch: Professional service providers are essentially selling air to some extent. Management consultant, I mean, what does that mean? That can be very broad in general. What have you done, particularly as you kind of mentioned that you felt like your pipeline was good and your rhythm was good? What’s been the most effective way for you to market your business?

Jack McGuinness: So a couple things. First of all, you’re right, selling professional services and selling leadership development or leadership consulting, it’s a very crowded space. So getting targeted and narrowing our focus was, I think, the first thing that your book’s helped us with, but then when we started working with you, you really helped us with this, you can’t be everything to everyone. You got to narrow what you do and you got to be able to tell a story that’s compelling and that connects with them, that doesn’t talk at them. And the work that we do is very much an unrecognized need in many cases. There’s not a lot of CEOs just sitting around saying, “My team’s really dysfunctional. Let’s hire someone to help them.” But I guess some of them do, but we weren’t getting calls all day. So I guess that’s one way of putting it. But I guess the first was really narrowing our focus and getting a more narrowly-defined target market.

Jack McGuinness: And then the second thing that really has helped us is becoming thought leaders in the work that we do. Now, we’re not Marshall Goldsmith or anyone like that, but we have developed a lot of content in the last three years and we did that with a lot of discipline. You call it a content plan, I think. I can’t remember the term, but we had a content plan with a schedule and the types of things we were going to use, LinkedIn, writing for magazines, doing webinars, speaking, those types of things. And until you get disciplined at that, and frankly you have to write something before you can do much of anything else. And then re-curating other people’s content, re-curating our content, words that I didn’t even know what they meant frankly. And so I think those two things, targeting and becoming thought leaders in a very disciplined, organized way has been really instrumental for us.

John Jantsch: So a lot of folks, I mean I think a lot of people hear that advice that they need to be doing that. But when it really comes down to it, as you alluded too, it’s a lot of work or can be a fair amount of work. So when did you kind of realize, “Hey, you know what, this might be paying off?”

Jack McGuinness: Well, it wasn’t too far after, probably six months after we put our content calendar together and started writing for Chief Executive Magazine. We started getting some calls. So a couple of our biggest clients now are from the writing we’ve done for Chief Executive Magazine. And so I’d say within less than six months we definitely saw some benefit. And then you guys helped us. You and Jen have really helped us figure out how to track our Google and our LinkedIn and Facebook numbers as well. And using SEO and using just simple things like having better titles. And it is a lot of work, but we have seen the impact. I mean frankly, nothing’s perfect, but our first five or six years, it was up and down every month, particularly in the first quarter of the year really. At the end of the year we haven’t had a good year pretty much. And then all of a sudden you’re like, “Okay, well, what are we going to do now?” We’re looking at each other trying to get the next sale. And we don’t really have that anymore.

Jack McGuinness: Our sales, our pipeline is much smoother or robust, I guess you would call it. And our monthly revenue is smooth out, so we don’t have those peaks and valleys anymore. Knock on wood. You can never rest, that’s for sure, running a small business. But I feel like with a lot of discipline and targeting, it’s really paid off.

John Jantsch: So let’s start a little bit about family life and owning a business. In your time before, and obviously your life has changed the 10 years you’ve had the business, but how do you manage? Because a lot of times running a business, it’s like, there’s always more to do.

Jack McGuinness: Right.

John Jantsch: So how have you managed kind of the elusive balance of trying to do all of this but also trying to enjoy a rich personal and family life?

Jack McGuinness: I’m fortunate from a couple perspectives that I have a wife who is a partner in a big law firm, so that certainly helps from an earnings’ perspective. But I think we were all over the place when we first started in terms of marketing. We would go to conferences, we’d go to networking events, we just did a lot of stuff that really just didn’t have… And handing out business cards was a useless construct to be honest with you. And so with the discipline came a much more productive way of managing what we do. Particularly as it relates to marketing because we don’t do those events or those pay for play things anymore. I have like three different breakfast groups that I formed with people that are like-minded, that are selling to similar people, that are willing to give to each other. I do writing, webinars.

Jack McGuinness: So everything’s very targeted and pretty disciplined so that I don’t feel a need to just go do lots of activity. So I feel like it’s been much more focused. Because frankly, as a small business owner, we’re both marketing ends selling and delivering the work that we do. And so the delivering takes up a lot of our time and it’s what we really like to do. So that one you can’t mess with, but you can mess with how you generate your business and get much more discipline there.

John Jantsch: Anything on the horizon for 2020 that you think is opportunity for relationship impact?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah. Again, through your advice and counsel, I’m very slowly and methodically putting together… I have an outline for a book that I’m planning on when my youngest daughter heads off to college in the fall. I will have even more time to focus and just go every couple of weeks and start the process of writing a book on how to build a great executive leadership team.

John Jantsch: Well, obviously I applaud that because, I mean, that’s the next logical kind of step in your content platform, if you will, that you were talking about. And Marshall Goldsmith, beware.

Jack McGuinness: Yeah, that’s right. Thank you for that. I don’t know. I don’t know about that. My aspiration is to meet him. I love that guy. But I think that’s the other thing is too, you pushed, you guys were really encouraging me to do more video and I made some attempts at that and it just didn’t feel right. So I hired a firm that does video and I did my first shoot last week. A couple of days worth of both customer, partners and me. And they have a lot of micro clips, some larger videos. So I’m starting that whole process this year. It took me a little longer than I wanted it to, but that’ll be a big push this year as well.

John Jantsch: Well Jack, thanks for stopping by and talking a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and relationship impact. You want to tell people if they want to check out your work where they can find you?

Jack McGuinness: Yeah, please. It’s relationship-impact.com and lots of rich content in there, all focused on how to build a great leadership team. John, I can’t tell you thank you enough for having me on your podcast and for the great partnership and advice and counsel that you’ve given me over the years and will continue to do so. It’s just been… I really don’t think that Gil and I would be in this place without you.

John Jantsch: Oh, well, thank you. I appreciate you sharing that and hopefully we’ll bump into you soon out there on the road.

Jack McGuinness: Thanks, John.

Using a Framework to Create Inventive Content

Using a Framework to Create Inventive Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Melanie Deziel
Podcast Transcript

Melanie Deziel headshot Today on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I sit down with marketing expert Melanie Deziel.

Deziel is a keynote speaker, author, award-winning branded content creator, and lifelong storyteller. She is driven by a desire to help brands create compelling and credible content to share with their audience.

She is the author of The Content Fuel Framework: How to Generate Unlimited Story Ideas, and the founder of StoryFuel, which teaches entrepreneurs and companies how to tell better brand stories.

Before StoryFuel, Deziel served as the first editor of branded content at The New York Times, a founding member of HuffPost’s brand storytelling team, and was Director of Creative Strategy for Time Inc.

Today on the podcast, Deziel and I discuss her book, and she shares how any business—no matter their size or resources—can establish a framework for creating compelling content that their audience is excited to consume and share.

Questions I ask Melanie Deziel:

What’s the focus of your book that’s going to make it different from other books out there about storytelling?
Is there a finite collection of focuses a business should try to take on?
Not everyone listening has a content team. If someone only has the bandwidth to create in one format, where should they focus their time?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

How a framework built around focus and format can help you generate new, novel content.
How to get more efficient in your content creation when you’re short on time and money.
Why our content is influenced by how our audience wants to consume content.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Melanie Deziel:

Learn more about Melanie Deziel and StoryFuel
Pre-order your copy of The Content Fuel Framework
Learn about the Content Fuel Game and download the worksheet for free with the code DUCTTAPE
Follow on Twitter
Follow on Instagram
Connect on LinkedIn

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Zephyr.

Zephyr is a modern, cloud-based CMS that’s licensed only to agencies. The system is lightweight, easy to use, and incredibly fast. And with an array of beautiful themes to choose from, you can get your clients’ websites up-and-running quickly and with less effort. Or, if you’d rather build a custom site, Zephyr includes agency services to be your plug-and-play dev shop.

Zephyr is passionate about helping agencies create great websites for their clients. To learn more, go to Zephyrcms.com.