John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you could have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jennifer Wallace. She’s a freelance print and television journalist who began her career at 60 Minutes, and she’s a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. We’re gonna talk about we new book Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic and What We Can Do About It. So Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Wallace (01:22): Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:24): So I always like to, this is a big topic. It’s an important topic. I always like to start with like, why’d you want to tackle this topic? ?

Jennifer Wallace (01:33): Yes. So, yeah, it, it, I have three teenagers of my own. I’ve been a journalist for 20, 30 years, but I know what it takes to write a book. And so I’ve been very reluctant to invest in a book until 2019 when the varsity blue scandal hit. I don’t know if you remember that, but Sure, sure. Parents from the East coast and the West Coast went to jail for conspiracy to bribe their way in their kids away into a, a highly selective college. And so I thought to myself, how did we get to a place where parents were now willing to go to jail to get their kid into a school? And I wasn’t buying the narrative that parents just wanted status and they just wanted the bumper sticker. I knew there was something deeper, and I also had my own three kids who were nearing high school age. So I wanted to know, what, where should I be focusing my parental energies? What’s the best way to secure a a, a fulfilling successful midlife for my kids? What can I do now to kind of put those roots in that could come to fruition throughout their lives?

John Jantsch (02:44): So as a trained journalist, you actually did research. Not every author does . Talk a little bit about it because obviously psychiatry, psychologists, I mean, there’s a whole range of research subjects involved in this. Curious how you tackled that.

Jennifer Wallace (03:01): Yeah, so I wanted to make sure, so I’m raising my kids in Manhattan, and I wanted to make sure that the anxieties I was feeling, uh, in my own, you know, children’s childhood and that I was seeing in my community among the parents, that it wasn’t just an east coast thing or a west coast thing. Mm-hmm. I wanted to know if these anxieties were being felt around the country. And the anxieties that I’m talking about are the feeling that as parents, we are responsible for launching our kids into a, a successful future. And so I teamed up with a researcher at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and, uh, we surveyed 6,500 parents throughout the country, which was an extraordinary sample size. We were hoping to get a sample size of a thousand, but within a few days, uh, 6,500 parents had filled it out.

(03:48): And what I found was that the anxieties and, and fears I was feeling were also being felt in Alaska, in Maine, in Washington state, in Jackson, Wyoming, in Cleveland, Ohio, in Florida, in Texas. It was everywhere. So this was, you know, uh, if you want, I could read you a couple of questions. I asked these parents because I found it so fascinating. I asked them on a scale from one to four how much they agreed or disagreed with this statement. I feel responsible for my children’s achievement and success. 75% of parents felt responsible. And then I’ll read you one last one. I wish today’s childhood was less stressful for my kids. 87% of parents agreed with that statement. So I wanted, uh, to get, I wanted to kind of dig in and get to the roots of these, um, fears and anxieties and this intense pressure that’s on parents today.

John Jantsch (04:45): Okay. So there, there’s a lot of things that have changed generationally, but do you buy the idea that every generation has felt that to some extent? I mean, I’d like to hope my parents thought that a little bit . I certainly, you know, felt it about my kids. And obviously now my kids have kids. Isn’t that just something every parent feels?

Jennifer Wallace (05:05): I think it is something every parent feels, but I think when I was growing up, for example, just in the seventies and early eighties, life was generally more affordable. Housing was more affordable. Sure. Healthcare was more affordable, higher education was more affordable. Parents could be reasonably assured that their kids can make some wrong turns and still wind up. Okay. And over the generations we’ve seen that, that kids for the most part have been able to replicate their childhoods, if not do better. We are now looking at the first generation that is not doing as well as their parents. And parents are feeling these macroeconomic pressures that are in our environment, the steep inequality, the crush of the middle class. And they’re nervous. And I think they have reason to be

John Jantsch (05:49): So, so it’s not just that the parents are crazy, um, are crazier. Now what you’re saying is that the, the children of today, uh, millennials, you know, even now are not affording houses. And, uh, even though they’re making far more than, you know, baby boomers did when they came, uh, outta college. They’re, it’s a whole new set of circumstances.

Jennifer Wallace (06:10): Exactly.

John Jantsch (06:12): So how much you, besides say, you know, you talk to a lot of folks in interviews and you talk about, you know, things like, and these are maybe symptoms, right? Of the circumstances. Loneliness is an all time high. And how much of a crazy sort of reset did Covid cause?

Jennifer Wallace (06:32): Well, covid, I, so two things I think happened in Covid. I think it, if we’re talking about youth today, yeah. It, particularly the population that I studied for this book, I, I looked at the top 25% of household income. So this is, you know, parents who could generally choose where they live and what was happening in these communities, in these upper middle class communities. Things slowed down. Parents weren’t traveling for work anymore, kids weren’t doing those extracurricular activities. They were sitting together at the table as a family. And I think for a minute, kids, well, the researchers not just, I think this, but the researchers who studied this population at the start of covid the first month or so, despite the fears and the anxieties, kids were doing fairly well in be because they were feeling the support system. Mm-hmm. of their families. Um, and then as time wore on, the anxiety started to increase.

(07:30): Oh my gosh. What happens to the internships? What happens when, um, you know, when uh, acts and SATs become optional? What does that do? How do I now make my kids stand out? And so where I thought, I’m in the early days of Covid, I thought maybe I won’t have to write this book. Actually, I think the need is even greater. And what I’m finding coming out of Covid is that the anxiety and the depression and the loneliness that kids were feeling became exacerbated. Mm-hmm. . And so while I thought in 2019 when I sold this book, it might be a hard sell to tell parents to widen their definition of success. I think parents are seeing what’s working and what’s not working, and they’re scared. Mental health concerns top the list of parent anxieties today. And I think parents and including me, we’re looking for answers.

John Jantsch (08:22): You spent a great deal of this book talking about something you call mattering. So I think we probably ought to go into what you mean by that and what the implications are of not mattering. Yeah. Is that the way to say the opposite of that ?

Jennifer Wallace (08:37): Yeah. So I went for the book. I went in search of healthy strivers. I wanted to know what, if anything, these healthy achievers had in common. And

John Jantsch (08:46): I, so maybe you ought to define that. What a help. I mean, what is that

Jennifer Wallace (08:49): Achiever? So the way that I defined it, and I worked with a researcher at Baylor who helped me with this, was kids who were doing well. Despite the pressures by doing well, I meant that their parents, their peers, teachers at their school identified them as doing well as kids who were able to bounce back from disappointment, who had a good support system and often had a sense of purpose to what they were doing. What these healthy achievers had in common was a high level of mattering. And mattering is this idea of feeling valued for who we are at our core, by our families, by our friends, by our community. And also being dependent on to add meaningful value back to parents, to friends, to the community. So the kids who were doing a high level of mattering had this, um, kids who had this high level of mattering.

(09:45): It was like a protective shield. They still experienced step backs and failures, but they were able to bounce back from them because it wasn’t an indictment of who they were. They already felt valued. And the kids who were doing the worst felt like their mattering, their value was contingent on their performance. That I only matter when mattering has been around since the 1980s. It was originally conceptualized by Mars Rosenberg who brought us self-esteem. And what he found was that kids who had a high, a healthy level of self-esteem enjoyed a high level of mattering. They felt important and significant to their families. And mattering matters, not just in adolescents, but really throughout our lives. Mattering at midlife, mattering in retirement.

John Jantsch (10:28): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(11:14): Alright, so I wanted to find this question. How has writing this book changed your parenting?

Jennifer Wallace (11:22): Oh my gosh. In so many ways. In so many ways. I feel so lucky that I had access to the greatest researchers on achievement and, you know, living a life of wellbeing and meaning. And so what I do now, I no longer solve. I have three teenagers. I do not solve for their happiness at home, which I used to do. I now solve for their mattering. So when they’re not acting like themselves, when they’re feeling down or anxious or off, I think, are they not feeling valued by the family? Are they not feeling valued by their peers? Are they not being dependent on to add value? Because a lot of kids in these high performing schools spend a lot of time building their resumes and hearing from their parents perhaps that they matter, but they lack social proof. And I think as parents, when we don’t give our kids the social proof that they matter, we make them more vulnerable to life’s ups and downs.

(12:20): But if a child, for example, oh, how’s a way to give a child social proof that they matter chores, meaningful chores at home? What are ways that your child, and I’ve thought about this in my own home, what are meaningful ways that my kids can give back to our family to improve our family wellbeing? Well, uh, two have become tech experts for me. They kind of go on off and on depending on who’s in the house. Um, my daughter, you know, uh, my older son was, uh, tasked with bringing my younger son to school, even on days that he might have off or a free period, he still had to go in early to take his brother. He was dependent on, we relied on him to keep the family functioning. Before I would go on reporting trips for this book, my daughter would, I have a bad reputation with tech at home.

(13:07): So my daughter would check my carry-on to make sure that I had all of my chargers, that my laptop was charged, that I had a battery, and the battery was charged for my recording device on my phone. So they, we in our home, we have figured out, we also have something that we leave on the refrigerator called family matters. And these are things that we’re trying to wrestle with as a family that we need solving. Like for example, one family matter was, you know, we have a closet really close to our front door, but for some reason the shoes never went in the closet. And instead they would just pile up in front of the front door. And I would trip every time my guests would trip coming in. And so a family matter was like, what could we do in our home to make the entry into our home a little smoother for ourselves and our guests? And so my son said, well, here’s why we don’t put our shoes in there because nobody organizes and they just throw their shoes in and then when you’re running late, you can’t grab your shoes. So he researched it and he found this shoe rack on Amazon that could easily put our shoes out and now the shoes go away because we solved it and he solved it. So,

John Jantsch (14:13): Alright. So how much of this idea of matter, because that, what you just described is obviously in the crush of parenting can be hard, but it’s just a good parenting skill, you know, to make people realize they matter for what they, you know, care about. But there’s a whole lot of parents driving children to believe that they will only matter if, and you know, I think some of the stress that a lot of kids feel is like, I don’t really wanna be a doctor , but that’s the only way I’m gonna matter. So how much of that mattering is mattering for your parents? And I’m gonna have a question in here somewhere, but do you see what I’m getting at

Jennifer Wallace (14:54): ? Well, I do. And I, so I did the 6,500 parent survey and I surveyed 500 young adults and I asked them about when they felt valued and appreciated by their parents, and 70% of them reported we had respon 500 respondents, ages 18 to 3570% of them said that they felt like they mattered more to their parents, that they were more valued and appreciated when they were doing well in school. Mm-hmm. , 50% of them thought they were more loved and 25% of them said they thought that a lot, the highest measure that our survey. So one in four kids thought their parents loved them more when they achieved. Yes. That was very hard to read as a parent. Yeah. Yeah. And I think we love, there’s no parent I met in doing this book that did not love their child unconditionally. Not one I’ve yet to meet one that says, oh no, they only matter when they get straight a’s .

(15:49): But what our kids are hearing in the messages, in the subtle messages we are sending them, is that they matter most when they’re doing well. And so what I would say to parents, if you think that, you know, if you’re wondering what are the messages that you’re sending in your house, Tina Payne Bryson, who’s a psychoanalyst, gave me four questions to ask to kind of take that temperature once she said, take a look at your child’s calendar. How are they spending their time outside of school? Take a look at how you spend money as it relates to your child. Number three, what? Take note of what you ask your child about every day. Mm-hmm. . And number four, notice what you argue with your child about. When you look at those four things, it will show you the message you are sending to your kids and how it can be interpreted as contingent mattering, contingent love.

John Jantsch (16:42): So a lot of things have changed, of course, in parenting technology is, you know, I hear from young parents now is, you know, is really the bane of their existence. Various forms. Social media can be thrown into that at, you know, what role do those, like seeing other people strive, you know, now because everybody wants to talk on Instagram about all their successes and things. How much competition, you know, striving creates some of this stress?

Jennifer Wallace (17:08): Oh, I think it has exacerbated it. So I don’t believe this, that the, I don’t believe social media and technology is the root, but I think it’s a magnifier and an accelerant. So I think the, the root of the anxiety and the loneliness and the depression, we are seeing this huge rise is this unmet need to matter for who we are at our core. And social media and technology just exacerbate that.

John Jantsch (17:34): How far can you take this? Trying to use the right words here. Where’s the healthy balance? Because some achievement is not all bad. . Oh my, this is totally, and so there would be a way to interpret this as just let ’em be kids. But where’s the balance? How do you find

Jennifer Wallace (17:50): Those? Not my message. Yeah. That’s definitely not my message. This is not an anti ambition, anti achievement book because I, I’m highly ambitious. I’m just ambitious for more than my work success. I’m in mm-hmm. , I’m ambitious as a wife. I wanna have a great marriage. I’m ambitious as a friend. I wanna have deep, meaningful friendships. I’m ambitious with my hobbies. I wanna be okay on the tennis court. So I want for our kids to, to be ambitious for more than just their work. But work is important if it, because it feeds us. And so I want kids to understand why their, you know, why they’re striving, what is it all for? It is not just to be better than other people, it’s to, as one school puts it that I interviewed, that I visited, not to be better than others, but to be better for others. Teaching kids how to connect achievement to making a greater impact on the world. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. I certainly don’t want a generation of anti ambitious kids that soci our society can’t take that. We need healthy ambition. And what I wanna give in our kids with this book is, uh, a way to motivate them with a healthy kind of fuel that will sustain them. Not a dirty fuel that will break them down. Yes.

John Jantsch (19:06): So, I know you don’t go into this in the book, a lot of my audience are business owners, entrepreneurs, they’re in toxic cultures inside of organizations. So really a lot of the work that you write about this could really apply to a workplace, couldn’t it?

Jennifer Wallace (19:19): Absolutely. I wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal in December about the power of mattering at work. The surgeon general names mattering as one of the key pillars to workplace wellbeing and mattering at work is, you know, a way to retain people. Yeah. It’s a way to encourage high performance. It’s, yeah, we need to humanize the workplace and mattering. What’s so great about the framework of mattering is that it’s intuitive and it’s actionable. Right? Mattering is about recognizing other people’s accomplishments, telling them why they matter to the organization. Get just slowing down enough to recognize them and treat them with dignity. That’s what mattering is.

John Jantsch (20:05): So now that we’re almost done, I’m gonna say, what do we do about this ? Yes. We spend a lot of time defining the problem. What’s the solution?

Jennifer Wallace (20:15): The solution is to bring back mattering. I mean, the way we are raising our kids today is so different than the way we raised them when you were growing up or when I was growing up. I mean, success was part of a child a, a childhood, but we weren’t defined by our successes or our failures, the way too many children are today. So I think the solution is at home to make your home a haven from the pressures and to lead with mattering and to lead with at every chance. Telling your kid, showing your kid that you value them for who they are at their core. Get a PhD in your child, find out what uniquely makes them tick. What are their strengths? One way to, one place to go. You could visit the mattering movement.com, which is, uh, nonprofit I co-founded that gives tools to parents and teachers and educators on how to foster cultures of mattering for young people.

John Jantsch (21:10): Awesome. Well, Jennifer, I appreciate you taking some time to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. You want to find out or you wanna share with people where they might connect with you and, uh, obviously find out more about Never Enough.

Jennifer Wallace (21:22): Oh, I’d love that. So you could head over to my website, jenniferbwallace.com, and I’m not sure when this is airing, but the book is coming out August 22nd, and lots of goodies and pre-orders. If this is running before then,

John Jantsch (21:35): Well th this’ll run probably around then, but also, you know, live out there on the podcast webs forever. So hopefully people will take some time to listen to this important topic and check out the book. And again, as I said, I appreciate you stopping by for a moment and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Jennifer Wallace (21:53): Excellent. Thank you so much.

John Jantsch (21:56): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Mike Volkin. He is a serial entrepreneur, speaker, marketing consultant, fractional chief marketing officer, army veteran, and author of seven books. In addition, he has built and sold six of his own companies. And as a marketing leader, he specializes in helping businesses scale, particularly ones that help people, animals, and or the environment. So lots to unpack there. Welcome to the show, Mike. Yeah,

Mike Volkin (01:26): Yeah, thanks very much. It sounds like I have a productive life, but it’s not that exciting sometimes. But yeah.

John Jantsch (01:32): So, so let’s talk a little bit about, I’m gonna ask you about the chief marketing officer role. ’cause the fractional CMO role is something I wanna focus on. But tell me a little bit about the experience of building and selling six companies. I’m sure there’s a whole lot of people that you consult with that would like to do that as well.

Mike Volkin (01:49): Yeah, I think that what’s makes me a more complete marketer is being able to do something like that. But I’m always, I’ve always been the kind of like guy that’s had ideas in my head and I’m never short of execution. So, you know, I give things a try. I see what they stick. Some of them don’t. I, I said I built and sold six companies. Doesn’t mean I’ve only started six companies. A lot of ’em, I get to the finish line. I spent one time, I spent over 60,000 bringing a, a company to the starting lines to where I was gonna launch it. And I didn’t like the looks of it and I never launched it. You know, sometimes that happens, but sometimes it works out and you get to build a value, which is really fun. And you get to find buyers and then sell ’em off for a good chunk of money. So,

John Jantsch (02:24): So, so tell me also a little bit about other then, it’s a nice way to kind of have a niche people, animals in the environment Yeah. You list as a specific focus.

Mike Volkin (02:35): Yeah. I’ve listed . I, I’ve worked with a lot of companies, put it that way over, I’d say at least 600 by now over my 20 plus year career. Either doing strategy work from a marketing perspective or, or doing marketing leadership work. But you know, I’ve, overall that experience, I’ve learned that the companies that I’m most passionate about working with are companies that help people, animals, the, or the environment. It’s not to say I don’t like working with other companies. I like a lot of different types of industries and business models, but the ones that I most enjoy working with are ones that actually help people, animals of the environment. So that’s kind of my niche that I’ve developed.

John Jantsch (03:08): Yeah, so, so I guess that’s another way of saying you won’t work with, uh, companies that hurt people, animals in the environment. Right? That’s

Mike Volkin (03:14): Right. You know, I, I was contacted the other day about a, you know, from a company that does beef jerk and I’m like, you know what, I’m a vegetarian. I don’t wanna help you sell beef Turkey, . So I kind of turned them down, but I told ’em the reason why. So,

John Jantsch (03:24): Yeah. Yeah. O over long time ago, I had a cigarette company actually contacted me. Oh, that was kinda the same way. . Yeah. But it, it was a big company too. It was tempting, but yeah.

Mike Volkin (03:35): Yeah. As a marketer you can put your foot down ’cause you’re gonna help these companies grow and develop the culture and you kind of gotta be passionate a little bit about the service or the product that they’re offering, you know?

John Jantsch (03:44): Yeah, absolutely. So I started, in your intro, I talked about the idea that, uh, you are a fractional chief marketing officer, A CMO. If somebody comes to you, you, like, they’ve read your buy on, they say, Mike, what is that fractional chief marketing officer thing? How do you kind of neatly define that?

Mike Volkin (04:00): Yeah, it’s a tough one. The way I usually say it is that I work with companies that can’t afford or don’t have the ability to obtain a full-time chief marketing officer, which is often sometimes 300,000 plus a year. So I’m able to segment my day into six parts, so to speak, and one company gets one of those parts and I can work with four to six companies at any given time.

John Jantsch (04:24): Yeah, and to your point too, I think there’s a lot of companies that just don’t need the a full-time. That’s true, right? I mean, they need strategic input. They need somebody that’s guiding them, but that person doesn’t have to sit at a desk all day.

Mike Volkin (04:35): I know. Yeah. I know. A lot of times I talk myself out of a job because a company will just need me when they go to market to create the strategy, get some marketing processes going, and then they fire me or have me train a, a mid-level marketer to do what I executed and set up. You know,

John Jantsch (04:49): You’ve been doing this for a while, as have I, have you seen a change in the marketplace for accepting that, that idea? Very, we have leaned into the positioning a lot harder the last few years, even though we’ve always been doing it because it seems like small, mid-size businesses not only get the need for strategy, but I think the whole fractional employee, if you will, is really caught on, hasn’t it? Yeah.

Mike Volkin (05:11): Yeah. It’s been steadily growing ever since I’ve been doing it for like the last 10 years. In fact, when I was first doing it, I was calling it a part-time CMO because the word fractional wasn’t even around. And then covid hit, and then everybody got used to doing rero remote work and freelance work started getting really popular, even though it was popular beforehand. And now kind of fractional. CMO is just kind of a name, names stake. Yeah. I mean it’s not just CMO work, it’s fractional executive work C levels of all types. So it’s just, yeah.

John Jantsch (05:40): Yeah. I, yeah, the fractional C F O I think is probably been around longer than any other role because, you know, a lot of organizations, they need somebody to do their taxes, do their bookkeeping, but you know, they also need a little strategic advice on that, but rarely need a C F O O. What I’ve seen a lot in the last couple years also is a lot of organizations, I think, you know, let’s keep blaming stuff on the pandemic. Why don’t we, you know, kind of got caught without a strategy. You know, the market was good. They rose with , you know, the market. And then they realized, you know, we don’t have any way to stand out, you know, in the market or way to differentiate ourselves with our customers. So it seems like there’s hunger for this thing that we call strategy. Now, would you, have you seen that as well?

Mike Volkin (06:22): Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the, you know, a lot of people, obviously companies went under or had struggled with the pandemic, but my business was great as a fractional. CMO companies came to me saying, Hey, either one, we never paid attention to marketing before. And now’s our chance to kind of retool and start to strategize. And the other part is, you know, you know, let’s get creative, you know, help. Let’s hire you to help me get creative and let’s do something outta the box here. So I had some fun projects during covid and worked with companies I probably never would’ve normally. So I actually, I don’t wanna say I enjoyed the pandemic ’cause that’s not good to say, but from a fractional CMO standpoint, it was pretty beneficial for me. Y

John Jantsch (06:57): Yeah. And, and I think that will continue. I, we also had a lot of CMOs jump out of companies and decide they didn’t wanna work for ’em anymore. And so I think there’s more people hanging the fractional shingle out there, if you will. Yeah. Would, would you say there’s a, I don’t know if it’s size or industry, but would you say that there are companies that get to a certain point that need this role, maybe more than others?

Mike Volkin (07:22): I would say every size company needs a fractional cmo, but they’re certainly companies that are pre-revenue, or probably the ones that most needed are the ones that didn’t think they needed a marketing senior marketing leader. They got the marketing like, wait, our sales aren’t really what is expected and our, there’s the product market fit really isn’t there. Let’s hire somebody senior to figure out what’s going on. Uh, because a lot of entrepreneurs, as you know, have big goals. They’ll come to meet time and time again saying, we got a billion dollar idea, and this is gonna be massive and take equity in the company and this and that. But it rarely works out like that. Right. and not everybody’s a unicorn, or they wouldn’t be called unicorns. But, you know, even larger companies, I’ve worked with larger companies, it’s not common, but they might say, you know, our marketing director needs a fresh look at things, or we need you to keep tabs on our managers or something. So from a larger company perspective, I’m more into the project management and consulting from a, from an advice standpoint, from a a smaller to mid-size company. I come in as a fractional CMO with a strategy perspective to develop something and some strategy and some processes in the company. So my roles are vary depending on the size of the company. Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:30): You, you, you know, another type of company that I’ve seen over the years quite often is that company that is very founder sales driven. They grew nicely, 10, 15, $20 million company, but they plateaued because they don’t have that senior team at all. Or se uh, senior marketing person. I think this fractional CMO is very attractive to them as well, because they may be ready for a CMO, but the typically the founder has no idea what to tell the CMO to do, or if they’re doing a good job. And I, so I think that hold, doesn’t that hold ’em back? Sometimes it’s like, I’m not gonna hire that senior marketing person because, well, I don’t know what they’re, I don’t get marketing.

Mike Volkin (09:10): That’s the typical way a company grows, right? So they go to market, they have a very tight budget, you know, they do the lean business model thing, and they hire the minimum that they need to get a lot done. People wear a lot of hats. They might even have a marketing department with nobody actually specifically dedicated to marketing with any specific marketing skills. And then they realize they need the strategy. That’s my sweet spot. When I have a company that has data coming in, they have customers, they have, you know, things that I can look at and grab onto to create a strategy. And then that’s when things really start to take off. When they have processes, they know who they need to hire or need to upskill, and they really need my services at that point. So generally, my sweet spot is somewhere around 250,000 in revenue to 3 million in revenue is when companies decide I wanna scale, but I don’t have the team to do it. Or the strategy.

John Jantsch (09:55): Yeah. Yeah. And even in that range that you mentioned, I mean, you have different problems at $2 million than you did at 250,000 probably as well. And so if you’ve never dealt with those problems, even having an outside perspective is, is pretty important, isn’t it?

Mike Volkin (10:09): It’s always important. You know, one of the key freelancers that I hire for a lot of my projects or my clients that I work with are the marketers. Because yeah, marketing is so fast. It’s not, you know, back in the sixties it was like, here’s the yellow pages and let’s get listed. And that was marketing. Now it’s like, and even lately, it’s like, you gotta be on top of these AI programs and what they’re doing and their capabilities. It’s all these different specialties and marketing should just, I mean, there’s hundreds of ’em. It’s, you can niche down to anything now,

John Jantsch (10:34): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification

(11:20): So if somebody asks you to come in and, you know, it’s like a typical thing. We need marketing or we need marketing help, we’re not really sure. Like our website’s not working. I mean, it’s always like some little tactic thing, right? Yeah. And you know, you’ve been doing this for 10 minutes, you realize no, that , they have a whole strategic problem. Where do you focus or how do you get them to realize? ’cause nobody ever wakes up and says, I need strategy, better go buy some strategy. Right? So how do you get them to realize that all their problems link back to being a strategic problem?

Mike Volkin (11:51): Yeah, that’s a really good question. So the, probably the most popular thing that I do when I first come into a company is I, I give ’em an audit. I just go through not just marketing, but every piece of data I can get ahold of. You know, even if they gimme financial statements, P and ls, whatever, I’ll, I’ll look at everything I can to get an overall glimpse of how data’s coming into the company, how it comes outta the company, and then I’ll look at the resources and especially the staff. You know, I wrote a, I wrote a book called The Business Success Formula, and it’s literally a formula on how to create business success. And the heavily, the most heavily weighted elements of that formula is the staff. It’s 50% more valuable or heavily weighted than any other, uh, formula, part of the formula.

(12:29): But typically what happens is, I’ll, I’ll give an audit. And then the thing about clients is they come to you and they don’t know what they need. They don’t know what they don’t know. So they might come to you with a problem and say, Hey, we need strategy. And I’ll say, wait, you’re not ready to scale yet. You don’t need a strategy. You need to fix some stuff first. So I go in and I, I tell them, usually there’s a clear communication problem with the way they’re portraying their products or their service on their website. It’s not hitting, right? It’s not resonating. Conversion rates are low, bounce rates are high. All those key performance indicators that indicate that you’re just not ready yet to scale. You need to refine some things. So typically what I do is I start with their website and their marketing materials and I refine the messaging. And that usually alone gives ’em a good 15, 20% boost in revenue and conversions right off the bat. ’cause a lot of companies don’t really think too hard about that kind of stuff until they realize there’s a plateau.

John Jantsch (13:18): Yeah, yeah. Their message is, here’s what we do, here’s what we sell. Right. ,

Mike Volkin (13:23): And then also the testing is really big too. I mean, that’s how Uber and the, these companies that just exploded to a billion dollar valuation, they just tested every little minutia of their company. So AB testing is big too. I’ll ask ’em, you know, what have you tried for your calls to action? What have you tried for your different menu options on your pricing plans? And they just don’t, they just threw stuff up. They never really did any research on their pricing, and they just thought, you know, that’s this, the price, it’s gonna be a hundred dollars a month. But they never really did any research or surveys or anything. So there’s that element to it.

John Jantsch (13:49): Yeah. Or, or worse yet, we find a lot of people just like, well, this is what everybody charges in, you know, free in our market, so we’ll just be competitors charge. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So, all right. You mentioned, you know, here’s when I talk to people that, that decide to be fractional CMOs, one of the real challenges to the business model is you’re really just selling your time. I mean, or that can be one of the challenges is, is, you know, you’ve mentioned that there’s six companies that get a six to me. I mean, you may be highly paid for your time, but how do you scale a business like that? Or is it in your mind not really possible

Mike Volkin (14:26): To a certain point? The way I scale it is I have a, I’m not an agency, but I have a close-knit group of freelancers, depending on the skillset that I keep near and dear to my heart that I know do good work and deliver good value. And I don’t need a quote unquote babysit them too much. Like I know, right? Right. If I give them a task with very little effort or instructions, they’re gonna complete it. So I have about 20 to 30 of those people in my pocket. So when I create a strategy, I tell the team, listen, if you don’t have anybody staff that can do this, I have people on staff now I have my fee, my hourly fee, but if you want me to manage them and work with them to deliver the product, like I will charge more for that.

(15:00): So that’s the way I scale it, is I’ll either upcharge the freelancers that I recommend just because of I’m working with them and I’m managing them. So other than the hourly fee, I also charge that. And I also make a, a good amount of money from referrals too. Like if I can’t, I don’t fit every client that wants me to work with them. So I’ll say, listen, I know someone I used to work with, he’s great. Give him a call, he’s gonna work with your company, and then I’ll take a 10% cut or whatever from that freelancer I refer to. So

John Jantsch (15:26): Yeah. One of the things that we’ve been teaching for years is a repeatable system. As you mentioned, a lot of times people, they’ve had no strategic direction, so they don’t really need A CMO. They need what A CMO would’ve developed for them. Mm-hmm. , and then obviously somebody to orchestrate the implementation as you do. One of the things that I’ve found is, and you know, a lot of people will shoot me for this comment, but , you know, eight mo 80% of the companies out there need about 80% of the same thing, . And so I believe that there is a way to actually build a repeatable system for strategy development and then teach it to like account manager, you know, level folks rather than somebody that’s got 25 years of experience. Do you, does that sound like heresy to you?

Mike Volkin (16:07): No, because you’re actually speaking my language. This week I’m actually launching a business where it’s gonna be the first ever AI generated marketing strategy. So I’ve been working on it for quite some time, but, uh, it’s literally gives a company, and it’s just for marketing agencies. I’m not rolling it out to everybody. So a marketing agency would come, they answer 16 or so questions about their clients, and it would spit out a three month marketing strategy for them based on the answers. So, you know, not to plug myself, but it’s called your marketing expert.ai and it’s gonna be launched this Friday. So I’ve been working on it for a long time. So yes, I do think that strategy is yeah, repeatable. However, the, even I’ll be at my AI marketing strategy, it’s not gonna get you 100% there. There’s little nuances about every company and culture and the, the experience, the staff and like you just AI can’t do, no matter how good AI is gonna get that, you need to be able to get in there that last 10% and customize it.

John Jantsch (16:57): Yeah. Yeah. I, you know, I’ve been, obviously all marketers are, you know, talking about AI today and Yeah. You know, I tell people, I think the best that you can expect from it right now is it’s just an informed assistant. Mm-hmm. , it can do a lot of the legwork for you. You can do a lot of research for you, you can give you ideas to expand your thinking, but it, in the end, like you said, the first 10% and the last 10% are all you.

Mike Volkin (17:21): Yeah. AI is certainly not replacing anything. Um, but it certainly does help and the potential there for something more, you know, more development. Obviously ChatGPT 4 is awesome, but, you know, I think a lot of clients that come to me thinking that AI could solve their problems, and it’s really just more of a, a helpful tool to save money. It does cut down some of my time. Like if I need to, sure. You know, copyright a script or something real quick, I’ll throw it in the chat G B T before I hire a writer and I’ll hire the writer, look at it and review it type of thing. So it has certainly built some important processes in some businesses, but it’s certainly not replacing anything at least just yet. But it certainly will in the near future.

John Jantsch (17:56): One of my favorite content uses is, you know, you write a really great, you know, piece of content and then just let AI turn it into 18 formats. That’s right. So, so the writing’s good. The writing is yours, it’s original, it’s on point, you know, but then it takes that and gives you all the uses cut up. Yeah. Talk a little bit about, you mentioned this early on that you end up, because of your background, you’re able to actually kind of put your spin on some areas that people would think, well, that’s outside of marketing. I, you know, I tell people all the time, I think everything a business does is marketing, you know, , how they send out their invoices, you know, they’re hiring, I mean, their people obviously are, you know, are going to, you know, be a part of marketing or a part of the brand, you know, like it or not. How, how aggressively do you just say, Hey, we have to look at all these areas, or is it really a, because it could be, you know, it could be a really big rabbit hole to go down too sometimes for folks, but how important for you is it to address kind of the whole, you know, ecosystem of the business and how it impacts marketing?

Mike Volkin (18:55): Yeah, that’s a good question. So typically, I mean, there’s no less than three dozen different types of inbound marketing tactics and outbound, right? So, right. You can’t do them all at once or you’re gonna be spread too thin. So you have to look from a CMO standpoint, you have to look at the budget and also the resources. Like you can have the, a huge budget, but have no staff really to be able to execute it. So you have to balance that in with the, the strategy work you’re doing. But typically what I like to do is I like to have two, maybe three different marketing channels that a company is gonna perfect where they can say, I put in $10,000 in this marketing strategy and I got $40,000 r o i once you could do that repeatedly, then we move on to a different channel.

(19:32): And depending on your skills of your staff, we, it depends what, what channel we select, you know? I mean, if, if nobody likes to speak in front of a camera, I’m not gonna be selecting a YouTube strategy for you. Right? So, you know, that’s the kind of artwork that I don’t think AI is ever gonna be able to pick up, but that I come in as a CMO and I have to look at from both sides to say, okay, do we have the staff and resources, and then what channel do we pick based on that? So that’s the way I usually approach that. And I don’t usually have them do more than three different types of inbound marketing at once.

John Jantsch (20:00): So, so, so what about some of the areas that fall outside of that? So, I mean, we’ve all seen this, you, you know, you’re generating leads, they’re converting leads, and then, you know, service drops the ball and they’re going out the back door, you know, it’s like, oh, it’s marketing’s fault. You know, we’re not growing , right? Yeah. I mean, so how do you know, how do you stay disconnected or do you, you know, from that area that maybe isn’t seen as marketing?

Mike Volkin (20:25): Well, marketing, that’s a good question. Marketing and sales is always almost presented as one and the same for a company. Sure. Especially if it’s a sales led company. But honestly, before I ever launch a marketing campaign, I used to not, but now I do. I always look at the sales process, I’ll look at the sales conversions and I’ll, this guy isn’t cutting it, or this team isn’t cutting it, or they’re, they’re doing the wrong thing on the, on the calls to the clients. But ultimately you have to be able to, your scope of work, when you outline what needs to be done with the client, it has to clearly outline what marketing is and what sales is like. I just had a client the other day who wants me to hop on some, um, sales calls, and I’m like, I’ve never done that in my entire life. That’s not what marketing is. You just have to explain to ’em this is what marketing is and this is what sales is. And it’s different with every company. Sales isn’t necessarily sales from one company to the next. So in my contract that I send out to my clients, I have a, a long bulleted list of things that I do. And then I also have a, a list of things I don’t do in regards to sales, like taking phone calls from clients and customers.

John Jantsch (21:22): Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Mike, you wanna tell, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to drop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. You wanna tell people where they might connect with you and find out more about your work? Yeah,

Mike Volkin (21:31): Thanks. Always available for speaking gigs. mikevolkin.com, m i k e v o l k i n.com. And if you’re a marketing agency, you want some marketing strategy, my new website, yourmarketingexpert.ai.

John Jantsch (21:43): Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by the show and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road, Mike.

Mike Volkin (21:48): Alright, thanks so much, John. Talk to you soon. Hey,

John Jantsch (21:50): And one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com.co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketingassessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.

John Jantsch (00:00): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting? All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You could license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive. Look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you could have ’em today. Check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification.

(00:55): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Carol Roth. She is a recovering investment banker, entrepreneur, speaker, economic business, and financial commentator, content developer, and a New York Times best selling author. And we’re gonna talk about her latest book, which is also a New York Times bestseller called You Will Own Nothing: Your War With a New Financial World Order. So, Carol, welcome to the show.

Carol Roth (01:28): John, it’s so great to be with you and it’s so fun to be in this seat. ’cause I feel like so many times over the years when we’ve chatted, the roles have been reversed and I’ve gotta interview you. So like now I’m in the hot seat.

John Jantsch (01:38): Yeah, I think that’s right. So let’s just get it this little tiny financial world order topic that you tackled. what, what lit your fire?

Carol Roth (01:51): So I was in the media talking about lots of issues and you know, I’ve been an advocate for the underdog and for individual wealth for a long time. And I have people who are doing all the right things. You know, they’re working hard, they’re saving, they’re just like, why can’t I get ahead? Like, what’s going on here? And certainly, you know, over the past several years we’ve seen just this historic transfer of wealth from Main Street to Wall Street. We’re dealing with the debasement of the currency and all the impacts of that. And then all of these other wild topics are coming up, things like E S G and Social Credit and Central Bank digital currencies. And then Wall Street’s coming in to compete with you for a home. And kids are going to college but not getting returns. And so like all the people are like, what’s going on?

(02:38): What’s going on? And I’m like, I I don’t know, , hold on a second. And it just kind of hit me one day that two things, one that they all fell under this meme that had made its way around social media called You’ll Own Nothing. And I felt like that was a, a crazy tie that set the, the, the stage. But in terms of you’ll own nothing, there’s something that goes on through history that I think that is really central to the book. And that’s the shifting of the global financial order. And we’ve been at the center of the global financial order here in the United States for about 80 years. So for us we’re like, well, it’s never gonna be any different ’cause we’ve never known anything different. Yeah. And we’ve had this immense prosperity. But we have to remember that, you know, 80 plus years ago it was the British and before the British it was the Dutch.

(03:31): I would imagine that, you know, those citizens of those countries felt fairly invincible during that period of time. You’ve got the British Imperial Empire. Those people are going, this is gonna go on forever. I don’t know how things are gonna change. But we’ve seen a lot of those signposts that say, yeah, we’re getting long in the tooth. You know, we’ve got a, a crazy debt load as we’re recording this. We just saw the, the second US debt downgrade ever. We have a, a fed who hasn’t kept the currency stable for either the domestic or the the world stage. We’ve seen the weaponization of the US dollar, particularly against Russia as, as we invaded Ukraine. Uh, they invaded Ukraine and we froze their access to reserves. So we’re getting all these signposts that say, yeah, there are a lot of folks weren’t real happy with the US being the the leading superpower.

(04:24): And when that happens and you are wealthy and you are well connected, and you go, oh, things are shifting and changing, and I see this has happened throughout history, you go, well, I just hope this is gonna work out for me. Or you go, oh no, we better figure out a way so that we hold onto our wealth of power when this all shifts and, you know, let the chips fall where they may with everyone else. So I think that’s kind of the, the, the underlying foundational thesis of, of where the concepts of the book all kind of tie get tied together. And by the way, uh, you know, it’s not conspiratorial. I know everyone likes to say this is like a, a giant conspiracy theory. You go on the White House’s website right now, find President Biden’s speech to the Business Roundtable March 21st, 2022. And he talks about exactly this, that the change, you know, every three or four generations. And he says There is going to be a new world order out there that’s very easy to Google. So my hope was to take these things that kind of get, um, tinfoil headed , so to speak, and then bring them together with lots of resources and lots of citations in a way that help people make sense of what’s been happening and then give them a plan to fight back.

John Jantsch (05:37): So, so you spend a lot of time in the book, you know, unpacking all these things that are happening. Yeah. Is your intent in the book then that people create their own plan? Or is it just, hey, this guy’s falling in, you better duck

Carol Roth (05:51): ? Well, I’m a planner and I’m a fighter. So I, you know, that, that’s in the subtitle. You know, your plan to fight against this new financial world order is that I think that you can’t come up with a relevant plan. Right. Unless you know what’s coming at you. And so you have to empower yourself with the knowledge because you know, the, the stakes that might be changing for something like the, the levels of debt and, and, you know, internal promises of the US government are gonna be very different than say if we go to a central bank digital currency. So I think it’s important for us to understand these things. There’s also a ton of misinformation out there mm-hmm. . And so a lot of times things get poo-pooed because people understand like half of it and that have made up another half of it that doesn’t exist. And so the entire scenario gets thrown out the window instead of focusing on that part that really is true and, and, and is at issue. So the intention is, you know, 10 chapters of telling you, here are all the different things that are coming. And then one chapter of you, here’s what you can do now that you know all of this.

John Jantsch (06:58): Okay. So let’s unpack you through out some buzzwords, some terminology. Let’s unpack a few of those. Let’s just start with social credit. What is it and how does it play into this?

Carol Roth (07:07): So social credit is sort of a spectrum from cancel culture to what I would call informal social credit to what, what you have in China, which is a very formalized social credit system. So maybe the easiest way to understand it, just to start with China, there was a video making the rounds on social media over the past few weeks where, you know, all of a sudden someone got a call on their cell phone and a warning message started blaring. And it said the person who’s calling you owes lots of debt and they’re, you know, they, they have a bad social credit score and we would like for you, if you answer this phone call to please tell them to pay off their debts. , that’s one of many examples of what social credit is in China. It is a formalized system, although not quite as formalized as some people think.

(07:57): But you kind of on a jurisdiction by jurisdiction basis with letter grades or number grades that basically say, are you doing the things the government wants you to do and deems as appropriate and or are you not doing those things? And if you do those things, you get good marks. And if you don’t do those things, you get bad marks and there are severe penalties. You know, one of the stories I I told in the book came from N P R a gentleman by the name of LA Juan, who was a colon intermediary and the government in China changed its stance on coal and he went bankrupt. And, you know, they took away his ability to travel and the most Orwellian thing was they put his picture up on a billboard and it said, you know, here’s this person, here’s their unique name and number and they’re not a trustworthy person.

(08:44): So you take that and you go, okay, well that’s, you know, it’s the c C P and you kind of take what social credit is trying to do. And of course my book is coming at this from an economic lens. So, you know, outside of other things like freedom of speech and censorship, it attacks your social standing. Mm-hmm. . So those are your opportunities, ways that you get to make money and sort of participate in, in society. In some cases it attacks your job and doesn’t leave you with that source of income. In other cases it goes after your assets. You go, okay, well, you know, how is that happening here in the us? Well it, it’s happening very much in the us If you think about around Covid, regardless of whether you, where you stand on Covid, I’m not here to try to change anybody’s mind.

(09:29): I’m just telling you the reality of the situation that, you know, they were telling people not to show up for Thanksgiving and for Christmas they were saying if you didn’t have a vaccine that you couldn’t, you know, go into a restaurant, you know, once those opened by mandate and uh, participate in society, if you weren’t wearing a mask at Trader Joe’s, someone took a picture of you and ridiculed you on social media, maybe called your boss. These were all things meant to, to go after your social standing. Then we had a mandate that came out that actually took people’s jobs away. People who had been deemed heroes and who worked through crux of the pandemic while their people stayed home. Those people, whether they were nurses or uh, military or policemen or firemen, they ended up losing their jobs by mandate. And the mandates coerced big businesses, even if they weren’t by mandate, they didn’t wanna run a foul and get in trouble of making, you know, some people not, you know, be able to go to their job.

(10:29): And then we saw businesses actually shut down . So your assets were taken if you are a neighbors to the north and you were a trucker who participated in the freedom convoy, you had your bank accounts frozen. And so, you know, we see these kinds of things we certainly thought during covid, but we’re seeing it happen on an ongoing basis. If you say the wrong thing on social media or you act out in public, people are going after your financial standing. We saw with the Twitter files and, and information coming out of Facebook that the government’s actually coordinating on some of these cases. So you may not have that official number system yet, but you certainly do have the, if you’re doing the right things or the wrong things, whoever gets to decide what those might be that you’re finding, you know, what’s happening with you and then your financial opportunities gone after. And you know, you can go down the road. Dave Chappelle, Joe Rogan didn’t work for them ’cause they were super powerful, but a whole bunch of people where it did work.

John Jantsch (11:31): Hey, marketing agency owners, you know, I can teach you the keys to doubling your business in just 90 days or your money back. Sound interesting. All you have to do is license our three step process that it’s gonna allow you to make your competitors irrelevant, charge a premium for your services and scale perhaps without adding overhead. And here’s the best part. You can license this entire system for your agency by simply participating in an upcoming agency certification intensive look, why create the wheel? Use a set of tools that took us over 20 years to create. And you can have ’em today, check it out at dtm.world/certification. That’s dtm.world/certification. So if I’m sitting here thinking, oh my 401K’s fine, my financial advisor says I got enough money to retire. I mean, how do I draw back and look at the macro picture? Like, does the dollar, you know, destabilization, you know, how do I look at that macro picture? Do you see what I’m getting at? Yeah. So I, ’cause I think most people just look at their like, how’s this impacting me?

Carol Roth (12:41): Right? So I think there are two things and they sort of stand at odds with each other. One is, there is this anti ownership movement that you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy Wall Street’s competing with you for a house and they want you to think it’s for your convenience. You’re getting these articles of, oh you don’t need to have a car. You know, let us just, you know, enhance your transportation or take Uber we’ll share things and that’ll just work out for you. And I think that people need to understand that ownership is what drives wealth creation. That if you don’t have assets that have the opportunity to appreciate and value or at least retain their value, you don’t have

John Jantsch (13:22): Wealth or passed down generationally.

Carol Roth (13:23): Yeah. Passed down generationally. If something like the house is the biggest financial asset on households, balance sheets from a dollar value basis. So this is how middle class families sure retain wealth and pass them on. So if you go away from that ownership, you don’t have that wealth creation opportunity. But then going back to the, we just talked about with social credit, you also have all these other people that you’re beholden to. If you own your own house, you can pretty much do what you want in your own house, and maybe there’s an H O A or whatnot, but if there is a corporate owner who is now in tight with the government, they don’t want you to have a firearm. They want, you know, gas stoves to be banned. They want, you know, whatever it is, they have control of that. And I’m really worried you say something bad on social media, you get kicked out of your home .

(14:16): So that sounds super, you know, convenient and yolo and no, I’m gonna go live my life carefree. But I think people are really forgetting about the implications of that. So that’s one piece. The second is that , we are on this insane trajectory and that will have implications in terms of the US’ global financial standing. What I don’t know is duration in catalysts. If I knew this, if I could tell you exactly how long this was gonna take and what the catalyst was gonna be, John, I would be on a super yacht in the Mediterranean and not having this lovely discussion with you. So, you know, it’s easy to look back in history and go, oh, over this, you know, 50 year period this happened and over thousands of years, 50 years is a, a pretty small little, you know, enclave. For us living through it 50 years is, is a huge chunk of our lifetimes, right?

(15:15): So we have a different perspective. So I think it’s an awareness that there could be long-term inflation that eats in to the purchasing power of what you have. That tends to benefit again as we’ve seen over the last 15 years asset holders. And it tends to hurt people who are savers and retirees and people who are just trying to get by. So in that case it really lines up with the notion of ownership. But I think we also just have to have an awareness too that things could get crazier and you just have to be prepared for that. I use in the book, I, I nod to Saturday Night Live this wonderful skit that was done with Dan Akroyd pretend to be Gen Jimmy Carter. And he was like, wouldn’t you like to have a $500,000 car and we’re a $75,000 suit, everybody could be a millionaire.

(16:13): You’re joking that, you know, people don’t understand the difference between a top line number of purchasing power. And I think that’s just one of the things that people have to get their head wrapped around because if certain things happen in terms of the global financial order, it could impact the dollar standing and that could have implications on, you know, whether it’s your 401K or whatever else. Which is why I think it’s important to diversify, which by the way, John is financial advice. I would give people advice under any circumstances, but I think that looking at it through this lens, you know, gives it a sort of a different vibe and a different sense of urgency.

John Jantsch (16:53): Alright, so we don’t have time to cover all of this today. I’m not even gonna throw climate change in at you. Okay. But let’s talk about, and this is a topic that really, you know, I’m passing, my kids are all outta college. Fortunately they didn’t have to take on debt, but there are a heck of a lot of people that are coming outta college today going, I’ve got $300,000 worth of debt and I’m not really even sure I wanna do what I trained , you know Yeah. To do in college. How do we fix that one?

Carol Roth (17:24): All right, so I’m gonna talk about how we fix it going forward before we even try to address the people who are currently, you know, in the situation. Right? But you know, the government is the largest predatory lender in the country. And what they have done is they have taken minors and, you know, 18 year olds and they’ve saddled them with five and six figures worth of debt at a time when they don’t really have the financial, you know, wherewithal and the, the understanding to understand what they’re signing up for to make those decisions about things like return on investment, which is unfortunate given the fact that we fund the education system, but it’s just not a piece of that . And they really have transferred this wealth from young people to colleges and their administrators. I mean, the cost of college has exceeded the G D P and wage growth by a factor of five and eight times. And I always forget which one is which. But one of ’em, it’s five times one of, they’re

John Jantsch (18:20): Big, they’re both big. Yeah. It’s

Carol Roth (18:23): Exponential. It’s horrendous. So the more money going into colleges isn’t producing these amazing outcomes in terms of growing the economy or your individual opportunity. It’s just making the college administrators wealthier and letting them put more on the payroll. And it’s really despicable. So we need to go to a system where we get the government out of student lending and stop this free for all that’s going to the colleges. We need to have an underwriting process. Mm-hmm. , I mean, we value in the market an engineering degree different than a underwater basket weaving degree. You can sit and argue about it. And that’s not my case. To make my case is just the reality of that’s just how it works.

John Jantsch (19:05): So to pay except underwater basket weaving has got to be harder than being an engineer . I’m, I’m just gonna say it

Carol Roth (19:11): May take some engineering skills to be able to do that, Mike, but it probably doesn’t. Ward water warrants an $80,000 a year education to do that. Yep. So we need to get up to a point where there’s a bankruptcy process, there’s an underwriting process, and the colleges have some skin in the games to realign these forces so that it, the college is serving the purpose that everybody seems to think that it is, but that it actually isn’t. So that entire thing, and I just don’t understand from, you know, any party why we don’t have more people standing up and saying, you know, , your young people are getting ripped off and we’re transferring money and making colleges wealthy. We have to stop that. Like, that seems to me like a universal winning stance and it’s just, it’s despicable. And so what’s happening is that even though young people are coming out of school and they’re making more than the Gen Xes or, you know, boomers before them, even on an in place to adjust basis, they’re balance sheets are so wrecked by this debt that they just can’t get ahead of themselves. And so, you know, on top of all of the assets being inflated, they just, you know, can barely get themselves out of debt to be able to, to go through their lives on a, a normal basis. So that’s something that really everybody should be focused on because we want young people to be able to participate in the American dream. And if we have this highly educated population that has degrees that don’t have the value that they’re supposed to derive, something really needs to change. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:50): We didn’t even touch on so many of the items that are tied together to, so you’re gonna have to get the book if you wanna find, hopefully Carol scared the crap out of everybody and now you have to buy the book so that you can get the solution as well. Carol, you wanna invite people to connect with you. Obviously the book is available anywhere books are sold.

Carol Roth (21:09): Yes, books are available anywhere. Books are sold by a hard copy. You know, start walking the walk here and own physical things connecting with me. I am mostly on Twitter @Caroljsroth, but you can find me, you know, hanging out on LinkedIn from time to time or that Instagram place or whatnot. And yeah, I can’t believe John thought so quickly

John Jantsch (21:31): As I, I knew it would, you know, I do a lot of these interviews and obviously some o authors, uh, posed suggested questions. You, you had, I think it came at, at about eight pages of suggested questions. So, you know, clearly we touched on the surface of, of what’s, uh, involved in this. Can I, can

Carol Roth (21:47): I leave you guys with a marketing thing since this is a marketing podcast?

John Jantsch (21:51): Yes, do it.

Carol Roth (21:52): Okay. So I had somebody who was quoted in the book, his name was Andrew a Egan and he’s an estate planning attorney. And they did the best leveraging of pr. And this is what people need to do, is they put together a graphic and they say, congratulations Andrew Egan for being in the best New York Times bestselling book, you’ll own nothing. And put a whole thing about it. And they put this thing up on LinkedIn, which meant that not only is he getting the exposure in the book, but now everybody else knows that he’s an authority that’s in the book. And then of course I picked it up and re-shared it again, . And it’s a great reminder to people that if you’re going to do PR things, leverage them because you will get so much more mileage out of that than just, you know, hoping that somebody reads the book and calls.

John Jantsch (22:39): Yeah, no, no question. I’ve said all along that, you know, being a guest on podcasts is one of the best gigs going because the podcaster is very incentivized to make sure lots of people listen to your episode. So a absolutely 100%. Well, Carol was great, uh, catching up with you. I appreciate you taking a few moments to join us and, uh, hopefully we’ll run into you again, uh, soon, one of these days out there on the road.

Carol Roth (23:01): Always a pleasure.

John Jantsch (23:02): Hey, and one final thing before you go. You know how I talk about marketing strategy, strategy before tactics? Well, sometimes it can be hard to understand where you stand in that, what needs to be done with regard to creating a marketing strategy. So we created a free tool for you. It’s called the Marketing Strategy Assessment. You can find it @marketingassessment.co, not.com, dot co. Check out our free marketing assessment and learn where you are with your strategy today. That’s just marketing assessment.co. I’d love to chat with you about the results that you get.