John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network gain grow retain is built to inspire SaaS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to Gain, Grow, Retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:48): And welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jan and my guest today is Alex San Filippo. He is the host of the top rated podcast called podcasting made simple. He’s also the found of podcasts.com a software company focus specifically on the podcast industry, Alex and his team have created popular services like pod match, a service that matches podcast guests and hosts together for interviews and podcast. So P a project management tool that helps podcasters keep up with their episode releases. So guess what we’re gonna to talk about today,

Alex Sanfilippo (01:22): Alex? I’m guessing it’s gonna be podcasting, but I just have a hunch.

John Jantsch (01:25): We’re gonna talk to podcasters. Yeah. Welcome to the

Alex Sanfilippo (01:28): Show me, you know, I’m gonna tell a quick little story here. I’m gonna, I’m gonna hand it over to you cuz it is your show. But when I was getting ready to start podcasting, I looked up podcast episodes about podcasting and I actually found your show. It was an episode that you did with John Lee Dumas and it was titled everything you need to know about podcasting. It was actually May 1st, 2019 still holds up today. I went back and re-listened to it, but he talked about getting your hands, dirty, learning everything in podcasting, and you completely agreed with that. And that really shaped me as a podcaster early on. So I’m kinda a product of what you’ve done on this show. So thank you again for having me. This is like the biggest honor ever to be here, so thanks.

John Jantsch (02:02): Oh wow. Well, I, I always love to hear that a few words that I, uh, bale, you know, sometimes help people. So that’s awesome. So, so let’s hear a little bit about your journey. I mean, why focused on podcasting and podcast tools?

Alex Sanfilippo (02:15): Yeah. So before this, I have a long background in the aerospace industry and before somebody’s listening thinks I was somebody cool. I wasn’t an astronaut. I wasn’t a fighter pilot it and I wasn’t even a real engineer. I just worked behind a computer and, and basically ran operations for an organization. And I was working all way to a senior position and that company thoroughly enjoyed it. One thing about the aerospace industry and I’m not dogging the company I was with because they were a really nice group of people, but it’s a very competitive space. And after I think that year 12, I was like, you know what? I think I want some sort of change. And I think I wanna try being an entrepreneur cuz as a kid, I had a few interactions as an entrepreneur and I was like, I think I wanna go back to that.

Alex Sanfilippo (02:53): I really like that feeling. And so for me, John, not knowing what I was doing as an entrepreneur, I was like, I’m gonna start a podcast and talk to people who have successfully left a nine to five job and moved into some sort of entrepreneurship role. I’m like, I’m gonna, I’m gonna start doing that. And something I realized right when I got into podcasting, I mean, I just referenced your episode. Like that was free. I didn’t pay to listen to that. It’s such an abundant mindset area. Like, I mean this part of the world, I can’t even call it. Like even like I sort of marketing, like it’s just like the channel of podcasting for like lack of better term is just a great group of people. And I just saw this abundant mindset in the industry and I was like, you know what, I’m gonna go all in on this. Like I love this. So I stepped into podcasting, did a good job growing my show at that time. And the first chance, like I got to develop software for the industry, I jumped all in on that.

John Jantsch (03:41): So, you know, you mentioned something as I listen to you talk about it. I think one of the best ways, best motivations for getting into podcasting is something you just mentioned. I, you know, it’s, it almost started as a research project for you right? Talking to people. Same for me. I started my first couple episodes were with authors who were way more established than me, but I, I knew I could give them something a little bit of an audience and, but I really wanted to talk to them. You know, it wasn’t about like who’s listening or can I attract advertisers? It just became a vehicle. And I think that’s a really pure reason to start is,

Alex Sanfilippo (04:11): You know, I really think it is because here’s the one reason for that. And it’s the same for you. I’m willing to bet. You’re curious. So you ask really good questions. Even if you don’t have experience as an interviewer, you still ask good questions cuz you actually want to know the answer versus just what’s the next question I can ask this guy, right? Or this lady like how do I continue the conversation? No, it’s, you’re truly curious. And that makes for a great episode for somebody to listen to.

John Jantsch (04:34): I can’t tell you how many free coaching sessions I have acquired over the years from doing this. I’ve definitely had people on the show. I’m like, they really, really know how to do that. I wanna know how to do that. And Hey, maybe somebody will get some benefits,

Alex Sanfilippo (04:46): John guys like you or I ever get the bill from all these coaches we’ve had on we’re in some serious trouble.

John Jantsch (04:53): So, so, you know, here’s the burning question. We’ll get this out of the way. I, you know, there are billions of podcasts now. I don’t know what the real number is, but I’m just gonna go with billions. Should I start a podcast?

Alex Sanfilippo (05:04): Yeah, I think so. And you know, you had a great episode with Dan Franks, uh, on February 23rd, uh, 2022 that covered this question really well. Like is it too late to start a podcast? I say, no, it’s not. As long as you don’t go general. So I’m gonna add that to it. If you say I want to be the next and I hate that everyone gives this example, I’m gonna do it. You already know what name I’m gonna say, but if you wanna be the next Joe Rogan, it’s just not going to work. And I don’t say it to be negative or mean to anybody, but you’ve gotta have a very narrow, specific focus and not even go after all of the listeners, I’m doing air quotes there, but you know, all the listeners, the idea is to really hone in on what you’re looking for. And if that’s the case, I say starting a podcast is a great move for just about anybody or any company.

John Jantsch (05:44): Well, yeah, and I think one of the ways to really narrow it is, you know, I tell business owners all the time. I mean, who’s your target market start interviewing them. Yeah. That’ll be a great show because it’ll be great content for you. And who knows. You might actually stumble across somebody who could become a client. So it doesn’t have to be, as you said, you don’t have to say, I’m gonna take on the world of marketing. You know, even, I mean it, it can be really in your

Alex Sanfilippo (06:06): Backyard, you know, something else really interesting that you just mentioned there, I’ve never had this happen, but I used to hire a lot of people like in aerospace, like one of my primary things was hiring people for, it was a massive organization and I never once had this happen. But if somebody said, oh, I learned how to do marketing. Let’s just use that as an example, because I started a podcast and interview people about it. You can check it out here. I would’ve hired that person on the spot. Even if the podcast never had a listener, because that means they were really devoted to learning the craft in a way that I’d never seen anyone else do it. So something as simple as that, like think about like creatively, what a podcast could be for you. That’s one example that I just thought of off the top of my head. Like there’s many other applications I could have used there as well.

John Jantsch (06:44): So many people are familiar with this format that you and I are doing, cuz obviously they’re listeners and I’ve been interviewing people for years. What, what are some kind of out of the box formats that you’re seeing people do or even applications? I, I ran me the other day. They said that they’ve got, you know, a hundred employees and they’re distributed now and this just, they do a podcast that is purely an internal vehicle communication vehicle. So what are some things?

Alex Sanfilippo (07:09): Yeah, that one is really smart. I think we’re gonna see more and more of that. Even with small companies, cuz it just keeps the culture. Right? Everyone’s hearing it every day. That’s a smart one, one that’s like, I’ve not seen a lot of John, but I really wanna start saying more of is more of the, the story type podcast. Like right now you see like the big ones, like wander is a big network that does this. Yeah. They have like business awards as one of I really enjoy or NPR and it’s more like a story it’s got sound effects in it. I would love to see somebody do something more like that, but not such, such a big network, right? With just a few employees, maybe doing something like that. I think there’s a lot of room for growth there because the engagement is really solid on those.

Alex Sanfilippo (07:44): But that’s one type of podcast I’d actually love to hear more of now. I’m not ever gonna undersell the power of interview. Like this is the, in my mind, the most powerful form of podcasting. But the other thing is solo casting. And John, you probably know this about it. It can be hard to listen to. If they’re long episodes, they’ve got to be short, they’ve gotta have one single topic and the person has to have the right cadence. I’ve done a few solo episodes, but if I can be fully, fully transparent here, I think I talk too fast. So I think some people are like, oh my gosh, it’s so much information. But if you get somebody that has the right cadence with their voice and they can keep it really precise and really short, I think that there’s a lot of room in the solo world too.

John Jantsch (08:22): You know, it’s funny. And of course this is gonna sound like I’m patting myself on the back, but I, I do. I don’t know how often once a month maybe a solo show and I get more feedback from those from people because I Doty, typically take a topic and just teach on it. And so I do think sometimes the, the listener who’s out, it’s like, oh, that’s, you know, a different thing. They get, they feel like they take something away. Sometimes these interviews, you get great actionable things. Sometimes you just hear people kind of, you know, talking to each other.

Alex Sanfilippo (08:50): No, I I’d love to ask you a question on that because you’ve got a bit of a hybrid nut model. Now you’ve been interviewing since 2005 on this show, but then at some point you introduce the, the solo episodes. Do you find, like, you’re saying you get more feedback on ’em. Do you find that the audience also learns from those? Like, is it a good model to have like the, the hybrid? Is that something you’re gonna stick with?

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John Jantsch (10:05): I think I’m gonna stick with it because it, because of the feedback, you know, if I wasn’t getting positive affirmation, I’d probably say, oh, you know, I’m shedding listeners, you know, by doing those. But, but I don’t think exact that’s the case. In fact though, they get downloaded more too. So I think that, I think that it’s, you know, I don’t know if it’s an interruption to the people that are used to, you know, the normal thing. But I do think partly because of my style is I, I, I treat them almost like works many workshops. So, you know, I do give a lot of actionable things and you know, so hopefully people do, but whether, you know, that’s something I want to dive into. I is some of the, you know, the run of show, you know, kind of stuff. Um, I, I always think, find it funny when I look at somebody, you know, you go on iTune and you listen the length of all their shows and like one show’s five minutes, one’s 92 minutes. And I, I wonder if, you know, we get comfortable listening, like what to expect from a show. Do you feel like that’s a mistake to be kind of all over the place? You know, one time I’m gonna talk about this one time, I’m gonna go a lot longer. One time it’s gonna be me.

Alex Sanfilippo (11:06): You know, I think that podcast episodes should be as long as they’re good for, for lack of better term. Sure. Like as long as it’s good, it should be, it, it should continue to be an episode, but it’s better to have some sort of rhythm. I imagine if you’re watching a TV show, like let’s just compare it to that because a lot of people do that. If it’s Tuesday, like let’s go back when you couldn’t watch them in whenever you wanted. Right. But if it was Thursday at five 30, I remember it was like even a kid watching shows at that time. And my mom knew it was over at six. So I was guaranteed to sit down for dinner. I could start at five 30. She was fine with it. If that episode or that show was 40 minutes, sometimes 50, sometimes 10 sometimes.

Alex Sanfilippo (11:40): Yeah. She would say, no, you’re not watching that show because I don’t know when it’s gonna be over. And I think subconsciously many of us are still wired that way. So I think sure you can see the amount of time that it’s going to be. But I think that people are used to, okay, my commute, I get to listen to John. It’s always up the same amount of time or it’s gonna last just as long as my workout. I’m happy with that. But if people start having to feel like, oh, it’s over already or, oh man, this episode’s really long. I’m have to listen to it over three workouts. I think that’s a little bit of a problem. The consistency in the amount of time of a podcast I’ve seen with my numbers has always helped it. Now, granted, there’s always an exception I had in episode one, I think was 50 minutes or like 49 minutes in change. And all the rest are about 30, 35 minutes. That episode did well, but it was really good the entire time people stayed engaged with it. Yeah,

John Jantsch (12:23): Yeah. Yeah. I think to your first point, you know, it’s like people would say, how long should a video be? You know? Well, as long as you can be entertained right on a video and not, and most people can’t be entertaining very long. So I, you know, that’s always been my belief that people have listening behaviors and you know, they walk the dog or they run on the treadmill or something and, and that’s when they want to consume. And so you kind of established that habit. So it’s a little bit risky to break it up. I think a lot of people, I get a lot of questions for, you know, tech, the tech side of, of podcasting, where do wait, you know, there’s great blog posts. There’s great. You know, John Lee Dumas, I think you mentioned maybe at the, of the show. I can’t remember if we were recording it, but we mentioned John show

Alex Sanfilippo (13:06): We’re recording.

John Jantsch (13:06): Okay. And he, he really got his start in that pod, you know, podcast paradise or paradise podcast thing. So he was really heavily into teaching people that he’s got some rate info there. Where do you send people to, to kind of figure out the tech they need?

Alex Sanfilippo (13:18): So I use buzz sprout as my hosting provider, which most people that are familiar with podcasting these days, you have to have a hosting provider. Buzz sprout has a really good tutorial on how to start a podcast and they have all these subcategories. They’ve done a really good job, just building like the ultimate guide to launching a show and then understanding the, my problem, John. And you had an even bigger problem when you got started cuz of how long ago it was, there was no education out there when you started for me, it was figuring out what kind of mic I needed. Like there’s so many options out there. And I finally ended with one that, that has, I forget the name. I’m not the technical guy at all, but basically if I step two feet away from this mic, you can’t hear it. And when I started my podcast, I was in a condo.

Alex Sanfilippo (13:54): And so you have shared one. And at first I started with like a Yeti mic, which was a great mic. But if my neighbors were walking, you could hear it. If someone flushes the toilet, you can hear it. Right. Like I need, I didn’t have a true studio. So I need a mic that if you’re two feet away, you can’t hear it. Learning those things was a really tough thing for me. But now yeah, I think buzz, Sprout’s doing a good job with it. There’s a ton of YouTube channels now basically I’d look it up topically, but I do think still the number one piece of advice I give to people is to find somebody who’s experienced that you like their style that you’ve learned from. Yeah. And find a way to connect with that individual. Even if you pay them for a little bit of coaching time, I’m telling you can save thousands of dollars just by meeting with that person, getting their advice.

John Jantsch (14:33): Yeah. It’s funny. Um, you mentioned that, you know, back in the day kind of talk, it was actually not only hard to do a show, it was hard to get people to listen to a show. I mean, they, we didn’t have, you know, the apps on, you know, you

Alex Sanfilippo (14:45): Couldn’t even listen that wasn’t an option, right?

John Jantsch (14:48): Yeah. It was, we had pod catchers. You had to subscribe to a specific tool that you would, you know, log into then and you would, it you’d tell it what show you used. RSS feeds. You would tell it what show. And then you could listen to that show. But I mean, teaching people how to actually listen to your show was as much a battle as getting it recorded. So pretty, we, you know, this technology, you and I were recording on Riverside today. You know, we’re both using, I don’t know, $600 microphones that make us sound good. Uh, we’re recording ’em locally. You know, this show gets uploaded. Um, so that even if you and I have a bad connection, it, it still comes up, you know, crystal clear. So I mean the, you know, and, but I do think that I do think the expectations have been raised. Right. You know, when I first started it, people listen to a crappy show because what option did they have? But now, you know, you’ve got NPR in, in the game and you’ve got, you know, these professional studios in the game. So I think, uh, the, it is worth spending maybe twice what you thought you were gonna have to spend for some of the equipment. I think because people expect,

Alex Sanfilippo (15:47): Yeah. I, I completely agree with that. Talking about like the change of tools, like back in the day for casting, I mean, back in the day definitely meant 2005, but also meant 2018. When I started like just a few years in the past at this point, like the, the technology and the rate of change in podcasting is huge. And going back to what we were just talking about, I do recommend making a small upfront investment because you might for, this is my forever mic. I’ll be real. There’s better microphones out there, but I don’t, I’m never gonna need another microphone. I’m never gonna need another video camera. Like I’ve got all the tools that I need and it’s streamlined it so much. You kinda have to compare what’s it worth my time or my money. I will always rather spend money than give up my time. And thankfully that podcastings hit this point. Now the tools are just getting better and better that you just have to make that consideration for yourself, which would I rather do? And one little hint for somebody who’s listening. Like, oh, I don’t know if I wanna spend $500 on a mic right now in today’s world. You can almost sell a mic with, with, for what you bought it for. So you should be okay. Worst case scenario used something like Facebook marketplace and someone will pick it up tomorrow. So you’ll be okay. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:44): Yeah. Certain mics certainly hold their value. The, the part that probably a not of people don’t realize, they think, oh, you and I are talking, we recorded this. We’ve got a podcast. Right. But a lot depend upon how much editing you wanna do, how much stuff you wanna put into it. There can be a lot of post-production that, that goes into actually getting it to a point where somebody can listen to it on, on iTunes. The good news is we were talking about tools out there. They’re now complete services out there that will do that part of it for you. Which, and, and then I know at, uh, podcast pros you have, or podcast pros, I’m sorry. You have a, you actually even have some SOPs or a service where somebody can actually get kind of the here’s, you know, here’s some tools that streamline that. Talk a little bit about your postproduction

Alex Sanfilippo (17:30): Process. Yeah. So for the longest time, going back to that, that first episode of your show, I heard of about with JD talking about getting your hands dirty and learning it all. I learned it all. It was a mess, but when you do that, and you’ve said this as well, like you’re able to, when you know it, you can, you’re able to actually sub it out. Like, you know what you’re doing and you can save a lot of money by knowing these things up front. You don’t need to become the best in the world, but if you understand them, it’s easier to sub out. So I’m thankful to say, just after the second year of my podcast, I don’t touch any of that anymore. I don’t edit, I don’t even have the software on my computer anymore. None of it. And I’m thankful for that, but it all came from starting from a place of building an SOP, which stands for standard operating procedure.

Alex Sanfilippo (18:04): So basically knowing and documenting every step, you make a on the way. I mean, and I’m a little OCD with this stuff. So I even said like set up my mic, like, and after that, make sure that it sounds good, like every single step, but when I started going through and doing that, I went from being really stressed out and feeling like frantically like, oh no, did I forget anything that I missed something? Like, what am I doing here to being very organized of? Okay. Check done with that check done with that, having that available tells you what you can sub out pretty easily. And the way that I always start with that is I, I put how much time things would take me. So I started an Excel spreadsheet is what I did. And I’d organized it by the amount of time it was taking me to do stuff. And obviously the most time consuming part was editing. So my mind, the first thing I needed to sub out was editing. Cuz now I’m saving four hours a week by doing that. I was doing it one episode a week at that point with my show. But yeah, having all that organized and in one place is so helpful cuz it tells you, this is exactly what I need to do to make it to the next level.

John Jantsch (19:01): Yeah. And you, you know, obviously what you just explained is something that is a principle we need to bring to our businesses in general, every aspect of our business. And, and especially, I love the idea of how much time is it taking, cuz basically what you’re saying is how much money am I losing or how much money am I investing when I could be out, you know, networking or doing whatever probably makes me a lot more money. So it’s a great way to look at it. Let’s, let’s flip the, to the other side of the mic and that is being a guest on podcast. I’m, you know, I’m a huge fan of being guests on podcasts. I think today it, you know, it, it replaces guest blog posting in my mind because you know, those guest blog posts just get buried somewhere. Whereas, you know, I, I can just tell you, Alex, I’m gonna promote the crap out of this show. Right. Because I want people to listen to it. Right. And I’m gonna link to some, some resources that you tell me. So, you know, I think being a guest on a podcast is today. One of today’s best its audience it’s exposure, but it’s also backlinks too. So tell me how you view, because I know you have a little experience in matching people. So tell me how you view, you know, you know, not everybody needs to start a podcast. I think you can get a lot of benefit outta podcasting, but

Alex Sanfilippo (20:09): You know, I’m glad you brought that up. Cause earlier we talk about starting a podcast being really important. It, it’s not for everybody like you may, if someone was thinking about, and they’re listening to somebody be like, you know what, I don’t wanna do this, but then at least if you have a product service, something you’re trying to get out there, you’re a speaker, whatever. It might be a marketer of some sort, right. Uh, get on podcast is a guess. I think it’s a huge opportunity. The back links alone, as you know, John art. Um, amazing. I mean, when you have a link coming from apple to you or from Spotify or Amazon coming to your website, that looks good and we’re not gonna get into SEO obviously. But I think it’s a great way to grow your craft. As a matter of fact, I’ve been telling people recently, John don’t start a podcast until you’ve been on some, make sure you like the medium.

Alex Sanfilippo (20:49): Yeah. Make sure that you think you can actually add value. Make sure people like to listen to you, like make sure that it works out for you. Cause that’s a good way to test the water. But I think that being a guest on a podcast is so important, but here’s what matters. It’s not one size fits all. And I’m not saying that some podcasts are better than others, but I’m saying that some podcast are better for you than for others. Here’s the thing if you like golf, but you’re trying to, to, to explore like SEO marketing, don’t go on golf podcasts, right. Unless it’s just a hobby, you wanna do it for fun. Fine. But no, you need to find podcasts that are about marketing, but specifically SEO podcast. And don’t look for the biggest one. Like John, it’s an honor to be on your show today.

Alex Sanfilippo (21:25): But my target is you usually shows with under a hundred listeners, which maybe sounds crazy. But the way I view a podcast listener is not like social media. I view it as somebody sitting in a seat. And if you told me there’s a room right behind you, John, with a hundred people sitting in it or 50 people sitting in it that are interested in my exact expertise and topic, I would skip anything else in my life to make sure that I’m there. So I can speak to those people. That to me is the power of podcast guessing when you have the right niche in mind.

John Jantsch (21:51): Yeah. And, and, and there are so many shows, just like what you described. And in many cases, you know, you’re gonna have a better shot at getting on that show as well because they, you know, they obviously they want good quality content, I’m assuming, but you know, they’re not necessarily having household names on their show as well. So I think that, that it, it be better time spent for sure. I always like to ask people that are in certain, uh, industries, the future question. So let’s end today with kinda where do you see this going other than just continued

Alex Sanfilippo (22:22): Growth? Yeah. So the obvious answer of course is continued growth as you said, but there’s a specific reason that I bring that up and it’s because right now we are seeing an influx of marketing dollars hitting podcasting at an unprecedented rate. Yes. I mean, it is just flowing into podcasting right now. And along with that, the big players now we’ve got Amazon, we’ve got Google, we’ve got Spotify, YouTube just hired LinkedIn. LinkedIn,

John Jantsch (22:43): LinkedIn is doing a network now

Alex Sanfilippo (22:45): HubSpot as you’re very familiar with, but, but YouTube just hired a director of podcast, which is, is interesting for YouTube. And we actually show that Netflix got announced as well, that they hired a director of podcasting. So we don’t know what’s coming, but here’s the thing. All these big networks they’re focused on the top 500 shows out of everybody. And most of them are celebrities at this point, right? Like those are the big ones, but all the tools get better for the individual creators because that just drips down into the entire industry. That’s why I think that get being part of podcasting is really, it’s gonna be the future. And I think we’re gonna see more and more great things happen in the industry. So I think it’s an exciting time to be on either side of the mic right now.

John Jantsch (23:21): Yeah. So Alex, thanks so much for showing up and uh, at the duct tape marketing podcast and sharing your expertise and hopefully we’ll, uh, run a, into each other one of these days soon after

Alex Sanfilippo (23:32): I’m hoping. So John, I really appreciate time. It was absolutely an honor to be here. Thank you.

John Jantsch (23:36): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments and just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com And just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client’s tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network gain grow retain is built to inspire SaaS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about grow growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to gain, grow, retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:49): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Dale Bertrand. He has been an SEO specialist to fortune 500 companies in venture back startups around the world for two decades. He speaks in industry conferences, leads, corporate training events, and serves as entrepreneur in residents at the Harvard alumni entrepreneurs organization. So Dale, welcome to the show.

Dale Bertrand (01:17): Well, John, welcome to, well thank you for having me. I must welcome you to your own show.

John Jantsch (01:23): Well, I appreciate that. I don’t think anybody’s ever done that. So that that’s awesome. So, you know, we’re gonna talk about SEO. Uh, we’re gonna specifically talk about maybe a brand or an evolution of SEO, but it’s funny before we get into it, you know, a lot of people, you know, I bet you get this question a lot, you know, what are the big changes recently, you know, in SEO and, you know, I think SEOs, like a lot of things just kind of evolves, you know, like some of the big, like the, probably the biggest change, if there was one is, you know, rank brain, which really changed how SEO people need to think about SEO, but that’s coming up on seven years ago. So I think a lot of, a lot of people want to see like sudden change, but I think there’s this evolution, but I’m gonna ask you anyway, what are some of the biggest changes in SEO that, that you are following?

Dale Bertrand (02:11): Well, thinking of it as an evolution is definitely the right way to think about it. When I started with SEO, believe it or not was in 1999, long time ago. And, um, even back then we knew where the puck was going. So to speak, like, you know, the metaphor like skate to where the puck is going. So we’ve known for a very long time that what Google’s trying to do is help people find the right information, the answer to their question. So Google’s just getting a lot better at it with, um, AI and, and all of the different algorithms that, that the fall under the AI umbrella. So we, we call Google an AI based search engine now. And AI based search engines are just a lot better at choosing the right content for the query, giving you the right answer at scale than the rules based search engine, where, where Google started out

John Jantsch (03:00): Well. And I think you can test this for yourself. I mean, you start doing a search anymore and on nine times outta 10, they know what you’re searching for before you finish. Right? I mean, yeah,

Dale Bertrand (03:10): Yeah. They’ve got the data. I mean, they process billions of searches a day and every time you interact with Google, every time you enter something into it or click on a result, it’s watching you and Google’s using that to, to basically serve up better rankings.

John Jantsch (03:24): Yeah. And it really, you know, a lot of times people look at SEO as a way to trick Google, I guess. I mean, and that’s kind of how we used to look at it right. In some ways. And really the thing people forget is Google doesn’t care about us or our SEO or our websites. I mean, they’re trying to serve their customer, right?

Dale Bertrand (03:47): Yeah. That’s really important. And I think how you frame SEO and how you think about it matters a lot. So if you understand that you are trying to help Google serve its audience, its searchers, right. Help by giving Google the content that it needs. If you’re writing, let’s say you’re writing a recipe for a Manhattan or any other bourbon drink, right? Like Google has already has access to thousands and thousands of recipes for Manhattans. So like you’re just not giving it something useful. So that’s one way to think about it. And then the other part of it is,

John Jantsch (04:18): You know, it’s only two o’clock or I am Dale, but Manhattan sounds really good. I’m sorry, go ahead.

Dale Bertrand (04:24): I should a drink cocktail mixed box before this. So we could really have some fun and record it at the same time. So the other way people think about SEO is whether it’s like a technical discipline. Like people think of, well, I’m optimizing my website, so I’m moving the HTML tags around or I’m moving the elements around or, um, adding words like adding my keywords and, and that’s, what’s gonna make all the difference. And that’s really the biggest change that we see with the evolution that Google’s undergone as they switch to AI algorithms.

John Jantsch (04:56): So, so I’m taking this directly from something you’ve written the end of, uh, technical SEO doesn’t mean SEO’s dead. It means that your SEO resources are better spent optimizing for your customers, not Google’s algorithm.

Dale Bertrand (05:10): Absolutely. So Google’s algorithm is trained to find the right content to find the content that your customers are looking for when they’re making a buying decision. So the better, you know, your customers, uh, the information they need, the questions they’re asking and then how to answer those questions and give them the information they need to facilitate the purchase. Hopefully they buy from you, but the better you understand your customers and better, you’ll be able to create content that Google serves because Google’s doing like a damn good job of figuring it out nowadays does

John Jantsch (05:44): Do things like keywords in your titles and metadata and your URL to have a keyword. I mean, does that stuff not matter anymore because they know what it says.

Dale Bertrand (05:54): It’s not that it doesn’t matter. Like it it’s just that it makes it harder and easier at the same time. Like it’s simple, but it’s hard to do like, you know, just creating the right content, creating the content that your, um, customers are looking for, but you can really boil it down to a three step process. Like the first one is building your platform. So making sure that there isn’t anything very broken about your website that would prevent Google from calling your indexing, your content. So that doesn’t mean you’re optimizing for, to get the last millisecond of page speed on your site, but you’re fixing big issues that would prevent Google from seeing your content. And then the second step would be keyword, visibility. What are the right keywords? Make sure they’re in the right places. That’s different from keyword stuffing, or even making sure that, you know, you, you have, you have dispelling or synonym and all of that.

Dale Bertrand (06:43): Like it, it’s really more about the intent behind the keywords. You want people, you want purchase intent keywords. So yeah, whatever you sell, you wanna make sure these are keywords that people are typing in. When they’re trying to decide, you know, what they’re gonna buy in that category. And then the third step is really building targeted content and what I call multifactor authority. So the targeted content is the right type of content around the intent behind those keywords that you identified in the first step. And that could take a number of different forms, but it really depends on what you’re selling and what your customers are looking for us. So remember you need to know your customers. And then the other part, multifactor author is proving to Google that you have the answer. So if I’m writing about I’m making something up here, non-alcoholic drink recipes or something like that because I sell non-alcoholic, um, spirit.

Dale Bertrand (07:35): Then Google needs to believe that we are the brand. We’re the website that that information should be coming from. And so that’s back links, that’s engagement with the site, reducing your bounce rate, making sure that when people come to your site, they stay, cuz Google will notice if they just bounce directly back to Google’s, uh, search page and then the company you keep matters. So like if you were selling non-alcoholic drinks, you could imagine that there are a number of medical or organizations or mothers against drunk driving that would care about the mission behind your product. And you wanna make sure that Google can see that you’ve got endorsements of all types. You can imagine from authoritative folks in your space.

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John Jantsch (09:11): And I know the answer to this, but you know, I’m just gonna tee it up for you. Okay. So, so some might interpret what you just said as getting back links, but you’re talking about something much deeper, aren’t you?

Dale Bertrand (09:22): Yeah. So back links are still important and you know, we work to get white hat, you know, to sorry we work to earn back links, um, on our projects. So that could be PR, but a lot of it is just making sure that you’re running a good business. So you’ve got customers that are raving about you. You’ve got products worth writing about, and your business is making an impact with your customers or a community or something, uh, where Google can see that you’re gaining traction. So, so that’s why it goes beyond back links. Because if you think about it back links are really a proxy for something there, a proxy for endorsements in your space, in your market. The, if you’re maybe you’re in the medical space and you’ve got the Mayo clinic, you know, writing about you, you might have a partnership with them. And an artifact of that is the fact that they’re linking to you. Yeah. So, so we wanna start on, we wanna start with the run, a good business, make good friends, you know, make you earn those endorsement. And then once, once we have that, then we’re looking at ways to translate those into technical artifacts on the web that Google can see.

John Jantsch (10:25): And, and certainly one of the things that they can see better than ever is that they’re the right links, right? There’s they’re links back links. That make sense. That would be logical, that would actually contribute to the conversation, you know, as opposed the, you know, round Robin directories that, you know, nobody ever actually sees and they have no authority at all. I mean, that, I think has been something that’s been with us maybe at least five or six years, hasn’t it?

Dale Bertrand (10:47): Oh, longer than that. So I, I should know because we, I mean, I was doing, I’ve been doing SEO for a very long time. So there used to be black hat techniques that worked and, and we did it because it worked nowadays. It just, they have to be natural links. Like you really do need to be building a community around your brand and content. A lot of it depends on whether you’re B2C or B2B. If your B2C, you want to build a community, um, around your brand, get traction and make sure Google can see it. And then if your B2B, then the number searches is gonna be lower, just gonna be lower volume, but still they’re gonna be valuable. Organic traffic is valuable. But in that case, it’s more that you want to make sure that Google can see the company you keep so that you’re, you’ve got relationships with the industry trade organizations and conferences. And if you’re in the medical space, it’s PhDs, sorry, MDs or MD PhDs, which is even better and what, whatever works in your industry.

John Jantsch (11:42): So there’s really a lot of elements here. I mean, there is the technical aspects of content of website that, that lead SEO there’s the, the actual good deep content itself. But then in a way it’s actually promotion of that content, you know, to the right audiences that, that then drives, you know, the right links or drives the right mentions or right. Traffic. So, I mean, do you see it that way as almost like three disciplines?

Dale Bertrand (12:11): I, I try. So, yes, but I try not to. So when it comes to like a, a successful SEO campaign, there’s gonna be a lot of elements. Like you said, the technical platform, keyword research, the customer research, the content, and then the authority building. And then there’s, you know, there’s PR within that, there’s a lot of dis disciplines within that, but it’s really hard, especially for small business owners to think about, uh, to, to even, you know, have the courage to do SEO when it requires so much. So instead. And, and I, I think I learned about this, John sitting next to you at a dinner a long time ago, where you kind of helped me simplify some of my ideas, the way that I like to think about it. We, you have a purpose behind your SEO and what I, and when I say you have a purpose behind your SEO is that you’ve got a purpose behind your brand, a purpose behind your business. And, and a quick example, I’ll give you is that we worked with a company that was a manufacturing company and what they manufactured was Velcro straps. And it it’s pretty darn boring. And I hope they’re not listening to this cause they get excited about manufacturing. It’s run by two engineers. And these Velcro strap are used by electricians. If you’re installing bundles of wires into a big building, you need a lot of these Velcro straps to make sure that it’s not spaghetti of wires everywhere. I

John Jantsch (13:23): Got a few of ’em here with all my technology that hooked up here.

Dale Bertrand (13:26): Perfect, perfect. And for them, we, they wanted to do SEO. They wanted to build content, but what were they gonna do? They gonna write 50 articles about like, Hey, Velcro’s awesome. For all these reasons, we’ll write one article about each reason. So you could do that, but it’s not gonna help you build a community, build authority and have Google see that you’re gaining traction. So what, what we realized when we were talking to them is one of the founders of this company was he was volunteering weekends at a technical high school near, near where they’re located. And so what we did was we put together a campaign. We called it the campaign to recruit the next generation of electricians. And basically it was, you know, they were going to identify young people, help them pay for some exams, some licensure, and also help them put a little bit of money towards their schooling.

Dale Bertrand (14:15): And what we did was we promoted that campaign. We said, Hey, if you care, and we reached out to like-minded organizations like organizations that care about providing, you know, job opportunities for young people. And there was one that was about finding job opportunities for recently incarcerated people. And we told them like, we’re looking for kids to help. Could you help promote this campaign? And basically when we look at it that way, and the reason why I call it purpose driven SEO is because we wanna find something behind our brand that we can promote and build a campaign around. And then we get all of those other artifacts of SEO, the, the content, the technical platform, the traction, the links, the authority building the, the endorsements of like relationships with other organizations that are helping us promote our campaign. We get all of that by just focusing on this one purpose. So that, that’s why I like to think of, uh, SEO campaigns as like purpose driven SEO campaigns.

John Jantsch (15:11): And, and I love that. And before people think, oh, I have to learn this new, you know, tactic or this new technique. What you just described is what people like me were doing in the eighties. Right. It was just PR and community building, but we pitched a newspaper, you know, or we went out to a nonprofit agency and got them, you know, to partner what? So, so the more things change, the more they say the same, I mean, yeah,

Dale Bertrand (15:35): Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:36): Human influence hasn’t really changed or what people’s desires are or what lights them up. Hasn’t changed. We just have to figure out now they’re on different journeys. They’re, they’re in different platforms, they’re in different places to get their information differently. And we just have to, we have to just remember those principles. Yeah. And then apply it to the technology. Don’t we,

Dale Bertrand (15:56): And then also realized that there was a hiccup in the fabric of time in the marketing space where all of a sudden these technical people, I have a technical background. I was a programmer before I started doing SEO, but technical people for all of a sudden had all this value because the web came along. And if you could optimize a website, just write or get your programmer to do it, you would get traffic from Google. Yeah. And, and those days are, are really behind us. Yeah. Where like Google’s AI has gotten to the point where it understands when a brand is building traction or if, or if you like sell a B2B service or something like that. When you have, have endorsements and relationships with folks in your space that makes you worthy of organic traffic and rankings. So now Google’s getting like, it’s just getting so good at what they do that we’re reverting back to actually generating the, the right content that your customers are looking for and proving to Google that you’re authoritative in your space.

John Jantsch (16:52): So, so that example that you gave you, you give that a name or at least a point of view, which I think people I’d love you to kind of riff on this a little bit, because I think people need to acknowledge this and, and think about this more and you call it promoting the story, you know, not promoting your content or not promoting your products or your, you know, web pages or whatever, but promoting kind of the whole story, which to me was that was the technical, you know, school, you know, story that, that people got interested in and the byproduct was you got links and you got traffic and you got eyeballs.

Dale Bertrand (17:29): Yeah, exactly. That’s what Google is, is looking. So just think of it as like brands that are building traction or building like an audience. And if you can show that initial uptick, then Google will give you the rest of the traffic and kind of have to help you go along that trajectory help you grow along that trajectory.

John Jantsch (17:47): So one of the elements of this kind of authority ideas is actually finding and activating influencers. I mean, people that you, you know, we all think about the, oh, you know, the top 10 names, every single person can name. Sure. We want them to talk about us and our stories and, uh, content. But you know, for that you’re Velcro person, Gary V talking about them is probably not gonna really do a much good, you know, how, how does the Velcro, you know, manufacturer go out there and find the right influencers to, to talk about their story.

Dale Bertrand (18:17): So what you would love is if it was your customers and it depends a lot of it depends on what you sell. So you could be in a consumer space where you’re basically, um, you’re basically incentivizing and your customers to, to be brand evangelists and talk about the products, review the products, whatever you can do to get them to do that would work. It could be an ambassador program. And then in the B2B space, it, it might not be your customers. Another example I gave is we work with the 3d printing company that sold, you know, multimillion dollar high end 3d prints, but there’s just not enough customers to really, you know, turn that into links and, and relationships that Google would see. So we focused on 3d printing hobbyists in order to generate content and build a community around the brand, even though what we were selling and making our money off was high end 3d printing machines that, that they could never afford. But we were able to build a community around the brand that Google saw and, and generated rankings in traffic.

John Jantsch (19:15): So I, I have kind of one final question that I’m just curious your opinion on this, cuz there’s a lot of various opinions, you know, on, on SEO related sites, how valuable are signals in social media. So people linking from Twitter, people talking about your brand from a pure SEO standpoint, how valuable are those?

Dale Bertrand (19:37): So there’s two answers, both are correct, which is the direct value of the links. And the mention is not valuable. Yeah. But we still use social media as a tool for PR, which helps us build real relationships, get back links on, on websites that Google can see stuff like that. And we know that it’s not valuable cuz short version of the story, Bing had tried to use social media instead of back links because Google started out, you know, really focused on back links to determine authority and the best websites. And when Microsoft started its search engine, they said, oh, we’re gonna do it better. We’re gonna rely on social media. And it just didn’t work. Yeah. So they abandoned it. They went to links just like Google and now Google and, and Microsoft are both trying to figure out how to incorporate social signals. But uh, apparently what we see in the research is that it it’s just not, it’s just not good. Like it doesn’t help them. I identify the best content, the same way back links, engagement, and these other artifacts of real world relationships too.

John Jantsch (20:41): So Dale tell people where they can find out more about fire and spark and uh, the work that you’re uh, doing.

Dale Bertrand (20:48): Yeah. So we’re at fire and spark.com all spelled out and you can email me directly Dale, D a L E fire and spark.com um, all spelled out. And um, always, I, I love talking about SEO. So if anybody has any SEO questions, I’m, I’m happy to hear it.

John Jantsch (21:03): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you, uh, taking a moment to stop by dot tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road again, maybe in beautiful, uh, state of Maine.

Dale Bertrand (21:12): Awesome, John, and thank you for the opportunity.

John Jantsch (21:15): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in. Feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also. Did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little. And in that tab that says training for your team.

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network Gain Grow Retain is built to inspire SAS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to gain, grow, retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:50): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today’s Whitney Johnson. She’s a CEO of the tech enabled talent development company, Disruption Advisor, one of the top 10 business thinkers in the world as named by thinkers 50. She’s an expert at smart growth leadership. She co-founded the disruptive innovation fund with Harvard business schools late Clayton Christensen. And she’s the author of a book we’re gonna talk about today. Smart growth, how to grow your people to grow your company. So Whitney, welcome to the show,

Whitney Johnson (01:24): John, thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:26): So Clayton Christensen is probably the person that, you know, people that have been doing this as long as me hold up there as like that’s the first person that like said stuff that made sense to me. So, so let’s start with the S-curve then. And just kind of, I I’m sure a lot of people have been exposed to it in various statistics classes or something along those lines, but let’s talk about how you’re applying it to, to growth and to leadership.

Whitney Johnson (01:49): Yeah, so I was exposed to it in investing with Clayton. So we all have our, our place that we learned about it and it’s been around for a hundred years and we used it to help us figure out how quickly an innovation would be ado and trying to make investment, buy and decisions. And as we were applying it for investing, I had this insight that we could use the S curve, not only to think about how groups change over time, but how individuals change over time. Yeah. And every time you start something new, you start a new project, start a new job. You are at the base of that S and growth is happening, but it’s gonna feel until you reach a tipping point or the near the curve, and you move into the sweet spot that steep, sleek back of the curve, right? And then you reach this place called mastery where growth starts to taper off. And my aha was is that we could use it to understand the emotional arc of growth. And when we take on something new, it allows us to say, okay, if I know where I am in my growth, I know what’s next. So that’s how I’m applying it.

John Jantsch (02:48): So unfortunately, you know, while a lot of people accept this idea of yes, oh, there’s this point where it takes off, you know, there’s a lot of times, that’s the point where it actually dives nose dives too. Right. We get through the hard part and now we’ve kind of outgrown our abilities. D does that, do you see that happening with personal development in the same way?

Whitney Johnson (03:07): Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things that was interesting to me is as you have now, surmised, I’m very steeped in disruptive innovation. And what we saw with disruption is that even if you were going to pursue a disruptive course and your odds of success increased by six times that went from 6% to 36%. So there was still a 64% chance that it wasn’t going to work. And it’s going to be similar. When you decide I’m going to jump to this brand new S curve, I’m going to do something new. Are, there’s a large possibility that you’ll decide this curve isn’t for me, or this is not going to work. And so one of the things that I recommend is at the launch point, you have this Explorer phase of deciding, do I even want to be here? Whether you decided to jump or were pushed, but then you’ve gotta go through this collection phase. Yeah. And that’s that place where say, I do wanna be here, but can I get the resources that I need from this ecosystem in order to accelerate into the sweet spot?

John Jantsch (04:09): So I’ve owned my own business for, um, coming up on 30 years. And one of the things I’ve realized is that I’m constantly in about 47 S curves at any given time is what it feels like to me. I don’t feel like there’s one S curve of growth. Yeah. I feel like there’s everywhere. So how do, I mean, I think it’s, I think it’s easy for people to sort of oversimplify this idea of, oh, here’s where we are on the curve. But how do, I mean, what, what’s your view of, I mean, do you feel like that’s a reality or is that just me being psychotic?

Whitney Johnson (04:40): I, I think that the S curve is a fractal that you can think of your life as an S-curve. You can think of your career as an S-curve. You can think of a job as an S curve. And then within that job, you’ve got roles and then projects. And so you can continue to drill down. And to your question specifically, once you start to say, okay, well, where am I in my, I roll on the S curve overall, everything that’s required of me, but it very much is a portfolio of curves that you are going to have a number of different curves that you’re on within your work. And if most of them allow for you to be in the sweet spot, then you can say in aggregate, you’re in the sweet spot. And if you think about your life, you’re balancing your portfolio of S curves where you’ve got your career. Maybe it’s a really steep curve. So in your personal life, maybe you don’t want quite as steep of a curve. So you’re putting together that portfolio. I have a background in investing. So I do think in portfolios to answer your question, yes, we’re on multiple curves. You want to balance them. So you’re not, you know, only on the launch point for all of your curves or only in mastery to, to create that balanced portfolio.

John Jantsch (05:45): I’ve, I’ve actually referred to it as seasons. I feel like, you know, businesses go through seasons. You know, they’re not, they’re not annual linear necessarily, but they’re, I think it’s kind of what you’re describing. Isn’t it? It’s like, okay, now we’re in this gathering, you know, period, you know, because then that’s gonna produce, you know, fruit. I feel like that is something almost tangible.

Whitney Johnson (06:05): Oh, I love that. I love that metaphor. So, and I love talking about growth. And as you can see our, our listeners, can’t see, but I’ve got behind me, botanical prints of strawberries and peaches because we’ve grow raspberries and strawberries, et cetera. But if you, if you wanted to pull that metaphor, you could argue that the launch point that’s the spring and that’s the time where you are planting. And then you’re going to move into the summer, which is a sweet spot where you’ve got that bountiful, you know, everything’s growing, and then you’re gonna start to harvest when you get into master. And then when that decision’s made to do something new, you’re gonna go dormant. There’s gonna, there’s this period of latency where you’re quiet and it’s the winter. As you start to think about moving to your new curve.

John Jantsch (06:50): So, so the subtitle of the book, how to grow your people to grow your company would imply that this is a book about leadership. I will tell you that as I read it, I was like, no, this is about personal development. So that is

Whitney Johnson (07:03): That, oh, you are very astute. It’s both. Yeah. Let me tell you there, there was a study that came out recently from a ego Zender that surveyed a thousand CEOs and the thousand CEOs wrongly agreed that to transform the organization, they needed to transform themselves. Sure. 80% strongly agreed. And so my whole premise, my thesis is that if you want to lead an organization and we talk a lot about how to grow your team and grow your organization in the book, but it always starts with you the fundamental unit of growth as the individual. And so I purposely wrote this book so that if you only care about personal growth, then you just read the narrative and you can get that. But if you do care about growing your team and your organization, then we’ve got these interludes that are very practical, very actionable on how to do that. But yes, you are, right. This starts with you as a, the individual.

John Jantsch (07:59): Yeah. Cause really, without a great deal of self-awareness, you’re probably not gonna be a great leader, right?

Whitney Johnson (08:04): No.

John Jantsch (08:06): So are there some, I I’m sure this is like a lot of things, you know, people read this book, go, we’ve gotta do this, you know, at our company. Right. So what are some of the first kind of new habits or questions maybe that, that people need to start asking themselves as you know, instead of just saying, okay, this is the new way.

Whitney Johnson (08:26): Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I love that question because I believe in setting small, ridiculously small goals, I read atomic habits and you probably did two. I was

John Jantsch (08:37): One of my questions actually.

Whitney Johnson (08:38): Well, there you go. Yeah. So what I recommend you do is if you find yourself thinking, oh, this model makes sense to me. Yeah. And it is purposely simple. It is purposely visual because that makes it useful. What I would say to you is just get out a piece of paper and draw the S and say to yourself, where am I on this? S yeah. And then have a conversation with a person, a colleague, a person on your team and say, where do you think you are on the S now we have an assessment tool that you can use, but you ask me a simple way to start. Yeah. That’s where you’d start is you draw it out, you have a conversation, and then you can plot where your team is. But that initial spark of just drawing that curve and talking about where do you think you are, that orients yourself, orients, you orient your team, and you can start to have a very robust conversation about growth and the growth upside you see in this role in your organization.

John Jantsch (09:35): So this leads me to my James clear moment, as a matter of fact. So you just talked about orienting yourself and I, and I suspect that there is a point, I, I think people probably can orient themselves in the sweet spot and they probably can orient themselves into getting started. It’s that messy middle, that sometimes is really long boring slog. And one of the things that that James puts in, in atomic habits is that a lot of times people are successful. Not cuz they have better goals, but because they can tolerate boredom because that’s a lot of what it, you know, we get tired of the stuff. We don’t wanna do it anymore, even if it’s working. So, you know, how, what, what advice do you first off, I guess I have to ask you if you agree with that assessment, but if you do, you know what, you know, what does allow people to get through that long part where you’re not seeing any advancement necessarily? And so you don’t really know where you are.

Whitney Johnson (10:25): Yeah. It’s a great question. And what I would say is I wouldn’t necessarily call that the messy middle, cuz I think when you’re in the sweet spot, that’s where you’re exhilarated and you’ve got this optimized tension of it’s hard, but not too hard. So you’re feeling this sense of, of competence and autonomy and relatedness. I think what you’re referring to is when you’re at the launch point and you’ve made the decision, Hey, I’m gonna do this and growth is happening, but it’s not yet apparent. It’s like the, the Lily pads in a pond, like there’s one and then there’s two and there’s four, but ah, there’s not very many pads in the pond. And so what I recommend you do there is number one is know psychologically what’s happening is that you are at the launch point. It is going to feel like a slog.

Whitney Johnson (11:12): And that helps you talk yourself through the impatience that you feel. But then to your James clear our James clear moment to make things clear is if you think about what’s happening in your brain, whenever you do something new, you’re running a predictive model. And so with the launch point, you’re running this model and you’re making lots of predictions, most of which are inaccurate. And so your dopamine is dropping a lot and that is not fun. And so what you can do is you can set those small ridiculously small goals. Like for example, I’m learning Korean right now. Am I studying well because I love KRAS, but am I studying 30 minutes a day? No, I have an app. I pull out dual lingo and maybe I do 30 seconds a day and maybe I do three minutes. Yeah. Wow. I’ve done it for 103 straight days. Yeah. And so what happens is when that goal is really small, you can hit it every day. You can oftentimes beat it. And when you beat goals, guess what happens, dopamine ding. And so it’s that ability to have those small goals, beat those small goals at the launch point that allows you to basically gamify it and move through the slog of that place where growth is not apparent until you hit that sweet spot and things become exhilarating.

John Jantsch (12:27): And now let’s hear from a sponsor. Running a business is a lot like, I don’t know, running a pirate ship. You’ve got your eye on the prize and the entire crew to coordinate with customizable options. HubSpot CRM platform is carefully crafted in-house so your business can keep running in ship shape. It’s powerful suite of marketing tools work seamlessly together. So you and your teams can deliver a better experience for your customers. Consider it treasure map with a very clear X marks, the spot with HubSpot, save, reuse, and share your best performing emails with your team for a faster and more consistent way to communicate with prospects. Use social media tools to schedule and publish updates, monitor terms and analyze performance. You can even use bot bill to create robust, automated multi-channel campaigns, learn how to grow better by connecting your people, your customers, and your business @ hubspot.com.

John Jantsch (13:25): So you have a lot of you break kind of the stages down into a lot of things that you should be doing or paying attention to. Or I talked about maybe new habits and I’ll just let you, um, kind of talk about how it applies is collect like a child. You know, I’ve always told people, I think curiosity is really, you know, my superpower. I mean, I’d love to see how things start, how they work, why they don’t work, why something is outta place. And so that to me, I was like, well, yeah, I just do that instinctively, but talk a little bit about that. How elite, you know, or somebody trying to develop personally can apply that idea.

Whitney Johnson (13:59): Well, first of all, I want to flag for you. That is a superpower. Whenever someone says, Hey, I just do this instinctively that is telling me, oh yeah, that’s a strength. Not everybody does that just a reminder. Yes. So just wanna wanna say that one of the thing is that a child does that around the curiosity is first of all, they, and we would go into something and say, I just want to understand what this is. I just want to figure this out. And at that point there’s very little ego and your identity is not on the line. And so for example, I can remember when I was three or four years old, our family had gone to see the sound of music and I came home and we had an upright piano and I started to figure out how do I play do Rayme on the piano?

Whitney Johnson (14:48): There was no question in my mind of like, will I not be able to do it? Will I look dumb if I can’t figure it out? None of that identity ego was part of the equation. And so collecting like a child is to be at the launch point and say, I like this curve. I, I want to be here. I now have to get the data that would tell me, can I get the resources that I need? And, and I’m gonna be able to gain momentum here and just to collect that data and not have it be a referendum on your identity. It’s just data. Can I get the resources? Do I enjoy this? If the answer is yes, then I keep going. If the answer is no, then I stop. It’s not about my ego. It’s just about iterating and learning and grow, growing and developing. And so that’s the collecting like a child where the ego is out of the equation.

John Jantsch (15:37): So, so it may actually be a superpower. My parents didn’t always think it was

Whitney Johnson (15:41): Then it definitely is.

John Jantsch (15:43): So you, you know, the personal development part, I think, you know, people are gonna grow by reading this book. The leadership part in ways is, might be harder to install in an organization because there’s so many, there’s so many culture aspects that I’m, that keep coming up for me as, you know, just that collect like a child, giving people a permission to do that. Doesn’t always happen at organizations. Does it?

Whitney Johnson (16:06): Yeah, no it doesn’t. And I think that one of the things that is increasingly a it to me, the more experienced I get in life is that so often we’ll say, well, I think this using this as a tool to think about growth is a great idea, but can you persuade my manager? Right? And the answer is, no, I can’t persuade your manager. Um, but you can. And the way that you can is if you will start with you and if you will start to implement this idea with the people on your team. Yeah. And to collect those data points, because when you are persuading someone to do something new, you are effectively asking them to jump to a new S curve, which is scary. They don’t want to do it. And so what you’re doing is you’re packing a parachute for them to make it safe for them to do that new a thing. Yeah. And you make it safe by you being a Proofpoint by being the people on your team, being a Proofpoint and something as simple as drawing an S and having a conversation. That’s not very scary. Yeah. That’s pretty easy to do. And so you have more control than you think you do, and start with something so simple. So ridiculously it’s pretty tough to say, well, I don’t wanna listen. No, it’s something simple. You can start there.

John Jantsch (17:20): So you filled this book with a lot of interviews of people that you talked to that, you know, kind of are, are doing some of this. This is probably a difficult question. So I’ll let you break it up. If you want, you know, is there a story in the book or is there a person that you’ve talked to since, you know, reading the book, even that you feel like has really kind of nailed this approach and brought this approach to their organization and it’s made a difference.

Whitney Johnson (17:42): Yeah, I do actually. So, and they’re not in the book. So it’s a company called Chatbooks. They’re in Provo, Utah, and they turn Instagram photos into, oh yeah. Or actually Lehigh, Utah, they turn Instagram photos into books and they have been around for about seven years. It’s a great culture. People like to work there. And because people like to work there, they had a lot of people who were getting to the top of the Sur, they were reaching mastery. And, and so we administered our S-curve tool. And our CEO said, Whitney, this is really helpful because it’s giving us a language to talk about our experience. Three examples specifically what happened? One person, the chief marketing officer said, now I understand the experience I’m having. It’s not that I don’t like working here. It’s not that I don’t like you as a boss. It’s just that I’m at the top of my curve.

Whitney Johnson (18:28): I’m not growing anymore. Right. I need to do something new. And so it de personalized her jumping to a new curve at a different company. In another instance, you had the president who was presumably on a new curve, but he was bumping up against the scope of the CEO that allowed them to have a conversation said, Hey, CEO, go jump to your curve. So that I’ve got headroom on my curve. Again, allowed them to have a conversation. And then the third thing that happened was the CTO who had been there for several years, was taking on some new responsibilities that were putting him at the launch point. And he was kind of uncomfortable, cuz he’s supposed to be the expert. Yeah. He gave him a way to say, Hey, everybody doing something new, I’m at the launch point, it’s supposed to be uncomfortable and awkward and gangly. And it gave him permission. And then also could talk his team through that. And so very simple language to talk about the experience that people were having.

John Jantsch (19:25): Well, that’s, that’s such a great example too, because very different outcomes for all of them, but all of them, you, even if they were painful because they caused change all of them very positive.

Whitney Johnson (19:35): Right?

John Jantsch (19:36): Yeah. That’s awesome. So, so wouldn’t you tell people where they can find out, I know the book’s available anywhere, but where they can find out more about your work as well.

Whitney Johnson (19:43): Yeah. Thank you for asking. So one easy place is to go to Whitney johnson.com and or our podcast disrupt yourself. But Whitney johnson.com is the easiest place to start.

John Jantsch (19:55): Awesome. Well, I appreciate you taking the time out to stop by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we’ll run into you in person one of these days out there on the road.

Whitney Johnson (20:03): Oh thank you, John, for having me.

John Jantsch (20:05): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. So just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You could and find it @ ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client’s tab.

John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network gain grow retain is built to inspire SAS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about grow growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to gain, grow, retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is David Novak. He’s the founder and CEO of David Novak leadership. The parent organization to five nonprofit. It’s dedicated to developing leaders at every stage of life from ages five to 65. Love that David is also the host of the top ranked business podcast. How leaders lead with David Novak. He’s also a New York times bestselling author, taking people with you the only way to make big things happen. And we’re gonna talk about a, his newest book today. He’s the co-author of take charge of you, how self-coaching can transform your life and career. And of course, you know, I’ll just throw this in as a throw in. He was a co-founder the retired chairman and CEO of yum brands, one of the world’s largest restaurant companies. So David, welcome to the show

David Novak (01:42): And thank you, John. It’s a honor to be with you.

John Jantsch (01:45): So are you, in some ways we’re gonna talk about self coaching, right? So are you in some ways and probably, maybe not intentionally, but are you in some ways taking on the existing coaching industry?

David Novak (01:56): Well, I never really thought of it that way. I think what I’ve really tried to do is, you know, when you look at all the research out there, there’s a big problem. People aren’t getting the coaching that they, they want to get at work. You know, it’s well above 50% of people who are totally dissatisfied that they’re not getting developed at work. Yeah. Then you compound that with what’s happened with the pandemic and all the virtual working. So people are not around their coaches. So even if you’re getting, even if you have a good coach, you don’t get to see ’em now, you know, as we thought about writing this book, you know, I wanted to come at coaching at a different angle. There are a lot of coaching books out there, but I hadn’t seen anything where people were really taught how to coach themselves. Yeah. And you know, because not everybody can afford a business coach like you or me or not. Everyone could afford a sports performance coach. Like you Goldsmith who I co-wrote the book with. But what, what we decided is that we could give people the tools and the processes we use to, to coach others and help them coach themselves to success. And the basic premises is life’s too short to delegate your life and your career to someone else. You need a state and step up and take accountability for it.

John Jantsch (03:06): So, so, you know, you mentioned the pandemic and obviously a lot of people are familiar with people talking about the great resignation, but I think the great resignation is more about just kind of, I wanna rethink what I want to do with my life. Maybe. I mean, I’m wanna change careers or I wanna change this thing. So, so obviously I would say that the need for self-reflection, at least if not self-coaching is probably greater than ever.

David Novak (03:28): Yeah. You know, it’s funny we started writing this just before the pandemic, but I don’t think there’s ever been a book that’s better time, right. For what’s going on out there because you know, people right now have had more of time in the last two, two or two years or more to really self reflect and to understand, you know, what makes them tick, you know? Yeah. What we give people is a pro for doing that so that you can end up in the right place. And part of that, John is really understanding what your joy blockers are and what your joy builders on how to really get at the single biggest thing that get, have the biggest impact on your life. And, you know, I think giving people tools, what I love about this book, more than anything, John is just the exercises and the processes that you have to go through to, to, to really, you know, be a self coach. You know, it’s a book you can read straight through and enjoy it, but the people who are gonna get the most out of it are gonna do the exercise is in the book.

John Jantsch (04:21): Yeah. It’s definitely more of a hands on tool, so to speak. But well, one of the things that, that we all know is the best question, the best coaches don’t tell you what to do, that they ask you questions that, oh, questioning is a big part of this book, isn’t it?

David Novak (04:35): Yeah. Yeah. I think we, we start out by talking about it, the need to have a, a self-coaching conversation, you know, a conversation with yourself, we ask people questions that cause them to reflect on where they’re at. And you mentioned it earlier, John, you know, self-awareness is absolutely critical. You know, you, if you’re coaching someone else, you gotta help them build self-awareness. And if you’re coaching yourself, you better have a process that can get you to understand, you know, what really makes you tick. And I, I couldn’t agree with you more. It’s like great marketing, you know, anything that you convince yourself of is infinitely superior to, to, to having someone tell you how you’re supposed to think or what you’re supposed to do. I always say telling isn’t selling, you know? Yeah. And so you really want people to come up and Dr with their own.

John Jantsch (05:23): So it’s become very fashionable, but I think also useful to talk about coaching in leadership circles, you know, that leaders, best leaders, coach, I’m wondering if, if you’ve thought about this as a leadership book. So, so the leader, you know, probably needs to do some self coaching right. And then teach people to do self coaching as well.

David Novak (05:41): Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, I think this is a leadership book. It’s a way to help you become a better leader. Right. You know, all the, you know, I do my podcast, John, and, you know, and I’m sure a you and I spend some time together, I would quickly realize that you’ve been a great self coach throughout your career. You know, all the great leader are self coaches and, you know, whether they would necessarily call themselves that or not. Yeah. I think we’ve kind of got a new moniker that hopefully will, will, will catch on. Yeah. But, you know, I think that, you know, when you think about why people leave companies it’s been documented and many times there’s two reasons why people leave. Number one, they don’t don’t feel appreciated for what they do. And number two, they don’t get along with their boss. Yep. They’re tied to each other, you know? And so, you know, I’ve, I really am a big proponent of recognizing people for what they do and coaching versus being a boss. I think being a boss is a, is sort of like a 1950s term, you know, and you know, you know, coaching is really what it’s all about today, but still, even though people know it’s a valuable trait and great behavior for a leader to have very few people are really good coach and it’s a big problem out there.

John Jantsch (06:49): Yeah. I think there’s a level of vulnerability that you have to have as a good coach as well, or as a good mentor leader. That, and I think just what you said, the boss term sort of conjures up. No, I’m supposed to have the ante, you know, as, and I think that’s part of

David Novak (07:04): It’s it’s humility. You know, the one thing that humility says is it’s basically, you know, I need you, you know, it, it says I can’t do it all by myself. You know, the best leaders have a, have an uncanny combination of confidence and humility. Nobody’s gonna follow someone that isn’t confident, right. You know, you know, you’re gonna not gonna be inspired by EOR. Okay. You’re gonna be inspired by somebody really believes in something that’s possible and believes in other people. And they’re confident enough to let them know that. And you know, at the same time, they’re humble enough to let everybody know that they need ’em. And I think humility is it’s that it’s, you can’t do it loan. You didn’t get there by yourself. Right. It’s acknowledging the value of other people.

John Jantsch (07:43): And now let’s hear from a sponsor, running a business is a lot like, I don’t know, running a pirate ship. You’ve got your eye on the prize and the entire crew to coordinate with customizable options. HubSpot CRM platform is carefully crafted in-house so your business can keep running in ship up shape. It’s powerful suite of marketing tools work seamlessly together. So you and your teams can deliver a better experience for your customers. Consider it a treasure map with a very clear X marks, the spot with HubSpot, save, reuse, and share your best performing emails with your team for a faster and more consistent way to communicate with prospects. Use social media tools to schedule and publish updates, monitor terms and analyze performance. You can even use bot builders to create robust, automated multi-channel campaigns, learn how to grow better by connecting your people, your customers, and your business@ hubspot.com. So, uh, very early on in the book, one of the things you ask us to do is identify the, and you mentioned this earlier, but I want you, I wanna go deeper in this, the joy blockers and joy builders. So tell me a little bit about that process of, you know, what you’re asking people to do there.

David Novak (08:54): Yeah. Well, I think, you know, we gotta start out with writing down and thinking and reflecting on what blocks your joy. Yeah. You know, when you know, what is it that when you do this or you spend time on it, what really takes your joy away? And then, then you write down what gives you joy. Okay. What are those things that, you know, as you spend your time, what gives you joy now, then stop and reflect on how you spend your time. Are you on the joy blocker category most of the time, or are you a joy builder? You know, I think here’s where, you know, you’re gonna find out, maybe you might not be matched up with what really makes you tick. You know, it’s amazing, you know, John, everybody says do what you love, but they don’t really think about why. Okay. Why is that so important?

David Novak (09:43): Number one, if you love something, you know, you don’t work. It’s like Warren buffet says, it’s like, you tap dance to work, you know, but you really love it when you love something, you can’t wait to learn more about it. You know that you better because you get better at what you do. And I don’t know about you, but there are very few things that I love that I’m not at least halfway decent at. Okay. And so when you combine all those things, you know, you can actually end up doing something that you’re gonna be quite successful at. If you can find what that land is too many times, people, you know, know are doing stuff because they’re other people think they should be doing it versus doing it because this is what they truly love.

John Jantsch (10:22): You know, it’s interesting, or sort of ironic about that statement though, is that, you know, a lot of times when we’re just getting started with a new skill or a new task, we don’t love it because it’s hard, it’s uncomfortable. We get good at, as you just said, by sticking with it. And then it brings us joy. And I think sometimes there’s a little trap on that. Isn’t there.

David Novak (10:43): Yeah. There could be, you know, that’s the harder path. Yeah. I think it’s a harder path when you gotta start out doing something that you really don’t enjoy. You know, for example, you know, I came up in advertising, marketing. I love that at, I mean, you know, that’s what, you know, that was something I always loved. So I would read everything I could about it, learn everything I could about it. But if you asked me to do, you know, a financial analysis, you don’t, that would’ve been pretty tough sledding. Now I learned how to do financial analysis and I could do it, but it wasn’t something that I necessarily loved. But if I’d had gone into finance, I don’t think I, how to end up being a CEO.

John Jantsch (11:18): Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I’m curious, why did you land on joy as the key metric?

David Novak (11:26): Yeah. Well, I think it’s funny. Joy’s a real buzzword now. Have you noticed that? I don’t know. I mean, we just kind of hit on it. Yeah. You know, joy, you know, it’s, it leads to elation. Okay. It’s it like, it gives you it’s more than satisfaction. Okay. It’s CLE in, in what you do, you know, it’s that tap dance to, to work kind of notion you, you never have to work a day in your life. If you do something that you love, you know, know it’s, you know, I think that’s why we really landed on that. And it’s funny now everybody saying joy. So I feel like, you know, I guess we’re gonna look like a copycat, but it certainly wasn’t there when we started writing a book. Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:05): Yeah. You could see some people because this is different for them to think, oh, wait a minute. I’m supposed to coach myself. Do you find that it takes pride to get better at this? So, I mean, you start asking questions and you’re like, I don’t know. I’ll just write something down here. But I mean, have you seen people get better at self coaching?

David Novak (12:22): Yeah. Well, you know, this is something that we basically have created John. Yeah. This is a whole idea of self coaching. Right. I’ve seen people get good at better at coaching. Yeah. But I don’t think, have really thought about self-coaching them, you know, self-coaching itself. So what we hope is that this book helps people really go through that process. And then we’re not saying that if you self coach that you don’t nude coaches, in fact, we talk about the importance of having assistant coaches in your life, but it’s focused, you know, once you go through the self reflection of understanding what you need and what your areas of opportunity are, then you can target where you need to get people to help you and find those assistant coaches that can get you to where you wanna go. You know, for example, I did mention Warren buffet a little bit earlier when I became CEO at young brands, I was a marketing and advertising per operations had never really worked with wall street.

David Novak (13:17): So I said, you know, I looked at myself, I said, man, I better get up to speed of this or hurry. And I said, who could I learn from? And I said, well, you know, be pretty nice to go get some advice from Warren buffet. And I was able to use some contacts and get in and go see him. And I think it was 1998 and I saw him of 2016 once a year in Omaha. But, you know, he gave me great advice about how to talk to the wall street, how to be a communicator as a CEO and you know, but I did that by realizing that I needed to get that skill. And, and I not only needed to get that skill, I needed to get that skill in a hurry.

John Jantsch (13:52): Yeah. So one of the things, I think, challenges a lot of people and why a good coach is, you know, a good coach holds a mirror up and just like, here’s, you know, here’s your truth. Right. But I think a lot of us struggle with, I, I would see a lot of people struggling with asking themselves or self coaching a little bit because they’re so mired in their own beliefs already that at what’s true for them maybe is hard for them to see.

David Novak (14:19): Yeah. I think that’s true. One of the things we talking about the book is to get different data point. So you can really have an accurate assessment of what you are. It’s really interesting when you think about coaching self-coaching whatever. Yeah. You know, one of the keys to any businesses you well know is the first respons of leadership is to define reality.

John Jantsch (14:38): Yep.

David Novak (14:39): Okay. And then you gotta create hope. Okay. You know, and inspiration in terms of what you can be. And I think self-coaching forces you to really get a true sense of who you are a real sense of who you are. And you know, if you’re really focused on that and you wanna be a good, you wanna do the self-coaching, you’re gonna be open, you’ve gotta have a growth mindset. You gotta be open enough to really, really seek the truth. And it isn’t that true. No pun intended. Isn’t that true for any great leader is they’re looking for truth. Yeah. Not only in their business, but it in themselves. And then they go forward. You know, one of the things I talk about in the book is the exercise I do every year, which is my three by five card exercise where I write down on one column, you know, what am I today?

David Novak (15:21): And the other column is, what do I need to be tomorrow? And I do that every January, I write it down and I put it up on the refrigerator. I look at it every day and you know, I had all of my people that I let at young brands do the same thing. And I, every quarter, when I was coaching them, I’d go back to this, this self assessment that they had of themselves in terms of where they wanted to go. But that, that, you know, ha taking the time to do that reflection is important. So many people get caught up in the windmill of work and the RATATA just on to work and doing their thing and coming home and, you know, getting up and doing the next thing, they don’t take the time to reflect. And I think that’s what we’re seeing right now, John, with this whole great resignation is people now have had the time to reflect and that reflection is causing them to say, Hey, look, I think there could be something more in my life.

John Jantsch (16:08): Yeah. And I think

David Novak (16:08): Is what do you run to?

John Jantsch (16:11): Yeah. And I think when you talk about that idea of looking at your joy blockers, joy builders, I imagine there’s a whole lot of people that have not sat down and said, I, I even looked at what, what am I doing? You know, day to day in my work or in my job that is causing me stress. And I didn’t even realize it, you know, or causing me joy. I didn’t even realize it.

David Novak (16:28): You know, I, when I, I never really felt like I retired because I went to something else. Okay. But when I was talking to myself and self-coaching myself on what’s next for me, you know, what I realized that, that gave me joy was, was basically three things. The thing that gave me the most joy at work was teaching leadership. I taught a program called taking people with you. I did it to over 4,000 people. It was the hard, hardest thing I did, but the thing that gave me the most joy and within that framework, I helped people figure out how to take what they thought was the single biggest thing that they were working on and make it a reality in young brands. The second thing that I really realized gives me big joy is my family. And the third thing is golf. You know, I would like to really become a really good senior amateur golfer, those. So I said, I’m gonna spend the rest of my life on those three things and anything that gets in the way of those things, I’m gonna basically say no. And people have always ask me, geez. You know, do you Ms. Young brands? And I say, I didn’t know, I could love something so much and miss it so little. And the reasons that I filled my life up with what really gets me joy.

John Jantsch (17:33): Yeah. You know, it’s funny, I talk to a lot of business owners that are selling their businesses or retiring or needing to step into a different role because the business has grown kind of beyond their capabilities. And I think what you just described there is they get so much personally from the business that it’s kinda like they feel lost. And I think a lot of people retire because they’re so attached to the thing, as opposed to what you just described, the, what you got from the thing, as opposed to what it meant to you.

David Novak (17:59): Yeah. And so many people, you know, when they do retire, it leads to depression. It leads to illness. It leads to, you know, they F because they don’t have anything that, that, that gets ’em inspired every day. So I think it’s a constant pro of understanding where you’re at and figuring out where you want to go. I remember another story I talk about in the book is when I was, I came up in marketing and, you know, I realized when I was at Pepsi, I met with the chairman of PepsiCo at the time Wayne Calloway. I, he, one time he asked me what I wanted to do. And I said, look, I’d like to be a division president of one of the Pepsi divisions. And he said, you’re a really good marketing guy, David. And I said, well, I’d like to be a division president. He said, you’re a really good marketing guy, David. And I knew when I walked out of there that he thought I was a really good marketing guy, but if I was gonna be a division president, I’d better get some operations experience. And so I went out and got the operations experience and then that helped me become president of KFC. And the rest is history, but it’s like, you, that’s getting a real understand of, you know, how other people see you, not just how you see yourself. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:02): That’s awesome. Well, David, thank you so much for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. You wanted to share where people, obviously the book will be available wherever you buy books, you wanna, where people might connect with you and your work.

David Novak (19:12): Yeah. I think you can go to take charge of you.com for, and order the book. If you go to David Novac, leadership.com, you can learn about the leadership programs we have, it’s nonprofit, but we’re focused on, as you mentioned earlier at developing leaders at, at, at every edge age group and, you know, we’re make making huge progress and you can follow me on Twitter and David Nova OGO. I try to provide a leadership inspiration every day and the share of my podcast that I do. Awesome.

John Jantsch (19:38): Well again, thanks for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast. And hopefully we will run into you one of these days out there on the road,

David Novak (19:42): David. Okay. Thank you very much, John. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch (19:45): All right. That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in. Feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing man to your program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at duct tape, marketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

John Jantsch (00:00): ]This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the Gain Grow, Retain podcast, hosted by Jeff Brunsbach and Jay Nathan brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network Gain Grow Retain is built to inspire SAS and technology leaders who are facing day to day. Challenges of scaling Jeff and Jay share conversations about grow growing and scaling subscription businesses with a customer first approach, check out all the episodes. Recently, they did one on onboarding, such a key thing when you wanna get going, keep and retain those clients. So listen to gain, grow, retain wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (00:48): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Laura Bull she’s best selling author and brand strategists who specializes in transforming people into competitive sustainable business brand. She’s also the author of, from individual to empire, a guide to building the, an authentic and powerful brand. So Laura, welcome to the show.

Laura Bull (01:15): Thanks for having me. It’s the long title, isn’t it?

John Jantsch (01:18): You know, it’s fun, not the longest I’ve seen that’s for

Laura Bull (01:22): That’s true.

John Jantsch (01:23): My publishers love to get a bunch of, uh, stuff in there.

Laura Bull (01:26): Yes they do.

John Jantsch (01:28): We were talking off air and it’s in your bio, but I didn’t read it, uh, that you spent 10 years with Sony music entertainment in artist development, working with brands like Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Johnny Cash. And I, and it’s interesting when I was growing up, people wrote good songs, recorded them and then went on tour to sell albums. The three artists that you named, or that, that I named in, in, in your bio, you know, are really more of a package. Aren’t they? I mean, it’s that the industry, or just even the branding of the industry has changed dramatically, hasn’t it?

Laura Bull (02:00): Well, I think people are starting to understand that they have to become a brand. A, the industry has changed in the sense of nobody’s really selling the products that they’re making. Right? The albums have become basically obsolete because of retailer. I iTunes decided that they were gonna, you know, charge 99 cents, basically, right? When, you know, the record labels, who is the manufac of the music, they actually were putting in millions of dollars and needed that $20 return on investment for each sale. So when that kind of started getting a little wonky, you know, and people, listen, Johnny Cash has been around and he’s been doing it for much longer than iTunes, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so he, you know, he knew it had to be a package deal. He did the television, he did merchandise. He did sponsorships. I mean, that’s kind of, I think now newer artists are realizing that they really have to start out with all of those different revenue streams in order to even state a chance. And so I think that, you know, in the Johnny Cash days, I think that the brand kind of developed over time and in our, what I call the narrative age, you know, PA post the internet age. Now we’re in the narrative age where there’s just so many narratives coming at us daily. And minute by minute, you know, I think everybody is realizing that they have to really figure out that brand at the very beginning or they don’t stay at a chance.

John Jantsch (03:20): Right. And, and I think the parallel there is for business brands as well, right. I mean, it’s not a hundred percent, yes. We don’t just make a product and get, hire a sales team and send them out there to tell the world about it. Right. I mean, it’s so many channels and avenues

Laura Bull (03:33): Well, and a lot when you’re dealing with people, a lot of the time and, and record labels used to do this all the time and kind of still do, they’ll just throw out a song to radio and if it sticks and they’ll throw out a few and then if it doesn’t work, then they’ll just drop ’em and make their millions on another artist. Right. You know, that’s true in so many different industries publishing in

John Jantsch (03:52): Politics, book,

Laura Bull (03:53): Publish publishing book, right time a person is the product that they’re selling as a business. You know, a, I find in my experience that these people aren’t actually treating themselves as businesses do. Right. Uh, they don’t have a mission statement, you know, like things like that are just so commonplace in a business scenario when you’re developing staff and, you know, corporate environment, you know, people aren’t realizing that they need to do that as well.

John Jantsch (04:21): All right. We’re gonna move off the music, but I gotta, I I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least invite you to tell me. What’s like one of the wackiest stories that came out of I’ll give you two avenues to go here. Oh, what’s one of the wackiest stories that you wanna share or who’s somebody that came on the scene and didn’t develop like flamed out. Like they should have, should have gone big and didn’t

Laura Bull (04:44): Oh gosh, I have so many friends that should have gone big. And didn’t I, and I didn’t, I can’t even, I wouldn’t give you those names cuz it’s not fair to them. So a wacky story. I mean, I’ve had some pretty wacky stories. I have a cool story. I’ll tell you we were doing the Johnny Cash. I think it was Johnny Cash. No, it was the, it was one of the CMA awards or something. And I was a lowly intern and I was like a, I was working a stage hand. This was, I won’t tell you the year. It was a very long time ago. And the, the crew all had their like meals together in the Opry house, next door to the, the, or whatever, where all the production and the television production was going on. And I sat down one time and OU Harris was sitting with the crew, having the meals with us. And it was like, everybody else was hold up in their dressing rooms, having their minions, bring them food. You know what I mean? And she was the most senior person there and didn’t really say anything. She was just chill. She was just hanging out. I was just like, okay, hi.

John Jantsch (05:49): Well, well I’m a huge fan. So that goes right on what my perception of her brand is too. So

Laura Bull (05:54): Yeah. Very chill. Very cool. Yeah. I won’t tell you all the I’ll save all the wacky, the, the insane stories that you would not ever believe unless, you know, so that I can save myself from lawsuits.

John Jantsch (06:05): Well, that’s all right. Let’s talk about, uh, the topic of the hand, personal branding is something that’s been with us like a decade. I don’t know. Tom Peters came out with brand me, which was an awesome book probably 15 years, years ago. And feel like that was sort of the launch of it. But I know from your book, you’re saying that like we’ve moved on from that. And that influencer branding is a very different thing. So I’ll let you just kinda set that up.

Laura Bull (06:29): I’m so glad you said that. Cuz I feel like, you know, everything, all buzzword get a little stale, right? So authenticity, I get it’s in the title of my a book, but you know, that’s one of these words right now that is just like so overdone, because nine times outta the out of 10, it’s actually used in an incorrect way. And there is a whole study of personal branding. But when it comes to what I call influencer branding, first off, I’m trying to redefine the term influencer because influencer is just not online. Only, you

John Jantsch (06:59): Know, it’s not TikTok. I don’t have to just

Laura Bull (07:01): Start at TikTok. It’s not TikTok. You may have to start a TikTok. I’m not saying you can’t, but you know, there are on, there are offline influencers that are just as powerful and, and for 2000 years, this IST something new, right. You know, influencers are influencers. So that’s the first thing I’m trying to do. But then secondly, in it’s really about these people who are products, how do they figure out all the crazy things and all the unique things that make them unique and authentic and real and people, but then they have to whittle it down. Then they have to whittle it down, uh, to something that is as focused as like a Nike shoot. Right? So I think that is where influencer branding comes in because it’s taking that personal brand and then turning it into something that is competitive in the marketplace, but also focused enough to be a business brand.

John Jantsch (07:50): So I think the, I think the unfortunate thing is when we talk about influencers, you know, there’s all like the really plain examples. Good and bad. You, you know, that probably aren’t that useful in some cases for the person who’s actually trying, uh, to build something. So would you say that one of the traits that I notice and I just let you sort of share your thoughts on this is that it’s not just about being popular or, and you know, putting your name on all kinds of stuff. It, the people that I think really do a great job with it kind of have a point of view about what they’re trying to accomplish.

Laura Bull (08:26): Well, it’s gotta be a purpose. Yeah. So that that’s, you know, that comes into the personal branding thing. You have to have a purpose, you have to just like any business, you know, whatever Nike stands for, you know, somebody has to connect with that over Adidas. You know what I mean? So it’s the same thing when it comes to people, they really, if they have a very unique purpose with a unique concept around it, whether that’s a product or a service they provide. And the way that I kind of look at the brand itself is three different avenues. You have the image, you have the narrative and you have the product slash service. All three of those things have to be saying the exact same thing to the consumer, for them to really connect directly. There is no such thing as an it factor, right? I like if you have all three of those things and a consumer can pick it up within nanoseconds, then you have a good brand. That is something that is gonna connect with people.

John Jantsch (09:25): Well, I’ll push back a little on the it factor thing, because that certainly, and I, I don’t mean to challenge you on. I just mean that’s certainly a perception that like in the music industry, I’m sure you saw people is like, I don’t know why they didn’t make it, but this person made it. I don’t know why either, but it’s just like people connected. So I mean, it, it exists, but I think what you’re saying is that it’s not something you can just bring to market.

Laura Bull (09:49): It’s not something that you’re born with. Right. They’re like when I say there’s no such thing as an it factor, it’s because it’s not something that is like, oh my gosh, this person has it. And this person doesn’t right. It’s, you know, if you have two minutes on the tonight show talk, uh, couch, right, right. If you can, if your image says exactly what your purpose and what your brand is, and your conversation says the same thing and whatever you’re selling connects with all three of the, those things that is a clear enough message that the consumer feels like that person has the, you know what I mean? Yep.

John Jantsch (10:23): Yep. Yep.

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John Jantsch (11:23): So I, I, I wanna get into some practical like how to things, but I you’ve mentioned the word narrative a couple times and in the world of marketing and branding storytelling is, you know, again, another decade or so of, you know, nobody was talking about it to now there’s a whole section in book stories on, you know, on storytelling and marketing. You’ve mentioned narrative. And I think that’s, I really picked up on that because in my last book, I talked about the difference between nor narrative and storytelling. And I’d love to just throw that to you. What’s the difference in your view of narrative versus storytelling?

Laura Bull (11:54): I feel like storytelling is part of the narrative. Yes. Everything that comes, anything that is a message to the consumer about the brand is a narrative. So I have a whole chapter in my book about narratives and breaking it down and how to avoid bad narratives. You know, a lot of brands get muddled. They have two too many narratives going on. Some are the inauthentic, you know, some are, they don’t have, you know, some don’t even have a narrative. They don’t know what they’re out there saying they don’t know what they’re trying to communicate, you know? Yeah. And so it could be everything from the bio, the story, you know, I feel like I’m trying to think any, I’m trying to give other examples. And I can’t think of ’em off the top of my head, but like even a housewife, like in that chapter, I use Bethany Frankel as an example of a narrative coming before the product.

Laura Bull (12:44): Right. She was a, a TV personality and her personality was the narrative. I really, the way that I plotted out in my book is personality traits, values. All of those things are part of the narrative. So she already had that out there before she even created skinny girl. And then, so the product came after which in normal business product service comes first and then you build the narrative around it. Right? Yeah. So I think we’re in this really interesting place now where if social media and with television and all of the different direct to consumer platforms that we have, I think that narrative has almost, if not become the most important thing to connect.

John Jantsch (13:25): Yeah. I tell people, it’s the way you tell the story, you know? So it’s like a movie that starts with the fiery crash, you know, and you don’t know what happened. And then all of a sudden cut to the protagonist in seventh grade. I mean, it’s like, there’s still a story in that, but it’s the way that the story’s delivered that sucks you in.

Laura Bull (13:42): And I also, in addition to that, I also say tone. Yeah. Yeah. You know, are you a professional tone? Are you a familiar tone? How are you delivering the message? All of those are part of the narrative. Absolutely.

John Jantsch (13:53): So let’s get into sort of nitty a gritty, like your framework. So you talk about traits or the five PS, you know, of an influencer. So if somebody’s thinking, okay, we’ve talked in general terms about influencers, you know what, you know, what do I need to do if I’m a brand and I, I want to increase my influence, my power, you know, what are the things need to start thinking about doing first?

Laura Bull (14:18): Well, so the first part of my book is about that personal branding side. So it’s a lot of the introspection things. Yeah. So the five PS right here, the five PS

John Jantsch (14:28): Are wait. Right. Did you have to go reference your book, Laura,

Laura Bull (14:31): I’m pulling up as a visual.

John Jantsch (14:35): The only reason I, I say that is I, I too get interviewed on shows about my books and somebody will say on page 47 in this book. Yeah.

Laura Bull (14:42): I definitely dunno. What’s on page 47.

Laura Bull (14:45): I, I, I make this comment on social media all the time. I forget so many things that I’ve written in my book. It took me five years to write this book. I wrote a hundred thousand words and only 50,000 good ones. So, and I’m not writing another one, but so the five PS that you’re referencing is more about the psychology behind the fact that as people who are also the product that can get in your way with self branding and with, you know, making business decisions that are personal driven instead of business driven. Right? So a lot of the, the, okay, so passion is one. Yeah. Perseverance is another positivity is another purpose and power. And there’s a lot of grit elements in that from Angela Duckworth. There’s the happiness advantage factor from Sean ACOR. You know, a lot of people confuse passion and purpose. And so that’s an issue. And then power is really about, you have power over your own brand as the CEO of your business, right? And once you under the psych accepting the fact that you have the power actually gives you the confidence to be able to pull it off, you know what I mean to, and that confidence actually comes through in the brand. So these elements actually do shine through, into the brand itself. Once you get to the second phase, it, which is, you know, creating the actual brand pillars. Yeah. So,

John Jantsch (16:13): So, you know, you kind of hinted at what I hear all the time, people talking about imposter syndrome. And I think that’s really what you’re talking about in some ways is that the, and I hate the whole like fake until you make it, you know, conversation. But there really are a lot of people that, that it’s really, that they own that power. And that’s really allows them to make the decisions that are in their best.

Laura Bull (16:35): Maybe benefits goes 90% of the way for, you know, public figures, for sure. Yeah. You know, you have to, and if you don’t have the confidence that you are an expert in what you’re talking about, nobody’s gonna believe you, that you have that expertise. So, but also when you are a public figure, like a musician or like a TV personality or whoever they’re, they have so many people around them and everybody is gonna chime in with what they think you should be and what they think your brand should be. And if you don’t have a solid foundation in what you are, then you will get derailed. Every single person that I have seen has had that happen, that is the number one way people are failing.

John Jantsch (17:18): So there’s a pretty well known influencer in the marketing business space. Gary Vanderchuck like, you’ve probably run across Gary V. Yeah. And I really think that, you know, I, you know, I met Gary when he was just starting, cuz I’ve been around a long time and he just, that, that was his whole stick is like, you have to believe me because I’m so confident, you know, and that really attracted people. I’m saying he wouldn’t hustle and you know, do a lot of things. But a lot of it was just an attraction factor of guys. This guy’s so positive about what he’s doing, that he must be onto something.

Laura Bull (17:49): Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:52): So there was one other, um, piece in, in your book that I found very interesting. I’m kind of a cool, I’m kind of a tool and process person. So your, your brand matrix.

Laura Bull (18:04): Yes.

John Jantsch (18:05): So do you wanna maybe unpack that for us and, and uh, oh,

Laura Bull (18:08): It’s hard to explain without visuals.

John Jantsch (18:11): Well, well you, you feel happy to feel free to send me anything. I’ll post it. Uh, if you’ve got some visuals you want us to post,

Laura Bull (18:18): Oh, they can go to my website, Laura will.com. I have free resources there. So the, okay. Think about a Vinn diagram, right? Three circles. One is the image, which I said earlier, narrative is the other and the product and service is the last one. The intersection is a group of terms that can apply to all three areas, right? So let’s say pink, for instance, the artist pink, pink hair, right. Would be under image. Yeah. But that’s obviously not gonna apply to the narrative and the product that she is offering. Right. However, if you dig deeper about the pink care Rebell, Rebell is in the center, you can portray revel in image. You can portray it in narrative and you can portray it in the product and the service that she offers. That is the type of things that you’re looking for at the center. Now taking it a step further, you need at least four or five terms in the center of that ven diagram, because it’s the grouping of those together that it’s going to make you unique from the outside in the marketplace, from the outside competition, right?

Laura Bull (19:24): If there is something in there, like let’s say you get those final grouping together and you’re looking at these words and it minds you of somebody that’s already in the marketplace. All you have to do is remove one and replace it with another true and authentic. Of course, you’re always, you gotta make, you gotta do the authenticity work first, get to the brand matrix. So basically once you have your four to five brand pillars that is incorporated it for the rest of your career, and they have to be generic enough to be able to evolve over time, but they also have to be specific enough to set you aside from the competition. So it’s this really narrow spot that you’re trying to work towards.

John Jantsch (20:02): Well, I think you did an amazing job explaining it to,

Laura Bull (20:04): I think that was the best one I’ve done to say.

John Jantsch (20:07): And obviously pick up a copy of the book if you really wanna dig into to this. But so Laura, it was awesome having you stop by.

Laura Bull (20:14): And it’s an audio book too now, by the way,

John Jantsch (20:16): Which

Laura Bull (20:17): Just came out instant bestseller the first week I was, I held off on that too, because I was confused. I was concerned without the visuals, but it they’re taking it good. So I like it

John Jantsch (20:27): More than 50% of my book sales are audio book now it’s crazy. Yeah. So, all right. Tell people where they can find out more about, obviously the book can be purchased anywhere you buy books, but uh, where can they find out more about you and your work?

Laura Bull (20:40): Laura bowl.com? I have, uh, free resources there and any of my books and information and connecting information there, as well as my social media, I met the Laura bull on all the platforms. Awesome. And Laura bowl branding on Facebook. Sorry.

John Jantsch (20:55): That’s all right. So thanks for stopping by the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll, uh, see you one of these days out there on the road.

Laura Bull (21:02): Yeah. I love it. Thanks for having me. You

John Jantsch (21:03): Bet. All right. So that wraps up another episode. I wanna thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that offer our system to your client’s tab.