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Why You Should (Never) Play It Safe

Why You Should (Never) Play It Safe written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Chase Jarvis

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Chase Jarvis. Chase Jarvis is an award-winning artist, entrepreneur, and one of the past decade’s most influential photographers. He’s created campaigns for major brands like Apple, Nike, and Red Bull, and directed Portrait of a City, earning an Emmy nomination. His fine art has been showcased globally, and he contributed to the Pulitzer-winning Snowfall story in The New York Times.

As a tech innovator, Jarvis created Best Camera, the first photo-based social networking app, and wrote the bestseller Creative Calling. He also founded CreativeLive, an online learning platform acquired by Fiverr in 2021, where over 50 million students have honed their creative skills.

In his new book Never Play It Safe, Jarvis dives deep into the power of safety and focused attention as key drivers of success. We examine strategies for conquering self-doubt, uncover the transformative impact of play in our lives, and underscore the essential role of practice in mastering any skill. Jarvis passionately reminds us that life’s most rewarding experiences often await beyond the boundaries of our comfort zones and urges us to focus intently on what truly matters.

Key Takeaways:

  • Safety is often a construct that holds us back.
  • What we focus on defines our reality.
  • Attention is a superpower that shapes our experiences.
  • Self-talk is crucial; we must be kind to ourselves.
  • Playfulness is essential for creativity and joy.
  • Everyone starts as a beginner; it’s part of the journey.
  • Success is often a result of consistent practice.
  • Practices and habits are crucial to achieving our goals.
  • Unfortunately we are influenced by those who have given up on their dreams.
  • We must challenge societal norms about success and safety.

Chapters:

  • [00:00] Introduction to Chase Jarvis and His Journey
  • [02:51] Defining Safety and Its Impact on Creativity
  • [05:50] The Role of Attention in Achieving Success
  • [08:49] Overcoming Self-Doubt and Imposter Syndrome
  • [11:59] The Importance of Play in Life and Work
  • [14:54] The Power of Practice in Mastery
  • [17:57] Conclusion and Where to Find Chase Jarvis

 

More About Chase Jarvis:

 

This episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by: Oracle

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Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

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(01:02): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Chase Jarvis. He’s an award-winning artist entrepreneur. In one of the past decades most influential photographers, he created campaigns for major brands like Apple, Nike, and Red Bull, and directed Portrait of a City earning an Emmy nomination. He’s also a founder of Creative Live, an online learning platform acquired by Fiverr in 2021, which where over 50 million students have honed their creative skills. But he’s out with a new book called Never Play It Safe, A Practical Guide to Freedom, creativity, and a Life You Love. So Chase, welcome back to the show.

Chase Jarvis (01:46): John, thanks for hosting. It’s nice to see your face. It’s been a little bit,

John Jantsch (01:49): It’s been a little bit, I have fond memories of Creative Live.

Chase Jarvis (01:54): I

John Jantsch (01:54): Got to do two shows there. It was a lot of fun. You really did something very significant there. Well,

Chase Jarvis (01:59): Thank you. Those were impactful shows that you put together and grateful to have had you on the platform. That was certainly ahead of its time, and it was fun to see the world finally recognized. What would that be? About 12 years after we started the company that, wow, hey, online learning is a really, it’s a big thing. Who knew? Yeah, it’s fun to be on the other side of that as well. That was acquired in 21 as you said, and I got to rest a little bit goof off. And then when I thought, what do I really want to spend my time doing? It was very much writing a little bit about the lessons I’d learned along the way and that gave birth to never play it safe.

John Jantsch (02:37): So as an author, I know that certainly authors and publishers pick apart titles every word in a title. Right? So let’s start, I know this is a crazy question, but how do you define safety, especially safety that holds people back, right?

Chase Jarvis (02:51): Sure, yeah. It’s important to acknowledge that this is not about belts and sunscreen. It’s not about emotional or physical safety. All of things are very important in life. The kind of safety that I’m talking about when I take on this book, this topic is the kind of safety that keeps us stuck living the lives that other people are trying to prescribe for us. The thing that is on this side of our fear and our comfort zone, and part of the reason that I ended up working on this particular book and titling the book as such is I realized when I sort of deconstructed my own experiences and having had a show and a podcast of my own where I’ve done more than a thousand episodes and many of our mutual friends are some of the world’s most creative and talented entrepreneurial people. And it turned out that when I sort of did the research on myself and folks like you and others, that man, everybody reports that all of the best stuff in their lives was on the other side of risk, on the other side of discomfort.

(03:51): So I started to ask the question, well, how can we get better at reliably going there? The word, the sort of analog is safety, because when we are taking risks or we are outside of our comfort zone, we feel unsafe sometimes in our head, mostly in our head, a little bit less in our body. But how do we get good at going there if all the best stuff in life is over there? So that was the topic of the book and how I think about the term safety. Again, the title of a book is meant to get you to pick it up, and it is, I want to make sure that people know it’s like, Hey, seat belts are real sunscreen’s. Good, let’s keep up with that stuff, but let’s, how do we get at the best stuff in life?

John Jantsch (04:31): It’s sort of playing small.

Chase Jarvis (04:33): We get

John Jantsch (04:34): Talking

Chase Jarvis (04:35): Out of living our dreams by people who’ve given up on theirs. So we end up taking advice from the wrong subset of people, the people who haven’t done what we want to do or people who are themselves afraid for us. And sometimes this is our parents, our career counselors, our peers, they have great intentions in mind, which is what makes it tricky and why so many of us fall short of our potential. There’s no evil overlord. Someone is not out there trying to keep you down. People want you to be safe, but what they’re really talking you out of is the safety, the fear that they have for if you took that chance and went after that career that only 1% of the world has. Or it turns out though, that’s again where the best stuff is and how most of us are going to feel most alive.

John Jantsch (05:23): And I wonder since this wasn’t my original question, but since you went down that path, I mean is some of that fear, especially a lot of times, like you said, they wouldn’t do that leap, but is there also a fear that you’ll be more than me, that you won’t need me anymore? I mean, is that the genesis of some of that

Chase Jarvis (05:44): Advice? It is, and it’s generally not. I think people that, especially people that are close to us, they want the best for us, but just their understanding of what is the best for us is filtered through their own filter of what’s good for them or their perception of what’s good for us. So most of those things, while you make a very valid point that some people, this is usually in the peer landscape,

(06:09): Don’t want us to leave them in the dust and go on some grand adventure when they chose to play it safe. But I think the takeaway is that there’s so many inbounds, so many inputs to our decision frameworks and processes, and it’s really managing those inputs and categorizing them appropriately that this book is about. It’s like no one’s out to wants you to live small and most of the people that are giving you advice love you very much. And still the cultural message is we celebrate people who’ve taken great risk and have helped move culturally. Society, technologically, conceptually, artistically helped us move forward, and yet we’re reluctant to take those steps in our own lives. So this is really about how do we untangle the programming and in the same way that we’re largely talked out of our creativity, you know, can walk into any first grade classroom and say, who wants to come to the front of the room and draw me a picture?

(07:12): Every hand goes up. So we get talked out of that stuff, this awareness that we are creative and it’s very similar. We get talked out of our dreams by people who think we should be all the things that their parents and the generation before, and that’s what our aspirations should be. So this is like, wait a minute, who are you to define my aspirations? Realizing that we get again talked into or out of so many of these things and how do we both acknowledge and maintain our own sort of independence and get to do the things in life that really light us up?

John Jantsch (07:50): So the book is arranged around seven, what you call levers, and I was on an AM radio show one time for one of my books, and the host had clearly not read a word of the book. And so they’re doing the interview and he goes, chapter two is called this, tell me about that. And I’ve hesitate to do that, but your book, your titles, your levers all start with one word. And I feel like we could do an entire show on tell me about attention

Chase Jarvis (08:14): Because

John Jantsch (08:16): I mean, it is pretty obvious the way you’ve arranged it. These are things that hold people up. And so I would suggest, because you call it the superpower, that attention is kind of the linchpin to starting this whole process.

Chase Jarvis (08:30): It really is. And yeah, thanks for inviting the reader to know a little bit or the listener to know a little bit about essentially when I deconstructed my successes and failures and the successes and failures of so many of our peers and friends and ordinary people who’ve lived extraordinary lives, there’s a very clear pattern that a handful of things, the same thing sort of creativity that I mentioned earlier that are native within us, but that we sort of give up on or get talked out of by just cultures messaging that man, if we actually just paid attention to some of these things and reconnected with these parts of ourselves, that’s what people who have really tapped into the best stuff in life, that’s all they’re doing. So I do trot out there’s seven levers, seven tools that live net natively within us. And the most important, and the first one in the book is attention because whether, I guess we’re largely taught to get attention, that’s how you stand out and that’s how your business becomes successful.

(09:34): That’s how you find a mate. And yet what we know about attention is that the people who are the best in the world at directing attention, at focusing at paying attention to what matters to them and what is important and can eshoo distractions and are eshoo the things that aren’t important or will make a difference in success or failure or fulfillment, that’s actually where the gold is. Because what we pay attention to literally defines the experience that we have of life. And I gave a really very challenging and heartfelt difficult example in the book Viktor Frankl, if you may be familiar with his work, he wrote an amazing book called Man’s Search for Meeting, which was about his time in 1942 in a concentration camp. And man’s search for meeting is a master class, a master work in what you pay attention to defines your existence.

(10:30): Now Viktor Frankl was in the middle of the most horrific thing that humanity may have ever known and is managing through. He’s a professional trained psychologist, so he’s got some additional skills above and beyond what our normal skill rate is, but he’s unable to have an experience that is filled with meaning and connection even in the most difficult circumstances. Now, fortunately for everyone who’s listening to this, you are not in that situation and yet it’s still true, like what you pay attention to where you direct your attention, it is the experience of your life. If you think things are hard and the world is difficult because all you’re doing is glued to social media, then that’s what your experience is going to be. By contrast, if you spend time doing what you love around people who care about you and in a connected community and get a healthy dose of nature, then you’re going to have a different experience of life so that we can control. That is what I’m calling attention to and that this is a trainable, it’s a skill that we ought to stay connected with.

John Jantsch (11:40): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape. That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. You see on social media, as you mentioned all the time, people posing the idea of imposter syndrome, which is really to me is sort of saying, I don’t trust myself or I mean, how much of that do you see playing a role that there’s almost like a self-sabotage that goes on because I don’t trust myself enough to actually do this thing, so I’m going to distract myself with something else.

Chase Jarvis (13:09): It’s so true, John, and I think it’s a smart point to bring up in the book. I frame it as such that, but the world does some dirty work on us by telling us the things that we should be and what we should do and whatnot, but we actually do the dirtiest work on ourselves. The most important words that we say are the ones that we say to ourselves and to me being able, this goes hand in hand with attention. What messages are we giving ourselves? Of course, if the world wants us to be either accountants or doctors or lawyers, when we really want to be a YouTuber, an artist or a race car driver, I’m not articulating one is more virtuous than the other, but there are dominant paradigms and if we buy into that and start telling ourselves stories about who we were yesterday and what we can possibly do achieve or how we can be connected or fulfilled in this life, then again, we are the ones that we’re in conversations with most, right between our ears.

(14:19): So the goal in learning to pay attention or to direct attention is that what you feed yourself matters and choosing to feed yourself not junk food is out. It has a tremendous downstream effect on what’s possible with our one precious life. So as you mentioned, imposter syndrome and there’s all sorts of other, I guess, related things that, look, we can’t pretend that these things don’t exist, but what if we developed the muscle that when we made a mistake, it wasn’t that we talked so nasty to ourselves, but what if of ourselves as experience, what kind encouraging thing would we say like, Hey, that’s not like me. Next time I’m faced with this, I’m going to do X instead of Y. That’s how we would talk to our friends, and yet we don’t have that relationship with ourselves way too often. So this particular chapter is trying to get us to realize words matter, what we say to ourselves, matter matters, and that we’re actually in charge of that.

(15:22): Whether we think so or not, the world is happening for us and it’s our job to do what we can get in the driver’s seat and pay attention to the things that truly do matter. What if you started, there’s that famous exercise and we’ll play it here for anyone who if as soon as you get the gig, then stop playing and listen. If you haven’t played before, then follow along and it goes like this. Look around wherever you are right now and notice for me take 10 seconds and count everything in your field of view. That’s red. Go ahead now just look around and count everything in your field of view. That’s red and you’re kind of going, okay, 1, 2, 3, 4. I mean right now the truth is you’re even calling things that are sort of rust. You’re calling them red too to do as many things as you can to chalk up all the things you’re looking for.

(16:12): Now the question is how many blue things did you see? And you’re like, wait a minute. That’s the punchline. You see exactly the things that you’re looking for. So how does that extend had we extend this metaphor to our lives? Well, what we pay attention to and what we’re looking for, what messages we are telling ourselves between our ears really, really matters downstream to what we see in the experience that we have. So if you can decide that you’re going to be open to a universe of colors or that you are especially going to look for things that light you up rather than the blueprint, as I mentioned earlier, that social media might have us believe or an imposter syndrome would have us believe, then that’s what you’re going to see. So how do we get out of the backseat, get into the driver’s seat, and again, the phrase that stop playing it safe because the world wants you to be safe. Your biology thinks that in choosing to become a YouTuber or to pursue your passion or to eshoo the, let’s call it the career that your career counselor or that your parents wanted for you, that’s somehow riskier. But the truth is it’s all risky. How risky is it to park the desires that you have for this one precious life until it’s too late? I would say that’s the ultimate risk.

John Jantsch (17:30): So a lot of two people when they decide, I’m not going to play it safe, I’m going to go all in, right? I’m going to go for it. Sometimes that leads to blinded like I’m on the goal, nothing else matters. And lever five is play the most important work we do. And I would suggest, especially since you’ve called it the most important work we do, it’s probably the one that people counterintuitively forget.

Chase Jarvis (17:53): Absolutely. And what I like to think about in terms of that is success leaves clues. So think about the time, and this is, anyone can do this right now, while if you’re sitting in traffic or walking on the walking path or on, you’re at the gym with us in your ears right now. Think about the times where you felt the most lit up, the happiest, most playful, the highest version of yourselves. I promise you there was levity in your day-to-day in moment to moment, there was joy, there was connection. And yet whether this is our puritanical roots or the culture, this work hard culture, this grindy culture that we have become a part of or that’s memeable on social media, it ignores that playful part of ourselves and that’s playfulness and joy. That’s the engine of life. It truly is. And the world might have you believe otherwise that the tortured artist is really where the best work comes from.

(18:54): And yet look at the people who’ve had really long, fruitful, rich, connected careers and have been doing what they’re doing for a really long time. This joy, this playfulness, it can be brought to anything even to work. Again, watch an 8-year-old, you say, okay, it’s time to pick up your toys. And they might be disappointed that they’ve got to pick up at their toys, but they’re going to make room noises while they’re running around the room, grabbing the toys and picking up their stuff. That’s our natural state is to seek, find and engage in play. And yet as an adult, we somehow disconnect from that thinking that, oh, it’s all about work and play is something that we only do after all of the work is done. Well, let me tell you, there’s never a time where all of the work is done. So do not deny this great state that it pays dividends to be in for some future time that never comes.

John Jantsch (19:50): So you’re not supposed to have favorites, I suppose. But my favorite is practice. And the reason, I mean, that sounds really boring, the grunt work, right? But you have a set of principles in there that I think by themselves really are a masterclass. And I think a lot of people, I was talking to somebody who’s a writing coach and he said, you won’t believe how many people show up and say, I want to write a fiction book, but I’ve never written one. I’ve never taken any classes I’ve never practiced. And it’s like, no, it’s all practice and it’s being okay with being really bad, but that’s not what people want to hear. It’s like I want the magic pill. But to me it’s my favorite because I think it really is what brings it to the heart.

Chase Jarvis (20:32): Absolutely. And there’s nothing like if you can’t be willing to look foolish beginning something, then you will do nothing because we’re all terrible at everything when we start out. Think of how basic, if you had an able-bodied child watching them learn to walk,

(20:53): It looks like it’s the most difficult thing in the world. And yet we all walk around completely unconscious. If you’re an able-bodied person and without thinking about it and everything, including something as basic as that takes practice, why then would we think that that career we want the outcomes that artistic, the master work of fiction that we completed, why would we think that we could somehow become, do that without a whole lot of stumbling and some really important good foundational habits, IE practices to go with it? And the reason there are manyfold, but one is that now we can see the best in the world do their thing effortlessly at any time by just picking up our phone, staring at it for five minutes. You don’t see the iceberg of work underneath the surface. You just see someone who’s the best in the world that unlike thousands of years ago when we were in tribes and we watched someone start to not know how to hunt, then to become the best hunter in the tribe, we watched it with our own eyes and it made sense to us. Now we just see what appears to be effortless brilliance everywhere. Well, I’ll tell you what, underpins every person you look up to, admire, appreciate for the things that they have done or the people they’ve become in their life is a set of really profound, often very basic practices that they’ve put into play and that’s available to you. It’s just understanding what practices, what habits are going to get you to your desired outcomes.

John Jantsch (22:27): Well, chase, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. It is always so great to visit with you. Another excellent book. Where would you invite people to connect with you or certainly find a copy of Play It Safe,

Chase Jarvis (22:41): Never Play It Safe is available everywhere books are sold and Amazon will ship it to you wherever you are. If you can support your local, that’s cool too. And I’m just Chase Jarvis everywhere on the internet. So Instagram, YouTube, Twitter x, I don’t know what they call it anymore, but I’m just Chase Jarvis everywhere. I’d love to connect with you. I’ve got a popular email newsletter if you like, these tidy bits. But John, just hat tip to you for running such a tight ship and building the community that you have over there. And I love Duct tape and grateful to always be welcome to feel welcome here and to be a guest on the show. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (23:15): Alright, well again, thanks for stopping by and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.


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Personalize Employee Benefits By Granting The Right To Choose

Personalize Employee Benefits By Granting The Right To Choose written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Brandy Burch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brandy Burch, CEO and co-founder of BenefitBay, a company innovating the employee health benefits industry through Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs).

With a vision to make health benefits more accessible and customizable, Brandy has rapidly expanded BenefitBay and helped redefine how employers approach employee health coverage by ensuring fair and equal purchasing power.

We discuss the evolution of employee health benefits, the advantages of ICHRAs for employers and employees, and the complexities involved in implementing these arrangements.

From Tech-first inexperienced health benefit startups to the burden of having too many choices, Brandy Burch explains that DIYing health benefits internally is not all it’s cracked up to be and giving employees a say in what benefits they choose from pets to fertility can be an enormous BENEFIT to seeking talent, as an agency.

Brandy Burch also shares insights on risk management, the role of BenefitBay in the market, and the importance of personalization in employee benefits. The conversation also touches on the challenges female CEOs face in the insurance industry and the unique advantages of Kansas City as a tech hub for health benefits innovation.

Key Takeaways:

  • ICHRAs provide employees with more choice in health benefits.
  • Employers can budget more effectively with defined contribution models.
  • The complexity of ICHRAs requires careful partner selection.
  • BenefitBay acts as a software service to streamline the process.
  • Personalization in benefits is becoming increasingly important.
  • Kansas City is a growing hub for health tech innovation.
  • Female CEOs face unique challenges in the insurance industry.
  • Employers can attract talent by offering personalized benefits.
  • Risk management is crucial when transitioning to ICHRAs.
  • The market for individual health plans is competitive in many states.

Chapters:

  • [00:00] Introduction to Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs) and BenefitBay
  • [01:08] The Evolution of Employee Health Benefits
  • [02:44] Understanding  ICHRAs
  • [05:00] Benefits for Employers: Cost and Budgeting Advantages
  • [06:43] Risk Management in ICHRAs
  • [09:41] BenefitBay’s Role in the Market
  • [10:32] Target Audience: Who Benefits from ICHRAs?
  • [12:27] Mitigating Chaos in Transitioning to ICHRAs
  • [14:25] Attracting Talent with Personalized Benefits
  • [15:47] Trends in Employee Benefits
  • [19:10] The Shift Towards Personalization in Benefits
  • [20:17] Kansas City: A Hub for BenefitBay
  • [22:56] Challenges for Female CEOs in the Insurance Industry

More About Brandy Burch:

 



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Brandy Burch (00:00): Can you hear my dog?

John Jantsch (00:01): I can. This is a dog friendly show.

Brandy Burch (00:03): This is a live dog friendly show. Yeah, there are a lot of rules around ensuring that individuals aren’t discriminated against and ratios are met and affordability calculations based on what’s available in their market and ensuring that their employer is not classing people unfavorably and everyone’s getting equal and fair purchasing power. So it is complex, but really what it means is we’re going to be able to access our benefit dollars and make the choice that’s right for our family.

John Jantsch (00:32): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Brandy Burch. She is a CEO and Co-founder of Benefit Bay, a Kansas City based company innovating the employee health benefits industry through individual coverage health reimbursement arrangements. That’s a mouthful. Hopefully we’ll unpack it with a vision to make health benefits more accessible and customizable. Brandy has led Benefit Bay’s rapid expansion and helped redefine how employers approach employee health coverage. So Brandy, welcome to the show.

Brandy Burch (01:08): Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (01:11): I mean, I definitely want to unpack an I-C-H-R-A because I usually talk about marketing and not necessarily insurance, but a lot of my listeners are business owners and employers and it’s certainly a topic that will be of interest. But before we get into that, I’m just curious, was there something that had you sitting around one day and said, I need to start a company that does I ccra?

Brandy Burch (01:38): No, that was not something I was envisioning or thinking about. I was actually at a different software company and was really introduced to the idea and asked to join this startup vision and actually started as the operations lead, not the CEO. So I was part of the founding team and got to build it from the ground up, but our CEO left a year in and then I’ve been leading the Reign since then. So it wasn’t something I was sitting around on my couch thinking about, but it absolutely was something that I was solving throughout my career because I was in business, I was a business operator for my entire career and I was a purchaser of benefits, which are one of your largest spends when you’re running a small company or any size company.

John Jantsch (02:24): So we have, as part of our employee benefits, we have a health insurance coverage for employees. And I imagine most listeners are fairly familiar with how those work. There are different arrangements that you can do in different pays and things, but so how significantly different is an individual coverage health reimbursement or maybe before we even get into the difference, what is it?

Brandy Burch (02:46): What is really defined contribution? So it is an employer’s ability to set a bucket of dollars aside for the health benefit and allowing the individual to choose. It’s much more complex than that because there are a lot of rules around ensuring that individuals aren’t discriminated against and ratios are met and affordability calculations based on what’s available in their market and ensuring that their employer is not classing people unfavorably and everyone’s getting equal and fair purchasing power. So it is complex, but really what it means is we’re going to be able to access our benefit dollars and make the choice that’s right for our family. That’s the definition of what it’s a large acronym. Yeah,

John Jantsch (03:29): So you hit on really probably what’s a key part of it. I mean most, at least in my experience, I could be wrong on this, but most benefit plans are like, here it is, do you want it? Do you want your spouse in it? I mean that’s pretty much the decision. So what you’re suggesting is this is vastly different in that you have a lot of choice.

Brandy Burch (03:49): Yeah, you have a lot of choice. And I know you mentioned you’re in Colorado. I’m in Kansas City, the average market has 68 to 133 plans to choose as an individual. So you’re up to the market of all the carriers in your plan design. You have HMOs and EPOS and PPOs, and you have HSAs and you have the flagship brands and the Aetnas and the Cignas and the Kaisers and the United Healthcares, which you also have option to be in a community health related product. And so maybe you have a Denver Health Plans, maybe you have a Connecticut, if you’re in Connecticut now you have an ability to purchase that and your employer likely wouldn’t have purchased that because they would’ve needed something that fits everyone in all 50 states. So they would’ve had to have purchased a larger network product that is more expensive. You may decide to buy something that is more community-based, direct primary care driven, something that you are really passionate about that’s driven by a hospital system. There are a lot of hospital system carrier plans that are out there, and so that allows that individual to be put back into the driver’s seat, but also make a more conscious decision with those dollars that matters more to their family for access to care.

John Jantsch (04:57): Alright, so theoretically, and I’m going to come back to that, that’s a better idea for the employee because it gives them choice. I mean, we can argue maybe I’m the employer and I’ve done all the research and I’m telling you this is the best plan. Maybe that’s an option, but what’s the benefit for the employer? Is this cheaper? Is this easier? You’ve already said it’s complex, so what’s the benefit for the

Brandy Burch (05:19): Employer? Yeah, I mean, in the Colorado market, it’s cheaper in the Kansas, Missouri market, not necessarily. So in 34 of the states right now, individual products are priced competitively to a large margin to group insurance. So the employer would benefit by going to this model because the employee has higher purchasing power with lower dollars. So that drives the budget down. In addition, it allows you to budget because you set a defined contribution model, it’s always $800 or $450 or $650 for that employee that’s seated in that class that you’ve modeled out. It’s not, oh, does that employee have seven children? Now they’re going to break the bank because I’m doing something over here that’s going to be different. It’s going to be a set defined contribution and there may be an additional child add-on that. You could decide as an employer, but you can budget.

(06:14): And I think that’s the biggest piece. And if you budget significantly higher than lower cost silver products, you do not have to change your budget every year as an employer. They’re having to change it every year because the rates going up 6, 10, 19 31 51. The types of rate increases we’re seeing are pretty significant. And then if you were an employer in self-insurance, you’re now getting out of that risk pool because self-insurance, although it sounded really exciting for employers to manage their risk and manage their cost and drive care saving behaviors of their employee populations, that’s a lot of administration. It’s also a lot of work. And then if you end up with one or two laser claimants, you’re suddenly in a balance sheet risk problem. And so that allows that employer to budget and just stay out of the risk game.

John Jantsch (07:03): So speaking of risk, obviously you just pointed to one, but this versus sort of the traditional one carrier path, does this approach actually aid in reducing risk for employers as well?

Brandy Burch (07:17): It does. I would say the only area of risk for employers in ICR is choosing the wrong partner.

(07:26): Anytime there’s a new market, you’re going to have a lot of startups, you’re going to have a lot of people wanting to disrupt it from different ways. However, not all startups are created equal from a compliance perspective or from an insurance acumen perspective or from an ability to become licensed and appointed with a carrier. Right? Your technology tool set has to meet a certain level of guidelines. Your engineers need to be in the US there are various types of risk that exist out there when you decide to go with something that’s new and a disruptor and you don’t vet your technology providers. I also would say a lot of the technology providers are going direct to the employer and cutting out the broker. I feel there’s a risk there because who is going to be the consultant in that situation? Who is providing that advice and who is holding that technology provider accountable?

(08:17): Now the employer’s back in that business of trying to manage something. So I would recommend that to eliminate a risk, you’re always working with a broker still, and you’re not trying to just go with a technology provider who’s trying to now become an insurance agency and now become a direct to employer sales agent because the insurance acumen and knowledge that needs to be at that table needs to include those other pieces. It needs to be that they’re bringing a quote every year to the employer of what is best for you this year. And icra, even though I’m an ICRA provider, may not be best for you every year. Maybe you suddenly are in Kansas and Missouri and you have 300 employees because you acquired a company. Kansas and Missouri is about 10 to 15% higher unless there’s a certain geographic population that works out there on individual rates. So you need an honest person at the table with you who’s not trying to just cut your consultant out of the conversation to win those dollars.

John Jantsch (09:17): So do you consider Benefit Bay a broker or do you consider yourself a marketplace or a software? I mean, how do you characterize yourself?

Brandy Burch (09:25): Yeah, we consider ourselves software as a service and we consider ourselves the chosen partner of those employers and brokers. So we add value in this chain where we’re taking away that administrative lift, that decision making at a large population. Imagine you’ve got 2000 employees. Your broker nor your HR team, can handle 2000 employees going through a decision that they’ve never had. They’ve never had the permission to make themselves. They’ve traditionally just had a carrier, an HSA and a PO

(09:56): Or maybe a buy up and a buy down. So I’ve got two choices. I’ve got one carrier, I’ve got two paycheck choices, that’s all I’m deciding on now. You’ve got the paycheck choices, the carrier choices, the type of plan choices. So benefit based steps in that gap as a partner to the broker because these brokers as well haven’t been selling individual products. So they were selling group products and they’ve become experts in their states and now they have to be experts in every state. And so we stand in that value chain there and then we solve the technology gap for the carriers on taking a large group population in individual products.

John Jantsch (10:34): So are you suggesting then that there’s a certain size company that this makes sense or does it make sense for a 20 person company

Brandy Burch (10:44): It makes sense for the sub 50 in a certain way? Benefit Bay does not specialize in the on exchange market enrollments. That’s an under 50 lives. You are subsidy eligible, you could remain subsidy eligible for your employees. So there may need to be an on exchange enrollment that’s dealing with healthcare.gov or that’s dealing with an on exchange product. There’s a lot of long wait times and hold times. We are looking to service those larger employers. So I would say for us it’s more of a 200 plus employer size that we service up into the thousands. What we do see is there is a great company called Stretch Dollar that’s doing the sub 30 really well. And so we refer any groups that try to come to us in that area to them, but they don’t utilize a broker, right? Because it’s a smaller group, it’s not going to have enough commission for a broker to, and so they’re able to play as the broker and as the technology system. But in the same respect, they don’t service up over 50 because there’s a lot of compliance laws around the over 50 employer space. Those are called applicable large employers. And we service those well. So we have a partnership. They’re sitting in tech, well, actually I think they sit in Pennsylvania and San Francisco. Can you hear my dog?

John Jantsch (12:00): I can. This is a dog friendly show. This

Brandy Burch (12:02): Is a live dog friendly show.

John Jantsch (12:06): I can’t hear your dog. I was actually going to tell you. I could see you were starting to fidget about it. So let me ask you this then let’s, I don’t know, pick a number. Anything over a hundred. To me migrating to this would seem like chaos, right? And so I assume that I would think that would be one of the reasons a big company might actually go, maybe I see some benefit, but the chaos to change isn’t worth it. So how do you mitigate that?

Brandy Burch (12:34): Yeah, we mitigate that by speaking to how we’ve solved the problem and we’ve thought about it. How does a group insurance experience work? And this individual experience really is similar. The only difference is when they get to that enrolling in your benefits, we’ve all done it. We’ve all enrolled in our benefits and have been admin. When they get to the enrolling in their benefits, it’s just that they get to put in their healthcare providers and they get to search for things that matter to them. And they get to decide, I want a gold product, or I want a PPO, or I want an HSA or I want to only go to this carrier. It matters to me and they take care of me. And so they actually get to filter down what it is that matters to them. Once they select that product, we submit the application to the carrier for them through technology, and then we facilitate the payments in a lump sum for the business. So the business is able to just have one deduction via a CH that we pull. And then each of these payments are individual on behalf of the individuals, but we expose all of that the way the employers used to. So our largest group right now enrolled is 3,430 employees. Imagine 3,430 employees sitting across 49 states. Actually,

(13:46): Those employees are going to make vastly different choices than they would if they were on group. This employer thought about going back to group, they surveyed their employees because they were having a technology solution that wasn’t doing a great job. They ended up just switching technology solutions, which was significantly important for us because we were able to deliver a better experience. But in that scenario, they looked to go back to group and their employees were like, no way we get to choose now. What are you going to dump us in? I get to be in the plan that matters to me here, and I get to have a better product than if you would’ve narrowed us down to a larger network, it would be more expensive. So we have seen it’s a little stickier once it gets going though, once you give someone a right to choose, it’s kind of hard to be like, no, I’m just going to decide for you now. Right?

Testimonial (14:30): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier, honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (14:46): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM world slash scale. Well, benefits play a large role in attracting and retaining talent. So would you say that companies would even have the ability to maybe promote that as a differentiator? As a benefit, I mean, and play a role in retaining and attracting?

Brandy Burch (15:39): Yes. I would say that is true. I see that a lot in our Northeast clients because Icra has been around a little longer and competing well in that market. And so we see that they’re advertising that on their websites. They’re saying, you get to choose by over X number of health plans that they’ve given back two and a half million of cost share from the employee’s paychecks with this program. And so also, most of the employers, when they do see this savings, they invest in other benefits. So then they improve the benefits package overall. They’re adding additional disability payments paid by the employer or life insurance at X of your salary, or they’re allowing you to spend those dollars in some other product that matters to you and your family, whether it’s pet insurance or something else. So I find that’s a motivating product to employees to be able to have access to that.

John Jantsch (16:31): Yeah, yeah. So since we mentioned pet insurance, are you seeing it, are there some trends that you’re seeing in employee benefits that people are really trying to push the boundaries on?

Brandy Burch (16:42): Yeah, I feel like employers are trying to have a more engaged employee population. They’re trying to offer a lot of new mom or new parent type benefits. They’re trying to offer infertility. For those that have concerns with infertility, they’re offering mental health, virtual mental health, virtual care, zero access to those types of programs as add-ons. I think all of that’s really important to have access to as an employee. And then individuals can choose which piece of it matters to them. And if they would’ve tried to add infertility to an entire population, it would’ve been insurmountable. But if they’re able to just add it for those who need it, then it is something that matters. And there’s a lot of really great startups out there in these types of spaces. Kansas City has a couple marma and Leva apps that are around surviving that first year as a mom or a nursing mom or a new parent. And those are really engaging and keep your employee feeling like you care that they’re returning to work and they’re not sleeping and all of the things, how do you survive that? Where’s the network online that can help me get those materials? So seeing a lot of those types of engaging and rather than our employer knowing our health outcomes, which happens in current traditional group insurance,

(17:56): They’re able to access through a lot of the big brother tools around drug usage and claims. They’re able to know what’s going on in our family rather than them having that type of overbearing access in the individual side. You just get to make an individual decision with your dollars. They don’t get to know that you’re maybe getting cancer treatments

Brandy (18:15): If

Brandy Burch (18:16): You don’t want them to know. So there’s a little bit of that that I’m seeing as an evolution of this personal choice. Also, holding carriers accountable to deliver actual customer service and to deliver payments on our claims timely to approve services that we need. Because if we’re in the driver’s seat of our benefit dollars, we could be brand loyal or

Brandy (18:43): Not,

Brandy Burch (18:45): But if our employer is or our broker is, we really are voiceless in those types of service outcomes.

John Jantsch (18:53): Yeah. Yeah. And while you talked about the positive benefits of working with a broker, there probably are some negatives where a broker is like, Hey, I get more commission over here. I’m going over here. So

Brandy Burch (19:07): I mean, every industry, there’s going to be motivators that are driven by greed. There’s going to be motivators that are driven by fear. And I think that we have carriers that are motivated that way. We have brokers that are motivated that way, and we have employers that are sometimes motivated by just doing what’s easiest. And if I change carriers and get a better outcome, that’s even noisy. And I’m nervous about that because Susie or Tom may be mad.

Brandy (19:33): And

Brandy Burch (19:33): So sometimes getting that better outcome requires a little friction, and that’s why benefits have kind of evolved to where they are. I think a lot of people just keep status quo, even if it goes up year after year, because it’s all that fear around personal benefits and changing them and causing any type of outcome to anyone on your team. And recruiting has been hard the last five years it’s been employee’s market. No one wants to upset the apple cart,

John Jantsch (20:01): Right? Right. Hard to replace people. It really is. So I kind of hear you saying that if there’s an overarching trend, it is personalization of the benefits, right? I mean, is that a good way to say it? Yeah,

Brandy Burch (20:13): I think it’s personalization of the benefits. I think it’s the last area that we haven’t been able to personalize, right?

(20:20): I describe this as favorable legislation, like when pensions move to 401k and allow your investment dollars and make your decisions after a few poor decisions based on lifelong service to a company and your retirement’s gone, you were able to move to individuals have the accountability to invest their benefit dollars and to invest those appropriately. Now, some don’t do what’s right with their actual benefit dollars, don’t access those. And that does happen on the healthcare side. They may not use all the dollars available to ’em. They may go with the lowest price product because they don’t use their benefits or they don’t want anything out of pocket. And it goes back to a personal accountability. And I think we need to get there, especially for our own health and improving health outcomes. Right.

John Jantsch (21:09): I’m curious if there, you and I talked before we started, I grew up in Kansas City. I’m curious, is there any reason that Kansas City is a good place for benefit Bay two b? Was it started there for a reason or that just happened to be where the players were?

Brandy Burch (21:23): It really was founded in Omaha by Zach Harris, the CEO. And when I took the seat a year later in April of 22, I moved into Kansas City and the reason why I moved into Kansas City is one, I’m here, but two, there’s a great tech hub in Kansas City around health tech. We have a ton of health techs that are of all, we have a lot of investment from larger ecosystem players in this market. It’s a great market to have a work from home role and recruit. There aren’t as many companies in Kansas City allowing the flexibility of working remote.

(21:58): And when you have a remote first company and you’re in Kansas City, I feel like the recruiting is really easy for us. I wasn’t having as much luck in Omaha, and I think it’s because there’s a long tenure of large insurance ecosystems there and a lot of enterprise business where people are very comfortable and confident in their compensation, in their benefits and in their retirements package. To go to a startup I think was a little more risky in that market. In Kansas City, I’m not feeling like people have that aversion. They’re saying, oh, that sounds fun. I want to be a part of this. You mean I get shares, I get to be remote, I get to do the commute with my family or a handle to school drop off. And the motivation here, we’ve been able to hire 26 people in market. So now we do kind of have a hybrid work location downtown, and people can come if they want, but Tuesdays and Thursdays tends to be when we’re all heading in there. No one wants to deal with the commute Monday, Wednesday, Friday, I guess. But I do think the recruiting, the tech ecosystem was really important and the investment ecosystem is really great here. Casey Rise just introduced me to a great partner within CVS Aetna, and you just never know when those types of networks and really support your growing startup. And I feel like everyone’s here to lift each other up in this community.

John Jantsch (23:22): I would agree with that sentiment. My final question really is there probably aren’t a lot of CEOs that are females in your particular industry. Is that first off, is that correct? Is that changing? Has that presented a hurdle? How have you navigated that?

Brandy Burch (23:37): It is correct. You’ve

John Jantsch (23:38): Got four questions by the way to answer any one of ’em you want.

Brandy Burch (23:41): It’s correct. Across all industries, there are limited female CEOs in insurance, even less so in venture backed companies, even less, right? So we are a venture backed company. It is tough to raise capital as a female in a VC world. It is tough to raise capital in a non-original founding role of an organization. You have to survive that transition of a founder nuisance that people may feel that’s on the cap table and they have to believe that you are the one leading the company and that you can do this and you didn’t lose team members talent. The tech didn’t serve it, and you were able to keep your customers. So that has been some things that I’ve had to overcome. I think the biggest thing is there’s one other female CEO in this industry right now. I think the biggest thing is being able to transfer experience rather than I haven’t been a part of the Facebook or some other tech startup

(24:43): And I wasn’t necessarily an Ivy League grad. So those two things have been hard in a tech startup world. What I think has allowed us to be successful is that we are operators as an overall team, and our VP of engineering was in large insurance carrier technical development, and then cancer research, technical development. We come with the expertise to the technology solution rather than come with the technology skillset or background of being in serial startups. We come with various small business, medium-sized business grit and experience. So I think that’s made us successful. It’s made it hard though, to start that journey from here to here. Now here, everyone loves us, but you’ve already got your proof point, so 400% growth. And so it’s a little better when the numbers are black and white and then they can’t really go to all those other things to make a decision.

John Jantsch (25:42): The intangibles.

Brandy Burch (25:43): Yes, exactly.

John Jantsch (25:45): Well, Brandy, again, I appreciate you taking a few moments to share the story with the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there anywhere you’d invite people to find out more about Benefit Bay and your work?

Brandy Burch (25:55): Yeah, I’d go to benefit bay.com or you could follow us on LinkedIn Benefit Bay or Brandy Birch, CEO, and founder of Benefit Bay on my profile.

John Jantsch (26:04): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you spending a few moments. Hopefully I’ll run into you one of these days when I’m back in Kansas City

Brandy Burch (26:10): For sure, John, Chris Hotten. Now you’re going to be hearing about it all the time. It’s hot in Colorado, so now you’ll have a little experience there. We are going to grow 300% in Kansas City, so it’s starting to move,

Brandy (26:23): But

Brandy Burch (26:23): That 300% is based on, we used to have one to two customers and now have Right. Pulling uphill climb. Yeah. It’s

John Jantsch (26:30): Harder to do that every year.

Brandy Burch (26:32): Exactly. Yeah. Thanks John. Take care.


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Why You Should Read Business Books That Are Not About Business

Why You Should Read Business Books That Are Not About Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of being INTERVIEWED by Sara Nay. Sara Nay is the COO of Duct Tape Marketing. She oversees day-to-day operations to support the growth of Duct Tape Marketing and the Duct Tape Marketing Consultant Network.
She focuses on strategic planning, goal setting, and directing the company’s operations in support of its goals. And on a personal note, she’s also my daughter—which makes me “Pop Pop” to her kids!

In this episode, we change it up a bit as I become the interviewee. We explore my journey into entrepreneurship, why I started my own business, why I didn’t work for someone else (the answer will surprise you), my passion for small businesses, and the evolution of marketing over the years.

I reveal lessons from my polar opposite parents and my former fears about running a business.

We also dive into my favorite topic: the impact of AI on small businesses, the opportunities and challenges they face, and the importance of curiosity and innovation in business.

I wrapped up with a glimpse into my future aspirations—what might life look like after Duct Tape? And I answered the timeless question: What’s my all-time favorite business book?

Key Takeaways:

  • I started my entrepreneurial journey due to a lack of confidence in traditional employment.
  • Working with small businesses is both terrifying and gratifying.
  • Curiosity drives me to explore new marketing trends and technologies.
  • AI is not just a tool but a foundational element in marketing.
  • Small businesses can leverage AI for efficiency and personalization.
  • The buying intent of consumers remains strong despite market changes.
  • Experience helps entrepreneurs navigate ups and downs in business.
  • Marketing and innovation are the two pillars of a successful business.
  • Reading outside of business literature can inspire innovative ideas.
  • I envision a future where I write a work of fiction.

Chapters:

  • [00:00] Introduction to a Unique Podcast Experience
  • [02:01] The Journey into Entrepreneurship
  • [04:03] Passion for Small Businesses
  • [05:49] Curiosity and the Evolution of Marketing
  • [08:03] AI’s Impact on Small Businesses
  • [11:08] Opportunities and Challenges for Small Businesses
  • [13:52] Riding the Waves of Business
  • [16:21] Business Advice and Insights
  • [19:46] Future Aspirations and Legacy

Let us know if you’d like to see us make more shows like this!

 

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

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at Oracle.



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Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM world slash scale.

(01:00): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsc, and doing something really crazy today. A couple things actually that we’re going to do a little different today. I’m going to be the guest and I’m actually going to be interviewed on my own show by none other than Sara Nay. Some of you have met her. She’s the head of operations at Duct Tape Marketing, but she’s also one of my daughters who has worked with me for 13 years.

(01:28): So we thought, let’s see what kind of questions she could come up with and hopefully you’ll find this entertaining. Now, another thing that we are experimenting with today, so hopefully cross our fingers. This works out there in LinkedIn land. We are actually streaming this live. This is the first podcast that I’ve streamed live, so we’ll see how that works out as well. Love to get any feedback in the comments if you would like to and ask questions in LinkedIn if you are so inclined. And we’ll just see how this goes. But for now, I’m going to turn this over to Sara. Are you going to introduce me or how’s this going to work?

Sara Nay (02:05): I think people know who you are at this point, but I was actually curious as you were talking through that. How many interviews do you think you’ve conducted over the years on this podcast where people have listened to you be the host?

John Jantsch (02:16): Yeah. Oh, be the host. So I started this show in 2005 and certainly have done a minimum of a hundred shows a year, some years actually more than that. So I dunno what that adds up to. But yeah, I think we’re over 2000.

Sara Nay (02:30): So you’ve possibly listened to John interview guests 2000 times or so at this point. So this will hopefully be a fun perspective to hear him being interviewed. So my first question to you, I want to go way back to when you started Duct Tape Marketing as an entrepreneur. And I want to know more about the reason of why you went into entrepreneurship versus getting a full-time job.

John Jantsch (02:52): And I tell this story in my last book, I haven’t been telling it for years, but now that I’m getting old, all the secrets come out. But I often felt like when I got out of school, I didn’t feel prepared to do necessarily anything, any skill. I didn’t have honors in degrees in college that would’ve made me stand out to employers. And so I really think of, a lot of it had to do with a lack of confidence almost that I could get a job I saw that my friends were getting. And so I really thought as silly as this sounds, because a lot of people actually think, no, I’ve got enough years of experience to go out there on my own now. And I actually thought, no, I better go out there on my own. I know I can hustle work and maybe that’ll turn into something.

Sara Nay (03:38): That’s great. And you chose the small business space. I know you didn’t originally start there, but what caused you to make that shift into the small business space?

John Jantsch (03:46): Yeah, like I said, I hustled work, which meant anybody that would talk to me, I’d say I could do that. How hard could it be? Yeah, sure, I could do that. So I got big projects, little projects, whatever came my way. But I did land some small business clients that needed marketing help and I knew I could figure out how to help them, and I just really enjoyed working with them. I often say there’s something equal parts terrifying and gratifying about working with that person where they’re actually writing the check. I mean, they’re making a decision to pay you or maybe some other expense. It’s not the big company that accounts payables just paying the bills and moving on the next day. So I really love that. And plus you got to see the results of your work. I mean, you actually could see that, hey, this is making a difference. And so I think that’s why I really chose to serve that market. And quite frankly, it was a very fragmented market, mean nobody was really serving them in the marketing space. So I saw a lot of opportunity there as well.

Sara Nay (04:45): And that leads to one of the next questions I was going to ask is what keeps you going after all of this time? So obviously I’ve seen a lot of passion over the years towards the small business audience. Would you say that’s been one of the things that’s contributed to you being able to continue this on for 30 or so years at this point?

John Jantsch (05:01): I think there’s a couple things. There’s no question I feel like I’m serving me. I mean, I am a small business, so I feel like I’m one of the brethren, and so that I think is really gratifying. I think another thing too is I really always often talk about curiosity being my superpower. I just love the new stuff. And so to keep doing this, I mean, you think about all the things that have happened in the last 30 years in marketing in technology, and I think if you didn’t love it and weren’t really curious about what’s new and how does this work and how can I apply this, you’d kind of get run over. And so I really think that’s added to my love of staying in this and really helping other people figure it out. And I think people look to our brand for that guidance. We’re not excited about the next new thing because it’s the next new thing, but we’re excited about it because it can help us do what we’re fundamentally here to do as marketers.

Sara Nay (06:01): And that curiosity piece, obviously there’s been a lot of evolution in the last couple years on the topic of ai, and we’ve as a company, been diving into AI quite a bit in terms of increasing our productivity and what we’re doing for our clients. And so just curious, well, I didn’t mean to use the word curious there, but how has this curiosity of yours allowed you to dive into the whole topic of AI on a deeper level?

John Jantsch (06:22): Well, it’s just another thing. I mean, if you think about it, I mean, since I’ve been doing this, I mean when I started this, we didn’t have the internet. We didn’t have websites. So it’s like, oh, the website’s another thing we got to figure out. And then, I don’t know, email, social media. I mean, just over the years some new thing is going to come. I think that AI in a lot of ways is going to be different in that it’s not a platform. It’s not even a tool really. I think it’s going to be a plumbing, it’s going to really be baked into pretty much everything we do. In fact, it’s been baked into many things that we do without our knowledge. It’s just when a tool called chat GPT came along and it was very easy for somebody who didn’t know anything about it, could actually now experience the results of AI that might actually benefit them.

(07:12): So I think that’s why at the last year and a half, you’ve seen so much buzz about it. But I just think that it’s a perfect example of curiosity. I mean, you can make AI do just about anything it seems like. And so now it really is up to your imagination. So to me, it’s like the perfect tool to really explore and find ways that maybe nobody’s even talking about it. Or a lot of times what happens is a new technology will come along and people will discount it because they’ll see the ways people are talking about it. There’s no shortage of get rich quick people that are back out there on the AI train trying to say, oh, take this course and you can make $5,000 a minute in your sleep. And so I think that turns a lot of people off. But what really excites me is when you can go, but I can do this little thing that’s going to make me more efficient, more profitable, is going to take away work that I don’t like doing anyway. I mean when you start looking at all the possibilities, it really is your only limitation, I think is your imagination and your curiosity.

Sara Nay (08:20): And talking back to the small business space as well, which is a lot of who we serve, how do you think AI is impacting that group specifically?

John Jantsch (08:29): Well, I think that, let’s talk about marketing. I mean, that’s one aspect, obviously where it’s pretty much impacting anybody because there are things that AI tools can do much more efficiently, and I would say in some cases more effectively than even humans. It’s very good at doing research, it’s very good at analyzing, let’s say your Google Analytics data. A lot of people look at that and go, oh, good, we had more hits or whatever. And to be able to say, no, tell me what we need to do differently. Tell me what we could do better. Tell me what our best opportunities are. And to have something that is basically a super computer with just very common language requests and prompts can now crush that data and really give you some insights back that are going to help you prioritize or help you certainly work better.

(09:17): We’re going to see personalization going to all new levels to where customer segments will be inside a database and they’ll be able to have AI look at who that person is and what their needs are and where they are in the buyer journey and what segment they’re in. And all of a sudden say, similar to say how Amazon says, oh, you read these three books, you’ll probably like these three books. Well, that’s going to start happening at a greater level for pretty much everybody. And I think that’s one of the things that these advances in technology do is they really democratize some of the things that the Amazons of the world have made an expectation. But at what cost, right? I don’t have tens of thousands of programmers that can make all this stuff work for me. Well, all of a sudden now, even the smallest business has that kind of computing power really in their hands.

(10:11): So I think that every element hiring, it’s certainly impacting for folks. I mean, AI can take 2000 resumes and really analyze them for exactly what you’re looking for. There’s always going to be a human element, but there was a great deal of that kind of repetitive work that doesn’t necessarily require a human element and frankly is work that is kind of mind numbing. There’s not a whole lot of humans that want to do it. And so I think you take things like that and all of sudden, now I know you and I have talked about this, all of a sudden now you’ve got people who were doers who are now really more managers of the doing. And I think that’s actually very empowering. A lot of people talk about, oh, it’s going to replace people. I think it’s actually has the opportunity to not only make people more successful and more efficient in their work, but I think empower them to actually do better and bigger things.

(11:08): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape. That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape.

Sara Nay (12:11): Yeah, absolutely. And on this note too, what do you think are the opportunities for small business right now? And it doesn’t necessarily just have to be limited to ai. It can be anything. And also I’d love to hear what do you think are some common challenges that you see in the small business space as well?

John Jantsch (12:26): Well, I think the opportunity and the challenge are probably the same thing. I’ve been talking about how I think the last 10 years, some marketers have gotten pretty lazy because it was actually easy if you just followed Google’s rules, which they laid out, you could get search traffic. I’m not saying it was like magic fairy dust, but I mean, you did the things that they said you should do. You could get search traffic and you could get leads. The social networks were more than willing to sell all the data on their users. And so you could really target very specifically who might want your products and services. And so consequently, some businesses were able to grow pretty easily. Now of course, what’s happening is you look at the search results, you do any kind of search on Google, and they want you to accept the generative AI answer that they’re going to give you rather than clicking off to the website.

(13:16): That might also, frankly, they might’ve actually extracted that answer from. And so search is going to get much harder across the board. Industries are seeing 25 and 30% of their organic traffic just disappear overnight because people are getting the answers that they want without reading the blog posts that might also have a CTA on your website. And of course, third party data is going away. You can’t sell that data. And so consequently, all the ad platforms are actually increasing their pricing extremely. So that’s going to be the real challenge. But I think the real opportunity is the buying is not going away. The buying intent is not going away. People still need those products and services. And so businesses that I think can figure out how to actually make a real connection with prospects and with customers and really focus on brand strategy as well as campaign or marketing strategy, I think are going to be, I think the ones that really stand out today. So there’s a real opportunity, but it really does change the mindset to being less about demand creation and really more about organizing behavior and focusing very much on strategy.

Sara Nay (14:29): Yeah, absolutely. And building trust and guiding the customer journey and getting referrals, which I’m sure people, if they’ve heard you speak, I’ve heard you on those topics before. I want to take it back to you a little bit at this point. So as we said, you’ve been in business for quite some time. I’ve learned this from you and seen it. There’s a lot of ups and downs in business. And so I’ve struggled with that over the years is to say things are going to be okay, we’re going to get back on track. And so just from your perspective, what has helped you ride all of those waves over the years?

John Jantsch (14:57): Well, I think there’s no question that experience helps you. I mean, when you go through a couple of those ups and downs, you’re like, oh, okay, actually there was an opportunity in that we were, woe is me. But then you’re like, oh, wait a minute. There’s actually an opportunity or we can learn something from that. So you do that enough times, and I’m not saying it doesn’t take some resilience and some grit, and I certainly had times when I was very worrisome about putting you guys through college, all the things that every business owner goes through. But there’s no question that seeing it a few times and realizing, hey, not only is everything going to be okay, but we just actually, we have to start thinking about it differently. We have to start looking for where the opportunity is because it’s always there. And I think that helps kind of say, okay, yeah, this was a down month, but hey, every December is a down month or something along those lines.

(15:52): The experience really comes from that. There’s also an element of mindset that’s a piece of it as well. And I really often, my parents were very different people. My dad was very worried all the time. We had 10 kids, I don’t blame him, but he was worried quite often about something was going to go wrong, and my mom was the complete opposite. She was like, oh, nope, something different. This didn’t happen because it wasn’t supposed to. And I think that sort of optimistic mindset is certainly can be a real tool for entrepreneurs because you do have to really look for, we get very focused on what we want to happen or what we think should happen. And when it doesn’t, you can really get knocked off track. But if your mindset is okay, that wasn’t supposed to happen that way, where’s the opportunity or what is supposed to happen? I think that mindset, while it can be hard sometimes, really can take you a long way.

Sara Nay (16:46): Yeah, I like a lot of what you said there, but I agree with the learning aspect specifically. That’s something that I’ve really tried to shift my focus on is if we don’t reach a specific goal, it’s okay, what can we learn from this versus stressing out about it to do better next time around? So that’s great. I have a couple quick fire questions. Maybe these will be quick, maybe not, depends on what you have to say on ’em. But to wrap us up today, the first one I want to hear is what is the best business advice you have ever received?

John Jantsch (17:13): Dang, I’ve been asked that question so many times on the podcast that I’ve been on, and I don’t know that I have a great answer, but I always go back to early on in my journey, I read a book that was actually written in the fifties. Most people of my age are familiar with Peter Drucker, and the book was called The Practice of Management. And that book, I just remember, I’m not even sure really why I read it to be truthful. I wasn’t trying to understand management of a big corporation, which is what he wrote about, but he had a line in there that to this day, and you’ll see it quoted all the time because a lot of reference it, especially marketing people, but the quote in there was, the only two things in a business that matter are marketing and innovation. Everything else is a cost. And again, you’ll see that people quoting that all the time. But I remember reading that in the nineties perhaps when I was still consuming or when I started consuming a lot of business books. And I just remember thinking, okay, that idea of marketing and innovation, that marketing needs to be a system, that marketing needs to be a high priority, that marketing is everything really infused a lot of my thinking through the years,

Sara Nay (18:25): And this relates to that. It might be the same answer, but what’s the best business book you’ve ever read? Is it that one or is it a different one?

John Jantsch (18:33): So it’s actually sitting right here.

Sara Nay (18:36): There you go. He’s coming there.

John Jantsch (18:38): This is not a business book. And I tell people this all the time, that one of, and this may be just my curiosity bug, but one of the ways that I’ve gotten great business books or business ideas over the years is to read books that are not related to business. And this one is by Christopher Alexander. It’s kind of a classic, I don’t know if my camera’s going to pick it up, but it’s called The Timeless Way of Building. He’s an architect and he was talking about building communities, and there’s so many things that can be gleaned from things like math and science and architecture that apply to the industry that you’re in, but it’s just a different way of looking at it. A lot of times you read out business books, you read marketing books. You and I have laughed about this before. All those books on operation systems basically just are saying the same thing. They’re just coming up with different terminology for it. And I think that’s true of consistently reading business books. So my advice to people all the time is get out and read books that are completely unrelated, not just for your own knowledge, but to read them with a filter of how could I apply this to my business? Or are there ideas or terms in here that would apply to my business? A lot of the things that I think have become cornerstones of Duct Tape Marketing really came from other industries.

Sara Nay (19:59): I think that’s just showing your natural curiosity to go out and explore outside the box and think beyond the typical business world to find out some of these things. Okay, one last one. I lied. I’m going to throw one more in it and then we can wrap up. John’s obviously not going anywhere. Duct tape is his thing. He is been around for a long time, but I’m just curious, what’s next in your future? One day after Duct Tape Marketing Woodworking, there is

John Jantsch (20:20): No after Duct Tape Marketing.

(20:23): Well, maybe somebody who’s very familiar with Duct Tape Marketing will continue the legacy of Duct Tape Marketing. We’ll see if that happens. However, yeah, you mentioned woodworking. I love doing that. I’m really still very much in the amateur ranks, but I do like building furniture and things. I kid, and hopefully my wife can’t hear me right now, but I would like to write another book, but I want to write fiction. I would like to write a book of fiction. And I personally know that it’s a lot harder to write fiction than it is to write nonfiction. So a lot of people would say, oh, you’ve written books before. How hard could that be? But different beast. So I think when I really do wind down kind of daily work on in a business, I will probably try to figure that one out.

Sara Nay (21:06): All right. Well, you heard it here first. Everyone, John Jans is writing a fiction book coming out in 2028. Okay, we’ll say.

John Jantsch (21:16): Okay.

Sara Nay (21:16): All right. Well, that’s all I got for you today.

John Jantsch (21:19): Well, so let me ask you a question.

Sara Nay (21:24): Okay.

John Jantsch (21:26): What has it been like working for your father for coming up on 14 years now?

Sara Nay (21:33): Yeah, I know people actually ask me that sometimes. And it’s funny, I joke that I call you John more often than dad these days because often we’re in a business setting. And so John is just what is easy for me to say, which is pretty funny. I started

John Jantsch (21:48): What you referred to me as Hot pop to your kids.

Sara Nay (21:50): Yeah, my kids, that name. No, I think it’s been a really positive relationship, working relationship over the years. I started as an intern and we were just kind of both like, is this going to work out? Does this make sense? But I think one thing that’s really helped us over the years is we compliment each other well, in terms of our skillset. You’re more of the visionary, the forward thinker. I’m more of the operations systems process person. I’ve become, I think, more of that visionary over the years. But we’ve really, I think, had a positive relationship because we’ve complimented each other and also stayed in our lanes when we needed to as well.

John Jantsch (22:24): Awesome. Well, thank you for taking the host job today, and I’ll take back over and say those of you out there, thanks for joining us. Let me know if you like this chef, you like this idea. Maybe we’ll hear more from Sarah on an ongoing basis to talk about some of the marketing things that we talk about all the time. So again, thanks for taking a few moments to listen to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.


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Consult with Ease: Personalize Your Customer Stragtegy Using AI

Consult with Ease: Personalize Your Customer Stragtegy Using AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with David Edelman

In this episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing David Edelman, a seasoned digital transformation and marketing expert.

As CMO, Edelman guided Aetna (now part of CVS Health) through becoming a digitally oriented, customer-centric brand. He built McKinsey’s Digital Marketing Strategy Practice and had leadership roles at BCG and Digitas. Repeatedly recognized by Forbes as one of the “Most Influential CMOs in the World” and by AdWeek as one of the “Top 20 Marketing and Technology Executives,” his work has attracted over 1.1 million followers to his LinkedIn blog. Currently, David advises top executives on AI and personalization.

In this episode, we dive into the ever-evolving world of personalization in business, uncovering the game-changing role of AI in redefining how companies connect with their audiences. Edelman emphasizes the importance of creating customer experiences at scale and the competitive advantage that effective personalization has.

Edelman explores the advantages of personalization, while highlighting the ongoing challenges of overstepping boundaries—a pitfall many of us have encountered firsthand. He shares practical examples of how AI enhances customer interactions and tackles concerns about data privacy and the potential discomfort of overly personalized marketing. The conversation also touches on the challenges marketers face in content creation and the need for more thoughtful, effective communication strategies.

Key Takeaways:

  • Personalization is about creating customer experiences at scale.
  • AI enhances personalization by analyzing customer data.
  • The privacy factor in personalization must be managed carefully.
  • 70% of consumers are comfortable with data use for value.
  • Speed of learning is crucial for competitive advantage.
  • Companies often have more data than they realize, but it’s siloed.
  • AI can help integrate data from various sources effectively.
  • Successful personalization can lead to increased customer satisfaction.
  • Content should be bite-sized and easily digestible for consumers.
  • Empowering customers with their data can enhance their experience.

 

Chapters:

[00:00] Introduction to Personalization in Business

[02:59] The Role of AI in Personalization

[06:00] Navigating the Privacy Factor of Personalization

[08:54] Competitive Advantage through Personalization

[12:02] Practical Applications of AI in Customer Experience

[14:53] Content Creation and AI’s Impact

[17:56] Successful Examples of Personalization

More About David Edelman:

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

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at Oracle.



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Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM world slash scale.

(01:05): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is David Edelman. He’s a long time advisor on digital transformation and marketing, and as a CMO, David guided Aetna now part of CVS Health through becoming a digitally oriented customer centric brand. He built McKinsey’s digital marketing strategy practice and has also had leadership roles at BCG and Digitas currently advises top executives on AI and personalization, and we’re going to talk about his upcoming book, his new book, personalized Customer Strategy in the Age of ai. So welcome to the show, David.

David Edelman (01:46): Thank you, John. Pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (01:48): So this may seem like a silly question, but I think it’s probably important to set this baseline to start with. How are you defining in the context of business personalization?

David Edelman (02:00): Yeah, sure. In the early days, and this was really early back in 1989 when I first started playing in this area, before the internet, it was really just focused on marketing, using customer data to target to do a bit more matching of a name. And then in the internet area it became retargeting. What we are talking about now though is with all the AI tools that are available, it is not just about marketing, it’s about a customer experience. It’s about creating experiences at scale that use a customer’s information to give them back value and then to constantly get better as you learn what somebody responds to, what they like, what they tell you about. And it’s a way of competing. It’s actually your value proposition, not just simply the way you try to push sales.

John Jantsch (03:04): So you mentioned AI already. So can we give me some examples of how ai, I mean we went from, like you said, being able to put somebody’s name into an email field, a first name field, and now we’re going to ai, which theoretically can say, Hey, I know every data point in this customer’s history or this customer’s journey, and because of that, I can not just put their name in there, but I can actually, it’s kind of like Amazon recommending, oh, these are books you’re probably going to like type of thing. So what are the big ways that AI is really impacting the approach to personalization?

David Edelman (03:46): Yeah, sure. And it’s not just generative ai, it’s a whole range

(03:50): Of capabilities that are coming together. Let me give you an example and just show how AI plays a role in all of this. So you’ve got the digital natives like Spotify, Uber who work with you, but there’s others who are starting to move into this as well. So for example, a few years ago in the town I was living in Lexington, Massachusetts, they offered an incentive for buying solar panels. And that opened up a floodgate of marketing, just crazy amounts of marketing. But one company sent me a physical mailing that said, you Edelman at this address can save 20% on your annual energy bills. There’s a personalized URL in here that’ll explain how with sungevity type the URL into the computer and I get a Google Earth image of the roof of my house with solar panels superimposed on it down the right rail. They calculate how much energy those panels can generate based on my longitude and latitude, the east west orientation of my roof.

(05:03): They even had tree cover examples in there. And then they use Zillow to get the square footage of my house and use that to calculate how much energy I would use over the course of a year. So they had the numerator and the denominator and that gave them 21.3% savings. So there’s a whole bunch of AI going into that. So they’re interpreting, they’re looking at all of these Google Earth images in our town to try to then figure out which are the ones that could generate at least 20% savings. So that’s not generative ai, that’s more machine learning calculation capability, predictive modeling that’s going into that. Then they used a generative AI capability to generate the roof of my house with the solar panels on top. Then on an ongoing basis, they’re monitoring how much energy I actually generate, and they’re using that to balance load and decide when to sell energy back into the grid. What’s the right time for doing that? Again, that’s predictive modeling. So there’s a whole bunch of capabilities here. And then when I actually talked to the chief marketing officer of Sun Jevity, she was telling me how they constantly test and learn to figure out how to even make this work, and they were using AI capabilities to do multivariate testing, to set up the test cells

John Jantsch (06:40): And

David Edelman (06:40): Manage all of the different variables. So there’s a number of different AI capabilities that are stitching together to make these kinds of experiences possible.

John Jantsch (06:51): So that leads me dangerously close to an idea that I was going to present. At what point does that get creepy? It can know too much. Or maybe more practical example. There are industries healthcare that are highly regulated, right? I mean, so at what point does that its ability to know surpassed my, surpassed the point where it’s a good experience for me,

David Edelman (07:15): The creepiness factor comes up all the time, John, and it’s real, and we’ve got to constantly think about what will make somebody feel uncomfortable. I was chief marketing officer of Aetna, so health insurance company where one of the things we were doing was marketing to people help them to encourage them to do healthier behaviors. So if they could do healthier behaviors, they’d be healthier, they’d save money, we’d save money, everyone would be good. But you have to be super careful about how you’re doing that, how you’re identifying people, what information is shared, the security behind it. We were incredibly vigilant about all of that and doing so in a way that had security guidelines through the whole thing. So I think it’s just critical to think about the customer. Too much of where AI could go is just bombarding people who you think have done a certain kind of behavior and then they’re wondering, how did you know this? You’ve got to take the customer’s perspective. How would they react? How are you adding value? As part of the work that I did with the BCG in writing the book, we surveyed thousands of consumers in the US and other countries. 70% of people said they were comfortable with companies using their data to help them get value, but 75% said they stopped doing business with brands who used it

John Jantsch (08:50): Inappropriately.

David Edelman (08:52): So you’ve got to really think through from the customer’s perspective.

John Jantsch (08:58): Well, and I think that’s probably true of all technology. I mean, if it actually makes a better experience for me or makes it easy for me to do something like online scheduling, I’ll do it all day long. But if they use it as a tool to, so I don’t ever have to talk to you the phone systems and things where you can’t actually talk to somebody when you want to do that. I think that it’s similar with ai, right? We’re always going to want something that adds value. We’re always going to resist something that either creates friction or a bad experience,

David Edelman (09:26): And that’s our whole thing with personalization. It’s about experience that make it simpler, easier, faster, enable you to discover new things.

Testimonial (09:36): It’s

David Edelman (09:36): About empowering the customer, and we talk about that in the book that you have to start by thinking through how can you empower somebody using this information about them?

John Jantsch (09:47): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. So buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape.

(10:44): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. Yeah, so the book presents a lot of examples of personalization that I think a lot of people might look at as, oh yeah, that’s something we ought to be doing that’s clever or that’ll make a better experience. But you really, the main premise of the book is that this is a serious competitive advantage. In fact, you actually have a formula in the book to calculate what personalization might be worth, and one of the key elements of the formula is speed of learning. So you want to take any, that was sort of a question. You want to take any component of that and break it down because you really to focus on the idea of competitive advantage?

David Edelman (11:29): Yeah, absolutely. So one of the most important things about personalization is having data and AI lives off data and you want data to be able to make predictive modeling and to make sharper and more granular and more timely predictions. You also want to be able to just simply know more contextually about your customer. That’s appropriate. And so the formula that we’ve put in, and admittedly it’s a bit of an abstraction, but it’s n which is the number of observations that you have times the velocity, the speed by which you can test and learn and collect more data squared.

John Jantsch (12:17): Because

David Edelman (12:17): The more you can collect data, the more you learn, the more you’re understanding the variations that AI thrives on. AI wants all those variations. It wants to understand the underlying correlations to those variations, and the more you can test and learn, the faster you can get that out the door, the more you can build up your knowledge base. And then the other side of speed that’s important is you can also act faster on it so that when you find out something about someone, often it’s a question of in the moment in real time, well, how fast can you act? That’s a critical area for assessing value. So we say the value from personalization, the advantage you can get is based on how much data you can get on your target customer base and then your speed of refreshing and acting on that knowledge squared.

John Jantsch (13:14): Okay, so what’s the constraint for most companies? I’m guessing it’s n they don’t really have access, right?

David Edelman (13:21): Well, it’s n most companies actually have access to more data than they realize, but it’s broken up all over the company.

(13:30): So they may have some marketing data, customer service data, sales data, product usage data, but they haven’t thought about it from a cross-functional way to bring it together. And AI tools now can actually make the integration of data easier than it ever was before. For example, there’s a tool from a company called Narrative called Rosetta, like the Rosetta Stone, and it looks at one dataset, understands its schema, looks at a second, understands that schema, and writes the code to combine the data sets and normalize them. So companies are using this. The trade desk uses this, for example, for importing data from its clients and mixing it with all its own data to do targeting for personalized, for programmatic buying and others. Pepsi uses this, Nielsen uses this, and it’s a way to leverage the power of AI to bring more data together upon which you can apply ai.

(14:30): So one thing is actually deliberately thinking about how to bring that data together. The second is speed. Most companies take six, maybe even 12 weeks to get programs out the door. And especially if you’re in a business like financial services or healthcare where there are compliance issues, it can take forever, but you can redesign your processes to be faster, still meeting all those compliance hurdles, but it’s a different way of operating. It’s getting people all together in a room with the right kinds of tools to be able to come up with ideas for tests, get them out the door, get everyone together instead of having a waterfall and setting up appointments. Oh, two weeks we can get together. No two minutes we’re together. Let’s just make the decisions. So it’s a different way of operating. So it’s a data mindset and then a focus on speed.

John Jantsch (15:27): Can you give some practical examples? Again, you’re talking about ways in which you would start thinking differently about this, but can you give some practical examples that you’ve seen where people have actually used AI very effectively to create better experiences for customers?

David Edelman (15:45): Yeah, sure. So I mean, one just that we all see, and maybe it’s gone a bit too far, is the Starbucks app. So Starbucks, when you open the Starbucks app in 300 milliseconds, you get a tailored experience that uses AI to know who you are, where you are, you near work, near home, maybe you’re just simply traveling someplace, what time of day it is. So what are you likely to want during that time of day? Do you tend to order food, what you’ve ordered before? Do you order on special, do you have points you can use? And all of that leads to an incredibly simple interface for you to just simply place your order. And there’s examples of that in B2B, Cisco, the food delivery company, S-Y-S-C-O does something very similar. They deliver to eating establishments all over this country, and if you’re a procurement manager for a restaurant, you open your Cisco app. Same kind of thing is happening where the AI is looking at all of those data points and bringing it together. And in the case of Cisco, even knowing what they’ve gotten, the warehouse because it’s food and some things they may want to move and offer on a discount because it might be appropriate for your menu. There’s things like that where you can just see it immediately and it makes your ordering, for example, so much more streamlined.

John Jantsch (17:17): Let’s go back to marketers. One of the biggest frustrations marketers have is that the ever-growing need for content seems to be the beast that they cannot feed enough to. So I think there’s some pretty obvious ways that ai, a lot of marketers, I think are realizing, Hey, AI is great at repurposing, which helps us content at scale. I wonder where you fall on maybe where it is today and maybe where it will be. It seems to me that AI is not very good at producing original content.

David Edelman (17:47): No, not yet. I mean, it depends on your need and the category you’re in. I mean, if you’re just trying to create simple product ads, okay, AI can do that. If you’re trying to create things that have some degree of emotion, there are advances that are making it easier, you should have a human in the loop. I think what AI can do though is unlock a lot of ideation

(18:11): And help you quickly see what something might look like and then you can adapt it. I think the biggest challenge that we all face as marketers from AI is just overwhelming customers because you can create so much more and frankly, so much more crap. And so people are going to start turning it off, they’re going to unsubscribe, and some companies have already started seeing this, and so less is more. It’s got to be smarter about when you’re reaching out, what you’re reaching out with, the way the content actually renders itself versus just simply bombarding the hell out of someone who happened to visit some content on their site.

John Jantsch (18:56): I wonder how, there’s one thing that I don’t think a lot of content marketers talk about, and this is I think both B2B and B2C is I think we sometimes underestimate how the consumers of that content are also using ai. So we write this beautiful 50 page ebook white paper that we spend a lot of time and energy on, and they feed it into chat GPT and say, give me the five things I need to know here. So if that dynamic is as big as I think it is, what does that tell marketers that they need to be doing with their content? Is that just something we’re going to have to learn to live with?

David Edelman (19:33): Well, I think a, it’s something you’ll live with. If you send overwhelming stuff to people, I think again, sending even a 15 page, not 50, but one five even, that’s a lot. So can you make it bite-sized chunks? Can you make it simpler? Videos? I’m a big believer in simple videos. One of the things we did, for example, at Aetna, when you get your health insurance, do you really understand that most people don’t. They’re confused, they don’t understand. So they call into the call center, they go out of network, they’re not happy, and that cost us money. So we use the service that was called Sunday Sky to create personalized videos for every member when they onboarded, you would get John, your specific health plan, who in your family was covered? Who had a primary care relationship with a doctor? If you didn’t, here are five that are near you that are taking new patients. Click here to schedule. That’s a power of content. That’s an experience. 70% of people watch the three and a half minute video, and we got it down to really simple language calls to the call center went down, satisfaction went up. People even opened our emails more often after we sent that.

John Jantsch (20:59): Are there a couple of examples of companies big and small that you see out there that are doing this well?

David Edelman (21:06): Yeah, sure. So I mentioned Cisco, the food delivery company, which I think is really good. Another great example in financial services is Voya. So they do employee benefits and generally you’ve got your 401k and your financial, and then you’ve got your healthcare and you may have personal investments and it’s all over the place and it doesn’t come together. They have invested in intermingling all of that into one interface that they call my voyage, and you can add your own information into it, and then they’ve put AI on it. That is pretty much agnostic, and I’ve seen it in action. It doesn’t bias us towards Voya. It’s just saying, what’s best for you in terms of making decisions of where, for example, to put the next dollar of your benefits, should you be saving in a health savings account? Should you put it in the 401k? And they’ve won most trusted financial service institutions since this has come out. They’ve been growing share, and so they’ve helped people essentially activate their own data, that it was scattered all over and they’ve brought it together, put intelligence on top of it and helped you make sense of it and use it to make decisions. That’s a powerful example of using personalization, just change the value prop.

John Jantsch (22:36): Awesome. Well, David, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where would you invite people to connect with you and obviously find a copy of personalized customer strategy in the age of ai?

David Edelman (22:48): Yeah, sure. So you can easily connect with me on LinkedIn and you can find the book personalized on Amazon. It’s right there. It’s actually number one in customer relations. It was one of the top new releases last week, so we’re very excited about it. I would love to hear stories of new ideas that the book sparks.

John Jantsch (23:09): Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you taking a few moments. Hopefully we’ll run into you on these days out there on the road. David.


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Run Highly-Effective Teams By Creating Principle-Based Habits

Run Highly-Effective Teams By Creating Principle-Based Habits written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Kory Kogon

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Kory Kogon, Vice President of Content Development at FranklinCovey. With over 25 years of business expertise spanning frontline roles to executive leadership, she brings a deep understanding of how to apply FranklinCovey’s world-renowned content to drive success within organizations. Her insights into the strategies and principles for building exceptional leaders, robust systems, and winning cultures demonstrate how FranklinCovey’s blended learning solutions create real, practical impact—enabling the critical behavior changes needed for transformational results.

She is a co-author of the #4 Wall Street Journal bestseller The 5 Choices: The Path to Extraordinary Productivity, and Project Management Essentials for the Unofficial Project Manager. 

In this episode, we discuss the enduring relevance of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 35 years after its release and explore how these principle-based habits can be applied in contemporary settings. Kogon shares her insights on being proactive, the importance of empathy in communication, effective time management, and fostering a culture that embraces these habits. She also touches on the significance of well-being in the workplace and how organizations can support their employees’ mental health.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Habit one, be proactive, is foundational for leadership.
  • Empathy in communication is critical in today’s world.
  • Time management is about prioritizing what’s truly important.
  • Building a culture around the Seven Habits takes time and effort.
  • Well-being is essential for productivity and effectiveness.
  • The principles of the Seven Habits remain unchanged over time.
  • Organizations must listen to their employees’ needs for well-being.
  • Effective leaders model the behaviors of the Seven Habits.
  • Understanding others’ perspectives can prevent miscommunication.

Questions I asked Kory Kogon:

[00:00] Introduction to the Seven Habits
[03:05] The Importance of Being Proactive
[06:06] Understanding and Empathy in Communication
[09:01] Time Management and Prioritization
[12:02] Building a Culture of the Seven Habits
[14:58] Well-Being and the Seventh Habit

More About Kory Kogon:

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

Oracle

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(01:02): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz. My guest today is Kory Kogon. She’s Franklin Covey’s vice president of content development and a senior leadership consultant with over 25 years of business expertise from the frontline to the executive team. She understands the application of Franklin Covey’s world-renowned content within organizations, including the strategy and principles necessary to build great leaders systems and winning cultures. So we’re going to talk a little bit about, this is almost a revisit. We’re going to talk a little bit about the seven Habits of Highly Effective People. A book that was out actually came out last century, has sold millions and millions and millions of copies and certainly is as rings as true today as probably ever. So Kory, welcome to the show.

Kory Kogon (01:52): Oh, thank you so much for having me, John. It’s a pleasure.

John Jantsch (01:55): So you continue to evolve and create content around the whole Seven Habits concept, but give me a little bit of what’s your history with Franklin Covey with maybe with the Seven Habits Library?

Kory Kogon (02:14): Well, we will take you back just a Scot before that. I’ve been with Frank Company for 18 years, so had the pleasure and honor of knowing Steven before he passed away in 2012. But prior to that, I was the vice president of worldwide operations for a global franchise company. And so myself and the CEO ensured that we had a seven habits culture.

(02:39): I was a franchise organization and around the world, a seven habits culture. And so my familiarity started there and it was only sort of by accident, but not really that I ended up at FranklinCovey. And so as a consultant first, and then as part of the practices around productivity and leadership. So my familiarity with Seven Habits goes way back to implementation within small businesses and then bringing that practical business experience with me to FranklinCovey, to blend it with things like the Seven Habits to really help organizations across sectors move forward. So that’s a little bit about my journey.

John Jantsch (03:24): So whenever an author or we’re talking about a book that’s like 200 ways to do X or seven habits or whatever the number might be, I always like to tease people and say, do you have a favorite favorite of the habits?

Kory Kogon (03:42): Yes, I do Habit one. Habit one, be proactive, which is the habit of choice. And I’ll tell again, very practical, very pragmatic. I’m an operations executive. Steven talks about being proactive, not reactive. So as a leader in particular or as an individual contributor, being reactive to everything makes you come off as victimized and just not as somebody who makes things happen. And Steven talks about the space between stimulus and response, and that’s why it’s my favorite because if I’m good at, okay, something’s triggering me before I hit the send button, can I count to 10 and think about what outcome I really want? And my whole career has been like that. To me, that’s being proactive and it saved me both personally and professionally many, many times. So happy one is very foundational and truly for me it is totally my favorite one.

John Jantsch (04:44): Well, and I recall in interviewing both Steven and his son Steven. Hm. Is that right? Hm.

Kory Kogon (04:51): Steven hr.

John Jantsch (04:52): Oh, hr, sorry, got

Kory Kogon (04:54): That. I’m sorry. Stephen. MR Covey,

John Jantsch (04:56): Steven, Mr. Boy, we both are messing it up. Steven, Mr. I remember some reference to Vitor Frankl in

Kory Kogon (05:03): His work

John Jantsch (05:03): Actually in that particular habit.

Kory Kogon (05:07): And again, just we say you have the power to choose your response. And again, Viktor Frankl was a terrible experience and just we learned a lot from how he handled the circumstances he was in. So you choose, you get very self-aware that we call it emotional intelligence in this day and age, self-awareness, get very self-aware to just before you, whatever circumstance you’re in, how can I think about how to deal with it in a way that I can live through it?

John Jantsch (05:40): Yeah, between stimulus and response, there is a moment and in that moment lies our freedom.

Kory Kogon (05:44): There you go.

John Jantsch (05:45): I think is the actual quote. Would you say because of your familiarity, sort of a long familiarity with the work, has the world changed in a way that has changed of those habits? Have any of those habits become more relevant? Just kind of talk to me a little bit about the evolution, I guess, of over 35 years.

Kory Kogon (06:05): Yeah, so the thing about the Seven Habits is that it is principle based.

(06:13): And I was just rereading this morning, Dr. Covey’s, when he was asked these questions, I was reading a transcript of an interview and he was so clear before he passed away in 2012, and we feel the same today. So even we just spent millions of dollars in relaunching and contemporizing the workshop, the course around the seven habits, and the habits didn’t change, the principles didn’t change, just how we applied them in a contemporary way that people really can consume and remember and do something with. So it’s how you point these principles and habits. And as Steven would say, as the more turbulent, the more challenging the world gets, the more important these habits and principles are. And that’s a true statement.

John Jantsch (07:08): So I’m going to, you didn’t ask me to, but I’m going to tell you my favorite. And that is seek first to understand, then to be understood. I think that a lot of miscommunication, and I asked the question about has the world evolved or changed, I feel like we’re in this moment where that habit is probably more important than I can ever remember it being.

Kory Kogon (07:30): I really appreciate that. And I didn’t want to interrupt you before, so I didn’t ask you that question. And I’ve taught this hundreds of thousands of times I think, and keynoting it now and speaking to groups as we’re relaunching and since the pandemic. I’m with you, John, because with the remote hybrid, the state of the world, there’s a lot of pain going on. And whether a personal or professional, if you are not listening, empathically to others, seeking first understand and putting yourself in others’ shoes and sort of not absorbing, but acknowledging the pain they might be in or the excitement that they’re in, and really understanding them without trying to fix things and do the whole autobiographical listening thing, giving them space and empathy to really feel safe, to be able to have a conversation and move to action. So I’m with you, it has become critical that whether you’re in a family, in a small business or a big business, that you are listening to each other deeply.

John Jantsch (08:43): I remember a story from the book that really, I remember drove that point home so much that we have absolutely no, especially a stranger, we have absolutely no idea what’s going on in their life. And there was a story about a man on a bus and he had, I dunno if you recall it, but there were children that were being unruly and he wasn’t paying attention to them at all. And everybody thought how rude that was, and he should take those children, take care of ’em. Well, turns out the story is his wife has just passed and nobody, you have no idea what it is going on in somebody’s life. And I think that story and that lesson really probably, or that principle really probably impacted me at a really early time in my career, probably more than anything.

Kory Kogon (09:24): Yeah, it’s a classic story around a paradigm. And Steven says, I was like, why doesn’t he get ahold of his kids? Whatever. So we had a paradigm shift, and that is really the basis of the seven habits is how do we help people become very, very aware that the way we think about things may not be exactly that and how we behave and show up in the world. Maybe if we were open to examining our paradigms, we could make good changes that make us more effective. And don’t go down those kinds of rabbit holes like Steven did with making that kind of assumption.

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(11:02): That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape. So this book was probably the first place I was introduced. I mean the whole four quadrant thing has been around since consulting was invented, but it was the first place where I really saw a clear picture of the idea of the stuff that’s nagging you but it’s not important and the important stuff that is also needs to be done or is the most impactful. That idea of, I don’t think he called it time management necessarily, but it was really more along the lines of if you just stay focused on the important stuff that’s actually going to be high payoff, then that’s probably all you need to focus on.

Kory Kogon (11:51): Yeah. So that’s habit three first things and that became so popular and important. He sort of blew that up into a bigger book and first it was achieving focus, achieving highest priorities. Now we have the five choices, the path to extraordinary productivity and the time matrix is a core part of that because, and he did call it time management, it’s a time matrix where you really have a process by which you can synthesize, let me get really clear on what’s most important, and then how do I make sure that I’m mitigating or eliminating the things that may be less or not important. So your brain needs a process, and so the time matrix is really helpful to that.

John Jantsch (12:35): Well, and we work with a lot of entrepreneurs, some of our solopreneurs, and what gets in the way with them so often is there’s things that they’re doing that they shouldn’t be doing at all. But then there’s certainly things that somebody else, one of my great examples, get that off your plate delegate that there’s lots of people who actually enjoy doing that. And I think that once people get to the point where they’re like, yeah, I shouldn’t be doing this. That’s not important. I can delegate this because frankly I don’t like doing it anyway, then all of a sudden you’re like, okay, maybe I do have the time for the important stuff.

Kory Kogon (13:08): It is, I’m sorry.

John Jantsch (13:10): I was just going to say it’s hard for people though because we’re just so focused on like, oh no, this thing is yelling in my ear so I better do it.

Kory Kogon (13:18): And I like to call from the neuroscience world labeling and reappraising. If I just write down, take the time to really write down what’s important. Tell you even and working in my past in the franchise business and helping support small businesses, we found that some of the entrepreneurs would do bookkeeping or go sweep the floor because they didn’t want to go out and sell. So they sort of knew. So there’s a whole psychology around some of that. And when you have a framework and you have a process, and again, that’s what effectiveness is all about, what are the tools that can support how I can get really clear on what’s important and come to terms with those things that maybe I shouldn’t be doing? Because if I don’t do that, I’m not going to achieve my end in mind of a successful business.

John Jantsch (14:07): How have you seen leaders? Because sometimes when you read some of these kind of bigger principles, they feel very much like leadership training and leadership skills. But in an effective organization, we have to also drive those down throughout whatever ranks. So how have you found leaders have been effective at not just embracing this but not because there is kind of a danger of buying courses and buying, it’s like, here go to this stuff. But how do you, have you seen organizations make seven habits almost a culture?

Kory Kogon (14:44): It’s a very good question. It’s not easy. I mean, it’s a very real question you’re asking. We’ve had clients that I can’t name here, but that have been with us for 25 years as seven habits companies and we were in my prior organization as well, and we made it part of the culture, what we know. I’ll tell you what my executive chairman used to say, Kory, if you want to win a championship game, you can’t just read a book, even if it’s the seven habits, you can’t just read a book or watch a video. He said, if you want to win the game, I’m not going to say to you, Kory, go watch a video on how to throw the ball and show up on Saturday to play the big game. And so our whole philosophy is around that. And with the seven habits, it’s a surround sound, how do we and Steven created the maturity continuum to give you an accessible, memorable framework and the see do get model around behavior change.

(15:45): And beyond that it’s how do we consume or digest these principles and the pragmatic practices that go along with it and really encourage people to practice it and speak the language over time. And so what’s the sustained learning to really turn it into a culture? And I think that small wins along the way really helped that. So our organizations really, they have posters up, they’re speaking the language, they’re behaving what they’re learning and small fires with groups of people start to people look in and go, Hey, wait, what are they doing? It looks like they’re doing great. I want some of that. So it takes work, but it’s certainly doable. And we’ve had some great organizations that really everybody speaks the language of the seven habits.

John Jantsch (16:36): So to me, over the last 20 years, one of the most gratifying things to see is a lot of the things that we’re talked about in this book, time management, better leadership skills, better communication skills, were all things seen as hard skills for leaders to learn. This book was really one of the first that the seventh habit sharpened the saw that MINDBODY spirit maybe are all a part of this in terms of you being effective. And one of the most gratifying things I’ve seen is the last, over the last 20 years, that’s become a very mainstream thought as well, hasn’t

Kory Kogon (17:07): It? Wellbeing? So wellbeing more than ever as people are working harder than ever

(17:14): And all of that. So we still, even in our new program, it is you have to sharpen saw, and Steven always said it again, even reading this morning, he said, the more high tech, the more high touch, and I do a lot of work around the implementation of AI and human capability and hybrid intelligence and all that. And I read that and I thought he was, so before his time on it, wellbeing is key, sharpen the saw. He said, you can’t do the first six habits without sharp because I find it incredibly difficult to pause and just be the kind of person I should be, whether it’s at home or at work, but it is right at the top. The younger generations will not work in organizations that do not have substantial things around how are you going to help me with my wellbeing? Seven habits are no seven habits. It’s a mandate.

John Jantsch (18:15): And I think that that was brought into sharp focus. I think after the pandemic, the whole quiet quitting thing that people talked about, a lot of it was like, I’m not getting charged recharged here. I think I’ve made a decision to leave. So I think that that habit is one that a lot more companies are at least coming to terms with.

Kory Kogon (18:38): Absolutely. And all kinds of quiet, quitting resignation, all of those things. And even with the economy changing and companies doing some layoffs and all of that, the younger generations are not going back. I mean, it is really significant for them to have a sense that an organization will care about their wellbeing. And I know there’s organizations today out there that are like, Nope, you need to work 24 hours a day or you can’t work here. And people will make their choices. But principally people, humans have to sharpen the saw. And that’s why that’s a timeless principle at a very timely point in the world right now.

John Jantsch (19:22): And it’s funny, it’s one that people say, oh, I don’t really have time to take to do that. Well, I think science proves it, but anecdotally, I can tell you if I exercise, I do better work. And so I take the hour to do that. I’m going to be way more productive the next three, four hours doing the work. So while it may seem counterintuitive, it certainly science backs it as a way to actually be more productive.

Kory Kogon (19:50): And in the new course we even have in there just a little research on the detriment of back-to-back zoom meetings or teams meetings, whatever you’re on, and the stress levels by not taking breaks. So I mean, it’s really critical. And whether it’s leaders or personally we go, we can’t see it. It’s like Steven, if you remember the famous line, he said, are you too busy driving your car to stop to get gas? It’s the same thing here. So into our overwhelm, we can’t see it. And unfortunately we know that over statistically, we know that over half of people will not do something about burnout until they are burnt out, which is terrible.

John Jantsch (20:37): Yeah, yeah. It’s like boiling the frog.

Kory Kogon (20:40): Exactly.

John Jantsch (20:42): You don’t realize it because it just happens gradually and then it happens all at once.

Kory Kogon (20:46): Right. So very timeless principle as habits its own. That’s right.

John Jantsch (20:50): So Kory, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to tell us a little bit about how somebody can consume the course or where they might find out more?

Kory Kogon (21:02): Sure. Very simply, just go to www franklincovey.com and on the homepage you’ll probably see a lot about our launch. If not just search seven habits. But it should come right up for you, right in the middle of a big launch world tour right now. So thanks John for asking.

John Jantsch (21:20): Awesome. All right, well again, I appreciate you stopping by the podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.


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Outsmart Competitors With Agency-First Web Design

Outsmart Competitors With Agency-First Web Design written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Itai Sadan

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Itai Sadan, founder of Duda, a website builder designed for marketing agencies and small businesses. As a digital marketer since the birth of the internet, I remember Duda’s early days. In this episode, we discuss the evolution of this website builder from a mobile-first solution to a comprehensive platform for responsive web design.

Given how competitive the market is, Itai Sadan shares insights on the strategic shift to focus on web professionals. Just listen to any podcast episode, and you’ll hear it in the ads. We also talk about the role of AI in enhancing agency efficiency and the unique value Duda offers compared to competitors like WordPress. Also, being one of this episode’s sponsors, Itai Sadan gives a Cohen Brothers explanation of the origin of the brand’s unique name.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Duda started as a mobile-first solution for small businesses.
  • The platform evolved to support responsive web design.
  • Focusing on web professionals helped Duda clarify its mission.
  • AI is transforming how agencies operate and deliver services.
  • Duda provides tools to enhance agency productivity and efficiency.
  • The company emphasizes the importance of websites in marketing.
  • Duda’s support team offers 24/7 assistance to users.
  • The platform integrates various tools to streamline website creation.
  • Duda is committed to improving Core Web Vitals for better performance.
  • The name ‘Duda’ is inspired by the film The Big Lebowski.

 

Key Moments

[00:00] The Birth of Duda: A Mobile Revolution
[03:02] Evolution of Duda: From Mobile to Responsive Design
[06:07] Focusing on Agencies: A Strategic Shift
[09:04] AI in Marketing: Opportunities and Challenges
[12:01] Duda’s Unique Value Proposition for Agencies
[15:02] The Duda Platform: Empowering Agencies
[20:00] The Story Behind Duda’s Name

 

More About Itai Sadan

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Duda

Try Duda, the web design platform trusted by agencies to create beautiful, high-performing sites quickly. Ready to impress your clients? Visit Duda.co and start building something unique!

 

 

 

ActiveCampaign

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Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it has genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You could choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale to book your free advisory call and learn more. It’s time to transform your approach. Book your call today, DTM World slash scale.

(00:59): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Itai. He is the founder of Duda. It was created to help small businesses connect with potential customers anywhere, anytime, and any place. Itai started the company from his garage in Mountain Valley, California. I wonder how many intros have that in with his high school friend, Amir Glot, who is now the CTO in 2008. They both noticed how the internet was shifting towards mobile and the need for better mobile first experience to extract customers on the go. Over the years, the platform has evolved. Today Duda offers a fully responsive website builder targeting digital marketing agencies and SaaS platforms. Duda has over 1 million websites hosted on its platform. So Itai, welcome to the show.

Itai Sandan (01:50): Thank you, John for having me. Excited to be on the show.

John Jantsch (01:53): So I’ve been covering marketing, digital marketing for many years, and I feel like I’ve seen the evolution of Duda. Talk a little bit about V one, like the very early days when you started this. What did the tool look like at that point?

Itai Sandan (02:08): Oh yeah, we went through quite a change over the years. So when I started the company back in 2010, it was really at the advent of mobile phones. iPhone came out in 2008, Android followed shortly after. And the first idea that kind of triggered the launch of Duda was to help small businesses take their website that was built back then for desktop primarily,

(02:35): And make sure that it really created a great user experience on mobile phones. If you remember, back then it was a lot of pinch and zoom of sites, and the experience was not really there. So we came out with a pretty nifty solution that just took all you had to do, put the URL of your desktop site, click on submit, and we do the magic behind the scenes and kind of optimize it for mobile. Created a second website, kind of an mdot, and that was the initial product for the first, I would say re four years of a company.

John Jantsch (03:07): And fast forward to today, Duda is really very accepted by agencies as really a full building platform for your entire online presence. So talk a little bit about that evolution, that change that you really saw, because you probably felt at some point the mdot was a little limiting for what to do, could be right. So talk a little bit about that evolution and how you’ve kind of walked alongside the changes in small business marketing in general.

Itai Sandan (03:36): Yeah, absolutely. So as I kind of alluded about three or four years in, as we started sensing that small businesses didn’t want to build a site for mobile, a site for desktop, a site for tablet. They wanted to build it once and it runs everywhere. And kind of at the same time, responsive web design rose to be the way to achieve it. There weren’t great tools that allowed SMBs to actually build responsive sites. So we kind of were thinking, okay, how do we take the solution that we built really for mobile primarily and add these other screens and worked on our second product, which is today our core product. And as we did that, we also went through a rebranding. Initially we launched the company as Duda Mobile. Then with this new product, we kind of cut the mobile out. And from then on, the company was known as Duda with building fully responsive website.

(04:33): But that was not enough. As we did that. Now, we were suddenly in competition with some very significant players like Squarespace, Wix, WordPress, and four years into the company of a very big question arose of what is unique about us? Why are customers going to come to do that? And we were looking at our user base and about 50% were SMBs, but the other 50% were these web professionals, web designers, digital marketers. And we felt like first they were just from a data perspective, they were growing faster and maybe from a culture DNA of the company, we felt we understood them better, we understood their needs, and we were better at building maybe more sophisticated software for a more professional user than kind of dumbing it down building simple tools for. So at that point, we made a very significant decision that was kind of the second big decision.

(05:28): Almost in the same year after moving from a mobile product to a fully responsive product, we basically decided to focus on only 50% of our customer base. And going forward, we said, we are going to be a web development platform for agencies, for web professionals. And from that day on, we did not spend a dollar more on acquiring SMBs. We became that platform for web professionals and that brought tremendous amount of clarity and focus throughout the organization. So my co-founder and CTO knew which features to prioritize, obviously the features that agencies wanted. Marketing knew at what level to message sales understood better who were their customers. So really that decision. I know a lot of companies are hesitant about narrowing your customer base and your total addressable market, but actually being much more focused, which everybody always tells you that you should do. It really helped propel the company forward, helped us be more unique and help the product become much better in doing what this type of customer really wanted.

John Jantsch (06:42): And those are two very distinct markets that had very distinct needs. So it makes it very difficult to try to serve both of them with essentially the same message, the same tool set. So whenever I talk to a technology company, a SaaS company, and we can talk about the changes in platform and the market that have occurred, I mean, I started my business, we didn’t have the internet talk about all the changes, but I love asking this question. In your time in doing what you’ve been doing and being an entrepreneur, is there anything in marketing that you feel like hasn’t actually changed?

Itai Sandan (07:21): Yeah, I think I know from when I launched it and first talking to VCs, and this was like 14 years ago when I started the company, there was always the question, will websites always be needed? Would it be replaced by social media? Will it be replaced now with ai? So the technology has changed, but websites stay a very fundamental piece of any small businesses marketing stack. And I don’t see that changing. I think we actually ran a survey with our customers, and 99% said that they still see websites as a very dominant component of their revenue generation capabilities in 2024, they actually expect much more from their website. And we can talk about that very soon.

John Jantsch (08:09): Yeah, I was going to say, I actually think they’ve moved from being a channel to actually being the hub. I mean the central part of their marketing.

Itai Sandan (08:17): Yeah, absolutely. They’re asking, they want to see more traffic, they want to see more leads from their website, higher conversions doing a lot more things, and they don’t want to pay more. So I think we can talk about that. That causes a challenge for agencies that are servicing SMBs, how do they continue to service them and help provide that additional layers that they’re asking for additional capabilities while keeping costs at bay?

John Jantsch (08:51): That’s a really significant question. We work with a lot of agencies, and a lot of them are especially agencies that are very focused on tactics. We do websites. We do SEO, we do content. I mean, the pressure on price for that stuff is, I mean, because there’s somebody doing it for $10, AI will do it for free mean, or at least that’s the perception, right? I mean, so a lot of agencies are really struggling with both revenue and certainly profitability today. I mean, first off, have you found that to be true? Second part of that, I suppose, is what has due to attempted to do to kind of address that?

Itai Sandan (09:28): It’s absolutely true. There is much more pressure to do more for less. And I think things like obviously AI are key technologies and capabilities that an agency needs to adopt in order to be more efficient with the existing headcount and staff that they have, do that. As many other players in the market, we’ve been very focused on adding AI features into our platform. We call those AI assistance, and they really help our customers deliver, build and maintain websites at half the time then it used to be before. So everything that you can imagine from the obvious things of text generation, content creation, but then to a lot of things that are kind of also behind the scenes around SEO taking a lot of helping with workflow, taking a lot of those maintain, but very important tasks that need to be done on the website and automating them.

John Jantsch (10:30): It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try Active Campaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required. Just visit active campaign.com/duct tape. That’s right. Duct Tape Marketing podcast. Listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now, this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only.

(11:36): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to ActiveCampaign today. Hey, attention all digital agencies. Are you looking to build beautiful high performing websites? Fast Meet Duda, the platform designed to help you create stunning, responsive sites that wow your clients and boost your business, whether you’re a season pro or just getting started, Duda Hass got the tools you need from custom widgets to seamless client collaboration. We’ve made it easier than ever to turn your web design dreams into reality. So why settle for less? Join the thousands of agencies who trust Duda to power their success, head to Duda.co and start building something amazing today. Yeah, I love the fact that you’re using the word assistance. That’s how I refer to AI right now. I mean, maybe there will be a day when it can create from scratch original stuff, but I think it’s terrible at that right now. But I think that it is very good, as you said, at creating efficiencies, doing mundane things, creating writing metadata. I mean, that’s like mind numbing work and AI can probably do that better than a human being in some cases. And so using it as an assistant, I think is the correct way to look at it.

Itai Sandan (12:56): We have capabilities inside the tool that with one click of a button, let’s say you have 500 images on a website, it will add all text to all your images automatically, right? It actually does it really well. You could go and edit it, but most people don’t. And these are very important things in order to be, for the website to rank and to be found for all these keywords. A lot of focus there.

John Jantsch (13:23): So in addition to the tools that you have built in, what are you seeing agencies do? Some of the things we talked about, like metadata and alt tags and creating efficiencies. A lot of people are focused very much on using AI for content creation, which makes total sense for marketers. But are you seeing agencies use it in other ways to run their businesses?

Itai Sandan (13:49): We have multiple examples. We have seen an agency create custom gpt for each customer.

John Jantsch (13:55): So

Itai Sandan (13:56): They kind of load that custom GPT with all the documents, all the information related to that customer

John Jantsch (14:02): Tone, they tone, tone, voice brand, right? Yeah, everything.

Itai Sandan (14:04): Yep. And that custom GPT is connected to additional tools like could be connected to an SE Mage or an H Rev to do that. So then when you need the specific tasks, you want to know how is this customer doing on their search ranking? The custom GPT would go and question SMR and return that answer, or how’s the traffic been to that website in the last months that it will go to Duda and check that and return that answer. So creating a lot of these efficiencies inside the business in the agency where otherwise it would be just going to many different tools to try to collect that data. So that’s one example. We’ve seen a pretty big directory. Local listings business in Australia really increase a lot of efficiency by embedding eye content into the generation of websites. So think especially today, in order to rank, you want to add more pages into a website, you want to find one of those keywords that I want to rank for.

(15:10): I want to create additional pages with content related to those keywords. You can use AI today to generate these specific pages, at least to give you a pretty good first draft that afterwards a human can go and review. They’ve been able to go from about the creation of 130 websites a month to about 270. So almost more than doubling. And they say that the majority of those gains is due to the use of AI for content generation. So I’m sure there’s a lot of more examples, but those are quick too, that I have top of mind.

John Jantsch (15:48): I still see a lot of business owners and even some agencies really seeing AI as a threat. I mean, where do you fall on that? Is it going to wipe out the industry or are SEO firms not going to be needed anymore? Where do you fall on that?

Itai Sandan (16:01): Yeah, I think similar to what you alluded to, I agree as well. I don’t think there’s any risk to agencies not in the midterm of being replaced by ai. I think the risk for an agency is to be replaced by another agency that makes better use of AI than they are.

John Jantsch (16:22): This is, I have said that exact thing numerous times. Yeah, exactly. Somebody who’s as strategic as you using ai.

Itai Sandan (16:30): So this is where agencies need to educate themselves, train themselves, embed AI into their workflows in order to make sure that they’re not falling behind.

John Jantsch (16:43): So this might be getting a little bit into the technical aspects of Duda, but I wonder if you could explain for people that are not familiar with it, if I’m familiar with, say WordPress, I go and I get an installation and I build the website and then I do all the stuff to it, right? Explain kind of how Duda works for agencies, right? Because you have a model where somebody can build countless websites on the platform for all of their clients. So talk a little bit about how that all works together or maybe even compare and contrast to say a WordPress.

Itai Sandan (17:13): Yeah, I’d say I’d start with that Duda was built with agencies in mind. So everything that we do, every decision about our roadmap is all focused on agencies and how do we empower agencies to be more productive, more efficient when they build websites. And we have kind of broken down the lifecycle of an agency creating websites for SMBs, and we try to address different pain points in that lifecycle of website creation. So we have multiple different tools. Of course, the bread and butter is the editor itself, and I’ll talk about that in a second. But we have multiple different tools to address different stages of that lifecycle. So for example, we help our agencies with acquiring customers because we know the value propositions of our website. So we provide sales training and marketing assets that they can white label and provide us their own. We have tools that help them gather information about a small business.

(18:19): We know how long it takes to get things like just to get the images for a business that you’re going to build a website for how long it takes to get business information, opening hours, email addresses, social media links. We have tools that scour the web and put that information at the agency’s fingertips. So again, it’s all about efficiency and productivity. And then around the website builder itself, there are a lot of capabilities there that are around productivity and efficiency that make it very easy and quick to build beautiful pixel perfect websites in the fraction of a time compared to what it would take you in WordPress. Now, the nice thing about using a proprietary platform like Duda is that you have a lot of things included that maybe in the WordPress, WordPress ecosystem, you would need to go into the plugin directory and you get plugins from different players that you don’t know how well they’re playing with one another and they break.

(19:24): And here actually, you have an amazing support team that is sitting, some of them are sitting right here next to me where I am here in Colorado, but they’re spread throughout the world, so they can give you 24 7 support, and they actually help you with issues that you have. They’re all very technical savvy in H-T-M-L-C-S-S, JavaScript. So they can really help you if you run into issues, you shouldn’t run into issues, but if you do, they can help you get the job done. And then on top of that, I would say we have a lot of these advanced tools that really for agencies that are not building maybe one or three sites a year, but if you’re thinking of taking your agency to the next stage where you want to build tens, hundreds, we have customers building thousands of websites a year. You need these tools. You’re not going to get them in the WordPress ecosystem. These are tools that allow you to make one change in the template, and it spreads throughout all the websites that you created. It’s tools that give you AI and sorry, API access into a website and either integrated into your workflow creation process into your CRM tools or things that through APIs you can go and make changes in your websites, your customer’s websites. There’s so many. Again, I gave examples of AI and capability. So there’s a lot of things

(20:51): Embedded in there. There’s things that, I dunno if you know, but Duda is also a leader in terms of core vitals, which is

John Jantsch (20:59): For speed, I’m sure.

Itai Sandan (21:01): And that’s just the page speed and load times. We do better than any other website CMS platform out there significantly better than WordPress. And that’s because our engineers are really focused on improving every single aspect. And that’s one of the advantages of having more of a proprietary platform. You can really control these things. But yeah, there’s a ton of advantages. I probably touched on a few of them.

John Jantsch (21:26): So I want to end today, our time today with probably a silly question, and maybe you’ve answered it a hundred times, but I’m sure other people have asked you. Is there any story behind the word Duda?

Itai Sandan (21:36): Yeah. So Duda is related to the dude, and that is, if you’ve seen the Big Lebowski, Jeff, who plays the dude there, that was a movie that both me and my co-founder were very fond of. I know him since high school and we went to college together. So initially when we formed the company, we called it Duda Mobile. We didn’t think that Dude Mobile was a great name. So we went Duda Mobile, and now it’s Duda, but still the culture and some of the aspects of that movie, and you can see them in our offices today. For example, I’m right now sitting in a room that is called the Dude, but there’s other rooms here that are called the Ringer and Urban Achiever and Pinky Toe. So there’s a lot of elements from, it’s kind of just a fun thing to have as part of your culture.

John Jantsch (22:25): So I’m hoping Happy Hour includes white Russians then. Absolutely. Awesome. Well, Itai, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there somewhere you’d invite people to find out more about some of the things we talked about today?

Itai Sandan (22:40): You can obviously visit us@duda.co. That’s where you can try out the software. There’s a 14 day free trial. If you need an extension, ping me directly. You can find me on LinkedIn, on Twitter. Yeah, I think those are the best channels to reach out to us.

John Jantsch (22:56): Awesome. Well, it’s really been a joy to watch kind of how you’ve grown this tool and evolved this tool. So again, I appreciate you stopping by and sharing a few moments with us.


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How Writing a Book is Good For Business & Why You Shouldn’t Do It Without a Coach

How Writing a Book is Good For Business & Why You Shouldn’t Do It Without a Coach written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Leigh Shulman

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Argentina-based author Leigh Shulman. A writing mentor with two decades of experience under her belt.

She founded The Inspired Writer Community, an online mentoring community for writers at any stage in their writing lives. Her bestselling book The Writer’s Roadmap: Paving the Way To Your Ideal Writing Life helps thousands find their way in the writing world. Her international writing retreat and website are listed as The Write Life’s top resources for writers, and her words have appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Longreads, and Guernica, among others.

Leigh lives with her family, where she writes and contemplates (like most writers do) about whether she’s the only person who doesn’t like Dulce de Leche. We discuss the profound impact of writing a book on business success, the importance of storytelling in both fiction and nonfiction and the role of coaching in the writing process. We also explore how books can serve as trust builders, the influence of AI on writing, and strategies for finding time to write amidst busy schedules.

Key Takeaways:

  • Writing a book acts as a calling card for businesses.
  • A book can directly lead to client engagement and revenue generation.
  • Books can amplify credibility and visibility in the market.
  • Every business can benefit from telling their story through a book.
  • Books are part of a continuous learning process.
  • Setting clear goals for your book is essential for success.
  • Writing solidifies your process and helps define your next steps.
  • Feedback from readers and peers can guide future writing projects.
  • Both fiction and nonfiction writing share common storytelling elements.
  • Coaching can alleviate the challenges and self-doubt in writing.

Chapters:

  • [00:00] Introduction to Writing and Business Impact
  • [01:46] The Value of Writing a Book
  • [05:01] Books as Trust Builders
  • [08:02] Defining Goals for Writing
  • [10:05] Fiction vs Nonfiction Writing
  • [14:12] The Role of Coaching in Writing
  • [15:54] AI’s Influence on Writing
  • [20:03] Finding Time to Write

More About Leigh Shulman:

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

Oracle

Nobody does data better than Oracle. Train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less, take a free test drive at Oracle.



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Testimonial (00:00): I was like, I found it. I found it. This is what I’ve been looking for. I can honestly say it is genuinely changed the way I run my business. It’s changed the results that I’m seeing. It’s changed my engagement with clients. It’s changed my engagement with the team. I couldn’t be happier. Honestly. It’s the best investment I ever made.

John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You can choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale. Brilliant. Here we go.

(00:50): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Seth Godin, teacher, author, and entrepreneur. With over three decades of experience inspiring people to level up and make a difference. He’s published 20 bestselling books translated into nearly 40 languages, including most recently, the Song of Significance, the Practice, and this is Marketing. Today we’re going to talk about a new book called This is Strategy, make Better Plans. It comes out dependent upon when you’re listening to this in mid-October of 2024, October 22nd, to be specific, he is a inducted into the Gorilla Marketing Hall of Fame, direct Marketing Hall of Fame, the Marketing Hall of Fame. And today I’m going to officially induct him into the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast Hall of Fame as well. So Seth, welcome to the show,

Seth Godin (01:47): John, like the actual duct tape, your podcast is really useful and it lasts. And last, thank you for having me once again.

John Jantsch (01:56): You bet. Been doing this for a while and I think that I’ve lost track, but this is at least your sixth appearance and I always enjoy it. Always look forward to it. Me too. So if I were to gather a panel of 10 people to put them in a room and ask them what is strategy? I know for experience, I would get 10 different answers. Maybe 12. Maybe 12. You’re right. And some of them would be nuanced. Some of them would just be flatrock. So I wonder if you could, at least for a baseline, what is your definit?

Seth Godin (02:29): Right. So that’s why I had to write a book and why it’s called This is Strategy. I want to answer that question. It’s not tactics, it’s not follow all the steps in the plan and then you’ll get your result. We need that. But that’s not strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is our awareness of the systems around us and our decisions that we make to use those systems to help us Cause the change we seek to make, it is an assertion about the future and it gets better if we talk about it.

John Jantsch (03:06): Sometimes I talk about how everybody has different notions of it and a lot of the confusion, I think people come by honestly. I mean Google the term marketing strategy and you will get said lists of tactics from what is supposed to be an authority. So I really get it. But your definition, a philosophy of becoming. Do you find that, while I think that is an amazing definition, do you find that people struggle with Can’t get my arms around that idea. I need something more tangible.

Seth Godin (03:38): For sure. That’s why it’s a book and not a blog post that people who have a strategy that is working look like they’re smarter than everybody else the same way. Good waves make a surfer seem better than they are. And our blindness to the available strategies is the main reason why we get stuck. And so there are countless examples and questions that we can go through to help us see what we couldn’t see before, and that once we learn to bring empathy to our work, everything about it gets easier.

John Jantsch (04:20): Yeah. So you jumped ahead of me. I was going to challenge you on the empathy word because quite frankly, I think a lot of times when people think about strategy, all they think about is how are we’re going to compete? And sometimes that doesn’t have a whole lot of empathy in it. So how should we be thinking rather than that limited view?

Seth Godin (04:40): Okay, so there is kindness and empathy, but I’m not making a kindness argument here. What I am saying is you might want to be the king of the world in charge of everything, but you are not

(04:53): That other individuals and organizations have agency, they can make a choice. And so when you wrote your breakthrough book about marketing, you wrote it in English that showed empathy for the reader you were seeking to serve because if you had written it in Czech, they wouldn’t have been able to read it no matter how much you insisted they do. So what we have to do is acknowledge that the people we are seeking to do business with, we are here to serve them. And they don’t know what we know. They don’t see what we see. And that’s okay. If we don’t go to where they are, they’re definitely not going to come to where we are. And that has to be built into our understanding of the choices and the systems and the decisions and the time as we compete because you don’t have to have pity for your competitors, but it really helps to have empathy for anyone who has agency.

John Jantsch (05:51): So again, in my world, probably to some extent in your world, although yours is a little broader, more diverse maybe in some cases, audiences, I talked to a lot of marketers and so when they think strategy, it’s a business strategy for gaining more customers or something along those lines. Would you also say, well no, this is something every individual needs to be thinking about. I mean, we all need people strategies.

Seth Godin (06:16): Well, from a very practical point of view, let’s start with the 17-year-old who lived down the street who I helped get into college, and he just made the most expensive financial decision of his life. It’s going to put him a quarter of a million dollars in debt. And he did it without a strategy. He decided to go to a place that isn’t worth the money and isn’t going to pay off because he was judging it on what did it feel like to visit the college campus and how will that window sticker make him feel? Well, if he had said out loud before he started, that was his goal. It would be coherent, but he didn’t say it out loud. It was intuitive. He didn’t really have a strategy. He was just stumbling in the dark. So we easily become the victim of a credit card company, the victim of someone in our life, in our family who isn’t engaging with us in a way that’s productive with our boss if we don’t have a strategy.

(07:19): So when I got out of business school, my strategy was super simple. I want to get a job at the fastest growing company that will hire me. I don’t care what they make because if it’s the fast growing company, I’m more likely to find a smart boss and I’m more likely to get exposed to interesting problems. And that two years will set me up for the next thing I want to do. And the person sitting next to me in class, their strategy was, business school is really expensive. I’m going to go work for the most prestigious, highest paying job I can get. And time demonstrated that I probably had a better strategy because the trajectory of my career over time was different. And so when we invest in time as we make these choices, whether it’s understanding what the admissions office wants or understanding what our partner wants or understanding what the customers for our locksmith company want, it’s all the same thing. It’s do we see the game? Do we see time? Do we see systems? And what moves are we going to make?

John Jantsch (08:27): So you mentioned system, so I was definitely going to go there as well. You talk about systems delivering value. I’ve gone as far as saying the system for many business is the strategy

Seth Godin (08:41): You’re using system I think a little differently than me. Tell me what you mean by system.

John Jantsch (08:45): When I created Duct Tape Marketing, I actually decided people needed a marketing system. And that if I could at least come in and say, look, here’s something we can do and we could repeat for a lot of folks and we’re going to install a system, which people were like, why didn’t I think of a system for marketing? That’s how I’m using it. And that’s been my body of work

Seth Godin (09:06): And that’s super important. But the reason you need one is you are trying to make a change in a system outside of your company and having a persistent tool inside your company is the only way to do it. So what are the systems we’re talking about an example I like to share how much should a wedding cost? And the answer is exactly what my best friend spent plus $20. And that’s why weddings cost a hundred thousand dollars. Now, the wedding industrial complex is a system, all these people in the system making decisions that if the system didn’t exist would seem absurd, right? But they’re not absurd because they are part of something. The healthcare system in the United States does not make health. It makes treatments. And there are all these, well-meaning people in the system, but they make decisions that don’t make any sense outside the system, but inside the system make perfect sense. So if we’re going to dance with any existing system, we need an internal system. So we can repeatedly do our work, but we better be able to see what the system in the outside world does in order to be able to make a change there.

John Jantsch (10:24): You make what I still, I’ve actually said this in various ways for many years, ports that you actually as a business get to choose your customers. And you have said that, and I think a lot of people are like, that’s completely wrong. That’s not how it works. The customer is always right. I just have to find enough people to give me money and whatever they want I need to create. And this notion of choosing your own customers to some people seems a little elitist almost is when it comes to business. But boy, is it a much more enjoyable way to do business.

Seth Godin (10:56): Yeah, well, this is a breakthrough and of course it’s elitist. You deserve that. You deserve to spend your days offering this thing. You’re offering to the people who will appreciate it and engage with you in a way that’s helpful. When you take anyone off the street, you have sacrificed your agency and vision for randomness. So David Chang’s a famous chef and he’s been in the news for many years. Before he was famous, he had a tiny restaurant in New York City called Momo Fuco and it hadn’t been reviewed yet. It only had 40 seats and you could sit at the counter. I don’t know how I stumbled on it is where my kids were younger, the four of us, my wife and kids would get in the electric car drive to Manhattan and go there for lunch on Saturday. And we would sit at the counter and I haven’t had meat in 40 years and I would say, I would like the Brussels sprouts.

(11:53): Please leave out the bacon that benefits both of us. You don’t have to waste the bacon and I can eat them. And the first three weeks we went, I loved it. And the fourth week, the guy behind the counter, I’m pretty sure it was David said, there’s a vegetarian restaurant a few doors down. I think going forward, you guys would be happier there. We put this on the menu, we like bacon, thanks for coming, but don’t come back. And that was the day in my book, he became David Chang because he said, I’m going to build a restaurant not for people who are hungry. There are countless restaurants for people who are hungry. I’m going to build a restaurant for people who want to see what David Chang wants to make. And you can do that in any line of work or you can be a commodity. Those are your two choices. If you want to be a commodity, you got to put up with whoever’s going to give you the money. But if you pick your customers, you can pick your future.

John Jantsch (12:52): I’m not sure if there’s the flip side or if this is actually to me an advancement of that same idea. You also talk about choosing your competition. And I think that one is in some ways even more brilliant because I don’t think anybody thinks about that idea. It’s like, no, this is who I compete with as opposed to, oh, this is the category I’m going to actually claim.

Seth Godin (13:13): Yeah, right. So a lot of your customers, John, actually want a job without a boss. There’s nothing shameful in that they’re freelancers at scale. They’re not entrepreneurs who are claiming an unfolding future. And so they find a category where they can put out a sign and wait for the customers to come. They’ve already determined who their competitors are. They intuitively picked. But if you decide that you are going to compete with scammers and spammers and people who are always fast talking and racing to the bottom, you’re either going to do that or you’re going to fail, right? You pick them that when you decide to be a plastic surgeon in Columbus, Ohio and there’s only one other plastic surgeon, your practice is going to be different than if you’re a plastic surgeon in Park Avenue in New York. You pick your competitors and then you pick the standards that your customers are going to measure you by.

John Jantsch (14:16): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. Buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape. That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape immediately. What I thought of when I read that was even in the same business marketing consultants, choosing what you’re going to charge is a way to pick your competitors. There’s so much competition in this bucket. Let’s go over here.

Seth Godin (15:38): Exactly. That’s exactly right. Positioning is a generous model. It is not differentiation. It is saying to your customers, if you are looking for this is what I have. If you’re looking for that, let me give you the fun number of those people.

(15:54): And there’s a story, it may be apocryphal, I don’t think it is, of several of companies. Were trying to build big financial institutions, people like Fidelity, et cetera. And one of them did some research and discovered that 80% of their customer service calls were coming from 5% of their customers. And that these customers tended to have low balances. So they decided to write all of these people a very respectful letter saying, we don’t think we’re the place for you. We are having trouble serving this. Here are the phone numbers of three of our competitors. Please find someone who’s a better fit. Well, when you move those customers away, you freed up your entire customer service team and you’ve established your position in the marketplace, which is we are here for people of a certain kind of resource and a certain kind of question. And those people over there, that’s where you should go if you’re a different kind of customer.

John Jantsch (16:49): So when it really comes down to it, people who read books, love tools, they love like, oh, this philosophy of becoming is great, but what are the 40 questions that I need to ask in order to develop my own strategy? You happen to actually have that for us. So how did you decide on what that very curated list should be?

Seth Godin (17:11): Well, it’s not that curated because I could have had 40 different questions. It’s designed to prompt you down the path. And the way I did it was after I wrote the first draft of the book, I made 45 videos to become a Udemy course, which is in the world now. And then I had 350 people inside the purple.space community. I gave them access to the course for free and watched them do the course. And it was very cool to be able to watch other people have interactions about it. I could see where they were getting stuck and instead of me diving in and clarifying, I just clarified it in the book. And what I have found is it asking simple questions. Who’s it for? What’s it for? What is the change I seek to make? Who else has done this before me? What assets do I need?

(18:05): What do I need to learn? These are very straightforward questions that we avoid every day. And I know this because I spend time talking to friends about their projects. And when I bring up any of these questions, they get slightly anxious because left unsaid, you’re off the hook, left unsaid. Well, whoever needs it. But if you have to say it, then if it doesn’t come true, you’ve made a claim that you’re responsible for. But if you’re going to spend your limited days on this project, please say it to just two or three people. Say it to claude.ai, own it and see what other people say back.

John Jantsch (18:49): It’s funny, I work with a lot of organizations and I’m sure you have as well. You take one look at me, you’re like, well, it’s obvious what you need to do. And yet they have really brilliant people inside the organization that are like, oh my God, that’s brilliant. Why didn’t somebody tell us that? Why is it so hard for people that are in it every day to see strategy or even rather than just like, here’s what we do, phone’s still ringing. Keep churning.

Seth Godin (19:18): Yeah, well, so there are many differences between you and me. You are way more patient than I am.

(19:23): And that’s one of the reasons why I have never done a day of consulting in my life. Because in person, when someone hires a consultant, they often want them to solve their problem. And what you have the patience to understand is only they can solve their problem and your job is to create the conditions for them to see how to do that. But I have sat with people running for president. I’ve sat with people who are billionaires, people who run giant organizations, friends, and they have no clue what their strategy is. And if you point out what a possible strategy might be, you can watch their eyes light up and they realize someone just showed them a path when they thought they had to go through the woods. And then inevitably they get off the path and they go back to the woods because it’s hard to say no in the short run. So you can say yes in the long run, it’s easier to say yes to the urgency of right now and then have to dig your way out of a hole later. You have no choice. And so strategy is this affirmative action, this decision-making to say, I have the internal discipline to turn that down so I can do that instead.

John Jantsch (20:38): Yeah, that’s one of the brilliant things about having a clear view of what your strategy is. It actually helps tell you what not to do. Does it?

Seth Godin (20:48): Yeah. That’s actually the hardest part.

John Jantsch (20:50): And I think that’s what people are struggling, especially entrepreneurs are struggling with the most. There’s so many things they can do and there’s no filter for what they should do.

Seth Godin (20:59): So they end up doing mediocre this, mediocre this, but at least they did everything. So in my case, when Twitter showed up, I was early, could have had quite a big following on Twitter. And I said, but if I say yes to that, what am I going to do less of? Am I willing to become a mediocre blogger to become a pretty good twitterer? And I was like, no, that’s not my choice to be there. It’s my choice to be here. Let me focus on the thing that fuels my strategy as opposed to serving somebody who’s decided I would make them happier if I did that instead.

John Jantsch (21:37): Yeah. And as it turns out, you were so good, you ended up having a big follow on Twitter anyway without even participating there. It was amazing. No, brilliant. So would you say that one of the things that holds people back, call it mistake, call it a choice, is that generally speaking, especially a going entity, there is going to be some pain before there is gain to actually adopt a clear strategy because you’re going to have to invest. And it’s not a short-term effect.

Seth Godin (22:09): I think there’s already pain and you’ve justified the pain because doing your work and there’s going to be a shift for sure, there’s going to be taking a deep breath and saying, we’re not going to do that anymore. So there’s a lot of things to criticize about Jack Welch, but one of the smart things that Jack Welch did was their strategy is if we can’t be number one or number two in a category, we’re not going to do it anymore. So that’s why General Electric stopped making toasters

John Jantsch (22:41): Because

Seth Godin (22:42): They said, we can make a pretty good toaster and an okay return, but let’s just sell this toaster division and focus on someplace where we can win. That was painful, but it ended up, at least for a while, being a really smart move because being a meaningful specific is better than being a wandering generality that can fuel many strategy choices.

John Jantsch (23:05): So the last, I’ll end up here with a timing question. The last decade at least, I mean, I’ve been doing this 30 years. We didn’t have the internet in marketing when I started, right? I, so we can talk about how much has changed, but the last decade, I feel like as every coming decade, it just feels like the speed of change accelerates. So how big is a lot of times when people make a great strategic decision, it was just good time. So is there an element of luck to this? Because who knows what the next quarter’s going to bring?

Seth Godin (23:42): There’s a huge amount of luck. What we’re trying to figure out is how can you make the deck as stacked as you can before you have to pick a card? And the thing about change is this systems change when they have to, not when they want to. And what forces the system to change is a shift in communications information or technology because systems depend on those things to maintain their status quo. Well, guess what? The biggest systems change in history is happening right this second. And when systems confront the combination of climate and ai, they are going to be transformed. If you show up when a system is in flux and embrace what the system is about to become, it’s like being a surfer who gets a perfect wave, that learning to use the systems when they’re shifting to help the system get what it’s wanted all along, that two hours of work will pay off in 2000 hours of benefit. And this is the moment to do that.

John Jantsch (24:53): I said that was my last question, but then you opened up the whole box on what you’re doing on climate. We could do a whole show, I’m sure you have done entire shows. Can you give sort of a one minute invitation to people to find out more about the work you’re doing?

Seth Godin (25:08): So I volunteered for a year and a half full time and built the Carbon Almanac with 1900 other people. It’s at the carbon almanac.org and it is a judgment free book, 97,000 words, footnoted fact-check illustrated with cartoons. And you can look up anything that’s in it, and if you don’t agree, but you need to know, you need see and understand what is actually going on. Carbon in the air is invisible, but easily measured, and it doesn’t match the way we grew up in the world to imagine that the weather is just something that shifts back and forth. The climate is not, the weather and the climate is changing in a way that’s going to create 15 million refugees without homes in the next five years. It’s going to put American cities completely underwater. You don’t have to like it, but it’s happening. So the question is, what will we all do about it? And it’s going to be really hard to make that decision in 20 years, but if you know now what’s coming, it represents not just an urgency, but an enormous opportunity.

John Jantsch (26:20): Well, and if you think the wars over oil have been bad, which we see the wars over water.

Seth Godin (26:25): Yeah,

John Jantsch (26:26): We actually need water. We don’t really need oil. That’s going to be, I’m not sure what it’s going to be anyway, Seth, as always, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop on Duct Tape Marketing podcast. And I know people can find your books anywhere, but there any place you’d want to invite people to find out more about this as stretch?

Seth Godin (26:48): I built a page at Seth’s blog slash tis, and there’s some videos and links and other things there. We made this really fun deck that has 5 million combinations of prompts in it. Add a collectible chocolate bar, my first one ever with a trading card and everything inside. Very fun.

John Jantsch (27:05): Well again, appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days again, out there on the road.


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How to Build Game-Changing Strategy by Choosing Your Customers and Competition

How to Build Game-Changing Strategy by Choosing Your Customers and Competition written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Seth Godin

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I had the pleasure of interviewing Marketing Hall of Famer and frequent guest, Seth Godin. A renowned expert in marketing, entrepreneurship, and strategic philosophy, Seth shares his invaluable insights once again on our show. With over 30 years of experience and multiple bestselling books to his name, Seth and I dive into my favorite topic—STRATEGY. In this episode, we explore how both businesses and individuals can transform their strategic approach for greater success.

In his latest book, This is Strategy: Make Better Plans, and a little anecdote about a chef, an electric car, and 30 years of veganism, he defines strategy as a philosophy of becoming and explains how understanding systems, the art of choosing customers, and competition can lead to long-term success.

Seth Godin challenges conventional strategy ideas, emphasizing empathy and awareness of the systems influencing customers and competitors. His thoughts on building sustainable, intentional strategies are a must-have for agencies, entrepreneurs and business leaders looking to stop running around in circles and make a meaningful impact.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Strategy Is a Philosophy of Becoming: Godin explains that strategy isn’t just about following a step-by-step plan. It’s a forward-thinking philosophy that requires systems awareness and making intentional decisions that align with the change you aim to create.
  • Empathy is Key to Effective Strategy: Godin stresses the importance of empathy, not just kindness, in strategic decision-making. Understanding your customers’ needs and the systems they operate within helps businesses connect more effectively and create long-lasting relationships.
  • Choose Your Customers and Competitors: Godin highlights a critical but often overlooked aspect of strategy: businesses can choose their customers and competitors. By doing so, they can avoid commoditization and focus on serving those who genuinely value their unique offerings.

These insights from Godin highlight the power of a holistic, empathetic approach to strategy. He provides actionable guidance for entrepreneurs looking to outshine the competition and build lasting value.

Questions I asked Seth Godin:

  • [00:50] Define anticipatory customer experience…..

More About Seth Godin:

 

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

Oracle

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John Jantsch (00:16): What you just heard was a testimonial from a recent graduate of the Duct Tape Marketing certification intensive program for fractional CMOs marketing agencies and consultants just like them. You can choose our system to move from vendor to trusted advisor, attract only ideal clients, and confidently present your strategies to build monthly recurring revenue. Visit DTM world slash scale. Brilliant. Here we go.

(00:50): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Seth Godin, teacher, author, and entrepreneur. With over three decades of experience inspiring people to level up and make a difference. He’s published 20 bestselling books translated into nearly 40 languages, including most recently, the Song of Significance, the Practice, and this is Marketing. Today we’re going to talk about a new book called This is Strategy, make Better Plans. It comes out dependent upon when you’re listening to this in mid-October of 2024, October 22nd, to be specific, he is a inducted into the Gorilla Marketing Hall of Fame, direct Marketing Hall of Fame, the Marketing Hall of Fame. And today I’m going to officially induct him into the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast Hall of Fame as well. So Seth, welcome to the show,

Seth Godin (01:47): John, like the actual duct tape, your podcast is really useful and it lasts. And last, thank you for having me once again.

John Jantsch (01:56): You bet. Been doing this for a while and I think that I’ve lost track, but this is at least your sixth appearance and I always enjoy it. Always look forward to it. Me too. So if I were to gather a panel of 10 people to put them in a room and ask them what is strategy? I know for experience, I would get 10 different answers. Maybe 12. Maybe 12. You’re right. And some of them would be nuanced. Some of them would just be flatrock. So I wonder if you could, at least for a baseline, what is your definit?

Seth Godin (02:29): Right. So that’s why I had to write a book and why it’s called This is Strategy. I want to answer that question. It’s not tactics, it’s not follow all the steps in the plan and then you’ll get your result. We need that. But that’s not strategy. Strategy is a philosophy of becoming. It is our awareness of the systems around us and our decisions that we make to use those systems to help us Cause the change we seek to make, it is an assertion about the future and it gets better if we talk about it.

John Jantsch (03:06): Sometimes I talk about how everybody has different notions of it and a lot of the confusion, I think people come by honestly. I mean Google the term marketing strategy and you will get said lists of tactics from what is supposed to be an authority. So I really get it. But your definition, a philosophy of becoming. Do you find that, while I think that is an amazing definition, do you find that people struggle with Can’t get my arms around that idea. I need something more tangible.

Seth Godin (03:38): For sure. That’s why it’s a book and not a blog post that people who have a strategy that is working look like they’re smarter than everybody else the same way. Good waves make a surfer seem better than they are. And our blindness to the available strategies is the main reason why we get stuck. And so there are countless examples and questions that we can go through to help us see what we couldn’t see before, and that once we learn to bring empathy to our work, everything about it gets easier.

John Jantsch (04:20): Yeah. So you jumped ahead of me. I was going to challenge you on the empathy word because quite frankly, I think a lot of times when people think about strategy, all they think about is how are we’re going to compete? And sometimes that doesn’t have a whole lot of empathy in it. So how should we be thinking rather than that limited view?

Seth Godin (04:40): Okay, so there is kindness and empathy, but I’m not making a kindness argument here. What I am saying is you might want to be the king of the world in charge of everything, but you are not

(04:53): That other individuals and organizations have agency, they can make a choice. And so when you wrote your breakthrough book about marketing, you wrote it in English that showed empathy for the reader you were seeking to serve because if you had written it in Czech, they wouldn’t have been able to read it no matter how much you insisted they do. So what we have to do is acknowledge that the people we are seeking to do business with, we are here to serve them. And they don’t know what we know. They don’t see what we see. And that’s okay. If we don’t go to where they are, they’re definitely not going to come to where we are. And that has to be built into our understanding of the choices and the systems and the decisions and the time as we compete because you don’t have to have pity for your competitors, but it really helps to have empathy for anyone who has agency.

John Jantsch (05:51): So again, in my world, probably to some extent in your world, although yours is a little broader, more diverse maybe in some cases, audiences, I talked to a lot of marketers and so when they think strategy, it’s a business strategy for gaining more customers or something along those lines. Would you also say, well no, this is something every individual needs to be thinking about. I mean, we all need people strategies.

Seth Godin (06:16): Well, from a very practical point of view, let’s start with the 17-year-old who lived down the street who I helped get into college, and he just made the most expensive financial decision of his life. It’s going to put him a quarter of a million dollars in debt. And he did it without a strategy. He decided to go to a place that isn’t worth the money and isn’t going to pay off because he was judging it on what did it feel like to visit the college campus and how will that window sticker make him feel? Well, if he had said out loud before he started, that was his goal. It would be coherent, but he didn’t say it out loud. It was intuitive. He didn’t really have a strategy. He was just stumbling in the dark. So we easily become the victim of a credit card company, the victim of someone in our life, in our family who isn’t engaging with us in a way that’s productive with our boss if we don’t have a strategy.

(07:19): So when I got out of business school, my strategy was super simple. I want to get a job at the fastest growing company that will hire me. I don’t care what they make because if it’s the fast growing company, I’m more likely to find a smart boss and I’m more likely to get exposed to interesting problems. And that two years will set me up for the next thing I want to do. And the person sitting next to me in class, their strategy was, business school is really expensive. I’m going to go work for the most prestigious, highest paying job I can get. And time demonstrated that I probably had a better strategy because the trajectory of my career over time was different. And so when we invest in time as we make these choices, whether it’s understanding what the admissions office wants or understanding what our partner wants or understanding what the customers for our locksmith company want, it’s all the same thing. It’s do we see the game? Do we see time? Do we see systems? And what moves are we going to make?

John Jantsch (08:27): So you mentioned system, so I was definitely going to go there as well. You talk about systems delivering value. I’ve gone as far as saying the system for many business is the strategy

Seth Godin (08:41): You’re using system I think a little differently than me. Tell me what you mean by system.

John Jantsch (08:45): When I created Duct Tape Marketing, I actually decided people needed a marketing system. And that if I could at least come in and say, look, here’s something we can do and we could repeat for a lot of folks and we’re going to install a system, which people were like, why didn’t I think of a system for marketing? That’s how I’m using it. And that’s been my body of work

Seth Godin (09:06): And that’s super important. But the reason you need one is you are trying to make a change in a system outside of your company and having a persistent tool inside your company is the only way to do it. So what are the systems we’re talking about an example I like to share how much should a wedding cost? And the answer is exactly what my best friend spent plus $20. And that’s why weddings cost a hundred thousand dollars. Now, the wedding industrial complex is a system, all these people in the system making decisions that if the system didn’t exist would seem absurd, right? But they’re not absurd because they are part of something. The healthcare system in the United States does not make health. It makes treatments. And there are all these, well-meaning people in the system, but they make decisions that don’t make any sense outside the system, but inside the system make perfect sense. So if we’re going to dance with any existing system, we need an internal system. So we can repeatedly do our work, but we better be able to see what the system in the outside world does in order to be able to make a change there.

John Jantsch (10:24): You make what I still, I’ve actually said this in various ways for many years, ports that you actually as a business get to choose your customers. And you have said that, and I think a lot of people are like, that’s completely wrong. That’s not how it works. The customer is always right. I just have to find enough people to give me money and whatever they want I need to create. And this notion of choosing your own customers to some people seems a little elitist almost is when it comes to business. But boy, is it a much more enjoyable way to do business.

Seth Godin (10:56): Yeah, well, this is a breakthrough and of course it’s elitist. You deserve that. You deserve to spend your days offering this thing. You’re offering to the people who will appreciate it and engage with you in a way that’s helpful. When you take anyone off the street, you have sacrificed your agency and vision for randomness. So David Chang’s a famous chef and he’s been in the news for many years. Before he was famous, he had a tiny restaurant in New York City called Momo Fuco and it hadn’t been reviewed yet. It only had 40 seats and you could sit at the counter. I don’t know how I stumbled on it is where my kids were younger, the four of us, my wife and kids would get in the electric car drive to Manhattan and go there for lunch on Saturday. And we would sit at the counter and I haven’t had meat in 40 years and I would say, I would like the Brussels sprouts.

(11:53): Please leave out the bacon that benefits both of us. You don’t have to waste the bacon and I can eat them. And the first three weeks we went, I loved it. And the fourth week, the guy behind the counter, I’m pretty sure it was David said, there’s a vegetarian restaurant a few doors down. I think going forward, you guys would be happier there. We put this on the menu, we like bacon, thanks for coming, but don’t come back. And that was the day in my book, he became David Chang because he said, I’m going to build a restaurant not for people who are hungry. There are countless restaurants for people who are hungry. I’m going to build a restaurant for people who want to see what David Chang wants to make. And you can do that in any line of work or you can be a commodity. Those are your two choices. If you want to be a commodity, you got to put up with whoever’s going to give you the money. But if you pick your customers, you can pick your future.

John Jantsch (12:52): I’m not sure if there’s the flip side or if this is actually to me an advancement of that same idea. You also talk about choosing your competition. And I think that one is in some ways even more brilliant because I don’t think anybody thinks about that idea. It’s like, no, this is who I compete with as opposed to, oh, this is the category I’m going to actually claim.

Seth Godin (13:13): Yeah, right. So a lot of your customers, John, actually want a job without a boss. There’s nothing shameful in that they’re freelancers at scale. They’re not entrepreneurs who are claiming an unfolding future. And so they find a category where they can put out a sign and wait for the customers to come. They’ve already determined who their competitors are. They intuitively picked. But if you decide that you are going to compete with scammers and spammers and people who are always fast talking and racing to the bottom, you’re either going to do that or you’re going to fail, right? You pick them that when you decide to be a plastic surgeon in Columbus, Ohio and there’s only one other plastic surgeon, your practice is going to be different than if you’re a plastic surgeon in Park Avenue in New York. You pick your competitors and then you pick the standards that your customers are going to measure you by.

John Jantsch (14:16): AI might be the most important new computer technology ever. It’s storming every industry and literally billions of dollars are being invested. Buckle up. The problem is that AI needs a lot of speed and processing power. So how do you compete without cost spiraling out of control? It’s time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud. Oracle Cloud infrastructure or O-C-I-O-C-I is a single platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, and AI needs. OCI has four to eight times the bandwidth of other clouds offers one consistent price instead of a variable regional pricing. And of course, nobody does data better than Oracle. So now you can train your AI models at twice the speed and less than half of the cost of other clouds. If you want to do more and spend less like Uber eight by eight and Databricks Mosaic, take a free test drive@ociatoracle.com slash duct tape. That’s oracle.com/duct tape oracle.com/duct tape immediately. What I thought of when I read that was even in the same business marketing consultants, choosing what you’re going to charge is a way to pick your competitors. There’s so much competition in this bucket. Let’s go over here.

Seth Godin (15:38): Exactly. That’s exactly right. Positioning is a generous model. It is not differentiation. It is saying to your customers, if you are looking for this is what I have. If you’re looking for that, let me give you the fun number of those people.

(15:54): And there’s a story, it may be apocryphal, I don’t think it is, of several of companies. Were trying to build big financial institutions, people like Fidelity, et cetera. And one of them did some research and discovered that 80% of their customer service calls were coming from 5% of their customers. And that these customers tended to have low balances. So they decided to write all of these people a very respectful letter saying, we don’t think we’re the place for you. We are having trouble serving this. Here are the phone numbers of three of our competitors. Please find someone who’s a better fit. Well, when you move those customers away, you freed up your entire customer service team and you’ve established your position in the marketplace, which is we are here for people of a certain kind of resource and a certain kind of question. And those people over there, that’s where you should go if you’re a different kind of customer.

John Jantsch (16:49): So when it really comes down to it, people who read books, love tools, they love like, oh, this philosophy of becoming is great, but what are the 40 questions that I need to ask in order to develop my own strategy? You happen to actually have that for us. So how did you decide on what that very curated list should be?

Seth Godin (17:11): Well, it’s not that curated because I could have had 40 different questions. It’s designed to prompt you down the path. And the way I did it was after I wrote the first draft of the book, I made 45 videos to become a Udemy course, which is in the world now. And then I had 350 people inside the purple.space community. I gave them access to the course for free and watched them do the course. And it was very cool to be able to watch other people have interactions about it. I could see where they were getting stuck and instead of me diving in and clarifying, I just clarified it in the book. And what I have found is it asking simple questions. Who’s it for? What’s it for? What is the change I seek to make? Who else has done this before me? What assets do I need?

(18:05): What do I need to learn? These are very straightforward questions that we avoid every day. And I know this because I spend time talking to friends about their projects. And when I bring up any of these questions, they get slightly anxious because left unsaid, you’re off the hook, left unsaid. Well, whoever needs it. But if you have to say it, then if it doesn’t come true, you’ve made a claim that you’re responsible for. But if you’re going to spend your limited days on this project, please say it to just two or three people. Say it to claude.ai, own it and see what other people say back.

John Jantsch (18:49): It’s funny, I work with a lot of organizations and I’m sure you have as well. You take one look at me, you’re like, well, it’s obvious what you need to do. And yet they have really brilliant people inside the organization that are like, oh my God, that’s brilliant. Why didn’t somebody tell us that? Why is it so hard for people that are in it every day to see strategy or even rather than just like, here’s what we do, phone’s still ringing. Keep churning.

Seth Godin (19:18): Yeah, well, so there are many differences between you and me. You are way more patient than I am.

(19:23): And that’s one of the reasons why I have never done a day of consulting in my life. Because in person, when someone hires a consultant, they often want them to solve their problem. And what you have the patience to understand is only they can solve their problem and your job is to create the conditions for them to see how to do that. But I have sat with people running for president. I’ve sat with people who are billionaires, people who run giant organizations, friends, and they have no clue what their strategy is. And if you point out what a possible strategy might be, you can watch their eyes light up and they realize someone just showed them a path when they thought they had to go through the woods. And then inevitably they get off the path and they go back to the woods because it’s hard to say no in the short run. So you can say yes in the long run, it’s easier to say yes to the urgency of right now and then have to dig your way out of a hole later. You have no choice. And so strategy is this affirmative action, this decision-making to say, I have the internal discipline to turn that down so I can do that instead.

John Jantsch (20:38): Yeah, that’s one of the brilliant things about having a clear view of what your strategy is. It actually helps tell you what not to do. Does it?

Seth Godin (20:48): Yeah. That’s actually the hardest part.

John Jantsch (20:50): And I think that’s what people are struggling, especially entrepreneurs are struggling with the most. There’s so many things they can do and there’s no filter for what they should do.

Seth Godin (20:59): So they end up doing mediocre this, mediocre this, but at least they did everything. So in my case, when Twitter showed up, I was early, could have had quite a big following on Twitter. And I said, but if I say yes to that, what am I going to do less of? Am I willing to become a mediocre blogger to become a pretty good twitterer? And I was like, no, that’s not my choice to be there. It’s my choice to be here. Let me focus on the thing that fuels my strategy as opposed to serving somebody who’s decided I would make them happier if I did that instead.

John Jantsch (21:37): Yeah. And as it turns out, you were so good, you ended up having a big follow on Twitter anyway without even participating there. It was amazing. No, brilliant. So would you say that one of the things that holds people back, call it mistake, call it a choice, is that generally speaking, especially a going entity, there is going to be some pain before there is gain to actually adopt a clear strategy because you’re going to have to invest. And it’s not a short-term effect.

Seth Godin (22:09): I think there’s already pain and you’ve justified the pain because doing your work and there’s going to be a shift for sure, there’s going to be taking a deep breath and saying, we’re not going to do that anymore. So there’s a lot of things to criticize about Jack Welch, but one of the smart things that Jack Welch did was their strategy is if we can’t be number one or number two in a category, we’re not going to do it anymore. So that’s why General Electric stopped making toasters

John Jantsch (22:41): Because

Seth Godin (22:42): They said, we can make a pretty good toaster and an okay return, but let’s just sell this toaster division and focus on someplace where we can win. That was painful, but it ended up, at least for a while, being a really smart move because being a meaningful specific is better than being a wandering generality that can fuel many strategy choices.

John Jantsch (23:05): So the last, I’ll end up here with a timing question. The last decade at least, I mean, I’ve been doing this 30 years. We didn’t have the internet in marketing when I started, right? I, so we can talk about how much has changed, but the last decade, I feel like as every coming decade, it just feels like the speed of change accelerates. So how big is a lot of times when people make a great strategic decision, it was just good time. So is there an element of luck to this? Because who knows what the next quarter’s going to bring?

Seth Godin (23:42): There’s a huge amount of luck. What we’re trying to figure out is how can you make the deck as stacked as you can before you have to pick a card? And the thing about change is this systems change when they have to, not when they want to. And what forces the system to change is a shift in communications information or technology because systems depend on those things to maintain their status quo. Well, guess what? The biggest systems change in history is happening right this second. And when systems confront the combination of climate and ai, they are going to be transformed. If you show up when a system is in flux and embrace what the system is about to become, it’s like being a surfer who gets a perfect wave, that learning to use the systems when they’re shifting to help the system get what it’s wanted all along, that two hours of work will pay off in 2000 hours of benefit. And this is the moment to do that.

John Jantsch (24:53): I said that was my last question, but then you opened up the whole box on what you’re doing on climate. We could do a whole show, I’m sure you have done entire shows. Can you give sort of a one minute invitation to people to find out more about the work you’re doing?

Seth Godin (25:08): So I volunteered for a year and a half full time and built the Carbon Almanac with 1900 other people. It’s at the carbon almanac.org and it is a judgment free book, 97,000 words, footnoted fact-check illustrated with cartoons. And you can look up anything that’s in it, and if you don’t agree, but you need to know, you need see and understand what is actually going on. Carbon in the air is invisible, but easily measured, and it doesn’t match the way we grew up in the world to imagine that the weather is just something that shifts back and forth. The climate is not, the weather and the climate is changing in a way that’s going to create 15 million refugees without homes in the next five years. It’s going to put American cities completely underwater. You don’t have to like it, but it’s happening. So the question is, what will we all do about it? And it’s going to be really hard to make that decision in 20 years, but if you know now what’s coming, it represents not just an urgency, but an enormous opportunity.

John Jantsch (26:20): Well, and if you think the wars over oil have been bad, which we see the wars over water.

Seth Godin (26:25): Yeah,

John Jantsch (26:26): We actually need water. We don’t really need oil. That’s going to be, I’m not sure what it’s going to be anyway, Seth, as always, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop on Duct Tape Marketing podcast. And I know people can find your books anywhere, but there any place you’d want to invite people to find out more about this as stretch?

Seth Godin (26:48): I built a page at Seth’s blog slash tis, and there’s some videos and links and other things there. We made this really fun deck that has 5 million combinations of prompts in it. Add a collectible chocolate bar, my first one ever with a trading card and everything inside. Very fun.

John Jantsch (27:05): Well again, appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days again, out there on the road.


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Mobile vs. Desktop: Where Do You Convert?

Mobile vs. Desktop: Where Do You Convert? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with Steve Oriola

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Steve Oriola, CEO of Unbounce. Steve Oriola is a tenured CEO with over two decades of experience scaling dynamic B2B SaaS platforms, including Act!, Constant Contact, Pipedrive, and Julius. He recently led Unbounce through the acquisition of Insightly CRM, in which the two companies effectively merged.

We discuss the findings of a recent benchmark report on CONVERSION RATES. That’s right—we tried to get rid of email, but it looks like it has entered the chat again.

Our conversation covers the importance of simplified copy, the enduring effectiveness of email marketing, the dynamics of mobile versus desktop conversions, and the rise of Instagram as a leading platform for conversions. We also cover the significance of writing at (if you can believe it) a lower grade level for better engagement, the nuances of industry-specific language, and the role of conversion-rate optimization in marketing strategies.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Complex copy is significantly hurting conversion rates. Although industry-specific language complexity can vary, simplified language resonates better with audiences today.
  • Email remains the highest converting channel despite the rise of other platforms.
  • Mobile traffic is high, but desktop conversions are still more substantial.
  • Instagram is outperforming Facebook in terms of conversion effectiveness.
  • Adopting a mobile-first design strategy is crucial for success.
  • Benchmark reports can provide valuable insights for businesses.
  • Testing multiple variants is essential for optimizing conversion rates.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to Unbounce and Steve Oriola
[03:58] Email’s Enduring Effectiveness in Conversion
[05:59] Mobile vs. Desktop: Conversion Insights
[09:32] Writing at a Fifth to Seventh-Grade Level
[11:43] Industry-Specific Language Complexity in Conversion
[13:59] Using Benchmark Reports for Industry Insights
[16:32] Integrating Insightly with Unbounce
[18:58] Capturing and Retaining Attention in Marketing

 

More About Steve Oriola

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!



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(01:04): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Steve Oriola. He is the CEO of Unbounce. He is a tenured CEO with more than two decades of experience scaling Dynamic B2B SaaS platforms, including Act! Boy, World Slash SThere’s an oldie constant contact, Pipedrive and Julius. He recently led Unbounce through the acquisition of Insightly CRM, where the two companies effectively merged. But we’re going to talk today about a benchmark report, some new research that Unbounce did on conversion. So Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve Oriola (01:43): Great, thanks for having me, John. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (01:45): So I mentioned ACT is Act still around. That was the first CRMI ever used 25 years ago.

Steve Oriola (01:52): Act is still around, has a portion of their business desktop and a smaller portion that is SaaS. So yeah, they’re still delivering.

John Jantsch (02:01): Wow, that’s great. Alright, so probably let’s just not bury the lead, right? The big thing that you guys have been promoting about your findings is that complex copy is herding conversion rate. So let’s start there. Tell me about that.

Steve Oriola (02:15): Sure, yeah. What we’re finding is that, and this is just a difference between 2020 and 2024, really over just three or four years. The actual copy that resonates in lands is now fifth to seventh grade level copy as opposed to a little bit more like ninth and 10th grade or eighth and ninth. And people aren’t getting dumber. We believe the noise is increasing and you have less of an opportunity to land a message and get attention. And that’s what we believe the dynamic is. And we think during Covid, people may have had a little bit more time to read possibly, but the noise is intense now and we find the difference between fifth to seventh grade language and professional language is like two X in terms of conversion. So it’s a significant difference.

John Jantsch (03:08): And I imagine some of it’s the filter, right? I mean, like you said, people aren’t getting dumber, they just are willing to invest less time. And so it’s like give it to me very quickly. Don’t make me dance around and get the plot. And I suspect that’s probably what’s going on as much as anything, right?

Steve Oriola (03:23): Yeah, there is, but if you read the report, there’s a lot of nuance in there, right? A statement like that, you go into a particular vertical and it stands on its head. So we are talking about industry wide and that’s really the power of the report is to drill down into a particular vertical and see what the impact really is.

John Jantsch (03:43): So people have been trying to kill out email, kill off email for many years.

Steve Oriola (03:48): The

John Jantsch (03:48): Report shows that email is still the highest converting channel. Why do you suppose so many people want email to die? Is it just because we are sick of getting it, but we also buy stuff?

Steve Oriola (04:00): No, I think it’s because we now have so many other forms of communication. People think, well, email is the old one that’s going to die. Email is, you have to keep in mind email is an effective store and forward mechanism. So if you think about use cases and storing forward is preferable, sometimes it’s there. You don’t have to read it right away. And the other thing that might make email seem more effective is it’s a bit of a lower funnel tactic and comparing it to higher in the funnel tactics for conversion, not really fair. Those higher in the funnel channels and tactics are very important, yet you might not act on them until you’re in an email and have something in your

John Jantsch (04:41): Yeah, so it’s an attribution issue as much as anything probably.

Steve Oriola (04:46): I think it’s a bit of an, and we say that in the report, we caution people, we say, look, email is a much more effective conversion mechanism, but it might not be the first stop. That’s

John Jantsch (04:57): Way. So along those same lines of conversion mobile versus desktop increasing, my clients are seeing 50, 60, 70% mobile visits, but this report found that, but that’s not where people are pushing by.

Steve Oriola (05:13): Well, they are. I think they’re converting on mobile, they’re just converting higher on desktop. But if mobile makes up 70% of your traffic, you got to look at it in real numbers too.

(05:24): And it’s probably worth grinding on that mobile conversion rate in your tactics, but understand that desktop does convert higher. I think there is, and this isn’t in the report, this is sort of me, there is sort of an assumption that maybe on mobile you’re not seeing everything. And in fact, that is a bit true. You do design your responsive mobile to not have everything because dealing with constraints on the device. And I think people just sort of have an understanding of that. And if they’re really going to make a decision about signing up for something, they may want to be on the desktop and feel like they have access to all the information.

John Jantsch (06:07): And I think going back to our attribution thing, I think if we were able to follow journeys as thoroughly as they happen, I mean we would find a lot of people doing research, finding stuff, and then going, oh, I’m going to go to the desktop now. Right?

Steve Oriola (06:19): Exactly. Yes. That’s a good point is yeah, you’re sitting on the couch and there’s a commercial on during the football game and you’re on your phone researching a landing page vendor or something.

John Jantsch (06:30): Yeah. So Unbounce clearly sees lots of landing pages built and sees the effectiveness of those. Where do you, and maybe the research directs some of this, but where do you counsel people when it comes to this idea of mobile first? That everything needs to be designed there first and work there and be optimized there first.

Steve Oriola (06:53): We believe in that. I mean, certainly deal with the hardest constraints upfront when you’re designing, and then you could probably loosen up as you get to desktop. And the reason people do that is if you start with desktop, you may not think about the constraints of mobile and then you’re designing for that and it’s really difficult. So just flat out in general, mobile first is the right strategy. I think from a conversion mechanism like a landing page, I think you, yes, mobile first, but I think you really need to consider the industry you’re in. If you’re in financial services, people will do research on mobile, but they’re going to make decisions when they’re in front of their computer at home. So I think it’s industry specific as well. So I recommend people comb through the data in here to get that kind of guidance.

John Jantsch (07:40): One of the highlights in the report, I guess maybe I don’t pay enough attention because maybe this wasn’t a surprise to you all, but it was a little bit surprise to me that Instagram is outperforming Facebook in terms of being a paid, converting paid social channel. Was that surprising?

Steve Oriola (07:59): Not for me and probably not for people in their twenties. I think what’s changing over time is we have different platforms by demographics being sort of dragged into adulthood in the business world. And I’m sure my daughter is more likely to do something on Instagram than Facebook for

John Jantsch (08:18): Sure.

Steve Oriola (08:19): So that certainly could be part of it. I also think Instagram just is a mobile first channel and application. And as you see mobile take over more and more of the traffic, that’s probably part of the dynamic as well.

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Steve Oriola (10:17): I’m sure there are AI tools out there. We wrote our own model to score grade level

(10:23): That is not available as an external service, but I’m sure there are those out there. And our methodology was to look at a whole variety of tools or methodologies to grade level people’s writing and reading and chat. GPT can help you simplify, but one of the things that’s in the report is the kinds of words that will make it more complex. And the number of three syllable or greater words in your should be a below 15%. So that’s all laid out in the report, and you can easily do that yourself by looking at the content. And again, gen AI can summarize and simplify and you can even ask it to, I think if you write in there, dumb it down, it will literally dumb it down for you. So there are ways to do

John Jantsch (11:18): It. Yeah, I’m terrible at writing run on sentences and I’m certain that probably gets in the way, right. Shorter sentences, probably better

Steve Oriola (11:27): Then don’t be a copywriter.

John Jantsch (11:29): That’s what editors are for. That’s right,

Steve Oriola (11:31): That’s right.

John Jantsch (11:31): So there are things in here. There were a couple of things that surprised me as I’ve mentioned. Were there things in here that surprised you all, especially since you’ve done this research before?

Steve Oriola (11:41): I think some of the spreads in conversion rates in some of the verticals were significant. I believe it’s health and I think financial services as well with regards to the complexity. The language, financial services actually benefits from a little more depth of language and a little more complexity of language. I think there’s an assumption there that if you’re pursuing financial products, that’s real impact on your life and you want to understand it a little bit more. So those kinds of departures from the median as we measured, most things were a little surprising in some of the verticals. Just the level of nuance once you get down into the verticals was surprising.

John Jantsch (12:23): I’m going to come back to the verticals, but I wonder if, I mean, you’re analyzing a lot of copy that is, I don’t know, top of funnel for a better word, that you’re getting attention, right? With landing pages in some cases or getting people to move to a next stage in a journey. Would you agree that potentially simpler language is better there because we don’t have a relationship as we get deeper and I’m starting to analyze, can you actually solve my problem? Do I want perhaps a more complex language or at least deeper language because I’m going to spend the time?

Steve Oriola (12:55): Well, landing pages are not only top of funnel. So landing pages,

John Jantsch (12:58): I knew you were going to say that

Steve Oriola (13:00): Landing pages would come into play further down the funnel, even in retargeting, even in customer marketing to your own customer base. So the closer you get to that, the more complex the language can be and probably the more information people are looking for. So I think that plays a role for sure.

John Jantsch (13:20): Yeah. So you talked a couple times about industry specific benchmarks. Would you suggest that somebody who’s thinking, oh, I’m going to read this thing and see what my industry is doing, would then actually be able to draw the conclusion of, oh, okay, we’re doing really well or we’re doing better than people in our industry, or we need to up our game. I mean, do you feel like they can use the tool that way?

Steve Oriola (13:42): That’s really the purpose of the tool.

John Jantsch (13:44): Yeah,

Steve Oriola (13:44): Exactly that. And we didn’t release all of the verticals yet. We’re still crunching data to write this report. We crunched a year’s worth of data, 57 million conversions, over 41,000 landing pages. And the verticals that didn’t show up as statistically significant. And those kinds of numbers aren’t in here, so it’s not going to cover everyone. I think if your vertical’s not in here, you could still look at verticals, you could look at the data overall, so it will work for everyone. But if your vertical’s in here, it’s a benchmark,

John Jantsch (14:18): Roughly how many verticals you think covers, it’s going to be tough for a specific,

Steve Oriola (14:23): Yeah, sorry, I think we did seven or eight and maybe we have that or more coming.

John Jantsch (14:27): Okay. Okay. Alright. Conversion rate optimization is obviously a huge part of landing pages of marketing in general of webpage of pretty much everything. How can we make this better, right? I think there are actually probably c-suite titles given to that function

Steve Oriola (14:46): Director level. I’ve seen VPs of CRO. Yep.

John Jantsch (14:50): So you talk about in this report something called simple CRO, and I think a lot of people feel like, no, it’s terribly complex. So explain how that differs.

Steve Oriola (15:01): We can give a lot of capabilities. Our platform is not just for building landing pages, we have an AB testing solution and it’s more than A and B, it’s sort of we can create multiple variants and pick the best copy and even prior to statistical relevance, that’s just a math problem. We can help and we can also maintain those variants and direct traffic to the variant that makes the most sense for you. And we’re taking signals in order to make those determinations. So it’s way more than a landing page platform. And I think that’s an important consideration because we were designing and building a CRO platform and that’s what it’s about. So we would call that pretty simple because the tools are there if you want to go further beyond what our tools let you do. We have a third of our customers, I’ll call them customers or agencies, and they serve well beyond our customer base. And a lot of those agencies are performance based and go quite a bit further and start optimizing for revenue and other things beyond the conversion where they have that data and usually it’s their MarTech stack that we’re integrated into. So there are ways to go much further beyond. We make CR os simple, but we also want our more advanced customers to be able to go further.

John Jantsch (16:31): How is Insightly the CRM showing up in the unbalanced product?

Steve Oriola (16:36): Sure. Well, it isn’t yet. We’ve been one company since July. We are integrating the platforms and you’re likely to see the landing page solution be an upsell for marketing automation, right? Insightly has both a CRM and a marketing automation platform. The data science team that we built to turn our platform into a CRO platform is now very dialed into the CR ad Insightly. So you’ll see the kinds of things that we can do and have done. We’ll start doing on CRM and in marketing automation. We also have an attribution solution, a company that we bought a couple of years ago called Leads rx. So we have all the makings of a pretty rich, dynamic, exciting marketing solution

John Jantsch (17:28): You take on Salesforce pretty soon, right?

Steve Oriola (17:30): There you go. Well, we know our market and we know where we’re going. We hope not to always be running into Salesforce.

John Jantsch (17:41): So I think in the report, I think this is where I grabbed this, you talk about attention spans being obviously part of the issue, and I think you identified 47 seconds. I’m not sure if that came right out of the report or not. So you see a lot of marketers read that and they’re like, how do we get attention fast? How do we do gimmicky things? So what are some of the best ways to capture first, I guess, and then retain attention if people are only going to give us so many seconds?

Steve Oriola (18:08): Yeah, I think it comes down to clarity, which is usually simplification in this context. It usually means simpler words, not four or five syllable words and shorter copy and test generate multiple variants and test. That’s really the only answer. And we give you a platform to do that.

John Jantsch (18:32): It truly is the only answer. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought, oh no, that’s the winner. That’s the winner for sure. And you’re like, what? Yeah,

Steve Oriola (18:39): No, that’s right. And some of the things, and as you comb through different verticals, some of the things are a little counterintuitive. So yeah, you got to look for that.

John Jantsch (18:47): Yeah, it turns out clarity is much harder than complexity, isn’t it? It’s speaking of counterintuitive, Steve, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by. Where would you invite people to connect, either with you or clearly those interested in getting the full report? Where would you send

Steve Oriola (19:02): That? Oh, go to unbound.com and you’ll get directed there from the homepage. Something will probably pop up and nudge you there too. So that’s where I’d start. And yeah, it’s a pretty good report, so it’s getting a lot of play.

John Jantsch (19:18): Again, appreciate you stopping by and taking a few moments. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.


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Franchise Secrets to Leading Effectively

Franchise Secrets to Leading Effectively written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Ducttape Marketing Podcast with Tiffany Slowinski

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interview Tiffany Slowinski, an entrepreneur and co-owner of three successful franchises. Tiffany shares her journey in the franchise industry, insights on using the Culture Index to improve team dynamics, and the importance of self-awareness in leadership. She discusses how data-driven information can transform business communication and productivity while addressing common misconceptions about leadership tools. Tiffany Slowinski emphasizes the need for buy-in from leadership and the role of self-awareness in effective team management.

 

Key Takeaways:

  • Transforming team dynamics can lead to increased revenue.
  • Communication styles can be adjusted based on team data.
  • Data can help identify potential leaders early on.
  • Misconceptions about leadership tools can hinder progress.
  • Self-awareness is key to effective leadership.
  • Leadership buy-in is crucial for implementing change.

 

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to Tiffany Slawinski
[01:34] Franchise Journey and Insights
[03:11] The Power of Culture Index
[05:01] Transforming Team Dynamics
[08:50] Addressing Executive Skepticism
[10:46] Common Misconceptions in Leadership
[12:31] Utilizing Data for Effective Leadership
[17:11] Working with Spouses in Business
[19:57] Self-Awareness in Leadership

More About Tiffany Slowinski

  • Check out Tiffany Slowinski’s Website
  • Follow Tiffany Slowinski on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by:

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!



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(01:03): Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Tiffany Slowinski. She’s an entrepreneur and co-owner of three successful franchises with her husband. Jake is a mother of four. She draws inspiration from both her family and career through Team Spark Advisors. She uses data-driven insights to help businesses improve communication, productivity, and employee satisfaction. She holds a master’s in psychology from Columbia University, enhancing her experience in leadership and team dynamics. So Tiffany, welcome to the show.

Tiffany Slowinski (01:38): Thanks for having me, John.

John Jantsch (01:40): So did I read somewhere it says you have four kids. Do you have four girls? Did I

Tiffany Slowinski (01:44): Read that? Yes.

John Jantsch (01:46): So do I.

Tiffany Slowinski (01:47): Oh, that never happens.

John Jantsch (01:50): Mine are grown and having babies of their own now, but it was fundraising for girls, especially as a dad. I would always get questions like, oh, is that really hard on you? And truthfully, they were way harder on their mother than me.

Tiffany Slowinski (02:03): People are always like, wow, your poor husband. I’m like, I dunno what you want me to do about this right now.

John Jantsch (02:10): I got tired of it. But any rate, so you have and your husband have a lot of history in the franchise industry. In fact, you actually worked corporately for a franchise before getting, tell me a little bit about your franchise background. It seems like you’re very drawn to that model, so you must think it’s a positive model.

Tiffany Slowinski (02:30): Yeah, well, with franchises it’s like just do what you’re supposed to and it takes some of the guesswork out of it. Going into franchises was kind of the opposite of most people in that I opened our franchises with my husband. They’re magazines that we own and most people leave corporate America to open a franchise. I opened my franchise and our franchisor asked me to come work for them. So I went backwards and that was during the pandemic. And we had just recently opened our first franchise that year and we’re having a lot of early success. We were rookies of the year, fastest growing publication the company had seen up to that point. And so they wanted me to come to the corporate level and help do for everybody else what we’ve been able to do with ours, which unsurprisingly is not exactly how that works. You can’t just get everybody else to do what you do.

John Jantsch (03:37): So the Team Spark Advisors is primarily, you primarily use the Culture Index survey to work with folks. There are, I’m familiar with at least eight. There’s probably a hundred of those types of surveys out there. I’ve taken Strength Finders and Colby and some of the other ones that are out there. Is there something about Culture Index that you think makes it particularly effective for business?

Tiffany Slowinski (04:01): My original background with it was in my time working for our corporate franchise, we were clients of Culture Index. I was the end user and I had done all sorts of surveys, like you mentioned, our CEO was really big on that and I, psych background, I always found them somewhat interesting, but I was never so drawn to something as I was Culture Index. And for me it was kind of for a few reasons. One, it just pegged me and everybody around me that I worked with so accurately I’d never seen anything like it. Some of these other surveys we took, there’d be like half of us in the room would be like, oh, we have the same letters or we’re the same. But I’d be like, I don’t understand it. I don’t see it. I don’t think we’re similar, but this paper is saying it.

(04:50): This with Culture Index had a lot more depth to it. There were a lot more possibilities. It wasn’t just your detailed or your social, there was degrees of things and how those traits played together. The other piece is really what’s the differentiating factor? I talked to a lot of businesses. You were like, I’ve done a million of these things until I start talking to them and they’re like, oh, that’s different. I’m really a walk alongside you model. I’m a consultant. I’m not selling you a batch of surveys and saying, Hey, here’s information on your team. Good luck with that. I’ve trained you for an hour. I’m there every step of the way because you’ve got to learn how to actually put it into practice. Otherwise it’s not worth anything.

John Jantsch (05:30): I’ll put you on the spot a little bit. Hopefully you have one that you can pull up quickly. But do you have a business, a case study that you’ve actually worked with a business and they’ve gone through the work and done the work and listened to you and it’s completely changed the team dynamics?

Tiffany Slowinski (05:45): It changes beyond even team dynamics. It changes their revenue. It changes a lot of things because when you don’t have the right people in the right seats that can really drag down progress, can drag down everything. So when I work with a company, first thing I’m doing is going in and getting a baseline on the current employees because a lot of times it’s this whole like, okay, we think we’re good over there, just help us with the new people until you start working with them. And then it’s, oh, maybe we’re not as good here as we thought. And I wound up spending actually more time working with them on their existing teams than the new employees. They always think about the new employees is what they want, but the actuality is it’s really helping them define their existing teams. And I’ve seen this one company I’m working with, they moved people around a little bit. They made some changes that you would’ve thought, are people going to really accept what could feel like a demotion or when they’re going to work basically exploding in their brain every day and it’s not working. Nobody likes to go to work and fail. And that’s what it feels like sometimes for people to be in the wrong seats. John, the old adage, you take your best salesperson and you make ’em sales manager

(07:04): And they’re lousy

John Jantsch (07:05): And they fail.

Tiffany Slowinski (07:07): And that happens a lot. We take our best person and we’re like, okay, since they’re really good at doing the work, let’s make them the leader. And that is a completely different skillset. And you’re taking a person who’s really good at what they were doing and now are they kind of setting them up to fail?

John Jantsch (07:24): Yeah, I often find that there are definitely people that are good at doing the work, so to speak. I am a marketing agency so that do the execution really in a lot of cases don’t like to lead. People don’t like to delegate. They love the doing. And then there are people that they want to delegate everything. They want to have a team doing the things. And sometimes it’s very difficult because there’s work to be done, right? It is like, no, you do this and you do this and you do that. So is there any sort of, I don’t know the right trait or term for this. If somebody takes the culture index or one of these index type of tools, I mean, can you start to say, oh, you’re going to be better as a leader, you’re going to be better as X, or is that actually a mistake to maybe make those assumptions?

Tiffany Slowinski (08:14): It’s not a mistake. It’s helping putting people into the right roles. So I get it. You can’t necessarily take a person with no work experience at all their first job out of college and say, oh, you’re going to be the CEO O because you have the right traits. They still need experience.

(08:33): But if you are seeing early signs of we’ve got data here that supports this person will be good in leadership at some point you can help identify that early. And it doesn’t mean they get to skip all the steps, but it’s letting them know, Hey, we see potential in you. Hang tight. Yes, you have to learn the role. And I know that might kill you a little bit in the meantime, but if you work with us and do a good job, we could fast track you. So showing them the possibility of what the future could look like

John Jantsch (09:00): When you’re out there pitching this sometimes, and I’m sure you run up against some executives that are like, yeah, this is something we’re supposed to do, but it’s like the feel good stuff. Go ahead. What are some skeptical executives? I mean, how do you convince them the value of using a tool like this for both alignment and recruitment?

Tiffany Slowinski (09:22): So it’s really about aligning with the right partners. For me, there are visionary profiles and that’s kind of the fun of sometimes having the data people before I talk to them in that I don’t really have to pitch or convince them of anything. They realize there’s a problem and they’re proactive and they want to solve it. They know there’s people issues. I’ve yet to come across a company that says we’re 10 for 10 on every employee. It doesn’t happen.

Tiffany Slowinski (09:48): We

Tiffany Slowinski (09:48): Like to think we’re good at this, but let’s be honest, it’s really hard because people will present themselves a certain way in an interview process. Social people are four times more likely to be hired. Why they interview? Well, they have those skills. So a skeptic, I’m really not going to come into you. And then we’re probably not a good fit because unfortunately a skeptic at the frontline will sometimes continue to be a skeptic through the process and it winds up hindering things. We don’t get anywhere unless you come in with an open mind. I ask leadership, come in and come in with an open mind that we’re all going to hear things about ourselves we don’t like. There’s no perfect person. I’ve had to swallow some of my own pills about who I am and when you can embrace that and say, I’ve got these gifts and I’m going to work to those, rather than spending all my time worrying about like, oh, I’m low detail, I’m a disaster at organizing things, I knew that, right? So I can have an admin that does those things for me and not beat myself up with a fact. That’s not a strength of mine.

John Jantsch (10:55): Alright, so let’s throw the skeptical ones out because they’re too hard to work with, but there probably are some misconceptions that leaders have. What are some of the common ones that you encounter where people are either not seeing how to use this or seeing it as less than talk about some of the misconceptions that you encounter?

Tiffany Slowinski (11:15): So sometimes there’s a bit of an attitude of I just want to pay for something to fix this.

Tiffany Slowinski (11:21): Yeah.

Tiffany Slowinski (11:22): And I don’t want to have human involvement just go deal with the HR director and let them do this and it’s not going to work. I could take your money, but I’m going to tell you right now, a year from now, you’re going to say, that didn’t work and I’m not going to continue working with you because this is top down. If there’s not buy-in at the leadership level and there’s some work to be done

Tiffany Slowinski (11:47): At

Tiffany Slowinski (11:47): The leadership level, and these are busy people who have other things they need to do, but if they invest little bit of time upfront, this starts to become something that’s incorporated down. If we try to start this at a lower level, it’ll never infiltrate up. It’s too easy to go back to our ways. It’s too easy to say, well, this person has this great resume. I like them. They came from our biggest competitor. Just hire them and you will take my data and you will throw it in the garbage can because it doesn’t say what you want it to say. And so if you haven’t worked on this with me, you’re not going to have a belief in the product and you’re kind of wasting your money at that point.

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(13:31): So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth. Boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. Alright, let’s say an example internally, a team, a leader says, I’m going to have all my people take this. Even if they’re not trying to solve a problem, they just feel like, Hey, I’d like to understand each personality better. How would somebody, and again, I know you’re not looking at results, but how would somebody use the fact that they have that information now to adjust how they communicate, adjust how they lead, adjust how they delegate, even what have you seen people that really embrace this do?

Tiffany Slowinski (14:11): Yeah. So knowing who is working with them, that’s why it’s important to involve leadership of multiple levels because the CEO is not necessarily spending any amount of time with certain people in the company. So I’ve got to work with different levels of leadership, but you know that somebody is less likely to take initiative or is going to move a little bit slower. You can set deadlines, you can send reminders. You can say, I’m over my dead body, I’m set a reminder, but I’ll have my admin do that or I’ll have this other person do that. I know myself is not going to do that. Right? So in understanding how people work, you can modify yourself to a degree. If these are people that you value and that are doing a good job, there’s a certain amount of modification to your behaviors that you’re going to want to make.

(15:05): If this person is not doing a good job is costing the company money, you’re trying to turn yourself inside out to be able to work with them. Maybe this is not the right spot for them to be in because you have to think about, as a leader, how much can I change myself before going crazy as well to accommodate you for the right person. It might be worth it for the wrong person. You’re not going to want to spend your time doing that. Simple things, communication styles, somebody who wants all the information and asks all the questions and can be very irritating to someone who’s a little bit of a quicker mover, lower detail, good enough to move on. And those two people understanding that, okay, let me at least have some compassion when this person’s bombarding me with questions and not flip out. And on the flip side, knowing that person’s not going to take to this, so maybe I should just send three bullet points in an email and they’re going to be more likely to respond than trying to send them something that’s like 17 pages long.

John Jantsch (16:05): How much do you advise people to use this data? For example, we have everybody. We happen to use strength finders, and so we have everybody actually take it, but then we also have them share it with the entire team with the idea that, hey, here’s what really irritates me. Here’s how I like to work, that we get some of that stuff off. How important do you think it is that people are consistently reinforcing and sharing the styles of how I like to work and really making sure that hopefully uses that in a positive way. But do you find that by reinforcing it, bringing up all the time, sharing it actually makes it more useful? Or is it, do people feel more vulnerable doing that?

Tiffany Slowinski (16:53): So the important thing to note, there’s no wrong people. Anything that could be a positive, your greatest strength could also be your biggest weakness, right? It’s cliche, but it’s true. So there’s no person I’ve yet to come across him that has it all. They could be more equipped for certain roles that they’re going to be very ideal, but there’s no person who’s literally good at everything. So I do think that communication and keeping this front of mind is important because again, if you look at it once, oh, that’s so cool. John’s just like this. We have this in common, but in this way we’re different. You’re going to forget about it. And where does this really come up is when there’s a dispute or things aren’t getting done or falling through the cracks or you bringing in a new person to train and you’re realizing they’re getting trained the wrong way by constantly having this information out there and being reinforced and talking about it.

(17:48): There’s different logic is one that I look at, and that could be really hard for somebody to say, I’m lower logic. Nobody wants to think that about them. But they’re also some of the most passionate people who could be amazing presenters and cheerleaders in an organization. I mean, there’s a lot of good that comes from being emotional like that, but if you’ve got a low logic and a high logic person in an argument, they could be basically speaking a different language. They can’t relate to why are you so upset right now? And why are you so calm? That’s suspect, what do you just not care? And that can cause arguments. So you just even be able to understand their high logic. They’re going to be a little bit colder. That’s not a reflection on me that says something about them and not me. You can reason with them better and have a more productive conversation.

John Jantsch (18:41): You are in a unique position where you work with their spouse, so spouse and coworker. And there certainly are a lot of folks out there that are in that. And there are also a lot of entrepreneurs where one is very entrepreneurial, one is not at all, maybe stay at home or work in a corporate job. How often do you find that actually having couples participate in using a tool like this generates some interesting insights?

Tiffany Slowinski (19:09): Just about every company I’m with within a day of meeting me, they are surveying their spouse and their children because all of a sudden it’s like, my wife, I really want to learn more about that, or My kids are driving me nuts. Let’s see what’s going on there. So it’s so common that even if you don’t necessarily work together, you work through life

(19:34): Together. And those roles can look a little different in a household than a business. But in my case, with my husband, some of this was so obvious, I’m super social. Off the charts, social, top 1% of humans walking the earth, he is low social. This will come of no surprise to either of us. We both know this about each other, but now when I’m dragging him to the 19th event of the weekend, he can look at me and he’ll say, Tiffany, I’m low social and this is draining my battery right now and I can’t just tell him to shut up anymore because the data says it. He’s right. So it is helped me to be, even though I always knew that I don’t think I ever understood the toll that me dragging him around would take. And so I’ve become much more cognizant of, okay, you can’t skip Christmas, but there’s certain things that maybe I don’t really need you by my side, it’s doing you no good. Let me let you sit this out because he’ll be a much happier human and he’ll be more productive at work on Monday if I let him skip out some barbecue on a Sunday afternoon that he doesn’t feel like being on. Anyway.

John Jantsch (20:46): So sort of along those lines, do you ever find that people either try successfully or unsuccessfully, so they go through this and somebody’s in a certain role and they’re really great at the role, but there’s an aspect of it that they’re going to need in order to progress and it’s just not there and the data shows it. Can you use a tool or would you even advise using a tool to help somebody improve in an area that is maybe not joyful to them, but important?

Tiffany Slowinski (21:16): Yeah. So it’s not to say that we can’t modify ourselves at all we can. And so through training, education, experience, wisdom, self-awareness, when I have people who are self-aware, they can more easily say, okay, I’m not exactly showing leadership traits here. In some ways, what can I do to work on that? I can see now exactly where that’s needed. But if they can’t acknowledge that in themselves, then you’re just banging your head against a wall. So there’s absolutely ways we can all improve. It just goes to ask how far, I had a business owner recently hopped on a call with him, and I was somewhat surprised, but he said to me, Tiffany, do you think I should keep running my own business?

(22:13): And it’s sort of unusual. I looked at his profile, I said, this scares the crap out of you every single day, doesn’t it? He’s like, yeah, I’m like, you don’t like this? He’s like, no. I’m like, yeah, you’re a really risk averse person. This is really uncomfortable for you. So he’s acknowledging that in himself, and if he’s even asked me that, okay, so some people could take my information and go, oh, this just says I’m a bad leader. I’m not going to pay attention to that. Or they could look at that information and go, okay, now what can I do about it? Who else is he going to bring into his company? Are there people who can help co-lead with him to take some of that pressure off so he could do what he’s good at, but still have other people there?

John Jantsch (22:51): It’s interesting. I have done well, I’ve done thousands of interviews, but I’ve done hundreds. That leadership is a big part of the conversation. And it’s amazing how often the idea of self-awareness comes up as being really, you can’t pass go and be a leader if you don’t have some level of self-awareness. I’m sure you have discovered that as well.

Tiffany Slowinski (23:15): Yeah. It’s integral, right? You can, again, have great traits, but if you don’t realize how you come off to others, that can be really challenging. I’m an extraordinarily low patience person, and so understanding now that I think before I speak, I’m a quick mover that there’s times I can come across as angry

(23:43): And I’m not really angry. I’m being direct and trying to get something done, but realizing the experience of the person on the other side is she’s mad at me. And it’s like, oh, I’ve had employees say that to me. You’re a little scary sometimes. I’m like me, right? But with experiences come, wow, that could be perceived as scary, and I don’t like hearing that about myself. And it’s very easy, again, to just say, I’m not scary. You’re crazy. But if people are telling me that, then I need to behave differently because my quest to get things done quickly can’t come at the cost of other people, feel like they can’t keep up, and that’s really what’s at play there. I just move very fast and seeing this data points and realizing they’re never going to move at my speed. Me expecting that it’s driving too hard, it’s creating too much friction. So I purposely modify myself to become more patient. Am I always perfect at it? No. But it’s only through awareness that I even try to put that in place.

John Jantsch (24:46): Absolutely. Well, Tiffany, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast to share a little bit. Is there someplace you might want to invite people to connect with you and find out more about your work?

Tiffany Slowinski (24:55): Absolutely. You can connect with me on LinkedIn, Tiffany Slosky, or you could go to my website, team spark advisors.com.

John Jantsch (25:03): Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you stopping by, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.


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