John Jantsch (00:01.038)

So some people walk into a room with more credentials, more data, more experience maybe, than anyone else there and still get ignored. Somebody else with less of all three changes minds instead. And the difference always comes down to who knew how to tell a better story. Hello and welcome to the Ductape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Don Yeager, a repeat guest, National Speaker’s Hall of Fame inductee, 13 time New York Times.

Best selling author and longtime associate editor at Sports Illustrated. And I can go on and on about all books about some of our famous sports sport sports stars. But well for for the purpose of this show, we’re gonna talk about his latest book, The Business of Storytelling, Inspire Action, Build Trust, and Drive Results Through Stories. So welcome back, Don.

Don Yaeger (00:38.984)

Just makes me sound old. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (00:53.778)

Hey, thanks, John. I always appreciate the opportunity to spend a little time with you.

John Jantsch (00:56.782)

Well, so let’s dive right into the book. you have some universal truths in this book. it’s kind of four f based al around that or structured around that. and this is the one that I this is the one I wanted to test. It says no formula governs a great story, but then you give us like 10 elements to build a great story. So how do you square those two things?

Don Yaeger (01:22.814)

But but the ten elements are not a formula. The formula is plus dot you know, you know, insert hero here, insert challenge there, and out comes transformation. these are elements that amount that allow a great story to come together. And I just I just know these elements to be true and they and you cannot really tell a great story without without covering that waterfront.

John Jantsch (01:30.37)

Yeah, yeah.

Right, right, right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:49.805)

Now you, occupational hazard, let’s call it that, you know, have interviewed thousands of people. you’ve heard thousands of stories, and some of your the people that you’ve chronicled books are amazing storytellers. so how do you translate that to the person that maybe, you know, certainly doesn’t have that background, but but maybe, you know, doesn’t have a communications team, you know, is really just kind of trying to

Be more authentic in a world of AI. I mean, how do you translate that to them?

Don Yaeger (02:23.069)

Well, first off, thanks for saying those words because I think that’s a real driver in all of it, right? I mean, I think there are so many people that think I’m gonna seed that s I’m gonna I’m gonna ask AI to tell my story for me. and the one thing I will promise you is that the one is that AI cannot tell your story for you. in fact if you lean into it, y you may or may not have any control about what your story shows up to be when when you’re when you’re suddenly introduced. AI

John Jantsch (02:25.358)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:33.869)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (02:49.422)

Sure.

Don Yaeger (02:53.179)

as we know, likes to make things up. But on top of that, it also has it has weaknesses that that remain and will probably always remain. The one thing AI can’t do is is is bring heart to the to the equation, right? obviously it’s very, very not very insightful of me to say, but that a computer can’t bring heart to the equation. But that’s what a great story does, right? A great story takes statistics and numbers and everything else and it and it and it wraps them

John Jantsch (02:56.27)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (03:22.959)

in a heart and that ability to kind of humanize a good story belongs to us.

John Jantsch (03:32.633)

So you know, I think there are two ends of this because I have listeners that need to pull a story out of somebody. and certainly I have people that have a story they need to tell. particularly thinking about the person that needs to pull a story. when you start when you start interviewing somebody, you know

I’m I’m guessing there are some people that just get right to the heart of it. I’m sure there are also some people that put up a mask and it’s like here’s the story I w Okay Here’s the story I want you to hear. I mean, how do you actually get to the real story when when you or or do you just realize, hey, they’re not gonna tell me anything, I’m done.

Don Yaeger (03:58.942)

Most most put at the mask. Yeah. Right.

Don Yaeger (04:10.963)

So I don’t give up on it. one thing I one thing you know, if you do the right prep work, right? You’re listening to somebody, or you’re reading stories with someone’s interview involved. one thing that happens is you become really clear, like these are the stories they’re just used to telling, right? These are the ones that it’s like, you know, they they pull up pull a little cord and then you know, it just spews out. and at the end of the day, what I’m always trying to do is,

John Jantsch (04:12.323)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:27.66)

Yeah, right, right.

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (04:38.375)

be aware of those stories so that if they start going there, I can immediately kind of start to shift it in another direction. I do not want the story everybody else gets when they’re in conversation with John Jatch, right? I’m I’m looking for something that I can pull from you that that you may not have wanted to say when this conversation began. I have lots of experience doing that, but I think the real key is you have to know what you don’t want.

John Jantsch (04:57.975)

Mm.

Don Yaeger (05:06.619)

in order to really start beginning to drive people to where you hope to get. And so research is an enormous part of what I do when I’m trying to pull a good story from someone. I’ve

John Jantsch (05:20.492)

You you you are you gonna try to get me to cry, Don? Is that the is that the goal? So so let me push back just a moment because I mean you’re interviewing, you know, Deion Sanders, Walter Payton. there’s a lot out there about them. I mean, you can find all the stuff, but what about the CEO of a small, you know, private company? there’s not a lot maybe out there.

Don Yaeger (05:23.411)

I I i it will not be long, brother. I’m gonna have I’m gonna make that happen. So get ready. Get the tissues out. I will make it happen.

John Jantsch (05:49.154)

How do you do that research and prepare when there’s not much to know?

Don Yaeger (05:54.43)

So first off, I I would I would disagree with you that in today’s day and age, there is almost in today’s day and age, there are so many places you can go. I did I did an interview this morning or I I I was on with someone this morning in which I actually I shared with her, hey, you know, I saw in classmates, and you may not even know what classmates actually shows you the yearbooks of people you know, dating back a hundred years.

John Jantsch (05:56.866)

Okay. Well that’s true. You know what they ate for lunch, right? Yeah.

Right.

John Jantsch (06:17.452)

Mm-hmm. Sure.

Don Yaeger (06:24.407)

And I said, hey, I I was looking at Georgia Christian co Georgia Christian High School, where you graduated in 2005. I saw the the the yearbook and I noticed that you were not just a three-sport athlete, you were also a homecoming queen. And like she was blown away. It was an but it was a simple website. you know, that that’s not a difficult one to get to, not a difficult one to track. It wasn’t stalking. It’s a yearbook. The yearbooks are available in libraries.

John Jantsch (06:43.054)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:47.375)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (06:52.639)

so she just understood that I had taken time to learn something about her, that sh that that she wasn’t she wasn’t even aware other people might know. And and it gave me an opportunity to talk about being a three sport athlete myself. And, you know, I was not homecoming queen, but I, you know, and then between that, suddenly we go from I know something about her, I’ve now connected to her because we both have something in common, and then it allows me to go into different places.

John Jantsch (07:09.113)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:14.521)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:21.807)

in the interview process. So the idea of actually finding there are unique websites out there. Almost any one of these CEOs is on a charity board. There’s amazing things you’ll find about them in the charity board website that most people won’t go to look.

John Jantsch (07:31.533)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (07:36.333)

Yeah, they put per personal details down there sometimes, right? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (07:39.666)

Right. And about the things that they’ve done for the charity that might be really inspirational. And if I can know that, again, it’s very public knowledge. I’m not finding stuff that isn’t available to everyone else. I’m just doing it well enough that at the end of the day they they realize I’ve cared for them by check by learning about them.

John Jantsch (07:43.512)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (08:00.633)

So let’s get back to the to the to the book, but but one one more stop. Let’s unpack a little bit in your mind why storytelling is so effective. you know, the neuroscience actually even you know, behind it, not just as a tool, but but really as a as a you know, I mean just part of our human nature.

Don Yaeger (08:21.191)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, think about it. It is the it is the the the one thing that’s been true over the history of mankind is that we relay knowledge through story. We relay history through story. We relay we build relationship through story. And I mean, you you go to the caves, you know, you you you walk into the crypts.

John Jantsch (08:32.857)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (08:45.805)

And you you see things that that will blow your mind because you’ll understand that this was the way history was recorded. It’s just as true today. the way that I want you to to to understand me is through story. The way I hope I can relate to you is through story. And some people might argue that they don’t need to know how to do this, that it’s just a nice to have. I argue that it’s a it’s a it’s an imperative. In today’s day and age,

Revenue changes hand money changes hands over storytelling.

John Jantsch (09:23.449)

Well and j and just just the human connection. I mean, you know, obviously storytelling in the boardroom, storytelling, you know, on a on a you know, reporting, you know, call of the numbers and whatnot are factor, but just even like making a connection in a sales call. You know, my my dad you know, was an old kind of bag carrying salesperson and he’d walk in the office, first thing he did is like

There’s Walter Payton’s jersey, you got three kids, you got, you know, there’s Muhammad Ali. It’s like I know how to connect with you now because I’ll f I find that common thing and you know, it’s corny as it and contrived, maybe as it can sound, you know, it just it speeds up the process of connection so much. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (10:04.665)

Absolutely. And what happens? So, you know, sometimes we love to say people like to buy from people, you know, like them. People like people like them, right? So how do you make sure that they know that you’re like them? You understand who they are, and then you try to draw that point of connection. So it’s not just again, this it’s it’s funny. I started several years ago as I was really I I had been working for years to become known as a good storyteller.

John Jantsch (10:16.588)

Yeah, right, right, right.

John Jantsch (10:20.973)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (10:34.013)

Great storyteller. I’ve been fortunate. The likes of Simon Sinek, the likes of John Maxwell, people that I value greatly refer to me in that way, and that’s awesome. But one of the things I started asking people is: would you be better as a salesperson if you could tell better stories? Would you be a better leader if you could tell better stories? would you be a better parent if you could tell better stories? And the truth is.

John Jantsch (10:54.223)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (11:01.277)

There almost is there’s not a question I could ask you where you would say no. There is this is a skill that if mastered makes you better across the board.

John Jantsch (11:04.879)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:16.419)

So let’s get to I we we kind of flirted with them a little bit, but maybe you could pack, unpack, you don’t have to do do them all, but just the book is based on these universal truths. So maybe kind of cover the range of those and maybe you can pick I always like to to to ask authors to pick their favorite.

Don Yaeger (11:37.568)

well, the universal truths, there are four of them, and there are 10 elements. But four the four universal truths, the first one’s extra. I mean, it’s just the first one we would have to agree on between each other because I know it, I know you know it to be true. That’s that the best stories are always human. I could tell you a story about our productivity. I could tell you a story about how many more widgets we are producing today than we’ve ever produced before. But if I tell you

John Jantsch (11:41.177)

Right.

Don Yaeger (12:05.447)

How those widgets are changing lives for one family or for for for a for a user of our product or or how producing more widgets is making more of our employees wealthy enough to be able to rise to pull themselves out of poverty. If I can use if I can build the story around people, it always remains more memorable.

John Jantsch (12:31.555)

Well, I you know, just just go look at a dozen Google reviews of say like a I don’t know, a furnace company or something. And I will tell you that none of the five star reviews will say this is the best company. They will say rusty fixed our boiler. And he was, you know, he closed the door and he was so kind to my children. I mean, that’s I mean that that that proves your point, doesn’t it? I mean, that’s what people connected with.

Don Yaeger (12:46.536)

Yes.

Don Yaeger (12:50.803)

Right.

Right. And and it it is. It’s the every s every great story is human, right? That’s so that’s that’s first and foremost. The second of the universal truths is that it is the story behind the story that is the story. You know, many people think, I can I’m gonna tell you my story about my life and and often it’s very linear, but it’s the things that made that happen that that absolutely that’s the real story. The story is what what is what’s

John Jantsch (12:57.295)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:06.031)

Mm-hmm.

Don Yaeger (13:23.217)

behind the curtain. And so you have to start asking you the questions of, you know, why, what, how, who was involved in the, in the, in, in the, and as you’re telling the story and you start bringing some of those questions to the fore, you start finding the deeper story, the deeper story about why what you’re doing matters and who it matters to. the third of the universal truths is that we argue all the time that that there’s money in storytelling.

John Jantsch (13:52.322)

This is

Don Yaeger (13:52.926)

That is not and and there’s and and we use a number of examples, but one that I love is a couple of journalists, a couple of researchers several years ago decided to take on a project and they took, they bought a hundred items off eBay, right? Hundred chotkis, little things worth nothing. never paid more than never paid more than three dollars for a single item. then they distributed those hundred items to guys like you and me, right? Storytellers.

And so but they they they picked some really great ones. And and in the distribution, they asked each person to take their tchotchke and create a story about its significance to them as the seller. And then they put them back on the on on eBay, and while they spent $193.50 to start, they put them back on eBay, and the second go round, they they earned $8,000.

John Jantsch (14:52.354)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (14:52.935)

Hundred ninety three turned into eight thousand dollars in four days because stories suddenly made this no longer was it a you know, a car key. It was the key to the most amazing vehicle I’ve ever owned in my life. And I had to sell the vehicle. I kept the key because it meant something to me. Now it’s now it’s at a place in my life where I I’d I’d love if you happen to be a fan of Maserati, I’d love for you to own this key so that you too anyway.

John Jantsch (15:21.744)

Well wait a minute though. That that made made me my first bubble, thought bubble that went off in my head is did the stories have to be true? Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (15:21.863)

You get it, right? And if

Don Yaeger (15:30.449)

No, they did in this particular case, they actually note in each story this story was created for this item by author Doug Dorst or you know, whoever it is. And but they make it clear. Now, I argue that the good stories we want to tell have to be true. Right. Now, could there occasionally be some embellishment for the terms for the for the value of speeding something along? Yes. but you know, we’re not.

John Jantsch (15:37.168)

How funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:48.42)

Well of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:57.52)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (16:00.146)

We’re we we are in the we’re in the process of developing true stories.

John Jantsch (16:05.785)

So I I’m not sure we got through all four truths, but I I I want to circle back to one thing. all the best stories, like you said, are human, but also they’re probably personal for some people. and I some people are it’s hard for them to tell them. They don’t think anybody wants to know that part. they’re afraid it’ll make them look bad. but but but my guess is sort of the deeper or the more deeply personal, the more

Probably engagement. Yeah.

Don Yaeger (16:37.649)

Without question, because well, a couple of things happen. Number one, there’s probably as you’re telling the story, there’s some piece of it that they have lived too, right? So in some way they are on the journey with you as you’re telling your story. But secondly, they get a chance to know they know something about you that they didn’t know when the conversation began. And in the process, a connection is built, right? And we and we’ve already discussed it a couple different times. commerce occurs when connection is built.

John Jantsch (16:52.75)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:06.265)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (17:07.313)

Right. And so if we can make sure that we are we’re finding ways to to become in relationship and sometimes my my ability to share my cancer journey, especially if I know that you’ve been on if you’ve had dealt with cancer, right? it will allow the two of us to w we we have that moment together. And and yes, a pr every great story has to have you in it in some way.

John Jantsch (17:37.391)

Yeah, and I think from a business standpoint too, you know, a lot of times when somebody encounters a business, all they see is, wow, this is a great business. but the story behind it is the struggle that actually made it. So I think has real value, doesn’t it? Yeah.

Don Yaeger (17:52.07)

Absolutely. It’s never you know, there are a lot of people like to look at you, me, people and say, wow, what how how incredible that success is. But that grinding that occurred 20 years ago when we were struggling to try to figure out how we were gonna pay that week’s that week’s grocery bill, that’s a that’s that’s it’s lost on most because we’re so busy assuming that everything has always been that way for John Jance or Don Yeager, right?

John Jantsch (18:11.471)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:21.199)

Right. So for particularly for a small business, do do you and I know you don’t necessarily consult on, you know, with small business owners in that way, but certainly the book covers information for them. do you is are there like three or four core stories that every business needs to have and be able to tell kind of at the drop of a hat?

Don Yaeger (18:43.603)

Completely. I would say number one, you know, we all would agree the origin story. You came together to solve, to, to, to, to cre to patch a hole in the universe. What was the whole? And what made you understand the whole? Like what was so so when I say the story behind the story, don’t tell me what you came along to solve. Tell me why you came along to solve it. what was it that made that happen? Number one. Number two,

John Jantsch (18:55.971)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (19:11.789)

there’s always a great story about some customer whose life you changed by doing really well at what you do. Tell me the story about one of your customers. Number three, tell me the story about one of your employees, right? It this so many of these stories they don’t have to, they don’t have to be about you, the owner. They’re they’re often more effective if they’re about the people that you have been that have been part of the journey with you.

John Jantsch (19:16.345)

Mm.

John Jantsch (19:26.829)

Right.

Don Yaeger (19:39.752)

And if you could tell me the story about one of your employees and how one of the things I mean, I I did some work the other day for a company that regularly they do call centers, they’re working with people in life insurance, and they were so taken by trying to deal with a man who was struggling with the with the loss of his wife, and he was just trying to figure out what the policy looked like. the person on the on the phone just realized, you know what, I want to send something extra to this guy. And so went online to Harry and David, sent some pairs.

To the man. The man writes a note to the CEO of the insurance company and says, there’s no way she could have known this, but pears were my wife’s favorite fruit. And that your employee was able to do something like that. That’s a story the CEO now gets to tell. And it what it says is this is how we care for the people that we consider our policy holders, right? The people that are our stakeholders. And this is the freedom I give my employees to care for them.

John Jantsch (20:18.892)

Mm.

John Jantsch (20:26.008)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (20:37.863)

There’s so much in that story that will make you attracted to his company, more so than one of the others, that it gives him a competitive advantage when he tells it.

John Jantsch (20:49.293)

Well and and certainly goes way beyond any kind of words on a website, you know, of we we care, we’re the carrying company, right? Trust us.

Don Yaeger (20:57.437)

We’re the carrying company. Let me give you our slogan and in fact let me show you the per the posters which which explain all of our core values, all twenty eight of our core values, right? none of which your employees can re can recite.

John Jantsch (21:10.925)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So a lot of small business owners, I I and and I wonder if you could just we could wrap this up with you just kind of giving them advice. don’t like to talk about themselves, don’t think they have a story. so how does if you were going to advise somebody whose job it was to create those core stories that the company should have, what do you think is the best way for them to get at that when there’s really not any ready access to it?

Don Yaeger (21:40.538)

So, I mean one of the things you might want to do is just literally there are lots of right now, there are lots of unemployed writers in the world, right? There are a lot of writers looking for jobs because newspapers are closing, magazines are closing. There are a lot of people who understand how to how to take stories and help them. So there’s plenty probably of access to talent. You can go to Fiverr and you can find all kinds of people. But more importantly, understand the story doesn’t have to be about you. If that’s your if that’s your place of discomfort, make the story about your customers.

John Jantsch (21:48.377)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (22:04.397)

Yeah.

Don Yaeger (22:09.809)

Make that story about your employees. As I said, make that story about the moment that this that it became apparent that this company needed to exist. And yes, you might be included in the story, but it’s not about you. And if that’s a point of discomfort for you, there are plenty of ways to let the world know how special you are without pumping yourself up.

John Jantsch (22:34.637)

Well Don, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work and certainly pick up a copy of the business of storytelling?

Don Yaeger (22:42.855)

Well, business storytelling is, as I love to say, available anywhere that that good books are sold. so if you go there and it’s not there, it’s not a good bookstore. but yeah, Amazon is a is a big is a big part of our our strategy. but they can also I’d love if they’re if they’re a friend of yours, reach out to me. I’m at Don Yeager dot com. And and I and I own all spellings of my last name so you can butcher it.

John Jantsch (22:50.219)

Yeah, yeah.

Don Yaeger (23:12.135)

And you will probably still end up at my website, but it’s Don Y-A-E-G-E-R dot com.

John Jantsch (23:17.143)

Yeah. Probably a lot of E’s before the A. Certainly. Well, and I would Well just like I own D D U C K marketing, as po a as well, ’cause a lot of people you still use that erroneously, so it directs to the right place. But and I would also encourage folks you know, if especially if you’re a fan of of good sports writing, certainly Don’s entire catalog.

Don Yaeger (23:20.049)

There is a lot of that.

And I own that site. I own that site too, by the way.

Don Yaeger (23:36.669)

Right. That’s right.

John Jantsch (23:46.228)

of of books would would have something for you there too. So well Don, it was great for you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you again soon out there on the road.

Don Yaeger (23:54.362)

Always. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.964)

You know, I’ve spent thirty years or so around agencies and consultants, and I’ve never heard this much quiet exhaustion from good marketers. Not bad marketers, good ones. the work is fine. The business around the work is what’s breaking. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and it’s just me. doing a solo show. I’ve got some stuff I want to get off my chest, I guess. And so

I love to use this platform to be able to do that. So if you are a marketer, a marketing agency, a consultant, a fractional CMO, this show is just for you. The agency model, as I’ve called it, is outdated. The people winning right now aren’t working harder inside of it. They’ve replaced it. We have I don’t know. I’ve lost track. Thousands of marketers I’ve spoken with in a lot of the

Things I’m going to identify today are things that are really phrases, words, sentiments that have come right out of their mouths. and I want to frame those as the nine shifts that I think every marketing advisor must make today. Can’t get past two minutes here to talk without talking about I AI and the good, the bad, the ugly. I mean, a l a lot of our clients now think that AI can do the marketing for them. they’re trying to bring it in, produce more.

at scale, be more efficient, and it’s really just making more noise. And it it’s I think from a a marketer standpoint, from an agency standpoint or consultant standpoint, it’s added another hurdle in helping them understand the value that we bring because I think they’re looking at, hey, this tool only costs 20 bucks and I can make it do all this stuff. and really people aren’t paying now for more stuff.

They’re paying for marketing leadership. They’re paying for strategy. They’re paying for a systematic approach to bring AI into their businesses. And that’s really where I think we have to move as marketers. the the the I’m not saying that AI is doing all the stuff yet, but certainly it is getting low it is getting easier and easier to do, and people are willing to pay less and less for it. I mean, the the days when

John Jantsch (02:23.074)

You know, I used to get paid ten thousand dollars to write an ebook, for example. And I, you know, I can’t imagine anybody paying a hundred dollars for that. So the th those days are are quickly coming to an end. But again, I think that this is a real opportunity for people who embrace this idea of marketing leadership. So I’m gonna get into the the nine shifts, as I call them, that I think every advisor, marketing advisor, really needs to make.

Right now, in order to kind of catch this next wave that that I think is really upon us, quite frankly. All right. So number one, we have to go from invisible generalist to really owning a point of view. here’s a quote, and each of these shifts I’ve I’ve pulled a quote from somebody I’ve either interviewed or or spoken with recently. the quote, I sound like every other agency out there, and I do not have a unique

Method to stand on. I mean, I think this is this is number one because it’s the one that it’s the domino. It’s the one that makes all the other ones fall into place. If you don’t come aren’t able to come into people and say, here’s what I do, here’s what you’re going to do, here’s what it’s going to cost, and by the way, here are the results we can inspect. And this is the framework that I built it on. And we have actually installed this in hundreds of other businesses, and it’s proven to work. If you can’t

guide and lead a a business owner into what they need rather than saying, hey, we do it all. tell us what you need. you you’re setting yourself up for failure completely. So a lot of the people that license our methodology, our advisor certification,

really lean towards this idea that we have this framework called strategy first. We have a whole different approach to how we go to market to what folks in our networks sell. And I think that that gives you or can give you at least a point of view. Strategy before tactics is a point of view, shockingly still very unique in the world of small business marketing. And so adopting that kind of point of view and going to somebody and say, look,

John Jantsch (04:42.444)

You need a website? Sure, we build websites, but first you’re gonna go through strategy first. because we know that the only way we can deliver a valuable website, in fact, your marketing in general, is if you start with strategy first. That is a point of view. That type of thing is what’s something you have to hang on. Shift number two: from custom everything to a productized flagship offer. Here’s the quote: I’m exhausted from writing.

Custom proposals and starting from scratch for every new client. We have one engagement sold the same way, delivered the same way. So now instead of my I can do that when somebody out you actually are saying this is my process. and now at first pushback, sometimes people are like, yeah, that’s just like cookie cutter templated.

No, it’s not at all. It’s a framework that delivers custom work that can be taught, that can actually be delegated, that you can actually hire people to do. We successfully have consultants in our organization. We have con successfully licensed over four hundred agencies and consultants on this methodology, and being able to to productize that so that you can get good at it, so that you can get

Delegate it, you you you actually are able to deliver more value because you have a framework that you can apply everything to. Shift number three, from pricing effort to pricing outcomes. This is this one is.

Been dying a very slow death for many, many years. I actually had somebody ask us, you know, how much we charged an hour. It’s it’s been years since somebody’s asked me that. You know, that mentality is just not only is it a recipe for disaster, you basically are going to sell up all your time, you’re going to sell up all your usable capacity without any ability to scale. But when you have a proven framework, when you

John Jantsch (06:50.841)

Have a proven point of view, guess what? People will pay more. All people really want is a result. If they’re, if they’re trying to buy your price down, it’s because they don’t understand the value. And when you’re able to go in with a specific point of view, a specific framework, a flagship offer that you can show them the results that you’ve gotten for others, price goes way down the list because they the risk is goes way down.

the the list. And so if if you could start thinking in terms of

John Jantsch (07:27.489)

I sell a strategy first for fifteen thousand dollars and it doesn’t really matter to the client what they get for that. I mean they want the result for that, but but like the output or the input, I’m sorry, how many hours, who does what, how many pieces of paper they get for that. they no longer care if they’re convinced in the that you can deliver the result. So those first two shifts go hand in hand with shift number three. So shift number four.

From execution retainers to leadership engagements. Here’s the quote: Clients treat me like a vendor, question my tactics, and cancel when budgets get tight. That’s a sure sign that you are a vendor rather than a trusted advisor. As I said before, there’s still business out there for execution.

but it’s going to go away. it is going to become less and less, and it’s going to become commoditized. Even if there’s plenty of people willing to pay for it, they’re going to be willing to pay a lot less for it. So you have to shift now. Your whole, you have to take that strategic leadership seat because that’s the piece that’s really missing. And most of the businesses I’ve worked with, even if they have a founder who has built a tremendous business, and maybe they’ve brought in a couple of people to

Do the marketing, or they have an agency to do the marketing. They’re still lacking that person that’s making judgments, that’s making decisions, that’s actually keeping them on track and owning the results. And those are retainers people will pay handsomely for. In fact, they will pay far more than they will pay for somebody to do their SEO. SEO may be part of what you end up selling, but if you sell the leadership engagement, you sell strategy first.

All of a sudden, you have a completely different relationship with a client. What are we up to? Shift number five from referrals and hope to a lead system. Now, here’s the quote: I have no idea where my next client is coming from. If word of mouth dries up, again, most of the many of the agencies that we work with, they, I mean, you do good work, you’re going to get some referrals.

John Jantsch (09:41.44)

you work your warm network, you’re going to be able to uncover some opportunities. But actually having a lead system in place. I mean, marketers, I mean every industry does this, but marketers are the worst marketers. let me ask you this. How many LinkedIn posts or email, cold emails have you gotten telling you as an agency they are going to help you generate leads?

That’s the thing we’re supposed to be doing for our clients. We’re supposed to be really good at doing for our clients. And yet the industry realizes we’re terrible at it. and so shifting to a pipeline that is constantly being filled by having channels that you own fill that pipeline up and never, ever, ever, depending on cold email. There I said it. there’s some people listening that probably will debate that, and maybe there’s some people that have had success.

But you want to be in a position where you wouldn’t want a client that would come to you based on a cold email because they wouldn’t be the right fit client. They wouldn’t understand the value you bring. They wouldn’t understand what it is to hire a trusted advisor. Shift number six: from selling to advising. this one really gets people. I mean, here’s the direct quote: I hate feeling like a salesperson. I spend too much time doing proposal.

Theater. Boy, isn’t that true? So, what you have to do is start changing the entire dynamic of what you think selling is. Essentially, what we do is we actually demonstrate to somebody: here is a process that we’re going to run you through that will help you understand the gaps that you have in marketing, maybe help you understand what marketing actually is. And by virtue of doing that,

the the conversation will not be can you send me a proposal? It will be can you do that for me? What you just ran me through, could you do that for our business? That’s the difference between selling and running. I’m sorry, selling and advising. and it changes how you feel about it. It changes who you deliver to, it changes how you deliver. and you’ll never say I hate selling again because it’s a joy to actually do it. You’ve got to adopt that.

John Jantsch (12:04.621)

So I’m up to number seven. And coincidentally, these are all things that we do. People that come into our certification program, our duct tape advisor program. these are all things that we have figured out that that you not only need to make, but we’ve actually got the solutions. We’ve actually built it for you. So you don’t have to make any of this up. You don’t have to create any of it. It’s all been done for you. So I’m gonna give you one URL right now.

If you want to go through an assessment, all nine of these shifts are on an assessment. It’ll ask you, it’s very simple, it takes five minutes. It’ll ask you nine questions. They’re essentially you’re gonna rank yourself one to ten on where you are in these shifts. It’ll help you identify your three lowest, the ones where you actually could use the help. So I’m gonna give you the URL now dtm.world slash shifts.

It’s a hard word to say. Harder than it should be. Shifts. S H I F T S D T M.world slash shifts. All right, gonna keep moving here. Number seven, from doing the work to running the system. If I step away for a week, the whole business stops because everything lives in my head. You ever experience that one? So this is about SOPs and templates and you know delegation at 60 to 70 percent margin.

But it’s also about this idea of where you position yourself, where how you position yourself to a client. In fact, we actually talk about installing a marketing system in a business. In fact, we have a marketing, all the components of what we call a marketing operating system. So after strategy first, we’re actually going to work on what’s next, what’s next, what comes in the stage that they are in now and the stage that they’re going to be in 90 days from now. And we’re

Constantly building on that. It’s one of the reasons I think that that we have such long retention. We we keep our clients three, four, five, heck, one, it’s been with us over a decade. and I think a lot of it has to do with this mentality of installing a system. we have built all the components, and I don’t think there’s anyone else. certainly no one that has 30 years of doing this, but I don’t think there’s anyone else that takes this really system view.

John Jantsch (14:28.008)

Of installing marketing inside of a business. Shift number seven. No, we’re up to eight, aren’t we? From dabbling in AI to installing it. So here’s a quote: clients think AI can do my job for free, and I’m losing my margins. just trying to keep up. So here’s how I think we need to view AI. Sure, use it in your business. Use it, it does so many wonderful things. I’m not really gonna extol the virtues of that, anybody who’s

in marketing right now realizes that this is a tool that we have to embrace. But a lot of our clients are trying to embrace it as well. And they are hacking their way through it, they’re getting terribly frustrated, they’re actually discovering it costs more in times of in terms of time and effort. And so what really is resonating with the small to mid-sized business is part of marketing is actually having a systematic approach to installing AI.

Instead of everybody just bring your favorite tool and use it however you want, we actually need to get them to think in terms of if we build it this way, if we build these skills, it’s all still based on strategy. we’ve built the strategy to begin with, so now we have the tools and the ability to build the strategic approach to using AI with humans inside a business. And that mindset shift of

Not just like, we’re gonna create this automation or we’re gonna create this hack or we’re gonna save you this much time. It just needs to be part of the plumbing of the marketing system. And I think that you will find if you go out and start using just that message that that we’re gonna help you install a systematic approach because right now it’s chaos in most businesses. And so somebody who’s actually offering to manage the chaos as part of marketing.

is going to be invited into a leadership role inside that business. All right, number nine. From going in alone to being in a network. I’m tired of trying to figure out every problem myself, and grind is incredibly lonely. we have over a hundred agencies in our network that we meet monthly, we do things quarterly, we share.

John Jantsch (16:46.093)

resources, we share assets, we share a strategic partner network to actually do some of the implementation, to actually build some of the AI automations and things that that our clients need. and so that’s a huge component. If any of you are out there, even even in an organization with 10, 12, 15 people, a lot of times the founder, the leader feels at least a little bit alone in terms of addressing or getting advice.

on the on the things that they are experiencing. So imagine tapping into an entire network of of folks that that that could help you do that, help you wrestle with the problems that maybe they’ve actually wrestled with, that they’re wrestling with at the same time. So it’s it’s it’s not just camaraderie. It has tremendous value in terms of assets and people and network and mentoring as well. So those are the nine shifts.

I want you to imagine the next time a client says, okay, you want us to do strategy. How how how much is it? and you just without batting an eye, you don’t look down at your shoes, you don’t do anything, you just say it’s twelve thousand dollars. and the reason you say that is because the last 10 prospects that you talked to, you said the same thing and they said yes, and you had the confidence, you had the position, the

the the posture to say that’s what it is. And I know that it brings tremendous value. So the duct type duct tape marketing certified advisor program is really built around these nine shifts. And here’s how we structure it. When you join us, you will go into a 90-day one-on-one coaching engagement with our lead consultants who have now done this training

for many, many years that have actually implemented strategy first and the marketing operating system with clients for a number of years as well. and they will fit this to where you are. We have people that are just starting out and this is a great model for them because all of a sudden it’s like here’s the entire roadmap done for you. You’re boom, you know, you’re out there next day. We also have a lot of folks that are

John Jantsch (19:06.765)

Are feeling like, hey, the model has changed on me. It’s let me down. I need to do something different. But they’ve got experience, they’ve got team, they’ve got processes, and we’re able to mold this to exactly the shifts that they need to make. There’s also an entire library of training for you, for your team that you get access to, an entire network of partners that you get access to for implementation gaps that you might have. And as I said, you’d be part of this network.

for monthly masterminds and quarterly training on kind of the latest and and greatest thing. We bring in lots of folks to kind of keep us all up to speed on that. So if any of the shifts that I’ve talked about make sense and you want to jump on a call with Sarah Nay, who’s our CA CEO, she’s one of the people that does the training, the one-on-one training as well, just schedule a time with her. I’m gonna give you a link to do so. and

She’ll go over these nine shifts. she will walk you through, in fact, if you take the assessment, she’ll actually have what what you have identified as your lowest scores and you’ll spend time doing that. So if you want to take the assessment, it’s dtm.world slash shifts. And then if you want to schedule with Sarah, it’s DTM.world slash chat. So DTM.world either shifts or chat or both.

when you take the assessment, you’ll also be given the opportunity to schedule a time with Sarah as well. So if you didn’t go get all of that written down because you were driving in your car, we’ll all you can also find it at Duct Tape Marketing as well on the podcast homepage. you will find this as well as the links in the show notes. So thanks for tuning in. Appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Let me also offer one other.

piece if you haven’t clicked off yet. which one of these nine shifts resonated the most with you? I’d love to hear from you. And it’s just John at Duct Tape Marketing. send me a note. All right, take care.

John Jantsch (00:01.122)

So most consultants build a business around what they’re good at. A smaller number build one that they can actually sell. The difference between those two paths shows up probably pretty quickly, long before anyone’s shopping for a buyer, that is. And usually it’s invisible to the person living it. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, my guest today. I have two guests: Beth.

Mazza and Victoria Sivrais. They’re serial entrepreneurs, collective moms of nine, who built and exited two successful professional service firms that advise SP leaders through make or break decisions, equal parts, boardroom powerhouses, and chaos managers. They’re now on a mission to help 10,000 women build seven-figure businesses. So, Beth and Victoria, welcome to the show.

Beth (00:50.765)

Thanks. We’re happy to be here, John. Thank you. No.

Victoria Sivrais (00:51.513)

Thanks so much.

John Jantsch (00:52.834)

Did did I butcher either one of your names? I ch I I hopefully not. Good, good, good. Awesome. Well, so I have to start by telling you that I have nine siblings, if that counts for anything. So so so I do I do have a sense of and there was only f 14 years between the ten of us, so I do have a sense of a little bit of what you guys are going through. Right. I only have four kids of my own, but but the the ten ten f

Victoria Sivrais (00:56.239)

You got it. I’m impressed.

Beth (01:03.416)

Hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (01:04.303)

Really?

Beth (01:12.05)

Whoa. So you kept chaos.

Victoria Sivrais (01:13.187)

That’s incredible.

Beth (01:19.289)

So do I.

John Jantsch (01:21.304)

10 member family was quite something. So let’s jump into I I want to start with this may feel like a challenge, but I I know you guys have the answer to this. but I want to start with this sort of disconnect for me. As I read your bio and you know, S P five hundred, you know, make or break decisions. and then I look at the the title of the book, which I actually I forgot I forgot wasn’t in the in the bio, so I’ll

Beth (01:25.293)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (01:50.999)

Read it out right now. entrepreneur like a mother. Build a company that buys your freedom and not one that owns your life. And, you know, that sounds a little more like a lifestyle business book that maybe is different from you know what what I read in your bios. So help our listeners understand where where where I’m getting that wrong.

Beth (02:13.767)

yeah, that no, that’s a fair question. So two things. One is side hustles don’t give you financial freedom. They don’t pay for your kids’ college. They don’t pay for your house. They don’t pay for you to retire at the age as we did. So our number one premise behind this book is you gotta build a business where you get financial freedom. And you can do that if you choose the right business model and you set some of the right barriers from day one of your business. And

John Jantsch (02:22.221)

Right.

Beth (02:40.801)

Literally the entire book is about when we did that successfully, which we did a lot, and when we did that unsuccessfully, which also was a lot.

John Jantsch (02:48.44)

Sure, sure. Well, that’s the only way you learn one from the other, right? so so a lot of what you talk about is the idea of of building your your first business, planning to sell it. and I think a lot of people, I I I can’t imagine there are too many people that that’s not the dream. however, you know, you get sort of stuck in the day-to-day and it’s like, no, I’m just trying to pay the bills or pay myself, and it turns into a job, not a business even. So how did you

How did you make that decision? What did you do that changed, you know, how you went to business that that you know, in into business that that really made that happen for you?

Victoria Sivrais (03:26.979)

Yeah. So I I think from our perspective, sales became the center of everything we did from day one. So I think when you are trying to create a lifestyle business or one that just kind of is a replacement to your corporate salary, I think there is a a slowness of it sometimes. Maybe take your time. It was never our mentality. From day one, it is

How can you get more clients? How can you build our brand? And how can you expand to a point where you have a scalable business that then becomes attractive to a buyer? So I think that that was number one. Now, where I what I personally fell short, somewhere in the middle of that, was I couldn’t give up control about some of the more mundane tasks that were necessary to run the b business forward. So I was lucky enough to have a business partner.

John Jantsch (04:13.133)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (04:20.205)

That was, hey, it’s time to, it’s time to take invoicing off your plate. It’s time to take HR. It’s time to hire the HR manager. It’s time to hire someone that can actually run the office on a day to day basis. And that is, I think, what became the difference of we were creating a lifestyle business to a scalable business that that we could sell one day.

John Jantsch (04:44.782)

Well, and I think you aptly refer to that as a kitchen cabinet idea, or at least that that to have like, you know, a champion, a compensator, and a connector. is that something that can be one person that has three personalities? Does that definitely need to be outside people? you know, that like I have this skill set, you have that skill set. is that something you decide from day really early on? Or when you decided you wanted to change this business at least?

Beth (05:07.971)

Yeah, I think

I think there’s no way we as moms, unless we had a cabinet, could do this, right? Cause we needed cheerleading, we needed like people to pick up our kids when we were our flight was delayed. But then we also needed really, really big thinkers. We built a software product. Like we needed a big software guy that we didn’t know anything about. So we did it very methodically, which is how we’ve we’ve written it in Hunterprel Like a Mother. Three types, champions, connectors, compensators, and we built it.

Over a few years, and we did as much asking of favors as we did giving of favors, and we paid it as much for it as possible. But I mean, two members of our kitchen cabinet, one saved us from signing a very bad deal to sell our company, two did. And at least two to three of them made the introductions for the clients that paid us a lot of money, especially in a post-COVID world where those were not coming very quickly.

John Jantsch (05:43.053)

Mm-hmm.

Beth (06:09.781)

So it’s it is a long term, it is many people that you keep up with, that you spend twenty minutes a day with with, but it’s also what you do from day one of the business. You’re always thinking about building that.

John Jantsch (06:23.446)

D do you think that that you had or do you think that it takes a different sort of investment mindset in in the business than most people have? Cause again, a lot of people get in, they get a client and then they want the next client and then it’s like, you know, we’re we’re just trying to keep this thing going, you know, hustle work. Did did you have a different investment mentality than that?

Victoria Sivrais (06:45.019)

a hundred percent we did. So, like, I mean, yes, it was about building clients in and building revenues in the early days. but it then became how are we gonna have an expense structure? Cause our our goal from the get-go was to run 30% margins, which is very attractive in a professional services business. And so our investments what were centered around

not only driving growth at the top line, but maintaining and expanding that margin that was, you know, break even in the early days to to the the goal of the 30% margin. So like as a result, like our power move three is make the money moves that matter. And that is all about the financial non negotiables, not only personally as a as a woman raising a family and building a business, but also within the business, what are you willing to do?

John Jantsch (07:24.567)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (07:36.586)

Achieve your goals. So, like a couple of our goals were we only paid out at net 45 to our vendors, but we were pretty slavish to collecting it net 30. So we had a nice cash cushion in between. You know, we never had our expense line go above our retained revenues because half of our business was project revenues, but we never took that expense structure over our retained revenues. So we knew we had the flexibility for investment in later, and we only took on debt.

John Jantsch (07:57.654)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (08:05.291)

if we knew we had an identif identifiable return on that investment. It was just those were three of our non-negotiables that we always had.

Beth (08:14.423)

And the one other thing we did is we invested in sales and marketing. When we were two people, we were putting 10% of what we made into sales and marketing. We put out really good thought leadership that we wanted SP 500, 1,000 CEOs to read. We figured out real early we could not get it read if we just sent them emails. And we invested in marketing. We were very early on SEO. We did all that to get the marketing out to make sure that.

the influencer to the CEO or the CEO himself saw our thought leadership, which as a really small firm, we had some really big bills, but that was a total investment. And we by the time we sold 50% of our business came from that effort. Come there were calls in from that effort.

John Jantsch (08:59.172)

Okay.

S so so in the eight minutes and or nine minutes now and four seconds we’ve been talking, you’ve actually demonstrated more business savvy than most people have, let’s face it. So what how do you translate that in your book to somebody who maybe hasn’t you know, really some of the things you’re throwing out hasn’t even considered?

Victoria Sivrais (09:22.509)

You you know, we we put it in the framework of these five power moves. And honestly, we really, we really, I people would say we dumbed it down. We didn’t. We actually brought it down to a level that we needed when we were learning ourselves. And we tried to be as explicit and as prescriptive as we possibly can. So, like power move one is all about whether or not it’s a passion project or actually a really viable business idea. So we start with what is your total addressable math.

Market, how do you figure out what your total addressable market is? And how do you figure out how you’re going to capture a portion of that that makes it a seven-figure business? Then we start to talk about, you know, build the network with your kitchen cabinet. Like where, you know, most entrepreneurs tend to be control freaks, a, you know, type A people that think they’re great at everything. The skinny is you’re not. So like figure out what you’re not good at and figure out where you can kind of support that.

John Jantsch (10:09.646)

Sure.

Victoria Sivrais (10:18.713)

Then we talk about the money moves that matter. Then we talk about, which is honestly a favorite of both of ours, is respect the pivot. Like understand that when things aren’t going the right way, you gotta be able to dodge and weave as quickly as you possibly can. And then the last piece is really once you have a business that is moving, now how do you scale it? And I think that those are the pieces. And again, depending on where you’re at in your business, you can pick up in any one of those places.

And I think that that is the beauty of this framework that we’ve created, is that you can jump in wherever you’re at with your business.

Beth (10:52.621)

I mean, this this book is intentionally so prescriptive. You literally have your pen and you’re writing this stuff down. There are worksheets, there are questions. We give our real world examples. Times we did great things and terrible things, and it’s all in there so that not only do you know what to do, but you can also feel better that two idiots figured out a way to make it work too.

John Jantsch (11:15.98)

All right, so you can smack me for this question if you want, later at least. is could can men read this book.

Beth (11:24.397)

My God. Do you know how many female mavericks are men? Like we never talk about that. So many of them are men.

Victoria Sivrais (11:24.409)

Hundred percent. I mean a hundred percent. I mean

Victoria Sivrais (11:32.976)

Can we also talk about that between the two of us, we have six brothers? Like we are the two women and a lot of men in our life. And so like it’s not meant. We wrote it in the idea, because I think a lot of times women, particularly women who want to be mothers, are told that they can either be a business owner or they can be a mother. And the point is, is you can do both. Like we’re sick of that myth and we’re trying to break the break the glass on that myth.

John Jantsch (11:38.131)

Ha ha

Beth (11:39.811)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:50.304)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (11:59.746)

Men doing the same thing, and especially now, men versus like when my parents were growing up and you know there was no mom out in the workplace, like dads are just as involved with the kids versus where they used to be. And so, like, my husband is a hundred percent partner of mine. He is, I mean, we were just negotiating who’s picking up kids this afternoon because I had this podcast. So, like, I mean, those business owners, well, and even honestly.

John Jantsch (12:08.579)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (12:17.411)

Yeah. Right.

Victoria Sivrais (12:26.667)

ambitious men and women within corporate America. I think there’s a lot of pieces that you can take out of this, particularly around the the building of the kitchen cabin and respecting a pivot. Like those are just clear things that help you drive your business forward, whether or not corporate or entrepreneur.

Beth (12:44.771)

But men should pay full price for it. Women think it’s just men should pay just for everything you put us through through the generations.

John Jantsch (12:45.197)

So yeah. Hey, I think it’s fair. so there one concept you talk about is expertise dependent businesses versus system dependent businesses. talk a little bit about what that looks like and why that’s an important concept.

Victoria Sivrais (12:46.873)

For sure. We’ll give the ladies a discount. Yeah.

Beth (12:54.819)

Ha ha.

Beth (13:10.029)

Yeah, I think this is a big one. We as women, we only want to do the things that we’re best at. So we tend to, I think, begin expertise driven businesses, which is what Victoria and I did as well. But expertise driven businesses, unless you are in like some amazing area where you can charge 50,000 an hour, you are maxed, right? You are maxed how much you can make. And and you’re you’re also giving up like so much of your life in in being the go to person.

What we learned, because we scaled twice, right? And so we we learned a lot, is unless you can put your expertise into some kind of a system, and then you can hire, retain, train, support, empower a team of people that can do almost what you can do, you can’t scale. It doesn’t matter if you have AI, it doesn’t matter what you have, you cannot scale. You have high-profile people that want to talk to a human being that’s competent. So

We really learned in that second business. And some of that was driven by our own employees saying, You’re not even giving us a shot on goal. You’re not even letting us get a shot to talk to a CEO. You haven’t trained us. And we both really stepped back and we really invested there. And we turned out selling the company with seven or eight people that could do what we did. They all got a small piece of the business. They all have great careers. But I mean, that was a big investment from us. So, like if you want to be bigger, you want

John Jantsch (14:17.439)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:30.819)

Yeah. Yeah.

Beth (14:34.273)

Your kids not to have college debt, you’ve got to figure out a system driven business.

John Jantsch (14:38.967)

Yeah, I am. you know, I w we work with a lot of business owners and I mean the the one thing I counsel them on all the time is, you know, until you’re no longer the rainmaker, you know, you’re stuck. And I think that’s really to me, that’s the really the big one. If you know if that’s if you’re the only person that can sell the big deal, then you’re you’re never gonna get out of this thing. So what one of the things that I read that

Victoria Sivrais (14:44.319)

Mm.

Victoria Sivrais (14:50.115)

No

Victoria Sivrais (15:00.367)

Agreed.

John Jantsch (15:05.495)

the seventy-five percent of your cash w went into cold outreach from day one. that’s almost taboo for like consulting, you know, type businesses. It’s like, no, you build your network of trust and you get referrals. And so so talk a little bit about that math for a high touch advisory firm.

Victoria Sivrais (15:24.023)

I mean, you d we call it in the book, we call it caveman marketing. Cause I mean, it really was. I mean, it was a numbers game in the beginning, in terms of the cold outreach. For every ten calls we made, we got one meeting, you know, or every a hundred calls we made, we got 10 meetings, we got one close. Like it just it was what it was. What I think we did very interestingly to support that was not just the cold calling. It was up front, we made a ton of investment in that thought leadership that Beth talked about a little bit ago, which was

John Jantsch (15:28.099)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (15:53.302)

Not cold emails selling our services. It was it was expanding and sharing our expertise around areas that mattered to the C-suite and the board of directors of these large public companies. And we never asked for anything from it. We honestly just would share as much as they listen to it. And honestly, in in COVID is where it really, really took off because you know, that March date, March 16th.

All of our public companies just stopped paying us. All of our huge pipeline just stopped responding to us. No one knew. We were working a hundred hours a week trying to assuage all the concerns on Wall Street that every public company was going belly up. Like we didn’t have anything to do except for just kind of maintain our client base. So in our spare time, which we had so much of it, we just wrote about what was happening out in the market. And we just kept on sending out

John Jantsch (16:24.319)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (16:44.046)

Mm.

John Jantsch (16:48.771)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (16:49.775)

Thought leadership after thought leadership, we did really basic roundups of by industry, how people are talking about financial position, cash on hand, investments, all of those things. And that drove our SEO, which became us the number one ranking in both our core business, which was investor relations, and our growth business, which was ESG communications consulting. And so when the world started to slowly open back up that summer.

John Jantsch (17:04.441)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (17:17.827)

They said, okay, there’s all these mandates that we have to do. Who should we call? you know, those ladies that never stop emailing us about all the things that are happening. And it opened the floodgates. And so it didn’t stop us from our cold outreach. We still did that. But when we got there, we had built such great brand recognition that they picked up the phone when we called.

John Jantsch (17:24.431)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:36.11)

Yeah.

All while homeschooling at the same time, right?

Victoria Sivrais (17:41.347)

For sure. For sure. My

Beth (17:42.027)

okay, we can’t. We’re like BTSD. I mean. But I mean, the one thing I want to add on to that is that SEO was super expensive. We invested a lot. AI is not the ability to be found on AI is a different game. And we always talk about, my God, how much higher would our margins have been if we have AI and figured it out?

Victoria Sivrais (17:48.868)

Bye.

John Jantsch (17:54.201)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:07.874)

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no question. Did

Victoria Sivrais (18:09.081)

Totally.

Beth (18:11.021)

And you can be so super localized with AI too that it’s for smaller or very localized businesses too.

John Jantsch (18:15.616)

Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I’m curious, did either one of you have entrepreneurial upbringings?

Beth (18:22.393)

We both did. My we both did. My my dad is a serial entrepreneur, my biggest supporter. Both my brothers are entrepreneurs, Victoria.

Victoria Sivrais (18:23.855)

You got.

John Jantsch (18:24.97)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (18:34.425)

Yep, my dad’s an entrepreneur and and his dad, who I actually never had the luxury of meeting, had I can’t even count the number of businesses that they’ve told me he’s had. And my brothers followed in the same footstep too. So like it it is there. So maybe it is a little bit in our blood.

Beth (18:50.719)

And like at my family dinner is if you had to admit that you worked for someone else, everyone was like, For shame, you know, so you didn’t have that.

John Jantsch (18:56.586)

Yeah. So I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by and and share some of the insights here. But if somebody’s listening runs a business whether alone or they have a team, what would be the first thing you call them power moves? What would be maybe the first power move you would say? Obviously you don’t know who these businesses are or what they’re doing, but but what do you typically find like this is the first hole to plug?

Beth (19:23.223)

It’s always the money moves. It’s always that we look at the PL and go, what are you paying an executive coach for? Or if you increased your prices five percent, my God, this would change your take. So we want it to be softer than that, but God, it’s always that make the money moves that matter.

Victoria Sivrais (19:24.918)

Always.

Victoria Sivrais (19:41.027)

I mean, we talk to business owners all the time, and almost I would say one out of every four, they’re telling me, yeah, we’re I’m making a ton of money. Like blah, blah, blah. Okay. So less your expenses, how much are you taking home? well, nothing. And okay. So you’re not actually making money. Like, I mean, it is pretty basic like that, I think. And honest to God, like in the early days of Claremont.

John Jantsch (19:58.499)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:02.606)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:09.943)

it was something that I didn’t know. Like it like pure cash I knew a profit and loss statement, but pure cash management about paying a vendor after you’ve been paid by your clients. It never had occurred to me, to be honest. Like I I figured I just want to stay on top of my bills. Like there are real basics of of building Yeah, totally.

John Jantsch (20:22.478)

Right.

John Jantsch (20:28.354)

Yeah, it’s it’s check checkbook finance. Right. Yeah, that’s funny.

Beth (20:32.899)

Yeah.

Victoria Sivrais (20:35.011)

So I mean it’s so I I go back to the that the money moves that matter every day of the week. And I think secondarily the building the kitchen cabinet, knowing what you’re good at and what you’re not, and how to supplement where your weakness is is critically important too.

John Jantsch (20:39.822)

Yeah, yeah, awesome.

John Jantsch (20:51.232)

Awesome. Well again, Beth Victoria, I appreciate you stopping by and talking about Entrepreneur Like a Mother. is there anywhere you would invite people to connect with you, find out more about the book?

Beth (21:02.583)

Yeah, for sure. So it is available for pre order on Amazon. But if you go through female mavericks dot com, you actually get the course as well, which is pretty cool. And if you only have ten minute increments or ten minutes of tolerance for us a day, that’s another way to do it.

John Jantsch (21:15.246)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Sivrais (21:17.325)

And we’ll share a code for a ten percent discount on the book as well as the code through our website.

John Jantsch (21:22.158)

Okay, awesome. We’ll do that quickly ’cause we’re gonna publish the show and it within gosh to get it out around launch time, depending upon when you guys are listening to this show. It comes out in September, but it will be available after September twenty second. We’ll have a link in the show notes as well. So again, appreciate it and hopefully we’ll run into you one or both of you somewhere out there on the road.

Victoria Sivrais (21:30.884)

Yeah.

Beth (21:44.675)

Thanks, John. Bye.

Victoria Sivrais (21:44.717)

Awesome. Thank you so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.806)

So most people build referral networks by meeting, I don’t know, as many people as they can, as many people as possible. Today’s guest picked five or so and went all in on the trust with each one of them and turned it into a $50 million in funded deals without any cold calling. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jermane Cheathem. He is the sales director at Dale Financial Solutions and runs something called Creators Learn.

Where he teaches other sales professionals how to build the same kind of referral-based business. Today he actually pitched me on the idea of doing a building something live here on the show. So I have no idea what I’m doing today. we’re just gonna dive right in and see if he can actually use a duct tape marketing offering as the case study. So, Jermaine, welcome to the show.

Jermane (00:55.296)

Thanks, John. I’m looking forward to it, man. I I I’m just as lost as you in today’s episode, so we’ll figure it out on the fly.

John Jantsch (00:59.47)

Well well let’s get let’s get a little context. In the email you originally sent me, you said you had been making 300 cold calls a day, which sounds absolutely terrible. and that that nothing was really working. So what was the day you realized that that math would never kind of get you to where you wanted to go?

Jermane (01:20.414)

Well, I realized it because I was working twelve hours a day and getting very little results from it. life is short, we all die. So I knew that was not gonna pan out long term. And the way I had the epiphany was I was talking to one of the people that were working on the deal that we were working on together, and he told me, Hey, Jermaine, I’ll have some more deals for you.

John Jantsch (01:27.299)

Yeah.

Jermane (01:46.558)

And I realized, wait, wait, I’ve been going at this the entire wrong way. Instead of me going one-to-one transactions and trying to figure out one-to-one how I can get someone to buy my thing, I should just partner with people that already have my ideal customers in their sphere of influence. And my thing helps them sell their thing. And because you know, I was doing financial services, I just partnered with medical device salespeople because my financing helped them sell their the medical devices to the doctors. So

It became a win win win situation where I did ninety percent less work but got ninety percent more income. So I just turned the entire vehicle on its head.

John Jantsch (02:26.2)

Yeah, I I wrote a book actually called The Referral Engine in twenty ten. and that was one of the premises of that book was you your customers, people who know you, I mean, certainly know how great you are. they can refer you, but they can refer one or two people maybe. whereas, like you said, that right strategic partner might have five hundred people that could send your way. So a hundred percent agree with that. So one of the things I wanted to focus on is I think

I think that you said most of your results came from just a small group of people, five maybe even. how did you pick those instead of the, you know, obviously the others you hundreds you could chase?

Jermane (03:05.6)

Well, because they started sending me business and so there’s no reason to chase more business if you have ample business already. It’s all about quality, never quantity. I’m always looking for leverage and simplicity. And so for me, leverage and simplicity is always about how can I manage the fewest personalities, procedures, protocols, and get the greatest return while deepening my relationship with those individuals. Because you can’t have a a hundred friends.

John Jantsch (03:08.952)

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:32.706)

Yeah.

Jermane (03:33.382)

You can’t be close enough because there’s not enough hours in the day. So you have to really dive deep into who do you want to spend your time with and develop something bigger as long as it’s profitable. I I always have this adage like the best friends to have are friends you make money with.

John Jantsch (03:45.507)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:50.711)

Yeah. Well, and and and that’s a really good point though. I mean, I know you’re you’re kind of being facetious, but not. is that that those five or whoever, whatever the number is, they have the right values, they bring you the right kinds of customers, a deal is easy with them. I mean, it just you know, it’s like there’s a whole bunch of people out there that can make life hard. You know, when you find people that can make life easy, then then like you said, why not focus on deepening that relationship?

Jermane (04:18.622)

Yeah, it never makes sense to me to chase anything in life. Because you’ll notice like the best friendships, the best relationships, the best business partners, they were always very easy at the very beginning. It was never a bunch of convincing or scratching and clawing or following up. Like even to me, following up is almost a waste of time, to be completely honest. Because if you it it because you’ll spend 90% of your day following up people that will never buy from you versus just pay attention to the signals that are already there.

John Jantsch (04:21.388)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (04:29.272)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (04:38.914)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jermane (04:48.264)

That are easy.

John Jantsch (04:50.07)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we provide fractional CMO services, as I told you. And actually we have a whole network of of certified marketing consultants that that license our practice. So I thought you had offered to kind of do this live, you know, break break this thing down live. And so I thought let’s let’s use the duct tape marketing fractional CMO service as you know as kind of the guinea pig for this. you know, we provide this service to

Really small to midsized businesses. We’re not, you know, we’re not going after Fortune 500 companies. These are like two to twenty million dollar businesses, founder led quite often. and what we’re providing them is is marketing strategy, marketing leadership, which they they haven’t had. in many cases we will also execute excuse me, execute on the plan for them with our team. but the primary thing that that we’re bringing to them is a a a strategic outlook on the on their market.

So what what other context would help you kind of do to do today’s goal?

Jermane (05:53.29)

So is there any particular vertical you’re in?

John Jantsch (05:57.268)

y you know, we don’t we haven’t. I just I’ve always enjoyed the variety of of working with different types of businesses. we do a lot of business in the home services industries, you know, remodeling contractors, roofing contractors, that kind of thing. And we do a lot of work in the professional services. So other consultants, you know, architects, accountants, lawyers. Those are probably the two biggest.

Very broad you know, markets, but home services and professional services.

Jermane (06:29.544)

And so which is the most profitable and which do you enjoy working with the most?

John Jantsch (06:36.205)

Well, you know, my team does all the work, so I I couldn’t tell you the I couldn’t tell you this but you know there’s they’re drastically different. I think the reason we went into those two fields is professional services have always relied very much on thought leadership. and that’s really how I built my whole practice was on thought leadership. but then I started moving a lot of that thought leadership towards

Jermane (06:42.644)

What do they say?

John Jantsch (07:04.009)

businesses like remodeling contractors who, you know, we’re like, what do you mean, thought leadership? You know, we we just build this thing that people tell us to, but we’ve actually been in very successful at c almost changing that that industry by having them, you know, think differently about it. So if I were going to pick, you know, my one of my favorites is remodeling contractors. you know, I just I love working with them. We can have great impact, you know, especially ones that we can teach some of the, you know,

the differences that what we bring and what strategy really means, we we can have massive impact on on their business, really transform their businesses.

Jermane (07:39.006)

Okay. And so we’ll just take those two avatars. so with the with the contractors and with the professional services folks, how do you currently acquire those clients?

John Jantsch (07:41.955)

Okay.

John Jantsch (07:53.166)

Well, we ha I’ve been doing this thirty years. I’ve written seven books on marketing. and so we have we you know, we have a little unfair advantage. I I shouldn’t say it’s unfair. I mean we work to build it. but most of the most of that comes to us by way of the fact that that we have a pretty well known brand, you know, nationally.

Jermane (08:11.699)

Got it. So it’s mostly all inbound, I’m assuming.

John Jantsch (08:14.39)

It it really is, yeah.

Jermane (08:16.327)

Okay. Is it mostly from the books or what what’s the main driver?

John Jantsch (08:19.917)

Well, we’ve continued to you know, we do webinars every month. you know, we we put out tons and tons of content. We’re very active in the social channels, so it’s the books are a big part of I would say half the business that that that finds us sites having read or at least been aware of one of my books.

Jermane (08:41.843)

Got it. Okay. interesting. Okay. So the though here’s the problem I see with the current setup. But but I know why you set it up this way, being broad. But strategic partners always work the best when we have a very narrow offering and avatar, obviously. so with that being said, what I would do on the contractor side.

is I would probably partner with franchisors that do those type of franchises because it doesn’t they have to have to have a ROI. They have to have these franchises work. And so what’s the biggest hindrance of growing a franchise? Marketing and sales and getting more revenue, right? So I would include some type of marketing package that you already have, included in the franchisor’s pitch to the franchisee.

John Jantsch (09:25.521)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (09:37.433)

Mm-hmm.

Jermane (09:42.9)

That would be an easy now. Obviously, you’d want to even get more niche as far as they only do bathrooms or they only do kitchens or like the more niche the better. But that would be what what my first thought with the with the remodeling situation would be partner with the franchise or now on the professional services. what I would probably do since it’s again very broad and we don’t know what these coaches or consultants are actually doing, but they all

Since they’re thinking about thought leadership, most of them I’ve noticed really place a very high value on branding. They believe brand is like the B’s knees, but real entrepreneurs know branding comes after sales and marketing. It becomes almost a byproduct, but they don’t know that. So I would partner with brand consultants, brand coaches, whatever, offer your package. Say your package is $10,000. You give it to the brand consultant.

John Jantsch (10:28.632)

Yeah.

Jermane (10:40.701)

Or coach and say, listen, this is what I do, X, Y, and Z, it’s $10,000. However, you can offer it to your clients for whatever you want to price it. You can price it at $20. You keep the spread. We make our 10, you make your 10, whatever. But that not only makes the branding person’s offer stronger, but it also is gonna exponentially help their client actually execute on the brand. so everybody wins in that scenario, and also everybody wins in the in the franchisee scenario. So

Those are my two high level thoughts on this live kind of workshop. if you know if we had like more narrow specifics, I could have a lot more leverage. Like, for example, I had a a client that was doing high end gourmet chocolates in Dubai. She couldn’t figure out how to sell them. And so since I I knew where her market was and all the situations, I was like, your best strategic partner is gonna be the top fifty restaurants in Dubai.

John Jantsch (11:13.572)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:18.007)

Is it?

John Jantsch (11:26.638)

Nice.

Jermane (11:38.576)

Top high end 50 restaurants in Dubai. And you can either do this wholesale or retail, but you give them the chocolates for free. Everybody loves an awesome surprise at the end of their meal. Especially when they’re high end, they’re wrapped in this beautiful box. And so you can either give them to them for free, obviously. Once they get ingrained and they get the response back from their clients how much they love these chocolates after their meal, after they spend a thousand dollars on lunch, then you can either decide I can do wholesale.

John Jantsch (11:50.04)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (12:05.112)

Mm-hmm.

Jermane (12:07.731)

Wholesale and sell these chocolates to the restaurants for 50 bucks each, whatever you decide on the pricing, or even better, retail, where you include your business cards at the bottom of the box, your Instagram handle at the bottom of the box. So then these people that make millions of dollars can reach out to you directly, tell their friends and family about you, and then you have a direct and consumer play. But again, you’re just using strategic partners who are these high-end restaurants to get your foot in the door to these high net worth individuals who want to buy your chocolates versus trying to figure out.

John Jantsch (12:31.108)

Yeah. Sure.

Jermane (12:37.811)

How to do it one to one on your own.

John Jantsch (12:40.452)

Yeah, so I I kind of set you up a little bit in that we’ve been doing this, you know, we’ve been doing strategic partners for fifteen, twenty years. And so like on the remodeling side or the home services side, every every trade has an industry group and every industry group has a local chapter. And those have been so because we can educate on marketing, which is frankly a topic they all are always interested in.

we do a ton of education in those associations and those trade groups and that puts us that has them effectively put us in front of their audience. on the professional services side we’ve had a lot of luck with the all the Martech software solution folks, you know, people like HubSpot put us in front of their audiences because

they know that their folks need strategic marketing and you know, not just a tool. and so we’ve had a lot of luck in those two though both of those areas, you know, probably account for about half of our business you know, in any given year is the fact that we get in f we have people put us in front of their audiences. So that we’re not that you know, they’re not pitching anything or you know, we’re actually not e we we don’t even set up referral relationships with them. We just provide value.

to their users or their clients and and you know, some of those folks decide to hire us.

Jermane (14:01.181)

Yeah, no, that’s that that’s the that’s the only way to that’s the only way to do it. But it’s it becomes even more strong when you can figure out from a strategic lens of how you can make sure that your thing helps your partner sell their thing. Because then they it’s it’s not it’s not a want, it’s a need. I have to have Jermaine’s thing to sell my thing. That’s when those relationships last for a lifetime and the deals just become super simple because

John Jantsch (14:16.205)

Yeah. Yes. Very, very key. Yeah. Yeah.

Jermane (14:28.979)

Your partners doing all the selling on your behalf because they need your thing to sell their thing. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:33.816)

That’s right. That’s right. Well, they it and and I think that’s a really key, especially when you’re trying to develop a an initial relationship. I mean, let’s face it, you know, people are gonna consider, well, what’s in it for me? and so I I think you’re absolutely right on that. You know, I get pitched every day with people that they call it partnering, but what they really want is for me to sell their stuff. and it you know, it it really that idea of of providing value first in some fashion, you know, you

you hit on and it is like it helps me s it helps them sell their thing. Absolutely a hundred percent key.

Jermane (15:08.851)

Yeah. And and then and this is just kind of something I learned in in my finance space. And then I started to realize like, okay, as I’m getting into coaching and consulting, like how am I gonna find people to coach and consult? Like I’m I’m not I learned learned my lesson. So like it’s all about finding these partners that need your thing to help them sell their thing. And if if more entrepreneurs can think from that lens, it makes life not only easier, but it’s actually funner because you’re doing business with people you like.

John Jantsch (15:22.051)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jermane (15:36.945)

And everybody’s winning. So it’s not like a competition or winners and losers. It’s like we’re rowing in the same direction.

John Jantsch (15:37.519)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (15:43.963)

So if you were gonna c again, you obviously would have a lot more context than this, but you know, there’s a ton of people out there. I mean, again, I talked about getting pitch I I tell you the thing I get pitched more than sell my stuff is people that want to generate leads for me by sending out cold, you know, cold email or whatever. so and a lot of people are following, you know, for that. if you were talking to somebody, somebody came to you as a prospect and said, you know, we’re doing this cold outreach and we get one or two percent response and

You know, it seems to be going okay. What would you tell them? What’s kind of one move you would say, here’s what you need to do to find your first real part.

Jermane (16:21.713)

well first stop doing anything cold. Like cold email, cold call, cold ads, like it it doesn’t I mean it works but it’s it’s it’s the the the ROI on your time, your resources, your money, you it it it’s it’s like it doesn’t make sense.

John Jantsch (16:24.206)

Yeah, I agree. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:37.142)

It it it it’s also abusive to both parties, yourself and and the person you’re sending it to.

Jermane (16:41.488)

Yes.

Yes. I think there’s I think there’s somewhat I think there’s been over the last I don’t know when this developed, but there’s a misconception on how the human psychology works when it comes to sales. people want to put sales or marketing in one box and then put the rest of their life into another box, like as if it doesn’t bleed through. No. Sales and marketing in your normal life are the same. Your wife, your friends, everyone you interact with.

John Jantsch (17:03.203)

Yeah.

Jermane (17:12.847)

You know them because they know, like, and trust you from some situation that you infiltrated and became known at church, in the in the soccer club, and whatever, your local baseball team, whatever it might be, you became part of a community, if you will. That is the only thing that matters in sales and marketing. Is once you’re be part of some community where everyone is winning based on your thing, then you don’t have to sell market or brand.

John Jantsch (17:18.404)

Mm-hmm.

That’s right.

John Jantsch (17:30.137)

Business.

Jermane (17:42.355)

Because they send you ready to sign clients that you don’t have to convince because they trust Tim and Tim trusts Jermaine. So now they inherently trust Germaine. It’s just human nature, it’s not rocket science. So the first thing I would do is say stop anything cold. Second thing to do is

John Jantsch (17:46.992)

That’s right.

Jermane (18:00.53)

Here everyone has a Rolodex of friends, family, previous, co-workers, anybody. I don’t care if it’s 50 people, a thousand people, whatever. Reach out to every single one of those folks. Pri I would hope on a phone call. That’d probably be the best. you can always message them and just say, I’m looking to get into this is exactly what I do. When I first started in the finance space and I was struggling because of all the cold calls, I reached out to my Rolodex and I one lady I talked to, she was in marketing, and I said, I’m looking into get into the healthcare field.

John Jantsch (18:03.641)

Mm-hmm.

Jermane (18:30.345)

Do you know anybody? That’s all I said. She said, Great, let’s have let’s have lunch. Went to meet her for lunch. She gave me a couple names. I called those names. I said, she I I I I dropped name dropped her name, like who she referred me. Next thing you know, I’m getting deals from these folks because I’m leveraging the network that’s already in my phone. So first thing is call everybody or contact everybody in your phone currently or on your LinkedIn or whatever that knows you and say, I’m looking to get into this industry or find people on here or whatever.

They’ll start giving you names. They’re gonna start introducing because humans want to help other people. We love to help other people, it’s inherent. So that’s that’s step two is contact everybody on your phone and then reach out to those folks and tell them what you’re trying to do. And then that is the first step. You’d be surprised how much comes from that first domino because then they start referring you to five, six other people. And then once you have like one key, I call them MVPs, most valuable partners.

John Jantsch (19:19.384)

Mm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:27.013)

Mm-hmm.

Jermane (19:28.071)

Once you have one MVP that’s sending you business that’s solid that you like, your reserve friends, everyone’s winning, that one MVP knows other people that probably has the same service or product that you could also distribute to to that community. So it becomes a snowball, a domino, you can have different analogies for it, but people forget to leverage their backyard. Like if I live in Phoenix, why am I calling someone in Texas? I should exhaust Phoenix metro area first.

before I go anywhere because it’s just no like and trust. It’s you can talk about common things, the weather, the sports teams, whatever. So we we get I think I think a lot of folks look at, you know, gurus or successful people and they see them in their tenth chapter and they’re trying to copy the tenth chapter where they’re in the first sentence of their first book.

John Jantsch (19:56.88)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:16.025)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely, a hundred percent. You know, I think that point about reaching out to everybody on your phone, I make that all the time because maybe two of them are prospects, but they all know somebody who needs what you do. And that and I think your point of just letting it out there wide open, do you know anyone who? You know, is one of the best, you know, best opening phrases you can make you know, to to your warm market for sure.

Jermane (20:44.913)

Exactly. Yeah. It’s it’s simple man, but you know, simple’s not always executed on for some reason.

John Jantsch (20:45.072)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:49.548)

No, no. Well, that’s you know, there’s the the lure of I can send a thousand emails with the click of a button. you know, that seems a lot easier, right? so but it it you know, do less and but just do it better. you know, as opposed to trying to trying to spam everyone. Well, Jermaine, I I appreciate you reaching out to me and and agreeing to kind of do this fun little episode today. Is there some place you’d have people connect with you or or find out about your work?

Jermane (21:18.995)

Yeah, best place is at my website, creatorslearn.com. They can check out all my socials and then they can also book a call there too with me directly.

John Jantsch (21:27.106)

Awesome. Well again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Jermane (21:32.991)

Sounds good, John. Appreciate it, man.

John Jantsch (00:01.24)

So, what if the same people that taught millions of businesses to build marketing funnels to generate inbound leads admitted maybe some of that’s dead because they’re the ones that killed it? Their own traffic dropped 80% almost overnight, but revenue kept climbing anyway. Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kipp Bodnar. He’s the CMO at HubSpot.

Where he spent over 15 years since company had a little less than 10 million in revenue at that time. He also co-hosts the podcast Marketing Against the Green and serves on the board of Gusto and Similar Web. We’re gonna talk about his new book, co-written with Kieran Flanagan, as called Loop. Outlearn, outmarket, and outgrow. So Kip, welcome to the show.

Kipp Bodnar (00:50.602)

John, thanks so much for having me. Pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch (00:52.332)

So so so when I read your co-author’s name, I just immediately go into this Irish accent, which is terrible. But I’m I’m sh well, I’m afraid that people get very tired of that, but it’s just it’s such an Irish name. So I I mentioned the idea of HubSpot’s traffic numbers going down. was there a like a time period? I mean, HubSpot’s not loaned.

Kipp Bodnar (00:58.334)

I love it. Please. He he has a great Irish accent accent. Do the whole show in it if you want.

Kipp Bodnar (01:06.932)

completely.

John Jantsch (01:21.932)

A lot you guys had just done such a good Yeah, I was gonna say, you guys had just done such a good job of building a lot of organic traffic. was there like a day when somebody said, This is a problem. I mean we we actually we need to do something about this?

Kipp Bodnar (01:22.88)

Tons tons of people have.

Kipp Bodnar (01:36.821)

There’s a couple things. One before this all happened, we knew it was going to be a risk for the future. So we bought a company called The Hustle. We we diversified well well beyond the blog, but we lost 140 million visits over the course of a year. And so what happened was between the rise of AI and Google doing a bunch of algorithm updates, you saw a pretty dramatic. Like at the start of that, it wasn’t like you lose a little bit of visits and then it got

John Jantsch (02:04.216)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (02:06.88)

gradually worse. It’s like it dropped off pretty good, pretty quickly. And it’s like, gosh, there has to be a better way. And if this is happening to us, I’m sure it’s happening to others and will like or will likely happen to others. And we need to get ahead of all of this.

John Jantsch (02:19.234)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:23.138)

Just from my own experience, our traffic is probably down 50% from its, you know, from its high. But we pr pretty quickly realized it was a lot of garbage traffic. you know, it yeah. Yeah. I mean, and you guys did, you know, you had the listicles. I mean, you had all the stuff that that drove eyeballs that probably wasn’t very high value traffic. So, you know, in some ways are we better off, you know, well, you know, not having to try to chase that.

Kipp Bodnar (02:32.116)

Lot of it was garbage traffic. It’s a key insight for everyone.

Kipp Bodnar (02:39.37)

Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (02:54.354)

look, I think we’re better and worse off at the same time. I think I think the ability to bring people to a site that you owned and you controlled and you could really shape their interactions versus being more reliant on podcasts and YouTube and TikTok and reels and everything else that’s out there, you know, which you’re limited to those platforms and their guardrails and their rules, that’s probably the tough trade off.

John Jantsch (02:56.962)

Yeah, okay.

John Jantsch (03:03.79)

Right, right, right.

John Jantsch (03:12.374)

LinkedIn, even yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (03:21.834)

Are we better off for maybe not wasting as much time and effort on people who are never gonna buy our products? Also, probably a good thing. So I think like everything in life, there’s good and bad.

John Jantsch (03:28.472)

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So one of the things you talk about in the book is the idea of the marketing funnel being dead. what’s something that loop does that the funnel maybe structurally didn’t or couldn’t?

Kipp Bodnar (03:45.109)

Yeah, so if if I think about Loop, Loop is our framework for how you actually do marketing in this post AI world. And the reason for that, it you have to optimize for learning. AI, what it actually does is it enables you to scale your brains, your taste, all the things that make you and your company really good. And allows you to do a lot more, but you can also do a bunch of crap. And you can also fail to learn and compel in those lessons. So what Loop does is it gives you a playbook to

John Jantsch (04:01.762)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (04:14.208)

Kind of do any marketing tactic or campaign that you want. And there’s kind of four simple steps to it. First is you work with AI to express your ideas and your and get them into content that’s really remarkable and personal to your audience because AI can bring all that context together, your customer interviews, what people are saying you about online, conversation your sales teams are having, and make that and turn all of that into really great content with you based on your insights and your perspective. Then

The other thing we found that AI is really good at is helping you tailor the second part of the framework to make that content deeply personal on an individual basis. Then AI has opened up new distribution channels, and that’s the third step amplification. Those are things like answer engine optimization, working with influencers. AI has transformed advertising. It’s made advertising far more scalable than I think it was in the pre-AI world. And the fourth step is evolve. The one thing that AI

John Jantsch (05:00.95)

Mm-hmm.

Kipp Bodnar (05:13.492)

has really does well that nobody’s really taken on yet is it helps you codify your learnings and put them into systems that keep getting smarter every time you use them. And so that’s what we set out to do. We wanted to answer the question, like every market I talk to is getting yelled at by their CEO. Well, why is our traffic down and how do we do AI in this AI world? Like what the heck do we do? And we wanted to, I wanted to write something that I could hand to anybody who asks me that question and give them a real concrete answer.

John Jantsch (05:43.117)

Yeah, in fact I I just started playing with it today. It may come out earlier in the week, but Claude just introduced a anthropic just introduced a skill builder that it basically just follows you around. It’s like, you know, if you’re gonna do a process, you’re gonna go on Slack for this, you’re gonna go here, you’re gonna go here, and it and then it’s like, okay, I’ll build a skill that does that. so that that idea of codifying is just getting easier and easier and easier, isn’t it?

Kipp Bodnar (05:53.92)

Mm-hmm.

Kipp Bodnar (06:09.539)

I i the thing it’s a perfect example.

John Jantsch (06:11.414)

Yeah. So you talk about something called a taste profile. I wonder if you could walk me through the solo entrepreneur, you know, who doesn’t have an entire marketing team, how do they build a taste profile?

Kipp Bodnar (06:15.243)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (06:20.012)

Yeah.

Well, see, this is the fun part, is that the taste profile I think is most beneficial to like the small, small team or the solopreneur, right? Because all a taste profile is, is spending a few hours to make the decisions that you know, but haven’t like had the exercise to clarify all of them, so that you can actually then give those decisions to AI and AI knows what you want to achieve and has all the context around what you want to achieve. And so it’s essentially two parts. The first is

John Jantsch (06:31.362)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (06:52.011)

Customer taste and might be a s we give you a list of questions to go have AI do research for you. Even so if you’re a solopreneur, you use those questions, you go do the research, and you kind of understand what the market and the customer thinks your category and how your product might fit into there. The second part of this is like brand taste. So like what do you think about? Like, why does your company exist? What does your product solve in the world? You know.

What do you what do you believe about the world that’s unique and differentiated? Like how do you think about your thought leadership? And we give you very specific questions to kind of go through and get to clarity on those. And then once you have all that together, you put that in any AI tool. I do it all the time. I’ll do a blank version and then I’ll do a taste profile version. And my taste profile version is always way better. I actually built like an independent grader to C. And I’m normally like a C with generic AI and like I’m an A with a taste profile. And it’s one simple thing that

It takes you a couple hours to do once and then you probably need to update it, you know, a couple of times a year, depending on how your your business changes.

John Jantsch (07:53.154)

Yeah, I mean we run across that all the time. You know, that that we because we’re the same way. We’re like, look, you gotta put all this stuff together. It’s a little work in the beginning, but it will save you so much time and and so much better output, right? In the end. and and people want to skip that. It’s like, I don’t want to sit down here and answer all these questions, but I’m yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (08:12.287)

It’s hard. You have to make the hard choices. You know, like that’s the like this is real marketing though. Marketing is the I I had David Epstein on the marketing Instagram podcast recently. And he’s like, Look, the people who are succeeding in this new world are brain first, tool second versus tool first, brain second, right? And that’s that’s what this is all about.

John Jantsch (08:27.35)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s it’s another vote for a good liberal arts degree, isn’t it? So you talk about something in the book called the AI buyer sim. and you go as far as saying I think that it can predict customer reactions with ninety percent accuracy. first off, that’s amazing. we ought to all be using that right, but

Kipp Bodnar (08:34.277)

Yeah, g exactly right.

Kipp Bodnar (08:52.575)

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch (08:56.77)

What is the I’m I’m gonna go go the opposite side of you of of that idea. What is the risk of kind of relying on that type of data and being wrong?

Kipp Bodnar (09:08.289)

I like this question. here’s the risk. marketing, I I think of marketing as this interesting relationship. And it and I see everything in like frameworks and graphs and charts and two by twos. And the two by two here is like how predictable the results you’ll get from it, and then how high or what’s the magnitude of those results, right? And so when you’re trying to simulate your results and predict your results so that they’re really predictable, the risk of that.

John Jantsch (09:19.383)

Yep.

Kipp Bodnar (09:36.8)

Is that you’re gonna do what everybody else is doing. And when you do what everybody else is doing, you’re gonna get an average result. So you’re gonna get something that’s highly predictable, but the magnitude is gonna be kind of low or average. And so what you’re leaving on the table is like the crazy thing that might fail a bunch of times, but when it hits, hits really big. And that’s the biggest risk in taking taking that. And so you should use the taste profile for things that you know, or excuse me, you should use the BIOSIM for things you know, like kind of.

John Jantsch (09:46.926)

Mm-hmm.

Kipp Bodnar (10:03.861)

I know how this is gonna work. I I have this tried and true, but for new things I wanna go outside of that and really do some wild tests.

John Jantsch (10:12.685)

So one of the things that I think a lot of people are suffering from i is this, you know, even though organic traffic is way down, people are still producing, you know, stuff that AI sameness, I think you call it. A lot of people have called it that. so so what’s the sort of what’s the marker that says, no, this is actually above all of that? This is better quality, this is you know, this is done I mean, is it just the amount of time you spend, the amount of research, the amount of

Kipp Bodnar (10:25.58)

Yes.

Kipp Bodnar (10:35.671)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:41.429)

Citations, you know, I mean what is it that makes it get out of that sameness?

Kipp Bodnar (10:46.231)

So I think this is what’s interesting. Pre AI, you could just be prolific. Right? You could just, hey, I’m gonna outgrind, I’m going to write some stuff. The stuff doesn’t have to be great.

John Jantsch (10:50.859)

Yes. Right.

John Jantsch (10:55.795)

I remember I remember people I remember people asking me all the time when I’d talk about blogging, how many words does it have to be? You know, like like that was the yeah that was the marker.

Kipp Bodnar (11:04.233)

yeah, that was a that was a topic for years. Yeah. And and so, and now now it’s not good enough to be prolific. Like I call this kind of like the Taylor Swift problem. Like you have to be prolific like she is, but you also have to be great. Like the things you have to do have to be great. And you’re asking me the questions like what makes great content in a world where somebody can type something into a chat GPT, a Claude, and get any information they want. And what I what I found is that.

John Jantsch (11:17.761)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (11:34.004)

It is the things that make your that are unique to you or your business. And so that is, do you have unique data? You I know you have unique customers, and those customers have unique stories. You yourself, if you’re a solopreneur, have a unique history and framing and life story that you have to bring to the table. There is there is a level of like research and rigor and putting things together in clever ways that people wouldn’t expect.

John Jantsch (11:39.521)

Yeah. Yeah it’s

Kipp Bodnar (12:02.975)

I think those are some of the key highlights that make if you just go around and pay attention to what you think is good and interesting, you’ll find that those are kind of the backbone of most of most of the things.

John Jantsch (12:14.377)

Yeah, I tell people all the time. It’s like, what’s the only thing what’s the thing that only you could write about? Nobody else in the world could. You know, and they they they start thinking about that and they’re like, okay, I could add that. Like you said, customer stories, you know, is is an easy one because everybody should everybody should have those. Yeah. So talk a little bit about you mentioned already, I think, answer engine optimization. how does that go beyond just writing FAQs?

Kipp Bodnar (12:18.761)

Yes. I love that.

Kipp Bodnar (12:28.927)

One hundred percent. Everybody has that.

Kipp Bodnar (12:37.718)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (12:41.877)

Yeah, so answer engine optimization is a very interesting topic. It’s something that everybody’s obsessed with. Like, what does ChatGPT, G Google Gemini, Claude, Perplexity, what do all these things say about me and how do they talk about me? And the first thing you need to do is understand like how visible you are on those answer engines. So what’s your visibility? And that comes in two terms: mentions and citations. Mentions are just like, do they talk about you and do they talk about you positively or negatively?

John Jantsch (12:47.553)

Right.

John Jantsch (12:50.869)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (13:11.105)

Then citations are like, do they link back back to you? And something you you you have to say. And you’re right that FAQ pages are one way to do that. The three most cited resources on Chat GPT and Claude, for example, though, and Gemini, for example, though, are YouTube, LinkedIn, and Reddit. So if you’re not involved in YouTube, LinkedIn, or Reddit, you’re probably less likely to get mentioned on the topics that are relevant to your business.

John Jantsch (13:13.877)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:32.577)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (13:39.489)

The other thing you have to do for content you do own, like your website, it’s not just FAQs. The way I like to explain it is we spent the last 20 years writing for machines who were trying to parse information like humans. Right? It’s like you had all this deep meta description, keyword density, all these things. Now we have machines who act like exactly like humans. And so you need to write exactly like you’re writing to a human, but simple, plain spoken.

John Jantsch (13:58.348)

Right. Schema, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (14:08.694)

non you know, non-jargon framed in easy chunked segments so that this machine who re who acts exactly like a human can pick those couple sentences up. Like if you go to our CRM page, right, there’s a what is the CRM box and it’s three sentences and it’s very in plain English explaining to you what a CRM is.

John Jantsch (14:30.197)

I think in your particular case, like all SaaS offerings, you know, there’s typically pricing, you know, has been on your pages forever. but but but for a lot of businesses, that’s a new idea, or just even the fact that, you know, their whole goal was to get somebody on a phone call so that they could then explain how everything worked. How how do we have to now start thinking about the fact that that the buyer journey is going to go a lot farther?

Kipp Bodnar (14:36.47)

Yeah. for for sure.

John Jantsch (14:57.356)

you know, bef maybe before we get that phone call and that we need to reveal a lot of information that maybe we wanted to hide because we didn’t want our competitors to have it.

Kipp Bodnar (15:08.088)

So the reality is the interesting things, good and bad, about LLMs is they will give you an answer. Right? It will always give you an answer. So if somebody asks what your price is, one, if it had if there’s just no information on the internet about it, it will make something up. If there is information your customers are talking about it on Reddit or G2.com or some of these places, it’ll aggregate that. And what I have found is it’s often wrong.

John Jantsch (15:13.931)

You’re right. Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:25.337)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:29.877)

Right, right,

John Jantsch (15:35.533)

Yeah. Yes, yes, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (15:36.225)

And it’s often misanchors me. It’s like, I think this thing’s gonna be $50. And it turns out it’s $500. And like, wow, I was that I I don’t want that thing. I was expecting it was gonna cost a very different amount. So I look at this as like, you have to provide that information because if you don’t, you’re gonna have buyers who are gonna get an answer anyway, and it’s not an answer you want them to get. And so you’re gonna have to operate more transparently than I think that you want. And by the way.

I think that’s a good thing. I think you’re probably likely going to attract more people by doing that than by hiding it.

John Jantsch (16:06.636)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:12.373)

So one of the steps you mentioned was evolve. what does that look like day to day for a marketer?

Kipp Bodnar (16:15.286)

Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (16:21.152)

Yeah, so the way I think about the evolution of marketing and what it means to evolve is like it used to be, let’s say I had a I have a Google AdWords campaign on. I maybe I’ve run a Google AdWords campaign, I run a weekly email campaign. It used to be, well, all right, like once a month, maybe once every couple weeks, I’ll look and see how that’s going. Right? And I’ll look and I’ll make make a few little tweaks. Now it’s like I can, you know, at HubSpot, we have our Breeze assistant, like our version of Claude inside HubSpot’s like,

You can ask any of it any of these insights anytime you want and get instant learnings and change much faster, right? And be like, not only do I can I get this information, I can get recommendations from this thing that’s really smart and knows my business, right? And then I can actually change way more rapidly. The other part of what Evolve means is you have some system. You run your business off systems. And in this AI world, there are

John Jantsch (16:59.393)

Yeah, yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (17:19.756)

You know, agents, there’s skills, there’s workflows. You can actually have AI update your systems based on what you learn. And that’s the big unlock. Before AI, you couldn’t do that. You would have to remember, I need to go make this change to my system based on this thing I learned. Exactly. It’s in eight places. my cousin Tim actually set this up for me, so I gotta wait till he’s back from vacation so that he can update it for me. Now you can just.

John Jantsch (17:28.095)

Mm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (17:35.341)

And it and by the way, it’s in eight places.

Kipp Bodnar (17:47.523)

have it do it in the background and like run a recurring task. And that is transformative because we all know the power of compounding, right? Like you you do that, you add have an update a smart learning every week, you know, half a year in, you’re like getting massively better results.

John Jantsch (18:01.46)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. With with real data. All right, here’s the here’s the big question, you ready? Is is inbound marketing dead?

Kipp Bodnar (18:05.75)

With real data.

Kipp Bodnar (18:10.7)

I’m ready, please.

Kipp Bodnar (18:15.372)

I think inbound marketing as we know it is dead because it was predicated on a world where information was scarce. And and and and knowledge was scarce. Now knowledge is abundant and actions and attention are more scarce. And so I think the loop loop framework as well as all the work that everybody’s doing in the marketing world today is trying to go beyond that old world and help companies thrive in in this new one.

John Jantsch (18:25.025)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:43.936)

Did did you have to actually be the one to tell Brian and Dormash that that that finding?

Kipp Bodnar (18:47.032)

We had a we had a nice debate. You know, so the the loop book that that everybody’s gonna read on September twenty second started as like a ten page memo that I wrote. And the name of that memo was In Bell Marking is Dead. And it it wasn’t even called Loop at the time, but it was all the these observations that you and I are talking about. But this was, you know, eighteen months ago, you know, a long time ago.

John Jantsch (18:58.18)

okay.

John Jantsch (19:02.56)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (19:12.128)

Yeah, awesome. All right. So if a small business owner, this is always the hard question, actually. Small business owner reads reads the book. What’s the one page they should act on this week? You don’t have to cite a page number. As a as an author also, I I know when people ask me that, I’m like, I don’t know. I wrote that 18 months ago. But what’s the one concept? How’s that that they should act on this week?

Kipp Bodnar (19:16.002)

Yeah. Yeah, let’s do it.

Kipp Bodnar (19:26.206)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (19:36.672)

Yeah, we talked about it earlier in the show. I think you should do fill out your taste profile. It’s it’s it’s it’s on it’s i early on in the book, because that way your your AI tools have all the context of you, your business, and your taste, and they will just make far better decisions. Even if you don’t know it, it will happen.

John Jantsch (19:58.112)

Do you one thing that we’ve we’ve found s like if I tell somebody you need to fill out your taste profile, they sit there and they go, I can’t answer all these. But if I actually ask them the questions, interview them, th all of a sudden they’ll talk for hours. so th that’s that’s a tip you might give people. Yeah. Yeah.

Kipp Bodnar (20:08.759)

Yes.

One hundred percent.

well first of all I love that and second of all if you’re listening to this show and you’re feeling that way, have a friend, have your spouse, have somebody just, you know, open the book, write down the questions separately and just record you. And then by the way, you can just upload that video to AI and you won’t have to ever type or write anything and it will take care of it all for you.

John Jantsch (20:25.004)

Yes, exactly.

John Jantsch (20:33.024)

Plus it sort of automatically gets your voice and tone and how you speak and all that kind of stuff. I love. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, Kip, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you’d invite people to connect with you, find out more about Loop and everything else you’re up to?

Kipp Bodnar (20:35.724)

Yeah, exactly. That’s a that’s a great point.

Kipp Bodnar (20:49.0)

Yes. So you can obviously learn more about Hubswata Hubs dot com. You can find the book at loopmarketing dot com. And then for me, you can find me on Marketing Against the Grain, on YouTube and wherever you get your podcast.

John Jantsch (21:01.908)

Awesome. Well again, appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Kipp Bodnar (21:06.462)

Awesome. Thanks, John. Appreciate you having me.

John Jantsch (00:00.984)

So, what if the next big shift in events has nothing to do with virtual versus in-person and maybe everything to do with who or what is actually running the room when it’s live? Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Blue Melnick. He runs Sage Event Management with his wife and business partner Barry Baumgartner. They produce live events for the likes of Tony Robbins and ClickFunnels. And these days, Blue’s focused on what’s next.

an AI co producer called Obi that runs inside a live event built to help small businesses run bigger launches with less overhead. So Blue, welcome to the show.

Blue Melnick (00:41.195)

Thanks, John. I’m really, really excited to be here and talk a little bit about AI, a little bit about events if it makes sense. And yeah, just a a a fun conversation.

John Jantsch (00:47.406)

You bet.

So we all lived, well, if you were around four or five years ago, we all lived through kind of a a giant shift in how events work. a lot of people really were already doing it. A lot of people had to figure it out. what’s telling you that AI is is is actually maybe even a bigger shift and not just another way that we can be more efficient?

Blue Melnick (01:17.397)

Yeah, you know, it’s interesting you you mentioned COVID essentially and and the shift we all had to make from in person events to virtual events. And some of us had to make that shift really, really, really quickly. I think the biggest difference between what happened then and what’s happening with AI is nobody told us at that point that the shift was coming.

John Jantsch (01:30.456)

Right.

Blue Melnick (01:41.877)

Right. Nobody was like, hey, in six months, you’re not going to be able to do in person events anymore. So start preparing. and exactly, exactly. I think, and I think, you know, that’s the good news. because this this shift with AI, I I I mean, I started hearing about this inside of masterminds that we’re a part of inside of conversations with our clients a couple of years ago. Right. it almost was like it was with the advent of essentially,

John Jantsch (01:44.75)

Right.

Yeah. Yeah. Get a Zoom account right now.

John Jantsch (02:05.174)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (02:09.46)

Chat GPT 3.5 was really where things started to get interesting and people started to notice, coaches started to notice, and you know, people started to talk about prompt cookbooks and how you could generate a year’s worth of content in 17 seconds and things like that. People soon realized that AI slop is a little bit too much of a real thing. But over the course of the last couple of years, it’s gotten progressively better.

And I think for those of us who are running coaching programs, who are running live events, who are helping people with the information that we have in our heads, right? The knowledge that we have so that they, our clients, can take that knowledge and implement it in their business. AI is becoming a real tool that we can use to help get our clients.

Faster results more effectively. Yeah. Most most people talk about when they talk about AI still today, you hear most people talk about how I can be more productive as a result of AI, right? I can get more done. I can do this with it. I can do this. I can do that. I, I, I, I, I. And I really think, funny enough, I really think that the key to AI making a huge difference for a lot of people is.

John Jantsch (03:19.918)

Yeah.

Blue Melnick (03:36.852)

Is turning that and not seeing what AI can do for me, but seeing what I can do with AI for my clients. and that that’s where we’re seeing a huge shift. And the cool thing is, like, you know, like you, the the original question, which was how is this one different and possibly bigger? COVID went away, right? Virtual events are still a thing, but you can also now go back and do in-person events if you want.

I think AI, with AI, the genie’s out of the bottle. You know, like that’s that’s sticking around. It’s not like in a couple of years we’re not gonna have AI with us anymore. I think that is just gonna become more and more and more prevalent. And I mean, not to be not to be a doomsday person, but I think clients and coaches and consultants who don’t start to integrate tools that help their clients get results faster with AI.

Are going to start to see a decline in business. And it’s going to be slow and gradual. For some, it may be like paper cuts, but for some, it may be much bigger than that.

John Jantsch (04:38.956)

Yeah. Yeah.

Well, and I think what’s what’s gonna happen, what we’re telling people and coaching people on is that you know, clients are starting to figure out businesses. We work primarily small, mid-sized businesses, starting to figure out they can use some of these tools and they are sort of haphazardly using some of these tools. But I think the real winner in the coaching consulting space is gonna be the people that show them how to do it right, how to how to actually, you know, put leadership first instead of the technology first.

and that’s really I think a great I think that’s one of the greatest opp I’ve been doing this thirty years. I think it’s one of the greatest opportunities for consulting. that that that’s you know, that’s come come before me at least.

Blue Melnick (05:23.287)

Totally. And you know, I think I I saw something interesting on on Instagram or I don’t remember if it was Instagram or Facebook recently, but an old client of ours posted something online and and they were like, This is so amazing. I just vibe coded a whole new CRM and I got rid of my platform that I was spending hundreds of dollars a month on. It wasn’t a big number, right? It was like

John Jantsch (05:43.054)

Right.

Blue Melnick (05:50.552)

Two, 300 bucks a month on whatever they were using. And I have to tell you, I thought to myself in that moment, I’m a bit of a nerd, I’m a bit of a nerd. I love technology. I, I mean, I’m I’ve been vibe coding new tools like crazy. But when I saw that, I thought to myself, that’s insane. That is the one, there are a lot of things that I want nothing to do with having to manage the infrastructure of. And one of them is the backbone of my business, which is our CRM, right? Like

John Jantsch (06:19.725)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (06:20.757)

I don’t want to deal with the, I mean, I know what I would have to deal with. I don’t want to have to deal with the C the SMTP servers and the the all of the stuff behind the scenes. And sure you can do it, but as a you know, as a small business owner, isn’t our time better spent on better things, like getting more results for our clients? Come on.

John Jantsch (06:27.789)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:39.96)

Yes.

John Jantsch (06:45.135)

Yeah, and I I think one of the things that people are missing that, you know, there there was this time when, like, QuickBooks is going away, Salesforce is going away, all these things are going away. I think they’re only going to get stronger because we’re going to get more dependent because they’re building all the AI into it natively. And so all of a sudden it’s like, why would you build any in fact, not only why would you, but I can’t ever leave. You know, because my entire business now, you know, depends on this this tool. So I think some of the bigger SAS files.

forms are actually going to win.

Blue Melnick (07:16.699)

I I agree with you. And I also think that there’s an opportunity for those of us in the coaching and consulting space to create you know, to to leverage AI and help our help our clients get the results that we provide, right? The the knowledge that we have much, much faster. my my wife calls it the moment of need.

John Jantsch (07:36.055)

It’s just

Yeah.

Blue Melnick (07:43.381)

Right. When a a small business owner, an entrepreneur wakes up at two o’clock in the morning and they can’t get back to sleep and their brain starts racing. I’m sure this has never happened to you.

John Jantsch (07:49.198)

Yeah. I I I had one of those last week, two thirty in the morning, yes. I I just got up, I was like, why fight it?

Blue Melnick (07:54.36)

Right. Exactly. Right. So but you’re your so your brain starts racing, and who’s the last person that you can call at that moment? it’s our coach, right? You know, I’m not getting on the phone with my coach at that time of the day. so instead you log into chat or you log into Claude. And I think that that’s an opportunity that should be taken advantage of by those of us in the coaching and consulting space. Because

John Jantsch (08:05.167)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You’re right.

Blue Melnick (08:24.939)

Claude and Claude and Chat and you know, Grok and Gemini, all of them, they’re fantastic and they’re great tools. But they really don’t have the experience, the expertise that that you have, John, that I have, that your listeners have, right? All of us as individuals, we’ve got this incredible expertise that is very specific. a long time ago, I’m sure you’ve read it.

John Jantsch (08:37.942)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Blue Melnick (08:51.515)

Some of us have read it a thousand times, but think of Think and Grow Rich came out, right? And there’s the the segment inside that chap inside that book on specialized knowledge versus generalized knowledge. And specialized knowledge is what everybody tends to pay money for, right? That’s that’s why they come to us and hire us for whatever it is that you or your audience charges. It’s specialized knowledge, not general knowledge. And I think it’s

John Jantsch (08:55.183)

Sure, sure, sure.

John Jantsch (09:12.44)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (09:18.825)

Interesting that the big thing that AI companies are aiming towards, right? The big ones, the Frontier Labs, as you will as they call themselves, they’re aiming for this thing called AGI. Right? Have you have you heard the the right? So AGI is are is it artificial? But the thing that’s important is the GI, general intelligence.

John Jantsch (09:33.175)

Mm-hmm. Sure, of course, of course, yes.

Blue Melnick (09:46.068)

So everybody’s like, this is gonna be amazing. We’ll have this, you know, AGI. It’s gonna be a moment, it’s like the, you know, the moment when Skynet opens up and takes over the world. I’m like, or maybe there’s an opportunity for us to use AI with our specialized knowledge and grow our business and help our clients get results. And I think that’s really where where we’re headed, you know? And I agree with you, it’s a huge opportunity.

John Jantsch (10:08.815)

So so Yeah. So so let’s talk a little bit about OB. first off, I mentioned it in the intro. what the heck is it?

Blue Melnick (10:13.408)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (10:18.231)

So a couple of years ago, Barry and I, we have a coaching program where of course we help people help people launch a high-ticket offer through the power of a virtual live event. And we we’ve been doing what coaches in group programs do forever, which is we take our knowledge, we teach you, and then you have to take that information, translate it to your own business, and then apply it.

John Jantsch (10:31.535)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (10:45.135)

And you know, as a coach, as a consultant, I’ve I’ve said the same thing most coaches and consultants have said for, you know, years, which is I’m responsible for my part, which is I’m gonna deliver all of the information to you. You’re responsible for your part, which is the implementation. But the problem is that gap between knowledge and implementation, we think of as something that’s like, it’s just like like just this this far apart, right? It’s so close. But for our clients, it’s

It’s like the Grand Canyon. It is a massive, massive, massive gap that is where people fall down. It’s why, you know, courses, generally speaking, have like a sub 20% completion rate. And in our inside, we were seeing a lot of the same things inside of our coaching program. And we were like, okay, well, what if we were to use AI not to create an open ended, like custom GPT?

Right. Like this, you know, just open chat thing, but rather a way to use AI and our knowledge to guide our clients through a specific process or what we call a journey and ask them questions so that we have the context that is most important, like, hey, John, who do you serve? How do you help them? you know.

John Jantsch (11:58.095)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (12:08.075)

Where do they live in the world? What are they trying to accomplish? How are they better after they’ve worked with you than they were before? Things like this. And then use that context to continue to grow and build on itself with the specific thing that I want you to do next in order to get the outcome that I’ve promised if you work with me. So inside of our coaching program, we started to implement these AI steps.

That we’re like, okay, first you’re gonna teach we’re gonna teach you how to determine who your right fit client is, create a profile for them, figure out what it is that they’re struggling with at two o’clock in the morning, and figure out what it is that they’re trying to achieve. And all using a combination of AI with our know-how, right? 20 years of having done this. Then we’re gonna go from that to, okay, how is it? What’s the framework that you have? What processes do you have to help your clients achieve the result?

John Jantsch (12:52.138)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (13:04.575)

Then we’re going to go from that to now, how do we package your offer? Right. And all of this goes in order. And as we go from one thing to the other, we taught people how to do this previously over the course of like a six-month period. Now, what we do is we guide them through this process where they’re answering a series of questions, and rather than having to apply it to figure out what their process is or

John Jantsch (13:18.22)

Right.

Blue Melnick (13:30.698)

apply it to figure out what their coaching program or their offer or their high-ticket offer is, we just provide it to them. So we teach them the know-how so they understand how to do it. But then we rather than them have to translate, rather than them having to, you know, cross that gap, that chasm that is the Grand Canyon, we literally just grab them and drag them across. Right. Maybe we zip, maybe I should I should use the analogy of a zip line. But that’s what OB is. So we’re using AI.

To ask our clients specific questions to help them get the result that they came to us to get in the first place. And to get that result faster, quicker, and easier. So that in a one-year coaching program, in our case, your coaching program doesn’t have to be a year, your program doesn’t have to be a year, but whatever it is that you’re doing with them, you’re able to do it faster and more effectively so that they get the outcome. Because here’s the thing.

John Jantsch (14:18.509)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (14:28.363)

You know, we’ve all gotten refund requests from maybe a course. Like if you sell a digital course, you’ve you’re you’re used to refund requests. When people get a result, they don’t ask for a refund.

John Jantsch (14:33.27)

Great.

John Jantsch (14:38.966)

Right. Right. You know, and even as somebody who has sold courses for twenty five years, you know, nothing frustrated me more than the fact that that I know that only a percentage of people were doing anything with it, whether they asked for a refund or not, you know, they they, you know, in some cases they just felt guilty. You know, it’s like, it’s my my decision to buy it. I just didn’t use it. I mean, we’ve all we’ve all probably done that ourselves. talk talk to me a little bit about the state of the

the course and the coaching industry in general. I know that’s a that’s a a big topic to to to open up, but you know, one thing that of course people make lots of proclamations, but one thing people say with AI is like, well, nobody’s gonna do a course now because nobody wants to watch a 40 minute video. They’ll just tell AI to tell it what’s in the 40 minute video. it tell me well, just from your opinion, where that’s wrong, where that’s right, what that means.

Blue Melnick (15:34.796)

Yeah. Well, I think there’s a few things. first off, I think courses as they used to exist, let’s just say yesterday, I I do think are gonna die a slow death over the course of the coming years. And for some people, they’ve died a really, really quick death because people just stopped buying. I think there’s a number of reasons for that. one of the reasons is for those of us who have recorded courses in the past, you know, it’s it’s kind of like birthing a book.

John Jantsch (15:43.629)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:50.957)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (16:03.285)

Right. It’s it’s a slow process. It takes time. And once you’ve recorded it, you’re like, I never want to do that again. Like we, I I mean, I don’t ever want to stand in front of a camera with no audience and record my content again. So that’s one problem. And the the flip side to that is people don’t, to your point, don’t want to sit through a 40-minute long video and then have to translate. So I think courses as they existed yesterday are gone. But here’s the thing.

John Jantsch (16:03.733)

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Right.

John Jantsch (16:24.212)

Mm-hmm.

Blue Melnick (16:32.083)

Over the course of the last, let’s say 120 years or so, and I know that’s a big number for some of us, but over the course of the last 120 years in the education space, we’ve seen monumental changes, right? television, radio, books on tape, VHS, CD-ROMs, not in this order, obviously, the internet.

do you I don’t know if you remember when Stanford released their entire course curriculum in 2012 on the internet for free. Everybody was like, my God, courses are dead. Stanford’s not even charging for their stuff. Right? So this has happened over time multiple times. The the prediction of our knowledge being necessary, it’s the end of that. And every single time, what happens when you go back and look at history is

John Jantsch (17:08.044)

Right.

Blue Melnick (17:25.269)

The desire for knowledge, the desire for people to take you through a specific journey never changes. What changes is the delivery mechanism. So how our clients get information or desire information or transformation is changing, right? TikTok is a part of that, you know, or Instagram reels or Facebook reels, the shorts are a part of that. AI is a part of that. They want the information and the transformation faster. So

In order to keep up, in order to keep moving forward, we as course creators have to deliver that information in a bespoke way, right? So how do you deliver customized knowledge to let’s say you sell your course to a hundred people? You don’t want to sit down with a hundred people and do this one to one. This is why we sell courses, right? But how do you take that information, provide them bite-sized chunks, the equivalent of an Instagram reel? So they feel as though,

That’s interesting. And now they answer a few questions and they get an output that is customized to them based on what they just learned. That’s a different way of learning, which is where the where your audience is right now. They’re looking for that dopamine hit. They’re looking for that instant gratification that, you know, scrolling, doing this with our phone provides, but they’re looking for it from you because they still need it.

John Jantsch (18:31.404)

Right.

John Jantsch (18:45.524)

Yeah.

Blue Melnick (18:51.371)

Right. It’s not like all of a sudden ChatGPT and Claude have gotten so much better and now everybody’s getting results. That hasn’t happened. Right? Just because you have a genius in your pocket doesn’t mean you know what to ask it. So

John Jantsch (19:03.318)

Yeah, yeah, in fact I in fact I think people are working harder and getting less, quite frankly, out of out of that.

Blue Melnick (19:07.963)

I yeah, I wouldn’t disagree with you. I saw a study recently, or I read a study yester recently that talked about how companies that have done huge implementations of AI in their business are actually seeing their workforce be less productive than they were before, which is I think surprising to many people.

John Jantsch (19:28.716)

Yeah, I think I think the I’ve said all along, you know, everybody talks about, all the changes in marketing and I and the one they they often forget is the fact that what’s changed the most is the way people buy now or get to buy or expect to buy. And I think that what you just pointed to, consumption behavior, you know, of course is is probably what should be driving, you know, how we’re thinking, you know, about them as much as content.

Blue Melnick (19:54.23)

Yeah, and you know, I was I was doing some more research. And of course, some of this research is a little self-serving, right? Because I have a solution to what I think is a problem. and I think we’ve found, I mean, this isn’t a whiteboard solution where we’re like, we think this is gonna work like this. I mean, we’ve been using this solution inside of our coaching program for two years. And we’re seeing like massive, massive results. And the thing that I’m that I’m loving about it, truthfully,

And this is selfish, right? But I inside of our coaching program, we used to year over year, because it’s a group coaching program, there’s like 150 people in the program. We used to see about a 30% renewal year over year. And since we’ve started implementing Obi inside of our coaching program, our coaching program renewals have increased to 45% or more every time we go through a renewal cycle. And we’ve gone, we’ve been through three of them now since we released this platform.

John Jantsch (20:32.47)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (20:53.494)

Hmm.

Blue Melnick (20:54.545)

And it’s the only thing we’re doing different. Like it’s not like all of a sudden it’s not cheaper. We’re not one of those coaching programs where when you join the second year, it’s like 50% off or anything like that. It’s the same price year two as it was year one. with the same promise, incidentally. So you know, I think I think that says obviously says a lot. but yeah, I think consumption is really important. We have to see what it is that our clients

John Jantsch (20:59.062)

Yeah.

Blue Melnick (21:23.625)

Are wanting, what the audience is is looking for, and shifting to delivering it in that way so that they get the support they need in their moment of need. So this leads to just another thing that I was working on recently, just really, really quickly. I think this is an interesting one. I was looking at the amount of money spent on education, essentially on online education over the course of the last 30 years or so. And

It does this like that. Like it’s, and it’s just like it’s hockey stick, right? It’s just like keep going. So I overlaid something else over top of that, which was I was like, okay, now let’s compare the amount of information that was accessible on the internet for free at the beginning of that compared to now, right? Where now is let’s just say 100%, and back at the beginning is a percentage of it.

John Jantsch (21:59.393)

Mm.

Blue Melnick (22:22.463)

And when you overlay the amount of information that was free over top of the amount of information that people are spending on information, they both go hand in hand. Right. And when you overlay that with a third piece of information, which is the amount of folks who have digital devices that can access that information, all three of them go up in the same level, which is counterintuitive because you would think, everything’s free on the internet. Why would they need me?

John Jantsch (22:32.717)

Yeah.

Blue Melnick (22:53.151)

And actually think the opposite is true, right? Everything’s free on the internet, which is why they need you to provide the specific transformation that they’re wanting rather than this general piece of information that’s out there called Chat GPT or Claude. so yeah, I think that’s where we’re at. That’s you know a little bit of a soapbox, but I’ll I’ll stop.

John Jantsch (23:02.806)

Okay.

John Jantsch (23:09.686)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (23:16.692)

No, I’ve I agree with you a hundred percent. I unfortunately we gotta wrap up today. So I know that you are launching a program coming up soon. So you wanna tell us about that, where people can connect with you, find out more about Obi.

Blue Melnick (23:30.805)

Yeah, so listen, if you want to learn more about how I think course creators are about to make a comeback, my my lovely wife, Barry Baumgartner, is hosting a free training. you can get access to that at changecourse.ai. if you want to learn more about Obi, Obi is going to be released in some in the month of September. I’m not sure when you’re listening to this, but it’s going to be released in September 2026.

We’re using it internally. We have about 60 beta testers right now who are using it. And you can find out more by going to obai or sorry, obio, or on Instagram or Facebook at obai. So lots of ways to find out more about us. but we’d love to yeah, answer any questions you have. We’re having some fun over on our Instagram channel recently. Of course.

John Jantsch (24:15.566)

Awesome.

Blue Melnick (24:25.767)

we’re we’re using AI to produce a lot of the content, but very openly, right? Like we’re not trying to hide it, but we are trying to have a little bit of fun with some of the tools that are available to us as creators these days. So check it out.

John Jantsch (24:37.634)

Yeah. That’s awesome. Well, Blue, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Blue Melnick (24:46.027)

Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:01.668)

So what if the reason so many leaders stay stuck is not that they’re not working hard enough, but that they keep getting very good at solving the wrong problems. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kevin D. St. Clergy. He’s an entrepreneur, speaker, mentor, and author of Beyond Blind Blaming. Stop solving the wrong problems and instantly unlock results. After building and exiting his own company,

Kevin’s focus is work on helping entrepreneurs and leaders uncover the hidden assumptions, mindset blocks, and false diagnoses that keep them stuck. So, Kevin, welcome to the show.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (00:42.382)

Thanks, John. Appreciate you having me.

John Jantsch (00:44.122)

So the term, I want to start with, as I often do, words out of the title, the term blind blaming is, doing a lot of work here. How would you define it? You know, I’m imagining one of my business owners listening to this, sitting at a stoplight right now, wondering why their numbers are flat. So for them, how would you define the term blind blaming?

Kevin D. St.Clergy (01:08.834)

Now I’ll start with the story. It’s the origin story that everybody likes. I’ll be quick. But when I was 10 years old, I was a phenomenal baseball player at a batting average of five 50. And for those of you listening, five 50 is epic. It’s great. and people noticed I was going to bat every other time I went to bat Babe Ruth and his hayday three 94, just to give you an example.

so my dad and I went to work. worked with me on my mindset. I mean, I was young, but I love baseball and, we had a buddy who was actually used to coach for the Dodgers who was helping me with my swing in the off season. We practiced every day. And the next season I stood up and I was ready, but something was different because I started swinging and missing. In fact, I missed every time I went to bat for the entire next season. I literally went from here to zero and you probably guess what I heard from the stands. Come on, kid, keep your head in the game, play to win this time. And then can probably really imagine what my dad would give me lectures on on the way home.

John Jantsch (01:50.298)

Yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (01:56.552)

about how bad my attitude was and that’s the biggest problem who by the way still thinks that’s what it was back then even though he’s read the book. But what we found was two weeks after I quit because I’d had enough of the abuse and eventually started blaming myself thinking I’m just not right for this game I quit baseball and I went to a fluke eye exam we figure out what the real problem was I just couldn’t see the ball.

Doctor said, sorry, kids practically blind without glasses. And here’s the real problem, the adults in my life for that two year stint never stopped blaming me for something that was completely out of my control. And that’s what we call blind blaming. And I see it in business, I see it in relationships, I see it everywhere. We all go through it. So for people that are down on their business, they immediately start thinking of things like, well, it must be my marketing, which I know you’ve taught for years. And a lot of times it’s not their marketing, they’re just not answering the damn phone when people call.

John Jantsch (02:44.058)

Yeah. It’s interesting how many times I’ve run into that, you know, that exact scenario. It’s like, you know, we’re just not getting enough leads and, we do call tracking and things like that. And we were like, yeah, you are. We’ve listened to the phone calls. You know, that’s not really the issue, so how does, let’s start there. Well, there’s, mean, I can go a lot of directions, but since we went there, how like,

Kevin D. St.Clergy (02:56.929)

Yep.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (03:11.938)

If you’re working with a client, you’re working with a business and you can clearly see that they’re blaming the wrong things for the results that you’re bringing. mean, how do you circumvent that? How do you change direction with that? How do you help them recognize that they’re looking at the wrong? And it’s rampant. mean, perfectionism is an example of blind blaming, I think, a lot of times.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (03:31.766)

It’s rampant. yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (03:36.812)

Yeah. Well, the book’s broken into three sections on purpose. It’s awareness. So I’m finding that once people start reading about blind blaming, and they’re more aware of it, then it starts to make sense.

John Jantsch (03:42.883)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:46.383)

Yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (03:48.342)

Then we teach them the RCD method, which is how they get past blind blaming. It’s very simple, but remember simple doesn’t always mean easy, but it’s simply reflect. RCD stands for reflect. Is there something else going on that I can’t see? You’ve got to learn to ask yourself that question because if you keep solving the same problem over and over again and you’re not getting any different results, that’s where we lead to insanity. But that’s what we go through as small business owners. And even when you get really big like we did with our agency, we had 450 clients with 900 locations, Sean. So I have plenty of scars of people like

I don’t think your service is working. I’m really I’m showing 22 leads last month from your call tracking number Yeah, but we only scheduled two. I was like, well, that’s not my fault That’s blind blaming so But here’s where I think people fall down because they’ll get their team together and say what do you guys think it is? And they’re all in that sphere of influence and everybody else says what must be marketing. It’s certainly not us as salespeople It’s got to be the marketing. I just don’t have enough leads and the leads are generating their crap

So connect is the C stage. You have to connect with an outside source, a mentor, a coach. I like paid coaches. I’ve had one for 20 years. Just got a new one that’s kind of up in the next level because I want to get the nine figures here pretty quick. So I’ve just needed a coach that’s already there. And then I also have mastermind groups. Those are some of my favorite ways to learn. I know you’ve been part of them. I think you’ve led them in the past. And I think when you do that, these people can see what you can’t see because they’re outside of that sphere of influence. You’re not tied down with your successes and your failures.

John Jantsch (05:11.29)

Yes, yes.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (05:12.181)

And finally, once you know what it is, this is where D comes in. You got to decide to do something different. In fact, it was pretty cool because.

I was a little worried about this in the chapter because it does use the F word and even Jack Canfield, he’s only the second guy I read the book. He’s like, man, I even love your effing part. And I’m like, my God, I just got Jack Canfield to say the F word on video, but it’s MFD make an effing decision. Because once you know what it is, I see a lot of people are like, no, maybe not. Let’s go back and review this again. Do something. And that’s a great story. Cause when we came up with this, it was actually one of my clients. She was debating on whether to go with one or two loans to double her business. And she’s like, Kevin, what do you think I should do? And I just told her straight up.

up, Kayla, I think you need to make an effing decision. But I didn’t say effing. I’ve known her well enough. I helped her start a business seven years ago. And she’s like, okay, okay, she comes back a month later. And I always like to start coaching calls off these days with what’s going well. And she’s like, Kevin, I’m MFDing all over the place. You changed my life. Even my husband’s noticed and we’re doing things. We got the loan. We bought the business. We’ve doubled the size. We’re doing great. I’m like, MFD, what are you talking about? She’s like, make an effing decision. What you told me to do on the last call. I’m doing it. And I was like, Kayla, do you mind if I use that in my book? Because I love that.

John Jantsch (06:16.378)

Hmm.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (06:18.018)

And that has turned out to be the biggest thing I was worried about has turned out to be the thing that people mentioned or remember the most. Cause they’ll come up to my booth after a talk and say, man, I love the MFD part. You’re right. I’ve got to make some decisions and make some mistakes.

John Jantsch (06:30.276)

So how you think about the entrepreneur, mean, there’s more to get done in a day, every day, seemingly than they possibly can. So, you know, they get really wired for go, go, go, go. In some ways you’re saying, wait a minute, slowing down is actually a more aggressive approach than, just constantly going at full tilt. How do you get people who recognize that, you know, that our part? Yeah. Yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (06:55.968)

I do a schedule audit and I see do they like for me 5 to 5 30 a.m. I get up early I didn’t used to because I worked in a bar all through grad school but now I get up and from 5 to 5 30 is my quiet time I grab a cup of coffee I do not look at a screen and I just journal and try to come up with ideas and I can see it on their calendar when they’re working six days a week and trying to see customers or patients whoever you’re working with because they keep losing people and they don’t give them some they don’t give themselves time to think

John Jantsch (07:16.312)

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:24.78)

Right. How do you get them to do that? How do you get them to do that? That’s… Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (07:25.87)

And so I make them, well, I make them schedule the time. Just like yesterday, we had a client, I’m like, where’s your admin time? He’s like, well, I’ve got administrative assistant. I didn’t mean for her, when are you working on your marketing? She’s like, what do you mean? I’m like, wrong answer.

John Jantsch (07:39.226)

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (07:41.934)

So at the end of the call, we had her physically book these two Fridays in a row that she was gonna take four hours to work on this. And she’s so excited, because then she’s like, well, what do I do? So we had to actually lay out what she needs to do. So first you gotta schedule the time. What gets scheduled gets done. Then you need a personal assistant to protect you from yourself, John. This is like Christina Cann, who I think you interacted with, she booked this.

John Jantsch (07:57.988)

day.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (08:04.909)

Christina’s constantly protective for myself because I say hey booker there. No, that’s your time to work on marketing for us to keep the company going I’ll find another space for that person So a lot of times I’ll find entrepreneurs who are just GSD getting us done and they’re not focusing on time for themselves nor do they have a personal assistant and that’s usually one of the first hires that I have people do when they’re a solopreneur

John Jantsch (08:27.268)

Yeah. And, know, for years I’ve, I actually just blocked that time out every week, that I’m going to do, you know, cause there’s a lot of things that you actually, you can’t get done between, you know, podcast calls, right? I mean, there’s, need that three hour ramp, if you’re going to do it. And so I’ve, I’ve just had that on my calendar and, know, the nice thing is you can’t schedule over it. You know, other people can’t schedule over it.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (08:29.357)

.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (08:41.355)

Right. Yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (08:51.757)

No, and I like, yeah, I agree. And I like having breaks. mean, Christina is really good about a 10 a.m. break from 10 to 10 30. That’s my walk and my snack from 12 to one. I do take a lunch. I didn’t used to take lunches. I worked through it. Just power through as a mistake. 30 minutes at three o’clock to three 30. And I usually wrap up my day between two and two and three o’clock these days because I start pretty early.

John Jantsch (09:06.967)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:13.427)

Yeah, same here. So when you’re working with a client, have you started to recognize specific patterns of language particularly that kind of tip you off that like, this one’s in blind blaming mode?

Kevin D. St.Clergy (09:16.077)

.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (09:25.613)

Yeah, it’s the stories they’re telling themselves. And I’ll give you a great example of somebody recently. She’s like, I can’t wait to work with you. She was really excited. It our first call. We had a great interview. And she’s like, was like, what do you think your biggest challenge is? When we got to that point, she says, well, I’ll never be as big as you, but my biggest problem is marketing. And I said, wait a minute, let’s stop. Let’s go back. It’s not your marketing.

John Jantsch (09:27.45)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:43.988)

Hehehehehe

Kevin D. St.Clergy (09:50.036)

Why did you say you’ll never be as big as me? She goes, because I just know it. I know I’m not going to be as big as you, you know, I’m like, okay, well, let’s work on that. So we spent the first call working on mindset because our coaching program we called M3 mastery. It’s mindset, margins, momentum. I just find if we build the business owner that builds the business, we’ve had a lot of success with that over the years. And a lot of times just giving them a way.

to dream bigger and think big makes a huge difference. We were at dinner a couple nights ago. I was on a big podcast, live podcast here in Austin with a bunch of people and one of the people was one of my customers and she had been invited too. And she’s like, you know, before I met you, I just thought I’d be happy with just a million dollar a year business working, know, Monday through Friday, eight to five. And I never thought that I’d have a $3 million a year business working Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday and taking Thursdays and Fridays completely off.

It wasn’t until you taught me how to think bigger that made the big difference for me. So build the business owner that builds the business and start thinking big. I mean, that’s why we’re, you know, we had an eight figure exit. I want a hundred million dollar exit next. That’s my next thing. So the bigger you think, the bigger you’ll get.

John Jantsch (10:51.417)

if

John Jantsch (10:59.354)

So, let’s go back to that marketing example. I totally agree with you. Walking that back to mindset certainly was the place to go. But we work with a lot of agencies and I mean, so I hear this story all the time. You deliver, results are still flat, everyone blames the agency. So you’ve probably heard that exact situation. How do you get people to walk that back? Because they’re basically making that

Kevin D. St.Clergy (11:01.933)

you

Kevin D. St.Clergy (11:22.285)

.

John Jantsch (11:28.686)

decision, if you will, that blame based on what data they can see or what data they think they have and that data is we’re not growing.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (11:32.066)

Yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (11:39.342)

Yeah, so they, I mean, we call it the three fatal falls of blind blaming. So the first one, we have these cognitive biases, John, that you’re well aware of, because I’ve been following you for years, and you’ve helped me a lot over my career, so I could say thank you in person, by the way. But.

John Jantsch (11:51.799)

You

Kevin D. St.Clergy (11:53.838)

I think the first fatal flaw is there’s this thing called availability bias. And these cognitive biases are there to help us make decisions quicker and do things better and faster, but they can be getting away and hinder our success as well. And the first one is called availability bias, which means the first thing that pops into an entrepreneur’s head about what’s wrong with their marketing, that’s it. It’s got to be their agency and the people that have agencies that are working with customers. Cause I had a marketing agency for 17 years. I know the scars. I’ve got the deep wounds. For those of you who do choose to read the book, you’ll see those wounds in the, in the book with some of my

examples. But once they do that then the next fatal flaw comes into play where it’s confirmation bias. They become a treasure hunter to prove themselves right and they start looking for data to back that up. Well I’m definitely slow. It was my slowest month ever and I wasn’t slow before I hired you guys so it’s your fault.

And so then finally, you’re too busy looking at the wrong problem, you can’t focus on the right solutions. So that’s the third fatal flaw. So what we do though is, especially for like agencies, when working with agencies, I just share with them what we did when we changed our whole model from just providing digital marketing services to a business growth company and started including coaching, because I was getting so frustrated and so angry of generating leads and then them not converting those leads to appointments. And so we created Front Desk Academy.

Then I was getting really frustrated because we were putting the leads in front of them and then they weren’t closing them. And of course it’s still our fault. Couldn’t be them, it’s not their sales process, not another sales training. I had a recent customer and she said this online out loud to everyone that when I mentioned that we really need to work on your sales process, she started crying. So it was, I was like, I didn’t want to make you cry. I said, no, it’s not you, you’re right, I need to fix this. So.

I think what agencies need to do is they need to pivot a little bit and they need to start looking at the results that they get and what it really does. Because people, don’t think people want to sign up for more marketing. They don’t want to spend money on marketing. What they want is to make more money, grow their business and have more of an impact.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (13:47.534)

And that’s the change we made in 2018. When we became a business development company that provided digital marketing services, and no matter what they did with us, we would help them grow. Because let’s face it, you’ve done this, John, some marketing works, some doesn’t. Some digital marketing takes months to get going. But what we did is we developed a business assessment to help them identify holes in their bucket, and then we helped them fill it. So weekly, we were coaching them for the first eight to 10 weeks they were on board with us, where a lot of people got a return on their investment before we even started their marketing, before it got going.

John Jantsch (14:17.412)

Yes.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (14:17.665)

That’s when we quadrupled the size of our company. We did really well. We weren’t even looking to sell. Our broker came to us and said, look, I think your business is worth this. And we started laughing. And then he got that. So it was kind of a blessed day. Anyway, I hope that answers your question in a good way.

John Jantsch (14:21.924)

Yes.

John Jantsch (14:29.242)

Yeah, no, absolutely. That’s really where we’ve been for years. mean, the only thing when people engage us, it’s not to do their marketing, it’s to do what we call strategy first, which is a very set engagement that has set deliverables that we work on their business objectives first. We work on the founder and finding where they’re getting in the way. and I tell you from a marketing standpoint, it changes the whole relationship too.

in day one not seen as a vendor. We’re seen as a trusted advisor and all the other stuff we want to recommend, they’re like bring it on because you’ve changed the relationship.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (15:01.046)

Yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (15:09.279)

Yeah, and I love it. Yeah, because you’ve become a partner and when somebody comes in with a lower price, they’re like, yeah, but I lose John and his team. That’s what we learned. We just did it. The story is in my book as well. But yeah, I agree. And I love that you’re doing that.

John Jantsch (15:13.433)

Yes.

John Jantsch (15:16.761)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:23.62)

So symptom fixing versus root cause thinking. How do you get people, most people are in symptom, you know, this hurts, you know, how do I fix it? How do you get people to start thinking way beyond the symptom to, you know, wellness, if you will, if we’re going to use the analogy.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (15:41.174)

Yeah, so back to that. We teach them the process. We teach them how to move beyond blind blaming with making them aware that blind blaming exists and they’re suffering from it. Then we take them through the RCD method, but a lot of times they don’t really know how to dig a little deeper. So we’ve been really big on if we’re working with coaches or agencies, helping them develop an assessment that does go deeper.

And then that’s how we identify things. We have them take a small assessment that helps them step out of the box and take a look at the way they’re doing things. For some reason, I mean, when I used to do it in person, it worked okay, but when they have them do the assessment and they see the results with the AI stuff we have today, it’s made a huge difference. And they’re like, man, I knew exactly when I went through this assessment what’s really going on.

And now it just helps my coaching go a lot faster. Don’t know why I’m not, I don’t, it was just something that I learned to do at a conference and we started using it and then we started teaching our clients to do the same and they’re seeing the same thing. So having an assessment that helps them step out of the box and look at the way they’re doing things to identify some other things it can be is one of the first things. But a lot of times just if you’re working with a good coach like yourself, who’s got a lot of experience and you’ve seen the same mistakes that entrepreneurs make every other day when it comes to their marketing, we know.

Cause I love it when people tell me like, well, I definitely need to rebuild my website. And I always ask why. Look, I had a digital marketing. My company’s job was to produce some doubt so that you would switch to us. But I always instructed our practice advisors as we called them, cause we were in the medical field to ask them how many leads a month before you switch and come to us, how many leads a month are you going? And you can probably guess what we got, John. What do you mean?

John Jantsch (17:16.922)

One, two, yeah. Yeah, well, that’s true.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (17:18.253)

I have no idea. No, most of time it was like, I don’t know. I just know I need to switch because my business is down. And then sometimes we wouldn’t let people come on board. like, listen, no offense. I’d love to earn your business, but you’re getting like 30 leads a month from your current marketing company. I don’t think you have a problem with this. And we used to secret shop their clinics before we’d get on the phone with them. I like, listen, your problem is your front desk. In fact, you know, when we said how much are your hearing aids, she said they can be as much as $7,000, but you probably won’t need those. Great script.

No, they would hang up and go away. And I said, guess who scored worse on these secret shopper calls? Do you think it was the front desk or the owner? The owner. They’re the worst. So anyway, that’s, that’s some of the things that we do is help them step out of the box and take a look at other things.

John Jantsch (17:52.922)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:00.1)

So, I mean, you’re in the personal coaching mindset space. So you probably quite naturally get, mean, some of your engagements probably get personal pretty fast. and I think, what I think is interesting about that and where there’s, see a lot of resistance, particularly from service providers. It’s like, I’m just here to do this, you know? but what I’ve seen is that I think what people are craving now, just what you said, they don’t want.

more marketing stuff. They don’t, you know, they don’t want to basically go, I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve talked to somebody and they’ve had like five agencies and they’ve all done the same thing. You know, it’s like you’re hiring them to do the same thing. You know, what did you, what did you expect? And, and what I think people are craving today more than ever is transformation. Um, and I think that we have a real opportunity as service providers or whatever we want to call it to actually go so much deeper and help them evolve.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (18:39.021)

yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (18:42.519)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:58.552)

not just as a business, but as a person. And that’s a space that I think is wide open, quite frankly, in the marketing world.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (19:05.229)

Yeah, I agree because we, as I said, we found that we in our big masterminds where we charge 25 and 50 grand a year. It’s very interesting to me to go from a digital marketing company charge of $900 a month.

John Jantsch (19:15.63)

Yeah, right.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (19:17.549)

and having this, have you done for me today to 25 and 50 and then soon to be $100,000 level and have people go, I can’t believe this, you changed my life. I can’t wait for next year. Let’s, they’re re-upping. We have a 90 % up rate, re-up rate at the end of the year. It’s fascinating to me because we changed the way we focus. We talked about that transformation and what’s happened with other clients. So yeah, totally with you. And it’s, it’s just amazing to me. If we can get more agencies to focus on that transformation, John, uh, cause that’s what we just trademarked heck out of this, but we call our program M3 Mastery from Trans

John Jantsch (19:34.852)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:39.46)

Peace.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (19:47.456)

transactional to transformational and that was my big lesson when we really focused on Getting some transformation in their business not just what we did or the service provide That would that made a huge difference and sometimes as you said We’d find that the owner has a health problem that when I am diagnosed for years Like just recently we had somebody who has a very large eight figure a year of business, but she was miserable I was like, long has it she been to the doctor? She’s about 43. So she’s getting up to you know in that age She’s like, you know, I read your book and I’ve got an appointment

John Jantsch (19:49.38)

Nice.

John Jantsch (20:13.742)

Yeah, yeah.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (20:16.981)

And so she came back and she’s like, my God, my testosterone is low and I had no idea. It’s been that way for years. My doctor never run the test. And once we got that fixed, she exploded. Her team culture completely changed. Everything came into place where the coaching finally started working. Cause she was getting frustrated with me and I’m like, look, I think there’s something else going on that you’re missing. Let’s go back to that assessment. Cause we look at five different areas. We look at their health, we look at their purpose. We look at their relationships, not necessarily their personal relationships with the people, how they react with people.

John Jantsch (20:22.468)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (20:32.985)

Hmph.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (20:46.895)

people at work and a few other things like a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset and then we make sure they have the right resources and usually in those five areas it’s not about finding one thing in each area John it’s about finding that one thing and for her it was low testosterone which is something that I went through a couple years ago so I put in the book.

John Jantsch (20:46.906)

Sure.

John Jantsch (21:00.396)

Yeah. Yeah, that’s funny. Well, Kevin, I appreciate you taking a moment, a few moments to share with our audience. Is there someplace you’d invite people to find out more about your work and certainly get a copy of the book?

Kevin D. St.Clergy (21:12.011)

Yeah, you bet. Yes, sir. I always recommend people go to the website blindblaming.com.

We have for 15 bucks, have all four copies of the book that you can get plus a bunch of bonuses. It’s just a great way to get in our funnel and you’ll get invites to some of the challenges and things like that that we do as well. So blindblaming.com is the best place to go and just from the feedback I’ve got the last couple of years on the book, the book. You can listen to it whether it’s audio, PDF, or if you’re a book book person like I am because I’m older, you can get all four copies and I think it’ll change your life.

John Jantsch (21:42.854)

I appreciate it. And again, hopefully we’ll run into one of these days when we’re out there on the road. In fact, I’m going to be in Austin.

Kevin D. St.Clergy (21:51.38)

great, I’d love to see you. Yeah, come up to the compound. We’d love to have you. So we got indoor golf, we got a garage, Mahal, we got a casino, we got a wine cellar. So we got some fun up here. Come see me.

John Jantsch (21:51.537)

maybe I’ll stop by.

Sara Nay (00:01.474)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host, Sara Nay, stepping in for John Jantsch. Today, my guest is Heidi Ellsworth, who is a nationally recognized leader in the roofing and business building industries, serving as president of the coffee shop, an award-winning group of digital platforms. With more than 30 years of experience in roofing in sales, marketing, and business development, she has played a pivotal role in advancing how the industry connects, communicates, and

Rose. Welcome to the show, Heidi.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (00:33.167)

Thank you so much. That was such a nice introduction. Thank you.

Sara Nay (00:36.59)

I’m excited you’re here. and so let’s dive on in. Let’s get to the point. so you started in roofing I believe in nineteen ninety-three. So you’ve been in the industry for quite some time now. And over the years you ended up building one of the most influential media and community platforms. So I’m curious what caused you to see a need for building a platform like you’ve built?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (00:46.12)

Yes. Yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (00:59.979)

you know what it it actually started when I was really young. My dad was a general contractor. And as kids, we’d be in the back of the car and we’d be driving someplace. And my dad would point out everything, every job that he had done, right? Every job, every house, every roof, every light pole. And as I grew older and, you know, worked with him in the business as a teenager, and then watched him as I started my marketing communications, I realized how

Much he would have appreciated to have someone put together a case study for him to tell his story, to share his successes, you know, more than just pointing them out to your kids and spouse. And that really stuck with me. And I wanted to be able to tell the stories of the amazing small businesses and in my case, craftsmen and women who build.

America, right? Who build and we we’re just not America who build everywhere. and so that that inspired me. And my business partner, Vicky Sharples, had actually started Roofer’s Coffee Shop back in 2002. And when she asked me to join her full time, I helped her launch it in 2002, but then sh I joined her full time in 2015. And it gave me that opportunity, that opportunity to do something I’d really kind of thought about for many years before I

Actually started full time with the coffee shops.

Sara Nay (02:27.566)

I love that story and and we actually have some in common because John Jance is my father and he actually founded Duct Tape Marketing and so I grew up watching you know the impact that he was making in small businesses’ lives and it really inspired me to kind of follow along on on the path that he laid.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (02:43.512)

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. My my kids actually work for me now. And nothing that, you know, I probably much like you, they came to me and they said, you know, we just we’re interested and we love what you’re doing. And so they they will also tell that story about their grandpa. So it’s yeah, it’s I love family businesses.

Sara Nay (02:48.073)

nice.

Sara Nay (03:04.822)

Yeah, it’s amazing they came to you. I I came to my dad about 16 years ago and was like, I need a job. But it worked out. I’m still around 16 years later. Yeah. Awesome. Well, one of the things that I know you talk about obviously is marketing, and that’s a lot of what we focus on as well. And a lot of people, when they think about marketing, they think, you know, I just need more leads or I need to run ads or I need a website in place. But you and I both know that it’s a lot deeper than that. So I know you talk a lot about

Heidi J. Ellsworth (03:08.81)

Yeah, it worked out obviously very well.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (03:32.184)

Yes.

Sara Nay (03:34.316)

A combination of like online communities, directories, networking and content. So why does that combination work so well in trades or just small business in general?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (03:45.039)

Yeah, you know, I think it honestly has worked for decades, right? The the idea that you build trust with your customers and that you’re authentic, that you help them guide them in making good decisions for their whether it’s their home or their business or whatever, that it’s it’s more than just a sales call. It’s a relationship, it’s it’s consulting on what makes what is a win for everyone involved.

and that’s always been the case, I feel, in in in with successful small businesses, with successful businesses, period. That’s always it’s about trust, it’s about your brand, it’s about your culture, all those kind of things. Well, now let’s throw in technology and what has happened the last, you know, five years, but really the last year when we’re talking about AI and the things are changing the landscape, is that it has created

This transparency that wasn’t there before. I mean, when I started and when I was first mark helping contractors and small businesses, because I worked with a number of small businesses doing their marketing too. it was about, well, should you name your company with starting with an A so you can be at the beginning of the yellow pages section. And it was about being part of, but it was still a part of being that little league team of doing all those things. Today, your whole life.

Your whole business is out there online. And so if you do not have a consistent message, a consistent brand, really authentic real story to tell and to share, it’s gonna come out and people are going to see it. So what we started in 2002, Vicky and I, with online articles and directories, and then grew it, you know, starting 2015 really into a multimedia platform with podcasts and webinars. Today.

ha has created this rich, rich environment for AI to search, to find content, to be able to see real stories. And so we are encouraging small businesses, all businesses, in and right now we serve the roofing industry, the coatings industry, the metal industry, and the outdoor living industries to get their directories up.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (06:08.622)

Get their art give their articles, do podcasts with us, just like we’re doing right now. All of this feeds that AI need for information. And we really, like you do, work with them to really tell their story and make sure that there’s a consistency between their website and between what they’re putting on our site so that as people are finding things online, whether that’s AI or real people.

Sara Nay (06:21.464)

Yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (06:36.308)

they’re finding consistency so they can build that trust in that brand. So it’s just a different way, but it’s even more important today than it’s ever been, I think.

Sara Nay (06:44.578)

Yeah, that’s great. And a lot of times when we’re working with businesses, we’re we’re helping them diversify like what they’re doing from a marketing perspective. And so you mentioned a few things like the directories and communities and content and credibility online, but are you also advising people to focus on offline efforts as well? And what does that look like?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (07:04.92)

Yeah, big time. offline is being involved in your community, giving back through charitable activities, doing that sign at the little league field. but here’s the difference. And and I don’t know if you’ve seen this, Sarah, in all the different folks you work with, but I can tell you in the construction industry, we have a number of very humble, very humble business owners who are like, Yeah, I donate, I I re-roof people’s homes every day. I

I helped build the little league dugout. I I’m not gonna tell anyone because you know we’re not supposed to. We’re just supposed to do good deeds. And so the conversation we have now is do those good deeds, but it’s okay to talk about it. It’s okay because other people, other small businesses will see what you’re doing and they will follow. So it amplifies the good deed and it also helps your marketing. It’s cause marketing is so important.

Sara Nay (07:50.094)

Yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (08:02.232)

And then I also am very much about networking. You know, it’s marketing is about networking also. So if you’re talking about off-grid, whether you’re online or you’re going being a part of an association, being part of your chamber of commerce, being, you know, that is also marketing because you are taking the time to be there, to give back, to help with your community. So we encourage all of that, but we encourage them to talk about it, to share it.

Sara Nay (08:26.392)

Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. I always think about marketing as, you know, going out there and focusing on your online presence, obviously, but also then having conversations with people is a big part of marketing and people don’t always think about it that way. But it’s as you said, it’s, you know, donating, it’s attending events, it’s having conversations, it’s networking, it’s finding strategic partnerships. Like that should always be a conversation, regardless of what industry you’re in. It should always be a focus while you’re also building all out your online presence to support those efforts as well.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (08:45.91)

Exactly.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (08:55.32)

Right. We always say people do business with people, right? They they they want to know who they’re doing business with. They want and and I know that’s a little muddier in today’s world when you think of Amazon and some of these things. I I really don’t know who’s on the other side of that screen, but on a local small business basis, people want to be with people and they wanna know you and they wanna know who you are and they want to feel good about buying from you and trust.

Sara Nay (08:55.638)

Ultimately.

Sara Nay (08:59.415)

Yeah, exactly.

Sara Nay (09:22.238)

Yeah. Absolutely. And I would argue that’s becoming more important in the age of AI right now. But going back to the content piece, because we have been preaching content, content, content for years. But what if someone’s listening and they’re like, Okay, I get it. I need to be producing content, but I don’t know how to get started. How what would you advise on how to get started with content production that’s representing a business?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (09:45.113)

Yeah, I tell you what, it’s easier than it’s ever been. It’s much easier than when I was doing it when I started out in my career. but I I just said this on a call earlier today. Transcripts are gold. If you want, if you’re looking for gold out there, transcripts are gold. So taking your phone and recording your thoughts, recording conversations, thought leadership conversations. Obviously, you have to be careful of privacy and all that stuff, but and then

Sara Nay (09:59.119)

Mm.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (10:15.118)

videos on your phone, taking videos, having those, you know, referrals or talking to the your customers about what they like, what was successful, why they’re happy. And then taking those videos or those audio tracks, turning them into transcripts, and forgive me, Sarah, I’m sure there’s gonna be a few people out there who are gonna be like, no, don’t say it. Put it into AI. Put it into AI.

Sara Nay (10:39.5)

Yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (10:43.514)

put it into AI because it’s a tool. It’s a tool to be used. Now, here’s where people go sideways with AI and building content. And that is they don’t read what comes out, right? So it’s it’s just like if you’re putting something in and cooking it and making something and you never taste it, and you just put it out on the table and it’s terrible. That’s exactly what will happen with AI. You can put all the ingredients in, your thoughts, what you’re doing, everything, you put it all in.

It bakes it and comes out. If you don’t take the time to read it, to edit it, to change it, to make sure it fits exactly who you are, then it’s not a very good tool. So that’s what I’m like. Capture the thoughts up front, make it easy, use it as a tool to run through and then edit, edit, edit, and read it. That is so incredibly important. But it’s just, it’s created an opportunity. I mean, and there’s

That’s just writing, right? But I mean, there’s also a lot of programs out there that will help with video editing. There is, you know, that phone is the best tool you have. Although Sarah, this morning I was on with a contractor who does metal roofing and he just got his metaglasses and he’s blowing it up on social media with the videos the job site and talking to his customers. And he singing its praise, loves it.

Sara Nay (11:55.554)

No.

Sara Nay (12:03.352)

That’s amazing.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s amazing. I feel like those glasses would take some of the pressure off. You almost forget that you’re recording ultimately. ‘Cause they’re just on your face.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (12:12.12)

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. And he says it’s so easy. And then there’s software to edit those, you know, say pull me a clip. yeah. So it it I think it’s easier than ever, but you have to not be afraid and you have to check your work. I can only say that like 10 million times because I believe it so strongly.

Sara Nay (12:30.658)

Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, I know I you actually interviewed me on a podcast yesterday. So we reversed roles and we talked a lot on that podcast about the customer journey. and so so far today we’ve talked about a lot of things that people can be doing to get awareness when it comes to getting in front of people. but how do you see like the customer journey changing in the age of AI?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (12:36.611)

Yes.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (12:52.866)

Yeah, I think it’s become even more important. I think you have to stay in touch with your customers. You need to have the touch points along the way to make sure that they’re getting what they need, that you’re delivering what you promised, that they’re happy. the the communication’s a little bit easier because of automation. So you can automate a lot of your messaging that goes the touch points, you can automate and making sure they’re getting communication they need to have a good customer experience. But

That one on one, I think will never go away. You s you still need that touch point with your customers. And I mean, it depend there’s so many small businesses on so many different levels, but it’s obviously if it’s retail, it’s little bit easier to have that face to face. But in construction, law, all those other things, making sure you s stay in touch in that customer journey. and I I would say at the very beginning, there’s nothing more important than listening.

Listening and understanding the needs and the pain of your customer and how you can solve it and then deliver.

Sara Nay (13:58.947)

Yeah, exactly. I think that’s so key, like especially in like the sales process I’ve been sold to so many times over the years where it’s like, did you even listen to what I was saying or are you just going through your script to like pitch what you think I need, even though I just told you that’s not what I need? And so I think it is really key to listen and ask the questions and stay curious. But you also made another great point in the customer journey. There’s also a lot of businesses that focus like

Heidi J. Ellsworth (14:06.778)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (14:21.816)

primarily on marketing and just getting more and more and more people in the door. But then like once people become customers, they kind of like forget about them and they don’t really communicate well. Like I’ve signed up for services and products over the years and it’s like, okay, I paid this money, what’s next? It’s crickets. Like what can I expect? And so I just think like it’s sad, but communicating with your clients and customers after sale can go such a far way. And often a lot of businesses forget about that piece because they’re so focused on leads, leads, leads.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (14:30.01)

Right.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (14:50.713)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (14:50.796)

And so from your perspective, like any advice there on how to like how to nurture people and take care of people more after they actually become customers?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (14:57.241)

Yeah.

Yeah I think a lot of times you gotta think about yourself as a customer. As a customer, what do I want and what do I wanna do? And if I have a great experience, how many people am I gonna tell? And I I I that to your point is that’s the best way to generate leads or to generate people coming to you. You know, that they heard, Yes, we love these guys, they are so great, they did all of this for us. You you gotta go see them. I had a a chiropractor in

lady in town who was just so phenomenal. And I told one person who told another person and they told another person. I mean, and everybody keeps coming back, going, Thank you, she’s so amazing. and so I think yes, new leads are important and branding and having your name out there so that when someone does hear your, you know, or someone has a need, they’ve seen you, they’ve heard about you from the community.

And that’s really that’s the ultimate lead generation. But I really feel with lead generation today, too many people just want that instant lead and ’cause because Google has kind of trained them that way. Those are they take a lot more time and usually are not nearly as qualified.

Sara Nay (16:03.586)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Sara Nay (16:11.842)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean referrals are the most, I feel like, the easiest can to convert when it comes to leads because there’s already a lot of that trust built in. but I’m curious in your work, have you helped different businesses build out referral programs or is it more just built on in sp like helping people feel great where they want to refer ultimately the companies they’re working with? What’s your approach there?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (16:18.521)

Yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (16:33.4)

I yeah, I’ve worked with a lot of different companies who have done it. I mean, in construction, it’s all about referrals, right? I mean, in fact, some some folks they don’t even do marketing, and now we say that’s not a good idea either, because you need that full schedule around it. But I’ve worked with people helping to put together, I mean, I’ve worked for contractors, small businesses that where we put together referral programs, how we’re going to communicate that. And that starts all the way.

you know, you your sales team needs to understand it. And then you need to be consistent and talking to people and finding out. But you can put together a lot of referral programs. You can give a lot of gift cards away. You can do all those kind of things. But if you don’t have stellar work and great communications, people won’t care about a gift card. So I I believe in referral programs, but I really believe in delivering the what people need and then and then following through.

Sara Nay (17:26.147)

Yes.

Sara Nay (17:30.498)

Yeah, absolutely. And your chiropractor example sets the table for that exactly. I mean, I have a person that’s done our taxes for years, and I think everyone I know he also does their taxes. And it’s just because he’s done a great job and he communicates well and he’s on time and he’s responsive and we can rely on them. Like it’s all those things that you want. And once you find someone like that, like literally the next time someone’s like, Who does your taxes? I’m more than willing to refer them because I’ve had a good experience. And so I think that really highlights

Heidi J. Ellsworth (17:38.938)

Yeah, exactly.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (17:48.547)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (17:58.255)

Regardless what industry you’re in, like yes, as we were saying, I do think referral programs have a place. But as long as you’re nurturing people throughout the whole experience and you’re delivering on what you promise, they’re just gonna refer you naturally as well, which is a win all.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (18:12.672)

Exactly. Exactly. And I I use myself a lot as my own focus group, right? I’m like, how do I want to be treated? What is is a gift card gonna really make that big of a difference to me? No, really good service is gonna make a big difference to me. And so now and knowing that I’m there’s a lot of people who have different opinions and so you need to ask and talk to a lot of people. But if you kind of start at home and build that out, treat others like you wanna be treated.

Sara Nay (18:37.346)

Yeah, absolutely. Love it. Well, thank you. We are coming towards the end of our show. So I always like to ask a couple questions as we get towards the end. based on what we discussed today, is there one tip or one thing that you want to leave the audience with before we go?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (18:54.098)

Yes, I would say get to know your and purely selfish here, but get to know your online resources. Get to know the people behind those. sign up for podcasts, sign up for send in articles, get your directories. there’s really nothing more important right now for your online presence, which is a part of your bigger marketing plan than that. And so if anybody has questions and they want to see what we have done at Roofers Coffee Shop.

It’s easy. Heidi at Roofers Coffee Shop dot com. I’m more than happy to answer any questions.

Sara Nay (19:26.67)

Awesome. And then one final quick question I like to ask because I’m a bit of a book nerd. Are you reading anything right now that you would recommend or have you read anything lately?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (19:31.343)

Yeah.

Heidi J. Ellsworth (19:36.182)

Yes, I’m kind of a I’m really big into sci science fiction and fantasy and stuff like that. So Onyx Storm is one of the ones that I just finished and I can’t wait for the fourth book. So yeah.

Sara Nay (19:44.609)

Awesome.

Awesome. Love it. All right. Well you already shouted out there where people can connect you with you online. anywhere else that you want to connect online?

Heidi J. Ellsworth (19:56.93)

yeah, roofers coffee shop dot com. That’s our oldest and our first brand. And so you’ll see a lot of different things there. If you’re looking for a roofer, go to askaroofer.com. And as a homeowner or a business owner, if you’re looking for you know help to pick that roof and get something great, askaroofer.com has all kinds of resources and you can ask and find a con a contractor. And that’s also part of our platform.

Sara Nay (20:21.056)

Awesome. All right. Thank you so much, Heidi, for being here today. I really enjoyed our conversation. And thank you all for listening to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. We’ll see you next time.

John Jantsch (00:01.806)

So nine out of ten clients say their agency makes them more likely to succeed. I guess that’s the good news, right? four out of those ten are also planning to cut back on their relationship within a year. We’ll talk more about that. So, hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Brian Gerstner. He’s the co-founder of Agency Core, an organization that does independent research study.

They surveyed over five hundred and seventy-nine agency leaders and four hundred of their own clients in twenty twenty six. he is also the president of White Label IQ, a ninety person team that works exclusively with agencies, spent more than twenty years in the business. We’re gonna talk about that research. So, Brian, welcome to the show.

Brian Gerstner (00:50.782)

It’s a pleasure. How are you, John?

John Jantsch (00:53.104)

awesome. So you know, there’s a lot of organizations out there. You’ve been in the business twenty years, a lot of organizations out there doing producing data. Is there something that you’re trying to learn or you like initially started this to try to learn that maybe nobody else is ev is measuring?

Brian Gerstner (01:09.034)

Well, it it was really about looking inside of agencies. You know, in in all the time I’ve been, you know, working inside of agencies, it it’s really a bubble. Like you’re doing everything you can to the best you can and you’re not really exactly sure how other peers are are successful or what they’re doing. So we wanted agency core to really take a look inside of agencies so that people could see how people are being successful, what kind of retention, where they’re focusing, what kind of products they’re selling, what

John Jantsch (01:25.91)

Yes.

Brian Gerstner (01:39.144)

And at the end of the day, truly, the study is an attitudinal study. So it’s not about the specific mechanics, but it has a lot to do with like the overlying attitudes that people have and how those attitudes really reflect how successful they are and what they’re doing.

John Jantsch (01:50.925)

Yes.

John Jantsch (01:56.813)

Yeah, you know, we work with a lot of agencies. And I I tell you, I’ve been doing it that for twenty years as well. And it it, you know, you say attitude, I’ve been using the w the word mindset, you know, because I think there definitely is a there’s a bigger shift going on right now, it feels like, than ever, you know, before since I’ve been in this. And a lot of it is they just have to wrap their heads around a whole different way of going to market, even, or at least that’s what we’re seeing. Y your study actually

does kind of sort agencies into a couple groups that I would call maybe mindset. You know, has a lot to do with those groups. One called the confident differentiator. That was maybe my my favorite. what is a what does a confident differentiator do day to day that puts them in that segment?

Brian Gerstner (02:43.785)

Yeah, so it it it’s a classic story, right? We’ve all heard about niching down. but the key in that attitudinal s segment is that we see these are people who have taken a position. It’s not just, you know, sitting down with your team, you know, talking like, here’s who we are, here’s what we do. But it’s really about, you know, spending the time going out speaking, writing, creating content around it.

John Jantsch (02:50.016)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (02:58.05)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (03:11.805)

you know, turning down clients that don’t really fit that core focus that you’re providing. So they’re they’re creating that classic true differentiation that, you know, we all talk about in Seek, but when we I think as we look at the study and things we might touch on is the statistically the people who are in that particular segment are doing way better. I mean, you know, even as we talk about differentiation, we’re seeing the numbers really start to create a huge gap.

John Jantsch (03:15.35)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (03:41.063)

And how those individuals are much more successful and competent.

John Jantsch (03:46.176)

And and not just revenue, profit, probably, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (03:49.258)

Well, I mean, we’re we’re not really talking about products specifically, but like things like how relevant is my agency? How much of a concern is do I have about being able to justify the fees that I’m providing? You know, is AI you know, how much how much of a threat is AI to my business model? Those individuals are reporting, you know, much more confidence around those types of areas. So we’re not specifically talking about profit, but once again

John Jantsch (03:57.045)

okay.

Brian Gerstner (04:19.401)

The the attitude here.

John Jantsch (04:19.734)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So so I you know, we encounter, I mean, th this idea of, you know, find a niche has been around a long time. I think a lot of people have gone down that path maybe incorrectly. in other words, saying, We’re gonna just work with Dennis starting tomorrow. and and and and and then find, you know, six months in that they don’t really Dennis isn’t a good market or you know, whatever the

Brian Gerstner (04:37.502)

I need a

John Jantsch (04:47.17)

Not picking on dentists, just you know, it’s more the the approach. So so what does your sir survey say about that kind of hesitation of like, I don’t wanna turn other you know, other stuff away.

Brian Gerstner (04:58.901)

So this is more me speaking as agency owner and just kind of in there. I you know, if someone comes up to you and in your heart you know you can help them and they have a big bag of money in their hands, my goodness, take it. You know? being able to niche down is really an a function of you know, are you demonstrating an authority? And at the end of the day, are other people

John Jantsch (05:11.436)

Yeah yeah. Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah

Brian Gerstner (05:28.199)

saying, hey, they’re really good at this, because we can talk about ourselves all we want, but the moment other people start saying, Hey, these particular people have a great reputation in this one particular area, that’s that that’s when you know you’re you’re truly, you know, establishing that that confident differentiating positions.

John Jantsch (05:31.404)

Yes.

John Jantsch (05:49.343)

So one of the I see this all the time. 13 to 16% of agency owners say they’re fully executed on the strategies they name as their top priorities. what’s up with that?

Brian Gerstner (06:01.141)

So that’s wild. I you know, we I know being a college kid in in the business is like common, you know, like we’re we’re horrible at doing our own marketing, but we do it for others all the time. what I I for me that statistic stands out greatly because there’s so much change in the market with AI and just the way things are changing, you know, and the fact that you know, if you’re using a cloud, I’m using open AI.

John Jantsch (06:09.538)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:13.026)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (06:31.731)

we’re all kind of the same agency at the end of the day if we’re not really standing on a particular reputation or authority. So when we look at 13% only executing it, what what blows my mind is when there’s so much change happening and we know like a lot of the you know actual deliverable work that we do is being commoditized more rapidly than ever before.

John Jantsch (06:38.531)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (06:58.247)

I look at it and it just blows my mind. We’ve got to be able to do better. I mean, our our business are our business models might fail for those who are sitting there and rely on the complexity of marketing, you know, being able to execute because it’s too technical. I mean that that the tide’s going out and AI has really eroded that area. So unless we’re really showing authority and a true understanding of our clients,

John Jantsch (07:12.888)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (07:19.224)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (07:26.921)

we’re not going to be able to be competitive. And what wh I really like gives me a lot of hope about this is once again, it’s about the fundamentals of marketing are still so true.

John Jantsch (07:35.69)

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Always they haven’t changed no matter what the platform, right? S so that statistic I cited at the opening that nine out of ten you know, f feel like their agency is more likely to make them succeed, only four out of ten, but four yeah, four out of ten plan to reduce the relationship. So walk me through both of those numbers. I mean, how can they both be true at the same time?

Brian Gerstner (07:40.707)

yeah.

Brian Gerstner (07:56.502)

Well, so I think what it really looks at is just as I said, you know, the tide is moving out on certain types of work. So when we look at the nine out of ten as far as end clients, and that’s the specific statistic came out of the agency edge research through AMI. it is, you know, we’re still incredibly relevant. Clients know they need an agency, they need an expert, they need authority in a position and that, you know.

John Jantsch (08:14.966)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Gerstner (08:25.841)

it is more likely that their initiatives will will be successful if they have the right people at the table with them. You know, it’s just knowing that like we’re still incredibly relevant. Okay. But when you look at the certain end clients like decreasing their spend, you know, we’re all seeing it, whether it’s like producing brochures, writing content, you know, AI is doing it excessively well, you know, and for a lot of clients, good is enough for certain types of work.

John Jantsch (08:37.386)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:46.485)

Right.

John Jantsch (08:55.532)

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Gerstner (08:55.951)

when I I bridge the two together, it is the fact that the agency can show up, provide strategy, provide greater, higher levels of confidence and judgment and direction. And with that in place and, you know, as an end client, access to a lot of these tools that are more affordable than ever before, they’re moving faster. So I look at that statistic and I say,

There are certain types of engagements that we’re used to doing and providing deliverables that are now commoditized that are absolutely we’re gonna lose we’re gonna lose ground on those. But the it’s the strategy work, it’s the judgment and direction that the nine out of ten comes from.

John Jantsch (09:36.012)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (09:40.61)

Yeah, yeah. Well, and that’s you know, I’ve been preaching the this line, strategy before tactics, for, you know, at least thirty years. And and I mean it’s you know, it it’s absolutely gonna be, I think, the only space left. In fact, one of the things I think has happened is is AI has actually opened up a marketing leadership gap. and I think really exposed it. It’s always been there with small to mid sized businesses, but I think AI is

really exposing the lack of leadership in marketing. And I think that I how do you feel agents I believe that agencies can rush into that gap, you know, and stop worrying about, you know, SEO tactics. but how do you get an agency that’s, you know, that’s got 20 people sitting around that their job is to like do reports and do do the stuff we give to clients and get them start thinking more about leaders. I know you didn’t research this, but but I’m curious what your thoughts are on

Brian Gerstner (10:37.823)

So there’s two thoughts and one is just very awakening. Like that agency you just described, the the truth is revenue is gonna make that decision for them. Right. and on the other side, I do believe that you know it is a lot about you know, the questions that your clients are gonna ask us. I can tell you over the past year or two, how our clients have started to engage us has been very different.

John Jantsch (10:42.134)

Yes.

John Jantsch (10:47.701)

Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (11:07.628)

Mm-hmm.

Brian Gerstner (11:07.859)

You know, from you know, asking about deliverables and the more technical service offerings to showing up and going, How do we do this? Should we do this? And it is once again fundamentals, right? If we’re focused on our clients and we’re looking at the questions they’re answering and we understand the problems and pain that they’re having, naturally there should be a progression. If we’re stuck and focused on the deliverable, I mean, that is a core thing. Like if you’re not client focused or client centric, then you’re gonna you’re gonna miss that transition.

To some degree. but I think the decision’s gonna get made for you, good or bad.

John Jantsch (11:39.49)

You Yeah. You you identified another another segment you call the AI opportunity embracers and and we certainly are seeing that out there that people are rushing in saying, there’s money to be made in this new frontier. but I’m also seeing a lot of them already going, We can’t really get any clients just pitching that because they can do it themselves for twenty bucks a month, right?

Brian Gerstner (12:01.725)

yeah.

Brian Gerstner (12:05.653)

Well well, I mean, my agency is very heavily in this area also because we do a tremendous amount of development work and we do a tremendous amount of like work that is being affected by AI. So like in this, like we have we have a people problem. The the adoption is really difficult to really, you know, to get with people, to get people to truly know how to leverage it. And when we look at this particular segment, a lot of the problem is

John Jantsch (12:10.029)

Sure. Mm-hmm.

Brian Gerstner (12:35.199)

People are moving into AI aggressively because it is new, there is a lot of opportunity, and honestly, right now AI itself is enough of a buzzword that you can hang your hat on it. What I can tell you though, right exactly.

John Jantsch (12:47.277)

Sure. It’s like when social media came around. There were all these social media social media marketing agencies.

Brian Gerstner (12:52.521)

Yeah. From being in the business long enough, I can tell you that this opportun the the whole, you know, AI being your differentiator, like that is gonna disappear really quick. It’s already table stakes. when you look at it, end clients already understand that we’re using it. They just want us to do it responsibly. So this particular segment, the real the people who are chasing AI going, AI is the answer. there there is there is still plenty of opportunity in this area. The big concern is

John Jantsch (13:03.629)

Sure, sure.

John Jantsch (13:08.331)

Yep. Yep.

Brian Gerstner (13:23.061)

People are running really fast, but where are you going? You know, there there’s a reason the compass was invented before the clock. It’s because it’s more important to know where you’re going. So the big fear in this area is that you’re moving really fast and you’re gonna end up somewhere where there’s not going to be enough ground to live on.

John Jantsch (13:30.273)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:41.441)

Yeah, look at all the hundred thousand dollar stalled AI projects that a lot of corporations launched.

Brian Gerstner (13:45.781)

Yeah, we’ve had funny we we have our own graveyard. We have our own graveyard, but we’re learning from every one of it. I call this you know, this is definitely education.

John Jantsch (13:54.19)

So so what’s the research say about pricing? pricing models that you know, are clients saying, Hey, you need to do this for you need to charge me fifty percent less because you’re using AI to do it?

Brian Gerstner (14:07.893)

we’re not really seeing that. We’re seeing that not only are marketing budgets in general in the industry still increasing, but we are seeing that end clients are saying that they are willing to not only not decrease, but they’re willing to pay more for higher levels of expertise in a specific area. We have seen where like I think twenty-nine percent of end clients are saying that they expect to reduce fees because of AI.

John Jantsch (14:27.741)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Brian Gerstner (14:36.575)

But once again, I’m bringing this back to that concept of commoditization, where certain types of deliverables absolutely do not have the pricing power that they used to. So if you do, just like the confident differentiators, if you have a level of authority, absolutely the end clients are more willing to pay for it more and more ever before. So when you look at that statistic about agencies themselves saying, like, what was it? Only 25% believe

John Jantsch (14:43.234)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (15:05.585)

AI strategy is a differentiating factor in selection, I’m saying like this isn’t gonna last forever, but hey agencies, here is a giant window. There’s a door open right now. And if you can aggressively take take advantage of this, it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity.

John Jantsch (15:17.735)

Mm-hmm. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:26.743)

Well and I tell you one of the things we’ve seen o over the years is coming in the strategy door i is a far better relationship to with the client than coming in the vendor do this thing door. and I I think that so, you know, we we our our clients have been with us for many, many years and I think it has to do with the fact that we start them all with strategy. you know, as of before we ever start talking about fixing all the stuff they want fixed.

Brian Gerstner (15:52.471)

And I know like there’s a lot of agencies I work with just don’t feel comfortable, don’t feel like they have the pricing power or that at the end of the day they say, Hey, my clients don’t want it.

John Jantsch (15:57.526)

Right. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:02.273)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian Gerstner (16:04.924)

That’s hard. I I I I get it. I I get how that’s the conversation, but like there just as you said, like the agency that’s producing reports, like, you know, if you focus down, if you niche in, if you if you lean into an area, it is an investment. It’s hard. Growth is painful. But as you do that, you are able to show up in a more significant way. You can charge more, your clients will spend more. And there is still a lot of power in the generalist. I’m not saying like niching down doesn’t mean

John Jantsch (16:07.275)

Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (16:33.834)

You have to choose an industry. You can choose a region. You can tre choose an attitude. You can choose strategy. But then you do have something to hang your hat on. I think people get caught up in niching down means I have to work with dentists all the time. That I I I don’t believe that’s true at all. But it does mean that you have to have focus and you can’t be all over the place. The the general’s position will erode. and even those that are very successful, I think they’ll find out that like there there is

John Jantsch (16:40.962)

Right.

John Jantsch (16:47.275)

Yeah, yep, yep, yep. Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:54.625)

Yep. Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (17:02.612)

there is some commonality between who they’re getting business with, whether it’s like the size of the in the SMB, whether it’s the region, whether it’s the tactical approaches, there is typically a common thread in there that has allowed them to be successful that they’re maybe just not focusing on.

John Jantsch (17:07.33)

yeah.

John Jantsch (17:13.644)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:19.369)

Yeah, I mean we’ve done that before with clients, you know, make it well let’s show me, you know, show me your thousand clients and we whittle it down and like eighty percent of their business is coming from this twenty percent band. you know, happens all the time.

Brian Gerstner (17:30.506)

What? Yeah. You just don’t see it ’cause you’re so in it a lot of times.

John Jantsch (17:35.147)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we’ve talked about the the the the confident differentiators and and maybe the the outliers, the the opportunity seekers. Who what does the data show about these people that are like where do we go? I just feel pressure. I don’t know what direction to go.

Brian Gerstner (17:54.059)

Right. i it’s a hard place to be because obviously and I think when we look in that, like sixteen percent of that segment was very open about just like, you know, closing it down and moving on. a lot of it is because you know, to be in this industry you have to have like some some s significant moxie to show up every day. Like someone’s moving your cheese every day, every hour. And you know, for a lot of people that that’s why this industry is so exciting too. But

John Jantsch (18:05.899)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (18:13.719)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:22.711)

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Gerstner (18:24.714)

This is, you know, where we’ve been used to like, you know, weathering the storm, whether it’s you know, the pandemic or the two thousand eight housing or you know, just the politics that are running through. this is not a storm. This is a new climate. So for those that have weathered many, many storms, I know there there are some people who are just like, you know, like I’m tired. ’cause it does there’s there’s a lot of investment.

John Jantsch (18:42.156)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:50.133)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Brian Gerstner (18:54.622)

I I will have to say though, John, like, you know, as I’ve been talking to people, even like a year, year and a half ago, the conversation was a lot about are we relevant? Like with AI coming, who’s gonna need us? What are we gonna do? I will tell you just in the course of one year, the conversation has changed dramatically. We are relevant. I will tell you that right now. And so, you know, for all those folks, it’s like, you know, stick around, you know, follow the data, talk to peers, you know, you’ll

John Jantsch (19:03.819)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:11.917)

Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Gerstner (19:23.878)

And I I do think that you know once again we we just need to become acclimated. It is a new climate, you know. As we start to learn more and we start to get more comfortable, things get cleared, there’s less uncertainty than there was before. And for those folks, you know, the statistics just show that it’s a big change and it’s a difficult change. And but

John Jantsch (19:32.993)

Yeah, yeah.

Brian Gerstner (19:49.738)

There’s still probably more opportunity than ever before if you can take the time to to see it.

John Jantsch (19:56.556)

Yeah. that that’s absolutely the message I’ve been trying to to give to folks as well, because I’ve I’m feeling it. the demand hasn’t slowed down at all. It’s just they’re asking different questions. exactly. Yeah, yeah. Well Brett

Brian Gerstner (20:07.146)

They really are. Yeah. And the the pressure you’re putting on your own team are very different. You know, it is you have to retrain your entire team a lot of times.

John Jantsch (20:13.484)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (20:17.183)

Yeah, you know that’s a I don’t want to go down too much of a rabbit hole here ’cause this could be a whole nother show. in that I think that’s one of the s that’s one of the challenges that a lot of agencies are are facing is the people that they attracted and hired and trained are are probably not as relevant for the work that needs to be done now. In a lot of cases, yeah.

Brian Gerstner (20:31.914)

Okay.

Brian Gerstner (20:36.086)

Right. Yeah, and one last statistic, but like even in this, I don’t have the exact numbers, but even though there’s been a tremendous amount of attrition, when we talk to agencies, hiring has become significantly harder. So think about that. There’s been a lot of attrition, the market is full of more people, but yet it’s even more difficult to hire.

John Jantsch (20:50.177)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (21:01.363)

Yeah, and I I told you we could go down a whole rabbit hole here. What we’ve experienced is that to be successful, you’re gonna have to hire you’re gonna have to hire a different you’re not gonna hire a doer. You’re gonna have to hire a strategic thinker who can actually become a leader in your organization because I think the doers, you know, we can outsource, right, Brian?

Brian Gerstner (21:05.137)

Okay. Well,

Brian Gerstner (21:23.924)

Yeah, I mean, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:28.173)

Exactly. So so I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you’d invite people to to get the research? First off, I know you have that hosted and and then obviously find out more about white label IQ.

Brian Gerstner (21:41.771)

Yep. So absolutely go to agencycore.org. everything is completely ungated. You can download all the data, all the visualizations, all the studies, executive studies. It’s all there for everybody. No gating, no emails required. But you know, sign up and we’ll keep you informed. for us, you know, whitelik.com, absolutely. Also, Brian Gershner, look me up on LinkedIn, I’m pretty active.

John Jantsch (22:07.469)

Awesome. Well again, I appreciate you stopping by. Maybe we’ll run into you one of these days just up the highway there.

Brian Gerstner (22:12.692)

Right. Appreciate it, John.