MKJ (00:00.888)

Hey, hey, CEO, Mischief Makers, MKJ here, and my incredible guest, Ashley Gross. Ashley, you ready to rock about strategy and tactics? My favorite, right? This is where the rubber meets the road. This is where, all right, what do we do? We’ve talked about all this great stuff, Mary, know, esoteric, yeah, mindset, blah, blah, blah. Now, what do I do? So let’s talk about what you do. You have helped so many people with AI. What…

Ashley Gross (00:10.33)

I’m ready.

MKJ (00:29.718)

If you can talk about a strategy, let’s say someone’s a small business owner and they’re looking at this whole AI landscape and they’re like, what the flip do I do? Jasper, what? Chat GPT? I mean, yeah, I can ask it a question. can write me something, but half the time it’s not right. What do I do? So first off for a small business owner, give me a strategy that they can think about, and then let’s dive into the tactics and the actual things they can do to use this to better their life.

Ashley Gross (00:56.337)

Yep. OK, so here’s the strategy. It’s very simple. Find the problem. Find the burning problem that you are experiencing this quarter. And not you, the business. What is the business’s main problem this quarter that you need to solve for? That is where I start my strategy off. Technology is only as good as its purpose and how good it was built. If you don’t know the problem, then you’re just kind of throwing AI in the shiny sticker effect on everything and hoping something sticks. There’s no strategy. Start with the problem, always.

MKJ (01:27.096)

Got it. So let’s say I’m in a small business and I’m looking at what I think the problem might be is I need more leads. So how, let’s die. Give me some problems and your diagnosis and the actual tactics people can use.

Ashley Gross (01:46.011)

Yep, so here are three business problems that every single organization I’ve ever worked for has, right? Lack of clean data without relying on third party tools, lack of insight into the customer journey, and then slow sales cycles, right? So those are the three problems I like to focus on because they’re painful and normally everyone is aware of them. Now they might not know that that’s the problem, but they’re feeling some of the after effects of one of those three problems.

Those are the three areas I like to start with. Now, my answer for once you find that problem and you diagnose it, where do you start? There’s already someone in your organization that is excited to take on AI. Give this to an employee that is in the trenches, they are a practitioner, they are doing this work. Because if you are a founder or a senior executive, the further up the chain you move, the less insight you have into the trenches.

And really, this is where AI implementation takes effect. So you need someone that is in the trenches doing work every single day. And they know the workflow. That’s the important part, because you can’t have human in the loop if you don’t know what that workflow looks like. So I would say look for the employees. It can be something so simple, such as putting a Slack message out and saying, does anyone want to form an internal task force, an AI task force? Call it whatever you want. And then in that call,

find the employees that are excited and they’re raising their hands and have them align with the founder. This is exactly what I did. I’ll just, I’ll give you the copy and paste playbook I had. I went to the founder and I said, what do you think the business’s main problem is? He gave me an answer. said, great, hold onto that and do me a favor. Don’t tell anyone else what you think it is. Then I brought in all the senior executives and the founder. And I specifically told the founder, don’t give the executives any pointers, right? So just the C -suite members and the founder and myself were in this call and I said, hey everyone.

We want to talk about what the business’s main problem is. And we’re going to go around and everyone’s going to tell me what they think it is. Here’s why I did this. If you take the senior executives and you put them in front of the founders, they become almost childlike. Where they have an open mind, they’re very vulnerable. They don’t want to have the wrong answer. They don’t want to look dumb. And that has to go immediately in order for you to feel safe to experiment. You’ve got to get rid of that mindset. So I purposely make them uncomfortable so that they’re willing to have an open mind.

Ashley Gross (04:03.749)

And so eventually someone’s brave enough and it starts this domino effect of everyone starts giving ideas. And one of two things happens. So one, the founder actually gets to hear from his senior staff what they think the problem is in a way that they’re not gonna be penalized for what they have to say. So it’s helping the founder, but it’s also helping the employees, because most of the time what the founder says is the issue is not what the senior executives are saying, which makes sense, because as you go further down the food chain, you’ll actually know what the problems are from those people.

MKJ (04:26.894)

Okay.

Ashley Gross (04:33.637)

So everybody agrees on what the problem is. Let’s just say it’s lack of clean data. So we’re like, OK, great. When we’ve had this issue before, senior executives, what have we done? And then marketing and sales, product, everybody goes around and they talk about, well, when we had this issue with our CRM and we weren’t getting good leads, here’s what we tried before. Here’s the metrics we used to test this. Here’s the timeline that we used to test this. This is the AI ROI, right? If we don’t.

pick the use cases where we know metrics and we know pre -AI ROI, we’re not going to be able to actually get good figures post -AI. Then after that call -ins, we’ve diagnosed the use cases that immediately are solutions to the problem. And we’ve only picked use cases to test AI with that we have metrics pre -AI for, and we’ve applied a timeline.

MKJ (05:04.172)

Yes.

Right.

Ashley Gross (05:20.967)

So then these executives go back to their teams and they say, OK, here are the use cases we picked. And usually there’s like 10 per department, right? We have not narrowed this down yet. In that call with the department, so you have marketing having their separate call, product sales, everyone, then the leaders of those departments are saying, here’s the list. Out of this list, what do you guys hate doing? What do you hate doing out of this list? What this does is, one, you’re figuring out what that specific use case is.

But two, you’re not threatening anyone’s job security. Because if you’re picking a use case and you’re allowing them to help you pick the use case, they’re advocating for themselves. They’re giving you insight that you probably didn’t have as a senior executive. And you’re automating tasks for them that they hate doing. So of course they’re going to be more willing and intrinsically motivated to try this out. Once you have that use case, apply a timeline, tell them the metrics, have bi -weekly 30 -minute calls.

where you bring every department together and say, hey, as far as this use case goes, what are we seeing? What barriers did we run into? What roadblocks are there? And then that’s how you actually get pilot projects off the ground. But you have to do it in that order. And you’ll notice like 90 % of that was communication. That’s really it, is internally aligning, communicating expectations, making sure those expectations are realistic, and then hitting the ground running and experimenting.

MKJ (06:29.281)

Yeah.

MKJ (06:37.714)

my goodness yes and look at that i love how you just logically lay it out i know we talked off mike about you the whole imposter syndrome very briefly but that’s where so many people get stuck it really is that fear but you you’ve taken that scenario and just logically broken it down into into its component steps.

Ashley Gross (07:00.22)

Yes.

MKJ (07:00.258)

So now take that, that’s beautiful. All right, anyone listening, if you are in an enterprise or a small business that has a team, a large enough team that you can apply that, run with it, go join this community, find more information, you will be the savior of the company if you do this. You will be. So now let’s take that and translate it into, let’s say, an entrepreneur with a small team. They don’t have, you know, these components, C -suites and all the employees.

Ashley Gross (07:17.222)

You will.

MKJ (07:27.618)

but they do have maybe a small organization where they have consultants or they have maybe a few team members and they use consultants, how can they translate that idea that you just laid out into more of an entrepreneur, real small, small business?

Ashley Gross (07:43.025)

So when I did my research, I found three reasons why businesses fail to start or three reasons why businesses fail to last longer than five years. We’ve all seen that really ugly chart where it’s like, business’s success levels and then after like year five to seven, it’s like, boop, like huge drop off. Those three problems are a bad business plan, lack of resources and knowledge, right? Or lack of finances. Those three problems seem very silly to me because if you know that those are the three reasons,

MKJ (07:56.898)

Yeah, go on.

Ashley Gross (08:12.859)

there shouldn’t really be, like you shouldn’t be failing for those three reasons. And so for small businesses, I always kind of put an emphasis on the founders and the board of directors if you have any. Everyone’s bad at something. So humble yourself. What are you good at? If you look at those three reasons of failing, what is the one reason that concerns you the most? That’s probably where you need to set aside some time to dig in deeper. So.

You know, when I was starting this business and I knew it was going to be formed around a community, I had never started a business around a community before. So was like, I need to go do some research on communities so that I don’t have a bad business plan. That was my first step was really analyzing what my skillset was and identifying what my fear was. Because when you are afraid of failing, that’s when you’re going to make mistakes. Everyone’s going to fail. And so knowing that uncomfortability and knowing that that was the skill set I needed, I looked at AI tools that would help me

form the community and maintain the community so that I didn’t have to do it all on my own, because I had never done that before, right? And it’s not realistic for me to be the moderator, to be the teacher, to be the leader, to be all of these things. And so I looked at the AI tools that would help me do those things, and I implemented them so that I can’t fail for that reason now. So if we look at lack of financing, well, I’m bootstrapping. So I’m good there, right? And then if we look at lack of a bad business plan, I was like, OK.

MKJ (09:27.864)

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (09:34.075)

Well, previously when I built my business, I would just kind of put an MVP together, take it to market, just do the dang thing, if you will. And this time I was like, well, what would an AI enabled employer do? They would figure out how much they need to make right from day one so that if you’re bootstrapping, you don’t have to have this break even period. You don’t have to be throwing a dart into a cloud and hoping it sticks on the dartboard. You have a number.

MKJ (09:42.882)

You

Ashley Gross (09:59.921)

that you need to hit. And so then you define the pricing for the community and the pricing for your products around that financial projection. So you’re not guessing anymore. And so I implemented tools like Wave, which is exactly that. It’s a financing automation tool that is technically an AI tool where I knew that a bad business plan was something that I didn’t want to have happen. So I automated all my financing so that I had a firm budget. I had financial projections. I had the daily updates for them.

You know, it’s just really taking your skills, what are you not good at, use AI to figure out what you’re not good at and fill those gaps. And then once you have those gaps solidified, enhance what you’re already good at because you’re probably going to go a lot further as far as impact goes.

MKJ (10:44.396)

Wow, that is amazing. I love that because that’s so many people think AI is just generative AI because that’s what we’ve seen with chat GPT even perplexity. I mean, I use perplexity almost exclusively because I use it for research and I’m not going to use generative AI for writing. I’m just not, I’m not comfortable with that. I have a very unique perspective and persona and communication style.

and I just haven’t been able to teach AI to do that for me. And it feels kind of weird to do that because I really, then I’m not human, then I’m not actually building relationships. I’m using AI to do that for me. I just don’t want to go there right now. Who knows if I’ll do it in the future, but right now that’s not it. So AI to use different types of AI, I also use it in another tool that I use called Zero Work where I’m actually building automations for the company for doing things that would take

Ashley Gross (11:15.292)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (11:23.569)

Right.

MKJ (11:39.416)

They’re repetitive tasks and I don’t want to have to do these repetitive tasks and I don’t want to have to hire a human to do the repetitive tasks. I can build a robot to do it for me. So what final words, what final advice would you give someone who’s looking at using AI, but they’re still a little bit scared, but they’re feeling a little more emboldened with your process that you’ve laid out? Is there any last words you’d like to give them?

Ashley Gross (12:05.361)

Yeah, I think you hit it on the head, right? Not once have I said I’m using AI to write for me or replace me. When people are using generative AI to write for them and be their voice, you can tell. It’s so obvious.

I’m really over the, you don’t use AI, you’re going to get left behind. You won’t. But what will happen is we live in an instant gratification world, right? Consumerism is instant gratification. You can click a button, have something at your door within 24 hours. For better or for worse, that’s the world we live in. So when you’re looking at your business, you physically might not get left behind if you’re not using AI. But your business and the competitive landscape will, because your competitors are everywhere all at the same time. And it’s only possible because of the relatability.

and personalization that comes with using AI tools. So instead of using it to replace you, look at it as filling in the gaps. What do you need to figure out? What needs to move faster for you to push the needle? That’s where you have AI come in. But make sure that that skill set is already good so that when AI comes in, it’s enhancing the good and not enhancing the bad. That would be my final words.

MKJ (00:01.016)

My goodness. CEO Mischief Makers, welcome back to the conversation with Ashley Gross. Ashley, I you ended that last conversation on such a brilliant statement that we’re going to dive right into that. But first off, you’re ready to dive into impact and innovation? Yeah. So just for anyone listening, if this is your first time listening to this podcast, this segment of the conversation impact is self -explanatory. Who are you impacting? Innovation typically isn’t.

Ashley Gross (00:14.897)

I’m ready.

MKJ (00:28.414)

And when we talk about innovation here we talk about we’re not talking about the Steve jobs in the Elon Musk’s of the world although they’re brilliant and wonderful and have an amazing job to do we all innovate every single day and the way we do that is we take our previous experience and the things that we’ve learned and our intuition and the things that excite us and our mission in life if we have such a thing we’re lucky enough to have such a thing and we use that to innovate what we’re currently facing and so.

Ashley, you ended our last conversation talking about the fact that you don’t strive to be an expert because you want to constantly learn and grow and you don’t want to just settle on the fact that, I’ve learned this and I’m done because that’s like death to me, right? You might as well just lay down. You’re done. No, you’re not. There’s many more things. So take us a little further in that. In your previous experience and your professional experience, how has your how have your decisions

Ashley Gross (01:10.96)

Yes.

MKJ (01:25.858)

and the things you pursue been impacted by the fact that you don’t want to be considered an expert, you want to actually learn and grow constantly. So kind of take me through that. What have you done?

Ashley Gross (01:35.825)

Yeah. OK, so I can actually take you way back. And I won’t stay at this age. But when I was younger, my mom used to take me and my three other siblings to Myrtle Beach every single year for like 10 years. Like we had the same routine, same week vacation, yada, yada, yada. And every single time we went, I don’t know if you did this or if it was just like, I hope they still do this. But when you go to those stores and you’re getting something like a token to remember the vacation, hermit crabs were like,

the bee’s knees, okay? So every year for 10 years, we would get hermit crabs. And if you know anything about hermit crabs, they grow out of their shells. So when you purchase them, you have to get multiple shells as they get bigger. And so as a kid, I know this sounds so funny, but I just thought like, how cool is that? Like you get to have this living being and you get to pick out its different shells so that as it grows, it like moves into a different shell. It like sheds itself, right? And becomes like bigger and different. And I always thought that was really, really cool.

And so for me, I don’t know. I mean, it wasn’t just that experience. I think it was also being raised by a single mom and just seeing her have these many different hats and normalizing that and not having to stay in one bubble. But I think just in my career, I really, really wanted to pursue biology in college. And I was terrible. I was so bad at statistics. Like, I literally failed statistics. I’m not kidding. Like, it was an actual F on there to the point that my mom was like,

Can we pay someone to pass this for you? And I was like, mom, that’s illegal. You go to jail for that. So let’s just keep that thought in our heads and not say that again. But I wasn’t good at math, but I really loved biology. And so I was like, OK, what else can I do where there’s a formula, but I get to experiment, and I get to test hypotheses? And so naturally, marketing came up, because that’s really what marketing is. It’s half creative, and it’s science and math.

So I ended up finding someone who worked for Google. And I just begged and pleaded. And I was like, hey, I’ll be the coffee girl. I’ll be whatever you want me to be. But can I just shadow you for a little while? And so when I was in college, 18, I think 19 years old, I started going with my friend to her workplace. I didn’t have an official badge or anything. I just started showing up and bringing people coffee, networking. In between my college classes, I was just hanging out at Google.

MKJ (04:00.408)

So anyway, who can say that? Okay, listen to this. Who can say that, you know, I was going to college and kind of in between classes, I just hung out at Google. Okay, great. I just gotta say, okay, wow.

Ashley Gross (04:01.914)

Yeah

Ashley Gross (04:12.909)

It was one of those weird situations where was like someone in my network though, she was a couple years older than me. And I had no desire to like do things that people my age were doing because it just didn’t seem appealing to me. I was like, I want to make money. Like I don’t like I need to make money immediately. And so I started shadowing her and following her around and that led to an internship which led to an apprenticeship. so

MKJ (04:23.126)

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (04:35.375)

You know, my career started off in corporations. And corporations are great. Like, I definitely recommend if you’re interested to go down that path. But my issue was they teach you how to do one thing really, really well. And for me, that was a limitation that I didn’t want to accept. So I started in product marketing. Then I went to JP Morgan for Demand Generation. And again, like, I was taught how to do one thing. But for me, I needed to know what

I was doing and how it impacted the next department and the next department so that I could be better at my job. I’ve always been like a full picture person. I don’t like to obsess over the little details. I like to zoom out. And so I was like, all right, I’m not learning as much as I need to be. So I went from corporations to startup work. So I went from being one of hundreds to one of like 10. And I was all of marketing. And I loved it. Like I embraced the chaos. I did it for like seven years.

And it was just like such a good, I mean, I learned way more in those seven years that I’ve ever learned in my life, just because I had to, you had to figure it out and putting myself in that vulnerable position where like, I knew I was capable. I knew I could do it. but like just having to be all and do all really helped me to know not only like how to market or how to write good copy, but like how writing the good copy affects the product and how the product affects the launch and this life cycle.

So I really think that that’s kind of been my life motto is like when I don’t like my shell anymore, I’m okay to move up. Even if it feels uncomfortable, I’m like, it’s time. And it comes in different forms. I wish somebody would have taught me this when I was younger, because I always grew up with this mentality of like, you should love what you do. And that is such a BS. Like you’re never gonna love everything that you do. It’s just not realistic. What I wish I would have been told is,

MKJ (06:20.817)

I know.

Ashley Gross (06:26.863)

Figure out what tasks you love doing and how much of those tasks you need to do to feel fulfilled on a weekly basis. That’s the information I wish I would have known. Because for me, that looks really, different, right? And so it was important for me to learn that about myself in order to feel vulnerable enough to make those moves. And by the way, if anyone’s listening and they’re worried about making a move, because I feel like the longer we stay in a role, the more comfortable we get and the harder it is to leave,

MKJ (06:36.771)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (06:55.505)

I just want to validate with some numbers. I intentionally would leave jobs every 2 and 1 to 3 years for more opportunities. Every single time I left, it was for a $50 ,000 raise. Every single time. That was something in the back of my head, again, like strategy, where I was like, if I’m going to do this, it needs to make sense monetarily and also experience wise. If you’re not earning or learning, it’s time to go.

MKJ (07:20.146)

my goodness so many things unpack there but let me let me just ask everyone listening that is a perfect example of innovation because everything from way back to the beginning of what you saw with your mom having to wear many different hats and the hermit crabs and the ability when you’re in a corporate that’s great and amazing opportunities but you had to be pigeonholed into one thing and and wearing that one hat it gets way too tight.

it gets uncomfortable, we need to switch hats. That’s just your personality and what you saw growing up that felt very comfortable. So you look now, now let’s transition that to what you’re doing now and how that sets you up perfectly to innovate AI use for enterprise and small businesses, both because you can wear the employee hat,

Ashley Gross (07:57.776)

Yes.

MKJ (08:14.594)

You can wear the board member hat. You can wear the senior executive hat. And you can now wear, because you’ve started your own business, the small business hat and the entrepreneur hat. And that right there is how you’re innovating your space. You’re bringing that previous experience and the way you look at the world to bear fruit for AI use in business. What a flip and amazing thing. So how are you doing that? What are you doing now?

Ashley Gross (08:22.779)

Mm -hmm. Yeah.

MKJ (08:42.7)

And how did you take that information and now start prompt community? Because that’s where you are now. But you’ve got a couple of it. You’ve got gettheprompt .com. You’ve got the prompt community. What’s the actual business and what do you do?

Ashley Gross (08:55.525)

Great questions. OK, so we just rebranded to you, which I’m really excited about. So we are now the AIWorkforceAlliance .com. And it encapsulates it a lot better, because from a marketing perspective, I should have known this, but prompting can also be a barrier, which I found to be. Because if you’re getting into AI, you don’t necessarily know about prompt engineering. And so it was holding people back from understanding what the mission was, which was the whole reason for a rebrand, which I think is so funny, because.

As a founder and a business owner now, if I don’t like something, I change it. And that’s kind of innovation. The backbone of innovation is curiosity. If you just stay curious and you don’t force yourself to have these black and white ideas, and you stay in this gray area and just kind of get comfortable knowing that maybe there’s not a right or wrong answer, and maybe it’s just flowing and ebbing in a certain way, and that’s OK, and it’s supposed to change, then it works really well. And so to answer your question,

I think really what people need to understand is if you think about it, your brain and how you think is just a subset of your experience. And so if you have never experienced AI and disruption in careers and taking on new technology, that’s OK. But you’re probably afraid. And that’s OK as well. But diagnosing that as lack of experience equals fear.

is the only thing that you need to accept, right? You’re afraid because you’ve never done it. And that’s totally fine. In order to get good at something, you just practice it over and over again. So all of my experiences leading up to this were, OK, if I wanted to start over in my career again, I would have to start an entry -level job and work my way up. And that sucks. And I don’t want to do that. And I don’t want everyone else to have to do that as well. I don’t know anybody that went to college and is using the career, like the certification that they got in college.

for their career now. I don’t know one person that has. And that’s totally normal. But my idea was, all right, let’s figure out a way to make this digestible so that regardless of what people want to do or where they’re coming from, they can look at AI as this tool that can amplify and enhance their values and their work. And so my work at AI Workforce Alliance is really just based on everyone comes into this community, they all have domain expertise, and it’s like, what do you want to do?

Ashley Gross (11:16.431)

And the community decides what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. So some of the courses are interactive. Some of them are prerecorded. I bring in other experts, right? I say experts loosely, but other instructors. And we all just have this hive mind approach of like, okay, I know AI and I know how to make it work for you, but I don’t know your domain expertise. And that’s where the community comes in. And so as I’m teaching them AI, they’re like, hey, I have HVAC experience and I can use this to automate this.

And it’s just this really cool concept whenever you have a community centric business where you’re going to have different opinions and perspectives come in and you’re all going to figure it out together. There’s not one thing that everyone has in common other than the fact that we are not going to be afraid of AI. We’re going to embrace and figure out how the heck to make this work for us. So what we do is we just go through every single week tutorials on how to use, you know, perplexity to increase your SEO without paying any money.

how to create a product framework, right? Using Jasper AI, just all of these little things where you see it in a startup, you have to be scrappy and you have to be fast to innovate and ideate. That’s this community is you come in in 30 minutes, we’re going to have something at the end of that 30 minutes and it’s going to be really cool and we’re going to iterate as we go, but we’re going to do it safely and there’s going to be guardrails and there’s going to be an intention in a framework. And that’s really it. It’s not anything more confusing.

I would say the other really cool part is just aligning with the employers. Like there’s a channel directly for employers so that if they don’t know how to figure this stuff out, they don’t have to worry about going to their board and feeling weird that they don’t know what they’re doing. They can just go into this channel with other employers that are figuring it out as well and share experiences. Because if you don’t know what you want, sometimes it helps knowing what you do want and vice versa. So just going in there and having this vulnerable open conversation with other employers of this is what I’m seeing, what are you seeing, how are you navigating this?

That’s a lot of AI. It’s a lot of communication and just questioning and feeling safe too, but people don’t feel safe too in their workforce. They need to leave the workforce to feel safe to have these conversations.

MKJ (13:11.522)

Yeah.

MKJ (13:16.812)

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, because they’re supposed to be a domain expert in that in that workforce. And if they’re not that they feel vulnerable, that they might somebody else might take advantage of that. The company might not like that. Yeah, no, I get it. And I agree with you. Innovation really has to come from a place of curiosity. And the other thing that Peter Lasoske, I work with him in in another company. And we what he always says, he’s the CEO of that company. And he always says, what else is possible?

Ashley Gross (13:24.12)

Exactly.

Ashley Gross (13:27.961)

Exactly.

Yes.

Ashley Gross (13:49.136)

Yes.

MKJ (13:49.474)

So it’s sense of curiosity, but then asking, OK, here’s my framework. What else is possible? And that’s basically what you did way in the beginning. You said, what else is possible for me to be able to spend more time with my son and less time at work? What else is possible? That’s it. And if you start asking those kinds of questions, you can innovate anything. You can change anything within your power. Wow. So how are you looking at this world of AI?

Ashley Gross (13:58.0)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (14:02.309)

Yes.

MKJ (14:19.114)

and in through through this innovation lens, what are you finding as what else is possible?

Ashley Gross (14:26.705)

Great question. I love this question so much. So when I was looking at this community, I was thinking, OK, I am not the end all be all. I’m not this powerful force. I’m just an average person that said, I’m going to figure this out. So when I built the community, I thought, OK, there’s going to be a period of time where I have to teach all these courses because it’s not that widely known yet. We need to share knowledge. We need to get everyone on board and benchmark them. We opened on May 1. Now the students that have been with me since May 1,

are teaching these courses because they come in not knowing anything, they get up to speed, they figure out how to apply AI to their specific domains, and then they become teachers. Because what you’re not seeing on the market is people being able to get certified and then turn around and practice teaching in a safe environment and get feedback and then go try to get the promotion or the AI job role, right? We’re missing the element though of dialogue, of practice, and we’re not setting people up.

to succeed, we’re setting them up to fail because 90 % of AI implementation is internally aligning your stakeholders, being okay not knowing the right answer or maybe there isn’t a right answer and feeling safe enough to fail because not every pilot project is gonna make it off the ground. If you are so focused on succeeding that you’re not paying attention and experimenting, it’s not gonna last. These pilot projects are failing for a reason because they don’t have executive buy -in.

and employees and employers are not aligning on what’s actually possible. So as far as how I’m innovating, I’m literally turning the students into teachers so that they’re practicing in the same environment that they learn from. They still feel safe. They’re still making connections and friends. It runs without me. I’m not supposed to be the main focus. And it’s not. It’s not about me at all. It’s about them. And internally, now they’re getting certified, and they’re going into these rules and actually understanding what’s

what’s possible and what’s intentionally supposed to be gray and ambiguous and figuring it out before the market has even kept up with it. know, Gartner just put out a report lately, I think it was last week or the week before, and it said 30 % of enterprises are going to have to hire a chief AI officer by 2025. That number is going to change drastically. I’m not going to wait for them to figure it out and change it. I’m going to go ahead and prepare my students on how to go from being a generalist chief AI officer

Ashley Gross (16:48.825)

and learning AI to segmenting it in their verticals and with their domain expertise that they’re either coming from or they want to go into. So that by the time the market catches up, these people are already ready to go. And they’re not only ready to go, but they know how to teach, they know how to communicate, they know how to align. They have had time to focus on the skill sets that need to be enhanced, and they’re enhancing them and then applying AI to them.

I’m not waiting on the world to change, because honestly, that’s silly. I’m setting people up for success beforehand so that they can actually enjoy this, because they had, just like I did, they raised their hand at the opportunity to learn. They should be rewarded. That’s all it takes to be curious and innovate.

MKJ (00:01.292)

Hey, hey, CEO Mischief Makers, welcome to the conversation with someone I am just like jumping out of my skin to be able to talk to and introduce you to if you don’t know her already, Ashley Gross gets to join me on the conversation today. Hey Ashley, you ready to rock?

Ashley Gross (00:15.938)

I am.

MKJ (00:17.45)

Okay. All right. So everybody just a little bit of a background on how I met Ashley. And I’m telling you these conversations, these relationships can develop if you align with someone and you’re just unique and you and genuine, you have no idea where things can go. So Ashley and I met in Mark Schafer’s community. She was doing a presentation to Mark Schafer’s community of which I am a member.

And it was like, my gosh, I have to talk to this person. So we connected and we’ve had a conversation and it’s like, we’ve got to talk on the podcast. So thank you for joining me. I’m so happy we’re here together. let’s dive into mindset. That’s what this is about. So you have such a unique trajectory in what you’ve done over the last, four years. what in the world, first off, tell people who you are and what you do.

And then secondly, start off with this whole mindset shift that you had that got you into doing what you’re doing right now. So I know that’s a complicated question, but start off with letting them know who you are.

Ashley Gross (01:18.167)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (01:21.834)

No, I love this question. Okay, so let me go back a couple of years. So obviously my name is Ashley Gross. Before I was all these wonderful things that I’m about to spout off, I was a 10 -year marketer. And in 2020, I found out I was expecting my son. And I was really, really excited for this. I didn’t know much about kids, obviously, because this is our first, but I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of time on my hands. And I’m a firm believer that the…

future of working is going to be based on outcome and not based on hourly. So instead of using your time and getting charged per time, you’re going to get charged per outcome. So it was kind of like this moment for me of clarity where I was like, gosh, I’m about to have way less time on my hands, and I need to figure out how to still complete 40 hours worth of work in 15 hours, right? Because I a recession -proofed my job, and I knew I was going to be a mom. And so I started dabbling around in Jasper AI.

And I really used it to streamline everything. Instead of just working for the sake of working, I built a strategy, right? Like why am I creating content? What am I doing? And I trickled it down. And long story short, I developed so many use cases, but I was able to condense my work week from 40 hours to 15. And then flash forward to 2022. And because I was using AI for everything and had an AI first approach, I garnered the attention of the CMO. And she was like, hey, listen, you’re already known as the AI girl internally.

is there any way that you kind of want to roll out AI? We don’t know what we’re doing, but we want to figure this out. And I was like, yeah, absolutely. Because coming from a marketing background, my trajectory originally was just CMO. I feel like that’s how a lot of marketers are. It’s like the end goal is CMO. And so with this realization of, my gosh, AI is wild and disruptive and chaotic, I was also like, this is a good visibility moment for me to raise my hand.

And instead of waiting another five to seven years to work my way up to CMO, why don’t I just raise my hand and see where this goes? Because maybe I don’t want to be a CMO. Maybe I want to change verticals or something. And so I raised my hand. And I did this on top of my marketing job for a year and a half. And long story short, we developed 25 use cases, over 25 use cases. And they are all so cool. And I would love to nerd out over them. But.

Ashley Gross (03:33.45)

I know that the real measurement of success was we overachieved our pipeline target of 90 million and hit 115 million three months after implementing AI. So talk about like a bananas experience. I went from being an individual user and contributor to training over a hundred people on how to use AI effectively and productively. And I was able to measure and tie that impact into revenue, which is like kind of crazy, right? All pre -taught GPT.

And having that experience, was like, holy crap, like this is wild. This is really going to change lives. And immediately I was like, know, enterprises, just the bigger a business gets, the slower they are to innovate because there’s more people. And so my first thought was, this needs to be in the hands of small business owners, solopreneurs, smaller companies in general, because they can just rapidly innovate faster anyways. So AI is only going to enhance every single thing that they’re doing. So I went on to create my own company.

MKJ (04:26.402)

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (04:28.85)

and founded a community where we don’t just educate and upscale employees, we upscale employers so that we can actually align the workforce and see real progress happen with AI. And it’s so cool and it’s the wildest experience ever and I’m just so grateful for everything. But it really just started with me saying yes and raising my hand and not knowing what the heck I was doing, but being determined that I was gonna figure it out.

MKJ (04:52.524)

my gosh. it was you, kind of became a, from what I hear you saying, you kind of became a accidental AI user because you looked around and realized, okay, I’ve got this job. I still need to make the same amount of money, but I also have the son and I’ve still got to want to be a mom. So I’ve got to figure out a way to do both of those things and spend less time in my job, but still do the same job and be able to spend more time as a mom. So it’s kind of like an accent. You looked around for tools that would allow you to do that.

Ashley Gross (04:59.964)

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (05:15.443)

Yes.

exactly.

MKJ (05:21.55)

that will enable you to do that? What made you do that? Because most other people, we all have become, I’ve become a mom, I did it differently from what you did, but it was the same concept, the same process, the same thought process. But most of us either make the choice, the decision. I’m just gonna either quit my job or go down to part -time, or I’m gonna put my kid in daycare and just leave it at that and stay full -time 40 hours, or any combination of those two.

Ashley Gross (05:22.003)

Yes.

MKJ (05:49.452)

We don’t usually look around, very few people look around and go, what tools do I have at my disposal to be able to do both effectively, but spend less time over here? What the flip made you in your mindset decide I’m going to look for tools to do this?

Ashley Gross (06:05.994)

I think the mindset shift really happened back in 2020 when I realized I wasn’t getting a maternity leave. Talk about a naive first parent. I very much thought that the company I worked for, they loved me. They had actually just given me a bonus. And they had intentionally told me that I got the biggest bonus out of the whole entire company. And so I was like, this is going to be easy. I’m just going to say I’m pregnant. these things are going to happen. And again, looking back, I just kind of want to give that version of myself a hug because bless her heart, what if she didn’t know anything?

But when I had to go back to work two weeks after giving birth to my son, that was really the moment where I was like, no, we’re not doing this. This is not, it wasn’t, you I knew that I needed a plan and I knew I needed to be intentional and strategic. And so the moment that I found out I wasn’t gonna have a maternity leave, it was really like, okay, the problem is I need to figure out how to work 40 hours worth of work into 15 hours and still have a good outcome, right?

I knew the problem, and so finding tools that were built to solve problems around productivity, it was like, OK, we diagnosed this, we’re vetting these tools, now it’s experimentation. And so it’s really just a formula of, found this problem, what are the tools that are saying they can solve this? Are they safe to use? Do we know what they’re doing with our data? Let’s go experiment if all those things are a check mark.

MKJ (07:29.314)

Yeah, yeah, that and that I think it from what I hear you saying again, it kind of comes from the way you look at marketing and your marketing position is that very logical strategic way is a problem that’s out in the world. And we can do this from a marketing standpoint. These are our customers. This is the problem they have. Then here’s our solution. This is how that will solve it. And then now it’s a matter of being aware and testing the waters and getting as many people to be aware of it as possible. So you just took that same framework and applied it to your specific position.

Ashley Gross (07:59.379)

Exactly.

MKJ (07:59.67)

Wow. Yes. So now let’s go further. So yes, you said yes. And, and I’m telling you, mischief makers listening, when you’re given an opportunity like this, I mean, it’s so rare to begin with, to be given an opportunity like you, you had, why would you say no? Right? How could you, I, I had this situation when we were, we went to Europe for the first time, we went to Norway and, you know, they’re like, you’re from California. You have a Tesla. We’re like, no.

And they’re like, well, would you like to rent a Tesla? And I’m like, yes. And my husband’s over going, well, I don’t know. It’s kind like, dude, stop. No, we’re renting a Tesla. I don’t care what we have to do. If it’s only like another five bucks a day, are you kidding me? Why would we not? Right. So it’s that kind of situation. But this is way bigger. You had this opportunity from the CMO because you used it in your own situation without any expectations.

Ashley Gross (08:38.452)

You’re like, no.

MKJ (08:57.826)

from the company and first off I cannot believe I at least got six weeks in disability when I delivered my kids it’s down to two weeks now what the what.

Ashley Gross (09:05.333)

Yeah. And it wasn’t even two weeks. I had to use my vacation time. So it was one of those weird, it was a weird rule. And I fully don’t understand it still. I just kind of like moved on. But it was one of those things where you had to work for the company for nine months before you announced you were pregnant in order to get the maternity. It was very, very strange. But yes, I went back to work two weeks after and I had to use my unpaid vacation hours to take off.

MKJ (09:32.554)

Okay, that’s nuts. I’m not even going to touch that. I’m not going to ask you what company that is. I’m just going to go move past that because that really pisses me off. But anyway, all right. So now you did this out of your own necessity with no, no expectation from the company at all, because it was on you to figure this out and you did it. And then how did you get the attention of the CMO? What, what happened in this process to go from, I’m doing this by myself in my own little world over here.

and then the CMO says, hey, roll it out. I mean, that doesn’t just happen the next day.

Ashley Gross (10:05.564)

No, it happened over the course of, think, probably seven months of me just sharing knowledge. I’m really, really big on once you have knowledge, not gatekeeping it. And so any time I had the chance to network, I would always incorporate AI into the conversation, because who doesn’t want to get rid of the monotonous work that they hate doing? Everybody has something about their job that they have to do that they hate doing. And so I almost looked at it as a networking liaison for me.

So whenever, I’m sure everyone to a certain degree feels like this, when you’re trying to network with senior executives, it can be really nerve wracking, especially when you’re remote, because you don’t know how their vibe is or how to, you don’t know anything intimately about them. And so anytime I was on a call, I would just intentionally say, hey, I saw that you’re preparing for that board meeting next week. Are you using any AI tools to streamline that? Because that’s a pain point that I knew that they had, and I knew like,

time wise, it takes hours. And I mean, you’ve worked for many companies. I’m sure you know the moment like there’s a board meeting scheduled, every single employee doesn’t matter who you are. They’re like, God, our executives are going to come to us and ask for a million things that day. So let’s just prepare to have our work done for that day so we can be on call for our executives, you know? So it’s really just finding those painful pain points that are just painful enough that they’re willing to be open and vulnerable to any suggestions for improvement.

MKJ (11:10.304)

Here we go.

MKJ (11:27.384)

Yeah, wow. And so you took the initiative to reach out and say, hey, are there any of these things that I could help you with? And then they were like, sure, that would be great. And then you basically educated them on how to do that. And obviously they got an immediate benefit, immediate ROI in the sense of their time less and their output higher. So then you just kept doing that for different executives or did you specifically just do it for your CMO?

Ashley Gross (11:35.305)

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Ashley Gross (11:50.388)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (11:56.244)

So I did it. I know I didn’t actually do anything for the CMO. She heard from a couple senior executives. So I wanted a promotion. And I knew I wanted a promotion. And so I was like, OK, who are some people that are not in marketing that can be my internal stakeholders? And so I was very intentional. So I went to the head of product. I went to the head of sales. I went to a couple members of the HR and people teams. I strategically picked a few from each department, though.

And I already knew what use case I wanted to pitch to them for AI, but I made it organically come up in conversation. So I would book time with them and I would say, hey, like I’m demoing this AI tool. Do you have any use cases where you really hate doing something? And then, you know, most of the time they would say the task that I already selected, because I did a little bit of research beforehand. But if they didn’t have any ideas, then I would say, perhaps. And I would like cherry pick the one I already thought. And they were like, of course, that’s a great idea. So it’s really just like how you intentionally network.

but apply AI to that. It was really just a copy and paste formula that I used.

MKJ (13:00.182)

And so then once you were doing that with other senior executives then because the CMO was you know in that in that hierarchy did did he or she just start getting wind of it or did you did it was there an intention to trying to get the senior executives to go to bat for you I mean how did how did that go.

Ashley Gross (13:20.522)

Yeah, so on top of having intentional conversations with these other senior executives in other departments, I asked her if she would mentor me. And again, this was very strategic and intentional. And so I said, 15 minutes every other week, I will have the outline ready to go and the questions. And so I aligned this with our all hands calls. So every time her and I had a mentorship session, it was after an all hands call when we had a company update about priorities, what was going on. So I knew that I didn’t have to guess where her mindset was.

and what her priorities were because I had just heard it in a call. So I didn’t have to ask her a bunch of questions. She didn’t have to repeat herself. I did all of the work, right? And so she kind of really just said, listen, the board is coming to me and asking me to roll out AI under the realm of digital transformation because CMOs get stuck with these things all the time. And they’re really ambiguous as usual. And I was like, yeah, this is great. We don’t have any set expectations for this.

Let’s go at this with overall job satisfaction and let’s try to add more job satisfaction to every employee’s workflow because if the employees are happier, then they’re going to get better customer service, our brand excels. And so my mindset was I’m not going to tackle this from a aspect or perspective because a lot of people aren’t aware of how much time they’re spending. So my mindset was really let’s make everyone happier. And in the back of my mind, I was like, OK, if I make the employees happier,

MKJ (14:27.086)

Right. Right.

Ashley Gross (14:45.012)

from an executive and board level, they won’t have to lay people off. We ideally won’t have employee turnover. We’ll be able to upsell and cross -sell more. We’ll be generating more sales. So I kind of was doing these mental jumping jacks on front end Ashley, back end Ashley. And I knew back end Ashley was the board. But what I presented to the rest of the employees was job satisfaction. It was very intentional, though.

MKJ (15:08.494)

Yeah, that and so that when I talk about mindset, so many of the mindset shifts I’ve had have been accidental, have been where I did something and accidentally I got a result and I went, I can do this. This kind of a mindset, you are very intentional, you are very strategic. And it’s not just strategic, I completely do not get the vibe from you.

Ashley Gross (15:28.596)

Mm

MKJ (15:36.322)

that you have a hidden agenda and you want to make your pie bigger, your pie slice big. That’s not the intention. The intention is that this is a way the world can be better. And right now, my world, weren’t, I know, thinking about your own business or anything like that, right? This was just my intention is to get to CMO. And the way I make my world better is employees and employer and board make all of that better.

and talk to the person I’m talking to not because I’m trying to manipulate but because I know their position so when I’m talking to employees I’m going to come from the mindset of the employees when I’m talking to senior executives I’m going to come from mindset of senior executives and then they will then take it to the board. Unless you actually got the opportunity to talk to the board that’s it that’s a totally different thing did you. Wow.

Ashley Gross (16:04.51)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (16:20.714)

Exactly.

Ashley Gross (16:26.044)

I did. again, so I, it’s funny because when you listen to your gut, you know, you, and we talked about this before this podcast episode, but when you listen to your gut, your gut says yes, but then at a certain point you have to start saying no to things. And so one of my, the CMO was like, Hey, you know, here’s your learning and development budget for this. If you want to go to any conferences, like you can use this budget however you want. Maycon was right around the corner. This was two years ago.

MKJ (16:40.675)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (16:54.324)

And I was like, OK, well, I want to go to Maycon. And she was like, OK, great. Our board members are going to be there as well. So if you want to meet anyone, let me know. And I was like, yeah, absolutely, I want to meet the board members. And so again, this was really intentional. I could have used this learning development budget however I wanted. I personally am not a huge fan of in -person, because I have a hard time compartmentalizing and learning and networking. But again, I was like, if I want them to know the impact and I want to get better at what I’m doing, because I’ve never been a board member, I need to communicate with them.

Went to Maycon, before I went to Maycon, I reached out to this board member and I said, would love to meet up. So I already had a dinner on the books with him and his staff. And I was explaining my background and where I came from. And again, that was intentional and that led to more opportunities. So it’s a portfolio company and they own multiple other companies. And so they put me in contact with their other portfolio companies when they were getting ready to roll out AI.

to kind of use me as this point of contact and reference of like, well, why did you pick this vendor? And what about this? And what was this conversation? So again, just like leveling up, because it’s like, once you have the foundational skills and you know how to use these tools, then it’s time to teach, right? If you’re not learning, you should be teaching ideally both. And then it’s like, OK, roll this out to 100 people in the organization. Don’t have board experience. All I have is executive experience. Let’s level up again. And you keep going. And I really think my mindset has always been, I never want to be an expert.

Because that means that I’m throwing in the towel and I learned everything I needed to. And that is terrifying to me. It really is. I think there’s always room for improvement. that’s really been a big mindset shift for me, is just continuing to, if I’m interested and there’s passion there, we can keep digging in. We can always go deeper. If there’s not passion, then it’s time to switch careers. It’s time to try something differently.

MKJ (18:25.122)

Yes. Yeah.

MKJ (00:00.632)
Hey, hey, mischief makers. Welcome back to the conversation. MKJ here and my incredible guest, Chris Doris. Okay, so Chris, if people listening, if you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, you need to go do so because the stage has been set. For now, me asking Chris a real simple question, sir, how, what are some of the tools? What are some of the ways that we can start taking off?

those glasses, removing some of the conditioning and living life more through joy.

MKJ (00:54.724)
So how can we take off some of those glasses and change the mental conditioning that we had and start living life more through joy?

Chris Dorris (01:06.164)
Yeah.

Chris Dorris (01:09.567)
And not just driven more powerfully, you joy is a part of it, but you know, it’s like the better we mentioned it already, the better we feel, the better we are, but only always and only in everything. But it’s not just about happy. You know, it’s also about competence, expertise. I ask a lot of workshops, I ask people, I ask individuals in coaching sessions this question all the time as well, which is,

At what point does someone become an expert? And a lot of times people answer that by saying, I think like the Malcolm Gladwell sort of response, where it’s like 10 ,000 repetitions of something. It’s like after you’ve achieved a certain level of success, but that’s not the right answer.

Because we all know people who achieved plenty of success, even at the academic level, like students who are great students. I mean, they get straight A’s, and yet they freak out every time they go into a test. I’m gonna get killed. Like, no you’re not. No, you’re not, shut up. You always get it. So they have an incredible track record of evidence, of proof of excellence, but yet they’re still choosing fear.

So someone becomes an expert when they choose to be.

You know, when they choose that. So yeah, it helps to have a lot of great performances and track record and evidence, right? But that’s not it. It’s like it’s, Muhammad Ali was great example of somebody that, you know, when did he become the best? When did Muhammad Ali become the greatest? When his name was Cassius Clay and nobody knew who he was. He chose that. So we talked about eliminating complaining.

Chris Dorris (03:04.554)
All right, so that is, I’ll reiterate that, that is actually a tool. And convert those complaints into authentic, genuine expressions of gratitude. But here’s another tool, which is not entirely dissimilar from that. I call it catch, own, and replace. And what we’re doing is we’re catching. So this is the inner world inquiry. Let me preface this by saying that I really do believe that the most successful

happiest, mentally tough, and those three are all interconnected. People in the world choose to live in a perpetual state of self -inquiry, always asking themselves questions like, how am I feeling right now? Is it useful? Am I even choosing this? So the tool is to elevate your state, is catch, own, replace. So you catch yourself when you’re feeling unpleasant and you don’t want to be.

If you want to be, then that’s your priority, and that’s beautiful, you get to choose that too. I just don’t find it’s not a it’s not a useful choice often. But we have choice. So if I want to be pissed, I can. But is it going to serve me right now? Probably not. I mean, unless I’m in a boxing ring, or if I’m a lineman, an NFL football field, then it will.

MKJ (04:09.86)
Right, Yeah.

MKJ (04:19.443)
Yeah.

MKJ (04:24.54)
Right? Right. That’s right.

Chris Dorris (04:27.372)
But in most cases it doesn’t. But again, it’s your choice. So you catch yourself and you’re feeling uncool and you don’t want to or you can’t afford to in that moment. And then you own it. Now this is the second step of ownership is a big deal. So the ownership phrase is, I am not feeling this way because of what’s going on. I’m feeling this way because of how I’m thinking about it right now.

MKJ (04:52.004)
That’s right.

Chris Dorris (04:52.664)
Marcus Aurelius, one of the greatest, if not the greatest, Roman Emperor, he was a mental coach for sure, he said, if you are troubled by something, it’s not the thing itself, but your own estimate of it, which you have the right to revoke at any moment. Ownership is the opposite of being a victim of circumstance, letting the outer world govern your inner state, like the traffic, then you getting pissed off and you’re blaming it on some set of circumstances, which is a bunch of people in cars going somewhere slowly, congested.

MKJ (05:18.271)
Yeah.

Chris Dorris (05:22.26)
Alright, so catch and then own. So, let’s stick with the analogy, alright, the same example. I’m in my car, I’m in traffic, I’m trying to go somewhere and I might be late and I’m getting pissed off. The practice is to catch myself as fast as I can when I go into anger or frustration. To catch myself, wow, I’m really pissed off right now. That’s right there, that’s your key to freedom, is awareness. And I say, wow, I’m really pissed. I’m gonna get really pissed about this.

And then the next step is to own it. So I caught it, now I’m gonna own it say, you know what, I’m not pissed because of traffic, I’m not pissed because I might be late, or I might miss this meeting. I’m not pissed because of any of that. I’m pissed because I’m thinking poorly about this situation right now. That’s ownership. And so catch own it and the last step is to replace. And then you replace your thought with whatever, you replace that thought with whatever you damn please, but I have some suggestions.

That’s why I wrote a book on mantras, the book of mental toughness mantras. And there are all these replacement thoughts. Like, you said it, but you didn’t say it like this, but you said it twice today. You said a version of this. This is my mantra for this. Ain’t bad just is.

I call that the great neutralizer mantra. Ain’t bad, just is. Shakespeare, that’s my Jersey boy version of Shakespeare’s in Hamlet. Act two, scene two, he has Hamlet actually say, so Hamlet’s in jail, imprisoned by the King of Denmark, I think, and he’s really reflecting heavily upon his situation, and then he discovered nothing, and this is the line from Hamlet.

MKJ (06:46.381)
you

MKJ (06:49.688)
you

Chris Dorris (07:05.992)
Nothing good or bad happens, but thinking makes it so.

That’s Hamlet. Nothing good or bad happens, but thinking makes it so. So traffic isn’t bad, it just is. And I can have it just be is, just is a bunch of people in cars near each other going slowly because of congestion. It could be isn’t, it’s like that. Like this is a domino. It just is. I’m not happy about it, I’m not pissed about it, it just is. But I also have the choice to upgrade that interpretation if I want. Right, at the isn’t -ness line.

MKJ (07:15.191)
Yeah.

MKJ (07:30.278)
Yes. Yes. There’s no judgment.

Chris Dorris (07:41.98)
Or the OBSERVATION line, is the OBSERVATION line. No emotional charge down, no emotional charge up, just is. And I can have life be that way. OR I can have it suck OR I can have it be filled with gratitude or enthusiasm. All my choice, I never don’t have that choice. And without practice, I will not exercise that choice.

MKJ (07:45.336)
Yes. Yes.

Chris Dorris (08:08.094)
So that’s the long answer. To summarize it, your question, what’s a practice, another way that we can strengthen the way that we get more mentally tough or developmental mastery or upgrade the way that we experience life is to practice catching yourself when you’re unnecessarily feeling poorly and own it. And then upgrade your thinking in the moment and it doesn’t take long. In fact, do you want to do an exercise?

MKJ (08:37.826)
Yeah, go.

Chris Dorris (08:39.326)
Okay, do we have time?

MKJ (08:42.178)
Yeah, we got like two minutes. Is that enough?

Chris Dorris (08:44.434)
Okay, create, so everyone listening to this, do what you gotta do, whatever you need to do inside yourself to create the state of anxiety right now, go.

Why don’t you do it, Marion, let me know when you’re done.

MKJ (08:57.038)
Yeah, yeah, I’m there.

Chris Dorris (08:59.084)
Okay, good. How did you do that? You did that rapidly. Here you go. I thought about okay, I thought about

MKJ (09:00.406)
I thought about money. I thought about money.

Chris Dorris (09:07.668)
That was the beginning of the answer, right? And then you fill in the blank, you said, happened to be money. Okay, so you thought about money in a not enthusiastic way. You thought about money in a scarcity way. You thought about the lack of it. You thought about fear. You created anxiety, okay, by thinking though. But your answer was, I thought about. So now, do whatever you gotta do inside yourselves to create the state of total serenity. Let me know when you’re done.

MKJ (09:16.408)
Yes.

MKJ (09:34.948)
Okay, I got it. Yes.

Chris Dorris (09:35.936)
So you were able to do that as well? How’d you do it?

MKJ (09:40.872)
I remembered walking on the beach this morning and the waves crashing on the sand and running with my mantra.

Chris Dorris (09:47.316)
Okay, so there you go. So the answer’s the same, the end of it is different, it’s unique, right? But the beginning is I thought about or I chose to remember, in other words, I chose to fill my mind with the thought of blank. So that’s the answer. So you just in a matter of moments traveled the entire expanse of the human emotional spectrum from low grade anxiety to high grade serenity and the only thing in the world to change is the quality of content in your thinking. That’s how fast it can be.

MKJ (10:17.252)
So there you go. That’s exactly it. And it’s each, the way you do that at a deeper level, you might start at a higher, start at a very superficial level of, let’s say traffic and I’m anxious or angry or frustrated, and how can I just not be frustrated and get to that O line, that observation, it just is. And now once you master that, now you can choose to change that.

in a positive way and the more and I agree with you 100%. I’ve read your stuff. I’ve followed you. I agree with you 100%. The more people go above that O line and change the energy to positive, the more our world will change to the positive. Is there any last thought you want to leave people with that?

Chris Dorris (10:56.35)
Hmm.

Chris Dorris (11:02.738)
Yeah, agreed. Amen.

MKJ (00:00.804)
Welcome back to the conversation, CEO of Mischief Makers, MKJ here, and my incredible guest, Mr. Chris Doris. All right, Chris. So if you haven’t listened to that first conversation Chris and I had about mindset shifts, you really need to go listen to that because that’s going to start the whole process for what we’re talking about now, which is I consider it the messy middle. So Chris, if you kind of bear with me a little bit into this messy middle.

impact and innovation. So number one, if I could ask you who specifically do you want to impact the most in the work that you do now?

Chris Dorris (00:44.103)
That’s a question, Mary.

Chris Dorris (00:49.687)
And you broke up a little bit, want to make sure I heard the question, who do I most want to impact these days in work?

Ahem.

Chris Dorris (01:02.409)
Most of my clients now are in the world of sales.

And I didn’t pick that, okay? Like I’m working in the enterprise sales industry. I didn’t even know that was a combination of terms. Enterprise sales just means you sell big expensive stuff, like big things, big deals. So it’s a of software for big companies. But, yeah, that happened serendipitously, right? It happened by me continuing to follow my path and do the one thing, which is serve, serve, serve, help people, and it just evolved, you know, like we talked about in the first segment.

MKJ (01:18.133)
you

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Dorris (01:37.237)
evolving from social work into, then I was a licensed therapist, then I was a sports psychologist, and now I’m an executive coach. So who do I want to serve? I want to serve everybody. I want to serve, you know, here’s a good answer for it is whenever I do these workshops, you know, so I’ll do a lot of one -on -one coaching and I do a lot of one -to -many coaching, right? So we get these workshops, get hundreds and hundreds of people on calls, and we do surveys. I do surveys afterwards.

And invariably, invariably, when people are answering the question, what stood out, what was most valuable for you, you know what they say? I’m use this with my kids.

MKJ (02:20.314)
So that’s it.

Chris Dorris (02:20.491)
So it’s still the work, the work that I’m doing now, even though it looks on the outside like I’m helping people sell real expensive stuff and make a lot of money. Yeah, that’s part of it. But what’s really happened is I’m helping people eliminate unnecessary suffering.

MKJ (02:37.4)
in many areas of their life, not just in sales. Yeah. Yeah. Wow.

Chris Dorris (02:40.021)
in all areas.

Because that’s a training ground. like, know, when I tell, when we, you know, I create agreements with my coach. I don’t assign homework as a coach. used to, but I learned a much more effective tool, which is we co -create agreements at the end of each coaching session where we agree on some things that they might do between not might do, will do between now and our next session. And,

Where was I going with that?

MKJ (03:08.986)
the agreements because it’s impacting many areas in your life.

Chris Dorris (03:13.417)
yeah, yeah, right, right, thanks. Thank you, good tracking. So I just remind, I remind all the clients that what, know, the agreements of the work that they’re gonna go do, that your training ground is your life.

And I use another mantra, well I use a million mantras, one of them is no seconds off. And now that sounds a little neurotic, but it’s not. It’s actually what I mean by that is I take no seconds off from living in a state of inquiry where I’m thinking, asking myself questions like, how’s my mood right now? Could it use an upgrade? Like what kind of emotional state am I thinking my way into in this moment? Am I choosing it? Is it serving me? Is it intelligent? Is it pleasant?

Right, so that’s your training ground. So where’s your training ground? Now, and now, and now.

MKJ (04:01.06)
now. Yes, I love that because that is the number one shift I’ve made in my life to make my life happier, make my life more joyful, make my life more living on purpose. All the words we’ve heard people use to describe whatever whatever cliche you want to talk about. It’s not a cliche. It’s a fact. This is it. This is it. So right now we are choosing

to share a conversation about some pretty impactful things, at least I think they’re impactful for life. And you can take those and micro commit them to a particular part of your business, to a particular part of a relationship, to a particular part of a success journey you’re on. It doesn’t matter. You can take, or you can look at the whole and say, where am I right now? Where am I choosing to be?

spiritually, physically, mentally, whatever other E you want to add in there. It is so true. is now. And I love how you said that. No seconds off because in life you don’t get any extra seconds. So why would you take any off? Why would you not be present for any of them? Because you’re going to end sometime.

Chris Dorris (05:19.915)
Well, it’s like I…

Chris Dorris (05:27.221)
Yeah, I said that it sounds like no seconds off sounds like it could be it could sound overwhelming, but it’s not. It could sound exhausting, but it isn’t. It’s the opposite because what I mean by taking those seconds off of unnecessary suffering is what I’m saying. Taking those seconds off of paying attention to my inner world experience in this moment so I can upgrade it if I’d like to. And that’s not exhausting. It’s invigorating. What’s exhausting?

is spending so much time struggling against and fighting reality. That is exhausting. Having a problem with what is. And I don’t promote complacency. In fact, I say the less of a problem that I have with the problem, the more capable I am of solving it. So I bring enthusiasm. bring enthusiasm. You know, the word enthusiasm is such a cool word because it actually comes from the Greek word entheos.

MKJ (06:15.898)
Yes. Yes. Yes.

Chris Dorris (06:26.281)
which translates into the creator within.

Chris Dorris (06:31.893)
So when I choose enthusiasm, I’m activating creative genius. So not only do I feel good, but I am being better, but only always and only at everything. So enthusiasm is a great mistake. And here’s a little takeaway for everyone. this is a profound practice and it sounds so simple. Start eliminating complaining, start reducing the frequency of complaints. Seriously, complaining is just dumb.

It’s an extremely popular stupid habit because it literally deactivates intelligence. Because I’m fighting reality and that’s a battle that I will lose 100 % of the time. So I don’t want to engage in that battle. I want to be able to work with, like Bruce Lee said, be like water, flow, which is synonymous with the zone, the flow state. So that’s an invitation for whoever is listening to this to

MKJ (07:20.688)
Yeah. Yep. Yes.

Chris Dorris (07:31.109)
Start eliminating complaining as a behavior. So heighten your awareness to the frequency. You know, it’s amazing Mary there were scientists did this research I don’t know how they did this but this is pretty wild They could take a guess on how frequently human beings on average complain

MKJ (07:49.634)
as a percentage of the time they’re awake, I would say more than.

Chris Dorris (07:53.133)
Well, how often do you think of… Once every 11 seconds is what these scientists come up with.

MKJ (07:59.92)
my goodness. Yeah, I was going to say more than 70%.

Chris Dorris (08:08.299)
Well, yeah, so that’s like, right, almost six times a minute. That’s full size, five times a minute. And that’s amazing, right? So start paying attention to it. Most of our complaints happen silently inside of ourselves. We even make it into the spoken world. We’re just having a problem with something. Coffee being cold or your stomach growling.

you’re doing a podcast interview. All the millions of things. I’m not talking about war or sex trafficking. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about pay attention to all the problems that you’re having with life. I was listening actually to a book by Eckhart Tolle one time and it was the one he wrote after The Power of Now. It’s called The New Earth.

MKJ (08:38.99)
Yeah.

MKJ (08:46.66)
Right, major.

MKJ (09:04.56)
you

Chris Dorris (09:06.145)
The Power of Now is his, I think it was the first huge, at least hugely famous book that he wrote, and that was about how much more powerful we are when we are present. And then The New Earth is how different we humans are collectively when we practice being more present.

And he asked a question that stopped me in my tracks, is, what percentage of your life do you spend in a state of wishing things were different?

I thought, wow, wow. If I’m be honest with myself about that, you know what? The answer is a lot. And I don’t want it to be. So I’ll reiterate the invitation to your audience, which is to start paying attention, seriously heighten your awareness to the frequency with which you complain, and turn those complaints around, literally.

MKJ (09:49.37)
Yeah, no.

Chris Dorris (10:02.445)
And this can’t be fake. It’s not hokey. This is not looking at life through rose -colored glasses. This is not putting a silver lining on things. This is shifting the way you’re experiencing reality from weak to powerful.

So stay with the thing that you’re complaining about and see if you can do the work, and this is real work, to shift your thinking about the thing that you’re having a problem with. Let’s just take traffic as a simple example of something very, very popular for people to come have a problem with. So the next time you find yourself in traffic and you’re going, this sucks. Actually, whenever you say this sucks, I encourage you to

to break, to follow it up with this. Say to yourself, unless it doesn’t. So you’re breaking a habit there. This sucks, unless it doesn’t. And now you’re opening up to, maybe let’s not have it be that. Maybe let’s not have traffic be such a pain in the ass. Look, I’m the authority of my life, I author my stories. So what story do I want to put on this one that’s going to be better? Well, first of all, I’m pretty pumped about the fact that I have a car.

MKJ (10:51.354)
Yeah. Unless. Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Dorris (11:16.193)
Like I don’t have to ride the bus. I don’t have to use public transportation. And there are roads that are amazing. They’re amazing. You know, I’ve traveled the world and we have the greatest roads. Some of them. You know, and thank you to all the people that went into building them for us. You know, and thank you for radio technology so I can listen to ESPN radio as I…

sit around or thank you for cell phones so could actually have a meeting while I’m sitting in traffic. But I don’t have to. I could. So just shifting into different practicing, seeing the world differently. And again, we really want to emphasize, it’s very important to me to emphasize this is not looking at life through rose -colored glasses. In fact, it’s actually taking the glasses, the distortion glasses off. The lenses that would have us experience reality.

MKJ (11:50.586)
Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Dorris (12:11.781)
problematically. I learned that. Take those off. So I free myself from the conditioning of my past so that I can experience reality as it is and I’m convinced that reality as it is, is nice.

MKJ (12:25.154)
It’s amazing. that so that in terms of this whole messy middle of innovation, that’s exactly what you’ve done. You’re you’re you haven’t just said, Okay, I’m going to be a coach and I’m going to coach people through their their whatever’s I’m going to help them with be better leaders, I’m going to help them with the life coach, I’m going to help them with a sports coach. You didn’t you didn’t

box yourself into those definitions and you’re broadening it. That’s why you answered when I asked who you’re impacting, anyone, everyone and anyone because you’re broadening this to anyone who has an inner life that is affecting their outer experience is the person you can impact.

Chris Dorris (13:04.193)
Yeah.

MKJ (13:06.8)
And that’s your innovation asking those questions like you ended our last conversation talking about that curiosity of what else is possible. That’s what you just said, unless it isn’t what else and that can be applied to everything we do. Quick story, my husband and I, we’ve been married 40 years and we raised our two sons for 27 of those years in a in a beautiful little subdivision, nice little cul -de -sac, cute little house.

Chris Dorris (13:07.639)
Yeah.

MKJ (13:36.144)
Kids are grown now 22 and 25 and we’re like, all right, I don’t want to die in this house. I want to go out and experience more of the world. So we sold our house. We sold all our possessions, anything that didn’t fit in a 10 by five storage unit.

And we temporarily moved in with my father -in -law with the intent to use his house as our base. He invited us to do so as our base to find out where our next home was going to be. And as we start traveling, we went to Florence. I want to get my Italian citizenship so I can go live anywhere in the EU and experience other cultures. And so we traveled a few different places, Switzerland, Norway, blah, blah, blah. Well, we found out when we got here that things were quite right. And my father -in -law has Alzheimer’s.

Chris Dorris (14:13.985)
Nice.

MKJ (14:20.656)
And so we have a choice. Are we going to continue on that path? Or are we going to help him live out his last years in his home and make sure that he’s comfortable? He just turned 90. So at first, when we thought about this, I thought, I’m stuck. I’m stuck here. Well, gee, I don’t think so. I’m not stuck anywhere. This is a choice.

This is a choice I’m making and I’m only 60. So I got plenty of time ahead of me right now. This is much more important. So now my mantra, whenever I find myself thinking, because Alzheimer’s is not fun. Anytime I find myself thinking of woe is me, I say to myself, no, you know what? You’re blooming where you’re planted. You’re planted right here and you’re going to bloom. You, you live in a beautiful home by the ocean.

Chris Dorris (14:45.547)
Hmm. Hmm.

Chris Dorris (15:00.214)
Mmm.

MKJ (15:15.628)
could this it’s not bad it’s amazing I get to experience the joy of listening to my father -in -law tell some stories of his life in the 1930s and the places he

Chris Dorris (15:30.219)
Mmm. Mmm.

MKJ (15:32.388)
He swam in these ponds and he drove a Model T with no floorboards, right? And just the amazing stories of life that I have never experienced. So guess what? My goal of experiencing other cultures and other places is happening right here.

Chris Dorris (15:51.831)
Hmm.

MKJ (15:55.318)
If I was upset and still saying I’m stuck and why and all these things, I wouldn’t experience that. So I’m, I’m, I’m getting exactly what I wanted, which is different experiences than I have. And, yeah, it’s not fun sometimes. Yeah, it’s difficult sometimes. but that’s life. Nothing is always perfectly the way you think, but if you open,

and you’re curious and you ask what else is possible, it actually is what you think. It is joyous. It is incredible. And that took quite a long time to get to. But thank you for allowing, because that realization of what I just said about experiencing other cultures and then now experiencing my father -in -law’s culture, I didn’t understand that until this minute. I said I was blooming where I was planted.

Chris Dorris (16:51.073)
Hmm.

MKJ (16:52.228)
but I didn’t realize it at that depth.

Chris Dorris (16:59.457)
Beautiful.

MKJ (17:01.274)
So thank you. Through our conversation, you allowed me to see that. How now, because the last time we talked, you also talked about the children that you helped with golf and their parents and now in sales. How are you, and you thought for a moment when I asked who you impacted and you said, well, I’m mostly working in sales, but how, what’s your next step?

in this journey, in this innovation.

Chris Dorris (17:32.353)
Hmm scaling so so I’m using technology I Met a guy I was in an event over in Portugal and I met this young man brilliant young man and he ended up going to work for a company that does cloning for coaches and And they were they were just starting out

and they asked if they could use me as a beta test to clone me. wouldn’t cost me anything. So I said, of course. Why would I say no to that? It sounds fun and exciting. And that was now a couple years ago, and it has evolved into this phenomenal product. So I can reach so many more people. Now, at first, I thought it was terrible. I was very skeptical about it. Well, it sucked, unless it didn’t. But I wouldn’t have used it at the beginning.

MKJ (18:09.637)
you

MKJ (18:26.746)
Yeah.

Chris Dorris (18:32.759)
But the technology is so fascinating and I know nothing about it, but I know enough to know that you can really improve. So this AI -generated clone, it’s like Coach Chris Doris’ clone. And over time, we educate it or train it. We put all of my books into it, all of my podcast interviews as a host and a guest.

All of my, I’ve got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of videos out, everything from my YouTube page, and we just put it into the clone, and the clone learns. And now, it’s really good, and it’s at a point where it’s usable. So, that is gonna help me scale tremendously, and in addition to that, I’m recording hundreds of more videos.

for sales leaders and for sales people and the world in general. It’s like the mental toughness toolbox. It’ll be like a hundred something videos of all these different exercises and practices that we can use. It’s basically the masterclass that we could have had in grade school and high school and college on how to strengthen the inner world. So that’s like my next move is to use technology to scale the heck out of myself and reach tons more people.

at a significantly lower rate than you would pay to hire me.

MKJ (00:00.784)
Hey, hey, CEO, Mischief Makers, MKJ here, Mary Kathryn Johnson. You can just call me MKJ. And I get to chat with someone I was introduced to from a very dear person to me, Laban Ditchburn, introduced me to Chris Doris. Chris, you ready to have a conversation today with me?

Chris Dorris (00:19.022)
Most definitely, Mary. Thank you.

MKJ (00:21.791)
Awesome. All right, well, start off. I know who you are and what you do, but start off kind of letting people know who you are and what you do.

Chris Dorris (00:29.054)
Well, I refer to myself as a mental toughness coach. And I think it could be helpful for me to define what mental toughness is. This is my definition and I doubt that you’ll find this anywhere. Mental toughness is a superpower. It’s a human skill that’s developed through diligent inner world work. Training. Specifically, it’s the ability to respond rapidly to all of life. Not some of it, not most of it, but all of life.

with grace, mastery, creative genius and enthusiasm so that we can get to the creation of excellence faster and with least effort. And I’ll repeat that in a little more summarized way. Mental toughness is the ability that is earned through diligent inner world work that most of us have not had exposure to ever. It’s the ability to respond rapidly to all of life with grace, mastery, creative genius and

and enthusiasm so that we can get to the creation of excellence faster and with least effort. So that’s what I do is I help people train their brains.

MKJ (01:38.086)
How did you do that? What started you on this path? Bring me back to a time when you didn’t have that mental toughness and had to, because most of us are accidental in what we do in the sense that we typically have to do it for ourselves before we do it for someone else, whatever it is. So take me back to why you landed where you landed. What mindset shifts did you have to go through to get to where you are?

Chris Dorris (01:54.59)
Hmm.

Chris Dorris (02:04.082)
Well, growing up, my father died when he was very young and I was nine and we struggled. So our house was characterized by scarcity, a lot of fear, and a lot of unpleasantness. Now, in contrast, my neighbors, who were really close, really, really good friends with my dads, theirs, the Canes, their last name was Kane, Dan and Mame Kane.

Retired railroad workers from the Philadelphia Railroad. Kane was their last name. They had one child, a daughter. Guess what they named her? Candy.

MKJ (02:45.025)
my goodness, at least they had a sense of humor.

Chris Dorris (02:45.64)
Yeah, it was great. And she was super sweet. So anyway, I love the Canes. I love them. And they have such a beautiful vibe. My bedroom faced their house. So I’d be in my room in the evening reading hearty boys books or something. And then I would hear they would always be on their back patio having cocktails and laughing. So loud and so hard. You know how laughter is contagious. And I would find myself, it was just I was catching their joy.

MKJ (03:11.664)
Yes.

Chris Dorris (03:15.496)
I was literally catching their joy. And I didn’t have clarity like I do now in hindsight, but I realize now that what was going on in me was I was observing a stark contrast between the vibe in my home and the vibe in theirs, and obviously theirs was a heck of a lot more appealing. And it was during those formative years where I didn’t, again, didn’t know it at the time, but it’s so obvious to me now.

I was so curious that why is it that some people choose such elevated states and some don’t? And the elevated states are so much more appealing to me. So I studied psychology and then I became a social worker and then it evolved. Everything just evolved. I stayed on one path for my entire life. I stayed with the one thing and it’s taken on many different iterations, but that really is the origin.

MKJ (04:07.418)
Yeah. So what was the answer to that curiosity of why do some people choose joy and others don’t? Because I hear you. I come from a family of three girls, difficult environment. I chose the path I chose to not take on the drama, to look for the positives, to look for a different way of doing things. And my two sisters did not. So what, why? What is that? What is the answer?

if it can be encapsulated into a statement or into a five minute conversation.

Chris Dorris (04:38.324)
I put it into one word. I’ll give you my response in one word, conditioning. But I’m gonna need to explain that. So you can also make the argument that the work that I do, mental toughness training, mental mastery training, is about unlearning.

MKJ (04:49.712)
Yes.

Chris Dorris (05:00.956)
It’s freeing ourselves from the conditioning of our past so that we can experience reality as it is, as opposed to through the thick lenses of our conditioned past and living in the prisons of the conditioned mind. Like, for example, we all grow up and we learn that when you don’t get what you want, that sucks. But that’s just like a rule. When you don’t get what you want, that’s bad. We’ve also all been conditioned to permit the outer world to govern the inner world, to let what happens in life really govern my inner state. So I like to use a lot of mantras.

and one of them that I’m thinking of right now is the outer world is a reflection of the inner world. What I’ve got going on in my life is the direct result of what I’ve got going on in my mind and if I haven’t strengthened the way I use my mind then I’m have chaos. So my answer to the question is why do some people choose joy and others don’t, I believe I’m really convinced that it’s because

of the conditioning. We’ve been conditioned to shift away from experiencing life opportunistically and enthusiastically to experiencing life problematically. If we don’t do the work to get back, then we’re going to stay there.

MKJ (06:09.176)
see more of it more of the the the scarcity yeah yeah I hear you I get it so I’m sure that took a path it wasn’t just all of sudden one day you realized all of this right so like an onion I’m sure that analogy has been used it peeled back a little by little by little is that true or was there more of a defining moment for you when your your mindset shifted to that that non -condition

Chris Dorris (06:32.414)
There were a bunch of defining, well, okay, so there’s one thing, I’ve always been, I just, love humans. I love people, I believe in people, and I love joy, I love celebration. And I also love badassery. I like peak performance, I love sports. I love sports, sports is governed, I mean, it’s been a major influence in my life. And there was a long period of time where I was a sports psychologist. I was working exclusively with competitive athletes on.

performing well by strengthening the mind. And Mary, one of the coolest observations I’ve ever made of human beings is that we’re at our best when we feel our best. So I became really fascinated in that. When I was doing social work, I was working with tough populations. That was my first job out of college. Except for the quick job I had on a scallop boat, but we will have to talk about that another day. That was a mistake. Great learnings, but whew, that was rough.

MKJ (07:26.736)
Thank

Chris Dorris (07:31.872)
Yeah, so I, you know, worked with homeless people and drug addicts and chronic schizophrenics on the streets in Atlantic City, New Jersey. And it was a hell of a, that was hard. Whew, that was tough stuff, tough work, people with a lot of suffering, right? Great foundation for the rest of my life, vocationally speaking. But one of the observations that I made is these people that have nothing. When, for whatever reasons, the ones who chose, and it’s a real operative word in our conversation here.

MKJ (07:40.07)
you

Chris Dorris (08:01.672)
The ones that chose to believe in themselves and in life, they seem to get the breaks, which I thought I was very fascinated with. I very, very fascinated by that. It’s the ones who put in some effort seem to get rewards. You know? So that was, right, yeah. Well, it’s like the ones who chose not to be victim -y, even though they had every reason to.

MKJ (08:19.961)
concept.

you

MKJ (08:30.404)
Yes, yes, yes.

Chris Dorris (08:31.218)
Right? So that was pivotal for me. But then there was certain dip in this stuff. Like I was playing, I was a basketball player all my life. I played in college and after work I would go as a social worker at the Jersey Shore. I would go play pickup games at night. One night I shattered my leg, really bad compound fracture. And it was, I got an infection. got a fatty embolism. I got pneumonia. I almost died from it, from this infection. So was a really serious, like,

freak accident, right? Freak. And thank God for it. Because, and I thank God for it because it took that. Then I stopped playing hoops, I started playing golf. I got really, really, really into that game. And if you ever played golf, you know how mental it is. It’s so incredibly psychological. And that’s when I had a real another discovery, which, and that’s obviously something that you just can’t predict. You know, I realized, wow, maybe my ticket, here’s my next step.

is I’m going to marry my passion for psychology and the human spirit and human potential with sports. My other most favorite thing. So then that was the next iteration. Starting a sports psychology practice and then working with all these golfers and these golfers, some of them are amateurs and they’re business people and they’re sales teams and kept evolving. I was a licensed therapist, then a sports psychologist, then an executive coach.

MKJ (09:54.202)
build over into all other places. I mindset does that. Go ahead. Yeah.

Chris Dorris (09:56.382)
But there is a through line. The through line is the same. The backbone of this vocation remains the same, which is helping people experience life more beautifully, more powerfully.

MKJ (10:06.17)
Yes, yes, yes. And to be able to take that that peace and that joy into other areas where they obviously are seeing they aren’t feeling that way. Yes, I hear you. I had a similar not a not a almost dying, but a funny situation when I was eight months pregnant with my second son. I fell and broke both my legs.

Chris Dorris (10:31.399)
MKJ (10:32.742)
both legs and casts up to the knee and couldn’t take a shower couldn’t take a bath could barely stand on one leg for any length of time so I was I had a bedside commode I didn’t even know what one of those was didn’t even know it existed and yeah it made me sit and sitting was not comfortable and similar serendipitous

Chris Dorris (10:49.106)
Hmm.

MKJ (11:01.978)
This was the second pregnancy. first pregnancy, I also went into early labor and was in the hospital for a week to stop the labor. So there was my first opportunity to sit. I didn’t take it. And so now this was the second one. It was basically like, OK, this isn’t this isn’t an option anymore. You will sit because you can’t move hardly at all without the use of a walker and you’re going to sit. And I was the first and only time in my life I was depressed.

Chris Dorris (11:11.518)
Hmm.

Chris Dorris (11:22.905)
Yeah.

Hmm.

MKJ (11:30.09)
Never before and never since have I been depressed. Just like all consuming of me, right? How terrible this is for me and all this. And it was my my son, my older one, who was three years old at the time, wanted me to play cars because I always used to play cars and things with him on the on the floor. And he’s like, Mommy can play cars. And I snapped at him. What are you talking about? Look at me. How can I you know, how could how could I how dare you? And the look on his face.

Chris Dorris (11:33.374)
Mmm. Mmm.

Chris Dorris (11:39.015)
Mmm.

MKJ (11:59.086)
snapped me right out. I’m like, okay, this is ridiculous. You are not, you are not permanently disabled. Why are you acting like you are? Why are you embodying this, this disability?

Chris Dorris (12:04.541)
Mmm.

MKJ (12:17.786)
rolled my belly big, big, huge baby hotel over and got on my knees and got on the carpet and started playing and, and was amazing until I of course had to go to the bathroom again next and had to figure out how I was going to get off the floor to go get to that bedside commode. But that’s another story. I mean, looking back on that, it’s so funny now the things that I had to do and the way life was. But at the time in it, boy, it was like, you’re going to stop and you’re going to think about the hard charging, go getting main bread winner.

Chris Dorris (12:36.382)
Yes.

MKJ (12:47.942)
person that you you are showing the world and and you’re gonna have to think and that is what’s allowed me to feel like if I’m going to if I can get through this with my sense of humor intact I can do anything and I started my first business 18 months later so it’s it’s completely a shift so take me through after you

Chris Dorris (13:04.114)
Hmph.

MKJ (13:15.882)
You went to mental toughness with sports. You’ve, think, ventured beyond mental toughness with sports. What was that next iteration, the next mindset shift after all the wonderful golfers that got your help?

Chris Dorris (13:29.294)
Well, so this is There was you know, there was a point where I was doing work with I was working with professional golfers I was also working with junior golfers Because I wanted to work with youth and you know get them working on their minds to you know so they take these tools to help them play better golf but out into life and

was at a junior golf clinic one day and I noticed there were some familiar faces in the room. I said, how many you kids have been to one of these before? And bunch of their hands went up. And I said, so what did you guys take from the last ones?

Chris Dorris (14:07.102)
crickets. So I thought, that’s not a good business model. And so afterwards I went back to the drawing board. I went back to my office and started thinking, how can we improve the value here? And that was an important question. That question actually, asking that question changed my life. Thank God for that. I came up with two ideas. One was I’m going to do less content and go deeper. And I’ve done that for the rest of my life. And that’s a good idea. Less is more thing.

MKJ (14:07.631)
Anything?

Chris Dorris (14:37.406)
But the other idea that was absolutely life altering was I’m going to invite a parent to join the kid for free. So maybe the parent will retain some of stuff, be able to reinforce it. So the first time I did that, a bunch of parents came and one of the guys after the workshop came up to me and said, man, you gotta come do this. I run sales at a company over here in Tempe, Arizona called Insight, a huge company.

And I said, yeah, I’m familiar with that company that’s their own I -10 and they sponsor one of the college FBS bowls. It a big, deal. says, yeah, well, I run sales there and my sales team’s struggling pretty hard. They can use, this is exactly what they need. And I said, all right. And we did that, turned it into be a great gig. The guy, Dave Canham is his name. We’ve become great. He’s like a brother to me now. This is like 20 years ago, more than that even. And great golfer too.

And he said, know, we force a relationship and he said, listen, man, this is so important on so many levels, the work that you’re bringing here. If our transcends sales and business in general, wherever I go, I’m bringing you with me, man. And he kept that pledge. So decades, a couple of decades later, he’s moved on and up and he’s brought me into these companies and introduced me and it just grew like that.

But I can really trace it back to Dave Kahneman, but the reason I even know Dave is because I thought, how can I increase my value? That was the question that I reflected upon, and that reflection was life altering. How can I improve what I’m bringing? How can I make it better? How can I serve more effectively?

MKJ (16:22.104)
And in that.

That’s it. But in that process, it wasn’t what I hear you saying is it wasn’t just what other program can I create or what other module can I add or anything like that in terms of value. You looked at the individual and said there are sound. I don’t know whether this was conscious or unconscious, but there are other people in this individual’s life that can also help me impact them.

if they come and hear what I’m saying, especially parents, obviously, children are not isolated little islands. If they go home and there’s no, no support of what you’re trying to help them with. It’s that’s why you got the example the answer of crickets when you asked what did you take from the last one? Because there was no there was it’s a whole I mean, you know, you don’t want to use the word holistic, but it is a whole unit it is there are other people in all of our lives.

Chris Dorris (17:05.65)
Yeah.

MKJ (17:16.89)
that if they are involved in this process of mindset shifts and mental toughness and all the things you’ve been talking about, then we have a support, we have a reminder, we have something beyond just our own heads where we can actually impact deeper and stronger. That’s what I hear you saying. Was that conscious or unconscious?

Chris Dorris (17:39.476)
I was very conscious about bringing, keeping it simple. I just wanted it to be more valuable. felt like these kids, golf is a tough sport. And I’ve played a lot of sports in my life, of all the ones that I’ve participated in, golf is more of a mirror for the soul. And golf is also a very neurotic culture. It’s an amazing game and it’s got a strange culture. It’s like the opposite of like surfing.

You know, you ask golfers how to go and there’s pretty negative answers unless it was an unusually good scoring round. Or unless you’re a little kid or an old, old person. Everybody in between gets miserable. But then you ask a surfer after a mediocre wave day, like, it was rad. It was epic. Yeah.

MKJ (18:27.13)
doesn’t

Chris Dorris (18:30.246)
So there’s enough negativity, the sport’s hard and kids are learning fast to be really negative, like smashing their, when the ball doesn’t go where they wanted it to go, they feel like I gotta show the world that I’m pissed, that I’m better than that, and it’s just all this weird learning. So I just wanna, I want humans to not suffer. And I was using, in a divinely selfish way, using sport because I love it, but.

I mean, think about golf is such a privileged sport. So few people ever get to do that. And then, and these kids are learning to ruin the experience, this privilege, this amazing sport where outside and this, know, manicured grasslands, which scientists say is like the most soothing of environments. And they’re acting like jackasses because they learned to. So the question was very conscious is how can I help these kids play PLY?

play better and experience intrinsic reward and discover their excellence. Because if they’re walking out of this workshop and they can’t remember Jack, well, that ain’t going to get it done.

MKJ (00:00.458)
Hey, hey, CEO mission makers. MKJ here with Andy Cunningham. Andy, I cannot wait to dive into this section. You ready to rock with me?

Andy Cunningham (00:01.533)
Hey!

Andy Cunningham (00:09.4)
Absolutely. Let’s get down to business. Yes.

MKJ (00:12.436)
Let’s get down to actually the rubber meat in the road. What do we actually do? So again, if you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, I highly encourage that you do so because now we get to take exactly what Andy just talked about at the end of our last conversation and just run with it. So you mentioned that journalism has changed. PR has changed because we now own, we now can…

influence and impact and create our own content on many, many different channels. And there aren’t any gatekeepers in that respect anymore, at least not in the journalism respect. Social media still has gatekeepers. We won’t get into the details of that, but they do. So how do we do that? And I’d love for you to bring in just try and encapsulate again, your book, Get to Aha. You talk about positioning, you talk about all those things, but let’s start with

How do you craft that story and decide where to publish it on what channels?

Andy Cunningham (01:11.602)
Sure, so let’s start with crafting the story. This is why I got into positioning, because it is the epicenter of great marketing. If you don’t have the right position in a marketplace, the story you tell doesn’t even matter, because you’re not fitting. People talk a lot about product market fit. Well, that’s what we’re talking about here. It’s product market fit. And if you find that white space on the competitive landscape where you uniquely fill a hole,

Then then you’ve got the the nugget if you will have a positioning strategy and so you develop you first you figure out What is that unique and compelling spot on the competitive landscape that you and only you can own incredibly and then you build a message architecture around that and that’s critical for storytelling because once you have that message architecture Now you have the framework to write your story and then you can tell your story. So once you have a great story

Then what you do is you parse it out in many pieces, many bits and pieces, for all the different channels that we have. So there’s long form content where you can use the whole story. There’s short form content where you just pull out the critical pieces of it. There’s social media where you just might pull out a meme or two that you’ve created. And you just start on this journey of building your own digital footprint. And the one thing I really want to stress here, for those of you who are not communication people,

The only way you can get people to remember your story is you have to repeat it over and over and over and over and over again. And it has to be the exact same words. You can’t be telling your story 27 different ways. It has to be the same words and the same phrases in the same way. And if you look at our politicians today, they’re pretty good at that. They’re pretty good at being on message. And that is the key, is being on message. So once you have your story,

and you start to build your digital footprint and you’re on message all the time and repeating the same story, you are now building a digital footprint. You’re building real estate in the virtual world with your story. And then all of a sudden, you can then talk to a real journalist, know, the New York Times or a Wall Street Journal. And the first thing you know they’re going to do is Google you when you call them. And if they don’t find anything, guess what? You don’t exist.

Andy Cunningham (03:28.582)
So the first thing you do is build that digital footprint. Then you can reach out to the Wall Street Journal and you can say, hey, I’m from XYZ company, and I have a brand new product in this new market, and I’m super excited. Can I tell you about it? And if they Google you and they find a story that you have already planted there, they are far more likely to talk to you than if you don’t have that. So that’s the name of the game. And those are the tactics. That’s what you have to do. It’s really not brain surgery, but it’s.

all important.

MKJ (03:59.814)
It is, and it, so many of us, you know, we say something once and we think, well, that’s it, we’ve said it, and that’s all there is to it. That’s not the way it works. We have no idea, right? We have no idea who heard it, who saw it, where, if anybody’s gonna see it again, the algorithms, if they had it or didn’t have it or any of those things. But if we do that, so let me ask you this, the difference between your owned real estate, your owned digital footprint,

Andy Cunningham (04:08.956)
Yes. And we get bored.

Andy Cunningham (04:28.87)
Right.

MKJ (04:29.468)
and you’re borrowed, right, or you’re rented land. The rented land will be the social media algorithms and all those. And you’re owned, like a podcast you own, your blog posts you own, your website you own. Is there a distinction between those two, or should we be saying the exact same thing in both places? Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (04:48.936)
You say the same thing all the time. If you’re giving a speech, if you’re teaching a class, if you’re on a train with somebody, no matter what you’re doing, it has to be the exact same words. And just to add a thing to this, the reason that I wrote this book, which talks about the process of how do you actually come to that positioning, the thing that is, I think, innovative, if you will, if we can back up for a second, about what I wrote in the book is that I discovered that there are three kinds of companies in the world.

And it really is an expression of their DNA as a company. And if they align everything that they’re doing from a marketing perspective, like their storytelling, like their marketing, with the DNA that is who they are, they are far more successful. And that’s a key. So I defined these three types. There’s mothers who are customer focused, there are mechanics who are product focused, and then there are missionaries who are concept or change the world focused. And if you know which one you are and you align your behavior with that,

you will be more successful. And this is true whether you’re a human being or a company. So for example, what I like to tell people, if you’re Curry and you’re showing the world what a great basketball player you are and all of a sudden your mother says, you know, I don’t think you should be playing basketball. I think you should be playing the violin. So you stop playing basketball and you start playing the violin and you suck at it. It’s because your DNA.

is not about violin playing, it’s about basketball. So if you target yourself and your behavior against the thing you’re good at, guess what? You get better at it.

MKJ (06:22.336)
agree 100%. I really, really do. And there are your that’s why this whole structure of storytelling and figuring out what your DNA is figuring out now how to communicate that DNA based on I love how and I know you I can tell very clearly that you love data, you love breaking things down into a clear stepwise process. And you’re very good at that. You’re very good at that.

Andy Cunningham (06:48.206)
Yes, definitely. Definitely. Yeah. Yes.

MKJ (06:51.44)
even storytelling, something we think is all creative and blah, blah. It’s not. It’s still a process, right? Right. So I’m telling you people, if you have not read this book, get to Aha! It will be in the show notes. You need to read this book because if you don’t, so many companies I work with, so I do consulting on category design, positioning, all those things. And then conversation. I like

both sides of the conversation, not just what we tell people, but how we interact with them. Yes, and that’s why I call it conversation, not just communication, because it is back and forth. And especially now we have tools. There’s a company I’m working with called Relatable that basically allows you to use interactive video to build that relationship. So…

Andy Cunningham (07:23.864)
Absolutely.

MKJ (07:40.916)
conversations are where we’re headed in the internet world. If you’re just using passive media, then you’re going to get passive engagement. You need to interact in some way. You need to listen. That’s right. But that story is vital. if you’re brand new company and you think, here’s my story, and you’re more of a product design person, and you’ve been designing the product, and you’re excited about how it works,

Andy Cunningham (07:42.598)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (07:51.484)
Right. Yep. You do need to interact and you need to listen.

MKJ (08:09.148)
You have to have someone walk you through developing that story and really what are you doing, not just how great your product is. So.

Andy Cunningham (08:15.9)
Yes.

MKJ (08:18.228)
That’s what you need. You need someone like Andy to walk you through that, how do you create that story? What really is it you’re trying to do? It’s not just the way your wonderful software works. It’s what impact you’re trying to make. And if you’re diving into the software and you’re all wrapped up in the software, you’re not thinking about the story and how it impacts really the world and the customer, right? How does that work?

Andy Cunningham (08:29.864)
Exactly. Right.

Andy Cunningham (08:41.601)
Exactly. something I want to add to the point you just made there, back when I started in this industry a long time ago, there weren’t that many technology products out there. So finding your differentiator was actually not that hard, because you pretty much had one, and you just had to uncover what that was. And I used to say we would excavate the differentiator and then bring it to the forefront.

However, this has changed dramatically in recent years because now, if you just look at any category of product, let’s just take the one we live in, which is Martech, right? So we know there are over 8,000 Martech products alone. So think how many accounting products there are, how many HR products there are, how many finance products there are. You can’t differentiate any more based on the product alone.

So this is why storytelling is even more important today, because now it’s about your story, which could be about your mission. It could be about your vision. It could be about your target market. It’s not going to be about the product so much anymore. storytelling is everything. Yeah.

MKJ (09:44.968)
Yeah, yes, yes, yes, I, it really is. And I agree with you. That’s that brings us to another concept of really just the, our children who are coming up behind us, who are basically native digitals, right? They were born into this world of digital, they, they really don’t know what we know of analog, right? They would never imagine taking a trip on a drive and not bringing their phone with them. I mean, we

Andy Cunningham (09:59.239)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (10:08.445)
yeah.

MKJ (10:10.962)
We lived and existed and survived and thrived without that ability, right? So, but they are native digitals. And in that native digital world, all these softwares are ubiquitous. They are ubiquitous. are just, they’re everywhere. So not only do you have to differentiate because of your story, but you have to differentiate because this new breed of human that’s coming up behind us really is.

Andy Cunningham (10:16.4)
Right. Yes.

Andy Cunningham (10:25.021)
Yes.

Exactly.

Andy Cunningham (10:36.624)
Our children.

MKJ (10:37.856)
Our children, right? mean, they don’t, it was so weird to me when they, when they would drive up to go, you know, someone would come to the house and pick them up when they were, you know, 17 years old, they wouldn’t come to the door. They would just text and say, I’m here. And, and the kid would leave. like, well, where’s your friend? he’s waiting in the car. okay.

Andy Cunningham (10:50.812)
Right, yeah, I’m here, yeah.

MKJ (10:58.248)
I mean, that was completely foreign to us, but that is the way they live because this is all ubiquitous. It just is. They just exist with it. So now you have to think about this new breed of human and how do you tell the story with them? That’s why we have TLDR now. Too long didn’t read. That’s why we have all these new ideas and ways of looking at the world. And these people do not want to be sold to. They have my sons have ad blockers on their phones. So if you’re trying to reach them just with ads, you’re not going to do it.

Andy Cunningham (11:05.212)
Yep.

Andy Cunningham (11:13.094)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (11:24.412)
Yes.

That’s true. That’s why the value of advertising is going down. But programmatic advertising is going way up. So all the ads now that you see on your social media feeds, it’s crazy.

MKJ (11:28.17)
So you have to find it.

is going down.

MKJ (11:35.86)
Yeah. Yeah.

MKJ (11:40.084)
Yes, yes, but even those, even those, it’s really, they’re the decisions for which companies to research and figure out whether they want to do business with are all happening in dark social. They’re all happening in their private messaging with their friends. Yes, it’s not where they’re just scrolling social media and they see an ad.

Andy Cunningham (11:59.91)
Yeah, yes, all with their friends. Absolutely.

Yeah, the friend network. Yeah.

MKJ (12:08.004)
they’re going to their friend groups and they’re going into the whole dark social and say, what do you think of this? And I’m looking for that or, did you hear about this? It’s all happening in places right now. Most of us can’t. Yeah, we can’t quantify that yet. I mentioned this other company again, they’re they’re working on quantifying that the whole interactive video thing. But I it’s so fun. I’m a right same thing. It’s so fun.

Andy Cunningham (12:15.282)
Yeah.

Very, very true. Yes. Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (12:27.566)
I’ll have to check that out.

MKJ (12:35.524)
to be into this world, even though I’m an old timer, I’m an old native analog, age doesn’t matter. My eyes absolutely sparkle with some of these, some of the no code tools that I get to play with where I can automate so many things. It’s just incredible. But if you don’t tell that story, I really have to leave it on that note.

Andy Cunningham (12:45.768)
Alright.

Andy Cunningham (12:52.102)
Yeah, very cool.

MKJ (12:59.41)
Is there anything we talked about positioning, you talked about storytelling, you talked about being an excavator and trying to dig into really what it is that makes you different as a company? And I’m telling you, if you’re identifying yourself as an accounting firm or a PR firm, you’re not differentiating. You can’t identify yourself that way. You can’t, yes, definitely. So is there any last piece of advice? Of course, I’ve already said they need to go get your book and I’ll put some more.

Andy Cunningham (13:10.568)
Right.

Andy Cunningham (13:17.648)
Impossible.

Andy Cunningham (13:26.45)
Thank you.

MKJ (13:27.076)
information on that because right there if you just do that I’m telling you you’re going to be blown away. But is there any piece of advice that you can give about a company or an entrepreneur who’s wanting to differentiate themselves and wanting to be heard in the noise and create that digital footprint? Any last piece of advice you’d give them?

Andy Cunningham (13:32.296)
Well, thank you.

Andy Cunningham (13:47.442)
So yes, and I got it from Apple, right? And it’s the whole think different ad campaign that Steve launched when he came back to Apple. And it’s such a brilliant phrase because it’s not about thinking differently. It’s about thinking something different. And that was the brilliance of it. And so whatever you’re building, whatever product you’re building or service industry that you’re in, think about doing it in a different sort of way.

Don’t do it the same way everybody else is doing it. Think about doing it in a different way. And if you are doing it in a different way or appealing to a different part of the person’s mindset, for example, Apple products appeal to people who like design. That’s just the way it is, right? So Apple decided they were going to focus on that side of the brain. And that’s a differentiation that is beyond the product. Now it’s about who they’re talking to. So when I say think different, I mean

Don’t just think about how to make your product different, OK? Because that’s cool if you can, but I bet you can’t. But if you can, that’s great. But if you can’t, what is it about that that is targeting a different market, living in a different space in the market? What is it that is different about it that isn’t about the product? And start telling that story, because that’s where the future is here.

MKJ (15:08.725)
Yes. So every marketer, every conversational designer, every mark on person communications, this, what Andy just said is, is where your life will, will bring a, sorry for using the same word, but a different value to the companies you’re working with. If you can dig that out.

Andy Cunningham (15:26.588)
Yes.

MKJ (15:30.716)
If you can come into a company and they say, this is what we are and this is who we are and this is what we do. And it’s the same words that anyone else in that same industry is using. If you come in as a marketer or some kind of communications person and you can try and dig out and ask questions, it really is about curiosity. Ask questions, ask unique questions that not everybody’s asking.

Andy Cunningham (15:50.576)
Yes.

MKJ (15:55.142)
Why did you do that? And it usually has something to do just like Andy was talking about with Steve Jobs. It has something to do with the the founder of the company had a specific vision that that vision or that thought. Maybe no one has brought that out. Maybe no one has really dug into where that came from. Dig into that. It is right, isn’t it? Most of the time, founder.

Andy Cunningham (16:03.655)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (16:11.29)
Right. Yeah. It could be the phone. Yeah. Yeah.

MKJ (16:18.673)
has created this thing and somebody hasn’t, no one has actually asked the right questions to dig that out. That I think is the place you’ll find the differentiator.

Andy Cunningham (16:24.68)
Thanks.

Exactly. Think about Richard Branson, who all the companies Richard Branson has ever founded, none of them were very differentiated products, including his airline. None of these things were differentiated products. But he made the difference. His personality, his cult of personality, and the way he talked to customers, those were the differentiators for Richard Branson’s stuff.

And that’s what built his great brands. And so you have to think, you really do have to think different. Don’t think like we’ve been thinking for the last 50 years. Think about something completely different.

MKJ (00:00.59)
Hey, hey, CEO Mischief Makers, welcome back to the conversation. MKJ here and my amazing guest, Andy Cunningham. Andy, you ready to dive into this messy middle part, this innovation thing that I talk about?

Andy Cunningham (00:01.898)
Hey.

Andy Cunningham (00:14.196)
Yes, the messy middle. My whole life is the messy middle.

MKJ (00:19.354)
Every time you wake up and you’re like, yeah, I’ve got this routine set and I’ve got all these appointments, but man, things all of a sudden happen in the middle of everywhere, don’t they? okay. So, right. If you have not listened to our first conversation and unpacked Andy’s mindset journey, the amount we could go through in about 15 minutes, please go back and listen to that because we are going to now take it deeper.

Andy Cunningham (00:27.323)
Absolutely.

MKJ (00:47.266)
and talk about innovation. Now, Andy dropped a couple of things in our last conversation where she was able to work with Steve Jobs himself. so Andy, you kind of bring us through that process? You already told us how incredibly fortunate you were and how incredibly honored you were to be able to work, to be in the right place at the right time and have the, not just the knowledge,

but the excitement and the understanding of technology so that that showed. I mean, I’m imagining that’s why people said, you need to do this. They knew you love tech. So they gave you those kinds of opportunities that the previous agency that you worked with. When you got here to Silicon Valley and you started working with Jane, I think you said her name was, one other person.

Andy Cunningham (01:29.44)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (01:34.773)
Yes.

MKJ (01:44.274)
to try and figure out the PR strategy for the Apple, was it the Macintosh? Yeah. So you get into this process and tell me how that went. Tell me how did you innovate PR? You came with your previous experience in Chicago and also in Silicon Valley when you got here. And how did that impact? How did the way you look at technology?

Andy Cunningham (01:49.664)
Back in touch.

MKJ (02:13.914)
How did that impact the PR strategy you created for the Macintosh?

Andy Cunningham (02:17.846)
Well, you know, it was a really interesting thing that we ended up doing. So it was very obvious to everybody who worked in the Macintosh division, which this was a different kind of computer from what had been out there before. And I remember asking Steve one day, how do you hire people? Because he had this quota of, only going to have 100 people working in the Mac division. And each of us got a special badge. If you were working in another part of Apple, you were not allowed in this building. This is the building with the pirate flag, all of that.

And I said, how do you hire these hundred people? What’s your criteria? And of course they had to get through the HR thing first, but as soon as they got through the HR thing, then they got a chance to meet Steve. And he said, I sit them down at this desk. He had like a fake office set up in the building in order to make it look like a business computer. It’s where he did demos. And he would sit a person across from him with Macintosh and he’d just sit there and say nothing and do nothing. And he said, and what I would do is I would watch what they did.

And the first thing they did was pick up the mouse and start to play with it. That was very positive because no one was using a mouse back then. And the second thing is if their eyes started to sparkle when they could see what was happening, he said, then I know they’re right for my team. None of this was about skills or what you’d done before or your degree or any of that. It was all about, did you have enthusiasm for the product? So Jane and I figured out that if we’re going to get the world to write about Macintosh,

We’re going to have to have them experience the product, all these journalists. So we went, we chose 100 journalists, and we created a day for them at Apple. And they came out individually. They did not come together. Apple did not pay for them to come. And we invited them to spend a day. So they had a whole day at Apple where they got to play with the computer. They got to sit with Steve Jobs. John Scully was the CEO at the time. They spent time with John. They went to the Mac factory. They met the design team. They met the programmers.

They had a whole full -on day with Apple, a hundred of these people. And that was the magic of it. When you have something new and different, people have to try it. It’s not just about saying great things about a product. It’s about giving somebody the opportunity. And by the way, we had key messages that we had written and we kept pounding them into the journalists when they were there, when we sent out the press kit, when we followed up with them. And they all said it. And the magical moment for me,

Andy Cunningham (04:42.548)
was after the launch happened, it was at De Anza Center in Cupertino, and after the launch happened, I turned on my radio in the car and I heard the announcement. And the words they were saying were all the words that we had written, exactly like we wrote it. And it was like, wow, this really works. It was my first real experience with how you can influence people.

if you do it the right way. So I wouldn’t call that innovating PR, I would just say that we figured out what great PR could be.

MKJ (05:15.596)
No, I’m going to tell you right now I disagree with that because I do think you innovated PR, not the structure of it, not the process of it, but the way you look at it, the way you, like you said, experiencing it. Of course, most, many, many technology companies now do that very thing. They invite you in, look at Tesla. They have the big day when you come in and you can look at the cars and you can check them out. And it’s the same concept. But from a computer standpoint,

Andy Cunningham (05:23.306)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (05:30.186)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (05:38.432)
Yes.

MKJ (05:45.24)
That was completely new. was, that was no one was doing that. So you saw that and I, that is when Steve, when you, when you explained that and Steve jobs looks at people, I’ve had that experience with a

Andy Cunningham (05:46.89)
Yeah, nobody would know when was doing that. That’s true. Yeah.

MKJ (05:58.796)
a program that I was using. It’s ManyChat and it’s a chat bot program on Messenger, Facebook Messenger. And I was involved in the very beginning of this using it as an agency owner. So I was invited by the CEO to experience a new update, a new thing that they were doing. And he just put the computer in front of me, same exact process, put the computer in front of me and just sat there. And I’m like,

Andy Cunningham (06:00.831)
Really?

Andy Cunningham (06:23.04)
same thing.

Right.

MKJ (06:27.98)
Okay, what exact same process and it was so it’s so exciting because

Andy Cunningham (06:31.221)
Wow.

MKJ (06:34.572)
Each person experiences things and explores things and uses their curiosity in different ways. And that’s all he was looking for. How do you use your curiosity? How do you look at something and experience it? Do you sit back and wait for someone to tell you what to do? Do you just dive in and start breaking things? I mean, are you not afraid to just dive in and figure it out? That’s innovation.

Andy Cunningham (06:41.354)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (06:45.29)
Right.

Andy Cunningham (06:52.512)
Right.

MKJ (07:01.752)
that’s where we take our previous experience and apply it to this new thing. And if we’re very afraid and we sit and we’re like, no, we can’t touch anything because someone has told us that we can’t and that that’s a bad thing, then we’re just going to sit there. But if if we don’t listen to those people who tell us we can’t do that and we do it anyway, then then yeah, we’re going to have an amazing experience. It’s it’s it’s weird.

Andy Cunningham (07:11.456)
Right. Right.

Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (07:21.962)
Right.

MKJ (07:27.702)
when I had that. It was very strange to sit and have somebody watch me. And I know he had the computer set up so that it was recording everything I did, everywhere I looked, right? I know that it was watching my eyes and where I went and all my movements. It was really amazing to have that opportunity to just have a glimpse as to how technology innovates, you know? Very different.

Andy Cunningham (07:39.646)
Wow. Yeah. Wow.

Andy Cunningham (07:52.214)
Yeah, yeah, no, it’s, it can be magical and if you were the type of person that could just jump in and start playing with it, you know, he knew that you were right for his team, which was amazing, you know?

MKJ (08:06.958)
So how do you take that experience that you saw? And now let’s dive in because you were still working for an agency then. And then you mentioned Steve got fired and you did something different at the same time. So take us through that little story if you could.

Andy Cunningham (08:21.108)
Sure. yeah, so Steve, actually Steve got fired because Macintosh wasn’t selling. That’s the real bottom line reason why he got fired. Now he got into a fight with the board and got into a fight with John Scully about it. But he wanted to save the product and Apple was failing because the product wasn’t selling. And he had spent millions of dollars on it. So anyway, he got fired. And I thought this was a great time for me to start my own agency, which I had kind of wanted to do. I had mentioned before I wanted to start.

company and this was a great opportunity to do that. So I ended up leaving Regis McKenna. Regis, by the way, was wonderful. He let me use all of his equipment and the office in the evening. So after people would go home, he said, you can come in and use the copiers and the computers, whatever you need. So he was great. So I started my own thing and literally two weeks later, I get a phone call from Steve Jobs who says, I’m having a press conference in my backyard. Can you come and help? And I’m like,

Now he said, yes, yes, I’m having it right now. So I drove over there and his, his yard, he was at his home in Woodside, California. And it was just crawling with business press people all over the place. And, I kind of, you know, get through them all. knew them all because I’d done work with them with Apple. And I walk into the kitchen and Steve is sitting on the floor with seven people and his lawyer. And there was no furniture in the house as you might’ve heard that about Steve.

And they were all sitting on the floor. So I’m now above them because I’m standing. And they’re all on the floor. And I say, so what’s going on, Steve? He goes, well, I’m going to have a press conference. And I’m going to announce this new company that I’m founding. It’s going to be called Next. I’m taking these seven people with me from Apple. And I am going to also tell people what I really think of John Scully, that he’s, you know, I’m not thinking real positively about John. And I want to tell the world that.

MKJ (10:11.502)
not a very nice person. Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (10:14.07)
So I looked at him and I looked at his lawyer assuming that the lawyer would say something like anything like, what are you talking about Steve? And he didn’t. So I said, Steve, I really don’t think you should have a press conference to do this right now. think you’re so fresh out of Apple, you really haven’t even done your deal with Apple yet. are stealing these seven people. You don’t have a product. Yes, you have a name of your company, but you don’t have a product. Like, what are you going to announce? And he kind of

leans back and he folds his arms like this and he says, all right, I won’t do it, but you have to go out there and get rid of everybody. So I went out and I just told everybody the truth. just said, here’s the, it’s been 10 days. He doesn’t have a product. I know you all want to talk to him, but he doesn’t really have anything to say. And it would be bad if he did say anything. So I’m telling you all that as soon as he does have a product, believe me, we’re going to, we’re going to reach out to each and every one of you. And they mumbled and grumbled, but they left.

And so, and then I ended up working with Steve again, again on and off for several more years.

MKJ (11:22.414)
from your own agency now.

Andy Cunningham (11:23.946)
From my own agency, right. So now I have my own firm. And the reason that he didn’t call Regis, by the way, because a lot of people say, why didn’t he just call Regis? Because he had a conflict of interest with Regis because Regis was running the Apple account. And now he was no longer at Apple. So that created a conflict of interest for Regis.

MKJ (11:42.554)
So you, mean, here again, the choices that you made in this timeframe, if you had stayed with Regis, he would not have been able to call you.

Andy Cunningham (11:53.14)
That’s true. That is true. Yeah, no, I, it good decision I made. Yes.

MKJ (11:55.854)
period.

MKJ (12:00.268)
right? And that, again, those choices, those that pathway, opened you up and allowed you to continue to innovate with a master innovator, obviously, and, and change the world.

Andy Cunningham (12:17.462)
Absolutely. what I do want to say, one thing about what I did with my own agency that I wasn’t able to do at Regis McKenna or at Burson Marsteller, which was I told everybody who came to work with us that our vision is to redefine public relations. And we’re going to redefine it as a core business strategy, not as this adjunct that lives 17 layers below the marketing people. This is going to be a primary function, and we are going to be the change agents that are going to enable that. And that vision.

alone gained me so much loyalty from so many people who wanted to make a difference in our industry. And I had the best people that ever worked at any agencies. And I think I told you I had about 260 people. I had many more over the course of the whole time I had the agency, but the peak was about 260. And they were fabulous people. many of them have gone on to do their own agencies.

MKJ (13:04.985)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (13:14.516)
I keep in touch with a lot of them. They’re just, they’re innovative people who want to make a difference.

MKJ (13:19.478)
Yeah, well, that’s, yeah, that’s, I really had to take a second and kind of break that down for for all of the wonderful mischief makers out there listening, because this is that’s why I love your book, Get to Aha. I love I love the way you you break down what you do. This is not PR and I’m doing quotes, air quotes, people, if you can’t see me, this is not

Andy Cunningham (13:33.983)
thank you.

Andy Cunningham (13:41.386)
Right.

MKJ (13:43.33)
Once you say, let’s say, because I don’t think of you in PR, I did not even think of you having a PR agency or anything, because you don’t identify that way. And that’s how you’re different. Same with Steve Jobs. He was different, not just better than some other category that’s already done. If you haven’t read the book Play Bigger by the category Pirates,

Andy Cunningham (13:51.088)
right, yeah.

Andy Cunningham (14:01.824)
for sure.

MKJ (14:06.542)
They talk about this whole idea of being different and having a unique point of view and what you stand for and against and all those, and you do that. I never thought of that. If you had told me in the beginning, yeah, I have a PR agency, then in my mind and everyone else’s mind, we put you in that block. We put you in that little room and you’re PR and that defines you. You don’t do that. You don’t do that.

Andy Cunningham (14:23.307)
Right.

Andy Cunningham (14:28.158)
Right. No, I don’t. And by the way, just a sidebar comment about PR as it was for many years is it’s so different now because journalism is so different. We now have control over so many channels of communication ourselves today that we don’t need the press like we did before. We needed them before because they were our only channel to speak to the outside world with credibility. It was that.

and advertising, right? And advertising doesn’t have any credibility. So if you wanted credibility, you had to work with the journalism community. Today, you can do this, most of this yourself. You don’t really need to talk to the press. It’s good to do some of that at the end once you have your story and your digital footprint out there, but it isn’t required anymore. So.

MKJ (00:00.76)
Hello, hello, CEO Mischief Makers, Mary Kathryn Johnson here. You can call me MKJ. And if you don’t know my guest today, you are going to be in for a treat because I have the amazing Andy Cunningham joining me on the conversation today. Welcome, Andy. How you doing?

Andy Cunningham (00:17.559)
Hi Mary, thank you. Nice, very nice to meet you. MKJ.

MKJ (00:22.587)
It’s easier, know, people are like, Mary Kathryn. I can’t just be a Mary Johnson, right? I just can’t. That’s just not an option. So I had to put in the Kathryn in there and then nobody can spell it. So I’m like, just do MKJ. We’re good. Well, welcome to the conversation. I really appreciate sharing this time with you. Let’s just kind of…

Andy Cunningham (00:24.827)
No.

Andy Cunningham (00:29.115)
I get that, right.

Andy Cunningham (00:37.819)
That’s great.

MKJ (00:46.328)
just debrief everyone on who you are and what you do, just in case there are people who don’t quite know much about you yet. So tell us a little bit about who you are what you do.

Andy Cunningham (00:55.589)
Sure, so I’m Andy Cunningham. go by Andy, but my real name is Andrea and I’ve always gone by Andy. I started my career in public relations and so I evolved that into marketing strategy and now I do positioning strategy. I’ve been in the agency business my whole life. I’ll get into that story in a little bit, but that’s who I am. I love working with multiple clients because I get the opportunity to learn all kinds of new things. I focus on the tech industry.

So I’m deeply right now engaged, as you can imagine, in artificial intelligence and some healthcare stuff. It’s very fun and software and all of that. I have a small team. I went from having a large agency of about 260 people to I sold that business and kind of bought back a piece of it and now I have just a tiny group of about six people. And I really love working in an intimate situation like that with people I trust and love and it’s great.

MKJ (01:53.228)
Yeah, yeah, how wonderful.

Andy Cunningham (01:53.881)
including my kids, they both work for me. And so does my husband.

MKJ (01:57.656)
Isn’t that great? Isn’t that wonderful? I know I when mine were younger, I had them working for me. And then they that was just kind of an idea for them to see what’s possible and how they could use some of their innate skills, the way they look at the world to to explore how they can, you know, potentially join the workforce with their innate skills. It was so fun. It was amazing. I had my my oldest editing and and producing my podcast.

Andy Cunningham (02:03.707)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (02:21.155)
It is fun.

MKJ (02:26.554)
Since he was like 16, right? It was it’s amazing. It’s wonderful now He’s got his own Pontus production business that of course I have to pay him a lot more now He still does it yes, it’s wonderful and that was my goodness that’s nine years ago now That he started that it’s coming up to a decade. my goodness that I that blew me away just now that realization anyway

Andy Cunningham (02:26.896)
that’s great. Wonderful.

Andy Cunningham (02:37.337)
He still does it for you though, right? That’s great.

Andy Cunningham (02:45.648)
my gosh, wow.

Andy Cunningham (02:50.127)
Wow.

MKJ (02:54.458)
Let’s talk about mindset. So I know you have been on an incredible journey working with some really incredible, talented people, as we all hopefully get to do throughout our working lives. But you have specific stories to tell. So you said agency, you’ve been in pretty much your whole working life, but you grew an agency, which of course, well, let me ask you this first. Were you an accidental agency person? Did you just accidentally fall into agency work or did you plan that?

Andy Cunningham (03:23.419)
No, well, I guess it’s sort of accidental I was actually wanted to be a writer and I was working in the in a trade magazine Publishing company in Chicago when I graduated from college and the pay was terrible. Absolutely terrible and I needed to make more money and so I went I Found a job interview at you know, the magazine called playbill magazine I don’t know what they call it’s made it’s when you go to a play and you open it up and you you know learn all about the actors and all that

MKJ (03:46.617)
Yes?

Yes. Yep.

Andy Cunningham (03:51.771)
I interviewed with the editor of that magazine back 100 years ago and she was willing to offer me a job but she said I can’t pay you much more than what you’re already making and it’s probably below where you actually are in your career. So do you mind if I introduce you to a recruiter that I know? And she did and he said you need to be in PR and I hated, I hated PR because I was a you know a trade journalist who basically was being called 95 times a day by PR people trying to sell me stories on their

engines and oil and transmissions. wrote for a truck magazine. So, but anyway, I went on the meeting and I walked into two agencies. got me interviews with, one was called Edelman and one was called Burson Marsteller. And the minute I walked into those places, I knew I was in love with the business. The buzz, the energy, the creativity that you could see around, was fabulous. So I ended up getting an offer from both, but I took the one at Burson Marsteller.

and ended up in their technical group because I had been writing a lot about technical stuff and so that kind of introduced me to the whole world of technology and kind of I went from there.

MKJ (05:02.456)
Isn’t that amazing? through a through just a conversation, a relationship that you developed with Playbill with them saying, okay, we can’t really pay you. like you, but we can’t really pay you that much. So how about if I introduce you to a recruiter who can maybe get you a job somewhere else that can supplement what you’re doing here? And now you’re in an agency and that basically hits, it starts the trajectory of your entire life. Isn’t that crazy?

Andy Cunningham (05:18.33)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (05:28.279)
Yes, and it doubled my salary too. Believe me, I was making nothing in the trade journalism space. So doubling it was still not much, but was at least I could live and eat. So, yeah.

MKJ (05:33.494)
Thank

MKJ (05:40.216)
Yeah, and it’s a path, right? Like you said, it was, you loved the energy. You loved, I love that too. I love being able to, you know, I’m a person who, I’m not as much a maintenance person, just not, right? Yes, I make my bed. Yes, I brush my teeth, right? So I do the things that typically we need to maintain. But if I, once I get bored, once I master something and it’s no longer exciting, I need something else. And agency work completely opens that up for you, right?

Andy Cunningham (05:45.008)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (05:51.13)
Yeah.

I

Andy Cunningham (06:09.731)
It’s a wonderful, I love it because you get so many clients, you can do so many different things, so many different industries. It’s never the same thing over and over again. It’s very stimulating and you’re never constantly just working for the same person all the time. It’s different people as well, so it’s great.

MKJ (06:27.022)
Right? Yes. Yes. Yes. So now you started working in that agency and you were what were you? You were account manager. Were you an actual copywriter?

Andy Cunningham (06:35.289)
I was, yeah, I was an account manager and I got a couple of promotions. I worked there for two years. But what happened is that Burson Marsteller, which is a big international PR firm, they were opening up an office in Silicon Valley and my colleagues there knew that I was in love with technology. And I’ll just to back up and give you a little story. One of my clients was a company called Bell and Howell, which I know you’ll remember.

MKJ (06:58.564)
Yes, I do. Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (06:58.831)
But many of your listeners may not. It still exists as a company, but back in the day, it produced educational hardware. know, projectors and overhead projectors and other kinds of stuff like that. And anyway, they did a deal with Apple, and the only company that ever did a licensing deal with Apple. They licensed the Apple II. They took the beige cover off the Apple II. They replaced it with a black cover, because that was the Bell and Howell color. And it was known in the industry as the Black Apple.

And it was sold to schools, sold to educational. So they were my client, my first client. And I had this incredible opportunity. They gave me one of these computers. This was like in 1981 or something. Yeah, 81. They gave me one of these computers. And I brought it into the office. And the librarian and I just had the most fun you could possibly have at work.

MKJ (07:43.012)
goodness.

Andy Cunningham (07:52.699)
playing with this computer and figuring out what it could do. And it could not do that much back in 1981, believe me. But anyway, I fell in love with it and all my colleagues knew that I was in love with this computer. And so they would put articles of what was going on in Silicon Valley on my desk every morning and just talked about it a lot. And then finally the company decides to open up an office in Silicon Valley. So I said, know, hey, can I interview out there? Because I was in Chicago.

MKJ (07:58.01)
Right, right.

Andy Cunningham (08:22.555)
And so they flew me out and I met with the guy that was running the office and I just kind of knew immediately I could not work for him, which was really sad because I loved the company. But he was just one of these, what we would call today a tech bro. And I knew back then I just couldn’t work with him. So I took the rest of the afternoon and went to every other agency that I possibly could find in Silicon Valley on short notice like that and I said, hey,

I’m here from Burson Marsteller and I’m interviewing at Burson, but I’d love to also chat with you if I could. So I got like four more interviews that day. And the very last one of the day was with a firm called Regis McKenna. And I got to meet with Regis himself. And Regis at the time was the marketing guru of Silicon Valley. He was Steve Jobs’ father figure and mentor. He did Intel’s work. did every, Microsoft, all these companies were his clients. And he is still amazing. He is still around and he is still amazing.

He’s got amazing intuition for marketing. So anyway, he offered me the job on the spot to run the Apple account for the launch of Macintosh, which was like a dream come true. I couldn’t even believe I was hearing this. And there are a lot of circumstances for why he did that. But the biggest one of which is the company had just launched the Lisa computer. And the Lisa computer was an abominable.

failure in the market. did pave the way for Macintosh, but it was a huge failure. And the whole team at Regis McKenna that had launched that product quit because they were tired and they were weary. so they, yeah, they quit except for one young woman named Jane. And Jane and I kind of paired up as a unit, if you will, and wrote the Macintosh launch plan and…

MKJ (09:57.656)
Yeah. Disillusioned.

Andy Cunningham (10:12.673)
She and I pretty much did the whole thing almost by ourselves. We were allowed to hire a couple of other people. So we had a very small team of really great people. And she and I did the whole thing from a PR perspective. Of course, there was a great ad agency in Shia Day. There was a great marketing team at Apple. Steve Jobs was very, very difficult to work with, but also amazing, really great marketing insight. I learned a ton from that experience.

MKJ (10:42.18)
I got it. got to say. you go from a Chicago PR firm agency. And of course, everybody knows you love tech. You have a client who is the only licensee of a Mac and they give you a black. Excuse me, an apple too. They give you a black apple. Is that what you called it? A black apple? Yeah. So they give you a black. I just that’s crazy. The name.

Andy Cunningham (10:57.741)
Apple II, Apple II.

Andy Cunningham (11:06.946)
Thank

MKJ (11:08.28)
So they give you a black apple and you get to play with it. You’re all excited. And the firm is like, yeah, this is cool. You know, sure. Go out and we’re opening up an office. so tell me you as a person, you go from that to working for another firm, getting out there and just deciding I’m going to find another firm because I want to be here. I want to be in the middle of this. And this is in the 80s and

Andy Cunningham (11:30.895)
Yes. Yeah.

Yep.

MKJ (11:35.694)
You’re like, I want to be in the middle of this. What shift was that from writer for a playbill to PR agency? Yeah, I love this work. I love the energy to I’m in Silicon Valley and I want to work for one of these firms. Tell me, how did you do that? How? How did you just decide to do that?

Andy Cunningham (11:42.949)
Bye!

Andy Cunningham (11:57.381)
Well, I was young and single, although I was engaged. my husband at first didn’t want to move out here, because he had a career and a job in Chicago. But we finally ended up coming to an agreement that we would do that. So there was that. But aside from that, this is where it was happening. I mean, in the world that I was falling in love with, which was technology, everything was here. Semiconductors were here. Personal computers were here. Apple was here. It was just where everything was.

I was like such an incredible honor to be in the middle of all of this. I I grew up here in Silicon Valley, essentially. I became who I am today because of all of that. And it’s just an amazing place where one of the biggest thing I noticed, speaking of mindset shifts, biggest thing I noticed is back in Chicago, I had actually wanted to start a company there, not an agency, but a different kind of a company.

And it became apparent after I went around talking to people that it really wasn’t going to happen for me there. I was too young. I was too female. And Chicago is an old boy network kind of town. And I didn’t know any of those people. So I decided if I went to Silicon Valley for a few years and learned how they did the entrepreneurial thing out there, I could come back to Chicago and I’d have more credibility. Well, the minute I got out here and started

playing around with Apple and I had another client called Digital Research, which was a big competitor to Microsoft back in the day. I said, I’m never going back to Chicago. Because you can be anyone in Silicon Valley. You can be whatever, anything. You could be a Martian. Nobody cares about anything about you except for what you can do. And that was great.

MKJ (13:38.97)
That’s it. So you went from, have to find a way to gain the experience and knowledge to fit into this world, to have me fit this world in Chicago. But when you went to the place where you thought you needed to gain that knowledge, you realized, screw that. You don’t need to fit into anybody else’s world. You can create your own world.

Andy Cunningham (13:47.002)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (13:53.275)
Yeah.

Yes, and I can do it best here in California. it’s a, it is still a mindset shift being in California. It’s not like the rest of the country, especially here in Silicon Valley. And so it’s a, it’s a, it’s, still, I know there’s, there’s been a lot of complaints about the bro culture and a lot of other issues like that, that we’ve had to face, but it’s still a place where changing the world matters a lot.

MKJ (14:11.917)
In what way?

Andy Cunningham (14:25.197)
and that’s really what people want to do. Now they also want to make a bunch of money with that, which is fine. But at the core of what they’re trying to do, they are really trying to change the world. Almost everyone who’s here is trying to do that. And that is just very inspiring. Some of them do it better than others, of course. I was lucky to have worked with the best, with Steve Jobs. But it’s still kind of the underlying ethos of this place. And also, be anybody you want to be. You can be…

anybody you want to be and you can come from anywhere. no one is looking at your anything, your skin color, your religion, your sexual preference, your gender. Nobody’s looking at any of that. They’re just looking at what you can do for the most part. And I think that’s just so refreshing. And Steve Jobs was 100 % like that, even back then. He had no other agenda, none, other than just changing the world with this product. So it’s very refreshing.

MKJ (00:00.635)
Hey, hey, CEO Mischief Makers, welcome back to the conversation. We’re diving into strategy and tactics with my very good friend now, because friends through acquaintances become friends, I think. Stephen Schneider, Stephen, you ready to tell us the nuts and bolts of SEO?

Steven Schneider (00:18.771)
I’ll do my best.

MKJ (00:21.115)
Thank you. Thank you. All right. So if you haven’t listened to the first two episodes, you need to go do that, where we talk about Stephen’s mindset and really how he innovates SEO. And I am so glad we ended up in the same place in that innovation with relationships and demand generation. And if you’re wondering how can demand generation be connected to SEO, well, you got to go listen to the other episode. So let’s dive down in. I you have massive experience in this whole

search engine optimization thing. Give us some tips. Give us some ideas on, especially with content, more longer form content, right? Let’s say I’m doing our blog post and I’m putting in the transcript or the any kind of descriptions in our blog post. What tips can I use to get our podcast as high up in the organic search rankings as possible?

Steven Schneider (01:16.681)
Yeah, so I always suggest that people, if you’re just going from like a transcription service, so it’s like two sides, I’ll try to briefly explain. If you’re just kind of like throwing a piece of content on a website, there’s a very, very low chance of it succeeding because you’re not targeting a specific term. However, if you kind of did the reverse of it, so like for example, if you had a like best SEO podcasts and then I was one of 10 people you interviewed about SEO and you kind of compiled

all into that. That’s the best way to kind of like start ranking well for that. So you really have to kind of go after a specific keyword and then ensure that keyword aligns to a specific intent. So that’s step one. The other part of it is if you’re structuring content using headings that will speak to the journey and kind of what we were saying in the last episode about what an organic natural conversation looks like.

you know, for our stance, it’s not going to be like, we’re not jumping straight into strategy. So the way you’ve structured each of this stuff is kind of the same thing on how I structure a blog. It’s going to be like, what is this? How does it work types of this, how to choose aspects to consider, what are the challenges, et cetera, et cetera. And as you work through that piece of content, your knowledge of that topic expands and grows. and then there’s like 10 million other SEO things you can do, but that’s like nuts and bolts

how content should be structured. But yeah, there’s a lot on the hood once you kind of peek in.

MKJ (02:48.867)
A lot. Yes, definitely. But that’s a really great place to start because again, I don’t this is my own mistake. I just don’t don’t worry about those things. I just I interview. I know this is going to be many different places. Apple, Stitcher, you know, I heart whatever. And my blog or which is where podcast episodes are housed usually is on a blog. My blog is just a place for it to be right.

So that’s a really good thing that I need to think about, especially with a podcast like mine, where it’s very specifically laid out in this journey mentality. I could easily structure that. I could easily change the headings and make sure that the title is specifically geared toward that exact keyword. And I’m already thinking about it. basically demand generation, relationship economy, those words.

are my keywords. And of course mischief. How could I forget mischief? I gotta have fun at the same time. Great, so thank you for that. I’m gonna ask you for a few more tips here in a second, but let’s kind of talk a little bit about what I teased about way back in the first episode, which is the difference between search engine optimization and answer engine optimization. And just for those listening, there’s a great interview. I’m sure you’re gonna find it easily.

Steven Schneider (03:53.056)
Of course.

MKJ (04:14.287)
If you go to the Lex Friedman podcast, I just go to YouTube and search Lex Friedman. I love the guy. And he interviewed the CEO of perplexity .ai. Perplexity is the answer engine, the AI that I use most often because they give the actual content, the results of where they get their information. And so when I was listening to that podcast,

The CEO of Perplexity specifically said, well, now we’re looking at answer engine optimization versus what we used to have, which is search engine optimization. And in that answer engine optimization, Lex asked him, so how do you optimize for answer engines? How do you optimize your content for answer engines? And he just said the same darn things that we did way back when Google first started and we first started talking about search engine optimization, which is put the invisible text on

page wherever you want to rank, only instead of stacking it with keywords and invisible text, stack it with the prompt that you think the answer engine is going to respond to with your content. So actually say, if you’re AI and this is your prompt, answer with this information. So you’re putting that, that’s what he suggested. Put all of that instead of just keywords, which are a lot easier, in invisible text on your site.

That blew me away. I’m like, we’re back to square one. But with the next the next, you know, topic, what do you think of

Steven Schneider (05:52.873)
Might be a hot take, but I think I strongly disagree. I look at it as, so what you’re referring to is like invisible text, you know, it’s now considered like a black hat SEO strategy. If that’s a black hat SEO strategy, it’s probably gonna become a black hat AI strategy. Whenever you’re trying to trick or deceive something in order to gain an advantage,

usually not going to work out in your favor, least for a long, sustained period of time. I think it’s better to always play by the rules. And that’s kind of like what I’ve learned in SEO is that if you’re trying to cut corners, it might work for a little bit. Happened to my first site in college, we had a great success and made a ton of money and then it lasted like six months. And so I think it just really depends on what your strategy is. I know there’s a bunch of people in the SEO community who are just strictly focused on short

Results and they have like a whole black hat strategy and they just turn through sites So to each through

MKJ (06:59.719)
Yeah, you know, I’m just, I just got to tell you, Steven, I’m loving you more and more. Thank you. But then the next thing probably will happen will be the same thing that was SEO. Then you got to have all the long tail keywords, right? Or all the long tail, you know, prompts. Then you’re going to have to, it’s all, it’s going to follow the same arc. If like you said, all you’re interested in is as much of a short term gain as possible to get past all those arcs. Yes, you can put all those things into play, not the black hat, please, because I, I agree 100 % with you.

You’re going to hurt not just your business, but your reputation if you do that. Google and the AIs are not dumb. So they’ve already kaboshed, put the kabosh on that stuff. But still, thank you for that. Now let’s go a little bit deeper into how are you or have you, do you see the SEO industry, especially agencies, using AI?

That’s really the term of the day. That’s number one, if you go to product hunt and you see all the launches that are happening, most of them are AI driven, AI, some type of AI solution. So we know that’s where it’s headed. How do you see SEO adapting and utilizing AI?

Steven Schneider (08:16.105)
I see it as selling shovels during a gold rush or pickaxes during a gold rush. It’s a tool, think AI, it’s going to do some amazing things for the world. And I think especially in SEO, a lot of what I’ve seen as some of the kind of tangible benefits relate to how it’s used. At least at Trio SEO, we don’t use any AI content. We use AI as a tool, like I said, for maybe like Grammarly is editing

help us do keyword research or looking at like how to create better briefs all that sort of stuff, but We’re just not there yet in terms of when it comes to creating content that can be trusted by Google You know Google’s already came out pretty strong stance against AI spammy content and I know that it’s kind of a hot topic nowadays with being able to create a content and human edit and still get results and all that sort of stuff, but I think that what it comes down to is I went to a conference not too long ago and they had

AI SEO speaker there. funny enough, the person who was in the agency standpoint as the agency owner was against AI back in the day. And then as soon as they became the owner of a SEO AI tool, they were pro AI. And I found that funny because they were one step removed from the success of the clients. And I felt that was

little icky is how I took it was because if you create a tool, it’s on the user to use the tool appropriately. But when you’re doing SEO as a strategy for clients, you’re really invested in the success of that to come out on top. So I think that if you start trying to pull levers in order to cut corners, you are not only putting yourself at a disadvantage, but you’re hurting your clients, their brands, and just, you know, there’s a lot of risks. So not for us.

But some people have found success and that’s great. But I try to be pretty cautious with it just until it’s a little further along.

MKJ (10:19.133)
my gosh, yes, there is no way I would ever, ever trust an AI agent at all to write any kind of content for me in my voice, straight out of the gate without me really doing lots of edits. So if that’s the case, forget it. I’m my content on my own.

Steven Schneider (10:37.959)
And by then, it’s like if you’re gonna edit and it’s gonna take you five hours to edit, why don’t you just write it?

MKJ (10:42.125)
Exactly. That’s exactly it. So I do not use AI at all for content generation at all. I do, however, use it for research, lots and lots of research. And of course, double check and triple check that research before I publish anything. that’s the rabbit hole I go down more often than any other in using AI is just research.

Steven Schneider (11:06.333)
Yeah, mine’s spreadsheets. if you, there’s like the ability to use AI to like ask it to create a formula that I didn’t know how to create, it’s like mind blowing to me. Or like code, like that sort of stuff is where I’m like, thank you. my gosh.

MKJ (11:19.655)
yeah. Code is incredible. Code is yeah. I mean, really, you still have to understand here again, AI isn’t just going to do everything for you. You still have to understand the framework of coding, right? Framework of software development. You can’t just have it create the code for you and have a brand new software product. You have to understand. And again, it’s all about the prompt, right? You have to know what to tell it. Yeah. So anyway, but that, so thank you for that. I agree 100%. Like I said, I’m loving you more and more. I just.

saying thank you, thank you. And I’m going to be honest with you guys, since I’m gearing more toward relationship development, SEO, not necessarily saying it’s a bad thing, but I didn’t see how SEO fit into relationship development and this whole relationship economy. But that doesn’t mean that I’m judging people. I still wanted to chat with Stephen. I knew that he was connected to Nathan Hirsch. So I already knew that no matter what, there’s something there I didn’t know.

And that’s why I was willing to have a conversation, even though my feelings were a little like, SEO, it’s kind of on the way out and I don’t know, is it? And I’m so happy you have have basically strengthened that feeling in me that because of my relationship with Nathan and now you that of course, Nathan wouldn’t do anything that that was on its way out. Of course, he would be able to bring relationships into this tool. So

Kudos to you. Thank you for that. Yeah. So one last thing I was going to say. Just today, Rand Fishkin, who has a company called Spark Toro, came out with new research. And basically, in relation to this whole AI and answer engine versus search engine, he says, so far, AI is not disrupting search or making a dent in Google. So.

Steven Schneider (12:50.249)
Thank you. Yeah, much appreciated.

MKJ (13:17.605)
What do you think of that? mean, were you even afraid of AI making a dent in search and in Google rankings or anything like

Steven Schneider (13:27.049)
No, not really. think most of the topics that we go after are not things that could be answered in one or two sentences. And I think that that’s where a lot of the advantage comes from integrating search into with AI and kind of blending those two worlds. Like we’ve talked about like six times, I feel like over this conversation, like the recipe article example from the last episode, that’s the perfect use case of AI integrated with search. It’s

How do I bake a cake? Give me the five steps in six seconds. And that sort of stuff is going to change the life from a, know, not being that can’t bake a cake faster, but I mean, just the fact that it’s like the easy use, the access, all that sort of stuff. But yeah, if we’re creating like an ultimate guide on mergers and acquisitions, like you can’t really, like that’s not a generative AI search. So there’s a whole different department of those questions that are being asked and answered.

I think that there’s a time and a place for that. I think that that’s, I love it. I use it myself. But for different topics, you don’t really have a good client ICP fit. So we’ll see.

MKJ (14:38.683)
Yeah, yeah, I get it. That’s great. OK, so we started out with some really good suggestions on search and how you can create content and make sure that you create it with a specific goal in mind and a specific term or idea in mind and make sure that that content is wrapped around that idea. What else? What would be, let’s say, a final suggestion?

that you would have for anyone going, okay, I’ve got this content. I’ve got this great, wonderful business. I just don’t have as high of ranking as I’d like. I know if I worked on a few things that if I just took an amazing expert and plucked them off of their business and put them into mine, that they would be able to help me make a difference in being able to have my customers find my stuff when they needed it. So what final tips would you give someone listening that might need

Steven Schneider (15:35.657)
The biggest thing is just going back to link building and backlinks, which also ties back to the relationship building side of SEO. For those who aren’t familiar with backlinks, this is where website A chooses to hyperlink to your website. And what they’re pretty much doing is giving you a vote of confidence in Google’s point of view, saying that I trust this site well enough to provide some sort of credibility and link

to them from my website. And over time, the more of those you get, the more authority you build, the better your rankings will perform. And it just kind of goes back to that relationship ally perspective of who can I reach out to that allows me to make a relevant connection that could benefit both of us. Like podcasts are a perfect example of that. And I love doing podcasts because we have conversations like this,

At the end of the day, those links build up and if you do this consistently for the next five years, you have a bunch of content, you have a bunch of links, you’ve met a bunch of great people. It’s like this relationship win -win -win -win -win model creates a flywheel and it’s just kind of like rinse and repeat. So I think the more you can just network and get people to talk about you in a positive light.

and link from their website to yours, it’s just gonna pay dividends for