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 (00:00.804)
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 (00:00.59)
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 (00:01.122)
Hey, hey, CEO, mischief makers, Mary Kathryn Johnson back at the microphone with you and Stephen Schneider. But we get to talk now about impact and innovation. And this is fast becoming my favorite part of the podcast because it is that messy middle. And I love the messy middle. I just love it. Anyway, welcome back to the conversation. Stephen, how are you doing? You ready?

Steven Schneider (00:24.085)
I’m great, I’m excited, let’s get into

MKJ (00:25.9)
Yeah, let’s go. All right, so if you haven’t listened to the mindset episode, please go back and listen because you will hear how Stephen’s journey has evolved and what type of mindset he had to adopt and change, which is usually the biggest mindset difficulty for most of us with any kind of an agency or service based business when we started out with the product ourselves. So now.

All right, you help people with SEO. I get that. It’s an important part of business. Who specifically? Do you just take any SEO client or are there specific clients you feel you can help best?

Steven Schneider (01:09.591)
Yeah, so we always start with a discovery audit. We don’t take on any client. We are all business owners first. And so it’s really important to us that meaning like we want the SEO to succeed. And so for that reason, we won’t take on a client that we just know that we’re taking money from. And it’s like, you have no potential upside of winning. Like we’ll just say like, go build backlinks for the next year, come back and get some content with us. But like, it’s just not a good fit at this time. So no, we don’t take on anyone. We like to work with people who have an established brand.

They also have to have a long term mindset just because SEO takes 6 -12 months to really get up and running. And so it can’t be people who are looking to experiment with SEO and want to just see what happens in 30 days. It’s like, that’s not how this works. So since day one, we’ve been pretty picky. And I think that that’s also kind of proven to be an advantage from our side of things. So we work with people who have a very

easy manner to work with. Like we don’t want to email people who are constantly emailing us and asking us for meetings. It’s like, no, we want to work with people who seem like a friend. Like, you know, it should always be someone that you can like go get a drink with or whoever afterwards. yeah, we try to make sure it’s a good fit, both sides.

MKJ (02:20.024)
Yeah, totally. Yeah, totally. So I know you walked us through your previous experience in college and you were getting your degree in business in college. What was your degree? Finance. Okay, got it. And so through that degree and the way you were looking at the world, what did you think you were going to do in finance? What was your goal?

Steven Schneider (02:28.833)
Finance,

Steven Schneider (02:39.529)
I had no idea. I was actually in marketing originally and I figured that marketing was, and this is not to bash anyone with a marketing degree, but I figured that marketing was easier to learn on YouTube than finance and finance had more upside. Marketing was just so saturated, I think it still is. And so I just looked at it, was like, if I’m going to go to college and make it worthwhile and be in debt, I might as well get a degree that’s pretty hard and at least has some potential. I was probably going to go into

you know, VCs or, you know, investments or something like that, just cause that’s more interesting. But yeah, I had no idea. I was just going to like stay in school forever until I figured it out, like get an MBA, maybe get a PhD. Like it was just whatever, whatever in the course.

MKJ (03:21.272)
So through that, you definitely got an MBA and a PhD in entrepreneurship, it sounds like. Yeah, that’s awesome. But you didn’t have to go into debt, at least not that kind of debt, not school debt. I’m sure you went into other kinds of debt, but not that. Wow, okay. So with through that finance and that, it sounds like you just had an openness to like, hey, whatever, if it hits me,

Steven Schneider (03:24.621)
Yes, I did,

Steven Schneider (03:33.581)
Yeah.

MKJ (03:48.274)
and it’s interesting and sounds like I can do it and I have a, you know, some type of, I can make some kind of an impact in it and make a living at it, then yeah, I’ll consider it. yeah, I think is the number one requirement for entrepreneurship. You have to be open. You have to be open. You have to change when you need to change. I mean, the day we’re talking right now, the Dow just dropped, you know, thousand points so far and NASDAQ’s gone down. would?

Steven Schneider (04:00.289)
Yeah, yeah, good way to put

Steven Schneider (04:06.349)
Yep, absolutely.

MKJ (04:17.902)
four, almost 5 % or something. So lots of changes happening. And as an entrepreneur, if you look at those and think, my gosh, the world is ending, you’re probably not going to survive as an entrepreneur. You have to adapt and pivot and whatever other word of the day you want to use. So how does that finance and that openness and your foray into SEO for your own blogs, how did

How do you bring that into this new venture from an innovation standpoint? And just to remind everyone listening, I don’t define innovation as the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk’s of the world. I define innovation as every human being that takes their previous experience and looks at a problem differently because of that previous experience. It’s actually called tacit knowledge. So how did you take that previous experience and adapt it to

current venture with your SEO agency to make it different from any other SEO agency out

Steven Schneider (05:26.061)
Yeah, so I think it was, I feel like I’m naturally a lucky person, which has kind of been one of those weird things that we say out loud. And I think that like, it just happened to be this good fit because with the first company, you know, when we were publishing 400 articles per month, that machine was so finely tuned at that point that it was just like, nothing could go wrong. You just continuously scale and everything, you know, you add in more team members, et cetera. But when we come over into the agency now,

I had already figured out what that system looked like and knew it to a scale that like we’re, for example, coming up on year one when we’re publishing around 120 articles per month. So for context, like I already know how to scale four times bigger than where we currently are. And so once that was realized, you know, everything else was like little minor things I could just figure out along the way, like client communication or like client strategy, more of like clients as a whole.

It was just really kind of figuring out how to fine tune that last like maybe 15, 20%. So when I kind of flipped the script, I’m really only having to master 20 % of the entire landscape of things. And I think just kind of keeping that in mind and be like, the hard part’s done, the hard part’s done. And like reminding myself of that really just kind of allowed me to free up a lot of that mental head space so that I could focus on what was in front of me and not be so overwhelmed by the all the other moving parts of the business.

MKJ (06:53.964)
Yeah, yeah. Well, let’s take that because in our last episode, you talked about some black swan events. those are those, you know, I’m going to throw a wrench into that where yeah, I got this. It’s the same machine. It’s not the same machine. Definitely. So take me through that. How did that experience of going through those events help you innovate your current SEO agency so that now you can help your clients navigate those because

Steven Schneider (07:05.88)
wow,

MKJ (07:18.776)
We’re coming up to a US election, which, and again, we just talked about financial markets. Who knows what’s at Israel? Just who knows what’s on the horizon? So how are you innovating your space based on your experience with those events?

Steven Schneider (07:36.215)
I think the biggest thing is just trying to be very open and realistic and honest with clients. One of the things I always like to communicate with clients is that you probably didn’t get into business day one thinking it was going to be an overnight success. And if that’s the case, you have to zoom out and stop thinking in weeks and months and quarters and instead thinking years and be like, if this strategy is actually as strong as we believe it is and there’s confidence behind

Will I be happy when I look back two, three, five plus years later, when all of the pieces of content are fully published and bringing in that organic traffic and it’s fully pumping? Are you going to look back and say that you wish you had done more or are you going to look back and be like, wow, I’m so happy we held off on that? Like you have to kind of just zoom out. And I think that that’s the biggest thing to realize is that yes, there’s always going to be these weird bumps along the way.

But one of the best quotes I’ve been living by since meeting Connor, Nathan, my new partners is that conflict leads to change. And so as long as you can embrace that change and push through it and learn from it, the next one’s always gonna be easier. And I think that’s just the biggest thing is just reminding that and being mindful and also just of living the moment and knowing that it’s okay to feel that uncomfortableness, but over time it gets

MKJ (08:54.252)
Yeah, definitely. I mean, I remember the first big Google algorithm change, the very first. I’m that old. OK? No, I remember the first one. And it shook our worlds drastically because everybody was riding high and raking in the dough and all this kind of stuff. And then, boom, Google all of a sudden just goes, never mind. We’re going to go do this other thing. And

Facebook has done it many times. LinkedIn has done it many times. This is unfortunately one of the difficulties. If you, you, you, hook your business, if you anchor your business to any social company, any social media site, any outside force, and you actually hook it to that as your only possible success, then you will be broadsided. Absolutely will because

business doesn’t care about you, it cares about its advertisers and where it wants to put the next algorithm change so that they can make their most money, not necessarily just you. Of course, those goals are aligned most times, but not necessarily for affiliate marketers. So we’ll leave that one alone. so how really how are you able to or what do you do? We’ll get into this next time. But what do you do when a major shift like that happens? Like

we’re talking about. mean, yes, we can look at long term. Yes, those are wonderful things to think about. But ultimately, at the end of the day, your job is to your clients pay you to get them as high on the first page of Google whenever someone searches for a particular term as possible. And what that does is basically lists them well,

Google’s kind of changed their structure a little bit, so it’s not just a ranking of 10 anymore. There’s a lot of different stuff in there, including AI and all that. But still, that’s a list of their top nine competitors. That’s it. You’re on the list. If you’re in the top 10, you basically have just gotten yourself in line with your top nine competitors. So again, if you don’t differentiate yourself, basically, it’s going to be a race to the bottom of price if you look just like those other 10 competitors.

MKJ (11:17.582)
So I’m sure you help your clients not look like those 10 competitors if you’re looking at long -term success. Do you do that first off? And how in terms of innovation, in terms of the way you look at SEO?

Steven Schneider (11:34.069)
Yeah, so I love SEO because the or content SEO, say, because of the creative psychology that goes into the art of creating blogs and content. And so what I mean by that is any any person can write an article a million different ways. There’s never going to be an exact way to look at it. The same thing applies

SEO content and creating good outlines or briefs or kind of the structure bare bones of that content. and so one of the things that we really kind of like try to focus on is the reader’s psychology. And one of my favorite analogies is like, you know, there’s nothing worse than trying to look up an article or a recipe on how to bake a cake. And then you have to read the first 2000 words about getting the flour and baking the cake at grandma’s and turning on the oven and the experience. It’s like, just give me the recipe

We’ve all been there and like people overlook that in SEO. And think that that’s one of the things that we try to like sift through is how are you building in trust with your content? How are you building in that experience? How are you actually considering what that reader experience is like from the get -go? And remember that you can’t just create content for the sake of Google. Obviously there’s a lot of like tips and tricks you can do to optimize it. But at the end of the day, people are reading these articles. It’s not Google just reading the articles.

And I think kind of going back to like what you were saying in the first, you know, episode, it’s very relationship focused content is relationship focused. You’re creating this piece of asset for them. And so if you overlook just human tendencies, like, is it going to be boring intro? Is this introduction suck? Like all those little things where people just kind of glance over, we spend extra time on, like we hammer in the introduction. We always add a too long, didn’t read summary snippet at the top. Like, you know, we kind of just give them the,

information immediately and then let them decide if it’s worth carrying on or directing to a lead magnet for more information. So we’re always looking at ways to improve content and just kind of keep that mindset top of mind. And also just remember like we’re on borrowed time as it is once someone clicks on that piece of content. So how do you kind of fight the ADHD mentalities of people who just want to like get the answer quickly and leave and then also kind of meet the other side of the conversation which is people who actually want to read it in depth and learn about

Steven Schneider (13:57.057)
the task or whatever the guide is about. So I think just meeting customers on all fronts and keeping that psychology forefront of mind has really kind of taken us a long way because I don’t see a lot of people doing

MKJ (14:10.446)
Okay, so that thank you for saying that because that’s exactly what I’m talking about with this relationship economy, right? So that’s the relationship economy versus the attention economy. Attention economy is just get me on the top of Google, give me the keywords, splash it in, I don’t really care what it looks like, just get me on that top and then hopefully people will click and make me money, right?

I’m not putting it down your three to 400 blogs that you did way back in 2017. That’s the way it was. That was where it was structured, right? That’s the purpose of it back then, but it’s evolved. And especially with people like yourself and my sons, your native digitals, you guys pretty much your formative years have been on the internet. So all of those things, you can see them a mile away, right? You can see the, the, the tricks.

Steven Schneider (14:38.925)
Time and a place for sure. Yeah.

MKJ (15:01.184)
And I’m talking the true tricks that marketers, and I know the reason you were a little bit not exactly as warm and fuzzy about marketers, because I’m gonna tell you right now, they ruin everything. Absolutely ruin everything. Sorry, it just is. They ruined chat bots when I had my chat bot agency. I mean, yeah.

We won’t go into that. You can listen to many other episodes and hear Mary reminisce about her chat bot agency days. But this is the relationship economy and the reason it has switched to this relationship economy and what you’re talking about with being able to meet the customer where they are.

Basically, you’re meeting the potential buyer where they are. The TLDR you need for the native digitals. They know what TLDR means. Old timers like me, most of them have no clue what that means. They want to read the whole thing, right? They want to experience it’s a different culture. Doesn’t mean you can’t switch and it’s age based because, hey, I’m 60 and I’m in the TLDR, right? Doesn’t mean just because your age is a certain thing that you can’t do either one.

But that is, that’s exactly the relationship economy. That is demand generation versus lead generation. Lead generation is do an ad or something even organic to try and get them in my funnel, to try and get them down to the bottom to buy. Demand generation is us as entrepreneurs entering the buyer’s journey on their terms, not trying to get them into our sales journey. And so you’re doing

You’re doing that even with SEO, even though I don’t know whether you knew the term existed or whatever, but you’re doing that. You’re building relationships and you’re meeting buyers where they are. How? First off, have you heard those terms? And secondly, how are you then? I see that as your innovation. Did you do that on purpose or did is it just because it’s the way you

Steven Schneider (17:05.773)
Yes, I feel like a little bit of both. like when we like in the first company, I yes, I have heard those terms. First question. I saw like I studied those terms was like, this is the way we got to do it. But I just I wrote a lot of articles when back in the early days of kind of bootstrapping, you know, lot of my first company. And I just remembered like reading a bunch of guides and seeing like, what was the playbook people were doing. And since I do come

that affiliate marketing background, you know, you’d always have like a table at top. You’d even have like a bullet point list of products before the table and then a TLDR section below the table. And you’re just like literally like trying to get as many clicks as possible. And I think a lot of that and just common sense, I like at least it feels like common sense. It’s like no one wants to read a 4 ,000 word article. Like no one’s, no one’s reading a hundred words if you’re lucky. Like they’re just on a mission.

and you’re a checkpoint along the way. So, you know, I kind of just keep trying to keep that in mind and put myself in that perspective and be like, how does this flow? And then for, you know, people on the other side who want to read it, it’s like, do the sections flow organically? And it’s like, does a, should it go like, what is a, how does it work? What are the types of, you don’t just jump straight to like, you know, here’s the sales pitch. It’s like, you got to kind of like work down and kind of like building that knowledge.

so that at the end of it, they feel like they’re informed enough to proceed to the next checkpoint. And so I just try to create content. Like I think I would want to work through it and give or take, depending on the topic, I could be on either side of that conversation. So sometimes I just want it quick and like, you know, the recipe, like don’t care, just give me the recipe. Other side, it might be like I’m researching a new computer and like I actually need to study the nuts and bolts of it. So.

Yeah, I think just trying to keep in mind that people are human and some are antsy and some aren’t. And how do you find the best of both worlds?

MKJ (00:00.817)
Hey, hey, CEO, Mischief Makers. Welcome back to the conversation with myself, MKJ, in case you don’t know who I am, if you’re the first time here, welcome, and my incredible guest, Josh Elitch. Josh, you ready to dive into impact and innovation? I think you

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (00:16.738)
I love it, let’s do

MKJ (00:19.113)
All right. So if you haven’t listened to the first episode when we talked about mindset shifts and what Josh is doing, please go back and listen to that when you get a chance, because it will set you up for what we’re going to talk to next. So Josh, the last conversation we had, were you you went into some details about what your next step is going to be with up my influence and how you are loving impacting the people that you work with. But you want to be able to impact more people than you know. Personally, you can’t do that just by yourself.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (00:47.746)
No, no, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, even in, I’m sorry, go ahead. Yeah, yeah, please.

MKJ (00:47.767)
So take me through that process. Hang on a second. So take me through that process of how, so first off, identify for me what your business is. Do you consider yourself just in terms of a, so people can kind of start with a starting point that they might understand. Are you an agency? Are you a consultancy? What is that basic premise to start with?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (01:14.094)
Sure, so for the B2B world and usually you’re six and seven and some eight figure businesses, if they’re agencies, B2B service providers, consultants and coaches, again, as long as they’ve got some professional reputation, they have to be account -based sales and marketing. And also they have to be willing, and this is the most important thing, we don’t work

more bro -y oriented marketing and sales. It’s just, if you’re like a one call close kind of shop and that’s all of your scripts and stuff are designed like that, we’re probably not gonna be a real good fit for you. Now, if on the other hand, you believe in the relationships and that’s important to you, like you’re just not trying to work people through a sales script, but you’re willing to get to know one another before you end up doing business together,

this could be quite a perfect match, quite frankly. So what I do is I serve as that fractional virtual chief revenue officer. And my job is to take a look at your sales. And in most cases, the people that we work with usually have very good offers. Like they’re very good at what they do. The value is typically bigger, right? So at a minimum,

It would be a $10 ,000 ALV, but usually it’s more, you know, in the 20 to $100 ,000 range in terms of, again, average lifetime value of that client or first year value. But we have clients that sell seven figure engagements. So when you’re talking about your potential customer like that, being a Broie salesperson is going to be very challenging today. LeadGen is going to be exceptionally

challenging today. So we’ve come up with a platform, we’ve done this close to 250 times now. We’ve worked with close to 250 different clients. And so my role is to just simply get you more at bats. Like if your offer is good, your conversion is good, generally your customers stick around for a little bit of time, right? Well, then the only other variable you need to fix is you just need more opportunities.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (03:34.702)
So in that case, that’s where we zero in all of our attention. You need higher quality people and you need to spend time getting know one another. So we create a system where we facilitate not high volume, but generally about two very high quality introductions consistently week after week after week after week with your dream ideal.

persona, your ICP, your customer avatar, right? They have to fit demographically and psychographically. And what our clients typically find are conversion rates around 15 to 25%. Now, so again, what this means is rather than thinking about this is someone who’s in need and I have to compete with them versus all of these other vendors that they’re shopping, it’s not like that. Instead,

MKJ, here’s the goal is you want to make a relationship with someone and have them come to this conversion on the first call. good, this is really important. So please don’t mistake what I’m saying here. You want the other person that you’re meeting with to come to this realization. good, now I have a friend who does what you do. If you can get there in the relationship, business is an inevitability.

Because what I know about high value business leaders is they will move heaven and earth to try to do business with their friends. I do it. I constantly look for excuses to do business with my friends. And so if we can get that kind of caliber and quality of person on your schedule week after week after week with no lead gen, no paid ads, none of that stuff is necessary. What do you pay with? A little bit more time on the front end, a little bit more generosity.

That’s your ticket. So I’m gonna now from this point forward, MKJ, I’m gonna be referring to the book, The Go Giver by Bob Berg quite a bit, who has written what we consider to be part of our holy texts. For what we do around here over and up my influence.

MKJ (05:43.021)
my goodness. All right. So that my friends is a perfect example of innovation. So if you know what a chief revenue officer is, if you know what a fractional revenue officer is, if you understand the basic dynamics of that person in that role, what you just heard Josh talk about is nothing like anyone you’ve ever talked to. So even though I started him off with what’s the typical definition that someone can start with and put Josh in a

He broke that box apart because that’s innovation. So no one, no one on the planet competes with Josh in what he does.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (06:23.178)
no! No!

MKJ (06:24.159)
No one, there is no competition. There is no other chief revenue officer or fractional revenue officer that is going to be compared to him because that’s not what he does. He creates relationships. He helps move business forward because he knows. So now we get into the impact part. You know exactly who you are impacting. You know exactly who you love to work with. And that probably took quite a bit of trial and error to get to, I can imagine.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (06:48.398)
It did. It did. And I’ll be very frank with you in 2000 conversations of my own with potential customers, you which has led to, you know, about the 250 clients over the years. And those are just the VIP clients. I’m not including all the other clients that we used to work with. Here’s one thing in very, very intimately what I hear frequently. And we generally work with folks in their 30s, 40s on up. Again,

very good at what they do, they’re respected, usually in their space. I hear this refrain or this sentiment, you know, at this stage in my life, I didn’t think that I was gonna have to be competing for business. I didn’t think I was gonna have ups and downs. At this stage in my life, I thought that that would be resolved by now. I hear that a lot. And what I want you to know is if you identify with that sentiment,

You’re not alone. Generally, we have those feelings and we attribute that somehow to our worth or somehow we think that it’s a reflection of how good our offer is. It’s usually not. It’s because we talked about, you know, if your offer is you create results for your clients, if your conversion is generally okay, there’s only one other variable you need.

You just simply need to be building more relationships consistently. And if you’ll do that, so if instead of talking with two a month, you talk with 10 a month, in theory, you should have five times the number of new clients. But again, the frustration is, okay, well, if I want more people, that means I need to be out there doing TikTok dances, or I need to be slamming people’s DMs. No, you don’t, because that’s not how those higher caliber people do that.

very tactically, you’re going to have to give them something that they do want, a leader caliber invitation. It’s not to sit in on your webinar. I’m sorry. It’s not that that doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work as well as it once used to. I think you should still have webinars, but you should acknowledge that that’s probably gonna be somewhere else in the user journey. So an invitation to that might come at stage three or four,

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (09:13.226)
Step one, step one is if you’re initiating the invitation with noble intent, then you’re just gonna have to be very honest on what they want. And white paper may not be it, webinar may not be it, coffee just to chat, that’s gonna be harder too. Again, I’m not saying that this stuff doesn’t work, it just doesn’t work as well as it once did because it’s not your fault, marketers have ruined everything.

Marketers, lazy marketers, flock to every good idea and bastardize it until it’s no good for good people like you and I. So it’s not your fault. So where do we have solace? We have solace in generosity. Lazy marketers are never going to spend more time with fewer people. That’s just anathema to how the lazy marketer chooses to operate. They are more about spray and pray.

the intentional account -based folks that we work with, these go -givers, these folks that are leading in generosity, they earn the time together and they get consistency and predictability. If every single month you get eight to 10 new high -level introductions, probably you’re gonna end up doing business with one or two of those people directly, plus secondary benefits of collaborations and introductions and other things that leaders that are friends do

Mary Catherine, know you and I are doing all kinds of fun things together that are going to help each of us. And most leaders have a lot of things going on. So it’s audacious of us to look at the world and assume everyone wants to buy our product. That’s not your job. Your job is to show up in service and then just see how you can provide the highest value. It might be they engage on your offer. It could be something even better. It could be something different or

you know, again, what I find is, you know, when you start networking with consistency, you get into these neighborhoods and most of us know lots of people just like ourselves. So I might not be your client, but I probably know someone who’s gonna be your client. So if we have the opportunity to get to know each other, we’ll get there. So we could talk a little bit more tactically about that generosity a little bit later.

MKJ (11:29.881)
Yes, absolutely. so if someone’s sitting out and they’re like, my gosh, this resonates so much. I wish I could do this. can’t, can’t, I’m so burnt out of this lead generation hamster wheel and I don’t know when it’s going to stop. What advice would you give them to innovate? So you’ve innovated your space so that you don’t have to go out and do lead. And Josh, it is so true marketers. I am so sad with what happened with chat bots, the way they went, the way they

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (11:40.162)
Yeah. yeah.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (11:52.205)
no.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (11:59.938)
I know!

MKJ (12:00.207)
It was opposite of what I was doing. I was doing conversational design. I was helping people choose your own adventure from the customer’s perspective, not mine.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:07.405)
Yes.

MKJ (12:10.565)
and it just got completely ruined. was so sad to see. And clients came expecting that ruined piece, right? Just get me to a sale. I had a client who did, in 99 days, I got her a million dollars in her $99 course product. And she had a 30 % refund rate. I felt sick to my stomach.

I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to have a 30%. That’s not what business is about. That’s people feeling bad about the decision they made because they felt coerced into it. I don’t like that. So if someone’s sitting out there going, how do I innovate my space? You mentioned GoGivers, so that’s a great place to start. What other piece of advice would you give them?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:44.685)
Yes.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:55.694)
Yeah, if you’re talking, if you’re talking strictly about how can I innovate, I think one thing that we can do is stop pretending like you have all the ideas or you’re supposed to have all of the ideas. I don’t. I’m not smarter than the market. All I simply do is because of the volume of conversations I have with my ideal partners and clients, they tell me what they want and need. I have the ability to test a lot of messaging.

And so what I share today is not based on what AI told me to say or what Josh’s brilliant mind told me to say. I’ve just been doing this a lot. So we’ve been 100 % inbound for over four and a half years. I’ve had more than 2000 conversations in that time with my dream ideal clients, partners, et cetera. And so because of that, I’m just better at what I do

only because I just keep on showing up. It’s, you I started playing the bass guitar about a year ago. And when I started it, I felt like I had kid fingers, like I can’t do anything on this. And so I read a book and it was just so brilliant because it said, listen, when you do the activity, it doesn’t matter if you think you’re getting it or not. You are, your brain is getting it. You are always, this is activity knowledge. Do the thing, have the power.

but you will not have the power unless you do the thing. So in the case of innovating, the more conversations you have with people and you say, listen, this is what I’ve done in the past. But if, let me ask you, like if I were to give you the magic wand and I were to say, well, listen, Josh, this is what you’re good at. But you know, what I really need more than anything is X. Like if I can get enough people to tell me what they want.

either

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (15:17.208)
they’re not gonna be good customers. it’s fine that you move on to people who recognize that, know, it’s sometimes like I hire a lot of people and I like to pay them well for the value that they bring. So, but yeah, validation through conversations will help you innovate in ways that you’ll never be able to come up with on your own. Just talking with real people. People have a credit card in their pocket, but don’t worry about trying to sell them on the first call. Instead, ask them what they want and need and then see if you can help them with

I like, you today our product is nothing like what it was at the beginning. It’s way more, it’s way higher ticket today, quite frankly, because that’s what our market wanted. And yeah, so yeah, it’s quite a relief when we give ourselves permission, MKJ, to not have to be the genius.

MKJ (00:00.538)
Hey, hey, I can’t, cannot wait to continue this conversation. It’s MKJ. Welcome back to the conversation. Mischief makers. I get to chat again with Ronnie Loaiza. Ronnie, are you ready to take mindset into impact and innovation? So if you haven’t listened to our first conversation about mindset, you need to go back and listen to that because it’s going to inform you about where we’re headed now. So.

RonnieLo Life Coach (00:16.272)
Yes.

MKJ (00:27.736)
You know, tell us a little bit more about your, your life. Now I want to go back to you. You mentioned in our last episode about travel, you mentioned about being born in the U S but then you went back to wherever your, your father was and then you moved back to the U S when you were five. and from your native language of Spanish in, into the United States and started speaking English. And I’m sure I know you speak other languages still. but tell me a little bit more about that.

journey. What where were where did your family live after you were

RonnieLo Life Coach (01:04.86)
I suppose, well, we did move quite a bit, for the most part I lived in Florida. And then when I graduated college, again, I was the black sheep. Everybody in my family, because we were Latin Americans, you became an architect, an engineer, or a doctor, right? And I was, my sister became an attorney. My brother got like two masters in different things in economics. And I was in mass communication and they’re like, what, what is that? You know, liberal arts.

But I already had a job in a newsroom, granted it was just answering phones, but I was answering phones in a local news station in Tampa, Florida. So I thought my foot’s in the door. Why would I waste time going to graduate school? So my father dangled, I’ll never forget we were, I think a Denny’s or somewhere like that. He dangled sending me to France for just a few months, go learn French, because I had taken German in high school. And he’s like, go learn, me and travel. I was like, okay. I ended up going for five years.

MKJ (01:59.737)
That’s how.

RonnieLo Life Coach (02:03.036)
And it was immersion. And that’s the thing. I’m not afraid of going anywhere. I don’t care if they don’t speak English, especially now with technology. You just carry your phone, you Google it right away. It’s the translators on automatically. But before the phones and all that, I never had any qualms of going anywhere and meeting new people. To me, it’s exciting and you learn. And the more I traveled, I mean, I was traveling on my own at 12. My parents would send me, but I would go on my own. The more I traveled, the more I thought, I don’t know anything.

MKJ (02:11.915)
yeah. Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (02:32.368)
The more I learned, the more I knew I didn’t know. In other words, and it really opens your eyes to other people’s mindsets, other people’s cultures. It makes you more inquisitive. so we don’t just live in our own little world. And when you say impact and innovation impact, I really believe in you want an impact in your life. That’s why you’re getting business coaching, mindset coaching, life coaching, whatever it is you want to impact. And every aspect of your life,

MKJ (02:34.53)
Yes. Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (03:01.328)
relationships, your career, your love life, your family, your wellness, your health, every single aspect is a subset of the other and each one has a little to big impact on the other. It just does. So I’m holistic. You have to take care of all of it. And that doesn’t mean more time on each one. It’s like, of course you balance things out. Like I said, at different impacts, but back to me, I would think

I was just always very inquisitive. I guess if you, somebody once told me, it’s, it’s gotta be the reporter in you. And I thought, you know what? I became a reporter because I was always curious and because I found it exciting and I wrote well. I’m like, okay, English. so it wasn’t the reporter in me. It was me that brought it to the reporter

MKJ (03:44.378)
Correct. Yeah. The job, your curiosity is what was in you that made you good at that job.

RonnieLo Life Coach (03:51.088)
Yeah, it really was. And I had to be very objective. When people used to email me, remember that they used to email the, the newsroom rather than just call or post. I would get complaints from both sides and my news director was like, you’re doing great. When you get a, when you get complaints, you’re doing great. People are listening. They’re, they’re hearing you. And when you get them from both sides, you know, they don’t know which side you’re on. I’ll never forget

MKJ (04:14.041)
That’s That’s even better. Yes. Because that’s when you, know, not only are they engaging with your content, but then you also know you are making a statement that they either agree with or disagree with and they are willing to take time to tell you. So that’s impact. That’s amazing impact. I mean, most people on social media right now would love that because most people aren’t getting that kind of engagement.

RonnieLo Life Coach (04:36.454)
No, right. And, and the thing is as a coach, not as a coach, as a reporter, I always made sure, cause I wanted to be able to, back then you had to get a story. If you had a lot of controversy in it, you had to get it fact -checked by five people. Now they don’t rarely take the time to have it fact -checked by one. That’s just the way it is. Cause everything’s too fast. Everybody’s just trying to get it on air. But back then I made sure the soundbites told the story I attributed and I had the people say the stuff. If they got mad at

All I did was set up the soundbite. I didn’t say a word. I was objective. Reporters are objective. That’s why when people complain about the media, I’m like, no, reporters don’t want to get sued. They report. Now that’s different in people. I’m not trying to be condescending, but we have so much media out there. People do mistake show hosts for reporters and journalists. They’re not. They can say whatever the heck they want because it’s their show. That’s different. And I think I bring that into coaching and that I am very objective.

MKJ (05:07.47)
Yeah.

MKJ (05:19.14)
Yeah.

MKJ (05:23.992)
Yes, for me. Yes, yes. Yes, that’s right. That’s right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (05:35.532)
I do not push an agenda. I do pull things out of you and I pull no punches. I do challenge

MKJ (05:41.22)
But see, that’s where that comes from. So that’s the innovation part. So just to make sure we’re all on the same page, I don’t think of innovation as the Steve Jobs and the Elon Musk’s of the world. I think of all of us as innovative. So you have taken that curiosity, that objectiveness, that ability to find the sound bite, hear the sound bite and take that piece and clarify it with your clients. You’ve taken that skill and you’ve applied it to coaching.

And that’s not the case with every coach. Every coach doesn’t have that previous experience and knowledge and innate curiosity that you do. And that’s innovation. So how are you? You’ve already kind of broken down a little bit about how you’re doing that and how you you can ask those questions and be objective. What else out of that previous experience that PR, that journalism, that communications degree, what else are you bringing out of that that make

a very unique coach.

RonnieLo Life Coach (06:43.93)
Well, I think it’s to make things clear to people so that they understand. I say, if I repeat something and I don’t know if I told you this, but somebody asked me a question about what do you think is different about you? And I remember answering, I hear between the lines. And I thought that as a kid, I hear when the miscommunication is about to happen as it’s happening between other people. I would just pay attention.

And you know, you’re hearing things around you and in all conversations you hear when the conflict is going to happen in the miscommunication. And I really took that into conversations between people socially and as a journalist and in public relations. I really hear between the lines what clients are really saying. And so then I always try to give them what they wanted or what they needed, also give them what they need, make them think it’s what they want. But you also have to let them

This is what I hear is this true. And so people have to really clarify it in their own brain. So I guess I bring that now is I hear things. I hear little points where I can turn the conversation and really make them go deeper. You know, the six layers of why. That’s an ICF thing, an International Coaching Federation thing, but it’s true. It’s like people say, well, I want to lose weight. Well, why do you want to lose weight? Well, I want to feel more confident. Why do you want to feel more confident? Then it starts getting

MKJ (08:11.524)
Yeah, yeah, if they can do it. If they can do it.

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:12.548)
Then it starts getting really good. do they really want? That kind of thing. and the innovation I think I bring with me is I really keep bringing the facts. Is that true? Is that fact? Are you, is that realistic? Is that doable? Are you realistically going to do it? That kind of thing. And that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in them. I totally believe in them. It’s just, if you’ve tried things before and they haven’t worked, you got to look at that. It hasn’t worked.

So we got to look at, well, will work so that you do achieve and you grow from that and you celebrate it. And my innovation is accountability. People always said I hold them accountable. I wanted to turn that around into, some people want an accountability coach or they want an accountability partner, but most people, when they hear accountability, it’s like, ugh, they’re going to nag me and they want to ghost you if they don’t check in with you and they feel nudged and pushed. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, I’m not here to push you like

or nag, accountability is for you to start liking. mean, deep down feeling happy with yourself. And so you hold yourself accountable. That shouldn’t be a bad thing. If something didn’t work, you look at the fact, why didn’t it work? And there’s a difference between giving yourself grace and using an excuse. There really is. And people start seeing that. like, was that an excuse or did something out of my control happen? Or did I just not feel like it? Why didn’t I feel like it? Just look at the

Tomorrow is another day. You’ll live. It’s okay. If you didn’t feel like it, you didn’t feel like it. You have to look at why. so back to accountability, I kind of coined celebrative accountability. When they start working with me, I’m like, let’s celebrate. And at first some of them think, this is silly. This is too much celebrating. And then they like it. It’s like, if you’re about to go do something, whether it’s in business or how they set up their cubicle or productive productivity habit, whatever it is, or in their exercise, as they’re about to go do that action.

that they’re turning into a habit, I’m going to go do it. I’m about to do it. I’m starting, I’m going, whatever they want to say that’s natural to them. And say it out loud because your brain hears it. It’s like, yep. And it’s like when you’re turning on your computer, you say I’m turning on the computer. Yep. And as they’re doing it, I’m doing it. Yep. Note it capable. And afterwards celebrate it. So they start celebrating with me. Like they’ll go on Voxer at the end of the day. I use Voxer to nap.

RonnieLo Life Coach (10:37.018)
And all they have to do is little green check emoji if that’s all they want to do or done did it. But usually they start telling me how they did it and it’s great. And it’s a great feeling. Some of them at first feel it’s silly because they’re not used to praising themselves, but then you get used to it because when they leave me, when they go off the nest, they learn how to hold themselves accountable by celebrating themselves. That’s it. You just have to validate yourself, not blow up your tush, but truly look at the fact. Did I do it? Yes.

MKJ (11:01.678)
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yes. Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (11:06.556)
Can I do it? Yes. And that is dopamine for the brain. So when we are training in habits, no matter what it is, and it can be relationships and dating and in your health, whatever it is, when you’re training yourself in habits or coaching yourself and, and you’re, you’re activating it and you’re making sure that you can do it and you’re celebrating it. When you do that, it’s an instant reward. Our brains need instant rewards. Yes, we need a vision. You’re in business and you coach a lot of people in business and careers.

Yes, you have to have that vision. Yes, you have to have your mission and mission statement. You’re your own CEO and C -suites like, okay, how am I going to carry this out? But every day, everyday daily things and every hour things, those are, I don’t want to lose my train of thought. Those are tiny actions that have to be your instant reward because the long -term goal is not enough. Obviously it’s not because a lot of people fall by the wayside. It’s like my long -term goal is to make a hundred thousand.

my first year or 500 ,000. Yay. That’s your long -term goal. Celebrate today. What did you do today? What action did you do today? What email did you send today that you were hesitant? What sales call did you make today? What did you post today? How did you reach out and network today and celebrate it and celebrate it? Cause you need an instant reward. We human beings need an instant hit of dopamine.

MKJ (12:16.868)
Yes.

MKJ (12:30.106)
Yes, that’s the reason. So I agree 100%. That’s the reason that little red dot on your notifications exists. Because the dopamine hit when you open it and clear it is a is a yay, I did it yet. It was annoying thing. That’s the reason it’s there. Go watch the movie. Social, social.

RonnieLo Life Coach (12:51.868)
Social network.

MKJ (12:52.898)
Yeah, no, there’s a it’s the movie that’s basically was the start of showed the start of Facebook and is it social something? I think I thought there was another word. Anyway, no, no, nothing is a documentary. It’s a documentary, not a not a film. Yeah. Social. Anyway, I’ll think of it or input it in the show notes. But that dopamine hit

RonnieLo Life Coach (12:59.93)
Yeah, social network. With Jessie. Okay. I thought it was called the social.

okay.

MKJ (13:17.262)
that because we all have that desire to clear that to see who’s talking about me. Why do I have five little red dots on there that someone’s either mentioned me or looked at my post or like my poster? We need to do that. We need to clear that. We need to know who’s who’s who’s talking about us. And then we get that celebration that we’re good, that we are that somebody likes us that.

All those reasons and it sounds like you probably did that same thing in from the innovation standpoint when you were a personal trainer. We don’t go from overweight to fit overnight and it doesn’t happen with just doing one exercise or eliminating one food or any. It is a small series of steps. So.

RonnieLo Life Coach (13:53.858)
Mm,

MKJ (14:02.71)
Is that true also that that the way you looked at personal training and those small habits that you developed as a personal trainer or first as a person who needed personal training from injury, then as a person who became a personal trainer, helping others do the same thing. Is that what led you into the actual coaching?

RonnieLo Life Coach (14:24.07)
Consciously, probably, probably, because when I first, you the pandemic hit and I had to, couldn’t go to people’s homes and boutique studios anymore. And I’m like, my God, what do I do? And my husband said, go on zoom. I was not, you know, an Instagram selfie kind of girl. like, okay, here we go. Opened up the laptop. Everybody went on zoom and we realized we were more focused and it was easier and we didn’t have the clinging clanging of the gyms or we didn’t have the distractions of the home. And it was so convenient. They could go on at any time. but yes,

It’s getting my clients to get into habits and then we start the easy way. I myself, I remember I was an aerobics kind of girl. Now it’s called cardio. So it was really hard not to pound my body and just go running and go jogging or do a step class and do weight training. And that’s what saved me. And now it’s weird if I don’t, it’s really weird if I don’t working out every day for me is just part of who I am. It’s part of my identity. So that’s okay. Let’s go there. That’s what makes it

Habits you don’t have to think about. You already do them and it’s weird if you don’t. Because it becomes part of who you are. What does a writer do? They write. Don’t worry about all the process and how many words you write today and all that. Just write. Just sit down and write. Don’t edit while you write. You know, I’m an athlete. Well, what does an athlete do? They do their sport. Don’t worry about how. We’ll get there. The details will come. If you don’t know which…

MKJ (15:29.626)
brushing your teeth.

RonnieLo Life Coach (15:49.658)
which path to take in a new career. I’ve taken a lot of people through a career transition, which really surprised me, but it’s true. It’s like, whoa, whoa, Bessie, slow down. It’s not all about the resume and the cover letter. Those are important, but those are tools. What do you really want? And let’s go after that, but hey, what are your habits? What’s your habitual way of thinking? And then we go through the transition, going through

Again, I don’t want to lose my train of thought.

What is it that you want and then which path to take? That was it. People are afraid of taking the wrong way. It’s like, just tell me which way, which direction, what job, what should I do on LinkedIn? What should I do on this cover letter? It’s like, take a path. If it’s not the right one, you’ll soon know. It’s like when you get on the road, the freeways will come, the off -ramps will come, and you will then make decisions. Don’t worry about

all the decisions. Now, it’s good to have business plans. It’s good to have a vision. It’s good to have all of those, but you also have to be flexible. Habits allow you to be flexible because your habits are your identity, your core values anchored on that. So you can be flexible on all the details because your core values and who you really are, that’s there all the time. It’s like your car you’re driving. That’s your car. That’s your engine. The momentum follows naturally. It’s natural momentum. So don’t worry about all the tiny little

decisions and and paths that you’re gonna take they will come and then you will decide and of course you can ask people for their advice and their consultation and get a mentor I think that’s wonderful and that’s smart ask people who know and have been there but then you make up your own mind according to what you want and what you feel your intuition is

MKJ (00:00.558)
Hey, hey, CEO, Mischief Makers. Welcome back to the conversation with my friend, Peter Lasoski of iProlio and the framework and tool relatable. All right, so Pete, in the beginning, we talked about the first episode, we talked about the mindset shift between lead generation and demand generation, the mindset shift between the awareness economy or attention economy and relationship economy.

Now let’s get a little deeper in that and talk about how you and Relatable specifically are innovating that type of marketing to help people be, well, for lack of a better word, there is no better word, be relatable. So take us through a little bit how you’ve taken that idea of demand generation and relationship economy and really encapsulated it into a framework and a tool with Relatable. How did you do that?

What did you, why did you come up with video relationships?

Peter Lisoskie (01:00.31)
Well, you know, the first thing is, and guys, have a, if you ever want to come join, we have a sub stack. If you look up, be relatable on our sub stack. It’s our community there. I, Mary and I have written some articles there. I got to do some more for you guys. But you know, one the things there’s, I wrote an article in there. It’s called the seven unwavering truths. One of them is, you know, we’re on the internet. It’s a international right. Everybody has a right on the internet.

Cell phones are ubiquitous. 96 % of the global population has cell phones. But there’s another one and it’s called everybody wants personal and relevant these days. So guys think about this, right? You look out there and you look at what’s happened. I, the other thing too is, you know, I do talk up there about the clash between the two types of,

people out there now, the native analogs, these are pre -internets, the native digitals, these are post -internets. Most of them were born with a cell phone in their hand yet, they’re 51 % of the global population now. So they’re driving, that’s the movement, part of the movement that’s driving these things. But one thing I will say about this, as it relates to what you asked me is,

You know, if you look at that, the personal irrelevant and the other unwavering truth is everybody is watching or listening these days. This is why podcasts are growing and have existence. But video is also growing at a dramatic rate. And I will say, look, here’s the thing. I have a radio show. I’ve had it for 16 years. It’s on the Bonneville network.

I can paint pictures with words, I can create demand, but I cannot do it with as richness and as familiarity and as building relationship and trust as I can with video because you can actually see me. Okay. And there’s a big difference in what’s going on in the brain. So if you look out there, Mary, you got you to, I like YouTube, you know, you can look up what, anything you want to learn how to do it’s on YouTube. We all know that. Right.

Peter Lisoskie (03:07.696)
So, and then there’s TikTok. TikTok has value, you know, for entertainment and there’s some good information, things depending on what you scroll through and watch. But the thing is, guys, think about this. This is another common sense thing. In those, they’re all, and same thing with LinkedIn, they’re all passive videos. And what happens is, passive videos beget or create passive viewers.

You know, it’s a watch and forget. I watch, move on, right? There’s no interaction, there’s no engagement, there’s no trust or relationship building. And by the way, if you look at LinkedIn videos, which now they’re coming out with a new thing that’s more like shorts and portrait style, you look at TikTok or you look at YouTube shorts or you look at YouTube, you are nothing but a set of eyeballs and IP address.

Why do they do that? Because they want to put ads in front of you. That is the business model of the analog implanted from radio and TV ad days that Mary’s talked about in posts. We plopped it right onto the internet. And we said, that’s how we’re going to do business. Yet.

These native digitalists are going, uh -uh, we’re not doing this anymore. I reject email marketing. I’m rejecting funnels. I’m rejecting all this social stuff. I’m building interaction and community. And by the way, if you have 20 something kids,

MKJ (04:21.37)
No.

MKJ (04:28.534)
ads.

Peter Lisoskie (04:35.702)
They’re Native Digitals, they don’t do email. They’re going, why would I do email? I have a community. You have a couple boys about that age, Mary. The thing is, they’ll just take their community somewhere else and people will follow. The other thing about Native Digitals

MKJ (04:46.564)
Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (04:49.536)
They look at the world totally different. Their primary reality is the digital space. They’re tourists in the physical reality. Analogs, our primary reality is physical. We’re tourists in the digital. Hence the clash. A native digital will never come up to your door and knock on the door and go, hi, I’m here. They’ll sit in their car and they will text you. Guys, if you’re laughing, it’s because this is common sense and you know it to be true. And the other thing, by the way, if you have kids that are native digitals, where do they all

MKJ (05:14.714)
True.

Peter Lisoskie (05:19.58)
out they do video games they have friends around the world they hang out discord and they talk to each other that’s a native digital and you may not relate to it but think about

MKJ (05:25.7)
Yep. Yep.

Peter Lisoskie (05:31.222)
going way back your ancestors, your grandfathers who are running around on horses could relate to Henry T. when he came out with Ford. I mean guys, we have had these shifts from the agriculture to the industrial age to the knowledge worker age and we’re moving into the wisdom age of wisdom here in the next few years. The thing is there’s always going to be these transitions. It’s understanding, okay, what is actually going on in these mega trends of transitions and what do I need to do to be able

MKJ (05:40.826)
That’s right.

Peter Lisoskie (06:01.138)
Thank

be propel myself forward within that transition. That’s all I’m saying. So, you know, if you have the choice between a passive viewer that’s just an IP address and eyeballs to as a business owner or one that you could bring into your relatable world and make them active, engage them, send… I mean in awareness, you’re not going to click their email or phone number. You’re going to send them somewhere. Like I did, send them to sub stack. Send them somewhere. Look, I’ll give you a story.

of this. So on LinkedIn, just about two weeks ago, was telling Mary this story.

So there’s a lady that she actually because of our we’re going to talk about this because of our unique point of view and our change of perspective on my banner I talk about future proof your business get a predictable stream. She messaged me was actually a video or audio thing in the DM and she said hey that’s really cool future proof that makes total sense to me and relatable that’s like the perfect name for your product for interactive video relationships. You know I know a lot of people and I’d love

be able to talk with you about this and get you introduced to some of these business owners. So I wrote her back, well first I went and looked her up, I didn’t realize that she had over 800 ,000 connections on LinkedIn. I was like, wow, that’s a pretty big person here. So I did a message back on audio, which you can only do on mobile, right on LinkedIn. And then nothing. Crickets.

Peter Lisoskie (07:33.216)
So I followed her posts and you know, she does, she has really good content. I really like what she has to say. She’s trying to create her own impact and movement in the world. And so yesterday I said, you know what? I’m gonna do, cause look, know, Mary knows this. In my company, we all say, you gotta eat your own dog food. I’m the dog at your door. And the thing is, I

You know, the thing is, I wanted to create a tool like Relatable for myself and by the way, happens, you you guys, it’s really good for all of you business people too. So, what I did is I created a personal.

Relatable interactive. Now here’s it’s very simple. It was a short one. It was a clip we call clips It was maybe a minute and a half. All I did was say hey, this is the guy behind the profile You’re seeing me. I want to thank you for your content. This is why I comment on your content I really like what you’re trying to do. You did mention all I said was you did mention you’d like to speak to me and You know find out a little bit more about relatable interactive video relationships and by the way at the end when I get done talking

and there’s gonna be a little button there, just tap on it, you can set an appointment. Inexperience, it was just a simple, relatable. Took me four minutes to create maybe. And that’s from turning the camera on to shooting it out the door. It was a direct message to her.

Well guess what? I have a meeting with her tomorrow because of that personalized approach. See, this goes way beyond some of those ones you see in your email where they’re doing personalized videos. They’re not interactive. Yeah, the person shows up but you can’t do anything except for maybe send them a video back. We create whole interactive experiences. I mean, you think about it take beyond that. You know, I’m not a big believer in email but if I’m gonna do email or email marketing campaign, I’m gonna make it an interactive relatable

MKJ (09:09.146)
Yeah, right.

Peter Lisoskie (09:25.294)
experience where emails no longer email. It’s a relatable interactive experience. that kind of is the, I guess the, hopefully that answered your question in a longer format.

MKJ (09:26.254)
Right, right, right, right.

MKJ (09:35.574)
Yes, it did. And so and I want to take it a little bit deeper because I also know that you have a ton of experience in brain science and brain research and how we interact with each other and the different centers of the brain and parts of the brain that are the impulse to either buy or not buy or build relationships or dopamine and you know, the whole little red dot to you, we feel like we have to get rid of that little red dot, you know, they they made it that way for a reason. But you understand

all those reasons behind it. this is why I think and this is the part that I love about innovation. You were the perfect person to create this framework and product because of all of that previous knowledge and experience, not just the brain research, but also your software development, also the team dynamics that you have, also working in large corporations that are specifically designed

for lead generation and sales rather than relationships. So all of that culminated into that time when you’re standing in front of the mirror going, there’s gotta be a better way, right? That’s kind of the crux of it. There’s gotta be a better way. So talk a little bit about that whole idea of how you innovated interactive video relationships with also the component of your previous experience and all of that brain research.

Peter Lisoskie (11:00.31)
Yeah, yeah, Mary’s right. I’ll just tell you the quick story behind that. was my last gig, I think, in the semi -corporal world. was the vice president of product strategy for consulting firm up in Seattle. And we did these, I created this innovative week -long approach. We worked with a lot of companies that did science solutions. So.

Brilliant scientists. CEOs typically were scientists, but they didn’t really know how to productize something and take it to market. We did, right? So we took them through this week long thing. going back, look, I’ve worked with Harvard, MIT, voice of the customer, customer experience, all this blah, blah, blah, blah,

Right. So, you know, I was up there and I was doing my talk. We had gotten into, we had a whole war room. It’s like a week long thing. And we basically go from the point zero to having a complete plan with project management, everything at the end of how they’re going to execute this thing. So we were in the part where it was talking about, okay, how are you going to connect to your customers and things like that? And Mary, if I’d forget, I want to talk about ICPs, ideal customer

and buyer persona because I think that’s a bunch of pile of baloney too so anyway

MKJ (12:14.756)
Yep. Yep.

Peter Lisoskie (12:15.782)
So we were there and I noticed back in the corner, Mary, there was a couple of guys that were looking at each other smiling and kind of whispering to each other, which caught my eye. These guys were here with this, it was a brain assay type company. So at the coffee break, I go back to these guys and I’m like, hey, I introduced myself and I said, I noticed you guys were talking, we were talking about voice of the customer and stuff like that. And they looked at me and they said, Peter, we’re sorry to tell you, know, they introduced

There are a couple of neuroscientists and they said, we’ve done a lot of fMRI studies and some EEG studies and that’s people do not buy based on benefits and features. They buy based on emotion what happens in the reward circuit of the brain. I went, really?

I said, do you guys want go to the Met and have a steak and drinks and let’s talk? So I took them out that night for three hours and what they told me about, and they showed me, they had some data in their briefcases. I about fell out of my chair because, you know, I’m an engineer. I understand tech to some degree, but I’m going.

man, these guys have got like the ultimate, well at that time I was thinking sales, the ultimate sales thing where you can get inside of the brain because people are buying based on emotion. They’re not buying based on benefits, right? That’s the neocortex. The reward circuit, the nucleus incumbents, this is where the dopamine and the addictive effects, whether you’re a drug addict or a alcoholic, but it’s the same thing for social with the red dot like Mary was talking about, right? So I went out in the trenches, I had another company at

MKJ (13:28.676)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (13:51.732)
time. And in 22 months, I built my company Marriott from 1 .4 million to 6 .6 million. And I… It was because I crafted this… I called it the buying mood blueprint. It’s out there. I think about 10 ,000 people have taken the course online now. I never wrote the book. I’m working on the book as I have time. But the point I’m making is on this is this is… This leads to you know, some things happening in today’s world.

And that is number one, I can write emails to persuade people. I can evoke emotion in emails, but I cannot develop a relationship with an email. It’s impossible. You cannot do that. I know because of the brain research I’ve done, the brain science and research and things like that that I’ve done. So, you know, if I look at things and I say, based on relationships, Mary.

Yes, have dopamine. Dopamine is a motivator to get people to do things. It can be good or bad, like the red dot, like put your phone down, quit being so addicted to social and being so addicted to phones. That’s dopamine addiction in the nucleus and comas of the brain. And we kind of need to knock that off. Social has created that. But if I look at it and guys go, okay, in the relationship economy with relatable, what do I want to elicit? Well, I want to create oxytocin and glutamate in the brain.

MKJ (15:07.972)
Right.

Peter Lisoskie (15:19.206)
Oxytocin is what they call the love hormone. It’s a neurotransmitter. And basically it is what when you have a significant other.

when you are with that person, oxytocin is being dumped into your brain. It’s a bonder. Guys, if you’ve ever gone through a divorce or breakup, you’ll understand because that oxytocin goes away. That’s where that pain comes from. It’s in your brain. So oxytocin, there’s ways to do that. Relatable and the framework of being relatable, right? So when we talk about the framework, I wrote a book on this as part of our platform.

Being relatable means being genuine, being authentic, having transparency, showing vulnerability. All those four words create what? Oxytocin in the brain. Because people go, man, I can relate to you. And this is exactly why we call the product relatable.

MKJ (16:11.64)
Yeah, and if they

That’s right. That’s right. And if they don’t, they go away. And that’s great because that would if we tried to sell to the people that don’t relate to what we’re talking about, that’s where we’re going to get the buyer’s remorse and the I don’t like this and all that because we persuaded them to do something that didn’t relate to them. Wow. So I’m sorry, I interrupted your your story. Keep going.

Peter Lisoskie (16:19.894)
Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (16:39.426)
Well, yeah, the only thing I have to add is glutamate. Now, guys, you hear all these, I don’t know if you know, Yasmin Ali, cool guy. I follow his stuff on, he’s got, I don’t know, a

hundred thousand, two hundred fifty thousand. He was just hanging out with Ferrari. I think they’re gonna be doing some business together or something. But anyway, the thing about him, he was talking about you know and a lot of people do this. The blah blah blah. You got to write stories. Stories create emotion. Story but you know here’s the thing guys. What happens in the brain is when you are telling a story it produces glutamate. Glutamate works with a hippocampus which helps you to remember and recall

the stories that you have created. Think about guys, go back, another common sense thing. You go back to the cave person days. What did they, before written language, what did they do? They told stories. Native indigenous tribes told stories. Why? Because glutamate helps you remember them. You can recall them and pass them on to generations. This is exactly why telling stories is so powerful. Now, I will tell you this though. With glutamate, there’s a downside. Glutamate, if you do a lot of negative emotions tied to a story,

actually create cell apoptosis which kills the cells in your body. Which causes illness, cancers and things like that. So this is you know, there’s a lot of power in these different things and you got to be careful about how you’re using it in the right way. You know, one of my biggest heroes and mentors is Joseph Campbell. If you think about the hero’s journey, what he created and the power of myth. I got those VHS tapes back in the I don’t early

from my mom for Christmas one year. But you know, it’s so powerful the whole idea of the hero’s journey. You look at Toy Story, Monsters Inc, the Star Wars, the whole franchise is all built. In fact, what’s his name? Star Wars. He knew Joseph Campbell. They were friends. Yeah, George Lucas. George Lucas in Joseph Campbell’s Lifetime Achievement Awards came up and said,

MKJ (18:21.988)
came

MKJ (18:33.604)
Yes. Yes.

George Lucas. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Peter Lisoskie (18:46.614)
when he was talking about Joseph Campbell. If it wasn’t for Joseph Campbell, I would have never been able to deliver Star Wars when I did. It probably would have never been created.

MKJ (18:57.432)
Yeah. Yep. Those are my favorite interviews of Joseph Campbell was when he’s at Lucas Studios or actually at what does he call it? But anyway, his ranch Skywalker Ranch, that’s it. When he’s at Skywalker Ranch being interviewed for that PBS special, that’s my memory of Joseph Campbell and I got those on tape and it’s powerful. It’s absolutely powerful. So that that’s why I wanted you to talk about that because all of

Peter Lisoskie (19:07.24)
That was brilliant.

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (19:18.668)
Yeah.

MKJ (19:26.532)
has basically culminated in this product now, your previous experiences that you just outlined in a quick story, your software knowledge, your wanting to build relationships and have a movement towards something. And that I think we all around that COVID time just got fed up with the way things were done. And we basically had to say, there’s got to be a better way. And all of that previous experience culminated into

innovating this space with this new framework and product. And as I say, it continues to evolve. It continues to grow because you constantly ask what else is possible. If you said, this is it, this is it, we’ve got it. It would be static and it would be passe very, very quickly. But you specifically say, what else is possible? What else can we do? This product has innovated.

just in the last six months because you keep asking that question what else is possible so any other ideas on innovation because that i think those those key internal patterns that you have with you know i’m i there’s got to be a better way and what else is possible all of those things are what allow you to create innovative products so any other last words on innovation

Peter Lisoskie (20:51.552)
Yeah, last words on innovation, the way I look at it, and Mary asked me this years ago, there’s some key components. Number one, you gotta have clarity. I fight for it every day. Mary asked me one time, how do you define success? Way back, I think in her first podcast, and I said it’s clarity. Second is, you have to strive, not better, different.

what can I do that’s different that aligns with megatrends but is also based… I want to do things based on timeless foundations of human beings. I’ve traveled all over the world and I don’t well you know I’m not some guru guy. I just have watched and I’ve observed and you know different cultures and extremely different from the United States and going wow there’s some similarities here. Third, the last thing to leave is

You lot of this, you ask the question, what else is possible? It’s a part innovation with a sprinkle of inspiration. And I’ve told Mary this several times. Innovation is based on your previous experiences and the puzzle pieces you put together in your life. But then out of nowhere comes this inspiration. And if someone knows where the hell that comes from, let me know because I’ve never been able to figure that out. That’s a lifelong endeavor. I’m like Joseph Campbell for myth and the power of myth. Trying to figure out where does inspiration come from, but we all

had it and we all have been hit by these ideas and it’s like wow that’s really cool and it’s not all based on experience some of it’s totally unrelated and so anyway that’s what I want to leave with you guys with that’s kind of how this stuff happens and how we create things that we do different things into the world that can create these impacts and movements.

MKJ 
All right, welcome back to the conversation with an amazing person, Brian Wallace. Welcome back to the conversation, sir. How are you?

Brian Wallace 
You gotcha, still doing great. Let’s do it, round two.

MKJ
So if you have not listened to our conversation about mindset, you need to go listen to that because we are now going to build on some of the very specific things that Brian shared. We talked about talent. We talked about hard work. We talked about certain mindset issues and consistency and those kinds of things. But I think most importantly for this segment, we talked about how you look at relationships and some of the things that Brian brought up.

We’re talking about kindness. We’re talking about how people treat each other. When you have a conversation, are they just staying surface level about sports and weather, or are they actually getting into the depths of actual human relationships? So let’s take that a little bit further. I know…

I know based on this, this is just our second conversation. I know that relationships are very important to you and they are what drive you personally, I believe, and professionally. So how, first before I ask you this question, I want to reiterate for the audience, the way I define the word innovation is not the Steve Jobs and the Elon Musk’s of the world coming up with new ideas and products and all that. I think of innovation. We innovate every day.

of the previous experience we have gathered, the tools that we’ve learned, the way we look at the world, that changes the way we look to our future and the things we do. So your pre and it actually has a title it’s called tacit knowledge. And so that tacit knowledge, which is inherent and instinctual after a while, we guide our lives by it.

So in that sense, I talked about relationships, we talked about mindset and how you look at the way you do business and the things you do, and especially now you’re looking at conferences. How are you taking that previous knowledge, that intuition, and now innovating the space of marketing and what you do?

Brian Wallace 
Sure. So innovation is really just applied wisdom over time. So when you have a lot of vet bats and the better you got, the better you really got instead of just this aspirational sort of fake it till you make it paradigm. That isn’t always such a wonderful thing. And I don’t know, you can’t believe all the little popcorn nuggets on the internet. Sometimes you see like, don’t believe everything you read on the internet, Abraham Lincoln. So, you know, there’s a lot of stuff that you should take with a grain of salt and kind of throw that out and adopt some new mindsets.

MKJ 
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
Hmm. So innovation is a very interesting thing. I really liked what you said because a lot of people mistake when I talk about innovation, when I talk about innovation as a function of the events that we just started, I tell people innovation is not technology. Technology can be used to solve innovative problems, but you can…

like peel a banana backwards and that’s innovation. Like literally the guy that started Ted, you know, like Ted talks before he sold it to the other guy, that’s his Ted talk is that you’re all eating bananas wrong. Is that tech? Did we need to build AI machine language, buzzwords, SaaS cloud computing, blah, blah, blah, tech babble. We did not. It’s a banana. Okay.

MKJ
Exactly. Exactly. So yeah, right now, that’s all right. Totally. I get it. Because it’s the easier way. So just try it. If you haven’t done it, try and open a banana or peel a banana from the opposite end of the place you typically would. And you’re going to be very pleasantly surprised that something… It really is. It really is. And that little black…

Brian Wallace
I wasn’t expecting to talk about bananas this much, but here we go.

Brian Wallace 
Right. Yeah. It’s cleaner. It’s weird, right? Like, it seems unnatural, but it is natural.

MKJ
thing at the end of the banana disappears. It’s amazing. Anyway, so yes, and this basically fits directly with what you talked about in our first conversation when you left the tech world. You were tech heavy and in that whole world and you started transitioning into 18 years ago, you said, marketing and what you’re doing now. And now that, so take me from when you first started your marketing firm to now.

Brian Wallace 
Yeah.

Brian Wallace
Yep.

MKJ 
and really specific, you got specific on infographics and telling stories with visual stories. How did that, how did you innovate that?

Brian Wallace
Sure, I would say that we’re in about three and a half evolutions so far, or revolutions, if you will. So version one of now sourcing was sort of a remnant from what I was doing in tech, where it was sort of a play on words of outsourcing in a period of now where I thought I was going to be a portable CIO, CTO, help you figure out vendors, blah, blah. And I’m like, wait, I don’t really want to just do technology. What am I doing?

MKJ 
I like evolutions, yeah.

Brian Wallace
So now we’re talking 2006 housing market crisis where Brian and the fam are leaving New York and weathering out the global economy crash in Kentucky, where we barely know anybody at all.

building this crazy company, but it was also the dawn of social media. So now we’re at revision two. So revision two is we’re at the awakening of a very interesting moment in time where there is a leveling of the playing field where instead of gigantic TV networks, movies, talking heads, newspapers, and whatever, all of a sudden a human being

can open a Twitter account, Facebook, MySpace, but I don’t know. That wasn’t really the moment where it kind of changed. But more like Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn a little bit later, stuff like that, and a few other social networks that went away that we’re not going to talk about right now changed the way people got information, changed the way people communicated. And it was very different from the first internet age. So I said, wow.

I still have all this tech floating around in my head and we have a small team, but I really like the human behavior side of stuff. And I took some neuroscience and stuff in undergrad and did a bunch of interesting stuff.

I said, wow, this is really interesting. So early on, we were a very early social media company. And back in the day, we did stuff for places like John Deere. And we worked with Jay -Z when the Blueprint 2 album was coming out. It was like the Wild West. And everything was amazing. And I wrote for Mashable for a while. And that was cool back then. But I don’t know if that still hits the same whatever. But here’s the thing. And now we’re approaching how version 2 becomes version 3.

Brian Wallace
I thought that everybody wanted to be a social media expert because they were just retweeting some blog post or something. So there’s like absolutely no barrier of entry at all. And that scared me a little. And then Twitter would change its background sizing for a graphic and you’d have like hundred people saying, no, what’s going to happen? It’s like, calm down. Like everything’s going to be all right. Like, okay, chill. So I didn’t want to be like everything to everyone. And I wasn’t really satisfied with.

iteration two of now sourcing. And then now we’re talking 2010. No, that’s not true. No, no, like just a couple of years after existence. Never mind that. So like 2007, 2008.

there was a website called dig .com with two Gs. And dig .com had a very interesting principle to it that we may never see in the world again. So I did say the redistribution of power, where you had major networks down to the hands of individuals, but just because you had a random Twitter account or Facebook account didn’t mean anybody was really listening to you. You could just have an account, right? Before they got kind of creepy and politicized and having everybody argue with each other and algorithms and selling data and social experiment,

crap. Don’t even get me started. We’ll save that for like show number four therapy session. Anyway, so there was this there was this site called dig .com that you would take a story, you would curate it, and if enough people voted on it, it would be on the front page of their site, which might as well have been the front page of the internet. Because if a site was that popular,

MKJ
I know. Yeah, I think we do. We’ll go there, believe me.

Brian Wallace 
it would have so much simultaneous traffic that the site, with few exceptions, would literally crash with simultaneous traffic. And there were 100 people, not giant corporations, but individual humans like you and me, that were responsible for 50 % of what would actually hit the front page. And I was one of those people. Or 1 ,000, whatever. Like a few hundred people maybe were consistently hitting it. So.

something interesting was happening in the evolution of who I am, what our company was doing, and the weight of the world, and how it was shuffling its levels and variations and abilities to influence others. So I said, huh, this is really interesting, and it seems like it’s a different model and a paradigm than what we doing already.

Tech by itself, no thanks, we’re good, everybody does that. Social by itself, no thanks, whatever. I don’t want to just do social media, whatever. So I said, all right, what are we all good at? We’re good at storytelling, we’re good at visuals and art and stuff, and we’re good at this weird, uncanny…

I hate the word virality because virality is just an amplification of good or bad. I don’t know that everything, don’t want everything. Like we don’t want Ebola, right? Like not everything like should go viral, not, and it shouldn’t be the goal in your life. In the world where everybody thinks they need to make some noise, you actually should make some signal and have people pay attention to things that matter instead of glittery glam nonsense.

But I digress. So we were good at these three things, storytelling the visuals and making things popular, viral, whatever you want to call it, influential. And at the time, there were maybe like two places in the entire world that were doing these weird things called infographics. And I looked at these things and I said, wow.

Brian Wallace 
This is something that bypasses the pseudo sophistication of the human mind that we’re covering for the subconscious of the actual human mind and all of the core emotions and all the storytelling and stuff. And I said, wow, this is really a thing. There’s even a guy, Jacob Nielsen, I think like 30 years ago said, people don’t actually read on the web. There’s actually a different thing that happens in your brain that lights up differently called chunking. So you’re actually looking for different visual patterns and structure and stuff like that.

So I said, hey, let’s go do this and stop doing everything else. And everybody’s like, what’s an infographic? Why would you do that? I’m like, I don’t know. I think this is a good idea. And the rest is history. And we’ve done this thousands and thousands of times. We’ve done stuff for every imaginable vertical. I don’t want to get into all the solutioning and all that. We’ll probably save that for the next episode. So I won’t give away all the.

the goodies of that and encourage everybody to listen to the next episode. We’ll leave it at that. And I guess I could say version 3 .5 into 4 is now, hey, let’s do these conferences. OK, full stop.

MKJ
So wow. Okay. So, everybody listening, I’m going to have to go back and I know there’s a part of the first episode where he talked about mind that I’m going to have to go back and listen to. There’s a one, you want to talk about chunk. There’s one piece of information where you used mind that it just basically went right over mine. And you did it again with the, when you were talking about the, the infographics and the stories and, and I love the chunking cause I’ve heard that before and it’s absolutely true. And I think it’s because of the overwhelm.

that we have with so much information we have to find a way to filter and so we chunk we scan we scan.

Brian Wallace 
Yeah, we have to, because the presentation of information is so different. You are incredibly overstimulated. Whether there’s an ad or not, and these infinite doom scroll things are destroying our brain, memory, ability to think, reason, act, react. Imagine a book. Remember when we would go to a library and use the card catalog and look at a book, and our brain was less crowded with insanity.

MKJ 
Yes. Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I think about my kids that way as well to help them. Luckily, you know, yeah. my goodness. Yes.

Brian Wallace
yeah, please read a book. Yes. I’m so glad there’s so many books behind you. So thank you for your service.

MKJ 
You are very welcome. Very much. That’s one of the topics with myself and both of my sons is what book are you reading? Wow. How do you like it? What do you think about it? It’s vital to our society, I think, to continue the human race. But I digress. But the innovation you talked about, thank you for taking us through version one, two, three, and now 3 .5, because we’ll talk about that in a second too. Because I still think everything that you’ve

Brian Wallace 
Yeah, I would agree.

MKJ 
you’ve talked about it, and it’s now becoming even more clear because your brain science, right, the neuro linguistics, whatever you studied before in undergrad that specifically sparked that, you’ve continued in that research. You’ve continued making that a very important piece in your progression, in the way you look at the world. And because of that,

I think it’s allowed you to be more, quote, futurist. I know that’s a buzzword, but it is. It has allowed you to go and analyze the situations that we are in, the social media. I call the people who follow the social media algorithms, I call them algorithm zombies.

because that’s what they are. They’re zombies to the algorithm. So any algorithm that changes, my gosh, we’re doing carousels in LinkedIn. nope, we’re not doing carousels anymore. We’re doing, you know, whatever. It’s a zombie -like attitude. And when you create a business, when you actually strategically set your business to follow the algorithms, you are a zombie and you will, your brain will die. I’m sorry, it’s just the way it is.

Brian Wallace 
I kid you not, I literally think that some of these people must think that there’s like some dude sitting in a cubicle named algorithm and how do we make this person happy? And it’s like, what’s wrong with you? Do you know that there’s like humans that look at content? Why is this the only way you understand the world?

MKJ 
Yeah, so we know that that’s not where we are, but because of that, because of that neuroscience, because of that ability to see things that way, you are able to know human to human is what we’re talking about. And so if we need, if we are, have humans on the other end of all of our marketing, then we have to allow them to absorb what we want to tell them in a way that meets them.

not tries to make them change and have the dopamine hit of the internet, of social media and Facebook especially, and all these things. So with that, what is it?

Brian Wallace 
Yes.

MKJ 
So how did you, how are you now going into the next phase? Because I love the fact that we’re talking about innovation and you have a conference called innovate. So tell me a little bit more about why you did that and how that worked. And I know I’ve heard this story, but I want my, my listeners to hear it because it’s fascinating. Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
Yep.

Brian Wallace
It’s a wild story. Yeah, it’s a wild story. If you ask me, am I going to put on a conference to really like go at the conference industry?

in 2024, I’d be like, I mean, I do a lot of content marketing. I’ve put together small events. I’ve done a lot of LinkedIn events all over the planet and spoken at all sorts of stuff. And I’ve been behind the scenes at a major world conference on their advisory board. So it’s not my first day when it’s triangulating all of this stuff. But if you said, hey, are you going to run like a conference proper and be the have this be part of the evolution of the next phase, in addition to all this stuff you do, I’d be

No way. That doesn’t make any sense. So it wasn’t like a comedy of errors, but it was like one of the most unlikely of places. Like if we’re watching Lord of the Rings and it’s like, oh, and suddenly this ring came to the Hobbit. And so I guess I’m the Hobbit in this story. I don’t eat like 11 Z’s and all that. Like I eat regular meals, but I digress. So because like we said earlier, I’ve been in the bluegrass part of the nation for a while, better part of last 17 years.

MKJ 
Aw darn.

Brian Wallace 
We tend to work with a lot of the industries that are over here because of proximity. So the part of the world has a lot of the world’s bourbon and alcohol and stuff like that. So a lot of the big brands are based over there and sometimes they hire us for marketing stuff. So one of my buddies that became the head of marketing for the sixth, the oldest bourbon brand called Green River Bourbon, and even has a horseshoe made out of glass in the bottom of the bottle. That’s really

Talk about innovation, right? You could have a glass bottle with innovation, not just tech. So pretty sure it’s an old industry. In any case, glass bottles aside, we were about to do work for this particular brand and they got acquired by a hedge fund and my buddy lost his job because shuffling brands. And the story doesn’t stop there. And it could have been one of the best deals we didn’t get.

because then he starts talking to the who’s who of this town, a small town. I believe they say it’s the fourth largest town in Kentucky. Kentucky doesn’t have very large cities, so that doesn’t mean it’s big. Its metro is probably 80 ,000 people, which could be a couple of blocks in California or New York, right? So who are we kidding?

MKJ 
Yeah, yeah, yeah. yeah, yeah.

Brian Wallace
But here’s the thing, this little MSA of maybe 80 ,000 people is the county seat and is the big brother of like a 10 to 12 county radius, so just endless land and ag in every possible direction, which means that they benefit from being a little bit bigger, ages and stages punching above their weight class in terms of political and grants and public, private.

MKJ 
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Brian Wallace
partnerships and all sorts of stuff. So somehow after all was said and done and the dust settled these guys over the last…

10 years, whatever, I forget the exact dates that they started and stopped, but they built a $200 million waterfront for 80 ,000 people. How much waterfront is that per person? It’s a lot of money. Like that should be for a city of millions. And it looks like it. Like we talked about bluegrass a couple of times. So imagine this in a contiguous mile, mile and a half.

MKJ 
Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
You have waterworks that they probably were looking at the Bellagio or something. The International Bluegrass Hall of Fame. A bunch of hotels right on the river. A beautiful river walk.

one of the largest children’s parks in the world, and this gigantic oversized convention center. So unlike a bunch of events, place matters. You can go to cool places. Like, where does everybody go for events? Go to New York at the Java Center. You go to LA. Endless events at Vegas. Sometimes you go to Miami. Austin’s popular nowadays. But a lot of things look like the same thing with the same Tom and Jerry background on repeat in the background. And sometimes you don’t

the four walls. So here, we intentionally went to something that’s a little bit out of the way. And everybody loved it because everything doesn’t look like that. Things aren’t always so clean and safe and affordable and intentional. And there you go.

MKJ 
And that again, because of your previous experience, you spoke, you talked to people, you felt comfortable with the people you were speaking with, you felt like they were good people, they had a heart, a purpose to this rather than just making money or whatever and increasing their influence or whatever that is. And you gathered together a conference full of people and you said, you just picked up the phone and called people that you knew from the other conferences that you

had attended or were speakers and these people and just said.

Brian Wallace 
I actually did more than that. I did more than that. Do we want to get into something that I did? You sure? OK, you ready? So I think a lot of people think that a way to get people to come to an event is you do a bunch of social media posts. Then, of course, everybody’s going to magically see that one post that you’re doing for five seconds. Even if they see it, they might like it. They might comment. But are they really going to stop what they’re going to do and go to a city that

MKJ 
Go. Yep.

Brian Wallace 
The two major airports that are near it are still a two hour drive? Probably not. So how do you get people to come? By inviting people. Inviting people that know you, that like you, that trust you, that have worked with you, that have heard you by reputation. So I literally did a ground game for months where I went to numerous cities and I explained my vision person to person. Sometimes some small groups, sometimes some events, sometimes some breakfasts and lunches and drinks and whatever.

And guess what? I don’t think there was a single city that I went to that at least somebody didn’t come. And I’m not just talking about like an hour away. I’m talking about people came from both coasts. People came from different countries. It wasn’t a giant amount of people, but the people that came all fit that whole column of stuff that I said through the gauntlet. They were all wonderful people that were generous and not scarce with their connections and talent and power. And they were all at the top of their game of stuff. And when you bring that

of that many people together, even if it’s 10, even if it’s 20, even if it’s 50, 100, 200, 1 ,000, whatever, the numbers don’t matter because what you’re doing is special.

MKJ 
That’s innovation, my friends, that is innovation. So you are continuing to do these conferences. Is that the next evolution of your business and your goals? That’s…

Brian Wallace
Yeah, sure. So we’re going to keep on doing what we’re doing. I have a book in my mind that for all sorts of reasons just has been delayed for a while. But I want to teach people the proper ability to attain and utilize influence. The word influence has been ruined over time by influencers that often take your money and go to jail and make conferences in the Bahamas that don’t happen. But we’re not throwing shade at anybody in particular. So.

I like the word renown, which makes me sound like a Renaissance painter, but just, you know, I’m not that old timey. I’m from today. I’m not from the past, but I think that a renowned person is respected that doesn’t treat you like that. So I want to teach and educate people that way by eventually finishing this book and writing it and having that part in parcel with the whole conference. And I want to do it again. We already announced a date,

same time, same place next year. There’s another major city in America and I also want to bring it abroad.

MKJ 
All right, CEO, Mr. Makers, welcome back to the conversation with my friend, Erin Hassan. Erin, welcome back. I cannot wait to dive into a little bit more about your previous experience, but this episode is about impact and innovation. So let’s start with who you want to impact. Each of our businesses, and that can be a particular industry, a particular avatar, however you would define that, but who are you trying to impact with your current gig, your current business?

Aaron Hassen
trying to help myself. Let me define that. Wait a minute. So, I started out as a founder, owned a company for four years and then sold it to a competitor and then got into marketing and led marketing programs for 20 years. And now, I’m at the head of H Marketing, which is a fractional marketing team for founders and revenue leaders that don’t have the time or the expertise to solve their marketing challenges. And that was me.

So I was a founder, I had issues and challenges, I couldn’t do it all. And I needed someone like me. And I didn’t want them just to come in and consult. No, I mean, that’s valuable for sure. Give us a plan, get us a line, that’s great. But then you need somebody to execute to make sure you get the results from all of that research and planning and things like that. So that’s.

That’s what we do at A .H. Marketing, our fractional team is, you know, we come in and do all the research in the background and, you know, understand the customer and the market and the competitors and the landscape, the category, all of that, do positioning and messaging and just get ready to go to market, develop the communications and the foundations, the technology, the tracking, all of that stuff. So then we can start running campaigns and

and actually driving leads and opportunities in the door, supporting the sales team. I needed all of that as a founder. I didn’t just need one piece. And I wanted to be able to hand it off because as a founder, what you want the most is to replicate yourself. You just don’t have enough time. And so it’s like, can I find somebody just like me? And I think that’s the differentiator for at least my businesses. They’re actually hiring.

a founder, somebody who gets it from their perspective and operates in a way that they would. And I call that marketing like an owner. So that’s what I do. I’m an entrepreneurial marketer and that’s just the way I see and view the world. And I think it’s what those founders and revenue leaders really need.

MKJ 
Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I think that is an amazing differentiator. Because what you’ve done is, is you’ve positioned yourself as someone just like them, but you can bring in that marketing piece that they can trust. Because you’ve done it before, just like they are doing it. But so that’s the impact. That’s awesome. Now tell me a little bit about the 20 years in corporate. How did that come into this? So you had your business, you sold it to a competitor,

Aaron Hassen 
Gracias.

Aaron Hassen
Yeah.

MKJ
then you went into corporate. What? What? Why?

Aaron Hassen 
I know, I was, as I was a founder, I really discovered that I love the marketing side. And I said, well, what better to do than to actually go help founders like me from the marketing side. And so I spent 20 years marketing for venture backed startups, a lot of Silicon Valley technology companies. These are like Y Combinator companies that…

have a lot of investment and need to grow fast. It’s a pressure cooker, there’s tons of pressure. The timeline is short, the runway is short in terms of investment. They’ve got to produce and they’ve got to produce now. It’s sort of an extreme environment to work in, but I learned to thrive in it. A lot of times I’d be the first marketer in. I would develop the strategy, the marketing program. We would go to market together with a small team.

have that initial success, find that product market fit, and then move to that next round of funding. And so, I did that for 20 years, had some major successes. And one company we went from 3 million to 65 million in four short years. We were acquired by the largest player in our space. It happened again when I went to another company. We

We were actually a single product focus. We were selling to major retailers like Under Armour, Michael Kors, GNC and all of that. And then we were end up being purchased by Klarna. So, you know, and it’s just those kinds of experiences have really influenced and informed, you know, how I make decisions and the way I view the world. And,

I’m somebody who gets results fast, who does things smartly, who remains efficient, is flexible, is ready to pivot, extremely resourceful. I spend their money like it’s my own. When I do invest, I invest for results. That is marketing like an owner. That’s the perspective I have.

MKJ 
Thank you.

MKJ 
Yeah.

Aaron Hassen
I think it’s the one that has made me and the companies that I’ve worked with so successful.

MKJ
Well, and you just basically put another notch on the trust belt right there because you were consistent from what you talked about in mindset, what you talked about at the beginning of this conversation, you want you market like an owner. And even through that 20 years, it wasn’t really corporate in that respect. If you were doing startups with venture, right, that’s different from Procter and Gamble or, you know, some some corporate entity.

Aaron Hassen 
The interesting thing, I’ll just interject real quick. The interesting thing is so many of these companies sold to enterprise. So I’ve sold to some of the largest companies in the world. We were selling to Delta and Coca -Cola. These are like Fortune 50s. And I had to learn the landscape inside those big enterprises. I mentioned the retailers we sold to, things like that. So although I was working at a startup,

you know, we were, I very much understand, you know, what’s happening at the corporate executive enterprise level because, you know, those were our customers and we had to understand them intimately and help navigate through those, you know, through that landscape in order to actually survive and grow as a business.

MKJ 
Yeah, definitely. But that again, that that whole trust factor just increased a bit because you, you were consistent. And you you basically saying, when you went into these startup environments, you treated it as if it was your money, you treated it as if it was your product, you, you were just as intimately acquainted with and caring about what you were doing, as the founder was. And, you know, I’m assuming you didn’t take a gig, if, if you didn’t align in that way,

Aaron Hassen
again that thing.

MKJ 
wasn’t just a job in that respect. Am I right?

Aaron Hassen 
That’s absolutely right. I love that you point that out because we talked earlier about the movie The 300 and the Spartans and how together when a team is aligned and going in one direction with a singular focus, they can really change the world. I think I was impacted by my Air Force experience and I went through leadership training in the Air Force and things like that and it’s just how I see the world. So as an entrepreneur,

I tended to want to go to market in the same way. And so when I would come on board, oftentimes there would be existing salespeople, maybe partnership people, product people, customer success. And I’m trying to figure out how I can align together with them so that we can go to market together. And this was 20 years ago. It’s now the trend. Everybody’s saying, how can sales and marketing align? How can we work as one team? I’m thinking…

We wouldn’t have survived if we didn’t work as one team. So, you know, I have a lot to offer in terms of recommendations and how that’s done. But yeah, it’s really informed the way I view the world. It happens to be the best way to work today.

MKJ 
Yeah, and that’s innovation, right? You’re not just opening up a book that’s all of a sudden on the new topic of, you know, fractional whatevers, fractional everybody’s, that’s really on the rise right now. Lots and lots of people are going in that direction. You didn’t just open a book and say, I’m just going to do a fractional thing, right? This is a natural progression of what you’ve been doing for 20 plus years.

Aaron Hassen
This is a national compression.

MKJ 
And in that mindset and all of your experience coming in, you are not, I mean, I wouldn’t even use that word fractional with you. Because it lumps you with all the other fractional people coming up behind you. I would really focus on your marketing like an owner.

Aaron Hassen 
I believe that there’s one truth that’s all together.

Aaron Hassen
I would really, really feel.

MKJ 
and we are your marketing team like an owner. And because that makes you the word that I’ve used and I haven’t heard it, I think I just made it up, un -competitionable.

Aaron Hassen 
Yeah.

MKJ 
right? There’s no way someone can compete with that because they don’t have your military experience and you’re starting your own gig and selling it and you’re working for 20 plus years with venture and bringing all of that because so nobody can compete with that. Let me finish that statement first before I say the next thought.

Aaron Hassen
If there’s no way someone.

Aaron Hassen 
works.

Aaron Hassen
and all of.

Aaron Hassen
Next part is…

MKJ 
And the next thought is, it sounds like the companies you work with now probably don’t have the venture capital that you worked with before. These are probably bootstrapped in many cases, companies. Is that true?

Aaron Hassen
It sounds like a company you should work with now.

Aaron Hassen
that you worked with before is are probably bootstrapped in many cases.

Actually, no. I have helped many of those. A lot of them have been on sort of a project basis. I’ll come in and help them with positioning and all that. But what I found success with, believe it or not, in our business, and it is a family business. My wife is a 16 -year marketer herself. I’ve got my 20 -year -old son helping us with graphic design and other things that he loves and enjoys.

and some other folks around to help us. But early on, yeah, I was helping similar companies, Silicon Valley tech companies, but we really found a sweet spot with those mid -market companies lately who have been around for a while. And so they really appreciate the value of marketing. They really understand it. The business has matured to the point where they’re not super desperate anymore.

there, you know, it’s, it’s just a different scenario. And I find that, I’m able to help them. Like for instance, I have this company I work with who serves, the event space and they work with the Hilton Hyatt and Marriott major conference hotels. These are some of the largest hotels in the country. They also work with major convention centers and they do technology like internet and digital signage and all of this. So there’s a technology spin there and.

And, you know, which is very familiar to me, but they’re working with these major enterprise brands, as I mentioned, very familiar to me, but they’ve been around 20 years. And so rather than two X and three X every year, which is what I’m used to, they’re actually growing at 30 to 40%, which is significant for a 20 year old company. And so I’m, I’m able to do for sort of a well established company, a mid market company, what we were doing with these startups using.

Aaron Hassen
startup principles because I think even enterprises would love to benefit from startup principles. So I take that to market, not just with those businesses that I’ve helped in the past, but with other mid -market companies and larger companies and we’re succeeding there too.

MKJ 
That’s fantastic. Yes. But what you’ve done now is taken that previous experience, taken that ability to go to market fast, understand all of the players, all of the information, and apply the strategy that you feel is best to help them reach whatever goals they have, whether it’s 30 to 40 % for mid -market or 2X or 3X for a startup. And you’re able to apply that.

Aaron Hassen 
Yes, what you’ve done now.

Aaron Hassen 
and all the strategy that you’ve been pressing on ever since you’re able to.

MKJ 
as a marketing, as an owner, but with all of that previous experience and showcasing that experience and say, if I can do this for this company, then I can do this for you as well. And that’s your innovation. That’s how you are. Again, nobody can compete with that. No one has that exact.

Aaron Hassen 
this for this company. I can do this.

Aaron Hassen
That’s how you are. Again, nobody can compare to that. No one has that exact combination of experience, knowledge, and understanding. I know data and all that is not a woo -woo thing. I’m not trying to make it a woo -woo thing. But it is an intuition.

MKJ 
combination of experience and knowledge and intuition. I know data and all that is not a woo -woo thing. I’m not trying to make it a woo -woo thing. But it is an intuition because of the previous experience you’ve had. I’ve seen this before. This is how it’s played out. Let’s try this.

Aaron Hassen 
See you later.

yeah, your instincts are born in your experience. And so, you know, it is very much based on, you know, what you’ve seen and done in the past. And I can tell you one of the things that has troubled me over time, because I love this profession. I got into this profession by choice, not by, you know, I…

I didn’t go the traditional route where I went to college, decided on my major, and then got into something I may not really love because I really didn’t understand. No, this is something I loved from the beginning, and I made a choice to get in and got my degree later. So it was kind of flipped in that way. And one of the things that’s troubled me over the last 20 years is just this decline in trust of marketers. So we see this in decreased CMO tenures.

There’s a recent Gartner study of 400 C -suite executives that found that 55 % of leaders felt marketing has an inflated view of itself and its importance. That drives me nuts. I look at the fact that of the four P’s that we learned in college, the product price, place, and promotion, how many of those are we actually trusted to lead anymore? It’s really just promotion.

You know, there’s something that’s happened over time in terms of our position as marketing leaders that really bugs me. And so I want to also help marketing leaders in how to approach things. Cause I do believe those founder CEOs, even your counterparts, your sales leader, your customer success leader, they’re looking for a partner. They’re looking for somebody they can trust. And to them, what a marketer means is that you know your customer and you know the market. Marketer.

Aaron Hassen 
It’s very definition is your knowledge of the customer and the market. And when we don’t come to meetings with knowledge of the customer and knowledge of the market, what’s happening, the trends, we’re not as valuable. And we start to lose influence. We start to lose their trust. And that’s the last thing that we need when we’re trying to do things that, and we’re trying to make investments and do things that might be slightly risky or we’re needing their trust. We’re needing their support.

the support of the investors, the support of the board, the support of your CEO. You can only get that if you come in, you know, ready to help and that means understanding the customer in the market. So, you know, as much as I want to help these businesses, I want to help our profession and other marketers out there as well.

MKJ 
You know, that is a perfect way to look at it. And I have a theory about that, because I agree 100 % with what you just said. The basically marketers are a sleazy word now. It’s just you just advertising to people, you’re just you’re just trying to capture and put them into buying and sell to them. It doesn’t feel good. And I think what we’re seeing is a pendulum swing. So we have the internet, there’s always been, you know, salespeople and

Aaron Hassen 
I think what we’re seeing.

of the internet has always been real.

MKJ 
and marketers who are trying to push people into that buying. But we’re seeing a pendulum swing with the internet where the massive amounts of access to potential buyers.

Aaron Hassen
But being a pendulum is a lot of work.

MKJ 
has basically dictated the way we communicate because of that immediate access. Instead of principles that we all know about relationships and trust, we didn’t need them, we being marketers, and companies, we didn’t need them with this massive access we had, we have. But now the pendulum is swinging and people are going, I’m done with this. I’m just marketed to you, I’m sold to constantly,

Aaron Hassen 
is basically dictated by the way we communicate. Because of that, we can access. Instead of principles that we all know about relationships and trust, we can access.

Aaron Hassen 
But now, people are going, I don’t like this.

MKJ 
people are bugging the hell out of me all over the place with texts and emails and DMs. And it’s like, go away. Stop. The only people I’m going to trust are my little whore. So now we’ve gone back to that localized, but it’s not location localized. It’s community localized. That localized trust. And we’re still marketing, or most people are still marketing to the masses rather than looking at that localized trust building.

Aaron Hassen
all over the place. Texts and… So go away. Stop. Not gonna trust our mind of horror. Now we’ve gone back to that localized…

Aaron Hassen 
community localized. That localized and we’re still marketing on those people. Marketing buses rather than looking at…

MKJ 
and relationship. And so it’s not new, we’ve had to do this forever. But now the pendulum is coming from this internet and this globalized audience that we have and potential buyers that we have. And I think marketers had those starry eyes that my gosh, the world is now my, my potential buyer, right? It’s

Aaron Hassen 
So it’s not new. I’ll try to do this forever.

Aaron Hassen 
I think marketers had those three I’s that, my God, the world is now much, right? Yeah. We used to have so much power. I mean, you think of the madman age and, you know, we could put things out there and say things and didn’t have to validate them. We’ve lost the power. The consumer has the power and there’s information parity, as you described. We all have the same access to information. Now with AI, I mean, we’re even, we’re smarter than we ever were. So.

If the idea as the marketer is, hey, I’m going to have something over you, no, that’s done. Your brand, if it’s anything, is what your consumer says it is and how they speak about you in the market. How do you influence in an environment like that?

You have to become more human. I’m thinking of the dating scene. Can you imagine if you use some of these practices when you’re trying to get a date? We have to become attractive to this potential suitor and marketers have to think the same way. We want to be somebody who’s trusted. We want to be attractive to the customer.

And we need to do so in a way that’s authentic, that’s trustworthy, that’s consistent, that’s appealing. And so, you start to go down track of doing things in line with treating others the way you want to be treated. So we get back to the golden rule.