MKJ (00:01.292)

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

Ashley Gross (00:15.938)

I am.

MKJ (00:17.45)

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

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

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

Ashley Gross (01:18.167)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (01:21.834)

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Gross (03:33.45)

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

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

MKJ (04:26.402)

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (04:28.85)

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

MKJ (04:52.524)

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

Ashley Gross (04:59.964)

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (05:15.443)

Yes.

exactly.

MKJ (05:21.55)

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

Ashley Gross (05:22.003)

Yes.

MKJ (05:49.452)

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

Ashley Gross (06:05.994)

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

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

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

MKJ (07:29.314)

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

Ashley Gross (07:59.379)

Exactly.

MKJ (07:59.67)

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

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

Ashley Gross (08:38.452)

You’re like, no.

MKJ (08:57.826)

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

Ashley Gross (09:05.333)

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

MKJ (09:32.554)

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

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

Ashley Gross (10:05.564)

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

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

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

MKJ (11:10.304)

Here we go.

MKJ (11:27.384)

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

Ashley Gross (11:35.305)

Yes.

Yes. Yes.

Ashley Gross (11:50.388)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (11:56.244)

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

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

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

MKJ (13:00.182)

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

Ashley Gross (13:20.522)

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

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

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

MKJ (14:27.086)

Right. Right.

Ashley Gross (14:45.012)

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

MKJ (15:08.494)

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

Ashley Gross (15:28.596)

Mm

MKJ (15:36.322)

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

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

Ashley Gross (16:04.51)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (16:20.714)

Exactly.

Ashley Gross (16:26.044)

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

MKJ (16:40.675)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (16:54.324)

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

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

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

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

MKJ (18:25.122)

Yes. Yeah.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dorris (01:54.59)
Hmm.

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

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

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

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

MKJ (03:11.664)
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

MKJ (04:49.712)
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

MKJ (07:26.736)
Thank

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

MKJ (07:40.07)
you

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

MKJ (08:19.961)
concept.

you

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dorris (10:49.106)
Hmm.

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

Chris Dorris (11:11.518)
Hmm.

Chris Dorris (11:22.905)
Yeah.

Hmm.

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

Chris Dorris (11:33.374)
Mmm. Mmm.

Chris Dorris (11:39.015)
Mmm.

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

Chris Dorris (12:04.541)
Mmm.

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

Chris Dorris (12:36.382)
Yes.

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

Chris Dorris (13:04.114)
Hmph.

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

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

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

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

MKJ (14:07.631)
Anything?

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

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

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

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

MKJ (16:22.104)
And in that.

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

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

Chris Dorris (17:05.65)
Yeah.

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

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

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

MKJ (18:27.13)
doesn’t

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (00:24.827)
No.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (02:03.707)
Yeah.

Andy Cunningham (02:21.155)
It is fun.

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (02:50.127)
Wow.

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

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

MKJ (03:46.617)
Yes?

Yes. Yep.

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (05:18.33)
Yes.

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

MKJ (05:33.494)
Thank

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

Andy Cunningham (05:45.008)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (05:51.13)
Yeah.

I

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

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

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

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

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

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

MKJ (07:43.012)
goodness.

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

MKJ (07:58.01)
Right, right.

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

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

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

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

MKJ (09:57.656)
Yeah. Disillusioned.

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (11:06.946)
Thank

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

Andy Cunningham (11:30.895)
Yes. Yeah.

Yep.

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

Andy Cunningham (11:42.949)
Bye!

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (13:47.002)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (13:53.275)
Yeah.

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

MKJ (14:11.917)
In what way?

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

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

MKJ (00:01.516)
Hey, hey, hey, welcome to the conversation. Mischief makers, MKJ here, Mary Kathryn Johnson. And I cannot wait to introduce you to my guest today, Steven Schneider. Steven, you ready to rock and help people dive into this business journey with us?

Steven Schneider (00:20.061)
I am, let’s do

MKJ (00:21.282)
Let’s do it. All right. So the first thing we’re going to do, obviously today we’re talking about mindset. That’s where we start 30 ,000 feet. Let’s look at the way we need to look at the world in order to make the changes that we need to make in our business and our lives and the world. I really do think we’re all here to make a difference. So, so Steven, start us out with who you are and what you

Steven Schneider (00:42.839)
Yeah, so I am co -founder and CEO of Trio SEO, which is a content marketing agency. Before that, I used to co -own a portfolio of about 40 blogs and we published upwards of about 400 articles per month. So lots of experience in large scale blogging and running massive teams and content systems in general. And now we get to take all of that knowledge that I learned with my first company.

and help clients do that for themselves. So it’s been a lot of fun and yeah, I love SEO, I love content, and I love entrepreneurship. So it’s been a good blend so

MKJ (01:21.356)
Boy, boy, can I, I can’t wait to have a conversation with you about this. And we’ll get into that in a minute when we get more into, excuse me, innovation. But man, here’s something to think about and where I’m gonna go with this conversation, Mischief Makers. SEO or AEO and how they connect? SEO, search engine optimization, AEO, answer engine optimization.

and the world being basically heading toward answer engines or AI. And we’ll get into that because there’s a statistic that just came out about Google and all that kind of stuff. So believe me, hang on for the third conversation when we get to strategy and tactics because you’re going want to be part of this with an amazing expert that you have right at your fingertips. So now that I’ve teased that, well, that’s just where my head is, right? And where the world’s head is.

So tell me you went from a, how many blogs did you say that you were running?

Steven Schneider (02:23.041)
Yeah, we were publishing about three to four hundred per month, depending on any given

MKJ (02:26.242)
my goodness. So three to 400 blogs and that’s, that’s what you were doing. You were writing the content and publishing the content, optimizing it to be searchable and to come up as high as possible in the rankings. And now you took that with the success you had with that and you’re specifically growing a business on SEO and allowing other bloggers to do the same thing you did. Is that

Steven Schneider (02:50.657)
Yeah, so it’s pretty much the exact same model. The only difference is I don’t own all the websites this time. It’s the exact same model in terms of doing the strategy, writing the content, the publishing, the uploading, except that we do it for people’s own brands and their websites and help them funnel high intent traffic to their sites via organic search. yeah, blogging and just kind of everything that is embarked with content SEO.

MKJ (03:16.866)
Wow, okay, so take me through, first off, give me a little bit of background. Before you got into this three and 400 blogs, you had to do something else. You just pop out and go, I’m gonna own three or 400 blogs, right? So something else was going on. What were you doing before

Steven Schneider (03:34.807)
I was studying entrepreneurship in college, actually. This was like many moons ago. And yeah, I was in a class project with a friend of mine and he just kind of told me, he’s like, yeah, I do this thing on the side. And back in the day, like we were in college, he was making 10, 15 grand a month doing this. And I was just instantly hooked and I was gonna get my MBA and do corporate or whatever. And I was like, okay, let’s stop everything, pivot.

If he’s doing this, I can absolutely do this. Let’s just learn this as quickly as possible. And my friend became my mentor and I just kind of started building websites with him and we had a small portfolio, maybe two or three sites before graduation. And that was enough to kind of, you know, give me enough information to be like, let’s double down this. There’s actually something here. And he had some pretty big sites. mean, they were making maybe 30, 40 ,000 a month by himself with his mother partner.

So we kind of merged and hit the ground running straight out of college. So yeah, it was almost like I didn’t really have anything else backed up, but I also didn’t want to have to worry about getting like a real job, quote unquote. So I was just like full steam ahead. was like, I will do whatever it takes. I’ll work as many hours as it takes and I’m not going to give up because this is way more fun and way more lucrative. So what more could you ask for?

MKJ (04:55.65)
Yeah, definitely. So let me take you through that one right there because we’re talking about mindset shifts. So you’re in college, you’re going to get a corporate job, you’re on the regular college hamster wheel of trying to find the career that you’re going to do for the next typically 30 years, right? That most people think about when they’re going to college. You don’t want to invest this kind of money and not think you’re going to be in that career for a long time. At least long enough to pay off the loans if you have them. So what in the world?

How did you go from that to entrepreneurship? mean, it’s one thing to see your friend doing something and talk to them about it, but you really had to have something that made you go, not just this is possible, but it’s possible for me. What was that?

Steven Schneider (05:39.061)
Well, I, yeah, so I knew him. Like I’ve known him, you know, for some time. wasn’t like we just met in college. Like I grew up with his wife and we go way back. And so I was like, well, if you’re doing this, like I can absolutely do this. Like it wasn’t like he was, you know, he’s a smart dude, but it wasn’t like I was looking at Bill Gates sitting next to me thinking this is so out of reach. And also he showed me all this sort of stuff and it wasn’t like it was rocket science. It was write an article and I feel like I’m, you know, naturally.

MKJ (05:57.712)
Right, Right, right.

Steven Schneider (06:08.617)
somewhat of a good writer, publish an article and wait for three months. And I think that that was the biggest mindset shift was SEO came with this massive game of delayed gratification. And so when you publish an article and you have to wait six months for it to even make its first dollar. And so he, or time told me, he’s like, you know, I’ve had plenty of friends do the same thing you’re doing and all of them drop off because no one can actually put in the time and be

I’m okay with that massive game to see it through. So yeah, I was just patient and I knew that had some time before graduation. So I was like, I really don’t have much to lose. And let’s just see what happens. And I made my first like 50 cents online and I’ll never forget that. And then once that came through, I just knew we were kind of going to be off of the races. So we had some couple of lucky strikes early on, which kind of put some wind in the sails. But yeah, it was just fun and it was energizing and it was within reach.

MKJ (07:07.874)
That’s amazing. basically.

We’ve all heard a similar story. I mean, this is like the internet dream, right? You you put in some work and you build something and you build some authority in some particular subject and you write about it and you show your authority and all that stuff and then and you You set it up because a blog is basically a setup process. It’s not just the words, right? It’s not just you talking about a subject It is set up a specific way to allow for that SEO to to be generated that search engine optimization for that

traffic to be generated. So what made you decide that the delayed gratification was worth it?

Steven Schneider (07:48.471)
I mean, he was making 15, 20 grand a month next to me and he was still in college and he’s just doing this thing as a, he was getting his degree as a backup plan pretty much. He had no intention of like studying computer science or anything like that. And I just saw, like, I just had never even fathomed making that much money in one month. And, you know, you kind of hear about, okay, you go to college, you get the six figure salary. You’ll be lucky if you’re making a hundred grand within a couple of years and you play the corporate ladder

It’s just a very rigid model. And here’s this 19 year old kid making 20 grand a month in his apartment. And I’m like, what? Like I remember like getting goosebumps when I first saw it. Cause was like, there’s no way you’re making that much money. He’s like, yeah, here’s all the analytics and blah, blah. And once I saw that, was just like, this

I’ve never seen anything like this. Like I will be your, like I will bow down to the day I die if you just teach me how to do this. And so that’s pretty much what happened. I just like bugged him nonstop to teach me everything he knew.

MKJ (08:50.934)
Yeah. And he wasn’t doing like ads and everything. This is really search engine. This is really organic.

Steven Schneider (08:56.567)
Yeah, so it was all affiliate marketing. So we would write like best of articles, like our first website was like a barbecue website. And so it’d be like the top five barbecues of like 2000 and whatever. And obviously we had never tested anything, but we just did like a bunch of research and like read a lot of consumer reviews and you kind of just get into a flow. But yeah, that’s kind of the name of the game.

MKJ (08:59.958)
Yes. Yes.

MKJ (09:08.855)
Right.

MKJ (09:18.792)
Yeah. And then so that’s I get that I totally, I totally understand it. And it is a machine, you set up the machine, you do the research, you figure out the topic.

I’m sure you used a lot of tools like SEMrush and a bunch of different tools to try and find the topics that you want to write about. Then looked at the affiliate opportunities, probably Amazon and a bunch of other sites, and then just started writing based on that research and the potential affiliates. But now, so that’s awesome, I get it. First off, how long ago was this?

Steven Schneider (09:53.528)
This was like 2017, like eight years ago, nine years ago -ish.

MKJ (09:58.605)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Six, eight, yeah, six or seven years ago now that we’re talking. So now fast forward to now and you’ve made a success of that. And I’m assuming you saw his results and beyond with 300 to 400.

Steven Schneider (10:15.319)
Yeah, yeah, we had a pretty good climb. We grew that to seven figures and, you know, we’re thinking about selling the company and trying to figure out what the next steps were. We got hit with a couple, we got three black swan events in 30 days. One of them being COVID that kind of shook the world. The other one was the fact that Amazon had cut their commission rates in half overnight because of COVID.

MKJ (10:35.457)
Yes.

Steven Schneider (10:42.929)
And then there was a Google algorithm update, which was specifically targeting affiliate product reviews. So it was just this perfect storm of chaos to pretty much chop our company in half. And we were just like, we knew this was a not forever thing, but like, guess it’s happened today. So let’s figure it out. And yeah, so it was kind of just a good, good time to take a lot of those learnings and set our sights on the next thing.

MKJ (11:11.069)
And the next thing is helping other bloggers or businesses do the same thing that you did.

Steven Schneider (11:16.663)
So it’s not with those same partners. So I left that company, Silicon terms, like I golf with them like once a week, great friends still. And yeah, I just kind of like took a year off to figure out what I wanted to do next. And just through random, like serendipitous way of life connected with Connor Gillivan and Nathan Hirsch through LinkedIn and just DM them and started talking to them. And just, was a very natural conversation whenever we spoke. And over time,

just learned that it would be a really good match for us to team up and create an SEO agency. Speaking of I already had the experience, I knew the entire system, how to do it. They had SEO experience, they have a massive network on their side and it really blended perfectly. And so yeah, we started that and we’re coming up on our one year mark now.

MKJ (12:05.836)
That’s fantastic. know Nathan, I don’t know Connor personally, but I know Nathan, I’ve interviewed him several times. And yeah, they have, they’re not just building machines. They know how to build machines. They know how to build machines. Yeah. But it’s not just that they also build relationships. And that’s why we’re still connected. Because I’ve left the world of lead generation and just building a machine to make money.

Steven Schneider (12:18.657)
They’re good at it,

MKJ (12:32.362)
and gone to the world of the way humans have done business since humans have been doing business together. And that is building relationships, know, like and trust. And that takes, that takes a little bit of a different spin, which leads me to the whole answer engine idea and all that kind of stuff. So we can talk about that later,

Okay, so you left there, you had some time, because you had a pocketful of money, I’m sure. And so you could kind of hang out and you’re, I think you’re probably the same age as my son. So if you were 19 at that time, and that was about seven years ago, you’re probably around 26 or 25, something like that.

Steven Schneider (13:07.447)
No, I was actually in college today. I just turned 30.

MKJ (13:10.082)
Okay, similar. Yeah, my son’s just turning 26 tomorrow. So not too different, right? Not, yeah, just a couple. Wow. Okay. So now you partnered with the original guys and now you’re partnering with Nathan. And I know Nathan and Connor had a process where they were looking for companies to give their machine to, right? Not give, but…

Steven Schneider (13:14.466)
nice, yeah, yeah, couple years

MKJ (13:34.454)
participate in that business by taking their machine and putting it into a business. Is that where you came into the play or did they spin this off? Because I know they started, you’re helping them with an SEO agency or they’re helping you, one of the two. Did they just take your, go ahead.

Steven Schneider (13:48.535)
It’s kind of yes, so yeah, so similar. they were kind of looking, they had this idea. So I talked to Connor and he and I text a lot over like a six month period and that was kind of like, you know, breaking brand of how we’re gonna work together and all that sort of stuff. And, you know, one time I was just like, you know, why don’t you guys have an SEO agency? Like this is the most no brainer business for you guys to set up. And he’s like, we have it all mapped out. We have like a 20 page document. They have all the marketing figured out. They have the competition.

literally 25 pages of everything written out and it had just collected dust for a year. And I was just immediately pitched myself and was like, I can do this, no problem. Like I know exactly how to do it. We can get up and running in like 30 days. And if you guys can get some beta clients, like this is a no brainer. And I think that that’s what they were looking for was someone who had already like been there, scaled it and could just immediately be put in a system.

that would at least kind of allow them to create a turnkey business because like, you know, Nathan is just like a networking machine and he handles the sales. And then Connor is a like master SEO on LinkedIn and has like, you know, 80 ,000 followers on LinkedIn, a great guy and just super knowledgeable. And I have the systems in the background and kind of the team building aspect of how to run the company. So it was just like this really eerie fit on how we could each bring our own piece of the puzzle together.

and kind of just like launch it and it would launch really quickly and it’s just kind of been churning ever since.

MKJ (15:22.626)
But there’s a big difference, and most people who own an agency become agency owners accidentally.

So, right, mean, and it sounds like you fit that mold, right? You were doing it for yourself, you were doing it, and then people probably were asking you, how are you doing this? How are you doing this? And then you met up with Nathan, they’re like, well, we kind of want to do this too. And you’re like, yeah, why aren’t you doing this? And you kind of accidentally fall into an agency. And it’s usually because you have very strong experience in the thing that you provide as a service. So how was that mindset shift to go from doing it for yourself and now offering it as a service to clients?

Steven Schneider (15:57.655)
It was definitely the most difficult mindset shift I have encountered to date. And that was one of the things that was so interesting to kind of have this like juxtaposition of when I used to work with the first company and we would always joke where we could, we would be so agile because we didn’t have to work with clients. We didn’t have any brand guidelines to adhere to. We could flip an entire site upside down in 24 hours if we needed to. And nowadays it’s like, we’ll be lucky if we get an email back in a

So it’s like this weird thing where something that’s so time sensitive SEO, there’s way more hurdles to jump through. There’s a lot more checks and balances we have to adhere to, brand guidelines, standards, due diligence checks, just research in general, and just communication. We really pride ourselves on good communication. That’s always been our priority since day one. And transparency goes hand in hand with that.

We remember and try to remind our clients that at the end of the day, we’re business owners first and you are too. And so we want to kind of put the hat on as if your site is ours and how would we kind of run your strategy as if it’s our own and then just keep them up to date on everything we’re doing and try to just build that trust in from the start. So massive shift, but we’ve gone through the ups and downs. mean, every company has that in year one, but we have a really solid team and a really solid process in place now.

MKJ (17:24.93)
That’s awesome. Yeah, that mindset shift is it is it. It’s it’s very different because again, you’re working with someone else’s company and somewhat someone else’s sweat equity that they’ve put into this or monetary equity, whatever, or a combination of both. And to go from you make the decision that you know is right because it’s your blog or your product versus I got to check with this person to make sure that this is what they want. How are you? How are

handling that. mean, yes, I hear you that you’re going to treat their business like it’s yours, but that communication and that ability to move quickly when that’s taken away and someone else doesn’t see it the way you see it, because they’ve got how many other things that they’re dealing with. They’ve got other marketing, just business itself. mean, they’re not an SEO expert. They’re an expert in whatever they do.

That isn’t as much your stuff isn’t as much a priority to them as running their business. So how are you handling that that mindset shift to to try and feel like you’re being as successful as you possibly can for them, but at the same time, meeting them where they are in their business?

Steven Schneider (18:34.583)
Yeah, we try and have as little meetings as possible with clients because we know exactly what you just said. Like they’re busy. They don’t have time to jump on meetings once a week and check in and all that sort of stuff. from day one, we have like a meeting once per quarter and that just kind of like sets our 90 day sprint in focus. And we go over analytics and answer any questions. So it’s like one meeting every three months. We also send out weekly emails every Wednesday. And what that does is at least like puts our name.

in their inbox and we go over like content updates. like three or four bullet points on how the content is progressing, like what was published this week, all that sort of stuff. Any growth wins that we see, like two or three bullet points, keep it short, keep it concise. And then like an SEO tip of the week that allows them to kind of take something on outside of our scope that if they wanted to go the extra mile, they have that access. But 90 % of those people don’t reply to the comp, like reply to our emails, but like at least they see it. Like

have to assume that they’re reading all that sort of stuff. And then the other side of it is we just front load a lot of that work and building that trust and building all those questions so that when we do the onboarding process, we just alleviate a lot of that stuff. Like, well, you know, the first 30 days we talk about, like we have a sample article that’s already written, we get their feedback, we create a brand brief with their team, making sure that all the tone, the voice, the guidelines, like we just front load everything and then over time have meetings as they’re needed.

We just have learned that like, if you can just build that trust in from day one, then a lot of it is really smooth from there on out and we can do what we do best and they do what they do best. And it’s just kind of like divide and conquer.

MKJ (00:00.76)
Hello, hello, CEO Mischief Makers. Welcome to the conversation, MKJ here. And I can’t wait to chat with my guest, Josh Elitch. Josh, are you ready to rock on this thing and chat with me on this podcast?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (00:14.944)
MKJ, I am delighted to be here. Thank you so much for having

MKJ (00:19.564)
I can’t wait. So Josh and I have known each other here and there and everywhere and in corners of different parts of marketing for several years now. And I just saw a post of his and went, I haven’t talked to Josh like forever. And I’ve got to chat with him and see what’s going on. So Josh, start us off by just introducing who you are and what you do.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (00:39.074)
Yeah, sure. So, you with a background as a journalist in the United States Navy for a number of years, that kind of led to my path of multiple businesses that I’ve started over the years. My last company did pretty well, Savings Angel. You we became a six -figure -a -month company just simply because I went out and served audiences with noble intent, just giving value.

And as a result, like we created that company with zero paid ads. It was just all organic, all generosity, all just being a good person to good people out there. And that led to that. So that’s kind of, you

You know, in that work, I accidentally started another company and of course that’s up my influence of which I think I have my greatest notoriety for today. But it’s essentially that same thing. It’s leveraging platform, it’s loving generosity, it’s leveraging serving audiences in order to make all of our goals happen consistently and predictably. most of my work, MKJ

is that of a chief revenue officer for B2B service providers, consultants, agency owners, coaches, as long as they’ve been around for a little bit of time so they have some decent authority. And basically my job is if they’re doing account -based sales and they’re relationship focused, I pretty much can keep them busy for the rest of their lives with sales introductions as long as they are willing to lead in generosity, which we’ll talk a little bit about here.

MKJ (02:16.132)
Yes, absolutely. Thank you for that. Because we are aligned completely on that topic. You give first and to good people, as you said, and it all comes back. You can call it whatever you like. Karma, can call it reciprocity, you can call it all kinds of things. But I believe 100 % in that. And I believe that that is how humans have been doing business forever. Whether the internet’s here or not doesn’t matter. So take us

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (02:41.166)
Certainly, yes.

MKJ (02:45.698)
I mean, that’s a pretty big shift from journalism in the Navy to marketing and to a sound that’s like a SaaS product. Was that what you had with the angel? Yeah. Yeah. That’s a bit. What’s that mindset? What was that mindset shift between getting out of there and going to

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (02:59.682)
with savings angel? yeah, yeah, so, yeah, so savings angel, go ahead. right.

Yeah, so what happened with Savings Angels is I really discovered, and again, this was a while ago, was back in 2007, but I had discovered, I did a lot of research and the problem that I wanted to figure out was I’ve heard of people that can cut their grocery bill in half and I knew that they had figured something out. And this was long before extreme couponing. And so I read every book on the topic I could find.

And I found out that there were two ways that any American could easily take an eight, $900 grocery bill and cut it down to three to $400. And there’s two ways you could do it. You can start to grow a lot of your own food and harvest and create a lot of your own food from home. You could raise chickens and that sort of thing. And you know what? It works, but it’s a lot of work. You got a lot of sweat equity. So that’s…

MKJ (03:59.096)
Yep.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (04:03.48)
wasn’t realistic for me. I didn’t necessarily at the time have a green thumb. I’ve certainly gotten one since then. But in reality, I had to look for other options. And so what I had found out was that you can save a ton of money if you just get a lot smarter around the timing of available discounts that you have open to you. Now, what I mean by that are sales, coupons, rebates,

other incentives, right? And so that was savings angels whole thing is we would basically take all of that data and say, you know, okay, grab this coupon, get as many copies of this coupon as possible. Wait, wait, wait, okay, now go, go to Meyer. And so we would help people get boxed at Cheerios for 25 cents, you these $5 boxed at Cheerios, like it was stuff like that. I would get free groceries every single week. Now, sadly, for someone who’s been listening, we describe this.

MKJ (04:51.522)
I got.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (04:58.71)
sorry, that business is no longer in business. I mean, it is, but it’s pretty much just a blog at this point. We don’t offer that service anymore. And since then, it’s been great. But MKJ, back to like why that, like how I got caught up in that was in my time in the Navy, when I was in journalism school, and it was a defense information school, where all the public relations people and the journalists and the broadcast journalists go to print journalists and so forth.

I had the opportunity to learn from Adrian Kronauer. Now, Adrian Kronauer, you may or may not recognize that name, that was Staff Sergeant Kronauer in the Vietnam War became the subject of the movie, Good Morning Vietnam, played by Robin Williams. And the whole story there is always, always, always be in integrity with your audience. Never lie. Sometimes that’s gonna put

MKJ (05:45.956)
Yes.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (05:57.002)
in situations where you say, if I do a hardcore, let me kind of transfer this now to maybe marketing and entrepreneurial, why does this matter to me? You can go on a stage and you can sell and you can have that masterful closing technique and you can use urgency and scarcity. And does that work, stuff work? Yeah, sure, works for some audiences. Some audiences it doesn’t.

MKJ (06:19.041)
Bye bye.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (06:24.498)
And one audience that in particular does not work very well for are gonna be sophisticated business owners, folks that have been around, folks that generally can have the ability to make bigger decisions. They’re the decision makers within the company. They’ve seen it all before, right? And so if you go down that road, you’re just gonna kind of be lumped into a bro -y, sales -y kind of thing.

And that’s not really who we work with. The folks that we work with, MKJ, are gonna be more, like they’re just very good at what they do. If they’re a leadership consultant or a marketing consultant, a branding consultant or something like that, like they do really good work. They’ve been doing it for a while. They have very good reputation. They’re the kind of people that if they were to walk into a room and say a VIP mixer at an event and just mill about and make relationships and chat it up, they would probably end up walking out of that room with

a of business, a couple of people that they’re probably gonna do business with. Like they’re just very talented people. That’s who we work with. Now, if you are one of those types of people, I’ve got such great news. You no longer need to compete in the red ocean of lead gen. It’s inappropriate for you to do that because your authority is kind of all you need. You really just need to build more relationships with your ideal connections and you’ll probably end up doing a lot of business.

Sorry, that was kind of a big answer that I ended up lumping a bunch of other stuff in there, MKJ.

MKJ (07:48.174)
Yeah. No, no. it’s perfect. Thank you. Because it showed that transition. It showed where the connection was between those things. And that’s really how. So you’ve been doing this now and leading with that intent and selling, if you want to call it selling with that intent, building relationships. Where what’s the next? Because I look at that as a mindset shift.

You came out of the Navy, you’re like, okay, what can I do? You start this company, you’re trying to help people. Everything is about trying to help people. I can see that clearly. But then you switch to up by influence, which is a different kind of company. So how did that mindset shift go from a savings angel to what you’re doing now? What was that shift?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (08:32.398)
Right. Yes.

But yeah, so both of these companies really are or I should say my go to market for them. Both came from the same way. So when I started savings angel, I had no money for ads. I’m just not a broey salesy kind of person. I’m uncomfortable with that. Like, I don’t enjoy that. I don’t like feeling like I have to talk people into things or manipulate people or follow these closing scripts that just feel out of character. I don’t like slamming people’s DMS like I don’t like being, you know,

I’m gonna date myself, Ron Popeel or the Sham Wow guy. Like it just, that feels icky to me. But yet I wanna still grow my business. So with Savings Angel, was give more value to as many people as possible. So my play was that I’ve been in the media more than 2 ,500 times on behalf of Savings Angel. And what do I

MKJ (09:12.309)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (09:31.948)
I don’t sell Savings Angel. I give lots of value away. And then people are like, that guy’s pretty smart. Yeah, some of them, not all of them. Some people are like, I do not care for that guy. And that’s okay. Like that’s, I’m an acquired taste. I realize that. So either you resonate with that and you’re gonna come find me and that’s great. Or it’s just like, next, who’s talking now? Okay, so what’s really interesting is that as Savings Angel was doing pretty well,

MKJ (09:39.382)
Yeah,

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (10:01.504)
my job was pretty passive. Like I just had to show up for media stuff, continue to build the right relationships, obviously looking at our big partners and deepening those relationships all the time. So I had some free time. And so I started serving in our local startup community here in Orlando. I’m originally from the Midwest, Michigan.

But, you in Orlando, I started doing a lot of work with SBDC, military veteran owned small business owners and founders, women owned, minority owned, just any opportunity where I could get on some boards, serve on workshops, all pro bono, 100 % pro bono. Just, it’s not an ask, it’s a give. And what I found is this, Mary Catherine, the same pattern is that when you show up and you’re consistent about how you serve and the value you give,

that you lead with noble intent that initially it feels inefficient, but then you get to a point where you are not able to out give the market. Now, a lot of early stage business owners might be a little afraid of doing what I’m talking about because they’re like, I need sales today. I need money. I got bills to pay. I get you. I know what that’s like. I’ve been there, done that many times over.

How long do you want that to continue? I hope that we can break out of that rat wheel soon. And the path to do so is you just need more high value, high touch relationships. I’m not talking social media followers. Those aren’t bad, but that’s not what I’m referring to. I want you, my friend that’s listening to us right now, to spend more time.

with fewer people, but higher quality people in terms of the potential of doing business together. I’m not talking about worth of a soul. I’m just saying, you know, who are the kind of people you would put on your dream 100 and those are the people you need to start earning time with through generosity. And we’ll talk about how platform is such an effective way to do

MKJ (12:05.668)
my goodness, yes. Now you see, right, mischief makers, can hear, you can understand why Josh and I align so well, because this is exactly, I agree 100%, demand generation versus lead generation. And demand generation is not just generating demand, it’s building relationships. It is giving, it is a slower process, and it’s not a flip the switch. You’re not in here and ads into a funnel, into a webinar, into a sale. You don’t go

from that to all of a sudden stopping that and just starting over and build relationships. You have to transition it because obviously you got to pay the bills. But I agree with you. It’s just a hamster wheel to just keep on that process. It’s going, it’s not going to lead you anywhere. And pretty soon it’s going to dry up pretty, pretty heavily because the native digital coming up underneath, they don’t, they can smell us a funnel. They can smell an ad. They can smell that a mile away. It’s, it’s ubiquitous to them. They were raised with

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:55.171)
Yeah.

MKJ (13:06.0)
so they can see it. So if you don’t build relationships, you’re going to be in trouble in the long run.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (13:07.426)
Yeah.

Yeah, and I think there’s something to be said for how much noise do you want to be in the midst of right now? Because right now, this is what we know from Harvard Business School, is they said 90 % of top level B2B decision makers never respond to cold outreach or unsolicited sales calls. So right off the bat, you are competing with every lazy marketer on the planet for that 10%. And I’m not just talking about marketers. You’re competing

super cheap labor and now AI at a pace we have never seen before. So listen, case in point, how much time do you devote to paying attention to spammers today? And I’m talking directly to you. How do you like being sold at? For most decision makers I know, they have layers of insulation to protect themselves.

They don’t respond to the spammy sales texts, calls, emails, DMs and ads. They’re too busy, right? Now, again, I think that that probably can work. It’s not my area of expertise. If you’re trying to market it, baby, brand new entrepreneurs. I don’t know. I don’t know.

certainly out of my zone of genius, but I do know that if you wanna work with sophisticated decision makers, you’re gonna have to do something a little bit different and it ain’t gonna be coming right out of the holster with bam, bam, bam, do I have an offer for you? Let’s grab a discovery call or watch my free white paper.

MKJ (14:43.579)
Sorry, that’s just, that’s perfect. Yes, I agree 100%. So now, all right, we could belabor this topic. We could talk on it for a long time. What’s the next mindset shift for Josh? What’s going on? What are you looking forward to? And who do you need to become? What mindset shift do you need to make to get to that level, that different thing, that different whatever? What is that?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (15:08.782)
Okay, so the big the transformation, this is a little self -serving. I’m going to talk about myself here for a second since you asked. And I hope that, you know, again, this is is helpful for other people that think about their own roadmap. There’s only so much good I can do in the world. I’m limited. I’m one person. I don’t like working 80 hours a week. I’m not going to do that. I love to be quite deliberate with my time. And so one of our core values is democratization and my influence.

I in open sourcing, believe in crowdsourcing, I believe in sharing and spreading the wealth. I believe that a rising tide lifts all boats, right? And so one thing that we’ve been working on, we at Up My Influence, we have worked with getting close to 250 just over the past five years, big ticket clients, VIP level clients. And again, I step in as that chief revenue officer.

You know, we could talk a little bit more about this later, but you know, how we leverage platform, specifically the platform of podcasts in order to build meaningful high level relationships for business development. Okay, so when we’re working on our own account based sales, we’re somewhat limited on impact, right? It’s just all roads kind of need to come through Josh or Josh’s sales team. So that is one path to being able

help the world and my empathy extends to the business owners that are frustrated, MKJ. They just wanna do what they do. They love doing what they do. They love branding. They love copy and content and marketing and or other professional services, leadership, mindset coaching, health and wellness. That’s what they’re passionate about. But then someone said to them,

In order for you to do what you really love, you’re going to have to do a lot of this icky sales and marketing stuff. And you’re going to have to do stuff that falls outside of your values or your comfort zone. I don’t believe it. I think that that is bad advice. It sounds good because it makes it sound like, you could just do this yucky thing and then you can automate it. And then you don’t have to do the yucky thing. Sales is not yucky.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (17:32.172)
Right, so if we think about it from a perspective where we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to try to convince other people and manipulate them into buying, yeah, it’s a lot of work and I can see why people wouldn’t enjoy that. But if you think of it from a, know, going to, let’s say, think of the best event that you’ve ever been to and you’ve, I’m gonna close the loop here on Josh in just a second, just in you’re wondering here. But let’s say, again, you walk into a room.

and the pressure’s off. Like no one’s thinking about sales. Like everyone’s just relaxed. You know, maybe they have a drink, maybe they have coffee or water, whatever. They’re just milling about, hanging out. Hey, what brings you here? Tell me about what you do. Blah, blah, blah. You know, and I think we’ve all had that magical moment where you get to talking with someone and you’re like, you start to look at them like, huh, I wonder if there’s something we should be doing together. Like it’s that type of energy. That is how

the big leaders do business. It’s organic, it’s authentic, it feels happenstance or it feels like the universe or God’s kind of brought these two people together. That is how the majority of high level decision makers like doing business or getting a word of mouth or something like that. Not anything that is forced. So Mary Cawthon, part of my vision is to keep more B2B solutions providers and business owners in business

so that they don’t have to do the yucky stuff which just burns us out. It’s hard to do stuff outside of your values if you don’t enjoy it and do that day after day after day. You deserve to build a huge network of friends. fact, listen, if you can get to a point where you’ve got two, 300 high level friends, and I mean like a legit friendship, like where it’s not just social media high five in each other, whatever, but like legitimately people.

who really are looking out for you. They believe in you and you believe in them and you send business back and forth and you do good stuff together and you create this one plus one equals 11 dynamic week after week after week after week, it’s game set match. And so MKJ, that is my goal is to create that whisper network with all of these great business owners that just want to do what they love. So what does that mean?

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (19:52.706)
we’re gonna have to spread the wealth. right now, one thing that we’re working on is a true kind of, know, E -Myth next step in the process. And, you know, we’ll be licensing what we do because I can’t reach the whole world on my own, or at least if I do, I don’t know that that’s necessarily a path that I want. I would

Like I said, much rather kind of to my own personality. I’d much rather shine the spotlight on other people. I’m happy to do my part, happy to serve, but I don’t know that I necessarily want to be the next Tony Robbins. I’d rather be the guy that creates a bunch of Tony Robbins, if you know what I mean, right? So yeah, that’s kind of my energy.

MKJ (00:00.676)
Hey, hey, CEO Mischief Makers, MKJ here. Welcome to the conversation and welcome a new friend I’ve been able to make, a friendship, an acquaintance, and we’re gonna get a little deeper in that conversation to friendship, Ronnie Loaiza. Ronnie, how you doing? You ready for

RonnieLo Life Coach (00:19.689)
Yes, I am. Yeah, I’m really thankful for the friendship as well, because I’ve been following you on LinkedIn. So it’s kind of weird that you might not know that people think they know you because of your content, but we kind of do a little bit. we feel like, I know who you are, you

MKJ (00:35.271)
That’s amazing. I’m so glad you said that because it really that’s that’s kind of the power of being in someone’s ears Right because they hear your voice they hear your they they get to know you and I do the same with Everyone else I follow as well. It is it is kind of a friendship even though we’ve never met in person So let’s start this off. So first off kind of tell everyone who you are and what you do. Just start

RonnieLo Life Coach (01:01.413)
Well, it was started many years ago. I live in California, just South of you. live in Southern California in Los Angeles. just real quick. When my mom decided to have me, she was in love with New York city. They, my parents lived in South America and Venezuela. So she came and spent the last part of her pregnancy in New York city, became best friends with a lady who was the receptionist of her doctor moved in with her. Cause they asked her, you got to stay with us

There’s a point to this. My, my mom’s friend, Jean, had a really good friend from Brooklyn and, no, she, were living in Brooklyn. My, her friend lived in Queens. She was this Jewish lady who smoked like a fiend. name was Ronnie Munger and I’m named after her. Ronnie Munger. And she flew back with me when I was one week old. So I’ve been traveling ever since and love adventures. You know,

She showed me to my dad and she’s like, meet your daughter Ronnie. He’s like, okay. I was supposed to be named Celeste or something Spanish like that, you know?

MKJ (02:04.97)
And she just unilaterally decided, no, there’s this amazing woman I met in Queens. Her name is Ronnie. I’ve got to name my daughter Ronnie.

RonnieLo Life Coach (02:12.495)
And my sister, born in the sixties, was named after Jacqueline Kennedy. So her name was Jacqueline. but we all moved here when I was just turning five. So while my mother tongue was Spanish, I started kindergarten at the age of five, here in the United States. So I started speaking English right away. And like I said, I’ve loved traveling ever since. I don’t know that had anything to do with it. My parents were really the kind that you have to go somewhere every summer. We had to go somewhere, whether it was a road trip or on the plane. So I love

MKJ (02:16.42)
Jacqueline, there we go.

MKJ (02:28.42)
Yeah.

MKJ (02:38.836)
wonderful. And so tell everybody what you do for a

RonnieLo Life Coach (02:41.837)
I’m a habit coach. I help people. know you’ve heard that before, but I do help people really make the changes they want, whether it’s a small change, a big change, but usually that change they’ve been wanting to make many times and they may have tried, but things just go by the wayside or they recess, you know, whatever. I hope they make the changes they want and achieve their goals. One tiny action at a time that becomes

Instead of all the force discipline, all the to -do hacks and the constant revving up of willpower. It just leads to burnout. I know this because that’s what people have told me for decades. And that’s what I’ve been dealing with. And I finally saw the common thread of we are just a big blob of our habits every day. And when you do the research and you look at all the studies, 40 to 50 % of every one of our days is a series of our habits and how we behave.

is our habitual, the way I call it, our habitual way of thinking. So I became a certified habit coach. I am now up in the levels in life coaching. So I’m a, I always have to get this right, a master certified professional coach.

MKJ (03:51.187)
Okay, that’s fantastic because we are going to start with mindset and I know more about your background that impact and innovation is going to get into which is I can already start seeing the trickles of why you are doing what you’re doing because of what I know about you. So we’re gonna uncover a few of those things. But let’s start with mindset. Okay, so I understand mindset probably doesn’t fit into habits in that respect, but it does.

RonnieLo Life Coach (04:15.217)
Yeah.

MKJ (04:16.282)
It absolutely, and I probably, it looks like you’re agreeing with me. This is a mindset shift. Each of those little shifts are little mindset shifts. That’s why I’m just going to throw a statistic out here from my world of marketing. That’s why it takes 66 touches in order for someone to feel comfortable enough typically to buy. That’s the average now. It used to be when I started in marketing in 2003, it’s like seven or eight touches, right? Seven or

RonnieLo Life Coach (04:41.538)
Yeah,

MKJ (04:42.074)
impacts with your business before somebody’s ready to buy. It’s now 66. So that’s why it’s so many little micro commitments, little mini yeses. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about in habits. So tell me how, what, what shifted your mindset from what you were doing before you became a habit coach or, or mindset coach. I’m just using mindset as my word.

What shifted your mindset to allow you to start doing that? Why are you doing what you’re doing?

RonnieLo Life Coach (05:16.891)
Well, mostly because I used to be very, meditating just doesn’t work for me. I don’t get it. want, I wanted to work. I want to be in that Zen. And I just wasn’t, when I started really working with people as a personal trainer and I was not athletic at all. I came from the world of journalism and then public relations. And you’re right about the public relations. We used to say a commercial takes seven times to watch till somebody actually pays attention to it and acts on it. same with infomercials. Remember those.

MKJ (05:46.202)
Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (05:46.349)
so now it’s like, have so many, don’t let me go down rabbit holes cause I could, but we have so many distractions all around us, especially on our phone and our computers that it’s hard for our mind to focus because we’re focusing, focusing and we’re like refocusing constantly. So until we latch onto something, yeah, it takes a lot of taps and hits. So back to my mindset

MKJ (05:51.651)
I know.

RonnieLo Life Coach (06:12.721)
When I finally became a personal trainer because of health issues and I’d said, what do I want to be the next 20 years of my life? I said this to myself at 46. I’m like, who does that? And especially in LA, all the personal trainers were in their twenties, want to be actors or in the industry. I’m like, I think I will. Because my personal trainer at the time, who was a corrective exercise specialist, I was put with her by my insurance. I stopped hurting within two weeks. I learned how to train properly for my spine and my back and my hips.

And I was so into it because I asked a lot of questions that she’s like, you need to become a personal trainer. I’m like, why me? She’s like, because if women and men, but especially women, if they see you at your age in great shape and feeling good and you have herniated disc and you have this and that, you’re your own walking billboard and they’ll believe you and they’ll relate to you. So when I decided to study and become a personal trainer, more than just kinesiology and biology and anatomy, I realized

Every one of my clients, I wanted to make them as fit as that person could be, as fit as that individual could be. Forget the cookie cutter workouts. And it was 90, I’m making up this number though. I thought the majority of their, their issue or their success was their mindset. It really was. And I wasn’t all woo woo, but it was really about how do we change the way you’re always thinking? That’s really it. I now call

MKJ (07:37.852)
Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (07:38.863)
your habitual way of thinking, because we’re in the habit of thinking a certain way and reacting a certain way. So that’s how I got into the mindset. And back then I wasn’t into life coaching. It’s whatever it took to relate to them and connect with them to have them at least start changing their way of thinking about something or approaching something or about themselves. That now that I’m a coach, now I have the tools. People always say that, but I do know a great process. And of course we tailor it to each

But that’s how I got into the mindset. And I can’t, for example, I cannot do just affirmations that are not true. I’m a gajillionaire. Yes, I am. I am the goddess queen with the best body. If it’s not true and you doubt it, I don’t believe in fake it till you make it because that’s just it. It’s fake and our brain knows it. And if there’s any, even a sand of doubt or like cynicism, your brain will look for the evidence to prove your cynicism or your

MKJ (08:26.89)
That’s it. That’s it.

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:37.029)
So I believe in confirmation over affirmation. Give yourself a fact that is true or truth. Confirmation over affirmation. If you look up in the dictionary, when you’re affirming something, you’re confirming something. But really a confirmation is, I’m confirming this is fact. And when you say that out loud, you tell your brain that and your brain goes, noted, you’re right, you’re

MKJ (08:57.048)
Yes, and we do we do our bodies follow our minds. They just do it you it you manifest whatever you want, whatever whatever reality you really do believe in your mind, you manifest that in your body. So okay, I get it. I get where you came from. I get the mindset and I also get that most of us become

the or start the businesses or start the career trajectory that we have started because of our own needs. So from your own needs, from from your MPR and injuries and going to personal trainer and then going, I can do this. I do have the power to do this. I can change. I can heal myself through knowing what to do the right way to do it. And now, lots of people need this.

Okay, it’s not just personal training and the exercises. It’s the mindset I did the same thing when when I would teach people how to lose weight I Would teach people how to quit smoking and I would teach people how to lose weight and it was always a mindset issue Not what you eat It has to start with mindset. It’s not just what you eat. I mean

RonnieLo Life Coach (10:11.987)
absolutely.

And now the caveat is Mary Jane, I hate to interrupt you, but I have to do the caveat because you’re going to get listeners and audience people go, well, I’m addicted. And that is true. And there is a difference between addiction and a habit. Absolutely. There are people who smoke that can quit and some people do the willpower and that’s hard and kudos to them. But most people, if they’re addicted, they have to go, they have to wean off, whether it’s patches or some treatment, but other people use hypnotherapy. That’s mindset.

MKJ (10:23.3)
Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (10:44.537)
And the same with eating. Yes, you may go to a diet, you may go to all these plans and courses, but they don’t work unless first of all, you’re willing to commit. But second of all, take the tiny, tiny actions. It is the process in that, in that account. It’s not just willing it. And so yeah, mindset comes into play that you can’t just wish it, wish it, wish it. You have to take action. Even remember the secret and the law of attraction. Everybody after that said, you can’t just wish and kick your heels.

MKJ (11:00.588)
It is basically complete.

MKJ (11:06.67)
Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (11:12.549)
you have to then do something about it. have to take action. So it’s not just mindset that you, yeah, you’ve, you want to will it. Okay. You want to will it first of all, but then you have to go through the process of how can I do it? And the way that I have found that works with people, whether you’re addicted or it’s a habit is really first, first, you have to take a tiny action to make it into a habit, a part of who you are. That sounds woo woo, but it really has to be who you are naturally without thinking about it. has to be in your subconscious.

MKJ (11:12.654)
Yeah. Yes. yeah.

MKJ (11:40.932)
Completely. Completely. Completely.

RonnieLo Life Coach (11:41.989)
that describes you. So to do that, I link habits to something or actions to something you already do because we already have enough in our busy days. And that’s the problem. And I’m sure you’ve seen a lot of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs and business people that take courses and webinars and plans and they go to these inspirational conferences and business conferences and they walk away with all these big plans under their arm, like I’m going to implement this. And then it all starts falling from under their

You know, or they take webinars and they put them into folders and then they don’t go through all the folders and all the modules because it’s a lot and it’s more than what you you’re used to doing. So I take it to what are you already doing and how can you link it to that? I call it habit chaining. Other people, since James Cleary now call it habit stacking. don’t like stacking because it sounds like you’re compiling on stuff. Just link it to something you already do and take tiny actions that are doable.

That they’re easy. So I go through a list of ideations, like ideas, what could you do? And people always, especially in business, want to do four five things that went, I can handle those new four things. Like if you could have, you would have. Let’s do one and start winning at that one and make it a habit. When you start proving to yourself confirmation and your brain starts going noted, capable, noted, you feel that win. You feel that triumph. You make a part of who you are. You can then progress.

MKJ (12:47.817)
That’s right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (13:06.693)
But to take on all these to -do’s and plans, that’s what fails.

MKJ (13:11.268)
Yeah, completely. anytime, anytime, the first step has to be that you are capable, you are able to do that. But some of the and we’ll talk more about that in strategy and tactics, all the specifics of what you can do. But number one, if you’re trying to lose weight, and there’s still a bunch of whatever your favorite food is that you binge on in the house, it isn’t going to work. I don’t care how much willpower you think you have. It’s not you’re not going to be able to stay away from

because habitually that’s what you’re using that food for whatever it is, the feeling that you’re trying to get. So completely. So what’s your next mindset shift you have to make? You’ve shifted from PR to personal training because you needed it to have habits because you needed it. What’s the next mindset shift for Ronnie?

RonnieLo Life Coach (13:56.913)
for me. Well, have had to, I have had to accept the fact that I’ve been a solopreneur since letting go of the paycheck, you know, um, because it’s hard to go from a W -2 to a 1099, especially when you’re not used to keeping up with the books. I forget to invoice people. I really do. I didn’t, when I was just a personal trainer, my clients would literally tell me when I went on my own.

Don’t I owe you? I’m like, yeah, okay. I have to look at it. It’s like, if I could have worked for a company and they got me all the, all the clients and they took care of invoicing, I would be the happiest thing. I don’t, I would even go for socialized medicine and socialized personal training. Cause I loved doing it. Just give me my cut. But it’s true. You have to get in that mindset of, wait a minute, this is a business as well. Grow up. so with me now, I really do have to keep reminding myself that I pay

I pay people for what I need and want. Same thing here. So no, it’s not true that it’s, you don’t want a transactional relationship. It’s part of it. So of course you have to have a real relationship with people. People want to connect. And also people know that there is going to be a transaction. So that’s been my mindset. like charging my worth. It’s hard. And then I look at other coaches that charge 300 an hour. It’s like, okay, I don’t charge that much, but

MKJ (15:21.018)
Awesome.

RonnieLo Life Coach (15:21.733)
You know, that was my biggest struggle. That really was.

MKJ (15:25.998)
Yeah, thank you for that because that I think for all of us as we start in business, that is that is all not all probably some people probably don’t have that. Some people probably have a different relationship with money. But most of the people that I have I have talked to, whether it’s on this show or in training or in masterminds or anything, money issues are a big deal. They are they are things we have to

change in ourselves. And there was there were some exercises that were so pivotal for me, some of the questions that I would ask myself, or some of the statements that you have to, to basically finish. And I don’t remember who gave these to me. I think this was one of the sales trainers that I worked with in the past. Just just finish these statements. Not for you. I’m thinking for the audience. Finish these statements.

RonnieLo Life Coach (16:20.357)
Yeah, yeah,

MKJ (16:23.108)
People who have a lot of money are… Just finish it with the first thing that comes to your head. If I had a lot of money, I would… Right? Just finish those statements. Rich people are… Right? If I had a lot of wealth, I would… So even just changing some of those words, if you finish that statement unconsciously, just automatically finish it, then go back and ask yourself, who taught you

RonnieLo Life Coach (16:26.87)
yeah, I see what you’re

MKJ (16:53.124)
Who told you that that was true? That people with a lot of money are one of the things that I thought selfish. You know, that was what I was taught. That was what I was taught. And see, it’s what I was taught. I was taught by my mother, people who have a lot of money are selfish. And I had to look at that and go, okay, I don’t want to be selfish. Maybe that’s why I didn’t have a lot of money when I thought that. But who taught me

RonnieLo Life Coach (17:01.347)
Well, I didn’t think that, but that’s interesting that you thought that. I thought go -getters.

RonnieLo Life Coach (17:09.669)
Wow.

MKJ (17:23.086)
And why is that actually and just who taught you that? And is it true? Is it really true? No, it’s not true. No, it’s not true. People with a lot of money are not selfish. I can’t judge them as selfish. I don’t know them. So those kinds of questions, that’s how you can shift your mindset from where it is and if there are certain barriers. And I have a feeling you go through some of those similar situations of asking people questions and getting them to to look at their world a little bit differently, but with minute.

RonnieLo Life Coach (17:27.343)
Right. Right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (17:40.794)
Mm -hmm.

RonnieLo Life Coach (17:50.952)
yeah.

MKJ (17:53.723)
small, small habits. And I agree with

RonnieLo Life Coach (17:55.995)
Well, that’s just it. When we talk, when we do life coaching, I don’t tell people what to do. I’m not a consultant and we don’t go back and lie on the couch and talk to me about your childhood. I mean, we could, but it’s not therapy either. I am not a consultant. We agree on that. understand that from the get -go. A coach really gets you where you are, the change you want to make, and you propel yourself forward.

And I think I told you this when we first met, I’m like, not to sound all Yoda -ish, but you do have the answers in you because you believe things, so you have certain beliefs. You have values. What do you value in this, in that, in your life, in your business, whatever. You have your core values. So you have the answers in you. Often we change what we do from what we believe because we’re following the company, we’re following society, we’re following what our friends advise us to do, whatever it is. So go back to your core values.

And I do pull these kinds of questions and answers out of people and they really do answer themselves. And then we come up with possible actions, possible results, and they get to choose what they will do. Now I can make suggestions that they ask me to, but I do not tell people what to do. I’m no guru. I’m a coach. Just like in sports, you’re already on the team. You’re on your own team. And then the coach watches from the sideline.

takes the video, hey, come here, all right, let’s look at this video. What could you do better? What were you thinking then? What do you think about that? So I really do coach people and there’s a difference and they are amazed at how much faster they go, especially when they’re willing to, okay, I’ll give it a try. I’ll give it a go. And when they’re really honest with themselves and they answer the questions.

MKJ (00:00.568)

Hey, hey, CEO Mischief Makers, welcome to the conversation. I get to chat with a guy that’s been on my podcasts probably this is probably the fourth time I’ve talked to Peter Lasoski, who is the CEO of iProlio and the founder of the product Relatable and the framework Relatable. We’ve probably chatted, Pete, what? Probably at least four times on my podcasts.

Peter Lisoskie (00:25.84)

Well, you just can’t, you can’t get rid of me. I’m kind of like that old dog, the stray dog that keeps coming back to your door. You know, I will say that I was looking for pets. You know, one thing about sales is 90 % of sales is showing up and seems like dogs always do a great job, but they’re looking for food. They all show

MKJ (00:33.122)

And I

MKJ (00:43.448)

They do dogs, cats, birds. had a we have a raccoon that my father in law I’m living with my father in law right now and and he feeds the raccoons and the deer and everything. So the raccoon raccoon comes up to the back door back sliding door up on the deck. He has to come up on the deck upstairs and come to the door and he just sits there and stares at you until you throw him some bread.

Peter Lisoskie (00:52.205)

really? Wow.

Peter Lisoskie (01:03.376)

Because he knows what’s on the other side of that door. There’s food.

MKJ (01:06.754)

He knows and he watches he can see us. So I get up and he watches me and I walk over. I mean, it’s like, what the heck? Bandit is trying to steal bread. Anyway, thank you for coming back to the conversation and continuing to engage with me because I really we’ve got some pretty cool stuff going on. But but to follow this framework, we’ve talked about on the show before, but we’ve talked about different things. This time, I really want to hone in on.

the difference between what we were doing together before, let’s say back in 2020, that whole process we were going through, we don’t have to talk about the details there, but we had a very different mindset, you and I, in 2020 when we worked together on another product than we do now. So take us through that. What just between 2020 and now, when we worked on open lists and we were doing all of that in the process there,

We, know you and I talk about it in relation to lead generation versus demand generation, but it’s much deeper than that. The whole mindset is much beyond that, much deeper than that. So start with that. How did your mindset shift from what we did in 2020 to

Peter Lisoskie (02:21.284)

Yeah. Well, you know, Mary, it’s, it’s funny you say that because I, you know, we were going through, I hope, and you know, you’ve heard me say this several times, you know, in life and in business and in your personal life too, it’s like you win or you learn. I define failure as failure is when you quit, when you still have passion in something. And that usually leads to regret and no one wants to ever regret. Right.

That was the first thing. The other thing is, as you know, Mary, you know, me, you know I have a set of questions that I go through. One of the most important questions for innovation and inspiration is what else is possible? And

I asked myself when we were back in 2020, this was at the height of the COVID, right? And people were kind of isolated and things like that. It got me thinking about, you know, and then I moved up to my property here. We couldn’t meet anybody because for a year, because we were stuck in COVID. So that triggering event got me thinking about like, well, wow, you know, being isolated, human relationships are important to me. And

They’re important to everybody, right? We’re social as human beings. And then I started thinking about, okay, well, what actually goes on online in the social world, right? Or in the digital world. And it’s like, I started realizing, man, we’re doing a lot of stuff wrong. As far as how do you actually develop, you know, a human relationship? So…

MKJ (03:49.144)

you

Peter Lisoskie (03:54.766)

I was sitting there brushing my teeth one morning in my bathroom and I was looking in the mirror and I thought, okay,

Peter Lisoskie (04:07.108)

How does a person actually create a human relationship, right? And you know, I started getting clarity on that. Way back when when I was on your show and I told you child bots were a pile and you got mad at me. You know, if you think about how relationships, we start with awareness, connection, and engagement. And if you look in most everything,

whether it’s passive video, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, everything. Everything stops there, all social. It’s a truncated relationship. It gets so bad that…

Facebook calls people friends. They’re not your friends. You don’t know them, right? So this is the thing of like I said, well, wait a second now. What’s the rest of relationships? we have to, beyond engagement, there’s nurture, there’s trust, there’s respect, and then business is affinity or personal is intimacy. So I said, okay.

MKJ (04:55.652)

Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (05:20.456)

I told you a long time ago, we’re not just in business to build software to make money. That’s a byproduct of doing the right thing, creating the right impact and transformation, and creating a movement. And I’m more about creating impacts and movements than I am about just making a big dollar valuation. That all will come as a side entity to that.

So that’s where the focus should be and that’s where our focus is. It’s like, okay, that’s the way humans do relationships and where we are today with email marketing and funnels and websites and social media, we’ve got to fix this crap, right? So.

And the other thing too, Mary is it was funny because I was talking, this was yeah, back probably back in 2020. There’s a buddy of mine, he’s pretty, pretty wealthy. He lives down the street from me. And you know, we, go during COVID. The only thing we do is I go out for walks with him. We talk about each other’s businesses. I mean, the guy’s got his own private jet and he flies around, does business, right? And so, you know, I got to know him over a while and it was funny because he’d tell me, goes, yeah, I’m going out, I’m golfing with this, this guy and I’m golfing with that guy. And we’d do business out in

golf course and I’m going you know what I said think about that people it goes down to the old adage people do business with people they like no trust it is timeless it is never going to go away and I can make a case even with artificial intelligence that’s just going to propel that for people to do business with people they like no trust so that’s how this the origins of our new movement

MKJ (06:57.603)

Yep.

Peter Lisoskie (07:08.164)

with the framework and tool called Relatable, that’s how it began, was we have to get back to human -to -human interaction, digitally human, creating relationships because, and we’ll talk about this, I’m gonna stop talking here, you know, because I know you wanna interject and you have some thoughts too. I don’t wanna monopolize this conversation, but you know, the thing is,

There’s been a massive shift. This shift is not going to happen. It’s happened. And we’ve gone away from the attention economy and lead generation

the relationship economy with demand generation. And that’s where we wanted to be and provide a tool and a framework to help people in the relationship economy create a predictable stream of potential customers or clients.

MKJ (08:04.556)

Absolutely. And that is a mindset shift that you have to flip that script you have in your head. Because the script we had was lead generation, get as many people in the top of the funnel as possible. We may not have created a funnel to do that, but it’s get as many people into our world as possible. Tell them all this great stuff that we’re doing. Send them emails, send them a chat bot message. Do whatever we can do to get them to understand how amazing we are.

and then sell to them at the bottom. really the shift is no longer that it is really the awareness, which is the same as the top of the funnel. Tell people who you

what you stand for, what you stand against, what your point of view is. I know we’ll talk about all these things, but I want to talk about it in the next episode because that’s when we talk about innovation. So we’ll talk about that. But here we’re starting with awareness and we’re going, okay, here’s who we are, not here’s why you need us and why we are the amazing and why we’re going to sell you this thing that’s going to get you this great thing. It really is, here’s who we are. Here’s what we believe in. Here’s where we stand in this world.

Peter Lisoskie (09:07.578)

Yeah.

MKJ (09:13.624)

What we don’t like in this world based on what we do And what we do love and what we espouse and then hey if you want to discover more That’s where the consideration phase comes in people then can invite us into their buying process they can do the Research go to the website watch some of our videos, but then it’s it’s really an invitation. It’s not a

Peter Lisoskie (09:38.938)

Yeah.

MKJ (09:39.136)

And that’s a very, it may be subtle to people. They may not, they go, well, I can hear people saying, well, I’m inviting people when I try and sell them something. I’m inviting people to my webinar. I’m inviting people to my landing page. It’s a different framework. It is not selling. It is a true invitation in the sense that there’s no pressure. There’s no expectation. It’s just, this is who we are. Do you align or not? And if you don’t, awesome.

Go find someone else you align with. But if you do, come on. Come on this journey with me and let’s see if we really are aligned. Let’s get a little deeper in this relationship. That’s the mindset shift. And from you getting out of the shower one day, looking at yourself in the mirror and going, OK, we’re in the middle of COVID. We’ve got these, we need relationships, but we can’t have them right now because we have to stay all by ourselves. To have that.

Peter Lisoskie (10:07.566)

Yeah. Yeah.

MKJ (10:36.174)

basically create the framework for where we are now. And I know working with you over the last year and a half to two years on this, I know even that has shifted.

and continues to evolve the mindset of where we are. We were just talking before we came on air about another mindset evolution of how we look at the people we want to serve and how we consider them in our world. It’s constantly evolving as we open this up. So is there anything else you want to add to that?

Peter Lisoskie (11:01.914)

Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (11:06.717)

The only thing I want to add Marius, know, I look at things from like, and you guys, do too. We’re all the same as human beings. There’s a little or big thing, however you place value on it called common sense. If you think about common sense and you go, well, okay, how do we develop relationships? Well, common sense tells you what I just said in this podcast. There’s another common sense thing too, guys.

I want each of you to go look in the mirror whenever. Tonight, tomorrow morning, after your shower, whatever. Look in the mirror and ask yourself this question. How do I buy? Now, if it’s not a pack of gum or candy bar, the answer is, common sense is, well I go online and I do research. If that’s how we’re buying, do you think that your buyers…

any differently than that person is staring back at you in the mirror? No. And this is where things fall apart with lead generation because we are inviting someone into our sales process to try to persuade them to buy.

when that is not how we buy. That is not how anybody buys. Common sense will tell you that is not how people buy. If you don’t do it, they’re not doing it. So why are we doing lead gen in the attention economy? Which is, well, okay, here’s the thing. So since I need to convince these people, I am going to use technology and I’m gonna bug the shit out of them. I’m gonna send a lot of emails. I’m gonna run them through a funnel and sell the hell out of them. I am going to go on social and

until the cows come home. And this is exactly what’s happening. And this is, you know, these people, look, we’ve talked, Mary and I, we’ve talked to a lot of CEOs and founders. And every single one of them now is starting to get in panic mode because they’ve done this play by the numbers, aren’t, you know, arms length stranger marketing, or I’m gonna send them through a funnel. And the problem is not only do we not buy that way, but people’s BS meter is at an all time high, Mary.

Peter Lisoskie (13:18.34)

They know. I mean, think about it this way. Another common sense thing, and I’ve told this to you, Mary, but for the people that are listening, right? You guys know this to be true. If you’re gonna go buy something, is the first thing that pop in your head go, I think I’ll pick up the phone and call a salesperson. No, we don’t do that. In fact, Gardner, which we all know, the respected research company.

MKJ (13:18.402)

Yeah, yeah, completely.

Peter Lisoskie (13:42.16)

They did a study late last year and found out that 72 % of all B2B and B2C buyers want a seller free experience. That means they never want to talk to a salesperson. So, and guys, if you don’t believe me, you go talk to SDRs and BDRs out there. They’re panicking because they’re not getting leads. And the cold call, mean, here’s the thing. You guys listening to the common sense.

When someone, a strange number calls you, do you ever pick up and go, hey, yeah, let’s talk. No, we don’t. In fact, now we have spam features on our phone to report and block those people. It’s getting harder and harder and harder for salespeople to operate in this environment

MKJ (14:11.404)

answer.

Peter Lisoskie (14:25.552)

That is the common sense approach. This is how people, they don’t want to be sold to, they want to buy. So you have to match that. But I will stress this once again. When they are going through that process, if you never build a relationship and trust with them, you’re gonna lose them to your competitor. Another study came out by Gardner, 84 % of all potential buyers, clients or customers,

MKJ (14:45.956)

That’s right.

Peter Lisoskie (14:54.128)

will buy based on relationship, even if your competitor has a better price or better sales terms, 84%. So if you don’t get the relationship economy thing right and you don’t get the demand gen thing right, guess what? Your competitors are and they will go to them and you will lose the business.

MKJ (15:15.3)

That’s right. That’s And that’s the shift we’re talking about. That really is. So here’s the deal. Peter and I work together on this product relatable and I am fulfilling a particular role right now, which is more of a partnership manager. And I get on lots of calls with people and the call starts out with them thinking it’s a sales call or they’re thinking I’m going to try and convince them of something or there because that’s that’s the way we’ve been trained. But the first thing I talk about is

This is not, I have no expectation. I’m just going to show you what’s happening. If it works for you, it’s great. If it doesn’t, that’s great. And this is the way I’ve done it since day one. I don’t do sales calls in that respect. And the, you can see, you can see the relaxation because, I, I say, I’m not, I don’t have anything to sell you. don’t, if they start off with what does, how much does this cost? Or how much does that like, it doesn’t matter what it costs if it’s not what’s right for you. So I don’t even.

I don’t even gonna talk about that until I find out if this is for you and that whole concept of not selling but actually talking about who you are and I dive into their business and what they do and how they market and how they’re different and all the things we just talked about in our mindset shift.

And it becomes an actual conversation between two humans to try and help their business, not a conversation of what am I going to sell you or what are you going to try and sell me, MKJ? What are you going to try and sell me? That it’s nothing about that. And even if it doesn’t, even if I don’t start talking about relatable or in it all share it, the conversation was a fruitful conversation because we got to know each other a little bit deeper.

Peter Lisoskie (16:42.693)

Right.

MKJ (16:53.32)

And that that’s what we’re talking about. And yes, you’re probably sitting there thinking, but hey, you know, I can’t I can’t put that on my KPI spreadsheet. How am I going to be able to put that in my numbers and make sure that I’m getting, you know, as a marketer or a salesperson and make sure I’m getting my meeting my numbers? I get it. There’s processes we can put in place for all those things. And we’ll talk about that on the last episode when we talk about strategy and tactics. But right now.

If you don’t even shift that mindset, you won’t get to that. You’ll stay in that hamster wheel, as Peter talks about, and just keep trying to get leads and keep trying to sell them and constantly around and around and around doing the same thing. And if you build relationships, you have a very different, rather than a hamster wheel, you have a very different style of doing business. So any last thoughts on that, Peter? Any last thoughts on the mindset shift between lead generation, demand generation and relationship

Peter Lisoskie (17:31.716)

Yeah.

MKJ (17:48.518)

economy.

Peter Lisoskie (17:50.108)

My only last thought is I just can’t stress the relationship economy piece enough. And that is… That was part of the reason why I wanted to develop something. So, I mean think about it, right? Mary what you just talked about. You have a wonderful approach.

but there’s a limitation to it because you’re doing one to one. look, I’d love to have business. I’d love to go to coffee and have an in -person meeting or a video meeting like this one -on -one with every single customer. And I do that to some degree as time allows. But part of what I wanted to do with Relatable is like,

you know, answering the question, what else is possible? How could we create an environment of interactive video where you could have a coffee chat with 100 ,000 people at a time? Right?

It’s not email marketing where I’m blasting emails 100 ,000 at a time. It’s like I’m having this intimate, interactive, engaging video conversation where they can see me, they can see my hand, body movements, all this body language, but they can build familiarity. And so that’s a key piece to it too, is guys, you, you know, we talk about if you do this right with the relationship economy, with Relatable as a framework and tool and demand generation,

you can create a predictable stream of potential buyers, customers or clients who you’ve developed a relationship with to some degree at scale. And that’s my closing remarks is everybody, every business wants to be able to do something at scale, but let’s stop doing it where we’re pissing off and annoying people. Let’s do it in a relationship fashion because like I said, to end this podcast, everyone wants to do business with people they

Peter Lisoskie (19:38.226)

Like, know, and trust.

MKJ 
Hey, hey, hey, CEO, Mischief Makers, welcome to the conversation. I cannot wait, truly cannot wait to introduce you to my guest because I love how these things work. We just kind of got introduced to each other because a friend of mine attended his conference and talked about it. And I was like, whoa, that was amazing. And we just connected that way. And we’ve already had one conversation and now we get to be on the podcast. And this has been, I think, two weeks.

since we first met each other. So welcome. Yeah, welcome back to welcome to the conversation, Brian Wallace. Brian, how you doing today?

Brian Wallace
That’s right. We go way back.

Brian Wallace 
Thank you, thank you. Doing great, beautiful day. How about you?

MKJ
Absolutely gorgeous, wonderful, beautiful, sunny day at the coast. I can’t ask for anything more except a conversation with you. So now tell us, for those people who don’t know who you are, who you are and what you do.

Brian Wallace 
Woo, well, buckle up. Brian Wallace, founder and president of Now Sourcing, born in Brooklyn, moved away when I was a year old before the accident stuck. From Metro New York, but the suburbs where we sort of speak a non -regional dialect. Spent the better part of a decade being a technologist on the East Coast, had enough of

moved myself and my family to the Midwest southern border, kind of where all that stuff comes together, which is a broad swath of land. It’s not California or New York. And for the last 18 years or so have been at the helm of now sourcing, which is most well known for content marketing and being one of the first innovators of infographics as a storytelling mechanism. Or as I like to say, helping make the world’s ideas more understandable by making them simple, visual and influential, which gives you the ability for permission of the mind to give you more permission for more of their mind.

Yeah, and kind of like you said, a little bit of conferences and stuff nowadays, but we could talk all day as we shall.

MKJ 
my goodness.

MKJ
Yeah, little thing here and there and everywhere. All right, so all right, Mr. Faker is listening. You can tell why I wanted to have a conversation with Brian. I mean, that was pretty understandable right there. So let’s dive in. You talked about the whole idea of infographics and storytelling, and you used the word mind.

So tell me a little bit more about how did you decide to go from Brooklyn to suburbs to southern border to the middle of the country, not New York, not Cal. What in the world is going on? How did you decide and what mindset shift did you have to make to end up where you are? I mean, just give me the most, let’s say the most recent few.

Brian Wallace
Yes.

MKJ 
or even from the beginning of starting your business. Maybe that’s it. From the beginning, the mindset you had to start your business to now and the different mindset for now expanding into conferences and all that other stuff. I mean, I just need to pick your brain, okay? So tell me.

Brian Wallace
Let’s do it. Yeah, let’s do it. So let’s unpack that multi -headed, multi -threaded question. Yes. So how do you leave New York and go to Kentucky? Because it’s not really the path that most travel ever. So my wife and I actually got to visit Louisville, Kentucky two weeks before 9 -11. I think you see where this story went. We’re like, oh, wow, what a nice city. Then we come back.

MKJ
Multi question, yes.

Brian Wallace 
And we’re an MBA school together, where the campus of the school that we went to, we didn’t go to that particular campus, was basically next door to where all that stuff was happening. And we’re like, that other place sure was nice and idyllic. And like I said, I was in technology before we got into marketing. And I like to call myself a recovering technologist, because I found that a lot of the world of technology

does not appreciate, nor is knowledgeable and cognizant in the art of conversation. A lot of people love to throw around a bunch of acronyms and nonsense. And honestly, I feel like a lot of people do not really appreciate the functional domain of technology

The internet doesn’t work. I almost don’t want to say that because the internet gods are going to cancel our podcast. Never mind. We love you, Overlord Internet AI, whatever’s running the show. Please, please keep this going. Our stream’s going great. We want to keep going with this podcast. Thank you, thank you. All right, have we given it the homage that it deserves? Yes. All right, let’s move on. So technology is often overlooked and misunderstood because a lot of people that are in it don’t really communicate very well. And you just don’t really care about it until it’s not working.

MKJ 
Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re good, yeah.

Brian Wallace
So I really kind of had enough of that and I really didn’t want to work for other people anymore. And I kind of had it with the East Coast with major world events and whatnot. And we gave it a shot. And there’s special brilliance that can be applied when you are in a place that a lot of people think is the underdog or is the laughing stock or is flyover country or whatever. I like to say flyover for lie too. Not everything is always perfect. And some of these.

higher cost areas and there’s sometimes safety concerns and clean and cost of living, all that stuff. So there’s a lot of places that like you can actually live well and there is a giant global community. Hello, it’s called the internet. Perhaps we’re using it right now. Have we ever met in person? Kind of feels like it. Do we always have to meet in person? It doesn’t. It does and it doesn’t. So the world is closer than it’s ever been and it’s always better when we can get together. And we’ll get to that when we talk about the conferences and

MKJ 
And it does. Yeah. And does it really matter? Yeah. No. Correct.

Brian Wallace 
But you asked how I got to where I am. So I got to build this incredibly innovative company without being under the scrutinizing microscope of, let’s say, a New York or an LA or Silicon Valley or whatever, where everybody’s always kind of posturing and all of that. And this was just kind of the undiscovered country, which, believe it not, actually made things a little bit easier, which sounds counterintuitive, but it’s true the more you think about it.

MKJ 
Yeah.

MKJ 
Mm -hmm.

Yeah, totally. And so I that I think I want to unpack a little bit more because there are many, many, many, many, many people who didn’t do that. And they stayed in the New York’s and the Californias. And, and so what was it that besides obviously 911, that’s a pretty big thing. But there are also many, many people that stayed even after 911. So what was it that made you was it the safety? Was it the opportunity? Was it just the

because I know you’re big in innovation, what was that? What was that mindset shift that made you decide no?

Brian Wallace 
It just seemed like a special, yeah, it seemed like a special place. So I will tell you that the reason that we went there for was like a specific health thing. And let’s just say that it was nothing short of like a revealed miracle in the world that we felt a great deal of gratitude. I believe, so a couple of things. Let me give you two paradigms that float around in my head.

One is you kind of have to find a place that fits your frequency in the world, because when you are out of sync in the world around you, it’s not exactly right for you. The other thing is I’ve always believed in having dialogue, conversation, partnerships, whatever you want to say, with a global community of people that think very different from one another.

and the sad reality and the state of the world. And we’re not just talking about New York, California, the coast, America, anywhere. I think that much of the world never reexamines what I just said. And many people sadly live, and I get why a lot of people do it. A lot of it’s comfort. A lot of it is family connection, familiarity, and all that. But you know where I’m going with this, right? So I’m saying, if you never leave your hometown and you never go 10 minutes away and you expect everybody to act like you look like you think

MKJ 
Yes, I do.

Brian Wallace
you, what do you think you’re going to get out of it? What do you think diversity of thought is in the world? We have a gigantic global community and everybody has brilliance to offer. And if you won’t listen to them because you expect everybody to think, look, dress, whatever like you, I don’t know. Like you might not be the coolest person at the party if you’re going to think like that. Let’s just say it. Yeah.

MKJ 
So that says it right there. That really does say what mindset you had to not just be tolerant. That word is overused, to actually be inviting of other ideas. That’s the only way we grow. That’s the only way. We can only grow to whatever is in our own minds. And the only way to grow beyond what’s in our minds,

is to have more input into our minds from somewhere else. So, wow, what an amazing unpack. Thank you for that. So now let me ask you this, unless there’s more you want to say about that, because it sounds like I was interrupting you. Okay. So now let’s take the next step now. Okay. You’re still in Kentucky, I take it? Living? Cincinnati now. Okay. Similar, right? Still middle. What…

Brian Wallace 
Gotcha.

Brian Wallace 
keep going. Yeah. No, I think I was

Brian Wallace 
Cincinnati.

Brian Wallace 
There were actually both the region called the bluegrass region, like the grass and the music sort of, yeah.

MKJ
Yeah, and the music. Yeah, thank you. My son’s played jazz. I get it. So…

Brian Wallace
There you go.

MKJ 
What’s the next mindset shift? So you’ve got this, you’ve got more opportunities, you’ve got more diversity of thought, more open to ideas. And now you’re getting into conferences and putting on your own conferences. And I love and we’ll have to unpack this as well when we get to our strategy and tactics. But right now, let’s talk about the mindset that made you open to going, hey, let me just kind of start a conference here in the middle of what everyone else would

consider nowhere. So what would what was that mindset shift? Now what are you looking to the future?

Brian Wallace 
Mm -hmm. So I think that when I look to hang out with people in the global community, I look for a few very specific key attributes of the kinds of folks that are, let’s just call it my tribe. Now, tribalism, don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. That doesn’t mean that it’s everybody that’s like carbon copies of Brian, because I don’t know that the world needs a bunch of carbon copies of me. Please, there’s enough. I can represent. We don’t need any of that.

MKJ
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

MKJ 
Yeah, right.

Brian Wallace 
Yeah, I don’t know. Where do you even go with

Brian Wallace
I think that a lot of people look for talented people and don’t look at what’s important first. So if I don’t have a good feeling about another person, they could be the most talented person in the world and maybe they’re sociopaths. Maybe they are toxic to my whole network.

Like I literally watch a bunch of documentaries about people that fraud the world to just like have extra radar, muscle memory to watch out for people like that. Cause that’s as you gain power and influence and a wonderful network in the world, the worst thing you could do is empower people that probably shouldn’t be there that will opportunistically be the time vampires to just ruin everybody’s day.

MKJ 
Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Wallace 
Sorry for the deep inhale to really kind of put that into perspective.

MKJ 
that so what we’re going to dive more into that specifically again in the next episode when we talk about innovation because what you just described is the muscle memory is the intuition that you’ve developed that basically has allowed you to now go to the next level continue with the diversity of thought continue with being exposed to different people different ideas but at the same time take all of that that you’ve already been exposed to and

and shift it into this is the way I look at the world. This is the way, these are the things that are important to me. You mentioned talent is important. Yes. Hard work is even more important most of the time than talent. So hard work and dedication and resilience and all those things. So what are, go into some of those things. What…

How did you develop that? You mentioned watching shows, you mentioned that, but you must have also been burned by some of the people that are time zombies, time, you know, time suckers.

Brian Wallace 
sure. Yeah, I I told you I

exited an entire career and industry and location and picked like all their profession and stuff for sure. So the whole talent thing is really the last of three gauntlets in my mind. So that’s the last one. I like having it hanging out and having great conversations with talented people because they have things to offer that I and others don’t know. But that first one, the anti sociopath radar, I think it’s just a lot of conversations with

MKJ 
Thank you.

Brian Wallace 
You just develop some finely honed skills. A couple get through, but we try not to. But the first thing that I look for are just people who are kind, right? Like people who…

You just hit it off. have a good demeanor. They’re okay to not BS around. I like people that are good conversationalists. This is all kind of part and parcel with the first of the three gauntlets. And like if your whole con and here’s how you know, like if your whole conversation is surface level things that it looks like they’re reading from a card and they’re like, blah, blah, blah, sports ball. What’s the weather? It’s like, you don’t have both of those apps on your phone, man. Come on. Like, is there anything going on there in the art of conversation? You just wish just wishing that I would go

and you want to pitch me something and you hope that you would rather just be talking to like some AI robot or something. Then we can just, we can both retire on the beach and AI will just talk to each other. And apparently humanity is not easy anymore. I don’t

MKJ 
Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, that’s, I love that. So in this idea of mindset, if we could kind of wrap that up, if someone is in a place and I talked to someone just Friday, just a couple of days ago from this conversation on a Monday. So Friday, I talked to someone who is brilliant. I love the way his mind works. He is an incredible coach. He is an incredible conversationalist. He cares. He loves creating amazing, amazing

experiences, but he keeps finding himself in the same place of being broke. So he’ll, he’ll make a bunch of money and do help a lot of people. And then all of a sudden now he’s maxing out his credit cards again and, and trying to scrape against, scrape the next meal. That’s a mindset issue that that’s not a, that’s not a tools issue, right? There’s lots of tools you can use that’ll help make you money with the, with your knowledge. So what if someone’s listening and they find themselves in the same place and they don’t, they’re not.

progressing. What piece of advice would you give them?

Brian Wallace 
and say emulate a farmer.

because a lot of people don’t understand how to live for tomorrow. But a farmer sure does because if they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they’re literally gonna starve. So when we have these first world problems that we are in the way of our own success in solutioning, maybe we should do that. Let me elaborate on that. I know we’re gonna dive into the tactics, but to answer and wrap the question that you’re asking. So imagine that you are the modern day farmer that works in the internet economy and like you plant one seed of corn and you’re gonna have one ear

and you’re like, wow, I’m so made for life. I’m so excited that I got this one deal. It’s like, what are you talking about? So you’ve got a whole field. It’s not cloud because you didn’t feel like it, because you wanted to be an Instagram influencer. What planet are you on? That world isn’t real. What are we talking about? So I think people.

lack the focus and intensity to keep it up on a consistent basis. Consistency, like you said, hard work and talent to pair what you said earlier is everything. If you just try and keep doing it, maybe you’ll get better and people will notice. And if you’re good and generous, that will come back to you.

MKJ (00:01.036)
CEO Mischief Makers, welcome to the conversation. MKJ here, and I get to share with you a guest that I’ve connected with probably for maybe a year and a half. I don’t know when he joined Rise, but I think he was there in the beginning with the coin. But let me introduce you to amazing marketer and a futurist in my mind, Aaron Hassan. Aaron.

Aaron Hassen (00:01.746)
Mr. Kroeger, welcome to the conversation. I would like to share with you the guest at five.

Aaron Hassen (00:26.45)
I’m doing great. Glad to be here.

MKJ (00:30.252)
Welcome to the conversation. How you doing?

MKJ (00:36.716)
alright were you in rise the rise coin

Aaron Hassen (00:40.626)
Yeah, I’ve been there since the beginning.

MKJ (00:42.956)
Yeah, I knew it. I had a feeling. All right, so tell everybody kind of who you are and what you do. Just give us a brief little intro here.

Aaron Hassen (00:52.498)
Yeah, I actually started out in the Air Force and then I left the Air Force to start a company. So I had a business that I ran. It was an advertising company for about four years. It was acquired by a competitor and it’s in that process. I learned that I really liked the marketing side of business. So I wanted to be a marketer. I didn’t have a degree in it at the time, but I talked my first employer into hiring me and I’ve been doing it.

right about 20 years at this point. But I started as a founder and then became a marketer and that has really impacted, influenced and directed kind of how I approach marketing. So I’m glad to talk about different topics around go to market and a lot of these small businesses that I’ve helped sort of start from the ground up and gain some traction.

That’s really where my perspective has been over all of these years. And I’m still doing that now with Marketing, which is a fractional marketing team that helps busy founders and revenue leaders that may not have the expertise in marketing or the time to address their marketing challenges. We come in and do their strategy and then actually execute their marketing plan for them.

MKJ (02:17.388)
Wow, that’s awesome. So you’re still the founder though, right? Of that company and you just did some marketing.

Aaron Hassen (02:19.122)
Yeah, yeah, I’m back into this. I stopped on the corporate side about two and a half years ago was my last role and now I’m leading this company.

MKJ (02:33.42)
That’s fantastic. Yeah, it’s amazing when you start as a founder and you have to do all the things, everything, figure it all out from the ground up, just because you have this incredible idea. And then you find your place, right? What was, let me ask you this, since this episode is about mindset, our first episode always is, what was that mindset shift that you had to make from first off, founding your company and realizing marketing was your gig?

Aaron Hassen (02:36.306)
Easy win.

All the things. Have a great day.

Aaron Hassen (02:47.442)
in your place, right?

MKJ (03:03.326)
And then we’ll get into the whole corporate and then back into a founder after that. But let’s start with that. How did you how did you discover that? What was that shift that happened for you?

Aaron Hassen (03:14.258)
Well, I just think the way my brain works as an entrepreneur is I’m just a problem solver. And I do that as an entrepreneur with products and services, but I do that as a marketer as well. I’m helping customers solve their problems and their challenges. So I’m just trying to connect a customer who has a need and an issue with a solution. And sometimes that solution is our product and service, sometimes it’s not. But either way, I’m in the business of solving problems.

for customers. So that’s how it all ties together. And if you approach it from the customer perspective, I think you’re a lot more successful. And I think also when you approach it from the entrepreneur perspective, in terms of how you do business and how you come to the job as a marketer, I think you can become much more successful that way in not only helping the customer, but how you influence your internal

MKJ (03:53.516)
Mm -hmm.

Aaron Hassen (04:13.746)
team members and support your CEO and all of those things. I mean, just having that experience of being an entrepreneur really helped me understand the CEO, the board’s perspective and the perspective of the other leaders within the company, the sales leader in particular. Because when you’re having your own business and selling your own product, I mean, you’re out there, like you said, you’re wearing many hats and…

So you start to empathize with the other departments and the product team or the customer success team. And you, you know, you, I not only understand the customer challenge or seek to understand the customer challenge, but I’m trying to understand the challenges of all the other leaders within the organization so that I can support and help them and we can work together as a single team and go to market unified. So yeah, that’s how it’s really shaped my perspective.

MKJ (05:05.26)
So let’s dive a little deeper into that though, because when I think about a founder, I think a founder also wants to solve problems. So what’s that distinction? How is a founder’s role or an entrepreneur’s role in solving problems different from a marketer’s role in solving problems?

Aaron Hassen (05:08.818)
I think of them times.

Aaron Hassen (05:27.346)
Yeah, you know, a lot of, so for me, I, the distinctions are less so. So I try to make the, I try to reduce those distinctions, but there are distinctions as a marketer. We, you know, we take a certain, a specific view or specific role in go to market. So, you know, we’re thinking of, you know, how we connect what we do as a company, our products and services and our solutions.

with the challenges of the marketplace and the customer. And oftentimes that’s a matter of communication and a matter of positioning. And so we have to come at it from that perspective. As an owner and a founder, you’re coming at it from multiple perspectives. A product perspective, can I build the best solution to this problem? Can I understand the problem and then can I build the…

MKJ (06:11.404)
Yeah.

Aaron Hassen (06:25.01)
an ideal solution at a reasonable cost, that I can deliver it in a way that offers value to them, but also to the other stakeholders. So your perspective is a little more global in that case, but I think that’s really important for marketers to have. They have to understand business as a whole and have a level of business acumen that allows them to

to play their role very successfully.

MKJ (06:58.06)
I agree 100 % because I love how you described it. And in a way, the founder really has to look at not just how can I solve this problem? What tool can I create? What product or service can I create? Because that’s where it comes from. That the person who’s the visionary that says, this is what I want to do and founds the company, starts the company or leads the company, even if they come in after that. But they also then have to, they have to find out who can I find to help me do this that can get on

on board with the vision that we’ve created, the the movement that we’re trying to create in the world, who can I find that that can help me do that? And for a marketing, especially for fractional, like CMO role, that’s a that’s vital, you are you are very, very close to that visionary person, and can help guide them from a communication, go to market and marketing perspective. So

Aaron Hassen (07:54.386)
Yeah, I remember one of the things I just started to cut in. As you said that, it made me think. I remember one of the things I desperately wanted so much when I was a founder was just to find someone else out there like me. You want to duplicate yourself. You’re like, I don’t have enough time or money or resources or, that’s our challenge is founding companies and building products. So it’s like, can I find someone who has my mindset? Can I find other partners that I can?

MKJ (07:57.74)
Yeah, go.

Aaron Hassen (08:24.018)
place in this company that we can do this together. And I often think of, you know, there’s a movie 300. It’s the story of the Spartans and how it’s just, you know, 300 soldiers, they were able to conquer, you know, huge armies and just do rather well on the battlefield. And that’s sort of how it is with startups. You’ve got to find that core group that you, you know, you can go to market with.

But if you do have a core group of folks who are very dedicated and singularly focused and on that same vision, that same goal and working together and aligned, boy, you can really change the world as you were alluding to.

MKJ (09:08.652)
Yes. And that, so the mindset that it takes to do that, you know, obviously there’s a lot of fear that we look at, and especially, I mean, you and I are, are going into not necessarily uncharted territory, but it is, it is a bit uncharted now. A lot of word of mouth is starting to come back. It’s something we’ve done for generations. This is how business has been done. We’ve got demand generation versus lead generation. You know, we’ve got all these category designers,

versus branding. It’s just a new way of looking at it, especially with the speed of communication that we have today. So from that perspective of mindset, how can you shift from all the typical go -to -market that we’ve all learned in dealing in business for 20 plus years? And we can adapt that. What kind of mindset do you need to be able to adapt the things that you’ve learned to the very

Aaron Hassen (10:08.274)
Very.

MKJ (10:08.414)
fast changes that are happening in our world, not just AI, that’s changing every minute, not even every day. It’s changing minute by minute. But what kind of mindset do you need? What are some of the key phrases, I guess, that we need to look at to be able to adapt to that and use it to our advantage?

Aaron Hassen (10:16.882)
Bye.

Aaron Hassen (10:27.41)
Yeah, it’s a great question. I think what you have to understand that what drives purchasing is trust. So we have to trust that this product or solution can solve this challenge. And what I’m about to invest in isn’t a waste of my time or money. And so we’ve been in an environment of distrust. And I think that speaks to the changes in the marketplace and how buyers are purchasing. And so we have to understand that as a marketer,

that we are in an age of distrust. And, you know, people, if you look at some of the research, the statistics, I’m often, you know, looking at all kinds of, you know, latest reports and news and research, and, you know, that’s part of our job and our role is to stay ahead of the trends and what’s going on and, you know, how is the consumer interacting? What are their needs and how do we communicate with them? So I look at things like, you know, the element…

Edelman Trust Barometer or Ipsos Reporting and Gallup, for instance. There’s a Gallup survey that said just 8 % of American adults rate the honesty and ethical standards of advertising practitioners, AKA marketers, right? Advertising practitioners as very high or high. So, you know, Gallup is saying, hey, there’s less trust in marketing and marketers and advertising out there.

you mentioned word of mouth, you know, and I follow Ed Keller and his Keller advisory group. He’s really the father of word of mouth and he’s done tremendous research and there’s been some research recently where he’s been looking at the creator economy and creators and also consumers of creator content. And, you know, just seeing the fact that, you know, today we’re tending to trust creators, influencers and experts.

you know, over the press, over company communications and things like that. So, you know, one of his stats through his research came out, it said that creator content is now trusted 2 .9 times more than advertising. And it’s actually more influential than advertising in purchase decisions. And that 80 % of those who follow creators actually take some kind of action.

Aaron Hassen (12:50.258)
So that action includes making a purchase. 43 % of those that were following creators actually made a purchase related to the creator’s influence. So these, we’ve got to look at trusted channels. We’ve got to look at trusted people. Our friends and our family we tend to trust, our colleagues and our counterparts, and also creators.

And so creators and influencers, and that’s why you’re seeing a lot of brands turn to micro influencers, not necessarily celebrities because they’re not very trusted, but looking at micro influencers. We’re looking for people like us that have some expertise. And then we tend to find them in different channels today. As you know, we’re going to our communities and more

what they call dark social, but these are our trusted channels, places we can communicate with these folks in a private way, whether that be on WhatsApp or Discord or Slack that aren’t necessarily tracked and traced and then cookieed and marketed through. So this is the way of the world today, and I think we have to pay attention to that. We have to build trust. And we know as marketers, you start with awareness.

and then it goes to affinity. They have to like you and then it goes to trust. You have to earn that. But we need to bring them through those stages in order to get trust from consumers in order to then potentially have a customer.

MKJ (14:32.972)
Absolutely. I love that there are so many ways we can look at that that lifecycle, if you will, awareness, and you said affinity, and then trust, I kind of look at it as curiosity, the affinity part, if we can help customers actually become or consumers actually become curious about what we’re doing, and start investigating, because what is it another Gartner poll, you know, 75 % of consumers,

especially B2B, don’t want, they want a rep free sales process. They want to be able to do their own research and then decide when to buy, no matter the price point. The price point could be thousands and thousands. They still want to do their own research. They don’t want to talk to a sales person. And so if we can create that environment of curiosity before we get to trust, because that’s, it’s required, why would they trust us if they’re not even curious about what we’re doing or even

Aaron Hassen (15:25.042)
We also.

MKJ (15:32.734)
feeling like it’s something they might need. So how are you okay, we’ll get into the next the next conversation with innovation. But coming back to that mindset issue, you talked about trust. How can we as marketers be open?

to these new ideas instead of taking and going, nope, I have to do Legion. I have to go do an ad and bring people through a funnel and then get them down to a conversion, whether it’s an OTO or an upsell or a down sell or, you know, how can we, how can we move away from that? Those blinders that we put on saying, this is the only way to do it and open to all of these new possibilities at Keller and the other information that you mentioned to actually be a little risky in that.

Aaron Hassen (16:19.345)
Yeah. I think marketers want to be effective. I don’t think they come into their job every day wanting to fail. And so, you know, the question is, you know, when things aren’t working anymore, are you ready to change? I mean, you know, marketing automation, HubSpot and all of that’s wonderful, but it just is less and less effective. You know, the digital advertising, social selling, all of that sort of thing, while it may have worked for a moment,

it’s working less and less. And so where do we turn? And, you know, what we do is we try to figure out what actually works with consumers. And yeah, it’s, it’s harder word of mouth is harder networking is harder. but that’s what happens when, people distrust. I mean, they then think of yourself. I mean, you know, if you’re in a situation where you’re constantly barraged with messages, people,

are trying to manipulate you or lie to you, and you’ve got to solve real problems and you have limited resources, limited time to do so, you’re going to sort of protect yourself. You’re going to go to people you trust, and that’s what’s happening in the market. So when that happens, we have to make adjustments. And I think it starts with listening first. So you really have to listen to your customer and understand what their issues are, what their challenges are.

They’ll actually tell you where they go for information. What are their most trusted sources of information? We know where it’s moving away from. It’s moving away from where they might have gone before. Even reviews and things now, you’re starting to see the statistics go down in terms of the trust for reviews because they’ve been gamed. These things, they work until they’re gamed. When you’re getting 15 messages a day, automated messages a day, you…

You start to figure out their automated messages and you’re like, hey, I’m not doing that anymore. I’m not reacting to that anymore. So we really do start to look at ways to influence a buyer from the perspective of relationship and networking and their circles of trust. So working with micro influencers and things like that to who go out there and put out content that’s valuable to these customers that can solve their problems.

Aaron Hassen (18:40.786)
Well, they’ll then take recommendations from those individuals. And also, how do we influence their colleagues? Like we mentioned, they’ll go to their colleagues. So how do we influence the people who are in their communities and those that they seek and they go to for answers? We can do that, but we have to do it in a different way, in a very human way, in a respectful way, something that earns the referral. So…

We’re back to an environment, although digitally, we’re kind of back to an environment where maybe we used to be 30, 40 years ago. And so that’s where we are. And so we have to start from there. So I just recommend, like I said, listening to your customer, understanding where they go for information, really caring to serve them, using those trusted channels that can really connect you with the community that’s around them.

focusing on the relationship, which is a long -term play, to be honest, and not a short -term one. You’re thinking more about the lifetime value of a customer rather than how many new brands you’re putting on, how many new logos you’re bringing in, and driving the numbers this quarter versus this year, and then offering consistent value. Just coming…

They have to trust that you’re going to be there on a consistent basis. And like I said, you have to earn those next steps. But you know what? You’re going to feel really good about your job, honestly, because it’s what you want as a consumer too. So when you’re giving your customers and your consumers what they need, which is also what you need, there’s an integrity to what you do.