MKJ (00:00.888)

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

Ashley Gross (00:10.33)

I’m ready.

MKJ (00:29.718)

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

Ashley Gross (00:56.337)

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

MKJ (01:27.096)

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

Ashley Gross (01:46.011)

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

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

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

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

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

Ashley Gross (04:03.749)

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

MKJ (04:26.894)

Okay.

Ashley Gross (04:33.637)

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

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

MKJ (05:04.172)

Yes.

Right.

Ashley Gross (05:20.967)

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

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

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

MKJ (06:29.281)

Yeah.

MKJ (06:37.714)

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

Ashley Gross (07:00.22)

Yes.

MKJ (07:00.258)

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

Ashley Gross (07:17.222)

You will.

MKJ (07:27.618)

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

Ashley Gross (07:43.025)

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

MKJ (07:56.898)

Yeah, go on.

Ashley Gross (08:12.859)

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

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

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

MKJ (09:27.864)

Yeah.

Ashley Gross (09:34.075)

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

MKJ (09:42.882)

You

Ashley Gross (09:59.921)

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

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

MKJ (10:44.396)

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

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

Ashley Gross (11:15.292)

Yes.

Ashley Gross (11:23.569)

Right.

MKJ (11:39.416)

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

Ashley Gross (12:05.361)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dorris (01:06.164)
Yeah.

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

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

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

So someone becomes an expert when they choose to be.

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

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

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

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

MKJ (04:09.86)
Right, Yeah.

MKJ (04:19.443)
Yeah.

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

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

MKJ (04:52.004)
That’s right.

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

MKJ (05:18.271)
Yeah.

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

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

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

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

MKJ (06:46.381)
you

MKJ (06:49.688)
you

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

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

MKJ (07:15.191)
Yeah.

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

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

MKJ (07:45.336)
Yes. Yes.

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

MKJ (08:37.826)
Yeah, go.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MKJ (09:16.408)
Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chris Dorris (10:56.35)
Hmm.

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

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

Andy Cunningham (00:01.533)
Hey!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

all important.

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

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

Andy Cunningham (04:28.87)
Right.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (07:23.864)
Absolutely.

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

Andy Cunningham (07:42.598)
Yes.

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

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

Andy Cunningham (08:15.9)
Yes.

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

Andy Cunningham (08:29.864)
Exactly. Right.

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (09:59.239)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (10:08.445)
yeah.

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

Andy Cunningham (10:16.4)
Right. Yes.

Andy Cunningham (10:25.021)
Yes.

Exactly.

Andy Cunningham (10:36.624)
Our children.

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (11:05.212)
Yep.

Andy Cunningham (11:13.094)
Yes.

Andy Cunningham (11:24.412)
Yes.

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

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

is going down.

MKJ (11:35.86)
Yeah. Yeah.

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

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

Yeah, the friend network. Yeah.

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

Andy Cunningham (12:15.282)
Yeah.

Very, very true. Yes. Yeah.

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

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

Andy Cunningham (12:45.768)
Alright.

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

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

Andy Cunningham (13:10.568)
Right.

Andy Cunningham (13:17.648)
Impossible.

Andy Cunningham (13:26.45)
Thank you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andy Cunningham (15:26.588)
Yes.

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

Andy Cunningham (15:50.576)
Yes.

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

Andy Cunningham (16:03.655)
Yeah.

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

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

Andy Cunningham (16:24.68)
Thanks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Steven Schneider (03:53.056)
Of course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MKJ (00:01.117)
Welcome back to the conversation, CEO, Mischief Makers, MKJ here, and my amazing giving friend, Josh Elidge. Josh, we get to talk about actual tactics, things people can do. This is my favorite, really. It’s like we talk about the mindset, 30 ,000 foot, then we talk about innovation, and that’s really cool, and that’s kind of the messy middle, like you talked about last time, where you kind of have to test. You kind of have to have conversations. You have no idea where it’s going to go. That’s the messy middle part.

And now, once we’ve gone through that, now we get to go, all right, now let’s do something. Let’s actually take action. So if you haven’t listened to the conversations from Monday and Wednesday or the first two conversations, mindset and impact and innovation, I highly recommend you do that because we are going to take this and just start running. So let me just ask it straight out. You’ve talked about building relationships. You’ve talked about giving without expectation in at least in the beginning of the conversation to help people to build

those connections. How does that actually work? What are some of the steps we can take to, like you said, if I have a high ticket offer and I need experienced entrepreneurs that I need to present that to, how am going to find those people? How am I going to do

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (01:17.644)
Yeah, well, let’s think for a second MKJ about things, invitations that we get as leaders ourselves that we say yes to, right? And I think that this, again, this is really critical if we just have to be honest, right? We are competing, like if you’re thinking, well, look, I’m gonna create a bunch of content on YouTube and that’s gonna be the way that I get a bunch of business.

you can do it, but there’s a lot of other people out there. And, you know, it might feel a little frustrating that, you know, we’re just dumping a thimbles worth of water into us in an ocean of content out there. So that may or may not get it. Giving away what other marketers are giving away, that may or may not be it. So what can you give away that nobody else has the ability to give away? What do you, what resources or audience

do you have access to that other people don’t? Now what’s unique about each of us is that we all have access to platform. And I’ll give some examples of what I mean by this in a second. Okay, and you all have access to an audience, even if it’s a super, super small audience. Like if you’ve got like 20 friends that seem to really dig what you have to share, okay, that is an audience.

already you might be thinking or realizing where I’m going with this, right? When you use platform to celebrate yourself, well, that’s what everybody does, okay? Or I want you to also think about, well, wait a minute, what would happen if I used platform to celebrate other people? Well, now we start to think of the push and pull of that.

That could potentially be the workings of a very good get to know you type thing. So this is again, kind of this go -giver thing, but we’re not going to do this in a transactional way. We are going to do this for the good of the industry or your audience. Like you’re truly going to be in service to other people and you’re going to earn that trust. So if you have an ulterior motive, we all know what it is.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (03:41.602)
You’re not fooling anybody. So your heart has to be in the right place. If your heart is not yet in the right place, go read the Go -Giver by Bob Berg and John David Mann, right? And then come back to me and then we can talk. So you might be thinking, well, okay. I think what he’s saying is that use platform, but like in our case, it got my influence when I’m your fractional chief revenue officer for a season. And you know,

A lot of times I only work for a period of four months and then we get everyone kind of locked in load and then they’re off to the races and stuff, right? But if I were your chief revenue officer, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re gonna get you giving away the type of thing that your ideal customer wants. And what I know about the power of platform is that significance is, it’s pretty effective. So what you’re able to give away is essentially introductions or you’re able to say,

I would love to recognize and celebrate you. I would love to celebrate you to my audience. Is it a big audience? No, it’s not. But if you wanna be in front of 5 ,000 randos, I’m not gonna be good for you. But if you wanna be in front of 50 to 100 CEOs that are leaning forward and are interested in this particular topic, then yeah, I would love to showcase you. And it’s amazing, MKJ, how many people you can get to show up to an award show when they’re being recognized. And again, we’re leading with noble intent.

We are shining the spotlight and making other people feel good about what they do in the world. It feels so good to do this. It feels good for you. It feels good for your guests. It feels great for your audience. And the objection may be, well, I don’t have an audience. That’s okay. I’ll give you an example of how I did this recently in an instance where I had nothing to gain.

I was at a conference, it was my wife’s conference. don’t do what she does. She’s amazing. She’s a licensed marriage and family therapist. She’s a licensed sex therapist. Very good at what she does. She was speaking at a conference with her kind of specific population that she works with. MKJ, that has nothing to do with what I do. I’m just hanging out at her conference because I want to go support my amazing wife and be in the audience and yay, yay, let her know that she’s doing great and hold her hand if she’s nervous ahead of time, that sort of thing.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (06:02.018)
So I’m just like hanging out and I’m a part of this Facebook group that this event is loosely associated with. And so I’m like, I kind of know the top a little bit here. So I went into the group and I wanted to see if it was okay that I did a live stream into this Facebook group. Okay, I’m not gonna promote anything. I’m not gonna sell anything, but I saw the founder, the director of this event.

And she was just like hanging out on her phone, taking notes or what, I don’t know what she was doing. So I went over to her and I’m like, hey, I’m just sitting around. Do you want to do a live stream to this Facebook group? And she knew the Facebook group. She’s like, yeah. And I’m like, okay, click. You know, I did a quick little post. I go live and I’m like, hey, we’re at this conference. And I’m here. You don’t know me, but you do know so -and -so, right? And so I kind of aim the phone to her and I’m like, you know, I forget her name. I’m like, tell me all about what’s going on here. And she’s like,

She like lit up and you know, it’s like people love to talk about the things that they’re really proud of. Right. And so she just started like, and this is happening. We got this going on next tonight. And then, you know, she’s kind of saying all that stuff. And I’m like, well, and I see that you’ve got some vendors here. You actually have some booths set up like I’m no dummy. I’m like, I know how this I know how our business works. Right. So I’m like, would you mind if we talk to some of these folks? She goes, yeah, let’s do it. Right. And so.

How much work am I doing right now? I’m holding a phone and I’m asking a couple of questions, right? And so now we start going from booth to booth to booth. Okay, what is Josh getting out of this? I don’t care. What is she getting out of it? Enormous, like she feels so amazing about this. Now these vendors who have invested a couple hundred dollars to set up a booth at this, you know, at this little event here, how do they feel? Like I am creating.

MKJ (07:29.555)
And having fun.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (07:51.982)
good in the world in that moment. So we end up talking with a handful of those vendors. I say, any final thoughts? Sure. She shares some clothes. And then I say, thanks. Thanks for watching. Bye bye. Stop. You know, and at the end of the day, yeah, probably maybe 100 or 200 people watched it or whatever. But in that moment and afterwards, her reaction was just like, first off, who are you? Secondly, thank you so much for doing

And it was literally like in that order, like at this whole time, it’s like, who is this guy? Like, why is he being so nice? Right? They’ll think about that. And now compare that to most our opinion of most marketers out there in the world. Think about those two personas, you know, the bro -y marketer versus what I did. Now, was I concerned about getting anything out of it? No, not really. Like, did I get anything out of

I kind of did like it. So was like, you know, you just have to be open, right? It’s not about, you know, I don’t care what happens. But at the end of that, she’s like, who are you? I’m like, I’m nobody here, but you probably know my wife, Jenny, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I’m like, well, let me introduce me to Jenny. And then they got to know each other. And will that ever turn into anything? I don’t care. Like I’m just there to do good in the world. And if it turns into great stuff, great. And what we know about the GoGiver is that it does. Where you plant

your seeds is not necessarily where you reap your harvest, but you never stop planting seeds because as an entrepreneur, as a director of growth, someone responsible for revenue and growth and impact in the world, it’s your job to constantly be planting seeds. Generosity just happens to be the most effective way to do it consistently and

MKJ (09:45.249)
my goodness. You know, I love what I love that story and MISCHIEF Makers listening. Think about this. Every relationship you have has a component of this in it. If you have a personal relationship with a spouse or a significant other or your children or your parents, it is you are, you don’t just take that relationship for granted. You have to still continually plant seeds with that person. You still have to continually give and they give to you. And that’s how the relationship deepens and grows.

Business is no different. It’s no different if you give and I can guarantee you the best gifts I have ever given made me feel almost better than the person who got the gift. It really they did. They made me feel that when you hit it on the mark and give someone something they didn’t expect and that they were so appreciative of and so excited about that lights me up.

almost more than the person getting the gift. So if you can think of it from that perspective and actually say, the more I do that in it, it doesn’t have to be strategic, right? Where everything has to have a purpose and all.

It is giving to the appropriate audience and giving something that you have, like Josh said, that no one else has, like he had access to that Facebook group. So he’s like, well, let’s go live. Well, there, who else in that conference would have even thought about that first off and had access to that Facebook group and known how to go live on his phone and showcase these people. He gave his own ability and your expertise that you have in

relationship economy, because that’s really what this is. It’s a relationship economy. You gave what you are very, very good at. And if you listeners can do that same thing, I’m telling you the long term results. Look at what Josh was talking about over four years, over 2000 conversations, 250 clients plus think about your business.

MKJ (11:47.449)
in that four year span instead of putting all that energy in the hamster wheel of lead gen and ads and just ip addresses that’s really what you’re building relationships with when you do that is ip addresses not humans if you switch that around to humans look at the power you have and what will come back at you so any other strategic and tactical tips that you can give the audience to to start switching from that lead gen to this

this relationship development.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (12:19.01)
Yeah. Well, again, you thinking about platform, I, you know, I use the example of going live in a group and there are, I will say this, there’s, could do this on YouTube. You could do this on LinkedIn, right? You could do the same thing. I am very, very bullish on podcasts and podcasts have some inherent baked in supply demand kind of nuances that

starting a podcast to network throughout your industry, it is just so amazing. I’ll just say, I’ll share some spacing stats here. Most podcasters don’t stick with it. 90 % don’t make it to episode 50. And I’m talking about independent podcasters. So if you can do this, and the reason that they don’t stick with it is because they’re just trying to get value from the audience. We consider that to be a secondary benefit. The most important value that you

if you want to start an interview based podcast is these relationships that you’re building with these other leaders, right? So if you can lead in noble intent, if you can give without expectation of return, then you will earn people’s trust and then they will want to do business with you. That’s what we do at Up My Influence. Now in podcasting, in the guesting and hosting world, you may not know this if you’re kind of casual to this world, but for every decent podcast that does interviews,

There are hundreds if not thousands of potential guests at any given time. And I’m talking about like really good fit type people. Most podcast guests are pretty high caliber leaders. These are the kind of people you wanna hang out with. So how do you earn that relationship with? Give them what they’re looking for. Give them what they want. Truly do them a solid. Don’t do it with a transaction in mind, cause people won’t like that.

Do that because it’s the right thing to do and it makes the world a better place. Then what do you earn? You earn all of this time and guess what? You end up earning business anyway. You just don’t have to do it in a scummy, yucky, bro -y kind of sales -y way. You just earn it because of the high value relationships. Again, you gotta have some intentionality to it. And if you need some assistance with that, I’ve got all kinds of free resources.

Josh Elledge – UpMyInfluence (14:37.87)
I don’t need your email. I don’t need you to opt in for anything. I’ve got all this stuff for free at my website. You know, if it makes sense to you and you want to have a conversation, sure, I’d love to hear about your offer. I’m always looking for great opportunities myself. you know, I love alignments where, you know, I’ve got, you know, over 6000, you know, PR agencies and podcast guest agencies and communications directors. That’s who we work with. We serve them. We serve that world because we’ve launched so many podcasts.

that whole world, which is my background in PR, they’re already repping your future clients. So help the PR people look good at their job, they’ll make connections for you. So that’s kind of one secret to how we’ve been 100 % inbound for four and a half years is just I show up consistently in generosity. So I earned that trust in those relationships and then I don’t have to work as hard anymore. I can just continue to be a good person, give.

Guessing great phenomenal experience. Anyway, so if you wanna see this in real time, you can go to my website, you can listen to my podcast where I’m building new relationships. It’s called The Thoughtful Entrepreneur. There’s about 2000 episodes depending on when you’re listening to this. I also, Mary Katherine, I hope this is okay for me to mention this. Is this cool? So I’ve got a free, it’s called my Attraction Mastery Workshop.

And again, you don’t have to opt in. I don’t need your email address. I trust you. You’re an adult, but you just go to my website and you can watch. It’s about an hour and 15 minutes long. You can play me at even faster speed than what I normally talk. If you can keep up, you’re welcome to. yeah, so you just go to this website and here it is. If you’ve got your phone, you can type this in or you I jot this down for now. You just go to this website. It’s www

Again, that’s www .upmyinfluence .com. And then when you go there, you’ll see where you watch the free video. If you want to chit chat with me or whatever, that’s completely up to you. You’re an adult. If you like me, cool. If you don’t like me, it’s okay. We all right. But happy to be of service, however that looks. Even if it’s just maybe I got some introductions for you. Maybe I can brainstorm with you. That’s totally up to

MKJ (00:01.21)
Welcome back to the conversation, CEO Mischief Makers. Thank you so much for joining us. My wonderful guest here, Ronnie Loaiza. Hey, Ronnie. Let’s dive in. Strategy and tactics, right? Rubber meets the road. You were talking about roads in our last conversation and freeways and all that good stuff. If you haven’t listened to the previous conversations for mindset and also impact and innovation,

RonnieLo Life Coach (00:09.294)
me.

MKJ (00:24.164)
Highly recommend that you do so. But in the meantime, strategy and tactics. What do we do? So you’ve been talking about little habits, micro commitments, celebrating each change that you make, celebrating each time you do something. Can you do me a favor and just take one, let’s say a behavior or a particular habit or

change that a recent client wanted to make in their lives and just kind of take us through what does that look like? What does it look like to celebrate? What does it look like to make a small change that then leads to the next small change that then allows us to actually incorporate that as part of our being?

RonnieLo Life Coach (00:56.387)
Yeah, because

RonnieLo Life Coach (01:07.652)
Yeah, it’s easier when you have one specific example, because we’ve been talking a lot in generalities and like, like you said, well, a freeway. Now let’s take it to yours. So people come to me for different reasons and usually it impacts or we, we fold in all the other areas of their life. They’re 12 facets of their life, I call it, but they always come to me with one thing and we end up working on various things, but let’s take it to one thing. Um, let’s go ahead and, and one particular client I worked with just yesterday, we have like five different things to work

MKJ (01:10.062)
Yeah. Correct.

RonnieLo Life Coach (01:36.312)
But one little habit that will really help all the other aspects. wants to declutter her home and she’s been a clutter person all her life. And she says she’s listened to the podcast. She’s, she tried to find, I forgot her name. Everybody followed her for a while. Have I used this for a year? I forgot her name. love her. She had a show, but you know who I’m talking about. she’s done it all and it doesn’t work. It’s because she’s been conditioned that way since she was a kid, you know?

MKJ (01:54.126)
Yeah, yeah,

RonnieLo Life Coach (02:05.76)
She needs to get more, you know, after talking, talking, we were doing a session, an in -person session. I actually went to her home yesterday. Usually we do, we work on Zoom, but I wanted to see her place. She wanted me to see her place. And then we got on and we were on the couch talking about something that as we whittled it down, we realized she kept saying the word energy. I’m just, I don’t have any energy. I don’t have the energy for that or well, that takes a lot of energy. And I finally just told her, I’m like, you’ve said energy quite a few times in the past half

So how can you have energy? And I’m like, no, but think about it. Don’t just start thinking of all these hacks. How do you feel? What do you feel is not energy? And I really want her to describe the physical aspect of it. Is it droopy eyes? Is it like sleepy? She’s like, no, it’s not that. It really was mental energy. As we whittled it down, we got to that because it wasn’t really physical. It was like, I have no time for

MKJ (02:41.274)
Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (03:03.414)
And she really resented that and she realized I’m rebelling. I have no time to do nothing. Okay. How would it feel like if you did nothing? And so I wanted her to imagine that and then she really couldn’t like just sit there and do nothing with no noise, nothing. And then she realized, well, I do kind of do that when I’m in the nursery with, she has twins, little baby boys, and she sits on the rocker and she just watches

And she automatically thinks, well, I could just leave them for like two minutes and I’m right there and I could get this done or put some things away. But then she realized, no, I’m just going to sit here on the rocker. And sometimes she’ll go on her phone. She’s like, no, I’m going to put the phone down. But she remembered what that feeling is like when she just watches her babies play. And then sometimes they’ll look up at her and they’ll smile or they’ll bring something to her. And she’s like, that’s as close as I can feel to doing nothing. And even then she’s doing

MKJ (04:00.122)
That’s right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (04:00.388)
She’s spending time with her children because in 10 years that’ll be gone. In 20 years that’ll be gone and that goes by fast. So like, do you want more time just for you even without the baby? She’s like, yeah. So let’s fast forward. She realized at night finally when her husband and her, they put the babies down at nine. They finally got time. He would fix dinner. She’s doing something and they sit down. They watch a little TV or something or talk. And then he usually goes to bed at 10 30. And she sits on the couch and scrolls on her

MKJ (04:05.488)
Yep.

RonnieLo Life Coach (04:30.016)
Instagram’s her best friend. That’s a lot of clutter in her mind. And that’s usually when she does a lot of shopping too. That’s why she has a lot of boxes. That’s also contributing to the clutter. You know, all this impacts each other. But that’s a habit of hers because she feels like rebelling like this is my time. Not really. She answered this. I didn’t suggest it for her. She’s like, Instagram’s got my time. Other people have my time. So we decided, what can

MKJ (04:31.384)
Yeah. Yes.

MKJ (04:38.52)
Yes.

MKJ (04:48.024)
Right.

MKJ (04:56.248)
Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (04:59.234)
honestly do. as soon as, cause you need an activator, something activates every behavior. Every action you take has an activator, whether you realize it or not. And when you don’t realize it, that’s a habit, but something always prompts you to go brush your teeth. Now you pick up the toothbrush. Now you put on the toothpaste. Something activates you to put the cap on. Let’s hope, you know, whatever, but you have an activator and I, I try to keep people away from the post that’s in the alarms.

I don’t know if you’re watching, if you’re watching this video, this is the post -it. It becomes a part you see around it. You don’t even notice that post -it anymore. People have post -its all over the place. So they, it tends to become part of their scenario. So they ignore it or people turn off the alarm and keep going and doing what they’re doing and they don’t pay attention to the alarm. So we try to find an activator that will truly remind you in joy, I enjoy. Yes, I get to do this.

MKJ (05:38.711)
Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (05:57.186)
as she committed to, as soon as her husband gets up, they turn off the TV and she goes to the bathroom or her room to put on her PJs. He’s probably putting the kids down or checking on them, whatever, or he goes to the bathroom first, she’ll put on her PJs, but she has to get up with him. I’m like, are you sure you’ll be able to do that? It’s like, I’m going to share this with him because you’ve got to engage everybody around you. And that’s something else we’ll talk about in strategies. You have to have the right environment and that includes

MKJ (06:13.242)
There’s a

RonnieLo Life Coach (06:24.556)
that she will literally physically stand up with him. if she wants to while he’s in the bathroom, if she wants to go ahead and do, she does a Duolingo, she can do it then, or she can just go change and then she’ll do her face. And then she will read. She wants to read. She doesn’t want to just lie there in bed. She wants to read because usually she’ll get sleepy, but at least she feels like if she read a page to three pages, she did something productive and it kind of winds her down. We’ll see. We’ll check in tonight because this just happened yesterday.

But she really felt like, because I really asked them, how do you feel? How does that feel inside? Can you imagine that? If there’s any resistance, we have to take away that resistance. Is there any barrier? Is there anything that can get in the way? Because you have to have an, if this happens, fill in the blank, then I’ll do this. Plan A, Plan B, Plan C. So if the baby cries, then I’ll do this. So we started going through all the barriers. Yeah, we look at the negative sides, what could happen? So then she’ll save herself.

MKJ (07:10.126)
Right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (07:21.036)
and that you don’t have to go, I messed up, I’m just not gonna do it, I can’t do

MKJ (07:24.676)
Yeah, yeah, because once she goes back to sitting on that couch and putting a couple of phone and starting to scroll that habit is fed again. And then but the more she actually creates that habit of getting up, getting herself out of that environment, going in, getting ready for bed and reading. And the phone is somewhere else in the house. It’s not next to her bed. Hopefully. I’m so many people sleep with their phones next to their bed. Thank goodness. Both of my sons don’t do that. They leave their phone in the other room.

And they turn it off, actually. There’s no sound or anything. And I turn mine off as well. But still, the more you have that habit of you break that habit and you have an impulse. I love how you did that. You had talked about there has to and you used a different word other than impulse. What was it? An instigator activator. That’s it. Something that activates you to make that change. So what so what are some of the other options? go ahead. Yes, when she

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:08.1)
Activator.

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:17.261)
She has to celebrate.

MKJ (08:21.461)
and gets up off the couch with her husband, yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:23.688)
No, get this. Her celebration will be as she’s brushing her teeth and putting her moisturizer on or whatever she’s going to do, she’s going to look herself in the eyeballs and celebrate herself right in the

MKJ (08:34.945)
I did it.

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:36.868)
Because I don’t want her getting, I didn’t tell her this, but I didn’t suggest that she get on Boxner Celebrate with me because then she would have to pick up the phone.

MKJ (08:42.906)
Pick up a phone, that’s right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (08:45.006)
But if she remembers that she’s holding that toothbrush with toothpaste in her mouth, look at herself in the eyeballs in the mirror and go, yay, me or you rock star, you did it. Yes. Whatever. It really starts. Your brain goes, yeah.

MKJ (08:51.674)
Yes.

MKJ (08:57.1)
And so that time, so how is that going to lead to her house being

RonnieLo Life Coach (09:04.516)
because we were talking about energy. She was rebelling that she had no time for herself. And then she ends up staying up like an hour or two on Instagram, and then her mind is cluttered and she doesn’t sleep as well. And then she, and it’s, it’s a domino effect. And then she doesn’t feel like the next morning she really got enough sleep. So then she doesn’t know if she’s going to do her Pilates with her five minutes Pilates and five minutes of declutter. She started that habit and she thought, and this is another thing, but I can also liken it to other people in their fitness, for example.

We decided she every day, she’s going to spend five minutes decluttering. She did it for a good streak of three weeks. Something happened at her work. Then she traveled and she hasn’t gotten back into it. So she’s going to try. She didn’t stick with her if then, and she realizes that which was asking for help. And she wasn’t checking in and celebrating it. She just wasn’t celebrating it. So people are like, what’s five minutes? Don’t worry about the time.

What will you realistically do? Because you have to get your mind in the, in the habit of that time, that location, that same bad time, same bad location. if you have a certain generation, you know what I’m talking about. Other people, used to do that with them with their fitness. How much can you do? People always, people who hadn’t worked out or weren’t working out and weren’t eating right, all of a sudden they can do it all. Right. It’s like, no, what can you realistically do as far as getting rid of what’s in the cupboard? That’s not good.

MKJ (10:14.426)
You know what I’m talking about, that’s right.

MKJ (10:25.432)
I know.

RonnieLo Life Coach (10:30.66)
Or can you put the bowl of fruit out on the kitchen table? Can you do this? We put good stuff and we also get rid of the bad stuff. But when people would ask me, well, I can work out at least 30 minutes a day. It’s like, but you’re not now. Can you do 10 minutes? Yeah, I think I can. Can you realistically, if all goes to hell, do five minutes when you don’t feel like it, when you have no energy, when you have a lot on your mind, you want to pick the action that you will do at your lowest. It’s like, yeah, I could do five minutes.

timer? I’m like even if you just do one minute, will you commit to doing one minute? And people are usually like, I remember this one girl, I call everybody girl, I don’t care if you’re 82, 42 or 12. She’s like, what will five minutes do? I’m like, look, we can get online and I can give you exactly what 50 minutes will do for you during the week. Your heart rate, your oxygen volume, it does do benefits. It has benefits. But we don’t care about that. We want to get your brain used to

MKJ (11:03.556)
Yeah.

MKJ (11:10.905)
All

MKJ (11:27.204)
Yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (11:28.996)
at the same time, same location. So five minutes a day, five days a week, she would commit, that’s 25 minutes, but she committed to 10 minutes. She’s like, okay. And it grew and it grew and it grew. Sometimes she’d be like, yay, I did 20 minutes. Yay, I did 15. I’m like, that’s wonderful. But you know what you only have to do? No, no, it was five minutes, but it always grew to 10 or 15. But I’m like, but you don’t have to because five minutes is good. Five minutes is

MKJ (11:53.796)
Yeah. Yeah. But see, that

RonnieLo Life Coach (11:56.258)
And people are usually resistant to that. They want to take on more than they can chew.

MKJ (12:00.666)
But that also takes for someone like myself, because I’m a rebellious person. So for someone like myself, that takes away that rebellion. That takes away that if I just do five, it usually ends up to 15. But no one’s making me do 15. No one’s telling me I have to do 15. It’s a choice. And when it becomes a choice, that is much easier to develop the habit rather than feeling like, I have to do this. Oh, it’s something someone’s telling me to do. Oh, I have to do it because my train.

it’s beneficial to have a trainer or a coach to have to account to when you see them. But but at the same time, it ends up because your body loves it. It ends up that your body craves it because you have that same time, same location. Wow. All right. So anything else? Any other ideas on? Well, so what would be the next? What is going to be so for this person that has the declutter and she’s able to spend some time on her

What will be the next small habit that you can help her make after she gets that time for herself?

RonnieLo Life Coach (12:56.76)
Well, we decided on a program. She is going to take section by section because it’s not, it’s also, she felt defeated because, what’s five minutes a day. But that’s what she thought of in the first place. thought, well, at least it’ll get me in the habit of putting, starting to put things away. When I looked at her place, it has things all over the place. I’m like, what about this hair band? It’s the little things. Like, what do do with this paper clip? It’s the little things that are all over the place. Everything has a place. I’m

MKJ (13:20.621)
Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (13:25.06)
Fast forward, went through, if you hired a cleaning lady to come in for four to six hours one day and make this place like it was for a photo shoot for magazine, could you keep it up? I knew the answer. No, she’s not in the habit of it. It’s like, would feel good. I’m like, but could you keep it up? Everything has an, do you have a place for this now? And I started going around, do you have a place for this? Do you have a place for that? And she’s like, no, they moved there six months ago and they still haven’t unpacked a lot of boxes. I’m like, you know what I see around here? There are boxes over there, there are boxes over there, there are how do you feel with these boxes?

MKJ (13:50.746)
That’s

RonnieLo Life Coach (13:54.66)
And that was it. It’s the overwhelming part. It’s the boxes. And where do I put these little things? So we decided, she decided a three month plan and people often go, whether it’s diets or their business or whatever it is, three months, five months a year, know, especially when I had my personal training clients. I’m like, if you lose a pound a week, they’re 52 weeks a year, I think, right? Let’s, let’s dispel two weeks for travel or whatever holidays.

MKJ (13:57.321)
Yes. Yes. Right.

MKJ (14:17.892)
Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (14:22.596)
If you lose 50 pounds in a year, let’s just say sometimes you only lose half a pound. Let’s say you lose 40 pounds in a year and your goal is to lose 20. Aren’t you ahead of the game? People want it so fast. So we decided because she was trying to go too fast and she was beating herself up to go a section at a time. And I’m like, let’s just put it for three months for now. We called it bubs, boxes and containers or cubs or something. She called it project cubs.

MKJ (14:30.104)
Yeah, right. I think you got there. Yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (14:50.116)
because it’s all containers and boxes right now. And she’s going to go one section at a time and she can devote three hours every weekend. An hour and a half, Saturday or Sunday or whatever. She can do that. She knows she can do that. She already knows when in between her kids’ naps because she doesn’t want to take time away from them. So that’s the next step for her. It’ll take three months, maybe more. But I told her, if we get to this by Halloween, you’re going to go through all these boxes, all these sections. But let’s say you didn’t. You’re going to go through a lot. The thing

MKJ (15:03.054)
Yeah, perfect.

MKJ (15:14.904)
yeah.

RonnieLo Life Coach (15:18.732)
She’s going to do the five minutes, let’s just put something away in the morning. That’s great. But she’s also going, she has a project of, all right, this is my weekend. She wanted to do it at night, but I’m like, all right, it’s nine at night. Are you realistically going to do something that takes energy away or time from your husband? People can say they will, but they won’t, or maybe they shouldn’t. We don’t want to give her any reason to rebel. So she figures, okay, the weekend is for

And she’s already, she told me this morning, she’s already contacted a couple of friends. I’m going to take a picture of this box and ask me about it later. Cause I’m going to go through this box. So she’s already engaged people to help her celebrate. She already knows what she’s going to do with stuff in the box. If she doesn’t need them, where she’s going to donate. So we set up a plan, a plan of action. The thing about habits is you have to set an activation for the immediate action. The second

MKJ (15:58.362)
Perfect. That’s wonderful.

RonnieLo Life Coach (16:13.208)
can be global, it can be immediate, but also for the future. You have to boost your ability. You have to have the resources, the knowledge, the skills. You have to be able to. Do you have everything you need? The gear, the equipment, the right setup? You know, there was a study, I forgot the doctor’s name, I’m just not good with names, I can see their faces and I know all about their story and their studies, but he had a study where even things in your business area, if you work at home or your own office or your cubicle,

Even things like a lot of pictures and mementos and stuff that you think just bring you happiness, that distracts your brain. Even though you’re looking in the computer, it still distracts your brain. Your brain is still trying to have a lot of cameras to focus on them. Get rid of it. It’s like a casino. All these bells and whistles. That’s why iPhones are set up that way. Also, Androids, I’m sure, where everything’s colored and a lot of notifications. It’s been shown when you put your phone on gray, you don’t look at it as much. It’s not as enticing.

So same thing with your work area. Is your work area boosting your ability to work or how you want to be productive or focused? So we go through that. She can’t get a lot of stuff done. And well, let’s go to the woo woo thing because her home is cluttered and then she does nothing. And it’s more than overwhelm. That’s a lot of energy. It’s exhausting looking at her place. She realized that because it’s just so much colors and boxes and you know, containers.

and stuff that hasn’t been put away, even a little hairband, a little hair tie, you know, it’s just, and socks on the floor that takes away your energy. It depletes you. And she kept saying energy. So you have to boost your ability, set yourself up with the right resources, information, all of that. Then the third thing, reward yourself, instant reward, reward yourself, reward yourself, even the tiniest action. And I shouldn’t even say even the tiniest action is an action. And then ensure repetition. How can you assure you can repeat

MKJ (18:03.18)
is yes.

RonnieLo Life Coach (18:07.736)
Have you had that talk with the family? Have you had that critical conversation with your colleagues, with your peers? Have you had that critical conversation with your spouse or your partner? You have to tell people, you know, you’ve heard boundaries. It’s the word of the day, but the boundaries aren’t for other people to keep up. Boundaries are your own. This is what I want in my life. It’s a little fence. I liken it to going up to the fence. You can look over the fence. Hey neighbor, how’s it going? Okay. I’m to go

Bye! You have to maintain it. You have to keep painting it. You have to keep it clean. Boundaries are for you. You’re not going to change other people. Don’t even expect it. If they change, great! But you cannot, you know, you can tell them what you need and want with no agenda on their part. You can’t expect it or demand it. You just tell them, this is what I’m setting up for

Now with your kids, your family, your partner, your colleagues, your peer, your boss, whatever, of course you can say, this is what I would like from you and it would really help me. And people are usually willing to get on your side when you approach them like that. I would like for you to help me, not I need you to help me. I need you to do this. More like I would like you to, it would help me so much. It’s a struggle without help. Can’t you relate to that if somebody asked you

MKJ (19:18.852)
Right, right.

RonnieLo Life Coach (19:35.276)
And so usually people are willing to see it from your side and they relate to you and they have empathy. So you ask people, you engage people with their own empathy.

MKJ (19:47.15)
There you are. Okay, so one last tip is there is there a final tip that you can give our audience about habits about how they can make the that first little change or the the cascading change? Is there any last words you’d like to

RonnieLo Life Coach (20:10.916)
that no matter how set in your ways you are, and we are all set in our ways, we’re human. No matter how set in your ways you are, you don’t have to be stuck in them. You can, like I used to say as a personal trainer, no matter what fitness level, you can be healthy. You can work out. No matter where you are in your diet, you can change the way you eat. No matter where you are in your business, you can turn things around or you can level

You can make that decision in your career. You can level up your relationship. You, no matter what, no matter what stage you are, what level or your situation, you can do it. And it’s easier when you do it with actual actions, tiny actions, and with facts. Like I said, confirmations, how you talk to yourself, not with, I’m going to talk to myself into positivity, but more like, okay, what’s a fact? Is it positive? Sometimes you just need to neutralize

So that’s the parting thought. You’re never too old, you’re never too set in your ways to be stuck there. And it’s great. You can pivot, you can level

MKJ (00:00.628)
All right, welcome back to the conversation mischief makers MKJ here and my wonderful guest Peter Lassosky for I think at least the fourth time that he and I have talked on a podcast of mine. Welcome back, Peter. You ready to dive down into ground level and talk about how we can actually make a difference with being relatable?

Peter Lisoskie (00:19.075)
Yeah, we can be real. Like I said, I’m the dog at your door. you are the raccoon at your door. Yeah. Begging for food. Yeah. So yeah, let’s dive into

MKJ (00:23.856)
Or in my sense, the raccoon at my door looking for bread. Yeah, right. That’s right.

So we already talked about mindset shifts and impact and innovation. If you haven’t listened to those episodes, please go back and listen to them because they will be the frame through which we will now craft. What do you

And so when we talk about what do you do, we’ve talked about relatable and this framework and tool using lead gen and demand gen and relationship economy. And we talked about innovating using brain science and all kinds of other factors with a previous experience. But now let’s take that relatable concept and let’s say we create an interactive video experience for our audience, our customers, a DM, for someone we’re trying to talk to about what we do and what our point of view is.

Now, how do we actually get that out there and use this idea of interactive videos and relationship tool to actually grow relationships? What do we

Peter Lisoskie (01:30.689)
So as far as, are you talking about like the distribution of it or what do you want me to discuss?

MKJ (01:35.968)
the content creation, the distribution, and how that all fits in the framework of our marketing and our business.

Peter Lisoskie (01:45.391)
So yeah, there’s, so in this relationship economy, like I said, first of all, you have to really think about, how am I going to build trust in relationships, right? That’s why the relatable framework and tool exists that gives you the ability to do that. But guys, here’s the thing. I will say that relatable to tool is no different than your car.

You know, you can have a fancy car or you can have a real beater, but at the end of the day, it gets you from point A point B. So, you know, well, yes, the tool is great and yes, the tool will do, it will help you build relationships at scale. The more important thing is you.

your message, your content, your thing that you do that’s different, right? Everybody I talk to, I tell them, look, you guys, look, if you’re a coach, there’s a million other coaches. If you’re a consultant, there’s a million other consultants. If you’re an agency, there’s a million other agencies. If you’re a SaaS business like us, there’s a million other SaaS businesses, right? So the thing about them, is, okay, what’s your different, right? And then how do you express that different?

That’s our, you know, our categories, interactive video relationships. That starts with the awareness. That starts with your point of view. What do you stand for? What do you stand against? In previous…

Shows here. I told you guys I stand against email marketing. I stand against cold sales calling I stand against funnels I stand against billboard websites because we’re again reshaping our website into a demand gen Experience not a billboard website. So I stand against short -term sales thinking I stand against lead generation. I mean we talked about all this

Peter Lisoskie (03:32.985)
You know, and what I stand for is relationships, authenticity, empathy, building that one of our value statements in our company. Mary knows this and she lives it every day. How can we give first? That’s probably our most important value statement, right? Because if you don’t have that kind of mindset, pretty much nothing else is gonna work for you, right? If you’re focused on the money, the money is never gonna come. So.

You got to start with the awareness and then there’s the change of perspectives, right? So you have to, you know, like here’s an example for change of perspective. And this is how, you know, if you’re doing something different, so in the world of different, there’s obvious solutions, obvious problems. That’s the status quo. That’s the blah, blah, blah. That’s the people you’ll see up on LinkedIn go, how I made X amount of dollars in this amount of time doing this.

marketing playbook.

And if you follow them, be careful because you may not get what you want. Right. So then Mary has a whole thing she talked about experts and things if we have time for it here. But that’s that. Then the second one is non -obvious problem to an obvious solution. That’s where we fit. Right. Because we the obvious problem is people know and we’ve talked to a lot of people they’re panicking now because sales aren’t working. Leads aren’t working. Emails not working. Funnels aren’t working. And so the

MKJ (04:36.535)
Please.

MKJ (04:49.187)
Yes.

Peter Lisoskie (05:02.097)
obvious solution is relatable. So that takes powerful point of view story and messaging and it takes repetition to get that out and change your perspective and so a lot of these common sense things that I brought up where people go…

Damn, he’s right. Right, so, you know, and that’s what gets people to go, yeah, I’m gonna try this out, because, you know, what you’re telling me, I resonate with that, and a lot of times they’re going, yeah, that’s happening to me too privately. So, and then the third one is non -obvious solution to a non -obvious problem. These are like scientific breakthroughs, academia, things like that. They’re wonderful, but the problem is they take millions of dollars and tons of time, usually years,

MKJ (05:20.196)
Yes.

Peter Lisoskie (05:47.991)
you to change the perspective. Okay, think about Thomas Edison and the light bulb. That’s a non -obvious solution to a non -obvious problem. Think about Henry Ford and the Model T. If customer, he would ask his customers, what do you want? They would have said a faster horse. He created something totally different, right?

MKJ (06:01.124)
in the automotive.

MKJ (06:09.742)
Right.

Peter Lisoskie (06:10.371)
These are things that that’s the first thing. So you got to have that change of perspective, right? So, know, goody story on that one, Mary. Change of perspective. We’re coming up with this this new you talk about, you know, continual innovation. So I was sitting back thinking, you know, we’ve got a lot of these businesses out there. They have these customers. And yet how do they actually continue the relationship and make it?

really good for them to turn them into raving fans. Well, I had a large construction company, 72 employees. We did a few thousand customers a year. Back in the day, we didn’t have any of this stuff. It was pre, actually pre internet, I think. Well, it was right around the internet when was starting. And so what I did is we went out and did good work. I called up a lot of the customers and the people were really appreciative of our business. So I’d say, you know, they would say, I love what you’re doing.

Is there any way I can spread the word? said, yeah, come on in, pick up some, we had paper flyers. That was what it was back then. So I had, at one time I had 289 customers coming up to my office on Highway 9 in Lake Stevens in Washington State. Then you go out and hand these things out to all their friends and neighbors and we get all kinds of work. Well, I used what was called send out cards at that time and I’d send them little cards, personalized cards and gifts, thanking them. Fast forward to today, that’s what relatable is.

basically on steroids, because we can use tech, but it’s done in the right way, not in the email marketing way, where you’re actually building these relationships. So that’s the key piece of that. Now, the second thing is consideration. In demand generation, look.

MKJ (07:34.488)
Yes. Yes.

Peter Lisoskie (07:52.485)
When people come in and they’re doing research, you are not the only game in town. In fact, I was telling Mary this the other day. Who do we compete with? Well, we don’t really have competitors directly because we’re a new category of software, but we do have indirect competitors. One is I’ve got, there’s 20 or so companies that are doing interactive video applications. The problem is they’re not doing relationship building. So those guys, while they have branching videos and questions and hotspots and all this stuff, I tell everyone,

That’s like going out with your significant other on the first date and at the end of the day they dropped out on a knee and go, hey, you want to get married? It’s like we don’t do that as human beings. You need to nurture, build trust, build respect before you’re going to enter into some kind of commitment. It’s as true in your personal life as is in your business life. So that’s indirect. Another indirect is passive videos.

This is why I make the distinction in our messaging and so does Mary. Passive videos produces passive viewers. And that’s about all you’re going to get.

And after they watch your video, maybe they’ll remember it for five minutes, but then they forget and they move on. Right. There’s no engagement. There’s no interaction. There’s no re -engagement to nurture. It’s just one pass. I mean, guys, if you’re TikTok viewers, your thumb is probably sore because you’re scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. Right. So this is exactly what I’m talking about in passive experiences. Right. So in consideration,

MKJ (09:15.972)
Constantly. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Peter Lisoskie (09:26.041)
We still have to help our potential customers understand how are we different?

Why should you consider us? That can be in the form of use cases, white papers, your website, customer success stories, a competitor buying guide. You should, and we’re developing one, you should go right, go, hey, this is what they are, this is what we are. You make your choice, but this is how we’re different and how we’re better as a fit for you in transformation and impact, right? So one thing I want to address here,

MKJ (09:49.006)
Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (10:03.785)
And guys, I learned this the hard way when I was a young engineer. And that is use cases. the reason why I bring this up is this. If you do not…

Create that connection between what your different is and your solution to exactly how they can use it They’re never gonna make that connection. It’s too much brain power. We look we have these things called brain heuristics We didn’t cover that in neuroscience, but there’s all these shortcuts We use as human beings because our croc brain still rules our brain. It’s our old cave person brain and Guys, we have evolved but not a lot. So the thing about it is it’s you know

MKJ (10:28.224)
All right.

MKJ (10:39.096)
Yeah.

MKJ (10:43.384)
Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (10:46.869)
You have to make those direct connections with people. So again, we are not perfect. We are still growing. We are creating all these use cases using Relatable to show people here. If you’re a coach, this is what you use. If you’re a book author or publisher, this is how you use it. If you’re an agency, this is how you use it. If you’re an HVAC company, this is how you use it. Right. So that they go, I get it. That’s simple. Man, that’s a good idea. I’m going to use that. Right. So that’s the consideration phase.

When people get through all of that, you know, it depends on, you know, the level. Like we have our prices are $49 to $399 a month. We’re not a $500 ,000 enterprise software platform. So typically, when they’re ready, they’re going to go, okay, I’m going to pull the trigger. I like relatable. What’s your FAQs? Do you have a free trial? Can I jump on board? Where do I subscribe? That’s the demand ready. Typically, they would probably not say, hey, I want to talk to a salesperson because

MKJ (11:38.158)
Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (11:46.391)
the level of money commitment is not there. If it was 500 ,000, although I will say Gardner has said, even for enterprise level, they never want to talk to a salesperson. So you better have really good virtual demos and things where they can see exactly how they’re going to use this in their organization. And oh, by the way, the other thing we do in consideration in Relatable,

MKJ (11:54.616)
Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Lisoskie (12:07.695)
There’s this thing called dark social. I don’t know if you guys have heard about it. It’s not the dark web. It’s nothing nefarious. Dark social, what’s going on is people are privately messaging other people. If you send texts, if you send emails, if you do WhatsApp, you send WhatsApps, or any form of private messaging, you are part of dark social. What?

I didn’t realize until about year ago was that up to 80 % of all content sharing and product and service recommendations are done through dark social. So that was another innovation I went hmmm. So what else is possible here? So then I said okay we got to create something in relatable where a person can watch your video content and you can say hey by the way if you like this and you’d like to share this with your business colleagues or friends go ahead and

on this button, you can text them, you can email them, you can send a WhatsApp right while they’re in the video. Now if they do text, if we’re in the United States, that’s a big deal. If you’re overseas, internationally it’s WhatsApp. Everybody uses in the Middle East and Europe and everywhere, right? South American countries. So, but let’s take the text example. You go right into your phone contact database, the link carries forward for that, or you can actually choose the one you want to send to them. And then you

Choose the ones you write your message and they get it. Now, think about it this way guys. You ever had a company that you didn’t know send you a text message? What do you do with those? We delete them, we block them, we report them as spam.

MKJ (13:43.534)
Gone. Yep.

Peter Lisoskie (13:46.093)
Now, if Mary sent me a text saying, hey, there’s this video thing I just saw on this. It’s really cool. We do it in Slack. We can do it in Relatable too, but it’s really cool. You should watch this. What do you think I’m gonna do? I’m gonna watch it, because I know Mary. That’s the power of dark social and private messaging. And by the way, guys, when those people are sending your message through text or WhatsApp or email, it costs you nothing.

to build your audience, build your customer base. Zero dollars. So again, we implemented that in Relatable because we

that friends will recommend other products and services to friends for those friends to buy it. There is no Yelp review, there is no customer review, there’s no nothing that can replace the power of that friend recommending something else to another friend. Because why? They know, like, and trust that person.

MKJ (14:47.126)
Yep, yes. And that basically fits exactly what we’re talking about. It’s relationships at scale. That’s exactly the power of that particular part of relatable. So I just want to take and encapsulate what you just talked about. This whole idea of awareness, I call it demand curious. And the reason I call it that is because that’s when the potential buyer’s thought process has shifted.

Instead of them just being aware of you and they’re seeing the fact that you exist. Now they’re curious about, well, what, is this about? How does this work? Who are these people? Now they start to get curious and start asking for things. They start clicking on things. They start opting in for things. They start reading more posts. They start watching more videos. That’s when they become curious about who you are. Once you’ve shifted to that curious state.

Now there, it’s going to be a cascade effect if they align, it’s going to be a cascade effect to get to readiness and to actually be ready to buy. But remember all of this is from the buyer’s perspective, not ours. In lead generation, it’s all about our perspective, our prospects, right? The prospects are about us. They’re our prospects.

the clients, customers, the funnels, it’s all about us and how we can get people through that process. This, what we’re talking about awareness, curious or consideration and readiness, it’s all about our potential buyer and whether they are ready to invite us into their process.

I know there is a lot we can talk about in this whole process of strategy, but so far, to just to kind of reiterate a little bit, we’ve talked about the fact that you can create content, video, interactive video relationship content. You can distribute it on multiple channels. Any of the channels you’re currently distributing your content, you can put a relatable interactive video on and they will interact with it. And then when people are ready to buy, you will be able to have that that clickable button right there on the video for

Peter Lisoskie (16:44.623)
Yep.

MKJ (16:51.062)
them to actually choose to enter into your world and invite you into their buying process. Any last thoughts about, and I love what you talked about. have to mention dark social. If you don’t think it exists or you don’t know that’s most of the time when you look at your Google analytics and it says that you just have a direct.

to your website, it probably came from Dark Social because someone shared your content and someone clicked on it in a LinkedIn DM, in a Reddit thread, a wherever. They clicked on that link and went directly to your site. It’s not because they typed it in. It probably came from a Dark Social exchange. So you need to know about that. If you don’t know about it, investigate a little bit more. Any last thoughts about the strategy of interactive video relationships?

Peter Lisoskie (17:17.85)
Yep.

Peter Lisoskie (17:43.997)
My last words is really the whole idea of this is creating interaction, engagement, nurturing, trust, ultimately relationships and doing that at scale. know, Mary, you talked about, I add to, I think you mentioned something about developing.

One way communication like email can do it. I will say brands can’t do it either. You know, imagine what if we had a brand where the customer decided what your brand was and it was dynamic. Ever thought about that? I mean, you you’ve heard me talk all the time, Coke, Nike, all these, they have brands. All of the rest of us, in my opinion, we don’t have brands. We have our personal brand, but really that brand is based on the relationships that you have with people.

MKJ (18:16.662)
It is. Yes.

Peter Lisoskie (18:32.197)
and your messaging and their ability to interact with you. you know, if anything, guys, you know, I can’t stress this enough. This is not something that’s coming. This is something that’s here. The relationship economy is here. The demand generation is here. If you go and look at your email statistics or you look at industry statistics of the 20 % open rate, 1 to 2 % click through rates, the funnels are now down to below 10%, probably near 1 % from the sources I have.

You know and the other thing too guys is I if you even just say forget Gardner forget All these statistics just look in the mirror. How do you buy? Is your BS meter at an all -time high? Would you pick up the phone and call a salesperson on your first thought if you not doing it your customers aren’t doing it either So it’s just based on common sense Mary and what what we really have to get back to you Like I have always said people do business with people they like

trust and that at the end of the day it’s always going to be that way and it’s not ever going to be different.

MKJ
Welcome back to the conversation my friends CEO mischief makers Brian Wallace is here with me and I Swear if you have not listened to the first two episodes of this This conversation you need to go back and listen to them because we are going to the gold has been dropped all along the way for you to just pick up and run with now We’re gonna get so

So we’re going to have so much information shared with you. I know I don’t know yet because we haven’t talked about this, but I know based on where the conversation has been that you need to listen. Okay. So tighten up those headsets or those earbuds or whatever, and have something ready to write with because we’re going to dive in. So first off, Brian, here we go. You ready?

Brian Wallace
We’re going to get there.

MKJ 
All right, so the first two episodes we talked about mindset, then we talked about a lot about innovation. And I love the way you unpacked innovation and how you are looking to that gauntlet, those three parts of the gauntlet. And I need you to remind us of those three things first. And then secondly, you used a word renowned. And I would love for you to dive deeper into that word. So first, the three gauntlet, then we go into renowned.

Brian Wallace
OK, so similar to the Innovate Summit that we just had, and I think I even said some of these things from the stage, there’s a lot going on. Pretty sure I said these things out loud. So the first thing is I want people to actually be good people that are caring, that are mindful of others and all of that, or you’re not getting past the other pieces of the gauntlet. You’re just stopped at the door or the.

you’re just going to hit the moat at the castle and that’s as far as you go. We’re not putting the drawbridge down for sociopaths and people who are just looking for the wrong thing and looking to just take advantage of others. It doesn’t work. Next is generosity in a good network. Now, a good network does not mean more social media followers and LinkedIn connections than the other. It means that they are really good connectors and they know the art of conversation, how to talk to people. And they’re

shy of that, they don’t believe in a scarce world, they believe in a big abundant world, regardless of their spirituality, religiosity, we all, because that’s not what we’re talking about.

I also want them to actually be good at stuff because if they don’t even know what they want to do, how am I supposed to figure it out? I can help them, I suppose, but they might be on the way and we’re always learning, but I think people need to carefully define some areas of specificity. I can get into a whole weird thing here if you want, or we could save that for later. Sure. So, all right. So I think I am of the opinion that a lot of people think that they’re good at X, they’re good at technology, they’re good

MKJ
Go. I love weird. Go for it.

Brian Wallace 
Climbing telephone poles, they’re good at soccer, they’re good at whatever, they’re expertises. I don’t know, they’re carpenters, whatever. Vocational, they fix air conditioning. It’s hot out sometimes, yeah, sure.

And then they’re creative and they their passion projects over here. And never the twain shall meet. But why? Who told you that? Who forced you to do that? Great school? Some teacher telling you no? I believe that humanity has the ability to synthesize a superset of skills and make things that are new and innovative, which I think we’ve talked about a couple of times here. Does the innovate council give us like a quarter every time we say it? I don’t even know. So there’s your three, yeah. So that’s your three step gauntlet and your superset bonus.

MKJ
Yeah. There you go. That’d be good.

Brian Wallace 
Okay, the other part that you said was renowned, right? So as alluded to on the previous podcast, I believe that the word influence has been ruined by the negative priming of the word influence, which is influencer, the people who used to buy the blue check marks and all the social networks on the black market. Craziness. For what? For fame to rip you off on some course that you don’t need? Okay, good luck with that.

MKJ
Renowned. Yes. Yes.

Brian Wallace
So people cannot disassociate this already ruined word. I feel like it’s a little bit scorched earth, which is why, even though like in our business, I say that we make the world’s ideas simple, visual and influential. I worry about that because we need to embrace at least a new paradigm and maybe a new word. So.

I don’t have a date on it yet. It’s still in development because it just hasn’t been the age and stage. And there’s been a lot of other stuff going on personally and professionally in my life. So haven’t had, it hasn’t been the season yet to launch it, but we’re going to talk about it right now. So the word is renowned because renowned could be a person who is still of respect that you want to meet that is interesting, that is generous, that has this connection and is good at stuff to help you in life. And I think that some people think that being a public speaker, being an extrovert, I don’t think you even have to be an extrovert.

You can be an introvert, you can be an ambivert, which means both. You don’t have to be like this salesy party guy that’s all loud at parties or something. You can just be like a mild -mannered person. doesn’t matter. I think it’s something that maybe some people are born with innate talent, but it is something that you can model after and reverse engineer. And I want to help show people the way.

which we are embodying and typifying in the way that we were running the first conference and hopefully one of many to come, as well as what I believe the book and all related material will entail. Yeah.

MKJ 
Well, yes, we’ll support. Yeah, I love that because you could just basically change that you use the word influence. I think you said influencing in your in your tagline and you can just change it to renown. And it that’s it.

Brian Wallace
Exactly. We need to use our influence to empower others. And that’s the thing. People don’t understand that power isn’t being the loud person with the microphone. It’s giving other people stage and the floor. Why would you not?

MKJ 
Yes. And here’s the difference between what I used to do, which was exactly what you were talking about. It was the technical things, right? I would build chat bots. I would do things with AI. I would do things with conversational design. Basically, the purpose was, at least from my client’s perspective, when I had this agency, which I just shut down at the beginning of the year, the purpose was to persuade people to buy their stuff.

And so we’re talking about lead generations, tactics, excuse me, lead generation. Well, I’ve switched that because my whole goal during that whole time was conversational design, designing conversations to allow the potential buyer to take their own adventure with your products and services and your business and your brand and your renowned status, to take their own adventure with that. That’s to me, conversations. That’s what we’re all about.

Brian Wallace 
Can I give you a rabbit hole? Can I give you a rabbit hole on this? There’s something to examine.

MKJ 
Go, let’s go.

Brian Wallace 
So everybody thinks that humanity and they themselves have all these strongly held opinions that they march around online and their posture a certain way and they like this and they support that whatever. But a lot of reality of the human mind is that it is not as sophisticated as you might think. And all these so -called strongly held opinions are weakly held that can be uprooted by other thoughts and paradigms that they haven’t considered yet. So you could actually, it’s not mind control, we’re not joining a cult.

So, you all you called us to be, don’t take any notes here. just chill. Calm down. The same for you. It’s just like good humanity. Please stick, please stand up. So yeah, like you can actually give people better ideas that they never considered. Think about like, it’s crazy. Like the stuff people believe and how it got there is wild.

MKJ 
Yes, calm down. Yeah.

MKJ
Yes, yes.

Brian Wallace 
permit me a little bit more tangent and then we can jump into more of the nuts and bolts. But this is important. It’s important to understand the mental model to get to the end of it. So have you ever read or heard about the story of how breakfast became a thing, breakfast cereal? Have you ever heard of cereal? Breakfast cereal invented the category of breakfast, to sell cereal. There is a commonly held phrase or knowledge in the world.

MKJ
yeah, because I’m going. Yeah. I’m right there. Yep.

MKJ 
No. yes. For a cereal I have, yes. Yeah.

Brian Wallace
that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. And then you say, interesting, where did it come from? I think I heard my parents, or I saw something about scientists with lab coats, pretty sure they were actors. It was invented by cereal companies in the 1930s. Okay, we’re closing in on 100 years ago, people. What are we talking about? So you’re influenced of an entire category of food, because people just eat leftovers or steak or whatever.

MKJ
Thank you.

Brian Wallace
and they invented it because they were bad at selling cereal and they started sugar coating it and making a bunch of weird claims that I’m not gonna get into, but do your own research on that. Trust me, it is a weird rabbit hole. I’m gonna leave it at that. All this to say that you actually can influence people for good by helping them along that

MKJ
Thank you for bringing that up because I’m also going to go into another thing. My degree is from UC Berkeley was in nutrition and food science at the height of the food pyramid being high carb, low fat, low protein. So it wasn’t just that cereal is the most important meal or breakfast is the most important meal of the day. It was the whole that then that went into the next one. They’re like, that worked. Let’s go to the next one and say, this is really what’s healthy for you. And fat is really

bad. So yeah, you don’t want me to go down that rabbit hole. But I get it. And so what I meant, what I meant when I said influence or when I said persuade, I wasn’t meaning persuasion in the fact that we can share new ideas. I was meaning persuasion in the fact that I want you to do what I want you to do, which is pay me more money for whatever I think you need to buy. That’s excuse me, Bass -Ackwards.

Brian Wallace
No.

Brian Wallace 
right.

MKJ 
Most people, especially in today’s internet, I could cite all kinds of statistics. B2B sales, at least 72 % of B2B sales, the person purchasing wants a representative free buying process. In other words, they don’t wanna talk to your salesperson. They wanna do their own research, they wanna find out what they like.

Brian Wallace
sure is.

MKJ 
and then they decide and call you up and say, I want your thing. No, I don’t need you to persuade me and tell me all this big sales pitch. I already know it because I did my research. So that kind of persuasion, that’s the difference between lead generation and a new term that I don’t know if you’ve heard yet. I’m sure you have demand generation. You put your, and this brings us right to what you do, storytelling. You tell stories about what companies do and then let the potential buyer.

understand what they do through that story. So is that true? First off, is that true? Yes. And so now…

Brian Wallace 
Absolutely. And yeah, I mean, we’re capitalists here, right? Like, we still want to make money. But I think something that gets lost in the noise of silly thoughts all over the Internet is that people want to do business with people that they know, like and trust. They don’t want to talk to a chat bot that has like one of those like fake Facebook silhouettes or I don’t want to talk to a logo like, OK, Wendy’s is funny on Twitter, but I usually don’t want to talk to a brand.

MKJ 
course.

Brian Wallace 
I want to know who’s behind the brand and what do they want to say.

MKJ 
That’s right. That’s right. That’s right. So and I can go into all kinds of ways that I’m doing and helping people with this because to me exactly what you just said, we don’t build relationships with the brand. We build relationships with humans. So who are you? And the more you tell that story, not just you personally, we don’t need to know all the details of, you know, your dog died yesterday. I mean, obviously I’m going to say, I’m so sorry. But for, of course, that’s right.

Brian Wallace 
Correct.

Brian Wallace 
I mean, it’s okay to say that, but you don’t have to say that. You can overshare too, right?

MKJ 
That’s right. That’s right. So in that situation, how do you tell, let’s get into the details of it. How do you help people tell those kinds of stories so that they can build what are no like and trust so that the customer can make their own decisions?

Brian Wallace 
So there’s two things I want to say here. I challenge people and I say, if you can’t be the best call of that person’s day,

maybe you haven’t really kind of gotten the point. something like one of my superpowers in the world is to have like an uncanny amount of ability to gain more intimacy, platonic, not like that, intimacy and trust quickly, because I’m not asking about how the weather is. You can look outside, you can see if it’s sunny or raining or whatever. You don’t need me to be the weatherman. I mean, I grew up in the suburbs of New York where I think we’re trained.

our accent to sound like the weatherman but go watch the weather channel go watch espn you don’t need me for the sports updates

MKJ 
Yeah.

Brian Wallace
If you want to talk about politics, I don’t know, that’s a great way to get divisive sometimes. I think we should be able to have a free exchange of ideas, and that’s part of what’s wrong with the world. what if instead of the surface nonsensical, plastic, smiley, pseudo things, that we just think that the object is to wait for the pause in the other person’s conversation to just shove some sales thing down their throat?

What if we actually could get to know people a little bit better? That it’s almost to the extent that they had a great time, that they learned a lot, that they saw that you’re good at stuff, and you somehow strung through three conversations worth of conversation in the first conversation. And then what if, before you even had the conversation with the person, what if your content, what if your public persona on all your socials and your blogs and wherever you show up in podcasts got a little bit of who you are?

Like, everybody listening, does everybody listening have to sit down with me after this whole three -part conversation? No, they do not, because who I am and how I think spills out into, even if your structure wasn’t as good as it was, I would still find a way to kind of fit it in, because I don’t read from cue cards. It’s just not in my nature. think

is it holds people back. People think that they need it and they don’t. So what if the best conversation that you had was from somebody like that and then you typified that, internalized it and brought that out to the world. And before you had that conversation, again, very important. If your content did that, you didn’t need all these slick AI lead gen tools. I’m not a Luddite, like we are on the computer here and we’re on the internet, we’re not in the same place. But what if your content primed the pump for people to have conversations with you like

that you already had part of the conversation in before you even talked to each other. And then by the time you dive in, how many people read my LinkedIn profile and listen to podcasts on it and click on things and they’re like, wow, I listen to your story, it’s so powerful. I’m like, wow, yeah.

Brian Wallace 
Really neat. Like you’ve gone far enough in the rabbit hole or as the salespeople would say, the buyer’s journey. See, we’re still doing it. We’re still making sales, but guess what? We’re also making friends because guess what? Like I can go to different cities throughout the world and throw an event or I could go to a place for lunch or coffee and like have multiple meetings one after the other. Why? I mean, why can’t other people do that? Am I above average at it? I guess, but I also have had a lot of practice at it and everyone can do this.

MKJ 
I just love it. I promise you, everyone listening, we will have another conversation. Because the main reason I say that though is because so much of our world right now is follow this formula. I’m a guru, I’ve done this, I’ve made billions and gazillions and whatever I’ve made and had these leads and that leads. Follow my formula and you can too. So much of the influencers are doing that. Whereas if we enable people, if we open people up and say,

Brian Wallace 
Nice.

MKJ 
you know what? Yeah, you might want to do things this way. Yes, you might want to tell your stories in an infographic, but it’s your story. It’s not my formulaic story. It’s yours. And so what would you say to those people who are used to going and following some guru’s formula or framework or recipe or blueprint or whatever, so that they can actually bring themselves out in their storytelling?

Brian Wallace 
It’s a simple exercise. I’m going to give, if you ever see me on stage, pretend you didn’t watch this part or listen to it. So very often, and I honestly do not remember where I saw this from. did not invent it. I tell everybody there’s a bit of a social experiment where we’re going to actually move our body a little bit and get into the mindset of what we’re about to talk about.

And then I’m sitting, standing, whatever, in front of a crowd of people. And I challenge everybody to raise their hand as high as they can. And then you have everybody that goes like this. For those of you who are not watching this in a video, I’m holding my hand up around to where my head is. And then I say, now raise it higher. And everybody has like another six inches. Some people go wild and they stand on a chair and then I make a joke about not falling off a stage and I don’t know that we have that hazard insurance or whatever.

And it is because everybody thinks that they need the okay from a blueprint and a formula and some guru and a piece of paper and a certificate and permission from the world for greatness. You do not need that with any external validation. And if you do, you can go with the, you know, non -regional dialects at Metro New Yorker to say that you have permission for greatness. There you go.

MKJ 
All right, CEO, makers, here we go. One of my favorite things in the world, the rubber meets the road. We’re down at ground level or in the weeds. We talk about details. I love the mindset. I love innovation, but it doesn’t mean anything and thus can apply it. So welcome to the conversation again. Welcome back. My friend, Aaron Hassan. Aaron, you ready to dive into details now?

Aaron Hassen 
All right, CEO, make sure everything’s here this is the best part. Let’s actually make something happen now, right?

MKJ 
Yes, we’ve got to set the stage, right? It’s like a play. We’ve got to set the stage, get the character set, and now let’s do the thing. All right, so we’ve talked about relationships, word of mouth, trust, selling or marketing to people like you want to be marketed to, human connection, all those things are really the foundations that we build upon. So now.

Aaron Hassen 
and connection, all those things, really the foundation.

So now, not marketing, not a market. There’s a company, as a user, a new company, they are having, they’ve been in, adapted their product, and they’re like, how do we look at people? Talk about three stages, awareness, affinity, and then, how do you, what do you, what is your plan, what is the strategy? Or, you know, where they are in their.

MKJ
Looking at marketing, go to market. Let’s say there’s a company who has either a new product or they have innovated and adapted their product and they’re like, okay, how do we let people know? You talked about three stages, awareness, affinity, and then actual getting to the actual relationship. What do you do? What is your plan? What is the typical strategy to take a consumer through that or meet the consumer where they are in their research process?

to get them to understand that you have their solution.

Aaron Hassen 
I’m done.

I use some frameworks and I want to share those with people, with other marketers, with founders and CEOs, because there are some incredible frameworks out there. But before I share those frameworks, really the way this comes to me at A .H. Marketing, so I was, as I mentioned previously, I was a founder whose company was acquired four years later. And then I got into marketing because I really liked the marketing piece.

of what I was doing in my company and I like that aspect of business. And so I dove in and for 20 years I have led marketing for B2B startups, often venture backed, Silicon Valley, Y Combinator. So these are pressure cooker situations. We have to drive results very quickly and efficiently. And so that’s been my experience.

I come to the marketing problem or problems from that perspective. And so what often happens and the reason that companies often need a marketer like me or a fractional marketing team like A .H. Marketing to come in and help them out is because they sense that there’s a poor product market fit or their pipelines have dried up or their salespeople are feeling unsupported or

They’re seeing lower than average contract values and they can’t figure out what’s going on. You know, there’s limited revenue streams. So the company’s at risk. Investors don’t like it. Like we can’t put all our eggs in one basket. Their messaging is just not resonating with buyers. You know, these are some of the symptoms that often indicate that you need strategic marketing support. But you don’t just need strategic marketing support. Oftentimes,

Aaron Hassen
You want somebody that’s not just going to do the thinking and the strategy and the planning, but somebody who can execute. And again, we talked last time about that’s exactly what age marketing does. As a founder myself, I was looking to replicate myself. I didn’t have enough time. I was looking for partners within my business that can take the ball and run. And so that was a critical piece of it. And so you need a marketer.

that is both a strategist but also an operator. Oftentimes these companies, I have found, lose track of who they are. We see the downstream effects. We see the pipeline dry up. We see the low conversion rates and things like that, but oftentimes they’ve lost track of who they are when that product market fit goes out and then they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how next to innovate.

We go back because the GPS is off and we have to get back to the core DNA and why they exist in the first place, why customers buy from them, what makes them special. And you do this by actually listening. You go and talk to customers. You go and talk to internal sales team who interface with customers, your client success team who interface with customers. You talk to partners. You have to figure out what’s going on out there. And as I mentioned last time,

You know, the very definition of a marketer is the fact that you understand the market and the market is your customer and it is what is happening in the marketplace, the trends and the forces shaping the marketplace. Without that information and insight, you don’t have much to offer your company. So, you know, we go and figure out the market, we start to listen and that’s the first step. You really need to listen. So we go through positioning.

with all of our clients. I don’t care what you’re doing and what your needs are. If you work with A .H. Marketing, we’re going to start you off with positioning because I need and you need, your team needs to align around what is your core DNA? Who is the customer? What’s impacting them today? What do they really care about? What are their problems? How are you positioned against the competition? You’re great at this, but we look at category as well.

Aaron Hassen
category design. And as we said, the context of the market and the forces that are shaping it, you’ve got to be relevant. If, you know, product market fit issues are often an issue of relevancy, you’re just no longer relevant. So let’s get back to who, you know, who you are as a company, how you can serve your customer. Let’s get your team aligned around a singular vision and goals. We talked about that movie 300.

and the Spartans. And if you can just get 300 soldiers to act together, you can rule the world. You can conquer greater armies. This is so key is that alignment and getting that relevance back again. So we use frameworks to do that. The positioning framework I really enjoy and love and have used for many years is a 6C framework by Andy Cunningham. She launched the Mac with Steve Jobs. She’s repositioned Oracle and Blackberry and

a lot of Silicon Valley. She’s a legend out there in the movie. They call her the other Andy. So if you’re ever watching some of those Steve Jobs movies, there’s Andy Hertzfeld, who was the product guy. Then there was the other Andy, who was lead communicator for Steve Jobs and worked with him at Apple, Pixar, Next, all those. I learned from her. She brought me out to Wyoming. She taught me her framework herself, and I use it, and it’s powerful.

But I also use other frameworks too, because once you get positioning down, you then need to actually start looking at your messaging architecture. Now, how are you going to communicate your business to the wider world and connect yourself to the problems that exist so that you can be relevant? They want to know who you are and why you matter to them. So you’ve got to figure out that. And then I go from there. So we start with positioning, we go to messaging.

But then, you know, we actually get into systems and processes within the business to build the foundation, what I call, you know, the lead engine or the opportunity engine. Then we start to run tests and campaigns and, and listen and to get feedback. Cause you know, what you think, you know, upfront often changes during testing. You start to, to adapt and evolve and, and then we do this process about every six months because the market changes on you every six months.

Aaron Hassen 
So, you know, I know I’ve said a lot there but in a nutshell, you know, that’s how we that’s how we do it

MKJ 
Yeah, that’s wonderful. That’s fantastic. Because what you said, I mean, we brought in a dating analogy. You brought in a dating analogy. And if you think about that, I haven’t never dated. I’m just, well, I think I had one date or two dates when I was in high school. But I’ve been married to my husband since I was 19 and 19 and a half and been with him since I was 16. So I’ve never dated. I’m not speaking from experience here, okay, except for the fact that I’ve raised two sons and they are dating because, what you said, I mean, we’ve gone into dating and…

If you think about that, I have never dated. I’ve been married to my husband with him. I’m not experience here. Okay. Except for the fact that I raised sons and they are dating because thank goodness they did not as long as I did thank goodness they did not start as young as I did. But when you bring that analogy in and you think about the best way to put yourself forward in this sense to a customer, a potential customer or consumer, is to know yourself.

You can’t go attract other people and think you’re just going to sell yourself to them. You have to work on yourself. You have to know who you are. You have to have a core that’s strong. You have to know what you stand for and what you stand against. Otherwise, you’re going to attract the wrong person. So it’s the same in business. What you talked about with knowing yourself and go back to the DNA and the cat and why you did this to begin with. Many times we lose sight of that because we get so caught up in those other things. We have to record things. I love what you said about that. I love what you said about positioning. I absolutely love everything you said about putting together that framework. Now in terms of tools, because I know there are lots of them and many, many more coming on the scene every day and many drifting off every day, AI is huge lots of MarCom types of products and tools. How do you evaluate tools based on what you uncover in that positioning and that process?

Aaron Hassen 
Yeah, the tools change depend on the challenge. And so you gotta, you know, once you can understand your customer and understand who you are and that means so much more than the tools. The tools are just a function of then how you actually, you know, go to market and, you know, get communications in front of customers. And you have to use tools to do that. And the tools and the channels that you choose,

are different based on the challenge that’s in front of you and who your market is. So, I talked earlier about, I’ve served different markets from hospitality to retail to automotive and all that, and the tools were different. The channels to the customer were very, very different. And so, I like to think of tools. It’s that next piece after you’ve developed the positioning, the messaging.

and then you’re building the systems and that lead engine, that opportunity engine. Now you need the tools that are going to help you actually go to market, like I said. So, you know, I often look at capabilities. Here’s what I need to do. What can this tool do? And how do I validate that? So, you know, now I’m a customer all of a sudden and evaluating tools out there and using word of mouth to figure out the truth.

and whether or not that’s going to work for me in particular, because I can go to G2 and check out the reviews and sometimes maybe some of those are gamed. We’re paying people to put reviews out there that are positive. But what I really will do is talk to my own counterparts and say, tell me more about that tool. And even though it may have worked for them and their specific use does not mean it’ll work for me and my use, it may not be the best tool for me.

But yeah, we go to research and we try to figure out what is going to be the best tool. And there are good tools based on the phase of company that you are. Like small businesses shouldn’t necessarily be using Salesforce, for instance. I mean, come on, the amount of capital and maintenance and things it takes to keep the hygiene of Salesforce up to date.

Aaron Hassen
to set it up and configure it. It’s become a very bloated and complex tool. I know a lot of people that are moving off of it, in fact. HubSpot has expanded their tool to act more like Salesforce, to pick up the pieces and do things on the sales side. They’ve got the sales hub. They’ve got all kinds of hubs now, but they’re all trying to be platforms that we use.

across, rather than having individual tools, they want us to use them as an omni -tool. I just need to value what’s best. For instance, we started working with a telecom company. They do both texting, phone, video, communications for customers. We started looking at, well, what phase are they?

in the, you know, how sophisticated a tool do we really need right now. And so, you know, rather than going with something like a Salesforce or a HubSpot, which are very, which, which I use for my other clients, for this particular client, we said, you know what, Brevo is an outstanding tool. And, you know, it can do all the things we need at this stage at the cost that we, that’s, that’s really good. And that’s, you know, economical. And so you tend to analyze the tools based on.

you know, the need and then the stage of the company and the budget and all of that. Because again, I’m marketing like an owner. I want to be a good steward of my resources. And so I want to spend their money like it’s my own.

MKJ
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. And then it’s so I love that process. You start with positioning, you go to messaging, then you go to the actual implementation strategy. And how are you going to create those opportunities or leads, however the company is looking at it. And it is more opportunities now with word of mouth and, and those kinds of things, rather than just capturing leads and putting them into a process. So I love all of that. And then definitely the tools are the last step. When I had my agency,

Aaron Hassen 
It is.

MKJ 
and I was building chatbots, it was, there were a few clients that were actually partners like that, where, because I didn’t just build chatbots, I actually developed their messaging and their strategy for how to market their products through this, through communication. And there were a few clients that were partners like that. Majority of them just wanted the tool to be implemented. They just wanted me to get enough leads in there so that they got their webinar filled so that they could sell. Which is a

is a purpose for, you know, it’s business, you got to make money. But that’s not what I liked. That’s not a good use of my time. So to be able to take that first step, because that’s all you’re really talking about, instead of me having an agency, it’s now a consultancy, so that not only can you strategize about what to do the positioning, messaging and the actual opportunity creation, but also you can implement

Aaron Hassen 
So.

MKJ 
that. And that’s what you’re doing.

Aaron Hassen
Yeah, we do. And there’s a difference. And I think what you’re alluding to opportunities versus leads, I would just want to touch on that real quick because if you’re marketing like an owner, owners care about customer lifetime value. We care about not only, you know, obtaining the customer, but keeping that customer and, and how, and having them expand over time. So when you come to marketing with that view that I’m looking for my best customer,

not just anyone. I want a customer that’s going to, that we can sell at a lower cost, right? Like I want to bring in the best customer that’s not only going to stay a while, but that costs my business less to actually put on the platform, but also maintain. And so we have to think about it from all aspects. You know, it’s, there can be customers that you go after, but they just require a lot of your time, energy, effort.

resources. And while on the front end, you know, if you’re just counting numbers from a quantity standpoint, they all seem to look the same, not to a founder, not to an investor, not to the CFO. You know, there are differences between customers and that is, you know, we have to think of profit margin, we have to think of expenses and lots of other things in terms of, you know, how do you

Like I said, how do you take care of that customer? And then is that how long is that customer going to stay? Like, you know, we’re going to invest X amount into them just to onboard them and to get them on. But then, you know, how long will they stay with us? Will they, will they tell other people about us? So, you know, from the front end, you want to look for the best customer that’s going to come in at the lowest cost and, and pay the most because they have the most value. They value your product in such a way.

that it really meets their needs. I mean, you’re looking for that sweet spot and in that ideal customer. And so, you know, that’s what we try and focus on and build from there. And I think that solves a lot of later issues where companies start to the product team as an issue, the customer success team. There’s all these downstream issues from marketers just trying to add logos in terms of quantity and salespeople just trying to get a commission.

Aaron Hassen (01:00:21.074)
no matter what type of customer they bring in the door and hand over to client success. All of that impacts the business. And so we have to care about that on the front end as well and do right by our team members, do right by our business, do right by the customer. So we’re bringing in the right type of customer that we can help. And that’s going to be satisfied and happy over the long term.

MKJ 
Yeah, there’s a new term, I agree 100%. There’s a new term that I heard the other day that kind of combines these, these ideas and it, it’s customer community. So basically, we’re talking about is community development is finding people who are super consumers who are part of our community who align very well. And we don’t have to convince them. We don’t have to try and persuade them. They get it. And those are the ones you’re talking about that have that lower cost to acquire. And

Aaron Hassen 
So please enjoy.

MKJ 
to sell to and to show that we have the value because they see it. They have the value, they trust. Once we get those people and they group together in a community, then they basically sell for us and there’s where our word of mouth comes from.

Aaron Hassen 
It goes.

MKJ 
So it all comes right through to that. So what last piece of advice would you give the mischief makers listening to help them align with their true purpose in marketing and help us bring our profession back up to the trust that we used to enjoy?

Aaron Hassen
That’s right.

Aaron Hassen 
Yeah, I think this is a great time to be a marketer, honestly. I really do. Despite the headwinds and the challenges where maybe the CEOs and leadership has started to lose trust in their marketing leader, we see that in the statistics. I think it’s really a moment that we can shine in that the consumer really just wants an authentic relationship with us, with the brand.

And so there’s an opportunity there. There’s an opportunity to market in a human way. And we can all feel good about that. We can do to others and treat them the way we want to be treated. And I think there’s an integrity. And so you can feel good about how you do your job every day. And the change you’re able to enact in the market, how you’re able to help customers find what they’re looking for.

You know, I think there’s just a lot of pride that comes with that. And if you view marketing that way, you’ll start with quality from the front side and from the very beginning. And that will lead you to taking the right action. And sometimes it means making a difficult decision and doing things that are harder or have more of a long -term benefit versus a short -term benefit. But in the end, you know, those really will be much more rewarding to you and to the business.