Message Clarity Matters: Bruce Ashford on the Communication Bottleneck Killing Growth

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What I saw in myself, I mean, I knew about my own frailty as a person and what character flaws that I had, but when I abused alcohol at the level that I did, it took on, I mean, it wasn't for a long period of time, but, and then I just saw the way that I fell apart as a person. It gave me a bit more of a tendency to, you know, when I see somebody else not doing well in a given situation, to wonder what it is that may be going on behind the scene and to have a little bit of a softer edge when I approach.

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You've probably been there. You're doing genuinely important work. You know it creates real value. But when someone asks you to explain what you do or why it matters, the words don't come out the way the work deserves. And without that clarity, you can't grow. You can't fundraise, you can't hire, you can't scale. You're stuck not because of what you're doing, but because how you're communicating it. Today's guest knows this problem from the inside, both as a strategist and as someone who has had to do the hard work of seeing himself clearly before he could help anyone else see their organization clearly. Bruce Ashford spent nearly two decades in academia and nonprofit leadership as a professor, provost, and board member for national organizations. He watched capable leaders with important missions fail to communicate their value, lose donors, lose momentum, and Plateau. He also went through something personally that changed how he understood all of it. Today he runs the Ashford Agency, where he works with CEOs of nonprofits and founder-led businesses to solve two specific problems: message clarity and structural clarity. He's a certified coach in both StoryBrand's Marketing Made Simple and the Small Business Flight Plan. And he's here today to help you see your business the way you've never quite been able to see it before. Bruce, I am so thrilled you're here. Thank you for coming on Your Brand Amplified.

Anika Jackson, thank you. I'm a fan of your podcast and I'm so grateful that I get to be a guest and, uh, hopefully I can, uh, do you a solid today.

I have no doubt you will. I, I'm always get a little verklempt when people who I have on the show tell me that they're fans and they've been listening. That just really makes my heart happy. So thank you. And I also have worked in branding. Nonprofit, a lot of these same areas. I'm in academia right now, so I'm really excited to dive into your journey. And I'd love, first of all, to dig into the clarity problem. You've worked with leaders running organizations that are doing really meaningful work, and they can't explain it. What does that look like in practice? What are the symptoms that you see?

Like the, the clarity problem? So I've got two clarity lanes, message clarity and structural clarity. With message clarity, a lot of times, you know, so I work almost exclusively with CEOs of nonprofits or of founder-led businesses, and when they come to me, usually it's because they want to grow, but they're, they're not growing and they need to solve the problem. And the message clarity thing, it is— most founder-led businesses, small businesses, and most nonprofits have not yet found the right words to use to talk about themselves, to win over their customers or their donors if they're a nonprofit. They haven't found the right words. And one reasons they have a hard time doing it. I'll list two reasons. One is it's difficult to figure out your own message, you know, on your own. It's like, it's difficult to read the label of a bottle when you're inside the bottle. It's more difficult, more difficult probably to write the label on the outside of a bottle when you're inside the bottle. And so you need someone on the outside to help a little bit. And the second reason is that often people look to marketing firms to just kind of magically be able to find the right words for them. But, you know, marketing firms in the past 20 years have had— they've had to learn a lot of stuff. They have to know web building. They have to know graphic design. They have to know 6 or 8 different social media channels and have expertise in each. They have to be able to create handsome PDFs and wonderful ebooks. And they have— I mean, there's just so much that they have to do. Audio streaming, video streaming. And so often a marketing firm doesn't even have anyone on staff whose expertise is actually words. And so message clarity often is, is the problem when somebody comes to me and they're having a hard time growing. What we do is we build a clear, complete, and compelling message for them. But sometimes that's not the problem, or it's not the only problem, and there are deeper problems. And that's the structural clarity. And by structural clarity, I just mean that Any given small business or nonprofit has 6 components, the way I see it, and those 6 components need to fit well together and all be headed in the same direction. And I'll give, I'll give the 6 components for a business. I'll just start with that and later we can press in and do what the 6 are for nonprofits. But for business, they are leadership, marketing, sales, product optimization, management and productivity, Or you could call that one even overhead and operations. And then the last one is cash flow. And we've got to make sure that those 6 components, or each component is healthy and that they're all moving in the, in the same direction. And when you get clarity on that, clarity is half the battle. It's not the whole battle because then you got to have the courage to fix the things that clarity has told you need to be fixed, but it's half the battle.

I've often had clients come to me for PR or even for their podcast for coaching, and I assess their SEO and we go through. Their messaging, and so many of them don't start with the right places, and they, they think they have the message, but you're absolutely right. The way that they communicate it, the way that external partners will understand it and stakeholders may not be the way that they're thinking of it from the inside out. So, and, and this is, it's so fundamentally important, but I think a lot of people just skip over it. They get to, you know, they wanna get the business up and running.

Well, you know, I, I'll just mention quickly, I'm a messaging expert. And yet I had a very difficult time creating the message for my own firm. And so I, I had some people help me with it and I'm getting ready to actually do a complete relaunch of my website and all of my marketing collateral in the next couple of months. And I went out and found a couple of really great messaging experts to help me with my own message. And so we all need help finding exactly the right words to use to describe what we do.

Yeah, even if you are a business consultant or business coach, it's always good to have your own. And I completely agree with that. I feel like we're the— it's that, you know, cobbler who doesn't have shoes scenario where we're so busy working on other people's brands that we forget to look internally, but we also don't have that outside expert coming in to help us. So you mentioned two things, right? You mentioned the communication clarity and you mentioned the structural. Capacity. Do you think that in terms of the clarity and messaging, is it a confidence problem that people are just afraid to step forward and say, and really present themselves in the best light? Is it just their initial strategy? Is it something else entirely?

Yeah, good question. I mean, I could talk forever and, you know, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a warehouse of words and I'm gonna try to, I'll just try to be concise here 'cause you've really teed me up. So, one of the— I'll mention 2 or 3 different problems here. One is that when we're messaging, there are 3 different stages in a messaging journey, as I see it, when we're messaging customers or donors or program participants, like whoever we're messaging. There's a curiosity stage, there's the enlightenment stage, and there's the commitment stage. And each of those is a little bit different. The curiosity, we have to pique their curiosity. We have to get them to stop when they're at our website or whatever and think, oh, wait a minute. This is me. I want to pay attention to this. What these people are telling me is going to help me survive or thrive, right? And so that's curiosity. And then there's the enlightenment stage, and that's where we've already piqued their curiosity, and we do that in a certain way. And now what we have to do is enlighten them as to what all we have to offer. And then the last stage is commitment, and each of those carries its own challenges. The second thing that I would mention is another really big problem is that Many, maybe even most nonprofits or businesses haven't yet discovered that by far the most effective way to communicate with a customer or a donor is by means of story. And the most important story is the customer's story or the donor's story. So it's gotta be a story in which the customer is the hero or the donor is the hero, that when they hear the words that we say about ourselves, they see their own life story in those words. And if our websites and our email campaigns and our social media can do that, we win. And so that's a second problem. And then again, I'll come back to this. I think the third problem is that marketing has become so complex and so complicated over the past 20 to 30 years. There are so many different areas of expertise that we, I mean, we have to figure out SEO and now AEO., and we have to figure out the graphic design part of building a website, but also the UX. And we have to figure out, I don't know how many social media channels now, and we have to do video and we have to, and words get lost in the shuffle. Yes. But words are at the heart of marketing. I mean, first impressions are visual, but commitments to act are message-based. And so the, the words really, really matter. And that's what I help people with. I help them with the words. In fact, my— when people used to ask me what I do, one of the ways I answer, if I'm focusing in on message clarity, is I say, look, like, oh, so you're a consultant, what does that do? You know, because you tell people you're a consultant and their eyes glaze over, you know, you couldn't have given a more boring answer. But so when they ask me what I do, I just say, look, you know how people out there who are telling bad stories in the world tend to hog the microphone? And get all the attention. Well, I help the good guys steal the mic, move to center stage, and tell a better story.

Ooh.

A story that drives people to good actions in the world. And that's what we do with words. Words matter.

That's such a great reframing. And you see so many brands get it wrong still on social media, on their websites, where they're talking about all of the different features, but they're not talking and framing it as benefits. They're not bringing in those stories of issues that we have as consumers that would want you know, us to then click on the link and become a customer. So, I wanna get into your story because you did talk about it took you a while to find out what you wanted to share. You just did it very eloquently. You've also had some rebranding yourself over time from being that academic to moving into other businesses. So, if you wanna share a little bit about that, I would love to hear that now.

Yeah, you know, I'll give fair warning. The story is not necessarily a pretty one, or, or at least not the entire Not the whole story. I think it has a prettier ending, but yeah, so the first 19 years of my career, I was a professor. I taught at the undergrad level intellectual history, philosophy, a little bit of Christian theology, and then I taught some courses at the grad level as well. Like that career, I was almost immediately put into administration, so I ended up being dean and provost there. And during a life crisis, during COVID a pretty significant crisis, I began to abuse alcohol. And over a period of a little bit less than 2 years, it got worse and worse, and I ended up losing a ton. And, you know, I lost my career. I lost a lot of the financial security that I had gained over the years. I lost some people who are in my life. I lost my dignity. I think when you abuse a substance, whether it's alcohol or something else, one of the common experiences we have is we lose some dignity. And a sense of self-worth because it can just, it kind of, you know, my experiences with the alcohol, the dependence on it, I wanted it to dull my emotions out, right? Negative emotions, but it also dulled me out spiritually. It dulled me out mentally. It limited the range of emotions that I had, you know, to just a few: resentment, fear, depression.

Yikes. All the negative ones.

Bad stuff. And so In the aftermath of that, you know, I had two things that helped me. One was I did, I went off for intensive PTSD therapy, uh, six weeks intensive there that reconnected left brain and right brain to help with some couple of significant trauma experiences in life. One when I was in my early 20s, and then the other was the crisis that happened during COVID But then the second thing is I started working with a 12-step program. And what the 12-step program does is says, look, something like this, it says, look, You have, for however long, and for me it was a little, you know, for a couple of years, had alcohol at the dead center of your life. It has staked out the high ground of your heart and your mind. And you can't just remove something that's staked out the high ground and taken the center of your life. You can't just remove it and keep on trucking, because what's going to happen is it's going to come right back and fill that void again. You've got to fill it with something better. And so what they do is they take you on this journey of learning to trust God, clean house, and serve others. It's not a religious program, this 12-step one isn't. It's more spiritual in nature. And part of the clean house part of it is that we have to undertake a rigorous moral and spiritual and mental and emotional inventory where we go in and take a very deep, kind of hopefully penetrating, very honest look at what are the character flaws that I've got, personality quirks, things that have happened in the past, all the stuff I've accumulated. What are the things that are going on inside of me that are sabotaging me, causing me to self-sabotage? And so you get clarity on that, and clarity is half of the battle. In order to have clarity though, you gotta have someone guiding you through it. You don't usually get complete clarity on your own. You need to have someone working with you, someone from the outside that you're saying these things to, and they're helping you process it. Once you get clarity on it, then you can get to work on it., right? And you can make progress. And it was that part of my life story when I was coming out of this career that I lost, the only career I'd ever trained for, purposefully trained for, and I had to figure out another career. I knew that I had done lots of communication type stuff. I had been an opinion writer while I was a professor. I'd written books, you know, I'd done a lot of writing. I liked words. And then I had been an administrator, so I understood the structure of a larger organization, $40 million organization, how to run it, stuff like that. But what my life story— I had an aha moment in the early stages of my recovery that in the same way that I had to do a rigorous and honest inventory of myself on the individual level, if I wanted to grow, it was that same thing that mission-driven nonprofits and businesses need to undertake. They've gotta do a rigorous inventory, a really honest evaluation of every component of the organization. Or if it's just messaging, rigorous inventory of their messaging and the words they use and how they're doing it. And if you can get clarity on that, then you can move forward and you can definitely grow. So that's a little bit of my story. I mean, there's more layers to the onion, but—

Yeah, I appreciate— —we'll do for now. I appreciate you sharing that because I think a lot of people go through some event that happens, whether it's alcoholism, whether it's losing a big job that was— I mean, you kind of went through multiple, multiple big events at the same time. But I think often people come on the show and they talk about that inflection point, that moment where they said, ooh, I cannot do this anymore. I have to find something better, find something different, find some purpose and meaning in my life. And you had that, but obviously went through some things. So coming out the other side, You have a story to share. You understand how to use this framing, not just for yourself, but I mean, I, I do the same thing. I think that I like to look at people's personal brands, which also could, you know, you could talk about ikigai, you could talk about purpose, you could talk about a lot of different things, but it's the same process that I use for businesses. Because if you know yourself really well inside and out as an entrepreneur, as a business owner, as someone who's even looking for another job, with somebody else, you're going to understand what your limits are. You're going to, you know, you know your values, you know what to say yes to, what to say no to. And I, I do talk about this probably every few episodes, but it's something that I'm really passionate about. And, and that's one of the reasons why I was really excited to talk to you about strategies, messaging, communication, and your story with that. So then how did you find and or figure out that StoryBrand was one of the avenues that you wanted to use for this line of work?

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So, I mean, when I first started recovering from alcohol, one of the ways that I coped with it is by chain smoking. Oh, okay. And I would sit on the front porch of my house and I live in a pretty nice neighborhood and I can't imagine what the neighbors thought. What kind of, I just sit out there on my porch, chain smoking in the evening, trying to read, trying to find something to help me recover from the nightmare that I was going through. And so I was reading, I had bought several different books on brand messaging and on messaging and They were okay. I learned something from all of them, but then I got Donald Miller's book, StoryBrand, and I was like, this is where it's at. This is an incredible book. Because when I taught at the undergrad level, one of the courses I taught courses, and when I said intellectual history and history of philosophy, I also taught a course on cinema where we would watch movies. And then I taught courses on literature, but from an angle of a philosopher. So we would look at philosophical themes in the literature or the movies. And so, what Donald Miller does that I love and fits with the way I view things is he says, look, if you want to do effective messaging, effective messaging, the most effective messaging takes place in the form of a story. And if you want to look at how to tell a good story, look at Hollywood screenwriters and the great literary figures. And if you do that, now there's 9 or 10 things that happen in every great story, and he's shelved it down to about 7 because that's all we need to know for marketing. So, I'll just mention those 7. But here are the 7 things that happen, 7 of the 9 or 10 things that happen in every great story that's ever sold tickets on Hollywood or through a publishing house. You have a main character or a hero. We call them the hero usually, but don't think superhero because the genuine main character of a movie or hero of a movie is actually a somewhat weak character. They're definitely not a superhero. They have a— and we'll talk about that in a second— and they want something. And so if you don't have a main character of the story, and if that character doesn't want something pretty badly, you don't have a story. The second thing that happens, and this happens 5, 6 minutes, maybe 8 minutes into a movie and 10 to 20 pages into a book, is that the hero faces a problem of some sort, some sort of an obstacle. And that obstacle manifests in 3 ways, okay? Something that's keeping them from getting what they want. There's the external problem. That's what they would state. Let's just say it's a guy who wants to win the hand of a girl. That's a tried and true story pattern. All right, and so the problem that, you know, the, what he wants really badly is he wants to win the hand of this girl, Fifi, whatever her name is. And the problem is that she has a boyfriend whose name is Frank, and she appears to love him very much. And so his external problem is, what am I going to do with Frank? How can I get her attention? And but he also has an internal problem, is that, that's how the problem makes him feel. And so it might make him feel sad, it might make him feel unsure of himself, frustrated, I don't know, might make him feel energized because he loves the thrill of the— I don't know. And And then at the, at the bottom of it, there usually in any stories, there's a justice element to the problem. And the justice element, it's going to sound lame since I've come up with kind of a lame storyline, but the justice element would be something like, every man deserves a shot at winning the hand of the woman who he's a perfect match for, and her boyfriend shouldn't get in the way. When we experience a problem, there's usually a justice element to it. So there's a main character. Has a problem and meets a guide. Now, in a movie or in a piece of literature, the guide usually only makes a very brief appearance, and the guide always exhibits two things: empathy and credibility. Empathy is, I see you and I understand what you're going through, I've been through it, or I understand it somehow. And then number two, and I can help you, I know how you can solve your problem because I've solved it before, or, or because of some other reason I can solve it. And That's the third thing, the guide. And the guide is actually the strongest character in the movie. I'm gonna stop here for a minute and say that a brand, the hero of their brand messaging should be the customer who faces some kind of a problem. And that the brand is the guide. And the brand always gives a simple plan. That's the fourth component, some kind of very simple plan, because if you confuse people with how to get your product or your service, they're gone. They're outta there. The brain is always trying to conserve calories. The brain does not like being confused. They will go to somebody else who can communicate it better. So the brand gives us a simple— the guide gives a simple plan and calls the hero to action. There's always a call to action. The call to action needs to be simple and clear. I can't tell you how many businesses have already missed at least 2 or 3 of these components. Right. Yeah, absolutely. They haven't foregrounded the internal emotional part of the problem. They haven't given a clear enough call to action. Et cetera. The sixth part of the problem is that he calls— the guide calls the hero to action so that the hero avoids certain failures or negative consequences. And the seventh is so that the hero achieves certain successes or positive things. And those are the elements of a good story. Those are also the elements of good marketing.

As you were saying that, I'm thinking of It's a Wonderful Life. It's such a great narrative that has every single one of those components, or a lot of the Pixar movies have those same agitations. When it comes to brands, are there brands that you think do it really well?

Yeah, I mean, some of the really big brands do it well. I mean, I think Apple has done it well, Nike has done it well in the past. I mean, if I'm looking at— I mean, there's a ton of them now that are doing it well because of StoryBrand. And the examples that I You know, a lot of the examples I have in mind of brands that are doing it well are ones that I've worked with.

I'd love to hear that because I know you work with a lot of nonprofits. Can you share an example of you taking somebody through that process?

And yeah, I mean, I was one of the recent ones that I worked with. I'll give a business example and a nonprofit. I just worked with a business from Malaysia that's called LearnLocal Malaysia. And they wanted to know, and then what they do is they teach Malaysian language and culture to expats. Americans and Europeans, right? And so, and their, their founder is a guy, his name is Adam Potter, who has a PhD in business. I mean, he is a really smart guy, a very good businessman. But when we went through my messaging product that I offer, my entry-level product, it's called the Million Dollar Message. And what we do is we do an intensive, it lasts 4 to 8 hours where we just carve out, we do the hard work to write your brand message and maybe the messaging for one or two products. And when I was doing that intensive with him, you could just see the lights coming on. And it was transformative because they had a really incredible business over there in Malaysia. And yet they hadn't found the right words to talk about themselves. And one of the neat things about that is as soon as we got finished doing this package, we also designed the website for him. And I immediately, I got a Google review and a LinkedIn review in like 2.5 seconds.

Oh my gosh.

And so this works not just in the United States in one culture, it works, it's transcultural. And it works not just with businesses but also with nonprofits. Yeah, I'll give you another example. There is a nonpartisan, nonpolitical nonprofit called Capital Commission that came to me, and they're faith-based. And unlike a lot of the faith-based organizations who say they're nonprofit— I meant nonpartisan— but really, honestly, they're working the angle for the right or the left, one or the other. They're pushing policy issues. This group doesn't do any of that. They provide spiritual guidance, counsel, confidential support. I'm losing my words right now. And they had just had a really hard time getting traction. When we went to their website, in their initial website, they were trying to message 3 different audiences on their homepage. And most nonprofits do. They were trying to message their legislators that they wanted to serve and their donors. And also their larger religious groups, churches and mosques and, you know, or whoever. And so what we had to do is with each page, and we have to do this for nonprofits, you want each page to focus on one audience because nonprofits all have at least two audiences. They have at least, they have their program participants and then they have their donors, and that's not the same audience and two different heroes. And so I went through with Capital Commission and we decided that on their homepage we were going to make the hero the donor, and that we would have a separate page for the legislators. And so it, but, and it works for any kind of a nonprofit. It works for Clarity Water. They do a very, I don't know if you've heard of Clarity Water, they do a StoryBrand type messaging for, for their website. So it works not only for people who are providing spiritual counsel to legislators, but for people who are providing clean water to those who don't have it. So there's a couple examples.

Those are great examples. I want to ask about organizations communicating below their actual value. What does that mean to you? And what are some of the reasons that they don't communicate their entire value and that they, how can they shift?

Very good question. I mean, my experience has been that most businesses and nonprofits do communicate far below their value. And I think one of the, and it'll come back to something you mentioned 10 or 15 minutes ago in this podcast. We lower our value in the mind of customers and whoever our ideal audience is. We lower our value in their mind when we don't tap into the emotions that they feel. Whatever emotions they feel, whatever problem that they experience and the emotions that it causes as it relates to my business or my nonprofit, often we never tap into those emotions in the, in the, the website messaging. So, you can read an entire homepage and you'll never really see the customer's problem addressed and how it makes them feel. And that's a huge swing and a miss. You'll also, many or most organizations will try to message a couple of different type of people at the same time on the same page. That's confusing. That causes us to lose. Often, organizations never have a, or they rarely ever communicate the negative consequences that will happen if a person doesn't buy and the positive consequences that will happen if they do. Oh, and what you had mentioned was businesses constantly talk about features. Oh, right. Right? Well, people don't usually buy features. I mean, maybe. Maybe somebody's like, I need a piece of wood that's 12 feet long instead of 6. And so they go and simple stuff, maybe they do. They're not just buying features. They're buying life transformation. They want to feel better. They want to have certain successes. They want to avoid certain negative things. And if we don't learn how to communicate that way, we sell ourselves short and we punch far below our weight class. And these things are a pretty easy fix. That's why I love doing this Million Dollar Message intensive, because you go in, in a relatively quickly time, you get the messaging fixed, and people have so much confidence. You talked about confidence a moment ago. When they finally have found the words that genuinely, legitimately describe the transformation that they're product or their mission, their program provides. They just go into it with a lot of confidence, whether they're communicating digitally or in person, on podcast or in a TED Talk or, you know, whatever venue they're in.

Hmm, nice. Now let's talk about the structural side of things a little bit. What are some of the differences between organizations that grow and ones that get stuck? I think that you have said before that they come down, it really comes down to one main thing. So what is that and how do we need to reframe?

Yeah, you know, so the analogy that I use comes from— I'm certified in a, in a business certification called Small Business Flight Plan. I've also developed a nonprofit flight plan, and that's appropriate to nonprofits. Nonprofit is not the same thing as a business, and there are some significant differences. But what causes a business not to grow usually is that they're— they have Often when a business or nonprofit has experienced first-level growth, they are still doing the same things harder and with more energy and more people trying to achieve second-level growth. But second-level growth doesn't come from doing the exact same things as first-level growth. And so what you have to do is usually, for most, in my experience with my clients, is that we have to go in and do an analysis of the 6 components of the business. Or the nonprofit and figure out what's working for this level of growth that we're in right now and what's not. And how do we get each of these components working and all moving together in the same direction? So the analogy is with a plane, with an airplane, right? My certification is called Small Business Flight Plan, right? And the one that I've developed for nonprofits is Nonprofit Flight Plan. So if you got a plane, if you've got a really good pilot in the cockpit who knows exactly what he's doing and all the cockpit instruments is working, but there's no wings on the plane, Are you going to fly? Yeah, absolutely not. Well, what if the wings are working and the pilot's there and the cockpit's great, but the engines aren't working? Well, plane's still not going to fly. What if the engines work and yet you have no fuel? Well, you're in pretty tough shape if there's no fuel. What if there is fuel and yet there are structural problems with the body of the plane, that the body of the plane is about to crack and that it can't sustain the weight? Or what if there's too much cargo in the plane? I mean, that happens all the time. They have to offload cargo because the cargo's too heavy and the plane can't take off. This is the exact same thing with a business or a nonprofit. We've got to become aware of— we have to do an honest, rigorous and honest inventory of the leadership, the marketing, the sales, our products that we're offering. Have we optimized them? Are there some we need to get rid of? Are there new ones we need to start? Do we need to take ones that are working and make them even better? Management and productivity, like You know, how do we get all of our staff together on the same page? And what are the meetings that we need to have and how can we make them not too long, but really, really good so that everybody's pulling together in the same direction? And I think, have I mentioned sales? Leadership, marketing, sales, product optimization, management and productivity, and then cash flow. With nonprofits, the way I would put it would be something like this: leadership and governance. Okay, because you've got a board that's usually significantly involved when it comes to nonprofits. And then marketing is good enough language, but instead of sales, we could talk about engagement because you have to engage with donors. That's fundraising. You have to also have to engage with program participants, whoever's benefiting from what your nonprofit is doing. And then sometimes you also have to engage with volunteers. And so you're actually doing sales, so to speak. You're connecting with multiple different audiences. And then instead of product optimization, you could talk about programs and impact. So how do we optimize the program? So if you're serving clean drinking water, are there ways that you can do it more efficiently so that you can serve more people? Or management and productivity is a really important one because whatever got you to first-level growth when it comes to management of people is probably not gonna get you to second-level growth, right? Because when you go from a staff that has 5 or 6 to a staff that has 30 or 40, A lot can get— the ball can get dropped very, very quickly. There's got to be new ways of marshaling all these people toward the same vision. They're on the same mission toward the same destination, all pulling together. And then instead of cash flow, we just talk about financial health with a nonprofit. It seems tacky to talk about cash flow when you're a nonprofit, you know.

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You know, I think in both cases, particularly for— I've seen this a lot in nonprofits. That are maybe smaller or very homegrown, a lot of times, and, and from my own experience in nonprofits and in the business world, the founder can be the bottleneck, right? We are standing in the way of everything else flowing efficiently, of many of things. Sometimes we're trying to leap to step 2 of the business, but vers— where we haven't even structurally set up the first steps and the, and the base solidly. Do you see that a lot with some of the organizations that you work with?

Yes, and thank you for prompting me on that. And I think it especially happens when you're moving from first-level growth to second-level growth, that the CEO has carried so much on her shoulders or his shoulders for so long, and there never seems to be time to take to kind of upload that or transfer that to the right people. And there never seems to be time to put systems and processes in place so that the whole organization isn't on your shoulders and in your head. And it does bottleneck, and it means that the organization usually cannot grow. It cannot grow until the CEO is ready. And I've worked with a number of organizations that have dealt with this, and it's absolutely liberating and transformative to the CEO. It doesn't feel that way at first because it takes some time to do it when he or she can then put the right systems and processes in place. One of my favorite quotes is by James Clear, his book Atomic Habits. Right? Such a great book. And his— his— probably his most famous quote in there is, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Most nonprofit CEOs do not get into nonprofit work because they love systems and processes. Oh, I love business management. This is— I'm going to go into nonprofit work so I can do business management. No, they don't like it at all. They like the mission. But the problem is that no matter how high your aspirations and goals are, you probably are not going to grow, or at least not going to grow much, unless you put the right systems and process processes in place. Systems and processes are absolutely liberating for a nonprofit. And for a business as well. Yeah. Or business. Yeah. Business as well. 100%. Yeah.

Because I know going into my PR firm, I was an accidental founder. I was just doing PR for a few clients and I kept getting more. And then I, all of a sudden I had a company and that, so I had to backtrack and go, ooh, I don't have, I wasn't expecting this. I didn't set up the systems and processes from the beginning. And now that's something I preach to everybody is it doesn't matter how passionate you are about it, make sure you set these up because you need to have a roadmap to follow and it might change, right? I'm sure you've seen this with some of your clients too. We sometimes have to pivot and go, oh, that isn't really what the market wants and needs and it's not what I'm best at. So let me go over here to something else that I'm being asked to do. You also mentioned another thing about leadership, right? And so I wanted to ask, how did getting sober reshape how you think about leadership, not just for you personally, but also from leaders that you work with? Was there a reframing in your mind?

I've never been asked that question. You threw a fastball. I'm gonna try to hit it. Yeah. So, you know, just off the top of my head, one thing that I had to do, so coming out of alcohol abuse and also the PTSD stuff that they did, I'd had a lot of adrenaline and cortisol in my brain. Things had to be very simple for me to recover. I had to simplify. I just had to have a few simple goals and go really hard after those goals. One of those goals was no alcohol. And then there were some other goals on the personal level, and I had to make it really simple. And the analogy with businesses is I encourage both businesses and nonprofits to take all the different goals that they've got— they've usually got a dozen— and pick 3 of them. Just 3. 3 economic objectives, critical objectives. They either have to be directly economic in nature or indirectly economic in nature. Narrow down to 3 so that you can prioritize. And then those 3 have to be carried down through marketing, sales, products, management, et cetera, so that those 3 things are definitely going to happen. That's one thing on leadership. I'd say another thing on leadership when it comes to how we treat people, what I saw in myself, I mean, I knew about my own frailty as a person and what character flaws that I had. But when I abused alcohol at the level that I did, it took on, I mean, it wasn't for a long period of time, but, and then I just saw the way that I fell apart as a person. It gave me a bit more of a tendency to, you know, when I see somebody else not doing well in a given situation, to wonder what it is that may be going on behind the scene and to have a little bit of a softer edge when I approach. That would be another thing. And then I guess, you know, I'm gonna get on a little bully pulpit for a minute. Go for it. Yeah, I think vision statements and mission statements are really important. Okay? And I'm gonna relate that to my recovery. So I think most businesses, I don't have any scientific data on this, I'm just gonna make the claim, declarative authority. Most businesses and nonprofits have really, really suboptimal and sometimes horrible vision statements and mission statements. And often when they have a vision statement and mission statement, They're not really, they're just two different mission statements. And the vision statement is also called a mission statement. And it's just a tangled spaghetti of 40 to 50 words. Sometimes there's technical words thrown in, or there's been a big debate among the board and everyone wants to get their favorite words and their concepts in. Anyway, they're just not very effective at all. Well, a vision statement is supposed to, in 25 words or 30 words or less at the most, give a picture of the destination toward which our nonprofit or business is marching. A picture of the mountain that we're getting ready to scale that inspires people and knows where we're headed. And the mission statement is supposed to tell the path that we're going to take to get there. This is exactly how we're going to do it. When I was recovering, I had to have— I don't know that I wrote it down in terms of a vision statement and mission statement. I don't think I used those two words, but I had to outline, and I did. I had— I bought a felt board that I put on the wall of my bedroom, and I made a life plan, a vision. I had a 10-year and a 30-year vision for where I wanted to be and where I wanted to go, whatever the goal, the where I wanted to be. And then I wrote basically— I didn't call it a mission statement, I don't think— but how was I going to get there? I made a plan. And I think businesses and nonprofits need to do that, need to do it badly. It's an incredible motivational tool for employees. It needs to be 25 words or less. It needs to be very memorable. It needs a vision statement, needs to give the destination, the mission statement, how we're gonna get there. So it's a motivational tool internally. It is also a motivational tool externally with your marketing. It's incredibly— if you have a really good vision statement and mission statement, it's a powerful marketing tool. And the reason yours hasn't been a powerful marketing tool yet, if you're out there listening, is probably just because it hasn't been optimized yet. That's another thing we can help you with, with The Million Dollar Message.

And that's such a good point because I often see people making statements that are very long and mixing up the two, as you said, even in the world right now, I'm working with a lot of people in the podcasting world and even in that world, people just con— and I'm like, you're not going to be able to get your message out and reach the right audience for your show and help them the way that you say that you wanna help them if you don't have this. I mean, it's any business. Business, nonprofit, any line of work needs this clarity. Yeah.

I mean, it's worse in the academic world, in my opinion. There's nothing like a professor, a bunch of professors to give a truly nuanced complexification of something, end up with 150-word vision statement because everyone had to, you know, argue their own point into it. Yeah, you just simplify, make it powerful.

Yeah. AI, of course, has to be part of what we discuss. Talk about AI and small business marketing. Is AI solving a clarity problem? Is it just creating new ways to scale an unclear message? What are your thoughts?

Yeah, for me, the thing that I like to talk about the most on a marketing type podcast when we're talking about artificial engines is the fact that we now have to— businesses and nonprofits have to win over the humans who are either going to be our customer for a business or our donors or program participants for a nonprofit. We also have to win over the machines. Yeah, but the good news is the the way you went over the machines is somewhat similar to the way you went over the humans. It's not completely the same, but there's a lot of really heavy overlap. So artificial engine optimization is a very, very important territory, and it builds on SEO and is, is connected with it in many ways. But it's so important, and in my experience, most nonprofits and businesses are paying no attention to AEO. So how do we optimize for artificial engines? How do we get them to pay attention to us? Well, I'll get the technical stuff out of the way first. First is that we have to make sure that whoever is our web manager has the schema, the backend schema, and the way the— basically the way the website is coded, coded correctly so that the artificial engine knows exactly what it is that you're doing and likes it and can easily read it. So there's that technical kind of stuff. And then there's also, I mean, there's so many things to say here. I mean, one of the things that artificial engines like is frequently asked questions, collapsible and expandable in natural human language, where you're asking the kind of question that people would actually ask to an an artificial engine to ChatGPT or Claude, and then you answer it in a clear and concise manner. And if you do that, you got a chance that ChatGPT or Claude might quote you, right? And then you also— ChatGPT and Claude, you know, are embarrassed, as embarrassed as machines can be. They're embarrassed if they mislead people because they've been programmed to try to not mislead people. And so they're always searching Google reviews and Yelp and, you know, LinkedIn recommendations. They're They're searching for crawlable reviews that are written about you that make you credible. And they're also searching to see if you have content depth. So if you have articles that exhibit genuine depth, you know, Chat and Claw get very excited and they talk to each other and they say, hey, let's recommend this business or this nonprofit. And so there's all kinds of things that you need to think about now to win over the artificial engines. The good news is, aside from the technical part, the backend stuff, most of the other stuff is pretty intuitive. And that's another thing that we help people with, with our million-dollar message package is how to win over the machines.

And I love that you mentioned Claude and ChatGPT because it's— I've seen podcasters that I help, their podcasts rank for the right keywords on those two. But then we are now starting to see Gemini, Perplexity, other large language models and engines that maybe they don't rank for yet. So I feel like there's, like you said, there's always so many more things we need to be researching. And that's something I'm actually looking into right now is like, how do we make sure that they can perform there?

I'll tell you a business that I found has— that is my guide, speaking of which, in this area that's incredible. It's got a Marcus Sheridan, and he has been very successful in a number of businesses. One was a pool company, and he blew up. And his big thing is trust. And his, his AI— his company for when it comes to AI marketing signals is called AI Trust Signals. It's really easy. And what they do is they go in, and to your point, when they go in, you can go in and get a free evaluation of your website, and they rank it under 3 different categories. But what they do, to your point that you just made a moment ago, is they show you, you might rank at 97% for ChatGPT, 87% for Claude, 60% for Perplexity. So you're never gonna— because each engine likes its own things, they have their own personality, if you will, as much as a machine can have a personality. But what there is, there are very clear categories that if we do certain kinds of things, then on the whole, we're gonna rank better with each of those engines than we would have if we're not doing those particular things. Yeah. No, that's very helpful.

'Cause I, I think AI can be a game changer if we use it correctly. As you said, if we use it to optimize what's already being said to about our brands by actual humans, those reviews, those ratings, the things we say about ourselves. And so, it's a constant little battle. And also knowing that tools are always ever-changing, there's one thing that doesn't change, which is what is the message and do you have the right message at the right time to the right people? Yeah. So, you gave us a great quote from James Clear. Do you have anything else that you would like to share with us today? Something that has continued to help you in all parts of your journey? Quote-wise? Quote, poem, verse, motto?

Oh man, you just keep teeing me up. And I told you I'm a warehouse of words. You shouldn't give me so many good opportunities. I'll tell you one that I've always liked is Augustine of Hippo, Saint Augustine. Some people know him as a philosopher, others know him as a theologian. Anyway, he's got this quote where he says, "The truth is like a lion. You don't have to defend it. Let it loose, it will defend itself." And in the business consulting and marketing category, one of the things that I like about that is if you have a business or nonprofit that's doing good things out in the world, people who are out there telling good stories in the world, driving people to good actions in the world, providing good things for people in the world, what we have to do is find out the truth about yourself and let it loose. And so when we're finding the right words to talk about what you're doing, we're finding the truth about you. And all we have to do at that point is just let it loose.

And for those who might be watching this episode, that quote is actually appearing behind Bruce's head on the wall. So, um, excellent. Yeah.

Oh, that's right. I forgot. It's, it's actually on the wall.

I love that. I was like, yay, you really love that. And it—

Well, I've also got, now that we talk about it, Winston Churchill up there. Success, you know, is, uh, consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm. Well, I've been a pretty big failure at a couple of points in my life, so I like that one.

I like that one too. I was having a discussion about that. As entrepreneurs and founders, we don't look at failure as failure. We look at it as just a learning opportunity to make whatever we do next better. So Bruce, I really feel like this is a conversation that we need to continue having. Once you set it, don't forget it. When it comes to your business, you have to think about clarity and continuing to refine depending on who you're actually speaking to. Are you actually sharing the right message? As I said, with the right people at the right time, we need that momentum. We need that clarity. And it's not just for organizations, it's also to people. We will obviously link your website in the show notes and everything else. And I really appreciate you coming on Your Brand Amplified today and just giving us such a great reminder and, and sharing your story as well.

Yeah, thank you, Anika Jackson. This has been a joy. It's been a lot of fun, and I wanna be a repeat guest in the future. So there's your chall— there's your challenge from me.

Okay, we, that's not an issue at all. We can absolutely make that happen. And the time really flew by.

So, it did. It did. I always love that.

So, thank you to everybody who's watching this episode or listening to it on your favorite platform. Leave us a rating, review, share, subscribe. It all helps discoverability for this show and for my amazing guests.

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