Best-selling author on demand-side sales and innovation answering questions from 3 business owners. Created more than 3,500 products & services, from Patriot Missle to the fuel arrow in your car telling you which side the tank is on (Bob Moesta)

G' day and welcome to the Grow It Small Business podcast. I'm your host, Troy Truan. Each week we speak with an owner who has grown a business with five to 30 team members to something bigger. Diving into their numbers and unearthing the pain they've experienced, we explore what they did to overcome each barrier and what they would do differently from day one. Let's get into it. Welcome everyone. Today we're having a follow up chat with Bob Mester from his recent book Demand side and sales 101, which has just become an Amazon bestseller and is now available on Audible. So we had a chat a few weeks ago and I've asked two friends and business fellow business owners to come on and ask some hard questions of Bob. So I've got James Baker Here from Vericon SaaS based business here in Tasmania and Ben Crowley from Bulk Nutrients who we've had on early on in the cast. I think it was episode 10. So thanks James and Ben for coming on, helping me grill Bob here with some questions. Great. Well, who wants to kick off first? James, have you got any questions there you might want to start with maybe.

Before asking some questions? Just a couple of comments. The book is fantastic, so well done on that and I've actually been using a lot of your tools, especially with jobs to be done for a long time now and the framework you give in that with the push, pull and the anxieties and habits is just makes so much sense.

Yeah, well, the thing is, is to me that the framework itself, it just allows you to realize too many people think they buy things for one reason and it's not, it's a set of reasons. And this allows us to kind of not only see the set, but see the direction of it and the magnitude of it and the positive and negative side of it. So it's been very useful to me just to kind of like make sure the I understand the game that I'm playing in. So very useful.

And James, you've come across Bob's work first up a while ago, I think you're doing your MBA at University of Melbourne and you came across a strategize material there, is that right?

Yeah, that's right. And I've been quite involved with their stuff over the last couple of years and I saw like you've got a bit of a relationship with Strategizer, they mentioned you a bit in their tools.

Yep, that's the Alex Osselter stuff, right?

Yes, yeah, yeah.

Alex is great, but he's one of these people who has kind of taken a very fresh approach to kind of simplifying and making about thinking and tools to think. And I think of jobs as a very similar tool in the context of like really good tools and frameworks help you think and facilitate conversations. And so it's not about the pretty part of the tool, it's actually about the way that the tool forces you to interact with other people. So I love all the stuff they've been doing.

So look, Bob, one question I have.

No, please. Yeah.

So like James, I really enjoyed the book. It was great. I did the audio version of it. I was slightly disappointed to not hear your voice though.

Yeah, that's cool.

The fact that business can't be good at everything and need to show your sort of deficiency or your weakness. It made me realize that a lot of businesses do this. Well and obviously very deliberately.

Yes.

You know, it's like the big box stores that sort of, you know, you buy direct from the warehouse, you know, and obviously save money on that component. But they market that very clearly, you know, so you can see the compromise.

Yes.

How important do you think that is? And to sort of what extent do you. Obviously that's more difficult for an emerging business too because you're, you're also trying to establish your credibility at the same time.

Yeah, I don't know. I think the reality is that the customer is the one who has to make the trade offs. And so what you really want to know is to make sure that as you're marketing, you're reflecting their value system. Because if you actually put too many features on something and they don't want it, this is when people go like, you know, I need a discount because I'm not going to use half of these features. And so this is one of the bigger problems is people don't understand like you might have the features but because you talk about all of them and people go like, I only need 80% of it. They're going to want a 20% discount. So when you probe, people say like, why'd you want a discount? It's like, well, I didn't need a discount all. It's not because they felt like they needed a deal. It's like, I'm just not going to use it all. And so these are the things that when you start to listen to the demand side, we just stop when people say, oh, they would have bought if they would have had a discount. Like to me it's actually never about price. Price is a way is almost like a, it's a way in which they communicate. But, like, sometimes it's about price because they want to feel like they got a deal. Sometimes it's about price because they want to feel like they actually got the best in the world. Sometimes it's about price because they don't want everything. And so you have to dig past price. And so my thing is, the closer you can mimic your value proposition to the progress that people are trying to make, that will resonate with it. And nobody cares about the snacks on Southwest. They're not going to not fly Southwest Airlines because their snacks suck. Because they're the lowest cost airline. They're on there on time. They're literally like, they do everything else really well. And it's like nobody cares. And so this is where I think Jason Fried says it, well, is like, you just got to choose what to suck at, Right?

Yep.

And it's a very important thing where the thing is, as an organization, when you say we have to be good at everything, which typically means you're going to be good at nothing.

Yep, absolutely. Look, the reason why this conversation is really relevant to us is that just to give you a bit of background about my business, we manufactured nutritional products, but we were, we were a bit of a disruptor in the market where we came in. And there was basically, the whole industry was about frills and things people didn't need and quite expensive products. And we tried to give people a much more basic product and we sold it directly to them from where it was made. So we pitched ourselves very early on, as, you know, you're not getting any crap from us. And we don't do discounts either. Yeah, but I think that what do you suck at and what people are missing out on? You make that part of your value story, I suppose.

But here's the thing, is that I think in your business, it's like, look, I'm going to give you a basic bottle. I'm not going to give you fancy graphics. I'm not going to give you all this other stuff. Look, I'm going to give you the best part of what I'm going to give you is in the bottle. And everybody else is, no, I got to have the graphics. And it's like, if you actually say, like, there are people who are willing to be out there, like, I don't need a fancy bottle because at some point I just need, by the way, I just need to know which is which. And I need a good way to differentiate one bottle from the next. But the reality is, like, I don't need fancy graphic. And you can actually make that fit the value code you have. Because a lot of people like all the fancy graphics mean I'm paying more because you're marketing it too much.

Yep, yep.

Ben, you got something else?

Most of my questions are around the processing. And you go over this in your book very well. And so I need to listen to it again and really take some notes. But it's that diving down into the detail of how do you really understand? Like, we do a lot of survey customers, give them samples, ask them for feedback, but, you know, people don't even know what they want. So most of my curiousness is around how do you really understand that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've done 16 interviews in the last three days. So this is. I'm just coming off it. So I got a lot of examples. Well, we'll come to that. Let's let James ask a question and then. Because I could spend the rest of the time on that alone. It is an important part.

So, Bob, I wanted to dig into a bit about what you say about humility, about what we don't know as business owners. For me, a real revelation was when we were just coming up with the concept of a very con. We thought that we were solving a problem around quality control for construction contractors. And it was only after we went and actually started talking to them that we realized that the people that could make those decisions actually cared about something completely different.

What was it? Sorry, what did they care about?

Cost control, of course. And because I'm an engineer and I was on the tool, I thought that that was the problem that everyone wanted to solve.

And for context, James. Sorry, for context, you didn't, as I've done in a few of my businesses, run off and build the product based on your assumption. You actually did a lot of testing and researching and talking to customers and found the true need before you started building the product. Is that right?

Exactly. So we spent 12 months doing this before we wrote a line of code.

That is a patient engineer, my friend. That is a patient.

A rare brain.

Like, whoever you work with, you drove crazy. Like, no, no, don't build anything yet. We're still going to do some more talking to people like, whoa.

We had some very good mentors along the way.

That's good. That's good to hear. And by the way, it's so humbling to literally go like, no, no, no, they want quality because I want quality. And you literally are like, do you want quality? And they're like, no, I don't Want quality. Like, no, no, you want quality. Like, there' notion of, like, when you look. It's almost like when you. My favorite is to record your interviews and listen to them in the beginning. And you just are, like, you're appalled at, like, how biased I was about the product because I love the product. And it's like, holy crap. Like, I didn't even let him talk. Like, it's just one of those things where you just realize, like, it's just not like. So one of the suggestions I can make for everybody is, like, when you talk to your customer, I want you to record it, and then I want you to go back and listen to it and then take the time to really understand what they said and literally discount everything you said. Like, just almost strip out that voice and literally. And you'll start to hear stuff that's like, wait, what did they mean by that? And that's where all this really comes from, is I realized just how to be asked how stupid I was and how arrogant I was. And so you talk about the humility part of it is like, so this is my office. I'm right here, right? And I've got these four mentors here. And I would say number three, who's. Clay is always looking down at me, kind of got a pointing his finger at me, kind of going, like, stay humble. Just remember, you just. There's more we don't know than what we know. And it's like, I think that's an important point in all of this as we start to sell is we start to realize we might know our product, but if we don't know how it fits in people's lives, we really can't sell it.

Oh, I'd add to that that two and a half years later, it doesn't get any easier to make sure that you stay focused on the customer.

It's no.

It's a constant discipline.

I think that people love to get in a role and, you know, fall in love with your idea, and then, you know, asking questions is difficult, isn't it?

Yeah. Well, I think the hard part is to truly understand their context, right? It's. You walk in with what you think you want to hear. You hear it, and then you're like a dog to meet, where you just kind of like, oh, my gosh, they just said they love the product. What do you love about the product? And I'll literally go like, okay, pause. What I want to know is, what about that feature and how does it help them and what can they do today? Because they have that feature versus not having the feature. I don't care about the feature. And it's like one of those things where I, like, almost get a ruler and, like, smack people in the hand to get them to go, like, stop and listen to what they just said. So I have these practice interviews I'm doing now where I'm just. We'll recruit people specifically and say, like, okay, this is going to be a learning exercise, and you're just going to just please come along for the ride, and we're going to do this. And it is so fun to call it. Game on. Game off. Game off. And the person we're interviewing is like, okay, game off. I'm like, okay, what was that question? What were you thinking about? And I'll just let. And it's this coaching session you find that's just so fun. And it's not. How do I say, I'm not trying to berate them or be bad. But it's more about, like, the thing that both Clay and everybody else has kind of like, you have to expect people to be better for them to get better. And so part of this is that I try to give direct feedback. And again, I will never release any of those interviews publicly because I think I'm probably inappropriate in some cases. But it's more just like, I just know people can do better. And so it's that kind of thing that I think is where you. Like you said, you hear people talk about the customer and they're literally just still talking about their product.

So going through the. You've got the six steps here.

Yeah.

For engaging with your customers, from first thought through to ongoing use. I imagine for a lot of business owners, it will be hard to understand how to start engage with your customer when they haven't even thought about you as a possible solution to their problem.

So. Interesting. Okay, here's the thing is those six steps aren't about how you engage with the customer. It's the six steps that they go through in order to finally say, I want to buy something to help them. Right. And you can choose to engage or not engage at any point in that process, but the reality is, this is how people behave, and you have to decide whether you want to engage or not at the same time. We usually engage around active looking and deciding, but I would say the game is one in steps one and two is if you can actually help them just even learn the language of describing the problem. So they don't even know what the problem is half the time, let alone the solution, by the time they've got that all figured out, like, you've got to be so obvious as the winner that it's too late.

That reminds me of the Henry Ford quote. If I'd have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for faster horses.

And my follow up question would be, is like, well, what would you do with a faster horse? Because that's what I really want to get to is like, well, I could move things, I could take heavier things I could actually do. There's a whole bunch of other things that we want to do. And so I want to get to what is the outcome they really want, not what's the product that they want. And so as people go through this process, I see it as the opportunity for us as a company to engage with the customer. But the reality is like, they still have to go through first thought, they still have to go through passive looking, they still have to go through active looking. And so the real question is, as you as a company, how do you engage with your cut? Like, so, for example, how do you get in the way of builders? Right. Who basically are worried about cost and when do they have the first thought that they actually have a problem with cost or quality? Right.

Absolutely. And we're going through this process at the moment just trying to talk to these contractors and I'm just trying to sell them on talking to me for 20 minutes. And that's really, really tough. So something else I'd like to hear your thoughts on is how you bring together customer discovery of actually making the right products to start with and the sales process and how we can bring those together so that you're not just having your product development people in one silo and then your salespeople in another silo.

Yep. So for me, customer discovery is about studying and understanding both struggling moments that people have and things that they buy or things that they do to make progress in their life or in their company. Right. So if it's a B2B, like what caused you to buy new estimating software? What caused you to actually buy, get rid of these tools and have these new tools.

Right.

Whatever it is. Right. And so to me, in the customer discovery part, it's trying to understand what are those struggling moments. I really don't really care much about what they picked or chose. What I really want to know is why they chose what they chose, what were they hoping for when they chose those things? Because I can usually find other better, cheaper, faster ways in which to do things that everybody else can't see because they just listen to the exact voice of the customer. So the customer discovery process is about understanding how their life unfolds when they try to do something new. Right. The sales process is actually the mirror image of this. It's just flipped. Because the way that people try to make progress is then for every person I interview, there's a hundred, there's a thousand, there's a million people behind them still trying to make progress, but they don't know how. So I just take that customer discovery process and then use that as the underlying sales process or the buying process to say, like, here's how we have to sell to people. And so to me, they're not two different things, they're actually one thing. And one is about looking backwards to see how people behave. And two is then flipping it into the future and saying like, which door do you want to open because you're in which context? And so for me, to be honest, this is how I wrote this book on sales is I've done so much customer discovery that when we're done, we go develop a product. And then the salespeople would come over and kind of say, like, oh, can you help us close? And I'd be like, yeah, here's five things you need to go to help close, or here's things you need to listen for to decide which job they're in. And I helped probably for the last four or five years, all these companies with sales, and it didn't even register to me that I was helping people in sales. So somebody suggested like, you should write a sales book. I'm like, I should? You know what, let me think about that. And so Covid hit and I wrote a book. Bob.

So a question I have in terms of marketing and solving problems, why is it that so much of marketing involves not trying to solve problems that we actually have? I'll give an example. It's like Ford markets their Explorer, this SUV is climbing a frickin mountain. And it's like, sorry, like 99.9% of people are never gonna use that for that purpose. So why, why is that still effective?

Yeah, so I actually don't think it is effective. I think the fact is, is that they have metrics around it where they, they will tell you that, well, the number of people who can see it and recall it, that's brand equity. Like so. So the fact is, the crazier the commercial, the more that people can recall it. And because I measure brand equity off the recall, then it's a valuable thing. And I just think that's crap. The reality is what causes somebody to buy an Explorer is not the advertising, right? And so what happens is you find that there's too many people who actually, in marketing theory, marketing basically says that it's features and benefits that cause people to buy. And so you should always talk about the aspirational thing, the thing that they can't do that you want them to do, right? And what happens is climbing a mountain is like, yeah, I've got four kids. Like, how do I get that many people into a car? I got all these, we're going to soccer or football. There's all these other things that say, okay, your car's too small. The thing is that most marketers and the advertising that I've been involved with, the first thing we do is we actually frame the struggling moment. We literally make sure that people go like, oh, my God, that's me. And the moment that they can identify with it, then they pay attention. And then they actually see we don't actually talk about the solution. We then talk about what's progress look like from, oh, my God. And I want to do that. Like, I want. I'm here struggling with this. And then it's like, oh, by the way. And we can help you with this because of these reasons. Because here's the thing is most people do not have. When they're searching in Google or they're looking at things, they actually don't know how to articulate the problem very well. And they surely don't know how to articulate the solution. And so what happens is when you start to put things out there, they only pay attention when they're struggling with it. The phrase I always use is that the average person in the United States sees a car commercial 36 times a week. 36 times a week. They only notice it when their lease is up or their car has a big repair or the fact is that at some point it's making a weird noise. And so they equate basically all that marketing around features and benefits as well. It's effective because it's sales, but they have no reference point to it wrapped around it. And so, like, when I go test marketing and commercials, the first thing I want to do is, can I. The other part is think of bringing an engineering or a prototyping mentality to, like, let me prototype type to get the right language on the struggling moment and then the right language on the outcomes they want so I can actually make sure that I've framed, like, when they can go like, oh my gosh, that's me. After that I got them. And that most people would say, well, that's just too generic. But if you look at, we have Snickers here in the States, we have something called Snickers bars, right? And it's like you're not you when you're hungry. And they show all these different situations people are in when they eat a Snickers bar. They go like, oh my God, that's me. They never talk about packed with peanuts or any of those other things around the Snickers bar. They literally go like, when I'm in this situation, I just grab a Snickers.

We've got Snickers in Australia as well.

I wasn't sure if it's called a Marathon bar or something else.

No Snickers here. And I love it. And it's, yeah, very funny ads, but very relevant as well. Got a cupboard full of snickers for my 7 year old daughter when she gets hangry.

That's exactly right by the way. We found that through jobs. That's the thing. All that stuff came through jobs.

So Bob, I recently did a talk for Grow a Small Business and my first slide of that I had that Peter Drucker quote. People rarely buy what the company thinks it's selling. So that was your starting point for the book.

Oh God, yeah.

And so my question for this is, for a business owner that hasn't gone through this discipline process, what sort of questions should they be asking themselves to understand what their customers are actually buying?

So here's the thing. I think the best piece of advice I can give a small business, by the way, I think small business makes the world run. So I think small business is at the very core of kind of like helping people figure out why do people paint their house or why do people hire lawns or like any of that stuff, like, doesn't matter, the small business. My thing is take the time to literally sit down with a customer and talk about why in the world did they buy you today? And so here's the thing, and what they have to do is like, they have to actually turn off like the ego and listen to like what was going on in their life and what were they hoping for in the future. So for example, if I'm a painter, right, like what caused them? You say, today's the day I need to paint my house. Not why they picked you as a painter, but like why? It's like it hasn't been painted in seven years. I've got a lot of Little kids, my in laws are coming to visit and I don't want the place to look like a shack. Like, it's those kinds of things that you start to realize. Like when you see these causal things, it'll help you actually market better. It'll actually say, like, when you should come back. It'll help you understand how to close and say, well, when's the last time you got the place painted? Who's coming over? Like, those are the things that people don't talk about because they just want a quote of how much you're going to cost to paint the house, right? And it's these. If you take the last five sales that you've closed and that you've finished and that you're done with the jobs and go back like, can I just bring a six pack of beer? And we can sit down on the porch or patio and literally go, like, why did you paint your house, man? Like, why did this happen? Like, why did you finally buy supplements? And it's not like any one supplement. It's like, what is it that's going on in their life and what is it that they're hoping for? And this is where you want to actually start because the rest of it will actually fall together. But if you hear your product or your service and that conversation, you need to actually just reverse it. You need to, like, say, like, there's a lot of painters, but why now? What was going on? We got to figure out how to fit into people's lives. And to be honest, like, part of the reason why I bought this book and what most people, the universal language that I get out of this book is like, God, it's a good book. Oh, it's okay. But you know what? Universally I hear, but I'm a way better consumer now. I actually take a minute to understand, like, why the hell am I buying that? What progress am I trying to make? Why am I buying this now? And you start to realize that people are stopping to buy all that crazy stuff and they have no idea why they're buying it because they're at least taking a minute to draw out the forces. God, I want a new pair of shoes. I got 48 pairs of shoes. Why do you need another pair of shoes, right? And it's like, well, I don't have these shoes. Well, is this about looking good or is this about actually comfort? Or is your feet hurt? If your feet hurt, get rid of the other eight pair that don't work.

Just on that, Bob. Because I think that all the techniques that you give seem to be very obviously effective and sound when it comes to, like, compulsory, you know, sort of goods. But when it. When it comes to sort of discretionary emotional spends, you know, let's say cosmetics or jewelry or something like that.

Yeah.

The same principles apply?

Oh, yeah. I think more so. So I've done this on religion. What causes somebody to change a religion? Right. And you start to realize it's an emotional social thing or change churches or switch schools, like any of these things. Where at some point it's not necessarily money that's involved, but time or social capital. And you start to realize, like, there's really. I think of it as that there's three kinds of resources. There's money, there's time, and there's knowledge. Those are the three things that people are willing to spend to literally figure out how to make progress. Like, I have to go learn something. I'll spend time to learn something so I can save money. I have money, but I don't have time. So I'll spend money to get knowledge so I can actually, you know, it's those three things that people are really trading up. So we keep thinking it's always about money. It's not about money. It's about money, time and knowledge that are the things that people are willing to either give up to get. James, I feel like I just blew your mind on that one.

Look, I love all this stuff. So this is not really a question, but more just a comment about the general approach. I think that a lot of people see sales as something that's a bit icky that you do to people. What I really like about this process when, I mean, I think we're all in business because we want to make an impact on the world and to help people that when you approach it, helping people to make progress, you're actually making people's lives better by. You understand how they make progress.

Yes. I think the other part of it, though is that you have to realize most people would say, well, as a not for profit, we don't want to charge money for this. But here's the thing is, if you don't actually make it harder for people, they can't actually value. People don't value free. For some reason, we think if we give people free things, it's good, but the reality is like, free with time is not free. Free with having to learn is not free. It's like when people have to earn something, they actually feel like they're actually making progress. And so we're confusing struggling with the fact of actually the notion of trying to make progress, something that's friction free, is actually detrimental to progress to me. This is where, like, a free trial, nobody actually commits to a free trial. I'll try it. I'll look at it. But the fact is, like, so at basecamp, what they did is they did something brilliant. It's like, I'm going to give you one project for your life for free. But here's the thing is you got to use it for something in your life. Planning a wedding, you're going to actually put out an addition, you're going to do a trip, whatever it is, you get this one thing. But you've got to spend the time to learn it, and you got to spend the time to put into it. And so you spend time and you create knowledge. Though it's free, it's not free because you have to invite a bunch of people to it. But the moment you actually commit to helping you make progress, you realize, like, holy crap, I need that in my business. That's how they have, like, you know, hundreds of thousands of customers. They don't offer a free trial on.

A more positive note, but personal one still, you know, you've been responsible for. I think it was like, three and a half thousand. Is there any product that you're, you know, particularly proud of in terms of solving an issue that you.

Yeah. So one of the things that. So Clay asked me this question a few years ago before he passed. He said, what is the greatest innovation ever? And I'm like, it's hard to put an absolute on any of that. So he goes, oh, no. I have context for you. You're dead. You're at the Pearly Gates. St. Peter has a list of all the things you did in your life. What is at the top of your list that gets you into heaven? I'm like, holy crap. Okay, now I got some context. I can talk about this. So I go through it and I started looking at. I'm like, look, I worked on the guidance system for the Patriot missile. It saved a lot of lives. At the same time, it probably killed a lot of lives. I'll probably not. I'll probably go to hell for that. I said. I said, you know, the Pokemon Mac and Cheese is something I worked on with Kraft, and we did a lot of good things, and it's delicious. It's probably still not going to get me into heaven. And I go back in time, and one of the very first innovations I worked on very early in my career was with Dr. Deming who's number four? He's number four up there. Guy in the red. And it was. I ended up having to drive around. Like, we'd be in Iowa and we'd be at a supplier doing something and we'd have to drive back to catch a plane. And my biggest anxiety was always, like, driving up to the gas station and kind of going, like, where the hell is the gas tank? You look in the both the mirrors and you look back and forth and you start to realize, like, because it's a rental car, I just have no idea. So you'd pull up to one side and be like, it'd be on the other side. So you pull around and eventually you'd end up like, just stretching it over the back. And Deming's in the front seat going like, this is a problem. We should fix this. And I'm like, I just want to get to the airport, man. And. And it turns out that took about five years to build, but I helped build. There's a little arrow on the gas tank.

Are you shitting me, Bob, you're responsible for that. I love that little innovation.

So it literally puts. It tells you which side the filler cap is on. And it was one of those things that it was embarrassing. But if you look at 1987, when I got the assignment in 1992, yes, it took five years of, I'll say, part time work and a lot of convincing of a lot of people to come up with that little arrow on the side. But that is the single greatest innovation that will get me into heaven. Now, the funniest part is your listeners are going to do this. Half of them are going to go like, oh, my God, that's amazing. And the other half are going, what arrow? What are you talking about?

I only found it three years ago.

Yeah, if you get in the car and you literally look and you look at the gas gauge, there's a little error. Like, look, I make no money on it. It's one of those things where once we did it, everybody did it. It's ubiquitous everywhere. But it's. The fact is, like, at some point, there's a little arrow that says it points the direction of where the gas tank filler cap is. That is what's going to get me into heaven. That's what I would consider my. Again, small, but a big struggling moment for a lot of people.

There you go. There's a little bit of Bob Mester innovation in everyone's car now around the world.

That's right.

That's right.

Crazy, isn't it?

Bob, before I ask a personal question again, what excites you when you're not, you know, coming up with these problem solving moments, like, you know, what are your hobbies or things you enjoy?

Well, so the first thing is I'll go back to this one, right? All the paintings in the room are mine. So I have a. I've a goal of having a thousand paintings before I start a gallery, right? So I've done about 848 or 849. So because I can't read is one of the things I do is I've built a method for me to help. Like, my wife will sit down at night and she'll read a book, but I can't read a book. So I literally go, and I go paint. I've been painting the whole time. So that's one of the things I do. I have this process now that's pretty tight around writing books. So because I'm dyslexic, I can't really write, but I can talk. And again, I have these four innovators who like. So I had three close head brain injuries before I was seven years old. I'm pretty much illiterate or I struggle very hard to read and write. And it's one of those things that these four people have changed my life in a way that enabled me who pretty much should not be somebody who worked on so many products and even be, to be honest, be an engineer. They all enabled me to be what I call an amazing builder. And the story is not really. So my next book is actually about. This is called Learning to Build. And it's about basically, how do you take somebody who's of average intelligence or less, somebody who is able to think but not necessarily communicate well. And these people gave me frameworks that enabled me to, like you said, go do over 3,500 different products and services. And it's one of those things where I feel all four of them have passed on. And so the thing I didn't realize when I was working with these people is the incredible responsibility to kind of pass on that knowledge that they passed to me. And so I spend a lot of time teaching now. And so this book, this first book, Demand side Sales is really. It's my third or fourth book. Most of the time I usually have to partner with somebody, but I'm using a company called Scribe Media who literally helps me really understand. Like, they listen to me, we frame the book, we describe the jobs of the book, we talk about what category it has to be. And we talk about kind of what progress we want people to make from it. We build out three or four job stories around it. And then from that we basically then define systems which turn out to be chapters. And then we fill those chapters and then somebody goes and writes each chapter and from that. So like I started this last book in like the October, I'll be done by the 16th of December, I'll have a first draft by the 1st of February. I'll get the graphics, I like to do the graphics. So the graphics will come by April and I'll have another book by June. So one of the things I did, and you laugh, but one of the things I did is I actually, I did some interviews a while ago when I was like on people who came out of nowhere. Like, how does somebody come from nowhere to literally have such a huge impact? And so we went and found these people and I went and did jobs interviews on them to say, like, what progress were you trying to make? And one of the common themes I found amongst all of them is they had some form of a near death experience. Like they had cancer, they got in a car crash, somebody close to them passed away. There was just some very, very emotional and functional thing that had happened to them that they realized time was of the most and precious thing. So I realized like short of me getting a near death experience, how do I actually imply, how do I make this happen to me? And so my mom, who was amazing helped me a ton. She kept deferring everything when she would retire, like, oh, I'll do this when I retire. I'll do that from when I. She was a schoolteacher and she retired when she was 62 and she was just getting ready to kind of live the life, if you will. And four weeks afterwards she found out she had stage four colon cancer and died four months later. And so I took her birthday and her death day and then I added to my birthday and I actually have 2,584 days left in my life. So I've chosen to say I'm not going to be like my mom and live. I can do all this stuff later, but I only have 2,584 days left. And so this is how I decide that how to make trade offs. I need a constraint to make trade offs to decide what I'm going to do and when I'm going to do it. So, so it's six, almost seven o' clock here in Detroit. It's dinner time. My family knows that I don't come home till 7. I will literally be out of here at 5. We have about 10 more minutes and then I'm going to go have dinner with my entire family. That's what I do. And so it's one of those things, like I value every moment of every day. And the craziest part is you go to sleep and you wake up the next day and you're full of energy. Like, holy shit, I got energy again. Like, how's that happen? So I spend every day to literally exhaust my gas tank every single day. And I have 2,584 days left. It's so amazing.

That's really poignant and insightful, Bob.

Yeah, I actually have to run myself, guys, just because I'm someone else's place.

Stay safe.

Yeah, we'll do. Look, yeah, thanks a lot for your time here and obviously the book appreciated and yeah, great stuff.

All right, so here's the deal though, Ben. Next time we're gonna do this again. I need a list of five questions from you. I want five real questions and I want them to be hard, no easy.

Ones, Bob, here's the counter deal. If you make it down to Tasmania, I think we'll do that one in person.

All right, that's good. We'll do that. Perfect.

Can I ask one parting question?

Yeah, of course, Jay.

Bob, what you were saying about your own experience with brain injury and not being able to read. And I think that's really inspirational. And I want to talk about trade offs when you're building a team. I think a lot of business owners, they think that they need to have these really well rounded people. My feeling is you want to have people that are really outstanding in doing one thing. And I'd love to hear from you about some of these outstanding people that you've worked with, kind of humanizing them, that they're real people who are actually quite flawed in their own ways.

Yeah. So this actually gets back to school and it's probably the other passion that I have is. And school has somehow shaped this, that we're supposed to be good at everything. And that at some point in time I realized like for the first 35 years of my life, all I worked on was the stuff I was shitty at. Right. And the reality is the moment I actually was very articulate about what I'm good at and what I'm shitty at. I went and found three people who are really, really good at the stuff I was shitty at. Right. One of them was my business partner. For 17 years, he and I worked, we're side by side because we actually complement each other so well that we are actually so much better together than we are separate that we will never, ever, ever work apart ever in our lives again. We worked apart for four months, and it was so miserable for both of us that we just said, like, screw it, it doesn't matter. And so my thing is that I think there's this. When we talk about diversity, we need diversity of thinking. We need diversity of people. We need. And to be honest, to try to think of how you actually create diversity is. I think part of this gets back to the humility part, is like, I know what I don't know, and I'm okay with it. And most people aren't okay with what they don't know because it makes them feel insecure. And I think the reality is we need to actually get people to realize, like, I know what I'm not good at. How do I go find people? How do I match people so it can actually make us better than each other. So to me, a team, I like to have as diverse a group as team as possible, because at some point in time, everybody actually is adding value because there's that diversity. And at the same time, the fact is, they also understand what they can't do, so they have humility, and they can actually then appreciate and value the people who have skills they don't. And so it's this crazy notion of, like, more diversity in a team actually enables the team to be 10 times more confident than a team of people. Of all smart people, I'll say average smart people. You know what I mean? There's just this crazy, crazy, like, this notion of how things come together. And this is where, like, you know, one plus one plus one is 20. And people don't get it. But it's. The fact is, it's the void, it's the negative space that actually creates the value for the positive space. I don't know if that made any.

Sense to anybody, but I'll make 100% sense.

Yeah.

Well, great. Any other final questions there, James?

Look, I've got a million questions, but I think we've got to wrap it up.

Look, I'm not going anywhere. I got 2,584 days. Plenty of time. But my thing is that I would love to help one hour at a time. And so as. As people see this and they want to actually reach out, my thing is, let's just get the questions flowing. I'm not. And by the way, I'm not trying to say that I know I don't have the answer to probably anything. I can tell you what has been successful for me and all I'm trying to do is inspire everybody to do better. And the fact is is like at some point, you know, when you're not doing your best work, do your best work. That's what I really want people to do.

Yeah, definitely. Great. All right, well, Bob, we might hold over any other questions for those 10 of those days you're going to carve off to come to Tasmania and.

Oh yeah, if I'm coming, let's be clear, the jet lag alone is going to take me. I'll be there for a month.

Yeah, I used to live in London so I'd fly back every year and it's 24 hours in the tin can, so I don't think.

Oh man.

One way, 24 hours. Yeah.

Well, we'll have to set up a tour when I get there. Like, like who are we gonna talk? Like I want to. So here's the thing is I want one on one time with real business owners to help them. By the way, not my wife's definition of a vacation, but more my definition of a vacation is like I want to go visit 24 companies in 24 days. Like, that would be incredible.

We've got a lot of great and interesting companies down here in Tasmania. So I'll send you information on Tasmania and if you can convince your wife and family to come down, it'd be wonderful to have you down here.

We'll work that out. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for, you know, tolerating my. Some of my rants, but hopefully you found this a little entertaining and a little bit knowledgeable.

I definitely did.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks, Bob. Thanks, James and Ben.

Cheers.

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