#H2HChat Shareology Edition: Scaling Growth through Human Connections with Brian Moran

Hey, everybody. Welcome to another H2H Chat. So excited to be here. I'm here with co-host Suzie McCarthy in New York, who is displaying for us all of her nice daily wares in the background. And so how are you, Suzie? I'm in the office.

It's great. I'm speaking to you from my closet/home office. You know, it's New York, so you got to consolidate. Right. On second thought, I probably should have folded my stuff. So Mom, if you're watching, I'm very sorry.

If your mom is watching, that would be awesome. Yeah. So you are both in New York. So Bryan's in New York too. And just before I let Bryan talk, I wanted to introduce Bryan because we're so obviously excited to have him here. Bryan is a great friend of both Suzie and mine. There's a lot of funny stories Bryan and I could share on this that we will probably try to refrain from sharing, but there's also a lot of good ones that we can share, and that's the point of this whole thing is to be able to share what's appropriate, but then also some things that help to drive awareness, especially in what today's topic is, and how do you scale human sharing, how do you scale a business, especially with what Bryan does. Bryan really focuses a lot not just in small business but also how big businesses can target and partner with small businesses because it's really, you know, if you think about the amount of businesses that are around in the United States or even the world, small business is larger, way larger in quantity than enterprise. And Bryan, I'm sure, will back me on that and have more to say about that. But that's why we wanted to have Bryan on. The other reason is because Bryan has a really eclectic background. So I wanted to share that with you, and we'll talk about that, but, you know, he's worked for Some really great places like Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine. He's won so many awards, and you can find him @bryanmoran. And then also, if you guys don't mind, again, if you're new to this today, remember you can tweet. There's a tweet chat running, and that's #H2Hchat, and you can follow the entire discussion there. And please, at any given time, you can put a question out, Suzy and team will be collecting that, and she will run the second half of this where your questions will be driving the second half of this chat. So it's very interactive. Let's make it more interactive. First of all, Bryan, how are you doing?

I'm great. You know what, it's a pleasure to be here with you and Suzy.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here with you as well, and I'm looking forward to talking with you about this great topic because it's something that everyone's trying to do, especially I think if you look at what we're— what everyone's trying to do even as a small business, right? Small businesses can be as low as one person. Right. And everyone's expected to scale. I mean, who doesn't want to grow their business, right? Otherwise it'd be, you know, a different world. So how do you scale human Relationships. Let's just start off with that.

Well, first I got to answer 2 of your questions beforehand. We can tell any story today between you and me as long as you agree today that you will never run for political office. And me too. And I'd be happy to share them.

So it looks like I can't agree to that. So what's next?

So when you said I have an eclectic background, I literally wanted to turn around and see what was behind me. Because I had obviously cleaned up for the video chat today, and I thought I might have had something hanging out behind me that shouldn't have been there. That's what I thought when you said I had an eclectic background.

In that case, I think I have a more eclectic background. You do.

Suzy, you win. You win. I'm second. Bryan's third.

Hey, Bryan, just before we get started, Suzy You reminded me— thank you, Suzie— that we have a thing, a game that we play. Okay. Here's the game. Anytime you mention human, then this sound will play. Now, I want you to know that just last week, Jay Baer broke the record, which was previously Held by Joel Comm. And Joel Comm had 5, I think it was 5, right, Suzy?

Uh, I think it was 7. It was 7.

Well, Joel had— Joel had—

Oh, Joel had 6.

Joel had 6.

Jay had 7.

And Jay Baer broke the record with 7, and he strategically placed human along the way. So I just want to let you know if you want to play the game,

Sure.

And human will be played.

So human, human, human, human, human, human, human, human, human. There you go.

We have a winner!

I now have 54 minutes to extend the record.

Okay, well, that's done.

See, that's how we do things in New York.

I was gonna say.

Right, cut right to the chase.

Yeah,

done. Your question though.

Actually, my question is how do you interpret the challenge of scaling human relationships in business?

Well, depending on the type of business that you're in, right, human interaction can be everything. You know, you look at some of the larger companies that have, you know, really mastered the art of human connections to grow their businesses, like Harley-Davidson. So Harley-Davidson has done a masterful job of making their customers their staunchest advocates for their brand, and their customers feel this incredible connection to the brand and to the company. Ben& Jerry's is another one that has done a fantastic job of really weaving in the fabric of their mission statement, their vision statement into everything that they do, and they've really developed this incredible connection so that when people actually go into their stores, they get this good positive vibe, which is incredible. You can do that even as a very small business owner. Developing human relationships is something that you can use to help others, to have others help you grow your company. So that is, it's an incredible tool when used correctly.

So let's go back in time and talk about you first before we start Because you really have gone through so much of a, like I said, an eclectic background, but not what's behind you. But you've worked for some of the massive, major public papers, newspapers, and magazines. Mm-hmm. And you've seen the news and what's gone on, and maybe you could talk about that. What has changed? Describe what you did there and what's changed since then.

So interestingly enough, I went to journalism school. I had every intention of being a writer, either at an ad agency or at a newspaper, and then I found out how much they paid when I got out of college, and I said, let me try my hand at sales. And so I actually came up on the business side of the magazines, first at Success, Entrepreneur, Inc. magazine, so I had focused on the small to midsize business space, and what's transpired over the last 20, 25 years is nothing short of incredible. Magazines, newspapers, TV, all of the traditional media were nothing more than content delivery vehicles, right, but it was much more like a monologue, you know, 20 years ago. So the way you had human interaction was newspapers told you what the news was, TV stations told you what was happening in the news that day, same thing with magazines, and you read it and if you felt strong enough about a particular opinion or subject, you wrote a letter to the editor or somehow you chimed in, you took the time to connect with them. Well, now take that delivery method and flip it on its head, right, so it's done a complete 180-degree turn where now it's very, very interactive and the content delivery vehicle has changed and people don't want a monologue anymore, they want a dialogue. And so the human interaction is critical to the way— The way we approach content delivery. And the way it's written for people. So it's very much a dialogue today. That's what's changed.

That's a good one, and so that plays really well into today's theme because the dialogue is what makes humans— or sorry, people— I can't win my own game, can I? It helps people to connect. So let's talk about that. What is your advice? What's your Thinking now you've gone from the newspaper, the traditional newspaper, to the traditional magazine, to now the non-traditional newspaper or non-traditional magazine, the connection as you're describing it between what was one way to now that's engagement. Mm-hmm. How does that translate into whether it's sales or into Content delivery. Yeah, how does that translate?

Well, everybody now, you know, we talk a lot about citizen journalists, right, so everybody has a camera and everybody has a blog and everybody has a social platform that they've created, and so we're all now individual content delivery systems. And in business, you need to look at it that way. I talk to business owners every single day. And I can't tell you how many of them don't understand the opportunity that's presented to them with this, what we still call new media, right, or 21st century media. And that is that they have an opportunity to connect with customers, experts, influencers, the media in ways that they never had before. But they look at it only as one avenue. as a sales channel. You know, so Twitter or LinkedIn or Facebook, Instagram, it's all a sales channel to me and everything gets pushed out. Well, what they're doing is what the traditional media did 25 years ago and it's only a monologue. They're not listening. And so this connection that we're talking about, it has to start with that it's a two-way street, that you need to listen more than you actually talk. And before you get involved with it, Understand that it's a process. You know, most people will say, well, the social media fad has passed me by, so I'm just going to wait till the next stop to get on, as if there's something after social media. Well, whatever's after Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever the next generation is, it's a continuation of what we're doing now, so it's 2.0 or 3.0. So Don't wait to get on the bus, get on it now and learn how the system is working, right, instead of just pulling back and saying, this is not for me.

So you say that society is still learning to engage, haven't we engaged our entire lives? I mean, going back to the beginning of cavemen, isn't engagement really something that's innate?

No, I mean, you have extroverts and you have introverts, right? So you have people who, you know, like you, me, and Suzy, who can talk to the wall behind you and actually have an intelligent conversation. And there are other people who simply choose not to engage because of either phobias that they have or fear of letting go too much information about themselves. And that's— those are the ones who sit on the sidelines. So engagement has always been kind of not a level playing field. You know, it's for the people who have embraced social early on are taking full advantage of it now. From a business perspective, even if you are introverted, you still need to figure out a way to engage with your audience, with your customers. I mean, when your customer walks into your store, you don't run into the back room. I hope you don't, right? You go up and you say, how can I help you? Think of social media as your store, but you're just engaging with them on a different platform.

Yep, so now let's talk about the listening side, because really listening is what I'm hearing in terms of how you grow and how you scale it, but let's go back to that small business Thinking, right? Because sometimes I think that enterprise companies, big companies, have the same problems that small businesses do. You know, it really— you know, they're short on resources.

Mm-hmm.

They don't have a lot of time. They don't know quite when and how they're going to get things out so that they can scale what we're talking about here. So isn't the problem kind of across the board, and how do you Like, give me a tip. Like, how do you really handle all this?

So what you're asking is, you know, there's a great quote from— and I'm going to attribute it to the Dalai Lama, but maybe that'll get me full consciousness on my deathbed. But he said, when you're talking, you rarely learn something new, but when you listen, That's where the learning comes in, and I'm paraphrasing it, but it's a quote worth looking up. And that's where I think a lot of companies fail, because as I said earlier, you know, people— most businesses are looking at these social channels now as just, you know, pushing content out. Let's talk about what discounts we're going to offer this week, or let's talk about a new product that we're launching or a new market that we're entering. You know, and they don't say, what do you want, Bryan Kramer? Like, how can I help you? I'll give you another great quote. You know, there are 2 types of people using social media, you know, and that walk into a room. The first one says, here I am, and the second one says, ah, there you are. Right. Be that second person on social media. Be that second person in the way that you connect with other people online. That you listen to them, you engage with them, you retweet them, and good things will always come your way. And you do it out of sincerity and, you know, a genuine nature. Don't say, okay, you know, I'm going to tweet— retweet you 3 times so that you'll retweet me once, or you'll follow me, or you'll engage with me. But do it out of genuine interest in what the person is talking about. And I think that's how you start relationships.

Okay, talk to me a little bit more about that, the genuine interest. How do you tell whether someone's being genuine online or not without body language? You can't see somebody online. How do you tell whether that's the case?

Interestingly enough, so I will get people who will retweet me 5 times in 30 seconds and then 3 minutes later say, hey, Why aren't you following me back? So that's pretty obvious, that's an obvious one at the one end of the spectrum. But I think you always have your antenna up, especially if you're a successful business, whether you are small, medium, or large. If you're successful, people want to partner with you, they'll want to connect with you, and so the question is what are their interests? If they— if you connect with them, if you follow them back or you connect with them on LinkedIn and they immediately come in and say, hey, can you do this for me? You know, then I think they've missed the meaning of the relationship, right? They've missed the meaning of that human connection.

Yeah.

Where's my applause? I was trying to find it. Delay, delay. No, but they've missed that. And, you know, it just— it starts with this. You have to love what you do every single day, right? You have to love— I know you and I know Susie and I know I love what I do every single day. When my feet hit the floor, I'm excited for whatever happens in my day, the good, the bad, and the ugly, right? Because I can expect it. You know, I've been doing it long enough that I know how the game works. But I think with that kind of genuine love of what you're doing, um, that interest in connecting with people just comes across naturally.

Mm-hmm.

You know, how can I help you? People always ask that. How can I help you, um, today? Like, what can I do for you? And, and I always think that's one of two people: somebody who is really genuinely interested in being my friend and helping me, and then the other person who in the back of their mind is thinking, okay, I'm gonna help you and then you owe me one. You always want to have that. We know people like that. You always want to have your antenna up for the people who are gonna hold that chip for a day to be used in the future.

Right. So isn't that— yeah, that's fun. And that could be a whole other show talking about how people hold chips for that. And yeah, you and I and Susie have all talked about that before where That's not what this world is about, but also it's not what makes you social. It doesn't build social goodness when you hold the chips against others and you just do it out of the good of your heart. You walk the walk, and I'm going to put you on the spot real quick because you have, I think it's like over 175,000 Twitter followers. Probably one of the most engaged, high-level Twitter following people that I know, and you teach this stuff, you run a consulting business, you help enterprise businesses to find their sweet spot with small businesses. You're doing a lot, and you're traveling a lot. Mm-hmm. How do you scale? How do you do what you do? For the people out there that are trying to do what you're doing. How do you feel and have a good day more times than not? And I'm sure both Suzie and I are listening in on this particular answer even more so because this is a productivity level. You are very productive in what you do, so how do you do what you do?

I have great partners. So I've set up a network of great partners, and I consider both of you to be part of that network. of like-minded companies where, you know, when an opportunity comes across and it requires additional bandwidth, I can reach out to my subject matter experts and pull them in. You know, probably the best example that I have is Riva Lisansky, who was the former editor of Entrepreneur Magazine for 25 years and definitely one of the most recognized figures In the small and mid-sized business market, you know, she is fantastic, and I know that if I bring her into a project, she will immediately get up to speed and be able to, without very little instruction, be able to help me accomplish my goals and objectives for that. But I have, I have so many other people that I consider to be not only partners and subject matter experts, but good friends. So that makes scaling my business that much easier, and I'll do the same for them. So if they have an opportunity— yes, you're right, I have a large Twitter following— and they say, hey, this would play well into a tweet chat that I'm doing or a project that I'm doing, can you help me? Not a problem. You know, I'm always interested in the rule of reciprocity. I'm more than happy to help those people. That helps me scale. Then when the project is done, I go back to running my day-to-day business.

You found your groove and you certainly know— it seems like what you're saying is you reserve a part of your day for helping others, not necessarily for focusing on yourself. And that's where you find a lot of value. Now, how do you scale that to grow your business bigger?

You know, that's a great question, but let me take a step back because this is where a lot of people make a mistake. You come to this fork in the road, you've had some initial success, you come to a fork in the road that says, Are you a small business owner, a passionate small business owner, or are you an entrepreneur? If you're a small business owner or a passionate small business owner, you go to the left. And if you're an entrepreneur, you go to the right. And the reason you go to the right if you're an entrepreneur is because it's going to require an investment, maybe of capital, hiring new people, entering new markets, scaling your business for growth. And, and this is where so many people make a terrible mistake. You can't really go wrong if you go to the left, right? Maybe you've limited your upside opportunity by saying no to something, right? I'm going to stay as a small business owner because I like the work-life balance that I have. Um, and so you missed an opportunity on a big project, but that's okay because you're still making good money and you're able to live the lifestyle you enjoy. It's when you turn to the right, when you say, I want to be an entrepreneur and I'm going to hire people and I'm going to open up a new office and I'm going to make this investment of capital or maybe even take it in from the outside, that's when the treadmill gets turned up. And not knowing what type of business owner you want to be is what really is the underlying major factor in most businesses failing. They don't know who they are and they don't know what they want from their business. And so when I hear people talk about scaling, you know, how do you scale your business? The first question should be, do you want to scale it? Right. Is that what you want to do? And so to your question about me, yes, I do want to scale my business. And I'm actually toying with a number of different options right now. about what the next steps are, and so I'm very— I'd say I'm more conservative. You know, I'm the tailor. I measure twice and cut once. So I want to make sure I get this right because I'm in a good opportunity, I have a good thing going right now. Where do I want to be 3 years from now? So that's what I'm looking at.

So what is your— what's your advice for managing The amount of data, the amount of people, and the amount of process that it takes to do that on a daily basis. How do you manage the interactions, the moments of truth, the relationships that you could potentially build? Because you and I and Suzy all know there are relationships out there just waiting for us.

Oh yeah, and we talk about that.

We don't have the time to do that. Where do you find— where do you scale that? How do you do that?

And that is such a great question because people who are listening in right now, people who are following this on a tweet chat, are also nodding their heads saying, that's something that I have to deal with on a regular basis. And it's all about prioritizing your time. See, the one thing that we all have in common is that we all have the same amount of hours in a given day. And so you look at big data, you look at phone calls that come in or emails that come into you, and you say, how is this going to help me achieve my objectives? You know, so if I partner with this person, I have a goal, right? I hope that we all have a specific goal, like on December 31st of this year, right? We say, we're sitting down at breakfast and I say, hey, how did you do on your goals? And you'll know, either you hit them or you didn't, because it might be a revenue number, it might be new business, whatever it is, but it's hopefully Hopefully specific, measurable, and attainable. And everything you do between today and December 31st should help you get closer to that goal. If it doesn't, then it's a time robber.

Well, we got an interesting screenshot of Bryan right now. Yes. I think he'll pop back in here any second. What's that? There

he is.

That's kind of awesome. Your face did a— if you remember back to CHiPs, for anybody who watched TV, you remember the freeze frame at the end when they stopped?

Yes.

Did that happen to me? You had one of those, but it may not have been the most flattering freeze frame.

Ooh, you know what, that happens.

I forgot to catch a screenshot, so we'll keep going.

They've always said I had a face for radio.

Yes, you and me both.

Can you hear me, Bryan?

Yeah, I can hear and see you, so go ahead.

We got you.

I can hear you, can you hear me?

Yes, we got you.

Okay, good.

Momentary blip.

The wonders of Google, Google, so we're back.

Okay, but to kind of summarize that point, every day you're going to get faced with time robbers and with people who are trying to take your eye off the prize. So when you're looking at big data, when you're talking to customers, when you are planning your day, The question is, how is this helping me get closer to my goal? Right? And, and there is, as you said earlier, Brian, there's a part of your day where you're saying, how am I helping other people achieve their goals? And that's the rule of reciprocity, because unless you can do it by yourself, you're going to need help, whether it's internal or external people. Always keep in mind that these are the people who are helping you achieve your goals. Make sure you understand what their goals are and how you can help them achieve their goals.

So it's certainly a, you know, there's a level of wanting to help who you help. Now let's take this into the content side because that's really where you're born from, and content can help you do what we're talking about, and nobody knows that better than you. You want to describe the process you take with content and how you use that to scale human relationships. See what I did there?

I did, and that was brilliant. From a content perspective, you've got to have your finger on the pulse of what's happening in your particular industry or with the people that you're connecting with. Right, don't write just to put stuff out there. Always think of quality above quantity. So I'd rather see one good post from you a week than 5 average ones, one a day. Right, so the content, why are you writing this? Put yourself in the reader or the listener's chair and ask yourself, how are they benefiting from this? What knowledge am I sharing, what wisdom am I imparting on them that's going to help them run a better business? And I think if you take it from that perspective, then content is a fantastic tool to make that connection with others and build it, because then they see you as a resource.

Yeah.

Now you're a trusted advisor, you're not just somebody who is tweeting for tweeting's sake. Or to grow your Twitter followers. You're actually somebody who knows what he or she is talking about, and I like you, I want to follow you because I think you can help me.

I love that, I love that. Bryan, this is the part of the show where you think you had tough questions, but they are about to get tougher.

My family, I don't think, is on Twitter, but it sounds like they might be.

They might as well be. Alright. Because Suzy takes over now. And she's going to not only have her own questions, but feed you some questions from the tweet chat. So everyone out there, time to unleash, although you have a lot of good questions, so she's going to get those going, but we want more. So everyone out there on #H2Hchat, please pose your questions to Bryan. We are talking about how to scale relationships in the human economy, how do you build and scale your relationships. Suzy, why don't you take that over? I'll pass the baton to you.

Alrighty, first of all, I have to say that I am taking insane notes here because this is just too fabulous, Bryan. You probably— I think I've mentioned it before, but I'm the daughter of a small business owner, so I've grown up with, you know, the scarcity of resources and trying to go back and forth, trying to even, you know, as a social strategist, build strategy. For my parents and all these different things. So this is just so great to talk about application. So I have a few initial questions. Let me see which works. So this is one from Christy. She says, how do you scale and still keep the conversation personal without burning the candle at both ends? As a small business owner.

Alright, this is going to be do as I say, not as I do. Unfortunately, I have a tendency to burn the candle at both ends. So, but it comes back to again what your goals are. If you find that you are taking on too much work to achieve the same goals, then you have to You have to address the approach that you're taking. You know, somehow, somehow if you're scaling your business, then your goals have changed. You said, okay, instead of 5x, I want to be at 10x next year, or 7x, right? Well, if that's the case, then you might have to add additional resources to your business, whether it's a new hire or freelancer or somebody who can help carry the, carry the ball across the goal line. If that makes sense. If you've added more work to achieve the same goal, then you need to figure out how to be more efficient. Think of your operations as a picture frame. You can get maybe 10 or 12 pictures into that picture frame, and if you do that, you'll achieve your goal. If your goals have increased, you're going to need a bigger picture frame. I'd like 16 pictures in that picture frame and not 10 or 12. But if you, if you only have 10 or 12 and that's going to help you achieve your goal and you're trying to add more pictures into it, you need to take some out. So by that I mean, if you are saying we're going to connect with our customers using conferences, okay, then that's going to cost you money, that's going to cost you time. What are you taking out of the equation because you only have a finite amount of resources, what are you going to take out of the equation and replace that with conferences? Or if you want to do a direct mail campaign, or if you want to do a big workshop, right, all of these things can help you achieve your goal and your objectives, but they can't be lumped one on top of the other. You can't do the conferences, the workshops, the direct mail campaign, and an intensive social media campaign.

I like that. I like that a lot. I think that's, that's so important. So this, this kind of actually, this plays into Jean Brunet's question. How do you balance engagement on social media and the work you need to do when solo and have a large following?

Think of it in terms of who you're engaging with. Okay, so you have your inner circle of influencers and experts and media who are going to help you achieve your goals and objectives, right? With a lot of other people, you look at it as lead generation, right? I'm not engaged with them now, but there's a potential to engage with them where they can help me in my business and I can help in their business. And believe it or not, I have about just under 3,000 followers. I go through my list every single month. I look at every name and say, have I engaged with them, have I talked to them, have I supported them or retweeted them? And so I'm very regular about doing that and staying engaged. If you can't answer, remember all of this. There's a great saying that I'm going to leave you— well, not leave you with, but tell you right now, and that is everything that we do is a means to an end, right? The end is the goal. It's the specific goal. And so what we're doing now, the conversations that we're having today, the social media stuff that I'm doing earlier today and later today, the trip into New York City that I'll be taking later this week. These are all a means to an end to help us get to that goal. So when you're doing— when you're on social media and you're tweeting or you're doing something on LinkedIn, ask yourself, how is this helping me achieve my goal? Be conscious of that early on, and what happens is it gets to the point where it becomes almost a no-brainer. You automatically understand how this is going to help you achieve your objective.

So then this is a follow-up from me. How do you balance that with what you were talking about, with the idea of genuine engagement? That sounds like a bit of, you know, there— it sounds like at the bottom line, and when we're talking about social selling, there is a bit of quid pro quo, right? Mm-hmm. If I am looking for lead gen, I'm assembling a database, I'm thinking through who I'm going to engage with. You know, I'm a social media strategist. I'm looking for people, you know, I love all of you who have like, you know, 50 followers. There are some of you who are amazing, but I am probably going to choose the person with 5,000 followers to engage with over 50. And that kind of interrupts— we want to be H2H, but then we also need the bottom line. How does that balance?

For my business, it's gotten to the point where It just, everything comes so naturally. And I will tell you something about the people who have 50 followers. They can be sometimes the ones who surprise you the most. I only have 50 followers, but it could be somebody— I'm part of an organization that would be like the motherlode of business for you, but you don't see that just because— I treat people who have 50 followers— this is going to sound very contrarian to what we're talking about here today, But I will tell you this, and people who know me on Twitter hopefully will agree, I treat people with 50 followers like I treat people with 50,000 followers, right. I am genuinely interested in talking to people and finding out what they do, especially if they run a business and I can help them in any way, shape, or form. You know, there's a great book Og Mandino wrote, a book called The Greatest Salesman in the World. I recommend it to absolutely everybody, but he talks about that, you know, just the idea of the more you give, the more you're going to get back, and I believe that. The balance is understanding that you have deadlines to meet. I mean, that's really what we're talking about here, you know, where to spend your time where you're going to get the most bang for your buck. I like to think of myself as very efficient with my time. I do watch my time robbers. People who call me in the middle of the day, I will say, can I call you back tonight? Or people who email me, and I have 4 folders in my email box. It's urgent, critical— urgent, important, everyday, nonessential. Urgent, important, everyday, nonessential. I immediately throw everything from my inbox into one of those 4 folders. I start by answering the critical, and then I move to the important, and what I wind up doing is delegating the everyday and nonessential. So a lot of people will say, I just don't have the time to do something, or I can't do this because there are not enough hours in the day. Well, the fact is there are enough hours in the day. You just need to look at the way you spend your time.

That's great advice. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. That makes a lot of sense. So this actually follows right into Robert Moore, one of our mutual good buddies here. He wants to know, how do you push back on the time robbers, whether they be assignment creep clients or the brain pickers?

It's easy. Somebody who's asking for my advice or asking for help from me, They have to understand that that's got to be on my time. I'm happy to help them, but it has to be after I've done the other things that are important that I get done. And if there's a problem with that, well, then you need to find somebody else. So that's those time robbers, that's an easy one. As far as my clients, and I got to tell you, I love my clients. And I've said no to a number of companies that wanted to work with me but had these very constricting agreements that I felt like wouldn't adapt to my style of running a business. So I've actually said no so that I'm able to do the things that I love to do without any issues. But there's that squeaky wheel mentality. Now a client will call and say, hey, I need this yesterday, and so we'll accommodate them. We'll make it happen. Hopefully it doesn't happen often, and in my case it doesn't, but we'll honor the squeaky wheel a couple of times for people to push in. After that, it's all about planning the work and working the plan. Again, how organized and efficient are you with your business? I find people who wake up in the morning and they go down, you know, whatever, they're creating their to-do list on the commute into the office or they're creating their to-do list and thinking about what they need to do at the breakfast table. That's the wrong time. What you need to do is you need to do that the night before. Yeah. You need to say, what are the things that I need to do tomorrow that I absolutely need to get done and rank them in order of priority and do it from hardest to easiest. Start with the hardest and work your way down. Today is all about execution, tonight is about planning, tomorrow we're going to execute the plan that we draw up tonight. If you take that approach, it's pretty easy when a call comes in or an email comes in to push it towards the end of the day.

Hey, just a real quick note.

Bryan, you there?

Yes. Both of you? Are you— I'm muted.

No, we're good.

We're good.

I'm good.

Okay, good. I just wanted to give a shout out to Alyssa Trumbull. She said that she is making— you don't know this, Bryan, but I'm making memes behind the scenes about what you're saying. So you're going to get off and see lots of Moran memes. One of them was urgent, important, everyday, and nonessential, the only buckets you need to be productive. And Alyssa Trumbull said that she is making this a sticky note for her desktop. So shout out to Alyssa for doing that. And there are still lots of questions coming in, so Suzy, I'll continue to turn it back over to you.

Alright, and parentheses as well, I'm getting a lot of pushback about my 500 followers I chose that out of thin air for social biz stuff. I'm all about niche communities. Now I'm like, okay, pointing you to other stuff. I love all the pushback I'm getting. I love our guys. I know. I'm like, oh man. Yeah. All right. You guys rock. I have a question moving into There definitely was some interest, a lot of interest when you were talking about scaling. And so a question from Tim, what enters into the left-hand versus the right-hand decision, the decision to remain a small business or scale as an entrepreneur?

What do you want? What is your ultimate goal? Where do you want to be in 5 years, Tim? So let's take Tim as an example, not knowing the type of business that he has. But what do you value mostly in life? You know, if it's to coach your kids on the weekend or go out to, you know, take your boat out on the weekends or spend quality time with your family— if you're an entrepreneur, you know the sacrifices you need to scale your business. It's going to require hours and hours in a given day. I don't know any successful entrepreneur that hasn't had to make significant sacrifices, especially early on as they're growing and scaling their business. So to Tim's point is, you know, you have at the one end of the spectrum the small business owner who's all about work-life balance. You know, a lot of times they're called income substitutors or the mom-and-pop stores. And you know what, they love what they do and they're happy being in that one retail location. Yeah. Then you have the entrepreneur who's at the other end of the spectrum, and we all know them. It's all about growth, and it's all about investing in people, new locations, new product launches, buying your competitor. So taking the money you're making and reinvesting it back into your business. In between those 2 ends of the spectrum is what I call a passionate small business owner. Now, Bryan, you and I could easily be considered passionate small business owners. Do you want 500 employees? Do you want to be a global operation? With offices in 10 states and 5 different countries.

Yes.

I knew you would say that.

We have a New York presence, we're moving.

But

you're starting in New York in Suzy's closet though.

Okay.

You know, bit by bit.

But you have grown your business, Bryan, and you said, you know what, I like the growth, I enjoy it, I see these opportunities, I have the bandwidth and the capacity to take on more business and hire more people, but it gets to a point where you say, I also enjoy the life outside my business and that's still important to me. And for those people, I call them passionate small business owners because they're willing to take some risks and chances. So to Tim's point, he needs to decide in his business where he wants to be 3, 5, 10 years from now. Does he have an exit strategy? I ask these simple questions to people and they have no idea. Who is going to buy your business and what are they actually buying? Or is it just something that you're just going to shut down when you're ready to retire? A lot of questions to ask before you come to the first fork in the road.

Yeah, yeah, so then this plays— thank you, that's a great answer. This plays into JS Gilbert, who is a constant attender of H2H chat. We love his questions. He started asking questions about 2 minutes into the chat. I have a list of his, so I'm picking the one that really kind of fits in right now.

I'm happy to answer any questions you have. I'll answer them after we're done. I'm more than happy to do that.

Love it. Stick around, we always have super active people. By the way guys, keep those questions coming. I'm getting a great variety here. So anyway, JS Gilbert says, what— now he wants to know what big mistakes are being made by businesses when they scale up. So they've chosen that fork in the road

and

then they're moving forward, right, and that's a long path. What mistakes are you seeing?

The biggest mistake is that they think the existing business that they have that they're scaling is going to be there forever. You know, when you win new business or you win new business from an existing client, you grow that piece of your business, that rarely does that happen overnight. You know, that requires relationships, you know, filling out proposals, right, and so you know that business is coming, but we know this, when you lose business, it happens overnight, it happens on the spot. All of a sudden you get an email one day and it says, you know, thank you very much, we're going in a different direction. And so you lost that business, but the problem is as you scaled your company to meet the needs of your client, so you've made an investment. So now you have the expenses, you just don't have the revenue. That's a big mistake. And so my advice would be lock in, if you can, lock in the client business before you take on additional expenses. So if you have a company that says, look, we love the work we're doing with you, we'd love to work with you more, we're gonna give you more business, get it in writing and say, okay, that's great, but I'm gonna hire more people, I'm gonna open up a new location to meet the needs that you have, so I need a 1-year or 2-year or 3-year agreement before I make that decision. Worst thing that happens, a person at the client gets fired, a new person comes in, and they take the business in a different direction. And now you're trying to as quickly as you can scale down your company.

So Bryan, what are you— with 10 minutes left and questions coming in, I'm sorry, I wanted to jump in real quick.

Go for

it,

I'll do Twitter responses.

Good, yeah, because there's a lot of them. So what I wanted to just kind of jump back into was the content media side of things. Because we definitely could spend a lot of time discussing how to engage, how to listen, how to be productive, how to do all these things. Mm-hmm. But just to kind of take a step back, how can small and medium and large businesses, how can any business use content to scale a relationship and what do they do? So what's your formula for content success? What's going to resonate and then how do you scale that?

Okay, most people have this reservoir of knowledge inside their head, right? If you've been doing what you're doing long enough, you've seen and experienced a lot, and so you can look at either past experiences to create content or future trends, and the content that you produce needs to resonate with the audience that you're delivering it to. Otherwise, it's never going to work no matter what. And the goal is to create enough kiosks around in social media that people can find your content. A big mistake people make is they write a blog post, they put it on their site, And they don't amplify it. So it's like if I write a blog post in the woods, is anybody going to read it? So that's a mistake that a lot of people make, the amplification portion of their content. They don't have relationships on Twitter or on Facebook or on LinkedIn or some of the other social platforms where they can write a tweet and say, hey, I just wrote this blog, might be of interest to you. Click here, right? And if they do that, sometimes they only do that once. So the assumption is that you only need to write one tweet and somehow everybody's going to find that and they're going to your website or your LinkedIn profile to read it. It doesn't work that way. Think of it almost as advertising— reach and frequency. So you need to put that tweet out there 3, 4, 5 times at different times during the day. And you need to write, you know, take out different elements of the blog to share with people because you know what, maybe that point didn't resonate with your audience, but the second point was overwhelmingly responsive. People love that. So getting back to content and scaling it, you have to think strategically. I'm going to write stuff that people want to read or people want to listen to, and then I'm going to put it in places where they are congregating and communicating with each other, and I'm going to write it in a way that's going to make them want to respond to whatever I wrote.

Love it, love it. It truly is a pipeline. I mean, it's a nurture, and it's cyclical. There's no start, there's no end. It's constant, and if you want to see it succeed, you've got to continue that cyclical process. Mm-hmm. Is what I'm hearing. I agree with that. Suzy, you have a question for him?

Yeah, as well. I wanted to kind of just ask a follow-up. How do you recommend that small businesses find the right channels to amplify on? So we have everything from restaurants to B2B. You know, people who are working in all sorts of places and their clients aren't necessarily even on social. We may be talking like a secondary and tertiary situation.

Right, so I have companies that are in— technology companies that are trying to reach Fortune 500 IT executives and they have a Facebook page and I laugh and I say, how many of your potential customers, you have 35 people who've liked your page, how many of them are not your family or your employees? And the usual answer is, I don't know, maybe 1 or 2, and there's no engagement and you're just throwing it up there, and it doesn't reflect the quality of your company, it doesn't reflect the standards that you hold for yourself and the products that you're creating. So here's the easiest answer to that. Ask the people you want to reach, how would you like to engage with us? Is it Facebook, is it Twitter, is it LinkedIn, is it sending you an email that we've published a new blog? But understand, that's only one element. The other questions you want to ask is, how can I engage with you? How can I be where you are and finding out what you're talking about, so that I can participate in those conversations. People are doing reviews online all the time and they're having conversations all over the internet about product reviews or places to go, concerts, companies to deal with. That's where you want to be. If you go into Facebook and there's nobody there that's of interest to you from a business perspective,

Couldn't agree more. Absolutely love that. So I guess the final question, something I'd love to add with— I always love to end our chats with the idea of, okay, someone— what can someone take away from their chat if they want to jump out there, get involved in social, what should their first step be if they're a small business owner?

Easy, have a plan. Put together a plan. Before you jump into the pool, learn how to swim, right? So don't jump into the deep end and be on every social platform trying to talk to everybody and spend 16 hours a day doing it. Social media is like college, you cannot take 128 credits in one semester You're not going to learn social media in 30 days. As Bryan pointed to and alluded to earlier, it's a process. So understand that you're going to weave this into your company and that there's definitely a learning curve, and just take it slow and steady. Don't have a— you know, don't say, we need to be here in 30 days. We need to have, you know, 1,000 followers and we need to have 500 tweets. Learn how to use it Correctly. The people who try and put together those plans and say, you know, I want an immediate ROI for my social media efforts always concern me. And I'll leave you with this saying: if you can't find the time to do something right, when will you find the time to do it over? Those are the people who get social media wrong, right? They run in, they jump into it, They have a bad experience and then they give up on it. They say, you know what, social media didn't work for me. But if you take the time to do things right, you're building a foundation for your future.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Love everything about that.

Good.

Alright, BK, take it away.

Well, that was awesome. See, I told you the hour would fly. It did. And you are currently at, without actually jumping ahead of the line by saying human 9 times at the very beginning, you actually used the word human even right now with Jay Baer at 6 times.

Human interaction.

Is there any last parting words that you'd like to leave everyone with?

Jay Baer is a wonderful human being.

And ladies and gentlemen, Bryan Moran just broke Jay Baer's record, so if you'd like to tweet Jay Baer and let him know that Bryan Moran broke his human record on HTA Chat, please do so. Bryan, thank you so much.

Yes.

Thank you so much, really appreciate it as always. Any last words that you really want to share?

You know what, I love doing this with you and Suzy. I would do it again anytime you want. Really, it's fantastic. I think the service that you provide to anybody who's trying to figure out how to use social media for business is fantastic. And so yeah, you can find me on Twitter @BryanMoran. B-R-I-A-N. Anybody who has questions and they weren't answered now, I'd be happy to answer them.

That was the I, by the way. Yes, please contact him at Bryan Moran, B-R-I spelled wrong. Bryan, truly, thank you for your friendship. Thank you for coming on and doing this with everyone. Just a thank you, very quick thank you. to our partner sponsors Newstar, MasterCard, Cisco, IBM, HootSuite, Freshdesk, Speakeasy, Influitive, Mutual Mind, and Cox Communications, and Little Bird. Very much appreciate everybody's support, we couldn't do it without you. Bryan, once again, thank you from everyone, and everyone out there, we will see you next Monday. Thank you guys for partaking in another H2H chat. I'll talk to you soon. Bye, everybody.

Thank you.