Speak Like a CEO With These 7 Simple Rules - Ep. #319

It was 15 years ago, almost to the day, April 27th, 2011. I had just opened my very first real business. It was an iPhone repair store in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and it was right next to a Subway. It smelled like fresh bread all day long, and I loved it. But after a few weeks, nobody was coming in the store. The haters were right. I was gonna fail. I had signed a personal guarantee on this 5-year lease and a newborn son at home who is now almost 16. And yes, you may have heard the story before, but stick with me for 1 minute because this is a brand new fresh episode. And then I was lying in bed on a Sunday night staring at the ceiling, and I had a stupid idea. Now keep in mind, I don't drink. I'd never been to a bar in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in my life. That's where I was living. But I thought, hey, college students go to bars, they get wristbands. What if I put my ad for my iPhone repair store on a wristband? So I pulled out my clunky Dell laptop, I Googled custom wristbands. They were 2 cents each. I ordered a few boxes and I started distributing them to bars around campus. What would happen? Well, college students would go out, get drunk, break their iPhone, wake up the next morning hungover with a wristband on their wrist that said Phone Restore, and then they would walk into my shop holding a broken phone and a ratty, smelly wristband. It changed everything. My store survived. We opened 3 more stores, and eventually we sold the business for about $1 million. And here's the thing that nobody tells you about running a business. On the surface, the wristband was like a marketing gimmick, but that's not what it was. It was communication. The kid was gonna break his phone either way. The question was whether my message was the one that his brain would grab when he woke up the next morning. That is communication. That's the game here. Remember, I've started about 80 businesses in the last 17, 18 years, and I've recorded almost 300 episodes of this podcast. I've watched founders close deals worth tens of millions on this exact microphone. I've watched other business owners fumble in real time. So I wanna talk about 7 different communication tactics that the best of the best do that everyone else misses out on. These are backed by real research and they're backed by my own stories of when they worked for me and also a couple stories of when I bombed because I didn't implement these tactics. So if you're a founder, a salesperson, a wannabe founder, wantrepreneur, operator, an employee asking for a raise, anything. This episode is for you because the money is found in improving your communication skills. And these principles apply no matter who or what you are. So I'm gonna end this with a wild story, but I wanna start by going through these 7 tactics. Number 1, the hook, the first sentence. That's everything. The first sentence is worth more than everything after it combined. Open your inbox right now and look at all of the cold pitches you get and delete in 3 seconds. Hi, my name is, I'm reaching out because, would love to hop on a quick call. No, stop. You're just gonna delete those. Everyone deletes those, yet you're also sending those. And around that same time as my wristband story, I learned the hard way that the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Best Buy deletes those as well. These people have heard that line 10,000 times and they're gonna tune you out before sentence 2. You're sounding like a car alarm in a parking lot. It gets shut out after a while. Now the cold pitches that I hear or read that stand out, they hit me with something specific to me. Not AI-generated specific, "Hey Chris, I see you went to the University of Alabama and that you currently run a..." No, not specific like that. Specific to a tweet that I posted yesterday or an episode that I aired just last week. Honestly, if it's AI-generated, doesn't even matter 'cause it's still relevant to me. This is something that proves the person actually paid attention. A few months ago, I got a cold email that started with this one sentence. "Hey, you said on a recent episode that your favorite type of business is one a high schooler could run. Well, I built one. Here's what it looks like." I read that entire email and I responded within 30 minutes and he's coming on the show. Now, many, many moons ago, I cold called the chief marketing officer of Best Buy to get my iPhone repair company into their stores. I thought, hey, they have Geek Squad, they're fixing computers, they need to fix phones too. This is a no-brainer offer. And I also did reverse engineering research, AKA Googling, and learned that Geek Squad was a very small business at the time they were purchased. They bought a system and a process, and really that's all I had at the time. And so I thought, okay, I don't need to be huge for them to buy me. But before I made this call, I met with maybe the only mentor I've ever had in my life. His name's John Nolan, love the guy. And he asked me about this woman, the CMO at the time. We pulled up her LinkedIn and he told me a fact about her. He scrolled way down to the bottom of the LinkedIn. That's where the magic is. He saw that she had played women's basketball at Gonzaga and he said, Chris, that one fact tells you everything you need to know about her personality type. It also tells you how to open the conversation. So that's what I did when I called her. I led with the Gonzaga thing. Before I got to me and my pitch, I led with her because what do people care about? Themselves. That first sentence is gonna do 80% of the legwork. Everything after the first sentence is just confirming what the first sentence already promised. So if the opener is generic, they're gonna assume that everything else is generic and they won't even read it. So tactic number 2, admit a flaw fast. I know this one's gonna feel wrong instinctually to you. Trust me, there's a thing in social psychology called the Pratfall effect, and that's when you admit a flaw or a weakness and then people somehow, for some reason, trust you more. That polish and sheen that you're always trying to convey to others, you think it makes you look more credible when actually it's having the opposite effect. So here's an example from my own life. When I first opened my first iPhone repair store, I had never fixed an iPhone in my life. People would walk in with a broken iPhone and I would say, Okay, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, okay. Uh-huh. Oh, okay. Yeah. Give us a few hours, we'll figure it out. Then I would go in the back, pull up YouTube, and learn how to fix their iPhone with their phone in my hand in real time. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. Now, maybe I should have been faking confidence that I didn't actually have, but instead I started practicing what happened when I told customers the truth. Yeah, I can figure out how to fix this. It disarmed them and any concern that they might have had about my credibility or lack thereof of was offset by the frankness of it all. They'd laugh, they'd come back, they'd tell their friends, and they became regulars. Believe it or not, there are more regulars in the iPhone repair business than you'd ever believe. But remember, if I would've been polished, I probably would've lost those customers. But the honest version got them. And I see this on my show every week. I don't know if you heard this episode from about a month ago. Mike Yoder had that drone deer recovery business turned drone agriculture business. He made $50 grand in his first 10 weeks doing agricultural spraying. But after we stopped recording, he just mentioned offhand that he grew up Amish. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's the story. Can we turn the camera back on? He said yes. We talked for 20 more minutes about what it was like to leave his community. And that little clip outperformed all the business stuff. And this is a business podcast. We'll link to that episode in the description, by the way. It's one of my favorites of all time. But it's a disarming story and it shows the person behind the story and people love that. So when you walk into a pitch, lead with one specific thing that you tried that did not work. Here's what we got wrong in year one. Well, humility, who leads with humility nowadays? Just watch when you say something like that, how the room will shift towards you. And I say room, it doesn't need to be literal. This could be on Zoom, over an email, text, whatever. The cleaned up version of yourself sells less, but the honest version sells more, which I've said this a million times. Honesty is profitable. Doing the right thing is profitable. Being a good human is more profitable in the long run than otherwise. All right, tactic number 3, stories sell. Sell your story. The data confirms this. The episodes of mine that crush on the show are never the ones where a guest reads off their profit and loss statement. It's the ones with one specific moment that a founder can't shake. Also, anytime I reference an old episode in this, we're gonna link to it, so just check it in the description. I interviewed a woman named Shannon. She has a roadside peach stand business and she gave me all the numbers, the margin cost, the logistics, et cetera. But the clip that resonated the most was when she talked about pulling up to a gas station in South Carolina at 5:00 AM with her 11-year-old son in the in the passenger seat and how she learned how to run a peach stand from her mentor. That's the thing that people talk about. So anytime you're pitching anything, leave the data and the numbers in the deck, but the story should be the thing that you tell yourself because investors, customers, vendors, business partners, anyone, they're buying the founder. The numbers are just the receipts. I'm sure you've heard on Shark Tank people say, oh, I bet on the jockey, not the horse. Well, that's true, not just in investing, but in life, in business and life and anything. It's about people. It all comes down to people. So if your pitch is 90% slides and 10% story, flip it and watch your close rate skyrocket. Okay, number 4, the dumber it sounds, the smarter you look. Let me tell you about a ship. Stockholm, Sweden in the 1600s. The Vasa was the biggest, baddest warship that had ever been built. It had 64 bronze cannons, 2 rows of 16 on each side. It was the best of the best. Gold paint, wood carvings, the pride of the king. They'd never seen anything like it. And on its maiden voyage, August 10th, 1628, the Vasa sailed out of the harbor and it was supposed to do a parade lap so everyone could see how awesome it was. But half a mile out, a minor breeze caught the sails and the ship tipped to one side. Then it tipped back, tipped further. The portholes for the cannons were open because they wanted to show off. It looked cooler that way and they filled with water. The ship sank right there in the harbor in front of everyone. 30 people tragically died and 333 years later, divers pulled up the ship and now it's in a museum right next to where it sank originally. And I saw it in person in 2018 and it was amazing. It was the best museum I've ever been to. And I realized that the Vasa sank because the builders were warned that it might be top-heavy, but they ignored it because it looked awesome and they wanted to build something that looked awesome, not something that was necessarily safe. Ideally you have both, but they chose for something that looked awesome. They didn't add enough ballast. Now ballast is what goes in the bottom of the hull to make it more bottom-heavy, to weigh it down, to keep it more stable. But everything above the waterline is pretty, and that's what they focused on. So the VASA is what a bad pitch looks like. It's what bad communication looks like. Beautiful slides, big words, TAM, ARR, blended CAC, vertical SaaS, recurring revenue, motion. It's all pretty above the waterline, but hollow below. And the first breeze you get, AKA the first real piece of pushback or question you get, the whole thing will tip over. And research at the University of Munich backs this up. They noticed that speakers who use simple, clear language get rated as more smart and more competent than otherwise. Speakers who lean into jargon, big words, trying to sound smart, sound dumb. They get rated lower. And the reason is because of what jargon does to a listener's brain. It triggers like a quiet alarm that says, "I think this guy's hiding something." And I see this on my show every week. You might not see it as much 'cause we edit it out, but Oftentimes a founder comes on and I ask what they do and they're like, oh, I have this vertical SaaS recurring revenue. Yeah. And I'm just like, bro, stop. Like, do you even know your business? The best business owners explain it like a 6th grader. What did Phone Restore do? We fixed broken iPhones. 4 words. Do you remember my Toasted Tours episode? What did Kevin do? They put windows in shipping containers, put it on a semi-truck and drive people through wine country. Peach Stands. I sell peaches on the side of the road. If you can't explain your business in one short sentence, then you don't understand your business well enough yet. It's hard to hear, but it's true. The first sentence of your pitch should be one that your grandmother could repeat to her friends. Number 5, specifics beat adjectives every single time. This is the one that almost nobody teaches, and it's the cleanest tell of an amateur communicator. Listen to this sentence. We saw really strong growth in our first year, and we believe we can scale rapidly with the right investment. What? Strong growth. That's so broad. Scale rapidly. How rapidly? What is scale? How much growth does that represent? The right investment? Is that $1 million? $1 trillion? Let's deliver the same message with this sentence. We grew from 3 to 247 customers between December and January. We grew from 3 to 247 customers. We add 30 new customers a month with no paid marketing. We need $400,000 to hire 2 engineers so we can double our growth. Basically the same message., but a different universe of meaning. Speak in numbers. You want to communicate with real numbers and proper nouns. That's the whole culture of this podcast is being tactical and specific and simple and approachable and accessible, et cetera. You know the drill. Name the dollar amount and the timeframe, the city, the year, the marketing method you used. What did Mike Yoder say? The drone business. I made 50 grand in my first 10 weeks. Connor Gross said, I wholesaled one self-storage deal. For $360,000 of profit. Shannon said, I opened 100 peach stands my first summer. You've heard me talk about the business I bought for $750,000 about 5 years ago. We made $10 million in 90 days. We didn't raise any money. We didn't use any paid marketing. That's my story. I could have said we grew really fast, but that doesn't tell the story. That's not interesting. So strip out every really, very, truly, incredibly out of your pitch altogether and replace each one with a specific number, date, or a name, and your pitch will land twice as hard with half as many words. Number 6, you wanna talk in chunks. Force the silence. Here's one of my favorite quotes about good writing, and I would apply it to good speaking as well. This sentence has 5 words. Here are 5 more words. 5-word sentences are fine, but several together become monotonous. Listen to what is happening. The writing is getting boring. The sound of it drones. It's like a stuck record. The ear demands some variety. Now listen. I vary the sentence length and I create music. Music. The writing sings. It has a pleasant rhythm, a lilt, a harmony. I use short sentences and I use sentences of medium length. And sometimes when I am certain the reader is rested, I will engage him with a sentence of considerable length, a sentence that burns with energy and builds with all the impetus of a crescendo, the roll of the drums, the crash of the cymbals, sounds that say, listen to this. It is important. Good thinking is good writing is good speaking is good communicating. Okay? Mix up your words, mix up your sentences, mix up your sentence lengths. The best communicators talk in short bursts, but the ramblers, and there's a lot of ramblers out there, it just sags. It just loses interest, even if the story itself is awesome. Now, when people get nervous, the default move is just to keep talking. You want to fill the air, you want to keep the room warm, so you just keep rambling. You add caveats, you hedge. But don't, try not to, have some self-awareness about that. If you watch a CEO talk the top of their game, think of Steve Jobs presenting the new iPhone. They land a sentence and they stop, pause, but they also know when to not stop, when to keep going, when to power through, speed up, or when to slow down. And of course, in any negotiation, the person doing most of the talking is usually the one losing the negotiation. I learned this the hard way. It was October 21st, 2021. I was sitting in Texas Children's Hospital next to my daughter. Who was waiting on a lung transplant, and our biggest customer was 90% of our revenue. He was an absolute nightmare, wielding his revenue over me like a club. And that afternoon I sat in the hospital and wrote him an email, short paragraphs, no softeners. And this was the closing line: Your continued involvement in this working relationship is a greater liability to our business than the current threats you are making. It removed all power from him. One sentence. Put your strongest line at the end. Put your strongest two lines, no matter what you're communicating. If you only want them to remember two sentences, You want to put one at the beginning and one at the end. What happened in this case? He kept talking, kept threatening. Eventually his own team had to step in around him because he was a liability. Oh, we never worked with him again. And it was the right call. It was the only call. So if someone's steamrolling you, getting louder will lose you the battle. Going longer will lose you the battle. So go shorter. There's a quote I read. I can't remember who said it, but it was, I have made this letter longer than usual because I have not had the time to make it shorter. It's a lot of work to be succinct. It takes practice, but it's worth working at. Guys, TKowners.com. That's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about 1,000 people in there building, starting, growing businesses. Check out TKO as in the Koerner office, TKowners.com. Number 7, end with a recommendation. In all of your communications, don't end with a question. People will follow a specific recommendation about 60% more often than responding to just an open-ended question. Because the open-ended question requires them to think, exercise their brain. That's friction. How many of your outgoing emails end with something like, "Let me know what you think. Open to your thoughts. Would love to hear your reaction." I do that sometimes. I'm guilty of a lot of this stuff. But when you end with something like that, then it's a signal to the other person that you don't fully believe in the thing that you're sending. So end it with a recommendation, something like, "Here's what I recommend we do next. We get on a 20-minute call next Thursday at 2:00 PM and I'll walk you through implementation." I'll send the calendar invite later tonight. Very specific. A recommendation. Just one thing. Real time on a real day. This is what leadership in communication looks and sounds like. And people follow leaders. They don't follow people that stall and seem unsure about what should happen next. Test this in your outreach. 50% of your emails end with something like, let me know what you think, aka set aside part of your day to think about this and then respond to me. Not going to happen. And then in the other 50%, end with a recommendation. Your response rate will go way up. And yes, all of these principles work in person as well. End the meeting with, "Here's what we're going to do next," and a specific date, and watch just how quickly things move. It's funny how a lot of these principles make sense in retrospect. And I look back on my life and I can recognize times where I did them well and times where I didn't. And usually it was just by accident and I'm only able to connect the dots in retrospect. So By no means do I want you to think that like I'm this master communicator, because I'm neglecting to tell you about all the times where I royally screwed this up. But one of my favorite stories, my best stories of all time, is when I pitched to John McAfee, the accused murderer, founder of McAfee Security. At the time I pitched to him, he was hiding out somewhere in Tennessee, but I guessed his email address and I wanted to pitch him on this software that I was trying to build. And he responded. He said, come pitch me in person. On your business. And the business idea really was just an idea, was this piece of software or algorithm or Google Sheet really that could help predict cryptocurrency price movements. But he was so paranoid about his security that he would only give me his actual address the morning of the meeting. So it was like a late February in 2018, I think. Drove to his house. I pitched him in front of an Australian film crew that happened to be there anyway to film like a, an Australian version of 60 Minutes about him. And he agreed to partner with me for 25% of that business and to promote me. And we ended up building a community of over 70,000 people. We launched a free airdrop token that hit like $30 million in market cap in a matter of months. And then, you know, the crypto market crashed and everything died. And, you know, that was a year and a half, 2 years of my life wasted. Not really, but it was a great learning experience. And for those months that I ran that business with John McAfee, He was tweeting about me twice a week. I actually tell the full version of the story on episode 9 of this show. If you scroll way back about 2 years to spring of 2024, March of 2024, we link that as well. But I'm telling you this story again because the entire reason that pitch landed was all because of the first sentence that I said to him when I first sat down with him. I led with a question about something specific he had posted online, specifically him. A, it told him I did my research. This was pre-AI. B, I threw in a compliment and we love compliments. So his brain stopped for just a moment. And this was the same move that I used on the CMO of Best Buy about, you know, Gonzaga. And this is the same move that I'm teaching you here today. So before you go, remember this one thing from all these businesses that I've started, some hit, most failed and/or were abandoned, but the ones that hit and the ones that failed had the same thing in common. They either lived or died on communication. How you communicate with your customers, your employees, your vendors, your investors, et cetera. The founders I interview on the show that are crushing it are not any smarter. They're just better at communication. They've done more reps with these 7 things that I just taught you. That's the difference. So I gotta eat my own dog food, right? I gotta end this with a recommendation. My recommendation to you is to pick one move of these 7. Let me know what you think out of your outbox. That's one example. Pick that or any of the other 6 and let me know how it goes in the comments, and we'll see you next time on the Koerner Office.