Ep 65 Curiosity To Success w Don Miller of 'Storybrand' | #MUIYB Mike Up In Your Business Podcast

Foreign. A new camera, and it looks like it's filming a little bit dark, but if you like that picture, I'm good with it.

Oh, it looks. It looks good. It's pretty raw.

It's kind of.

Hey, hold on. You wear glasses?

I wear. I wear readers. Cheater.

Early prescription.

No, no, just. Just Walgreens. I buy them by the case. I really do. I'm not joking. I buy 12 at a time, and I lay them all over the house there. I have, like, three in every. Every backpack, every.

You know, they're. Everything are amazing. Yeah.

The same. Oh, they're unbelievable.

I finally moved to Progressives, which. So I'm near. I'm. I'm farsight. I can't see up closely, so not well. But even in the distance, things are now starting to blur. So I got these Progressives, which. It kind of messes with your mind. You have to. Wherever your nose points is what becomes clear. So if you want to read, you can't look down. You got to, you know, move down a little bit or actually more. It's like the tv.

So.

So first of all, tell me about this, the baby. Are you willing to share any details?

The coming baby? I can. I believe I can. Yeah. My wife is a funny version of nesting. She won't put anything on Instagram. She won't. You know, she's not like, making the nursery or any of that. She's just like, all of a sudden, you know, we don't. There's no. There's nobody outside of the four walls of our home. You know, like, no. Nobody needs to know anything. You know, I mean, that's just my wife's way. So. But. But she has given me permission to. To say we are pregnant, even though we're not putting it on Instagram. I'm just. So we're due June 23rd. So, I mean, we're in the third trimester or. Betsy's in the third trimester. My God. Well, it's.

Yeah, I get it. My gosh, I'm amazing.

I'm. I'm. You know, I don't know if you were like this, Mike, but I couldn't emotionally, irrationally process it as a guy. You know, Betsy's processing it all over the place because her hormones are reacting because she's pregnant and the baby is now kicking and she's already bonding. They're already spending quality time together, if you will. But it wasn't visually until she started really looking pregnant that I was like, I started to get excited. Yeah.

Oh, I can imagine. And do you know what kind of baby you're having?

Yeah, it's a girl. We know it's a girl that's excited. And we've got a few names we don't know. We don't know quite the name yet, so I won't share that. But we've got a few names, and.

I bet you that's the most common questions you get. What are you having, when's it due? And what's the name?

It seems like, yeah, I'll tell you the most common.

It's.

I wasn't expecting my friends, including you, to be so excited. So it tells me that there's something really cool is going to happen.

All right, so let me tell you why I'm excited. You are a good human, and I mean, you are extraordinary, Don. There's not many people like you. And so I'm excited for your daughter. Like, for a baby to grow up in a family that loves and cares is sometimes an exception. Unfortunately, it is exceptional. Yeah, that's why I'm excited. And dude, you're gonna be like the best father ever. I can't wait.

I, I, we're gonna have fun. I know that. We're gonna have a good time. And I'm already wondering, like, how much entrepreneurialism do I teach her? I guess you just feel it out, kid.

I guess, I don't know. I guess for everyone's their own path. I, I have three kids. I got started very early. My first son was born when I was 21 and just instant fatherhood and a lot to learn. And at the end of the day, my only advice as a father, that I can depart, I think that's of any value is, and you know, this is not what we say, it's what we do.

Yeah. And kids catch more than they learn. Yeah.

They're so smart. I want to ask you about, I don't want to ask you about Business Made simple yet.

Okay.

I want to ask you about your transition from a faith based writer to a business writer. I, I don't know of another individual that's been so successful in both genres.

Yeah, I wrote faith based memoirs. And the reason I wrote faith based memoirs is because I wrote memoirs and my, and I, you know, I was somebody who went to church and I was somebody who was raised in a Christian home, Southern Baptist. And you know, when you're a memorist or when you, when you're, you feel driven to inspect your life or what the way I say it, pull lint out of your belly button and hold it up to the light. Inevitably, I'm going to write about, you know, all the things that, that I've studied or thought about or interactions I have. So those were all faith based. I would say that, you know, other than maybe a book called Searching for God Knows what, which was a very, I think, was an interesting book, but it was a poor attempt at a Christian personality theory. And now that your audience is asleep, you know, but I transitioned because there were a couple reasons. One is the, you know, I think you're like me in the sense that you like to master things. You like to really understand something and figure out a way to simplify it. You know, there are people who, you hand them a machine with 12 parts, they'll hand it back to you with six, and it works more efficiently. Yeah, yeah. And you're that guy. And I think I, hopefully, hopefully I'm that guy. The problem is with Christian theology.

You.

Couldn'T, I couldn't simplify it. I mean, I couldn't simplify it and still have it be true.

Yeah.

And, and the culture that I was writing to, I think many, many people believed in that culture that we were given all the answers. And the more I wrote and the more I inspected, the more questions I had and the more convinced I became that we haven't been given very many answers at all.

Oh, interesting.

And so to me, I could no longer write books that had answers. I could just write books that had questions. And, you know, it's a very evangelical community, is a very closed, tribal community. And, you know, for the, for, you know, me to, for me to go outside of that, those, those frameworks, if you will, and say, you know, I think this, I think Judaism is interesting and I'm curious as to the, you know, what free market metrics explain its spread. That's not a question that they're asking or interested in asking. Right. And so that became obvious when I made a. When I made a movie about one of my books. And while the book sold a million copies, the movie, you know, only about 100,000 people went to see it, which isn't enough to fuel box office. And the reason is the movie wasn't about the fact that Christians are right and other people are wrong. And so it failed at the box office. And so there is a kind of message that the dominant demographic within evangelicalism is interested in. And that message is, we're right.

Right.

And we have, and we ultimately have security because we're right. And that's not a knock against evangelicals. That's Virtually every tribe, you know, every.

Tribe feels they're 100% right. Sure.

And so I'm just. I. They may be and we may be, because I still pray to Jesus, and none of my theology has really changed. I just have too many questions to write books that that market would be comfortable with. And I got more interested in narrative structures, and I got more interested in Victor Frankel's work on what makes a life meaningful or how do you have a meaningful experience? And then I got, you know, Accenture thankfully asked me to create a project management curriculum, because there was a fan over at Accenture who was this wonderful, very intelligent guy, and he asked me to work on this project management curriculum. And that entered me into the business world. And then I realized, I really like this. I'm really good at it, and I hardly ever get criticized. And when I wrote Christian books, evangelicals would light me up.

I mean, really.

Oh, no. I mean, light me up. I mean, why. You know, I have a. I have an interest, as you know, in going into politics someday. And I know, I know. Somebody once told me, they said, you know, what are you going to do with all that, with all the anger and the visceral attacks? And I said, you know, it'll be a break from having written Christian memoirs. So all of those reasons combined. And here's the other thing. I realized what I really loved. What I really loved was composing experiences, emotional experiences through books not unlike a symphony or something. You're sort of taking a reader through the ups and downs and then simplifying ideas. And that's what I really loved doing. It's just that I was writing about my life as an evangelical, and now I'm writing about my life. Having grown a business. I get the same fulfillment. I really do. I get the exact same fulfillment. So, you know, that said, I want to make sure I don't get a bunch of emails or my customer service people always ask me to say a couple things. Nothing in my theology has changed. I'm not a heretic, and I still pray to Jesus. So please, you know, disclaimer made. Yeah, we'll have that flash. Yeah, there you go. So.

But you weren't leaving a genre as much as pursuing a genre is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, exactly. I wrote seven Christian memoirs. If you write your eighth memoir, you're. You're a clinical narcissist. So I'm. I'm just a regular narcissist, as, you know, like, I'm not a clinical one. I can't write the 8th one I kept it at 7, so.

But your first book in this space was Storybrand and yeah, wildly successful like, so it's atypical for someone to enter a space marketing. There's a lot of established names and, and brands out there and you came in, became the dominant force. What would you attribute that to?

I think I came in through the side door. I came in, you know, really talking about ancient narrative structures and sort of Joseph Campbell kinds of material only for businesses. And while that, while some of that had been attempted, it hadn't been attempted really in the way that I did it. You know, it was, you know, how to clarify a message and your message matters. The words that you're using to talk about your products matter. Here's an ancient framework that helps us distill information into a narrative that's interesting. And if you want customers to be interested, use these tools that had just never been done before. I will say, though, I certainly never expected, you know, half a million copies or anything like that. That was not, you know, even in my wildest imagination. I thought, you know, it'd be great to get 50,000 books out there and talk with people who are interested in this and I will be extremely fulfilled in having these conversations because I love them. I've never gotten tired of helping somebody clarify their message. It never gets old to me. And so I'm very, very to go back to my evangelical upbringing. I thank God every day that I, I got to pivot my career. And I certainly feel like I'm still being used somehow and is in whatever.

Well, I think we're all tool for.

Exactly, for the divine.

I really do.

So I love that you believe that because I, I, I, I hope that that's true because it certainly feels true.

Yeah, to me too. I'm curious about the business though, behind it. Was that something you planned out was to build the Story Brand company effectively, or is that something that was a natural outcropping of the.

Well, it started with Storyline, which was a life planning conference that we had up like, I think at our biggest one, we had like 25 or 2700 people there. So it was a successful business Story Brand. The framework that we would later call Story Brand wasn't, was created by me in order to market Storyline and we, I had no, I had no commercial interest in getting it out there. It was just a narrative structure that I'd created something similar for Accenture and now I created it that was for project management, this was for messaging. And then I just thought, I want to Put together a little beta group. And so for free, 10 businesses flew to Nashville and we spent a couple days together working on their brands. And it was just extremely obvious from the beginning that this, you know, this can grow to be, at the time I thought a $2 million company. And last year we did 16.5 and that's only about five years later, so. So, you know, again, just super lucky to, you know, lucky. But also that's what you get sometimes when you, when you chase your curiosity, you almost always get something magical. The fact that the Venn diagram overlaps with commercial success though, I think is where I got lucky.

Yeah, I love that. Chase your curiosity. I'm just writing that down. So, yeah, so that's an extraordinarily large company in the small business space. Right. So 16 million plus dollar company was that 50 employees? 100 employees?

We have 30. Yeah, we have 30.

30 is unbelievable. Seriously.

Yeah, I never saw that coming either. We have 30 team members now.

So there's a rule of thumb that a really profitable business will be posting $200,000 top line per full time employee. So 30 times 200,000, that's a $6 million business. $16 million. Sounds like you're, you'll be doing okay.

Yeah, we're doing okay. You're doing okay now. It's funny how like you still wake up at 3am though, and go, yeah.

My heart's still racing.

Is down by 1%. Oh my God, we're going to die.

I know, I know. Tell me how the pandemic affected. Because you do those conferences. I've been to three of your events. They are absolutely fabulous. How the pandemic affect you?

Well, like, like most of us, we, we went to a live stream model. We did it really early. I mean, we did it, you know, we Pandemic shut us down in mid March, May. We were on a live stream. So we were one of the first people I know, like Tony Robbins took a lot of time to get there. Of course he did it. I mean, you go to his set and it's like a Coldplay concert or something. Incredible. But, but you know, it took them a while and, but we just, we threw everything in really early and achieved some success. And then we invented, you know, because we thought we don't know where we're going to get cash tomorrow because 80% of our revenue is dependent on people getting on airplanes and coming to Nashville. Yeah. So I thought this, how am I going to keep everybody, you know, I'm going to have to let people go And I, that's the last thing I wanted to do. And so we did a live stream called Donald Miller teaches Writing. And I think we charged like $149 for it or something like that may maybe it was 99, I can't remember. But we, but we had 5,700 people sign up for that. And then we did, we did Donald Miller teaches productivity which had thousands of people. And so we actually had our best year ever and our highest profit margin ever. In fact this year because we strategically decided not to do those things again that we, we, we really only sell a few, we only sell three products and we're going to double down on those products and not do extra products this year. It's actually going to be a challenge to beat last year. Now I've never not beaten my previous year so I'm very, very serious about making it happen. But it's going to be a challenge to do it.

And are you going back to the live conference model?

We, we are, we are thinking about doing that in the fall and we will, we will certainly do both live and we will certainly do live stream, there's no question about that. And we're thinking about doing a live one in the fall, but aren't quite sure yet.

Did you see something different for the consumer, the way they engage virtually versus live?

Well, we had small groups in our, in our live streams we had small group leaders, literally like 200 of them.

That's smart.

And so they were able to interact with coaches. I actually think we had, you know, it was one third the cost to attend our livestream. Plus you didn't have to fly. I think you got more coaching on the live stream than you did live and in person. Now you can't beat a live interaction. But because, because it's, you're limited by time and because you can mute yourself, the whole, everything just got much more streamlined.

Yeah.

And I was actually shocked that as we certified business coaches and as we certified marketing guides, I think they got more out of it and we were able to get through the same content much quicker because we weren't in a room live. It was just much more efficient. So you know, there's always trade offs and a lot of people learn in person really, really well and of course they miss that. But in terms of the value that we, we gave, we will, we will always have live conferences and live certifications because the value we just discovered is extremely high.

Yeah, I can see that. I dare say I was emailing with Lindsay, your assistant.

Yeah. Or not. Well, she's on my team.

Yeah, not Lindsay. Mel.

Yep, Mel.

No, with Mel. And she's like, oh, Don's over at Tony Robbins. It was, I can't remember what was about. But you spoke at Tony Robbins conference relatively recently, I believe, right?

Yeah, I've done it five or six times and.

Oh, wow, what's that experience?

Well, I mean, his live audience is like driving a Ferrari. He attracts such wonderful human beings, Mike. Yes, they really are just. Wonderful human being. And he's a wonderful human being, you know, so that's no surprise. So I did a bunch of live stuff and he asked me speech speak at Business Mastery. So I'm not speaking it, you know, unleash the power within or anything.

Right, right, right.

But he has me speak at Business Mastery and I cover messaging and marketing. And then, but then I did it recently, I think like two weeks ago, and he bought a whole warehouse in Florida right near his home. And he's got a stage inside there that it really does feel like you're on stage at a Coldplay concert. And he's got massive, you know, I don't know, 50ft by 100ft screens in front of you and behind you the whole time you're teaching and you literally see hundreds of people. And I mean, I literally, I, you know, I, I was like, hey, you know, so, and so it's good to see you guys over there in Israel because he had an Israeli flag behind him and the guy just looks shocked. You know, I'm like, no, we're really, we're really interacting. We're really.

Yeah, yeah.

Talking to each other and, and you know, we do that here, but we just do it with like big screen televisions, not with like 100 foot by 50 foot screens. And then his team is just, you know, they're just top notch. And I can't say enough about the organization. They do a great job.

It was great to see some organizations. He's one of them that I observed that just elevated their game during the COVID pandemic.

Totally, totally. And that's hard to do.

Yeah.

When you're doing things at the level he's doing, he, he spends money on, on, on adding value. He does, yeah.

Because the cheap or the poor man's lobster was just do videos, pump them out there selling for 99 bucks or whatever. And it's a, it's a down, you know, download when you need it right.

From the comfort of your couch.

And then some people, yourself, Tony, I saw some others, Robin Robins, who's in Nashville elevate and actually pursue deeper engagement, which was almost counterintuitive.

Yeah.

And actually Robin Robbins, do you know her?

I don't know. I've not even heard. Oh my.

I to introduce you at some point. She has a similar size business, but they exclus as yours. They exclusively serve IT companies. They do four live events a year for their.

Oh, yes, no, I did meet her. She's wonderful.

I spoke relentless Red, they call her.

Yeah, I. I spoke at one of her events. Yeah.

Oh, oh, that's right, that's right, that's right.

So.

She, she and I, we talk maybe once a quarter or something. Just, you know, just touch base.

Something. Yeah.

She started this company called Big Red Media. It's how to do these virtual events. She started at the beginning of 2020 or right after the COVID pandemic, say two months after March and 5 million in 2020. And this year they're like, we're. We think we can double that.

Wow.

And that's just a little kind of.

Yeah.

You know, outcrop. So.

So she has a great team too.

She's a great team. A great team, actually. Talk about teams, where do you find your people? If you have 30 people that can run a 16 million plus dollar company, they have to be extraordinary. How do you find great people?

We hire slow. Now, now, I also will fully admit my first three or four hires. I cannot believe how lucky I got.

Was JJ one of the first.

JJ was up there. Kula was there. Tim sure was there. Kyle Reed was there. You know, those were all in the first five or 10 hires. And you know, just talk about people who were good at execution, you know, people who would give a massive return on their paycheck. You know, I. I got really lucky out of the shoot. Not only that, but as a writer, you know, I can go into. I'm right now I'm in a bunker in the back of the garage. Like a cinder block bunker.

Oh, I remember you showed me that. I didn't realize that's the finished bunker now.

It is, yeah.

Can you spin around? Is there anything else to show there?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that's. Well what it is. It's just a 10 by 12 room. And. And let's.

Cool.

But there's whiteboards on both sides.

Super cool.

And that's actually, that's that map of America back there is a gun safe. So you actually. No way. You pull the map of America off the wall and there's a gun safe. I don't own any guns. So. It's just, it's, it's literally water pistols for kids. Is it really? Yeah, totally. Hold on. You want to. Let's see. Yeah, sure. I gotta see this.

What are the pins in there? I gotta.

It's gonna be, it's gonna be fuzzy, but yeah. Oh, my God.

That is the coolest thing ever. So for our listeners, he just opened it up and pulled a water pistol out and started shooting it at me. I got squirted in the eye.

That's right. If you, if you try to rob me, you're going to get wet.

I will get you out of someone.

I will get you wet. That is awesome. Yeah. So I, you know, and, and I'm so happy down in this room that I can come out once a week and, and meet with the team and, and, you know, what I just said is a recipe for disaster. And yet the people that I hired were able to run a company and manage themselves and manage, you know, customer expectations and all that kind of stuff without needing constant micromanagement for me. And so that was really lucky. And then, then we started getting wise and we just, you know, we have a rule, rock stars only. And we take a long time to hire somebody. We, we do let people go relatively quickly, and it's almost never because they're not competent or they're not really good at their job, at what they do. It's more because we miscalculated the person that we actually needed and they don't have that. So. But we do let, we do let people know we give a great severance when, when it doesn't work out. That's happened, you know, just three or four times. But, you know, it's, it's just higher, slow, fire, quick.

I mean, and culture, I'm sure, is massively important for you.

Culture is really important. And you know, we just had a conversation this morning because, and we, we said this. The most important element in creating a great culture is winning. Yeah. I mean, if you don't set people up to win and the organization is not winning, you are going to have a fight on your hands to create a positive culture. So, you know, culture is not a ping pong table and, and a breakfast bar culture is winning. And, you know, you can have a ping pong table. I have nothing against that. But you want to mess with people's morale, you just chalk up a few losses in a row, and at that point you're really, you're hurting your people. So everything for us emphasizes what our three strategic objectives are, what those goals are when we're going to accomplish them and how you participate in that accomplishment and that all that stuff, we try to make as much of it measurable as possible.

Hey, man, you dropped the hammer when you came out with Business Made Simple. I mean, it's clearly at least clear to me where the vision is now is that you're going to be the definitive source for business resources. So tell me, what's the master plan that you have going on?

Well, I mean, Business Made simple is a book that I wish somebody would have handed me in my early 20s because it would have. Yeah, it stimulated my entrepreneurial imagination. And the book really came about because I had hired a few people who were very, very intelligent. They had a lot of experience in large organizations, Harvard degrees, and came to realize pretty quickly they weren't actually great at growing a small business. You know, they were actually great. If they had $500 million, they were great. And I mean that. They would have been really, really great. But when it comes time to bootstrap in a business, I don't think they were able to do it. And you start realizing that at business school, they teach you. You know, you read a white paper on trade with China, and you. You study a 1973 Volkswagen ad, and you don't need any of that to grow a business.

Yeah.

You know, you don't need to even understand mergers and acquisitions. You don't need to understand private equity. You don't need to understand venture capital. You don't need to understand, you know, you don't understand any of that. Unless you want to be chairman of the Fed or something. You know, that's only one person. So the rest of us have to actually figure out how to grow a business. So, you know, the way I grew a business was I treated it like an airplane. And, you know, you and I have talked about this before. There's the analogy is the cockpit, which is your leadership, and there's about five or six things the leadership needs to be working on. Then there's the right engine, which is your messaging and marketing. The left engine is your sales. The wings are your products, the body is your overhead, and the fuel tank is your cash flow. And so if you can manage those six parts of a business and keep them in proportion to each other, the airplane will fly. But mess up one of them, and you're in a lot of trouble. Mess up two of them and you're going to crash. Yeah. And the only thing you can't. You can't mess up cash flow. And that's why I tell everybody about your books is because that's the one thing you. You can have. You have a perfectly engineered airplane and you run out of fuel and it's going to crash. And so you've got to manage cash flow really well. But if you can understand those six components of a business and how to run them, everything else is just. Is just business speak and stuff. You don't need to know unless you're in mergers and acquisitions. If that's what you do. If you're in finance, then you do need to understand stuff. But if you're selling plungers or you're a locksmith or you're a real estate agent or a financial advisor, these are the six things you got to get right.

I think it's an excellent illustration. What about the business behind the book? You have Business Made Simple University that's continued to expand, it looks like.

Yeah, totally. We have now about 17,000 people who subscribe. It's $275 for a full year. We've never raised our prices, and we don't see a price raise coming. And now we're excited because we have about 10 or 11 online courses that teach all aspects of business. And then we're adding a monthly coaching call from me where I will be on a live stream once a month, the one coming up in May. I'm teaching sales. So right now I'm guiding Berkshire Hathaway Home Services through an effort to double their home sales within three years. And I'm going to teach the method that I'm using with Berkshire Hathaway. And you know, that's 275 bucks. But you get 11 more live streams and you get 10 courses. And then in January of next year, we're actually launching an online day planner that takes your tasks and move them over to the next day. And you can create your life plan and have a day planner inside the platform. And it's still going to be 275 bucks. So our whole thing is just more and more and more value. And we Hope to have 250,000 people in our online platform by 2025. And we've got 17, 18,000 now. So we've got a long way to go. But we're hoping that that works.

This is the masterclass that's actively advertised, but specifically for business. I mean, do not miss this opportunity. Everyone listening to the show, every subscriber mind, go to Business Made Simple. Don, before I let you go, we're confirmed for October 18th.

We are. You're coming to Goose Hill. And that's the deadline to get the barn done.

Yeah, you gotta hurry up. So Jeff Walker is excited to join us. He's.

Yeah, I've spent a little time with Jeff. I went out to Durango and met with him and spoke at his thing. And then we were at BlackBerry Farm with Michael Hyatt. And he's a wonderful guy. Just, Just smart.

He's such an affable guy. I love him. It was his common theme.

Brilliant.

But. But James Clear is coming back. Everyone's coming back. I haven't heard from Ryan Holiday yet, but everyone else is coming back. So thank you for hosting us. Yeah, I can't wait to see either. And yeah, the baby will be there. I can't wait to meet the baby.

The baby will be here. You'll meet. You'll meet her. Oh, also, the only thing that we ask, we'll pay for food and everything. Bring your favorite children's book.

Oh.

Because we're gonna build. We're gonna build a massive children's book library here at Goose Hill. I like that for kids.

I, I. You know what? I'm gonna put some thought into it. I have a. A favorite from the 70s. I don't even know if it's still around. The one that I was raised to. My father read it to me every night.

I think there's a. I think there's a kid's book in you about finance and, Or. Or a kid's book about being.

I may have written it. Yeah. So the money Bunnies may be coming out this October.

We would absolutely love that.

I'm working with my illustrator now, so. Thanks, Don. Just thanks for your time and thanks for joining me today.

I'm so glad. Mike, thanks for having me on. As an honor.