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

I'm using a new, a new camera. 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. I'm not a guy—

or are they prescription?

No, no, just, just Walgreens. I buy them by the case.

Yeah, I really do.

I'm not joking. I buy 12 at a time and I lay them all over the house. They're— I have like 3 in every, every backpack, every, you know, they're everywhere.

Those things are amazing.

Yeah, I have the same thing. Oh, they're unbelievable.

I finally moved to progressives, which, uh, so I'm, uh, near— I'm, I'm farsighted. I can't see up closely, so, uh, 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 wanna read, you can't look down, you gotta You know, I moved 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, nope, nobody needs to know anything. And, 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.

Uh, I'm just—

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, that's amazing. I'm, I'm, you know, I don't know if you were like this, Mike, but I couldn't, I couldn't emotionally or rationally process it as a guy. You know, Betsy's processing it all over the place because, you know, her hormones are, are reacting because she's pregnant and the baby is now kicking. And, you know, she's already bonding. They've already, they're already spending quality time together, if you will. And that, 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, uh, do you know what kind of baby you're having?

Yeah, it's a girl. We know it's a girl.

That's exciting.

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 the due? And what's the name? It seems like—

yeah, I'll tell you the most common. I, 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 gonna happen.

All right, so let me tell you why I'm excited. You are a good human and, oh, I mean, you know, I, I, you are extraordinary, Don. There's not many people like you. And so I'm excited for your daughter. Like, um, for a baby to grow up in a family that loves and cares, um, is, is sometimes an exception. Unfortunately, it is exceptional. Yeah, that's why I'm excited. I'm—

yeah.

And you, 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, uh, 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, I have 3 kids. I got started very early. My first son was born when I was 21.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and, uh, just instant fatherhood. And I had a lot to learn. And at the end of the day, my only advice as a father that I can impart, I think that's of any value, is, 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. So 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 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 memoirist 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, uh, 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, I would say that, you know, other than maybe a book called Searching for God Knows What, which was a very— I think it was an interesting book, but it was a poor attempt at a Christian personality theory, uh, And now that your audience is asleep, you know, but I transitioned because there were a couple of 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 6 and it works more efficiently.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're that guy. And I think, 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 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 me to go outside of that those frameworks, if you will, and say, I think Judaism is interesting and I'm curious as to what free market metrics explain its spread. That's not a question that they're asking or interested in asking. And so that became obvious when I made a movie about one of my books. And while the book sold a million copies, the movie 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, right. 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, and none of my theology has really changed. I just have too many questions to write books that that market would be comfortable with. Um, and I got more interested in narrative structures, and I got more interested in Viktor Frankl'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 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. It's like this. So all of those reasons combined Uh, and you know, here's the other thing. I, I realized what I really loved, what I really loved was composing experiences, emotional experiences through books. Uh, not unlike a symphony or something. You're, 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 flashing.

Yeah, there you go.

So, but you weren't leaving, uh, a genre as much as pursuing a genre is what I'm hearing.

Yeah, exactly. I wrote 7 Christian memoirs. If you write your 8th memoir, you're a clinical narcissist. So I'm just a regular narcissist, as you know, Mike. 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 wildly successful. 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 and 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 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, um, and so I've— I'm very, very— to go back to my, my evangelical upbringing, I thank God every day that I got to pivot my career, and I certainly feel like I'm still being used somehow in and 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 hope that that's true because it certainly feels true.

Yeah, to me too. I, I'm curious about, um, the business though behind it. Was that something you planned out, was to build the StoryBrand, um, company effectively, or was 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 2,500 or 2,700 people there. So it was a successful business. StoryBrand, the framework that we would later call StoryBrand, was created by me in order to market Storyline. And 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 wanna 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.

Mm-hmm.

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 5 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 a $60 million-plus 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, 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'll be doing okay.

Yeah, we're doing okay.

You're doing okay.

Now it's funny how like You still wake up at 3:00 AM though and go, oh yeah, my heart's still racing. Profit is down by 1%. We're going to die.

I know, I know. Tell me how the pandemic affected— because you do those conferences. I've been to 3 of your events. They are absolutely fabulous. How did the pandemic affect you?

Well, like most of us, we went to a livestream model. We did it really early. I mean, we did it, you know, pandemic shut us down in mid-March, May, we were on a livestream. 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. It's incredible. But, you know, it took him a while. 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, um, so we did a live stream called Donald Miller Teaches Writing, and I think we charged like $149 for it or something like that. Maybe it was $99, I can't remember. But we— but we had 5,700 people sign up for that. And then we did, uh, uh, 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 3 products and we're going to double down on those products and not do extra products, right? 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 are thinking about doing that in the fall, and we will certainly do both live and— we will certainly do livestream. 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 engaged virtually versus live?

Well, we had small groups in our livestreams. 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 live stream, 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 certify business coaches and as we certify 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 tradeoffs 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. She's on my team. Yeah.

Not Lindsay. Mel.

Yep. Mel.

Mel. With Mel. And she's like, oh, Don's over at Tony Robbins. It was— I can't remember what it was about, but You spoke at Tony Robbins' conference relatively recently, I believe, right?

Yeah, I've done it 5 or 6 times. And oh, wow.

What's that experience like?

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 beings. And he's a wonderful human being, you know, so it's no surprise. So I did a bunch of live stuff and he has me speak, speak at Business Mastery. So I'm not speaking at You know, Unleash the Power Within or any of that. Right, 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 2 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, 50 feet by 100 feet screens up on in front of you and behind you the whole time you're teaching. Yeah. And you literally see hundreds of people. And I mean, I literally, I, you know, 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 talking to each other. 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. He's because the cheap or the poor man's Lobster was just do videos, pump them out there, sell them for $99 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 Robbins, 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 got to introduce you at some point. She has a similar size business, but they exclusive as yours. They exclusively serve IT companies. They do 4 live events a year for their— Yes.

No, I did meet her. She's wonderful.

I spoke to Relentless Red, they call her.

Yeah, I spoke at one of her events.

Yeah. Oh, that's right. That's right. That's right. So she, she knows we talk maybe once a quarter or something, just, you know, just touch base. 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 2 months after March, and $5 million in 2020. And this year they're like, 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. Yeah, a great team. Actually, talk, talk about teams. Where do you find your people? If you have 30 people that can run a $60 million plus company, they have to be extraordinary. How do you find great people?

We hire slow. Now we, now I, I also will fully admit my first 3 or 4 hires, I cannot believe how lucky I got. Mm.

Was JJ one of the first?

JJ was up there. Kula was there. Tim Scherer was there. Kyle Reed was there. Uh, you know, those were all in the first 5 or 10 hires. And, um, you know, just talk about people who were good at execution, uh, you know, people who would give a massive return on their paycheck. Uh, you know, I, I got really lucky out of the chute. Not only that, but as a writer, you know, I can go into— I'm, 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, uh, and, uh, let's see.

This is cool.

But there's whiteboards on both sides.

Super cool.

And that's actually— that's that map of America back there.

Yeah.

Um, is a gun safe. So you actually— no way. Yeah, 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 what— it's literally water pistols for kids. Is it really? Yeah, totally. Hold on, I'll— you want me to— let's see. Yeah, sure, I gotta see this.

Where are the pins in there? I'm gonna—

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 the shit out of someone.

I will get you wet. That is awesome.

That's 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 from 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. Um, 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 at what they do. It's more because we miscalculated the person that we actually needed and they don't have that skill set. So, but we do let, we do let people know we give a great severance when it doesn't work out. That's happened, you know, just 3 or 4 times. But, you know, it's, it's just hire 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 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 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 3 strategic objectives are, what those goals are, when we're going to accomplish them, and how you participate in that accomplishment. And 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 it's 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, Harvard degrees and, um, 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 enormous, you know, $500 million, uh, they, they were great. And I mean that, they would, they would have been really, really great. But when it comes time to bootstrapping a business, um, I, 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 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. But, 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—

I love this analogy.

There's the cockpit, which is your leadership, and there's about 5 or 6 things the leadership needs to be working on. Then there's the, 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 6 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. Uh, mess up 2 of them and you're gonna crash.

Yeah.

And the, the only thing you can't, you, 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 6 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 6 things you got to get right.

I think it's an excellent illustration. Uh, what, what about the, the business behind the book? You have, uh, Business Made Simple University. Um, is that— 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. Uh, we, we've never raised our prices and we don't see a price raise in coming. And now we're excited because, uh, we have about 10 or 11 online courses that teach all aspects of business. Uh, and then we're adding a monthly coaching call from me where, uh, I will be on a livestream once a month. The, the one coming up in May, I'm teaching sales. So right now I'm guiding Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices through an effort to double their home sales. Within 3 years. And I'm going to teach the method that I'm using with Berkshire Hathaway. And, you know, that's $275, 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 moves them over to the, 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. So our whole thing is just more and more and more value. And, and we, you know, we hope to, we hope to have 250,000 people in our online platform by 2025. And, you know, we've got 17,000, 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, you do not, do not miss this opportunity. Everyone listening to the show, every subscriber of mine, go to Business Made Simple. Uh, Don, before I let you go, uh, we're confirmed for October 18th.

We are. You're coming to Goose Island. That's the deadline to get the barn done.

Yeah, you gotta hurry up. So, uh, Jeff Walker, uh, 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, and spoke at his thing. And then we were at Blackberry Farm with Michael Hyatt, and, uh, he's a wonderful guy. Just, just smart.

He's such an affable guy. I, I love him. There's this common theme Brilliant. Um, but, but James Clear's coming back. Everyone's coming back. I haven't heard from Ryan Holiday yet, but, uh, everyone else is coming back. So thank you for hosting us. And I can't wait. Yeah, I can't wait to see either. And, uh, 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, uh, the only thing that we ask, uh, we'll pay for food and everything. Bring your favorite children's book. Oh, 'cause 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, uh, 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 to me every night.

I think there's a, I think there's a kids book in you about finance and, or, or a kids 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. Uh, so thanks, Don. Just thanks for your time, and thanks for joining me today.

I'm so glad, Mike. Thanks for having me on. It's an honor.