Jon Davids: Mastering Personal Branding | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #90

Hey, everybody. Jeff Duden here. And we are on the home front and I am more than excited to have a great marketing talent influencer and somebody who can really, I think, help a lot of us try to sort out this whole social media and promotion for ourselves personally in our business. John Davids.

Jeff, great to be here on the home front.

Yeah, man. Yeah, man, it's awesome. I've been really excited about this. I've been digging through your book, which is marketing superpowers, which is that you have made the information in that book so accessible and so actionable. And maybe it's just because I'm on that path right now with the podcast and we got, I think, the fastest growing property service franchise platform in North America right now. So we just got lots and lots of reach that we're trying to obtain and then also, you know, we're trying to be known, liked and trusted because this is important decision for people as they get into franchising.

But I'm glad you say that because I, I'm, I'm so glad when I hear people who maybe don't come from this world, and I know you have a marketing degree, but I love just hearing that people find it digestible, easy to access. I find there's too much intimidation and high walls that are put around business and, and marketing and growth. And it doesn't have to be like that.

Sometimes you sound really smart when you try not to be too smart.

That's exactly it. It's, it's taken me, it's taken me a long time and getting all the knowledge that I have to be able to express it in a way that everybody understands. I tell people, if people don't understand what you're saying, it's probably because you don't really get it all that well.

That's interesting. The book opens up, you dive right into this axis of influence and real simple, the interplay between whether people know like, and trust you and reach and, you know, how you, which quadrant you fall into. And for us, I mean, we, we, you know, we, we've got this podcast. It's going really well. It's going better than we expected it to, obviously, because you're on. I mean, who would, who would have ever thought we'd have John Davids on, on the home front? But you know, sometime dreams come true. John, you know, you just, if you just keep, if you live long enough.

Listen, man, I see you climbing the charts and I have tuned in. I mean, this podcast is really good and I'm actually surprised that you haven't been doing it for longer because you're really polished at it. It's climbing the charts fast. You look great on camera.

Well, hey, I appreciate it. You can keep going. No, but like, so, but, but we're in that point of trying to figure out like, what does it mean? What is the real impact that it can have? How do we best help people and then also, you know, how do we, how do we accomplish our goals inside of this? And I think what we've learned with the podcast is that, you know, it's really not for compelling people. It's more for convincing people. Convincing people that, number one, we're good people. Number two, our heart's in the right place. Number three, we're going to give uncondition by having people like you on that are going to share things that are, that are going to really be able to make an impact, make the stuff digestible. And also, you know, look, we've had some success in different things, but you know, we're also approachable and here. So I think for us it's really good to help people when they decide to engage maybe in the franchise industry or in home front brands specifically to get to know us and more than, and get to know us. And they don't even have to tell us they're there. That's the beautiful thing about it. They can be voyeurs and just listen and engage if they want to. And then. But ultimately it's so nice that when I finally get to meet people at the end of this process that we put them through, that they already have a good background about who we are and what we stand for, just makes everything easier.

And you pointed something out there that was so interesting. And this happens a lot, especially if you've got a megaphone and an audience or a community on the Internet. People come out of the woodworks and the first thing they'll say to you is, hey, I've been tuning into your podcast for seven months. I've been reading you on LinkedIn or on Instagram for two years. And these are people that you've never heard of before. They're not loud in the comments, they're not liking all the posts, but they're ingesting everything and it makes a big difference. It almost feels like when you're on that sales call, it's not even a sales call, you've been selling them for two years just by talking in their ear and putting messages out there, which is completely authentic.

It is. And especially in franchising the most Important thing is the relationship with the franchise partners out there. So the fact that they can get to know what to expect from us over time and do it on their own terms, it just makes it that they already know that they're going to be a fit for our culture and they're going to get along with us and that they can kind of get aligned with the things that we believe in. Whether it's, you know, giving a million books to children through Carson Scholars or, know, helping veterans or, you know, this whole financial freedom for families on Main street usa. Like, those are the kind of the things that we care about, if those matter to these people. And, you know, it's not like they're going to see it on a. A deck in some sales presentation where it's just going to fly by on a screen. You know, they know that, like, we walk the walk, we talk the talk, and it just makes everything easier. So that being said, this is not a Homefront Brands commercial, although it kind of turned into it. But see, that's. That's what's great about John. John just.

He just rally believers, man. I love it. I'm eating this up.

Yeah, well. So, John, why don't we go back, because you've got an incredible background, very similar to mine in a lot of ways. Tell us, if you don't mind, just go back and tell us how it started for you.

I was a kid who didn't do all that well in school, didn't have any of the check marks on my resume as a teenager that would have told you I was going anywhere special. But I had a lot of passion in here, you know, in my mind, in my heart for a couple things. And I kind of just started dabbling early on. So my first kind of big story of entrepreneurship happened in college. So even before that, I was a kid, I was doing snow shoveling. I was always trying to find the arbitrage. How do I find labor to do the activity and how can I capture some value in the middle? And when I got to college, I had a buddy who was building Internet websites and, you know, know kind of making a little bit of money on the Internet. And I was always passionate about media, magazines, that whole side of the business. I was. I was always walking into bookstores and picking up magazines and just looking at the masthead. What does it take to make a magazine? And I thought, you know what? This Internet thing is taking off. This is like 2003, 4, and I love content. Why don't I build a magazine on the Internet, which sounds super simple today. That's buzzfeed. But this is before buzzfeed. So I basically had to figure out three things. I had to figure out how to make the content, how to get the audience, and how to monetize. And so that three steps for me. The first thing I did was I went to my college English department, and I said, hey, I'm a student here. I'm making a magazine. Are there any students who can write for my magazine? And they ended up saying to me, yeah, we can actually send out an email to all the students with this magic thing called a listserv, which I had never heard of before, we could blast out to all 5,000 students here in our department and tell them who you are and to email you. And with one email, I had a hundred applications of people that wanted to write for my magazine. They just wanted the experience. So, boom, overnight I had writers, I had an editor, and I got lots of content. Writing about sports and cars and pets and music and relationships, anything we could think of. So that was step one, and then step two was the hardest. How do you get traffic to the Internet? And this is taught me so much. And a lot of the lessons that I ended up putting in the book Marketing Superpowers came from this one tactic, which was figuring out where the attention is and how to hijack it. So back in those days, it was msn, aol, and Yahoo. That's where all the traffic on the Internet was. About 92% of all the Internet traffic started with those three homepages. And I thought, okay, on these pages, you've got news and sports and lifestyle content, just like the stuff I'm making. I wonder if somehow I can get my content on those sites and get people back to my site. And over the course of six months, with a whole lot of calling and a whole lot of cold emailing, I finally convinced the guy who ran MSN to let me put my content on their site in exchange for links back to my site. He said, how much we have to pay you? I said, nothing. Don't pay me a pen any. Just put links back at. On every article back to my site. And overnight, Jeff, I had. It was like 2 million readers a month, cumulatively, that came to my site, threw up that Google AdSense JavaScript, and I was making hundreds and hundreds of dollars a day doing that. So that's how I got into the world of entrepreneurship.

So you were. Who was generating the cat? Who was the payer on that money that you were bringing in? Was It MSN paying for the clicks or advertisers.

Yeah. So the way it works, actually really simple. What you need is traffic on a website. So I had traffic coming in from this fire hose of MSN and eventually AOL on Yahoo. We got our content on all those sites. And when you get on the homepage of Yahoo in 2004, holy crap, you got a lot of traffic coming in. So once you have traffic coming into an article, let's say it's five ways to lose weight this summer on that page there on my website, you'd have ads that were being generated automatically by Google. Weight loss supplements, pills, you know, nutrition plans, whatever it is. And when you clicked on those, Google sent you a check. So we were generating thousands of clicks every day. You can imagine those checks added up.

Oh, yeah, 100%. Now, was that your first. What was your first side hustle going back to when you were a kid, when did you make your first dollar?

My first dollar would have been snow shoveling. Okay, so the. The hustle there. It's funny. One of the great questions when you're around entrepreneurs is what was your. What was your side hustle at the very, very early age when you were 9 years old? How were you making a buck? Because we all have those stories, right?

Right.

So my first hustle really was snow shoveling. And I realized that getting the contract from the neighborhood home was the most important thing. So I would go and get a contract for, let's say, 100 bucks a season. And I would find a neighborhood kid who will. Who would shovel the snow for 50 bucks. And I would say, okay, cool, I'll pay 50 bucks to shovel this driveway. And I would net the 50 in the middle. So it was just an arbitrage.

Got it. Got it. Awesome. Then you get. You go through college. Now you grew up in Toronto.

Yep.

All right. Lots of snow. That makes a lot of snow here. Lots, lots of snow. And then you go to university and you create this Internet business. Where did you go? From there.

From there. So by the time I graduated, I was making 300,000 a year. I ended up selling that Internet website blog in 2009. And from there I kind of stumbled. So between 2009 and 2012, I had this weird phase where I thought I had the Midas touch. Everything I touched turned to gold. Well, everything I touched felt good, but not all of it made money. So I had my school of hard knocks between 09 and 2012. And then in 2012, I was doing this really bad app. I had this idea to build it was basically Instagram for fashion. I was going to be take your photos of your fashion. Your friends can vote on it. And I was trying to do this. And consumer tech is, like, the bane of my existence. I will never touch it ever again in my life. But that was the concept. And while I was looking to promote that fashion app, I stumbled on the world of YouTube influencers. And I came across this video of this gal on YouTube who was making fashion videos. And there's a whole story there that led to the creation of Influicity. So discovering influencer marketing really happened in 2012 for me.

She was doing, like, unboxing, if I remember correctly. She'd go to the store, grab a bunch of stuff, throw it in her living room, and then just film herself, like, opening it. Right?

It was a fashion hall. That was exactly it. She'd go to Nordstrom, buy a bunch of stuff, come home, and then do a fashion haul. Hey, here's everything I bought at Nordstrom. And she was getting 50,000, 75,000 views on every single video. It was wild.

Yeah, that's crazy. And then, so. So you partnered with her. She, you know, you. You said, hey, come out and fly to meet me. You guys get together and you're like, I'm going to try to get a sponsor for this, and then we're going to make some videos with intention. How did that work out?

That's it, man. So you've. You've read the book. All these stories are in there. So I. I emailed or I DM'd her on YouTube, not thinking that she would even respond to me. I said, hey, I'm a guy in Toronto. I see that you're making these videos. How are you getting all these views? And she says, I just throw videos up on YouTube and people seem to like them. And I thought, this is crazy, because surely you have to be doing something more than that to be getting 50,000 views on a YouTube video. This is nuts. And she said, no, this is all I'm doing. And I've only been doing it for, like, eight months, and I'm doing videos every week, and this is what's happening. And I said, are you getting paid by the brands that you're talking about? And she had no idea what I was referring to. Getting paid by who? Who's going to pay me? I'm going shopping and I'm just talking about what I buy.

So she was just like a narcissist. She just was like, I just like people looking at My face. I don't care.

That's it. It's a generation of people that just wanted to show what they were doing. And so I said, I come from the world. And this is actually a really important point, Jeff, for people that are listening here and want to think about how they can apply their expertise. I basically combined two worlds now. So I had just discovered this pot of gold, of traffic, a new traffic source, just like the MSN AOL traffic source a decade earlier. But I had the expertise now of knowing how to sell advertising, knowing how the Internet works. So one point of this story I'll just, I'll mention here. I mentioned that I made money off Google Ads back in the Internet days. In the 2004 time frame, I also sold advertising. So I learned how to go into advertising agencies. Hey, you have Toyota as a client. Pay me $30,000. I'll promote Toyota on my website directly. So we were doing a lot of direct sales too. And so I knew that world and I just thought, wow, l', Oreal, Nordstrom, cvs, they would love to pay you to be a part of this. So I flew her into Toronto. She agreed, flew her into town, partnered up with a retailer that I knew. I said, hey, could we just film in your store? Don't pay me anything. I just want to film in your store for like an hour and a half with this gal on YouTube. And they said, sure, yeah, no problem. You can do it. And we did that. She just filmed the video walking through the store talking about these products. And that video, which I guess you could say kind of looked like a sponsored video even though we weren't getting paid, got 50,000 plus views. And I thought, holy moly, we've got a business here. So I just started brokering deals with her with all these brands. And I did that for two years straight. And that's. That's all I was doing in that time.

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That's. That's a Great question. And it changes every couple of years because platforms go in and out and platforms rise up that were never big earlier. So in 2015, officially, I founded Influicity, which is my agency, still my agency today. And Influicity got our start in influencer marketing. That's all we were doing. We do more now. We make podcasts, we manage social media, we build communities for brands of all sizes. But for the first five years, it was just influencer marketing. And even within influencer marketing was really just YouTube. And so the niche that we fell into very early was YouTube and fashion, and that was because of Teresa. That's the world I came from. So that was really the first big platform that I got to know after YouTube. I would say it was Instagram because it was rising up and doing very well around that time too. So YouTube, Instagram, after that, there was sort of some, you know, Snapchat going on. There was vine, there was Musical Ly. So there were a few others in there that were a bit more transient. They didn't. They didn't really stick like, like the others did. And then after, after that, you would get into, obviously TikTok, Twitter a little bit. And then notably, Facebook was never a big influencer platform. The reason being Facebook is, I believe, still today the largest social platform in the world by traffic. However, it's not very good at influencer because Facebook, generally speaking, prioritizes individual connections. They're sort of notorious for. You can have a million followers, but they're only going to let 2% of those people see your content at any given time. They really kind of. The influencer culture never really got there, and there are exceptions for sure, but Facebook never really got there like the.

Others got seems for us. And we've had a lot of discussion about it. Like, you know, we're. We're a franchise organization. You know, I'm 56. I'm the face of it. It's like, okay, what are the platforms that are good for us? Where are we? Number one, where are we going to find our people? But number two, where can we actually compete? Where can we be relevant? I think we're. I think we just crossed over this year. We're about six months through the year, 1.1 million views on YouTube for us, and we're a new show. Like, we're only. We're less than 12 months old really now. We're. We're right at 12 months old and then maybe a couple million downloads across Apple and audio platforms and other things like that. So you know, we're, we're, we're just getting started inside of this. But how does a business owner who decides that they want to expand their reach through these various platforms choose which are the best platforms for them?

Well, first off, kudos to you. Those numbers are massive, really massive. Most, the vast majority, 5 million plus podcasts have less than 10 episodes. They all suck and no one's listened to any of them. So the fact that you have this longevity this early on and you have those numbers, a million plus downloads on Apple, people don't get that in a decade. So kudos to you for, for accomplishing that. And by the way, I would never think you were 56. So that's, that's another kudos. You're doing everything right. So I love, I love these, what I would call middle and lower funnel activities. The podcast is great. People can sit there and binge and listen to hour long plus conversations with you and industry experts. Great, great move there. YouTube is a different animal. So here's something interesting. Every platform is sort of native to itself. And the reason, the magic key to every platform is that platform's algorithm. And so you might think if I have an audience on Instagram, I can just port all them over to YouTube and they'll watch my YouTube. The problem with that is, yes, it can work. And there can be some examples there where that, that you know, you're famous here so you can be famous there. Generally speaking though, you're big on YouTube because you've tapped the YouTube algorithm. You're big on Instagram because you've tapped the Instagram algorithm. You're big on LinkedIn because you've tapped the LinkedIn algorithm. And they're pretty separate. The way to think about YouTube is, is to make content that serves a very specific audience, just like you're doing with, with the podcast, and then really home in on that. With the right keywords, the right titles, the right thumbnails and give it time, you might find that your Apple downloads are going through the roof and your YouTube's taking a bit longer. It's not a problem. You're not doing anything wrong. You just need to give the YouTube algorithm time to ingest and move forward. And Apple's gonna do its own thing. So that's one way to think about it. Don't get impatient and say, I gotta change things up. Especially if you're doing basically recordings that are going to go on multiple platforms. It's totally fine if one takes off before the other.

How do you think about quality content versus volume of content on YouTube.

On YouTube I definitely lean towards quality. On other platforms, quantity actually is in favor. So the billboard, the billboard platforms, which are essentially Instagram Reels, TikTok and YouTube shorts, those are your billboards. Those are people driving along the highway, which in the digital world is just swiping your thumb. And you need to have the 10 to 12 to 15 second clip, which is probably going to be a clip from this podcast or something you've created separately. That just gives people a little slice of what you might sound like, what you might be able to provide in terms of value, gets them into your funnel and your funnel might be, give me your email address. Well, the first thing is just follow me and then it's give me your email, download the podcast, give us your phone number, join the mailing list, something like that. And then once they're there, you can nurture them for months and years on end. But you got to capture them somehow.

Got it. And then on YouTube it is more about, for our experiences. If we put up a clip that maybe wasn't that thoughtful and it doesn't do well, we suspect that hurts us in the algorithm.

Yeah, it also, I would say just confuses the algorithm. YouTube is extremely good at learning, hey, what kind of person is going to click on this and then watch this for 2, 3, 4 minutes? And the problem is that if you put different stuff out, some short, some long, some good, some bad, you're just confusing the algorithm. You don't need a lot of content on YouTube. Look at Mr. Beast. A video a month, biggest channel there is. You just need good content.

Yeah. So I have a 20 year old, he grew up on everything on YouTube, walking around the house. I mean, just so we watch Cletus McFarland, we watch Mr. Beast as well. You know, like you YouTube is. If he's home and, and he happened to get to the remote first, then we're going to be watching a YouTube video instead of, if my wife gets to it, it's going to be hallmark. If I get to it, it's either going to be sports or Netflix. But you know, so, so he's been the one that's really championed our YouTube and has very strong feelings about putting out stuff that's good that he knows what people watch and what people want to watch. But it's the F. You know, Mr. Beast is just absolutely defying numbers on, on when he put stuff up. But man, if you listen to his, his story like it was years and years and years and years of Figuring out what that algorithm was for him. And the, you know, of thumbnail with my mouth open versus my mouth closed background, just this picture for no reason. This color background does better than this color background. So it's, it's complicated. And I got to think that some people, it's a combination between art and science. Like number one, art. Do I like this and would I watch this if I have to go out and get a sandwich and I got 10 minutes and I go to, I go to YouTube and I see something and that's nine minutes and I can consume it. Like what's going to get me to click on that? But then the science of it is ab testing, constantly refining what you've got using the numbers, using the analytics. They give you great analytics on that, on that channel. So, you know, that's been. And then the question is, like you said, we had to learn that what's going to go good on the audio platforms is something completely different that we need to be paying attention to on YouTube.

Yeah. You've dug into this in all the right ways. And I agree with you that Mr. Beast is a scientist about it, but you also have to look at the objectives. So are you trying to get famous or are you trying to make money? And two different things. So Mr. Beast, he's in the get famous bucket. He's done a great job at it. And his videos are very general interest, very universal, very highly clickable, very easy to watch. And really they're about nothing. You know, they're about I fallen into a hole, let's see how long it takes me to get out. Cool. You're going to do very well in the get famous Bucket there as he has.

Mm.

The other side of it is let's make money. And that's where you get much more into the niching down and to the not caring as much about how do I optimize the thumbnail so that everybody's gonna click this. I actually kind of wanna rally my believers and repel everybody else. I don't want people watching this and, you know, messing up my comments and then rep, you know, calling our reps and taking up our sales time. They're not the right ICP for us, the ideal customer profile. So I really want to focus. And that's where you start to see channels being built that are less focused. You know, my YouTube channel, we actually, we started doing creative thumbnails, really creative wacky thumbnails, trying to get lots of clicks. And we realized, let's just standardize the thumbnail so it's the exact same thing every single time. So we actually create habit and ritual rather than impulse clicking. If you have no idea who I am and no interest in really what we're going to talk about, I don't even want that click. I want people who are qualified. And so you got to think about what the objective is and then align the strategy around that.

Yeah. I mean, if you look at Theo Vaughn, who gets, you know, millions and millions of downloads and everything he puts out, I mean, it's just the thumbnail is very simple. It's him, and then it's whoever the other person is. So there's no real. Like, anybody can put that together. There's no real creative around it. We went through. We had our wacky thumbnail phase. You know, we had a little. We. We had an. We had our overproduction phase where we were overproducing things. And I'm like. And then you look at the page and it's like, there's no way to tell that these things even go together. Like, they all look like different things. So now you're trying to. You're trying to just grab somebody by some. By a hook or by something, as opposed to just like, they're coming back and they're looking for our show. They're looking for, you know, they recognize that's our thumbnail. And generally when they click on it, there's going to be something good behind it.

The signature thumbnail is the strategy that I'm talking about. Stephen Bartlett at Diary of a CEO does a great job at it as well. You see the thumbnail, and it's not supposed to just attract you to click it. It's supposed to tell you, hey, this is Diary of a CEO. I'm talking to a guest. The little quote tells me what they might be talking about, and I either want to listen to that episode or not, but they're not trying to fool me into thinking I'm going to see a man falling into a hole trying to get out. That's not what this is.

Right, right. Man falling into a hole trying to get out. So for that business owner that's looking to jump into this. This complex world of promoting your business on these platforms, you talked about choosing a main character in your book. What does that mean? And how does. What is the process for somebody to make sure they choose the right main character for their story online?

People like following other people. A mentor told me early on many years ago, you like going to McDonald's, but you don't want to follow a French fry on Twitter. That's not what you're interested in. You're interested in the chef, the barista, the community, the farmer. So we're very attracted to people. And people is a term that I use actually kind of loosely, because it could also be a cartoon character. People are very attracted to Homer Simpson and Bugs Bunny. So you have to think about what the character is and the main character in the case of marketing superpowers that you're going to align your brand with. Now, one pushback I get early on is people will throw examples at me and say, hey, this is a big brand with no main character. This is a big brand with no main character. A. I would argue they did have a main character at some point, and they kind of still do. But also, I'm trying to give you a way to create marketing superpowers, not be an average marketer. I want the advantage that my readers have, the readers of marketing superpowers, to be so wildly out of whack with everybody else that it looks like something weird is going on. And a part of that is you have to have a main character. So how to choose a main character? It's the main formula. M A I N and essentially what it is, you might have to. I'm have to crack open the book here because it's been a while since I wrote this, but essentially, you want somebody who mirrors the audience or at least looks like someone they aspire to be like. So you've got to either be someone that I feel like I could have a beer with, or I could aspire to be like you.

Yeah, I got it. Mirror authority. The it factor. And they're not going anywhere.

That's it. Authority in some categories is actually even more important. If you're talking about a pharmaceutical brand or something, I'm actually looking to someone as an authority figure. But at the very least, they have to be someone that you care to listen to to get the klt. The known like and trusted factor.

Yeah. You believe, like, they have some basis for what they're saying.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The it factor is that charisma, that je ne sais quoi. What do they have that there is something that you want to watch? And by the way, that can be totally different for different people. So some people say, well, I've got to be like Gary Vee. I've got to be over the top and waving my arms and loud. Listen, there are a lot of people who are actually very quiet and subdued and have a really attractive quality to them. Think about people like Lex Friedman, Tim. Very quiet.

Yeah, Lex is, Lex has an interesting, you know, at first, you know, everyone's talking about like, so he's what, an MIT guy, Very smart. And, you know, I, he's. But he's, he's got prepared questions that he reads. And I made the mistake of thinking, okay, well, he's got prepared questions that he's reading. It sounds like he's reading off a page. I think my default was, I prefer an interviewer that's more interactive, that's live, that's taking the conversation where it needs to go. But he also has that ability. He's just very, very thoughtful and very deliberate about where he wants to take it. And I guess if you're going to do three hours, like he sometimes will do, you better have a plan because you can't just run around in a circle for three hours. I think it's, I mean, it would be very hard for us to do three hours of this. Right.

But yeah, and, and you also want to make sure that you hit the points that you can get value to the audience. I don't just want to talk about random stuff here.

Yeah. Tim Ferriss has a very kind of thoughtful, down low interviewing style that I think obviously a lot of people have come to enjoy.

And that, and that goes to the point of just completing that circle with the it factor. It's, it's, it has to be about you. It's got to be personal. Don't try to mimic somebody else. Everybody does this at the beginning, by the way. We all have this style at the start where you say, okay, I've got to be like that person. And that's okay to kind of just get started, but you have to trust that the more you, you are, the more you're going to be able to attract people who are like you and like your ideal customer. And then the end is just not going anywhere. You don't want to have to switch out your main character in, you know, in three weeks. So it should ideally be a founder, an owner, someone with an equity stake in the company that is there for the foreseeable future.

We're an entrepreneurship podcast and there's a lot of founders and small business owners that listen to the home front. Does every business need to be on social media?

Does every business need to be on social media?

Regardless of size, regardless of category?

I would defy you to give me an example of a business that can exist without social media. I would love to. I'm thinking, going through my head here Right now I would say that businesses don't need to be on every social media. You could certainly define where you want to be. But to not exist on social media would actually be a statement of some sort. And if you already had, if you've been around for 30 years and you already exist and you have the tailwinds, that's cool. A business starting in 2024 not have any social media presence. I don't know about that.

Yeah, I mean, I guess if you're a small accounting firm and you've got your clients and you're not looking for more clients, you still, you probably still need to have a page. But I don't know that you're gonna, you know, I guess you just set the camera up and video yourself doing returns. That'd be exciting. You know, it's funny, I'm e filing.

Right now, you could, you could do that. What I would do is I would look. What I always say is look at behind the scenes stuff. The things that's boring and routine to us is actually very interesting to other people. So if I was an accountant and I actually wanted to share something with people of value, the two directions that I would go in are, I would explain simple. I would explain complicated things in a simple way. So the go to there would be, you know, how to read a profit and loss statement. What is a balance sheet? Why do I need a balance sheet? What, what is it? Give me three things on a balance sheet that I should look at. I want to read 30 lines, give me three of them that are going to tell me something about my business. So it's certainly utilitarian content like that. And then it's also the behind the scenes stuff. You know, people use a term like write off. What, what is a write off? Do we even know what that means? Explain to me what a write off is. Like I'm three, you know, like, like I'm in third grade. That those are two things that an accountant could do.

Yeah. Are there? So, so if there was any small business and let's just say that they were really looking to drive new customers and they're not experienced on social media or they're just getting started, maybe even it's one of our franchisees, what are the top two or three things that you would recommend that small businesses or startups can easily do on social media to help them attract customers?

So the first thing I would do is think about the main character. So who is the main character going to be and what is the fit in terms of the Content that you can create versus where the customer is. Find that Venn diagram of this is what I can do. And you can write content. You can be on video. You can do photos, photo content. You could do meme content. You could have content where you're just doing audio or a combination of those things. And then what is it that I'm comfortable doing, and what is it that the audience is comfortable consuming? So, for example, if I'm opening up apparel retailer, I'm going to sell fashion, I'm going to sell shoes. Probably just written content is not going to do the trick. My audience is going to want to see photos or videos of something. Got to think of what that Venn diagram is of. Here's what I can do. Here's what the audience wants. What kind of content can I create that is entertaining, educational, inspirational, at least one of those things, if not all three of those things, and then choosing the platform of choice. So some of that is going to be dictated by the kind of content you're creating. Video content obviously is going to go on YouTube, but you can also think about written content being on multiple places and having different forms. So I'll give you my example. When I started doing written content back in 2020, I started to really get into copywriting and do a lot of writing. I started on Twitter and I was doing these long threads on Twitter and they were doing okay. Nothing was doing great, they were doing fine. And then I started taking that exact same content and putting it on LinkedIn. And the same posts that were sort of okay on Twitter were crushing it on LinkedIn. I don't know why. Maybe it's the right audience. Maybe the algorithm liked me better. Who knows, Maybe it was timing. But I started to build an audience, and that's where I have the biggest audience now is, is on LinkedIn. And. And so there's an example of sort of experimenting and figuring it out. And then from there I grew. I started making a podcast, video content. Now I'm on YouTube. Now I have a newsletter with many, many, many thousands of subscribers. So you grow from there, but start in one place.

I was just going to ask you about LinkedIn. We started very intentionally with a LinkedIn strategy. May 29, and we're sitting here about six weeks later, and it is absolutely crushing. And now we're rolling out our first newsletter. And I. I had somebody on the podcast really early that was a. An author that would write for CEOs, and he would do like four articles every month. And on LinkedIn, he had 880,000 people subscribed to his newsletter or something like some ridiculous amount because he was a great writer and everything that he wrote, it was tight, it was concise, it was fat, it was really. He just was a very, very talented writer and I think, I mean, I enjoyed just reading anything that he had. It was quick, easy, interesting, a little bit emotional sometimes and very thoughtful always. What is the cocktail on LinkedIn? You've got a big following on there. What's the cocktail that you have found on LinkedIn that people are attracted to?

And by the way, I can see you're doing super well. 12,000 plus followers. This is relatively new for you?

Well, no, I've had my LinkedIn for a long time. I got 12,000 followers and then I think another maybe, I don't know, 10,000 connections or something like that. So it's, yeah, it seems to be, it's been a good platform for me. I haven't really leveraged it much. Candidly, I don't know how I got that many over time. It just kind of built over as long as I've been on there. So now we're getting very intentional about it launching the newsletter. Hopefully we'll be harvesting some people's contact information from there to be able to continue just to connect with people and provide value to them. So, but, but yeah, it's definitely been, it was my main platform before we started doing all this.

LinkedIn is a place where you've got to really develop a voice and you just, you can't be boring. So much of what I see on LinkedIn is the exact same. We're congratulating an employee. I'm so honored to be on the Forbes 30 under 30. You know, with Beyonce, like, believe me, Beyonce doesn't know that she's on that list. So you shouldn't be so proud of that. But it's just, it's a lot of just self bragging and, and, and congratulations for your inner circle and look, that stuff's fine. I'm not knocking that as, as you know, you want to post that, go for it. But don't be under the illusion that that's going to build you an audience or any credibility on LinkedIn. It's going to get a round of applause from people that already know you and maybe, you know, it might lead to a conversation or two. The strategy that has worked on LinkedIn and obviously I'm on LinkedIn and we have a lot of clients who we manage on LinkedIn as well. It's really about identifying Your voice and then creating exceptional content that provides value. And don't worry about. Some people want to say, okay, well I should make my posts short because I want people to read them. And then, and then like I actually max out my posts every single time I hit the word count, I have to trim them and I do these long posts and people say, I don't understand. You're getting all these likes on your posts with 400 words. I don't get likes on my posts with 20 words. And I say, yeah, because my posts are really interesting. People like reading them and they like sharing, discussing, engaging, reposting. And so you've got to be interesting, provide value and then there's no getting around it. If you really want to be. If you want to be able to make posts that get lots of attention, copywriting is key. You've got to really understand how to write copy at an advanced level.

Yeah. Let's talk about Influicity, your agency, who's a customer for you typically.

So our clients typically, I would say are mid market and larger businesses. So when I say mid market, I mean like 10, 20 million revenue and up. And then the larger businesses, the Toyotas, the Disney's of the world, that's the world I came from. I sort of been working with Fortune 5000 type clients since my very first company in 2005, 6, 7. So that's who we tend to serve. Although I would say that, you know, we have clients that are venture backed startups. Maybe they've raised, you know, 2 or 3 million bucks and they want to, they want to fast track and grow their audience really quickly and do it with both organic and also paid strategies because we do a lot of paid at Influicity. Also I've got this framework that I talk about called Rent to own marketing, which basically means you should rent your audience on day one. Don't be afraid to spend money on Google and Facebook and TikTok because you've got to make sales pretty quickly. And then at the same time you need to own your audience. So you should be investing in those owned channels like organic social and newsletter and podcast. But people seem to have this impression, especially once they read marketing superpowers. They say, this is great, but how does this drive revenue from day one? Well, it drives revenue from day one because you're doing it in conjunction with performance, advertising and that sort of thing so that you have that sustaining you and then your brand takes off and instead of getting a I'm going to spend a dollar and make $3. You're going to spend a dollar and make $1,000 because your brand is really kicking in and supercharging.

Yeah, yeah, that makes great sense. Is it all digital that you focus on or do you get across a more comprehensive marketing program projects for these companies?

It's all digital, but it's not all social. So our clients will come to us and obviously it's the social media platforms, but it's newsletter, it's e commerce website building. We have a client right now. They sell home goods, actually, ironically, curtains and blankets, things like that. And we're now building out their. Their e commerce website and we're sort of building the brand from the ground up. And so that requires us to do a lot more work. We haven't gotten into things like broadcast television, billboard. We're not going totally analog. We are within the connected world.

Nice. I started the show with an unsolicited endorsement for your book Marketing superpowers. When did you write this? And yeah, there you go. It's great. It is absolutely great. Wouldn't say it if it wasn't.

Appreciate that, man.

Yeah, man. When did you write it and how has it helped you?

Yeah, writing a book was. It was a journey. Have you ever written a book or tried to?

I have, I have. I'll send. As a matter of fact, I think I signed one for you. We're sending it to you. It's called discernment, the business athlete's regimen for a great life through better decisions.

Oh, man, I can't wait to read that. That's going to be great. Yeah, it was a journey for me. So I got into the writing game in 2000 when I started writing for LinkedIn and Twitter. I sort of developed the muscle habit. I have a joke with my wife. She says, what are you doing on your laptop? I say, I'm doing my creative writing. And she knows what that means now. Back in the day, she had no idea, what are you writing? And so I got into the writing habit. And then I found writing a book was really the same thing, just a lot more of it. And so I have this Google Doc. I wrote my entire book on Google Docs. I think it's got to be 250 pages by now. And I would just get into the habit of writing a chapter at a time. And then it was a process of refinement. I think the number one thing that I got out of it, maybe you had the same experience, was it's better to just write everything you can and then trim versus Trying to add. Add, Add. It's easier to trim than it is to add.

Yeah, I mean, I wrote Stephen King's got a book called On Writing and his method. He would write the same time every day. So, like, your mind would get into this state and he would do it from, I don't know, 10 in the morning till 2 in the afternoon or whatever it was. And every day, same time, he would write a certain number of words. Then once he was done with a phase, he would put it aside for months, and then he would come back to the book, to the manuscript, and the goal is to cut out 40% of words. I have found that to be the absolute best method for writing, because I'll write something out and I'll be like. And it could be an important business, communication, something that's gotta land. It can't be too aggressive, but it needs to be firm. It's got to be direct. It's got to be clear. And just then going back and letting it sit for even 30 minutes and then going out and saying, I need to take 40% of the words out of this because there's lots of extra. That's ands. And there's all these different things that you put in there as you were spilling it out of your face onto the paper. But there's also just distractions of making things too complicated. And anytime I read marketing materials, you got like, you know, too many adjectives and, you know, connected by ends. And all of this stuff, it's just. It's exhausting. You know, just. Just say what you mean. And that's what I liked about. There's two things I liked about your book. I like the. I like the simplicity with which it was written and the clarity with which it was written. And then I also like the table of contents, because you got very granular. So if I. And. And a lot of times you'll see like eight chapters, and it'll. It'll. It's almost like trying to, you know, figure out a code, a secret code. What's in that chapter. I don't know. You know, it's like a hook for a video to try to pull you into it. But you. I mean, you know, every.

You.

You put what's. On every single page. I mean, almost here. So, you know, I could. I could find something that I was interested in and I could jump right to it. So I appreciated that as well.

I. I appreciate you saying that and noticing it. I'm. I'm very particular about that sort of stuff. So when it Comes to writing and copywriting. And by the way, there's a whole chapter. Because what you just mentioned was actually brilliant. It takes a long time to make something very concise and short.

Yes.

I spend so much of my time editing all of a sentence, and I'll just look at it and reread it, and I'll go, this is bloated. It just doesn't need all these words. And I'll chop and chop and chop. And then when you get a sentence down from. You know, it was. It was 17 words, and now it's six words, but it says the same thing. That is just such a feeling, you know, it's like. It's like losing. You know, you've just lost 11 pounds. Great. You feel lighter and happier. You're frolicking through the fields. It's wonderful. But to get to your point there on the, on the way that I designed the book, and I do this with all my writing on my landing pages as well. I like to give people a sense of. I want to give you the Kohl's notes inside the full book. And so if somebody just wanted to browse the table of contents, hey, section six, chapter 52 talks about check in testimonials. I want to know what that is. John talked about it on a podcast. What is a check in testimonial? It's right there, and you could just go right to it. I do the same thing on my landing pages. What I'll do is I'll. I'll write, let's say, a long sales letter. You know, it's. It's like hundreds of words, but I'll use capitalization. I'll use bold italics and highlighting such that if your eye just wanted to follow the highlighted and bold text, you could read that entire thing in 30 seconds. Or. Or you could read it in seven minutes. It's up to you.

Yeah, it's. You're making it. You're. You're writing it in a way that cannot be misunderstood. And people aren't going to have to burn a lot of calories to figure out what you're trying to say.

And this goes back to what we were talking about earlier, which is the idea that once someone knows a lot about a topic, maybe they feel smarter or it strokes their ego to speak about it in a way that's got a lot of jargon, a lot of lingo, you know, Because I want to show you that I know things that you don't know. And I'm very educated. And the more I know about the topic, especially marketing and entrepreneurship, where I spend most of my brain power. I find once I know something really, really well, if I can't explain it to my mother. And my test for the book, my editor was my mother. So I said, you need to read this book. She knows nothing about marketing and nothing about what I do. You need to read this book and if you don't understand this, you need to tell me so I can simplify it. I want to make it easy to understand. And believe me, the information in there, just because it's easy to understand doesn't mean it's not powerful. It's extremely powerful when you put it into practice, but it's also very digestible.

The biggest things that have changed my life are the just a simple statement. Somebody made a simple statement and I just like, okay, that's what I've been doing wrong in this area of my life. And also having your mom as your editor, there's no way she's not going to like it. So there's that.

I had a few people read it because you're definitely right. She has that bias for sure.

Yeah. Did she give you a five star review? I hope she did.

Oh, she did, of course. She was the first one on Amazon.

And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 10th.

It's funny, I said to her, she's like, can I have a copy of the book? I said, I'll give you a copy, but I'd love it if you would go and buy one and leave a review. Because Amazon knows what a verified review is. They see if you bought it. I'm curious to know from you though, because you work in the franchise world, what are the biggest marketing challenges or maybe the biggest challenge you would say that someone has in the world of franchising?

Yeah. So, you know, getting a lot of it's going to depend on whether you're working with a legacy brand, a Meineke, a Mako, somebody that's a household name that's recognized, you know, and people get into those brands, if they're even available to get into. And they have a built in set of customers because people are just going to drive, you know, McDonald's is McDonald's and you know what you're going to get. And you know, people are just going to pull in if they're a customer to McDonald's, regardless of whichever one it is. When you're dealing in the service industry like us, you know, we have a, we have a big lift to educate customers and to become a household name. And then you Know any, the demand is, is sometimes inconsistent. So, you know, people are only going to need a fence once in their life or when they're putting in a pool or maybe when they're moving to a new house. So now you've got to compete not only for that tip off, the ball goes up, right? Everybody has a chance to compete and bid on that word but you all, you know, so there's, there's the slot machine, right? Of, I'm trying to land an ad directly on a person who has that need today, okay? So there's that, it's a slot machine and you're throwing your dollars out there and you're trying to get it. And then, but the other side of it, like, how do you build a vending machine? How do you build a vending machine of customers that raise their hand and say, I may be looking for a fence, you know, not today, but sometime over the next two years, sometimes in the future. And I want to get a piece of content that might be a catalog or an educational piece, or engage with somebody that tells me that they understand my problem. So that you're, you know, you're, you're, you're building a set of potential customers, right? There's, there's customers today, there's customers that are going to buy sometime in the near future, and then there's brand awareness, right? So how do you sort your activities between those three things? I mean, we all want dollars today, but to your point, you're, you're paying for your customers. So not only are you, you gotta pay for customers today because you got people that need to do work, you also need to find a way, you know, along the way to be able to own those customers and to be the one of choice. So, you know, get. Making it the standard stuff, making it easy to buy. If you can get an app, you know, we have multiple brands and if you can get an app where people go there first to see if that's a service that you provide in their area, providing, you know, and then, and then it's capacity is a big problem in the service industry, so you might be able to drive the lead, but then you've got to convert the lead in such a way that says, yeah, we're available to get out there today and those types of things. But I mean, I, you know, it's, it's the same old stuff. And then, and then I think like there's still, there's still that even though the Internet, which I believe one day will be very successful, even though The Internet exists and has gotten, waiting for it. Yeah, you know, call me, I mean I'm a, I'm a visionary, call me crazy, but, but there's still belly to belly referral marketing things, places where you need to show up because it becomes down this know, like, and trust factor. So now can you, can you. You know, there's referral partners that you get through, places like BNI Networks or Chamber or these types of things or that you gain over time. So people will say, you've got to use John because John's the best at this. And if you can get John, you know, get John. But I think you look at that well, maybe podcasts are a way for small business owners to develop that without, you know, on a, on a broader scale. So, you know, I think, I think the challenges in marketing, which is exactly where I wanted to go next for us, come down to the dynamic nature of the digital space. And we spend, I mean, I am flying all over the country doing two things, recruiting people that can come in and help us build these great companies. So, you know, one of my big jobs is recruiting executives and presidents and things like that. We just acquired another brand, so now I've got to staff that up. And then going out and getting in these places where if I detect that the customer acquisition cocktail is being done, some being mixed together somewhere out there in a new and exciting way, then I need to be there to figure out what that is. Because you run the risk of the interception of your leads by people that are just a little bit smarter and faster. And that's the risk. Like when you. Well, I had a great business coach. He said, jeff, your job is to disintermediate any intermediaries between you and your customer. Okay, well, the Internet is a intermediary between me and my customer. And if I'm not careful, other people can step into that intermediary and take my customers before I ever see that they're there. So the challenge for us is to make sure that we are staying current with. I mean, I'm looking at AI tools now that, you know, two years ago this would have been a four month project with project management to build a piece of, implement a piece of technology and connect it all together. And that might have cost me 200,000, $250,000 to accomplish this one thing where I can go buy an AI tool now and have it installed within a week. And if I can do it, other people can do it. So, so that's the challenge. So I'm, you know, those Are the two like, I am traveling everywhere to make sure that we stay current. And I don't know how long this AI thing's going to last, but the transformation has been amazing so far and it's. And I think it's just getting started. And for people that are not paying attention and just want to do it the way they've always done it, I think they're going to look around and they are, they are going to find themselves behind.

I think you just dropped a lot of gold there. So I want to go back for a second because you said something that I talk about quite a bit, which is the ide that only 3% of your customers are in market to buy at any given time. And you need to be catering to other 97% who are going to be buying, who maybe are solution aware so they know you exist. They're not ready for you yet. Maybe they are problem aware, but they don't know that a solution exists yet. Or maybe they're not even aware that there's a problem or a solution. And so you need to be doing marketing at all those levels. That's the bottom 97%. The best way to do that is with the long tail. The podcast, my favorite is the newsletter. So if you can collect an email address and nurture that person for weeks and months on end, you can indoctrinate them and by the time they realize they have the problem, there's a solution. And you're the best solution provider. You've made the sale before you've ever entered the room. And that's also the other thing that I like to think about is the idea that I don't really ever want to be in a competitive sales environment. I don't want to be one of four vendors that you're looking at. I want to be so clearly the obvious choice, which is what you get. You know the stuff I talk about in marketing superpowers, it's not just about getting more customers. It's about winning the deals with the customers that you do have. And we all know what it feels like to be sitting at a table and you know you're getting the deal because the buyer's your neighbor, or the buyer is the guy you went to school with, or the buyer is good friends with your wife. Okay, great. So I know I'm getting this deal. Imagine if you had that advantage in every single room you walked into. Every time you entered a competitive sales scenario, you knew that you had an unfair advantage because you are just the guy or the gal in that industry that everyone trusts. That's what this is about as well. And I totally agree with you. You don't want to be in a situation where people are shopping on price and then choosing someone who they met yesterday, even though, you know you could provide the service just as well. That's a really, really cogent point that I think people need to pay attention to.

Yeah, a hundred percent. I mean, there's future customers. Who are they? And how can you, how can you be in their orbit? How can you be in their brain so that when that demand manifests into an action that there's nobody else that they're going to call first and they.

Wouldn'T even think about it. And we all have those people in our own cities. Think about your dentist, the plastic surgeon, the wedding dj. Like everybody has examples of, oh, I'd love to get that person. They're booked up for months. I've got to go for this person now. You want to be the first person. And it's not that they're better, it's just that they've developed this image and this brand that's that the aura that's around them. Everybody wants to work with them.

Yeah, no, yeah. Nobody ever gets used to be no, no technologist or no chief technology officer ever gets fired for going with IBM. So if they can get IBM, they're going to go with IBM. And if they can't, then they'll try to suffer with somebody else. But they know their career's on the line.

In my world, that was. Nobody ever got fired for buying a 30 second spot or a Super bowl ad. You don't get fired for that stuff. It's much easier to do that than it is to take a risk on some other advertising vehicle.

Yeah. John, due to the dynamic nature of the technology, in particular around marketing, what has been, and particularly AI and machine learning, what has been the impact on your agency and its ability to, you know, help your clients and also the ability to operate your business?

AI has been a net mega positive in, in my view. And I'm, I'm an AI optimist. There's all kinds of, you know, things you could look at five, 10 years down the line. Are they gonna, is AI going to be taking over jobs and you know, you know, economic impact and gdp and I get all that put that aside on a micro level. It is extraordinarily powerful to automate and simplify a lot of busy work that just takes people's time up. I mean, I, I look at something like simple Tasks, people are working in spreadsheets or word docs, they're writing sales copy and using ChatGPT or specialized tools that, that can do these different things. The thing that would have taken you two hours to figure out in Microsoft Excel, now you do in 30 seconds because you just go to ChatGPT and say, how do I do this? Just do it for me. And boom, it's done. It gives you the formula that you need in two seconds. So I love it for productivity like that, for the bigger jobs. The way we're looking at it in terms of serving clients is it allows us to do much more high level strategic thinking and actioning and that's really where the value is anyhow. And then we can sort of where we at wherever we can, where things are becoming commoditized because they can be done by AI, we can have that, you know, do it for you. Now, what I will say, and this is a big caution because I can sniff this out like a, like a, like a greyhound, is when you are being lazy with AI. So I have people, this happens all the time where people will say, oh, I've written some sales copy that you asked me to do. Okay, great, you know, send it over to me. And I understand that it's chatgpt because the first words are always, let's dive into the great world of. Anytime I see the word dive in, it was, it was AI because that's for some reason AI loves to dive. And so, and so I have to say there's never. And I still to this day do not have a moment where I will actually let AI do the job. It is, it is an internal that knows a lot of stuff but has very little wisdom and very little judgment. So yes, it can do the work, but you need to be supervising it like a, like a real leader, like a real supervisor. Don't let it run loose because it will do all kinds of wacky things. It can do the job, but you got to watch it.

Got it. John, how has AI and machine learning impacted who you hire?

I would say it hasn't really gotten to the point where it replaces a specific job function. It's a copilot, if you will. So I wouldn't say it's replaced or changed hiring in any great sense. We've always been an organization. I've got our key values up on the wall behind me and one of our core values has always been learn fast and share knowledge. So for us, you've got to be, see it to be in my orbit. You've got to be a very quick learner. You've got to be a curious person. You've got to be like, like you said a moment ago, you're wandering around looking for AI tools that are going to disrupt you because you want to jump on them first. You know, you want to be the disruptor, not the one who gets disrupted. So I'm in a culture constantly where people are bringing things to me, people are sharing things with me constantly that I haven't seen, seen or heard of before. And that's becoming more and more important because in the world of social media, where platforms come and go, advertising tactics change all the time, algorithms change. Now we have AI changing all the time. It's more important than ever to be a fast learner. Education didn't stop in college, right? When you're 30, 40, 50 years old, 56 years old, you've got to be learning every single day.

Yeah. The rate of change is just so fast now. Change is constant. And if you have people that want to settle in and just move the widget from left to the right, then those people are going to struggle because it's like, well, you just. And by the way, you specifically asked about the marketing challenges in franchising. That's probably one of them. Because, wait, it's six months ago you told us we were using this tool and doing it this way, and now you're telling us we're doing it that way. And I thought this was a proven system and I thought, well, at that point that was the best practice. But now for these reasons, I mean, this is the best practice and this is the best tool and it's more affordable and it does these things and this is what we get out of it. So, yeah, that's, that's what we're doing today. They don't like that. You know, they don't, you know, some of them don't, some of them don't like that. So I think conditioning ourselves to be comfortable and accept the fact that we are constantly going to have to test and challenge our business practices, our business tools and our business processes, because if not, then you're going to get left behind and we don't want to miss the opportunity to take advantage. And by the way, then, then there's always the chance that we're first or we're near first and we gain ground, we grant, we gain market share, we gain customer base. So for us as a franchisor, it has really. I mean, we're an adult learning, we're a training, we're a call center support company, but now like we are a research, development and change management organization as well.

Yeah, and that's a very smart way to look at it. I recently launched a business, a training company. So we do corporate training and we do individual training, you know, for small business owners, entrepreneurs, just like the folks that listen to this podcast. And the reason I got into that, you know, I wrote the book and one of the big learnings for me was basically what we've just been talking about for the last few minutes, which is that the idea that you can sort of know something and then coast through life for years at a time, that's just not how it works. You have to constantly be upping your skills. And one of the reasons companies work with us both, both on influicity, you know, doing the work, but also now on the training side, just training you guys how to do the work, whatever organization you have, a one person team or a 5,000 person team is because the things that you're doing every single day, which, which are working now, that's great. But it's going to look different in 6, 12, 18 months. And we're here to say, hey, here are the things you need to be looking at to make sure you can get that job done. Really good example, like an example that comes up all the time in our world is you really want to be early to new social media platforms because it's much easier and it's much quicker to grow. The people who are big on TikTok right now, most of them just happened to join TikTok in 2021 and that's why they got big. It's way harder now to build an audience on TikTok than it was in 2021. So just be early to the platform. But if you don't know the platform exists and you don't know how to make content for it, that's where we can come in and say, hey guys, here's what you want to be doing.

So John, what do you see on the horizon for you and your companies? What's out there in the future for you?

It's a great question. It's something I think about every day. So the book has definitely opened a lot of doors. The new things that are happening on my side, so inflelicity is running strong, have a phenomenal team there, working with great clients. I'm very focused right now actually on the training side. So we basically have corporate training and we've got this, what we call marketing superpowers vip, which is essentially. And you can click there. There's a QR code in the book. You can go to it. Marketing superpowers Pro or vip, same thing. And the idea there is we really want to help people implement everything that they're learning in marketing superpowers because it could be intimidating. You know, great. You've just taught me 17 things, but I'm running a business. I'm one person, or I've got, you know, nine people. How do we actually do this in a reasonable. A reasonable amount of time? So that's what I'm spending a lot of my time doing now, doing it for small companies and big ones as well. And then I really see a world where we can. We can turn a lot of this into playbooks and formulas. So I'm really. You probably got from the book. I'm. I'm very into developing a system, a template, a formula that works and then exporting it out as many times as we can. So I see us getting more specialized. You know, franchising is an area that we're looking at very closely. We work a lot in the restaurant space. We work with of a lot. A ton of restaurant clients. So I'm sort of looking at how do I apply marketing superpowers to real estate, to franchising, to restaurants, to travel. And is there a way for us to kind of specialize that in different areas?

Gosh, John, if there was only somebody you knew that you could talk to about franchising.

Here we are. Here we are.

Here we are. I'll be here all week. All right. Well, that sounds awesome. And I'm particularly interested in personally building tools. Building tools, building playbooks and working towards events with entrepreneurs and helping people grow their business and, you know, just continuing to expand the horizon of what we're doing. So I'm really excited for you on that. When did the book come out?

The book dropped June 18, 2024. And as of yesterday, I mean, pretty quickly. But as of yesterday, we're recording this in July. It was trending number one on Amazon in Internet marketing and global marketing. So I'm so happy with the reception. All I ask is if you get the book and you like it, please leave a review on Amazon because that'll help us just grow. Grow in the search results.

This book's going to be huge. I didn't know it was that new. It's going to be massive. I mean, it's really going to. It's really good. Everybody needs to read this book. Marketing Superpowers by John Davids. Highly, highly, highly recommend. And I've certainly enjoyed it and I've gotten some really great information out of it. John, last question.

Yes, sir.

If you had one sentence to make an impact in somebody's life, what would that be?

Do stuff to make yourself happy, not to please other people. And chase the status game. That's taken me a long time to learn. Really figure it out. And it's about figuring out what makes you happy because you got to get up in the morning every single day and do stuff for yourself. Chasing status and prestige, it's not going to do it. You've really got to do it for yourself.

Yeah. Beautiful. Well said. John Davids. Can't thank you enough for being on. This has been absolutely fantastic. The book is amazing. Again, marketing superpowers. Hot off the Press as of June 18th. Get your copy now before they run out. And John Davids, thanks for being on.

It's a pleasure, Jeff. Thank you so much.

Yep. John David's with Jeff Duden, and we have been on the home front. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Talk to you soon.