How the Unemployable can get their 7 Figure small business noticed with Jerod Morris. Part 1.

This week I'm going to take a little bit of a departure from the normal because I was very privileged to be interviewed by Jared Morris over at the Unemployable Initiative. And so I was on their podcast in the community. I want to share my lessons and learnings from the Speak PR program that I shared in this Unemployable community. So here's the first half of the program and the other half is coming out in 2 days' time.

And welcome, fellow Unemployables, to yet another Lunch and Learn, our regular opportunity here inside of the Unemployable Initiative to get better by learning from the wisdom, experience, and enthusiasm of a fellow member. This is our 39th Lunch and Learn and our 106th live learning opportunity taking place here on the afternoon of October 7th, 2021. I am your host, Jared Morris. And you know, there are a few common themes that come up time and time again whenever I host a Q&A or pose a discussion question about the challenges that Unemployable Initiative members are facing in building their audience-based businesses. And one of those recurring themes is about getting attention, getting noticed. With so much content and so many distractions vying for the attention of our ideal audience members, how do we get our content, our story, ourselves in front of them in a way that compels them to pay attention? Well, Unemployable Initiative member Jim James literally wrote the book on how to do exactly this. Jim wrote and self-published The Unnoticed Entrepreneur: 50 Ideas for Your Company to Stand Out. It includes his Speak PR methodology, a simple 5-stage approach that creates a framework for business owners to build a simple and structured approach to their public relations. And today, Jim is going to share some of the most relevant lessons from his book with us as we all try to increase our ability to get noticed by the people who matter. Jim, welcome. to, uh, to this Lunch and Learn, to the Unemployable Initiative. Great to have you here, Jerry.

Thank you so much for having me on. I'm joining you from sunny Bath in England. I'm not in the bath, but there is a place called Bath. I am joining you from here. So a real pleasure to be with you. Thank you so much for inviting me.

Absolutely. So, okay, before we get to your presentation, I have to get the backstory behind the line in your author profile that says this, quote, his first brush with getting noticed was at 18 when he jumped out of a plane in return for sponsorship and received expedition equipment in return for media publicity. What happened there? That sounds like a story.

Well, you know, I grew up in the southeast of England to wonderful parents, but parents who were not commercially particularly savvy. One was an academic and one a social worker. And I won a place on Operation Raleigh, which is this expedition to go to Australia. And I got a job like all good middle-class English boys did. And when I did the maths on selling toys in the shop, which is my job, I wouldn't get enough money before the expedition left Australia. So I had this idea that I would do something I was afraid of and that most other people would be afraid of too. And that was jumping out of an airplane, Jared. So I found this little airfield near me called Headcorn. I, I went around the shop and asked people to sponsor me. And, and amazingly enough, I raised much more money by jumping out of that airplane than I would have done in a year of working for somebody selling toys. That's kind of a, a light bulb moment. But then I had the money for the plane, but I didn't have the money for all the kit. So I went to a local newspaper and said, look, if I go on this trip, Would you cover a trip if I get some sponsorship? And then they said, well, that sounds interesting. So then I went to a local hiking shop and said, if you give me some kit, I'll get you into the newspaper. And he went, oh, that sounds like a good deal. And so there I was, this 18-year-old, and I didn't know what I was doing, Jared, to be honest. Never heard of PR. It just seemed like a good way to kind of bridge the 2 people's needs. And yeah, so jumping out of a plane got me there. And then getting some PR for a mountaineering shop got me clothes. So that's it. That was my first introduction to kind of being an entrepreneur and being in publicity.

Just a brilliant plan. You know, sometimes when we feel like we don't know what we're doing is when the best and boldest ideas come out.

Yeah. And I don't think I told anybody because no one said it wouldn't work. So I think I just did it. You know, now you put it on social media and people say, oh, maybe you shouldn't do that. You know, You know, I think sometimes ignorance is just the best formula for being brave.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that story. And with that said, I will turn it over to you and we look forward to seeing your presentation.

Well, thanks so much. I think really I started out by jumping out of an airplane and then I went to America to university and then got sponsored to go to Central America on an expedition. So I kind of got this background of having adventure and, and having it sponsored. But I wanted to ask how many people, Jared, that are here today are entrepreneurs? And I, I don't know if we've got the poll or not, but I, I guess pretty much everybody in the unemployable community is sort of freelance or unemployed, right?

Yeah, and I'm, I'm looking at the attendees and most of the people I see here are entrepreneurs, right?

Ian's raised his hand. And then the second question is, how many of you— thanks, Dan— how many of you also became fathers or mothers when you were running your own business?

Boy.

How many people started to run their own business? Because, yeah, Dan, so you'll know what I mean. I went to China in 2006 from Singapore where I had gone to start a company in 1995. So, I had a history of kind of starting businesses and having done them in England and America, I then went to Singapore and I got to China. And Jared, within about a year, I met a beautiful woman and I had my PR firm. And as you know, if you do PR, you get paid by the hour. And then all of a sudden, we had this baby on the way and I thought, how do I make more money when actually I'm going to have less time? PR is time for money, right? So I feel like working out that if I sold toys at £4 an hour, I'd never get to my destination. I figured the same was going to be true with, with PR, selling time. So when I was a young lad, I had been on the back of a Morgan sports car, and I'm not sure whether anybody here is familiar with Morgan. Anyone here heard of Morgan sports car?

Maybe.

It's a British car company, been around since 1909. So, I got to China and I had this young family starting. I realized I would never be able to make enough money just raising money from time. And my cousin sent me a picture of a Morgan, just like the one that my uncle had when I was a kid. And I thought, what a great idea. What a great antidote to being a dad and losing my youth. So, I bought a Morgan sports car, Jared, and I imported it to China. Now the thing was that when I drove it to places, people said, you know, 这个这个车车是什么意思？They said, "What kind of car is that?" 就你说了，It's an old car, right? And I said, "Actually, it's a new car. Look, it has a license plate. I can get a license plate." And and I said to someone, "Do would you like to buy one?" And they said, "No, yes." The Chinese said yes. So I rang Morgan and said, "Hey, you know what? Where's the dealer?" I've got a tech PR background. I know nothing about selling cars, but I could help your local dealer sell cars in China. And they said, we don't have one. It transpired that I imported the first Morgan sports car to China, Jared. Amazing, right? So this is in 2011. A year later on, I'd made an application to become the dealer of Morgan and got appointed to be the importer for Morgan. And this picture you see on the screen isn't just my solution to running out of money because I had school fees to pay because I had now 2 children. And I found a free parking space in Tiananmen Square. This is in Forbidden City, right? This is right in the very center of Beijing. What I decided to do was to drive my car into the very center of the Forbidden City, unannounced and without any permits. What happened was I I took a journalist that I'd met outside a supermarket who was taking pictures of my car, and I took him with me. And before the police came, which is about 5 minutes after this picture, we got loads and loads of photographs. Fast forward 7 years, Gerard, and what I did was I managed to build the Morgan brand over the next 7 years in China. And the Speak PR methodology really comes out of some of the lessons that I've learned where I built a car brand in China even though I didn't speak Chinese, even though I didn't have an ad budget and I didn't have any support from the manufacturer. And I just think that resonates for entrepreneurs who have got something really, really cool, can add a lot of value, but actually they haven't got VC money, they haven't got maybe a big backing, but they've got something really valuable to share that they know people will love if they see it. That's really What happened when people saw the Morgan car? So what I wanted to do was just to share. This is how it kind of started in China. I did something a little bit guerrilla, and this is actually within the purview of absolutely every entrepreneur. It doesn't cost anything to have an idea and take a little bit of a risk. And what I've done since being back in the UK is to then start a podcast called The Unnoticed. Entrepreneur. And I've got 350 episodes now of that. And I catalog what I call the Speak PR process. But what I've also done, Gerard, is I've interviewed now 100 experts and fellow entrepreneurs on how they get noticed and the tools that they use, because I'm a big believer that every entrepreneur deserves their thymos. And that's the Greek word for recognition. So in this book, I've basically curated, and I have to thank Brian Clark for that. I was listening to the 7 Figure Small one day on one of my walks in the countryside here and heard you and Brian talking about, you don't have to write everything, but you can curate the ideas of others. But what I've done is to create the structure so that the ideas flow so that an entrepreneur has the ability to put it into some system and into some context. Very simply, for PR, there isn't anything really super, super scary or clever. It's about creating content, having that be context relevant. And here's the part that most entrepreneurs and big companies fail in, and that's the consistency, Jared. What happens is many companies create content which is self-serving. They talk about themselves, they create content and they send it but it's not relevant at the time, at the place that it's going to be received by the audience, and they do it sporadically. So what I've got here is this idea that we have these 5 stages, and because we're building trust with our audiences, we have to do it consistently. So the essence of the know, like, trust is the trust part, and the knowing about you may be from advertising or from PR The liking might be from that, but it doesn't make people buy from you unless they trust you. So it's the consistency of communication that's key. And of course, that's the same in any relationship with family or friends or colleagues or teammates. So public relations used to be who you know. Now public relations is what content you share. So there's been a game change in the last 15 to 20 years. From the relationships matter to what you create matters. So I've just created a very simple process because there's a lot of information on the internet, which is all very tactical. But what I hear from clients is, I understand now how to do LinkedIn very well, or I understand how to do Facebook ads very well, but I don't understand how they integrate. And in this kind of rush to short-term tactics, What we've lost is the ability to sit back and take a strategic overview. So Speak PR is a simple acronym: Storify, which is about putting events into chapters and building your own story around your own brand. But more importantly, Gerard, it's not just about your story, it's about the story of what we, what we call the avatar. And most people think of the avatar as being your customer, but I think of it as 3 audiences. It's your customer, but it's also your employees and also your partners. All 3 of those have got to be aligned for your business to succeed. So storification is the first part. And if we think about Star Wars, for example, the story is actually about Luke Skywalker, but we have Obi-Wan as the mentor. And actually what we like to think about, what I like to think about in the Speak PR program, is that our role as business owners is as Obi-Wan Kenobi. We're the mentors, the coaches, but the story really needs to be about the person who's in the journey. Now, the reason that's important is that when we come to personalizing the message, it doesn't just mean saying, dear Jared, dear Alan, whatever. It means the message needs to be relevant to the person who's going through that journey. In other words, if we look at Luke Skywalker at the beginning, he doesn't want to hear the story he needs to hear. He doesn't want to go on that journey, but eventually he realizes that this is his journey. So under personalization, it's the message, but it's about personalizing the message for the individual that's going to hear it, not just about making it a, like, just a name replacement. Engagement is all about creating compelling content, and content— and I'll talk about this in just a little bit— but content which can be shared. Now, what many companies do is they create content about themselves, and then they wonder why it doesn't get shared with anybody else. Content that gets shared is content that's proven to be new and to be easy to understand. And I'll explain about the cascade theory in just a minute. Content that we create needs to be new because then people take notice of it, but it also needs to be simple to understand because if it's complicated, People don't want to take the risk to share it. Amplification is all about now using the technology that's available for entrepreneurs, all sorts of great AI tools. And this is the part that really has leveled out the playing field for, for business owners along with big, big companies. And then the knowing— I'm going to talk about the Active Communications Index. So it's a simple, very simple process, and it comes down to increasing content creation, increasing the frequency of distribution, and finally increasing the number of channels. Okay, I hope every— is everyone okay with this so far? We don't normally talk for this long without having people interrupt, especially at home. My children normally interrupted by now. So—

Yep, sounds like everybody's good.

Okay, great. So the idea is I'd like people to think about counting the input, not the vanity metrics. As we all learned from Facebook going down this week, If you only count the likes and the shares, actually you are really sort of at the behest of these big organizations. So one of the key takeaways I'd like people to think about today is what I call this Active Communications Index, which is very simple. How much content do you create? How often do you share it? And via how many channels? Content times frequency times channels. It's very simple. But what happens is people create content sometimes, they send it maybe sporadically, they don't optimize all the channels. So I know today I haven't got that long and this is all explained in the book. But a key topic, a key idea of this Speak PR is that you think about what you do, not necessarily what the, what the platforms tell you the result is. Because actually, if you continue, just like if you work out in the gym every day and you do a certain number of reps and a certain number of weights, you will get fitter, you will get stronger. Okay, so the Active Communications Index is very simply is how much content is being produced by your company, where is it being distributed, and when is it being sent, and how often. Now each one of these has more detail, but I know I don't want to bore everybody, but I do want to just dive in a little bit onto the when, because for those of us that are running companies with different geographies, I have offices in Singapore and China still, but I have clients in America. We must think about when someone is going to receive the information. We too often send information when it's ready and not take into account whether it's time zones or it's someone's on the way to school. So they It's not an optimal time to receive that tweet. So each one of these elements has got more depth to it, Gerard. But this idea of what you're sending, where you're sending it, and when you're sending it. I mentioned the cascade theory. There's a chap from the University of Vermont, a professor, Sheridan Dodds, who's kindly entertained me while I've been writing the book. Another chap called Duncan Watts, who was at Google. The key point about the 2-step flow of influence is this: that it's more important to find people who are easy to influence than it's important to deal with one influencer. So let me just say that again. As this diagram shows, what's important is not to go to one hero or heroine influencer, but to find lots of people who are ready to be influenced. Does that make sense? What that means is that sometimes companies pay an influencer, but the message that they give the influencer doesn't go into the influencer's network beyond maybe a recipient. For something to go viral or to cascade, what needs to happen is that everyone who receives it needs to share it. So that the influencer shares it doesn't mean that the people in his network or her network want to share it as Okay, and for something to go viral, you want everyone in that network to also make it go viral. And there's a formula that they talk about which I won't bore you with, but it's a key point in the Speak PR program, which should also be very, very reassuring for entrepreneurs because it's not about paying one person to who to tell their network. It's about telling lots of people who are receptive to your message to share it with their communities. So it's a fundamentally important point because it liberates the entrepreneur From thinking that they have to find one influencer. I made a little bit of a simplistic, forgive me, classification here where I think everyone can see, and maybe people that are listening to audio, but what I've got is a 2 by 2 matrix and it's all about content and consistency of delivery. So what I have in the top left quadrant, which is yellow by the way, is I've got a picture of people following. And that's people that are sending out dull content consistently. So, Gerard, there are lots of, especially big companies, they send out information from the corporate marketing department. It's not very innovative, it's not very interesting, but they keep sending it because the metric is how often they send. They're followers. No one really follows them, they just kind of take part. In the bottom right, I've got green, I've got people that are opportunists, people that deliver information that's really interesting but only inconsistently. And I've got a picture of a bag snatcher there for those that can't see it. In the top right, I've got people that deliver information consistently and deliver innovative content. So, and in the bottom left where we've got people sending out dull information every now and again, that's your unnoticed, right? That's your unnoticed entrepreneur. But we can help. With that, you and Brian, Jared, you know, you're key communicators because you consistently deliver innovative content, which is why you can build communities.