The Visibility Problem Every Founder Faces

Welcome back to the Modern Founder and CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Boudiger, and today I'm joined by Jim James. Ever since Jim jumped out an airplane at 17, he's been finding ways to make money through marketing across 3 continents. Today, he's a business consultant, a podcast host, 3-time author based in the UK, and managing director of Unnoticed Ventures. Jim, it's a pleasure to have you today.

Lawrence, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to join you on the show.

Thank you, sir. And Jim, you've built businesses across 3 continents since the '90s. I mean, what's the biggest shift you've seen in how companies are actually growing these days?

Lawrence, the big shifts, I think they're based on technology, actually. So you mentioned I've been building businesses since the 1990s, to just date myself. The first one was in Singapore. So the phase 1 really was the impact of the internet, and that really brought us connectivity. You know, when I first went to Singapore in '95, we didn't even have the internet. So we were sending things locally and sending things by fax. Phase 2 was the impact of mobile, you know, and mobile phones, text messages, mobile messages, and that brought mobility. I could then go to Hong Kong, for example, with my mobile phone and stay in touch with the business and the clients. Previous to that, I would be in Hong Kong and be away from the team. Phase 3, which we are right at the sort of head end of, is the impact of AI. And the impact of AI is scalability without the need for large-scale resources. So The biggest shift I think is all driven by technology, but we've gone from connectivity to mobility to scalability just in my lifetime. So it's really exciting. Absolutely.

And I think it's different when someone like yourself, you've done it all. You've been an entrepreneur almost your whole life and where you're in a position where you can advise others clarity. You, you, you're someone that has been and done that, and I think that makes such a massive impact. Um, Jim, you, you talk about unnoticed entrepreneurs. Why would you say so many good businesses still struggle to get attention?

Ultimately, Lawrence, it comes down to the founder, you know, to get attention. And a lot of founders suffer from imposter syndrome. They're good at something, they've built something, Either they're an engineer, maybe they're a software engineer, hardware engineer, or a chef, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have confidence in themselves even though they've got a belief in their product. And so that manifests itself as them failing to go out and talk about themselves that much. And that then brings us onto the second problem, which is expertise. At school and university, we're not taught to communicate. You know, we're taught to learn and study subjects so that we'll be good at doing work for other people, by and large, right?

Yeah.

The founder's job is to share the mission and the vision and the proposition of the good or service that they've made. And fundamentally, we're not taught that. And so there's a lack of expertise. And I think the final part is so many founders Rightly believe, in fact, all founders believe 100% in what they do. And so they think that if someone just sees it, they'll buy it. You know, they'll buy, they'll build something and go, well, actually, of course, I think it's brilliant. It's not the same though as getting into the mind of the customer, the consumer, following that customer or consumer on their customer journey. Same with consumer and B2B, by the way. And those customers have to see that product at work in many different places and different ways, right? So the founder maybe is a little bit shy, doesn't have the expertise, which is essentially marketing, and doesn't realize how frequently other people have to see their product. As an example, Lawrence, I'm talking with a company in Bali that's built a very interesting Google Glasses to AI to robot product, right? It's really very interesting. And I said to the guys, you've built it. They said, yeah, we've sold it to a restaurant in Bali. I said, that's brilliant. And they said, but now we're looking for the next product to build. And I said, but why don't you sell this repeatedly? And they said, we've already built it once. We need to find another customer to do something else. And so in their mind, they'd already got bored with building that one Google Glasses to AI to robot. And so they'd done the job. And of course, a real business, the product is maybe only 10 to 15% of what a company is. So founders, they keep building things without realizing that actually they have to go out and share the vision and build the team and ultimately to be a call master for that product or service.

Yes, it's almost like a lot of, um, I think you see the trait all the time with, with, uh, CEOs is where a lot of them, they are visionaries, they're also ideas people, and it's one idea after another after another. And sometimes you can get yourself in a position where you stretch yourself too thin.

You know, Lawrence, one of the big challenges for all entrepreneurs, especially younger entrepreneurs, and I myself in that category, you know, I'd like to say now, but certainly once upon a time, is we always think that the other business will be better than the one we're doing because we fall in love with the idea of what we've created. But the realization of the idea takes details, accounting, production, distribution, legal contracts with vendors and so on. Those are the parts of business that most entrepreneurs don't like to do. Almost by definition, because we are founders, we like to think of new things, which is why it's so important for founders to find partners and to find partners that complement them and have the skill sets and the knowledge and the connections, really like the yin and yang. You know, one person is thinking of how this is going to move forward as a product or service, and the other person is thinking about, Okay, how would we deliver it? How would we run after-sales service? How do we manage the cash flow? And so that's why really great companies really have 2 founders, uh, one to help build the company and one to help build the product.

Absolutely. And I guess we see this all the time, but a lot of founders, they, they focus on lead generation before, for visibility. Do you think that's almost backwards?

I think that it's about the timing, Lawrence, in terms of whether it's visibility or networking first, because the first few sales are normally to people that you know, because by and large, we don't invent things in a vacuum. You've had an idea as a founder because you've seen a person or from your own personal experience, you're solving that problem. So it's almost inevitable and sensible to sell to people like you in the same position as you that are probably in your network. But of course, once you get to a certain revenue, normally, you know, half, you know, maybe $50,000 to $100,000 of whatever you're selling, you've normally exhausted your immediate network.

Yeah.

And that's when you have to get into lead gen. So I think it's not that they're back to front. It's a matter of that you need to do them both, but in the right order.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I agree.

Maybe one is not important than the other, but it's all about kind of how you're structuring yourself. But I think early days, it's until you're in a position where maybe you can build a team around, the focus needs to be on acquiring as many customers as you can and working out from there, okay, how do we develop a system to develop the products? Jim, from your experience, what would you say is the fastest way for, let's say, a business that's doing between $1 to $5 million in turnover, those sorts of businesses, um, what can they actually become? How can they actually become known in the market? What would be the best use of funds at this point?

So Lawrence, for a company that's now scaling from $1 to $5 million, then there are a couple of different ways to do that. The first really, the first question really is on budget. Do they have a budget or not? Now, you know, I've interviewed over 500 entrepreneurs for my podcast, The Unnoticed Entrepreneur, and so that's formed the basis of the 3 books.

Yeah.

Everybody that I've interviewed, the first phase has been engagement with potential customers one-on-one. Either one-on-one, as in like, I come and meet you in a pub to sell you my nootropics beer, which is what one Andrew Wang did. He went one by one and sold cans of beer to people in bars, right? But of course, when it got a bit bigger, he was doing one demonstration to people in the Chamber of Commerce with 20 people in the room.

Mm-hmm.

And he grew organically that way. So the first part is to get people to try the product and to use the product. And then there's a theory called the cascade theory. Okay, so cascade theory basically is how ideas spread. And it's not just marketing ideas, any ideas, how ideas spread. And the basic fundamental of this is that everybody has to learn something that they think will be of value to other people. And it's easy for them to share. Okay. If you can get something that people think is of value to them and is easy to share, you get the cascade effect. Okay. So if you look at how ChatGPT spread, people went, oh, I'm using ChatGPT. It's really good for me and it's quite easy. I just send you a link. Okay. And then you saw OpenAI spread you know, as the fastest growth trajectory. And Lovable's been down the same path, right? So if you don't have a budget, the best thing you can do is to build something that benefits from the cascade effect because in effect, your customers are your referral network. Okay? So that's the cascade effect. Guy called Watts sort of designed that. And it's all about getting other people to carry your message for you. The other route, of course, if you've got budget, is advertising because brand building through advertising using whether it's Google Ads or Reddit ads and so on, that of course is what advertising exists for because you are doing a broad array of content and advertising at scale. But that does require budget, Lawrence. So, yeah, ideally, You engineer a product or service that other people want to tell other people about. And that's the quickest and the cheapest way of spreading your brand.

Definitely. No, and it makes complete sense. I mean, Jim, when we look at things like PR, like PR used to mean press coverage, but today it's podcasts, it's LinkedIn, it's content. But in your own experience, what would you say actually moves the needle?

Lawrence, what really moves the needle for a brand partly depends on whether it's B2B or B2C, obviously, because they're not quite the same. And as you say, we used to be controlled by channels where you used to get your content into the channel. Obviously now a big part of building your brand is to own your own channels because you really need to own your own destination. And I think this is one of the things that people are not talking about enough, even though now if you see many YouTube channels are being demonetized and you also see some quite famous Facebook players are being taken offline because these platforms are realizing that people are using their platform is just to sell things and they're becoming really like an eBay or a Temu channel for coaches and so on. So the first thing that I recommend my clients to do is to own their own domain name and to stack content onto that. Podcasts, YouTube, and Reddit are actually 3 of the best because the The LLMs and what we're now calling GeoSearch, you know, generative engine search, they index your websites, but they also index YouTube and Reddit and LinkedIn as trusted sources. So those are 3 that you really need to be on. But the thing that people are not often talking about, which is really, really successful is brand partnerships. If you're a small company, a startup, one of the best things you can do is to partner with brands that already own the customer base that you would like to talk to.

Yeah.

And brands are always looking for affiliations because you bring content to them. You bring maybe a new idea, you bring maybe a new audience yourself. So one of the things I always recommend clients to do, or, you know, entrepreneurs to do, is to look for partnerships. You can share the cost, you can share the audience, you can also stimulate some back and forwards, and who knows commercially where that might lead, whether it's an investment or equity. So PI is still the same. It's about reputation. It's about getting known. So the 2 shifts, Lawrence, are one is that you used to rely on third-party platforms to build the brand for you. Now you need to own your own domain name and use the other platforms, but make sure you own it. And the second really is to form partnerships because that enables you to get scale without the cost of trying to do it all yourself.

Absolutely. And would you say this, this is applicable for all business, all business sectors and all business owners? Is this something they should all be doing?

Yes. Own your own domain name. I mean, you as the company, but also you as the founder. Should own your own domain name because that gives you security. And absolutely the content, but also the partnerships, because that is really helping you to build an authority through association, Lawrence, rather than trying to do it all yourself.

Definitely. And just thinking about kind of our own business, everything that we've done up to this point has all been through partnerships. And so we haven't even, we don't do any cold outreach at all. It's everything we do is focused on building really strong strategic partnerships, great relationships with, with people that are already in the sector supporting our, our core, uh, our core target audience. And I think that's really made the difference because people buy from people that they trust at the end of the day. And so naturally having advisors that they work so closely with, with business owners, it's a, it's a much— it's a great funnel and it's a great way to generate consistent pipeline for your services as a business. Jim, you're now working with AI and where would you see that AI would generally be replacing marketing teams or would you say it's more so a support system?

The impact of AI on marketing has been phenomenal, Lawrence, you know, as you know, and across content creation, content scheduling, content analysis, and also competitor analysis and also distribution, you know. So really against all the dimensions of marketing, it's phenomenal. And also getting into now prediction, of course, which is the final component to that. AI is replacing some functions within marketing teams. For example, maybe copywriters.

Yeah.

Maybe some designers. But it's augmenting those departments if the companies are using it properly. So one of the interesting things about this conversation is people think that it's a zero-sum game, that AI or marketing department. And the assumption is it's an either-or. My view, it's not. It's the smart marketing people are using AI to grow their role within the company, but also to grow the company. Because the other assumption is it's AI or marketing. and the company is kind of somehow in a finite trajectory, right? Actually, what we're seeing is the companies that know how to deploy AI are able to grow more quickly. So to give you an idea, a couple of things that are really exciting, I think. One is creating UGC ads for companies that in the past couldn't afford video. So you can use products like Arcads, for example. Obviously you can use HeyGen, but there are some that are more dedicated to UGC, you know, user-generated content. Another one I'm using these days is called Hedra, which is really, really interesting because they enable you to retain the brand across different scenes and you can upload brand guidelines to make the video.

Wow.

So what you can now create, if you are, for example, a company that I've been looking at, doing some work with is heavy trucks, right? Big trucks that are quite hard to film, Lawrence. It's quite hard to take a big industrial truck that's used for military purposes on a road and film it. What you can now do is you can take a screenshot or a 3D visual, they might have, if they've developed the car in CAD/CAM, and I can animate that and make an 8 to 15 second explainer video And Hedra actually will animate that and give me a voiceover and show it as if it's a working product. So the marketing department actually can have a role that it wouldn't have had before because it couldn't afford to do a film shoot, right? So I think that we're in a really exciting time. We really shouldn't be thinking about it's them or us. It's about how do you use some of these new tools like Hedra, or there's a new one called Sooner for making music. You can make now sonic branding for your company in a way that you could never have afforded to engage a session musician before. So Lawrence, I personally like to think from a growth mindset point of view about AI and marketing, which is it's enabling departments. And if those departments don't do it, it's enabling a new generation of agencies, AI agencies, to create the content and make things happen.

Absolutely. And I think the difference is, is there was a time when we talk about advertising, maybe only the big players would have the funds, the backing to kind of really push. But now AI has made it accessible for everyone. So really there isn't an excuse. It's more so to stay accountable to a plan and put the work in. But in terms of the tools readily available, Anyone can benefit from using AI for their marketing these days.

They can, Lawrence. And AI is creating great content and there are now new platforms to enable distribution of that. So for example, if you have a piece of merchandise, let's say you have a product, my wife imports teapots, for example, from China because she's Shanghainese. We can now use a tool like Creatify to animate her teapot, And I can place that on a platform called vimeo.net. And Vimeo basically is a carrier that will take that video into social media channels. And it's enabled with a shopping cart. So you can actually put a buy now within the video on your TikTok through a platform like Vimeo. So what we're seeing is the complete supply chain from content creation through to distribution, through to merchandising, through to sales, adapting to what AI is enabling. And so, Laurence, I think it's such an exciting time for vendors of all sizes because they can now have the footprint that in the past only a large FMCG company could have.

Absolutely. And a recent experience on my side as well is we was able to develop a a full website just with Claude. And I'm by no means a web developer, but it was almost spot on to what I'd be looking for. And it was all done with Claude. It's, uh, it's fascinating.

Yeah, you know, and as you say, the vibe coding for websites, for example, mean that entrepreneurs can start up and have a website up and iterate daily to see what works. You know, in the old days, you'd build something in WordPress and it would take maybe 2 to 3 weeks or a month To build something. And what AI is enabling us to do as entrepreneurs is to iterate at speed. And that is, I mentioned about scalability being the third phase, right? You can iterate and scale at speed with AI with virtually no cost. And that is why AI is giving entrepreneurs like you and I superpowers. And that's really what's so exciting about today. Definitely.

No, I agree. And Jim, when we look at the, say, the actual systems and the scalability of a business, at what point would you say a founder needs to stop doing the marketing and then start building a system or a team?

A founder should keep doing the marketing until it becomes something that can be distilled into an essence and to be understood by other people. In those early days, and an entrepreneur or founder is promoting the product. And actually what they're doing, Lawrence, is they're learning the script, they're learning the positioning, they're learning the proposition. And this is why every founder should be out there promoting their products at the beginning, because that's the only way that they're going to finesse the difference between what they've invented and what the market wants to understand it to be. And they're often not the same thing. Someone invents something, but actually what's really important to the client is just an element within that proposition. So in my view, the founder needs to kind of like be making the omelet repeatedly until it, until they can make a perfect omelet.

Wow.

Once they've got the process, once they've got the ingredients down, once they've got how long it needs to cook for and how long to stir it for, When to put the toast in and so on, right? Then they could say, okay, this is what it needs to look like in the eyes and the ears and the hearts of the customer. And this is how I made it that way. Here's the formula. And it's at that point that they then say to either an agency or an agent, an AI agent, this is your role. You need to distill this because until the founder has done that, the agent or the AI won't know what it is that they need to be saying. So it's not a money thing, Lawrence, actually, or a time thing. It's a crystallization of the key messages and the value proposition that's so important for the founder to have. It's once they've got that, that they then need to do the handover and then they can think about scaling.

No doubt. Absolutely, Jim. And I think you're spot on there. It's the founders, they need to be very clear on what is the proposition, what is the best route to market, and how they effectively market themselves before they can look at perhaps even delegating with AI. With a lot of businesses, it seems when it comes to especially hiring or even outsourcing their marketing and operations, there are some problems and Especially with when we look at outsourcing, companies look at the bottom line, but I think there's always a lot of underlying issues where you can have management and leadership that then get pulled from core responsibilities. Um, where do you see most businesses get it wrong when it comes to hiring or outsourcing any aspect of their operation?

Most businesses fail with outsourcing due to a failure on their own part to clearly define what it is that they need done. Most companies haven't actually defined their own processes clearly enough. And what they do is they believe that the outsourcing agency will somehow intuitively understand what they need. You know, I ran a PR firm for 25 years, and what I realized after about a year was that the key source of tension between us and the client was a lack of understanding on the client's part of what they needed and what we did. So I did 2 things. One was I built a client engagement form. And what we did was we made sure that we did a full needs analysis with them. And I built what I called the East-West Way. So it was 5 stages, investigation, diagnosis, visioning, implementation and evaluation. And I did a whole long document. This is back in '96, '97. So it was a document. Now it would be a, you know, an AI and you'd have Whisper or something be spoken into it. So if you're listening to this and you've got issues with clients, make sure that you help them to clearly articulate what it is that they need doing, when they need it, what format it's in, who needs to receive it, who needs to approve it, who needs to validate it and so on, what format they need it returned it. The second thing that I did, Lawrence, was I wrote an East-West Works document, and this was a comprehensive illustration of what the agency does, job descriptions, hours of work, when we would do what. So I then spent time educating the client on how an agency works. This is what this person does and why they charge this much. This is what this person does. So what I really did was, at the end of the day, Lawrence, was to do alignment through education. And it's a, if you think of it in a way, it's a synapse, isn't it? Right? If you've got, you know, them and, and your agency, the synapse is the gap, right? Between the 2 nerve endings.

Yeah.

And that's where things can go really, really wrong. So what we're trying to do is to make sure that the signal passed from one place to the next. is as clean and as easy to understand as possible. You could think of it as also mapping database fields, right? You've got to have the same fields on both sides of the database to get a clean mapping. So I think that what you have to do if you are thinking about working with companies and you are the agency, or if you're working with an agency, is to get alignment, Lawrence, between the expectations And the undertakings. And I found quite quickly once we installed that system, the clients were A, grateful, and B, we reduced the friction, but C, of course, we became more profitable because we were spending less time redoing work that wasn't actually what they had in mind. Absolutely.

I found just as you were speaking there, Jim, about looking at my own experiences, I think businesses are very quick to tell you what works and what's great, but they don't always share what doesn't work. And often it's the case with, we have businesses that come to us where they'll say, okay, my goal is to increase revenue, and they think the solution is to hire a sales team. But as we both know, unless you've got winning strategies, accountability, you're just adding bums on seats in theory. And I think really it's more so the way that we like to operate with businesses is be very clear what success looks like from day one with each hire. And so if that means looking at a scorecard, looking at kind of the SOPs or KPIs associated with that seat in the business, being ultra clear on what that looks like, you avoid a lot of problems in the long run.

Exactly, Ross. And I'm glad And I'm not surprised you were doing that because I know you run your company very, very well.

Jim, would you say, do you believe founders must become the face of their business? Because this is a conversation I have with a lot of people where they're unsure whether they need— if even if they're thinking, let's say, about an exit, they don't know maybe whether there's going to be other ventures that are involved in. Would you say that founders, they, they still need to become that face of the brand?

So Lawrence, personal brand and sort of founder-led growth is such an interesting topic, and I'm going to share with you a theory that I have, a little model that I have that may be of use. In the early stages, the founder is actually what the customer buys because often the product or service is not fully formed and the customer buys what the founder is offering Because they believe that founder either has the experience or has the reputation or has the credibility or the, and the determination to deliver what probably will still need to be finally built or fully built. Certainly consulting industries, that's absolutely the case because the client is buying the other person's ability to deliver something that they may not have delivered yet. Right? So, so yes is the answer in the early stages. I, I think that it's absolutely true that the founder needs to be the personality building the business. But what happens is over time, and this is the second time in our conversation I'm mentioning the dimensions of phases in a business, right? Because the business changes over time and it's a mistake to think that one rule at one time is going to carry you through the whole stages of growth. Over time, the business obviously grows, the founders meeting less and less clients. They may still be visible through a podcast or YouTube or through PR, for example, but their connection to the customer is going to diminish because they have less time because they're running more people, more operations, more finance, maybe investors, maybe production. So what What needs to happen then, of course, is that the founder's vision needs to be articulated. And as we've said before about crystallizing that vision, it needs to manifest itself in the way that everybody in the organization speaks and understands that. And then at some stage, that becomes codified in the brand, for example, the logo, the podcast, the newsletter, and so on. So then the, the the founder becomes the spokesperson maybe of that, articulating that brand message, but isn't necessarily the founder who's seen doing that. One thing that then happens, of course, is that the brand, as we've seen in big companies like FMCG companies, you know, you don't meet the founder of Ford when you buy a Ford car, right? You might think you know Elon Musk and you might like a Tesla, but there's a big gap in reality between us. But what actually happens then is The founders can have what I call a dual brand strategy, because if you don't have a dual brand strategy, what happens is that you are forever as the founder tied to the brand of the business and you can't sell the business because you are still inextricably linked with that brand, right? So what I suggest to people is they have a dual brand strategy. So the company has a brand name. And that the individual founder has their own brand. They own their own domain name and they start to build the platform for themselves to communicate about issues, for example, about entrepreneurship, about finance, about sustainability, whatever the big issues are that are not strictly speaking what the company is addressing. Because otherwise what happens is the founder is talking about things that are in their mind, But they're not the things that the company is actually delivering to clients.

Yeah.

And consumers get really confused because they're like, well, why is he talking about this when I, I'm just buying that? You know, why is he talking about robots when I'm buying cars? Right? So have a dual brand strategy from the beginning, which is you have the company and you're involved, but over time you let the brand do the talking. And as a founder, you can then detach yourself. And the metaphor I have is like a rocket ship. You know, the founder is the astronaut. They pilot the rocket off Cape Canaveral. It goes into space, and at some stage that becomes a satellite that's launched. The founder doesn't want to stay in the satellite for a lifetime. They need to come back down. And if they're a serial entrepreneur, as you know you are, or as I am, They're looking for the next business. So that's why the dual brand strategy is essential, because if they don't own their own brand and their own strategy, they find it extremely hard to start another business.

Absolutely. No, it makes complete sense and it's something that I need to implement myself. It's something I've been thinking about for a long, long time, but it's almost like I wasn't sure where to really start with it. Um, but no, Jim, you're, you're completely right. But I guess for someone, or for the people, some people are just naturally camera shy. For those that are, let's say they're not a fan of visibility, they don't like being behind a camera, would you say these people are at a disadvantage these days?

If you're camera shy or voice shy, you are not at a disadvantage because building a reputation can be be accomplished through many different means. It doesn't have to be, you have to be seen. You could be read, for example, right? It's, you know, many a novelist who knows who John le Carré is, for example, right? And it's a nom de guerre anyway, nom de plume, isn't it, for John le Carré, right? So, but he's famous as an author, right? Even though you've never seen him. So The idea that you'd have to now be on TikTok or YouTube to be famous is, I think, a shame and one I'd like people to not worry about. Because what's also happening is that you can now create content from the privacy of your own island or, you know, as you guys are in Krakow, right?

Yeah, Pristina, across the border.

In Kosovo, sorry, not Craig, as you are in Kosovo. So you can create a global brand, but it could be written through Substack, for example. You could be writing something, or you could even now brief your AI-trained Claude to write that for you, and it would then publish to Substack. So visibility doesn't mean necessarily being seen in the conventional sense, but it could be being read or If you're happy to be heard, you know, then you can do a podcast as well. So there's many famous podcasters that didn't have a video component first. So being shy is definitely not a barrier to being a successful entrepreneur.

In any case, there's a way that you can market yourself effectively. I think it's just about putting aside the time as a business owner to do what is going to in the long run give you a massive advantage. Yeah.

And, you know, Lawrence, there are people who run businesses that are really not happy to be visible. And what they have as a solution is they find a partner who is. So if you look at the Google boys, Brin and was it Page and Sergey Page and Larry Brin, right? They, forgive me if I've got their name, but Page and Brin, right? They, one is happy in front of the camera, one is not. I used to work for a company called AMS Neve and the chap called, actually he's now Sir Mark Crabtree, was a brilliant audio engineer and painfully shy. So what he, he had a partner called Stuart Nevison who was not an engineer but loved to drive his Aston Martin and go to trade shows. And actually they complemented each other. So the business was able to grow because what they did in coming all the way back to our early point about partnerships, they were able to find a partner that complemented them. So if you are not comfortable at all being the voice of the company, you don't have to be. Your company can still have a voice. It just may be your partner's voice, which ultimately becomes the brand.

Spot on. Yeah, there's always a solution at the end of the day. It's finding great people, people that are better than you in certain areas. And if that's not your forte, bring in the right kind of partners. Jim, for the business owners that are listening today, what is one thing that perhaps they could implement into their week to get more visibility straight away Just something, a tip or something that they could do on a weekly basis.

Yeah. So for anyone listening that is thinking, how can they get some visibility from, from now on? The answer is to take a position on something, Lawrence, and to speak out about that. So the reason I mentioned that is because in this day and age of AI and mass content creation, what we're starting to do is to get vanilla content because the AI is trained on existing content, right? It's, it by definition, it's trained on historical content and it's, we know AI is trained to please. You know, it's like research shows that 57% of all ChatGPT responses are complimentary to the person who asked the question regardless of whether it should be or not.

Yeah.

So as an entrepreneur, the best thing you can possibly do is to take a position. It doesn't necessarily have to be controversial, but to take a position and let people know that you've got a distinct voice about something. And then that can manifest itself as it can come out as a LinkedIn post or as an Instagram or a YouTube or a podcast, Whatever you're comfortable with, or an article, or a conversation, for example, to a partner meeting or to clients. So I think the best thing you could possibly do as an entrepreneur is to state what problem it is that you want to solve, or why it's important and how you believe it should be solved. Because ultimately, that's what entrepreneurs are there for. And that can then also be the North Star for you and for everybody else. But that sends a signal to the market about why they should be looking for what you're doing. So it's free. This is not an expensive, you know, go and buy something. It's not going to take a course. It's just sit down and think about what would you like to be known for? Write it down so that you can be consistent and start to share that message with others.

Absolutely. As simple as that. And Jim, when people are— for business owners that have kind of— they've addressed to themselves this is something that they need to get better at and they want to move forward and stay accountable to a plan, where would you see that they— like the biggest waste of effort when it comes to their marketing? Where are they going wrong with it?

The biggest wasted effort in marketing at the moment is showing up on social media for the sake of showing up on social media. And, you know, I heard one very famous guy say, post every day, post every day, post every day. And actually, you don't see the most successful business owners in the world posting every day inane topics on social media because actually they're busy running their businesses. So I think that the, you know, and I was guilty of this as well. I was posting, you know, on LinkedIn and then I found actually, The ROI is next to nothing because it's the equivalent of having someone in your social group or at a business meeting who's just talking all the time. It's, A, it's bloody annoying, but B, after a while people just switch off.

Yeah.

So don't waste your time thinking that producing high volumes of content means that you'll somehow do better. And if you think about the parallel with, for example, movies or with music, Lawrence, you know, people that produce a large volume of low-value content, TV soap operas, for example, they're not the ones you remember or pay to go and see, right? In fact, soap operas are called that because it was the detergent companies that paid for the soaps to be made. That's why they're called soaps because actually the value of them is not that high. People wouldn't pay to subscribe to them, right? But we will all go watch a Mission: Impossible 4, 5, or 6. So focus on generating high-value content at the cadence that is comfortable for you. You know, that would be, I think, the best advice that I can give is focus on only delivering content when you're saying something that your target audience will find of value. Then you'll be the equivalent of the person in the meeting that listens. And when they're about to speak, people say, oh, we need to stop because Lawrence is going to say something. And he always says something of value. And ultimately, if you want them to be a customer, you want them to listen to you, not just know that you're there.

You're so right on that, Jim. I literally was speaking with a business coach a couple of weeks ago. And he said that several years ago, he went to a conference at like like a Gary Vee conference where, um, the kind of the agenda was focused on content, content, content. And what he took from that was, if I'm going to post 2, 3 times a day consistently, business is going to come. But actually doing that consistently for 2, 3 years, he got a handful of referrals, but really nothing consistent was built. And, uh, he recently this year transitioned to Instagram and is not doing the same volume but is doing, let's say, 3 posts a week but talking about real-life scenarios, and the difference is night and day. And so I think sometimes people get it wrong in the sense they think, like you just said, pump as much content as you physically can, but it's not about the volume.

Well, and you know, with Audra, it was Gary Vee that was on stage at this event saying, you know, every day, and he said, F this, F this, that. And I was like, you know, honestly, I'm 60 years old. This is just childish, you know, because it's like having verbal diarrhea. Your customers don't have all day to listen to you ranting, right? Your customers want to know what problem can you solve for them efficiently and cost-effectively that will enable them to get on with the rest of their day. You know, we're not trying to be celebrities as entrepreneurs. Right? The objective is to generate, as Peter Drucker would say, the only value of a business is to generate profit. Anything else is noise, Lawrence. Anything else is noise. So focus on sharing with your client how you're gonna help them get what they need so they have a better life or a better business, and then shut up and get on with running your business.

Agreed.

Agreed. Am I gonna get stonewalled for saying Gary Vee was being childish? Am I gonna get I'm gonna get like, I'm gonna get, what do they call it, canceled.

Not at all. Not at all. And Jim, would you say, would you say lead generation is broken?

Is lead generation broken? It's interesting. I saw an email the other day from a guy who's doing cold email outreach. He'd sent 600,000 emails and he got a 1 1.1% return, and he had sent the same number of SMSs and he got a 1.2% return, and he was delighted with that. And I thought, can there be anything less efficient than that kind of 1 to 2%?

Yeah.

Marketing and lead generation is not broken. What's broken, in my view, Lawrence, is this concept of cold email and cold outreach, because you're basically doing what in the old days we would just call direct mail, which was dropping lots and lots of leaflets into people's letterboxes to see who might reply, right? Nothing changes in business, right? It's, it's just the terminology has changed, the technology has changed. So lead generation has always, will always be an essential part of any business. Random acts of marketing to people in the hope that a few of them will go, oh, that's what I need. That's just frankly a waste of time, money, and people sell courses and software to make you buy it. But it's nonsense. Lead generation done properly is going to people who might actually value what you offer and building a proposition for them and delivering it to them, whether it's One-on-one interview, whether it's at a conference, whether it's having a coffee, whether it's on a forecourt for a car, right? The traditional elements of finding a way to share value with people, that's lead generation, Lawrence. That is not broken. What's broken is this technology-enabled mass marketing. That is broken and fundamentally just, I think, irresponsible. And it's a complete waste of people's money.

Agreed. And especially when we look at marketing agencies, I think a lot of them, they get a bad name for peppering and going for volume and volume and volume. And not to say every agency is bad, but unfortunately where you do have some players where they have made some mistakes, I think for a lot of business owners, they are on the fence about even working with With an agency. Would— Jim, would you say marketing agencies actually deliver ROI?

Marketing agencies don't deliver ROI, Lawrence, if they are not briefed on what it is that the ROI needs to look like. And also, one of the big problems for agencies is that they are paid not on ROI but on deliverables. So they're treated like outsourced employees. They're not treated like business partners. So structurally, Lawrence, the relationship is flawed. And if you ask a client to share the upside of the marketing activity, they don't want to take— they don't want to do that. They want a guaranteed, for example, number of impressions or a guaranteed number of leads. So the agency is incentivized to do that in the most cost-effective way possible, but it's not necessarily the most effective in terms of generating leads and getting closes because it's not in the agency's interest to ask the client the question, what is your offer? Because the client says, here's my offer, you get me this many Leads, right? But actually what needs to happen to generate proper ROI is that the agency and the client need to work together to refine the offer. Is it really an attractive deal for the potential customer? So do agencies deliver ROI? I would say a lot of them don't, but it's not because they couldn't. It's because the structure of the relationship. is flawed. And just to leave you with that, in any company, the sales team get commission, right? The sales team and the salespeople get commission, but the marketing team never get commission, right? So there's a mismatch between the expectation of the finance, normally finance team in a company, of what marketing should do and what it is they actually need the marketing people to deliver.

It's interesting as well, because I think even today, like when you look at businesses and their balance sheet, the first thing that when times get hard is marketing they want to replace or remove. And actually it's the lifeblood of the company.

Yeah, exactly. So what they're really doing is they're taking a short-term view, which is they'll try and optimize existing customers by reducing costs and living with what's in the pipeline currently. and saying we'll kick the can down the road as to what's going to happen in 6 to 9 to 12 months. As we know, those companies that invested during COVID came back faster than those that didn't.

Looking ahead 3 to 5 years, what will separate businesses that scale versus those that stagnate?

So Lawrence, over the next 3 to 5 years, the companies that scale and those that stagnate will be those that understand the importance of 2 things. The first will be the experience economy. So there's a great book by Scott and Pine called The Experience Economy, and it really talks about the need to create relationships and opportunities for the customer to feel special when they're buying, working with you. And the celebrated case study is the Florida Savannah Bananas. I say Savannah in one way, but I guess you'd have to say Savannah Bananas or Savannah Bananas, one of the two. So the Savannah Bananas, if you've heard of them, have you heard of the Savannah Bananas?

I haven't.

So a great case study for anyone listening, go and look at the Savannah Bananas. It was a failing baseball franchise and the people came in and bought it. And it's the guys on LinkedIn and they realized that actually people were coming to the games just as the guy on their own. And what they realized was that actually what they need to do is to attract the whole family to come. And in order to do that, they needed to make it into entertainment. And so they have, you know, sort of make it into a theater show and they have dancing and the pictures and so on. They dress interestingly and so on. So they've made it into the most profitable baseball franchise in the US. So they've understood that it's about the experience. And if anyone knows the difference between a 4-star and a 5-star hotel, sometimes it's the linen, but often it's the welcome, it's the warm towels and so on. So that's the first. The second is going to be the ability to combine those 3 elements that I mentioned at the beginning of our Talk. Sorry, I'm going to make editing horrible for you because now I've mentioned earlier questions. Any company that combines connectivity with mobility with AI scalability, the three technology transformations, all three of those have to be a part of that business that survives. So you're going to have an understanding that it's an experience, but you're going to be able to deliver that with mobility, connectivity. and scalability. Those, I think, will be the companies that survive.

And Jim, if you were starting a business, starting a new business from zero today, what would you focus on first?

Well, at my age, Lawrence, I think if I was to start a new business, I might, you know, get a bucket and spade and just offer to do gardening for people because the speed of technology change is so But joking aside, I mean, about going completely off the grid, if I was to start a business today, I would look for what in Good to Great we call the economic denominator. You have one product that you can sell repeatedly to many people. And so I would be looking at one product or service that could be made or sold multiple times. that has an experience wrapped around it and that can be delivered at scale using mobility and AI. So that would be, I think, the business. If I could find that, that's what I would be doing. Because if you think about whether it's razor blades or Coca-Cola or Mars bars, some of the biggest companies in the world sell one thing very well.

That's right.

across many markets. And so their economic denominator, their flywheel is very well defined. And that's what lends itself to the scalability that can be delivered by AI. And it's very hard to get AI to push your wheelbarrow, Lawrence. So I'm not sure I can use that yet until I manage to finish whatever the business is I'm doing now. How's that as an answer?

Jim, I couldn't ask more. This is, um, this has been a fantastic episode. Thank you so much for your time. I've, um, I've learned so much myself just, just from listening to you today.

Well, I guess the question for you is, so what would be your key takeaway? I always like to find out what, when I've ranted on, what, what your key takeaway is.

It's definitely the dual brand strategy because I've, I have a lot of people even, uh, I have, I hired basically like a marketing manager and, uh, he is always onto me. He's like, you need to build a personal brand. And I've said to him, like, it's really not my thing. I don't really like to be someone that is on social media.

Yeah.

But I've come to the realization and from our conversations this week that focusing on the dual brand strategy and spending time each week is something that I have to do. Because it's even once I'm in a, like, I think with being associates and staffing business, it's more of a cash cow. So I don't know, there's no intention to sell that business, but for QCP in the next couple years, there absolutely is. And I think, um, we'll always want to be doing different things and involved in different ventures.

So I think it's— Yeah, that's, that's why I probably need to write a little something about this, don't I? Because no one's really talking about it. And this is something, um, that, uh, struck me as I spoke to more and more people, um, that this is what's happening. So I kind of worked on defining it basically and, uh, and giving it a name.