Top Tips from Entrepreneurs on getting noticed for free.

Now, if you're an introvert and you're wondering, could you possibly have a podcast or be a guest on a podcast? My my guest today is going to explain to you how he managed to overcome being an introvert and really embrace podcasting to help build his ICT business. Peter Banigo, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim, and um. Glad to be here.

Well, you know, for those of you that, uh, don't know Peter, he's in a place actually where I grew up, uh, when I was younger. He's in Nigeria today, um, and I was there when I was 8 years old. But Peter's there just visiting his, his mum, but he's normally based in Leicester. So his business, Target ICT, is UK-based, but he's joining me here from Nigeria. So Peter, we're going to talk today about how you're getting your own personal ICT consultancy noticed. So it's really good lessons for people that are building their own business brand because you've got some learnings from Facebook and skills and sort of exercises that worked in other businesses you ran that have been not as successful with the new business. So we're going to dive into that and we're going to look also into how you have been doing content creation with articles as well and the successes that you've had there. So Peter, first of all, explain a little bit about your business and then we're going to talk about how you've been getting your business noticed.

All right. So Target ICT is basically a business I started to focus on what I'm best at, which is tech, because when I started my previous businesses, I started my first business in 2010. I've started a couple of things. I've done procurement. I've done e-commerce. At a point I had like 4 or 5 businesses running at the same time. But one thing I always got, one inquiry I got from my friends doing business with me was they always asked about, okay, for the food business, the biggest part of the food business was— The biggest part of the food business was a portal I built. where most of the orders came in through that portal. And people always asked, oh, how do you do these things? The processes in the business were always so like— the last Food Minutes had about 4 branches. The recipes, everything were just the same everywhere. I don't know how to cook. And so you can imagine things like that. So when I kept getting those inquiries on the tech part of everything, that's when I started Target ICT to help other businesses. Improve, do more with technology.

Really interesting that, you know, you, you found a market or a market found you eventually, in spite of, like so many of us as entrepreneurs, we start businesses and eventually the right business finds us, which is fantastic. But it's a competitive industry, Peter, being a service provider in tech. So How have you gone about differentiating yourself so that beyond that initial set of referrals, you've been getting people coming to you? All right.

So one thing I, one complaint I got from a lot of people working with other tech providers was they had to listen to and process a lot of tech jargon. So a lot of times you're working with a technical person, they say these big words, ROI, SAP, this, this, this, that, that, that. And with communication, because one of the first skills I learned was marketing, writing copy for my businesses, my adverts and cool. I realized that when you're communicating, when you're writing something people will read, if you use these big words, they have to stop. It stops the flow. They stop and they try to understand what you're saying there. So it caused a lot of conflict. A lot of times you're dealing with a person and you don't even know what they're doing.

You don't even know what you just hope.

that they do, hope that they mean well for your business and everything. So that's one thing we differentiate ourselves from others. We try to avoid jargon. We try to explain everything at the most basic level. So, okay, if we are doing this for you, you'll be able to grasp, okay, this is what's going to happen. There is no big technical terms masking what we're actually doing to make it look more complicated or stuff like that. So I think that's one thing. that's really, that really, that really differentiates and what people have always been happy about.

That's really wonderful. And on another show, we've been talking about keeping things simple. And with Ben Goodman, who's just written a book called Simple Up, and just about how much friction we create in the transaction because we overcomplicate in our desire to maybe look Smart. Smart, or yeah, that's right, uh, or overcome our own insecurity about why someone should buy from us. You know, we, we position ourselves in, in such a way that we may be, you know, incomprehensible, especially when it comes to tech. It's really, really good. What kind of content were you then creating, Peter? Because obviously if people talk to you, they would hear, you know, you bringing a simplicity and a clarity to the problems that they were facing. What other platforms and content types have you been using to share your message?

All right. So first of all, I started sharing blog posts. So typically take a problem a business is facing, try to explain it, make it easy, and share. Then recently, it is 2024. So 2 years ago, 2022, we started sharing it on a podcast. We started a podcast too for the business. So same thing, we just take a concept and break it down.

Peter, now starting a podcast is not easy. I mean, I've now been doing this for a couple of years and I have a couple of shows Under my belt. It's a lot of work. Just take us through the process then of why you decided to do a podcast instead of doing articles, because it's actually a big leap to start and then to keep it going. And you've got 59 episodes now of your podcast.

All right. So I think the process of it— okay, we started writing the blog post articles and all that. Then during the pandemic, I discovered podcasts, you know, stuck in the house all the time, no one around and everything. So I discovered podcasts and I realized that I actually used to listen to everything. Like I'll sit down, maybe I'm walking or I'm doing something around the house. I'll listen to a whole 45 minutes, a whole 1 hour. I would actually go to the links they mentioned. I actually research on the people talking and I'm like, okay, This seems like a better way to share this blog post because these days we realize people have very short attention spans. And I feel even me too. I feel it on podcasts. My attention span works better on podcasts than on articles. I might just read an article halfway and I drop it. So after that was 2020, I discovered podcasts. Then in 2022, I decided to start the podcast. And like you said, it was actually difficult because I did the first episode and abandoned it for a couple of months because I didn't want to. I don't know. I just, okay. Since I was young, I've really been, I grew up, I didn't really have friends growing up. I was just me, books, me and books. I always read books all my life. So getting all the businesses I started before this, I would always be at the background. I always have a partner making the talking and all that. I'll just do ads or do things that won't have me come out or have me come out in public. So when I put out that first episode, I'm like, oh my God, everybody's going to hear my voice.

And yet, Peter, you're a handsome young man, but also, as anyone listening to this can hear, Peter, you have a great voice for radio, right? For podcast, really, really great. You were an introvert, you said.

Yes.

So it was a big emotional challenge to overcome. How did you overcome that? Because I think there are many people thinking, oh, I'd like to either be a guest on a podcast, which is frankly, I think, a great way to start with podcasts before trying to create a show. But then to actually be hosting is another challenge again, because you have to take responsibility for the conversation and so on. How did you overcome that? Let's call it an emotional, a self-confidence issue. How did you get back after the couple of months?

All right.

So after the couple of months, I'm a member of Toastmasters. So I joined Toastmasters in 2016 because the same thing. I knew, okay, as a business person, I need to communicate, I need to talk to people, and I really hated doing that. So I took one of my Toastmasters projects in— that was level 4, I can't remember. my pathway was starting a podcast. This was after I'd abandoned the first episode. So I went through the program, the distance, and part of the requirements was having— I can't remember, is it 4 or 10? I can't remember how many. I think 4 episodes. You should have 4 episodes live for them to move, for you to move to the next level on the pathway. So I just, okay, I took my podcast and said, okay, let me just bring it back up and continue, use this and As an excuse to continue with it. And it's actually fun.

It's amazing fun having a podcast, right? You get to meet lots of interesting people, as you know, as you and I are doing today, Peter.

Yeah.

So, so it's called Tech Your Business. You've got 59 episodes now, which is Tech Your Business. It's available on all players and you've got the techyourbusinesspodcast.com as a website. How is the podcast helping you, Peter, in terms of brand awareness and generating leads?

All right. So in the, in terms of generating leads, one thing I've realized, okay, first of all, the podcast was started to share, like I said, share information, share this thing, things and all that. Then when I started having guests, I realized being in that situation where I'm talking to a person. Okay, it's Tech Your Business. So we have business owners and other tech experts coming to show how you can use tech in your business. So I'm talking to a fellow business owner. On a normal day, I'd have had to put out an ad, wait for them to come on a sales call, and then try to convince them. Or I would have had to maybe send a cold email and go through a gatekeeper to get through to them. But these people actually email, they come to you and they talk to you. And One thing I don't really like selling there, but what I do is most of the time I'm talking to you and I realize you have an issue. I just give a solution. I give a solution. Okay, this thing, oh, it can work better this way. And they come back, oh, this is nice. This works for me. Oh, this is this. And I've had like maybe 2 or 3 people who have become clients out of these people I've talked to just from things like that. So it's been amazing actually.

Yeah, well, that, that's one of the main ways that people talk about getting podcasts to be part of their sales funnel, is that people would love to come and talk to you on the mic in a way that they wouldn't come and talk to you if they thought they were being sold to, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And so, Peter, that's wonderful. And what about using the show content? Are you then repurposing the content from your shows into blogs, for example, or on social media?

Um, yeah, we, yes, we are doing that. So we do shorts, we do short videos for each episode. Then currently the website for the podcast is just like a Linktree. So I did that purposely so there is less to manage because I realized everything you start brings a lot of, takes up a lot of website.

Yeah, complexity.

Exactly.

Yeah, it brings complexity. Yeah.

So, so the website, we just made the links, just the Spotify link, the YouTube link, just that. So for now, we started the blog post on my main business website, but we stopped for a while because we want to migrate everything to the podcast website. So it's still going to be like the Linktree, but we would have a blog on it just for SEO purposes.

Right.

And Linktree, that's link, L-I-N-K-T-R, and then it's a dash Yes. And then it's .ee.

Exactly.

And I have one of those as well, Linktree accounts. And you can basically create one place for all of your URLs.

Yeah.

So it becomes like a one destination for you and all of your assets, websites and podcasts, and in my case, books and courses all under Linktree. So it's a really, really useful website to centralize all of your digital assets. So thanks for raising that, Peter. We haven't really talked about that. It sounds as though you've been making great headway in the podcast space and you have been building this new business. You've had multiple businesses before. Is there something that you've learned, Peter, where you could share something you tried that didn't work out now that you're building the ICT business? For those people that can't see, um, Peter, he has the, uh, the hat on. He has his, um, very nice targetict.co.uk hat and a matching t-shirt. So he has turned up on the video podcast looking the part. Peter, so you're a branded guest. Fantastic. What about— is there something that you've done that you could share that hasn't really worked out quite as planned?

All right. So I think, um, one thing I'll share is when I started my first, in fact, everything that started before Target ICT, I would always start something. Then you either use Google Ads or Facebook Ads and that's all. So like for the food business I had, I had my this thing, I'll just get a very high definition photo of the food items we cook, put something on there and people once then put the ads out by lunchtime and you just get sales. We used to have like 10 times returns on our ad spend then for that. So when I started Target ICT, I'm like, okay, I can just start this. I can use ads too and then push this. I ended up spending thousands of pounds and I didn't even get anything. And I'm wondering, isn't it the same adverts? What's wrong?

Yeah. I guess there's a different kind of bites, isn't it, really? Uh, yeah, you know, so, um, so that's interesting. So really the, uh, the different business responded differently to the same, uh, marketing strategy.

Totally differently.

Reminds us to be really sort of listening to, um, yeah, the needs of each individual business. You can't necessarily transfer the same strategy from one business to another. Um, Peter Benigo, you're, you're there in Africa today, in Nigeria today on the west coast, uh, but you're normally based in Leicester. Um, plainly you've succeeded because you've got through the first 5 years, Target ICT, you know, you're across the, the early years which are the hardest. Well, what would you say has been the secret to your success? Plainly it wasn't the advertising. You know, maybe some of the podcasts, but that's relatively new. What would you say is the secret to your success in terms of building the company now?

I think one thing that has really worked has been, and I think this is one thing that I've done in everything I have, in every business I've done, it has been, what's the word, exceeding expectations of our clients, exceeding expectations of the customers. So when we have something to do. Always make sure the customer ends up very, very happy. And when you have very, very happy customers, you don't even have to most of the time ask them to call others. They say, oh, I had this problem because I recently had a client. She has, she has an HR consulting company. She had a lot of issues with her everything. She had a couple of websites, everything, everything was faulty. And she had worked with different people. They kept piling Just making it harder for her. So I met her on a Facebook group complaining about it, and I'm like, okay, what's the issue? We talked and then we sorted out everything in about a week or so. First of all, she was on a bigger hosting plan than she would— than she was on a dedicated server when she was meant to be on maybe a shared or reseller server. They just oversold her. So yeah, so she gets them, so things like that. So we cleaned out everything, made everything work perfectly, and She's always like, she's always so excited. Sometimes I'm here, someone messages me on WhatsApp and they're like, oh, I got your message from this person. And she says, oh, she said you really helped her out in this and this. And it's always, it feels good. It feels good. So I think good work, exceeding expectations has been what has really helped.

And it sounds as though engaging with people in Facebook has also worked for you, Peter, not advertising, but just engaging and and solving people's problems before they become clients.

Yes, yes. And most of the time I do it free.

So you're a good man, you're a good man. But plainly, plainly you're doing enough, um, business to keep it all, all going, everything running.

Yes.

Yeah, which is brilliant. Uh, Peter, if I was to ask you, uh, for a podcast or book that you'd recommend, what would that be?

One book I read and I really enjoy, and that's one book I've read more than once, is The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. So it's really, it goes, because a lot of books about business, just a lot of them touch the surface. A lot of them make it look like a bed of roses. A lot of them just, yeah, are just there. But this goes really deep. It goes into all the everything that can go wrong and still shows you that in spite of everything, you can still make things work.

Okay. Ben Horowitz.

Yeah.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things. That's a great addition to the library for the unnoticed entrepreneur, I think. Peter, if people want to find out more about you and maybe get their hosting plan changed, where would they go?

I think the where you get the most updated information is from the podcasts. So you can go on Tech Your Business Podcast. The YouTube version is hosted on the company YouTube, that's Target ICT Limited. So yeah, so best place where you can get up-to-date information, techyourbusinesspodcast.com. From there you can link to Target ICT.

Okay, that's perfect. And as you can hear, you know, Peter's got a great voice for radio and got a handsome face for TV too. Peter, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for coming on the show today and really appreciate you sharing your energy and your enthusiasm and also that you are constantly innovating. Really recognize and appreciate how you've gone from business to business and never stopped trying to innovate and find a solution. So thank you so much for sharing that with us today.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having me.

So what a pleasure to have Peter on the show. And, you know, I wanted to have him on the show because here's someone who's overcome the anxiety of, you know, talking to other people, being actually shy, and hasn't just hidden behind writing articles, but has realized that podcasting is really a wonderful way to connect and engage with potential customers. But also, as you can hear, he's obviously grown as a person because now he's very comfortable to come on, on podcasts and share his message and share his voice and his wonderful laughter as well with us today.

So—

That is the case.

So if you've thought about maybe getting onto podcasts, I can encourage you to think about being a guest first, before you try and host, because it is a lot of work, but it is a great medium for you. So until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Please do share a review of this show if you can, and share the show with a fellow entrepreneur, because you might know someone like Peter who actually would love to listen to a podcast and doesn't want to get left behind. And this podcast is all about helping the unnoticed entrepreneur too. get noticed for what they do. Thank you for listening.

Thank you.

Now, does your content sizzle? Does it get people on your website and across your social media channels excited to talk to you? I mean, do they want to come and reach out to you? Because if you are struggling to make content exciting enough and you're maybe dabbling with AI to make it a little bit more exciting, but it's falling a bit flat, then my guest today is gonna be someone that you wanna listen to. Her name is Wendy Lieber, and she's the co-founder and CEO of a company called Content Bacon. She's actually joining us from Florida where they've got some storms. We're hoping she'll be able to stay with us the whole way through. Wendy, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Jim. Pleasure to be here.

Well, it's a pleasure to have you. I know that you've got some challenges in Florida now with the weather, so thank you for making the effort to dial in. We're going to talk about content because there's the old saying, content is king and context is queen. What about AI and how is Content Bacon, your agency, helping clients, entrepreneurs, and business owners to, to create content that really sizzles and gets people interested in their brands?

Yeah, it's a, it's a great question. I think one of the first things is this word content, right? A lot of people They don't even really know what that is because it's, it's all-encompassing. And so, you know, we help companies tell their story through different types of mediums that their audience is using. So content is just all the different ways we communicate with our audiences, both internal and external. And how do you make it sizzle? How do you make it have an impact? Well, it starts with you have to have a good story and a story that's constantly evolving and a story that has depth and breadth to it. It's not like a one and done, here's our story, let's tell it the same way 50 different times. It's, it's an evolving thing. And the way to have it evolve and get better is to actually do it because otherwise you are just saying the same thing. And there's nothing better than putting it out there to see what resonates, what doesn't, and even just getting aligned internally. How do we talk about ourselves in a way that's interesting and impactful?

Wendy, later on, we're going to talk about some of the mistakes that you've made as a CEO and leader of a company when it comes to content. But first of all, we're going to talk about how you're doing it right. You've talked about content as being a story. And interestingly enough, you said that the content Or the story needs to change. How does an entrepreneur, if you like, retain consistency, which is essential for brand building and reassurance, with evolving the story? How do you reconcile that dynamic, Wendy?

Yeah, I think it's being willing to go a layer deeper than others are willing to go and have a point of view, have a stance, you know, almost be willing to make mistakes and say things that might be provocative. So it's the opposite of playing it safe, right? Which so many companies and brands want to do because God forbid, you know, we stir the pot and, you know, we live in a culture right now that definitely doesn't reward. But I think in order to stand out and get noticed, you have to have some passion behind you. You gotta have a point of view. And so I think that's how you do it is Be willing to say what others aren't willing to say. Be willing to show your audience, you know, a little bit behind the scenes. Um, so it's not just like keeping it safe, keeping guarded. It's, it's, you know, it's very similar to having a relationship with someone, right? It's like if you don't go deep, the relationship doesn't go deep.

And I guess when— if you, if you see it in the context of having a relationship, if you're with your children or your parents, your family, your friends, you have some consistent values, don't you? Those don't change— honesty, integrity, and so on, humor.

100%.

But how you interpret the situations may change. Wendy, um, how does an entrepreneur not look as though they're being opportunistic? Because it's quite easy then to jump on something— AI is a good example— where people have a— but doesn't have a lot of depth to it. How do you help people to not look as though they're just kind of paper thin on taking positions?

Yeah, I mean, don't be opportunistic. Don't be paper thin. You know, it is like, don't just jump on bandwagons. I mean, I'm seeing it left and right. And, you know, I can get really riled up about it. Because, you know, there's so many companies out there, you know, they're experts in AI, and they know how to do all these things. And it's like bullshit. There are no experts right now. You know, like, we're all figuring it out. So I think, you know, one, don't do it. Like, be authentic. And as an audience, don't reward those companies. Like, don't jump on those bandwagons and reward them. So I think, you know, it's, it's having that discernment and that feeling of like, oh, I'm missing out, so let me— you know, everyone's talking about it, so let me do this. I mean, It's like, you know, just think of Bitcoin. And not that AI is that, I think AI is here to stay and it's a great tool, but only to the degree that it serves us. You know, I always say AI serves us, we don't serve AI.

Yeah, and I think that's a really good way of looking at the tool and the technology. But it is that within Content Bacon, Wendy, you have multiple content formats. Can you just, you know, that you deliver for clients, Can you just tell us the approach? Like, what comes first? What's most important? You know, is it important for a client or an entrepreneur to have content across all formats— audio, video, text, etc.? What— how do you help people to navigate the volume of content they need to create and decide on priorities?

Yeah, I mean, it's really that— helping them decide on priorities. You know, we start with strategy first, which is really defining the set of problems that, you know, we're being hired to solve and determining, you know, a very focused way to solve those. So, to your point, it's not let's do everything. It's let's figure out the key things we're trying to solve and then put together a very strategic approach to solve those particular issues or to, you know, capture those opportunities. So, That's, you know, from a content strategy perspective where we start and then determining the formats. We'd rather do less, you know, way better, you know, more depth, more quality than try to be on everything. And, you know, just like, you know, to use your word, be paper thin. That's not to say that over time utilizing multiple formats is certainly, you know, there's lots of tools that we can use in our toolbox Where it makes sense, we want to use as many as possible because people do consume differently. Some people love visuals, some people love the written word. Depending on where you're at, you may like all of them. But if you're, you know, on the subway, you know, you may want to read versus, you know, listen to a video. So just factoring all that in and, you know, adding on versus trying to do it all at once.

So from reading that, then what you're saying is also about thinking about the customer journey as well, isn't it? Where they're going to access the content. Um, Wendy, have you got a case study at the Content Bacon where you can just walk us through something that you've done that'll give an indication of what does work for a company? Maybe you can tell us what kind of company it was, because I understand the different industries maybe require different kind of content and different kind of distribution.

Yeah, so we work with a lot of technology companies. One in particular that we We've been working with for a couple years, so you know really getting to know their their story. They've expanded, you know rapidly, and initially their focus was on new new new, you know generating awareness. And we certainly had a a great success in doing that for them. But what we realized is that they were neglecting the leads that they had. You know, so we they were they had developed a very robust. Database and as their CRM, but we weren't working on that for them. So, you know, we did some discovery with them on, you know, goals for the year and, you know, where some of their pain points were. And it was like, yeah, you know, we're just not converting leads. So we really went to town on finding the gold in their CRM and really nurturing those leads and providing, you know, content that helped those leads determine like, hey, we're just here for, you know, the information, we're not going to do business, versus the ones that were looking for that more in-depth information, which then queued up the sales team to be a little bit more intentional, unengaged contacts in their CRM, and re-engage them because we were, you know, really dripping on them way more— I hate that term, by the way. I can't believe I just used it— emailing them, you know, more pertinent information. So re-engaging them and then really looking at, you know, kind of that middle of the funnel, middle of the flywheel, and giving them more in-depth information that had them ready to take the next decision. So, you know, able to reinvigorate their database and deliver a more steady stream of ready contacts for their sales team.

That's really interesting that actually there's a lot of gold in, in the CRM that most people have got. If there's a hallmark, Wendy, of that content that you can use to engage people in the middle of the funnel and move them to the— would it be the bottom of the funnel, I guess, where they fall out the funnel into you, into the customer database. Is there a hallmark of that content? Is it— does it have music? Does it have a short call to action? Does it have a picture of somebody or something? Is there a hallmark that people can think about, or is there some other determinant?

It's not really one thing, you know, because people need multiple touchpoints. It's, it's in some instances it's meatier content. It's very resource-driven content. It's really, again, in this particular instance, the target audience was a more sophisticated buyer on the other end. So having meaty content that really had, you know, a lot of technical, technological expertise and went deeper. So for this particular customer, it it was more of that. It was identifying some of the key issues that, you know, this audience was having and going deep and telling them how to solve it. And so that was really, you know, the hallmark for this particular customer. It may be different, it may be shorter, you know, wittier, funnier type content depending on the audience. And so I think that's a really important thing to uncover is what's important to your audience, not what you think important. Like, what are they dealing with? I mean, I like to really remind my entire team all the time that the person on the other end that we're talking to, in many instances, they have a real problem that they need to solve. And like, that's what we're interested in is how can we help you solve it? And so it's really important. It's not just creating content for the sake of content. It's really how is what we're doing truly adding value, truly helping solve a problem so that this, you know, we leave the, the other person on the other end, you know, better than we found them.

Yeah, and I think that's a wonderful point, Wendy, that almost in this day and age where we're not seeing people, in certain circumstances you'd have had a conversation with the customer that would have covered off information that they still needed after they've had the brochure. And sometimes maybe the content's not getting to the next level of complexity, as you say, answering the detailed questions about, for example, legacy implementation, for example, if it's in tech. Wendy, is there content that's being generated by AI? We're going to have one question about AI because this is your area. Is there content being generated by AI that you think is better than content generated by humans? What's your view on that?

Yeah, I think AI is a great tool. I think where we have found a lot of use for it is in, you know, some of the brainstorming, you know, aspects of the project. It's just, it's like an assistant, right? It kind of helps get the juices flowing. We've also found that we have, you know, every single one of our customers has a style guide. And dos and don'ts, right? We have certain customers who— there's just certain words that they don't want to use, you know, that might be part of their industry, but they've made, you know, like a very— like for us, like we use the word customer, not client. So if we were working with a content company that kept putting the word client, like, you know, eventually we would fire them because it's like, listen, you know, like hear what we're saying. So we've used AI from like an editor standpoint on those type of things that, yes, a human should be able to, you know, find that, but humans make mistakes. So where there's very specific, you know, right and wrong, black and white, we found AI to be a great tool to help us find those versus always relying on the human. And so it's things like that that we're constantly uncovering where AI can do a better job Because it can take direction and for the most part do it correctly, you know, 100% of the time, which it can't.

But, you know.

Well, I guess an AI doesn't lose concentration, right? It might hallucinate sometimes, but there you go. Maybe that's different. So when do you— which tool are you using for that checking, for example, against brand guidelines?

That's useful.

Yeah, our team has created quite a few. We use quite a few. You know, we've created our own, you know, custom GPTs. We've used, um, honestly, I don't even know all the software we're using because our team is constantly testing and creating, creating new ones. So if someone is more interested in that, reach out to me and I'll, I'll find out exactly what we're using because we, we are constantly testing and trying to find the best of the best. And we're also developing some of our own stuff.

Yeah.

And I think one of my guests earlier on runs a company called Brandwatch, for example, which is which is tracking, uh, across all the brand creators for a company to make sure that they're on, on message. So, but interesting you say using ChatGPT and creating custom ChatGPTs as well, Wendy. So, yes, I think as you say, we're all innovating. No one's quite at the other side yet. Wendy, you've had Content Bacon and you co-founded this business. You're in Florida and you're serving clients certainly all over America, I think also all over the world. As an entrepreneur, how have you been getting content bacon noticed? Because, you know, you do things for clients, but love to hear whether you're— can I say eating your own bacon? Because—

Yes. I mean, not as consistently as we would like, but yes, we do. We, we do eat our own bacon. So we do quite a few things. I mean, we do the basics. Right. So there is kind of like this mastering the basics that I'm a big proponent of, and that's creating consistent content in the form of articles, social media, you know, email content, you know, on a consistent basis. So it's like, you know, the foundational content that every company needs to look alive, stay relevant. So we absolutely do that. We, we've also used, you know, webinars, speaking engagement. Where really our, our focus is education. You know, we have always been big believers that we want to give, you know, a lot of information. We, you know, we want to be an educational resource. We, we truly want to help companies understand how to use content to grow. And so that's really been an effective strategy. It's not been a manipulative strategy. It's truly been how we feel So, you know, doing webinars, doing speaking engagements has, you know, always been an important part of our strategy. Yep. See our blogs. So, you know, again, the give before you get. We've got tremendous resources on our website for any company that wants to do it yourself. You know, we're big believers that an educated customer is the best customer. So we certainly, um, we provide, you know, that, that information.

Wendy, I have to ask you, because it's all, you know, um, branded pink and you've got the pig, I, I would have to ask you why, uh, the content Bacon as a name.

Yes. So first we're going through a rebranding. So stay tuned. We have like our next level branding that we're going to be launching. soon that I'm super excited about. But Content Bacon, which is a great brand, it's one of, you know, probably the best decisions my partner and I made. We just went through a branding exercise. You know, we came up with a lot of different names and listen, bacon makes everything better. And you put, you can put bacon in almost anything and it's better as a result. It's sizzling. So, you know, from our perspective, it made perfect sense. And it is a memorable name that tells a micro story. So it's got the elements of a good brand. So yeah, that's how we came up with it. And we have a lot of fun with it. Maybe we've gone too far, had too much fun with it. So when you see the new branding, you'll see, you know, maybe an elevated, you know, look and feel, which again, you know, all companies, I think it's, you know, constantly evolving is super important.

But I love that you've taken a position, as you say, with the brand in the same way you're suggesting people should take a position with their content. So I think it's really inspirational. I want to ask you that because it stands out, right? It really does. Wendy, um, as an entrepreneur, you've had Content Baker now for a number of years, it's successful, but would there be something that you could share that maybe hasn't gone quite as planned? Uh, a mistake maybe that you made? And I don't mean to embarrass you in any way, but always useful to hear what we shouldn't try at home.

Yeah, where do I start? So I think one of the mistakes, missteps I made recently was as we grew and as our team grew and I really developed my leadership team and to the most part, you know, really wanted my leadership team to kind of have the reins, I made a decision to step back from our Storytelling, if you will, and being out there and being the voice to really let Content Bacon be the brand and be at the forefront. And sounded good in theory, right? You know, not to be so attached. And but what I found was that, you know, I am the co-founder, I am the CEO. The vision of Content Bacon, you know, was my is my responsibility. And so not being at least one of the voices out there talking, sharing, was a real misstep for not only, you know, the, the world, you know, our audience, but also even internally. Um, because what I say to, you know, externally, my team hears, and that all works with our culture. So it was, it was really, you know, I saw the impact you know, kind of the dilution of the brand, it not being as interesting and innovative. And so more recently, you know, as I've stepped back into the forefront and started creating more content and started sharing our story, you know, I've seen the impact again, both internally and externally. So it's just a lesson. I don't know that I could have learned it any other way than actually making the mistake. So I'm grateful, you know, for the lesson. But I can at least share it because other entrepreneurs that maybe aren't the forefront of their brand and maybe aren't spending the time sharing, it could be and probably is a missed opportunity to have that leadership position and really be at the forefront because it's humans, right? At the end of the day, we're humans connecting with humans. And if your brand doesn't have that human voice, that human connection, It's, you know, I think you're missing a big opportunity.

Wendy, I think it's a wonderful point. And thanks for the honesty there. And I think that, you know, we all, me included, go through some fatigue, right? I certainly had this with one of my companies in the, you know, after about 10 years, you just sort of feel a little bit of fatigue. And rather than walking away, we need to find a way to recharge and then come back in, which is plainly what you've done. Wendy, you are plainly charged and coming back in and running Content Bacon. If there's a tip, you know, you remember also the Entrepreneurs Network, the Global EO, and that's a wonderful group. And I was involved in that in Beijing and starting that chapter there with Rich Robinson. So you've got a huge amount of experience and you must be successful to be in that chapter. So what would be a tip that you'd give to my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs?

Yeah, I think it's never stop telling your story and never stop evolving your story. And, you know, being passionate and having a burning desire for what you're up to. And again, that may wane at times. And so figuring out a way to, to tap back into that. And for me, you know, one of the ways was being the voice again, starting to create my own content, starting to think about what's interesting, what do people you know, want to hear about? What, what am I passionate about? You know, why do I have this company still? What, what is next? And so tying all that together has really like reinvigorated me. We've created new offerings as a result, and that's where, you know, my passion is. And then that overflows into my team. So I really do believe, you know, storytelling, telling your story, figuring out what your story is Refreshing your story, evolving your story—all of those things go hand in hand to build a company that that wins. And you know, I'm all about winning. I'm all about attracting, you know, winning team members, winning winning companies. And I think it starts with you know you winning and what does it look like to win? And and just making sure that you're able to tap into the why and that all. you know, bleeds into your story. So never stop telling your story. And when you feel stuck, that's a really good indicator that you need to go deeper.

Wendy, Wendy Lieber. Well, if we want to go deeper into what you also learn and how you learn, is there a podcast or a book that you've used on that journey? As you say, you dropped out of the business, come back in, recharged leading that. So any particular book or podcast that you've been reading that's given you some inspiration or some guidance or reassurance?

Yes, I am obsessed with Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guidara. So it's, it's a book. You can listen to it on audio. There's— it's amazing. And it's really about— Will Guidara owned Eleven Madison Park, and, you know, which was, you know, one of the top, the top restaurant in the world. And he— this book is really all about how to provide unreasonable hospitality, you know, service to others. And I am so passionate about that. And this book, like, to me, was just— I was just reading it, I would get too excited. I would have to stop because I wanted to, you know, implement so many of the things. I made my whole team read it. But to me, the reason why is It's really about, you know, serving your guests, serving your customers, providing something that's out of the ordinary. And I think in this day and age where we're trying to automate everything or use AI for everything or, you know, hide behind, you know, email and technology for everything, the human experience, the human connection, it's, it's why we're alive. It's what— it's where the magic is. And so I just believe that the more, you know, service is part of our businesses and really serving, which means you have to really listen, really be curious, and, you know, empower your team to provide that service and go the extra mile. I'm obsessed with it. So I guarantee if you read this book or listen to it, you'll be thanking me because it's amazing.

So it's called Unreasonable Hospitality, is that it?

Yes.

Unreasonable Hospitality by Ben Goddard. Wendy, if you want to find— Will Goddard, sorry. If people want to find out more about your unreasonable, unreasonably good content, which is sizzling at Content Bacon, how can they do that?

Yeah, so you can email me, Wendy, with the Y, old school Wendy, at Content Bacon. You can go on LinkedIn. You can go to our, our website. Um, yeah, I'd love to hear from you. I love having conversations with other business owners, entrepreneurs, and, um, I'd, I'd really love to hear from you. So those are some of the ways that you can reach me.

Great. And on contentbacon.com, there's also a website grader.

Yes.

So you can also get your website checked, which I should be doing to get mine done. Wendy Lieber, thanks for braving the Florida storms and joining me on The Unstoppable Entrepreneur today.

Thank you, Jim.

Well, it's been a pleasure. So Wendy, an impassioned conversation really about the benefit really of staying human and staying involved in your business. And in this day of AI, what I love as well about Wendy's approach is that it's, uh, actually she can't even remember the AI she's using because it's actually not the most important part of her business. Which is great because it's about the human touch and about the passion and the leadership and about the innovation and ultimately about the customer service. And that's something that AI will never understand because it doesn't have a heart and a soul, but you and I do. Thank you to Wendy for joining us on today's episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Hope you've enjoyed it. If you have, please do review it and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur because we don't want to leave anyone And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Now, if you're like me, you started a business or two without necessarily all the resources that you need to do all the marketing, get noticed for all the wonderful things that you can do. Well, my guest today is going to tell us a great story about a razor, $1 million, and a famous baseball pitcher's beard. He's also gonna tell us about how you can build a brand without a lot of money by being resourceful and a few other bits and pieces. And he's also gonna share with us about his favorite book, which comes from the Orient, from Asia in fact. Phil Masiello is joining us from Baltimore and he's the founder and CEO of a company called Crunch Growth. Phil, welcome to the show.

Hi, Jim. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I enjoy it.

Me too, 'cause we've got a lot in common, including you shared that you spent time in China, which obviously close to my heart. We both have daughters, in fact, from China. But we're here today to talk about business and about marketing. And let's start first of all with who you are and where you're from. And then you must tell us all about the million-dollar offer for shaving off a beard. Phil, over to you.

My pleasure. So I originally a New Yorker, born and raised in the Bronx in the shadow of Yankee Stadium. So I grew up as a, you know, as a, a sports enthusiast. But I founded my first business when I was 27 years old. It was a total disaster. We'll get— I'm sure we'll go back and forth on that at some other time. I went on after that business. I felt I needed more education, so I took the money when I sold it and I went to graduate school at the University of Maryland. And that's how I got down to Baltimore. And subsequent to that, I founded a couple of other businesses. One was a food Uh, retail stores, which got purchased by a supermarket chain. And then I founded a beauty brand with a supermodel, Raw Beauty with Carol Alt. Uh, and it was a shopping channel brand all around the world. We were in, and then we were in Ulta, Sephora, and all those big chains. Uh, but I had this, uh, idea and I built 800razors.com. Uh, and, um, that was really a struggle. Because we, we were doing all the things we understood how to do from a marketing perspective. We were running ads, we were doing search engine optimization, we were doing content, we were doing all these things and it wasn't working. It wasn't— I mean, we were getting some orders, but— and we didn't have a huge budget. We didn't— we couldn't sit there. We were trying to think of all these things to do. We talked about getting an RV and going into downtown New York and shaving people on the street and And just things to get noticed because what you're trying to do is get noticed and break your brand out from the clutter. And I woke up one morning and again, I'm a sports fan. I woke up one morning and Brian Wilson, who was a famous pitcher for the San Francisco Giants, had gotten traded a year before. He had Tommy John surgery and they traded him to the Dodgers. And this was the first time he was going to pitch in a year. And he was known— not only was he known for being a pitcher, but he was known for having this epic beard. I mean, it was a beautiful beard. And it was about 8 inches, 10 inches long. So I woke up and thought, hey, let's offer him $1 million to shave that beard with our razor. And we sent a message to his people and said, we'd like to offer Brian $1 million to shave his beard. They said, we'll discuss it with Brian. And that's all we needed. We just needed to have that email so we could say we are now in discussions with Brian Wilson to shave his beard with our razor. And what happened was fantastic because people were outraged at us. They were screaming at us on social media, on email, that, that we would, we would offer $1 million to an already millionaire to shave. The second part was people were sending us pictures on social media of all the body parts that they would shave with a price tag. I'll shave this for $10,000. I'll shave this for $5,000. And it just became this event and snowballed. And then the press got involved and we were getting interviewed Why we would do this, what are we trying to do, you know, all around the world, France, Japan. And this went on for about a week, 10 days. And TMZ caught Brian Wilson coming out of a gym in LA, and they asked him if he was going to shave his beard. And he said, I'm not shaving my beard for anything, any amount of money. Well, it just started it all again. People were outraged that, that he would turn down the million dollars. And so. The long and short of it was that all these things that we were doing, these traditional marketing techniques weren't working, but this sort of broke us through the clutter. This is what got us launched and got our foundation of orders, got customers, got us noticed, really did what we were trying to do.

So, Phil, I love that story because it really is out of left field, if I can, if I can use that expression, you know. And, and, and really, as you say, a great example of being resourceful and, and having an idea rather than going through kind of a standard process. But, you know, you woke up one morning and you, you thought of this idea. Do you now at Crunch Growth help startups and, and entrepreneurs to To kind of have those kind of ideas in a more regular fashion because if you're just waiting for inspiration, sometimes you can wait too long. So, how are you helping at Crunch Growth with that?

Yeah. So, at Crunch Growth, we're a full-service digital agency. We handle the entire e-commerce ecosystem. But what we're really good at and what we try and focus on, and it doesn't matter what size company you are, startup to, you know, half a billion or a billion dollars, we always run into the same problem, which is, do you really understand who your customer is, right? Who your target customer is? Do you really understand that persona? Because when you do, you can sit down and sort of think about where those people are, where that target customer is, and how I can get to them, maybe in a unique way. So to answer your question, yes. We work with all kinds of brands and we try and get them to think outside that box and say, okay, you can run $1 million worth of ads, but what's it going to get you? It may get you a 1-to-1 return. But if you could figure out who your customer is, and I'll give you another example. We had a game company that worked with us for years and it was a unique product.

Yeah.

It was part digital, part physical, and it was really a neat game. And once people got it in their hands, once people started playing it, they really enjoyed it. And so we talked about it a lot, and they were based in New York, so they started going to places where they knew their customer was a Gen Z millennial. They knew what type of person it was. So they started to go to these hangouts where those people were. And playing the game, which evolved into turning it into events at these places and recording them. They would always have somebody there recording it with their iPhone. No big deal. Not, not a major production and putting it on social media. So now they know who their customer is. They're showing their customer, their target customer playing the game and enjoying it. And which got people interested to go to the website and buy the product. And that was sort of how they launched because They had put all their money, and we see this all the time. They had taken, especially with startups, they had taken all their effort, all their money into building a great product and not thinking about the marketing of it and getting it out there into people's hands.

Phil, I think this idea of going out and being with the customer, I had the director of research at a company called Ipsos MORI, and he talked about going out and actually watching what people do, because often that's different to what they say they do, and the importance of being there. But that is really based on knowing who that customer is, isn't it? Because otherwise you don't know where to go. Many, many people, myself included, struggle with who the customer is because it's the old story, isn't it? We think, well, if I'm selling to everybody, I'm going to have a bigger business. I'm likely to have more opportunity. Phil, why is it not the case? You know, why, why is it that if you're, you know, theoretically going after a bigger market, it actually becomes a smaller business?

Well, I— if, if you can't please everyone and you can't speak to everyone, right? A, the way you speak to somebody who is, say, uh, you know, a A 65-year-old retiree versus a 25-year-old are 2 different methods of talking. And speaking today is video. Speaking is text. Speaking is all these different mediums that we have. So, if you're trying to be very broad, and when we were in the razor business, people say, oh, everybody shaves. So, you can be very broad. But that's not true. There's always a core customer. And yes, so let me use Cadillac as a good example. Cadillac is a car really for over 50 people, people over the age of 50, predominantly men. Okay. But when you see a Cadillac commercial, they will never show a 50-year-old man. They show beautiful young women. They show young guys In a nice suit, right? Because that becomes aspirational. The guy that's over 50 doesn't want to believe he's over 50. He wants to believe he's that 40-year-old guy who's got this beautiful woman. So what they're trying to do is talk to that group, that 40-year-old, to get the— to get them to buy the cars. Yes, over 50 is going to buy your car. Yes, over 60 is going to buy your car. Maybe even a 25-year-old will buy your car. But your core customer, the target that you're trying to get, is this one. This 35 to 45-year-old, let's say. It's the same thing in any business. So, if you know who your customer is, you know who your core customer is, the ones who are going to engage with you, you sort of build your persona around that. So now, instead of just speaking language, you're speaking to a person, right? We're big advocates of building customer personas to say, look, our customer is 35 years old. He's an engineer and he likes to do this. He eats this kind of food. Now I can build. Now in the office, we can talk about, we can give them a name and we can say that we're going to target to, we're marketing to Joe and this is how we're going to market. And so it becomes a different style of thinking and a more effective way because you're always going to get bleed. You're always going to get people younger and older that are going to buy your product. But if you can hone in on who your target is, you're more effective.

Yeah, I guess those, those are what we might call outliers, aren't they? Those people that maybe, uh, confuse, confuse you slightly because they, they buy something but they're not part of the core, core demographic. But Phil, you yourself, um, and you and I have something else in common, is that we both have shows. Uh, you know, I have a radio show on the local radio station here, Radio Bath, but you have a TV show.

Yeah.

Uh, so I'm full of admiration for that. I, I'd love to hear how you're doing that and what's the impact and the strategy behind having your own TV program, because that again is being resourceful, isn't it, rather than having resources. So help us to understand the show and how that came about and what you do with that.

Yeah. So the show is— it airs on E360 TV, which also airs on Apple TV and Roku and all these other places, Fire TV. But what I did was when I, when I built the show, it's really about, it's really about entrepreneurship and being resourceful, right? And I interview entrepreneurs who have started and founded their companies, their brands, large, small, you know, successful, maybe multiple entrepreneurs, people that have failed once. And what we're trying to do is the target audience is really aspiring entrepreneurs or business people or maybe somebody who's already in it, who's got a business that's 3 or 4 years old that they just can't get over the hump. They're just stagnant, don't have a lot of resources, don't have a lot of money. And so, they listen to me interview these other entrepreneurs and they hear how the struggles and what they've done and how they've overcome because we We all have overcome these humps. I don't care. The, the second reason I built the show is because I think aspiring entrepreneurs or people that are in it, you know, they listen to these high-powered entrepreneurs that, you know, own these huge businesses and they get a warped sense of reality. They think that, oh my God, I'm doing something wrong because I didn't go from zero to $1 billion in 4 years and I wasn't able to raise $600 million.

Right.

And so, we wanted to show them reality. People that have built businesses that have gone from maybe zero to $500 million, $200 million, $50 million, whatever it is. People that have built businesses for different options. Some people don't want to build a billion-dollar business. They just want a lifestyle business, something that gives them a good income. But what you see throughout, and we've probably done 50 shows already, you see throughout the same thing. An entrepreneur starts a business. His business plan is what he had envisioned, or he or her, what they had envisioned, and it's not working that way. So they have to pivot, right? They have to look at something differently, or they don't have the money to market themselves correctly. And so they have to think outside the box. So we give them all these anecdotes and all these these real-life businesses, real-life problems, real-life struggles. And I think that that helps people in a way. And so it certainly helps us because I like listening to those stories.

Well, Phil, and that's why I have The Unnoticed Entrepreneur as a title as well, because actually most of us are in effect sort of running in local marathons. We're not running in elite, you know, in Olympics. Most of us are, you know, playing sport or achieving in a sort of a balanced way. We're not necessarily all just in that 1% of any pursuit. So that's exactly a similar sort of feeling to the one that I have about this show. But what is the impact on crunch growth of having a show? Because it takes your time, takes your energy. It could be a noble cause. But if someone, you know, if we're listening to this right now and going, you know what, I could do a radio show or I could do a TV show. What's the ROI beyond satisfaction, Phil? What does it give you and Crunch Growth?

Yeah, that's an excellent question. So, what it does is, A, it exposes Crunch Growth to more people. And that target is really business people, right? We try and— we're here to help businesses grow. That's what we're called. It's Crunch Growth Revenue Acceleration Agency. So we're trying to figure out how to get you over that hump. So people hear us on the show, they hear the methods that, that we've employed, they hear us talking to these entrepreneurs, and then they get in touch with us because maybe they need help. And it's not just startups that have, that have contacted us. It's, it's businesses that have maybe been stuck between $50 and $60 million for 3 years and can't get over that hump. They've sort of stagnated. They need some fresh ideas. So it's— that really is part of our lead generation strategy, if you want to use that term.

Yeah, no, I think that's wonderful. A really great example of how you're leveraging a platform because you're getting both from a technological point of view, you're getting a platform, aren't you? And then also you're getting audiences that are already on those platforms. being introduced to you. It was a very cost-effective way of doing it. Phil Masiello, you've, you know, you and I actually, we both started our first companies at the age of 27. You mentioned I started mine by moving to Singapore to start my first company at 27. And, you know, also had my fair litany of failures there. But this is about you and not me. But if there's a mistake that you might have made, if I could be so bold, that you'd suggest that I don't make from a marketing point of view? What would that be, do you think?

I've made many, many mistakes, but I'll give you one example when I started. And I actually made this mistake twice, both times in the same sort of industry. I started my first business when I was 27 years old. And it was retail store, uh, food, uh, specialty food and, um, and, and catering. And I, I made the mistake of getting talked into doing a direct mail campaign, uh, and producing this beautiful, uh, beautiful flyer and putting it in mailboxes. And At the time, it was really the dawn of the internet, and I allowed this to happen, and it, it was, it was just a total flop. I spent a tremendous amount of money that I didn't have on this to get— I think it was half of a percentage return— and really did nothing. It did nothing to expand the brand. It did nothing to get sales. It did nothing. And I actually made the mistake again when I built the Daily Markets in Washington, D.C. And everybody said, oh, you know, you're in a city and you've got all these apartment buildings. We should do a direct mail. We'll hit the apartment buildings. And I did it again and it got— it did absolutely nothing for us. And twice I made that same mistake.

But Phil, I have to ask, what's your analysis? Why did direct mail to the general, into the local area for the store. Why did it fail? What was the learning?

People, people don't pay attention to what's in their mailbox anymore. They haven't since, I think, the '70s or '80s. When you see, when you watch the behavior of people, and I'm guilty of it, we get the mail, we get the important, we sort through, get the important stuff, and then we put the rest in the recycling bin. And that's exactly the behavior that people do today. It's not— when you think about the age group of people, and again, I broke my own rule from not paying attention to who my target is. You look at the age group of people that are raising families today, most of their bills are coming electronically. And this has been going on for the past 20 years. Most of their bills are coming electronically. And if they are getting paper bills. They look at their mail, they find the ones that are important, they throw everything else in the garbage. So, it's totally ineffective.

Very, very interesting. Kind of almost the medium has expired in that sense, hasn't it? Not the medium is the message, but in this case, the medium just has expired and without message.

Yeah.

But Phil, you've gone on to build other successful businesses like 800razors.com. And Crunch Growth revenue generation acceleration agency. Can I ask you to give us, you know, your wisdom, your sage wisdom of, you know, what's the one thing that you maybe recommend to all of your clients that they do that's kind of a cornerstone of every successful resourceful strategy?

Yeah. I'll tell you something that comes up an awful lot. And what we preach is you've got a product and find the people who are going to buy your product and understand who they are. We hear it all the time. And I know people are going to say, oh, he's going to say, you know, focus on the customer. And it's true. I find I don't care how big of a company it is. You have to understand your customer, and you have to understand their behavior in order to figure out how to market effectively to them. And again, you could be a billion-dollar company. I'll tell you the same thing because I guarantee you that if I sat in a room with somebody from you know a billion-dollar company, they would come up with all these different pieces of who their customer is, but they wouldn't be able to put it all together and say this is our customer. They because everybody thinks. Well, you know, I mean, I'm a supermarket, so I sell to everybody. Well, maybe, maybe not.

Well, interesting. So really, for all of that, it comes back to who you serve.

Yeah.

Right. Um, and that's the basis. I mean, there's a lot of talk about start with why. Just, just tell me, Phil, there's all this talk about, you know, start with why, and it goes back before Simon Sinek, of course. You know, earlier, uh, marketeers were talking about the need to decide who you're going to sell to and why. Do you tell people to start with why or with who?

I understand start with why. I understand why I exist. Okay. And I'll tell you everything. I'll tell you something I tell every single startup. I don't care about go out with your minimum viable product and find a customer who wants to buy your product. Find that customer. Because if you can't find a customer to buy your product, Then you're you're dead in the water. I don't care why you exist at that point because nobody's going to buy it. There's actually a skincare brand, a men's skincare brand that just filed for Chapter Seven liquidation. I can't off the top of my head. I can't remember what it was, but you know they had a beautiful why men wanted to men want to look younger, eye cream, effective skincare, all those whys. But at the end of the day, they just filed Chapter 7 and the CEO even admitted there's just not a big enough market for people who want our product. Well, had you done that in the beginning, had you gone out to find who's going to buy your product, you, you would have figured that out early on and not wasted your investor dollars, your dollars, et cetera. So again, I'm not discounting why. I like why, but first you have to figure out who's going to buy your product so that you can figure out the market.

Yeah, and I, I'm glad you said that because for all of the, uh, sort of esoteric interest in Start With Why, which is a very appealing message, um, it's not a very functional one because you can end up serving what you want, not necessarily what the customer wants to give you money for, right? And then although, you know, with the men's, uh, cosmetics and so on, if they're looking for liquidation, I could have some of that over here because I'm definitely in the market for ingredients to make me look younger. Phil, if I, if I can find them, ship them to me. Phil Masiello, though, um, Chapter 11, there's someone's opportunity there. Um, yeah, Phil, with all of your expertise, I know you've, you've actually written a number of books yourself, um, but what would be your book or podcast recommendation Do you think to me and my fellow unnoticed?

I go back to ever— this was something I learned in graduate school, and I, I, one of my marketing professors turned me on to this book, The Art of War, and I continue to go back to it. And it's not about, uh, you know, I know people say, well, you know, there's all different reasons to, to read that book, but I think about it in terms of strategy. It helps me think about strategy, because everything we do, whether it's marketing or whether it's advertising or whether it's business development or whatever, you have to have a strategy. And this— that book, it's, it's easy to listen to, easy to read. I have it on 4 different formats. And I just— to me, it's a, it's something I keep in my back pocket to continue to go to and get my strategy brain refreshed. Yeah, this—

and this is, uh, Sun Tzu by, uh, well, Sun Tzu's, uh, Art of War, right? Which is, um, which is fantastic. It also probably ties back into, you know, you having a daughter from China as well, right? And there's a nice symmetry there. But yeah, if anyone hasn't read it, it's, it's a brilliant, brilliant treatise really. And he addresses a number of issues including, you know, not taking on your competition head-on, for example. Very interesting strategy about not actually going to battle but winning the war. Phil, you've taken on many battles and plainly winning many wars too. If you want to find out more about you, where can they do that?

Well, you can go to crunchgrowth.com. I also have philmassiello.com, both of them. And you can always contact me at phil@philmassiello.com. I have the TV show Think, Engage, Thrive, which is on E360 TV. So I'm easy to find. You can, uh, and I, I, believe me, I'm, I'm pretty responsive.

You're easy to find, easy to chat to. Phil, thank you for joining me so much.

Thank you, Jim. It was great. I enjoyed it.

Uh, me too. And just, just for the record, if you've got a million and you want me to shave my goatee, I am open. I'm open to offers. It doesn't even have to be, uh, a million. I would take a lot less, or even maybe just a year's supply of free razors. I think I'm easy to please. If you can send those lotions my way. Phil, thank you for joining me from Baltimore today.

It's my pleasure. My pleasure. It was fun.

Well, it's been great fun. And, you know, we don't always manage to find guests that have got the kind of the depth of experience. And Phil and I, you know, both started our first businesses when we were 27, which is quite a few years ago. So it's wonderful to have the depth of his experience on the show. Many, many takeaways, but probably the, the real key one is to start with who. You know, it's not a business until someone's willing to pay you for what you do. Um, so I'm sure you're bearing that in mind, but if you haven't thought of that today, then just remind yourself who you're selling to. And you've been listening to me, Jim James, over here in Wiltshire today. Phil Masiello in Baltimore has been joining me as my guest. If you've enjoyed this, do please Rate the show on your player. It really, really helps. And follow the show because we also love to know that you are getting this and every episode every Tuesday and Thursday of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Thank you for listening to this episode with me, Jim James. And until we meet again, encourage you to just keep on communicating. Hello. Have you ever wondered whether you struggle to put things Easily, simply, so that other people can understand what you're saying. In fact, I've just done it now. I haven't just said welcome. I haven't just simply put the welcome. So I'm struggling from the problem that my guest today, the author and lecturer Ben Gutman, has written a book on. Ben, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Jim. Great to be here.

Well, you know, I have intentionally Made my introduction long-winded and complicated, and I have failed miserably because you've written a book. You're an entrepreneur turned author, and your book called Simply Put is gonna help people to understand how to communicate. And so on the, on the conversation we're gonna have, you're gonna take us through the different, the 5 different elements that we need to include in our conversation and our communications. And also tell us a number one mistake, a big mistake that you see most of us making, including me. So Ben, from New York, welcome to The Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show.

Awesome. I'm excited to be here and excited to share everything.

Well, you know, I'm excited because I need help, right? And so many of us as entrepreneurs, we get distracted with work, messages, social media, staff, customers. How do you help people like me to focus and get our messages so that they can be clearly understood by our audiences.

Well, what you just said was something that is something you hear a lot, which is that we have a really hard time getting simple. And one thing I would see in my experience, I ran a marketing agency for 10 years. I sold it not too long ago. I teach at Baruch College here in New York City. I teach marketing. And I'm also just a user of the world, right? I'm a customer, I'm a voter, I'm a donor. And, and so when I would see in all of those different roles, I would see the same problem come up again and again, which is that people who had great things that they wanted to share with the world had a really hard time connecting with their audience in a way that mattered. And so what I, what I saw in the trenches as marketing agencies, people would hire us for that type of problem. But now that I have this kind of remove after, after being out of it for a little bit, the problem kind of kept ringing in my brain. And so that's what ultimately led me to write this book, which is called Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win and How to Design Them. And so this book, what I identified in the first half of the book is this core problem, which is when we are on the receiving end of communication, when we are again, the listener, the buyer, the voter, the donor, we want things in a certain way, but then when we're on the sending end of the equation, we really are pulled in the opposite direction. So what do I mean by that? As a receiver, we want things that are fluent. And if you look at our own lives, we know the word fluent, right? You can be fluent in English or Spanish or Mandarin. You can be fluent in wine or in your favorite TV show, whatever things are easy, they're fluent, right? It comes from the Latin word for flowing, actually, which is kind of what it feels like. So if you ask a cognitive scientist about the word fluency, though, they're going to say it's a little bit different. It's about how easy is it for you to take something from out in the world, stick it in your brain, and make sense of it. And the easier it is for you to do that, the less sweat, the less effort, those kind of mental cycles, Well, you're more likely to like it, more likely to trust it, you're more likely to buy it. All the things that you want when you're communicating are positively affected by something being fluent. And on the flip side, if something is not fluent, something is hard to hear, hard to read, hard to understand, takes a lot of work, well, we don't like it, we don't trust it, and we don't buy it. All the things that we don't want. So we really want to be fluent and simple In how we communicate if we want to get across the thing that's important to us. But the problem is when we are in the sending position, when we're there making an advertisement or just sending an email or a proposal, we're really pulled in the opposite direction because inside of our heads there's some forces that are telling us kind of we have this additive bias. We want to add instead of subtract. And then outside of our heads and the environments we're in, all the incentives point to more. Right? We want to have more lines in our resume and more stuff in the newspaper, and there's not really evidence of absence, right? So that creates this chasm, and that is really the problem in most of our marketing and most of our communication, is that we want things to be simple. We have a really hard time doing that when we're in the sending role.

Isn't the challenge, Ben, that we don't know what to leave out, right? We struggle sometimes with Putting in one thing because I've got so many more things to tell the customer about which might be important. Ben, how do you then help, or how can we decide what's important and therefore reduce and then know what to leave out or maybe to deliver it later? How do you help us with that then, Ben?

Oh yeah, I mean, so what you're talking about is something that's often It's one of the biggest problems, which is people are unfocused a lot of times in their message. We have to understand that when we are communicating, we think what we're talking about is very important and is a big deal to us. But for our user, for our receiver, it's not that important, right? We woke up today with a lot of things we care about, and your ad for a new brand of shampoo was probably not one of them, right? So we need to kind of be humbled a little bit in how important it is to everything that we think is going into our communication. We also have to understand that everything we put in is a zero-sum attention game. We only have 100% of the pie to give in terms of how much we care. And that's a pretty small pie when we look at how distracted most of us are in the modern kind of media ecosystem. And every item we try to put in there, every time we add an additional point to it, what we're doing is we're distracting, we're taking away emphasis from the thing that is really important. And so, you know, this, this kind of leads me a little bit to the 5, like, solutions that we have for this problem. And I kind of hinted at one of them there a second ago. But when I looked around at the science, when I looked at the, you know, kind of the case studies and the history, I was able to identify 5 design principles that help us bridge that gap. Those are cool. And this isn't like a step-by-step plan. It's not like a rubric, but the better we can activate on each one of these things, the more effectively we're going to start to kind of inch towards the receiver.

Okay, Ben Goodman. So as the author of Simply Put: Why Clear Messages Win, I have to ask if you can help us to understand those 5 in the time that we've got, because obviously you've got a book and at the end, in fact, you've got a link to download a a chapter. So we'll be putting that obviously in the show notes, and Ben will also tell us about the link to get the free chapter of the book. But tell us, Ben, so if we've got 5 different aspects of what we're thinking or saying or about to implement in terms of communication, can you take us through? I guess that's one for each, each digit on the hand, isn't it?

Oh yeah. And you know, it's funny, I, I joke about on the first page of the book, I say, you know, it's a 208-page book about how to say things simply. It seems like I didn't take my own advice, right? And so there's a surprisingly deep well of science and kind of know-how behind each one of these things. And so, yeah, there's certainly, there's a whole chapter, a whole bunch of tools for each one of these things, but quickly I'll kind of outline what are these principles here. So the first one is beneficial. What does it matter to the receiver? Kind of features versus benefits, right? The thing you learn like 101 in sales is often the thing that's really forgotten the most. But people don't want the thing, they want what the thing does for them. The second one is focused. Are you trying to say one thing or multiple things at once? We talked about kind of the zero-sum attention game a second ago. The third one is salient. Does your message stand out from The noise. Does it rise to your attention? Does it have contrast? Does it zig when others zag? We only notice what we notice, right? Everything else kind of flies by, and that's obviously not what we want. The 4th one is empathetic. Are you speaking in a language that the audience understands? Are you meeting them where they are, both in terms of the little words, but also their motivations, their emotions? That's what we're looking for with empathy. And then finally, it's minimal. Have you cut out everything that isn't important and left only what is? And when we talk about minimal, by the way, we're not talking about the fewest number of words or the fewest number of sentences or paragraphs or pages or slides. We are talking about the least amount of friction. And that's a really important distinction there. Sometimes that means more words or more pages, But we want to optimize for the ease, not necessarily just the length when we talk about minimal.

Okay. Just interesting topic there about friction because I know Apple's been considered perhaps the past master of producing the frictionless technology, right? You buy one phone, it transfers all the data to the new phone by scanning the hologram, for example, right? So it's frictionless. From a Communications point of view, Ben, just help us to understand what do you mean by frictionless?

Yeah. And so you mentioned a really good example there, which is what's the user experience? If you ask a user experience designer how to make something easy, they're going to talk about friction. That's what we— my background is in design. Excuse me. And that's what we work in. We put friction between us and things we don't want people to do, we remove friction between the things we want people to do. And you can see this clear as day when you go into kind of an e-commerce situation a lot of times where the money's there. Amazon has the one-click checkout. Have you ever had to log back into your Amazon account? Right? Like it always works. Like you've never had to do. And it's very easy to click that button. Your stuff is already saved there and bam, bam, You're able to check out and be parted with your $20 to go buy that book. And so we remove the friction from that. But on the other side of the coin, if you go out and you say, I want to go cancel my gym membership, well, there's a lot of friction that those companies put in the process, right? Because they don't want you to get there. They want you to be stopped along the way. So you have to prove that you're moving. You have to go into the facility. You have to send them a letter, all these different things that are much harder than the process of giving them the money is what's required to stop paying them the money. And so when you translate that to messaging, we say, well, every time we add more kind of words or sentences that start to become these bumps in the road, they're a reason for us to pull off. It's a reason for us to say, well, I don't really understand what that word is. I'm getting bored here. I can't read that whole sentence. There's too many bullets on this. Every one of those things can be a reason for us to say, hey, you know what? I have thousands of other things that want my attention right now. If it's in my inbox, if it's the bird chirping out the window, I have so many things that matter that are going to be more enjoyable for me to place my limited attention. And I'm going to do that instead of kind of reading the thing that's a big slog here that's in your business proposal. If you want somebody to get where you want to go, you have to remove the obstacles that are on the way to that journey.

And so keeping, as you say, keeping everything simple then reduces the friction because the recipient has less things to consider, maybe less options to review, less places to do research. Ben, can you give us maybe an example of a person or a brand that does manage to simply put their message out? There are a myriad of people and companies that don't do it well, including myself, but what about some examples of good practice?

Yeah. I mean, so you mentioned Apple and Apple's a little bit of a cop-out, right? Because they're just so good at what they do. But if you look back about 20 years ago, before they had this kind of reputation for being this juggernaut that can do no wrong in the consumer marketplace. They were struggling and they introduced a new product that was an MP3 player called the iPod. And they were not the first company to introduce an iPod— sorry, an MP3 player, but they were the first company to kind of get a lot of the pieces right together in a singular ecosystem. And they didn't go around talking about their MP3 player in the way that everybody else talked about it. Everybody else said, we have this many gigabytes, we have this many pixels on our screen, it weighs this much, the battery lasts this long. That's what everybody else was talking about. But Apple goes ahead and they understand this important piece about benefits versus features, and they say, it's 1,000 songs in your pocket. It's 1,000 songs in your pocket. I don't want, as the consumer, I don't want a certain number of megabytes or gigabytes or whatever it is. I want 1,000 songs. That is tied. That's the benefit. The feature is the hard drive space. The benefit is that I get to listen to all of my music wherever I am. And so that based off of that one initial positioning for that product, the whole category changed, the whole company changed, and that's where the whole economy changed because of how successful they are.

So wonderful. So in your context of simply put, is it perhaps, you know, fair to say simply put in terms of the benefit that the recipient will receive from buying your goods or services, Ben? Is that one way that we could view the simply put, that for all the features of, as you say, storage and technical specifications in that case, we have to think about what, in your terms, you know, the beneficial argument, the salience? than the empathy is for the recipient of the message. Is that fair?

Yeah, I would say so. That's really the first principle. And I lied a little bit about it being not kind of a step-by-step thing. Beneficial's in the first spot for a reason. It's because it is probably the most important one and it's probably the one that most people are going to forget about, or not so much they forget about, the one they're going to get wrong the most. This is something I tell my students every semester and I say, if you only remember one thing from this entire class, from this entire degree that you're getting, if you remember this sentence, you'll be ahead of most people in the marketing world or in the business world in general. And it's not mine. It's from Theodore Levitt, who's a 20th century marketing professor at Harvard. He said, People don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. People don't want a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole. They don't want the thing. They want what the thing does for them. They want how their life is better because of that product. And so many advertisements, so many product descriptions, they all talk about the drill, but they don't talk about the hole. The best advertisements like that Apple one, They talk about the hole and actually they go a little step further. They don't really want the hole. They want the picture on the wall, right? Or I want the family memories on the wall. And those are the kind of things you're going to want to talk about. I'm not buying the drill. I'm not buying the mint flavor of my toothpaste. I want fresh breath or I want to have a better date tonight or I want that. Yeah, that's what I want. I don't necessarily want the thing, but so much marketing, so many kind of product descriptions or websites or proposals, they talk about the thing instead of what it means, because the thing is always visible. The thing is always there. You can experience it with your 5 senses, right? I can experience the mint flavor with my taste. I can see the drill and its color and its battery and feel the weight of its battery. All these things are very tangible, but the benefits are often removed and intangible. And unless you're in a position where you're you're talking to customers and you're thinking about it in terms of what things mean and how to get to a deeper level, it's very easy to kind of forget about the benefits and just focus on the features. And then you're just really selling yourself short.

Ben, I love that idea that people just want the whole, or they just, as you say, they want, actually they don't want the fresh breath, they want other people not to think they've got halitosis, right? So social acceptance. Can we just touch on AI? You know, I know it's sort of topical, and I know you're not writing about AI in your book, but how can people use AI to complement the lessons in your book, especially if they're working, you know, internally? You know, it can be quite difficult to have an objective opinion, can't it, of your own messaging. Can you give us any guidance on how you're using AI or how we can use AI to be simply put?

Yeah. So the AI stuff is fascinating. ChatGPT came out right as I was finishing my first draft of the book. And so I put a couple references to kind of the dawning era of generative AI in the book, but it's not, this is not a book about AI. It's something a lot more kind of fundamental. It's about humans, right? It's not about machines. I have a relatively kind of not simple, like nuanced take on AI. Number one is that cat's out of the bag. It exists. We can't, we're not going back. There's no way for us to live in a world where this type of tool doesn't exist anymore. And to that end, I tell my students, by all means, go ahead and use it and see how you can use it for good. And if you use it for bad, It's going to hurt you, but there are professors out there. And listen, my position is different. I'm teaching college seniors that are in a marketing class. If I was teaching high school or middle school English class, I would be absolutely much more worried and much more saying, hey, don't go out and use this for your means. For my means, it's about how do we use this for business and how do we make the world better through it? So that's one piece of it. Second piece is I think that AI as it is now is really good at kind of 2 parts of the communications puzzle. It's not good at doing everything for you because actually you get stuff that's really not quote unquote like simple. You get things that are a lot of fluff. If you just ask it to say, give me 500 words about topic X, it's going to be like the 8th grader that wrote the book report that has to like padded out saying, in my report, I'm going to talk about, you know, and it's that type of copy that you're going to get out of it, which really isn't great. It is really good if you're saying, hey, give me 100 possible, like, names for, you know, my blog, right? And it will give you a bunch of things that might kind of start, kickstart something else in your brain. Say, hey, you know, that's actually a pretty good name for my blog or for my newsletter or whatever it's going to be. So that's That's useful. On the other end of the experience, going in and saying, I'm going to— this is my text, I want it to be 20% shorter. That's where it really kind of excels right now is to say, I gave it the original material and I want it to help me optimize. I want to use it as a partner, not as the replacement. That's currently a really effective tool. And to that end, I had a friend who I was on his podcast recently and he took the lessons from my book. He built a little custom GPT with it and he used that to test his newsletter to say, okay, well, I'm going to write this newsletter by myself and then I'm going to use the AI to use Simply Put's lessons on the B version of the newsletter. Turns out the B version of the newsletter had about 40% more click rate on it, which was— I was very encouraged by, and I've been, you know, very happy to see that. So that's an example of how you can use this as a tool, but not a replacement for what you're doing.

I think that's really, really good advice, and thanks for sharing. Maybe you'll even let us see this extra custom ChatGPT for newsletter. Sounds very, very useful. Then if there is a, if you like, a mistake that you've seen people make sort of a common mistake that you can help correct us on? You've got your 5 elements. I understand that. But is there something that you see kind of people doing, entrepreneurs doing when it comes to communication that you can help us to kind of stop today?

Well, I think the biggest one is that people miss the features and benefits distinction, but I already talked about that. So I'll give you another one. When I talk about empathy, I talk about kind of getting out of our bubbles and being an enlightened idiot, right? Welcoming the enlightened idiot, somebody who's an outsider who can give you perspective on what it is that you're trying to say. Because we're in our own heads 100% of the time. We're in our own teams and our groups a lot of the time. And so it's important for us to kind of break out of that and to talk to people. And that could be going and doing market research and a focus group and spending a lot of money doing that. And that can be the thing you need to do. Or it could be saying, hey, let me just go ask somebody that I know for their opinion on this, or does this resonate? Go stop somebody on the street and do that. I've done that. I've gone and stood on the concourse at Grand Central Terminal and flagged people down asking them research questions. And you offer them a little tote bag or a gift card or something for that, right? But those are the type of things that you have to do if you want to see something be successful or if you want to ensure that what you're saying is effective. But I think that's the number one. It's kind of a no-duh thing, right? But it's also the thing that most people will ignore. Most people will completely not do that because it's uncomfortable, it's awkward, they don't like doing it. They might get feedback they don't want. Most people won't do it, but it is the kind of It's maybe the most effective tool we have in our toolkit here about making sure that we're communicating effectively.

Yeah, so actually going out and asking people what they think of what we're going to release, as you say, it's a brave thing to do. But ultimately, it's a recurring theme on the show is that we've got to engage with our audiences and get out of our homes and our offices and our own heads, Ben, as you say, in order to find out whether what we're saying is simple and simply put or not. Um, Ben, I like to ask learned people like yourself, especially as you're a lecturer at university, is there a podcast or a book that you would recommend?

So I, I have lots of friends that have written great books, so I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll look, I'll pull some oldies that are actually really good, so that's to not cause any turbulence. 2 of them, I'll give you a recommendation. Number one is Influence by Robert Cialdini, who is a psychologist and pioneer in the behavioral psychology space. That book is incredibly powerful. It's incredibly influential, as well as being called Influence. And it's something actually I tried to model my book after in terms of it being science-backed, in terms of it being optimistic. And that one, I say is an incredibly important read for anybody looking to do marketing. And the other one going back even further is Ogilvy on Advertising by David Ogilvy. I talk about this a lot when I talk to students or kind of when I mentor anybody is that you can go out and buy a great book today that's gonna tell you all about what TikTok's doing, but technology changes all the time. Humans don't change that often. We've pretty much been the same human for about 250,000 years. The things that were applicable in terms of how we made decisions 50, 60 years ago are kind of the same today. And yes, magazines are a different industry than TikTok is. And so some things are going to be a little bit silly when looked at through a modern context, but the general foundations in a book like that, if they're still relevant today, are probably still going to be relevant 100 years from now.

Ben Guttmann. Yeah. Ogilvy, obviously founder of Ogilvy& Mather, one of the champions of the industry. Ben Guttmann, if people want to find out more about you and also to get this download for this book, where can they go?

Yeah, I appreciate that. So you can go find me at benguttmann.com. There's 2 Ts and 2 Ns. It's not a very radio-friendly name. So you got to put both of them in there if you want to find me. But if you go to benguttmann.com, you can grab a You can grab a free copy of the start of the book, a free PDF download of the first chapter. And I encourage you to go grab and do that. If you want to buy the book, it's Amazon, Barnes& Noble, all the different retailers there. And then I also, I send a newsletter every Tuesday. I welcome you to sign up for that. That's a free thing also. Then finally, if you want to get in touch, send me an email. My contact info is on the website or reach out on LinkedIn.

Simply put. Ben Goodman, thank you for joining me on the show today.

Thanks for having me, Jim. So this was a lot of fun.

Well, it's brilliant. And in this day and age where things do get complicated, it's great to have Ben remind us that we have to put things simply, and that, that's not always easy to do when we've got so many things in our minds. And often the more insecure we are, ironically enough, about what we're doing, the more content we produce. So it takes a little bit of self-confidence to step back and think about what you're really doing and how you're really helping that client. Are you helping them to get a quarter-inch hole, for example, in their wall? So really good advice. And if you don't know, then go and talk to people and ask them what they think about what you're saying. Actually, Ben's point about advice from people like David Ogilvy is some things are changing, but some things Stay the same. And that's human nature. Thank you for joining me, Jim James, your host on The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. If you've enjoyed it, please do rate the show and share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And until we meet again, I just encourage you to keep on communicating. Hello, welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Have you built a business? And then after a couple of years, maybe 5 or 6 years, you've reached a plateau. Maybe you got a certain amount of revenue, a certain amount of staff, some clients, and then found that you might need to change direction slightly. I know that that happened to me. In my case, I moved from Singapore to China at that stage, thinking a new geography would solve the problems. And I've got news for you, it doesn't. But our guest today does have a solution of how he's managing to overcome the issues of when you grow a business And then need to transition to a slightly different one. And our guest today also works in the sports industry, so really interested in his perspective because it's quite a niche, but obviously in America a huge one. We're welcoming Zach Coleman, who's in Gilbert, Arizona. Zach, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me on.

Well, I was debating having you on because Zach's company name sounds as though I've got a stutter. It's creatitive.com. So I'm not pronouncing it, uh, incorrectly, I think. Zach, is that right? How do you say your company name?

It's Creatitive. Yeah, it's definitely a play on words, that's for sure. But you'll remember it now, that's for sure.

We'll all remember it. And just for the record, I haven't made them— I haven't made a mistake. Um, I make lots of them, I can tell you. I'm not saying I'm not immune from— I make lots of them. But today I've got it right. But Zach, on your website, you say we help legacy brands build competitive advantage beyond the game. Tell us a little bit about the company and the stage that you've reached that's led you to really think about how you transition to a new brand platform. So just give us a little bit of history first, please, about the creative company you've got there.

Yeah, definitely. Well, I think it all started when I was younger. My dad was a retired NFL player. He started— he was in way before I was born. I took up soccer, kind of be just like him. And over the years, I kind of got to a point where I realized that, hey, I can no longer follow in my dad's footsteps. I need to follow my own. Right. And so I took up visual communications in college. I loved— I loved the situation of being able to work on these, these amazing projects. No platforms necessary, just working on these amazing projects, going through the process of Finding, finding, helping people find their why through visual communications, right? And at the time I didn't realize it, but it was kind of a, it was kind of a way that I subconsciously went in due to me feeling like I was unseen and unheard as a child. I was very unseen and unheard through my young adult life. Always was that third wheel and anything that I did actually in college, I was, I would say that I was the guy that threw all the parties just because I wanted to be seen and be liked by other people. And it wasn't until I had children and I was at a point in my business, funny enough, the correlation where I started to realize that I could no longer run my business off of the fear of being seen and heard. Like, I just didn't have that motivation anymore. Funny enough, I was already succeeded to the point where, you know, I had this great family. I was pretty successful. Me and my wife don't have to worry about paying any, any bills as of late. I'm only 38 and we're probably pretty— we're pretty— I'm pretty successful with where I'm at. And I just got to a point where I was like, all right, if money's not an underlying factor, what is? You know? And it was a very similar correlation to how athletes, how athletes, professional and/or retired, go through their transition stage going out, coming out of the game. And that was part of my growing up with my dad and seeing his transition and what he did after the game. And so I purposely at the time was working with professional athletes and I still do on occasions, but work with them, helping them find their why after they retire. So a part of that is really understanding how to help them brand themselves personally and be able to build a business outside the game once they retire. And that's where most of that came in. And I'm a very techie guy. If you ever use a color scale, a color scale, my wife's a family therapist. And so she likes to use the color wheel of what color you are. I'm definitely a green-blue, which means I'm very process-oriented, but I'm also very creative. And so I had that battling with me for some time and the business grew to a point The business grew to a point where I was doing so much marketing for clients that my creative, my creative side wasn't getting, wasn't getting the attention it deserved. And I didn't realize it at the time until I started having this burnout. And all those together kind of created this culmination of burnout. And I was like, what is going on? How do I— what does my success look like now? Why am I working so much and getting very little in return? What do I do here? And so I think that that's kind of what led me to the point of what I would like to call my personal rebrand.

Zach, thanks for sharing that honesty really in that journey. And I think that for all of us that have run businesses for any length of time, we reach the stage where The initial sort of rocket fuel that got us going is starting to be empty in the tanks. And maybe that original, certainly for me, some degree of anxiety, right, of being poor and being unnoticed drove me to be ambitious. And once you get some success, and also in your case and mine, you get some family, that dimension changes, doesn't it? But Zach, that then creates some business issues. Doesn't it? Just tell us then, if you're transitioning from helping players off the pitch to transition into sustainable careers afterwards, what are you doing now then? Uh, who are you serving and what problem are you helping them to solve?

Well, um, it's not that I didn't love working with athletes. I had a very big passion for athletes. Uh, there was just This, this, I just couldn't get it going. You know, no matter how much money, time, energy I put into it, there was a validation of market that I had to push into with what I was doing. And it just, I was the first to market with it and it just wasn't getting validated with what I was doing. And I couldn't find, couldn't find, and what everyone, when everyone kind of looks at you and says, oh, just persevere, just kind of push through, push through it. It's like, okay. Well, that's great, but there's also the repeating the same mistakes causes insanity aspect, right? And so I had to really take a look at it and say, hey, like, I love working with athletes, but, you know, it's the one of the 1% that really want to open a business after the game. And I'm not in sports marketing, I'm in branding. And so I had to say, hey, I can't really validate my own products because every single one of these athletes wants something different. And I couldn't necessarily come up with my services at a certain point. I couldn't really keep— I was hiring all over the place because I was trying to fulfill too many needs, you know. Um, and so I ended up as part of that, you know, I still say, hey, we will help, um, professional athletes, you know, if their business is very related to what we're doing, like gym ownership, um, which is one of the things they love to do, um, after the game, then I will— we, we can help them with that. But For the most part, for the most part, it was that. It was that validation. And I was a— I had this fear, this fear of starting over, right? I was like, I put all this time, I put all this money into creative. It's sustainable. We have these clients right now. We're making an average of $300,000 to $400,000 a year off of it. But we were— we were in that valley of death period where I was like, how do we make it to the next stage in business. And a lot of it was due to my mental capabilities to evolve as a person.

Really interesting and also really honest of you as well, Zach, about reaching a stage where the money is no longer a motivation, right? And I absolutely hear you on that. And I'm sure that many of us that are listening to your story will resonate. When you decided to move across, you call it the valley of death, it's like stepping off that plateau into the new zone. Tell us about what it is that you've created as a structure, a framework to help you move forward that will then help others to move forward.

Yeah, so we have something what we call the 3 C's of branding, and these are actually what actually helped me develop myself through the process of trying to just refigure out, you know, honestly, you think it's, you think it's nothing, but really it's everything, right? It's like because you're so afraid of getting to that next level, you just don't do it. You just don't see, you don't see the glimmer of hope, right? And so I call these the 3 C's of branding, which are connection, contribution, and confidence. And just to give a little bit about the process of what that is. And it's, it's really just, you know, ways that you personally can go backwards a little bit and find, refine your why, refine and evolve your why to what your new, what your new passions are, what you have evolved to as a person. And basically a rebrand. It's basically what a rebrand is considered. So connection is all about getting to know who you are yourself. It's all about getting back to the things that you value personally. I lost my premise of going to the gym. I lost my runs. I was overserving my clients and I wasn't being present around my family. And so I had to go back and say, all right, I actually have to work less. I have to persevere. And like I tell my employees even, Hey, this isn't about you working 60-hour weeks. This is about you, you know, working 32 strong hours and spend that other 8 doing something that you personally love to do. And so I brought the gym back into my life. I brought my personal life back in. I had control over what I ate. And I used to do that quite a bit when I first started my business and I lost it, you know. And so bringing that stuff in actually did something funny. It didn't just help me connect with myself. And feel less burnout, but it also led me start to connect and have a tendency to connect with like-minded people within the community, within a community that I was trying to build, right? And so connection is by far, I think it seems simple enough, but it's probably the hardest people think how people have to get over is getting out of that disconnected mindset. And for me, for instance, was that seeking of validation, right? And moving to a connected phase of this is my life, I'm happy, I'm, you know, able to connect with people I want to connect with. And that goes deep. So it wouldn't just mean you're connecting with new friends or new people. It also means your clients and your employees, you want to be able to connect with them on a much deeper level. And so I tend to say from a tangible perspective, I tend to say, hey, think about it this way. What are your personal values and what do you value? And then why don't you translate those to your brand values, evolve your personal values to your brand values, because then you could start— your business is you, right? We've talked about this already. So connection is by far probably the most important, but the other 2 actually, actually kind of coexist with it. So connection really evolves around the why. Confidence. Confidence, on the other hand, is people's ability to act. Once you kind of get to know yourself, you kind of understand yourself more, right? And if you're able to understand yourself more, you have that ability to build your stories and your voice off of your past experiences, which just builds confidence. So being able to self-lead, be able to now lead yourself and lead by example. For other people is actually what confidence is all about. So instead of having an ego, for instance, my biggest thing when I was, you know, starting out was like, oh, I'm working with athletes, is this huge ego thing. Like, oh, everyone's gonna think I'm cool, you know, it was that validation seeking. And now it's, now it's like, no, like, I am now part of this tribe of this, uh, building this tribe of this, this direction that's actually who I am and who I want to work with. And so it just helps that momentum, you know, helps that momentum of confidence building and bringing on team members that back to connection have, have that same situation. So I can now confidently go out and talk about my successes, my failures, my struggles, and I will have this community around me that have fallen through that same concept. And that's really the whole point of confidence right there is that ability to act and fail But being motivated and determined based off of your connection with, with your, with your fellow people. Right. And so lastly is contribution. And I think this one really evolves around the who. Right. I think that I didn't really know who I was, who I was evolving into as a person. And so I had to kind of take a step back. And as I started bringing back this connection with myself, I actually started to get more clarity on who I could contribute to the best way I can. Who are those people that I feel like I can help? You know, you get so mixed up in this agenda of, oh, I'm going to charge this much money and that's my agenda. I'm going to make this. I'm an expert on this. When in reality, the contribution side, you shouldn't be overserving your clients, but you should be naturally knowing that, hey, We have certain situations that we can help people with because we want to, you know, and that goes back to offers or certain situations that you could provide because, you know, you can give them the best service that you can. Right. And it just waterfalls. And so contribution is all about really building that, that community and that group. And it can kind of help build this overall vision. Right. You're Your overall contribution to who you start working with will actually start building this vision, not just for your clients and your prospects, but your team. You'll start building this overall, this overall group vision where everyone's working together to start helping more people, right? And so that those are the three pillars that I like to say are are what you could start evolving to help you develop yourself as a person and how you can start kind of. getting past whatever valley of death period you're in, if it be the half a million stage, if it be the $3 to $5 million stage, even the $10 million stage. I think it's a cycle, just a little bit deeper with each of those cycles.

Zach, that's wonderful. And perhaps I can almost sort of paraphrase that about sort of a transition from worrying about self to being committed to the community, right? And as an entrepreneur, of course, our role is also to help the community And I personally believe that if you help the community, then the community will ultimately help you, right? And if it starts with service, which is why I have the Unnoticed Entrepreneur as a podcast, um, so that I can share great stories from entrepreneurs like yourself that otherwise wouldn't get a platform.

Yeah.

Zach Coleman, tell us in terms of getting noticed, because, you know, this show is also very much focused around how you're building the brand, how you're getting that message out. You're transitioning. How are you sharing this message so that you retain the business in the Creatitive company, but also then start to draw in business under this, if you like, new brand umbrella?

Yeah, so there is this transitioning period right now. When I started Creatitive, it was all about the brand name, right? And like I said, I had to take a step backwards and look at myself. And be like, oh, I need to bring in my personal brand. I need to start looking to be who I am as a person, and that's what's going to evolve with my team. And so as we're continuing to build GymMark right now, we're getting to the final stages of launching that. We're we're looking to transition a lot of what I did in the past was very much what a lot of digital marketers preach. You know, it's hey, let's do SEO. Let's do PPC. Let's do that. And Even though that's important and we do do that as part of our package, it's thinking about that in forms of community, right? And so I'm very big on getting my name out there by going on podcasts like this, creating a platform, creating a platform for people to hear me, understand, have me go through so I can help people on a much deeper level. And so contribute, right? We're going on stages, we're going a lot, we're planning on going on a lot more into a lot more fitness expos and fitness places that we can be around our tribe and our community a little bit more to help them more thoroughly. And so speaking is becoming a huge aspect of how we're going out, if it be through podcasts, if it be through speaking. That's interesting.

So really, as you say, becoming more engaged in the market as you've plainly gained a lot of self-confidence as that younger man you said was a little bit left out at home. Now you plainly sort of grown through that, which is wonderful to see, and matured and coming out into the market and showing real leadership. Zach, you've run the business now for 7 years. You've got through those first 3 years and you've built the brand, and now you're transitioning to the next stage. I do ask my guests if there's a mistake, something that you've done experience that you would like to give people a cautionary note about?

Yeah, I'm going to say this in kind of a two-note and go a little deeper because I know we kind of talked about it a little bit. Uh, you know, I was grasping at so many things, so many things. You, you kind of go through this desperation phase when you don't know your why, when you're trying to evolve. Everyone says, oh, try new things, learn, and I did, and was a positive that I learned new things and learned what didn't work, but I was listening to what everyone else wanted me to do. It was back to that confidence. And one thing that I did for a couple years into the business is I, for instance, I brought on ZoomInfo. I used a platform to help send out, uh, and do email campaigns. But here's the funny thing, it didn't align with who I was. I, I knew in my gut that me reaching out to people, even if there was an intent feature They were looking at it. It has its place in time for different types of company and different personalities. But for me, I— that it wasn't me. I'm like, I'm not going to reach people through— this isn't who I am. I like to connect with people. And so I spent $20 grand. We went through the process, we built these processes around it, and I got very little. We had great open rate, but we couldn't get any results because, you know, Yeah. I wasn't building relationships, you know. And so, it tended to be an easy $20,000 that I can now write off next— this year.

Right. And just to be clear, ZoomInfo is one of these sort of directories where you buy access to lots and lots of names and addresses, isn't it? And with its profile—

Yes and no. Yes and no. It's not like getting a list of very unvalidated prospects. Um, but it is a directory with high-end marketing directors and business owners of companies, um, that you can, um, be accessed to this platform and you can go in and you can download, you can, uh, basically reach out and even set up campaigns through it. It's quite expensive and the main reason I got it was because they had an intent feature. So I knew that, that kind of helped me a little bit with the connection part. I'm like, well, if they're already searching for this, And it shows them where in the pipeline they're searching for that service. I'm not, I'm not, I'm really just helping them by reaching out to them because of it. And that's a good positive. But really, it just would have taken so much time and energy to learn their platform, to train people on their platform to use it. It's like learning a whole new service, right, that you have to start doing internally. And it just didn't It just didn't pan out the way I wanted. And so I persevered, I gave it a shot, I tried it for 9 months, and I said, all right, move on to the next thing because this is no longer going to be something that's sustainable for us right now.

Yeah, thanks for your honesty there. And I think that, you know, you're not alone, and quite a few companies have bought into these big platforms and then they found the platform overgeared, uh, and also not in alignment with who they were as entrepreneurs, but also not with the systems that they have internally as well. So I'm glad you've raised that because sometimes we buy things that look like they're going to be the Holy Grail and solve all of our problems. And actually, we'd be better off just putting the money in a 401 or frankly having a nice holiday probably.

Yeah.

Zak, you have been successful and it sounds as though as well you've done an amazing job on your sort of self as well in terms of self-discovery. If there's one piece of advice that you give me and my fellow unnoticed entrepreneur out there, what would it be in terms of building that brand and, and that self-discovery that, that you've plainly done? You've managed to keep the business going whilst you've been evolving as an individual, as an entrepreneur. How— what's your advice?

Don't Don't crack on the foundations. And what I mean by that is I see so many people going straight to social media and, and saying, hey, we need to market, we need to start doing this, we need to start doing that. Those are all great. But if you don't kind of understand that, hey, you are going to be the first leader of this business no matter what stage you're at, if you have a multitude of CEOs or directors, if you're a one-man show and you have a couple of freelancers, Whatever you have, you are the leader of your company and whatever you do is going to be portrayed amongst everyone. So you in turn are that marketing. You— it's you. And so you need to be able to understand that, hey, let's really look at the foundations and be able to look at myself and set these foundations up to give me a better understanding of where we're trying to go or understanding my why enough so that I can persevere. and get past these hurdles is detrimental to any business, business owner, especially if they're, I would say, over $100,000 or over $500,000 a year, if not even a million.

Is that cool? And that's, that's wonderful thing. And as you say, ultimately, if you start the business, you are the, you are still the, the spiritual guardian, right, of the brand and the emotional guardian, as you say. If you make that connection in the community as well, you're really helping the community to grow. Zach, I like to ask people like yourself now that are obviously a thinker, what would you recommend in terms of a book or a podcast to me?

I love taking my reading, reading my books on podcast. I actually, I'd say Grit by Angela Duckworth was a great book. Book to help switch that mindset towards from, um, from the hustle culture to the grit culture. You know, like get into something, work smart, not hard, persevere, try through failures. And we've actually adapted Grit and Perseverance, the book itself, into our values. It's one of my biggest values personally. It's one of my biggest values I talk about with my team. And so I definitely recommend that book for anybody who's going through a period, um, going through a period. In one of our, uh, courses, we definitely talk— actually use the grit scale in itself to help people reevaluate their why and how they can kind of go in and try to push through things. So I highly recommend that book.

Thank you, Zach. And of course, as always, I'll put the link in the show notes to the book. Zach Coleman over there in Gilbert, Arizona. Have you got something that you can maybe offer my my fellow unnoticed entrepreneurs that will help them maybe learn some of the skills that you've got?

Yeah, definitely. We are starting to go through this phase as you you've talked about. We're going through pivoting to our tribe, which is the the gym leaders of of the world, and we're in the final processes of developing Gym Mark right now. And so we have a some podcasts and some resources that you can get by going to leavethatmark.com. Again, that's leavethatmark.com. If you want to hear more of our podcasts and how you can go from, um, you know, the smaller, the smaller gym that's burnt out to starting to build a community and starting to build a more sustainable quality lead flow, I would definitely check out that.

Zach Coleman, thank you so much. And if people want to reach you directly, how can they find you?

You know, I say, hey, let's just start a conversation. Reach out to me on LinkedIn at, um, at Creative in slash Creative. We can start a conversation. That's my personal platform. You can also find us on, uh, YouTube at Creative and websites at Creative too if you just want to go through a form and set up a call.

Zach Coleman, thank you so much for joining me. Thanks for saying your company name so many times because then people will know that I do.

I did that on purpose.

Zach, thank you for joining me.

Thank you. I really do appreciate it.

Well, what a wonderful story of how someone has evolved as an individual and managed to bring their business along with them and go from some degree of sort of introspection to then reflection and then to contribution. And that's really a wonderful transition. And I think as entrepreneurs, we have that role to play in society, actually, no matter where we live, where we learn through what we're doing. And then we start to contribute back to our societies with the benefits of the gifts that we've been given. So I hope you've enjoyed this as much as I have today, our conversation with Zach. If you have, please do review the show and do share it with a fellow unnoticed entrepreneur. And until we meet again, my name is Jim James. Thank you for joining me and just encourage you to keep on communicating.

Thank you.