Part 3 - How This CEO Tackles Employee and Client Happiness Head-On

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Welcome to this edition of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry wyd.

Now talk about what, as you've gone in there, think not everything has turned out. What, what are problems you, you've run into? You know, you got your staff listening here, so we're not going to talk about problems you've had with your staff, but what problems have you, you know, what are things that have just disappointed the, the heck out of you are you. You went out there and it would appear like you've had skyrocket growth. We all know that. You know, it's, you could have overall growth, but you could have slumps and derailments during the process. What are some of those derailments? When you're the CEO, you've got to take ownership of those.

Yeah, I see my job as making really four groups of people happy. The first group is the owner, the shareholders, which is just me. So that one's relatively stress free. The other group, or the two most important groups are the employees and the clients. And then the kind of ancillary groups.

Are the partners and the freelancers.

And so the biggest challenges have always been when we haven't delivered on our mission, which is to make team members or employees and clients happy. And so whenever any one of these groups of people or whenever there's individuals in those groups are unhappy, those are the trickiest times. And if that consistently happens, because sometimes people can be happy because of it's been unlucky or something that we couldn't ever plan for. But then if there's consistent unhappiness in either of those groups, then there's something wrong with the system that you have. And so the hardest times have been where there's been systemic issues that have led to unhappiness in those two groups of people.

And I know that you startups create a lot of those things and your overall business has been a startup, but you started bcast.

What is bcast because is a podcast hosting tool. And so what people may know about podcasts is that the audio actually doesn't sit with Apple Podcasts or with any of the other directories. It sits on a, a server that you would typically own.

And then Apple Podcast pulls the audio from that server. And so this is called podcast hosting software. And so at a similar time to.

When we started fame, we saw a gap in the market for podcast hosting software. And Then FAME has essentially funded the build of this application that we obviously.

Give for free for all our clients.

And then we are able to build stuff into that that helps us with our specific podcasting process. So yeah, currently a separate brand called BCasset Blue and then Famous Pink, but BCAF is wholly owned and maintained by fame.

And so what kind of situations have you gone through with that? Because that's a technical type operation and glitch. As we all know, technical things take a while to become reliably built. And so what are things you've run into there?

But here's a really good point that.

I recently realized, is that there's kind.

Of four types of leverage you can use as an entrepreneur. And I'm like heavily utilizing two and then not utilizing the other two. And that's because I'm skilled in in the first two and not in the second two. So the first two that I am skilled as people. So the four years in management consulting, all this like leadership culture stuff is what I'd love is what I'm good at.

Second is media.

So there's the impressions on LinkedIn, for example. So those two leverage, pieces of leverage are being used now. The two I'm not so good at is capital, eg, we haven't raised any money, we're fully boost threat. And then the other one is software. Again, like I'm not technical myself. I have some like product management skills, but not really. And so if let's say I spent four years not like doing people and organizational stuff, but I spent four years coding, maybe FAME wouldn't actually exist and we would just have a software company because I'll be using that leverage more. So yeah, there's definitely been issues and it's definitely not the strength of the organization.

And so how do you mitigate? How do you turn that into a strength?

That's a very good question and one that I should probably think more about.

Because a chain will break at a weakest length.

I think partnering technology with a great human business can be very valuable. So I think it's still worthwhile having the application. But in terms of how we would.

Turn it into a strength, I think.

I have to think more about that.

Well, the thing is, I think you might be onto the right idea there because partnering is something all big companies do. The only reason that YouTube, Google, remember when Google bought YouTube or like $350 million or something, and people going, what a bunch of idiots. You know, why would they? Who's going to be interested in cat videos? You Know, and, you know, and I think it's turned into a pretty good buy for Google. You know, they didn't have to just go out there and create their own. They partnered up. And so you see this all the time. You know, the. There's a great weather app that used, used. We also all used to love. I even forget the name of it now, but now it's part of Apple, you know, and they just, you know, they just bought it, you know, brought, brought it in. But you see this happening all the time because it's a good model. And especially that's why professionals, when they graduate from school with a medical degree or a, you know, attorney, they pass the bar, they go to work with a existing company for a while. You know, they partner up until they get their legs underneath and their strength, and then they, they, they've learned the ropes and they move out there. So that's, that's a possibility. But as things, how do you get yourself excited about doing things you don't want to do, knowing that you've got, you know, there's a certain amount of investment you're going to have to make in it to solve the problem? How do you get yourself excited about doing things you don't want to do?

One of my highest values as a person is growth. And so what excites me about the whole business thing, it isn't necessarily like looking good or getting money. It's more like the person I would have to become in order to achieve that thing. So the personal growth. And so with the LinkedIn thing, I was like, well, these other people that are doing it, they're not that much better than me, but I am going to have to improve, obviously, because I'm not getting the results at the moment. And that was just quite exciting. Like the innate process, like thinking if now I. 100,000 followers. And I think to myself, how could I get to 500,000 followers by the end of the year? Like, the person that I would have to be to do that excites me. So I think maybe that's fortunate. I have this innate, like, excitement or passion for trying to do stuff that I haven't done before, which may. Which is probably the answer to why I'm an entrepreneur or why I'm building this business.

Now, in that, and you refer to this earlier. Earlier is interacting with other people, you know, not just coming up with new content, but interacting with other people. Do you target the people that have the biggest followers? And as far as interacting there, because that gives you another excuse to Kind of follow them and pay attention to them. Are you just interacting randomly?

So there's benefit to commenting on other posts that are going to get a lot of exposure because you, your comment will likely get more exposure. So that's one of the reasons why I would comment on people's posts that are more popular.

Yeah.

But I don't, I only do it if I actually like the person and I like the stuff they post. It's not big creators that post stuff I think is complete rubbish. And then what I also do is if I see people consistently commenting on my posts, then I'll go and comment on theirs just because if nice I want to follow their journey, they're being nice to me. Yeah. Now the added benefit of commenting on people that have a big following is that that same thing would happen in that they'll start to like you and then in theory they'll come and comment on your posts. And that's a big driver of growth is the audience of the people that comment.

Yeah.

Because if someone has a massive audience and they comment on a post and that post will be shown to a percentage of their audience.

Yeah.

And that's how you get more reach.

Yeah. And I think there's a lesson for us in the, an extension of the lesson. Like the people they say, you know, your, who are your five people you spend the most time with, you know, and what are their income and their success levels that's going to influence yours. But it can be the same, it can relate to the same thing on social media. Who are the five or ten that you interact with the most and follow the most? And in your experience, would you say after this four, four or five month exposure, it has a direct impact on, you know, in terms of the transformation process of you becoming someone who would have the 100 million views and follows.

I think I have changed as a. I think I have evolved since start doing this in Jan. And maybe that's just like specific knowledge about LinkedIn but it's also probably a better understanding of humans, I think.

Yeah.

To really get posts that like pop off and get 10 million impressions, there's like a lot going on in the post, even though it might look quite simple. So I think, yeah, I have evolved.

Yeah. And you know what's interesting about this Tom, is this is journey you've gone on by yourself. It's not like you took your whole company with you and it's like you're in the world of LinkedIn and you're following these people that have bigger exposures. Bigger audiences and you're noticing things. You know, it's. A lot of this in life has to do with what you put your eyes on and what you follow. That's what, that's how babies develop. You know, they just look at you, you know, and they're just following. And, you know, I remember when my great nephew on the down in Georgia, when he was born, he would just look at you like this. And I said, what kind of monster is he going to turn into? And he actually turned into a fun.

Kid, but as a baby, he was.

Just like, he was taking everything and he would just not move. But when you're. A lot of this has to do with what you set your eyes on. And I think speaking for myself, you know, looking at social media, which is hard to get myself excited about it, because you look in there, there's a lot of, lot of things that are thrown at you by their, their algorithm. And it's like, I'm not interested in this crap. You know, why do they, you know, this feed, feed, feed. But you can, you can tailor your search and just ignore all that stuff right there and just say these, this is who I'm going, I'm going to, I'm going to grab. If this is a big party, I'm going to gravitate over to this side of the room and keep my attention over here. And it takes a while to learn how to do that. But you can control your experience and learn things from people that it is worth your time and you will look forward. Do you find yourself now looking forward now that you've identified people on LinkedIn that have the big following that you do agree with? A lot of their posts, they're not the, you know, it's, it really sucks your soul away to some of the stupidity that people will put out there. And you just like, you know, you want to tear your hair out, you know, because, you know, people are listening to this and taking it as a gospel truth and it's just total nonsense. But you can ignore those and you can find people that really have something valid to say and focus on that. And do you find yourself now having some anticipation about going in and seeing what they came up with today or something?

Probably like five people.

I'm going to get you to send me those five, those five names. I'm going to, I'm going to try and save time. Yeah.

I mean, you were saying at the.

Start of this episode that I was clever for using my podcast for learning, for learning stuff, I think is what we're doing here.

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And see, that's what but you know, a telltale sign is who you get on your podcast, you know, and so, you know, that's because I'm sure that's not an accident. You know, the, the guest selection I have on my podcast is by design as much as possible and you know, drive you guys nuts with wanting to get, you know, the cream of the crop of high producers. And by the way, I found two more of them today myself.

How did you find them?

Well, I've been stalking, I've been stalking one since she was 17 years old and came out to Trump Golf and started playing. She was like this six foot Amazon young teenage girl out there. And now she's gone on and had a tremendous career in the LPGA world. Lexi Thompson. And you know, you don't want to, you know, she started showing back up. I've only been out there the last two months since I've been back from Aspen. And she's been out there three or four times but getting lessons on the driving range. And I haven't wanted to interrupt her. So I was waiting for a time and sure enough this morning I drove out to the driving range. She was coming off, her cart was right next to mine and I said, boom, boom, boom. She said, yeah, I remember seeing you around, you know. So she not only agreed to get on the podcast, but gave me her, her manager. And it turned, I looked him up and he's, he's a manager, but he's got a management company where he's got a lot of the men, top men, top men, golfers. So we're going to see about getting him and then he'll be an entree into some of those other golfers. But we see them out, we see some of those out of Trump anyway. But yeah, it's fun to dial in because when you get someone who has High achievement, you know, that was not an accident. You know, and if you see someone go back to link and and you see that in the business world they've got lots of people following them, that's not probably not going to be an accident. And it's probably going to be even though there's going to be some people that have just get it through personality and nonsense is probably the people that have the followers have something to say, you know, and they're the ones kind of earn the right to have you pay attention to them. So as you go, what would you advise people? There's one thing to get all this noise, but how do you now create that? Turn that the podcast. The podcast and the LinkedIn and the social media into what suggestions have you found that are ideas to work with in turning this into sales funnels, you know, to get people. Actually you referred to it earlier like that you had lots of followers, but they not necessarily was turning into phone calls about the business. So how do you recommend people that are podcasters with you or you know, what you've learned from how to engage people with your posts that would cause them to have an interest in coming over to your business?

Yeah. So our belief is that we just want to the the ideal buyers. We just want them to start to know like and trust us. And if we can do that, then ideally when they come around to wanting to buy our thing, they're going to come to us. But the way we can speed up that process is by we have 80% of the content. Just get them to know like and trust us. Don't really ask for anything. And then with 20% or maybe just 10%, we are very clear about the thing we sell.

Yeah.

Now if you think about my LinkedIn presence because I don't have that third part. I have the first two. I have the thing I'm POS passionate about, I have the thing I'm doing every day, but I don't have the thing that we sell because I'm talking about remote work. But we sell podcasts. So I am getting people to know like and trust me, but I'm not really telling them enough about what we do. And so what I should be doing and what I will be doing soon is maybe one post a week or one post every two weeks is going to be like a case study is how we grew a client's podcast, for example. So that's what I'm going to start doing on LinkedIn for my podcast. What I do is I've just been four Years every. Well, with bi weekly. Now it's weekly. I just. The episode is like pure, like there's no ads or. The content is not about fame at all. It's about B2B entrepreneurs, B2B marketers. Then I do mention fame in the intro and outro that I do. And so anybody listening to an episode is going to be aware of what fame does.

Yeah.

So it's just this balance of getting people to know like, and trust you by giving them information that helps them. But then for a small portion of that, we have to tell them how we make money and what they can do to work with us.

Yeah, you have to find a way to get that in there. You don't have to be annoying about it, but you do have to be definite that you're in business. Right, Exactly.

And if anybody likes the content, they should also be happy to engage with that or consider that because they must know that the content's only there because someone's paying money somewhere, you know, and so if people truly love your content, then they're going to want to do business with you.

Now I'm going to give you a, a moment to just tell people why they should have a. If they don't have a podcast, they ought to think about a podcast.

I'll tell a story for this. I in. In that four year period of like doing online marketing, I had this business and it was kind of like a tech startup thing. And every day I would release a 10 minute or 5 to 10 minute solo episode of like what I was doing, what I was building. I'd actually batch record them at the weekend and then release one every day. And the business didn't end up working that well. But the podcast, it was called Zero to 4 Million Startups Bootstrap Journey to a 7 Figure Exit or something. And so it got a little, it got a decent amount of traction actually.

I was quite happy with it.

And what surprised me was that the people that were listeners how like bought in to the journey and how much they liked me or could be influenced by me, and that was because I was in their ears every morning. And so we actually had people, one guy specifically, I can't remember his name, but was like trying to give us money, was trying to invest in the startup, even though it's a rubbish idea. And so that's the power of the intimate connection that can be generated through the audio flash, video medium.

Yeah.

And so in my opinion, every B2B business should take one person, could be CEO, could be head of sales could be head of customer success. That we just need everybody in the market to get to know like, and trust them. And it starts with social. And then we can add that email bit in the middle.

That's kind of optional.

But the bottom part, the part where you really get people to know, like, and trust you is the. The podcast.

And I wonder if you're a. Like a New York Stock Exchange company, you know, really, you know, Fortune 500 company, you wonder if putting a human face, you know, you have the CEO turns over every five years usually there, you wonder who that face should be. But you, you know, you do feel like if there was a, you know, some personality come out there, be easy for. Easier for people to identify with, you know, but the question comes to, like, who should that be?

Yeah, exactly. It's. It doesn't have to be this year. It could be the founder. Just have to be someone that has passion for the subject matter and has relatively good communication skills.

Yeah. When you think of yourself as having good people. People skills, how do you think that manifests itself? You know, how. How would you describe that to someone who was autistic and they. They have no idea what people skills are?

I think it's understanding how someone feels and then tailoring your communication to, I want to say, maximize the good feelings. I think that's the core of. Of my skill that I think is understanding where they are and then communicating to ideally make them feel better. And so there's two things there. A, is like understanding how someone feels, and then B, it's selecting the vibrations or the words you say to ideally change how they feel.

It has to do with what I'm hearing. You say there is the ability to connect with people in a positive way with that. Would that. Would that be safe?

Yeah, I think that's probably a more concise way of saying it.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know. I. I had the benefit of following you anyway. So, Tom, you've watched our podcast grow up over the last few years. What do you. What do you. What kind of advice can you give me?

I think I like your hosting skills.

Thank you.

I don't think anything needs to be changed there conversational or not scripted at all, really. I think you have some idea of what you want to talk about, but then you roll around it. So I don't think we need to change anything on the hosting skills. And I actually maybe don't think we would change anything with the podcast. We have the guest. You're super clear on who the ideal guest is. I Think the next step is to take one of the social channels and try and blow up organically because it will help with other objectives, it will help grow the podcast. And so then we have to think about which one it would be. And maybe we spoke about this before, but I've selected LinkedIn and Twitter because I don't think I'm that charismatic or that good at on video. So they're like written platforms, basically. I think you're more charismatic and probably better on video and so that opens up other options, eg, TikTok, Instagram. Have you, have you thought about if you could only do one platform, which one you would do?

No. And I don't know, you know, where my target market audience would be the most, you know, in terms of entrepreneurs or leaders, high achievers, I don't know where they would be. But now we have the ex president on TikTok and so I guess everything is fair game.

You're totally right. That's the other very important part is like, where's the highest density of the ideal customers, listeners? And yeah, I think it's interesting for you, it depends on the age. I think they're like the entrepreneurs on all platforms and maybe in relatively similar densities, but it's just split out by age. And maybe the oldest is on Twitter and then LinkedIn and then these video ones will be younger. So it depends kind of which, what's.

The ideal age and do you recommend focusing in on one?

You know, 100%? Like the. The benefits of getting it right are so massive that diverting your focus to try and get multiple to work just doesn't. Just makes zero sense.

Yeah.

Bearing in mind that they're so different, like even Twitter and LinkedIn. So the post I did on Monday now is on like 10 million impressions. It would get like 1,000 impressions on Twitter now, admittedly I have a lot less followers over there, but they're so different. And so if you take the two things into account, like the upside of getting one working is incredible. And each platform is so different. The output of that is that it just doesn't make any sense to divert efforts and focus to try and get a multiple to work.

How would you give a quick summary? We've got to go. But a quick way for people to understand the difference between other than TikTok younger. But of course we have the YouTube shorts as well. Rather than taking one video and post it, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and just see which one takes off. I mean, should you run an experiment like that yourself and see which style you like to work, in, which platform it works better on or how. What, what's the different uniqueness in these platforms?

There's one easy, easy distinction, which is the written first platforms versus video first platforms. So that's Twitter and LinkedIn are written first. YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and I don't even count Facebook. I don't think that's worthwhile. They're like video first. And so that's easy. That's easy distinction to make.

Yeah.

But then to understand which one you should focus on or the difference between any of those, you just literally have to test it. And if you post daily to all the video ones or post daily to LinkedIn and Twitter, within a couple of weeks, you'll have a good understanding.

Yeah, I think one way to go about it is to run your own test and just see number one, what do you enjoy doing the written or the video? And also put it out there and just see where, where the response is, you know, like if you're musical group, you know, you take your act on the road and see where you get the response, you know. So, Tom, thanks so much for all of this. Any. I always like to give my guests the last word. So what would you say? Any last thing thought for people that want to do something big with their life and maybe, maybe they've already started, maybe they're thinking about it. Any last word to pass on to them?

Something that's always worked for me is that try to think less before taking action. Like the real value of or like the whole thing, whatever you're planning on doing is going to be a big learning process and you only start learning when you start doing stuff. So I would do less planning and more doing because that just speeds up the learning.

Excellent. Well, thanks so much, Tom. Let's look forward to seeing how your journey unfolds. I know it's going to be, you know, you've already said growth is one of your core values and it needs to be for all of us because if you're not growing, you're dying. And so it's going to be fun to see you grow because you've, you set the pattern in motion. The success pattern in motion is just a matter of staying on track. And I think your dog has got a lot of lives left to go. So I think you're set up for success for a long time, man.

The longest bear is alive and is being photographed on LinkedIn.

Then it's going to be fun. Larry, I want to thank you so much for having me on again. It's an honor.

You're very, very welcome. And thank you for all, all you and your staff do to make these programs work. Look forward to the next time. Goodbye. Thank you for listening to the final part of this episode of the Million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Great, great ideas. Don't care who used them. If you're motivated to move up in a big way. Right now, I've created a free training video to remove the mystery on how.

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