0375 | Joe Sanok

Hi, I'm Joe Sanock from Thursday is the new Friday. Com. You're listening to EA interviews.

EA interviews, episode 375, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round. Seven days a week, join Mario Ficcini for today's Expert Authority Effect interview. Would you like more time in your schedule? Do you feel like you're overworked? Even if you don't feel like you're underpaid, I bet you feel like you're overworked. Would you like more time with your family? Would you like more freedom? How would you like to be more efficient with all that you do? I know I do. I'm always optimizing. I'm always trying to leverage things, put the right people in place, use the right softwares, all kinds of different stuff. But I have a feeling I don't know it all either. Never claimed to definitely get most of it wrong. But the things I do get right, I'm glad I do. But we're going to be talking about time. One of my favorite things because regardless of how much money you have regular right now, in the future or whenever, we all have the same amount of time. We all have the same 24 hours in the day. And I have none other than TEDx speaker and author of Thursday's the New Friday, Joe Sanock on the show. And I'm going to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. And that's why I'm launching my new book to help you, regardless of where you think you your current writing abilities are. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com There he is. Ladies and gentlemen, Joe Sanock. Joe, how are you feeling today?

Oh, I'm doing great. How about you Mario?

I'm having a fantastic day and I'm excited to have you here because like I was saying in the intro, there's so many people that are successful. But do they financially, business wise, but how many have the time freedom that we all want? And I'm so glad you launched your new book and you're talking about this because I think there's a lot of people who can get back more time and I'd like to see them spending it with their family and friends, not just, you know, grinding away. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think if anything has been learned from the pandemic it's that the way that we did things up till 2019 is not the only way to do it. To have been in lockdown, to have so many things in our lives be disrupted and in our businesses be disrupted, people deciding not to go back to work or to change structures of families overall, we all have realized that there's no box to stay in anymore. There's no out of the box. There's just a complete open world. And we can create this future together in a way that's different than maybe the industrialists taught us, that we were supposed to run our lives.

So speaking of the industrialists, because I'm thinking of one in particular and some things that he created and I'm very thankful. You know, I see that you're in Michigan also and I knew that we're both, you know, we both have ties to Michigan and obviously Motor City, Detroit. So the car industry has always been prevalent, especially where I'm at. And that ushered in the industrial revolution or I mean, depending who you talk to, it caused it or was part of it, but certain things were going on. So much has changed in the last hundred years. Why do you think we adopted the eight hour workday and seven day work week? And how is it different now?

Yeah, so in the late 1800s, early 1900s, the average person was working 10 to 14 hours a day, six to seven days a week. And so they were working a farmer's schedule, whether or not they were farmers. And people had moved from Europe to help rebuild Chicago after the fire that happened there. And there were protests about just how the work conditions were actually worse off in Chicago than back in Europe. And so we see in 1926, Henry Ford switches to a 40 hour work week with Ford in an effort to sell more cars to his own employees, because he realizes people aren't going to buy a car to get to work faster, but if they have a weekend, they're going to spend more time enjoying that weekend. And it worked. And so that eight hour day became the standard. And we see a lot of laws then get passed, employment laws and workers rights, that that 40 hour work since 1926 has been the standard. So less than 100 years ago, the industrialists give us this 40 hour workweek. And it's completely arbitrary. He could have picked 35. He could have picked 45. It's completely arbitrary. But in the 80s and 90s, we see the research start to show that really that that Friday as a workday starts to disappear. We see the rise of casual Fridays. We See people start hosting baby showers at work on a Friday instead of doing it on the weekend or in the evenings. We see people doing cheesy team building activities on Fridays. And really Friday starts to a half worked day that is more a part of the weekend than an actually the productive workday. And then the pandemic blows it all up to show us that honestly, we don't need to work the kind of hours we thought we needed to work.

So for someone that wants to confront this theory and go, no, you need to do your nine to five. You need to. And for the record, I'm agreeing with you 100% because I haven't liked the 9 to 5 for the last couple of decades either. And I think that's why we chose to do what we do. But I still hear people saying, well, don't you need to work five days a week? And I feel personally with my upbringing and who I was around in school and society and all these things, I felt like the more you did it was a badge of honor. Like, oh, you're working two jobs, I've got three and a business, you're working three, I've got two businesses and four. It was like, how much can you possibly do at the, you know, regardless of the expense of your family and friends and all this other stuff to the point where it was like giving up Friday, Saturdays and Sundays was no big deal. You're not working eight days a week, loser. Why, why do you, where do you think that perpetrated from? Because even within the industrial age, there's a difference From we're working 40 hours a week in five days, taking the weekends off to just non, stop, non stop, go, go, go.

Yeah. When you look at what the industrialists taught us, they taught us that people are not individuals, that they're part of a greater machine, that they can be optimized, that it's just a conveyor belt and it can just go 24 7. We've outgrown that model in so many ways. But a lot of that ego that was developed as a result of overvaluing work and undervaluing life has really perpetuated that hustle culture. And we see that social media and the way that people express themselves really has perpetuated that hustle culture. But unfort, the neuroscience actually shows that the more that you work, when you're doing that seven days a week of working or you're working those late hours, the actual quality of your work is going down. There's a study out of Iceland that looked at a 32 hour week versus a 40 hour week. This is a 2,500 person study. Multi year multidisciplines. And they found that the 32 hour a week people actually had higher productivity than the 40 hour a week people. Which means those last eight hours was a hobby. It was actually making you slide backward. It's like you climbed this hill by just staying on the hill. You slid backward. And so we see over and over that people think they're getting a lot done, but the actual quality of their work, they're having to redo it, they're having to change it. It's just not as effective as they think it is.

Now what about the people who don't like taking breaks? Let's say, you know, okay, no more Friday. Thursday is the new Friday. Right, but what are you doing during those eight hours? Is there studies that show, you know, you're better off going four hours and taking a break, two hours, one hour? Because I also know there's that, you know, take your 15 minute break.

I almost said something, but the, there's different variations of what people believe is the best way to do it. What does the science and studies tell us?

Yeah, the big switch that we're seeing is the industrialists taught us, here's the one size fits all. We're going to squeeze people into that size. Whether or not that actually works, the new model is saying we're going to test, test, we're going to experiment, we're going to change within each industry to see what works. Almost like how artificial intelligence gets smarter over time. That we see that in the industries. And so one industry may find that they need to have a one minute break every hour and you know, then a longer 60 minute break. Another industry may say, we're going to do 10 minute sprints. And so what we're seeing is that actually knowing your sprint type, knowing how you best work and then applying that in small samples of experiments is one of the most effective ways. The University of Illinois actually looked at something called vigilance decrement. So vigilance how? Well you pay attention to something decrement, meaning that it goes down over time. So the idea is when you're doing a very boring task, you're going to do it worse at the end of your time than you do at the beginning. But they actually discovered that if you take a one minute break every 20 minutes, it completely eliminates vigilance decrement. Wow.

It's reminding me of the law of diminishing returns. It's like you know, if you're going all, we'll just push through it. I don't like doing it. And it's been a couple of years. I kind of figured it out just from doing stuff. It was like, don't touch it. After this point, you don't care anymore. You've, you've done your best. And often it would break things.

Well, yeah, I mean, Parkinson's law tells us that work expands to the time given. We've all experienced this. Maybe in college when you realized you had a paper due the next day that you hadn't even started, you got that paper done. Maybe it wasn't your best quality work, but that B minus helped you pass the class in the same way. We often overthink things. There's always this tension between accuracy and speed. There's things that I want to be accurate. If I go have surgery, I want to make sure that my doctor, that she spends as much time as she needs to making sure she's accurate. But in most of the business world and life world, moving on, it actually having that ability to move on things before you should is going to give you that feedback loop. It's going to allow you to test and change and switch things up. And so speed more than accuracy is usually what we need to value to be able to get more done, but then to get that feedback back to us and to not stress over it more than we really should.

For someone who goes, okay, I'm wrapping my head around this, you know, they've been working 10, 20, 30, 40 years and they're, they might be struggling with this concept, but they want to do it. They want that more freedom, they want more time. What would you say is a first step they should take to go, okay, you want to implement this, do this and then this?

Yeah, if we're looking at just very small steps in the right direction, the first thing people can do is look at their coming weekend, whether or not they have a three day weekend or a two day or one day. And to say, I want to add one thing and remove one thing. Add one thing and remove one thing. So what do I mean by that? So we're adding one thing in that we think is going to give us a good return on investment for our time. So for example, there's a book that's been on my nightstand and it's not a business book. It's not anything that, you know, gives me money value. It's just a book I've wanted to read. I'm going to give myself permission this weekend to make a cup of green tea, go read that book for an hour, and then we're going to remove something. You know, it may be that we decide we're going to outsource some lawn work to the neighbor kid. It may be that we're going to pay to have the groceries delivered this weekend instead of, you know, going to the shopping store and spending half of a Saturday there. Or it may be that maybe you. You've scheduled a coffee with a friend, and every time you leave that coffee, you feel like trash. They're just like a toxic. You're too old to have toxic friends. You can cancel that coffee date with that person. So remove something from your schedule that's going to allow you to free up some of that energy and some of those emotions. Now, if you take that experimental mindset, what you're doing is you're saying, I'm going to add something in and just observe. If that preps me differently for my week than if I hadn't done that, I'm going to remove something and I'm going to observe that. Because usually the way that we enter our weekend is that it's in reaction to the previous week, that we've spent the whole week just going full tilt. We get to the weekend, we oversleep, we overdrink, we don't exercise, we might socialize with some people, and then we're burned out from the weekend and we go into our next work week, we want to flip that, say, how do I slow down first to prep my brain to do the very best work in the next week forward so it's in preparation instead of reaction.

That is awesome. And one of the things I started doing years ago was at the beginning of the day, front load it with all the high priorities. Because as best as I've tried eliminating this, changing this around, there's always some random stuff that creeps in that halfway through the day and by the end of the day, it's like, what were you. Have you ever felt that? Where you're like, what am I supposed to be doing at this point?

Yeah. Yeah. And that's where the neuroscience is really showing us some techniques that can fast forward what we get done in a day. So, for example, every Thursday I was writing Thursday is the new Friday. That was the book writing day. And so some of the things that the science was showing me as I was writing the book was, first, we want to protect our brain. And so in those mornings, I never checked email before I started writing. I never checked my texts I never read the news, even though at that time there was a lot going on. In the middle of the pandemic, as I was writing this, I had that temptation where I wanted to click on the news and know what was going on, but I didn't. So I protected my brain. Then we can set up an environment for different tasks. So when I was writing, I had different lighting in my office. I moved my chair to a different spot. I had a different playlist I listened to on headphones that I only used for that writing. So that allowed. Allowed my brain to know, okay, this environment right here, this is going to drop me into flow state because I'm safe. I know it's. This is the writing environment. Whereas for podcasting, I have different lighting. I stand somewhere else. Doing those things that produce habits for your brain, tricks your brain to jump into different things. For example, even wearing this white shirt, this is my interview shirt that I've worn for over 200 media appearances around this book. I always wear this shirt. I have two of them. I make sure one's clean every day. That allows me to get in that habit of, this is interview time. And then your brain drops into flow state much faster by using some of these science hacks that really allow us to get more done in a shorter period of time.

I love everything you're saying. And same with the vest, same with my lighting. But I'll tell you what, if you're trying to relax with the setup I have now, I'm calm. But for creative writing and just, you know, that brainstorming ideas, you know, same thing. When I was writing my new book, it was like, I turn all this off, put the soothing lights on, put a little Lindsey Sterling violin and just, you know, let it go and see what comes out. That's vastly different than, we're in go mode. We're in execution mode. And just, you know, when I'm doing business, I like to wake up to go, what are the three biggest things that are going to give me the ultimate success today? And just execute on them. And it's like everything else will figure itself out. Love, outsourcing stuff, food deliveries, the lawn, everything. Everything you've talked about. I'm actually looking for someone to take out the trash, too. So I'm working on that one because absolutely despise it.

But like you're saying, it's all these little things that it reminds me of the analogy of that. It's that jar with the rocks and the sand. It's like most people fill it up with Sand. Then they go, oh, I don't have time for the big rock. When it's like, put that in there first and who cares if the rest doesn't make it? It's. It's not a game changer or needle mover to begin with. Now you were talking about the different industries. What about the different times? I want to address the morning people versus the night owls.

Yeah. So that goes back to the experimentation to really figure out for you personally, when is your time that you can just execute things. For me, from 9:30am till noon, that's my sweet spot where I have my most creativity, my most energy for really the types of things that I need to use my brain for. So I preserve that time for new projects, for things that I need to sort through with my team. Whereas interviews, that's really easy for me. So if I have an afternoon interview, I can show up and just do interview after interview. And so understanding our biorhythms, understanding the ways that our brain works, and then aligning that with healthy habits, all of that optimizes our brain through slowing down, through allowing us to do better work, to think differently. Because the science shows us that when we're stressed out, when we're maxed out, that's not when we try new things, it's really when we allow our brains to slow down, that that's where the new ideas come from. And we know this intuitively. We talk about, oh, I had this shower moment where I just totally solved all of these things, or I went for a hike. Even last week I was doing one of those sensory deprivation tanks. And the first half hour or so I'm in total darkness, floating in the salt water and very meditative. And then my brain started kind of going to business things. And I had a webinar coming up and I realized, like the kind of key for the sales portion of that webinar just came to me in this flood of thoughts. In the middle of this, my brain had slowed down enough to not be in fight or flight mode and to start linking between different parts of the brain differently than if I hadn't taken that time to slow down. Now, do I float to do business things? No. No. I do it because it's just good for me. It's good for my brain. But then the ancillary effect of it is it actually helps you do better business.

I love that. And yeah, for me, it's jump in the shower or cook something and it's like you'll be sitting there stirring some sauce or whatever. The case is like, oh, my gosh, the seven things I was thinking about just instantly, you know, and then the other. The flip of the coin. The other side of the coin. The flip side of the coin is, you know, I even said in my book, you can be staring at the screen, but unless you do something. That's exactly what I was doing. You can sit there and just be like, oh, I'm working. No, you're not. Walk away. Just do something more productive. For anyone who doesn't have access. I know those tanks are around all over the place now since they're more popularized, but for someone who doesn't have access, maybe they're in a rural area or they're traveling a lot. What are some other things you'd recommend they could do to just slow down?

Yeah. So we host an event in the summer called Slowdown School. And top entrepreneur flying to Northern Michigan. And we do all sorts of things. We go for hikes, we bring in massage therapists. We do yoga on the beach. We go skip stones on Lake Michigan. It's paddleboard time. What's that?

Paddleboard.

I bring my paddle board. Sure do. Of course, a lot of people, it's their first time paddle boarding, and it's just. They feel like kids. So finding those things that help you to do something new, to get out of your comfort zone, to just stop thinking about work, those are the things that help you just enjoy life. And when you enjoy life differently, it then allows you to do better work. So even just a couple of weeks ago, I got a bunch of dads together from my daughter's elementary school, and we all went and did a Learn to curl class together. All of the people there, other than myself, had never curled before, and it was hilarious. We were laughing like we were little kids, seeing people throw these rocks down the ice and sweeping and just trying something new and getting out of the house and. And getting away from all the adulting that is in our lives, Taking that time away is actually good for our business. It's good for our endocrine system. It's good for all of our vestibular. Everything in our body is bouncing back from those decisions. And we then do better business and we're more creative.

What I'm hearing a lot in here, and correct me if I'm wrong, it's not so much you need to go in a.

Sleep deprivation. That's not what it's called. The salt tank. Sleep deprivation. Take. That'd be weird. The shower, the spa, the this. It's not any one Thing it's do something you enjoy and just give your, give yourself permission and your body a chance to relax. Is that right?

Absolutely. You know, I think about when I was, I was in Nepal in, in between undergrad and grad school and I was at the edge of the Chitwan jungle with my friend Todd. And our, our guide said to us, okay, we're going to go into the jungle. If we get chased by a wild rhinoceros, climb a tree. Which I should have asked a couple follow up questions like, you know, which tree should we climb? Can we practice? How often does this happen? But I didn't. We go into the jungle, we're in there about an hour, we see a wild rhinoceros. And I had a point and click film camera, not a digital camera. So I took a picture, had no idea how it turned out. Like a moron, I take a step forward, take another picture, step forward again, and that rhino charges us. I take off running, blatantly disregarding the climb the tree advice because I knew that I could outrun my friend Todd. I had been a sprinter in high school, whereas he was long distance. So for a hundred yards, I know I got this guy. And we have a couple of Peace Corps volunteers as human shields behind us. So then we don't hear this rhino behind us and we come back and why didn't I climb a tree? The guide comes down the tree and yells at us, why didn't you climb the tree? When we're stressed out and maxed out, we never try something new. I knew I could outrun Todd. That was not the time for me to practice climbing a Nepali tree and potentially get impaled by a rhino. But that's how we run most of our businesses. We have these rhinos that are chasing us all the time. We never stop and say, wait, I need to step back and make some good decisions here and be creative and just allow myself to relax. It could be walking with a neighbor and doing a couple laps in your neighborhood in between webinars or in between whatever you're working on that that just allows you to step back from your work enough that when you come back in, you're just ready to kill it.

There's a great example. I love the point you made. I'm glad you're okay. I gotta ask, did the picture turn out?

It did. It was rather blurry, but it was, it was a better picture than I would have had had I not taken stuff. A couple stuff.

And I, I'm trying not to laugh, but it just Reminds me of the I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you.

Yep, there was three people behind me, so I knew that I had some good statistical survival rates. Human sh.

But you're so right about that because there was a time I was Joe. I even put it on Facebook. I was just like, I wasn't upset, but I just was like, oh my gosh, I'm so excited. I get to. I passed the exam. You know, I'm a firefighter now and everyone was congratulating me. But it was this one day a couple years ago, it was just like.

I don't know what was going on, but it was like I literally couldn't touch anything and make it go right. And by 8 o' clock at night, I was just like, you know what? I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm not a public speaker, I'm not a best selling author. I'm a freaking firefighter. Because all I've done today is put fires out. And some people thought I was being serious and a few were like, really one of those days. Like they were entrepreneurial friends like yourself. But.

How do you come down from that? We talked about the ways to do it, but if you're in such a wound up mode, if you're getting chased by that rhino, how do you in that moment go, I'm just gonna walk down the street here, go get that sandwich, or go cook this, or go just do anything else. Walk away from it. Like, how do you recognize it, capture it, and then stop it in the moment? Because I think that's a hard thing to do.

Yeah, I think a couple things come to mind. For one, most of what we do in business or in our work are self imposed limits. So we've got a webinar on Monday. I've got to get these slides done. You scheduled the webinar. You said you needed to have these slides done by Monday. You're the one that's stressing out about it. Most of what we stress out about are self imposed if we're in the entrepreneurial world. So I would start with, you did this to yourself. You can step back and even if you have to cancel that webinar on Monday, that's okay. The world's not going to fall apart. So let's start with that second. Michael Singer is author. He wrote the Untethered Soul and he has a number of other books and trainings. And he talks about the Buddhist concept of clinging and attachment and just thinking about butterflies and snakes. He talks about these two ideas and the idea that you see a beautiful butterfly and the rest of your life you try to chase and find that butterfly again you're attached to. My happiness has to come if this happens, if I see that butterfly or on the other side. You know, we were once, you know, scared by a snake as a child, so we now avoid snakes. But we also avoid anything that reminds us of them. Ropes, extension cords, Christmas lights. All these things that we now step away from because they cause this pain inside of us. Michael Singer talks about how, you know, when we recognize that, when we can step back and say, we're saying our happiness is being defined by these things that I want or these things that I avoid, we're creating our own unhappiness. And I would actually challenge most people to say we do that in business all the time. If I don't hit these marks, I'm not going to be happy. I mean, I realized I was doing that in the middle of my book launch. I wanted a New York Times best selling status book within the first week of launch. Who wouldn't want that? That was my goal. I looked at what people did to have that and in the first week it didn't happen. There was a huge book about Trump that dropped that week that swayed a lot of the status. That's out of my control. And to say I'm going to steal my own joy over writing a book I'm very proud of, over getting a publishing contract with HarperCollins, and then to say, because of this one thing that I attach to, I'm not going to be happy and now I'm going to be unhappy. We do that all the time. And so even evaluating what am I clinging to that I say I'm not going to be happy unless this happens or I'm avoiding on the other side, if we can move away from those things things, it's usually a lot easier to step back and say, you know what? Today is an off day. Things are hitting the fan and I don't know why. And it's probably smarter for me to just peace out from the day and to just go allow my brain to chill out and to do some things that are good for me so that I can reboot and tomorrow be probably twice or three times as effective, 100%.

Another one of my favorites is swimming. Just.

Relaxing.

And.

I agree with that off day because it's like, if it's not working and you're not in the good flow, stop the bad flow because are you really gonna, you know, for example, with our books, are you really gonna try writing when you just dealt with 37 problems and you're still a little frazzled from it? Unless you're in the right state. Same thing. I feel like with interviews, public speaking, there's certain things that's like. Like you're gonna have a real hard time hiding it. An email, sure, maybe you can. I still think it would come through because there's voicing, but there's certain things that are easier to hide it from than others. And there's. I've trained myself just to. If you're not in the right state of mind for A, B, and C, don't even bother with it because it's just, you know, the last thing, you know, to the point of the book. You really want something screwed up in there for the next decade.

Right. Right. I feel like. Like sometimes when you have those off days or days that it doesn't feel like it's clicking, maybe you don't just say, I'm going to quit and not work at all today, but maybe you say, what would give me some joy here? Where can I follow my curiosity? So there were days that the writing wasn't flowing for me. And so I sketched out on my whiteboard, okay, here's what I'm going to cover in this chapter. And then I just asked myself, what questions do I have? And I fell down some YouTube rabbit holes. And that was okay. I gave myself permission to say, I'm really interested in the 40. Yeah. And honestly, some of the things I discovered, the Haymarket bombing in Chicago, that came out of one of those rabbit holes. And then it was like, wait a second. This is part of this broader story of the 40 hour workweek and people pushing for it. Well, before Henry Ford. I probably wouldn't have found that had I not fallen down that rabbit hole.

Yeah. And I may be joking about it, but there's actually a lot of good stuff on there. And sometimes it does help to just break it off or go, you know, just go with the flow. Literally. I know it's a cliche thing to say, but so many people try to fight it. And it's like I can point to numerous things myself where it was like something happened.

Yeah.

It may have perturbed me in the moment, but, you know, Napoleon Hill. With every adversity lies the greater seed of equal and greater benefit.

There was something good that always came from it that, like you're saying, took you down a new path. And it's like, wow, this worked out better. Than I anticipated. And I think with everything you were touching on. I want to ask you specifically about one word, decommitting. Have you heard that before? And people use it.

Yeah, decommitting. I love that idea of owning who you are and what you're going to do. I remember I was the president of the Licensed Professional Counselors of Northern Michigan. So I'm running these meetings every other month. The first hour of the meetings was networking, and I do different activities to help therapists know each other. And then the second half was some sort of training. So someone would come in for an hour training. We'd get continuing ed credits and all that. And this one particular meeting that I was running at this point, I was self employed. I had left the community college I was working at. So I had no obligation to be at these meetings other than me deciding as the owner of my company that it was somehow beneficial for me. So I ran the first hour of networking, met some great people, we exchanged cards. And then the second half of the hour was all around mental health in schools, which is very important and wasn't my specialty at all. I had worked in the schools. I knew I didn't want to go back in the schools. I was happy to let other therapists go in the school. So the superintendent is there, principals, teachers, social workers from the schools. This is a panel of probably 12 powerhouses from Northern Michigan. I realized this is not my meeting. I don't want to be here. And so I decided that I would decommit from that meeting. I turned to the vice president and just said, you know, I have something I need to do. Will you wrap up the meeting for me, please? And she said, sure. I got up and walked out of my own meeting as the president and just was like, this is not something I want to be at. I don't need to be in meetings anymore that I don't want to be in. And for people that's hard because they're like, well, what are people going to think? People leave meetings all the time. You know, who knows? If I got a phone call, the thing I had to do was not be there. Like, that's the only thing I had to do. And I didn't lie, but I said, I've got something I need to do and it's not this. So I think figuring out for yourself how you can intentionally spend time on the things you want to, slow down where you want to, and then when it's time to kill it, kill it where you want to, those are the phases that we need to just keep going through to be able to optimize our brains and then get more done.

Wow, I love that story. Along with all the others you've been sharing, I want to ask you about, of all the people you've helped through your trainings, the book, through your business, who would you say is your biggest success story and what's their transformation?

Yeah, there's this one lady that comes to mind, Jessica Tapana. She owns Simplified SEO Consultants. She came to slow down school one year and you know, she's slowing down hanging out with everyone else. And at this point she only owned a group counseling practice. So she had three or four people that were working for, doing really good mental health work in Missouri. And she just was helping people in the evenings with their SEO. She was a self trained therapist that really just geeked out on SEO. But, but she was terrible with technology. She said, she jokes that she can't even set up her smart tv, but when it came to SEO, she just loved keywords. And by the end of the week, several people were ranking a page or two higher than where they had been. And at the end of that week I said to them, I was talking to them about how we all have skills that we don't even realize are really amazing skills. And so the first two days we're slowing down hardcore and then the second half we run full tilt towards their business. So we're in that slow down, kill it, slow down, kill it kind of pace. So we're doing a sprint. And Jessica did a sprint for 20 minutes all around SEO and potentially launching a business there. And I challenged her to ask the group that was there. There's probably 30 people or so. You know, if I started an SEO company, how many of you would want to be my first clients? And she asked the group that. And she left slowdown school with 20 new clients from a business she didn't have. She now makes about three or four times more from her SEO company than she does off of a thriving group of group practice. And so to just see how she's a therapist who is like a technophobe. She's terrible at technology in general. She says this about herself and she launched an SEO company. She's continued to surround herself with smarter and smarter SEO consultants. And now she has these amazing plans for people. And so when you find those specialties, when you find those things that light you up, that you geek out over, there are people that they, they recognize that as a skill and they recognize that your unique selling point is that you're unique. You're a technophobe that started an SEO company. That's crazy. I want to work with you instead of just some big SEO company.

That's exciting to hear because I think everyone like you mentioned has a skill set that they don't go down and expand and they can absolutely turn it into a business. I mean, getting 20 clients out of 30, that's. That's not even impressive from a business you don't have. But from a sales standpoint, most people aren't even closing that high. Even if you have refined it, spent the money on ads, hired, you know what I mean? It's like, that's like, what, 60, 70% closing rate?

Yeah, yeah. And I think that there's so many techniques there that you know, when you are in front of the right people and you make sure that people opt out before you even talk to them. I mean, my closing rate from for Pre consulting is 80%, because by the time they talk to me, they're. They're deciding what they want to buy, not if they're going to buy. And so even just figuring out how do I figure out some of those basic systems to save myself time. So I'm not doing 10 calls, but only landing one new consulting client. Like, we want to have, you know, eight out of 10 or more if we're doing it. And so figuring out how do I create those systems to weed people out is so important when you're doing the sales calls.

100%. I switched my business around about seven, eight years ago to people have to apply to go through our book business, book publishing program. And it's like, you know, I'm not looking for tire kickers or more. I mean, I got the show, you got the YouTube, got the books, got this. I mean, there's so much free info out there, but people don't realize that that's even a possibility. And I think it just lends itself even more to that. You know, what are you doing on Friday if you. Oh, Well, I do 100 calls a day. How effectively, though? Yeah, you know what I mean? It's like, I get it and it's been fun. I remember the whole boiler room thing. When I first started the business, I went into the. Which I didn't need to, and I had a sales team of five people. I didn't need to be doing it, but I was just like, I always benchmark everything, everything I've done and have other people on my team do. I've done myself. The most I ever did was 99 calls in an hour. And how effective was it? We ended up getting a client and you know, with the six of us collectively. But is it as good? Not. But is it as good as it is now? No, no, it was nowhere near it. But I had to reframe it like we're talking about and go, hey, there might be a better way to do it. So I appreciate everything you've been sharing so far. We got a little bit more. I got two more quick questions. One of them is yellow or black?

Yellow.

Oh, that's a good spin. That's not going to stop, so I'm going to have to slow it down. Yellow. My question for you is you mentioned some cool places you visited.

Where would you like to travel to next and what's the next big thing that's freaking you out or scaring you a little bit that you want to achieve?

Ooh, next place to visit is Petra in Jordan. I would love to go to that ancient city. Just looks beautiful and amazing. So that's definitely next on the bucket list. Or pretty close to next. I would say for me, the thing that's scaring me that this is I've had some opportunities come my way in regards to doing public speaking through some pretty notable business leaders. And they've invited me to speak for really major corporations. And so I like to prep so that I don't look stupid in front of people. So I've got some work to do in regards to these really big corporation keynotes.

You'll do fine and congrats on the opportunity. But I know the feeling. It's every time you go up to that next level, it's like, oh my gosh, you know, you do the prep work and it gets rid of it. But at the same time, if it's new to you, it's new to you.

Yeah, yeah. And it's like keynotes in public speaking is not new. But being at that level of kind of the kind of companies that we're talking about, it's pretty exciting. But also I want to do a good job.

Well, appreciate everything you've shared and we're going to thank our sponsor and come back for the imperfect action round. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours, and it's true. And that's why I'm launching my new book.

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Else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get your copy and I look forward to hearing your transformation as our next video success story. Once again, that's eapublishingmethodbook.com and we are back with the imperfect action round. Joe, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I'm ready. Let's do it.

The first question I have for you, 60 second or less answer is what is the fastest path to the profits?

The fastest path to the profits is slowing down. So to first optimize your brain, allow it to slow down and then have those creative solutions. Then I would say ask your own audience what it is that they wish you would create?

Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making and the fastest way for them to fix it?

Yeah, I see so many of my prospects and potential clients starting with the product and I would actually say you want to start with the audience building that. You want to find that niche, find that audience and then they'll tell you what product they want. Instead of building that perfect E course and then squeezing everyone into it, start with just audience building, understanding their pain and the transformation they want and then the products will launch themselves.

That is such sound advice. I remember one time there was someone I was talking to and it's like, you know, what do you think McDonald's is a good opportunity? He goes, yeah, but not if you're a vegan thinking, you know, jamming someone into something they don't want, probably an uphill battle. So thank you for Sharing that last but not least, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

I would say always have an upsell and a downsell. There's people that they want to move faster and they're willing to pay for that. And there's people that they want to bootstrap and they don't want to be sold into a high end product product and they just want to put in the extra time. And so to be able to meet people where they're at and to genuinely be able to say we have enough people that are applying at every phase of business, we just want to pair you up with the thing that matches your price point and the speed that you want to go. That then builds that trust to allow people to make the decision, do I want to pay more and move fast and have a lot of hand holding or do I want to go maybe a little slower or have to bootstrap it but then save a bunch of money that then allows people to decide for themselves the journey that they want to take.

I have to admit that is the best not only answer to the question and thank you for that for the show, but that is in over a decade the best answer. I've heard an explanation of the upsell and the invisible downsell.

Oh, thank you. I feel like we try to just at every level have something for people that makes sense for their price point.

I can feel, I can tell you genuinely that's how you feel about it. That has not been my experience in the other 99 plus hundred plus instances. So thank you for that personally and I hope everyone listening jots that down. I'm for sure gonna listen to that again.

One of the reasons I love helping people publish business books is because of all the information and education they can gain. I know in addition to publishing your book, you've also read a lot. What are some of the books that have helped you in business the most?

I would say the one thing takes the cake usually. I would say that's an amazing business book. I would say the War of Art helps from a creativity standpoint. I would say Michael Singer's the Untethered Soul and also the book Awareness by demelo. Those two are just great from a personal standpoint. So that you're approaching your business from a grounded standpoint instead of just a make money standpoint point. And then I would just say that your own intuitive just whether that's meditation or taking that time away, you have a lot to offer the world. And so listening to your own inner story and inner book, I would say as well.

And I will say Thursday is the new Friday. If you haven't picked up on that, pick up on it now and pick up a copy. Joe, thank you so much. Where would you like people to learn more?

Sure, they can go to joe sanock.com we have more about the book also. People are submitting their experiments there. Also, if you go to joe sanock.com forward/quiz, we have a assessment on your three internal inclinations that we talk about in the book. Usually we charge $49 for that assessment, but we're offering it for free to your audience if they just use the code titnf. So Thursday is the new Friday, that acronym and they can get free access to that there.

Well, thank you for making that available. I'll make sure it's in the show notes on eainterviews.com Joe, it's been an absolute pleasure. Good seeing you again and I've really enjoyed this.

Mario, thank you so much.

All right, Expert Authority World, we have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day and God bless.

You're already the expert, but have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate qualified leads while increasing profit for you 24? 7? And if so, how well are you promoting it? With my new book, the Expert Authority Effect Publishing Method, I take you through my process step by step. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit eapublishingmethodbook.com to get started now. Once again, that's EA PublishingMethodbook.

Thanks for listening to today's episode. I would love to know what you enjoyed most from it if you haven't done so already. I invite you to connect with me on my new LinkedIn. You can go to it directly at eainterviews.com LinkedIn Once again, that's eainterviews.com LinkedIn lastly, check out the full eainterviews.com site for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you on the next one.