Episode 119: Unveiling the Brain with Roger Dooley

Hey, I know, Roger. You're the consummate professional. In the beginning of the show, we do some grunting and groaning. If you want to do a shout out, well, that'd make you awesome because all the other guests do it too. But if you don't want to ruin your professional reputation, you don't need to do that.

Hey, I'm on the show, right? So it's already in tatters.

That's why we love him, Chris.

That's right. And you have joined us here at the Profit first podcast, episode 119.

Oh, come on, Roger.

Victorious.

Yes.

Whoa.

What was that?

Whoa.

Welcome to the show, everyone. We're happy you're here. Strap on your seven point seatbelt. Harness, Fat Daddy Fatback.

That's right, Fat Daddy.

Fat Back is with us. And my name is Chris Curran. I'm the founder of Fractal Recording and Pause youe Life.

Pause your Life. And I am Mike Michalowitz, the author of Profit first and Surge and the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and the Pumpkin Plan and a new book I'm working on and the new release of Profit first that's gonna be re released again in 2017. And I'm joined in studio by with for Christina Bulldog.

Hello again.

And you are listening to the Profit first podcast. This is a show where we explore all elements of profitability, from being the young guy in an old guy's business to the amazing powers of persuasion. You will discover it right here on this show and be profitable as a result.

That's right. This is all about profit. See, revenue is sunshine on a hill.

But profit is the money making mill. Not bad, not bad. I was thinking of a corn mill again.

Take note of that.

Take note of that.

All right, well, you can hear our show anywhere. You listen to a podcast, itunes, stitcher, tunein radio, all that. But here's the thing. The website, profitfirstpodcast.com. have you been there yet? There is some fascinating things happening on that page. Profit first podcast dot com. All our previous episodes. You can comment, you can ask questions there. You can, you know, upload pictures of Mike Michalowicz from the weekend. Whatever you want. Profit first podcast dot com. And we have a great show. We interview a great guest. Oh, today is just ridiculous.

And one of my faves, actually, he is my fave.

He's a favorite. Oh, oh. Making favorites, huh?

Yeah, I am. I totally am.

There you go.

So I'm up to.

There he is.

You did, Roger. You didn't join the grunting part. At least I didn't hear it.

I was grunting in an inaudible way.

Oh, the ultimate in persuasion himself.

Subliminal grunting.

Nice, Nice. All right, so you guess who that voice is, Christina.

Is it Roger?

It's Roger. Duly Roger. Yes, Roger. And he's gonna be joining us in just a second if we can get him back in his cave to be talking about new influence techniques and stuff and something he turned me on to. But first I want to discuss. Actually, Chris, I want to know what's going on with you first.

You know, I'm making some online courses. You know, maybe if you're listening to this and you have a business and you want to be more profitable, maybe you've thought of like, hey, I could use all the, you know, the gold nuggets of information in my brain and create an online course. You know, like a self study course where people can just go and buy it and take it and, you know, you know, you wake up next Friday morning and like, oh, 79 people took your course and you made, you know, $5,000. Anyway, I'm starting to create some of my own courses and it's actually not that hard. But do you have any courses, Mike?

I do. Can you still make money that way? We have profit you. Right, but it's for our members, so it's not like, oh, Julian didn't get a course for two days and then see if it's like our members pre recorded webinars. Yeah, yeah, but I'm saying I didn't know. You can still. I guess you could still make money that way. That was the hot thing. Like the guy at the kitchen table back in, you know, 2000 who's like, oh, I'll teach you how to train your dog in 30 seconds, you know, with our 30 minute video.

Well, no. Udemy is a platform for online courses.

Oh, yeah, I know.

Udemy has 10 million users and generates like billions. So I mean, so still six out.

It still works. Clearly. Yeah.

Anyway, I'll let. I'll let you all know how it goes. What have you been up to, you guys?

So because of you, Chris, I bought the book Getting things Done.

Oh.

The revised version. And I also, I bought it on audible and book. So I've read it and I'm happy to say I've already. I'm using some of the principles and so I can affirm that they do work. And I'm discovering a couple new ones. And I really enjoy it. I really enjoy it. Interestingly, I was starting to clean out the basement, which is only halfway Done while listening to this tape. So I was getting things done While I was listening to getting things done.

Oh, nice. Wow.

That bored the shit out. That bored the living crap out of Christina.

She's like, I did yawn. Sorry.

Hey, you did as a matrion. Any shout outs or anything like what's going on?

Yeah, oh, shout out to one of our other members, Teddy Decker. She's over in New Mexico. She's one of our mastery accountants.

Yes.

And she. Every day I feel like she's killing it. She's landing another client. She's implementing more systems for clients. I'm just amazed.

Now I'm gonna throw you a zinger that you may not know the answer to. Does she specialize in a particular software or niche?

I don't think she has a niche specialization yet.

No, she does. She does, she does. I just wanted to write. She is targeting UPS stores.

I did not know that.

And growing very quickly in that space. She's a great story about what niche specialization does, but she is known now for that in the industry. So if you have a UPS store and you're listening to this show, Teddy Decker is your gal. She'll say it'd be more profitable.

Well, there you go.

Yeah, so I kind of threw a loop there. I should have prepared you. What about a shout out from anyone else?

Yeah, we got an email in to you, Mike, as a thank you. This comes from Trevor Larson, owner of Perk City. And he said, hi, Mike. I wanted to sincerely thank you for taking the time to write all of your books. He said all three or he mentioned Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, Profit first and the Pumpkin Plan. He said all three have been life changing and it has helped him transform his first as well as create his own curve on a new startup that he's launching. He says you're by far my favorite author and I find myself recommending these books to my peers on a daily basis.

Oh, man, you rock. Thanks, Trevor.

Thank you.

Thank you, Trevor. That means the world to me. Seriously. Thank you. Thank you. I want to thank our corporate partners real quick. It's Fundbox, Fundera, Nextiva, Receipt bank and Xero. We'll talk more about them in the end the show. But we are here to talk with the man of men. Yes, his name is Roger Dooley. Roger Dooley is a speaker and an author of Brain Fluence. Chris. Right up there, Christina. And you see how it's kind of curving over the corner of the desk there?

I know you've read it like 20 times.

I've read it so Many times. And I have so many corners of the book bent that it actually expands up top so it looks like it's bigger up top. Brain Fluence. I cannot recommend it more highly. Listen, if you're listening to the show, you should have picked up the book by now and be reading it along in parallel. Well, Roger is the king of influence. He's going to share new strategies with you on how to use influence and persuasion to grow profitability. And let's get right to it. Roger, welcome to the show.

Thanks, Mike. Glad to be here.

Good. I'm happy you are. Did you fix that ringer in the background? Is it all set?

Studio audience is amazing.

Yeah. Oh yeah, it's huge. We do this in an arena. So I'm watching your. I'm a subscriber to your blog, meaning I check it out daily and I saw this post you did about Roberto Cialdini's new book, Pre Fluence, which I actually purchased because you suggested it and it came in yesterday and now I lost it already, which maybe is. Maybe that's a technique. So I buy more books so I.

Find it in like the most random place.

But you, you say he talks about a new principle that he hasn't talked about before and I think you have some perspectives on it. What's that all about?

Yeah, well, the book is pre suas and it's a sort of a pun, which is close, but since the book already disappeared on you, that maybe that's part of the technique to sell more copies. They sort of vanish after exposure to air. Once the shrink wrap comes off, they only have 24 hours. But Robert Cialdini is the master of persuasion. He pretty much invented persuasion science and influence science back 30 plus years ago when he wrote the famous book Influence that has sold more copies than any other business book as far as I know. Maybe Dale Carney might have sold more if you count that, but he sold 3 million copies. It's in 30 languages and it is one of the most referenced books in the space and he has not come out with a solo book since. He's co authored a few books that have been useful but not necessarily major works. And now after 30 years, he came out with a solo book. And when I spoke to him, he said that he waited that long because he really didn't think that he had a big enough idea to talk about until now. So that this has been met with a lot of anticipation. And fortunately I was able to get an advanced copy and read it and talk to Cialdini myself, which is great. I think there are two big takeaways from the book that the title itself is Pre Suasion. And that shows that his main point is that there's a time effect. He's added the dimension of time to the persuasion process. The and by that I mean he'd established his six principles of persuasion back 30 years ago, things like social proof. So if you show people that you've got tens of thousands of customers just like them, you'll probably do better Then if you can't show people that authority, if you have an endorsement from a celebrity or an expert, then that will help you be more persuasive. But the assumption was that there wasn't much of a time dimension. Reciprocation is one of the more famous ones which if I do something for you with no expectation of return, you're much more likely than to do something for me if I ask. And the sort of tacit assumption was that this was a sort of debt that once I did you that initial favor that would just sort of hang out there until you had a chance to repay it. And what Cialdini talks about in Pre Suasion is that in fact there is a time sensitive component too. And he gives a great personal example which is ties into his writing the book. He was going to do a sabbatical or a semester at, I think it was usc, some California university. And the dean called him up and said, hey, we've got your office all set up, it's a great office. We've got your brand new computer, we've got your staff support, your library privileges all lined up. And this was really sort of a much better arrangement than he expected than Cialdini expected. And so he was very grate and thanked the dean. And then the dean sort of dropped the other shoe and said, but you know, we've got this one problem. One of our professors is ill and we need somebody to cover one graduate business class forum. Do you think you could help us out with that? And Cialdini in that moment agreed, even though he knew that it would like totally derail progress on his book because he was anticipating pretty much full time writing and researching and so on. And now he'd have to prepare an entirely new course for the business school students and so on. And although it may have been sort of a fortuitous thing because it also illustrated to him the importance of time. First of all, had the dean not called him up with that good news, sort of granted him the favor of this amazing accommodation, had he just called him and asked him about the class, he probably would have said no. You know, gee, I'm sorry, I've got this book project I'm working on. Had the dean called back a few days later or even just in a separate call, he probably would have said no. But in that moment he was persuaded. So I guess that Dean should count himself as a pretty effective guy if he was able to persuade the master of persuasion to do something that he wouldn't have normally done. That's pretty good work. But throughout the book he talks about the importance of what immediately precedes the persuasion process. He's got lots of examples the some folks have referred to priming for years that if you like Dan Ariely has written about the effect of priming with different numbers where just by having people think of a random number, those who are thinking of a higher number will estimate a higher price on a product that they don't really know what it costs. So this isn't a totally new breakthrough, but what Cialdini is doing in the book is sort of putting it into an organized context. Bring a lot of this work together and some work that really hasn't gotten that much exposure to to add to the persuasion process. And one way feel free to barge in here if I'm going off course. I'll give you one more pre suasion example and this is something that for those folks who have websites or apps and that sort of thing might appreciate. A website did a they were in a e commerce website selling furniture and what they found was that they could adjust the background on their landing page to and change the behavior of consumers. And it was something that the consumers weren't really consciously processing. But they tested different versions. One that had clouds like sort of blue sky and clouds is a very subtle background and the other that had some sort of images of pennies so like little coin images in the background. And what they found was that then when they asked people what was important in the furniture they were looking for, the people who had been primed or pre sued as Cialdini would say, with the clouds found they said that comfort was more important than the folks that had not been queued in that manner where the folks that have been queued with the coins were looking at price as a much more important consideration. And all of that was that when they use the cloud background they sold more furniture and at a better margin so that just little things that people are not even aware of. If you asked them what background they saw when they first came to the website they probably wouldn't be able to recall it, but it had that effect.

Persuasion sounds like it happens all the time. Even if you're not intentionally persuading, you're persuading.

How do you. Something's happening, whether it's intentional or unintentional.

Yeah. So if you're always doing it, how do you wrap your hands around where to get started?

Well, I think you have to. There's probably a fair amount of literature to read. I mean you've been made some very kind comments about my book. But there's Cialdini's original book Influence, his new book, there's Dan Ariely and Predictably Irrational and a variety of other books that talk about these effects that people aren't necessarily aware of but do have an influence on them. And then, then you have to adjust what you're doing. Even I occasionally talk to nonprofit folks and some. There's some really interesting research there that again, going back to that currency priming. If you show people very subtly an image of money, it might be in an illustration on the wall in the room they're in or a screensaver on a computer, something like that. Again, they're not consciously processing. They are more selfish and less generous. They're more self oriented. Even a symbol like a business looking briefcase can have that effect. But another effect is that when people see the image of themselves in a mirror, they will tend to be more generous or pro social or more honest because that's the way they visualize themselves. So I mean there are all these strange little things that you know, can potentially have a not insignificant impact on your sales effort or whatever your persuasion process is.

Let's do a quick diagnosis of a business. I go into these little restaurants and they have that first dollar or $10 they made up and they have a prominently posted on the wall right next to the cash register. Do you think that may be negatively affecting a tip or something like that? Because now I am more selfish and more conscious because money's put in front of me.

You know, probably not too much. It's all right. I mean that's, that's something that I guess the only way to know for sure would be to test. But there are things that you can do to improve tips. They some of Cialdini's research.

Lay it on me, boss. Lay it on me. This is what, this is the juice I've been waiting for.

Giving somebody an unexpected mint with their meal or raised tips, giving them two mints, raised tips even more. And it had to be sort of Personal appearing as if it came from the server and there can can't recall. He did have a couple of other sort of tip related things in there that these relatively subtle influences could increase the the amount of tips.

But that sounds like reciprocity.

Dollar on the wall. I don't know.

All right. But that sounds like reciprocity meaning I I come up as a waiter, I, I give you the check but then I give you a little gift of this mint. It sounds like then people feel this response to reciprocating kind by juicing up the tip a little.

Yes, that would probably be a reciprocation reciprocity that would be that particular key influence. And there's certainly other things that you could do if if the server brought out something they had in common with the patron that might create liking or it might even create. And here we. I don't know if you guys have a drum roll sound effect but the I'm going to lead to use that is lead into the. After 30 plus years of there being only six principles of persuasion and that's something that he's maintained through the entire period. I spoke to him a couple of years ago and asked him if he would add another principle at this point because obviously he's seen a lot of research since then and he said no. Basically thought that everything else. There were certainly a lot of persuasion methods and techniques but they tended to fall into one of the other major categories. But in pre suasion he announces number seven which he calls unity. So that that Saudi here are groans from Everybody's gonna have to revise their PowerPoints and their handouts and so on because now there are seven principles of persuasion.

And how does unity work?

Well, okay, Unity is a sense of shared identity and it could be a social grouping, it could be geographic. The there's research. I don't know if he mentions this in pre suasion but there was a guy named Henri Tiefel who did some pretty amazing work with causing people to form into groups and he'd take like a random classroom full of people and he divided them into groups A and B and then have some totally arbitrary distinction. Like group A would have green circles around their monitors and the other one would have blue and. But it would sort of pit them against each other. And in a very short period of time with these totally arbitrary distinctions he could build this sort of sense of oneness among the each group and also a sense of otherness about the other group to the point where they would actually be mean to the other group. So, and this is something that has been used by marketers forever. I think the classic example is Apple, where while when Steve Jobs was in charge of the marketing, which is most, most of the time of its existence, they really emphasized that they were unique, a unique breed. You know, the other guys were the lemmings walking over the cliff or the faceless drones looking at that guy in the giant screen in the 1984 commercial, where they were the young, cool, heroic folks who were not part of that group. And it carried through into the much later generation of imamac. I'm a PC, where again, you had this distinction that, you know, I'm part of the cool kid group and you're part of the nerdy geeky group. So, you know, they, they exploited that. And the one thing I would say that's a little bit confusing perhaps, is that it resembles the. His other principle called liking, where liking is where you show that you have something in common with somebody else. But his distinction is that unity goes deeper. It's not like us, it is of us. So it's. It's a more deeper shared identity. And you know that. So I think to me, it's sort of as if he broke this out from liking. Because in the past, when I've analyzed, say, the various Apple marketing plan employees that used that us and them approach, I really consider that part of liking. But what, what he's saying is that there's really two things going on that are separate. There's liking or that is a similar. Emphasize similarity, and there is unity, which is a shared identity.

So let's get to some practical application for the folks listening in business owners. They want to increase their profitability. How can they use this principle of unity to increase their profitability?

Well, I think that often businesses who are local or regional in nature can do that by emphasizing some point of common kinship, if you will, they have with their customers. I know for quite a while I was in Knoxville, Tennessee. Lived there for five years, got my business degree there, and that is the home of Big Orange. And now I'm in Austin and it's kind of weird. We still have UT and we still have Orange, but it's a little bit different shade. But I'll be there.

Are you a UT fan?

I can answer yes to that and still be ambiguous because yes, I am a Tennessee fan, and if I stay here long enough, maybe I'll grow into a Longhorn span. Although they just knocked off my Irish the other night, so that didn't totally please me.

I became oh, that's true.

Yeah. I spent 30 years in South Bend, Indiana area, so I became a, an Irish fan sort of by osmosis. But in any case, what we saw so many businesses doing there, and I haven't noticed it quite as much in Austin, at least now, this many years later, Austin is perhaps a little bit more cosmopolitan in many areas. But what I saw a lot of people doing is really emphasizing their Tennessee University of Tennessee connection in some way. I saw concrete trucks that were painted orange and might have had a logo, a university logo on them of some kind. People would put things in their advertising. They, you know, go Vols in their advertising and so on. And really what they were trying to do with that is not so much support the team, although I'm sure they wanted to do that, was to appeal to the many other local residents who are their potential customers, showing that, hey, you know, we're, we're on the same team as you are. And so they're sort of emphasizing that shared identity. And it could be geography, it could be ethnicity, it could be religion, or it could even be some kind of a tribe that you can create. And Apple, for instance, created its tribe pretty much out of whole cloth. They weren't exploiting any other commonality than their own product line and their own brand and the brand Persona. So, you know, if I think that for a small business, sometimes creating that brand Persona is a little bit more difficult simply because you don't have the resources or the time and the money to do that. But finding that other common point that you might have with your potential customers, I think is you can use that unity principle and liking as well. And I would never just rely on one particular approach to my persuasion process. You know, you can do multiple things when you're trying. So just because you found a little unity hook doesn't mean you can't also use reciprocation or that you can't always use that. You can don't have to use social proof. You know, you need to find those things are going to be the most powerful in your situation.

You know, I was watching a fascinating real life experiment, if you will, with this concept of unity. I'm watching the O.J. simpson trial documentary on ESPN and it's the division of white people and people of color. And, and prior to the trial it was something like 60% of white people believed that O.J. simpson was guilty and 60% of people of color believed O.J. simpson was innocent. Vehemently. After the trial, numbers went up like 80% of white people thought O.J. simpson was guilty. People of color, 80% were convinced he was innocent. It's just fascinating how our thinking goes, Roger, along with the tribe, if you will.

Well, yeah, you know, what you're actually seeing in that case, I think, is another very common human foible called confirmation bias. And in essence, our. Our brains look for information that agrees with our preconceived notion and reject information that disagrees with it. So you can, you know, if somebody believes in a person's guilt, then they'll look at the trial transcript or TV coverage or whatever, and they will extract from that information that supports that belief and reject what doesn't. And it goes both ways. This is why politics are kind of challenging. You know, you would like to think that people are really open to any candidate that would be, you know, that would have the right ideas for them, that would agree with them. But there's a lot of research showing that you can show somebody, say, a plan, whether it's, here's a new welfare plan, here's a new foreign policy or foreign aid plan or something, and with the identical wording, if you tell them that the party that they are affiliated with supports it, they are more likely to agree with it. So even if it sounds kind of liberal, if you say yes, or the Republicans are really getting behind this, that individual will say, yeah, it sounds pretty good. It makes sense, and it works both ways with both parties and, you know, people. It's. It's unfortunate, though, because people are not processing information in a totally rational way, but I guess that shouldn't be news to anybody.

Yeah. All right, so here's what I want to do. I have your book, like I say over and over to everyone I meet, this is my. One of. This is my favorite persuasion book, 100 Persuasion Techniques. I want to read little excerpts from your book. You have 15 seconds. Because we got to fire through quite a few in a few minutes. 15 seconds to explain what you meant by that. And then there'll be an air horn that sounds off if you're over time, is that we can try it.

Every now and then somebody says something. You know, you said this in your book, and it's. It's been like five years, but. Well, we'll go with it.

Yeah. Okay. All right, on page. What does it say on page 245? Third line down. Now on page 245, principle 92, which is first impressions count. You say if their initial impression was good, flaws they find will be discounted.

Right. That's. Yeah. And actually That's a pretty good example of confirmation bias there, where people stick with their first impression. And so they will look for information that confirms that and reject information up to a point that disagrees with it. Obviously it doesn't work forever.

Okay, good.

I'm bringing my own air horn next time.

Let's see here, people. No, I don't want to do that one here. This is on 73. Want vs should time your pitch. Purchases for consumption. Days in the future were more likely to be healthy and nutritious. Do you remember you talking?

Yes. Yes. And it's. Netflix has observed that effect. It's kind of interesting. People will rent a documentary for future consumption, but they'll rent the action movie or the romance or comedy for consumption. Right now the documentary is something then they know they should watch that because it got great reviews. But so it. Depending on the kind of product you have, you want to presented either for media consumption or for Future consumption.

Page 201. Roger says, comma. Research across many cultures has shown that people like their initial letters, like M M for me, better than other letters.

Yes. Weird name effect. There's even research showing that people whose names begin with A or B get better grades than people whose names begin with C or D. That might be one of those hard to reproduce psychology experiments you hear about, but there is an affinity to that. So if you can show that in your marketing in some way by personalizing, it will probably work a little bit better.

You just beat the horn. All right, couple more, couple more. Use a difficult font to boost recall of important marketing information. Page 83.

Yes. In general, you want to use the easiest fonts possible because things that look hard to read translate into hard to do. So if you're. If you're giving somebody instructions, you want them easy to read, but if you want somebody to retain something that will. A harder to read font will slow them down a little bit and it could actually boost retention.

Page 98. This is actually my favorite. We use it in house. Reflecting on the shaky origins of a company made its employees more positive about the firm.

Yeah, I think it was a. I forget what the exact principle involved there was, but I think it had to do with FedEx and sort of the origin story of that company and reflecting on that shows and comparing it to what they had today actually made them feel better.

If you are selling the last thing we'll do. Page 185. If you are selling a complex product like an automobile, give the customer a simple reason to buy your product.

Yeah, that's one of those counterintuitive things that people are often more happy with a quick decision or simple decision on a complicated product than if they really try and analyze, because there's too many variables for people to analyze for. If a product has 20 different characteristics, it takes forever to try and compare them all, and you can't really. Your mind just gets confused and lost.

Nice. Okay, Roger, thanks for playing. Roger. Yes. That was wonderful.

Yeah, you just watch out when I admire horns.

Hey, you want a free T shirt from Profit First Professionals? We'll drop it in the mail to you.

Awesome.

Awkwardly, awkwardly small, though. We've run out of the big sizes.

So we're going to send you a child.

It's like a child size.

I lose however much weight I have to to fit into it.

Okay, so there's a picture of that. That is the ultimate persuasion tool. Wear it in public. We promise you. Roger, as always, a pleasure learning from you and joking around with you. Thanks for coming on today's show, but before we go, tell us where people can learn more about your books, about you, what's coming out your. Your in your blog, and all that stuff.

Yeah. The best place to start would be RogerDooley.com R O G E R D O-O-L-E-Y.com and on Twitter, I am RogerDooley. My main blog is at NeuroscienceMarketing.com One word.

Roger, thanks again for being on the show.

Hey, thank you, Mike. Great to be here, and nice to be with you, Chris and Christine.

Thanks, Roger.

So, man, you got to visit his blog. It's one of the last killer blogs. I'm not big into blogging anymore, so maybe this is his concept of confirmational bias. I think most blogs are getting weaker. It's lead bait. And here's the top five. Here's the four. Roger's blogs are amazing. He goes in depth. He gives details. You read his blog, and you are improving. You are improving your business. You're making it more profitable. And I don't just. I'm not just saying this. Roger was on our show, actually, the one we done GMAP with Ron. And he's like, oh, he's just talking about. We talked about our own website. He's like, oh, you have to set up this form, but give people three ways. Not everyone wants to fill out a form. They might want to email you or do this. We set it up and remember, our leads have jumped.

Yeah.

That was from Roger Dooley.

Thanks, Roger.

Yeah, absolutely true. We did it the next day I'm the type guy, when someone suggests something, I'm gonna do it because I know if I don't do it, I'll forget it. Did it. Boom. Leads jumped.

Nice.

And the only thing I can attribute to. Because that was the one dial or the one thing we shifted at that day was the redesign based upon Roger's insights. So go to his blog. All right, In a second, we recap what we learned. But first, I want to thank our corporate partners.

Can I challenge you to use all of them in one sentence? Yes, like a story.

You can. The fox jumped over the in one sentence. On a cold, rainy night, my receipts were piled up, and I used receipt bank to scan them in. But my phone, my next EVA phone was ringing with a call from Fundera, who was having a discussion with Fundbox about their accounting system, Xero.

Oh, man.

And everything came out good at the end.

Pause your life retreat.

Oh, right. And then. Right. And then we all stopped to do pause your life. What is pause your life, bro?

Pause your life. It's. It's just pausing, hitting the pause button, like when you just need a break. You ever feel like that? Like, dude, I just need a break. Dude, just hit the pause button. Go on a retreat or a meetup. We organize that, me and my wife, and it's great. Pause your life dot org. All kinds of cool stuff there.

Yeah, I think it's a great way to get a break from the manicness of life. You know those commercials with the Twix bar? They're like, oh, Marcia. Marcia Marsh is like some ogre guy. And, like, all you need is a Twix or a Snickers or Kit kat. Is it KitKat?

Give me a break.

Yeah, Is that what it is?

Break me off piece.

Whatever kind of candy anyway. It should be 100 grand bar, quite frankly. Eat some kind of candy, and then that person turns, oh, that's Snickers. That's Snickers.

Yeah.

They should do a pause your life commercial like that.

You should. Chris, get on that.

Yeah. And our tribe, because what Roger was saying about tribes is like the tribe for pause youe life is human beings. Because below everything, beneath everything, we're all just human beings. It doesn't matter.

It's not Tennessee fall fans only.

No, no. You put that on pause too, my friend. You gotta pause everything.

So. All right, why don't we do this, Chris? You start off with a takeaway, and then I'll share one, and Christina will. Because my wife just walked into the studio and she's like making hand gestures. Money. Okay. I figured out that gesture. Do you want to say hi while we're live? You want to say hi to everybody out there?

Hi, everybody out there.

I need money now. I say I need money. I need some money. Baby sounds like she needs her fix. All right, Chris, what. What did you learn?

We're gonna have to sample that sound clip, by the way. Yeah, well, I like the whole tribe thing. He talked about unity, the. That Robert Cialdini is talking about in his new book, the Unity Factor. Well, look, but. But what I liked about it, you can add something else, but he said it's a. It's a shared identity and that is like, like deep. That's why I said for pause your life. It's human beings. If you're a human being, you're like me, I'm like you. So anyway, I really like that. Christina, what was. What did you like about the tribe?

Oh, yeah, no, you. You definitely nailed that one. But, but spinning off onto something else was when he was talking about the confirmation bias and how we just. Our. Our brains are just wired to stick to your first impression and to stick to automatically find and pick and choose things that you're watching that agree with your values, which I know is kind of a given. But I don't think we sit to really think about how much we do that subconsciously. So it's kind of good to put it into perspective and say, oh, maybe I should try to make more of an effort to be more open minded about this instead of just hearing what I want to hear, like selective hearing.

I wonder if your upcoming rehearse. Not rehearsal, audition. The audition. I wonder if you could use some persuasion techniques, talk to Roger about that. Yeah, totally. Like, oh, we should.

Roger breath mints or something.

Is Roger still there? And he does dump us, right? He dumped us. Corey, did he dump us?

He's out.

Yeah, he's out.

He's pieced.

Okay. Corey even dumped himself. Everyone's abandoning. For me, it was two things. One was he said, seek kinship with your clients. I think that's a big deal as. As we're as a vendor.

What.

How are we related to them? But the other thing is Roger was persuading us because you're always doing it as we're talking. He spoke about Robert Cialdini, who theoretically he's considered a competitor. They're both authors in the same space. They. They compete for readers, but there's not a hint of that. Actually, Roger's like Cheltenham. He's amazing. He's the master of this. Let me tell you what my interpretation of what he's done. And you got to get this book. It's the most amazing thing. And now, my God, this guy Roger's so awesome. I want to buy more of his books because it's a free contribution and genuine, authentic. It wasn't like he's like, trying to make us feel. So I just thought that was fascinating. The entire conversation I'm sitting here saying, I admit, adore and respect Roger more every time he speaks because he speaks so openly about all the valuable things we need to know, regardless of who the original source is. Okay, so let's. I gotta go through a script here. We the corporate partners, by the way.

We want to know your takeaways. Go to profitfirstpodcast.com find this episode 119. It's just like a blog post. And you can comment on the blog post. So give us your takeaways and ask a question. If you have a question about one of these influence techniques for Mike or Roger, go ahead and ask the question there. And of course, you can rate and review us on itunes or wherever you're listening to the podcast. You can throw us five stars if you want to take note of that.

Yeah, he knows one more thing you could do. You can go to profitfirstprofessionals.com right now. Why right now?

Why?

Because there's a discount going on. If you act in the next 15 minutes, you'll also get a free set of books from. From Roger Dooley. And if you buy them now, none.

Of that is true.

None of that is true. Yeah. By the way, that's a big disclaimer. That's all bull wash. No. So here's the deal. Profit First Professionals is a membership organization of accountants and bookkeepers throughout the globe who have been trained on our methodology called Profit First. And some people are like, why do you call our methodology? Are you trying to be like, fake humble guy? No. I wrote the book on the core concept, but there are seven other people here at headquarters who've developed it. Halaj, the Hawaiian lumberjack, chipping away, coming up with new concept with Profit First. Mo coming up, actually challenging some of the ideas and saying, mike, I don't think this is right. Because she's working with member after member finding new ways to do things. That's actually why I revised the book. There's a brand new version of Profit first coming out. And then our 100, almost 50 members now, they kind of on a tear, and we're growing 150 members throughout the globe who are teaching profit first, serving entrepreneurs, and becoming more profitable. Yeah, and I love that the Snapchat's going. People get so fired up. All you need to do is go to profitfirstprofessionals.com right now. Click on the Find button. We'll hook you up with one of our 150 or so members who will help drive profitability in your business. Why don't you take that action now?

That's right. It's like having an accountant or bookkeeper supporting you and they're wearing, like, a cape with the little PFP on the front. Profit First Professional. You can have your own superhero behind you driving profit to your business. Hello. I mean, look, you maybe have an accountant or bookkeeper now, but what are they doing to drive profit? That's a. You know, you can ask them, right, Mike?

Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

I don't know. Anyway, thanks for listening. Thank you, Mike. Christina. Thank you, Roger Dooley. Thanks to everyone in the background over there, including. Including Obi Ron Kenobi and the Hawaiian Lumberjack. We really appreciate you listening and that we're able to be part of your profit journey. Hopefully, you're profitable. If not, let's get on it. All right, who's up next week, Mike?

Dude, I'll give you a hint. I met her on a yacht. The yacht burned down. True stories in the news. Burned down to the bottom. After this meeting. That's how salacious it was.

Wow. It was that kind of fling. Okay, tune in next week. We'll see y' all then.

See ya. See ya.