Here’s How You Can Stand Out, Get Attention and be Referable in Six Seconds or Less with Scott McKain

Two words, one 3x5 card that pitched and closed one of the most recognizable TV shows from the 1980s. And seconds. So what's the fastest way to stand out? Be distinctive, get attention, and be referlable in six seconds or less? Well, I'm here today with Scott McCain. You might recognize him from playing the villain in a Werner Herzog film and also one of the movies that Roger Ebert called one of the 50 great movies in cinema history to also being booked to speak by Arnold Schwarzenegger for an event on the White House lawn with the president in the audience. Now, Scott is known as the ultimate customer experience and distinction expert, and he's developed a system and a process for standing out, getting attention, and being what I call a category of one. So, Scott, what are some of the things that we're going to be talking about today in this episode?

Mike? We're going to talk about how the four cornerstones of distinction, clarity, creativity, communication, and the customer experience focus can help you create distinction for your business in a hyper competitive marketplace.

All right, And I'm going to just translate that into. This is a really engaging and fun interview. We actually did the interview and we're doing the beginning last. We're Tarantino ing this. I've learned so much. This has been so much fun, and you're going to rip into it and it's going to be something you're going to be able to use in your business right now. So you. You ready to dig in, Scott?

Let's go.

All right, let's do it. This is Capability Amplifier.

All right, Scott McKean, great for you to be here. We've had a little bit of time to talk ahead of time. And for anyone who doesn't know you, one of the things that we have in common is you're a nice Midwest boy from Indiana, came from a town twice as big as mine, 1500 people. And your parents ran a little grocery store in their town. And you've got clients like Apple, Cisco, Porsche, big organizations. And you've been doing more with the entrepreneurial market due to the fact that our common person of interest who introduced us was JJ Virgin. So what do you do? Who do you talk to? Tell us a little bit about your background here. Let's just dive into that for people don't know who Scott McCain is.

Well, Mike, I'm so fortunate to be from a small town, as you. Matter of fact, I was born in the same small town as John Mellencamp, so. So when I hear his song about small town man, it Takes me back because I was born in the same small town, grew up in an even smaller town a few miles away. And as you mentioned, my folks ran the local grocery store. So that was my first experience in business, was trying to, you know, watch how my mom and dad ran the store, a supermarket came in to our local community. And so watching how as an entrepreneur, my dad fought against the big box was a part of my early education. I got involved in a student organization and became state president in Indiana. That national officer had a chance to take two years off of college and travel and speak. So by the time I was 21, I'd been in the Oval Office with the president. I had had a private meeting with the chairman of General Motors in the boardroom in Detroit. It was just such an incredible laboratory to learn about business and to learn at everything from a small town store to the big corporations, got involved with organizations and kept getting invited to speak about what I had learned through that journey as a young person. But then I started my own small business, right? And I realized as an entrepreneur, there were things that big corporations were teaching their teams that goodness we needed in, I needed in my small business. My folks needed it. And then I went through a personal tragedy. I lost my wife to cancer, and I had to shut my business down and be her caregiver for a period of time. So when I got back in the business and I tried to relaunch, I went to my customers, mostly speakers bureaus, but other customers. I asked him, I think an important question for any entrepreneur. I said, when you refer me, what do you say? And the number one answer was, a good speaker and a nice guy. And they thought that was a great recommendation. And you and I both know that's a kiss of death.

That does not close deals.

It does not. You know, I couldn't imagine the VP of Sales of Porsche saying, you know, for this year's event, we need a really nice guy. They want content, they want meat, they want meaning. And so I had to discover how I could stand out in this plethora of speakers and authors. So I started researching Distinction. What did it take to stand out in a hyper competitive marketplace? And the blinding flash, the obvious through the research I started 12, 13 years ago was, gosh, if, if I need this for my small business, what's the likelihood that other businesses are going to need this as well? And it led me to really drill deeply into something other than the typical Apple, Amazon, Southwest stories, but to find a steakhouse in Indianapolis and a craft brewery here in Las Vegas and a resort in Scottsdale that were doing some really specific, fascinating things that became case studies of what all of us as entrepreneurs need to be doing.

Okay, so before we started rolling, we have some very similar philosophies. I believe that's part of what brought us together in the first place. And I call it a category of one. But you also have your own language pattern. So let's talk a little bit. And our goal with capability amplifier is always to increase someone's capabilities. I think of it like a matrix style download for your brain. So you can walk away after a session with us with a genuine upgrade that's usable right now that'll enable you to stand out, get attention, enroll more customers or clients, create a bigger, better brand for yourself, or attract perfect fit clients. So with that in mind, let's actually construct something in real time, maybe create a process, a system together and collaborate. And so with that in mind, you're a creative guy, you've got a lot of background in entertaining and educating. Why don't we find a way to get the most attention and create an elevated brand experience for anyone who's listening to this or watching us right now. What do you say?

I love it. I love it. Because, you know, one of the things I talk about a lot is that the customers you attract will always be of greater value than the customers you pursue. No one is attracted to a generic right. In the history of recorded business, no customers ever said, I love those guys because they're exactly like everybody else.

Right on, right on. I've got a little nugget to add to that, which is I always see you attract exactly who you deserve, which is based upon what kind of energy you're sending out, your language patterns, and also if you come from a desperate, cheap perspective, your conversation you have in your head and this is your brand too, this isn't just you. The owner is going to be one of desperation and being cheap. It's like your conversations energetically are reflected in the world. So you've got a four step system that you use. I'd like to just dig into some of your systems, processes and models for a moment.

Yeah. The first of the four cornerstones of distinction, as I'm studying it, is clarity. But here's where I think many entrepreneurs make an error, is that clarity is not just about what you are. It is also being willing to say what you're not. So often when we begin our businesses, you know, we want the door to be wide open. We're all things to all People, you know, I joke that in the early days of my speaking business, people say, well, what do you talk about? And I said, about an hour. What do you need? And no one is loyal to a generic, and it doesn't attract anyone. So one of the things that I think entrepreneurs have to work on, even successful entrepreneurs, it's one of those things that you constantly tinker with you, that you're constantly refining, is what is your clarity. A process that I use with groups is what I learned from my peripheral involvement in show business, and that's the high concept. I say bomb on a bus, and you think of the movie speed, you know, shark attacks. You think of Jaws. But businesses do this too. You know, Domino said, your pizza in 30 minutes. Federal Express said absolutely, positively, overnight. How would you describe your business in six seconds? You have to be that clear in the marketplace, because mindshare precedes market share.

Great. So the language pattern I've used for a little while is your category of one, which is how you own and dominate someone's brain with a language pattern that hopefully is even trademarkable. And interestingly, as I was listening to you, Dan, for example, he calls it the 4C's formula. So it's contentment, courage, capability, and confidence. You've got your four cornerstones of distinction. And we were talking about this before we started rolling for strategic coach. When people say, well, what is strategic coach? What does it represent? It's ultimately freedom for an entrepreneur. Freedom from freedom to. It's freedom of time, money, purpose, and relationship that requires a deeper conversation. But at least it starts the conversation, because why we become an entrepreneur is for freedom, most of us. And being an entrepreneur can be a very lonely place. Now, in my case, when I talk about the superpower accelerator, my big promise is to craft the moment when someone says, I've been looking for someone just like you, and I already know I want to work with you. How do we start working together? Hopefully, that fit in six seconds. Be like, wow, what does that mean? And it's crafting a story, a distinctive story that's repeatable by someone other than you, that makes someone want to work with you with the shortest period of time and the fastest enrollment possible. So going from three or 33 conversations.

To two, and, you know, Mike, to piggyback on that, we'll get into the cornerstone of communication in a minute. But you reminded me that I see so many folks talking about the elevator speech. What's your elevator speech? But the problem is, according to research, Yale, for example, says you got six seconds now to grab attention. If I'm unloading my 30 second elevator speech on you before I've really grabbed your attention with my clarity and my high concept of the statement that you're talking about, the audience tunes out. You've got to grab attention, and you can't do that with a muddled message, which is why what you're talking about is so important but so often overlooked. Because entrepreneurs, so many of us work harder on the wrong plan. We are biased by the stereotypical, you know, work harder entrepreneur, which is why what you're doing in Strategic Coach and the advice that you're bringing, from my perspective, is critical because when you have that laser focus on that clarity, all of these other things that you're talking about can happen, which is why clarity is the first of the four cornerstones, because it's where you got to start.

Great. And so while I was just listening to you and you said six seconds, I remember I used this for a long time. A goldfish has a attention span of, I think it was like eight or nine seconds. And the human now is less due to social media. And I can't remember the exact quote. I used it for a while. But this is something interesting. And when you look at a Numbers perspective. So YouTube has something they call TrueView, and it's a paid program that lets you essentially put a video in front of a competitor's video. It's the pre roll and they give you six seconds. So the first six seconds is on them. And then if someone continues watching, you actually pay. It fits in exactly with what you said. You've got six seconds.

Now.

YouTube wouldn't do this the way they do it if they didn't know this based upon playing back literally billions of views and videos. And that is the world we live in. And to ignore that right now, you do at your peril. So I would love a lesson through your lens and your experience of working through big brands guide us through the four cornerstones of distinction. So we started with clarity, but what do you think it takes right now to get that attention and stand out?

That's a fundamental challenge in today's world. And when you think about what we tend to do, and it's natural, we're proud of what we do. We've worked very hard to deliver what we deliver, but we want to unload everything and nobody has time to listen to that. So there's a couple different ways that you can approach it. One is I encourage folks to look at their mission statement if they have one now, mission statements look like they've been cobbled together by committee, but there's going to be some power words in there and that's what we're looking for. The power words like FedEx saying absolutely, positively, overnight, you didn't need to know anything else. They don't need to explain how the plane works. They don't need to explain the delivery system. It's what's important to the customer. So looking at customer evaluations can give you some power words as well. What are they identifying that's important to them, and it's coming up with that particular phrase. Now, some folks use it externally. We've seen that with companies. But with Southwest Airlines, an overused example, I'll grant. But Southwest uses it internally. Cheap, safe and fun. What else do you need to know? So what we do is cut through the chaff and really get to what is essential in what customers are looking for and how we can deliver that in a unique way.

Okay, so I'm gonna do a let's pretend with you. And I literally just got off a session where I'm working with Strategic Coach's sales team right now. Now, one of the salespeople, his name's Matt, Matt Yankee. I'm gonna give him a big shout out here. He's been with coach for 10 years doing sales and he's been doing something absolutely brilliant, which is he has cataloged every testimonial and positive response he's gotten for 10 years. And we just are categorizing all those. So what I've found is the language pattern of the customers, what you want to use in the outside world to attract more alike, the best of them. And many of the people who belong to Coach, for example, we got a lot of financial advisors, a lot of people in financial services, which it's a notoriously difficult business to stand out in. And it's also to be distinctive and it's also ruled by and run by compliance. So just trying to stand out, you can't depend on social proof. You can't use testimonials. You gotta craft a story. So like one of our members, his name is Charlie Epstein, we actually created a one man show called Yield of Dreams. So it's a knockoff of the movie.

I love that.

And we hired three comedians to co write this story and now we're gonna take that to online because Covid stopped doing a performance and a show and that's his mechanism for converting. So I'm curious again through your lens, if we were going to create a Toolkit of. In your experience, what are some of the best ways to capture the story from the client and get the language patterns? What tools are you recommending and how do you craft that engagement, especially when you're working with big brands like a Porsche or an Apple or even some of the smaller ones that you're working with right now.

Let me use financial advisors as an example. I was doing a program and we were just concentrating on that first one, on clarity. Not yet to telling the story or crafting the story, but just really on that clarity, that high concept statement. So this guy comes up and he says, here it is. I'll build your financial future. And I acted like I was going to sleep. You know, everybody in the room, you know, if I'm selling term insurance, I can say that. I mean it. You know, it's not at the level of sophistication that he desired. So we're talking and kind of find out. He's a retired Air Force pilot, you know, beginning a second career. I asked him what was there aspect about the service he provided that was really important to him. And he's safety and security. Right. He worked with a lot of former military. And so we developed the high concept clarity statement for him that when someone says, what do you do? He says, I fly people through financial turbulence. And you know what they said? They said, tell me more about that. Right. So now that opens up the conversation. There is a woman in Oklahoma who has won her community's golf championship for several years now, and she says, I'll raise your net worth and lower your handicap. Now, you don't want to get those backwards.

Right? Right.

Yeah, it's a very memorable phrase. But here's the other aspect, Mike, that I know that you talk about as well is that that makes you imminently referable. Picture a couple guys on the second tee and one person will easily say, you ought to call my advisor. He's flying me through all this financial turbulence. Your customers will parrot your clarity statement when it's that precise and well crafted. This is so much harder than it seems. I was doing a program for a group called CoBank, which at the time, I haven't checked it lately, but they were the seventh largest financial institution in the US but they only loaned to cooperative forms of business. And the CEO said that one exercise, developing the clarity statement, being clear about what you are. He said, it's the single hardest thing I've done as an executive because everybody wants their say. Everybody wants, oh, and we do this and we do that and you lose the gravity, the traction of the statement when you make it so convoluted. So it's finding that point, that clarity point. And it works for financial advisors, it works for small businesses, it works for big businesses as well.

And in your experience, so in this particular case with that guy, he had a background. So you're gonna work with a unique characteristic and history background and the language pattern. So what we did with Charlie Epstein, our hook is I make money funny.

There you go.

And his goal is to rid the world of money pains and money struggles, financial pain. And he also trademarked the term. It's about your desirement living your desirement years, not your retirement.

Retirement years.

Yeah.

That's so powerful too. So creating your own word, which is brandable and trademarkable, if that's a word, but you own it. I mean, you own that. And that is part of what crafts distinction in the marketplace.

That's really good. I think we've gone through this. This is great. And I know you and I could zero in and go through the system and the process. What is cornerstone number two after you have your clarity statement?

The second one is creativity. And the reason it's second, Mike, is a lot of folks would think creativity is first, right? Where you think outside the box so much, we think, oh, if I'm going to stand out, I need to be more creative. I went to Nashville. I was living in Indianapolis at the time. I was trying to think of what professionals have to be consistently creative to keep food on the table. Painters, sculptors, songwriters, Right. So I go down to Nashville. I have a friend in the music business there's got introduced to about 15 different songwriters, each of whom had had a number one hit. And so I'm asking them about the process. And without exception, every one of them said, oh, no, no, you have to get clear first and then you get creative. Right? How am I going to write a song? Well, I've got to decide. Is it going to be a ballad? Is it going to be up tempo? Is it going to be rock, pop or country? Is it going to be sung by a male, female or group? I got to get clear first and then I get creative. And as we think about that old cliche about thinking outside the box, if we always have to think outside the box, maybe we haven't defined the box to begin with. Maybe we need a better box so when we get clear first, then we can get creative within those confines. And the phrase that I use is for entrepreneurs, we need to be derivative but different. By that, I mean if you think about the Taylor family founding enterprise rental car, right? They had to be different than Hertz and Avis. So they came up with the idea, what if we took the car to the customer rather than making the customer come to us and get the car? Zero product variation in that business, right? The Ford's the same area you get it from. Jeff Bezos, sitting in his garage, thinks, well, wait a minute. What if we became the enterprise of books? And we'll get the book to you rather than making you go to Barnes and Noble or Borders to get it? I did a program for a big convention of dentists or like 2000 dentists in the audience. And I met a dentist from Austin, Texas, that put his dental office on a trailer, and they bring the dental office to the cul de sac. So you walk out of your house to the dental office. So it's the same philosophy of how do I become the Amazon or the enterprise rental car of dental offices in my community? So what I encourage entrepreneurs to do is to look at other industries or look at other companies and think, okay, if Amazon bought my company, how would they run it differently than I? If Steve Jobs came back and decided he wanted to run my business instead of Apple, what would he do differently than what I'm doing in this business? And it's a great technique to help you spur your creativity. Because unlike writing a movie or writing a song, as entrepreneurs, we only need one thing. We only need one creative idea that can separate us from the package.

Good. I did a interview with a friend of mine named Dustin Matthews not long ago, and he calls that the car crash moment. Or in media, it's sort of like, what's the hook and what I'm looking for? For example, one of the guys I work with, his name's Justin Donald. This is an unbelievably wild thing. So his backstory is he went from being about a millionaire to being worth $10 million in 21 months. His next 10 million a few years after that, and his third not long after. And he has a very unique way of investing and thinking about money. And in listening to him, we ended up crafting the 10 commandments of lifestyle investing. Because his unique story, what we realized, and we ended up trademarking Lifestyle Investor and Lifestyle Investing and buying the domain, believe it or not, which is hard to believe it even existed. But then the subtitle to his book, which became the Hook, is the Ten Commandments of Cash Flow Investing for Passive Income and Financial Freedom, which are all little phrases. They're deliverables outcomes and benefits. So my question for you then is if you were going to, from a creative perspective, you have some phrases that caused that creative avalanche to occur. Do you have any other stories, examples or questions you asked that caused that moment to be like aha, or some way of extracting that from a real customer, a paying customer?

It gets back to what I was mentioning earlier about derivative but different. You know, for example, George Lucas talks about Star wars is really a western in outer space. It's saying, what if I move this format into a different type of story? When we think about a lot of what we think of being pioneering movies, really, they're not. Michael Mann is a producer that went into Brandon Tartikoff, who was then the CEO of NBC, and he had a three by five note card and he just handed it. Rather than make a pitch, he just handed the note card to Brandon Tartikoff and it said MTV Cops.

And he purchased it immediately. And that is how the show Miami Vice came to be. Miami Vice, if you look at the scripts, was a very standard cop show. But they took that and put that in a new format. How MTV was shooting music videos and the colors and everything at that time. And it became one of the most successful shows in history. So we can do the same thing in our respective businesses. What if this idea in this other industry that seems so unrelated to what we do, what if we brought that into our businesses? St. Elmo's Steakhouse in Indianapolis, by the way, has higher revenue than Tavern on the Green in New York city. There are 12 other steakhouses within eight blocks and none of them are close to combined. They probably don't have the revenue of that one steakhouse. How did they do that? Well, he got creative in the fact that has the best shrimp cocktail on the planet. Indianapolis for shrimp cocktail, they are now selling their shrimp cocktail sauce through Costco and others. They found what my friend Jay Baer calls talk triggers. It got creative in a way. How do we become more referable? And you hit on this. It's finding something too that's unexpected. It's that unexpected combination. Fun Financial Services Shrimp cocktail sauce Indianapolis. You know, the things that aren't expected are the things that grab us and maintain our attention. And we gravitate towards them because we want to know more.

All right, so I just had a big aha and I got the hook listening to you right now. I have the hook for this show, this episode we're doing right now. You ready?

I'm ready.

Okay, I have to preface this with A little mini story first, which was something I did, a video not long ago. I called it the one word offer, two word brand. And what you just did is you had a two word offer, one a three by five card close, which is MTV Cops, C, O, P S. At first I thought I heard Cox as in the cable company. I was confused until I heard the rest of this. So MTV Cops equals Miami Vice. So that is the offer is. It's two words on a 3 by 5 card that closed one of the most recognizable TV shows of all time. And that's actually how I'm gonna open this session with you today. Because while you were talking, I was actually writing the int intro for this podcast based upon what you were saying. So that's the hook. And I think from a creative perspective, that alone is an opening story that can get the creative juices rolling. At least it would for me. And I'm imagining going through this process with a client right now. So thank you for that. That was a great gift. Well done, sir. So let's get into what is word number three in the process?

Yeah, the third one, it encompasses everything that you've been talking about. Mike, you do this so well. It's communication. And you know, part of what I talk with entrepreneurs about and part of what they ask of me is we have more generations in the workforce than ever before. One thing that it seems like every entrepreneur has in common is where do we get good people? And then how do we get those good people to make connections with our customers? And the one thing that unites every generation, despite their communication differences, is we love narrative. Right? I mean, we're story junkies. When I'm giving a speech, I'll stand in front of the audience and I'll say, how many of us here have a Netflix subscription? Well, every hand, you know, in the audience goes up and I say, so you know what I mean when I say, it's 11 o', clock, we can watch one more, right? Or 2am Hell, we might as well see how this thing ends, right? I mean, so we get so engaged in story that we're story junkies. Yet one of the things that I've discovered is we tend to run from our own uniqueness. We love the stories about how these other organizations have started, but very seldom do we really craft and polish and execute our own story so that it creates the audience response from our customers and our employees that we have of a movie or a television show that we watch.

Awesome, awesome. So you want to hear the intro based on Just what you were saying right now. Yeah, here it is. Here's the pitch. This is how we're going to open up our program today. And just for anyone who's listening to this, what I like to do is whenever I record a podcast, I'm always looking for what's the hook, what's the attention grabber, what's going to get the most attention, and also what's going to work on social media and the video. Because today we're recording the podcast, the audio, we're doing the video, and then this all gets edited together and blasted out along with little chunks to get people to subscribe to the podcast. That's my goal. And full disclosure, Scott, I have found that if someone listens to two episodes of my podcast, they come to me and they're ready to work with me. Podcasting right now is one of the best ways to share a message. And so I'm going to just get into it. Here's what it is. We can work on this a little together. And then, oh, by the way, I'm also transcribing this in real time using the app Otter O T T E R. And I always look at what's being said in case my brain or my ears miss something, because sometimes we project what we think on top of someone else's words. So here it is. Two words, one three by five card that pitched and closed one of the most recognizable TV shows from the 1980s in seconds. So what's the fastest way to stand out? Be distinctive, get attention, and be referable in six seconds or less? I'm here today with Scott McCain. You might recognize him from playing the villain in a Werner Herzog film that Roger Ebert called one of the 50 great movies in cinema history, to being booked to speak by Arnold Schwarzenegger for an event on the White House lawn with the president in the audience. Scott is the ultimate customer experience and distinction expert, and he's developed a system and a process for standing out, getting attention, being a category of one, and being referable and recognizable. So I don't know how long that was. Less than a minute. What do you think of that? Anything that I should add?

I got to get the transcript of that so I can put it on my website. I can't get anybody to write that. Well, that's great.

Good. Well, here's what we'll do is I'm motivated enough that we're going to convert one of the things that I'm working with someone, and I take an interview and turn it into an Article and publish it in Forbes magazine. Entrepreneur. And my goal is always to create that category of one as well. So that's why now I really know why JJ wanted us to meet. And it's so great to be able to collaborate. This is our, like our mini free zone frontier in real time. I love it. So here we are. We've got clarity, creativity, communication. But before I move on, is there anything that stands out? And by the way, what was the name of the movie that you played in the Werner Herzog film?

The name of Strosik, S T R O S Z K, which is the last name of the main character of the movie. It's about German immigrants that come to the United States thinking that the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you know, they'll just soak up, you know, the milk and honey and. And realize you got to work for anything that you get. I play the young and at the time I was the young banker that repossesses their mobile home. The allegory is that he's beaten up physically in Germany and then he comes here and he says, you know, they did it with a smile over here. You know, they didn't have to beat me up to destroy me. Got it. Got is a foreign film. There's no doubt about that. But you know, Herzog then, it's really been cool. Before he passed away. Roger Ebert has a film festival at the University of Illinois every year. Before he passed, his last wish was to show Strosik to the audience with Herzog there. And he was. And have me surprise him. And it was one of the great. Mike. It was one of the great moments of my life because, you know, Herzog is in Mandalorian, which is the hottest thing on.

Right on.

No, I'm just such an iconic figure. And when I walked out, he burst into tears. He is a wonderful, wonderful man.

That's an awesome story. This is another story for another time. But I actually produced a feature film years ago and went through that whole routine. So I spent most of my of my life behind the camera before I got in front of the camera. And that's great that you've had that background, that experience. Congrats. It's awesome. So I looked it up while you were chatting and I'm definitely going to watch it.

One of the interesting things was that Herzog offered me a role in another film, but unfortunately one of the cast members got sick and it was kind of a mess. So he ended up making it a German language film rather than English language film. But, you know, the funny thing was, I hated acting. I hated every moment of it. It's because I'm too entrepreneurial, right? As an actor, somebody tells you what to say, and the director tells you you're going to say it over and over until you say it the way I want you to say it. And everything was so hit your mark, regimented. And I'm too much of an entrepreneur. I wanted my hands on the wheel, so I'm so honored I got a chance to be a part of it. But I'm really happy with the way things turned out now.

It's one of those things. I think many of us have a story in our head, at least me. And I would imagine, like you, if you come from a small town, never touch Hollywood. Out in California here you go to LA and you see actors, actresses all over the place. And it's normal. Where we grew up, at least for me, I grew up where there was never anything going on in the little dinky town I grew up in. And Hollywood seems so far away. And the thought of meeting an actor and actress seemed like, you know, meeting the Queen of England. And I always had these pictures of every actor and actress is rich and famous and never has to work again as long as they live, only to find out, well, that isn't exactly the case. You know, the first time I spent some time with Richard Dreyfuss.

Oh, wow.

And he actually lives not too far from me. I met him on a plane. We spent a bunch of time together. He came to my studio, I worked with him and consulted with him for a little while. And I was interviewing him, and he said, let me tell you, there's one big distinction between being an actor and a movie star. And he goes, I'm an actor. I'm not paid like a movie star. Movie stars get millions and millions of dollars. We get rate. And so for as long as he's been in the industry now, he's more of a movie star than he lets on. But, you know, he doesn't have hundreds of millions of dollars hanging around. You know, it's a tough business. And the reason I got out of making movies so I had a business, made some money, made a film, was because I had to control distribution. I realized that I was just a pawn in a game and taking all the risk because I was an investor and a producer. This was a labor of love. My business partner and I had written seven screenplays and chosen one to make, raised a million bucks. The best way to make a little bit of Money in movies is by starting out with a lot of money.

That's so cool that we have that. My first book was titled All Business is Show Business and that came out 20 years ago.

I saw that title, man, it so resonates. When did it come out?

22 years ago. And nobody was talking about it back then, but what happened was it made local news in the Louisville, my hometown is on the Indiana side at 30 miles north Louisville. And they had me on TV when the Herzog movie was happening. Well, the news director saw my interview and said, hey, why don't you go see a movie and review it for, for us? Well, it ended up. I ended up getting syndicated to 80 TV stations. So every weekend I would fly to New York or LA to do a junket. Right, where you see the movie and then you interview the stars and all that. And one of the things that struck me, and I know this is another thing you and I have in common, was that I saw things about show business and how it made a compelling connection with the audience. And I thought every business needs that, you know, I mean every business needs that. Wouldn't you love to have a business that had the emotional connectivity that a hit movie or a hit television show does? I mean, how many hours have we spent watching Ozark for example, and we still want to see what happens next. What business wouldn't want that? We talk about and refer, oh, you've got to see this movie or you've got to see this show. A dry cleaners would love to have that. A car dealership would love. A financial advisor would love to have somebody referring their practice with as much passion as you refer a great movie. So that's the foundation of everything that I do is looking at what does it take to create that type of compelling engagement with our customers and with our teams at our respective businesses.

I'll give you a big write on for that. So you know, when I listen to you again, think about this. This is something that the. Let's see what came to mind here. Oh, okay. So number one, before you're given the opportunity to do what you do, that you get paid for, you got to be great at one thing first and that's getting attention. And by the way, the quote I was looking for earlier that I use and I got this from some Microsoft data is the average attention span of a human being has gone from 12 seconds to 8 seconds and a goldfish has a 9 second attention span. And I opened up everything from that. And that was the whole point is you Know, what kind of business are you in? I opened up with that question. I always ask the audience, what business are you in? I ask people to shout it out. They'll say, I'm a dentist, I protect teeth, I'm a doctor, whatever it is. And they talk about the outcome or what they do and sort of like, no, you're in the attention business first and foremost. And so again, I deeply, deeply resonate with that. The fact that you had that 22 years ago just goes to show that you were living in a time machine. But let's get to the final. So we got clarity, creativity, communication, and finally, customer experience.

Focus. And it dovetails with everything we're talking about, right? It is a focus on what does it feel like, what is the experience? There are three levels of interaction that every entrepreneur has with customers. And level one is processing. It's the non negotiables. Harvard said only 16% of businesses even have the list of what are the non negotiable? What do we have to get right every single time for customers? As a customer of your business, I have a right to expect you're going to deliver what you said you were going to deliver when you said you were going to deliver it. What else is it, right? If I'm on an airplane, I have a right to expect. It's going to be safe, it's going to be clean, all of those kinds of things. Okay, so that's level one. That's table stakes. You have to deliver that. Level two is service. Those are the activities that we undertake to make processing more palatable, more friendly. It's smiling, it's being nice, it's referring to the customer by name. But the highest level is the experience. And the experience adds the elements of personalization and emotion. So you're not just fixing a car, you're repairing my baby. Right? You're not just cleaning clothes, you're making me look professional. Those are things that go so far into making us referable. Because loyalty is only generated by emotion. Why would I be loyal to something towards which I have no feeling? It's when we create that emotional connectivity that we have an experience as a customer. And that experience is what we want to repeat and refer. But yet you were talking about financial advisors and dentists. I did a convention of cosmetic surgeons and I found out that most of those surgeons had done their undergraduate work, their internship, the residency, became a surgeon, and had never taken a course on bedside manner. You can get an MBA and graduate with an MBA and not have a single course on the customer experience and how that generates repeat and referral business. So we've been educated on the technical aspects of what we do, but not on the emotional aspects that would make us successful.

Awesome. So I took a lot of notes there about the non negotiables. So you're going to deliver what you said you're going to deliver when you say you're going to deliver it. And that, of course, is the first place of friction, and then the service, which is the second place in friction. But the third, the experience, that is a lot mushier and harder to quantify for virtually every organization. And it requires an enormous amount of nuance, especially in today's age of misinformation, cynicism at its worst. Plus the misinterpretation of an old conversation that may have been funny five years ago, and the fact that we live in a cancel culture era where who knows what kind of icky stuff someone can dig up on you. It's guaranteed, especially if you've been in business for a while. So I'd be curious, you know, what are some of the things that you're finding are working best now, from a best practice point of view, if we were going to create a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 things that stand out that you either talk about, demonstrate, use, or see from maybe the last few engagements you've had.

Yeah, Mike, I think we have to understand that customers only evaluate us on two variables, promise and performance. What does the customer perceive that we have promised them, and then how congruent is our performance based on their perception of the promise? And what we often see is in business, we've got one group making the promise and another group responsible for delivering the performance. And those don't get together. And because of that, we create friction and dissatisfaction and bad experiences and all of those things that create dissatisfaction. And today's customer, as you point out, has a megaphone they've never had Historically in business, if I don't like the food at your restaurant, it used to be that I would complain to the manager and I'd tell a few friends, you know, now I go on Yelp. I had a bad experience at a restaurant here in Vegas. I look, there's been over 4,000 people see the review. I had another bad experience at a restaurant before the pandemic hit. And I'm sitting at the bar writing my Yelp review. And before I left the restaurant, there had already been over 100 views. So customers today can spread good news and bad news more rapidly than ever before. And what we have to make certain of is that our performance is congruent with the promise.

Right on. Back to performance. Being an entertainer, being in show business, that deeply resonates with me.

As you know, Mike, I mean, you couldn't advertise, hey, you know, Keanu Reeves is in this movie. And no, it's a guy from Missouri that has the same name. It's not the kind of. I mean, you can't do that. The audience feels swindled. Here's another thing. Reminds me, because of where you're based, Mike is the University of San Diego did a really interesting study and it said that under promise, over deliver eventually causes us to be perceived as manipulative when we consistently under promise and over deliver to make ourselves look like a hero. Customers are smart today and we're perceived as being manipulated. Now, please don't misunderstand. We can do the extras that knock out our customers, but we shouldn't promise it on the front end. Hey, I'm going to, you know, give you a spiff because you're my customer. And then you give it and then you wonder why it didn't have traction. So what we have to do is just be congruent. We did a study of over a thousand customers. Ask them what they want. More than anything, you know what they want. They want you to do what you said you would do when you said you would do it. And it's sad in a way that that makes us a category of one, to use your language. But in today's world as entrepreneurs, we've really got to focus on what are we promising and how are we delivering it. Because if we don't do that, we can never deliver the ultimate customer experience.

Very, very powerful. Again, can't agree with you more. Really good stuff. So let's move on to wrap this up. First of all, I'm going to just tell people a little bit about you. You can check out Scott's website. It's at Scott McCain. That's McKin.com. he does have some amazing books. I've got to dig into them deeply. But there's Iconic. That's your most recent. There's Create Distinction. There's seven tenets of Taxi Terry, which looks like a story. Digging wells and building fences is another. And then all business is still show business. So you must have the follow up and what customers really want.

The taxidery story. It's kind of cool. I had a ride with a cab driver in Jacksonville, Florida, and I started telling the story and somebody put it on YouTube, they put the video of me. They were in the audience, you know, so it's kind of a shaky, bad video. And I got a call from McGraw Hill saying, would you write a book about it? It's kind of become the signature story that I talk about about this cab driver that now is, you know, distinctive and a category of one. And that's how he fights Uber and Lyft. And that is that distinctive experience that creates repeat and referral business providing solutions, not just selling rides. It's everything an entrepreneur really needs to be in today's marketplace.

Right? And this is some of the language that I've picked up as I studied your website. You have a great hero philosophy. And I shared with you one of Dan's books, which is who do youo Want to Be a Hero To? This is one of the opening conversations I have with everyone I work with. And you also have a podcast project, Distinct, which I see you've got episode 484. A lot of episodes, but they're snackable. They're seven, eight, ten minutes long in general. So I want everyone to know about that as well. And it's up to date. So anything else that you want to leave our audience with today, Scott, before we bring this big mothership home?

You know, Mike, you were so kind to mention the corporate clients that I've worked with, but I don't think there's anything more important than working with an entrepreneur. I know that sounds like what you'd expect me to say on something like this, but as I related to you as we were chatting, you know, the fact that my parents were entrepreneurs and they fought big competition and in fact ended up divorced a few years later because of all of the stresses and challenges and everything that you see all the time. And, gosh, if the work that I can do, and I know the work that you are doing, can help create that free time that you've talked about and that independence and the distinction that makes them exceptional. To me, that's just the greatest calling we can have. So I'm honored that you would have me be a part of this today. And I'm really, really grateful to you and to your audience for the chance to share these concepts.

No, it's my pleasure. It really is. So I think what I'll ask is again, check out Scott McCain. That's with an mckin.com. check out his podcast and books. And then what I'll leave for you as a listener is if you've enjoyed this episode, think of one or two people who could benefit from what Scott and I talked about and shared today and. And share this podcast with them. Just send a link over to them. And also every comment, every rating you provide brings more people to us, and that's the way we grow, is organically. So if you would, please head over to capabilityamplifier.com, click on the Apple podcast link, leave a rating and a review that goes a long way. I read every single one of them. It's very meaningful. And you can also send an audio message to Dan Sullivan and myself. We listen to all of them. That's right. On the website.

And.

And I'll respond personally to you as well. So if you've got an idea for a show, concept or idea, a challenge that you want solved, that's what we're here for. And so, Scott, you're awesome. I appreciate you very much, and I can't wait to spend some more time masterminding with you and coming up with some creative ways to work together in some way, shape or form as well.

Mike, that would be so exciting. I have followed you for a while, and the chance to connect is really exciting. Exceptional. Thanks again to JJ for making it happen and thank you. I'm excited about it and I look forward to it. Thank you.

Rock and roll. We love jj. Virgin. I love you, jj. All right, thanks.