How To Interview Founders & CEOs (Ghostwriting Secrets)

All right. I did a little soft intro of Katrina earlier. Again, I think she was employee number two. Two or three? I think it was two. When I was building Digital Press was a monumental hire. I'll give you a quick little story to demonstrate the importance of this. We onboarded Katrina, and we were like, here's all the clients that we're working with. You're probably working with, like, I don't know, 10 at the time or something.

A dozen or so.

And I was like, here's what we do. We get on the phone, we record the calls, we take the transcripts, we write the pieces. And she was like, cool. Where do you store all of this stuff? We were like, we don't. She was like, so where can I find the transcripts? We're like, they should be in this software called Rev. This was back in the day before we had AI tools, this company. You would take the sound recording, and then they would send it overseas, and someone would sit there and transcribe it and then send you back the transcription. So. So we've come a long way. And she's like, where can I find the previous articles? I'm like, well, just poke around online like they're somewhere online. We literally didn't have anything organized. So she came in the, what, first week, first month.

Oh, you guys were using Word docs. You were emailing iterations of V1, V2, V4, V10. Final, final one.

That sounds right.

So we transitioned everything to Google. We set up a trello. I organized everything. It was. I mean, for all of you who know Cole, he's not the operations organization's mastermind, but it was great. And I think it helped us build the team and get everybody organized so we could. I mean, what did we. Where were at the end, 20 people or so?

Yeah, I think we peaked at 23 people.

Yeah, 23 people.

Like, 80 or 100 clients at a time. And, yeah, it was. The metric I like sharing is that there was a point where we were producing more articles each month than Forbes and Inc. Magazine. And we did the math on it, and we knew, and we were trying to strike partnerships with all of them to be like, hey, we have all of these CEOs that are writing articles like, do you want them? And all of them said, we don't take ghostwritten articles. So then we, like, created Alien. I don't think I've ever shared this story.

I don't know. I don't think.

Then we created aliases, and Drew made up a fictional person and then started like, saying, I don't know. Like, I represent these executives, and they write these articles. Would you like them? And the same contact person was like, we would love the content. And Drew played this up for, like, a year, and they took so many of our pieces that the person at the publication was like, I've loved building. This is to the alias. They're like, I've loved building the relationship with you. Are you free for a call this week? Just so we could get to know each other? And the alias was a female, and my co founder is a male, and he was like, I can't get on the phone. They're gonna. They're gonna know. So for, like, months, he just kept being like, I'm so sorry you just missed me. I'm about to get on vacation. Like this. We. We did some serious shit to get.

But then we built our own publication, so it didn't matter.

Yeah. So that was. That was a whole chapter. The reason I wanted to dig into this is because talking to clients is such a skill in and of itself. Matthew, we had this conversation, like, intimately before you were about to hire someone. And the fear. There's like a fear when you start working with clients, and then you go, I'm gonna pass this along to someone else. And you almost have this belief that no one could possibly talk to clients as well as you. You're, like, the only person in the world that could do it, and they won't trust anyone else. And I had that same belief. And then I hired Katrina, and, like, in two weeks, I realized that she was way better at it than me. And that's ultimately the goal. I think, like, two things to look out for is, one, you want the person that you're hiring to be better at the thing than you are. And two is you want them to take some sort of accountability and ownership. Like, they come in and they go, you don't have any of this stuff set up. I just went ahead and set it up. Like, we didn't ask you to do that. You just didn't because that's what needed to be done. And so for everyone here, as you're looking to work with more people, those are two things that I always look for in the people that we hire and that we work with. So maybe to start with some fun stuff, who is the most difficult client?

Oh, I didn't have many difficult clients, to be fair.

Yeah, we gave you all the good ones.

So there is something to be said here about choosing your clients well, and this is something that I've learned from you and Drew because you guys had a pretty amazing roster of clients. But then when I went out on my own afterwards and started working with more clients and doing my own consulting and contracting. If you do not have good clients, they will always be difficult. And so really vetting the people that you work with, really making sure that you're aligned on the process, expectations, boundaries, all of these things are going to make it so much easier that hopefully you don't really have many difficult clients. So that's the pre step. Right. But if you do find yourself with a difficult client, there's a couple things that you can do. And I think the biggest thing here is why are they difficult? Right. What's the problem? That they're like, why are they giving you issues? And there's a couple reasons. So one story is there was this guy. I will call him Ron. He was your typical tech CEO, Silicon Valley guy. Probably drove a sports car. No offense to Don Juju. Yeah, sorry. No offense, but he was just one of those, like, very dominant personalities. He had had a couple of exits from companies, so he was pretty prolific. And he was originally working with you and Drew. He was handed off to me, and we just did not get along. And there are reasons why I can say that that's true. But he basically, he would miss calls. He wouldn't show up when he got on a call, he would rant for 20 minutes and talk about whatever issue he was having that day. It would take me a long time. Like, it was very difficult for me to interrupt him and interject. And eventually it came to a point where he made a comment about, I travel a ton. I've been traveling and working remotely since 2015. And he made a comment about, like, how I can afford travel and working remotely on a call. And I was like, all right, this is the end of this relationship, essentially. And I just realized he was an unhappy person. He was a. But it's. It's just one of those things, like, you can try to set boundaries with people. You can try to set expectations. They will probably do good work for them. But if you. If you're struggling the entire time, you're going to have difficulty having really good content. You're not going to build a great relationship with them, and everybody is going to be frustrated.

Yeah, something too. Just to give everyone here permission.

He's got a question, too.

Oh, I was going to follow up. What are some signs to look out for when you're doing that initial interview? Sales pitch.

Yeah, the red flags.

Yeah, red Flags. It's going to depend on every single person. Right. Because everybody has different personalities. And maybe something like that I can put up with, you can't put up with, and something you can put up with. You did great with this guy. I didn't do great with this guy. And so sometimes it's a personality match. So, like, are they domineering the conversation? Are they really quiet? You know, do they seem like they respect your process and trust you to a certain degree, or are they questioning everything that you're saying to them when you're trying to speak to them about what your pitch. I've had people ask me my age before and how old I am and how much experience I have, even though they were the one who reached out to me. And so it's just little, little things that maybe they tried to, like, undermine you or test your mettle a little bit. Because if you're attracting the right people, they should come into the call respecting you, at least respecting what they think that you can do for them and hear you out. So if they're nitpicking a little bit or if they're. They seem like they know exactly what you need to do for them, that's. Those are some red flags.

Yeah. What I was going to say, too, is just to give everyone here permission. We did this when we were building the agency, and honestly, we do the same thing in pga. It's just a very much zero tolerance policy. Like, we would have a couple really difficult clients and like, I would hear either from you or from another account manager that the client just over and over again, like, it's one thing to be difficult and difficult to manage, and it's another to just be like, you're impossible to work with or you just. Now you're starting to say things that are rude. And we just always had a zero tolerance policy. Just like whatever was in your best interest and other people's best interest. Like, we fired clients all the time. And I think I noticed that people have a lot of fear of doing that when really you should think of that as, you know your business is the most precious thing, you want to protect it. And especially as you hire other people, you want to protect them. You don't want them to just sit on calls with people that are saying things that are inappropriate or something like that.

Yeah. And part of that, which what you all were really good at at Digital Press, and what I've seen work really well for people is you set boundaries and expectations both for your team and for your clients. So When I came into digital press, I think for the first two weeks, I joined calls with you. I saw how you communicated with people. I saw how you followed up. You were literally on, I remember a call with Sam and you were on the call with me. And if I was fumbling a little bit, Cole would step in and help me out. And he just. You really set the expectation for how you behave on the team and as part of the team and how you communicate with clients and then also what those clients should expect from you. Right. You're gonna see an email from me 24 hours before our call with a list of topics and questions we're gonna cover. I'm gonna have the piece back to you in X amount of days. Right. Like, if I don't have it back to you in X amount of days, like, I'm gonna be following up as to the reasons why I'll be asking you questions. Like, just very. And part of the thing I really wanna talk about today is just proactivity, because that is, you talked about it a little bit in your. How, like, you're very proactive in trying to find the next offer for people. And if you're very proactive in your conversations, setting boundaries, setting expectations, hopefully you won't have bad clients and they'll know right from the start, like, okay, I'm going to respect you, you're going to respect me. It's a mutual relationship.

Yeah. I would say for everyone here who struggles with churn or retention, the vast majority of the time it has nothing to do with the result and everything to do with what you. If you are proactively communicating things, the client will trust you and the client will tolerate a lot because they. Ultimately, the thing that the person values the most is feeling like they have someone in their corner. You hire people that you want to work with. You hire people that you want to spend time with. You know, and so if the only time that you're hearing from the agency that you hired is like, oh, we did this thing, and you're not communicating anything else, like, they don't see you as a friend, they don't see you as a collaborator.

Yeah. And that's. If you all get anything from this. Today is everybody here is a ghostwriter writer working for a pga. And it takes so much more than just writing really good content or really good AI prompts, because you're great at those. But really it's about building relationships with people. And if you want great content, if you want great personal stories, if you don't want People to ghost you on calls. If you want to have good rapport with them and get really great stories, you have to be proactive and you have to build relationships with them. And I think a lot of people overlook that because they're so focused on, like, writing the best social post or writing the best email sequence, and they miss the personal part of the relationship. Like, I think Neil's. One time, when we were. Niels works with our company and has been creating some email sequences for us. And there was one time we were on a call, you were giving me an update. We had to. There was. We were troubleshooting something, I think, and you were like, oh, I'm in Norway. And, like, check out this view today. And he flipped over his laptop, and it was like, this gorgeous lake scene. And I said, okay. One, I'm, like, very jealous that you're there. Two, I now know that you're on vacation, and I shouldn't expect a ton from you for the next week. But, like, that's awesome. And we talked about traveling, and so it's just the little things like, that can go a long way.

Yeah. What are some of the other things that you did just to make people feel more comfortable or make them feel like you were friends?

Yeah.

Peace. I just want to talk about it and that, like, you talk about retention, that. That is the ultimate. And you. There's no, like, secret to doing that. Like, the secret is you just are genuinely interested, even if they aren't asking you questions back. I think that that was a really great point. I've ghostwritten for so many people who, like, don't know a single thing about me, but that's okay, you know? Yeah.

Yeah. So one of the things that we do on sales calls is we say pros to you. It's typically one of the first times they've ever even heard that in their life. Right. So if you just give someone a compliment or say proud, it'll just go so much further than you think. And even if you ask someone, like, what are your goals for the next six months? It's like, oh, that's a great question. No one's asking that. Right. So just simply asking those questions and getting someone to open up will do far more than the best pitch in the world. Like, getting to know that person.

Yeah. Ghostwriting is very much a exercise in selflessness, you know, like, the. You are a better and better ghostwriter. The less you need to make yourself part of it or make yourself the center of attention, you know? And I honestly feel like that was the reason why we attracted so many high profile clients. Like, it might sound really official, like what we did, and it couldn't have been further from the truth. It was a fucking disaster, like every day, you know, and like in hindsight it's like, oh, so official. We built this agency, we had all these high profile clients. Like, I was 27 years old. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything. But I feel like the one thing that both me and my co founder did really, really well is when we would get on the phone with someone, especially on a sales call, we would ask questions because we were genuinely interested. Like, we weren't actually trying to convince anyone of anything. I was like, I'm on the phone with this guy who built a billion dollar company, like, tell me everything I want to know. And because we oozed curiosity, they were like, well, this kid's crazy. But sure, like, I'm game to just tell you everything because you're just gonna listen and turn it into content. And I feel like that's the superpower.

Yeah, absolutely. And you also have to realize sometimes, depending on the people that you all are working with, I'm assuming they're business owners or they want to have, they want to become a thought leader is what seems mundane to them or that they've said it a million times. Could be really interesting to you because you've never heard it before. And it could be really interesting to other people. So I would have clients, I would ask them a question like, oh, what are some of the challenges you're having in your business, your industry right now? And they would kind of give me some of the basic answers. You dig a little bit deeper, then they start to get into things that they're like. We had one client who was the CEO of a biotech and they were developing new drugs and he started getting into a little bit of the complexity of like how you develop drugs in clinical trials? And it turned into an amazing piece, I think that we, that we wrote about it. But for him it was such. He'd said it 50, 100, 200 times. But for me, I was so interested and fascinated that it was a fresh perspective on something that he's talked about so often. So if you find it interesting and you find it fascinating and they say it and you're like, oh, that's kind of. That could be like a cool piece. It probably could be a cool piece. So dig into it a little bit.

Yeah. Your content strategy is basically, what are all the things you want to know sometimes.

It depends. It depends. And it can be a little tricky with clients who are in industries. I had, we had a couple clients who were in blockchain, and I didn't know anything about blockchain before I started at Digital Press. And so there will be topics and there will be industries that are trickier to deal with than others. You just have to find the piece that you just have to, like, follow your curiosity and try to always keep an open mind and ask deep questions, like the goals. Tristan, that was a really good one. Ask them about their goals. That's like a future looking one. You can ask them about their challenges. You can ask them like, if you had a magic wand and you could change things and everything would be different six months from now in your business, what would that be? You can ask them about something that they've achieved recently, like, what's the success you've had and how did you go about achieving it? And that people are usually happy to talk about things that they did well. So that's another way to open people up a little bit. And then once they get to know you, you can start diving a little bit deeper.

Yeah. One of my favorite questions was always, what do you feel like everyone else gets wrong about your industry? And the answers you would get, I mean, some people would, you know, you wouldn't get very much. And other people would go into a 45 minute rant about how nobody understands XYZ. And it was just awesome. Like, and the best is when you would get someone that was. That would rant so hard that they would at the end go, okay, can you send me that? Because, like, I need to bleep out like half of the things that I just said, you know, but, like, that's how much you want them to open up to you. What else? Like, how do you dig with someone who doesn't give you very much?

Yeah, yeah. So you have to figure out. So there's kind of two different ways. So they're not giving you much because they're not showing up to calls. Right. That's one issue. Or maybe they're like skipping out on you and you have to try to pull that information just to like get them to talk to you. Or maybe you're on the phone with them and they're just not giving you a lot of information. So we'll cover the first one and we'll cover it in two parts. So the first thing is, if you're having people not showing up to calls with you, you kind of have to look at yourself first and say, like, am I setting expectations and am I setting boundaries? Do they know how to get on the call? Did I send them the reminder email? Are they prepared to come and talk to me and answer my questions? What are the things that potentially could be roadblocking them from getting on the call in the first place? And if you've done that all, if you've done that well, which I'm assuming that all of you do because you're part of Cole and Dickey's course, is why aren't they on the call? Do they think that you don't need them? Are they super busy? Would they rather have their answers in a voice message versus getting on a call with you? Do they want to write it out? Some people are really good at talking on the phone and some people are really good at writing their thoughts out. So maybe they don't want to do a call. Maybe they would rather send you an 800 word piece on the topic. So, I mean, maybe not because they're hiring you, but there's different ways. We have people send notes all the time. I had people send me voice messages all the time and I would just transcribe them. Like, I had people who they were like, hey, I'm traveling, but I can type out my answers on the plane. So you just have to be a little bit flexible for, like, why aren't they showing up? And how can you start to be proactive and try to solve that before they miss three calls? And all of a sudden they're like, I don't think this is worth it anymore. So we're done real quick.

One big objection that people had all the time was was they wouldn't jump on the call and they wouldn't admit it right away. You sort of had to dig. But the root result of why they wouldn't get on the call is they thought, well, I hadn't thought about anything this week, so I don't have anything to say. And so they would just skip the call. And so you have to slow down and go, okay, so how do we solve that? And I remember when we started seeing that, we immediately just made it the default that every account manager would send like two or three topics and some high level bullets before the call. So it's like, hey, even if you think there's nothing to think and talk about, we already did the work. We already did the thinking. Here are some topics, you know, so every time the client doesn't do something, you have to take accountability for it and be proactive. And go, how do I serve it up to them? On a silver platter.

Yeah. And just remove as much friction as possible. Right. If someone's. If you want someone to get on a call with you or book a call with you, like, send him a calendly link, make it super easy. Like, I work with someone right now who is not tech savvy. And every single time we get on the zoom, I have to get on a zoom with him. I have to send him the zoom link to his email five minutes before the call. And obviously you try to avoid some of these roadblocks, but some people just need something a little bit different. So remove the friction and be proactive about what that person specifically needs.

What if. So a very different problem, which I remember so intimately, is like, you would get on the phone with someone, you'd be like, all right, so what's your framework for whatever problem building this thing? Like, you're say you're working with a SaaS entrepreneur and you're like, how do you think about making customers happy? How do you think about onboarding? And they would be like, well, you know, I mean, the first thing is like, you just gotta really care. You gotta really care about the customer. I'm like, okay, what else? Step two, like, you gotta give them something they love. And like, they're not giving you anything. Right. And so what do you do in that situation?

Yeah, there's two reasons that this can happen, I think so. One reason is they want to be a thought leader and they hired you to help them with that. And they do not have thought leadership thoughts. Like, as horrible as that is to say, I have worked with a handful of people who are. They will repeat things that they hear. They want to take a case study or a white paper or somebody else's LinkedIn posts, and they want that for themselves and they want you to copy that and replicate it for them. And they have a really hard time coming up with their own ideas. Those are the people to avoid if you can, because they will always be looking to you to come to ideas for them. Like, you need to do the thinking for them, essentially, in a lot of ways. And you have to have really good prompting to try to get them to say something different. Sometimes you can get there and sometimes you really can't. So, like, for example, let's say this person is like, oh, yeah, you need to care and you need to have something they love. Right? I'd be like, all right, what does it look like to you to care? What does it mean? To care about a customer, and then they will give an answer, right? Well, it means that you solve their problem. Okay. Like, what problem do you think that they have that you're solving? So you just have to try to peel back the layers and go a little bit deeper so they're not just giving you, like, one or two word answers and get to something. Like, sometimes that'll be enough to get people talking to you, and sometimes they just, you know, you're talking to a brick wall, and those are the. Those are the red flags. Sometimes people just aren't comfortable opening up to you yet. So if you're doing, like, a more. You're trying to get more, like, intimate topics, or you're trying to talk about, like, the leadership lessons that they've learned from their kids, or you're trying to talk about, like, a personal challenge. Maybe they just don't feel comfortable sharing that with you yet. So you have to try to, like, warm them up and get to know them a little bit better first. But the big thing is just try to dive deeper and be curious and give them something to react to. To. That's another thing. So if they're like, you already have ideas, you already have topics, you already have questions, and if you hand that to them and you're like, do you like this idea? Here's a list of 15 ideas. Which one do you want to talk about today? Here's the top three that I think, which one are you most interested in? And they'll be like, oh, I want number three. You're like, great. So they wouldn't even be interested in talking about number one or two. So avoid those at all costs. Try to get, like, give them something to react to and talk about what they're interested in. Because it's really hard to pull information out of people if they don't want to talk about something that day.

Yeah, I've been really obsessed recently with this idea. Has anyone here heard Hormozi talk about, like, unbundling terms? Like unbundling words? Like, what does it mean to be confident? That is a bundled term, and you don't really understand what that means until you start unbundling that term. And I feel like so much of extracting content is helping people unbundle the words that they use. And what took me and us and everyone in our company a long time to understand is that thought leadership is a skill. It is a skill to be able to articulate your perspective in the world. And I think a lot of times, if you're the Writer, you think if I just get on the call with this person, they're just going to say smart shit. And some do. Like, some you get on the call and you're like, every bar of that was fire. Like, I am going to use every single thing you said. And other people, you have to dig. And I started to reframe that as the calls are really them showing up to the gym, you know, you are training them to build that muscle and that we saw clients fall in love with that. Like, Heidi was a great example of that. Praveen was a great example. Like, they started to fall. Fall in love with getting on the phone and going, ask me questions like, I haven't thought of. I haven't articulated my thinking. And that's. If you approach it that way and you just keep helping them unbundle terms. And I think, just to close the loop, like, there's a difference between a client who might not be very good at it, but they're game to go on the journey with you. So they start in a place of, like, you just have to care, but it's clear they want to get better. And, like, each call, you can sort of see them taking steps in that direction. Those are great. Those are clients where, if you get over the hump, they'll wanna work with you forever. The bad clients are the ones where you dig and then you dig and you dig. And, like, by the third why, they start to get, like, upset, you know, and they're like, it's just the way that it is, you know? And like, usually those never resolve themselves. And so eventually you just. You have two choices. You're like, I either ghost think for you or I fire you and you move on.

And if you're ghost thinking for someone.

Raise your price 100%.

Buy a lot.

Yeah.

Going back to what you were saying a minute ago. When they're working on the surface and they're like, oh, but it's, you know, we just care more or whatever. Is it worthwhile to ask? Okay, what's a great example of a client where you felt, like, really showed up with that care?

Totally.

Or is that putting them at the risk where they're like, well, I don't really have anything.

But if they don't move on to something else. Right? Like, what's. Okay, give me an example. Oh, well, I can't really think of one right now. Okay, well, like, how does your team do that then? Like, think about your customer service. How do you guys show up and care in that way? So you almost have to always. One thing that I would always do is just you have to really listen to people. Like, if you're trying to take notes, and luckily, like, we've recorded every conversation, so I would kind of take some notes. But you can't be preparing yourself to ask the next question. You have to react to what they say. So if they're like, oh, well, I'm not sure. I don't have an example. You're like, all right, obviously they're, like, a little bit flustered. Now, what's a pivot that I can make? Okay, let's talk about your team. Let's talk about maybe the product for a little bit. You just have to be able to try to pivot in that way and keep them calm and open to talking to you.

Yeah, close listening. That is the ultimate skill of skills. Because what happens. And it takes a while to build this muscle, but what happens is the client will say something. Like, we ask, okay, well, what does it look like to care? And then the client goes, I mean, you just really have to take care of people. And, like, honestly, that's not really a problem that we have in our business. And, like, the average person would go, well, I guess it's not a problem. And then they would just move on. But if you're listening really closely, what I would follow up and ask is, oh, so you've never had a difficult customer, ever? And then they're like, oh, well, I mean, we have. I'm like, okay, so what happened? And then all of a sudden, then they start talking. And so, so much of it is like, yeah, it's great that we have all of this transcription software now where, yeah, you can jot down little notes, but I would actually encourage you not to actively do very much on calls. And instead, you have to really treat it like you are sitting down with someone. You haven't seen your friend in 10 years, and you want to ask questions to understand their life and go, what happened these past 10 years? And the more that you care and the more that you dig, the more that they divulge.

Yeah, what happened is a great one. Tell me more is a great one. Even if they say something interesting and they kind of breeze past it, I've had people, they'll just, like, drop an awesome quote. And I'm like, okay, well, I'm glad I'm recording that. But also, let's back step for a second, because what you just said was amazing, and I want to dive deeper into that. So tell me more. And so, like, reassuring people and letting them know when they gave you something great, they're like, oh, okay, maybe I should talk about this more. Or I have these stories, or I have a couple more examples like that. And that's you kind of, like, priming them and training them to give you. Give you more content, like, stuff that you'll need and will be useful to you.

That just real quick, I think that is an extremely, like, talk about an unfair advantage. I noticed that people don't do this very often, but we all want validation. Like, every single person wants validation, Right? And so imagine if you're giving a talk and no one moves their head at any point, or no one laughs, or no one smiles, or no one does anything. Right? Like, eventually you're gonna be like, this sucks. Right. And that is how most clients feel on calls with people. Right. And you get so much out of them when they say something and you react and you're like, that is fascinating. And they're like, really? You're like, I've never heard that before. Right. And like, you're not even gassing them up. You're just, like, genuinely reacting, you know, and you're just. It's like you're just validating and nurturing them, and all of a sudden you see them come out of their shell. I can't tell you how many times we worked with someone where the first, like, five calls, I was like, this is gonna be painful. Like, this person is not willing to share us anything. And then you start asking the right questions, and they're telling you about their life. They're telling. We have recordings of people being like, I just. I'm struggling at home. I feel like my wife's gonna divorce me. Like, I'm just working too much. Like, just full guts all over the table. But five, ten calls before that, it was, you know, everything's fine. Right. So you just validate and ask questions.

Yeah. And just try to. Try to be a person. Right. Like, everybody's a person. I remember when I got on the phone with some of these people at Digital Press, and they were running Silicon Valley startups, and they've raised $80 million, and they're, you know, I've got 30 minutes of their time. I was so nervous for the first month or so until I got to know these people, but they're all people. Maybe they're a little bit more trained or they're better at public speaking, or they're great at running a E commerce startup. But everybody, if you just go back to your basics of how am I As a human. Going to treat you as a human and build this personal relationship with you. Just treat them like that. And oftentimes they'll be able to open up to you in that way. I have a lot of good stories about that, but.

Well, we have. Yeah, we have some time. If anyone has questions, too. We can. We can dig into it. Yeah.

So I have a client where, like, he'll tell me, like, personal stuff or, like, open up and, like, that kind of stuff, but very little on, like, the technical. How you. How he does stuff. So then I'm doing, like, a lot of the coolest thinking on that. So is there any way to dig into, like, get his knowledge, like Spider was telling others? I don't want to be.

Yeah, too far. Too. Too personal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to take this? I'll go after you.

I mean, the thing is, everyone's passionate about something. I always like thinking the example of you're at. You're at a dinner party, you know, and you're just randomly talking to someone, and then it pops up in conversation that someone's like, oh, yeah, I like. You know, I paint miniatures. I paint, like, Dungeons and Dragons, little things. And. And you're like, really? That's cool. And then all of a sudden, for two hours, they're talking to you about Dungeons and Dragons. And so for each person, you have to figure out what would they be willing to nerd out about for hours. And sometimes it's the really. Like, we worked with CTOs who didn't want to talk about anything but technical infrastructure. I was like, cool, I don't know anything about that, but I'm going to be excited and I'm just going to keep asking you questions. And a lot of the questions are just like, oh, how does that work? Oh, why do you do that? When did you first get started doing that and just figuring out what they want to nerd out about?

Yeah. As far as getting a little bit, that's a great one. If they are nerds about their product or business, and hopefully they are, that you can get them to nerd out about a topic that's helpful to you. But if they're sharing too much personal information, you're like, okay, great. I've got all of the stories, and none of the technical content is maybe just taking. And it depends, like, we can talk about this a little bit later for your nuanced situation, but you almost have to set a boundary and an expectation that, okay, we can talk about this. Like, cool, let's dive into that for five minutes. Great. I would love to hear that story. Like, we have a little bit of time, let's talk about it. And then maybe it's just knowing the point to try to interrupt them politely. Like there's like that one guy I talked about who would rant for 20 minutes about nothing. Like eventually there's going to be a point where you're going to be like, I really appreciate you sharing this with me. Let's talk about it more later. But right now I'm going to get us back on track so we can get what we need from this call. So typically at the very start, maybe just like preface them with what you're planning to talk about that day. Be like, hey, thanks for, before you even ask them, like, how are you? Like, hey, thanks for hopping on the call today. I'm really excited to talk about XYZ technical thing before we get started. Like, how are you doing? You know, and maybe they'll like, you have to give them the opportunity to share personal things, but you have to stop them if it goes a little bit too far. And that just becomes comfortable, interrupting people in a way that's polite and respects what they just shared with you, but redirects because ultimately you know that like you need specific things from them and they're not, maybe they're not giving it to you in that specific situation.

Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

Yeah, yeah.

I think I need to just.

Yeah, just like set that expectation right from the start. And you know, it depends on the story too. Like, I had a client one time, I got on the call with her, she was pretty good at sharing business information and staying on topic. And we started the call and I could just tell she was like super flustered. And I was like, what's going on today? And she was in Costa Rica with her family and her five year old daughter ran through a glass door that wasn't like protected glass, sliced open. Her face had to be airlifted to a hospital for surgery without anesthesia. And I was like, all right, we got an hour to talk, you know, and she was just so rattled. And we talked about it for like 10, 15 minutes because she was processing it, she was flustered, she was trying to manage all of these things at once. And I don't think we got quite all of the content that I would have liked to get that day. But I followed up with her and maybe she sent me a voice memo later or I asked her, hey, can you just write out some more thoughts on this? Or here's what I have so far. Let's fill in some gaps. But you have to understand. Okay, when can I interrupt you and we need to stop this and when do you need to talk about this and in order for us to get to where we're going.

Yeah, another great frame. And then Matthew is. Yeah, saying I think this would be a great topic, but something I would say over and over again is I think this is a topic a lot of people would be interested in. So you're setting the frame as like it's not just me. Like, I think a lot of people would be curious to hear how you think about hiring or how you think about building this type of company, you know, and almost giving them that frame. I found triggers most people into being like, people care what I have to say and then they're ready to share, you know, so just another little one liner. Yeah.

Matthew, just curious if you found like an ideal cadence of like, is it weekly, bi weekly, monthly? And then is it 30 minutes, is it 60 minutes? You can go a little deeper. And then over time, maybe when they're a new client, you have nothing, but after they've been a client for six months, you have a lot of content. Does that cadence change? Just curious what your thoughts are on that.

Yeah. What do you mainly write about? Like, what are you writing for clients?

Mostly B2B services in different industries.

Okay.

Social content.

Social content, like LinkedIn, Twitter posts, kind of a thing. So do you have a pretty good idea at this point how much like, okay, if I get on a call for 30 minutes with someone, I can create X amount of pieces from that potentially, do you generally have a good idea? So I'd say, like, you have to figure out your parameters for that specific content you're writing. Like, you're writing social posts. I was writing 800 word articles once a week for people. So oftentimes, if I was doing two big ink articles a month or four a month, I would talk to them for an hour once a week. I think we had, we had slotted like 30 minutes. 30 minutes per article was kind of what we, what we landed on. And sometimes you can get more, sometimes you can get less. But you have to figure out your parameters for them. And like, okay, I know that I can in 20 minutes I can kind of get this amount of content from them typically. And maybe if you get to know them over time and you know more of their style and their voice, it becomes a little bit easier because you can see a topic and you can say, I know what they probably will say. About this and I can come up with a couple of posts and send them to them to edit and see if I was on track. And if I was on track now, that's 10 less minutes I need from them in the next call. So just trying to, like, over time, you might not need as much from them. You just have to judge at client and content. It depends.

Yeah, a little for everyone here, for every client. I would just add this into your weekly cadence, but something that I found that really builds relationships is once a week, email them. Or even better, if you have their phone, like text them an article or like.