Building Your Own Thought Leadership Brand | Scott Jeffery Miller | 484

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining me on the extension of the podcast Leveraging Thought Leadership, our LinkedIn Live series. Today my guest is Scott Jeffrey Miller. So I would go into his bio, but that would chew up a ton of our time. The short answer is is to Scott's bio, if you don't know him, you can Google him, is he spent a long time at the Covey organization, starting as a frontline sales guy and sort of moving up to the chief marketing officer there, and now is, I think, like special advisor to the universe at Covey or something. But what is, and the host of an amazing, amazing, amazing podcast that I've been blessed to be on, but what's been amazing about Scott over the last couple years is he kind of moved from behind the house to in front of the house. So Scott spent 25 years making other thought leaders rock stars and commercially successful, productizing what they are, kind of what I do externally, you've done internally, and then you chose to operate on yourself recently, right? So talk about maybe some of the background and the transition that you've made from behind the scenes to in front of the camera, if you will, in front of the stage.

Well, that's right. First, Peter, thanks for the spotlight today. Thanks for having me on. You are an icon in the thought leadership industry, and anybody who's thinking of writing a book or building their brand or productizing their IP should be working with you. So I appreciate the chance to come on this show with you today. That's exactly right. I mean, I spent 3 decades kind of as a director producer behind the curtain, behind the scenes, and about 4 years ago decided after a 30-year career doing that, I made a lot of people rich and famous and wealthy and thought, you know what? Yeah, hey, I can speak as well as they can. At least that's what I thought at the time. And so it's with this podcast that I host for Franklin Covey, now the world's largest weekly leadership podcast called On Leadership with Scott Miller that I started writing and speaking and keynoting more and moved out to the stage, so to speak. And I'm still doing producing and directing, but also kind of as the talent as well. Been a big transition, but felt comfortable that I had some expertise to share after so many years helping literally millions of people build their leadership cultures inside companies and helping to launch Franklin Covey's books that have sold nearly 60 million copies from a great team that I've had the honor of co-leading for many years. So lots of lessons learned, lots of mistakes. I've had lots of bestsellers and lots of flops. And so I know all of the things to do and the things not to do. Certainly writing and launching books changes by the week in terms of some publishers that are now audio first and this whole—

sure, sure—

now of video books, right? It's a big growing genre of just having video books. So happy to share my lessons learned.

So, so let me ask you this, because you and I know each other for a long time and have commiserated in the past of, "Oh, if the clients only listened," right? Like, it's really clear to us what needs to be done and how it needs to be done or whatever. Now that you are both sort of the strategy business person as well as the talent, who do you blame when something doesn't go right? Are you taking your own advice?

Well, I think it all lands on the author. At the end of the day, the thought leader is responsible for not just their own intellectual property, they're thoughtful for their strategy. They're responsible for their social media, their email database, words. Now you can partner with smart people like you that help to create strategies, but at the end of the day, the thought leader owns it all. They can't blame their strategist or their partner or their publisher. You've got to now also be your own marketer, your own strategist as well. So, you know, I launch about 2.5 books a year of my own and several courses. I also, like you, am an agent, so I own a talent, literary, and speaking agency And the puck is moving constantly. You know, what worked for me a book ago will not work for my next book in terms of who the readership is and is it B2B.

Stay there for a minute then, because, because there's so much in what you're saying. It used to be not that long ago, there was a cadence, right? Oh, get a new book out every 18 months, right? Like that was the rhythm, right? Whether you needed to or not. So sometimes books came out and they, they were okay, but that was sort of the rule of publishing. I would say now we're living in the— there's a little bit of the Wild West where these sort of old rules that worked for a long time, like you said, it doesn't work book to book and you're publishing more than 2 a year. So it's all about being agile. It's all about being resilient. Does it need to, you know, does it need to be in a book? So how do you start thinking about this? Because you've mapped out lots of content, lots of books that you'd like to do for various reasons, but how are you constantly taking in the information, the data, and then pivoting in real time?

I, uh, that probably is the question. You know, someone like Jim Collins, right, or Liz Wiseman can, you know, issue a book every 10 years, and those, those are very seminal books that require extensive research. That, that's, you know, that's a strategy, and it works for about 2 people a year, right?

And then there's the rest of us that have all kinds of—

I mean, I have collaborations going on with Scribd, Blinkist, Spotify. I have collaborations going on with 3 different publishers and podcasts.

And so Wait, wait, but stay there for a minute because we brushed through this quickly where you said earlier, you know, you've got to be in charge of everything. My experience has been, and I think it's the reason our business has thrived, is when our clients come to us, they've got the thought leadership piece down, plus or minus some minor adjustments. Hey, that could be made a little bit better, but they don't come to us with a blank page and say, build thought leadership for me. 80% of the energy is focused on sales, marketing, distribution, monetization. And many thought leaders, and rightfully so, it's just a foreign language to them. You know, they were the CEO of a company. They, they, they didn't, you know, literally whatever they do, they tend to be best in class. But marketing thought leadership and content or books or courses or programs or speeches, why would anyone expect them to know how to do that?

They typically don't. You're right. Which is why people like you and I have such value to them what they should know, what is— they should know who is their target market, right? And who is their customer and what is their course. And they should be building their social media. Most of my time during the day is advising people. Um, thank you for telling me you hate LinkedIn, or which they don't say that. They usually say they hate some other platform. It's usually not LinkedIn.

Yes, it's usually social media. They love LinkedIn. They love LinkedIn.

I actually, I think most people have graduated to LinkedIn as the one viable, the main viable source, right? What they usually say is they have a problem with a different platform, but you kind of need to be across lots of platforms, including LinkedIn. It probably is the most credible in terms of how to build your voice. Interviewed the chief product officer of LinkedIn a few weeks ago. He actually was complimenting me because most of my social on LinkedIn is about my life, not just, you know, a hard business post. I talk about my parenting skills, I talk about my, my marriage. So I try to, I try to build a, a persona of really who I am entirely. On LinkedIn, and it's worked out well for me. But I think you're right. I think thought leaders— by the way, you can't call yourself that. Someone else has to call you that.

Ever. Ever. Don't ever, ever, ever call yourself that.

Right.

Yes.

But you can be in the thought leadership space. I think the Wild West is a good thing right now because there's so many opportunities, so many potential collaborations, short form, long form. LinkedIn Learning is, of course, just exploding in terms of organizational opportunities. So many great places you could be, and you could be too many places where your voice is so diluted and you're trying to do too many things.

Well, and that, and that's— so stay there for a minute because a lot of folks struggle with that, where at some point there's got to be a line between, you know, church and state, paid and free, right? So I'm a big proponent of giving away a ton of stuff in lots and lots of modalities, but you also have to have things that are sort of behind the paywall or guarded or whatever language you want to use to say, and this is what you're going to pay me and my organization for. And the trick is to get those things to work together. There used to be a mindset of, well, if I gave it away, why would they pay for it? And, you know, it's like, well, if you give it away, there's a massive population that would never be your client, but let them be aware from it. Let them benefit from it. Maybe something that happened, the subset of people that will pay real dollars for real interventions on the consulting side or product offerings and solutions is really a subset of the group that you're making aware.

I mean, here's a perfect example. Dr. Stephen R. Covey, who passed a decade ago, wrote arguably one of the world's biggest seminal books, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. If you added up all the royalties that Dr. Covey would have made, I don't know, it might have been $30 million on the book.

Sure.

But that course has sold, you know, a billion and a half dollars around the world. And so, you know, understanding what you want to seed out and give out from an abundance mindset, from a contribution mindset. I'd say the most successful people have an abundance mindset where they're actually providing content complementary, not in a, you know, tread on me kind of way. Right. But you got to be smart about it. But figuring out then how do you, to your point, find those who do want to take a deeper dive and build a product or service around that, that they're absolutely willing to pay big dollars for to have corporate or individual interventions. There's a huge—

yeah, huge market. You know, you, you mentioned earlier, and I wanted to jump on this as well, is that you've got to know who your target market is. I'm shocked at how many people don't, or they, they do-ish, meaning, oh, leaders. Well, that's too vague. Managers. Yeah, that's too— like, I'd rather hear someone get really specific with me. Like, this is really designed for you know, someone in a first-time people management role, college-educated, under 30 in professional services. I dig that, right? Because that gives me a real level of specificity. And once I know who that is, I can put them at the center of the universe and say, where are they getting their information from? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they on Instagram? Are they on TikTok? It doesn't matter what my personal preference is, right? Because we all, I believe, have a preference. Like, I'm old school and still like to read books. I'm in the minority, right? So, right, you like to read books as well. But if we were to sit here and say, oh, the tool, the rest of the world must be like us, so let's just make sure everything we put out is in a book and we don't need to deal with short-form video and we don't need to deal with 500-word blog posts, we'd probably both be bankrupt quickly.

It's very true. I think the best person I've ever met about this, I may have mentioned this to you before, is Rachel Hollis, right? She wrote the books Girl, Wash Your Face, Girl, Stop Apologizing. This woman sold more books in 2019 than any author in America, second only to Michelle Obama. If you met with Rachel, she would tell you exactly who her client was, what her— what she was having for dinner, what her struggles were in her marriage, how many kids she had, what her disposable income was, what she bought at Target yesterday. I mean, she knew exactly who she was, and I do too. I'll tell you, my, my customer has increasingly congealed into It's, it's heavily female, probably 80% female. It's probably in the, in the, in the age of 32 to about 50. They usually have a mid-level management role. They're probably making about $120,000 a year. They're not in the C-suite. They're not individual contributors. They may have a side hustle, but they see me as a credible, trusted leadership thought leader. That is relatable and accessible, finds parenting tough, trying to keep their marriage together, likes to have fun but wants a better life for themselves. And that's really who my market is, and I write, I write to them.

So that's interesting because, you know, I did a piece a couple weeks ago on, you know, so lazy marketers stick to demographics because it's easy, right? Age, income, education level. Some of the characteristics that you mentioned that I think are as important, if not more, are the psychographics. They're trying to keep their marriage together. What's their tolerance for risk? They're struggling, they're time-starved, right? You don't typically find a list of 38-year-olds making $140,000 a year that are time-starved and stressed, right? You get the first piece. So I love the psychographic piece, and I think because you know that so well, it's easy for you to go, you know what, they're probably really comfortable with me exposing myself a little bit and talking. You put up some great stuff with the antics of you and your kids or going out somewhere cool with your wife or whatever. And some might say if that was a different demographic, if it was, you know, C-suite males, you know, over 60 making $3 million, maybe that would make them unrelatable or make you less relatable to that population.

And it's true, and it evolves, and not everybody in that group is going to fall in love with you. And, you know, one of my biggest challenges for myself is I have, you know, some leadership knowledge, I have some marketing knowledge, I kind of know now as a podcaster, and I'm writing some books on mentorship, and I'm an agent. And I do think maybe I've diluted my market a little bit by kind of being all things to too many people. And I've got B2B books and B2C books, I've got courses. And, and so I have to also be thoughtful that I'm going to write a parenting book, and it'll probably do really well for those who don't like parenting. I love my children, I don't like parenting, and I'm probably gonna piss a lot of parents off who find that their mission, their calling is parenting. They're not my people. The people like me that found out, you know, I probably shouldn't have been a parent, but I am, and I love my kids, but I'm just going to write a real raw book around how hard parenting is. I think it will do really well.

And so, but I think there's some— I, I think great thought leaders have courage, right? And if you're trying to be all things to all people, you water it down to the point of, well, there's nothing to agree or disagree with. And we're trying to— the most starved resource today, or the most scarce resource today, is attention. So if you were to put out a parenting book, like, I love the way you— for people that shouldn't be parents or don't like being parents or whatever, but love their kids, that's interesting because there's probably a massive percentage of people that may never have said that out loud and will say, thank God, Scott, you said the things that I've been thinking about, whatever. Peter, you're signaling to me.

Yeah, you're dead wrong. You said the best thought leaders have courage. The only thought leaders have courage. Meaning, my point is, if you want to be a thought leader, you have to have courage. I actually— you're not dead wrong, you're right on. You've got to have courage to be a thought leader. I did a podcast interview two weeks ago with Peter Zion, the famous geopolitical strategist, right? 100,000 views in a day. On YouTube. If you saw the comments in there about me, you'd like go take your life. I mean, it was just vitriolic, the evil things people said about me as a host. Worst host ever. This guy has cured me from listening to audio ever again in my life. And so I read them all.

You know what, I'm so— I'm sorry about that. Sorry, I meant to apologize about it.

I know, I forgive you. I took, I took all of your comments from YouTube and I put them in my social media and say, this is how you learn, this is how you live, and you got to be willing to put yourself out there. These aren't my people. These other 100,000 people are my people. And I'm gonna—

and I would say, you know, one of the things I advise my clients is that if you're not— and again, it's not intentional— alienating, pissing off, you know, distancing from some significant percentage of the marketplace, then there's nothing there, right? If 15, 20— it doesn't mean they need to stand up and burn your house down. That's not what I'm advocating. But if 15, 20, 25% of people say Well, I don't agree with him. I don't agree with the way he thinks. You know, I don't like kale. Great. Go eat your broccoli. Like, that's fine. But once you know, once it's self-selecting, then you know who to invest in in terms of building those— that rapport, that relationship with.

You kind of got to walk through that fire to know who they are. I had someone recently email me and said, literally, Scott, I've listened to you for 17 episodes and I just don't like you. I tried. You're just not my guy. And I thought, it took you 17 episodes to realize you didn't like me?

Most people know that in 17 seconds.

I kind of use that as an adage now to say, you're going to have to walk through that fire to really understand who your niche is, who your people are. And if you're not annoying some people, you're probably not sharing opinions and sharing experiences. It's kind of a badge of honor. Now, there are some people who do that intentionally. I'm not advocating that, right?

Yeah. And I think you have to— people are smarter than that. There are people that shake it up for the point of shaking it up. They don't believe that. They don't say that. I think the market's smarter than that. I agree. You know, in some markets, maybe that's appropriate. I mean, we're still dealing with business people, right? We're still working with people that have business challenges. I love that the dimensions of their universe are broader. Their parents, they're married, they're, you know, all these other things, right? Really, really interesting. If you're enjoying this episode of Thought Leadership Leverage, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com/LTL and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. So given that, Let's assume for the sake of argument we're post-COVID-ish, whatever.

We are.

We are. What are the top things that you're seeing that are so different today than just 3 years ago in terms of the market for thought leadership specifically?

Well, I think the individual desire to develop and build skills is stronger than ever. The number of people that are willing to swipe their own credit card without corporate reimbursement is off the charts. People are taking professional development enormously seriously, and they're not waiting for their company to offer them a course. They may or may not be reimbursed, but the, the opportunity to sell your courses, to create your content and sell it to individuals, is bigger than ever. I think the courage people have in their careers is unrecognizable. The willingness people have to quit their jobs for a bad boss that care about, you know, having a happiness and mindfulness and peace and calm in their life is like nothing I was ever courageous enough. So that's an emerging trend. I do think that organizations are starting to swing back a little bit to say, no, you got to come to work. And the person says, I don't want to. No, I need you back in the building. So what do we do to make it a win for both of us? I need you back in the business to build culture. For interpersonal communication to build trust.

Sure.

Well, how do we build culture that encouraged you to come back? Because you need to come back. It's not you have to or you're fired. I mean, it may be, but I need you to come back. How do we make this a win for us both? I think that conversation is happening a lot.

But comeback doesn't need to be binary. Comeback doesn't mean— that's right— that we're ever going back to 9 to 5, Monday to Friday.

It could be Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. But I need you back because we need to build culture And people will stay here if they've built friendships, and it's hard to build friendships. So there's that, that swinging back. I'll tell you also, I think there's great— there's— people have a, a big tolerance for risk in terms of trying stuff. I mean, side hustles are exploding. The number of books that are coming out. I mean, during the pandemic, everyone like me did 3 things. They built their social media. They learned to pivot from live to virtual keynotes cuz their income evaporated overnight. And they all wrote a book. And so there are—

well, I, I was calling it sort of the COVID Renaissance, and I think that's sort of over, where, you know, all of these brilliant people now had more time on their hands. So what'd they do? They all wrote a book. So we got flooded, flooded with that wave, you know. Now it's sort of normalized a little bit.

It is, but I think there's an opportunity to do that. I mean, there's so many ways to, you know, I don't think you have to sit down now and write a 40,000-word book. And there's so many short-form opportunities for you, LinkedIn Learning and Grim.

But I wanna touch on what you said on the keynote side. So one of the things that's interesting is I believe that the default switch with regards to events and speaking is no longer in person because we had this 2-year experiment that showed this is good for some things. This is good for delivering content. It's kind of lousy for connection and community, right? It's just not as good as being in person. That being said, businesses, large organizations had an opportunity to do the math and say, hey Scott, you're an SVP at Big Co X and used to go to a dozen events a year. Hmm. Every time you left the office, $5,000 in hard cost, airplanes, Ubers, food, whatever, and your productivity went down 50%. Why don't you pick 2 or 3? Right. And then on the other side, going to events used to be a bit of a grind. It's the same old, same old. So I'd rather go to less events. Per year, but have the bar be higher. So therefore, if you think about what is acceptable as a keynoter in an event space, it's that experiential, it's the woo-woo, it's the energy. I think keynoters have to get smarter, and it's more about capabilities development, it's more about learning. I mean, were you talking about that individual learning, taking programs? Most keynotes are entertainment, and I would argue they should be entertaining but have a strong educational takeaway to them, which is not easy.

I don't disagree with anything you said. I would add to that, live events are very much alive and well. People want to have community, they want to network, they want to see friends. So I think you're right. I think people are much more savvy. I'm going to do two, I'm going to do these two live things this year. I'm going to do these six virtual things this year.

Yes.

Because they can make a good— because there wasn't that option before necessarily. I mean, our keynote, our in-person keynote business is bigger. I— by the agency I own, Gray Miller, our keynote business putting people live in front of stages is larger than virtual. But I think it's going to flush out to probably be pretty even in the coming years. Yeah, it's a good thing to prepare for whatever comes next, which we don't know about, right? The next pandemic or the next whatever is going on in the Middle East or Eastern Europe, that's a dangerous place now, probably the most dangerous it's been in our lifetime. And if you think that's an exaggeration, you're not watching the news today. So every company is wise to be really thoughtful with who they're putting on planes where, but also to take control of your own professional development and figure out what can you do more efficiently virtually.

No, fantastic. So in our final couple of minutes here, speak to someone out there now that's listening. That is thinking of going down this road or they're early in their career as a thought leader.

Yeah.

What advice would you give them? No pressure, but it's going to be the most important advice they ever got. No pressure.

Well, for the person who's starting out, who thinks they want to become a thought leader, read voraciously. I mean, you should be reading at least a book a week. You should be—

Oh, easy, easy.

You should be building your body of knowledge. And at some point you want to hone in on a point of view about something. If you think about the most influential thought leaders, they're known for something. Seth Godin, Susan Cain, Dan Pink, Daniel Amen, Stephen Covey, Tim Scott. They own a space. They own high courage conversations. They own introverts.

That's the whole platform. That's their platform.

And I think that's an important continuation. You're going to own a platform. You might own mindfulness or you might own love and marriage.

Resilience. Exactly.

You want to think about what space do you want to own? And then I would be reading voraciously and start posting articles on LinkedIn. See if you can start posting long, short, build your social media. I'm a huge evangelist still of the power of social media, whether it be TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or LinkedIn. LinkedIn. You should be in all of them. You also should have an email database because, you know, a lot of people will say, you know, don't put all of your eggs in one basket because you never know what's going to happen on one of these other platforms that's owned by someone that you don't like or is going to be in jail or is going to whatever, whatever. So you gotta be thoughtful about it. Again, I think LinkedIn is probably the most trustworthy, stable space out there, but you should also be building an inbound opt-in email list as well. Start growing it because there's no such thing as overnight fame. Well, there is, but it's usually ill-gotten or fleeting.

Yeah, right. Usually ends in a felony.

You look at what all these people have in common. Dan Pink, Seth Godin, Liz Wiseman, Susan Cain.

They all play the long game. They play the long game.

They have a— they have— they're just building and building and building and building. All of a sudden you think their book is number one New York Times bestseller.

Yeah, that took them 12 years.

12 years of their blog 12 years of their column, 12 years of their weekly newsletter, 12 years of their podcast, all of that. My podcast I host, it's about 6 million every Tuesday. I mean, that is 250 weeks of taping interviews week in, week out. We have 50 in the can. I taped almost 320 of them all through COVID, drove to the studio in person, did it, masks on, all of that. Weekend, don't miss it. And it didn't become what it is because we bought the names. Right. We just built it organically. Took us 5 years and it still is, you know, it still is got a lot of room for growth.

Yeah. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your insight and I appreciate your work. Thank you for joining us today. Thanks for the spotlight.

Good to see you.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.