Episode 105: Becoming a Thought Leader with Peter Winick

It's time to share secrets and insights from fellow entrepreneurs. If you're looking to grow or start a business and you're a game changer, then keep listening to Avanti Entrepreneur for great advice from your host, Dave Mamano, America's Entrepreneur Coach. Hey Avanti Tribe, Dave Mamano here. Just want to thank our sponsor Paychex. You know, Paychex, they make it simple for businesses of all sizes to pay and manage their team. They make payroll easy with employee pay options including direct deposit, checks, pay cards, and so much more. Founded over 4 decades ago to relieve the complexity of running a business so that the owners can focus on what matters most. Above all else and more than any other company, Paychex makes it simple. Visit AvantiEntrepreneurGroup.com, go to our partner link and check them out. They're offering you a free month of payroll just for giving them a shot as an Avanti Tribe member. Give them a shot, folks. They really help this podcast to be possible. Really appreciate Paychex. Now enjoy the show. Hello and welcome to the Avanti Entrepreneur Podcast. I am David Mamano, your host, and we're here to help achievers and business owners and leaders move forward so that they can reach their potential. I do this by interviewing great business thought leaders, movers and shakers. And today I have on the show a great guest. His name is Peter Winick. Peter, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Dave.

Hey, so Peter, you are a very interesting guest for me. I think you're going to help out a lot of people on my show who want to learn more about kind of creating their own brand through, through thought leadership. That's one of your specialties. We're going to talk about that. Your bio, Peter, I'm gonna read that so people can get to know you a little bit more. Peter is an entrepreneurial-minded leader who leverages the power of internal and external relationships to accelerate growth within emerging and high-potential companies that have powerful intellectual property. His accomplishments include startup, startups, turnarounds, and M&A in the B2B services sector, with results driven by practical strategy, focused execution, and a disciplined method of cost control. That all sounds really nice. Uh, he has over 20 years of experience and has worked with a variety of thought leaders. He expertly leverages that along with his experience, uh, with such clients as IBM, Kraft, Microsoft, Avon, uh, Hyatt, and more. In addition, he has built and managed several consulting and professional development organizations. Peter is an information junkie and an avid reader of business books. He believes that taking great content and creating a platform to best support it takes a combination of art, science, logic, focus, passion, and creativity. So Peter, great bio. I'm gonna kick off right now because I'm an avid reader of books too. I love books as well. We're kindred spirits in that regard. So I just want to kick it off. What are, you know, so the Avanti Entrepreneur listeners are beginning to middle stage entrepreneurs. They're just getting on the roller coaster, maybe experiencing their First, you know, Loop-de-Loops and Dark Tunnels. And what are some of the books that are your favorites that you would recommend that they pick up and read?

Yeah, well, that's a tough question for me because all of my clients are authors, thought leaders, and speakers. So it's sort of like asking, you know, which is the favorite kid, right? So I don't really have a favorite. I mean, I'm just constantly reading, you know, both for pleasure as well as professionally. I think, you know, there's some of the basics. There's Good to Great, there's anything by Tom Peters. Drucker, if you go back to the classics, I think there's always stuff coming. I just read, for example, Sapiens, which was not what I expected it to be.

I heard about that book, I haven't read it.

Yeah, that was really, really, really cool. I'm a nerd for behavioral economics, anything on the behavioral side, because I think we were trained 100 years ago that people make decisions in a logical, rational way. Then we had the other side of the house that said, oh, here's this thing called psychology that said people are anything but logical and rational. Irrational. So then you sort of scratch your head and go, wait, but aren't those the same people making logical, rational financial decisions and whatever? And they're not. So I think there's a lot to learn from the sort of nudge and sort of those sort of things as well, particularly as a business owner, like, you know, what hooks people. And, you know, if you look at some of the things that are going on in technology and gaming, they're connecting that to brain science and neuroscience. And, you know, the reason we're all staring at our phones all day is because it's kind of analogous to crack cocaine in terms of the dopamine hit in your brain. It's not because they're sexy and shiny, it's a biochemistry thing. So it's sort of interesting.

Anyway, I found myself at a red light just instinctively going for my phone.

Yeah, of course. What else would you do?

And I said, no, don't do it. Just don't. It's like, you're right. It's like I need that hit, you know, like, ah, give me that hit. I'm fighting it. I'm fighting it. So Peter Winick, we met through some of my best college friends, Peter Nussbaum and Jason Neimark.

Yes.

You grew up with these guys, and I want to thank Peter for introducing us. Peter thought that you would be a great guest for my show because your specialty is— I'll say one of your specialties, I guess— is helping entrepreneurs to really stand out, stand out from the sea of sameness, as people call it, with thought leadership. Right? So what are some of the things that you do for entrepreneurs to help them build their brand as more and more people become coaches and consultants? And, and, you know, you go on Facebook and LinkedIn and everyone's an expert, everyone's a thought leader these days, right? Whether they're, you know, doing Beachbody nutrition consulting or entrepreneurial coaching, etc. How can someone just stand out from really, I'll say, the past 5 years of this tsunami of people attempting to be thought leaders.

So let me clarify that just a little bit. So I would say my focus isn't on helping entrepreneurs per se, it's helping a variety of authors, thought leaders, and speakers scale and leverage their content. Now underneath that, each and every one of my clients is an entrepreneur, right? So, but if somebody's got something entrepreneurial and they're the world's greatest commercial carpet cleaner, I don't know what thought leadership does for that. But what I would say is for more and more people, here's sort of the macro trend that's going on in the world. Whether you sell a product, whether you sell a service, whether you sell a commodity, whether you're an attorney, a professional services provider, everything's getting commoditized, right? Period. So if everything's getting commoditized, you have to fight that battle and decommoditize. Right, so one way to decommoditize as a lawyer, author, whatever, is through content and thought leadership. So there are often ways that you can take something that is somewhat commoditized as a professional and add some thought leadership to it. More importantly, I think, or more interestingly, is how does one use content and thought leadership and move that to get into a business? And what happens is most folks don't do that strategically. Friends tell them, "Hey Dave, you're interesting. You should start a podcast. You should do all this stuff with entrepreneurs." And you go, "Yeah, that sounds like fun." Right? But there isn't typically an overarching strategic plan. You sort of try stuff and you do stuff and whatever. And I'm sort of old school business saying, "Okay, well, what's your strategy?" Right? So, just because you're going into something that might not be hard cash dollars in, you're not maybe opening, buying a building that's going to cost you a couple million bucks where you got to do your ROI calculations, but your time is worth money. So, what are you investing in? What's the return gonna be? How are you going to build that business? What are the underlying business models? Because as you move into what I call the content space, there are multiple business models to be aware of so that you can choose the ones that make sense for you.

Interesting. So, as a beginning to middle stage entrepreneur, objectively, what are some of the first steps that they could be doing to, you know, take, I'll say, you know, Bill Murray, remember that movie, What About Bob? Baby steps, right? So, so taking—

well, given it's August and all of our shrinks are away, like, we got one more day until—

that's true, that's true. I'm sailing, I'm sailing. Uh, baby step into the elevator. Yeah. Uh, what, what are some of the baby steps that, uh, that a small business entrepreneur can start with to, to create some content and maybe someday work with a guy like you that really can bring them to the next level?

Yeah, so I think it's got to be something that you're either really passionate about, have something to say, and have actually processed and done. So when you look at sort of the world of sort of expertise, there's a couple of different places that those folks tend to come from. So there's academia, right? So there's world-class academics that could, you know, validate a hypothesis in the lab, if you will, and then sort of the entrepreneurs or the business folks often look at that stuff and say, "Hahaha, that's really interesting," in a perfect controlled environment, but in the real world, you know, I got to make payroll on Tuesday, right?

Correct.

Then you have consultants and advisors and such that are working with multiple folks that have concepts and such that have more grounding in reality. Hey, I've seen this work. I've seen this leadership methodology work in companies like this. And then you have folks that are just doing it., right? And never really thought of themselves as content experts or thought leaders, but because they do something and they practice it and it works, and then they add to it. So I think part of the answer to your question would be, what is the content that excites you and engages you? What is the stuff that you're using? And do you have anything to add to the equation? If you're just regurgitating back, you know, implementation, execution, growth, whatever, we don't really need that, right? But if you have a different twist on it or a different experience or a different way or something to add to it, then I would say that's a starting point.

Excellent. So a lot of clients that you work with, you'll help them develop a book to publish. Is that correct?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Or talk them out of publishing a book, actually.

Why would you talk them out of publishing a book?

I'm a realist and I've seen this all the time. So I'm in this weird vantage point where I'm surrounded by people that are writing books or just wrote a book or wrote 10 books or whatever. So I think oftentimes people will come to me and say, I want to write a book. And I say, okay, Well, let me walk you through some realities. First off, you have to figure out the business model underneath that. Are you going to go for a traditional publishing deal or more of a hybrid self-publishing deal? By the way, on a traditional publishing deal today, the business models are really, really bad. Publishers are not making money for the most part unless your last name is Clinton or Obama or, you know, if you really want to make money writing a book, get your leg eaten off by a shark, survive the attack, and then talk about how you walked home uphill from a shark attack. And that kind of stuff sells. On the traditional publishing side, a lot of the old deals that people think about don't exist anymore. Hey, David, you're going to give me a proposal. We're going to give you a 6-figure advance. You're going to go off to the woods in your cabin and go write this book and smoke a pipe and whatever, and then come back and life will be grand. Well, it's not going to really work like that. The deal that they'll give you if you get one with the big publishers, hey, David, here's the deal. Your stuff looks interesting. Let's look at your social media. Let's look at your platform. Let's look at the audience that you're bringing to the table because we need to go through you to sell books. We don't know how to sell books anymore. More as a publisher, that's number one. Number two, to offset our risk, we're gonna ask you to buy 3,000 copies of the book at wholesale. So now you just do a little math and say, well, shit, I'm taking all the risk, right? So if this thing flops, I got a garage full of books that I'm gonna be giving away for Christmas for the next 10 years. If it wins, I get 5 cents on the dollar. That doesn't really sound like a fine business deal. So that's one piece. Second piece is, does it have to be a book? Because a book is, you know, 200-page pages, it's gonna take you 6 or 8 months and cost you a fortune. Are you sure you're ready for a book? And what I mean by that is, have you tested the content out there in the real world? Have you started with short-form blogs? Have you turned it into short-form video? Have you actually got in front of an audience that looks like the people you're trying to sell the book to and talk about it and see if they give a crap? And if you haven't done any of those things, don't do the book first. You know?

Yeah. No, it's interesting you said that. So my last book, I self-published it. It's called Make Love in the Workplace, right? Rated G. It's all about workplace culture. I don't know if I would pick that.

Not me too, because people have taken that literally and they're losing their jobs every day now.

Well, so I published it about, geez, 4 years ago now, uh, and I'm— I just said the other day, I'm like, I don't know if I could have, uh, chosen that title today, right? Uh, but at the time I had 15 employees and I, you know, culture was number one. It was— I had a magazine for teens and So I— but it's interesting you say that because I started writing a blog about workplace culture, right? Before you know it, I had, I had like 20 chapters that could be expanded from the, you know, from the blog to a chapter. And then I did a TEDx talk, and then I developed even more content.

Exactly.

And that got, you know, a few thousand hits right away. And then I'm like, I got a book, right? So kind of expanded my blog entries, took some more content from my TED Talk. Gave it to somebody on my team. I don't want to say she ghostwrote it, but she expanded it to be even better and edited it. And then I had a book. So to your point, I kind of followed your advice for the journey. So, and it worked out well, worked out well.

Yeah, I would say when you were blogging, you also got real-time feedback, right? So you put a bunch of blogs out and we're the worst judge of our own content. So you might say, wow, that one really felt good, that one, that was brilliant. And you know, nothing. And then there's one that you're like, yeah, I don't even know if I wanna hit send on that 'cause it was kinda crappy. And that's the one that gets the buzz and you're like, oh, let me go deeper on that subject and deeper. The market will tell you what they like and what's good. You don't judge your own stuff, that's not a good idea.

Well, it's funny, you're right. Sometimes I feel like I have God on my shoulder helping me write and I'm like, this is fantastic, you know? And then I'm like, oh wow, only 4 people liked it. And then, you know, to your point, sometimes I'm like, ah, let me spit this out.

Boom! Exactly.

100 likes within the first hour. Okay, something's going on with this, right? So, and your second point too is I quickly realized that my book was going to be a marketing tool at the end of the day, right?

It was all it is.

Yeah, you know, I mean, it was— I, you know, it wasn't a bait and switch. I really strived to provide great, great content that was helpful, but I knew that, you know, my name is not Stephen King, or as you say, Obama or Clinton. And, and so unless, you know, there's some type of lotto type of miracle, it was not going to be like the New York Times bestseller. And I was okay with that. It was a marketing tool. It's a, it's a great way to introduce yourself, uh, add some expertise to your brand, right? And, uh, and do more speaking gigs, etc. And I love it. I'm writing a second book right now, um, for entrepreneurs about the power of peer groups and all that. And, and it's all You know, I'm not going to go to, you know, Penguin or Simon Schuster. I'm going to self-publish it and make it work, you know. So, um, that's great.

Well, even so, here's the other piece on the book. When you do your ROI calculations on the book, it's very, very rare that it's going to be, here's the number of hours I invested in this, then here's the dollars I invested in it, and then here's the number of units I sold, and that equals a profit. That's called normal business, right? So if I was going to get into the business of selling, you know, Glasses, I'd want to know what does it cost to make a pair of glasses, right? And how many can I sell? And what's my margin? That's not book math, right? So book math is the book is a— you know, why do you write a book? Well, there's an intrinsic reason that you'd write it. You're intellectually curious. It forces you to codify your thinking. You know, there's lots of non-tangibles, which are all good. But just from a business standpoint, you have to say, okay, so I've got the book. Exactly who am I writing this for? And I think this is an exercise you absolutely must do, is come up with 2 or 3 what I would call a client avatar. Who is this book for? And the biggest mistake you can make, and I get, I sort of cringe when I talk to clients early on, I say, well, tell me about, you know, the book you're writing or the book you wrote. Oh, this is great for everyone. And I'll say, okay, great. Unless you've got Coca-Cola's marketing budget, you can't afford to market for everyone. So I'd rather you tell me this is for, you know, such a specific demographic or psychographic or type of person that you could, you know, define that avatar. And you typically want 2 or 3 avatars that you can define. And then you need to say to yourself, okay, as a result of my spending 6 months of my life putting this book together and getting it to those avatars, because I'm a savvy marketer, what the heck do I want that person to do? Because the, you know, $15, $20 they gave me for a book doesn't mean anything, right? If you're lucky, you break even or make a buck or two. It's kind of a stupid business model. So once they get it, that's basically their admission into David world. Now what? And if you haven't thought through your services, products, and offerings based on what happens, somebody comes in and says, "Hey David, I read your book and holy cow, wow," it needs to be really clear to both you and them what the next step is, whether that means you provide coaching services, consulting services, validated assessment tools, video-based training. There's tons of things that it could be, but it needs to be an entree into your sort of community and into your tribe.

Yep, so, so important. You just summed it up, Peter. Thank you so much, because a lot of people are self-published. Publishing books these days, right? Through Amazon or whatever. And it seems like everyone's an Amazon bestseller. So, there must be a way to make that happen as well.

Well, here's the way. I mean, here's the— by the way, if anybody's trying to sell you an Amazon bestseller campaign, hang up the phone. It's really easy because it's a dynamic algorithm that works in real time. So, you pick your category. So, you're under, you know, whatever, management, leadership, whatever, and get a dozen of your friends to buy the book simultaneously at 4 in the morning, do a screenshot. 15 years ago, people thought that was impressive. It means absolutely nothing right now, right?

To be an Amazon bestseller. Yeah.

Yeah. And it actually, to me, shows a lack of sophistication when people are actually putting that out there. It's like, you know, you know, John Doe, Amazon bestseller. It's like, okay, yeah, that's nice. Yeah.

But you're, but, but you're a very high-level connoisseur, uh, so you know, right? So maybe, maybe the masses like are impressed, but you know, you, you know It's like you going to McDonald's and, you know, wouldn't appreciate the cheeseburger, right? Because you know better. But no, good point. I mean, it's, uh, I, I do see that, uh, a lot of books these days are bragging about the fact— a lot of authors are bragging about the fact that they're an Amazon bestseller. So, uh, to your point, I think it's starting to get watered down a little bit, right? So a lot. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Excellent. Um, so I, I want to ask you, Peter, uh, You know, you are an entrepreneur yourself. You're helping entrepreneurs, but at the end of the day, you have your own business.

Sure.

And how long have you had your business? And I, I always, you know, just the camaraderie piece with, with, um, all entrepreneurs, uh, having these adventures behind the curtain that are, are scary, the ups and downs, the, the crash and almost burns. And, uh, maybe you could tell us a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey and, and one or two experiences that that you went through that maybe weren't easy to go through, but you made it and now you could use those experiences to help others?

Yeah, so this business I started probably a dozen-plus years ago. So, and I've had other businesses prior to that. No, but this business I started a dozen years ago, 13 years ago, something like that. And ultimately what I saw is there were sort of two sides to me, right? One was, entrepreneur, because I started my first business at 22. Well, depending on how you define business, but my first sort of real business at 22, built that up, had an exit in 1999, was able to do a roll-up and all that sort of fun stuff and watch that blow up once the roll-up happened and the dot-com crash and all that. That was my sort of $50 million MBA. But on the other side, I was always a content junkie. So, when you start a business at 22, you have you have no resources, you have no experience, you have no reason to succeed, right? But somehow you grind it out and you figure it out. And some of it is because you're stubborn, some of it is because you're tenacious, some of it is because you're lucky, some of it might be because you're smart, I don't know, a little bit every now and then. Some of it is opportunistic, your timing's right, you get to an industry or field that's sort of taken out, whatever. But I was always just an avid reader. I loved to read business books, I loved to read magazines. If you're under 30, Google it, they used to sell them in things called newsstands, you could actually type I used to have one.

I used to have one.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, right.

I'm talking to a publisher, right? Remember them? Doctors' offices, dentist offices, whatever. But I was constantly going, okay, when I have a business and I'm, you know, like whatever, 26 and I got 80 people working for me, I'm going, am I the first guy that's ever had trouble getting the people to do what they want to do? Like, somebody's probably written on that. So, but I never thought that, I never even thought about the business side of that. It was just, okay, I have a need, I'll go buy a book or go do this or go do that, read it. Process it, see what I can apply, do experiments, etc. And then sort of those two worlds collided for me probably 15 years ago where I got recruited in to do a turnaround at a communications consulting firm that was based in Australia. And they were, you know, turnaround is code for, you know, the patient's dead and is on life support and the board's either going to shoot the sucker or, you know, sell it for scrap. So we were brought in to turn this thing around and a buddy of mine recruited me in to do that. I was like, I have absolutely less than no interest in training. I can't sit still for 2 hours. I don't know anything about this business. It sounds really, really boring. But he convinced me that it would be an interesting opportunity, and it was. And I actually learned the business side of content there, which was fascinating to me because they, at that point, that organization's primary product was a 2-day presentation skills company. So, you know, teaching people how to get up and communicate, teaching people how to sell, teaching people how to present data, which was kind of interesting, and there's a real need for that. And through repackaging and lots of other things that we did, figured that out and I'm like, "Wow, there's a whole business side to content. That's really interesting for me," because it sort of was the merger of my entrepreneurial passions with sort of my dorky, nerdy, like avid reader stuff. I'm like, "Oh, here's a thing," and, you know, here we are today. So, it's been fun.

Very cool. So, kind of a twist in the journey led to where you are today.

Yeah. I don't— I've yet to meet an entrepreneur who has a logical linear path, right? You talk to an assistant principal, it's like, "What do you do?" "I went to school for education." "And then what?" "Oh, and then I was a teacher." Like, okay, or, you know, talk to an accountant. Would you like— entrepreneurs is like, okay, well then I did this, and then of course I went to Yugoslavia for 2 years, and then I started a chain of, you know, pancake shops, and, uh, you know, now I own a proctology clinic or something. Like, who knows? Like, it's always— but it makes sense to them when you tell the story of how it all ties together.

So that's your next book, Peter, Pancakes to Proctology. There you go. Uh, well, hey, case in point, I, I started college in, uh, in pre-dental. And so I was gonna be a dentist, did internship and said, I don't like teeth, why do I want to be a dentist? Oh yeah, my cousin's a dentist and he has a Porsche and a big house. Not the right reason to choose the career, I found out early. So again, you're all— we're all pinball machines just going around, right? So, well, hey Peter, this has been phenomenal. Thank you so much for your great advice for business owners and entrepreneurs about the beginning steps of becoming a little bit more recognized and marketed in their field. Love the book. Advice, the book publishing advice of how to publish a book, or maybe why not to publish a book yet. So thanks for that honesty as well. You don't often find a business owner who makes their money from helping people publish books saying maybe you don't want to, right? So thank you for the objectivity and the honesty. Peter, if anybody wants to get in touch with you and learn more about you and maybe your services, what's the best way to do that?

Yes, you can check out the website, which is thoughtleadershipleverage.com. Or you can email me directly at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com.

Excellent. Peter, thank you so much. I wish you massive continued success.

Thank you.

All right. And thank you, Avanti listeners, for listening to the show. We appreciate you being here today as well. If you want to learn more about Peter and continue to listen to more podcasts that we have on avantientrepreneurgroup.com, that's where you go, avantientrepreneurgroup.com. We're there for you with a ton of services. You can learn more about our peer groups and our consulting services, our events, the whole works. Make it a great day and stay awesome. Thank you for listening. Head over to AvantiEntrepreneurGroup.com for show notes and more helpful advice from entrepreneurs like you. Continue to find your entrepreneurial rhythm at the Avanti Entrepreneur Podcast.