Juliet Funt Shares her Experience - Thought Leadership Leverage

So Julia, you've developed WhiteSpace and you've had the privilege of deploying it to audiences around the world for 10 years now. And you and I got together a while ago and we started to work on the business. And one of the products and one of the offerings that we came up with was this video-based training solution.

Yep.

So it took us a while to figure out what that would be and what it would look like and all those kind of things. We worked on it and here we are today at the end of a very long day.

Yay!

In a pretty cool studio.

Yep.

And we did the first round of So we sort of kind of gave birth today. I want to get a sense of what was it like? What was the experience like, not just from the production side, but getting to where we are today to get it out in little chunks there?

Sure, sure. So the scripting process was actually really fascinating to take the content, which is flexible and modular and moves differently from keynote to keynote, and kind of make it stand still by scripting it, by thinking through and making sure that every single module had a teaching point and had a call to action and had incredible precision. I actually think it was really great for the content.

That's great. So from a content perspective, it forced you to sort of get it really clear?

Yes.

That's cool. And tell us about the production side of it. What was today like?

It was a learning curve for me. I hadn't done prompter before, so that was a learning curve. And it's a long, arduous day of incredible focus. But it's also really fun because while you're doing each video, you know it's Frozen in time and now it can be shared and shared and shared. So as each one goes, it was very exciting.

Fantastic. One of the concerns that I see with authors and thought leaders that I deal with around the world is, uh-oh, when my stuff goes out there and it's not me delivering it, there's quality concerns, there's consistency concerns, there's— someone else is gonna do something different with it. How do I make sure, you know, not that I'm a control freak, you know—

But we all are, so yes.

How do we do that? So how do the videos make you feel relative to the quality and the consistency that In terms of how people experience the learning?

I think it gives you control in the good way because there is an element of quality control. When you have a product that you care about, you want to make sure it's deployed with consistency. And so you— when I'm on camera, I know that my delivery, my inflection, the way I care about the content is going to come across. And if someone else is saying the words, I can't guarantee that.

So you're a business owner too. You're a CEO, you're a founder, you've got your priorities, you're a mom. As a keynote speaker, people don't tend to come to your house to hear you speak. You tend to have to go to their house. Maybe we'll work on that one. That would be kind of cool. Like, there's 300 people coming over. What are your hopes for the business? How does this change your business now? Or how could it change your business?

Well, it's scalability. It's all about— I'm only one person. I keep very, very careful control of my schedule so that I'm a great mom to my kids and I'm not off gallivanting around the world all the time. So there's limited me, and this sort of just Expands the me that's available. If we have them in a can, then we can share them, and it's scalable from there. So that's the real big impact.

So it scales the business, keeps it consistent, doesn't force you to live on airplanes.

And it's also exciting to know that the modality is so friendly to the viewer, to know that these little bites, they're perfect for our ADD busy world. And we know that they're really gonna watch them and hopefully stay engaged through all of the enormous span of 3 minutes or 4 minutes that we're asking them to watch. And so I think that it's satisfying to know that it's gonna be such a good product.

That's fantastic. What do you think, or what do your hopes are in terms of the top 3 things that people will take away from the White Space program, from the video program?

Just to question. I'd say the number one thing is to simply stand back and question the way that we're living, to stop and say something is ridiculous about being in fast motion all the time. Number 2 would be to learn to let things go. What can you drop? What can you stop? And probably the last one is to look for where is good enough good enough. We're to figure out how at home and at work we can scale back on being so perfectionistic in order to retain more of our resources, connections, creativity, and productivity.

And that's both at home and in the workplace, obviously.

Yes. I mean, our business is at work, but white space is very, very important at home. Great.

Well, thanks for today.

Thank you.

Thanks for everything.

All right.

And this rocked.

Thanks, Peter.

Thank you.