Leveraging Thought Leadership Live w/Peter Winick featuring Joseph Michelli

And welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on this episode of the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. So we're doing a special LinkedIn Live today, which is kind of fun. My guest— this one I'm really excited about because I've been a big fan of Joseph's for quite some time. And I think I'm looking at his bookshelf, I think I have probably all of them either on my bookshelf or certainly if not on my Kindle. So, uh, so for those that don't know, Dr. Joseph Michelli is an internationally sought-after speaker and author and organizational consultant. Um, he's got knowledge of lots of business practices. He has written more books than many people read. He's written, uh, Stronger Through Adversity: World-Class Leaders Share pandemic-tested lessons on thriving during the toughest challenge. That was a little bit different given COVID. He's done one on Airbnb, Mercedes-Benz, Starbucks, Ritz-Carlton. The list goes on and on and on. He's got a really interesting model in terms of how he goes about doing that. So anyway, without further ado, welcome aboard today, Chris.

God, talk about fans. I'm a fan of yours. So this is fun to do. I'm coming back for a second visit with you. It's been years, I think.

I know. Yeah, we had you on quite a while ago. So the first thing I want to do for people that don't know is one of the things that I'm fascinated by your work is you've got this really interesting model, which is, you know, you go embedded consultant into an organization, but the organization needs to meet certain criteria in that they've got to have a big brand that is known to consumers like a Starbucks, like a Mercedes-Benz, like a Ritz-Carlton, et cetera. Then you go embedded and then Voilà, on the other side of it, besides the consulting you're doing, a book comes out, right? Like, now you've broken that model a couple of times or steered away from it. But how did you develop that? Because, and maybe explain it better than I did, because I think it's—

No, that was brilliantly said. Yeah, it's interesting. Sometimes it starts with a speaking engagement where I'll come in and I'll do a presentation on what is customer experience? How do we magnify customer experience? How do we balance technology and people? And so I'll do that presentation. And, you know, normally that's the why, why you should do it, a little bit of the how. But, you know, there's, if there's the right leaders in the room, it's not unusual to have them say, hey, how about the possibility of you kind of coming in and assessing where we are on this journey? And then from that assessment, creating a real consulting plan. And sometimes that's multiyear. So take Mercedes. I was involved with them for many years as they were doing their transformation to be at the top of customer experience. And so from there—

Right.

in conversations with the leadership team while I'm consulting, I define, this is probably one of those brands that's worthy of a book. I reach out to my publisher and see if they're interested. And the next thing you know, we have a collaboration agreement with the brand, and we have a publishing agreement with the publisher. And I run the middle and put that book together. But it is a— and the good— and the focus is always how wonderful the leaders are in those organizations that enable them to make these transitions. And it's not about me as the consultant, right? I mean, we're just a tool.

You're the Jiminy Cricket that happens to be there.

Yeah.

And there are also books that are positive, right? We're not talking about, oh my God, you're gonna go work at the post office for a year and tell us how horrible that is, or DMV or something like that. There's something about these brands that are stellar, they're top of class, they're Amazingly respected. You know, it's interesting, you went from one end of the— on hospitality to— what was the name of the Ritz-Carlton book? I forget.

It's called The New Gold Standard. Yeah.

The New Gold Standard. Then you went to the other side of that.

Airbnb. You know, it's interesting. That's just a funny story. I remember in about— I think it was about 2008, somewhere in that timeline. I'm with the CEO of the Ritz-Carlton and we're talking about, can we serve beer in a can?

Right?

It was always going to have to be poured into a chalice and handed with reverence to the guests. And it was really the question of the changing consumer. And at that same year, these 2 guys in California, in San Francisco, were trying to rent out their air mattresses and serve Pop-Tarts for breakfast. And they created that air bed and breakfast, Airbnb.

Yeah.

And so, and then at one point when I was writing the Airbnb book, Airbnb was worth more than Marriott in total. Irrespective of all the properties that Marriott owned. It was just, it was valued at a higher valuation. So it is ironic how that hospitality sector can go from self-serve, you know, campout sort of glamping sort of options to the highest end of accommodations.

Yeah. So what are the— so that model that you came up, which is really cool, 'cause you're doing the 3 things that you love, right? You're doing the speaking, you're doing the consulting, And then you're writing a book and what a beautiful win for the client to have their customer experience memorialized in a book, right? Like they work so hard at it and oftentimes they can only say how great they are or one of the net promoter score or Nielsen, whatever. There's only so many ways they can say it, but to actually invest 5, 6 hours of your life reading a book around, well, how does Starbucks do that?

Right.

That's really interesting.

Yeah. And I think the brands really do benefit from that. I think it's something they consider sometimes when they think of me as a consultant, because they know that one of the possible byproducts, if everything goes as we plan, is the potential to have a spotlight on their thought leadership, their industry leadership. So it really is a wonderful opportunity for them. I mean, some brands obviously I've consulted for, and they from the jump say, we don't want you doing a book. Like, you know, you're notorious for doing books about brands. So please, we want to keep our trade secrets, or please, we don't want to put a target on our back by saying we're great at something. We'd rather just fly under the radar. But those are more infrequent than frequent, I think.

Have you ever had any angst or tension between— because there's 3 parties here now. There's the author and the publisher, That dance doesn't always go well. And now you've got the brand that's a collaborative partner. Ever had any tension where maybe there's some things you wanted to highlight that the brand said, ooh, I'd prefer you didn't, or the publisher would say, we want more of that thing?

Yeah, there's always that tension. I was fortunate to get a PhD from USC, and I remember my dissertation committee, and I had 6 people to please. And invariably I'd write something and one of my committee people were completely opposite to what the feedback was from somebody else. I mean, the art of, of this is telling the truth and never saying anything you're not willing to stand behind. I mean, my job is not puffery. It's not to create that, but it's to give people insights on how you can be successful. And normally you just have to broker some of those deals. I remember with Starbucks, the very first Starbucks book, they required me to put Starbucks Frappuccino blended beverage trademark every time it came up. Like the little, you know, normally we just say, can't you guys just let us do that in the beginning, all these initial— once a trademark appears, it's always going to be trademarked throughout the book. No, they didn't do that. But over time, I think we've learned how to broker those discussions better and better. We're all trying to do the same thing, right? Tell an honest story that inspires people to do something different in their business.

Right. And this is where I think the journalistic skills and the consulting skills and the speaking skills are way are so related. So I want to pivot a little bit. You've been around this speaking, writing space for a little while now, right?

That's a nice way of saying you are one old consultant, speaker, author.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's true. I have been a little while.

Yeah. What's the same and what's different?

Well, I mean, it changes all the time. Like, by the time we finish this podcast, this you know, live, it'll probably be something different. You know, I remember early on, um, you— the authors got to keep all the audio rights, for example.

Yeah.

Um, that was a note, that was a boilerplate sort of thing, didn't worry about it. Then you'd sell those rights to Audible, which is an Amazon company or whatever. Um, no longer. I mean, with the emergence of, you know, the auditory mediums, the podcasts and all of this, you don't get to keep your audio rights. So, you know, books are being, you know, published in audio version, and that's just something that publishers keep. I think people don't read as much anymore. I mean, in all due respect, I think when I first got into this industry, the book sales were just gargantuan because everybody was relying on books as a primary form of education.

Right.

I think there's so many other competing options for people, so books are harder to write I, you know, publish on demand has been really big. So you see more and more people do their own publishing where, you know, someone like an Amazon gets an incredible amount of money, you know, 60% of it all, but you get a pretty good share, maybe 40% on the backside of that. And, but you're only making it every time somebody buys a book and the quality of the actual printing and publishing doesn't have that richness that I was used to early in my career. So there's changes. I think ultimately people are looking for the same thing though. They're looking for some, ideas that they can take with them tomorrow to solve a real-world problem. Nobody comes and says, boy, I need one more book for my bookshelf. Until I get that one more book, my life is not complete. What they're looking for is a solution in the form of a blog, a podcast, a live, a book, whatever.

No, I agree. I mean, there's lots of books that should have remained the TED Talk, right? And there are very few TED Talks that deserve to be made into a book, although The market might tell you otherwise. You know, what you said about the books earlier in terms of, you know, they don't sell as well, it's similar to albums, right? Like, used to be albums were the thing. When we were kids, you saved up your money and you got the album and, you know, there were 2 or 3 good songs and a lot of breadcrumbs in the meatball, right?

Yeah.

And now, you know, artists have to figure out different ways to make money on merchandise, concerts, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things I was gonna say is, you know, not that long ago, I'd say maybe 15 years ago, maybe even a little less, there was a pretty standard model that worked fairly well for a lot of authors. Get a new book out every 18, 24 months, go out on the speaking circuit, make a ton of money, rinse, lather, repeat. Because if you had the new one coming out, you could resell that into the client base. With books being consumed less for lots of reasons, and we can talk about the why, but it's just a fact, right? The average business book is selling under 2,000 units. Most of them do better year 2 than year 1. But if I were to say to you, the amount of energy and effort that I know you expend to put in a book, you're going to reach 2,000 people, you're probably going to say, well, I could just go on a handful of podcasts. Why would I do that? But that business model doesn't work anymore where you just crank out a book every so often or every 18 to 24 months. So you've sort of found a different way because you're not in the training business, right?

Yeah.

The more standard model today is you come out with a set of capabilities identified in a book, go speak at a company, and a company goes, great, you know, that's an awesome way to think about negotiation. What do you have for my 32,000 people? You don't have that.

I don't have that. And that, that's a great thing to have, except for the flavor of the day issue that comes with a lot of that. So a lot of the people who do buy those things are, you know, Carrot Principle this year, Fish Philosophy next year, and whatever it is, right? It's a, it's a cadence. But yeah, I think for me, I just have found that I enjoy doing the consulting. So once I've consulted, I love telling the story so other people can have access to it. I'm always writing for a dry cleaner in Poughkeepsie. Like, that's my thing. I don't even know what that is. But I mean, I have this sense of a small business owner, entrepreneur, who doesn't have the resources of a Ritz-Carlton at their disposal.

Yeah.

But they want to learn some of the basic principles of how do I get this these new hires to do something uniquely different from my dry cleaning corner than what that new hire might have been doing in another job elsewhere. So that's what I'm always trying to write for. And so for me, my clients give me a great workshop for that, and I just try to package it in different ways based on the industry and send it out to the world.

It's so funny that you say that because I started my first business, I was in my early 20s, and we weren't using the term thought leadership, like, you know, whatever. I was just a nerd. Like, I read constantly because as a 23-year-old or whatever business owner, I'm like, geez, I can't believe not everybody's doing what I say or that people aren't motivated. Somebody else must have had this problem before. Yeah. Go to Barnes Noble, right? And I'd look around and look at, oh, somebody's writing a book on leadership or management or accountability. I'm like, yeah, yeah, I need that. And for $20, $25, I didn't even know you can pay consultants the big bucks, which I didn't have then.

Right. And you wouldn't have anyway. You know, at that point, for most entrepreneurs, we want to do as much of ourselves as we can until we get in a bind. If we can't read our way out of it, then we're going to have to find some, the most low-cost solution we can to try to get out of it. And then, at some point, you get to a midsize business and scalability, and you start thinking, hmm, I don't know that I can go through that methodology. There's just not enough of me to go around, kind of a—

No, and I—

So then you start getting consulting. And literally, having the opportunity to sit with a Howard Schultz, right, like at Starbucks, Enables me to say, you know what? You can learn something from Howard Schultz. You know what? You're not in the coffee business. You're in the people business serving coffee. Everything's about people. Everything is about service. Everything is about understanding perceptions. Let's help you think through your business through that lens. That's what I love to be able to do. And, you know, right, I never thought I would hang out with Howard Schultz.

So, you know, the dry cleaner in Poughkeepsie is, I would call that an avatar where it's something that's keeping you grounded when you're doing your stuff going, would he or she care about this?

Yeah.

Yes, no, maybe, right? And what I love about that is in essence what you're saying is, does that entrepreneur that's aspiring to be better and serve their clients better and grow their business more and more, he might not want to take over the world and open 500 dry cleaning shops around the world, but what are the little nuggets that if he buys a book for $25 that can pick up a little something from Starbucks and a little something from the Ritz-Carlton and a little something from Mercedes and tweak or modify or something in their business, in essence, in real time, and literally, you know, see the differences. One of the things that's great about being an entrepreneur is like, you know, life's an R&D lab. You can try out an idea and see fairly quickly, as long as you don't do bet-the-house things, say, ooh, that was good, that was bad. But in my place, we've got to do it a little bit differently than that. Or yeah, what works for Airbnb doesn't work for me.

You know, and the weird part is that the bulk of my consulting business isn't coming from that sector. I think I sell books into that sector. But a lot of people who buy me as a consultant have read the same book that I was positioning for entrepreneurs, but they're more middle managers, or they're a senior leader who has a big problem at scale, and they're seeing an example of another great big business. So I'll give you just a couple of examples.

Right.

Clinton Homes, which is a Berkshire Hathaway company, you know, somebody read my book, sent it to the leadership team, and before you know it, I'm meeting with them. Or Veterans United, a home mortgage company out of Missouri, same thing. And then I'm meeting with that leadership team because they read the Ritz-Carlton book with a mindset of, how do we elevate it at our enterprise? And so, it's been a fascinating journey because I don't necessarily write for the people who I consult for. I write for individual readers, of which there is enough overlap between, I guess, CEOs in larger companies and Entrepreneurs to make it applicable to each other.

Well, some, you know, a lot of the work that we do with our clients, I think of it as the democratization of the intellectual property, right? Where a board of directors has, in essence, an unlimited budget. If they say, who's one of the best people out there in customer experience? And they look up, oh, Dr. Micheli, you could name your rate and come in and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah for the day, right? You get down a level or 2 levels or 4 levels or go deep into the organization, That's not so. So you have to have derivatives of your IP that are more accessible, not just from a language and framing, but from a price point, right? There's only so many people, even when they pay you to speak. What's the most people you've spoken to at one event? 1,000 people or something?

A couple of thousand. Yeah, but that's about it.

Yeah.

But you know what? I really stink at this, Peter. I mean, let's be really clear. I've got like 3 price points. And I really should have a big middle that I don't. So You can buy my books at about $30, right? You can buy me for a keynote at a sizable fee, right? And then add a zero, probably, at least to get me over up in the consulting space. But there's nothing from $30 to that, you know, tens of thousands of dollars sort of space.

Yeah.

And I, if I were redesigning my business with a mindset to that, I'd probably build some product in there, though I've never been good at that. Right? Like, I've been good. I know what I'm good at. I'm good at doing the consulting. I'm fairly good at speaking. And, you know, but all of that then flywheels into the books, which is just this virtual cycle. But I've never been good at developing product in the middle.

No. And I love the transparency there because I think that I see a lot of things in that space where one, a couple examples of what I see, someone fancies themselves, they've got this great idea and I'm going to build an app or a video-based, like, blah, blah, blah. This makes sense, right? And they spend a ton of money, time, energy, effort, opportunity costs, whatever. And then comes the marketing part and they're like, uh-oh, I never read Marketing 101. Like, now what? What do I do? How do I sell this? How do I do it? And it winds up idle. The other way to do it is to be listening intently into the market and identifying to potential clients what you— you have to have some ideas on what this could be. What flavors might the ice cream come in?

Right.

Describe that to them. And then it's much easier and it's a much better sort of portfolio management risk reward when they say, yeah, that's cool. We would really, we would license that from you. And then, you know, make your first client your investor.

Yeah. And see, and I think licensing and all that would be fabulous to know more about. So what we do, just so you understand it, I mean, I very well will develop a training program around a specific topic specific to your organization, extremely bespoke. I mean, like crazy bespoke. And then I'll pull all that back out and I'll someday put it on some training LMS training program and someday think I'm gonna sell it in a more generic white label way and never get around to it, right? That's just not where I go. I build product for my clients at a fee that's fair and very customized.

Um, so what's interesting about what you said is when people think about the sort of consulting to training business there, I see that as 3 buckets. There's consulting. You're going to pay me the big bucks to solve a real problem at a real point in time based on your data and variables and my skill sets. Now, they may or may not care about you, the frameworks you use, the models that you use, or maybe they do, and that's fine. But our problem is X, get us to Y, period, done, right? Then you've got on the other end of the continuum, off-the-shelf consulting. I'm sorry, off-the-shelf training, situational leadership, right?

Yeah.

Here's the quadrant. I don't care if you're the CEO or the first-year analyst at JP Morgan. It is what it is, what it is. You're in that more difficult space, which is that semi-custom, custom, quasi-bespoke training. And I think the problem people have in that market, it sounds like you're doing it properly though, is they charge the same fees as you would for off-the-shelf, but it's a lot more money. And you can't repurpose it. If you can't repurpose it, or it's not designed to be repurposed, you've got to be charging a different price point.

Yeah, and we do. And we make that very, very clear. We are always saying, if you want the off-the-shelf stuff, there is some great stuff out there and go get it. But most of the clients, you know, by that point, if they're talking to me, they know we're going to do it as completely customized, completely customized. We're going to shoot videos based on your executive suite. We're not going to have stock video, right? Like, so whatever it is, it is incredibly incredibly labor-intensive. And it— but, but my model works on a principle of not spending a lot of money to make money. That's really the simplest version of my model. It's that I'm going to get paid to speak, I'm going to get paid to create, and I will produce product when in accord with that at a very fair price.

It also makes sense if you've spent the time and you don't just come in as a consultant for 2 hours and, you know, scribble on a whiteboard. You're embedded, right? So you understand the nuance, the history, the culture, all those things. So they would be crazy to not take advantage of all that insight that they paid you for to be able to move that into the training. Because I think a lot of times what happens with training is people have good intentions, but the end user, the butt in the seat for, you know, Yeah. JP Morgan or Harley-Davidson, they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that's not really us. It's kind of like, yeah, I get you should be nice to customers, but like, you don't get the history here or the culture here or the heritage here or the, the why that wouldn't work exactly the way you do it. So they, it distances them from it.

Yeah, I think that, I think that's so true. And at the same time, I get so much from being embedded. I mean, I don't know that you really have to be willing to join the beast, if you will, in order to help the beast. You can't just look at it from the outside. You have to become part of it. And if you look at great consulting companies, you know, They tend to embed their teams, the McKinseys of the world, right? Like those are embedded teams. We see that model as really where we like to play.

So yeah. So have there ever been, and you don't have to name them by name, clients have come to you and said, oof, I want to work for them, or I wouldn't want to read a book about, you know, whatever?

I don't know the question. I'm not understanding the question. Did they come to me telling me they're—

That, yeah, come to you or—

Oh, and I wouldn't want to write about them? Oh my gosh, yes. Oh yes.

Or wouldn't want to spend 6 months with them or—

Yeah, no, we turn down clients. I mean, I think that not early in my career. I mean, you know, again, all transparency here, we're friends, right? Early in my career, I'd work for anybody who had money, right? Like I was hungry and scared. I think at some point you realize your reputation goes with you if you work for those companies and they don't produce. it really costs you in the end. So at some point we matured. And I think now I really turn down clients all the time. I turn down people who ask me to write books about them that I don't know anything about because I'm like, I'm sorry, I don't know you. I'm sure you're nice people, but I'm not about to take the intellectual, you know, whatever capital we've developed over time and burn it. So yeah, so I do that, you know, I'm very careful now. And there are companies though that fool me. I mean, I'm not, you know, they seem to be fully in.

Yeah.

And then the bureaucracy is so overwhelming, and there's an underbelly culture, and I'm in there for a while. And at some point, we terminate those agreements. You know, we say, look, we've been doing this for 6 months, a year. We're not getting any of the traction we envisioned. You shouldn't invest another 2 years in this thing. You've got some structural problems you need to fix, and we'd recommend these changes. If they get taken care of, we'd be glad to reengage, but you're going to burn money on us. And, and we've seen clients do that. Like, sadly, They just can't get out of their own way because of the way the organization is structured. And they're just spending money without results. And that's bad profit.

Well, it's interesting that you say that because we see that as well, where they, you know, they bring you in and you're like, yeah, okay, we, you know, we could talk about your cholesterol, but you're bleeding out. Like, there's some triage stuff that needs to be done. So, like, another cheeseburger is not the thing that's going to kill you. It's the fact that—

Yeah, you need a tourniquet right now.

Yeah, you need a tourniquet.

Exactly.

Do you want to give us any sneak peeks into what might be coming around the bend?

Yeah. Well, in 2025, I'll release a book about Amazon One Medical. So my journey there, kind of again, being very transparent, boy, this is— I'm going to go way back. So I remember getting a call saying, it's you or John Wooden to speak at an event at UCLA. And quite frankly, they're worried about whether John Wooden's going to be Well, I was going to say, this has to be when John Wooden was alive. Yeah, a long, long time ago. And he was not well, but they wanted him. They didn't want me. They wanted him, but they weren't— they were concerned that he wouldn't be able to perform for that event. So they hired me to speak at UCLA. UCLA Health Systems with a CEO who was just remarkable. He and I became good friends. I started consulting for them at UCLA and Then I wrote the book Prescription for Excellence. David Feinberg was his name. He's a CEO, amazing. He went on to Geisinger. He's just, he was at Google Health as a vice president. And then the second in command was a guy by the name of Amir Dan Rubin. And Amir was the chief operating officer. He went to Stanford.

Wow.

And then ultimately through a little route, he ended up at One Medical, which is a startup technology company in the the Bay Area. Just an amazing company. So I consulted for him. So here's again how it works, right? Like one speaking engagement at UCLA turns into consulting, turns into a book, turns into relationships with others in the C-suite. You follow them over to where they are. I end up doing consulting for them. Fast forward, they get purchased for about $4 billion by Amazon a couple of years back. And now I'm doing a book about Amazon One Medical based on my relationship both as a consultant and again, just as somebody who writes books about clients that I've worked with.

How cool is that? That's very cool.

Very cool.

So 2025. So we just got the movie trailer.

Yep.

Anything that you would, you know, you found your way, you know, with a different model, which is cool. If you were to be talking to someone out there now who is, you know, you minus 20 years or something, Let's go 30. Yeah, 30. Okay, I was being kind, but that was very kind. It was kind. Okay, do we hit 35 anyway? Um, yeah, what would you tell them? You know, like, they're passionate, they've got domain expertise, they're trying to figure it out. What are the things that you would tell them? Like, I love how you said before, yeah, I would kind of work for everybody earlier, but like, what else might you share with them?

Yeah, first and foremost, everything has already been thought up. I'm pretty convinced, right? So it is about you and how you package and how you take information, how you synthesize what is known. Really develop a point of view. Develop a point of view and a passion for your product in telling that story. Be your full self in the way you express it. I, you know, I'm a very conservative type of presentation, but there are people wildly outlandish. If that's who you are, leverage your strengths to differentiate yourself in taking that knowledge, packaging it, synthesizing it and presenting it with your unique spin. If you do that, there's always going to be a market for you. How you get it out there, the tools, the platforms, the technology, they're always changing. And I'm glad I don't compete today on those fronts.

Yeah. And I want to just add to that because I think a lot of times when people go in, I love the authenticity because I've known you for quite some time. You're grounded, you're authentic, you're not woo-woo charisma, pump it up. Like, that's not you, right? But a lot of times what the advice people get when they go to folks coming in, oh, you've got to be over the top and you've got to be charismatic and you've got to have a tagline. You got to like— no, you can actually just be you and find your way, right? So if there's an audience looking for woo-woo, rah-rah, let's jump up on our chairs and give thumbs up, they're not going to hire you. And by the way, if they did, you probably don't want to be there that day. If they want to go deep, you're like— I always think of it as there's sizzle in their steak. You're a steak guy.

Yeah.

Like diving into your stuff is a rich steak meal. Anybody can throw butter on some greasy meat and call it sizzle, right?

And different kinds of steak, you know. So I worked with Lior Arusi at Mercedes-Benz, and Lior is a consultant in my space. We could not be more different people. He is phenomenally brilliant. I respect him to the cows come home, right? But he's very different. I'll stand up on a stage and I'll kind of Be gentle about it. Lior is going to tell you, your baby is ugly, but I can help you get, get them pretty. I mean, Lior has— I'd never say that to somebody. Like, you know, if you have problems, I'm gonna position myself to be respectful of that. He's gonna break through the wall. Now, there's a whole bunch of people who should never use me because I'm just not breaking through the wall enough.

Yeah.

And there are a whole bunch of people who shouldn't use Lior because he's going to offend a whole bunch of the people, and they'll never get the traction on the change movement. All that said is, if you just trust there's an audience for you, and you don't have to be Lior's audience, right, and he doesn't have to be for mine. There's abundance out there in the world. If you can stake your claim and live in it with passion, it works. It works. Be a thought leader, you know, but also be yourself.

I love that, Pete, because there's, I mean, the self-selection comes in, right? Because the other thing is, You know, there's certain types of clients that are attracted to certain types of folks, right? And the folks that are engaging with you, they know what they're getting. You know what you're getting. And that's going to work well, right? If you, if they were expecting something else, or you were expecting something else, not so good. Cool. Well, I appreciate, this has been phenomenal. I appreciate your time. Love your work. And I can't wait till 2025 to get the, get the next book.

Hey, Peter, I am a super fan of yours. So continue doing what you do. You make the life better for all of us who are in thought leadership, And I'm telling you, if you're out there today, and I wasn't paid, this is not a paid promotion, people. If you're out there today looking for how to take what you know and turn it into a marketable product in the thought leadership space, there's nobody else like you. So please continue to follow Peter.

Thank you. Wow. Wow. I appreciate that. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.