Mastering Search in a Niche Space | William Vanderbloemen | 536

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is William Vanderbloemen, and he's got an interesting background in that he's got a combination of 15 years of ministry experience as a senior pastor. That's in and of itself is not brand new in the thought leadership space, but he is the founder of a group called the Vanderbloemen Search Group, which has focused on search primarily in the, I would say the, the, the church field. He's got an HR background from the Fortune 200 side, and he does a lot of speaking. He's written a couple of books. So it's a good example of the use of thought leadership as a differentiator in an otherwise commoditized, although niched out market. So Welcome aboard, William. Interesting story.

Yeah, thanks, Peter. And I, I gotta tell you, we sort of, if we end up being a success long-term, we probably ought to contact Malcolm Gladwell and have us be an appendix to the Outliers book. 'Cause it was just right place, right time. And, you know, we started the search firm in the fall of 2008, which was a brilliant time to quit your job and start something new. But that aside, it was the same month Twitter came out. It was, so there's just this convergence and we sort of fell into this thing long before I knew you or anything. We were like, you know, there's a big knowledge gap between what you learn. So I went to Princeton for seminary. I didn't learn anything about how to run a staff or build a team. I mean, it's just not part of the curriculum cuz it's not Ivy League theological education. So we said, all right, let's start the company. This blogging thing is new. Why don't we just offer free resources for people? That are thought leadership on how to build and run and keep a great team.

So stay there for a minute though, because I would argue that this might be— sound strange, but seminary, like lots of other places, call it law, call it medicine, whatever it might be, that are tasked with developing professionals with, with a, you know, at a high caliber, particularly at a place, place like Princeton, high specialty, whether it's medicine, pastor, whatever. They don't do the business stuff, right? Like, how do you lead people? How do you manage people? How do you run a P&L? How do you—

how do you read a P&L? Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So there's a huge gap there. Now, you could go out and be the greatest pastor ever as it, as it relates to the work, but if you're not savvy enough on the business side, um, it's not going to be sustainable.

And Peter, it's not even just the business side, it's the whole build, run, and keep a great team. And for a lot of people in the faith-based world, whether it's a nonprofit or a school or a church, they're using volunteers. So no one ever taught me how do you fire a volunteer? Like that's a whole different meeting. So, you know, we, we parked on this content thing. It really took off. We even got to a place where there is a content quota on everyone in the company's head. Everyone had to contribute content. Uh, for some it might be an infographic, for others it might be a podcast, for others it might be a written piece. But we just sort of—

I don't mean to interrupt you, but stay there for a second because a lot of people in lots of organizations talk about embracing thought leadership at an organizational level because it drives business outcomes, whether that's differentiating the firm, attracting clients, whatever, whatever. But I love what you said is you're putting your money where your mouth is and saying everybody's got a quota, right? So you might have, you know, in essence, search is a sales function, right? So there might be a sales quota. But now you're having people create thought leadership at a quota level. That's interesting, right? So is, are there folks that just say, eee, that's not for me. I don't fancy myself a writer. Or do you support them from a capabilities development standpoint?

Yeah. Well, so as the company's gotten bigger, we've had to learn new things. But in, in general, if you're not willing to produce some form of content for us, you're probably not gonna get hired. It's, it's pretty clear in the interview process. Now that has gotten more lax as we've gotten bigger and we have more specializations. Okay. So, but, but even down to like office manager, like do an interview with me on successful tips for office man. Like we'll find a way to make some content. And the fun thing, Peter, if you've got a, a listener out there who's like, I wonder if my team could create content. We did a thing where we, and we totally stole this from a friend of mine, Brian Halligan, who started HubSpot.

Wait, so you're the pastor that steals? Isn't, isn't that what they didn't teach that at Princeton?

What do I— There's nothing, nothing new under the sun, Peter. That's in, that's in the Hebrew scriptures and the Bible, but nothing new. So Brian said, run with it. And the idea was this, it was like, what if we did a contest where everybody produces a blog and we find a unified way of measuring like click-throughs or con, you know, page views, whatever the thing is you pick. And whoever has the most popular blog post wins 2 free round-trip first-class tickets domestic anywhere you want to go in the next year. And you know, we have a bunch of points, so it wasn't a huge, yeah, monetary investment. But man, he, Brian told me, you'll be surprised. There'll be somebody on your staff that is not a writer and their stuff will stick. And we've found that to be absolutely true. The intern won the contest and then became somewhat of a ghostwriter for a lot of people for, for many years. All that's to say, I couldn't be more in your corner for what you're trying to do. You know, we, we are in an industry that is—

I wanna push on another thing though. I'm sorry to interrupt you.

Yeah, go for it.

I like making a contest, right? 'Cause people love contests. They like winning things, whatever. But what you said, and I, and this is where I wanna push a little bit, is the most popular. So when it comes to thought leadership, there's a, you know, there's a struggle with what are the right metrics because I, you know, you could produce a beautiful piece of content that goes quote viral. But if it's going to Housewives in Minnesota and your market doesn't matter, boards of director at a church, you hit the bullseye, but it's the wrong target, right? So how do you, how do you stay focused and keep the organization focused on what popular means or what the right target or metric means?

Because it's really, well, we probably need to update this, Peter. We probably ought to hire you or somebody, but we are old school with our content-based marketing developed, 4 personas that we write to. They're very clear. Committee member, committee member Carol, Pastor Paul, you know, staff member Sally, and I forget the other one. And then there's the anti-persona that we don't write to because they never buy from us. We love them, but they never buy from us. So there's just not any point except maybe to do some help along the way and maybe some. Yeah, but I know that's old school. I know marketing.

No, but no, no, but, but stay on the persona thing. We call them avatars, which is whatever.

Same thing. Like we've got Okay, Pastor Paul drives this car. Pastor Paul loses sleep because of these 3 things. Pastor Paul sees this as a win. Pastor Paul gets frustrated with this. So we write to those pain points. Same with Committee Member Carol, Staff Member Sally, and I should know the 4th one, but I can't remember.

But no, so I love how, but I love how fluent you are in that, in that the, the ultimate litmus test is when someone, anyone, your office manager, whoever is putting out a piece of content, who is this written for? And it might be a great peace. Oh geez, it doesn't— yeah, it's, it's not really written for any of ours. Therefore, even though it's great, you know, no pun intended, right church, wrong pew, right? So, but I think a lot of people don't have that discipline to say, I know sort of almost at a visceral level what, you know, Pastor Paul, what he drives, what he's thinking, what's keeping him up at night. There are some evergreen things that you could assume would always, he'd always be thinking about. And then there's some things that are going on based on whatever, what's going on in the world, what's going on in the market.

Oh, oh, Peter, we had to, we had to do, you know, we have a, uh, here's the profile of Pastor Paul and we update it every now and then. But during the shutdown, like we had to update it daily.

Yeah.

Like today we're think we're worried about this tomorrow. So it's a, uh, they're fixed personas, but the, the pain points we try and keep an eye on and make sure we're doing what's current and not what we've always done.

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Huge. And it goes back to, I don't know, I, I think content-based marketing, thought-based leadership, if it's not coming from the top, it's not gonna work in the organization. So for all of it flows from Sometimes my good experience, sometimes my bad, my bad experience when I was a senior pastor at church, I probably, if you put the school in there, there were probably 250, 300 people on payroll, something like that. And I needed some help finding a staff person. So I tried hiring a search firm. Every time I talked to the guy, maybe he was a nice guy, I don't know him, but after every phone call, I felt like I needed to take a shower. It was so bad. It was so sleazy. It was, you know, every time you see a search firm in the, in, well, like in Mad Men, the drunk guy becomes the search guy and then they meet in the dark alleys and like, it's like, it's not cool. Right. So for me, that bad experience before I ever got to search made me say, I don't care if we don't make money, we will not be a vendor. We will be a trusted advisor.

Yes.

Yes. So for me, it's just a very personal crusade. To say thought leadership trumps clickbait. Right? And, it, it, the, the first—

stay there a minute because people, there, there's, you know, this tension, if you will, between what is content marketing and thought leadership. And it's not that one is better than the other, right? But they're just different. So content marketing to me, if I was producing diapers, if I'm Procter Gamble, I'd put out Procter Gamble, I'd put out a lot of stuff to teach new moms how to avoid diaper rash. Would I call that thought leadership? Absolutely not. Would it be content marketing that's really aligned to the product and the offering? So to me, the thought leadership is a higher level, right? And you have to take a little bit of risk. Not everyone has to agree with what you think, but you need to be able to justify what you say. It's not just opinion, but based on experience, research.

So, so 9 years ago, I, looking out over the horizon, which I think is part of my job, I could see, you know, baby boomers are retiring. There are not many Gen Xers to take their place. The millennials are not ready yet. There's going to be a succession crisis.

Yep.

And, and particularly in churches for a lot of reasons, because we had all this data. So I said, I want to write a book on pastoral succession. My mother said, I guess I'll have to buy all 12 copies. Who's gonna buy a book? And so I met with the publisher and they said, this is micro niche. If you sell 2,500 copies ever, it's a grand slam. Like, fine. And they said, what do you define as a win? I said, here's how I define it as a win. When this book is in every seminary library in the country, that's the win. Because it's no longer how many did we sell? It's, oh, they wrote the book on that. That to me is thought leadership. It's not just—

that's number one. And number two would be You know, I, I was, had a fairly well, a very well-known author on a podcast a couple months ago. And one of the things he said to me was over his career, and he's been blessed that he's got, you know, 3 or 4 books that have been multiple New York Times bestsellers. He goes, I probably literally sold a million books. There are literally 5 books, individual copies that have made him over a million each, but he didn't know which ones they were at the time he wrote them. So, you know, publishers by definition only have one metric of success. As you know, we sell times profit per unit equal X. I would argue for your book, if you've got a dozen net new transactions or net new clients with a lifetime value of multiple transactions over, you know, 10 years, that's a grand, that is a phenomenal success. So I think you need, you know, get out of the publishing industrial complex's version of success because your book that, you know, a book like that, yeah, maybe your mom's a little bit conservative there, but It's not gonna be at an airport. It's not gonna be on my bookshelf. I, I'm not your demographic.

No, but, but it sold 60,000 copies and it's in its 6th printing.

Wow.

So, and I mean, it's a tiny little niche. Who buys a book on this? This is like, if you have 6 toes, buy this book. Like, it's that weird.

So, did mom return the other 11 that she bought?

Exactly. No, it's, it's been a, and, and it has been in our sales funnel. Well, they wrote the book on this because now there's a lot of, you know, where the highest form of flattery is imitation, right? So we got a lot of flattery in the last 8 years. But when it comes down to who do we hire for the succession planning and the search, I can't tell you the number of times people are like, well, they did write the book on it before we ever looked at a consultant. We bought a case of his books and read it because that's got all the stats. And I've tried to make the books not William's opinion about this, that, or the other. And you tell me the right term for this. I totally made up this term, but I've tried to write books that are quant qual books. In other words, quantitative data with qualitative stories that, that, aren't just my ruminations, but are actually kind of data-driven. Yeah.

No, I, I think that's part of the definition of thought leadership. It can't just be, here's what I think. Now, it could be, here's what I think, 'cause I've been doing X for 30 years, whatever.

Right.

The shelf life, no pun intended again, on the book. So one of the things that's interesting, your book is a principle-based book. Now, things will change and evolve. And, you know, like you mentioned, during the lockdown, pastors didn't have to deal with how do I get people to come to me? Well, we know where they went on Sundays, but now with Zoom and all this other sort of stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

A principle-based book, or what I would call sort of an evergreen book like you wrote, should have a shelf life of 5 to 10 years. Like, people that your team is sending that book out today don't look at it and go, oh, that's 3 years old or 6 years old, that's yesterday's news. No, it's incredibly relevant to them at that moment where they're in the situation where you're most relevant.

Brother, you know, it's funny, this is off topic, but the publisher came back to us. Let's see, it was released in '13 or '14, something like that. Maybe it was released in '15.

I don't remember.

Anyway, in '19, they came back to us and said, can you do an updated and revised?

Mm-hmm.

And yeah, well, yes, we've got more research than ever. So we added— it's a way better book. It's got 100 150 more pages of research and graphs and charts. And here it's like, you can predict the future based on all this data we have. It hadn't done very well. People don't want a book that's 150 extra pages. So there's an example.

How many, how many pages was the first one?

Well, I mean, font size and page size and all that. It was 75,000 words. So it was 200.

That's a standard business book. That's okay. Yeah. Yeah.

So, and it went up to, I, I don't know if it went to 110,000 or something like that, but the feedback we've gotten—

bordering on textbook then at that point.

Yeah. The feedback we've gotten is, can you send us the original?

Is there a TED Talk on this? Right? Is it?

Yeah, there should be, right?

Yeah.

It's interesting.

Well, this has been great. I, I love the, the path that you've taken using, so one, you've got a really niche business, but then the path that you've taken to differentiate, because search is a commodity like almost every other professional service, right? And, and to be known as the guy that wrote the book is, you know, it's, it's interesting. You know, you said the book is almost 10 years old now. People are still coming to you with that reputation. And even if there are others that are, quote, flattering you at this point, you can still say, well, our book, you know, came out 10 years ago when we, you know, we've been doing this a long time. So there's a lot of Johnny-come-latelys. Good for them. That's cool. But we've got more depth, more experience, more placements under our belt, whatever the case may be.

Well, and what's interesting, one sign to me that it's evergreen is we've got a new book coming out that is a very quant qual book. It's not limited to churches. It's, it's what have we learned what are the telltale signs of the best of the best, the unicorns that you interview? And can you spot 'em quicker? And what we didn't realize was after all the research, it's not just about spotting 'em. We can actually teach people to become that, right? Yeah. So back to the first book, it's not even, this book isn't even out yet, but the presales, anytime the presales for the, the new book bump, all the other books bump too. It's like they're, they're evergreen. So, it's just interesting to see.

Oh, this has been great.

Excited to see where the next one's release takes us. It's not— it's very intentionally not designed for pastors to read. If they want to read it, that's fine. But this is— you help me here— but in the thought-based leadership, I know how to write to reach pastors or heads of school or heads of nonprofit organizations. Finding their board chair is a whole different thing. Because they don't have a common watering hole.

Mm-hmm.

Exactly. So this is more, okay, let's go a little mainstream. Let's show the world what we've learned about talent and how to find talent. Maybe it'll help some people become better at what they do and maybe it'll lead some chairs of the board to say, hey, we need a new, you know, CEO for the Bowery or whatever the, you know, the thing is. And they're thought leaders. They, they've done their homework.

Yeah. Love it. Love it. This has been great. I appreciate your time and sharing your journey with us. Thank you, William.

Thanks.

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