Peter Winick: ON Establishing where you fit in, and why now is the best time to launch something new

Hello and welcome to the Mericast, the show that puts you on the fast track to business confidence. This week's guest, Peter Winick, is the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. For the past two decades, he's helped individuals and organizations build and grow revenue streams through designing and growing their thought leadership platform. Platforms and products. His clients come from a very diverse set of backgrounds and specialities. They include New York Times bestselling business book authors, members of the Speaker's Hall of Fame, recipients of the prestigious Thinkers50 Award, CEOs of public and privately held companies, and many more. Now, I think it's fair to say that Peter lives his entrepreneurial life to the full, as you'll hear. He lives in New York, and he acts and thinks quickly. And as I found out, his entrepreneurial roots go back to when he was a very young man.

You know, what's interesting is I have always been an entrepreneur at heart. I mean, from a young kid, you know, washing cars and selling things and doing things, whatever. So I've always been incredibly entrepreneurial. I started my first, you know, real corporation. I think I was 22 and then sold that some years later. And I think part of the composition of an entrepreneur is you see the world differently, you look at the world differently. You're always trying to figure out, you know, what's the business model? How does this work? How can, you know, how can I be ahead of the curve, et cetera? And what I didn't realize until maybe almost 20 years ago is that there was another side to me that I thought had nothing to do or had no potential as it related to my entrepreneurial ventures. And that was, you know, before it was called thought leadership, you know, you were a nerd. Right? So that was the non-technical term. So I was always, you know, reading anything I can get my hands on. I was an information junkie, reading lots of books, business magazines. You know, I had subscriptions to everything. If you're under 40, Google that term. It was a piece of paper that was pretty thick that landed on your doorstep with a regular frequency. So, but I just thought like, that's just me, that I love to get information in. And quite frankly, when you start your first business at 22, you're not even aware that there's this whole thing called consultants that you can pay to help you figure stuff out. And quite frankly, even if I was, I didn't have the money to do it. So I was always trying to stay ahead of it. And then, like I said, about 20 years ago, I got involved in doing a turnaround for a communications consulting company, global company. And the gist of their business was based on a book that somebody wrote in the late 1960s. And I was like, wow, this light bulb went off. And I'm like, I've read hundreds, if not thousands of books. And I follow lots and lots of amazing thought leaders and such. I never once stopped to ask myself, what's their business model? Right? Like, what businesses are they in? How do they make a living? And quite frankly, who cared? Right? Like, you buy your book, you spend the money on the book, you take a couple ideas from it, you do something with it. And now, ironically, that's kind of all I do.

So before that moment of enlightenment that hit you around 20 years ago, what were you like? Were you sort of action action, action, action precedes any kind of clarity that you may have on why you were doing something? Did you just think, well, let's just do, do, do, and then maybe the thought in the thought sort of came along a bit later? Was it like that, or am I painting too extreme a picture?

Um, no, I think that's probably fair to say. In terms of, you know, now everyone has a diagnosis of ADD, ADHD, whatever. The technical term that most of my teachers used in grammar school was pain in the ass. So can you imagine? Like, he's difficult, he's this, he's that. And, you know, my mind works a little differently. I'm fairly quick. I don't have a lot of patience. I like to move from thing to thing to thing. But then there are other times where, you know, I could be in flow and be focused on something for hours and hours and hours. So I think part of the entrepreneurial journey is also realizing where you fit and where you don't. You know, I had a, quote, real job for a while in the— wow, back in the I guess '80s or early '90s. And I'm like, this is kind of stupid. I have to listen to, I have to do what other people tell me to do. I like, I don't, I don't want to do that. Like I, you know, there's politics here. There's, there's things that don't make sense here. There's all this other stuff, you know? So my preference is, is to, at least there's an illusion of control when you're an entrepreneur. Oh, I don't have to answer anybody. No, you have to answer to everybody when you're an entrepreneur, right? Or, or you're a broke entrepreneur. But I think there's this, fantasy of, oh, I can, you know, take this job and shove it kind of thing.

Did you, in those early days, I mean, your business, did you have a sort of series of things that went quite well or did you learn lessons through things that didn't go quite so well?

Oh, both. Absolutely both. So the, you know, I started my first real business at 22, which is now the closest thing I would compare it to is Grubhub., you know, multi-restaurant food delivery. But you gotta realize in 1991 when I did that, the radical technology, this is pre-smartphone, pre-whatever, was, you know, beepers and fax machines, right? This was the high technology. And to integrate a technology like a fax machine into a restaurant operation, which in those days, the, you know, the restaurant operators would say, hey, listen, we're in the business of adding heat to meat. Like we don't under, we don't want to deal with technology. So built that up fairly nicely, had an exit. And thought I was on easy street in my early 30s where this exit was, you know, if you remember the late '90s, everything was supposed to go public. Remember the sock puppet and all that? So we got caught up in that, rolled up the business, sold the business, and then I don't know, whatever it was, 14, 18 months later, it got wiped out. That's not fun. That's not fun at all when you think you're set for life with a big exit. So, you know, you have choices. You can either sit around and go pour me and pour yourself another cocktail. Or go, okay, what's next? You know, I think you have to have an okay, what's next mindset.

And let's go back to the moment of enlightenment that you said you came across this communications consultancy and you thought, blimey, you know, there's this whole kind of, it's a whole different way of doing things. You know, these things that I've been taking for granted, I've been devouring all this information, you know, but suddenly there's a whole industry here. What happened next? Did anything happen next or did it take a while for you to get involved in the whole thought leadership space?

Yeah, so, you know, it's funny what happened there was I was brought in by a turnaround team and I had never done any turnaround work before. I like to build things, right? So, and sometimes when you try to build things, they fail and that's okay. Turnaround work to me, and some people love it, is kind of depressing. So the board had brought this group in to say, listen, this company's very broken. It's been around a long time. We need to figure out how to fix it, sell it, you know, sell off the pieces. And it's sort of like, you know, pulling the, the gold from your teeth to sell off the scraps. So I didn't really enjoy that piece cuz there was a lot of things that we had to change, people we had to let go, systems we had to change. You know, it's, it was a little depressing to try to clean up someone else's mess, but we made really great traction. And then what happened, it was kind of, kind of ironic slash funny. There were 3 of us that were part of the core turnaround team that were brought in as an outside group to integrate with this group. And I'm going into work one day and remember when you went to work? Remember we actually got on a train and went to a place like, yeah, so this is, you know, the dinosaurs were on the train and, you know, there's a dinosaur section and a non-dinosaur section. I straddled. So I'm on my way to work and I got a voicemail and the voicemail basically came from global headquarters, which was based in Australia that said, you know, these two folks are no longer with the firm as of this morning. And, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, wait a minute, they usually mention the 3 of us in the same sentence. What's wrong here? Like, now I'm kind of annoyed thinking I've got to go all the way into the city to get fired. It would have been nice to get fired by voicemail, so at least I could have gone on with my day. So I get in and they had brought in someone that used to be at the firm to sort of be the temporary president or CEO or whatever. And, oh yeah, I want to talk to you. And, you know, they wanted me to stay and I was like, oh. Well, you kind of don't get it. Like everyone around here I think is an imbecile, right? Everyone around here is part of the reason that you're a failing business. The two people plus me that were turning this around, you just got rid of. But I said, you know, I'm reasonable. I'll, I'll give it 6 months or 3 months or whatever I said. And, uh, you know, if it works for me, it works for me. If not, I'm gonna go on and do something else. And, you know, I knew fairly quickly, uh, just more culturally, it wasn't even about the money or the opportunity. So from there, I left. I said, all right, I'll start something else or do something else. And then I partnered with somebody who had just launched a book and that blew up, right? So that was Keith Ferrazzi with Never Eat Alone in 2005. And that taught me so much. I ran Keith's speaking business and training and development business for 3.5 years exclusively. And that was like my MBA, PhD, JD in thought leadership.

So just for the benefit of our English listeners, when people say blew up, you mean that's a good thing rather than—

Yes, yes, yes.

Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. And you used to be able to say go viral and that was a good thing. And then, right. So I need to update my, uh, right.

Like, so this listeners, this is a fantastic thing. So, so you say that was your, your education, if you like, in this, in this area. I mean, education means learning. Um, so when you learn, you also learn by doing some things wrong as well as right. So, so, so, so what time do we have, Brad?

Yeah.

Yeah. What did, what did you, what did you do wrong as well as right during this, this kind of your, your PhD, if you like, in in this area?

You know, I think that's a good question, but I'll answer it a little bit differently and then I'll come back to the direct answer. The first thing is because I didn't really come from that space, meaning either publishing or speakers bureau or whatever. I was like the annoying 2-year-old that kept asking, why do we do it that way? Because there were things that just didn't make sense to me as an outsider that, you know, you would get folks that had been in publishing for 20 years, well, this is the way it's done, kid. You know, like what I'm like, okay, but that makes no sense to me. Like, why are we sending this guy on a book tour to go sit in front of 12 people to buy 15 books when his time is worth exponentially more? Like the math, like explain that to me as if I'm stupid because maybe I am. And then the speaking agents. So I was able to, because I, I didn't, I, I didn't come from those entrenched industries with those preconceived notions or biases or whatever to question lots of things. Now in terms of, you know, what we did wrong, we moved really, really quickly. Um, we were probably a little bit underdeveloped, a little, well, a little bit underdeveloped in terms of the IP development and all that. But we were drinking from a fire hose. You know, some of it was we were forced to be reactive because it was just happening all so, all so quickly. And, you know, there are times where, you know, particularly as an entrepreneur, where you say, hey, now is the time to plan and think and whatever. And there's another time that says, you know, hey, it's Valentine's Day and I'm a florist. I just got to— I just got to deal with what's going on here. I can't think about incremental improvements when I got a line out the door of 800 people willing to buy the product.

So there you are, you've gone through this sort of PhD or learning experience on your entrepreneurial journey. Had you ever sort of analyzed what you're doing? Had you just sort of in your mind, had you said I'm an entrepreneur or had you just gone from a succession of these experiences? I mean, had you been analytical to that extent to actually think about what it takes to be an entrepreneur? At that stage?

Well, yeah. And that's where I am today. So, you know, part of what happened there was it was an amazing experience. We were very— I mean, it was ultimately like running 3 startups in one because there were 3 different business models, you know, whatever. And we were looking for that sort of team. And then I realized, like, wait a minute, hold on a second. I was starting to get a little bit bored, which as an entrepreneur, that's dangerous. So, you know, when it comes in, You know, when it kicks in, like, okay. And started to also realize like, wait a minute, all this stuff that we're doing here, there's a market bigger than, you know, one person with one book that needs to be served. And, and you have to realize at this time things were really changing quickly in publishing. Things were changing in the speaker's business and we were, we were really, really good at it and ahead of the curve. So I'm like, you know what? I don't wanna be client monogamous anymore. I wanna go out and do this for lots and lots and lots of other people. So here I am, you know, when did I start that? 2005, uh, no, 2008. So what is that, 15 years later, here we are.

And have you had to take on more self-education, if you like, during that process? Because taking on many clients is a very different thing. You are juggling workloads, you are managing expectations about when something could be done because you know that you've got a certain amount of resources.

Yeah, I prefer that.

Have you learned some more from doing it, you know, from the agency side of things?

Yeah. I mean, if I, if I, if I answer that no, I shouldn't be here. Right? So I, I 100% because it is very different being an embedded resource in an entity, even if that's a fast-growing entrepreneurial entity, then, you know, serving the needs of dozens and dozens of clients simultaneously. I prefer the latter, A, because it's more interesting, right, to be, to be exposed to lots and lots of different problems and different clients and different phases of the journey. It's a portfolio diversification piece. You know, if one client's stuff blows up or you don't like them or whatever, you know, it's different when you're in the job world. You have a binary choice. Do I stay or do I go? Period. Right? I just quoted The Clash for my English listeners if you didn't get that right. You get extra points for that.

Very good. Very good.

But right, there you go. But you know, when you're operating a business with clients, you could, you could, do an analysis and review and say, you know what, that client's not profitable enough, that client's a pain, that client just, I don't like them, you know? And I love being at a stage where I don't, we don't have to, I don't mean to sound arrogant here, we don't have to take on anything that comes in that's willing to throw some dollars at us. Like, you know, we don't need the aggravation, right? If it's not a right type and it's not a right fit, that's okay. And I think when you're younger and earlier on or maybe in the very early stages of building something, you take on anything and everything. And I get, you know, to some degree that's a necessity. And then at some point you realize that's a bad business model.

So this raises a very interesting question then about, you know, how niche businesses, you know, succeed. And so have you sort of turned away work then, you know, that maybe didn't quite fit in your space as well as getting rid of clients that you didn't like very much? Yeah.

So I think the reality is, particularly in professional services, if you're in consumer packaged goods selling beverages or toilet paper or something, you're not in a niche business, right? I think from a professional services perspective, everybody's in a niche business. And if you're not, then you're a commodity and every engagement that you get, you're fighting on price, which is really not a fun place to be. You can only catch a premium if you're in deep and entrenched in a niche and develop that deep expertise in the niche. Like, I, it took me a while to realize in this business that 99.99% of the world couldn't care less whether I woke up in the morning or what we do or how we do it. And that's actually awesome and really freeing because we could put a lot of energy into finding that 0.0001 or whatever it is, right? And that's, that's what we try to do to be effective from a marketing perspective and a client services perspective.

And I mean, in terms of the business that you're running now, as you mentioned, so thought leadership leverage, and you run it with a guy called Bill Sherman, who's also been a guest on this podcast. To me, at least, you seem two quite contrasting sort of characters, you know, and I mean, how do you, and you're leading this business sort of together. I mean, how do you work together? And are you getting the yin and the yang of your two sort of sort of personalities and how does that work in terms of the other people?

So I think that's a great question and I'll sort of tie it back to the entrepreneurial piece is that, you know, we're living in a world now where business moves so quickly, things evolve, things are agile, whatever. So, you know, I've known Bill for almost 20 years now and the relationship has evolved from, you know, the original relationship was vendor. I brought him in an entity he was with on to do work for me. And then it became friend and then it became something else. And now it's, you know, so I think that's really, really interesting as an entrepreneur. You're like, you know what, I just like that guy. I just like working with that guy. And, you know, you mentioned the differences at first blush. You know, I don't think we can be more different, right? Like I'm more extroverted, I'm more outgoing. He's far more smarter and analytical. But the reality is we are very, very much aligned where it matters. Which is sort of mission, vision, values and how we think and priorities around client needs and all that other stuff. So I think sometimes things might appear to look more different than they actually are. And the reality is, you spend, you know, whoever you're going to be working with on a regular basis, you spend a lot of time with that person. Right. And if you don't trust them, admire them, like them, come to depend on them, etc., you know, that's, that's not a fun place to be either.

So that's a really important point, perhaps for our listeners, that you could have different personalities, but if you're aligned in the important things, then that's great. That sort of transcends personality. And in fact, the complementary personalities is probably an important thing in a way, because he will have a different way of seeing things to you, even if you are aligned around the mission. And that's actually quite a good thing.

Well, and I think, I think that's right. And, you know, we're seeing that at much larger scales, at much larger organizations with regards to diversity, more diversity of thinking. If everybody looks and acts like you, then all you've done is scale the blind spots that you as an individual have, and that's not smart.

And so we want to give our listeners the confidence they need to succeed. Many of them will be people who are just starting out businesses or at the early stages of their growth. I mean, is there a sort of, if it's possible to distill it down to a single or 2 or 3 sort of messages that you would give to them? I mean, what have you learned along the way to encourage them?

Yeah. So number one, I think there's never been a better time, an easier time, etc., to launch anything, right? Just in terms of the technology and the tools and the information management and the ability to market. I mean, you and I could sit here today, Trevor, and come up with an idea. We're going to sell, you know, purple coffee cups and by this afternoon have a website up, do some SEO searching, maybe even sell product that doesn't exist, right? Like years ago, And I'm not talking that many years ago, 10 years ago, that was tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. So I would say the first thing is what I've observed with people that are making the entrepreneurial journey is broadly speaking, there's one of two types. One are the types that, you know, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim, fire. You know, when they say, I've been working on my website for 6 months, I laughed. You're not serious. You know, that's a joke. Like, yeah, I know it's not perfect, but hit send or hit publish. That's an excuse. That's nonsense. And then the other is ready, fire, aim. Hey, came up with this idea, put up the website an hour later. Oh, and then 2 hours later I realized there was a typo or this link didn't work. And I'm like, I'll bet on the second person because at least they have the courage to put it out there. And as long as you're not making, you know, bet the house decisions, you know, you got to get it out, you got to get it out and you got to try. And I think there's a time and place for planning and then there's a time and place for doing.

So What do you do? Do you sort of, you think about what you want to do, but you keep that as quick as possible and then you act and then what, you refine? Is that what you mean? Yeah.

So, I mean, typically every year Bill and I will launch one or two ideas as sort of a venture, right? As a, and we say, okay, what are we doing? Well, we think this is something that we're going to try. What's, you know, what's the risk profile? Okay. I don't know. We'll, we'll, We're willing to invest this amount of dollars. If it fails, it'll hurt, but lowercase h, we're not betting the house. And if it works, we think this is the upside, this is the amount, you know, and then we need to be honest, like, okay, what are the costs are visible and invisible? Hey, we'll, you know, we'll invest $50,000 in this thing and see if it works. The invisible cost or what's the opportunity cost in terms of if both, if a majority of my time and his time are spent thinking about that and not running the business. That's a big number, right? If the team is distracted, if the brand is diluted. So there are things that are, you have to, you know, more so on the invisible costs than the visible. And, you know, for my sake, you can always make more money, you can always replace that, it'll hurt, whatever. But if you do something that damages your brand, you're done. You know, if you do something that violates the trust that you have with clients, you can't make that back.

Okay. So just, I'd like to look a little bit under the bonnet here where, where You as an entrepreneur, are there things that you're perhaps not so good at in terms of—

Oh, yeah.

Some people have things that they hate doing. For me, it's like the account side of things, which I always outsource, or there are certain other things that I don't do. But what is it that's your thing?

So again, it took me a while to realize here's a couple of things I'm really good at and I enjoy, because you might be good at certain things. That you just don't enjoy. So I'm good at this, I enjoy this, and it's profitable, right? That's where I wanna spend most of my time. Details, project management, Gantt charts, not my thing. Heavy duty tech, not my thing, right? So there's a long list of things that, you know, could I do? Could I proofread a document or something? Sure. Do I enjoy it? Do I like it? Am I best qualified to do it? No. Is there someone else that can do that at a fraction of my cost? Yes. Then why would I do it? You know?

Okay, so there's plenty of things, but you've outsourced those or given them to someone else to do.

So we've got other folks on the team. I mean, I think, you know, to some degree as an entrepreneur, when you look at your team, there are people fill gaps that you have. If not, you know, something's broken.

Peter, what are you up to right now? Is there a particular initiative or project that you want to talk about that you're particularly excited about? You talked about you innovate with Bill sort of quite a lot about things that you're going to be doing. Is there something on the horizon that you'd want the listeners to know about?

Well, there's one that we're sort of in a quiet period on, so we're not going to talk about that. But no, we're just continuing to grow the core business, grow the organizational side of the house. A lot of what we're doing now in this sort of— I believe we're post-COVID, right— is helping our clients deal with the current marketplace, which is transitioning from the default mechanism being in-person as a delivery vehicle for thought leadership to That is a choice that the client has, but they also, the default switch is now how do we do this remotely, right? And how do we deliver remotely and how do we create value remotely? It doesn't, so I don't think we're living in a binary world of one or the other, but you have to offer different modalities at different price points that each have different pros and cons. So I love being in person. Like for example, today I'm meeting someone for lunch, not something I do all that much anymore these days. And I'm looking at my calendar today going, Well, this is kind of a pain in the neck. I got to leave a half an hour before to go meet the guy. I got to have lunch with the guy. Like, now lunch is like a 2.5-hour thing. Like, okay, I'm much more selective about that today than I might have been. And it's a lunch I'm looking forward to. But my point is, you know, time allocation, understanding, you know, efficiency. Are you mastering remote tools like Zoom?

It's interesting because, you know, we were always told, you know, the old slogan, it's better to travel than to arrive. And now I'm thinking, you know, there's this person I want to go and meet, but I don't really want to do the travel, to be honest. It's like, you know, I don't want that experience. Yeah, the experience of sort of going up into London in my case. And so, you know, it's actually, as you said, it's a pain in the bum, you know, so a lot of the time now. So we don't do it.

But your default mode 3 years ago was sure, and now you wasted half or three quarters of a day to really have an hour of quality time with somebody. So now I imagine if you're going to go into London, you're going to say, well, let me write off the whole day and stack up 3 meetings. Let me do a breakfast and a coffee and, you know, whatever. You got to be much more cognizant of the efficiencies.

Finally, Peter, if people want to find out more about you or Thought Leadership Leverage or get in touch, what's the best way for them to do that?

Yeah, if you Venmo me directly. No, I'm kidding. They go to the website. That always gets my attention. So the website is thoughtleadershipleverage.com and you can email me directly at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. Thoughtleadershipleverage.com.

Okay, Peter, it's been an absolute delight. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me today.

Appreciate it. Thank you for having me, Trevor.

Well, I think you'll agree that was a real tour de force from Peter there. And for me personally, there were 3 things that stood out. First of all, there's Peter talking about finding out where you fit in as an entrepreneur and perhaps more importantly, where you don't fit in. And then he talked about the value in being what he described as that annoying child who always asks why do we do it this way. It's a very important skill to have, I think, for any entrepreneur. And thirdly, that there's never been a better time to launch things than today. And I hope that's a clarion call of encouragement for all those who are thinking about doing something. Just go ahead and do it, and maybe think a bit later. And thank you all for tuning in. If you've enjoyed today's episode, we'd love for you to subscribe, rate, and review through your use your podcast provider. And if you want to find out more about the Maracast or our business Marable Media, you can find us on LinkedIn. So don't forget to join us for our next episode, but until then, thanks for listening.