How Thought Leaders Win on YouTube and AI

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If people search online and they find your video as an answer to their, their question or their problem, You're getting in front of your dream clients, and that's somebody who's never heard of you before. So that, in my experience, is the best form of marketing.

How would you like to be ranked number 1 in your category in YouTube, Google, ChatGPT, and a lot more? I bet a lot of us. Well, you are in for a serious, serious treat today as I'll bring in a special guest Just outside of Salt Lake City, we got Nate Woodbury here. Nate is the CEO of Be the Hero Studios, and he helps experts, thought leaders become the go-to thought leader in their industries. He's guided clients to top positioning their space, transforming their expertise into category-defining authority that sets them apart and keeps them in demand. Through his work with more than 60 successful channels and brands, Nate focuses on the, on one outcome, helping clients dominate their topic and become the trusted name people recognize, remember, and choose. His strategies have helped coaches, speakers, consultants, business leaders turn their knowledge into consistent influence, high-quality opportunities, and lasting market authority. He's got a team of 35 experts and he and his company create scalable content strategies to help clients, thought leaders, et cetera, rise above the noise, attract the right audience, and build a powerful reputation in their niche. He's got some serious cool stuff. He's got the leaf strategy we're going to hear about. He's done things like he's helped people earn $10,000 just from 100 YouTube views. Whoa. Can't wait to get into that. So much more. Love the bio. Welcome. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Yeah. Awesome. I'm excited to be here.

All right, Nate, let's jump into this. Like I always say that I like to hear a little bit of the backstory. I know you don't wake up one morning and get out of whatever school you're in and say, hey, I'm going to be this online marketing genius. And come up with a system that's just blowing everybody away, which is what you're doing right now. How did you get into what you're doing right now?

Yeah, for a long time, I've kind of been going the opposite direction of a lot of marketing advice. So if we rewind clear back to 2013, I had a custom web design service. I was doing SEO. We were doing well. We had webpages ranking number 1 on Google. And so I noticed something. I was looking at the analytics, seeing the traffic. And I noticed that a YouTube video that we had embedded on this page ranking number 1 on Google, over on YouTube, that video was getting 50 times the views than traffic from ranking number 1 on Google. And that surprised me. And so I looked at other examples and I kept finding example after example of just one piece of content totally outperforming these pages ranking number 1 on Google. So I started to shift my perspective. And really focus more on getting content ranked instead of getting a website ranked. And I mean, that proved to be a very valuable choice because Google is not really a search engine anymore. It's more of a kind of an answer engine or a content engine. Yeah. So that's, that's where the strategy began. And then I've just evolved it and improved it and developed it over the last decade plus since to where now we know completely how to get you to own your category on YouTube, on Google, on these AI platforms. So that it can be a massive lead generation of, of like referral quality leads. So that's what we're, that's where we're at.

I mean, that, that's impressive. That's a big statement. I want to dig in. I mean, let's just talk about category. You say own your category. I mean, you could say bold, say, hey, I want to be the number one, uh, sales coach. Like, is it now like when, you know, the whole, the whole game when you go to Amazon bestselling books, like, yeah, there's like categories, subcategories. I mean, is it first like, let's figure out what niche we can get you to win at? Is it a little bit start there?

Yeah. So first I'll start with a little bit of a paradigm shift. In times past, we would focus on keywords. Today, the gold is if you focus on the questions. So if you know your topic, you just, you mentioned sales, right? So you can start doing the old-fashioned type of keyword research, but once you find the category of keywords, then I want you to turn off everything that's not a question. And I want you to turn up the word count filter. So essentially we're looking for really long specific questions. It used to be, I'd find questions that are 8 words or longer. Now that we have AI tools, people are being way more specific in their questions. And so typically you can find in one topic, really specific topic, you can find dozens and dozens of 10-word questions. And so what you do when I'm talking about owning a category is we find, okay, here's a category and I use a tree analogy. So I'll kind of get into that now, like the trunk of your tree. Would be your broad topic or your industry. And then the branches are all these different categories and the leaves represent these questions. When we find this category, we find a branch and we see all the questions on it. And because we're given so much information, they've typed in so many words, we know who they are and we know what their problem is and we know what help they're looking for. So when you look at one category, you can say, is this my target audience? How likely are they to hire me? What about this branch? What about this branch over here? And after looking at dozens of branches, you can find the one that's, this is the one I want to own right now. And just by focusing on that category, it becomes pretty clear what the strategy is and how you can own it.

So you're finding up, it's really, it feels like one subcategory of the bigger category and then tons of content and questions you build out towards that. I mean, obviously there's a lot more science into that, but that's Kind of what you're saying there. Let's go deep into that.

Yeah, I'll give you a quick example. I work with a lot of leadership experts, and so I was preparing a presentation for them, and I thought of the category leadership style. There's like leadership development, leadership, you know, dozens of different categories. So I'll just give you this one example with leadership style. If you go to YouTube right now and you type in leadership style, Simon Sinek is ranking at the top. And so you and me, we might look at that and say, okay, this category is already taken. We've got a real strong— How are we going to beat Simon? Yeah.

Exactly.

However, I pulled back the curtain and I found 30 questions that are 10 words or 8, 9, or 10 words long, all about leadership style. There were questions like, and I'm just going to kind of paraphrase here, but what is the leadership style of Nelson Mandela and what's the leadership style that you should have when transitioning in whatever? So I found 30 different questions. Simon had a video ranking at the top for 3. Um, and there were Brian Tracy showed up there. Um, it's wide open actually. If anyone wants to own leadership style, uh, with just being systematic and answering these questions in content, um, you could own that category.

I don't even know if you know this, but Brian Tracy's my partner.

Okay. Very cool. Brian Tracy.

I'm glad we're—

He's ranked, uh, there's like, there's Simon Sinek, another channel, and then Brian Tracy. So.

I love it. Good job. All right. So we're doing something over there. Um, that's good to know. But so, okay, well, I'm going to dig in a little bit. You said there's questions, 10 words. Is there like a formula, like 10 words, 12 words? Like, how do you even come up with a question? I feel like there's this huge transition from SEO to AEO, and that's part of the formula is finding the right questions. Is 10 the number? And how do you come up with the questions based on once you find that, that trunk, that, uh, that branch, if you will?

Yeah. So there's 2 tools out there. That I know that can do this, that will start with keywords, but then find you thousands of questions. And then you can narrow it down by word count and whatnot. One is semrush.com and the other is Ahrefs. I'm more familiar with Semrush, but both of them seem to do the, seem to do the job. So you type in your topic and then you turn on the questions button. And then under the filters, you can turn on a word count filter. And so my default is typically 10. I'll start at 10 and just see what's there. Because if there's a lot of 10-word questions, the number isn't really what matters, but what does matter is that it's really, really specific. And the more words actually gives you an advantage because how many other people that have put content on YouTube or Google are using that same exact phrase? And so even though a question might only have 10 searches per month on average, that's a trickle of gold because it's 10 people that You know, are searching for this exact topic. They find your video, they're gonna watch it to the end. You put out another one that brings in another trickle and another trickle. So you're, you're just slowly starting to build this momentum to where you get to a point where eventually you'll own the entire category just by going after these little trickles.

Interesting. And so now, is this a lot of this have evolved and you've really, have you seen your business and what you're doing really skyrocket with AI kind of over the last, I mean, obviously you were early on it, I'm assuming being, you know, just in talking to you, but has it gotten like more important and all of a sudden that this is like really opportunities grown for you because of this?

I wouldn't say it's not been exponential. The growth has been pretty consistent. And then I'd just say the strategy became both more clear and easier since, you know, the last couple of years that like ChatGPT has become real popular.

This is working before with YouTube is what you're saying, because you've been in YouTube for years. crushing there. So it's the same concept. It's just working better now with AI to some degree.

But the crazy thing to understand is a lot of people will chase an algorithm like I did back in the day with website SEO or with YouTube, with a lot of social media stars and wanting to build viral attention. The algorithms always change. And so you have to pivot and adjust. You'll have growth and then you'll drop. When you focus on search traffic, where you're focused on the person that's asking the question instead of focusing on the the platform. By focusing on the person, you don't have to worry about algorithm changes because hopefully the algorithm changes are working to make that connection better. Somebody has a question, you have the answer, and that's what these tools do is match that together. So I've seen steady growth. We don't plan our videos going viral, but when there's an algorithm change, I've only seen like positive bumps. So yeah, it's been great.

Okay. And do you find yourself playing more, I mean, out of all the different There's obviously big platforms, Google, GPT, and I'm gonna get into GPT in a second, but I mean, Google, YouTube, let's just start there. I mean, when you work with your clients, is it more like, hey, we're just going to figure out that lane. Let's get your branch. Let's nail it. And then we're going to hit them all. Or is it like, let's just go on and focus on YouTube for starters. And that'll help get your Google going.

Yeah. Great question. So the reason that we start with YouTube is we want to put content somewhere that is indexed and searchable. LinkedIn, we could have another side conversation about because LinkedIn's been bad for so many years. They kind of buried articles and just made it— they just wanted to compete with Facebook, I'm guessing, but we'll just use Facebook. I'll pick on Facebook for a minute. So Facebook is a great place to do paid ads, but if you're posting organic content there that you're hoping people can find your expertise through searching that topic, it's just not going to happen. Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, for the most part, it just doesn't work. And so, but when you put content on YouTube, you don't even have to put in the tags. You don't have to worry about your description. YouTube transcribes every single word that you say and it's indexed and it's searchable extremely well. So if all you did was find a question that your target audience is asking online, make a video with that question as your title. Obviously your video would do a good job of answering the question. You post it to YouTube and then the next day people search for that, they'd find your video at the top. Google owns YouTube. And so without doing anything else, your videos will start ranking at the top of YouTube search. If you turn your YouTube video into a blog post and embed your video on that blog page, that will actually increase your Google traffic. So we love doing that. And then just one side note about LinkedIn. I am experimenting with LinkedIn right now. Because apparently LinkedIn, now that we're in this AI era, they're like, oh, we want to have our content showing up in ChatGPT specifically. So apparently they've reworked it and the judgment is still out. I'm seeing, okay, if we take a YouTube video transcript, rewrite it as a LinkedIn article, and LinkedIn articles now they've made it so when you post an article, you then share it as a post to your connections. I'm, what I'm curious to see though, is if we start getting search traffic. LinkedIn analytics is kind of hard to see where the views come from, where the reads come from.

So this is so fascinating. And I imagine, you know, I'm sitting there looking at myself and let me just tell you, this is pretty mirrored by a lot of people you're talking about who's thought leader, all that stuff. You know, I'm sitting there like, okay, team, give me some topics or I'm just going to riff a 90-second reel about some topic, right? Community building, networking, whatever. Shoot a video on my phone. They put it on Instagram, you know, Facebook, it maybe pops up on LinkedIn. I ain't doing anything on YouTube. I got, which is now you're going to say, Eric, smack, smack, smack, smack. You're like, I have a feeling I'm going to answer my own question here. You're going to say, no, you idiot. You'll say, no, Eric, start with YouTube first and then splice that out and then put it across all the other channels. Would that be correct based on what I'm hearing?

Kind of, kind of. So start with another kind of paradigm. So A lot of times we think when we post content that we're marketing, but majority of our content posting is actually nurturing, right? So if we, if we post it to social media, our friends and our connections are the people who are going to see that. If it's shared and it goes viral, we kind of are excited about that, but that's not really our target audience. And so we're typically not generating leads. So when we, when we send out anything through email, we're nurturing our email list. Now YouTube can be used for either nurturing or marketing. Most channels that we see, they're asking you to subscribe. They want you to keep coming back. I'm a subscriber to MrBeast. Every video he puts out, he wants his subscriber base to love it, to like it, to watch it and keep coming back. So it's 100% nurturing there. So what I'm talking about is marketing where you're getting in front of new people who have never heard of you before. So you can do that through paid traffic. You can do that through going viral, but you're not gonna generate any leads. It's kind of the worst type of marketing. Or you can do that through search. If people search online and they find your video as an answer to their, their question or their problem, you're getting in front of your dream clients and that's somebody who's never heard of you before. So that in my experience is the best form of marketing. So in your case, You've been doing a good job. It sounds like from what you described, you've been doing a really good job of nurturing your connections and your friends. And if you come up with like trending topics or something that you're really excited to talk about, that's some of the funnest content to create and it's really nurturing. But if you want it to be marketing, not only would I suggest, yeah, let's include YouTube, but I would forget about what you want to talk about. And that's hard to do.

Yeah.

If you're excited about something, I'm telling you to forget about it. But search and find, okay, what is your audience asking? People who've never heard of you before, your dream audience.

Yeah.

What questions are they asking? Let that dictate what content you create. Put that on YouTube and now you actually have content that's marketing.

I love it. In this game, that, I mean, ultimately that's better. That's what I'm looking for anyway. You're doing all this nurturing, nurturing, nurturing, hoping to get a lead. Now you're like, ah, you could just shortcut it if you just hit YouTube, find the right questions and what your audience wants and just shoot content on that and go in there. Now my next thought, and I'm sure I'm probably the avatar of a lot of people listening today, is All right. Well, I got a bunch of reels on my Instagram, or maybe I've done some stuff, or some people listening have nothing yet. They create a YouTube channel and it's kind of naked, you know, initially, like, do these videos become the first videos? Or do you say, look, have some, have a base of videos in there where you're teaching a bunch of stuff? Like, how do you deal with that with your new clients?

Everything you hear on this show comes back to one idea, proximity. I wrote the book on it, literally. Proximity Pays, my bestselling book available now at proximitypays.com.

Yeah, good question. So I wouldn't worry so much about the channel itself and having that base of videos. I mean, it might help a little percentage improvement here or there, but I would look at kind of the funnel as having 2 main steps. So let's keep the sales and the promotion on your website. You're going to have your landing pages, you have your testimonials, you'll have your Your sales and promotional videos on your website. The videos that I'm talking about that we put on YouTube first, that's people's first exposure to you and we're not going to promote. All right. So they have this question, they're in a what's in it for me mindset. And when they click on the video and they're seeing you, they're kind of like, okay, what is this video? Is this really what I'm hoping for? I'll give you 2 ways we could go. One, we could start saying, hey, I'm Nate. This is what I do. These are all my credentials. This is what Why you should listen to me and here's all my client success stories. They're going to put up their defenses. If we instead don't mention anything about us, just focus on them and give, answer their question, give value, you know, and don't promote at all. They're not going to have to put up their defenses. They're going to be like, oh yeah, this is helpful. This is what I came for. They'll watch the episode to the end. And at the end, don't turn it around and say, okay, can you help me out? Will you subscribe? Will you like the video? Will you comment below? Because we turned it away from focusing on them to now focus on me. I would say still keep the focus on them and you could give them one of two main calls to action. One would be, hey, if you found value in this video, I've got a free resource that's going to help you implement it. So you can go to this link and that'll help you out even further. Or the other would be, hey, if you found value in this video, there's another episode titled blank that if you watch that video, you're going to help learn this, this, and this. So you can go watch that video now. Right. So it's all focused on them. When they go to your website, their defenses haven't been put up. They're not annoyed. They're not irritated. They're now, they're curious. They explore around, they're going to watch your promotional content and everything. And so it's a way of generating referral quality leads as opposed to leads that you have to overcome tons of objections and stuff. So.

Yeah. I mean, ultimately, as you're talking through that, I'm just imagining you're right. And It's fundamentals. I mean, we teach this, I mean, we do this with our thought leader clients, with Brian and Jack Canfield and others. It's like, you know, deposit, deposit, deposit, just keep giving, giving, giving, and then maybe withdraw. In this case, you're just like, hey, look, just keep giving deposits. At the end of the day, they like what you're going to give, they're going to find you. It's not hard to find you, right? Even if your branding of your YouTube has your company name on it, or like, they're going to go to your website and subscribe and find you if that's what they really like what you're saying, I assume, right?

Yeah. I mean, I love to be strategic with the call to action. But my focus in the first step is let's build a relationship because then if you have that, they have the interaction with your promotional content, or if you're on a Zoom call with them, let's say you're having a strategy session with them. If you've already built trust first, then you don't have to take that time to build trust in the conversation and overcome their concerns. It's a much better experience.

Got it. All right. I'm going to talk about this in your business because you're obviously a brilliant marketer and that was very helpful. Thank you. So, Is this a matter of you call Nate, he does the background, you know, figures out the branches and leaves and all that stuff. You follow his formula. Is it like boom, 100% success rate? Or as you're going to say, answering the questions that your perfect customer has in the right way that has value. So let's get past and assume that your client is somewhat competent, answers good questions and solves a problem, scratches the itch of the prospect. Always successful? Like, or is there times it doesn't work?

Yeah, we've gotten to the point where it's very, very predictable. You know, most strategies base a lot of the outcome on luck, right? They're hoping something goes viral or hoping something will work without actually knowing, but we're so tactical and we can look at, you know, what's the competitive landscape look like that we can, you know, I can guarantee anybody, yeah, we'll make you the owner of a category. And to talk about, you know, your qualifiers there, I'm very clear on the qualifiers of what expertise you have. I kind of break it down into 3 different levels of expertise. So a level 1 expert would be somebody who knows all the knowledge. They might have a degree or, you know, all this training. Level 2 means they've gone out and applied it successfully. So they've taken all that knowledge, turned it into wisdom, figured out, okay, well, in application, that actually doesn't quite work. I've pivoted, I've adjusted. So level 2 means you've figured it out and actually been successful at it. I don't think that's where you should start with thought leadership yet either. I think you need to go one more level. Level 3 means you've been able to take somebody else by the hand and help them get results. They've achieved success because my strengths and weaknesses are going to be different from yours. And your industry might be different. There's going to be a whole bunch of different roadblocks and obstacles, but if I can help people successfully navigate that, Now you're in a position where you can ethically position yourself as a subject matter expert, because that's what people want. If they're looking for an expert, they're looking for somebody who can help them succeed. And so, okay, for anybody who is a level 3 expert, you've been able to successfully help people get results. Okay, perfect. You're the person for this strategy. Because then if we just get clear before we turn on the camera, Just put pause on those things for a minute. Let's find out what questions are your dream clients asking? And do you have clarity on the outcome that you provide? Like I could talk about my leaf strategy and I used to mistakenly market that all the time. Ooh, I'm a, I help people grow on YouTube. I'm a leaf strategy expert. No one knows what that is. And, but if I tell people I build thought leadership, I help you own your category. I help you generate referral quality leads as a consultant. People understand that. And so if, if a level 3 expert has clarity on the outcome that they get, the transformation that they create, and they know exactly who their dream clients are, then we can find the questions and find the branch that they want to dominate and give us a few months and we'll, we'll own that branch.

Got it. So that was really helpful. I like that. And to me, there's a second lesson that you just taught in there. So I appreciate that is, is Almost asking for those of us who think we're thought leaders or want to be is what level are we really at? Are you just somebody that read a book and, you know, or are you somebody that, uh, you know, has done it? Great. That's a lot of us probably at level 2, but are we actually out there having taught it and gotten somebody else to also become really proficient at the things that, that's great. And so what if you're a level 2? Are they, are they, is it still work to some degree or not always just harder?

Well, you know, I would say I, back when I was a level 2 with this strategy, I put together a service. I saw these like little individual success stories, but I thought, okay, what if I were to build a thought leader using this strategy? So I put together a package. I tried selling it. I tried selling it at cost, no profit to me, but I couldn't sell it because I didn't have this track record of success with this idea. So I reached out to a handful of people and found 2 people that would allow me to give my service to them for free in exchange for like future Partnership, right? Those 2 clients, huge success. Like, and so people would just a couple years later, people were like, oh wow, I've seen what you did for Chris. I saw what you did for Paul. I want you to do the same thing for me. And then I could, I could charge for my services. So what that did for me is it took me from this level 1, 1.5, 2, somewhere in there expertise, but I was able to turn that into a level 3. So that I could really successfully market myself. Because if people look deeply and they're looking for an expert or a thought leader, they want to really know, like, who have they helped? What results did they get? You know, how many people have they helped with this? Like, if, if I were a therapist and somebody came to me with arachnophobia, they'd want to know, like, okay, how many people have had arachnophobia and that you've helped cure? I'm just making up an example. But if I said, oh yeah, I've helped 500 people overcome arachnophobia. They'd be like, okay, you're the person for me. Right. So that's, that's why I focus so much on that level 3.

I love it. Okay. And so you talked a little bit about strategies before, you know, as a, now as a consultant in this space, let's talk a little bit about your own marketing strategies now. Um, I don't know if I assume you're going to have, you're drinking your Kool-Aid to some degree and have your own channel doing the things to be one of the leading authorities on what we're teaching. Are you just pretty much Following your formula to ultimately get leads or find someone who wants to work with you? Is there like a tripwire, you know, like a small product price? Like how does your marketing work that you've seen be successful to get a client?

Yeah. I'll share a couple things and even be vulnerable on one thing. So get lots of clients through referral and word of mouth, you know, getting lots of clients from search. I love it when people tell me, yeah, I was asking Perplexity, you know, and your name came up. And obviously I'm getting a lot of my main focus on YouTube is search traffic, not going viral. The vulnerable part is this. For a long time, I've made hundreds and hundreds of videos on the topic of YouTube SEO or YouTube views. And it's just not ownable. It's not ownable because my channels, my videos don't go viral. And if MrBeast talks about how to get a lot of views, you know, all the other millions of influencers, their videos are going to rank above mine on that subject. But when I started, my channel's the strongest on topics about thought leadership, about personal branding, about subject matter expert, about evergreen content. I own those, a couple of those I own, a couple of them I'm the strongest and close to owning. So that's been fun. It's fun to figure that out because I got more clarity on my own kind of messaging, you know, and having that clarity allowed me, because I'd had for a long time many clients that are 8-figure earners just from them owning their category. And yet I hadn't owned my category yet. So it's fun to own some categories now. Nice. And then the other thing that I'm doing, I always experiment. I hired an ads team to help me figure out my funnel. And over 6 months, didn't make any profit, but I really figured out my funnel. And then finally at the end, I tested an offer where I would, for $97, do a competitive analysis. So people would fill out a form, we'd search their category and find all these questions. And then I created this software that I use the data from Semrush and then give it to this tool, and the tool will then scrape all the data from YouTube and find the top 50 competitors and show you who you're up against and if there's gaps and whatnot. So that's been really effective, offering a competitive analysis. And it's, you know, it's not a profitable thing just charging $97, but it filters in the right people who value, who understand the value of what that is. And then we get to have a conversation and, you know, explore what it's like to work together. So that's what's been working really well.

Love it. Yeah. Weeding out. So I'm thinking of throwing you my $97 right after this call. So like, like at the end of that, I get an analysis, but does it tell me like what the opportunities are at the end of the day? Like, what am I going to receive other than, yeah, I got a bunch of competitors.

So you would fill out a form and really tell me a lot about your dream clients, the outcome that you provide them. So that gives us some direction on what branches we should look at. And we dig and we find some branches that we think are pretty valuable that are ownable. And then we do that competitive analysis to show if you happen to be ranking at all or who are the top channels and where the gaps are. And so then we jump on Zoom and just go over it. And usually it's just a step. Sometimes you could just walk away from that, go start filming those videos and you'd have the clear path to owning that. Other times it's like, okay, well, this is a good step, but I want to explore some more branches as well. So yeah, that's what it looks like.

I love it. All right. Well, count me in. And then, uh, and so I noticed, um, kind of turning subjects a little bit. You have a, it says you work with a dedicated team of 35 experts. Tell me a little bit more about that. I mean, is it your team is 35? You have 35 consultants overseas? Like, what does that mean exactly?

Yeah. So I'm just here and I've got 2 filming teams, one here in Utah, one in Florida. So when my clients, you know, depending where they are and what's closest, they'll travel either to Utah or Florida and we'll film 20 episodes in a day. And then I have a significant team in the Philippines. They do all my editing, customer service, thumbnail design, YouTube management, blog management. So yeah, it's a team that have— I've really systematized this process and everyone has their specialty. I mean, I could just— thumbnail design is like the most crazy thing. And we have, we've using, we're using AI tools. And, and so when I've got like AI specialists, you know, a team of 4 different AI thumbnail specialists. So it's been great. I've been hiring people in the Philippines now for 16 years. Some people have been with me that entire time. And I've been there a couple of times. It's just a wonderful place to hire people.

That'd be a fun title. Like my title on my resume is a thumbnail specialist. That'd be a fun one, but I'm going to go back to a question I thought of in a second, but Quick tip on Philippines hiring. Like, what do you— clearly you're a fan. What's the number one thing, maybe tip you have on that?

So I was introduced to the Philippines by a guy who's become my friend now. His name's John Jonas, and he created a website called Online Jobs. Now I am an affiliate. So what's my affiliate? It's virtualassistanttool.com. Get a free trial, I think. But he pointed me to the Philippines because Their main language is English. And so it's, they're taught English in school. I would, it's still their second language, but like all the signage, everything is very Americanized English. And so there's not a communication barrier. No offense to anyone else around the world. I'll just bring up India. India is a great place to hire people, but there's often a lot of communication barriers because what I say they hear, but they don't necessarily understand. Philippines is a developing country, and so they are often really, really grateful if they can have a steady income of like $500 a month. They have internet, they have computers, they're very educated with technology. And so when you're looking for designers, looking for any task that's on a computer, any research or marketing tasks—

I'm a fan too. I have some great teammates that are overseas. I mean, my own biggest tip's always been like anything, you gotta be patient. You gotta do proper training. And if you do the proper training—

Absolutely.

Yeah. I mean, sometimes we take it for granted. A lot of times you're just like, okay, here's the job, dude, go figure it out. And it's like, no, you gotta like really, you know, do the proper commitment.

If I were hiring somebody that's like an editing expert, great. They know how to edit, but I need 'em to edit in a specific way and I've gotta train them on my system.

System. Yeah. Um, mentioned something earlier and I wanna make sure, um, for those listening, we don't, um, lose potential people that might be interested in working with you. You said you had video teams in Utah, Florida. Well, what if somebody doesn't want to travel to Utah or Florida? Like, are they able to still work with you and you just coach them on how to do it at their own home offices or just with your guidance?

Yeah. So I do have consulting that I offer and I'll tell you a quick story about Carrie, who's in New Zealand. So Carrie learned about the strategy. She was a perfect fit for it. And I said, you know what, obviously you're not going to want to travel to the USA all the time, but would you be willing to come once? In her case, the answer was yes. It might not always be. In her case, so she and her husband flew to Florida. They did a day of filming, filmed 20 episodes. They vacationed for a few days and then they filmed a second day, another 20. That was at the beginning of the year. And since then she's got a local videographer that I had a Zoom call just to kind of key her in on some parts of our system, but now she's been doing her own filming and we still do the editing and whatnot. And my role is always the strategy, just making sure that their rankings are going up, that they're owning more and more branches. So, yeah.

So let me dig in the question. So that, that's what they did. Do you have clients that never travel to you and still are successful, or is it kind of like, nah, if I'm gonna take it in the right way and do it, you're gonna need to invest that one time to come out and, and learn from how we do it?

I'll admit, I'll admit it's rare. So years ago I used to put on retreats where 3 days we'd come, we'd all stay in this cabin. I'd train, I'd teach my strategy. People would say, this was great. Be sure to let me know when your next one is. But I would look at their results and nothing. They weren't even trying. So I'm just like, I'm going to stop doing all this, this event. I'm going to take people by the hand and lead them to the results. So I do have the rare few people that just take my consulting and they succeed with it. Who was it? I just had a— who was it? It was just the other day. A client was telling me. The biggest reason that I work with you, because I, he was telling me, I have a filming team, I have an editing team, but I need the forced discipline. And so I come to you every time. So that, that's just being honest. Yes, you could succeed if you had the discipline and you did it on your own. We don't have a monopoly on videographers. There's so many videographers that can make you look great. I guess one tip that I would give is if you're going to do it on your own, I would actually schedule an Airbnb. And then have a videographer to come and meet you there so that you have to, you have that forced discipline. So yeah, that's what I recommend.

I love it. That's an honest answer. That's good. I think that's great. So those that are serious, myself included, if they want to see some of the results, and obviously I want to be relatable to your success stories where you took somebody who wasn't a huge name and all of a sudden now they're owning a category. Is there a couple quick examples or just go to what your website and you have all your case, a lot of your case studies on there?

Yeah. So I can tell you some examples now, and I do demonstrate a lot of these on different videos. on my channel, but you can look at Reagan Archibald.

I know Reagan well. He's one of our members and sponsors of our Speakeasy Mastermind.

Very cool. So, you can ask him. I don't even— wouldn't have to say anything. He actually refers a lot of people to me. I've worked with him for about a year and a half now. A year and a half ago, very successful business, lots of referrals and word-of-mouth type clients. Now, he owns so many categories. Tesamorelin is— I don't know a lot of the peptides, but I remember that name. Uh, we started in April a year and a half ago. He had no traction and now he completely owns that and many other peptide topics. So if you go to YouTube, type in Tessa Morellin, you'll find Reagan right there. There's Jason Schroeder in the construction industry. He provides consulting to the construction world. There's Jay Townsend. He is a politician coach helping you win an election. There's Dr. Carrie Ann Perkins. She's an OB-GYN. There's Nicholeen Peck. She's a parenting expert. So there's, there's a lot of examples.

Wonderful. How fun. Well, cool. Well, as we kind of wind down, is there any, any questions I didn't get a chance to ask that you wish I had?

You know, I think you've asked some great questions. This has been a very fun conversation. If, if anyone is interested in doing the competitor analysis, you can go to thoughtleader— what is it? thoughtleaderdominance.com. It's a $97 offer and no pressure. It's only if you feel like that would be a great fit.

And then if they just want to look at your videos and YouTube and all that, I know I'm sure it'll be down on the listing. What's the best way for them to find you in general though?

Yeah, either search for Nate Woodbury or I have another channel called The Leaf Strategy.

The Leaf Strategy. Welcome. Well, thank you so much for joining us inside the Speakeasy Podcast. It was an absolute pleasure. I learned a ton from you. I'm excited. I'm probably going to be one of your clients. So thank you so much.

Yeah, you bet.

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