Blending Magic, Comedy, and High Tech Savvy into CEO Communications - Steve Sashen Xero Shoes

Speaking with TJ Walker, dissecting the communication skills and practices of world class leaders.

I hear it from CEOs every day, TJ. I spend 60, 70% of my time communicating, communicating to customers, prospects, media analysts, other stakeholders. CEOs have to communicate all the time, day long. That's why I'm very excited about our guest today. He's the CEO of an incredibly fast growing shoe company. But some of you may have seen him portrayed as a criminal on television. You may have seen him on mtv, VHS, as a comedian. You may have used his script writing software. Here is he is a master, master communicator. Our special guest, Steve Sashin. Welcome to the program.

Thanks. I think you might need to clarify the criminal part of that.

What happened there? Why did people stop you on the street as if you were a criminal?

I played a killer on America's Most Wanted about 25 years ago. And much to my chagrin, I was getting a check almost every year for the last, Geez, almost 30 years. And then much to my chagrin, they caught the guy last year. And now no more reruns, no more check.

Oh, no. Good for society, bad for your bank balance. But your bank balance is looking good these days because of the explosive growth of zero shoes. That's zero with an X. It is.

And that's a very kind way of reframing reality because as an entrepreneur, I have no money. Everything is going back into the company because we're growing so fast. My wife and I and I run this with my wife. We are taking just enough cash to be able to pay the rent and keep our cat in cat food. And then everything else is going into inventory just to manage the growth.

And for our listeners not familiar with Xero shoes, I've seen them and they have tremendous reviews on Amazon. We're going to link to that in the show notes. But tell our listeners what the shoe is and how did it come about?

Well, let me back up with this simple idea. Your feet are designed to bend, to move, to flex and to feel the world. If you don't let them do their job, that can cause pain, that can cause injury. It can cause frankly, what happened to my father last year. He had no balance because he hadn't used his feet in decades and he fell down, broke his hip and died. And so our footwear is all about, oh, sorry to hear, it happens to people, sadly. And what our footwear is all designed to do is let your feet move naturally. First they fit so they're wide enough so your toes can Spread the way they're supposed to. Instead of being cramped up, they're flexible enough so your feet can bend and move and they have just enough ground feel so that you actually stimulate your feet and therefore your brain as you're walking, running, hiking, or doing everything else you can think of. Right now we're selling sandals and they're ultra lightweight too. So like the sports sandals we have, three pairs of them weigh less than a pair of the traditional sports sandal that most people wear. And in, let's see. Well, whenever people hear this, In October of 2016, we're launching our first shoe that's still based on the same idea. Fits. It's really comfortable, really versatile, really lightweight. And in the spring and fall of 17, we've got four other shoes that we're launching. So we're going from a kind of crazy hippie sandal company to a full on shoe company within the next 12 months.

And for people who haven't seen it, it is almost like a light coating on the bottom of your foot with a sandal top.

Yeah. The idea is that you want to be as close to barefoot as possible with just the perfect amount of protection and comfort.

And how do you go from a concept like this to actually making a shoe? A lot of people have good. I have great ideas every day. How many of them ever get turned into reality? Not many. Or what made you decide of all the ideas, all the entrepreneurial energies you could focus on places, how did you focus on this and how did you turn it into a reality?

It was a combination of fortuitous circumstance and luck and things that were out of my control. If you notice, there's nothing in there that I had anything to do with. And that's really kind of the way it feels to a certain extent. So I had been making these sort of do it yourself sandals for people, and with people literally sitting on the street corner making sandals with the same kind of design people had been using for over 5,000 years. And then this guy says to me, I've got a book coming out on barefoot running. And if you treated this goofy little hobby of yours like a business, if you had a website, I would put you in the book. So I rush home, I pitch this idea to my wife who tells me it is a completely stupid idea and it won't work, it won't make any money, it's a distraction from other things that we're doing. And I said, you know, you're probably right. And she goes to bed around 9 o' clock usually. So by 10 o' clock, I had a website up and it just took off. And we were incredibly lucky. Early on, we met some people who have had 40 years of experience in the footwear industry. They introduced us to their manufacturing and sourcing. They did a bunch of design work for us. There was a book that came out in 2009, 2010, it got popular, called Born to Run that really catapulted this whole idea of natural movement into the forefront of people's consciousness. And along the way, we again just kept meeting really good people. And now granted, you know, there was some skill on our end. I'm a good product developer, I'm good at figuring out how things work. I'm a good Internet marketer. I've been doing that since practically before there was an Internet. My wife is just a brilliant ops and finance person. And we just fell into this business and we've just been riding the wave ever since.

And I think the one thing you neglected is you are a brilliant communicator. You've had to go on places like Shark Tank and you've had to talk to a lot of people to get them to buy into this vision. A lot of our listeners do like Shark Tank. Can you walk us through that experience, what that was like?

Well, it started with sending an email and saying, hey, we want to be on the show and here's why. And we did that. The key to that was doing it right when they started casting, which they announced on abc.com so the day they announced they were casting, we sent in this email and then a week later I sent a video in. And then a couple weeks later we got a phone call where they interviewed us for about an hour or so and said, hey, send us a five minute video. Just talking about what you do. Actually, it was like, send us a five minute video with the answer to these 250 questions. Which was clearly not going to happen. So we sent this video, we filled out this massive questionnaire that had to be handwritten and neither Elena nor I have handwriting worth mentioning. So I hired someone on Craigslist to take our typewritten answers and handwrite them. And then they get us through the next step where we had to sign this completely onerous contract. And then we. Oh yeah, yeah, pardon the phone in the background that I can't get to from here.

And you know what, we're just going to use that as a learning moment for our audience because I'm guilty of it as well. But media training tip. I won't say number one, but top 10. When doing interviews, make sure your phones are off. Well, I try to not just silence mine, but to actually turn it off because what I found is I'll still get ringing on my, my iWatch, my Apple Watch, if I don't turn the phone quickly.

That's a phone that I don't even use. It's a long story, but it's on the other side of the office. And anyway, no, you're absolutely right. I just. I forget about that phone because I never even answer it. So why it rings, I don't know.

Most shows would edit that part out. We're going to use that as a.

Learning moment for the audience. It's a good one. The number of times where that's happened to people, like on actual television shows. I don't think that's happened to me live, but it certainly happened in situations like this, so. But I've seen it happen live. So, anyway, back to Shark Tank. They. We filled out the contract, this onerous contract where we had to sign away our rights to sue them if we died somehow. That was because there was a clause in the contract that was taken from an earlier show that they produced, which was Survivor. And then they said, you know, we'll probably call you in about eight weeks and figure out when we're going to have you come out and tape. And then three weeks later, they called and said, we need you out here in three days. And in the interim, Lena and I did a lot of research. We read all the autobiographies. We read the autobiographies of all the Sharks. We did mock Shark Tank sessions with really smart CEOs that we knew, some of whom had almost gotten on the show. One had been on the show. We interviewed and got advice about valuation from bankers, from venture capitalists, from people who owned shoe companies and sold them, from people who bought shoe companies. Just everything we could do to prepare. And then we went out there and discovered that all of our preparation wasn't for naught. But when you watch the show, it looks like a conversation. When you're in the tank, it is just a free for all. So the sharks are often not paying attention to you, rarely all paying attention to you at the same time. One of them will ask you 10 questions, and while you're answering the third one, another one will ask you five questions. And if you switch, the first shark gets mad, and if you don't switch, the second shark gets mad. And they're all trying to make points with each other and trying to come up with a great One liner that is going to make them show up on the. On the preview for the. For next week's show. And it's just. It's television that's loosely about business. Not a business show on television. And so we. We tape the show. And here's a secret many people don't know. We were in there for about 45 minutes and got edited down to eight minutes. So what you see is massively edited. Some people are in there for a couple of hours and it gets cut down to 8 to 12 minutes. So from the moment we walked onto the set, it was really kind of effortless. The cameras are all hidden. You don't see the cameras. So that makes it kind of relaxing. You recognize the people.

As relaxing as it could be with people screaming multiple questions at you from.

Different directions, but you don't have the added stress of feeling like you have to perform for the camera, so that comes in handy. But there's a paradoxical thing. We watched every episode of Shark Tank. We watched every episode of Dragon's Den from Canada and Dragon's Den from the uk so we felt really prepared. And we have. There's this thing that happens when you watch people on television where you get this false sense of familiarity. So you walk out and, hey, there's Robert. Looks like Robert. There's Cuban. Looks like Cuban. You know, you recognize these people, but the thing that many people forget is they don't know you. They are not your friends. And so you can't be. You want to be relaxed, but you can't be too casual because this is about business. So there's this fine line because if you act like these are people who know you and their friends, you will invariably say something stupid. So I had a joke, actually, that the producers wanted me to tell, which is that when I got back into. Into running years ago and started wearing my sandals, wearing these sandals cured me of all these running injuries that I had. And I became a masters all American sprinter, which means I'm one of the fastest guys over the age of 50 in America. And technically, as far as we can tell, I. I might be the fastest Jew over the 50 in the world.

Okay?

So they wanted me to tell that line, and I did. And the Sharks were paying no attention to me at that moment. So it got nothing. And then Cuban kind of looks and goes, what'd you just say? And I repeated it, and he kind of chuckled. But I instantly realized you can't tell jokes because you don't want them to be edit. You don't Want them to be able to edit the show so that you tell a joke and then they cut to all the sharks looking at you like you're nuts. And so anyway, it's a hostile environment.

And you're a lot more used to hostile audiences when it comes to telling jokes. Based on your previous background as a very prominent stand up comedian, you're implying.

By saying that that I bond more often than I didn't.

Well, everybody has occasionally.

Oh my God, look, one time I was taping a thing for an NBC documentary. I think it was all about the theme. It was like a 20, 20 episode or something like that. It was a. The theme was connection. And for some reason they got the idea to get a stand up comic involved. So they filmed me one night at Catch a Rising Star in New York and I did this little eight minute set or whatever it was and it just killed. I mean just, you know, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. The next night, same set in a bar in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. And I couldn't buy a laugh with $100 bill. It was brutal. And they thought that was perfect for the show because it showed connection versus not connection. And how do you deal with that? So yes, it's not like any comic ever enjoys bombing, but you know how to deal with that. And you get to a certain point where you just don't care whether you know you're competent. So you just don't care about trying to prove that you're competent. And once you do that, once that shift happens in your mind, everything gets so much easier.

We are speaking with Steve Sashin. He's the CEO of Xero Shoes. You can find out more information about these shoes at Xero. That's with an xeroshoes.com we've linked to it in the show notes. You can also say hello to him or thank him for appearing on the show on Twitter. Shoes. Steve, you have varied background when it comes to your communication skills that I would think help you in your current capacity as CEO of an up and coming consumer products company. How do you draw upon the different varieties of communication skills? And we should let the audience know. I've known you for more than 30 years, since probably 1982. You used to get me in free of charge, thankfully, to Catch a rising star and comedy seller, which I still go to Comedy Cellar all the time. It looks exactly the same.

They still serve the same falafels. It's amazing.

Yes, in the hummus and you still occasionally see a little bug walk by.

But it's dimly lit but still one.

Of the great, certainly my favorite comedy club in the entire country. But even before that, when most kids are selling lemonade or, you know, trying to sell magazines or they've got some awful part time job at, in a mall, you are performing magic and stand up comedy in the streets of New York City and making what a lot of people would consider a good living today.

Oh yeah.

So you're as close to a natural born communicator that I can think of. How do you use these skills now and how is it the same and how is it different?

It's very much the same. And let me preface this by saying the fact that I've done all those things is simply because I'm at an age where they hadn't invented Ritalin yet. And had that occurred, I probably would have been calmed down quite a bit. So I. Why it occurred to me to get into magic when I was 12 and start performing for income when I was 13, I don't know. It just seemed like the smart thing to do. Again, became a street performer when I was 16 and so a lot of it was just thrusting myself into situations and actually being curious about how to do it in a way that felt good for me. If you watch most performers or especially magicians in comics, there's this whole sort of stilted presentation that they have where they're trying to. I don't know what they're doing. It's like they're throwing the words out at people rather than talking to people. And I sometimes half joke that I have a genetic disorder where I treat everyone like they're a friend of mine. I literally don't talk to people differently other than, you know, being attentive to whether I'm using certain kinds of words that certain people get upset by. Sometimes I use them on purpose, but I'm attentive to doing that. But otherwise, my basic attitude towards humans is that there are friends of mine. Now this frankly gets me in trouble as the CEO, because people will sometimes call me and talk to me and expect me to act, quote, professional. And I'm talking to them like they're one of my old friends, which is for some people very disarming. Some people find it very comforting, but other people find it very disarming. So suffice it to say, the simple thing is that I'm always looking for the easiest way to present. Let me say this differently, the best way to present complex ideas in a simple fashion. So, for example, when I talk about what we're doing with footwear I'll often do something like I'll put my arm out in front of me and wiggle my fingers and say, this is what your feet are supposed to do. They're supposed to bend and flex and feel. And if you don't let them do that and that function, tries to move. And I then point at my wrist and say, up to your wrist or to my elbow or to my shoulder or to my back and say, you know, sort of ankle, knee, hip and back. And so I'm communicating this idea as simply as possible. And ironically, it's the same thing you do as a magician. You're trying to communicate a simple thing. Here's a deck of cards. It's an ordinary deck of cards. You don't want to try and draw too much attention to it. You just want to give people enough so they know the frame of reference that you're working from and then move from there. There's also just the phenomenon of when you work with lots of different audiences, you do become attentive to what kind of information resonates for them. So if I'm talking to someone who. If it's an investor, we discuss what's going on with business in one way. If it's someone who. In fact, here's a really weird example. When I do a pitch, like at an investor conference, I try to communicate the flavor of the brand as well as what's happening with the business. So my first slide has a picture of a doctor holding a pair of shoes. And the slide says, shoes suck. And then it just sets a tone that we're irreverent, that we're going to be talking about something unusual because most people don't think about shoes being problematic, and it goes from there. But when I'm talking to a different kind of investor, when it's not big pitch, but it's someone who I know is just all about the numbers, that slide goes away, and we get into this sort of medical thing of, you know, your feet are supposed to bend and move and flex. And so being aware of who you're talking to is important, and talking with them, listening to them is important. And those are all skills that I picked up, developed, refined, not deliberately, not consciously, frankly, but over time, that's. That's what happens when you just do this enough. And frankly, I just want to kind of leave this idea with you. Just got to do a lot of it. Because like I said before, the thing for comedians that makes a big difference is when you get to the point that, you know what you're doing well enough that you can stop caring how well you're doing it. And literally, you watch comics go from getting a few laughs to getting big laughs, even with the exact same material when that mental shift occurs.

And we should point out that in the comedy world, I mean you are on stage with the Jerry Seinfelds, the Bill Mahers, the Jay Leno's, all the time at Catch, a rising star and comedy seller. I always have tremendous admiration for comedians because it's what I think of as the one type of public speaking. Not only did I not master, I didn't even get to, you know, within 60ft of first base. I did take a stand up comedy class once about 20 years ago and I just, I never even got to the point where I could imagine someone laughing, much less getting to the point where it was open mic night and performing. So I do have tremendous respect because to me it's the ultimate form of public speaking. Because in any other public speaking, you go to a business convention and you, you will talk about some new product, the audience is rooting for you as long as you don't bore them to death. Your audience is so happy with you. In any kind of business presentation, political speech, stand up comedy is different. Your audience often has the attitude of make me laugh every 10 seconds or I will hate you. That's a very, very difficult.

It is a really weird setup that on the one that there is this kind of simultaneous rooting for you. And what's the word I was looking for? Started with C. I lost the word. A confrontational attitude. And you're right, it's like if they don't laugh, if they don't get the rhythm that you are in and follow that, that's a problem. I watched David Cross the other night and I loved his set because he just does these extremely long setups that can sometimes take five minutes before he gets into the jokes. And the audience went along with him and for other comics they wouldn't do that. In fact, you made me think of the best stand up comedy set I ever had was at the Improv in New York. And the improv was on 44th Street. And right next to the stage was a door that went right out onto 44th Street. And one of the emcees used to do this thing where he would open the door and walk out with a microphone and just talk to whoever he found on the street. So we had this idea one night, he says, hey, instead of introducing you and having you come up on stage, the way normal comics do. Why don't we do this thing where I grab you off the street and I rode my bicycle everywhere in New York. So he says, I'm going to just grab you off the street, and you come in with your bike and then do your set. So I went, oh, this is perfect. I go out on 44th street with my bike and my helmet and whatever props I had, and I wait for him, and. And he comes out and we just start talking, and he says, do you want to. Do, you know, any jokes? I went, what do you mean? Like, how to tell a joke? Like, you know, two Jews walk into a bar, Like a joke? He's, yeah. I said, I mean, not really. My family's kind of funny. I could talk about my family. If you want me to talk about my family, why don't you come in and talk about your family? He's like, what are you talking about? Then he brings me in onto the stage, and I now apologize for interrupting.

But the audience is hearing him. Or is there a video camera hearing him?

So it's all off stage. Literally all you see is the microphone cord going out the doorway on the.

Okay, so they can hear you.

Yeah, they hear it, but they don't see it. So then he comes back, like, out of the street with a guy, a kid, and a bike. And I have this weird thing going on in my brain where I'm thinking, okay, how do I do my act but make it seem like I've never done this before? And I'm shocked that I'm suddenly in a comedy club that I didn't expect to be in and make it seem really, really spontaneous. So I do that, and the first joke or so, it gets a good laugh. And by the third one, people realized that I was funny and they were rooting for me more than I've ever had an audience root for me in my life. They were so behind me, they so wanted me to be funny, that when I was, they just went insane. And for the next 20 minutes, I just owned this room. And at the very end, I'm about to take my bike and go back out onto 42nd Street. And literally, as I'm wheeling my bike through the door and the audience is going crazy, I hear some guy in the back go, wait a minute. I saw him on television last week.

Did the audience feel betrayed at that moment?

I don't know. I was out there.

They enjoyed it more. Okay, so there's nothing like low expectations to help and often help. You mentioned pitching. As a CEO, I Would have to imagine that you spend a lot of time pitching. You have to pitch. You have to pitch a new employee that your company's the one to come to. You have to pitch investors, you have to pitch to distributors, stores. Let's go back in time, though. Let's get in our time capsule and go back 40 years, because you just told us you started magic at 12, at 13 on the street, at some point, you actually had to make a pitch to people to give you money. I'm fascinated by that because it might not have seemed that significant, but I'm sure you see entrepreneurs, all people, aspiring entrepreneurs, because it's fashionable to be an entrepreneur. Everybody wants to be Mark Cuban and yet. But most people, I believe, fail. Not with a good idea, but they can't get up enough nerve to ask people for money and things. And you somehow got over that at 12. I personally don't think I got over that to really get comfortable asking people for money until my late 30s. You somehow did it at 12. How did you do that?

I'm going to disagree with you. I don't think anyone ever gets over it, frankly. And I think anyone who says they do, it's not that they're lying, but they have rationalized it in a particular context that allows them to do it and deal with the fallout that occurs. Because no matter who you are and what you do, there's. Whenever you ask for money, someone will have an opinion. It will either be, that's the right amount, that's too low, or that's too high. And dealing with other people's opinions is always a pain, unless you, again, don't really care or just know how to. How to handle that. So the.

But. But I mean, getting over it in the sense that if you were doing it twice a day at the middle of NYU in the summer, five times a day, and you were doing it five times a day and getting money.

It'S crazy, but you're over it.

You might not love that moment, but you're good at it at that point.

It's absolutely. It's actually street. Performing is insane because you're collecting an audience for no reason. There's no reason for them to stop and see you. And then you keep them there for no reason. They could leave at any point because they've made no commitment up until that moment. And then you ask them for money and they give you money for no reason, because they can leave if they want to. So to play around with each of those stages, how do I get them to stop and want them and make them want to stay. How do I then keep them engaged so they really want to stay? And then how do I get them to acknowledge that they receive some value and demonstrate that by handing me large sums of money is ultimately nuts. But framing it that way is the key. In my mind, there's just these various steps that you do, and it works. And the last part about asking them for money is. It's the way I said it is asking them to match the value they received. I'm not really asking them for money. I'm giving them the opportunity to express appreciation for the value they received. And then I would lighten it up by making it kind of fun. Or I'd say something like, look, you know, whatever you give is fine, but just remember, I am a performer. I'm on the street, and I like to travel light. And bills are much lighter than coins and hundreds. You've left ink in the 10.

So incorporating the humor in the pitch.

Because it's just disarming it makes it so that people don't think about it as a financial transaction, but they think about it again as part of a relationship, as part of a way of expressing appreciation. Now, it's different when you're selling a product, but ultimately, in a way, there's a similarity, because what you're doing with selling a product is getting people to see the potential value, the potential upside, and express their willingness and their desire to have that by handing you some money. And ideally, you do that in a way where they feel like they're getting a good deal out of it, where they're spending less in their mind than the value they're going to receive. And you can't do that perfectly for everyone. And then there's a whole psychology about whether you raise your price, because then there's this perception that it has to be better if you're charging more money. I don't like doing that, frankly. In fact, we don't do that. We deliberately.

Oh, I love doing that. I find people listen to me more and they follow my directions the more I charge.

Definitely a place for it. And we're, as a consumer product company, we're.

It's a little different.

Yes. We're building our business around providing value, not trying to create perceived value. And that's a choice. There's other people doing it the other way around. I have no problem with that. That's just not the way we're doing our pricing. For Lena and myself, we think, let's charge the amount that we would be comfortable paying. And that's the way we do it. Now there's constraints of course about cost of goods and what it costs to keep the lights on, but by and large we're not doing artificial price structuring. Now that said, there are definitely things that we do to try to encourage people to buy more often buy more products. We are in the business of making money for ourselves and eventually for our investors, but we're trying to not do it by being overtly, psychologically manipulative. Somebody offered me $2 million to develop a particular product that I know people would buy but does not deliver the value that this person thought it did. And I just can't do that. I said I'm not interested in, in making. There's the phone again. I couldn't run across to turn it off between now and then. Here's the joke. This phone rings once a week and here you're popular.

You know, I'm going to set up the next question and give a little brief. So I'm going to give you 60 seconds to do that. You're listening to speaking with TJ Walker. This is the program where we dissect the communication practices of world class communicators. If you want to learn more and become a better communicator yourself, all you have to do is write to me and I'll give you not one, not two, but four of my books on communication plus access to my online media training school and online presentation training school. All you have to do is go to mediatrainingworldwide.com and click the box for the free online course and you will get that sent to you at absolutely no charge. And this can help you become a better communicator. Whether you're an entrepreneur, the CEO, a mid level executive or even a high school student, these are skills that are definitely transferable. Speaking of transferable, Steve, the world is full of 27 year old social media consultants that try to sell you and me on these brand new fangled concepts like engagement. It's all about engagement. Well, you're doing engagement on the streets of New York City, hustling a crowd for your audience and you're giving value and you're getting them to like you. And all the things people often talk about now as brand new things. How, how have your, how is your background in comedy and magic and performing arts helped you or infused your perception of your job now that you do have to sell a consumer product and presumably deal with feedback on Amazon and Facebook and I don't know if you're on Instagram or Pinterest or all the other places.

Yeah. Well, first of all, let me back up. There was no way to turn the ringer down to zero, so I had to take the batteries out of that phone. Okay.

Second, that's a good solution, too.

I was ready to throw it out the window. So my favorite thing is, when I do get approached by some of these young people who think of themselves as marketing experts, my favorite thing is to say, you know, I've been doing this for longer than you've been alive, and it is amazing. They think that what they're doing is novel. And even more, if someone has not had to ask for money or make a sale, basically get someone to pull money out of their pocket and give it to this new party. If they haven't done that themselves, I have no interest in them whatsoever. I don't care what they're selling. I don't care what they're doing. If they haven't had to prove it to themselves, I don't want anything to do with them. The basics, though, as you said, haven't changed ever. Human beings are still human beings. They like to work with people they know. They like to work with people they like. They like to work with with people they trust. They like to see that they are. Either they like to see that they're the first, or they like to see that there's enough social proof that they can trust other people's opinions more than the person who they're talking to or who's trying to sell them. So all of these, let's call them, factors of influence, are still relevant. And there's an old joke that most people know. It's attributed to any number of actors. And the line is, they say acting is all about telling the truth, and once you can fake that, you've got it made. And it's really. I don't want to say this in sound glib or sound Machiavellian, but it's really the same when it comes to communicating in sales. There are some people who are clearly faking it. They're doing the steps to develop this know, like, and trust experience. And then there's ways of doing it where it's authentic. And Lena and I pride ourselves on being as transparent as we possibly can and being available and authentic. So when you call, if you want to talk to me, you can talk to me. When you get on social media, it's often me responding, or at least I'm a part of it. We're getting big enough That I can't do everything. But I often jump in at key moments because I am the material expert, or I am the. What's the word I'm looking for? Not material, the industry expert, the.

You're the big cheese when it comes to zero.

Well, I mean, it's not just about zero shoes. I know more about feet, footwear and natural movement and running than most people on the planet. And so a lot of times I have to be part of these conversations because I'm the guy and I like doing that. I enjoy doing that. What I don't like and what's very difficult to be candid is that the level of discourse on the Internet has dropped precipitously in the last five years. I've been online since before there was an Internet, when it was AOL and GeoCities and IRC and local bulletin boards.

By the way, I gotta. Did you have a computer in college? I don't even remember seeing a computer.

Yes, I graduated in December of 83 and I. No, I didn't have a computer in college. I got my first computer just a few months later because one of the guys that I graduated with got a job at IBM and got me a deal where I got a PC Junior and a printer for $999. And that was my first computer in 1984, end of 84, I remember seeing.

One walking from our, I think our dorm to the Cambridge inn in probably 84 in someone else's room. And this was at Duke University. I should point out I didn't even. I never actually saw one or touched one beyond that. So anyway, I'm making us both sound old. On to new things. 27 year old social media experts. Don't mock us even more.

If I want to sound old, I'll talk about how we played Lunar Lander in high school with a 100 baud modem. So that's. I mean, that was the first computer I used and then I did play with others afterwards, but the first one I bought, the first one that was mine, was that PC Junior in 1984. So wait, that was a segue or a tangent from what? What were we talking about?

Well, social media. How is your ability to communicate and your communication practices through social media different than if you'd started your company, say 10 years earlier? And what are the social media channels that are most important to you?

Well, I mean, I did have a company that I started more than 10 years earlier when I started Scriptware, the screenwriting software that I invented in 1992. And launched in 1993. We were on CompuServe and on AOL and again on IRC. And it was a very different world. And now, boy, the Internet now, social media now is sort of more akin to the Jerry Springer show than it was ten years ago where it was more akin to the McNeil Lehrer news hour. So it used to be people who were just looking for information, looking to find out more, looking to have conversations. But it wasn't just this venting free for all, where people will just go nuts over. I mean, here's a perfect example. Just recently I made a video that was talking about how our shoes are vegan because we've had a lot of people ask. And so I made a little video and we put it on YouTube, put it on Facebook, put it on Twitter, put it everywhere. Basically that's one thing. There's just more platforms.

So what does that mean? Are there some shoes that literally eat meat I'm not aware of?

Good point. There are some shoes that are made of meat products or the glues or animal based glues. And many vegans are not only attentive to what they eat, but they're attentive to what they wear. And so it's a question we get often. And I answered it. So I got a response from someone saying basically not even just commenting or asking or saying in any polite way. It was just a vitriolic rant about how I'm destroying the planet by using synthetic products. Now, there's two components to this. One is it's a short sighted argument because the synthetic components are the only components that have ever been developed that give you the performance characteristics that you need for the kind of products that we make. There's a reason that every performance shoe uses a rubber sole and there's a reason that they don't use natural rubber soles. There's a reason that we don't use natural products like leather. You can't get the traction that you need to do the things you do in our shoes and it wears out really fast. And so you'd have to. If we used a leather sole, you'd have to replace it maybe five or ten times during the time that our synthetic soles last. And the cost of doing that is higher than the nominal impact we're using by using a very small amount of material in a very small company. That is like a drop in the ocean of the universe compared to any major company or other people who are doing synthetic products. So on the one hand, it was a somewhat Short sighted argument about synthetic versus natural. But the more important part was that again, it was just vitriolic. And the challenge, to be totally candid, is that I have this forward facing public Persona and I can't respond in this case. I said my natural inclination is to talk to everyone like they're friends of mine. But this is a situation where I can't, I can't start a conversation with hey moron in the way that I might if you came at me and told me that you suddenly were, you know, using some homeopathic something or other to cure some non existent illness. And so it really is an ongoing and evolving challenge to communicate in these very difficult mediums. Text does not communicate nuance very well at all. And so it's easy to be misinterpreted.

Sarcasm certainly doesn't work.

Sarcasm doesn't work. Irony doesn't work. Sometimes humor doesn't work. I don't care what kind of smiley face emoticon you use. It's just a very. These mediums or mediae are very constrained and challenging.

I think media is already plural. God damn it.

Media is already, you know, and data, the whole thing of data and datum, that makes me crazy. But anyway, be that as it may.

But about criticism though, does it matter unless it become, unless it crosses a certain threshold? Because I looked before our interview today, I went to Amazon, looked at one of your products and you had scores and scores and scores of ratings on Amazon, the average was 4.5 and I read a couple of them. The one that was negative said great product. But I had one problem with one little doohickey and in my mind a 4.5 rating on Amazon is actually the highest you get. If I see something that's a five, typically that tells me someone's gaming the system or it only has two reviews or something is going on that's bizarre. Any product that I've really loved has some detractors. So I guess my question does it even matter if a couple of people are calling you morons if overall Your average is 4.5?

It does. There's nothing you can do about it. But it does matter in a couple of different ways. So using Amazon as an example, the problem with the Amazon interface is people will leave that comment and for someone to read the response to that comment. And we respond to everything as much as we can, but we try to respond to everything. The response of that comment, you have to click to see the response. And most people don't do that. So it's not a Great interface for seeing the communication that we provide. Sometimes we're thanking people for giving us information that we didn't know. Sometimes we're correcting information that they had that might have been mistaken. Sometimes we're merely offering help and telling them where to get it. But if people don't see that whole thing, it's a subtle. Just imagine the difference between seeing someone complaining and being instantly, instantly seeing the response that says, oh my gosh, we're really sorry, we didn't know that was possible. We've already alerted our product developers, they're already working on a fix. We're happy to replace that. Give us a call, here's the 800 number. Or not seeing that. And the reputation management is everything. And when a platform like Amazon's makes reputation management more difficult, that's problematic. And more while people do expect to have the occasional negative review, it's oh gosh, how do I want to describe this? I know it's not possible to please everyone, which pains me. As a consumer product, I know it's not possible to make a shoe that fits everyone, which pains me because I would love to be able to do that. But you. Gosh, I'm trying to think of how to describe this. It may not prevent all sales, but it undeniably prevents some. And our goal is to be able to put these shoes on people's feet so they can have the experience and benefits that they provide. And I have no, I've invited many.

And then you will be using lots of rubber to harm the plan.

No, just. We'll worry about that problem another day. But you know, I mean, I've invited the handful of critics who've come out, who've been vocal. And look, here's another thing. The people who are the most critical tend to have the most time on their hands and seem to be the ones who really want to do as much as they can to harm you. And we've had some where people have gotten online and been massively, massively critical and then privately tell us that they love our products and love what we've done. The disconnect is just tremendous. So I've invited numerous critics to get in a real time conversation with me. Let's do a webinar, let's do Facebook Live, let's make a YouTube video. Let's do something where we can have a conversation about what's going on so that we can educate and inform people rather than just have this crazy text thing going back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. That does nobody any good. But again, part of the challenge is not just the phenomenon of whether you get criticism, which again, everyone does. It's the context of it. It's the way that it's presented on a particular platform, whether it becomes useful information or not. And by and large, each new social platform presents the information in a less and less valuable and useful way to the consumer. And I think that's unpleasant.

You're listening to speaking with TJ Walker where we try to practice what we preach. We're talking about engagement. Let me actually not be the cobbler's. The cobbler has no children, no shoes. The cobbler's children wear no shoes syndrome. So I want your engagement. I want your feedback. What do you like about this show? What do you not like? What do you like about this segment? And feel free to post it on our Facebook page, our YouTube channel, on our blog. Wherever you're hearing this program, give us feedback. You can also send me a tweet. Jwalker. You can also give feedback to our guest or just thank him for appearing on the program. You can send him a tweet. Shoes. That's the Twitter handle. That's zero with an X. You can also go to his website and we've linked to that in the show notes. Steve, you just listed a whole bunch of different ways of communicating. Facebook Live, Google hangouts, texting, email, feedback on Amazon. You're a small company. Your time is finite.

You're not.

The United nations has 800 people in its ranks just to work on PR and communication. You don't have that. So how do you. Out of the almost infinite number of social media channels, Tumblrs and Vines and Instagrams, how do you put them in a priority list and how do you rank the importance and how do you allocate your time for this communication?

The allocation of importance varies and changes as platforms come and go. MySpace and you just stay on top of that. The thing that you monitor is which ones are getting the most engagement and more. Engagement is a four letter word for me, just like branding. Anything you can't measure that you can track all the way to a sale has limited value to me. If I can't see that it's really doing something, I'm less interested in it. It's the old Wanamaker line. 50% of our advertising doesn't work. I just don't know which 50% it is. So the magic of the Internet is that you really can track these things. Sometimes it's a little challenging, admittedly, but the goal is to be able to track so that you really can know from data where to spend your time in terms of the practical part of where to spend the time. We are a rapidly growing company and our continually slightly behind the curve as any rapidly growing company will be. The fantasy that we'll be on top of it and be able to handle everything instantly, in real time, with as much attention as we want is merely a fantasy. And we know that that's the way of it. So we're always just trying to do better every day. We're lucky that by doing well we're able to hire additional people and we make sure the people we bring in for any role social media savvy. We don't have yet someone who is a VP of social media or VP of digital whatever. So it is spread across our employees. There's now 13 of us. I tend to spend the most time on Facebook. I don't know why. It just kind of happens.

Is that where you get the most, and I hate to use the word engagement. Is that where people are commenting on your shoes or posting pictures or liking.

Yeah, that's where we're definitely getting the most engagement. And we have other people in the office who pay attention to Facebook. But I am on there, so that is probably two hours of my day. And is that the best use of my time? Perhaps not. But we're not in a position yet where I can turn that over to someone and feel confident that it's being handled the way that I would want. That's going to be changing. I do feel confident that that will change over the next six months, but we're in that transitional phase of making that happen. And does that mean that I'm going to be totally off?

I don't know.

I will confess that I was driving home the other day and just fantasizing about being completely off social media. Not just professionally, but personally as well. Just closing down all the accounts and the only thing that I would do is have a personal email address and then buy things on ebay and Craigslist. And that was a really blissful 20 minutes. I mean, remember here, I'd leave that.

Out of your investor pitch if I remember.

Well, you know, again, if we bring in people who can do it better than I, then so be it. But remember way back when, before the days of answering machines, when someone would call you and if you weren't home, they would just call you back.

It would just ring.

It would ring and ring and ring and, you know, you'd either pick it up or not. I really do miss that. I'm not a Luddite, I'm not even a Neo Luddite. But I do recognize the amount of time that one spends both personally and professionally on things that never existed just a few years ago is astronomical. And I don't see that it's necessarily led to increased happiness. It certainly led to increased business opportunities, which I'm forever grateful for. But I really do love the idea. There's a number of people who have famous people who've gotten off Twitter, Stephen Fry being perhaps the most, because they acknowledge the devaluation and the, the de evolution of the content and the quality of communication and the time suck that it is. And I think people are starting to kind of wake up. There's some research that shows that whenever your phone beeps because you just got a new text, or whenever your computer clings because you just got a new email, that people get a dopamine hit and that that's addictive. I have the opposite of that, frankly. I find it really unpleasant and I do it because it's not. I don't do it reluctantly. But I can't say that I, like many of the 20 somethings that I know, live for being part of that communication vehicle. That's not my personality, frankly.

One of the things I love about doing this show because I've only recently started doing long format interviews, is it does give me a chance. Sounds odd because we're talking through computers and through Skype. It gives me a chance to completely disconnect from everything else. I very purposely don't multitask. I don't have computer screens up, I'm not checking out email while we talk. I've turned my phones off and I can actually listen to someone and there's no other distractions, there's no phone.

And similarly, my favorite thing is having an actual conversation with a human being. And to a certain extent, everything you do online is merely a facsimile of that. And some platforms are better than others. And the goal of the Internet, since day one, the goal of the Internet from a marketing perspective was to have a one on one conversation with your customer or prospect. And that's still a fantasy. It still is not really possible. And people are still selling this idea as if it's a new thought they just had, which I find really funny. But it's sort of ironic that there's this strong clamoring for having one on one conversation through a vehicle that is just simply not designed for that at this point.

Now, you mentioned that you spend up to two hours a day on Facebook. How do you track that? How do you quantify that? How do you know your time, time is more valuable there, as opposed to posting a new video on your Amazon page, for example?

That's a really good question. I don't, frankly, I don't have a way of measuring that to determine that. I'm guessing, frankly, that my time is better spent on content creation than it is on all the various things that I do on Facebook, which is typically responding to people and answering questions, or mostly answering questions or coming up with a good joke to respond in some way. I'm willing to bet that my time is better spent doing other things. That said, as we mentioned before, one of the things that's important for Lena and I is that we are transparent and that people realize that there's actual human beings as part of our company. And when it's the CEO or the CFO who is engaging with people, that really does have an effect. People are moved by that and rightly so. It's not as simple as, oh, I shouldn't be doing it, but I am willing to bet that my allocation of resources is not optimal.

Who do you respect the most as a communicator in business and in your space? Certainly the guy who founded the Internet shoe company, Tony was sold to Amazon. I know you know who I'm talking about.

Yeah, he founded Zappos.

Yeah, Zappos. Yes, he is. He wrote a book that, you know, bazillion people read and is certainly a skilled communicator in that arena. Who else do you like? I mean, do you like Mark Cuban as a communicator? Do you like Gary Vaynerchuk? Who do you see as people who really get it?

I hope this doesn't sound too self involved because it's not my intention, but I know it can sound that way. I don't have enough time to pay attention to other people in that regard. My schedule is roll out of bed somewhere around 6, 6:30, get online to make sure everything's still working. Because one of my fantasies is that everything that was working yesterday is still working today. So invariably if something's going to break, it'll happen five minutes after I go to bed. So I roll out of bed, I get online, I check for emergencies. I also have people that I deal with on the other side of the planet, so I have to respond to them quickly. Then I at some point take a shower, grab some food, get to the office, and then so I'M in the office by 8:30 to 9:30, depending on what's going on or how many hours I spend just doing work at home and then work till somewhere between six and eight, come home, have something to eat, watch some TV with my wife and turn off my brain, go back to work for a few hours and rinse and repeat. Sunday afternoon I fall down for three hours and take a nap. And I literally just don't have.

Wow, that is impressive. And by impressive I mean the part where you say you don't wake up till 6:30. Your next product needs to be something for guys over 50 so they can sleep till 6. I wake up at 5 5:30.

Yeah, but I go to bed around.

Whether I'm tired or not. It doesn't matter what time I go to bed.

One, so somewhere between 12 and one. So. So that's the 6:30. Six to seven is, you know, doesn't matter.

I can't sleep past 5:30.

Oh wow. You know, I function better when I'm a morning person but I rarely get the opportunity to do that, so it's. I don't know what it is actually. When I was in graduate school I did most of my best writing at 2 in the morning. So I have this, this weird circadian, something that doesn't really fit anything that I do. But suffice it to say I just don't follow people enough to have an answer to that question. I will say one thing though. There are a lot of people that I have read a bit of who I won't mention by name, but whom I don't like and the reason that I don't like them. And this will apply to a lot of people. Yeah, I'm not going to mention names, I'm not going to even hint at names. The number of people who have become famous and well known.

Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins.

I am not just kidding. You don't have to. Let's just say there's a lot of hindsight bias that has made a lot of people a lot of money. So people who have become well known because they achieved some success, some form of success, more because of luck, chance, fate and things that are out of their control than their own skill set. And then they are touting themselves and being touted as brilliant, wonderful, smart people who've never done it again, they couldn't reproduce what they did or they were able to ride on the coattails of their first success or might not have been their first, but their big success. The amount of hindsight bias and Misappropriation of the value of luck or things, again, that are out of one's control is astronomical. The entire how to succeed in business book section is predominantly people who are looking at history, making up a story of why company X succeeded and company Y didn't, and then selling books and then selling consulting and selling whatever else they sell when there's just no, there's no there there.

It's hard to write a book that says this company succeeded because of 18 other societal and technological trends that no one knew at that time, but if they started three years earlier or later.

It would have been a complete failure.

It's very hard to write a book.

It's more than that. Human beings, by our very nature, we are wired to try to look for, for some pattern that will give us the thing that we imagine will make us happy in the future. And because we're wired for that, if someone says, oh, I have the pattern that when you follow it will make you happy in the future, we turn off our brains and assume that they're correct. And very rarely do we look to see if there's anything behind this new theory. And so that's why the self help section and the business self help section are these multi billion dollar industries where there's no evidence that anyone has ever read one of those books and as a result gone. Oh, and then become a successful fill in the blank. Or my joke is the people who are in those books became successful not because they read those books.

That reminds me, I have a great new diet book to recommend to you, Steve.

Exactly. It's the exact same industry and I find it really reprehensible. It's sort of funny. At one point I realized that all the books that I had that were either about Buddhism or psychology or business, there wasn't one new book that I purchased that wasn't saying something that I had already read in 50 other books. And so I just got rid of them all.

You know, I did that for different reasons. I moved from a tiny apartment where I had a bunch of books to a home. And I thought, am I really going to reread most of these books? Am I putting these here for myself? Or is it because I want to look smart to other people? And it's not that I don't have vanity and don't want people to think I'm smart, but I said, you know what, let me just give them away, throw them away, get rid of them. I prefer reading digital books.

Oh, see, that's plenty of.

And I'm a Little bit allergic to dust. So I don't like books around for that reason.

So here's a couple of fun ideas. So, A, I go through my books on a regular basis and say, if I haven't picked this up in the last X number of months or years, I will throw it away or give it away or donate it or sell it on ebay. B, I put all my books behind a door. So we have shelves that have doors. So bookshelves with doors. So you can't do the impressive thing because people don't see your books until they open the doors, which. Why would they do that? So you can do the vanity thing, but the digital thing is fascinating. I hate reading digitally. It's just not. Oh, I don't find it pleasant at all. And I don't. I like the feeling of moving through the pages of a book and I don't get that experience digitally. And I just. Yeah, I'm not a Kindle ebook kind of guy.

Fair enough. It's a big world out there, Steve. In our final moments, where can people learn more about your shoes? Or where can they see them? They've got their website, what stores have them, how do they get them in stores? Where all can you be found?

We're expanding into retail really quickly and dramatically starting in 2017. Right now we're sort of in between seasons where people are waiting to get product in in February, March of 2017. So there are some stores that are coming online, but they won't have product until for a few months. But if you go to xeroshoes.com, xeroshoes.com in the upper right hand corner, at least at this moment in the current site design, here's a link that says store locator and you can find the stores that carry our product there. Most of our sales have been online, so it's people who just see them and want to give them a shot or have seen them on other people and then come to our website and purchase. But if you want to find them in some physical location, find our store locator and take it from there.

And unless it's proprietary, what's the breakdown of online sales? Is it mostly Amazon, your own site? And other specialty shops? Walmart.

It's changing on a month by month basis right now. Online versus retail. Again, we started as an online store. That was where we began and we like that business. We were about 70 last year. We were 72% online and 28% wholesale or in brick and mortar next year. That's probably or possibly going to flip. We're talking to some retail accounts that are really, really large and could completely spin everything upside down. And that's one of the magic things about footwear, is that it does scale very rapidly, almost as fast as tech companies, frankly. And it just has a seasonality to it that makes that happen rather than any time when something gets hot, which is what happens in the digital world. But suffice it to say, we see the balance shifting. We are putting more attention and getting more attention from, putting more attention on and getting more attention from some other third party online resellers.

So that's going to help.

Amazon is big for us. It turned into about 30% of our sales volume this year without cannibalizing what we were doing direct on our website. And we're working to make that even better. We know that they are where people go to shop and so we want to be there. We know people go to Amazon and then come and buy directly from us because they like to buy direct from the seller as well. So there's a very interesting relationship between online direct sellers and people who then sell through Amazon as well. Again, I don't want to mention specific stores because you never know what's going to happen with relationships. So I don't want to mention someone who then backs out of an order or not mention someone who's mad that I didn't mention them. So again, hit the store locator. You'll see the third party retailers that are going to start to pick us up. Suffice it to say, when people talk about online as the holy grail, I can tell you that I know many big online sellers of products, of consumer products who discovered that the real growth and the real impact comes from going back into brick and mortar. It might not happen the way that it used to, where you just go into a department store and that makes your life. But what you said, where can people come and see these and experience them? People really do want to see and experience certain kinds of products. We're actually opening kiosks, zero shoes kiosks all around the country and eventually all around the world within the next couple of years. We just opened our first last week and it's already one of our top retailers in the world. And so we're going to be doing more branded retail through kiosks. And the retail world is changing dramatically. But now is not the time to be ringing the death knell for people going out and experiencing an actual physical product on their physical person.

It does remind me I always see these Internet new age marketing gurus talking about the era is over of advertising. The era is over of in person stores. Everything's digital online. You can't have any advertising. And they're doing this while half the time singing the praises of Steve Jobs and Apple and using Apple computers and using iPads and iPhones. And I always want to raise my hand at these conventions and say, but Apple's bought every billboard in town and the Apple store has 10,000 people going out the door waiting to get in.

Backing up to something we said just a few moments ago. You can't use Apple as an example for anything. Apple is by its very definition an outlier. Apple is so many standard deviations different than every other company that's ever existed that you can't use them as an example for something. And people love to do that. Look what Apple did. Who cares what Apple did? The proof that Apple is unique is that there hasn't been another Apple in the last however many years. So I find it just really mind blowing when people just pull these ideas just completely out of their butts to make a point. And it takes the barest amount of thinking to highlight how that was just a non sequitur. It was a moot point. It was completely irrelevant or not relevant for my business. And we go on and on forever on that.

Well, Steve Sashen, thank you for being so relevant to the businesses of so many people listening to this program today. Again, the company is Xero Shoes. Check it out on Amazon. Better yet, go directly to the source at xeroshoes. Com. That's Xero with an X. It's linked to in the show notes. Steve Sashin, thank you for being our guest today.

Oh, my pleasure tj. Thanks so much. Thanks for listening to speaking with TJ Walker where the communication skills and practices of world class leaders are dissected.