Ep. 17: How Story Selling Can Grow Your Business with Paul Roberts

Welcome to the Pub Date Podcast, the show where two book broads discuss what should happen before, during, and after your book publication date. Brought to you by Broad Book Group with your host Vanessa Campos and Jen Dorsey. Welcome, welcome everybody. Welcome to the Pub Date Podcast. I am excited to be talking to Paul Roberts, who is actually not just a guest today, but he's always on the show. So Paul is actually our producer and he's at OC Talk Radio. Hi Paul.

How are you? How are you?

Good. So Paul Roberts is a founder and station manager at OC Talk Radio. He has been in business of storytelling for decades. Lately, he spends his days amplifying the voices of Orange County business ecosystem by helping clients stream and record their live podcasts in his studio at the Co at UCI.

Right.

UCI is headquartered at the UCI Beall Applied Innovation Center. Welcome.

Wow, you got it all in. I appreciate, you know, I feel privileged today because the intro says a couple of Book Broads, but I only got one Book Broad today. Does that make me a Book Broad?

Am I an official Book Broad?

Okay, good. I like that. A book dude or a book broad. I like that. Well, I welcome the opportunity to come from behind the curtain because normally I'm the Wizard of Oz. Don't pay any attention to that man behind the curtain over there. I'm pulling the levers and doing all this stuff here. And a lot of it's mechanical, but it's what you guys do. It's help people to find first and then craft it and tell your story. Thing is, we were talking about offline that I'm so excited to talk about this is because there is the false impression in this world that everything is easy. I can write a book in 90 days. I can do a podcast, just get a mic and start talking. Storytelling is easy. Creating these craft narratives, no big deal. And you and I know it ain't so easy.

Yeah. And I think that, you know, today's day and age where everything is social media, quick, small blurbs of the things that you're doing, you're just hitting the tip of the iceberg. And that's great for catching people's attention. People's attention, but at the end of the day, you as a business owner, as a storyteller, need to share your struggle because that's what connects you to people.

There it is. When I studied screenwriting a million years ago at UCLA and other places, I thought I was going to be a screenwriter. The formula was real simple. There's some setup, there's a problem, there's a need, there's some reason we're going to talk about, and then there is a struggle. No struggle, no change, no epiphany, no learning moment, no aha. So no struggle, no change, no change, no story. But I have people come into the studio all the time, mostly business types, and their story goes like this: I saw a need, I came up with an idea, I had a little trouble raising money, putting it together, whatever, and now I'm a billion-dollar company. Problem, solution. Like, that's the story. That's not the story. The story is what happens in between, that struggle when you couldn't figure it out, when you had to adapt. We couldn't get the money. Elon Musk never talks about the days when he had to put his own cash in because it looked like Tesla was going to go under. Seriously, nobody was adapting. They couldn't figure out how to make cars. They're building, they're assembling them in tents, literally, because they didn't know how to manufacture stuff and they had run out of capacity. They were taking them out in tents and trying to screw stuff on to finish assembling it. Steve Jobs always skipped the part of the story when he lost Apple and got kicked out of his own company. We somehow think that that shows us as being weak, uncertain, doubtful, fearful, and yet that's what everybody wants to hear. That's the real story. As you say, that's what connects. Oh, you're just like me. Otherwise, you're Superman or Superwoman. How can I relate to you? I guess I'm an idiot. It was so easy to write a book. It was so easy to build a company. It was so easy to start a podcast. They did it. Why can't I?

I agree with that. It, it is one of those things where I'm a really big proponent of asking for help. Even if you are the person who is running your business, you know, your craft, there comes a point in time where you just don't know what the next step is and asking for help is important. And I don't, I don't appreciate as, you know, someone who works behind the scenes like yourself.

Right.

I don't appreciate it when people say like, oh, I got from point A to point B so quickly and it was just easy.

And without any help. I don't need an editor.

Exactly.

I don't need a producer. I don't need some other set of eyes on this thing here. I don't need consultants. I don't need anybody. I'm the lone wolf solopreneur guiding force. You know, the Steve Jobs, I see the vision, I'm just gonna get this done. But even they run into problems. Both of those great examples where they ran into serious problems that looked like it was going to seriously sink what became, you know, iconic brands. There were moments when it wasn't so clear and they needed help. It was Veterans Day recently. We did a show with a veteran. This guy was an Army Ranger. These guys are taught to be self-reliant. You're out on your own behind enemy lines. There is nobody to call phone home to. You got maybe a couple of buddies at your back, but it's, it's a pack. It's a lone wolf operating alone. And so you have to be resilient and you have to be self-reliant. But a lot of these guys come back with problems. Post-traumatic stress disorder, the biggest one. This guy came back with pancreatic cancer and he talked how difficult for him to finally say, I need help. That's weak. Suck it up. Figure it out. You're not strong enough. You're not tough enough. You're not bright enough. You know, we all want to be that lone wolf. We all want to be the Clint Eastwood riding into town, shooting everybody. That whole image is so ingrained in us, particularly as Americans, I think, and particularly men of a certain age. You know, we just never ask for directions. We never ask for help. We just think it's a sign of weakness. And yet, when you look at the great ventures, great companies always talk about great teams. We had another guy came on, he owns multiple, multiple companies. And I said, how did you do it? He said, I surround myself with good people. The true test of a leader is I should be able to leave and disappear and the company keeps going. It's not reliant on me and me alone. When I got into screenwriting, it wasn't so much fun because the studios will take it and rewrite it 52 times and bring in lots of things. Book editors— who was the great Max Perkins who worked with Hemingway and all these other people here? People think Hemingway just sat down and whipped this stuff off of his head, handed it in, and poof, they published it. How tough was that? No, somebody ripped it apart.— and said, "Oh yeah." "You're missing the point. This doesn't make sense. You gotta go deeper. You gotta be clearer. You gotta take this junk out." Michael Jordan has famously said he would not have been the icon he was had it not been for a good coach, 'cause he can only take it so far, and somebody else has to look at it from the outside and say, "Michael, come on. You're dribbling with the wrong hand here. You're doing it wrong." True great examples, great companies, great entrepreneurs, Great athletes rely on teams, but we are taught to rely on ourselves, particularly as entrepreneurs. And we somehow think, I don't need Vanessa Campos to help me guide the book. Here, just take it and do some. I don't need Paul to help me guide the podcast. I don't need any help telling my story. Where did that come from? And why does that continue to persist?

Okay, here's my theory. I blame the word entrepreneur. Blame it so much because when you hear entrepreneur, you think Well, the word itself just means the individual. You are an entrepreneur.

Right.

The reality is, is that no, no one is doing things alone. You don't do things alone. You have a community of people.

Right.

And everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Everyone wants to be successful and get to that point. So I blame the word.

When I was a kid, you all don't remember this, but Westerns were the big things in the '50s and '60s. I think on television—

Renegade and Cowboys.

Yes, Renegade and Cowboys. Have gun will travel, and one man, it's always one man against the world. The whole world's out to get me, John Wayne, but I'm gonna follow my own conscience, my own code of the West, and I'm gonna figure this out myself. I don't need any women, I don't need any community, everybody's giving me conflicting advice, run, fight, do this, everything. No, I can only rely on myself. And now that continued into all the space movies, you know, the Mandalorian. And it's always reluctant, I always get drawn into it, I don't really wanna do this, but okay, I'm here now and I've just got to do this. Cop movies tend to be like that. Easy Rider, one man against the world, riding across the country here. Maybe there's a buddy by your side, maybe you got a sidekick, but it's pretty much you yourself alone against the world. I don't know if that's an American ideal or a modern ideal, but it's so ingrained in us that we somehow think it's weak and it doesn't. It's smart to build a team around you.

That actually brings me to the point where I was thinking about this as you were talking, and what you do with business owners is that you basically draw out these stories. What we do here with you at OC Talk Radio and the production part of it, which I love, is that it's pretty raw. There isn't a lot of, you know, like, there's no fancy setup. But I appreciate that because it allows us to be a little bit more real.

Yes.

What are the things that you find that, um, that entrepreneurs— word, I, I just said it just like— what do you find that small business owners do successfully on podcasts that help them continue coming back to you and continue the storytelling part of it versus the ones that just kind of— which I'm assuming there are a few—

will— oh yeah, they're ones that fumble and stumble all the way. I'll tell you 2 or 3 lessons I've learned along the way, and I think it applies to any kind of storytelling, written storytelling, oral storytelling, video storytelling. We're all entranced with all these new channels and mediums that we're playing with here, from TikTok to self-published books. You know, we now have a chance to tell our own stories in ways we never did. We don't have to go to that intermediary, beg some radio station to put us on the air. We have the ability now to tell our own stories, to show our own stories, to write our own stories. Okay, here's what I have learned successful things people have figured out. They're so obvious, but they— nobody wants to do them. One is start what you said: be real, be genuine, be authentic. All the buzzwords of social media. We so quickly smell out overproduction, overwriting, overediting. It's perfect, it passes everybody's test. I didn't say anything that offends anybody, I didn't say anything that promises too much, I was vague. I painted some happy picture. It's so perfect, it's perfectly boring and perfectly unbelievable. Nobody buys it. We as consumers are tired of the fake process, the overproduced stuff. So Hollywood's stripping it down. They're even doing handheld cameras again, not long flowery prose and run-on sentences. And I think audio podcasts have done the same thing. Hard to just really talk anymore without the talking points, without the script, without all the bullet things you're trying to say, to really talk and listen. What I'm not doing right now here, I'm, I'm on stage giving a lecture and a lesson for us to really talk and go back and forth. That's a big one.

That's interesting because, okay, so my background is in journalism and public relations. That's what I went to school for.

Okay.

And marketing. So in marketing, you're thinking, okay, I need to come across as this person who's a thought leader, whose knowledge and I need to hit these 3 points. So you always, always, always, always come on.

And when I was a PR person, I did PR too, and we'd always jam into our clients, don't get distracted, hit these 3 points, mention the movie, mention the product, mention the brand, you know, make sure you get these 3 points in there. So yes, there's some logic to doing that, but if that's not a story.

Yeah, and it doesn't separate you from everything else.

No.

So you have to think about all these, um, actors who are going on these press junkets and they're having all of these stations and media outlets come to them and they're saying the same thing over and over. And you'll notice that the person who's interviewing them always wants to get that extra meat out.

Yes.

Because that's what's gonna separate their story from the person who just came before them or just came after them. Right. So to your point about owning your, your situation and, and being able to kind of deliver that, you know, to your audience and, and owning your story by doing your own podcasts and doing your own thing, you need to surround yourself with people who are going to, like you, Paul, pull you out of that comfort zone.

Yes. So get you to open up and be real and everything. And there is an art to doing this. We interviewed William Shatner of all people the other day, one of our Pedego e-bike shows. He's a big fan of e-bikes. He's 90, rides them. So they were able to get him on our show. I grew up watching Star Trek and all the things he did after that, Boston Legal and everything. Love him or not, This guy just puts a smile on everybody's face. He's an iconic actor. He just keeps going at 90. Particularly men of a certain age like me, I just— that was a big treat. Okay. He told a couple of stories and I thought, wow, he's so good at just spinning these stories, these funny stories of something in the past, something that happened to him. And I thought I pulled something out of nobody else ever did. And after the show was over, I went back on YouTube and looked at him. By God, half of the stories he'd told 100 times. But he found it in a way to make you believe this is the first time he said it, like an actor reciting a line. I used to represent a lot of famous actors like William Shatner. I didn't represent him, but Johnny Mathis, Anthony Quinn, other people back in the '80s when I started life as an entertainment publicist. I remember asking one of them, how can you say the same line on a play day after day, you know, 6 times a week and twice on Sundays? And they said, maybe the 100th time I've said it, but it's the first time the audience has ever heard it. So you have to somehow find something to make it a little fresh and interesting. It can't just sound like it's memorized. It can't just sound like it's repeated. Too much of the wisdom that we write, speak, say, just feels like it's been said 100 times, and you've said it 100 times, and it loses some of that feeling of spontaneity— real, honest, open. Spontaneous stuff, which goes to the second point, which is what actors always learn to do is to stay in the moment. I have people come in here with scripts. So Vanessa Campos Campos Campos, what do you think about book publishing today? I think it sucks. Great. And what's your favorite color here?

You know, like a questionnaire.

They say something startling. I think the economy is going to collapse tomorrow. Great. Okay. And now on to the next point. How did you start? Like they're not even listening, right? Throw the script aside. What? You think it sucks? You're a book publisher. What do you mean it sucks? Let's have a real discussion about this. I just feel like that's out of fashion. We don't even do that in our private lives anymore. Here, my wife's always saying, yeah, all right, cut to the point, cut to the point. The point is the conversation. The point isn't just being in the moment, being in the moment and debating something and discussing it. I have one friend I sat up with him one night, had a few beers and sitting around the campfire and we spent hours and he said, well, that was a waste of time. And I thought, really? You know, it was fun, but we seem to think, get to the point. Everybody's listening to the show. All right, what's the point? Come on, I'm going to write the 3 points down here. You can do some of that, but if that's all it is, it's not a story. If it's just a problem and a solution and no struggle, there is no story.

As you're talking about this, I'm thinking about my days back in journalism classes where I would literally go and listen to politicians do their spiel for the city of Long Beach. And it's just like, okay, but what's really at the story? So I would always stick around at the end and ask extra questions that no one else is going to ask them because everyone wants to play nice with the politician. Right. And that's when I realized it's like, well, we need to be in a kind of like one-on-one conversation here. And I think that that's what separates what you do here with OC Talk Radio is that it's more of that conversation.

It is.

And I'll be honest with you, it's almost like conversational marketing.

That's what I call it.

Right. Exactly. And I would like to challenge anyone out there who's, who's listening to go back to any of their business books and find the part of the book that is their favorite. And I almost guarantee that it's going to be a case study. It's going to be an anecdote, right? It's going to be something that makes that author human to you and relates what their struggle is to you. Forget the fact that they figured— cracked the code for 20x ROI, right? It's how they got to that point.

How they got to the point. And that's the third— you set me up perfectly. So if part of it's to be real and honest and open and vulnerable and say there's some struggle here when nobody wants to talk about the struggle, and other part of it's to stay in the moment and really listen and respond, not just read. This isn't a presentation, it's a conversation. It's back and forth. The third is what you said. Don't tell me facts and figures. Humanize it. Tell me the people stories. Put a face to it. Oh, now I can get it. And here's my three lessons I'm always saying. If you want to, if we're going to go down to a tangible takeaways, a story does three things in my book. One, you relate to it. Oh, now I get it. 2, you take it in differently. I don't know why or how, but we process stories differently. The tribal stories we all learned, how we do things around here, kid, the story of the country, the story of the company, the story of our family. That's how we do things. So we remember stories differently. It's a tribal sort of instinct. And 3, we will probably retell it if it's a good story. You don't do that with facts. How many was it? And what's the size of the problem? And what's the size of the market? We're in the middle of— now in the middle of November here. Democrats just passed this big infrastructure bill. They're getting ready to pass another one. And all the debate is, is it $3 trillion or $2 trillion? I don't know what's in it. And I don't know who it's going to help. I don't want to spend a dollar more than I have to. But if you tell me the little old lady family is going to benefit from childcare or the bridge that's going to get repaired and take me out to it and show me that, oh, well, that, yeah, we got to fix that, of course. They're not telling human stories, they're telling numbers. And too often in business, we're taught to tell the number stories, the market, the size, the need, the everything. And we think that's the story. That may be part of the story, but that's not the real, that's not the human part of the story. So I'm always trying to tell business stories in a human way and get people to be real and open up and be in the moment like a real conversation. And you think that's easy? Uh-uh, not today.

It's never easy because it puts you in that whole position of being vulnerable and you're always guarded and yeah, it's unfortunate, but you know, it's, and that's why, you know, just kind of on a slight tangent here. That's why word of mouth works so great for marketing because it's like, hey, I got to know Paul and Paul is great.

Right.

You should work with Paul because it's like, here's what they did.

Paul did for me.

Exactly.

And then they tell that story. That's why we all want testimonials and stuff here. But too often we want to reduce them down to sound bites, to snippets, to headlines, quick takeaways. I'm not saying there's all bad, but it can't be all the story is. I hate these things I see all the time. They call them listicles, or they used to call them listicles.

Yes, still do.

And somebody would say, I'm going to give you the 3 ways to write a book. And so you pop it open and it's just 3 little nothing, little nuggets.

I'm guilty. I'm guilty of that.

And we open it up and you say, that's it?

Where's the rest?

Where's the beef? Where's the meat, as we used to say, you know? All of that is not a story. A couple people, I won't tell you who they are on the station, who've written books, and I read them and they're just throwaway stuff. They're listicles. They're quick things they pulled together in a weekend, and now I can say I'm an author. There's nothing really original there. There's nothing in-depth there. There's nothing challenging, there's nothing that you struggle with in there.

Really?

What? Come on.

How? If it doesn't make you think, is it really worthwhile?

Yeah. So, and you always feel ripped off, don't you, when you get that? When you get that, that's all it is?

When you had to buy the hardcover book of something that was $27 and all it could have been was like, I could have bought this ebook or I could have waited for the paperback.

Right. So your job is to challenge them to go deeper. And to write more than they wanna write. My job is to do the same. And both of us have to teach them the long-lost art of storytelling. There is an art. There used to be guys when I was a kid in the '60s— I'm Irish, so many were Irish— Peter O'Toole or Richard Harris. Usually it was drinking stories if they're Irish, but they would tell you these wild stories and they were called raconteurs. And we would listen endlessly as they would spin these wild tales of their adventures. And there was an art to telling a story. It has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end. And you have to have a pace to it. And you gotta learn how to spin these yarns. We don't spend any time. I don't think there are any storytelling classes in school anymore here. We don't learn the art like we once did.

No, I think the only storytelling that I remember from journalism is if it bleeds, it leads.

Bleeds. If it bleeds, it leads. And so we've gotten down to just the facts, ma'am. Hemingway was famous for that. I'm a fan of Hemingway and, you know, his style was very journalistic. Just dot, dot, dot, bullet points. He got rid of all the flowery language. Let's just cut to the chase because he's a war correspondent and he's just trying— so all his novels have to be that kind of immediate, short. And so we popularized that style. We want it in 140 characters. We want a quick memo. We just want the highlights. We want the listicle. And there's a need for that kind of information, a place for it, if you're just recounting the facts. But if you're telling a story, there has to be a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it has to have a certain pace to it. And it has to be honest and hopeful, all these things that don't come easily for us anymore. I have businesses come in all the time, they want to tell their brand story, their passion story, their founder's story. They're horrible at it. It's no story. I had a little problem, I came up with an answer. It was a little struggle for a while, but here I am, a billion $1 million company. What can I learn from that?

You can't learn anything from that. And I have found, just on the side note, is that I am looking for, you know, as someone who owns their own business, I'm looking for quick solutions to do X, Y, and Z as I'm going through these— it's clickbait, you know, the 5 ways to do this, the 10 ways to do this. I'm finding that I'm really just looking for a turnkey solution. And when you start getting down into the meat of the program, It's going to require me to sit down and think about something. And I'm just, I don't have the time. I gotta keep going. I gotta keep going.

And that's why I tell people, I can give you 100 good reasons to do a podcast. I can only give you one. It's a commitment. Like writing a book is a commitment of time and energy. And the ones who fail at this, it's not because they don't see results. Oh yeah, I got people listening. People see me as a thought leader. I met people I didn't want to meet. I get, drive people aside. I keep them there longer. They come back more often. All the tangible metrics that people use, but they quit because it's a pain in the butt. Oh my God, I gotta come up with another conversation and another conversation, and I gotta actually sit and listen and talk and prepare and think about this. And that's what burns most people out. That's why they never finish the book or the podcast fizzles.

Or they write the book and they never continue to promote it, and they're like, well, what else? No, just keep talking about it.

Yeah.

They've already talked about it. Keep talking about it.

And that would be another show. It isn't a field of dreams. Build it and they will come.

They won't.

They won't. So all this effort to create this conversation, to record it, to capture it, if you just stick it in a drawer, nobody will find it anymore than if you write the great manuscript. Who was it? I forgot. Emily Brontë or one of those. I don't know if it was her or somebody wrote all these stories and then they didn't discover them until she died. She was like a spinster or something and she lived alone. Somebody published all this stuff. How horrible. You know, her whole life she's writing these great stories in her room and sticking them in a drawer, hoping somebody will find them. They did when she died. I guess if that's what you want, you can wait that long.

I'm not willing to wait that long. And I'm sure that there are a lot of people out there who are not willing to wait that long to share their stories. If they are willing to, you know, come to you and bare their souls, how can they reach out to you, Paul? How can people who want—

Impossible. I'm in a fairy castle. You can't find me. I'm Bill Murray. Have you ever read about Bill Murray, the comedian? He doesn't have an agent. The only Hollywood star I know that doesn't have an agent and doesn't have anybody booking him. He has an 800 number and an old-fashioned phone with an answering machine, and you have to find that number somehow through somebody. And if you do, he'll get back to you whenever he likes it. He listens to these things. So I don't know his number. I wish I could find his number and leave him a message here. But that's what we all want to be. We want to be that mysterious person. But if you want to reach OC Talk Radio, we're easy wherever. oc talk radio dot biz. Biz. Listen to our shows. We stream live 20-some shows we produce out of the University of California's Irvine's Beall Applied Innovation Center. This cool thing where they bring technology together and we're part of it. We got this cool studio and we're proud to have you because this is a conversation. It's exactly what I do with podcasting, the same conversation I hear about books.

It's easy.

I could do it in a weekend. I don't need any help. And then once I do it, it's done. It's never done.

Never the case. It's never done. The job is never done.

The job is never done, right?

So just a quick reminder for everyone out there who is interested in reaching out to Paul, it is called OC Talk Radio, Orange County, California, right? But it's not limited to Orange County, right, Paul?

No. Surprisingly, we do all sorts of big brands We do a show for Pedego e-bikes. We're starting one for the City of Hope Hospital. You know, we've got some national brands. I thought it was just a local voice and a local outlet, like a collection of podcasts we'd stream live first and then turn them into podcasts. And a lot of it is, but we help produce this ongoing long-form thing called podcasting where it isn't once and done. It's longer than a few seconds and it goes on and on and on and people get hooked on it and come back like a Netflix series. It's a recurring conversation. So we use this. A lot of people, they still might be played on OC Talk Radio, but they're using it to put on their websites and their social media and more and more live streamed on Facebook and YouTube and LinkedIn, all this stuff.

That's good because you have to understand, everyone out there, is that content is the gift that keeps on giving.

It does. It does. I had somebody come back to me when I first started this and he said, I didn't get anything. I'm not gonna— did it for 3 months. I said, well, you—

it's—

this is— do you tweet and people buy? Do you put a picture on Facebook and the phone rings? Well, no, that's why I hate social media. And I said, you got to give it some time. This is the long— this is the drip. And he came back to me 2 years later and he said, I'm so embarrassed, I keep getting leads from conversations I had and put up 2 years ago. I thought that was gone. That was my illusion when I came out of real radio, when it went into the ether It was gone. There was no Ethernet to catch it and carry it forward. It really was the ether. It just dispersed once it went out into the airwaves. Now it lives on. I don't know, like a good book or good content. Is it something that pays off years and years and years and years later? I think so.

Yeah. It's that continuous effort of the things that you never know are going to hit. And that's why I think sometimes marketing can be a very soft science because you don't, you never know what's going to resonate with people. You can A/B test all you want, but at the end of the day, I remember having one email that went out at the very beginning of my career at this media company, and 5 years later I was the director of the, the division, and I was like, what is this link that keeps popping up and recurring? It's from like 5 years ago. And they're like, oh, it's an email that went out, blah blah blah. And I'm like, someone saved that email link and is continuing to go back to that email link, and I was really surprised.

Leave you with this. Doesn't that make it all the more urgent to create real good, meaningful content and conversations? If it's going to live on, if this is just throwaway listicles, you crank them out every day and you just throw a few out there, little tidbits, snippets. Hey guys, here we are. Here's my 2 tips for today. Realize that that stuff may live on a lot longer than you think. So put some effort into it.

Absolutely.

All right, I got to put an effort to stop this, as much as I'd love to continue the conversation.

Well, thank you so much, Paul, for joining me today and being a very much honorary book broad.

I like it.

Thank you again for producing the show. I appreciate it. And I'm so happy that we ended up working together.

I am too.

And thank you again to Emily Carpenter-Polskamp, our associate producer of Little Red Communications. I will see you guys next time. We hope that you gained some valuable insights into the world of book publishing. Head over to broadbookgroup.com to learn more about us and all our services, and be sure to check out all our social media @BroadBookGroup. Until then, keep publishing.