Seth Godin's Timeless Marketing Strategies & Entrepreneurship Lessons

This is the session I know a lot of you have been waiting for we've been seeing the comments on LinkedIn the comments on Twitter on Facebook and I know a lot of you want to hear from the marketing Master himself Seth Godin so we'll bring him in we're so excited to talk to Seth today and if you don't know who Seth is first of all what's wrong with you where have you been but he is a renowned Ted Talk speaker marketing Hall of Famer Mastermind between 20 best-selling books it's unfathomable to even think about tribes

Purple Cow he's currently running the carbon Almanac he created all to MBA and more than 60 000 people have taken his online courses in marketing not to mention the three million or so people that have seen him speak and so now you all of you in the audience get to be added to that list and I can't wait to introduce him here so let's bring him in Seth gun so nice to meet you Great to meet you if I'm in the right place at the right time it's a good day that's a good attitude it's

good to see you again Seth this is going to be fun thank you for having me all right well I I'm gonna go deep right away we've got a lot to talk about but Seth with all these best-selling books that have changed the lives of so many people and that have changed the course of people's careers and their ideas what is a book that has changed your Life foreign wow okay so I will begin with this the book that will change your life the most is the book you write and I think that just about

anybody listening to this should write a book that doesn't mean you should publish it doesn't mean you should spend all your time trying to get other people to read it but I know that writing my blog every single day which I don't do for financial reasons makes me better Because I have to notice things I have to explain things I have to put my name on something that I believe but there are so many books from other authors that have had an impact on me Pema chadron's work Zig ziglar's work Patty Smith's book just kids

um the uh range of books on social issues cast which I picked his book of the year a couple years ago um Tom Peters and his work and I guess if I had to just pick one and put a name On it I would say um the war of art by my friend Steve pressfield it's a great place to start incredible recommendations right off the bat but that was that was powerful the book you write right because obviously um permission marketing changed the course of your career and and everything that followed right but you've done

like 8 500 blog posts like every single day right is is that your record or what do you have a live number Uh I don't look at the number very often I definitely don't look at my stats but I will tell you that it's more than 8 000 and there will be another one tomorrow and that's the point the point is I don't have to decide every day if there should be a blog post I don't have to decide every day if it's blog word I already decided there's going to be a post tomorrow and

what will go up tomorrow is the best post I have ready will it be my best post ever I don't Know I won't know until after it's done and decide once and then you can have a practice well before all the writing you were actually an internet entrepreneur so if we can go back kind of going way back maybe pre-acquisition by Yahoo can you talk us through the early days of starting up your own businesses and and you know where where your journey began well so let me just for the youngsters in the room meaning

anyone who's under 55 let me talk about the birth of the internet um I helped invent email marketing if you've ever used MailChimp or anything like that it's because of the company that I started uh but I got my first email address in 1976 when I was 16 years old and interacting with people on mainframes by email taught me an enormous amount and I started businesses shortly thereafter and the whole idea of The businesses was not to build something to make the maximum amount of money it was to be able to have the freedom to

make a difference the freedom to decide what to do tomorrow because I'm just not wired to do tomorrow what someone else tells me to do I'd like to please my customers please my audience but I want to make a map I don't want to follow map having a compass is great and so at the dawn of the internet AOL Prodigy those were our clients and when The World Wide Web came along Mark who worked for me brought me an early copy of Mosaic which became Netscape and I said this is stupid I said this is

like Prodigy but with no business model it's slow and it's clunky and we can't make any money on this get rid of it and my uh arrogance in not seeing what was possible on the world wide web probably cost me a hundred billion dollars and once you make a mistake that big it gets easy after that That's incredible was it like in I mean in 76 getting your first email um what that's not with a home computer like where were you using a computer at that time right like you didn't have a a desktop there

was no such thing uh in 1976 there was this little room in my high school where they put the Nerds and in the corner of the nerd room uh they had a Mainframe that was hooked up to the School district and so you it only had a printer didn't have a screen so you would type things in it with a on the screen and I built a version of Star Wars that you could that you could play and it would just print and that was normal we didn't think it was slow we thought that's the

way computers work when you talked about the the like lesson in the failure of the oversight of of seeing the the power of the internet the power of that browser right But um how do you feel opportunities like even being in that room with a computer in the corner like what what opportunities disproportionately affected the outcomes of your life oh so much privilege you know I was born with people giving me the benefit of the doubt I had amazing parents we didn't have to worry about putting food on the table there was an expectation that

strangers were welcome in our house Um I don't take that for granted I don't think I ever have my dad was the volunteer head of the United Way my mom volunteered at the art museum that's just the way I was raised um but being born in 1960 in the United States you know if you read gladwell's book outliers he points out that it's not an accident that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were the same age it's not an accident that you're present when the world is changing what's really Fascinating is that in the last five

years the world is changing again and there are a lot of people on this call who managed to make it through the pandemic looking at the mess that media and division have made of Our Lives thinking that they are surrounded by nothing but pessimism and that's a lot what the world felt like when I was starting my early companies we are right now laying the groundwork for who is going to be leaving tomorrow right that When the world changes is when there's opportunities for people who don't have power so if you have enough technology to

be watching the three of us talk you have enough technology to show up in lead and it's not going to be me it's going to be you people who get the joke don't chase some nft scam but instead figure out what can create real value for real people and you can build something so I I want to sprinkle in some Questions from our audience as we go whenever they're appropriate and we've got this one asked by James Preston from bear International which is what is not changing in marketing channels and messaging today that also worked

five or 15 years ago yeah so I love the laws of physics it doesn't matter what political party you're with the laws of physics don't change Newton's laws and and the rest of it are Real well there is a law of physics about attention and it's this every day everyone wakes up with 24 new hours to spend and it doesn't matter where they are what they do that's all they get and attention is always going to be scarce even more than real estate because you could you know build a dike and turn some motion into

real estate but you can't make more attention so who trusts you who gives you the benefit of the doubt who chooses to pay you in Attention because too much of marketing has become about hustle how do I steal attention how do I trick people how do I you know so much of the spam I get if I write back to people who should know about it I'm just doing my job yeah well you decided to do a job that involved pretending you listen to my podcast and pitching someone to be a guest when I've never

had a guest so stop it go do something with your time that works with Other people's attention in a way that they're glad to hear from you that hasn't changed a bit and I don't see it's going to change and I think the trust is more scarce than ever before and humanity is also becoming scarce because I can't tell if that picture was built by Dali or stable diffusion or a human right I can't tell if that voice on the phone is a real person or a script humanity is going to get more and more

Valuable as we decide where to allocate our trust so the scarcity of attention is a constant but where people put their attention changes and so how can you know the audience that's listening now and know where the places that they should be putting their efforts or attracting attention right so you know part of the magic of what you guys do is you help entrepreneurs think about What to standardize think about what to scale think about how to help people become not a mini version of the founder but somebody who can bring skills to Bear to

create scale and leverage and as somebody who right now is a freelancer no employees I alternate between having employees and not but I'm best when I have none being an entrepreneur is a skill and figuring out how to do it at scale is a skill it's not just being a Freelancer with helpers it's something else and so as we think about opportunities going forward someone has to win a tick tock but it's probably not going to be you somebody has to be the flavor of the day that everyone's pointing to but it's probably not going

to be you waiting to win the influencer sweepstakes I think your time is better spent building A foundational product or service that is resilient and worth talking about because when other people talk about you you have way more leverage and power than if you demand that people listen to you talk about yourself and I've tried to take that to heart I've never promoted my blog I don't hustle or hype my blog I had a hundred meters to my for my blog for a year only 100 people but then I started writing things that People could

share and when they share it it goes to new people not because I wanted to because they wanted to and that's how I got to a million it's funny I think in in one sentence there you probably said as much about what we at train you will do as we have through this entire event because we share that ethos is like we're not here to like shout from our soapbox like what we do we're here to bring value to Ancillarly help uh you know the businesses that are tuning in right and we get those comments

it's like well when are you going to talk about what tranual is it's like look it up we're here to bring you other value right um I'm curious when we talk about where the attention is um and and like how to have a real meaningful uh relationship with the people that you you hope to get Attention from a big buzzword is community he wrote tribes in 2008 about building tribes about building Community what would change if you wrote tribes today is there anything about how community yeah is built today and the first thing I'd say

is uh I meant absolutely no disrespect to uh first people's uh Native people and a few people have been offended by the title I don't think the title is a problem but I would change That because for a long time we have disrespected the people who came before and we have way too little respect in our work after saying that I would say that too much pressure is put on us to reach everyone and our real opportunity is to reach someone the smallest viable audience to matter to a few people is way more important than

to be noticed by everyone so in my case you know I've written some Bestsellers but not one of them not one has reached more than one percent of the US population it's enough right that if you can figure out how to matter to a few people it's scarier than having to say you could pick anyone and I'm anyone trying to figure out how to race to the bottom on upwork what a waste of time if you could be missed if you were gone that's important the second thing that I would address is that social networks

aren't really social and they tend not To be networks and doing what Mark or Jack or whoever makes money doing isn't your job your job is to weave together a community of people who would miss each other and so the communities that I've built and you know this one you mentioned this book I'm a volunteer I've worked full-time on this for the last year I don't make a penny from it there are 2 000 of us in the community online Building it with each other 300 people wrote it together in five months we were 97

000 word book we edited it we designed it we laid it out we fact checked it that's only possible because I brought empathy to the table the humility to say I don't know how to do any of these steps let me find people celebrate people connect people who can and when you're an entrepreneur that's hard to do Because there's all this pressure on you to be right and all this pressure on you to do it right now do you think that there's such a thing as Community overload or tribe overload if everyone's trying to create

communities or is it maybe just there there's not the authenticity that there should be in building those groups so you brought up a couple of my favorite words so the first one is people have said blah blah blah your Tribe I don't have a tribe and train you all doesn't either if we're lucky we get to talk to an existing tribe that would be there even if we didn't exist right so fast company figured out how to talk to the kind of people who like my work and then I was lucky enough to be a

columnist for them and wrote more words than anybody because they were already there and I got to show up and narrate for them so there is a real limit on Anybody who can have their own tribe but there is a shortage of people who can lead with generosity for tribes that already want to be connected and then the second thing which I'm controversial about but happy to rant all day authenticity is a Croc nobody wants you to be authentic they just don't that if Ricky Lee Jones has a sore throat and you go to her

concert you don't want her to authentically sing poorly you want her to bring the best Version of herself to that evening because that's when you are there people don't want authenticity they want consistency they want to know that even when they're not watching you're acting the way you said you were going to act choosing to be consistent is what a professional does authenticity is lazy and selfish it says I'm going to act whatever way I feel like and you better put up well we love consistency here so I Appreciate that point of view thank you

now you mentioned the smallest viable Market smallest viable audience also and so maybe that's something that's that's controversial because especially in our world in the software world you hear investors talk about the total addressable market and you want to serve this huge Market how big is your Tam and and you know see these huge numbers and so for most of the businesses listening how should they be thinking about their Target market their Target customer so let's name any company except you know some of the biggest social networks in the world right Starbucks Nike even Apple

would you be happy to be them because they don't have the majority we're not running for elected office we're trying to do work that matters for people who care so find the people who care and then do work that matters for them and what that means is that a million People paying you you know fifty dollars a year that's more than enough that's an astonishing amount of money for anybody who's watching this a million people there's seven billion people in your total addressable Market the reason we resist it as entrepreneurs is we want to be

able to treat customers as fungible and replaceable because there's just more people over there let's run an ad on the Super Bowl we'll be fine but the internet has no Mass Market there is no website not one except for Google and Facebook those are the only websites that reach more people every day than what a big TV show did in the 1980s that it's all micro it's not macro so figure out who you stand for and who you're trying to reach and don't worry about everybody ignore them shun the non-believers the only product with the

biggest the seven billion addressable Market is oxygen I think everything else is very Should be very Niche right that's true um how do you think about though like the marketing mix to address your your core customer right be like when you're trying to balance brand versus demand when you're trying to balance awareness to acquisition and really build a healthy funnel that's where a lot of people often get pulled into like okay well brand and awareness that means Mass Market that means Everybody has to know about me everybody has to talk about me so that a

few people want to buy right like what's how do you find parity between those two things when you're just trying to talk to the ones that might matter psychographics versus demographics for the first hundred years of marketing all we cared about was demographics because that's all we could care about what's your age what's your zip code uh what's your income what's your gender what's Your race what magazines do you read maybe that's all that was available but now we can know what you dream of what do you seek what are you clicking on so we

look for the psychographic because you've already decided who you are you've already decided where you want to go so a simple example which I keep tons of around here being the bar chocolate right these chocolate bars cost 10 or 15 pounds you should keep tons of chocolate bars correct but most People don't have 15 chocolate bars sitting around right they're eating junky Halloween candy I can't tell from this the curb when I look at your house if you're the kind of person that wants amazing thoughtful moral connected delicious remarkable 15 chocolate or crap that costs

a buck at the supermarket but when Sean asked an Ozzy my friend started one of the first Bean to bark chocolate companies that I bet there are people like me who would cross The street and go out of their way for the story and the experience of this that's who it's for and if you show up at eskenosi and say can I buy some Halloween candy they say no and that's the secret find out what the people you serve believe only serve them and ignore the rest figure out what people want believe dream of what

they're afraid of that's how we serve them do you think there's a correlation Between that really Niche focus and high price you know I have a friend that has an audio company for you know High ultra high fidelity kind of speakers but they're priced so high and similar to the chocolate is is the luxury of picking a small Market also giving you the ability to charge more or no correlation so I'm an audio file so I I need to know which Speaker Company you're talking about but we'll leave that aside for Another time um if

you look at headphones like beats which were designed for the mass Market they sound terrible if you're an audiophile and they're expensive but the mass Market bought them because of status and Prestige if you're the kind of person that wanted to walk around outdoors and show people that you quote have good taste unquote about the music you're listening to beats would Broadcast that to everybody now I can tell you brands of three thousand dollars headphones that sound way better for people who believe that that's what they want but I can also point out that Gradle

headphones which are made in Brooklyn cost less than Beats are for a very specific audience and you could buy them if you want and they sound better if that's your taste so if you want to go after high price and high margin you have to be specific but you Can also be specific and serve people without necessarily being the most expensive one in the in the market they don't have to go together okay we got to get back into the daily blogs that you write the Daily Posts because over 8 000 posts I know a

lot of people that suffer from like creativity block writer's block and you mentioned yeah Seth I talked to you about this on a call or a couple weeks ago right is that Like when I saw you at the HubSpot keynote years ago maybe seven um one of the things that stood out to me was like he's like a lot of people have writer's block or they say they do but there's there's really no such thing as talker's block so just reframe how you're thinking about writing and that it's like you're not you're not writing to

the computer you're talking to an audience to a person it's mythical it's made up there's no Such thing and there's uh something on Google that you can search which words were used every year in books since 1850 and you can see the year that writer's block started showing up before that there was none Mary Shelley's failed husband uh Percy Shelley the poet invented the whole idea and the reason that writer's block exists is because we're afraid of bad writing not because we are unable to write and when the stakes are high when you Say oh

my God all these people are going to read this then writer's block shows up but the answer which my friend Isaac Asimov taught me we worked together when I was 23. is simply right he sat it he's talking about he published 400 books in his lifetime and I said Isaac how did you do that and he said it's simple every morning at 6 30 I sit at this typewriter it was a little manual typewriter and I type until noon and then I'm done and it doesn't matter if what I'm typing is good I still have

to type and what happens is your subconscious says well if I gotta type I might as well type something good and if you type for three four five hours a day I promise you as hard as you try to write only bad stuff good stuff is going to come through and so knowing that there's gonna be a blog Post tomorrow all day long I'm seeing things engaging with people oh I'm gonna steal that idea and I write it up and I write five or six blog posts a day and the best one is the next

one and so you know how to walk you didn't know how to walk when you were born you toddled toddlers walk poorly in service of walking well but if they said I'm just going to wait until I'm a really good walker before I try nobody would ever walk Can I get very practical for like how to apply this for for people that are like you know that we work with that are using tranual that we hear all the time when you're trying to document processes in a business like people just don't know how to start

or where to start or when to start and that's like their biggest hurdle is like that it's similar right it's not just writing a blog post but it's writing down the processes in their business which seems silly because It's like you do these things you don't have to come up with something new this is how you work just write it down what is the blocker there and how can people actually start I'm really glad we're talking about this so I wrote a book called The Practice that is about being a toddler right one interview question

that's often misused when you're hiring somebody for any sort of process job is please tell me how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich And inevitably someone who hasn't heard that before will screw up because they make all these assumptions about how they understand to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and someone who has never made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich wouldn't no like for example you have to put the peanut butter on before you put on the jelly because if you put the jelly on first the peanut butter is going to

Skid off the bread right so I began my career writing Manuals for a software company and what you learn from that if you then answer the phone and customer services if you write the manual wrong the phone rings a lot because you didn't say put the floppy into the Commodore 64. you just said type this thing and they didn't do that step so part of what needs to happen is you've got to learn how to write a recipe but the other part which is super important is you have to write it wrong You have to

write it wrong and write it wrong and write it wrong you have to build a process where people give you feedback and you don't have to apologize and you don't feel bad because you are learning this is why curves exist on the street if when you're learning to drive you hit the curb you don't you didn't offend the curb the curb is just there to let you know that you're near the sidewalk go back toward the street So where is your curve how are you practicing this process right like I've been really enjoying uh watching

the chat fly by but what people are commenting on mostly is I've practiced more than they have and the way I've practiced is by doing this wrong by speaking in public Wrong by saying things that didn't resonate with people until I figured out things that did resonate with people and the magic of train rule is you're saying to people it Needs to get done stop asking employees to read your mind and it's safe to do it wrong on the way to doing it right because if you don't start you're never going to get good at

I love that you know I always thought the curbs existed because the people that sell the rims uh put them there because my tires always get scratched up so that they they must be involved somehow but people that are documenting process in their business you're right I Think they're Frozen They're paralyzed Maybe by wanting to be perfectionists and so the message you're saying you know just do it do it wrong understand it's going to be wrong is important and so should they be telling their teams you know this is just our current best way break

it ask questions iterate on it so I got I got two stories for you um both from big companies one bigger than the other first was Sleepy's mattresses which at one point had 70 uh Mattress stores in New York and I'm in a Sleepy's Mattress waiting for the person I'm with to buy a mattress and the phone rings and you could see the person behind the desk get all tense and then he answers the phone and says hello Mr sleepy and apparently Mr sleepy who was 75 years old at the time every day called every

single one of this of the 70 sleepy stores that was his only job and when you answer the phone he said what's wrong and if you couldn't tell Him one thing that was wrong he fired you but if you could tell him something about the story that wasn't working the way it needed to he would get it fixed that's all he did all day is find out what wasn't working and then fix it Paul orphalia who started Kinkos who I did a project with a long time ago Paulo orphalia had severe dyslexia he was functionally

illiterate and he built Kinkos to a company he sold To FedEx for almost a billion dollars by visiting Kinkos in person walking in and saying what did you come up with it's interesting that's working and then he would go tell all the other Kinko stores what that person had figured out so you know I I'm lucky enough to work with organizations that have lots of retail establishments I'm not a consultant but I happen to be married to somebody who has four stores and you need to create a culture where You can say to the clerk

that's not how we do things around here and they could say but that's what I was told and now you just discovered something that didn't work but if you're all hung up well I can't say anything or I'll hurt their feelings or you all hung up with if the boss tells me I did something wrong I'm in trouble nothing's going to get better and so it's like software debugging no one writes a program that runs the first Time debugging is what programming is really about that's such an important reframe in the mindset right it's like

standard operating procedures are just that they're standard doesn't mean they are best but it's how it's currently done doesn't mean you can't make a difference and improve upon it yeah you should call them a broken Opera Bops broken operating procedures like what's what's wrong around here I'm going to start Asking for Bops that's what I'm gonna do yeah I noticed in the background or what could be or what could be better and it's it's challenging to say what could be better because it implies something could be better but the alternative is everything is perfect and

if everything is perfect you're lying to yourself we actually just did a survey that we Were joking about this we were asking people you know what was wrong in your business and there was one answer at the very bottom that like 2.8 percent of people picked that was nothing and we just thought okay 2.8 percent of people are liars because that's that can't be true um all right so I can see linchpin behind you kind of blur it out but um obviously a huge hit a Incredible Book but one of the things I wanted to

bring Up with you is the idea of being uh indispensable in a business and whether it's something that people should aspire to being indispensable in a business or whether someone actually might want to be replaceable meaning that they could have someone step in and do their job and they are they're not you know stuck in the burden of this position forever so what do you think about that yeah this is a great question um there's a book I don't agree with all Of it but part of it is really good the e-myth we visited and

it talks about yeah um working on your business instead of in your business which is the key part of what you guys do um but there's another part of it that says you should design every job so that the dumbest possible person could do it because then the idea is you can just push everything down to the cheapest possible component and I have a problem With that particularly in an age of AI and offshoring where there's a race to the bottom and the point of linchpin is actually not that anyone is indispensable because no one

is it's would you be missed if you were gone do you bring something unique to the work something human that isn't just what's in the manual because the fact is that the vast Majority of your customers aren't doing things by the book every day that's why people pick them instead of the giant soulless corporations that they could pick instead that bringing humanity and care to the interactions within the company or to the customer is something that's hard to find at a giant Telecom but much more likely to be found in a company with 100 or

500 or 50 people in it so celebrate that figure out how do you let someone bring their whole self To work when it comes to caring when it comes to Bringing emotional labor to the work they do because the fact is just to pick a simple example every single person who goes to buy clothes is wearing clothes naked people don't go shopping for clothes so they already have clothes what is it that they're there to buy what they're there to buy is a story the way it makes them feel to transact the way it makes

them feel to shop so if you trained your people to Just Woodly walk up to someone and say can I help you and the other person says I'm just looking and then they walk away you've added no value whatsoever but if you give people the freedom and the responsibility to show up as humans then they can be someone you would miss if they weren't there and I think that that is critically important well I wish we had more time to text Michael Gerber and get him on here for a debate uh I he he wrote

the uh the intro To my book so we've known him for a while but I agree with you that you we don't want things to be done by just anyone that walks off the street and I think what makes you indispensable in a company is your ability to constantly be reaching for a new role taking on new responsibilities and creating a new role for yourself because if you stay in the same role forever you're not indispensable if you stay in the same position forever then that that's what Makes you replaceable and so you want to

be replaceable in each of the roles that you grow through and you're indispensable by growing I think if if you would agree with that yeah and there's lots of different kinds of growing you know there are people who have had the same job title for a long time but they've grown in terms of the responsibility the trust the impact the leverage the knowledge all of those things right but if you're if your Mantra is you can pick anyone and we're anyone and your employee's Mantra is I'm just doing my job then you've just signed up

for mediocrity because mediocrity and average are exactly the same thing Seth how would you help people overcome the fear of being replaced right like that's often the aversion to document the way that I I work right it's because well if you know how I do my thing then you don't need me and you might just get Somebody else and so it's like I want to retain my special secret sauce in my head like how do we coach um any employee that being like actually documenting that and being replaceable is actually a good thing to help

you step to the The Next Step so let's start by about fear and then I would love to dive into that specific thing uh yeah the difference between people who run a 20 mile marathon and quit and people who finish the Boston Marathon is not that the finishers don't get tired right that the people who finished get just as tired as the people who quit at mile 20. the difference is that the people who finish figure out where to put the tired that's the key you can't go to a coach and say teach me how

to not get tired if you really want to be an entrepreneur if you really want to be a contributor to an organization you're going to have to figure out where to put the fear And feeling the fear acknowledging the fear naming it is the first step to dancing with it and in your case this question about well what if they know my secrets a friend of mine run a company called penguin magic and even if you're not a magician it's worth checking out it's fun Penguin Magic is filled with magicians who show uh their trick

being performed and then for 20 bucks will sell another magician how they do it and Some magicians go to the Grave with their secrets hidden but great magicians are constantly teaching other magicians how they did it because your secrets aren't why you're a great magician the reason you're a great magician is you know what to do with the secrets and you know how to invent new secrets you know how to solve interesting problems but once you've solved the problem it's not interesting anymore teach other People how to solve it too because the more that we

give away and teach the people around us how we do what we're doing the more Frontiers are open in front of us to solve new interesting problems and that's what makes you a lynchburger it's like a scarcity mindset if you think oh I give away what I do and there's nothing left that's very scarcity whereas if you think I give away what I do and it inspires me to Start doing other things I can keep growing it's in the more of an abundance way of thinking yeah so you know I grew up in Buffalo New

York and when I got to college uh buffalo chicken wings were just starting to be on the radar and I said to my roommates well I'm from Buffalo so I picked up the phone and I called the Anchor Bar where buffalo chicken wings were first created in their form and the woman who runs it answered the phone and I said I'm Calling from Boston I've been a customer for years what's the recipe and she told me because the Anchor Bar wasn't successful because they figured out how to make jerk mixed turkey Frank's hot sauce with

margarine they were successful because they were the Anchor Bar and the more people who made chicken wings the better they did they're giving away that secret recipe it's exactly what you should do I actually had no idea buffalo wings Came from Buffalo New York is that a real thing that is a real thing I assumed it has something to do with the buffalo animal which I guess is dumb and retrospective okay thank you that's a that's a takeaway for me today that's so funny okay so let's let's jump to another question we've got here uh

Tamara Kemper from the promise me process mavens um she said I know the power of having Strong systems in my business and I want my business to be a place where people feel inspired to create Magic and connect I know they're not mutually exclusive but how do you think about achieving both of these so I guess kind of balancing creativity with systemization so if you want to be a jazz musician you need to know all the standards you need to know the scales you need to know how to listen and you need to know how

to Play in tune and only after you do all of those things do you get to be Miles Davis or Christian McBride or Sevilla Mae you need to have this foundation and the mistake we make is we teach kids to memorize the music and to play it as written and we forget to teach them to be musicians and this is true for your business that's one of the challenges of franchises franchises say you have to do Every single thing exactly this way or you get in trouble because we want every Subway to be exactly the

same well yeah but when that happens you're only making forty two thousand dollars a year at some point you need to solve an interesting problem and that's where the music comes first you need the tactics and the technique and then you get to do the great work so it's kind of balancing that Art and Science I guess right you've got the Foundation of how to do things but then you need to be a musician you need to have the freedom to create and be an artist I think it's the same in our businesses there's a

standardization a way to do things but we all have the creativity to innovate you know it's funny tomorrow we're talking to Ali Webb she was the founder of dry bar and so we're going to talk about that franchise thing and I think that's a great topic to ask her about it's just how do you Get creativity have a place there yeah you you should say hi for me um she is a superstar okay uh Michael Landau used to work with me um Michael and I have talked about standardization to dry bar a lot uh the

magic of dry bar is not that there's only the manual that tells you how to do it right the magic is a human being is going to look you in the eye and exert emotional labor to make a connection With you while they happen to be giving you a blowout but you're not there for the blowout you're there for the way the human being made you feel and that's hard to standardize you can't uh have a script for every scenario and every conversation with every person so interesting exactly so we got another question here from

Lisa Marie Vasquez which is uh I guess related to how you make people feel and a lot of the topics that we covered Today but how do you change the culture in an organization where where there has been little accountability so how do you change the culture anywhere what is culture culture is People Like Us do things like this if you tolerate a bully because he has good sales numbers you have just made it very clear that it's okay to be a bully as long as you have great sales numbers on the other hand if

you call a company Meeting and fire the bully in front of everybody you've now established what it's like around here People Like Us do things like this that when the CEO is just doing process and doesn't care about an individual consumer don't be surprised if that's the way the customer service people act as well so the thing about accountability is if all you're offering people is a chance to accept blame I don't think it's likely that you're gonna have a lot of People lining up to sign up for the accountability train that it needs to

be part of something and it needs to be part of ownership and authority and agency those things are the things you get when you add accountability in but if all you're doing is looking for who do I get to blame today I think your culture might need some work Seth in the early days of building Yoyodine and squidu like what Performance Management failures did you have so I will tell you two highlights while I'm trying to think of the best most Vivid failure other than losing billions and billions of dollars By ignoring the internet um

[Music] the at one point we had 17 people doing inside sales where we were calling People we had permission to call and selling them uh internet clicks long before anybody on the internet was selling clicks from banners and we give them all a 29 Radio Shack tape recorder and we said record all your calls please and then on Friday bring your best call to a meeting and so at the meeting consisted of was each person playing their best three minutes for the other people and that did a couple really cool things First of all it

was a form of standardization but giving people agency and ownership it elevated each person's contribution and it let them teach the other people their best lines their best uh approaches their best interactions at the same time the person who is running the sales team had had a great string of six months with no major screw-ups and I took him aside and I said if you don't have a major scope Soon I'm going to fire you in front of everybody in the company the way I was going to fire that bully and I said because if

we create a culture where only successes are tolerated people aren't going to try they're not going to be willing to risk a mistake and he knew I meant it and so he um pushed into new areas and half the time he was successful in half the time he Failed which is exactly what we needed in terms of my biggest failure I would say for sure my biggest failure were failures of Omission things I didn't do that I should have done we had 70 employees and 52 of them reported directly to me that I was so

busy being a freelancer with assistance that I was solving every interesting problem I could find and I wasn't developing enough people to build an institution and that's one of the Reasons that we sold the company to Yahoo which I don't regret but it was gonna I was gonna melt I couldn't continue to scale by being the center of all of these conversations but I didn't trust myself enough yet to say I could build a system and a process that could scale without me doing wow 52 direct reports I can't even imagine like it was so

fun when it worked it was great because like All day long all I did was someone would say this and someone would say that they tried this try this truth ah crazy it reminds me of like one of those old-time operators with like all the plugs and just like constantly answering phones yeah that sounds nuts seven you talked about having a uh a whole sales team right of what was that 16 19 something like that uh 17 people if you were 17 okay I was close uh Um if you were running a sales team now

what what would you do differently I think a lot of people are struggling with sales in the current climate and uh it's seeming less and less and less like cold DMS on LinkedIn is the is the right Playbook okay so spam isn't marketing and cold DMS aren't sales uh so let's be really clear what sales are worth doing if you meet somebody who says they were On the sales team at Google in the early years what they're saying is they had a job at Google but the sales that wasn't them Google ads sold themselves and

to a large extent still do I would imagine 95 percent of Google ads sell themselves so selling is largely an artifact of good marketing and marketing is making something people want to buy and talk about so job number one before I rebuild the sales team is How do I build a contagious viral useful service or product that spreads without me having to call people on the phone the second thing my book permission marketing is about anticipated personal and relevant messages delivered to the people who want to get them and there's a couple books that I

would strongly recommend one is spin selling which isn't about spin and the other one is let's get real or let's not play and let's get real or let's not play is Fantastic and it's about business to business selling encouraging the client to say look I'm here to sell you something because it's going to make your life better if you don't want me to sell you something we should stop right now but let's get real or let's not play and if we're gonna get real here's what I we need to begin with if I have something

that's going to help your career and your organization you need to show me Your org chart your problems what you guys are facing and what your competitive options are because if we can't do it together I don't want to do with you call somebody else here's the phone number of my competition play games with them when you're ready to not play games I'm here to solve your problem that's real selling that's what professional sales people do hustling people and hyping people I think you Should just skip that part of the day part of marketing and

selling is I guess uh this is kind of a buzzword but thought leadership and presenting and speaking so one of the questions we got for you is how to get better at public speaking and presenting you're on huge stages around the world and so what tips do you have on presenting so I wasn't very good at it I don't think anyone is naturally very good at it I know a lot of very well-known Ted Speakers and I would say almost every single one of them is an introvert that you know brene Brown isn't going to

come to your house and talk to talk and talk and talk and talk and neither is Simon sinek and um you know [Music] my friend the late Sir Ken Robinson could sit for hours without saying a word because this isn't about naturally and authentically being gregarious in Front of people it's a craft and you can learn to get better at it and the only way I knew no to get better at it is to do it and the way I did it was back a long time ago there was a conference called internet world and

they got reviews of every single one of their 400 speakers and the first time I spoke my ranking was 365. and I decided this was when I worked for free and I decided that my goal was to work my way all the way up And I looked at what people who had high scores were doing and I thought oh I see that or I see that or no one's ever tried this and you see what works doing it on Zoom is so much harder because you can't tell what's working but doing it in person and

if you want to start with a dog or a cat start with a dog or a cat figure out how to just take five sentences in a row that someone else wants to hear it's a performance and it's generous you're Doing it to help somebody else learn something and so I don't think you should look at slick TED Talks that are filled with jokes I think you should look at talks that change the way other people think or act even in the small can you persuade one person to do one thing and I'll give you

one last example and then I'll give you the mic back one of the things I talk about when I run various seminars is Take a twenty dollar bill and go to the bus station and see if you can sell the 20 Bill to somebody for five dollars it's incredibly difficult to do because you don't get the benefit of the doubt and they have no trust but if you put a 20 bill in your neighbor's mailbox three days in a row and then on the fourth day ring the doorbell and say I'm the guy who's been

putting 20 bills in your mailbox I got another one we just buy it For five bucks you'll have no trouble selling it because we earn the benefit of the debt that's an incredible exam have you ever done that as like a video it's inside uh the marketing seminar Workshop that I built I think that's so cool I love that the the today you've had you know dozens of these stories and examples and I think part of presenting and Performing is having those stories at the ready so Do you have just a bank of these do

you work in the off hours on coming up with these examples from your history is I know I'm getting into the nitty-gritty here but it's helpful for at least for me as an audience of one so I decided a really long time ago that if I didn't know how something worked I was going to ask myself how it worked until I figured it out refrigerators are not magic electricity is not magic the success of Starbucks is Not magic that person got elected it wasn't magic why did it happen and if I can't figure it out

I gotta keep asking myself until I do and every once in a while you come up with one that's worth sharing and so most people go through the world saying how am I going to get to where I'm going today and I go through the world looking for things I don't understand so I can figure them out and then share them with other people I gotta tell you there's one Thing I can't figure out right now that I've been working on for a long time I even talked to the co-founder of Netflix about this someone

needs to explain it to me here you go when Netflix launched streaming they did binge and the reason that they let you binge shows like House of Cards is because no one else would so it was this huge competitive Advantage this huge buzzworthy thing of you could go have all you wanted But now binging costs them billions of dollars a year they should just stop it also hurts their word of mouth because if every single episode of the next show was only on you know once a week new then the next day everyone would talk

about it but you're afraid to talk about it now because you don't want to do any spoilers so I said to him why are you doing that he said I don't know you'll have to talk to Reed because it's what we've always done so if someone knows The answer to the binge thing put it in the chat I would love to know Reed would hate that somebody just needs to tag him I remember um asking him this was like 15 years ago but asking you know why wouldn't they do uh Playstation games and things like

that and this was when they were doing all DVDs it was because they were moving into streaming and they said we're not in the business of shipping discs around we're in the business of delivering you Know entertainment video and and it was a he's very Visionary so I think if he heard you say that he'd like freak out so we should share this video yeah we could send it to him so around you just asking that question and then going through that process of just trying to figure it out right I think that one of

the most important Assets in anybody is curiosity I think the top performers that I've ever seen anywhere are innately curious and have that hunger to Figure it out right but you can't always identify curiosity in somebody when they're interviewing and hiring like what would you look for in a candidate that you were trying to build an amazing roster of people um to identify innate curiosity so I've hired thousands of people maybe hundreds and I've learned a lot doing it and what I've learned is you shouldn't interview people for a job it's a complete trap it

makes absolutely no Sense it's like picking people for your college based on the SAT all your lurking for is who's good at interviewing and so if you have a company where people get interviewed for a living then that's a good way to hire them but other than that it doesn't make any sense the best way I know to hire people is to work with them first give them a project pay them money to do a thing because when someone is doing a Thing you can see how they do the thing and that seems so obvious

and it's not particularly difficult to do but it means you have to give away your power and you have to give away this magical thing you think you have which is you can tell who's a winner or not based on a five minute or an hour long interview a a design firm I know once someone becomes a finalist because they've just gotta Whittle people down somehow they Say all right now you need to come to a design review bring us your portfolio and we're going to criticize it and then you're going to tell us why

your portfolio is good because that's what they do all day at work the way to see it want to work with somebody so try them out because you can pay them to do it and with things like upwork and the rest it's so super easy to do that Now if someone is good when you are working with them now they'll probably be good when you're working with them later now I've seen some some posts you know on floating around on LinkedIn of people not wanting to do those projects or those sample works even if it's

paid they just kind of want to get through a a job do you do you think that they just need to do it don't hire them hire somebody else There's a lot of people to choose from I totally get why somebody who has been indoctrinated their whole life to show up get an A on the test put on your resume get picked and go to work where it's safe and secure when you're doing what you're told that person wants to interview and get the next safe spot totally get it but the people who are watching

this call that's not the kind of organizations they're trying to build so don't hire people Like that and expect them to act differently then they're telling you they want to act right if you want to find people who would be missed when they're gone who are curious who are going to challenge convention who are going to tell you how to make things better start by looking for people who do that all the time well said where do you find the inspiration for your daily ideas how do you continue to draw inspiration You know as I'm

getting older it's easier to get tired but the thing that gets me untied every time are my readers are the people on this call are the two of you that to show up and have it resonate with people I'm just totally hooked on that what a privilege to be able to narrate this and you know when I was coming up I needed more connection I was a lonely entrepreneur being connected with other people who are on the journey is Priceless and the fact that I get to do that a little bit and you know with

the carbon Almanac to do it all day it's just thrilling love it amazing it's incredible I love it so um for those who don't really know what carbon Almanac is uh I know we're right at the top of the hour here like what do you want to give the little Spiel so people can get tuned into this and potentially join that community Uh the short version is 16 years ago I wrote my first blog post about climate change didn't solve the problem uh the problem has gotten significantly worse but I found myself hesitant to talk

about it because I had been indoctrinated into believing that my carbon footprint made me too much of a hypocrite and because it was too complicated and so I said well if I'm confused I bet you other people are confused too well I know how to make Almanacs I've made more almanacs than most people and so what we built is charts and graphs and tables and pros and cartoons and cartoons and cartoons that are all footnoted so you can in the safety of your own home look this up and get smart and you can discover did

you know concrete's eight percent of our problem I didn't know concrete was any percent of our problem I didn't know concrete was a problem it's a problem it's a really big problem so you start To see the system and for me we have a systems problem and the only chance for us to move forward is to find a systems solution and system Solutions don't involve plastic recycling which is a scam and a sham it doesn't work but system Solutions involved talking about it and if you're afraid to talk about it it's not going to change

so the almanac exists and we've got a free daily email and 40 podcasts and a free Kids book and a teacher's guide all built by volunteers none of us touch a penny so that we would talk about it and if you go to the carbon almanac.org you can talk about it too Seth well we are really passionate about solving systems problems uh as as you know we've talked about systems and processes a lot here so I think that's just incredible and can't wait to dig in a little bit more Thank you so much for sharing

all the wisdom today we've got so many great sound bites and and clips that we're just sure going to be replaying and this has been incredible thank you for spending your time here with us uh we really appreciate you well thank you both and thanks to everyone who tuned in go make a Ruckus everybody we'll see ya