Latest / Founder Talk with Alex Sheridan / The Marketing Genius Behind Nerds Candy with Bob Lambert

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The Marketing Genius Behind Nerds Candy with Bob Lambert · Founder Talk with Alex Sheridan

• 0:00
  Bob Lambert, founder of Human to Human.
• 0:01
  Welcome to the show. Cheers.
• 0:02
  Appreciate you coming on, man. Thank you.
• 0:05
  I thought you were late, but actually, you're early.
• 0:07
  Yeah. Funny how that worked.
• 0:08
  Out right. It was a good thing, yeah.
• 0:10
  So. You know, we we talked on the
• 0:11
  phone. It's probably a few months ago
• 0:12
  now. Yeah.
• 0:14
  And I was really interested in the story on Nerds, Nerds, the
• 0:18
  candy. OK, so your company launched the
• 0:21
  Nerds candy for Wonka and kind of put together the marketing
• 0:24
  behind that. And I want to hear that story.
• 0:26
  But before we get into that, I want to take the audience back
• 0:28
  because this is kind of interesting.
• 0:29
  I was doing some research before just looking up like Wonka and
• 0:33
  the nerds and all that stuff. And I found that Quaker Oats
• 0:36
  funded the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
• 0:41
  Because I was wondering like, who was that a marketing ploy
• 0:43
  that they just created this movie kind of like Lego did?
• 0:46
  And it worked really well for Lego.
• 0:47
  It took them from like almost out of business to exploding in
• 0:50
  revenue. But when I look back, it was it
• 0:53
  was Quaker Oats that actually funded.
• 0:54
  I was like, where'd they come from?
• 0:56
  And it looked like the the movie ended up becoming a classic.
• 0:59
  The candy did not. They sold the candy business.
• 1:01
  Quaker did in 1980. The candy assets were acquired
• 1:05
  by Sunmark and then in and then in 19.
• 1:10
  And I guess Quaker kind of figured from there like, hey,
• 1:12
  we're just, we we'll stick to the breakfast stuff, right?
• 1:14
  We're not going to do the candy stuff.
• 1:16
  But it's funny how they tried to kind of do what Lego did many
• 1:19
  years before. It didn't quite work out because
• 1:22
  the candy bar that they were launching when they wanted to do
• 1:24
  the movie was the Wonka bar. And I guess as you probably know
• 1:27
  all this, I'm going to let you talk in a second, but I want to
• 1:29
  give some history 3, The Wonka bar for Quaker based on that
• 1:33
  movie didn't end up doing as well because there's
• 1:35
  inconsistencies with quality. It just didn't take off.
• 1:38
  It wasn't really their thing. So they kind of sold the candy
• 1:41
  asset in the Willy Wonka line to Sunmark, from what I understand,
• 1:45
  and then they built the whole kind of branding and line behind
• 1:48
  it. And then 1983, your company
• 1:51
  comes in and helps launch nerds. So I'll let you, yeah, you tell
• 1:54
  this story however you want to tell it.
• 1:55
  But it's interesting. Well, yeah, you know, and, and
• 1:58
  actually I'm a part of a book called Spark and Synergy that
• 2:01
  just got released in September by G Riley Mills, which is one
• 2:05
  of the folks I'll be talking about a little bit later.
• 2:08
  And so he was, you know, it was about four years before that
• 2:12
  that he was just so, you know, fascinated by it and he was
• 2:16
  trying to get this book finished.
• 2:17
  So as you can imagine, it's about innovation, spark and
• 2:19
  synergy and that, well, how do you do this?
• 2:21
  How does that get started? So he was really into me about
• 2:24
  how did we do all this? Well, founding was around the
• 2:28
  Marketing Edge, which is a marketing company that I founded
• 2:32
  with a partner. And so we had CPG, predominantly
• 2:36
  Consumer Packaged Goods companies.
• 2:39
  We did work with airlines, banking and so on and so forth.
• 2:42
  But we were predominantly was on the leading edge of marketing
• 2:45
  companies back then. So you had basically back then,
• 2:48
  this was before the Internet, you have 4 disciplines,
• 2:50
  advertising, sales, promotion, public relations and direct
• 2:52
  marketing. Well, a lot of companies had ad
• 2:54
  agencies per SE of record or they'd have PR agencies, they
• 2:59
  would have, some of them were doing direct marketing, not a
• 3:02
  lot of them were. And then promotion, well,
• 3:05
  promotion was the door that we came through, but then we land
• 3:08
  and expand because you had in one agency all four disciplines
• 3:14
  and I had experts in all four of those.
• 3:16
  So it was, you know, where we took a budget and we looked at
• 3:20
  budgets the same way we did when we were marketing, you know, and
• 3:23
  also streamlining things for these marketing guys back then.
• 3:26
  That was they're trying to manage all these different
• 3:29
  agencies and of course they've all got their own agendas.
• 3:32
  So we made it real easy for them.
• 3:33
  And I a big networker as you know.
• 3:36
  So this is a gentleman that actually became the vice
• 3:38
  president there that I followed all the way from Keebler start
• 3:41
  up research or not actually craft and then landed a director
• 3:45
  of marketing job at Keebler. We work with him there.
• 3:49
  Then he ended up over at Willy Wonka Brands as the Vice
• 3:51
  President. And so Gateway gatewayed us in
• 3:55
  and we worked on a couple of the other brands.
• 3:58
  But this nerds thing is something that we found.
• 4:00
  We fell into it and that was because there's touring and
• 4:03
  looking at the, the candy making process cause a lot of those gob
• 4:06
  stoppers and bottle caps, sweet and sour kind of stuff and
• 4:09
  everything like that is really what they were into.
• 4:11
  Not chocolate and gummies was on the dawning, you know, starting
• 4:15
  a little bit. But all of a sudden when walking
• 4:17
  through the plant and walking this stuff and all of a sudden
• 4:20
  these buckets were underneath the machines where they were
• 4:23
  doing all this manufacturing. And I thought, you know, I
• 4:26
  looked at the marking and I said, what's this saw that some
• 4:29
  renderings off of, you know, like bottle caps and gob
• 4:31
  stoppers and all that stuff. And I said, what do you do with
• 4:33
  this stuff? He says we just toss it back in
• 4:36
  and whatever I said, what you ever think about?
• 4:38
  He says, as a matter of fact, you know something I've been
• 4:40
  thinking about that because it was these little beads of stuff,
• 4:43
  right? But it was all sweet and sour
• 4:45
  stuff. And so we started talking about
• 4:47
  it and I said, well, what's your idea about this thing?
• 4:49
  What do you, what do you think? And he said, well, I, you know,
• 4:51
  we could probably put a candy roll in robing around it.
• 4:54
  And then Kyle was a new terminology.
• 4:55
  And I said, what's that like? You know, you put a little candy
• 4:57
  layer on top of it and and then, you know, because we've done a
• 5:01
  lot of research with the the age category and they don't have
• 5:05
  real sophisticated why some of these other things were big hits
• 5:08
  because they don't have real sophisticated palates.
• 5:11
  And so you need that boom rush of flavor, you know, for these
• 5:15
  young people and all tweens. And so let's let's look at this
• 5:19
  thing. Let me take it back to my team.
• 5:21
  Let's look at this, see what we do.
• 5:22
  Sure enough, we innerated, innerated a couple of things and
• 5:25
  nerds came up. I mean, it was just this wild,
• 5:27
  crazy idea. We came up with nerds because
• 5:29
  back then nerds were what, you know, you expected me.
• 5:32
  Just people that were kind of out there and doing things.
• 5:36
  And so I'm going. To pause you a couple times in
• 5:37
  the story because I got follow up questions.
• 5:38
  So when you're touring the factory, right, are you looking
• 5:41
  for like what? What is your mindset?
• 5:43
  Why are you around the factory? Are you looking at product?
• 5:45
  Are they asking you to come up with the next big thing?
• 5:48
  Like what's going through your mind and why are you walking
• 5:50
  around? Predominantly it was, you know,
• 5:52
  like anything when we came in knew much like what you do, you
• 5:54
  got to do research, you got to understand, you got to
• 5:56
  enculturate yourself to what that is.
• 5:59
  And it really hadn't done a candy product before as far as
• 6:01
  any marketing goes, you know, and these were novelty kids
• 6:04
  candies. You know, they if they had a
• 6:06
  lifespan of three to five years, that was a long.
• 6:08
  Time. They hadn't done marketing
• 6:09
  before. Oh, yeah.
• 6:10
  They've done marketing. Yeah, they've done marketing.
• 6:12
  But with, you know, the VP of marketing coming in, it had a
• 6:15
  whole lot of different layer of sophistication, which I was used
• 6:18
  to because I had these big brands that we'd worked with.
• 6:21
  And so they were looking to take and elevate the brand because
• 6:24
  nobody knew a lot about it, you know, and now it's Willy Wonka
• 6:27
  brands was here in Chicago. And so we we started looking at
• 6:31
  that and said, OK, how, how we position some of this stuff.
• 6:33
  Because as you said, Willy Wonka, if when it was Quake or
• 6:37
  Gentleman wasn't a big, I mean, the movie was great, you know.
• 6:40
  So this is 1 where they owned by Sunmark then?
• 6:42
  Yeah, Sunmark owned this company here in Chicago.
• 6:47
  So that's how it, you know, it began.
• 6:49
  And so bottom line was I'm walking the plant with the VP
• 6:52
  and his, his brand manager and we're looking at different stuff
• 6:56
  and so on and so forth. And, and all of a sudden they
• 6:59
  stumble across this and I think that's kind of interesting.
• 7:01
  What the heck you do with this stuff and you're throwing it
• 7:03
  back in and batching again. I'm thinking, well, you know,
• 7:06
  and this brand manager just say, hey, you know, I haven't really
• 7:08
  been thinking. I thought, OK, come on, let's
• 7:10
  sit down and see what we can do here.
• 7:11
  Was your original thought process that you would just go
• 7:13
  check out the factory, learn more about the products, what
• 7:16
  they're doing, and then come back and kind of put together
• 7:18
  some ideas and creative concepts?
• 7:20
  But it actually just hits you when you're on the floor
• 7:21
  instead. Exactly.
• 7:23
  That's cool. That's exactly very organic.
• 7:24
  And what happened was this brand manager was pretty eclectic and
• 7:29
  he was, he was a really interesting guy.
• 7:31
  And so he'd been sitting and some ideas and we did too.
• 7:35
  So that wasn't the only thing. I mean, Nerds was a monumental
• 7:38
  hit, but we also concepted about three other products that just
• 7:42
  scored off the chart with the kids.
• 7:44
  It was amazing. It really was.
• 7:46
  One of those was called Sneak EMS.
• 7:48
  OK. And sneak EMS was a Jolly
• 7:51
  Rancher type of candy. OK, The problem with that was
• 7:54
  when the classroom, the foil would make noise and the
• 7:57
  teachers would discover, hey, you, you, you can't.
• 8:00
  Speak it then, yeah. So we started thinking about
• 8:02
  this and we said, OK, what if we took in and robe that in
• 8:06
  something that you could actually just pop in your mouth?
• 8:09
  OK, now the foil wrapper didn't make noise, you know, but the
• 8:12
  inside cellophane made noise. And so we found out that there's
• 8:16
  a rice paper over in Korea that you could take and all you could
• 8:20
  do, you could unfold the foil wrapper, but you just take and
• 8:23
  pop the whole thing in your mouth and we dissolve.
• 8:25
  Then you get this rush of flavor, right.
• 8:27
  So that's we, we label those sneakums and it was off the
• 8:31
  charts. The, the unfortunate part about
• 8:33
  that is it was just prohibitive at the expense because they
• 8:36
  didn't have the technology here. They would have had to, you
• 8:38
  know, to go through all kinds of things was a great concept and
• 8:41
  they loved it. They loved it.
• 8:42
  The kids loved it. The other one.
• 8:44
  Did it actually make it to mass market or no just test testing?
• 8:47
  No. Well, you know, I, I don't know
• 8:49
  to this day, you know, what happened after we left and and
• 8:52
  certainly I don't see that, that Willy Wonka Brands did it or Son
• 8:54
  Mark did it. Yeah.
• 8:56
  The second one was again off the charts and predominantly with
• 8:59
  boys and we called it Rd. Pets Rd.
• 9:02
  That was the leading to gummies and it was just.
• 9:05
  Before gummies were a thing or what?
• 9:07
  No gummies were really emerging. They were coming along.
• 9:09
  So we sit there and we said, you know, what if we take and and
• 9:14
  take a gummy, an indistinguishable animal and had
• 9:17
  put tire tracks over it, you know, and it was pretty wild.
• 9:22
  It really was kind of wild. And so the boys just went off
• 9:25
  the chart. I mean, the scores we got in
• 9:27
  this stuff because we always did focus groups with these kids and
• 9:30
  everything like that and learned a lot through the kids.
• 9:31
  And man were they mires early. They could tell you to the penny
• 9:36
  how much something cost and also about sharing.
• 9:39
  So we studied gummies quite a bit too, because that was really
• 9:42
  emerging pretty rapidly. And we studied how boys ate
• 9:47
  gummies versus girls. It was really interesting.
• 9:50
  Girls nibbled on the limbs when boys just throw it in and start
• 9:55
  chomping at it. Sounds about right.
• 9:57
  Yeah. You know.
• 9:58
  And so these Rd. pets went. Well, we ran into a bit of a
• 10:00
  problem with PETA. They just got over there.
• 10:03
  Oh, yeah. Back then, we were so strong
• 10:05
  about that. Yeah.
• 10:06
  And we just didn't, you know, at the time, from the positioning
• 10:09
  standpoint where they were in finance, it wasn't worth taking
• 10:11
  on the fight. Yeah.
• 10:13
  So it was unfortunate. So going back to Nerds, yeah.
• 10:16
  Where did the name Nerds come from?
• 10:19
  Was that from you guys as an internal with Wonka?
• 10:21
  It was, it was, it was a combination.
• 10:23
  We were doing a brainstorming thing and we had a process in
• 10:26
  which we did this OK, because the idea was a bad idea.
• 10:28
  So now you've got kind of the concept of like, we're going to
• 10:31
  take these little shavings and like turn into some kind of
• 10:33
  candy, but what's the name going to be called?
• 10:35
  Right, exactly. And, and often times, you know,
• 10:38
  it follows a process, an innovative processes.
• 10:41
  How do you come up with this? So we sat together with my
• 10:43
  creative team and, and marketing guy and he's pretty creative, a
• 10:46
  little bit frustratingly so sometimes, but you know, he
• 10:49
  wanted to change things all the time.
• 10:50
  And so we, we set together and it was one of the, my guys
• 10:54
  actually, you know, just kind of start throwing stuff out there,
• 10:57
  kind of getting crazy because we didn't want to stifle any
• 11:00
  creativity. And I had tremendously creative
• 11:03
  people. I had people worked on
• 11:04
  McDonald's stuff, you know, and, and, and wrote and drew and all
• 11:08
  that stuff. And so the team that was in
• 11:10
  there, they would take and not only she would start
• 11:14
  wordsmithing, but then the creative, the artist would start
• 11:17
  drawing. Oh, that's called phenomenal.
• 11:20
  And so as we're going through this, all of a sudden nerds and
• 11:23
  everybody just stopped. Yeah, yeah, that's it.
• 11:26
  That is it. We go boom.
• 11:28
  And where where was the the the concept for nerds?
• 11:31
  Like what was the methodology behind?
• 11:33
  It well, it was right after, you know, what really started to
• 11:36
  happen was you think about Cat Beach patch dolls back in the
• 11:39
  day, you were pretty young when that all happened.
• 11:41
  And that was a big phenomenon, right?
• 11:44
  And we started thinking we want to have some quirky kind of an
• 11:46
  animal or a thing that would represent that.
• 11:49
  And so we could burn a page out of Cabbage Patch basically.
• 11:52
  I mean, this thing had a pouch in it.
• 11:53
  It was a nondescript and the artist did a fabulous job.
• 11:56
  It was just globby thing, you know, because we started looking
• 11:59
  in nerds kind of nerdy, you know, and all that kind of
• 12:02
  thing. And the kids fell in love with
• 12:03
  it. I mean, it was amazing.
• 12:05
  They were ordering stuff was off the hook.
• 12:07
  Now the big. Was there any symbolic meaning
• 12:09
  of like, you know, it was kind of the throwaway stuff, kind of
• 12:12
  the outcast scraps, and that's kind of how nerds sort of are
• 12:15
  looked at in society, unfortunately.
• 12:17
  But was there any? Was that a conversation at all
• 12:19
  or no? You know, I, I think what
• 12:22
  happened was the spark really ignited once we, because we were
• 12:25
  just really kind of just moving around trying to figure this
• 12:28
  out. We had a lot of, we iterated a
• 12:30
  lot of names, but that one, when it hit, it hit because everybody
• 12:33
  just in the room went, Oh yeah, where's that guy?
• 12:36
  A lot of stuff with that. Where's, where's your marketer
• 12:39
  guy today? Is he still around?
• 12:41
  It'd. Be cool to say like hey I came
• 12:43
  up with the the name. Nerds.
• 12:45
  I you know I don't. You guys did as a company, so
• 12:46
  it's. Just, well, it's cool.
• 12:47
  Yeah. You know, and again, it's a
• 12:49
  creative process, you know, you don't, you try to make sure that
• 12:53
  the environment's right for people.
• 12:55
  That's just loosen up and let go, you know, and not be just no
• 12:58
  ideas. There's no boundaries.
• 13:00
  There's no nothing because it's it's a very creative process.
• 13:03
  And because I grew up in that process, you know, as a kid I
• 13:07
  was wanting to be a commercial artist.
• 13:09
  That's pretty shallow. I want to work for a big Madison
• 13:12
  Ave. agency, live in a penthouse and drive a Porsche.
• 13:16
  That was my whole goal. Right.
• 13:18
  Yeah. That was my whole goal.
• 13:20
  And so, but I ended up owning an agency and be in the be in the
• 13:24
  suit, you know, but all of that because I knew the mindset and
• 13:28
  what it took, you know, to do that.
• 13:30
  I didn't want to shackle these guys down and they were they
• 13:33
  were tremendous. I mean, working with pros is a
• 13:35
  whole different ball game and working with amateurs, you know,
• 13:38
  and so that's where that was the next thing was the box or how do
• 13:41
  we do this? That was the and that marketing
• 13:44
  manager came up with that. That was really cool.
• 13:46
  He said, well, what, what if we put two different flavors in it?
• 13:50
  We split it up and we had this, you know, magic box opening and
• 13:55
  then they could have a sample one or the other.
• 13:58
  And then our promotional skills kicked in and we said, hey, wait
• 14:01
  a minute, why don't we make it an instant win?
• 14:04
  So we borrowed a page out of Cracker Jacks and we had all
• 14:06
  these tchotchke, low end, real, you know, very inexpensive
• 14:10
  prizes. So it was a double sided and
• 14:14
  everyone was a winner. Some little tchy thing.
• 14:17
  The top prize we put in there, which really this stuff just
• 14:19
  flew off the shelf. They had great distribution.
• 14:21
  They had a great sales organization.
• 14:24
  They very reputable. They were really thought of very
• 14:26
  highly. And we just got displays up.
• 14:28
  That's all. We got up because we couldn't
• 14:30
  afford advertising, you know, back then to launch a kids candy
• 14:34
  product because you had basically television and sunny
• 14:36
  days, OK. It cost between about 3 to $5
• 14:39
  million. To do that to run one spot.
• 14:43
  No just period to run a campaign.
• 14:45
  Got it. How long would a campaign run?
• 14:47
  Yeah, probably went in about 6 weeks. 8 weeks.
• 14:50
  That's a lot of money back then we had. $250,000 to launch a
• 14:53
  product. So that's where the skill came
• 14:57
  in. Like I'm telling you being a
• 14:58
  marketing agency, being able to leverage the all these things
• 15:01
  and how to go about this. And we just decided it was a
• 15:04
  distribution because they had great distribution.
• 15:06
  It was all going to be about the packaging, all about displays,
• 15:08
  getting in displays in the candy stores and everywhere we could
• 15:11
  go and just make it very colorful, let it pop, you know,
• 15:14
  And then again, that's where my creatives came in because they
• 15:17
  work with kids products and, and then the sweepstakes, you know,
• 15:21
  basically you open a package, you open it up, you won.
• 15:25
  And the top prize back then was a Yamaha stereo set.
• 15:29
  Wow. The kid that won it bought 36
• 15:32
  boxes of this crap. He was, he was a tween.
• 15:35
  I think he was around 12 years old, eleven or 12 years old.
• 15:39
  And we had a big PR thing around it because I had PR, I'm one of
• 15:43
  those fabulous PR people in the country.
• 15:45
  And she's also the one that did the work with Muhammad Ali when
• 15:49
  we were launched Muhammad Ali's worldwide fan club out of our
• 15:52
  agency. And I got a whole story about
• 15:55
  that. But yeah, so the packaging was a
• 15:58
  hit and all this stuff took work.
• 16:00
  As you can imagine, we worked on this stuff probably for over a
• 16:03
  year, year and a half to really get everything locked in as to
• 16:07
  where it would be and pricing and a whole bunch of other
• 16:09
  stuff. There's a whole lot that goes
• 16:10
  into that, but the creative part of that, that spark and the and
• 16:14
  you know, my agency just got excited as heck because it was
• 16:18
  fun. It was a fun product.
• 16:19
  Some of this other stuff we worked on wasn't, you know,
• 16:21
  wasn't, you know, but the kids product and then the reaction
• 16:25
  the kids had to it, that was the other thing.
• 16:28
  Once we got through the basic stages and along the way, we
• 16:31
  were always vetting through with kids to see, OK, what's this?
• 16:35
  And there was some suggestions that came out from the kids, you
• 16:37
  know, that we took because we thought, OK, not everything, but
• 16:40
  you know, there's things that we would pick out in patterns, you
• 16:42
  know, some of their stuff that this is this, this could work.
• 16:45
  The kids are pretty excited about it.
• 16:47
  So we did, you know, and big back then focus groups are
• 16:51
  everything. You know, the research was
• 16:53
  everything because we don't have the kind of research back then
• 16:55
  we have today, right? There's no.
• 16:57
  And it was amazing too. We had to be very careful in
• 17:00
  those focus groups because there's always a kid that would
• 17:02
  dominate. So we had to, especially in the
• 17:06
  with the girls, they would dominate because they, they were
• 17:09
  little, you know, shoppers. And so they were kind of
• 17:12
  directing and everything. We had very skilled people that
• 17:16
  handle those. You know, I was all into not
• 17:20
  building out everything internally.
• 17:22
  You know, whenever we could outsource, I outsource because I
• 17:25
  could have my pick of the best, you know, to bring them in and
• 17:29
  and they love working with us because, you know, there were
• 17:32
  kind of the chains were off and we were kind of crazy wild and
• 17:35
  having a good time and you know, so.
• 17:37
  So you guys do this for about a year.
• 17:39
  Are you guys paid now from a business standpoint, I'm
• 17:42
  curious, are you paid for hey to come in and do this project or
• 17:45
  are you paid on hey if we do XML, we.
• 17:46
  Didn't see a record for them for about 3 years.
• 17:50
  So basically they paid us, you know, a fee, monthly fee like a.
• 17:55
  Retainer, yeah. Yeah, and the I made a couple
• 17:58
  mistakes there because not knowing how big Nerds was and I
• 18:03
  came up with the cons of the idea of I had AI had work with
• 18:08
  Ralston Perina and Ralston Perina had a division.
• 18:12
  I got to know the marketing guy that ran that whole thing really
• 18:14
  well. That was all licensed products.
• 18:17
  If you remember back in the day, they were licensing Barbie and
• 18:20
  Superman and all that and cereals and they were making
• 18:22
  cereals. Those things.
• 18:24
  They have a life span of maybe a year, 2 years, and then they
• 18:26
  Peter out. So I'll never forget it.
• 18:29
  His name is Dave. I called him up on a Friday
• 18:31
  'cause we'd already launched Nerds and it was out there in
• 18:33
  the marketplace and everything like that.
• 18:34
  And I just came up with this idea.
• 18:36
  Jeez, you know, I wonder if they'd be interested in doing a
• 18:38
  cereal. So I called him up and I said,
• 18:39
  hey Dave, I got a great, I got a great idea for you.
• 18:42
  He said, yeah, what do you got, Bob?
• 18:44
  And I said, hey, look, I got an idea for a new cereal for you.
• 18:46
  What's that? I said Nerds.
• 18:48
  He said, what Nerds? I said you never heard of Nerds?
• 18:52
  Nerds Candy says, no, I've never heard of it.
• 18:53
  I said how you do your research? He said I got the best research
• 18:56
  in the country. I got a cul-de-sac full of kids.
• 18:59
  I said, OK man. I said, so how I actually got to
• 19:02
  that cul-de-sac this weekend and I asked these kids about Nerds.
• 19:06
  8:00 Monday morning, he's calling my phone.
• 19:08
  Dude, we got to talk. They all knew what yours was,
• 19:11
  yeah. Well, they all knew it and we
• 19:13
  ended up doing a 7 figure licensing deal to to Ralston
• 19:18
  prenup. My, my mistake.
• 19:21
  I didn't get a piece of that. It was just, I brought it to
• 19:24
  him, laid in front of him, you know, 7 figures to the bottom
• 19:28
  line because all they had to do was and, and they picked up on
• 19:31
  everything. The double box, you know, the
• 19:33
  promotional stuff we were doing a lot of the things that we did.
• 19:37
  We got a little bit out of that to work, you know, as an agency
• 19:39
  got some work out of it. But yeah, it was, it was
• 19:42
  exciting. So when when did?
• 19:44
  You start to see nerds take off. Are you still working on the
• 19:46
  candy and and the marketing and things like that or?
• 19:49
  Oh yeah, yeah. Because there was introitive
• 19:50
  processes after. How do you follow up after a Big
• 19:53
  Bang like that? Then you got to continue the
• 19:55
  momentum. What's going to happen after
• 19:56
  that? And when did you start to see it
• 19:58
  take off and think, holy cow, we're on?
• 20:01
  Well, it was probably, you know, within six months of the launch,
• 20:04
  you know, when we actually got distribution, got in the stores
• 20:07
  and got it out there, this stuff was flying off the.
• 20:09
  Shelf. So they would send you sales
• 20:10
  reports and say yeah. Well, we, we met on a regular
• 20:13
  basis, right, you know, with the, with the client, I mean,
• 20:15
  right and discussing stuff because we're always, you know,
• 20:18
  about a year out in the planning year to two years out in the
• 20:21
  planning. So it was always a constant
• 20:23
  process of going through this, what's next, how we doing this
• 20:25
  and all that. You know, we weren't flying by
• 20:28
  the seat of our pants. I mean, this thing was a we
• 20:31
  didn't know it at the time, but we didn't realize how big this.
• 20:34
  I, I'm still pinching myself. I'm still sitting there going.
• 20:37
  I went to this book signing, you know, where I was a guest to
• 20:39
  come to this thing. I walk in in this restaurant,
• 20:42
  very eclectic restaurant down the city.
• 20:44
  He's got nerds boxes all over the tables and I'm looking at
• 20:46
  it. I came early and so I he didn't
• 20:49
  say anything to me. So all of a sudden he's up there
• 20:52
  talking about this introducing another guy that came in from
• 20:54
  campus San Francisco was in the book and then they introduced me
• 20:57
  and he said, hey, here's a nerds guy and by the way, Bob's going
• 20:59
  to hang around sign all your boxes for you.
• 21:02
  And I'm going, oh, OK, my line was bigger than his one time
• 21:07
  this were the black. And then people went home, got
• 21:09
  through kids, brought kids back, you know, So I'm saying I was
• 21:12
  there for about 2 1/2, three hours.
• 21:13
  You just. Talk about an iconic candy.
• 21:15
  I mean, that's, you know, this is what, 1983?
• 21:18
  It launched in 1985. It became the candy of the year,
• 21:21
  right? And then it's it's 2025 and you
• 21:23
  still see Nerds everywhere. I mean, it's not like you got to
• 21:25
  like dig to find them. Like they're the one of the main
• 21:27
  things that you see non chocolate candies.
• 21:30
  It's like, I love nerds. Yeah.
• 21:31
  When's the last time you had Nerds?
• 21:34
  At the, at the party, that's the last time I was a big as you can
• 21:37
  imagine, because I, you know, my, my career started Nestle,
• 21:40
  but I wasn't in the, in the, in the candy brand.
• 21:43
  I was in coffee tea, but I was a big hit and I knew all the, the
• 21:46
  candy guys. So, you know, we were exchanged
• 21:48
  coffee and candy all the time. You know, I was a big hit, you
• 21:51
  know, at home because around the holidays or kids come over, hey
• 21:55
  here, take what you want. So the nerds thing was a big
• 21:58
  deal because the, the kids really went nuts over that.
• 22:00
  The kids became very popular in the neighborhood.
• 22:02
  Oh, I'm sure my yeah, my dad came up with Nerds.
• 22:05
  That's pretty freaking cool, man.
• 22:06
  What? What happened to your business
• 22:08
  after that? Like once you come up with the
• 22:10
  candy Nerds, you launch it for Wonka and that brand.
• 22:14
  It's a huge success. What does that do to your
• 22:16
  business? Well, business was doing well.
• 22:18
  I mean, you know, we build a business from zero, Ground Zero.
• 22:22
  Literally it was me and my partner and secretary and admin.
• 22:26
  And when when we hit with Willy Wonka Brands, that thing just
• 22:30
  exploded. I bet.
• 22:31
  And you know, you, you got to choose wisely about certain
• 22:36
  things. Yeah.
• 22:38
  And my partner and I had a following up.
• 22:40
  So ended up where I had a double whammy announcement.
• 22:45
  I got married. It was the second time, took a
• 22:47
  four week honeymoon over in Europe come back.
• 22:50
  And my partner says I got good news and bad news.
• 22:53
  I see. Well, what's that?
• 22:55
  Cuz when I went on vacation, I didn't have no communication.
• 22:57
  I didn't screw around with anything.
• 22:59
  And I'm on my honeymoon. Yeah.
• 23:01
  And so, and this is a free Internet, too.
• 23:03
  Yeah. Yeah.
• 23:04
  So it's not like you're, you know, Yeah.
• 23:06
  And so he said, well, good news, marriage, you know, excited for
• 23:12
  you, blah, blah, blah. This one's gonna end.
• 23:15
  And he held the majority of the stock.
• 23:18
  Really. Yeah, So I won't go into detail.
• 23:21
  There were some other things behind the scenes that happened.
• 23:23
  You know, it was unfortunate, but it was I was OK to let go of
• 23:27
  it and I was OK to let go. I, you know, I'd been doing
• 23:30
  marketing and had been doing a lot of this stuff for a long
• 23:33
  time and it was getting to the point where it wasn't fun
• 23:37
  anymore. You know, I was dealing with a
• 23:39
  lot of, I don't want to be disparaging a lot of brand
• 23:43
  weenies were like 10-15 years my junior didn't know how to even
• 23:46
  didn't know what a strategy was. And so it was a constant kind of
• 23:50
  a tugging and I was the face of the company basically.
• 23:53
  You know, I was one that was walking the halls in these big
• 23:55
  companies and everybody knew me. And so, but I just said, you
• 23:59
  know, OK, if it's time, it's time, you know, we'll split.
• 24:03
  How has marketing changed over the last few decades?
• 24:07
  Because you've seen it, I mean, before you were there, pre
• 24:09
  Internet, pre social media I. Go all the way back to Mad Men.
• 24:13
  You know, when I first had my, I'm dealing with big JWT, I'm
• 24:16
  dealing with Leo Burnett and people like that when I was out
• 24:19
  that Nestle. So yeah, it, it was just quite
• 24:24
  an interesting transformation and the Internet, you know, it
• 24:27
  was kind of like the Wild West. You didn't really know until you
• 24:31
  got into all that stuff and they were late adopters because
• 24:33
  everybody, as you know, even right now with AI, everybody's
• 24:36
  kind of hanging on to what you know, what is that?
• 24:39
  You know, they know. And and so, you know, that was a
• 24:44
  blessing in disguise because I only had to deal with four
• 24:47
  things. You know, that was advertising,
• 24:50
  sales, promotion, public relations and direct marketing.
• 24:52
  That was it. Now today it's like a million,
• 24:55
  you know, it's a million things. And you can't, well, just, you
• 24:59
  know, you see now the backlash of, of social media and all the
• 25:02
  rest of the stuff where these companies are dumping money and
• 25:04
  all this stuff. And where's the where's the
• 25:05
  action? Where's the meat?
• 25:07
  Where's the beef? It's not there and people are
• 25:09
  starting to, you know, reduce their budgets and stuff like
• 25:11
  that. I love your part and what you're
• 25:13
  talking about. It's like we're tax the strategy
• 25:15
  here. So what you got tactics?
• 25:17
  So you don't have any strategy? What's the outcome?
• 25:19
  How are you measuring this stuff?
• 25:20
  What are you eating back? And I love that about what
• 25:23
  you're doing because that's what we did when I grew up, a
• 25:27
  strategy. I basically made a framework for
• 25:30
  my creatives and I said within this frame, paint me the most
• 25:33
  beautiful picture you can. But the whole objective here is
• 25:36
  to move the needle for the client, get sales, we've got to
• 25:39
  register performance and that was a big distinguishing mark.
• 25:42
  Now we won awards too, because they got very creative within
• 25:45
  that framework. And of course, my partner and I
• 25:47
  came out of marketing, you know, so we knew and that that was
• 25:51
  also a leverage point for a lot of these folks that we inter, we
• 25:54
  intersected with at these companies because we sat in
• 25:57
  their seat and very few agency people had ever been on the
• 26:00
  client side. So we sat in their seat and we
• 26:03
  understood what, you know, the push to pull, you know, some of
• 26:06
  the stuff that was going on and all the internal struggles too
• 26:10
  in the politics. That was another thing.
• 26:12
  And I made it very clear with all my clients because I had
• 26:15
  some pretty big clients that, you know, if a bullet's coming
• 26:18
  your way, it's, you know, I'm going to be between you and the
• 26:20
  bullet, OK, Because that was mantra.
• 26:23
  You've got to always make the client look good.
• 26:25
  And especially back then when you're dealing with millions of
• 26:27
  dollars, you know, your budget and everything like that.
• 26:30
  And I said, you know, if you, if we play ball, you know, with me,
• 26:35
  you're going to get promoted. And that was that was the big
• 26:37
  thing with all of them wanting to get promoted.
• 26:39
  Give me a leg up. Oh.
• 26:40
  Yeah, give me and you can help them become that success with
• 26:43
  the Yeah. And usually it was they were up,
• 26:45
  they were outgoing on the next company.
• 26:46
  Of course, I got a call about six months later.
• 26:48
  Hey, Bob. Yeah, so you mentioned a lot
• 26:51
  about creativity, which I, I, I think it's just a really
• 26:54
  important thing to be able to kind of use and master whatever
• 26:57
  you want to call it. Can you teach somebody how to be
• 27:00
  more creative or do you think it's partly they just have?
• 27:03
  It, you know, that's a great question because it's, it's, you
• 27:07
  have to have a curiosity. That's what made me good at
• 27:12
  business development or anything else, because I came from a
• 27:14
  background of a lot of curiosity and also observation of how
• 27:19
  things looked. I saw beauty in just about
• 27:23
  everything that I looked at and, and I would look at that, you
• 27:27
  know, and, and I would pull out, what's the beauty in that?
• 27:31
  What's that little nugget? What's that prize?
• 27:33
  What's that gem in there? And what can I do with that?
• 27:36
  Now, I wouldn't share with you that everybody's got that skill
• 27:39
  or that ability, but I think you got to have a real healthy dose
• 27:43
  of curiosity. And I will tell you one other
• 27:46
  thing. You got to be courageous.
• 27:48
  Yeah. You got to be courageous.
• 27:50
  And the other thing that I learned really good in the
• 27:53
  agency business, you got to really be good at standing up
• 27:57
  for yourself because there's a lot of pushing and shoving, a
• 28:00
  lot of forces that were against you, you know, on high and all
• 28:04
  that kind of stuff. As a matter of fact, that
• 28:07
  happened with Wilt, with Willy Wonka.
• 28:10
  And we had, we came to a rub with one of the brand managers
• 28:13
  and he was just creating fits for my creatives and I had to go
• 28:17
  in and I went to his the boss, which I knew very well that
• 28:19
  brought me in. I said, look, either he goes or
• 28:21
  we do. And he said, what do you want to
• 28:24
  do? I said I want to tell him
• 28:25
  exactly that, that I'm going to if he doesn't go along, play
• 28:28
  ball and get because he's costing you a lot of money.
• 28:31
  We're into overruns. We're doing stuff.
• 28:33
  You're stopping presses in the middle of night for scum dad and
• 28:36
  something I'm saying this stupid, you're it's costing a
• 28:38
  lot of money and costing frustration with my team and I'm
• 28:42
  not going to do that. He's belittling my team.
• 28:44
  He's writing copy. Come on those.
• 28:47
  People are annoying to work for, yeah.
• 28:48
  This is what you hired us for. And so he said go ahead.
• 28:54
  So I went in and had to have a real heart to heart.
• 28:57
  I said one or two things are going to happen today, OK,
• 29:01
  either we're going to be friends and we're going to continue on
• 29:03
  working, only it's going to be a little different kind of
• 29:05
  relationship, or you're going to be leaving the building today.
• 29:09
  Wow. And what was it?
• 29:11
  Oh, he, he got, he got, he saw the leg.
• 29:15
  Did he? Yeah.
• 29:16
  Yeah, I said stop. You know, you hired us for a
• 29:18
  reason. You have best people.
• 29:20
  I said. You're really creating a real
• 29:21
  problem here for my for my people.
• 29:23
  They don't want to come and even talk to you or be around you,
• 29:26
  you know, because you're. And you can't be creative in
• 29:28
  that environment too. It just, it kills everything,
• 29:31
  right? It does, Bob.
• 29:33
  Those are lessons you I learn. Yeah, for sure.
• 29:36
  I'm curious what you think about the personal branding aspect of
• 29:41
  marketing and social media and content creation now, because
• 29:44
  that really wasn't a thing back when you guys were doing that.
• 29:46
  It's more about the company, the product, you know, sure you had
• 29:48
  maybe ACEO or owner that would talk on ATV program or something
• 29:51
  like that. But now it's become like
• 29:53
  personal brand, personal brand and create content to build
• 29:55
  yourself and then you can channel, channel that business
• 29:58
  into your company and that we've seen that play out.
• 30:01
  It definitely works. But I'm just curious on your
• 30:03
  take on that. Not a big fan?
• 30:05
  No, no, I'm not a big fan. I get it.
• 30:08
  But in it, a lot of it is around narcissism and we're living in a
• 30:13
  Society of a lot of narcissism and it plays itself out.
• 30:17
  You know, how long are these people going to be around that
• 30:19
  have done this? You know, you got to have the
• 30:21
  goods too. You know, you really have to
• 30:24
  have the goods. If you look at the people been
• 30:26
  around for decades, they got the goods.
• 30:30
  Look at the let's just take Hollywood take actors coming and
• 30:33
  going, coming and going. Very few name on two hands that
• 30:37
  the ones that have been around a while, right.
• 30:39
  Well, genuinely, they have talent and they have gifts and
• 30:41
  they have ability. Not all of them are humble.
• 30:44
  I get that. I work with some of them, you
• 30:48
  know, the agency business, you find out real quick what's going
• 30:51
  on. But it was a different,
• 30:53
  different era back then. I'm not, I'm not putting it
• 30:56
  down. I think there's something to it,
• 30:59
  but you got to have more than fluff.
• 31:00
  You got to have more than there's got to be some substance
• 31:03
  there at least as to what's this brand And when you got everybody
• 31:07
  out there scrambling for clicks and doing all the rest of
• 31:09
  what's, what's the end game? It's just like what you talk
• 31:11
  about. No strategy, No just, you know,
• 31:13
  get out there and be smiling and doing all.
• 31:15
  You sit there and I understand. And we've got a society like
• 31:20
  that. You think about these young
• 31:21
  people who follow a lot of these people and jump into all this
• 31:23
  stuff. It's one of those things where
• 31:27
  like everyone all of a sudden got to have a microphone when
• 31:30
  social media and the Internet kind of came along.
• 31:33
  But so in certain ways that's good because it maybe it gave
• 31:35
  someone an opportunity or voice they didn't have before, But in
• 31:38
  other ways it's sometimes not as good because now everyone has a
• 31:41
  microphone. And so it's like, maybe there's
• 31:42
  a lot more noise. Who do you listen to?
• 31:44
  Some people are talking about stuff that they've never lived
• 31:47
  or done themselves, or they're claiming to be a business coach
• 31:50
  and they've never ran A6 figure business or 7 figure.
• 31:53
  But it's like, and how are you about?
• 31:54
  Are you a business coach? Like it doesn't make any sense,
• 31:58
  but there's obviously a lot of good ones out there.
• 32:00
  And you just see people like Elon Musk and he's like, they're
• 32:02
  building his personal brand. You know, Zuckerberg or Sam, Sam
• 32:07
  Oldman, they didn't start out that way.
• 32:08
  They didn't start out that way because it wasn't a thing,
• 32:10
  though. I think it just wasn't around,
• 32:11
  right? I think if it would have been
• 32:12
  around, they probably would have done it.
• 32:14
  You got to look at the evolution of all these people, too.
• 32:17
  I mean, they have very substantial stuff they were
• 32:19
  doing, yes, right. I mean, they were.
• 32:21
  I mean, Zuckerberg, Facebook out of his dorm room, you know what
• 32:24
  I mean? He's like, OK, And he had
• 32:26
  doubts. Same thing with Microsoft, you
• 32:28
  know, Gates, you know, and all of a sudden, you know, this
• 32:32
  thing grew. Yeah.
• 32:33
  They weren't personal brands. And I, and I would even argue
• 32:36
  today they're not personal brands.
• 32:37
  Yeah. Musk maybe from a standpoint of
• 32:40
  the notoriety and some of the things he's done, but this is a
• 32:42
  guy that pays it off. He knows.
• 32:44
  Yeah. I mean, you know, I've been
• 32:46
  doing quite a bit of background and some things about what's
• 32:48
  going on with him. And if you look at what he's
• 32:51
  accomplished and what he's done, he's taken known things just
• 32:54
  like at PayPal and, you know, now with Tesla and, and the
• 32:58
  Rockets and everything like that, he's taking known entities
• 33:01
  and things that existed, OK. And because the way his mind
• 33:06
  works, why can't we have a rocket lands back on the gantry,
• 33:09
  Yeah. Why?
• 33:10
  Why not? Yeah, why can't we have a car
• 33:13
  that's electric that will run for 300 miles, you know, and all
• 33:16
  that stuff and, and, and all these things start look at
• 33:19
  Starlink, what Starlink is doing for the world.
• 33:21
  Crazy for the world. He's got to be the most
• 33:24
  successful entrepreneur we've ever had.
• 33:26
  Well. You know, you got to compare him
• 33:29
  to Edison and a few of these other guys, you know, that were
• 33:31
  out there. For his time period, let's say.
• 33:33
  But, you know, it's interesting he picked Tesla because if you
• 33:36
  read a lot about what, what Tesla was going was doing, you
• 33:39
  know, the Rockefellers put him under because he was, he was
• 33:43
  going to give free electricity to everybody.
• 33:45
  And he'd go, no, that's that's not a business model.
• 33:49
  That's not a business model. And yeah, I was, I, you know,
• 33:53
  what they did to him. I mean, he died broke, you know,
• 33:56
  and this guy Nickel. Nickel a Tesla?
• 33:58
  Yeah, he blew a Tesla. So I thought it was kind of
• 34:01
  interesting that Musk picked up intentionally to name his
• 34:07
  company after Nicholas Tesla. Yeah.
• 34:10
  So I think what you're getting at with the personal brand
• 34:12
  thing, which I agree and talk about sometimes, which is you
• 34:14
  have to actually have lived it or done something or if you're
• 34:18
  going to spend, unless you're going to come out there and say,
• 34:20
  hey, I don't know anything about this, but I'm going to learn as
• 34:22
  I go and I'm going to share my journey.
• 34:23
  And I think that's part of what personal branding is.
• 34:25
  People are just saying, hey, this is my journey.
• 34:27
  I'm going to document what I'm doing.
• 34:28
  I'm not claiming to be some type of high level expert or some
• 34:31
  huge multi billion dollar company.
• 34:33
  I think where people get in trouble is they try to claim
• 34:35
  stuff that they're not or they try to build something that
• 34:38
  they've never really done before.
• 34:40
  You know, you can't talk about podcasts or how to build a
• 34:42
  podcast if you don't have a damn podcast.
• 34:44
  You know, you never even have one of the a studio for a pocket
• 34:46
  and you're going to talk about how to build a podcast or
• 34:48
  recommend that for other people. Or you're going to talk about
• 34:51
  LinkedIn ads and you haven't won clients through LinkedIn ads.
• 34:53
  You don't know how that works. Like it doesn't make any sense.
• 34:57
  Well, it's, it's kind of though the, you know, the the herd
• 35:00
  mentality, people following stuff and and again, it's a
• 35:03
  societal thing. I think, you know, it is to what
• 35:05
  has evolved for our society over a period of time.
• 35:09
  I talk about communications and, you know, a lot of different
• 35:11
  things hopefully will come out in the podcast.
• 35:14
  But you know, I think it's more important today than it's ever
• 35:18
  been. And I, you know, I tell people
• 35:20
  what's that kiddingly? And that is, you know, I've got
• 35:22
  4 grandchildren and they're all young adults now.
• 35:26
  And as I had a test text from and I said, I feel like I'm in a
• 35:29
  Star Wars episode. So I couldn't figure out what
• 35:32
  the heck is, you know, language has power.
• 35:37
  It's got real power. And particularly with like we're
• 35:40
  talking about messaging, I'm working with some folks right
• 35:43
  now that, you know, it's messaging.
• 35:45
  What does that look like? Well, the whole idea of and what
• 35:49
  I taught for 22 years with my Sales Mastery program, you got
• 35:52
  to touch people here, not up here in 2 minutes.
• 35:56
  Sales is going on up here. It's not going on up here, OK.
• 36:00
  And just like Angelou said, you know, it's how you make people
• 36:03
  feel. It's not what you're saying in
• 36:05
  the content half the time. How are they feeling about this?
• 36:07
  And that's really what good messaging is.
• 36:10
  When you think about ads that hit you or a certain thing that
• 36:13
  hits, you Just saw something yesterday on on social media and
• 36:20
  really struck. It was about a guy that was just
• 36:23
  down and out homeless and that guy reached down, helped him out
• 36:26
  and so on and so forth. This guy's now a
• 36:28
  multimillionaire and he's coming back and helping people, you
• 36:31
  know, and, and turning, that's emotional stuff, you know, it's,
• 36:35
  it's, it's cool stuff that it says, hey, you know, where are
• 36:39
  we at with that? You know, and looking out for
• 36:41
  our neighbors, looking out for people less fortunate than us.
• 36:44
  And I'm not, I don't want to get down the rabbit hole here, but
• 36:46
  the fact of the matter is it all gets back to messaging and
• 36:49
  messaging is marketing, You know, it's how you make people
• 36:52
  feel how they want to, how they're attracted to that.
• 36:55
  I shake my head at some of the stuff I'm saying.
• 36:57
  I'm just going, where's the message?
• 36:59
  You're not touching me at all. You know, it's like, how do you
• 37:02
  do this? And, and yeah, like I said,
• 37:06
  we're going to be working with somebody.
• 37:07
  I'm very excited about the the opportunity because they're
• 37:10
  rebranding and they're looking at some stuff that, you know,
• 37:14
  we're sitting there going, well, you haven't really got a
• 37:16
  strategy for this. What's what's really going to
• 37:20
  distinguish you? We came up with that when we
• 37:22
  work with our clients who said point of distinction not point
• 37:26
  of difference. OK, explain that.
• 37:29
  Well, think about that, you know, Well, Alex is kind of
• 37:32
  different, you know, versus Alice is very distinctive,
• 37:37
  distinctive looking gentleman, distinctive house, Distinguished
• 37:40
  Medal of Honor. You think about that.
• 37:42
  Now, in the dictionary, those two are interchangeable, but in
• 37:46
  the mind's eye one stands out because it's unique.
• 37:50
  So I'd rather be talking about our point of distinction than
• 37:54
  our point of difference. Yeah, what makes you feel a
• 37:56
  certain way to your point, right.
• 37:58
  Exactly. And that's where messaging comes
• 38:00
  in. The use of language is really
• 38:02
  powerful and using it in the right way.
• 38:04
  How many people have you been here talking about distinction?
• 38:07
  This is what makes us distinct. All of a sudden you see people
• 38:10
  going, well, yeah, OK, it could be the same stuff with the next
• 38:13
  guy down the street, Scott. But this makes us distinct.
• 38:16
  One of the things that people would always hit me with is,
• 38:19
  well, Bob, what makes you different?
• 38:20
  Anybody else or what? Why should I work with you?
• 38:23
  I said, Cuz you're looking at it.
• 38:25
  There's only one of me. But can't everyone say that
• 38:28
  though? But can't everyone say that?
• 38:30
  Of course, but there's no, there's not another one of me.
• 38:33
  So go out and find, find a duplicate of me.
• 38:35
  No, you're not going to find that, right.
• 38:37
  So that's my point of distinction is me and what I've
• 38:40
  learned in my experience and all that stuff.
• 38:42
  Now the payout is going to be, what do I do with that, right?
• 38:46
  So either you buy into it that I'm going to be able to help you
• 38:49
  because I'm very distinct with what I can do or my talents, my
• 38:52
  gifts or whatever it might be, or you don't.
• 38:54
  Right. Have you read Story Brand by
• 38:58
  Donald Miller? Right.
• 38:59
  What do you think of that book? What do you think about should
• 39:01
  every company be building a story around their brand?
• 39:03
  Well, as you've seen a big swing, you look at Simon Sinek,
• 39:09
  the people I'm working with with.
• 39:11
  Simon said. It's one of those guys though,
• 39:13
  too. It's like, what did he build
• 39:14
  before he came out with all this stuff?
• 39:16
  Not knocking him, I think he's got a lot of good content, but
• 39:18
  well, you know. Seny came out of the agency
• 39:20
  business, did he? He was a creative.
• 39:22
  Oh, yeah, He came out of the agency business.
• 39:25
  That's why, you know, you sit, look at him now and you say,
• 39:28
  yeah, OK, he gets it. He understood it because he was
• 39:30
  building it for other people. Now all of a sudden he's
• 39:33
  building it for himself and he's got, you know, the biggest
• 39:36
  selling feature he's got is communications.
• 39:38
  Now that's the number one course he teaches or anything else that
• 39:41
  he's doing. And if you look at that, all the
• 39:44
  top people are talking about story, 'cause you touch people
• 39:47
  with the story people relate to. Stories.
• 39:50
  We've been growing up with stories.
• 39:51
  We've been hearing stories since we're in The Cave, you know, So
• 39:54
  stories do have impact. And it's basically how do you
• 39:58
  weave that story? You know, how do you how do you
• 40:00
  weave that through? And there's you're.
• 40:03
  Looking at a company, do you think that they should build
• 40:05
  their brand around the story and their customers the hero and.
• 40:07
  Well, think about, you know, some of these companies that got
• 40:10
  that have been around a while have got great stories.
• 40:13
  They really do. The brands have got great.
• 40:15
  They've gotten away from it a bit, you know, and Nestle, we
• 40:18
  had great stories. Think about quick chocolate
• 40:21
  quick and the Bunny and all this stuff.
• 40:23
  You know, I mean the top branding guys and I had the
• 40:25
  privilege of working with JWT, Y&R, Leo Burnett here in
• 40:29
  Chicago. These guys were, they were.
• 40:32
  They were fabulous. What did they?
• 40:34
  Maybe we could pull out some Nuggets here.
• 40:35
  What did they, how did they think about branding that?
• 40:39
  Wasn't a, that wasn't a thing back then.
• 40:40
  It was messaging. It was really about how do we
• 40:43
  take and touch the consumer, right?
• 40:45
  How do we get through to them? Yes.
• 40:47
  And when they're at that 10 foot mark and making a buying
• 40:50
  decision in the store that they're buying our stuff.
• 40:53
  That's brand really, right? Of course.
• 40:55
  Yeah. But how did they think about it
• 40:56
  that was so differently when you sat with the top messaging and
• 40:59
  branding guys or girls too? What?
• 41:01
  What did they, how did they think so differently then, or
• 41:04
  just sort of distinguishly differently?
• 41:06
  Well, again, what was you have to pull those little Nuggets.
• 41:09
  What's unique about this? What's different?
• 41:11
  Chocolate's chocolate. But what makes Godiva or Lent or
• 41:16
  any of the rest of these guys, the ones that you go, oh, man,
• 41:19
  that's Swiss chocolate. That's really great.
• 41:20
  Yeah. So you take.
• 41:22
  Yeah, the Swiss chocolate. That's a good one.
• 41:23
  Yeah. You know what about?
• 41:25
  No one even knows why a Swiss chocolate would be better.
• 41:27
  It's just a thing. You know what I mean?
• 41:28
  It's just like a good story. Which is like a Swiss watch.
• 41:30
  Why? Why are you going to spend
• 41:32
  $25,000 for Rolex? You know, it's like the stuff
• 41:35
  isn't as acrid as the stuff you know.
• 41:37
  Are you wearing a Rolex right now?
• 41:38
  No. Oh, I thought you were playing
• 41:39
  too. I do have like one of my new
• 41:42
  newest toys and it's A tag that's a nice.
• 41:43
  It's the F1 version. So I didn't realize they're
• 41:46
  they're changing these every F1 championship.
• 41:49
  So what you're saying is they basically could see the story
• 41:52
  they came up with a story that was unique and and and
• 41:54
  meaningful to the customer. Well, if you think about it, I
• 41:57
  mean, you're a lot younger than I am.
• 41:58
  But it was all about stories. You know, back in the day with
• 42:01
  these brands, it was stories that they built around these
• 42:04
  things. And, you know, why did the kids
• 42:06
  scream? And I want that.
• 42:07
  I want that. I want that.
• 42:08
  You know, the psychology of this is much child psychology because
• 42:14
  we're all kids, all kids. Why do we have the toys we have?
• 42:19
  OK, Why do we Jones for getting these certain toys?
• 42:22
  By way of example, I just got a new chair from my office.
• 42:26
  Right. OK, I've been wanting one.
• 42:28
  The one old one's real kind of. Well, guess what?
• 42:30
  I got a gaming chair because I'm thinking to myself, these guys
• 42:33
  have got it. They know what they're doing,
• 42:34
  man. That's true.
• 42:35
  You're sitting there all damn day.
• 42:37
  Exactly. They're playing their games and
• 42:39
  all that kind of stuff. And I got a curve monitor.
• 42:42
  You know, that's cool. Wow, jonesing for that.
• 42:45
  Well, I waited till Best Buy had a heck of a deal on both of
• 42:47
  them, and I picked them both up, you know, and now I've got a new
• 42:50
  curve monitor. I'm waiting for the chair to
• 42:52
  come. Now, why do you think you
• 42:54
  mentioned some of the companies nowadays, They don't.
• 42:56
  They kind of lost their way with developing stories for their
• 42:58
  brands and products and things like that.
• 42:59
  Why do you think that might be? Well, it's an evolutionary
• 43:02
  process because they get away from what the mission is.
• 43:04
  They get away from what, you know, what works.
• 43:06
  And all of a sudden they got to come up with the latest,
• 43:08
  greatest new thing because that's what they're being
• 43:10
  charged to do. OK, instead of saying, well,
• 43:13
  wait a minute, why don't we really think about the way it's
• 43:15
  being done and we improve it just like Tesla did?
• 43:18
  What do you do? He improved the automobile.
• 43:20
  It's been around for how many years, right, Rockets going to
• 43:24
  the moon? How long have they been around?
• 43:26
  OK, so when you in communications all this stuff
• 43:29
  that he's doing, I'm pretty excited about a couple of
• 43:32
  things. I just get, you know, I don't
• 43:34
  want to go down that rail whole year, but I'll share him
• 43:36
  offline. OK, Alright, some some cool
• 43:38
  stuff. Yeah.
• 43:40
  And so that, you know, your journey thus far kind of led you
• 43:42
  to human. He was a human to human.
• 43:45
  Yeah. Human to human.
• 43:46
  Tell us a little bit. About what you're doing now, I'm
• 43:47
  curious. And then maybe some of the
• 43:48
  things that the other founders can learn from.
• 43:51
  Evolving after that and I took a break out for about a year and a
• 43:54
  half and I really explored network marketing, you know, the
• 43:58
  Avons of the world and these kind of guys like that because I
• 44:00
  thought, how in the heck do they Marshall these independent
• 44:03
  people to be their sales force forum and all that stuff.
• 44:07
  And you know, I I got behind the curtain.
• 44:10
  I got to reveal what was really going on.
• 44:12
  But yeah. And then ended up, you know,
• 44:16
  having a consulting company for a period of time and then I
• 44:18
  started the Samurai Business Group and that was really to get
• 44:22
  really very specific about mastery level sales for B to B
• 44:28
  OK. So created a whole curriculum
• 44:30
  around that. Got awarded to be 1 of only
• 44:33
  three training companies, got into De Paul's Center for Sales
• 44:37
  Leadership. We literally lectured down there
• 44:40
  and the students really sparked to it.
• 44:41
  So we ended up doing a semester on case with them that ended up
• 44:46
  in the journal and then up in HBR were 36 college universities
• 44:50
  that had a few of them had a sales course and that's why HBR
• 44:53
  landed there and go. You guys got a sales program.
• 44:56
  Wait, I heard of that. I mean, because it was a little
• 44:58
  couple paragraphs, you know, in a marketing book and that was
• 45:01
  it. And so, yeah, that was a that
• 45:04
  was a, you know, that came about.
• 45:06
  That was just phenomenal. My partner was really just
• 45:10
  Jonesingford to write a book and he was he was really kind of the
• 45:14
  the heavy thing that did the heavy lifting with a lot of this
• 45:16
  stuff. I was more the face of the
• 45:17
  company, which I've always been out forward-looking, networking,
• 45:20
  getting out with people and all that kind of stuff, which is a
• 45:23
  whole other thing we could talk about because.
• 45:25
  There's I would like to talk about that.
• 45:26
  Yeah, I'd like to talk about the network marketing and and maybe
• 45:29
  you'd call it relationship marketing too.
• 45:30
  I don't know if that's. A Well, you know, it's
• 45:32
  interesting because you know, when you look at the iteration
• 45:35
  of of databases and everything that came along, I was actually
• 45:39
  into the 1st actual was back then, not ACR.
• 45:42
  It was a it was a what they call it wasn't even customer service
• 45:48
  back then. I'm spacing on what the name we
• 45:50
  called it, but it was like Telemagic, you know, it was all
• 45:54
  dosh run. You know, it was basically and I
• 45:56
  thought this is greatest thing since sliced bread.
• 45:57
  I don't have to be doing manually.
• 46:01
  I don't know if you've ever heard of the McKay 66.
• 46:02
  No, McKay was a guy that ran, you know, had a printing company
• 46:05
  and he had labels. He was out in Minneapolis.
• 46:08
  Well, he wrote a book on McKay 66.
• 46:09
  He had 66 different data points that he would collect and every
• 46:14
  person that he would talk to, his clients and everything,
• 46:17
  their kids names, their birthdays.
• 46:20
  I mean, it was for that. And it was all manual.
• 46:22
  It was all manual. And I'm thinking, wow, this guy.
• 46:25
  But the databases he built were unbelievable.
• 46:29
  I was in the 1st 100. The big blessing I got was I was
• 46:31
  in the first hundred that when LinkedIn came along, I thought,
• 46:33
  man, this is good to be great. That's wild.
• 46:36
  Yeah. I was in the 1st 100,000.
• 46:38
  I got actually they they, they recognized that, did they?
• 46:41
  Yeah. The people got in early and I
• 46:43
  saw that thing come and I go, yeah, yeah.
• 46:46
  So this is cool. What is network marketing and
• 46:48
  and why should companies be doing it?
• 46:50
  Well, network marketing, you know, just networking period.
• 46:54
  Now it's gotten a bad reputation because everybody's talking
• 46:57
  about it. And one of the things in Bob
• 46:59
  Burger's writing, I mean, there's some great books on
• 47:01
  this, OK about it. And the, the basic thing is that
• 47:06
  people have lost and forgot. And it's probably 9095% of what
• 47:11
  I run into. And that's why I pulled back a
• 47:13
  lot because I used to do massive networking.
• 47:14
  I built networks here in Chicago and is about to give instead of
• 47:20
  the gas. I knew you.
• 47:21
  Were going to say that I knew that was the thing.
• 47:22
  Yeah, that's it. Is this pedantic as that sounds,
• 47:26
  it's really what it's about. Yeah, and explain what that
• 47:28
  means. Well, I got that all the way
• 47:31
  back from, you know, my marketing days and my building
• 47:33
  businesses. Is that you, you have to
• 47:35
  understand that you've got what you're sitting across from.
• 47:38
  It's about their interest, not yours, right?
• 47:40
  That's what sales is about. It's about their interest.
• 47:43
  And the method that we created, the buying decision model,
• 47:46
  what's been around since the dawn of man, all we did was
• 47:49
  codify it. And then we, we energize that by
• 47:52
  the Socratic method of questioning, which nobody was
• 47:54
  doing. They didn't understand what
• 47:55
  Socrates really did. You know as to the why questions
• 47:59
  and what you know what, why, where, when, how and who.
• 48:02
  Because the fact of the matter is a buyer will tell you
• 48:05
  everything you need to know, which is asking those questions.
• 48:10
  Because what you're doing is you're engaging them to think.
• 48:12
  And now they're going to tell you what it's going to take for
• 48:16
  them to buy from you. We never taught people how to
• 48:18
  sell. That is such an important skill
• 48:20
  set that it's a hard one to master at first because you, you
• 48:23
  and I remember on sales calls and even recently, I had to stop
• 48:26
  myself and say, hey, just keep asking why.
• 48:29
  Understand where they're going, what they want to accomplish.
• 48:31
  They'll bring up something and you kind of almost quickly want
• 48:33
  to go OK, got. It yeah, you.
• 48:35
  Kind of jump on it or you the next thing the next part of
• 48:38
  sales process and I caught myself a few weeks ago doing
• 48:41
  that and I go damn, they brought up two big things and I didn't
• 48:44
  go tell me more about that. Why is that so important?
• 48:47
  Why would you just not do that? Why I started it to begin it
• 48:49
  with, you know, and I, I missed out on some key things.
• 48:52
  I still ended up closing the deal, but I was like looking
• 48:54
  back and I was like, man, that's a, if I lose this deal, it's
• 48:56
  because I messed up. Like I I didn't go deep on those
• 48:59
  two things that they brought up when I know I should have.
• 49:02
  Yeah, And, you know, and I, I have a popular thing that I've
• 49:05
  taught people all the time. I'm the damnedest guy in the
• 49:07
  room. Help me understand.
• 49:09
  I use that a lot. That's it.
• 49:12
  Help me understand when somebody say something.
• 49:14
  Well, help me understand, Or if they're down a rabbit hole, they
• 49:17
  say, well, you're on page 10 here.
• 49:18
  I'm still on page 5. Let's back.
• 49:20
  Up and that takes confidence and patience to be able to do
• 49:22
  because sometimes you don't want to seem stupid or you want to
• 49:25
  send me. I got it, got it.
• 49:26
  Keep going. Let's roll this roll to
• 49:27
  understand something. People want to rescue you when
• 49:29
  you're stupid. Yeah, they want.
• 49:31
  Oh, Bob doesn't understand. So I gotta Yeah, Let me be
• 49:33
  helpful here. Let me be helpful.
• 49:34
  Oh yeah, People want to help because.
• 49:35
  Now I'm competent. Yeah, exactly.
• 49:37
  Exactly. And that's how you feel.
• 49:38
  Feel. Well, guess what?
• 49:40
  Exactly. And now what's that state of
• 49:42
  mind do they have? Yeah.
• 49:43
  Yeah. OK.
• 49:44
  Yeah. He's trying to help, you know,
• 49:45
  that kind of thing. You know, people will tell you
• 49:48
  everything you need to know if you follow the rules.
• 49:50
  Now, it's you're right. It's a discipline.
• 49:53
  OK. Psychiatrists, psychologists
• 49:55
  have known this for years. Like peeling the onion, they
• 49:57
  call it. Right.
• 49:58
  And it was needs analysis for a long time.
• 50:01
  Needs. Well, whose needs?
• 50:03
  Because all of a sudden you die, uncover something and then jump.
• 50:05
  Oh, yeah, Let me tell you about that.
• 50:07
  You know, instead of just really listening deep as to what
• 50:10
  they're talking about and understanding, you know, it
• 50:14
  doesn't take much. That's interesting.
• 50:19
  Well, tell me more. You know, it's also about
• 50:23
  cadence. It's about how you present.
• 50:25
  That's where I get into the communication and presentation
• 50:27
  skills. A lot that's lost today.
• 50:30
  You know, it's not really nuanced.
• 50:32
  And those are all learnable. And they're extremely important
• 50:35
  now for the younger generation because what are they?
• 50:38
  Where's their communicate? It's all this and, you know,
• 50:40
  everything else. And so that's why I've aligned
• 50:42
  myself with human to human. I sold my company back in 22.
• 50:47
  I stayed on for three years with the company that I sold it to.
• 50:50
  I'd known these people and then June, I jumped off and I've had
• 50:54
  this name for five years because what happened to me was I was
• 50:58
  really getting frustrated with young people.
• 51:00
  I was getting frustrated with the last half of the millennials
• 51:03
  because they're different than the front half and also the ZS.
• 51:07
  I'm down there, coach, and we're lecturing down at DePaul and
• 51:09
  these kids are pretty sharp. And I've lectured at
• 51:11
  Northwestern, University of Chicago, Loyola, you know, and
• 51:16
  smart kids, young, young people. But they, you know, they only
• 51:19
  know what they know, you know, and that's why you have to kind
• 51:21
  of back people up a little bit. And I got to get my mind set
• 51:24
  with that too. They only know what they know,
• 51:26
  OK, Till you educate somebody and you and then it's on them
• 51:29
  because. Probably the generation before
• 51:30
  you thought the same about you guys.
• 51:32
  Of course. These freaking kids, man.
• 51:34
  Oh, my grandfather. Yeah, right, Right.
• 51:38
  What else is you, boy? But yeah, so the the thing with
• 51:42
  communication, I think it's really important.
• 51:45
  We've lost our way. We've lost the skill of good
• 51:47
  communication. You know, if you listen to
• 51:49
  people that narrate books and the skill that takes the voice
• 51:53
  infliction and all the rest of that stuff.
• 51:55
  It doesn't take much, Alex, to learn this stuff.
• 51:57
  But you got to have, you know, and I'm very problem priest that
• 52:00
  I'm representing a company here in Chicago that's for over 20
• 52:04
  years and was sponsored by two actors, 2 auto work actors.
• 52:08
  It's enormously successful. It's a global company and both
• 52:12
  communication skills and presentation skills, which is
• 52:15
  really important now because I said on a deal where they had
• 52:18
  eight people and it was all remote, it was all online, it
• 52:21
  was Zoom. And the second day they trained
• 52:24
  those people because most of the communication they had was on
• 52:27
  Zoom. How to be, you know, how to be
• 52:29
  compelling, how to talk, how to use facial and everything else.
• 52:32
  You know, it doesn't take much. Yeah, it doesn't take much at
• 52:35
  all. But the fact of marriage,
• 52:37
  nobody's getting trained at. That's right, you know, And you
• 52:39
  got the shoulder generation coming in.
• 52:41
  Similar to sales, I think about the worst dates that I've ever
• 52:44
  been on were the ones where and. It's the same for sales calls
• 52:48
  were the ones where you sat across from someone and all they
• 52:50
  did was this just talking and talking and talking and you'd
• 52:53
  bring something up that they could have easily asked another
• 52:56
  question on. Hey, tell me more about that.
• 52:58
  Explain that. Oh, that's really interesting.
• 52:59
  What made you do that? Instead?
• 53:01
  They just take it and go, Oh, cool, boom, right.
• 53:03
  I did that one time and it's just like, those are the worst
• 53:06
  conversations, right Bob? Like they just suck.
• 53:08
  And the same thing in sales or business when you're sitting
• 53:11
  across from someone and they just all they they don't want to
• 53:13
  ask questions. They don't want to get curious.
• 53:15
  They don't want to, you know, it's just not fun.
• 53:17
  Well, let's face it, you got to have a real interest in other
• 53:20
  people. You do, I agree.
• 53:22
  You got to give a shit. Honestly, if you don't, it's
• 53:24
  tough to fake it. It really is.
• 53:26
  Yeah. And So what happened with this?
• 53:28
  I was getting frustrated, and the good Lord just tapped me and
• 53:31
  said, basically, you know, why don't you?
• 53:33
  Why don't you do something about it instead of bitching about it?
• 53:35
  So that's when I said, oh, that's a good plan I got.
• 53:38
  You know, I thought when are we going to get back to being human
• 53:40
  beings instead of human doings because that's what it felt
• 53:43
  like. Ended up pandemic and so I got
• 53:46
  the name and I didn't know what I was going to do with it,
• 53:48
  frankly. But the only last 10-12 months
• 53:50
  is when it really all started to come together.
• 53:52
  Use your gifts and your talents. What did I give you?
• 53:55
  OK communication skills. I gave you networking, caring
• 53:59
  for other people, curiosity. And So what are the basic things
• 54:04
  now that I've put together whole program that I'm now helping
• 54:08
  people, I'm not going to a real estate agent.
• 54:10
  I'm putting buyers and sellers together.
• 54:11
  That's it. I'm not taking any further than
• 54:13
  that. I represent three companies.
• 54:14
  That's it. It's a 3 legged stool and these
• 54:17
  are all skills and competencies that everybody needs today.
• 54:21
  Number one is trust. You don't have trust, You got
• 54:24
  nothing. You got trust sale, you got
• 54:26
  nothing. I got a company that has put
• 54:28
  that all together and I can I can do that for any company.
• 54:32
  What's? One, one or two quick things
• 54:34
  that maybe the audience could learn from them in terms of how
• 54:36
  to build trust. Because we talk about you got to
• 54:38
  build trust in sales. You got to build trust in your
• 54:40
  audience for them to buy from you.
• 54:41
  You. Got to have trusted just in
• 54:43
  lead. Can you name 5 people in
• 54:44
  leadership positions today that you actually trust anywhere, OK?
• 54:50
  That's part of the problem we've got today is you have to earn
• 54:53
  somebody's trust, but they also have to earn yours.
• 54:56
  OK. I think people are just too into
• 54:58
  themselves, that they don't give a crap about anybody else.
• 55:01
  And so, OK, And I'll give you an example.
• 55:05
  I used to do this, and it was intentional, where I'd be
• 55:08
  meeting with somebody and I wanted to know about them.
• 55:11
  I'd know about their family. I knew about their background.
• 55:14
  You know, through the course of this conversation, right?
• 55:17
  They never asked me once. What about you?
• 55:20
  Not once. And I was stopped.
• 55:23
  I said, can I ask you a question?
• 55:24
  And they'd say, well, yeah, I said, what do you know about me
• 55:28
  of this conversation? That's the point.
• 55:32
  You don't really care. Well, it's all one way, and you
• 55:35
  don't really care because this isn't gonna go any further.
• 55:40
  Yeah. It goes back to my dating and
• 55:43
  sales conversations. It's just not fun and it's not
• 55:45
  enjoyable and you don't feel like you feel like that person
• 55:48
  just has kind of their own interest in mind because if
• 55:50
  they're not curious about you and what's going on with you,
• 55:52
  the opposite don't care. But that's the perception you
• 55:54
  have at least, right? Well, yeah, yeah.
• 55:56
  And how do you, say, make you feel?
• 55:57
  Yeah, not good, right? It doesn't.
• 56:00
  It's just. Like being there, you go out
• 56:01
  feeling everything about them, but it's like, where's this
• 56:04
  coming back? Yeah.
• 56:05
  So that's what a lot of this is about, just human interaction.
• 56:08
  And that's why human to human and why I really settled on that
• 56:12
  is that we're a human centered business agent where I've got
• 56:15
  three companies that I can put three separate skills, number
• 56:18
  one, trust, building trust. And all the way from in a
• 56:20
  company, I can take it the individual level to team level
• 56:23
  right up into the leadership. And it's an assessment and we
• 56:27
  got a four box and we can put it.
• 56:28
  Nobody's ever done this before. As a matter of fact, he just had
• 56:31
  Stephen Emmer Covey on on a podcast that wrote The Speed of
• 56:35
  Trust over 20 years ago, which I was a huge advocate of because
• 56:38
  he came, Oh my God, it's terrific.
• 56:40
  And him and Rob had just a love fest about this.
• 56:43
  He's endorsing his new book, as a matter of fact, because of
• 56:46
  that. Then two, then two months later,
• 56:48
  Patrick Lancion. Yeah, five to six months, same
• 56:50
  thing. Yeah, that's a great book.
• 56:51
  Well, they're all talking about trust, cynics talking about
• 56:54
  trust. All these guys are now just
• 56:55
  like, hey, let's get back to some basics here because they've
• 56:57
  kind of lost our way. So everything to me is I've
• 57:01
  gotten trusted for a long time because I look at people.
• 57:04
  There's only one thing that a competition cannot duplicate in
• 57:07
  any company. Do you know what that is?
• 57:09
  They're people, if you look at the top people that are
• 57:13
  performing at levels above their peer groups.
• 57:16
  They've got absolute trust, loyalty and a lot of other
• 57:19
  things within that company. People are appreciated.
• 57:22
  They get up in the morning wanting to go to work.
• 57:24
  So true, you know, and it's not how much does that take to do
• 57:29
  that? It doesn't it's not anything
• 57:31
  extraordinary. And this young generation needs
• 57:33
  it too, you know, because they're highly skeptical.
• 57:36
  So I tell people now in specially small mid market
• 57:39
  companies, you better earn their trust pretty quickly because you
• 57:41
  got older people transitioning out and these young people are
• 57:44
  coming in. There's a couple of things that
• 57:46
  I can provide them with a trust in their leaders.
• 57:50
  So they got to establish the trust.
• 57:52
  And once you do that, young people will follow their they'll
• 57:56
  they want that number 2 is communication.
• 57:58
  Give them skills. OK.
• 58:00
  And that's just not a Pixie dust kind of thing.
• 58:03
  It's an ongoing thing. You know, I, I use sports
• 58:07
  metaphors. Why do you think top teams in
• 58:09
  all teams coaching, training and practice coaching, training and
• 58:13
  practice. OK.
• 58:14
  And what makes one team different than the other team?
• 58:17
  Well, a lot of it's intrinsic motivation, picking the right
• 58:20
  people, firing them up, you know, where that, you know,
• 58:23
  lineman charges out and just take somebody on that, you know,
• 58:26
  is £200 bigger than that or something like that.
• 58:29
  You sit there and go, holy crap, you know, there's a motivate
• 58:31
  guy. I also used to tell people in
• 58:34
  high end salespeople you hire for attitude.
• 58:37
  That's so true. Not for the resume.
• 58:39
  You hire for attitude and are they willing to learn?
• 58:42
  Are they willing to get better? And are they curious?
• 58:44
  Do they ask great questions? Do they want to know more?
• 58:47
  You know, all my interviews were exactly that.
• 58:49
  All behavioral interviews. So it's trust communication.
• 58:52
  What was the other? 10 coaching and mentoring for
• 58:56
  evolving or emerging leaders. These young people need that and
• 58:59
  a lot of these companies aren't equipped to do that.
• 59:02
  They don't have the people or they don't have the resource or
• 59:04
  they don't have the time. So what's happening?
• 59:07
  These young people are failing. They're flying away.
• 59:09
  That's why you got the turnover that you have because you're not
• 59:12
  really investing in them. When I came up to where I came
• 59:15
  up, you were career path. You had a coach and a mentor.
• 59:18
  I had fabulous coaches and mentor.
• 59:20
  I had fabulous training. To this day, that was
• 59:22
  foundational for everything that I did.
• 59:25
  Where is it at today? That's so true, Max.
• 59:27
  Even when I when I started my corporate job and this wasn't
• 59:29
  that far ago, but just 2014, like there was structure, there
• 59:33
  was mentor, there was leadership.
• 59:34
  It was like everyone talked about it and now it's like Yep,
• 59:36
  just don't hear about it as. Much you know in in in guys take
• 59:40
  you out and have a beer. You talk over the all the time
• 59:42
  everyone's in water lunch. Well, something that's gone away
• 59:44
  too. Yeah, that's the unfortunate.
• 59:46
  Remote stuff too, right? It's just gotten away from it,
• 59:48
  yeah. But the ones that picked the
• 59:50
  attention, I remember back the day and you, I don't know if you
• 59:52
  remember this, the guy, they had a, a, a meeting and their
• 59:55
  customers, biggest customers leaving them or some things like
• 59:57
  that. And this guy had had airline
• 1:00:00
  tickets and he was handing them out to everybody.
• 1:00:02
  You're going to go out and visit the customers because they
• 1:00:04
  forgot, you know, got them there.
• 1:00:07
  And then I. He said, and I'm taking this one
• 1:00:09
  to the biggest customer. I'm visiting them.
• 1:00:12
  I'll tell you the trick I did when I had my marketing company,
• 1:00:14
  because people, you know, a drop of a drop of negativity can
• 1:00:18
  spoil the whole pool, especially with the creative team.
• 1:00:21
  They if they really get against a client or they're having
• 1:00:23
  trouble with it, man, look out. OK.
• 1:00:27
  And so I, I was hearing rumors going around and I had 25 hand
• 1:00:32
  picked people in my company. So I, I heard rumors going
• 1:00:35
  around that we're going to nip this thing in the bud over the
• 1:00:38
  weekend. I went and got a huge about 9
• 1:00:40
  foot foam board. OK, And I had laminated on that
• 1:00:44
  a check from one of our customers and I called all hands
• 1:00:48
  deck that that Monday morning and I had two easels and I set
• 1:00:52
  that up and it was just blank. OK.
• 1:00:55
  And I said came in the room and I said, I'm a little disturbed
• 1:00:59
  about some things I've been hearing and I just want to
• 1:01:01
  address it. Let's just get this, you know,
• 1:01:02
  let's get it on the table right now.
• 1:01:04
  I said who pays you? Customers and.
• 1:01:10
  They're all looking bull. You pay a spot, wrong answer,
• 1:01:14
  wrong answer, flip the board over.
• 1:01:17
  I said this is who pays us. And when they stop paying us, I
• 1:01:20
  stop paying you. Do you get it?
• 1:01:22
  I don't want to hear no more bitching and complaining about
• 1:01:24
  this customer because that is who's paying you.
• 1:01:28
  And we're here to do the best work we can for them.
• 1:01:31
  And anybody that doesn't want to do that, there's the door.
• 1:01:34
  Now, I took my people out twice a year for a full retreat, twice
• 1:01:39
  a year, three days full, three days.
• 1:01:41
  We had fun mixed in it. But the whole objective of that
• 1:01:44
  was this. If we can't do the best work for
• 1:01:46
  this agency, how in the hell can we actually do good work for a
• 1:01:49
  client? We spent six days a year just on
• 1:01:54
  the agency's business and our branding and what we were, what
• 1:01:57
  we stood for and all that stuff. It was all in person.
• 1:02:01
  So you lived what you tried to do for other people, which I
• 1:02:03
  think is so key. Absolutely.
• 1:02:05
  Because, you know, that's what I learned, you know, and I have to
• 1:02:09
  tell you years later, I had to think about it because the total
• 1:02:12
  assets of my company walked out the door every night.
• 1:02:15
  I'm praying to God to come back in, man.
• 1:02:17
  And a lot of people don't understand.
• 1:02:19
  I don't care how much your manufacturing facility, your
• 1:02:21
  technology or anything like that, you got people in there.
• 1:02:24
  And that's the thing that concerns me the most now with
• 1:02:26
  the whole AI movement. There's a lot of backlash coming
• 1:02:28
  out of this. You got to have human beings
• 1:02:30
  here doing this stuff to keep it on the rails, keep it ethical,
• 1:02:33
  keep it moral, keep, you know, there's a lot of conversation
• 1:02:36
  going on about this stuff. What do you think happens with
• 1:02:38
  AI now that it's, I mean over the next few years, AI is going
• 1:02:41
  to, well, it's just like just be everywhere.
• 1:02:43
  It's just like the Internet, it's going to, you know,
• 1:02:46
  straight up going to be a lot and then it's going to have to
• 1:02:48
  settle in, you know, get the rails on it.
• 1:02:50
  My biggest concern is who's going to govern it?
• 1:02:53
  You know, because you know, we're already seeing, you know,
• 1:02:55
  you got, you got some of these AI companies getting sued like
• 1:02:59
  crazy because the simple factor they got information they
• 1:03:02
  shouldn't have, nothing shouldn't have.
• 1:03:04
  I'll. Tell you a quick story.
• 1:03:07
  When I had the human to human logo done up, I went out on
• 1:03:11
  Fiverr to do OK. Now I did AI 1st to see what
• 1:03:16
  they would come up with. An idea, right?
• 1:03:18
  And so colors were very important, you know, red, the
• 1:03:21
  red and the blue. I picked cerulean blue.
• 1:03:25
  That's cool. Yeah.
• 1:03:26
  And so because it has some meaning, you know, colors have
• 1:03:30
  meaning too. And through my creative data, I
• 1:03:32
  knew exactly what. So I, I go out there, so I I get
• 1:03:36
  a recommendation, one of the top guys in fiber.
• 1:03:39
  OK. And he's wasn't Nigerian.
• 1:03:42
  He was forgot what country he's from.
• 1:03:45
  And I couldn't he couldn't do my project for two weeks.
• 1:03:48
  That's how busy this guy was. I mean, he had five star ratings
• 1:03:50
  at the end. So when I went out there and all
• 1:03:52
  the things communicate through through through fiber, you can't
• 1:03:55
  communicate directly with the artist.
• 1:03:57
  And so I communicated, here's the colors specifically, here's
• 1:04:00
  what I want. And the last thing was no AI.
• 1:04:05
  This has got to be absolutely human creative generated.
• 1:04:09
  I better not find any AI in this.
• 1:04:11
  Now would you know? Well, yeah, sure you can.
• 1:04:14
  You can ferret stuff out. Yeah.
• 1:04:16
  So. And again, the interview process
• 1:04:18
  was, you know, he had given me five of these things.
• 1:04:21
  So he did. And I looked at all of those and
• 1:04:24
  that's what I came up with, you know now, which I didn't bring
• 1:04:27
  it to you. I'd love to see it.
• 1:04:29
  Yeah, I'm curious now. Well, you're gonna have one.
• 1:04:30
  Of these, now would you be mad if he used AI in the process to
• 1:04:33
  make the? No AI is here.
• 1:04:35
  AI is gonna happen. He came up with that logo which
• 1:04:39
  represents 2 the humans. That's cool.
• 1:04:40
  Part of it that I have OK the cerulean blue and the I do.
• 1:04:44
  Like the colors Sharp. Yeah, and, you know, flip, you
• 1:04:49
  know, I use both sides of the card.
• 1:04:51
  You've got to have a lot of people go you.
• 1:04:52
  Know, yeah, because people are like, I don't have that.
• 1:04:54
  Information Yeah, so, but yeah, you know, and again, my wife, my
• 1:05:00
  lovely wife, has given me some great advice.
• 1:05:02
  I because I grew up with a perfectionist, my father, you
• 1:05:05
  know, and, and so everything had to be perfect.
• 1:05:08
  My lovely bride gave me, said Bob.
• 1:05:10
  If it's 8085%, it's good to go because it ain't worth it for
• 1:05:14
  that extra 10% or whatever it is to get to be perfect because
• 1:05:18
  it's never going to be perfect. It's never going to be perfect.
• 1:05:21
  Yeah, perfection is really the the antithesis of good.
• 1:05:26
  Well, I always say sometimes it can be just a disguise for
• 1:05:29
  insecurity because we we think if it's not perfect, then we
• 1:05:32
  ship something out or put something out or post a piece of
• 1:05:34
  content. If it's not perfect and people
• 1:05:37
  don't like it or it doesn't come out the way I thought it would,
• 1:05:39
  that's a reflection of me and my character and who I am.
• 1:05:41
  It's not. People don't care about that.
• 1:05:44
  People don't care about that. One of the things I found out,
• 1:05:47
  it's not about you. Oh yeah, it's not for sure.
• 1:05:50
  It's not about your stuff, yes. So that's how people internalize
• 1:05:54
  it. Yeah, of course it is.
• 1:05:55
  Yeah. You know, it's gotta be perfect.
• 1:05:56
  It's just like today. It's gotta be perfect, you know,
• 1:05:59
  and all this stuff and, and, you know, matter of fact, people
• 1:06:02
  like flaws and pimples. I agree and stuff.
• 1:06:04
  Yeah, I agree. You know, just some realness in
• 1:06:06
  there, you know? Well, I tell people all the
• 1:06:07
  time, you know, I'm not tall, I'm not good looking, but by
• 1:06:10
  golly, I'm tenacious. You know that is true.
• 1:06:13
  That last one is true. I'll run circles, right?
• 1:06:15
  Because I, you know, I have a nickname, OK, that was given to
• 1:06:19
  me when I was in the agency business.
• 1:06:20
  And it's Lambeau, and that was after Rambo.
• 1:06:25
  Because I was tenacious. That's funny.
• 1:06:27
  I was one guy told me, he says, you know, Amber, you're like a
• 1:06:29
  Pitbull. Once you lock on, you don't let
• 1:06:31
  go, he said. You know, you hit somebody so
• 1:06:33
  many times you feel like they're surrounded.
• 1:06:35
  Do you know what's funny is that when we talked on the on the
• 1:06:37
  call, which was a virtual call, yeah, I picked up on your
• 1:06:40
  energy, but I didn't quite pick up on the tenaciousness.
• 1:06:43
  But as soon as you came in here, I picked up on it right away.
• 1:06:46
  I was like, wow, he's got more like fire than I initially
• 1:06:49
  thought on the call. And I think that's part of doing
• 1:06:51
  the doing. When you're virtual, it's not
• 1:06:53
  the same as when you're in person.
• 1:06:55
  And that's why we do this show in person.
• 1:06:57
  And I try to see my clients and do things in person as much as I
• 1:07:00
  can. I believe in them, man.
• 1:07:01
  It freaking matters. Well, people, I'll give you
• 1:07:03
  another one about messaging. Yeah, OK, Here we got the
• 1:07:06
  salespeople, business owners and all that stuff.
• 1:07:08
  And they said, well, you know, I said when's the last time you
• 1:07:11
  went out to your client? What do you mean?
• 1:07:13
  When's the last time you physically visited the client?
• 1:07:16
  OK. And by the way, how would they
• 1:07:18
  rate you? How are you doing with the
• 1:07:21
  client we're still doing business with?
• 1:07:25
  No, when's it going to be the time that you don't want to hear
• 1:07:28
  the slam door when they're out the door?
• 1:07:32
  You need to be doing quarterly or at least half year visits
• 1:07:35
  with your clients. And you got to find out because
• 1:07:38
  here's the thing, your business is going to come quicker and
• 1:07:41
  grow quicker by two things, expanding the business you have
• 1:07:44
  with the current client. And you got to make damn sure
• 1:07:47
  they're happy and they really like what you're doing and that
• 1:07:50
  you can do more for them. And #2 who could they refer you
• 1:07:54
  to? Yeah, because I always have the
• 1:07:56
  question I asked. I lead with the question as
• 1:08:00
  look, Alex, how we doing? Oh, Bob, you've been great this
• 1:08:03
  last year. Hey, look, nothing's 100%.
• 1:08:05
  If we could do one thing better, what would that be?
• 1:08:09
  It's amazing. And that's also a question you
• 1:08:11
  can ask somebody that's got a competitor and you're trying to
• 1:08:14
  get in the door. Hey, you never just a
• 1:08:16
  competitor. Say, hey, I know those guys,
• 1:08:18
  they did great work. We've been up against them a
• 1:08:20
  couple times, but nobody's perfect.
• 1:08:23
  I think I'd do one thing better. What would that be?
• 1:08:25
  I was advising a banking client because they were trying to get
• 1:08:28
  in talk this guy for two years, head of a company.
• 1:08:31
  And finally they met him at a networking event and I'd coached
• 1:08:35
  that day. And he said, yeah, you know,
• 1:08:37
  hey, we've been chasing after, you know, we know who you were
• 1:08:41
  banking with now and all that. If they could do one thing
• 1:08:43
  better, what would that be? This guy opened up like a
• 1:08:45
  gallon. I got a screaming voicemail
• 1:08:49
  message at 11:30 that night from this gal that I coached.
• 1:08:53
  You ain't gonna believe this. You ain't gonna believe this.
• 1:08:55
  We got a big meeting with these guys.
• 1:08:57
  I thought OK. It's very non threatening,
• 1:08:59
  right? It's like it's open the door.
• 1:09:00
  It's hey, there's just one little thing, you know, what
• 1:09:02
  would it be? And then that opens up other
• 1:09:04
  things and. That's the thing.
• 1:09:05
  That's the thing that again, you go down.
• 1:09:08
  So if there's a problem, let's fix it.
• 1:09:10
  I want to nip that in the bud. Now, what do you want me to do?
• 1:09:13
  If there isn't, well, nothing's perfect.
• 1:09:16
  Help me understand if there's other things.
• 1:09:18
  And by the way, I don't know if you knew this because that was a
• 1:09:20
  lesson. I lost $1,000,000 deal because I
• 1:09:22
  wasn't constantly telling a client that we did these other
• 1:09:25
  things. I was kind of pigeon holed.
• 1:09:28
  That's how they thought of me. And he went with one of my
• 1:09:30
  competitors. I didn't even know about it.
• 1:09:32
  I'm sitting at lunch and if you would see me in my food in my
• 1:09:34
  mouth and he told me that I'm looking at my went white.
• 1:09:37
  I said, Brett, what are you talking about, man?
• 1:09:39
  We do that. And he went white because we had
• 1:09:42
  a great relationship. He said, Oh my God, bye bye.
• 1:09:44
  I'm so sorry. I I haven't thought about you
• 1:09:46
  guys that way. And I said lesson learned.
• 1:09:50
  Never again. You can't tell a client enough
• 1:09:52
  times what you do. Yeah.
• 1:09:54
  And especially if it's new things or you're coming up with
• 1:09:57
  something else or you got a different slant.
• 1:09:58
  And there's where stories come in.
• 1:10:00
  Yeah, that's right. Hey, Alex, let me tell you about
• 1:10:02
  this story about this client I got.
• 1:10:04
  Now you know, it's they're not in your business, but let me
• 1:10:07
  tell you what happened. Yeah.
• 1:10:08
  And all of a sudden, what happens and they go, really?
• 1:10:12
  Oh, yeah, yeah. They had a bump of 22% within
• 1:10:14
  three months in the business. I don't suppose that'd be
• 1:10:17
  something you'd be interested in.
• 1:10:19
  Founders, if you're listening, make sure you're talking to your
• 1:10:22
  customers, get the reviews, see where you can make a bigger
• 1:10:25
  impact have the tough conversations, ask the tough
• 1:10:27
  questions that maybe are a little uncomfortable like what
• 1:10:29
  can we be doing better? Sometimes people are scared to
• 1:10:32
  open up that can of. Worms.
• 1:10:33
  Well, yeah, of course. Because they're afraid.
• 1:10:34
  They're afraid. Well, guess what?
• 1:10:36
  When you want to be afraid now or out the door.
• 1:10:38
  And guess what? Those conversations are going to
• 1:10:40
  happen with the without you, you'd rather be in the room with
• 1:10:43
  them. You better believe it.
• 1:10:44
  You better believe it and that gets back to the messaging real
• 1:10:47
  quick cuz it was going down real.
• 1:10:48
  The messaging is this. The clients will tell you your
• 1:10:51
  messaging. They'll tell you what they like
• 1:10:54
  about you. You don't have to go out there
• 1:10:55
  and recreate the wheel or come up with something stupid.
• 1:10:58
  Just use what they're telling you.
• 1:11:00
  I told that to the clients all the time.
• 1:11:02
  Use what they're telling you. They love you.
• 1:11:04
  I had a consulting firm, engineers, all engineers, right?
• 1:11:07
  Of course, engineers always got to be doing, fixing something,
• 1:11:10
  but they're very linear in everything.
• 1:11:13
  So they were dealing with a large company and their Q
• 1:11:15
  ratings were off the chart. I had never heard testimonials
• 1:11:20
  and things because I'd go around and interview their clients for
• 1:11:22
  them and stuff like that and it was amazing.
• 1:11:25
  But I, I kept saying to myself, why aren't you guys bigger?
• 1:11:28
  You're working with like companies that have multi
• 1:11:30
  divisions. You should be in at least half a
• 1:11:32
  dozen of these. So I went through this.
• 1:11:34
  I said, let me ask you something.
• 1:11:36
  These guys love you, man. They're raving about you.
• 1:11:38
  And I did what I did with you, you know, do you like what we're
• 1:11:41
  doing, blah, blah, blah. And then you ask them because
• 1:11:45
  they wouldn't ask. And I'd say, here's the simple
• 1:11:47
  thing, you like them, right? They're friends, OK, Just go to
• 1:11:50
  them and say, hey, look, you know what we do?
• 1:11:52
  And you know, how we grow our business is through people like
• 1:11:54
  you that would recommend. Would you be comfortable?
• 1:11:58
  Do you? First of all, do you know guys
• 1:11:59
  in the other divisions? Oh, yeah.
• 1:12:00
  We have meetings all the time. Would you be comfortable
• 1:12:04
  introducing me to one of them? Oh, yeah.
• 1:12:08
  Jeez, I never thought about it. This guy lit up like a
• 1:12:11
  firecracker. I said, you ain't going to
• 1:12:13
  believe this. I got a meeting with this
• 1:12:15
  division, and that's leading to this division.
• 1:12:18
  You know what I'm saying? This is easy stuff.
• 1:12:21
  You just got to ask. And again, to your point, it
• 1:12:23
  takes courage. It does.
• 1:12:25
  They got to get over to the hump of fear.
• 1:12:27
  I think that's the biggest thing that pulls back people.
• 1:12:31
  I've experienced it, yeah, there's no question.
• 1:12:34
  Yeah, yeah. If you can get past the fear of
• 1:12:36
  asking the tough question or putting yourself out there, I
• 1:12:39
  would say everything that you want in life is on the other
• 1:12:41
  side of your comfort zone. And we'll end with that.
• 1:12:44
  Bob, I appreciate you coming on the show.
• 1:12:46
  Man. This has been a really, really
• 1:12:47
  good conversation. I know I'm going to go back and
• 1:12:49
  re listen to this because I've learned so many things.
• 1:12:51
  There are things, as you said it, I was like, oh, I need to do
• 1:12:53
  that. I need to implement this.
• 1:12:55
  I know the founders watching have learned a ton from this
• 1:12:58
  conversation too, so I hope so. Thank you for coming on.
• 1:13:00
  Where can people find you, connect with you, learn more
• 1:13:02
  about what you do? Yeah, e-mail
• 1:13:05
  bob@human#2humanllc.com. They can text me.
• 1:13:13
  I take calls. I take texts.
• 1:13:14
  Wow. 847-922-1498 and this. Goes viral, Bob.
• 1:13:19
  Got a website? Got a website out there too.
• 1:13:21
  It's the same thing, you know, human to humanllc.com.
• 1:13:26
  Cool. We'll link it all up in the
• 1:13:28
  description too, so they can easily find you.
• 1:13:30
  But it's great. Appreciate you coming out here.
• 1:13:31
  Thanks for being on. The show.
• 1:13:32
  Yeah, this is great. This has been great, Alex.
• 1:13:33
  I've been looking forward to it. Thanks.