Blair Enns - What Is Strategy?

The lovely and talented Blair Enns joins me to explore the question: WHAT IS STRATEGY?BLAIR'S LINKS Win Without Pitching Blair's Twitter INTERACTIVE TRANSCRIPThttps://www.rev.com/transcript-editor/shared/m4jr6P_aQ9TmpdBKT3aCBIwyEF8RQOW6iVR4dv8w_tR26FKubH_uHjRLazDIaBMaGii5Y7IGnLKWWyV6XLOhdZXkG_E?loadFrom=SharedLinkTEXT TRANSCRIPTJonathan (00:00): Hello and welcome to ditching hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. And today I am joined by a very special guest Blair ends. Blair, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Jonathan. Great to be here. So I feel like you need no introduction, but can I put you on the spot and for anybody who hasn't heard your name before you maybe give them a, a quick name, rank and serial number. Yeah,Blair (00:22): Name rank. So I'm the founder and CEO of win without pitching the sales training organization for creative professionals. I've written two books the win without pitching manifesto in 2010 and pricing creativity, a guide to profit beyond the billable hour in 2018, three years ago.Jonathan (00:47): Great stuff. Love it. Okay. So the, the sort of impetus for this conversation was a tweet that you tweeted, obviously something you posted on Twitter about strategy. So what's the, what's the sort of backstory here.Blair (01:01): Yeah. And I forget exactly what the exchange was, but you and I were trading some pretty good definitions of strategy. One of my hobbies is I collect answers to the question, what is strategy? Because strategy is one of those words, like time and money are in the same category. They're they're words. We think we know the meaning of them until we're asked to define them. And then it turns out very few people have satisfactory answers to the question of what is strategy. And then when you get into that, then it's, it begs all kinds of other questions around this topic of strategy. So it's a rich vein for a podcast episode that's for sure.Jonathan (01:43): Absolutely. Well, so what are some of the answers that you've collected? I mean, do, do you feel like there are, do you feel like they sort of coalesce around a correct answer or is it just like people have different definitions and if it works for them great. What do you, what do you, what are your findings?Blair (02:03): I I've, I've asked hundreds of people this question, and I've asked it from a stage, you know, many times as well. So, you know, easily, I've heard hundreds of answers where, or in excess of 100 answers. And the most common answer is just an insufficient answer is an answer that, that says this person hasn't thought about the question, which isn't, you know, I'm, I'm sure there, there are a hundred words that I think I know the definition to that. If you ask me to define, I couldn't have a strategy, is, is one of those words. Usually the answer is some variation of a really smart plan. But the origin of the question why I first started asking it was so win without pitching is a training company, but we used to be, we used to be me a solo consulting practice. And I used to hear from my clients a lot.Blair (02:53): So creatives who have made their creativity, their business. So some designers starts at design firm. I used to hear from my clients when they were talking about their competitors, they would say, Oh, they're a really good firm, but they don't do strategy. Meaning they're not as smart as we are. Right. And so I started asking what strategy and people were just absolutely flummoxed by the question. So the answer is, tend to coalesce around a plan. Well, let's strategy is a plan. It's a detailed plan. Okay. So strategy is the plan. No, no, it's more than a plan. It's a really smart plan.Jonathan (03:35): It's a really smart piece that I think people get hung up on. Like what does really smart mean?Blair (03:39): Yeah. And then strategic as a modifier when you're positioning your firm we're a strategic design firm. Okay. What does that mean? Well, it means we're smart. It means we do the strategy. What strategy it's planning. Okay. So strategy is a plan. No, no, no. So we ended up in this circular discussion.Jonathan (03:59): Right? Right. So w the ones that, so a couple things to just chime in and kind of pile on there. I hear a lot of people use the word strategy incorrectly, which is different than defining it wrong. Cause I think if I asked the very same people to define strategy, they would say something like it's knowing what not to do or same, same with you. It's like a really smart plan. But I hear, I hear like a different, I hear people just use the word in the wrong place. Like people ask me like, what's a good SEO strategy or what's a good email marketing strategy. And what they're really asking for is tactics. And, you know, and they're asking about something extremely low level, they're looking for tips like tips and tricks on how to use drip more efficiently or something, or how to use social media more effectively.Jonathan (04:49): And you might, and some of those things would come out of an overall, like a higher level strategy. And, you know, based on the strategy, they're going to be tactics that are aligned or misaligned with the strategy, but they don't, but they have a tendency to just use the word synonymously with tactics, which is always something that I makes me nervous for them. Because if they, if they think that, you know, what, you know, like picking a time of day to tweet is a strategic thought process, then I'm like, okay, let's we need to have a conversation here.Blair (05:22): Well, Oh, so we're going to have to unpack both of these words, strategy and tactics, because, you know, I, the more I learn about it, the more I see there, isn't really a universal universal definition. And there are three definitions that I've heard that I like. And I remember I don't, I didn't go back and look it up. I remember liking yours. So there would be, there's probably five ones that I've heard that I've liked. And the three that there are three that I've held onto. And the, and the most recent one is one that really challenges some traditional ideas of what strategy might be. So what's, you've got a, you've thought about this question. What's your definition of strategyJonathan (06:03): A bit long, but I can't, I can't make it shorter and not lose something I think is meaningful. So, so from memory it's, as strategy is a high, a concise high-level approach to achieving an objective that applies strengths, your strengths against some things, weaknesses in a surprising way.Blair (06:23): Yeah. So there are a lot of keywords there, so I've thought of high level. Yeah. What else did you have? It's a high level, concise and high level, high level and put, goingJonathan (06:35): For achieving an objective. So that, that's the most important, like to me that's the, the most straightforward piece of it. It doesn't give you any direction, but it does say that it's gotta be, it's gotta be short. It's gotta be clear. It's gotta be high level. It's not a list of things to do. It's an approach to it critically to achieve an objective. So if you don't have an objective, there's no strategy. You can't have a strategy without an objective. So to me, any strategy meeting would, or, you know, discussion or thought process would start with what are we trying to achieve? And then how can we do that? It like, what's the approach that we could take that would apply strength to weakness in a surprising way.Blair (07:16): I also like the word concise, the idea that you can explain it succinctly. My first definition that I, I cobbled together from a few different that I found and I liked. And the bulk of it, I actually read on Wikipedia is this strategy is an idea that describes a journey to a position of advantage. So the idea follows your point about being concise. You need to be able to sum it up very succinctly and describes a journey. What I mean by describes a journey is you can easily tactics where the steps, if you see tactics as the steps in the strategy, and maybe I haven't actually thought too deeply by the word tactics, but tactics are the steps to implementing the strategy are implied or easily inferred. And then position of advantage is the, you know, the objective, the competitive the competitive game that you're hoping to achieve. So I really like that definition of yours. Do you want to say it one more time? Just for my benefit?Jonathan (08:27): Sure. So a concise high-level approach to achieve an objective or achieving an objective by applying strengths against weaknesses in an unsafe, in a surprising way.Blair (08:37): Yeah. Yeah. And then surprising is another important word. And I think I hadn't thought about that, but there's a tenant of systems thinking I think, or information systems that I'm trying to think of the author of this. And you know, all of the big names are escaping me, but they'll come to me. That information is surprise, no surprise, no information. I really liked the idea that there's something surprising there. I'm not, I wonder if that's defensible, I really like it, but I wonder if it's survived scrutiny.Jonathan (09:13): So in my blog post about this, I do say that that last piece, the surprise piece is potentially optional in a situation where it's not as competitive. So you've got a, you could imagine having a strategy where you don't have to communicate it to anyone. It's just you know, my objective is to, I don't know get my garage clean and the strategy I'm going to use is is instead of going through everything, you know, the big picture strategy is I'm just going to Chuck everything and okay, okay. What does that mean? You know, and then you you'd have tactics versus, you know, I'm going to sell everything or versus, you know, just like us, but this is kind of, it's kind of, it becomes like not meaningless, but strategy at that level. It becomes less important, I guess when there's not some kind of competitor, you know what I mean?Jonathan (10:12): So if there is some kind of competitor, whether that's another client or, you know, it's like a war situation, I feel like the surprise, every, every strategy that I would look back on always had that element of surprise that made it really made it instantly genius, where you're like, wow, that might not work. Of course, because strategy is a leap of faith. Like if you knew it was going to work, it's not a strategy. It's like, you've got this objective. You could do five, five different strategies for achieving the objective, you know, frontal assault, guerrilla, warfare, very different strategies. And then the tactics are gonna either align or not align with the chosen strategy. So when it's, when it's, when the S when the stakes are high, I think that surprise piece is pretty important when the stakes are low, maybe it's optional. It probably is optional.Blair (11:02): Yeah. I w I'm trying to think of example. So I've written I'm a big fan of Ben Thompson who writes this strategically. I was listening to him the other day on his podcast. Talk about the, I think it's fair. A fair child. Fairchild semiconductor is in a conversation about Intel, but when they said, okay, we're going to, we're going to go to market with these chips at a dollar, a piece or whatever the price was way be way below the market price, or even their cost at the moment. So the strategy is we're going to sell so cheaply. We're going to drive the volume way up. That's going to drive production efficiencies. Eventually we will be able to produce this at a profit, and we will just dominate the market. And that's exactly what happened. And that's Anne Thompson was talking about when he announced this at some conference, everybody in the room just had this audible reaction. Whoa, that's surprise. And that was a dominant strategy that changed the field.Jonathan (12:01): Yeah. The example I use is that that is fictional obviously, but the star Wars, the original star Wars movie, the objective was to blow up the death star. The strategy was to send an absurdly small force to sneak through their defenses and explode a critical vulnerability. And the tactics were all the things that they know. So like as, as Luke is flying through the, you know, the tactics would be things like, you know, the leaders will go into the trench and the rest of the each team will flank them and try and keep the tie fighters off and shoot the ground cannons so that the leader can go in and do the thing. So every time they're making a decision about which way to fly or how far apart the spaceships should be, those are all tactical decisions. And they're going to change constantly in response to feedback from the situation it's normal for tactics to change a lot. It's not normal. If your strategy is changing a lot, like when Luke shuts off his targeting computer, that's a tactical decision. It was not a strategic shift. He didn't, he didn't make a strategic change. The, the objective and the strategy remained the same, but he just, you know, changed his mind about exactly how he was going to execute it.Blair (13:11): The objective look, the desktop strategy is put a shot into the exhaust port and the tactics are all of these things and him making a decision to shut off the nav and use the force. That's the tactical a moment that's a tactical decision made in the moment in pursuit of the strategy. Right.Jonathan (13:27): But I would stress one thing about the strategy though. So like they could have had a full frontal assault on the death star with all of their, all of their forces and just,Blair (13:35): No we're talking about seriously because star Wars, Israel, this is not a fish oil example. Go on. Okay.Jonathan (13:41): Exactly. I think we're both around that age where it was real. But yeah, I think the surprise and the surprise piece is that like you, it's insane to send X wings or after the death star, it's like certifiably bonkers. But they're there, they could have tried to shoot from the moon and hit the exhaust part. It would have been just as crazy, or they could have sent their entire force and try and overwhelm them. So like, so yeah, so the exploit, the critical vulnerability, but with, but the S the real piece of the strategy that's interesting to me is that they chose to use just an absurdly small force to sort of sneak in versus a frontal assault or some ground, some attempt to send something from the ground.Blair (14:26): Now, let me back that into my definition of strategy, which is an idea that describes a journey to a position of advantage, position of advantages. The death star is blown up, right? The idea is we, we exploited it through the vulnerable place, the exhaust port. And then the, basically we, we, we have to, we have shoot a laser cannon or whatever it is, or not a candidate, but we have to put a shot into the exhaust port. And from that, you can kind of infer a bunch of different tactics that might be appropriate.Jonathan (15:02): [Inaudible] Yeah. Yeah. The tactics almost imply themselves with the strategy is good.Blair (15:08): All right. Now, so I think the word strategy, I believe I've looked it up in years past, but I have a great memory. It's just short. I believe it's about origins. I believe so, too. Yeah. Yeah. So it's almost always like, so the the desktop is a great example. But then we move it into a business context. I think things start to change a little bit, because my next, just speaking chronologically in terms of the definitions of strategies that I've really embraced, the next one I like is Michael Porter's, which is from Harvard business school, who says, strategy is the answer to the question, how are we going to become and remain unique?Jonathan (15:53): Oh, that's really good. There's this, there's a danger in that one though, because it, the how it doesn't say anything about concise. So like the, how will often be misinterpreted as a detailed plan, which I don't think is strategy, but yeah.Blair (16:07): Yeah. Well, it's going to get even worse when I get to the third definition, because we're definitely going in the anti concise direction.Jonathan (16:15): I do like that one though. I just think there's a lot of room for misinterpretation.Blair (16:19): Yeah. So when I think of like we've got a fair amount of overlap, or at least a little bit of overlap in our, in our, in the audiences that we serve creative and tech and the like, there's, you know, they're all kind of merging together and correct me if I'm wrong, but yeah. In the world that I serve creative professionals, what does it mean to be creative? Creativity is effectively the ability to see it's not the ability to write or draw it's the ability to bring a novel perspective to a problem. So creative people, and I mean, include all people who are creative and most entrepreneurs are creative, right? They are. Because that is their superpower is effectively solving the problem. They haven't previously solved. They have this positioning problem. They'd like to position, position their firms to be really, really broad so that they're able to solve all kinds of problems for all kinds of businesses.Blair (17:17): So that's one of the fundamental issues that we get to. So this that I'm dealing with in a, in an advisory basis, there are a lot of poorly positioned, greater firms. Now it's getting up getting a lot better as internet search strive. Some very specific searches. People are looking for very specific types of firms. So most firms have responded, but it's in the nature of that creative person to really broaden out their positioning. And I want to come back to this, this connection between positioning and strategy, it's effectively the same thing, but back to Michael Porter's idea, how are we going to become and remain unique? The creative business, the big challenge for decades of the creative business has been lack of uniqueness because everybody is effectively saying, well, we're creative problem solvers. Bring us your problem. We haven't solved before. And that was kind of the stake. They put it in the ground or didn't put in the ground,Jonathan (18:08): Right? Yeah. And like, all of their marketing materials are like, you know, we're smart people who solve hard problems and it's like, okay, but that's what everyone's saying. So, and you, and they may know internally that they have some different process, you know, like, you know, this firm might know that they have a better process than that from cause they used to work at the other firm and now they work at this firm. Yeah. There needs to be a meaningful difference, a difference that is meaningful to the buyer, a difference that the buyer understands, which is perhaps something that's much more high level. It almost certainly is something more high level than, than your internal process or how smart your people are, what your hiring process is. Yeah. So the difference and I do agree. Positioning is extremely strategic. I think there there's tons of overlap there between those two things. And they're to the point where it's almost effectively the same thing in a business context.Blair (18:59): Yeah. I think in if, if we have time, I'd like to come back to that and unpack the definition of positioning versus strategy and see where, where we get kind of tripped up. So, so for, for my audience of creative firms, I really like Michael Porter's definition because there is a lack of trying to be truly meaningfully unique among what I would call the creative professions, advertising and design.Jonathan (19:25): Well, you could argue that that that's being unique is one strategy. You, there could be another story.Blair (19:32): I would say that is your strategy. Your strategy is how are you going to be unique?Jonathan (19:37): Okay. Fair enough. Because the, the uniqueness could be that we're the low cost solution and that's your base. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. I see that. Okay. Like you're a generalist, but you're unique in the sense that you're the low cost option.Blair (19:50): Yes. It's not a desirable position, but if you have a production advantage, you've invented the logo making machine. Exactly. that's a, that's a strategy. That's a position in the marketplace.Jonathan (20:02): Yup. Yeah. Or you build a SAS that does this thing that, that now you don't need designers anymore, or you build, you build Upwork or 99 designs or something.Blair (20:11): Yeah. Now do you want to get into the paradigm shattering definition of strategy that will just stress everything we've talked about so far? Yeah. That's my favorite sounds great. So I'm going to have to read this. This was sent to me from a couple of clients of mine a few years ago. And this also comes from Harvard business school. Ken Andrews strategy is a stream of decisions over time, which reflect the goals of the firm and the means by which the firm achieves those goals. So when I remember sitting in a restaurant having dinner, my wife and I, and a couple one from Australia, one from New Zealand sitting there talking about strategy and they had met at Harvard business school and they dropped this point on me. And I said, well, wait a minute. But based on that definition, strategy can only be determined in hindsight because it's a stream of decisions. And they said, yes, exactly.Jonathan (21:14): Yeah, no, that is, I fundamentally disagree with that. Yeah,Blair (21:19): I think. And I haven't. So this definition has been quoted in a couple of books. One's called aligning the stars. I forget the gentleman's name. I haven't read it yet. I've lived through it. And I've since seen it out there in the world a few times particular, particularly from professionals who have attended Harvard. So it's definitely a Harvard business school definition. And one of the things I like about this is it's really easy to say what our strategy is, but most declarations of strategy are just or so aspirational than never pulled off. So to me, this is a really pragmatic, almost cynical look at what strategy is. So you could, you could summarize it by saying strategy. Isn't what you say, it's what you do. That's not the full definition, but that would be part of their implied definition would be strategy is really the decisions that you've made over time.Jonathan (22:27): No, that, to me, that that's a fundamental misunderstanding of the concept to me. I mean, when you first were saying it, I was thinking that, okay, maybe they're using that to encompass both the, the, the, the, definitely the creation of the strategy or the selection of the strategy and the execution of it over time. But then you went farther and it was more like how you summarize it, which is that you can only see what your strategy was in retrospect, which is like the laziest possible approach. I could imagine. It's like, why not? I mean, like, why even talk about it then? Like, just do whatever you want whenever you want. Like, how would you align an organization around that? I mean, it's kind of like, that's kind of like saying let's just assume that they, they believe that there's such a thing as objective and that, and, and even let's go a step further.Jonathan (23:17): This is probably unlikely in the absence of a strategy or preset strategy. Let's just say that the entire organization is aligned on the objective. Highly unlikely. If you don't, if you're operating in a definition of strategy, like you just described, but let's just say everybody is aligned on the objective. That would mean that everyone would be using different, decide on their own strategy. Everyone would have their individual strategy for achieving that objective. And if you don't have the same strategy, then the tactics that people are using are going to be stepping on each other's toes. They're gonna be pulling every, you know, one inch in every direction. There'll be no alignment whatsoever. Even if you have the same objective to be like, let's pull up the star Wars idea again. Okay. Objective, blow up the death star. Everybody do whatever you want. It's like, doesn't make any sense. So I think categorically reject that definition.Blair (24:14): I like how provocative it is. I like how it forced me to think about things. I like your retort to it. It reminds me of a couple of other provocative lions and I forget, was it Eisenhower? One of the U S presidents said and I'm paraphrasing plans are useless. Planning is priceless.Jonathan (24:35): Yeah. That's, that's good. But it doesn't mean there's no strategy. Yeah.Blair (24:40): It, another one of the strategies, models and a model is a view of a view of the world, how the world works or even not the greater world, but like there's a model for how we teach sales, training a model for how it works. So the line is all models are wrong. Some are useful. Yeah. So I think in the spirit of those two statements I think you can apply that spirit to Andrew's definition of strategy, which brings us to a related topic of what is strategic planning.Jonathan (25:18): Okay. Yeah. So let's slow down a little bit, cause there's some good stuff in there. So talk about how much time do we have. I'm not sure, but a while. So the Eisenhower quote that a plan is useless planning is priceless. The plan is what happens after you pick a strategy plan is the tactics. So that should change. And that's why it's like, you know, it, it is useless like on contact with the enemy of the plan is just not gonna work. Like, you know, I like my Mike Tyson's quote, everybody's got a plan until they get punched in the face. Yeah. True. Absolutely true. But that doesn't mean that there's no strategy. You just have to adjust your tactics to the reality of the situation. But without a strategy, you won't know what tactics to pick, which, which gets to like a question I have written down. Maybe we could hold off or do it now, but why, why is a strategy important? Like who cares? Why not? Why not have no strategy? And I think the answer is you tell me what you think. I think the answer is it's what allows us to, to distinguish an opportunity from a distraction.Blair (26:23): Oh yeah. That's a great definition. Great answer to that question. It's a really important question. I was hoping we were, we would get to it, but I haven't, I haven't thought about it too deeply. Look, why do we even do a strategy? It seems well, it's obvious you need to do a strategy. Well, whyJonathan (26:40): Why? Because, because everyone has limited time and money. So if you could do everything then yeah. Eventually, you know, infinite monkeys are gonna, you know, type up the works of Shakespeare, but you don't. So you've got an, especially in a competitive situation, a zero sum situation where someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. You don't have a lot of time. You probably don't have a lot of money or other resources. So you have to F you have to decide what actions to take that are going to be the most effective. And if you don't have a strategy, you can't tell them apart. So you literally don't know what to do and everything. And in a, in a less high stakes situation where you've got, you know, I worked with a lot of solo preneur developer types, that everything seems like an opportunity, like a, you know, a lead comes through and it's like, should I take it? Should I not take it? And it's like, well, it depends. What's your objective. And what's the strategy you're using to get there. I can't answer that question until I know what your objective and strategy are. And if you, if you don't have a strategy every time somebody says, we'd like you to speak at our conference, you say yes, until you're until your time is completely spoken for Susan.Blair (27:47): Perfect. Because you, we were having this conversation on Twitter and you said, come on my podcast and talk about this. And I said, I'm being ruthless about these. So I'm not going to do it this year. We can do it next year. And this is next year. And then I'm still trying to be almost as ruthless, but soar. This is a Monday or Monday morning staff meeting is at eight 30. By the time I arrived at that staff meeting, I had already had three meetings at seven, seven 30 and eight on opportunities to speak somewhere. And, and then in the staff meeting on the issues list, it's like, okay, I've had these three conversations. I have another one tomorrow morning. Like help me. What, how do we decide? Which of these are worth like I'm supposed to be doing? You know, we have our, I wouldn't call it a strategy for the year, but we have the, our objective for the year. I know what I need to get done this year. Here it is. It's February. I know. And these things are opportunities in a way, but the fundamental question are, is, are they distracting us from the objective and the strategy or the answers are not there, there are benefits. It's absolutely. So I love, can you say that again? It helps us to distinguish between an opportunity and a distraction. Yeah.Jonathan (29:09): That's what, that's, what a strategy is for two, two distinct it's like litmus test, does this align with strategy or not? And the strategy is automatically gonna, you know, the idea of the strategies to automatically lead to the, not automatically the idea is that it's your bet on the most effective way to achieve the outcome, given your constraints. So, so the outcomes baked into the strategy, you know, it needs to exist first. You need to know what your annual goals are or whatever. And then, okay, what's the strategy for doing that and that you, the litmus test for the billion decisions you're going to make between now and December 31st about how to spend your time and money. And without that strategy, you'll spend all your time and your money, like every opportunity that every, every thing that comes through will look like an opportunity. And you'll just, you'll just spend all of your resources on it. Cause you won't know what to say no to.Blair (30:01): Yeah. And that saying no is so vital, right?Jonathan (30:06): Yeah. Yeah. And which leads to all the like Steve jobs quotes, like, you know, good design is saying no to a thousand things or, you know yeah.Blair (30:13): Warren buffet, the difference between successful people and really successful people is really successful. People say no to almost everythingJonathan (30:25): [Inaudible] at one time. So at a I don't know where I saw this, but I think Charlie Rose was interviewing buffet and buffet pulled it in and he asked buffet to like, you know, could you show me the calendar, your, your pocket calendar that you showed me before, the, the interview. And he just, just like empty. It was completely empty. And I was like, that's my goal. When I saw that, I was like, yup, that's what I want. Empty calendar.Blair (30:51): So when you're starting out and you have an empty calendar, your goal isJonathan (30:55): Right. Right, right. Yeah. But so that's, I mean, I don't know if you're a Derek Sivers fan, but he just put up, released a book called heck yes or no, or hell yeah. Or no. And it's, it's about that. There's a F there's a stage at the beginning. He's a, he has a music background, music, performance background as do I. And there's a stage where you hustle and you take every, you say yes to everything. And then that works. Cause you're just clueless and you're young and you, you can live on pizza and couches and just sleep on the couch, eat the pizza, not the other way around. And when the, the time comes that it, or like when you get somewhere and things, you're getting inbound, essentially you're getting inbound leads. Instead of you doing all outbound, you're starting to get inbound leads and you're buried.Jonathan (31:42): Then it's time to start thinking like, okay, I'm only going to say yes to the things that are a hell. Yeah. And I'm going to say no to everything else. And it's sort of a lazy way to I'm lazy is the wrong word. It's sort of like a, it's an easy way. It's a, it's like a simple to understand way, but he's like, he's like has not regrets, but he I've heard him say on podcast many times that people misunderstood that they started using the hell. Yeah. Or no thing before they were actually there, you know, use it at the beginning. Like, like they're, they're the, pre-Madonna, they're the prize. And everyone's like, okay, screw you, you know, fine. But if you, once you're in demand, then, then you know, it's like, okay, to maybe clear your calendar a little bit. But until that time, I think you'll know when you get, you know, when you get there, it's like, you know, conferences are, are emailing you, Hey, could you come speak at our conference then at a certain, you know, like, well, how do I decide if I should say yes or not?Blair (32:40): Here's a, here's a bit, it's more than a line, but it's, most of it comes from Dan Sullivan, founder of strategic coach. And some of it comes from somewhere else. It might be Derek Sivers, but I forget where I cobbled it together from two different sources. There are two levels of success in business. The first level you get there through what you're talking about, hard work and saying yes to everything. So those are the two tools that you use to get to the first level of success. Hard work, you work your off and you say yes to everything that comes your way. And I say that to my kids. It's like at your age, just say yes to everything, work your off. Outwork. People say yes to everything, but the second level of success, there are different tools. And you have to down the first tools and the longer you've been at the first level of success, the harder it is to put those tools down.Blair (33:30): So you have to put down effort and staying yes to everything, and you have to replace them with risk and saying no to everything, almost everything, Warren Buffett's quote. So right. At some point, your, your income, you want it to be detached from effort. And so you want to look for well, fundamentally it's it's risk. It's like, where do we take some? And there are different types of risks, but Peter Drucker said in business, all profit is derived from risk. And then the idea of saying no to everything, that's the Derek Sivers point of like, hell yeah. Or no.Jonathan (34:06): Yeah. Yep. Yeah. And, and Steve jobs about good design. It's like, you have to say no to a million things. So I w what about risk? Wasn't the, probably isn't the word I would have chosen there. I would have chosen leverage, but I suppose creating leverage is a risk because it it's it's an investment in your future and it might not work, but it also reminds me of the, the main subject here, which is strategy. A lot of people when I'm working with coaching students, and they'll say like, well, what should my strategy, like were considering a couple of different strategies let's say to achieve this objective there, you know, one to three year business goals or whatever, whatever they want to do, whatever impact they want to have. And, you know, there's different strategies, different ways to approach it. And they'll say, well, which one should I do?Jonathan (34:50): Like, what they're really asking is which one's definitely gonna work. And that's what they want to know now. They're like, well, any of them could work in any of them could not work. You just, at certain point, it's a leap of faith. It might not work if it's definitely gonna work. First of all, that doesn't exist. Or if it does exist, that's not strategy. Or the objective is too easily achievable for it to be interesting. So I suppose if there's something there's something that happens with a strategy that, that I think a lot of almost like prevents it from sinking in to someone's mind. Like they could be listening to this and being like, I'm not getting it. I'm not getting, I'm not getting it. And sometimes the resistance to that absorption is that they can't imagine a Bulletproof it's like, cause that doesn't exist. Like if your objective is, especially if it's a competitive, if especially if it's like a zero sum competitive, we win, you lose type of situation. There's not a guaranteed way. It's a re it's the risk that you're talking about. It's like, you need to take this risk. You bet that this is the right strategy. And maybe it won't work. You know? So I don't know if that, I'm not sure how those things tie in, but it feels,Blair (36:03): Yeah. Well, when you're talking about business owners and you, you get into these conversations, you realize some people have started their own business and there would be better off as employees. They don't have the appetite for risk. So you can take what I said, which is risk and saying, no, you can substitute the word. I think you can subject to the word innovation for risk. And to me, I haven't, I've thought about this just not super deeply, but to me, innovation is this combination of creativity. So the ability to see an opportunity, you can see something and some people just suffer from lack of good ideas, not very many, but some do. So I see the opportunity and then risk. I'm willing to leap. And those two things combined to me, that's a pretty good those are the ingredients of innovation. So I think you can think about it that way, but there is no innovation without risk and there is no innovation without waste.Blair (37:00): Exactly. So this idea that somebody is looking for a Bulletproof strategy, it's that they want a guarantee. I remember back to Dan Sullivan, founder of strategic coach. I was in that coaching program for three years and we were doing so once a quarter, you meet with 40 entrepreneurs for a day. You're discussing all these things and they have frameworks. And one day we were doing an exercise around risk. And I had this realization that, Oh, as an entrepreneur, I had the sense, I was still kind of early. I felt myself as early in my entrepreneurial journey. And I had the sense that, okay, I'm taking a bunch of risks now, but at some point the risk goes away. Then I had this realization that no, I'm all in all the time. Right. For the rest of my life. Yeah. And I was immediately horrified like, okay, at what point do you lie down?Blair (37:55): And when do we get to rest on my laurels? When you pick the fruits of your labor? Not that you don't when you're yeah. When do you get to rest on your lawyer, lawyer, laurels, and just have the money flowing without you like constantly living three to five years in the future and making decisions about where out there. And I realized I two realizations back to back. And the first one I was horrified, I realized never, you never get to do this as an entrepreneur. And that lasted, I brought that up and we talked about it and that lasted about two or three minutes. And I realized the second realization was I would have it no other way. Right.Jonathan (38:33): Exactly. That's how I get it. IfBlair (38:36): You're, if you don't have that appetite for risk, if you're not willing to be all in, in that way where your fate is in your own control, get a job.Jonathan (38:45): Yeah. Right. I mean your, your post no exit, I think it's called. Yeah. Yeah. That I had a F I mean, this is off topic, but I had when I read that I was like cheering. I'm like, yeah, exactly. I think your line was like, I'm gonna die with my boots on. And I was like, yeah, why would I retire my life rules?Blair (39:05): Like never retire.Jonathan (39:06): No, never not gonna, not gonna do it. The, and, and I dunno, I suppose it's off topic. I would love, I would love to have a long chat about that. But that sort of like the idea of just the whole notion of, you know, working until I'm 60 or whatever, and then retiring to a hammock. Like, I don't know. I like what I do. It's I dunno. I just dig it. Like, why would I want to stop?Blair (39:34): We're not wearing out our bodies here at Jonathan typists.Jonathan (39:38): Yeah. I just write all the time. I love it. So I did have one, one counter-argument to that. I spoke with a guy named John Warrillow. He's been on the podcast a fewBlair (39:47): Times. I'm a big fan of his books. Yeah. Yeah.Jonathan (39:50): And so he, he convinced me he injected a thought into my head that I had never had before. And he was like, cause, cause we were on the, he was on the podcast and I was, the interview was about built a cell and creating products and services and, and that sort of thing. And he was like, he was like, the things he's all about like selling the best, valuing the business, creating more value in the business and then selling it and, you know, keep on doing that. And I was like, well, that's not, I'm never going to do that. But everything that you're describing increase, like anything that would increase the value for a buyer is going to increase the value for the owners. So it's still valid advice. And then he was like, well, you know, you could get, he was like two things could happen.Jonathan (40:33): That would change your mind about that. And I was like, Oh yeah. What health and something even bigger, like you want to do something even bigger. Yeah. So he was like, so if you, if something like that happened and that could happen, like I could see that happening where it's not that I would stop working, but I might want to pivot into something that's a higher level or something like that. Cause like at that point, are you just going to let your old business die? Would you rather sell it? And I was like, well, I would, I wouldn't want it to die. Which would mean someone would have to buy it. So it was like, Oh, okay. That broaden my,Blair (41:05): And I'll add two more considerations. So I have a friend who founded a consulting firm and he brought along the next gen. He was, he saw it as his responsibility as CEO should to bring on the next generation of kind of leadership. And he mentored these young people. And at some point they came to him and said, we want to buy the firm. And he realized he had an obligation to sell it to them. And I, I'm not sure that I would have felt the obligation, but I understood his of obligation. And so he sold it to them and went to do something else. So I can see that. And I can also see, like in my own business, I think of what we're trying to accomplish at win without pitching, which is to change the way creative services are bought and sold the world over.Blair (41:49): I can see at some point some somebody coming to me and saying, Blair, sell me the business. Let us bring to you the scale that you don't currently have. But you can continue to be involved doing the things that you love to do. I don't need to run a training company. So if at some point in the future, somebody came to me and said, no, look, we can help you with the, with the objective, like a bigger impact around the world. And we can take away from you all the things that there may be some days, maybe some days you don't and you can just continue to create content like Seth Goden just did this with a Kimbo. And if you listen to his podcast, I had to back it up and listen to it over again. And I thought, that's the smoothest. I've never heard anybody ever deliver the fact that they had just sold the company and where you almost didn't hear it.Blair (42:45): And clearly he is continuing to develop curriculum and content. He's just not running a training organization. So to me, I can see that too. So while it's a great mission and I never sell never retire, absolutely never retiring. Yeah. But even Michael Gerber and the E-Myth E-Myth he says, build and run your business. Like you're going to franchise it, even though you never will. What he means by that is put all the systems and processes in place. Yeah. And I think for any product ties service business, it makes sense that you build it for potential future sale. But my audience of creative and marketing firms, 90 greater than 95% of them are customized services, businesses that don't easily sell. In fact, my friend and podcast, co-host David C. Baker says the odds of selling a firm like that are one in 400. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a lot of nuance there, but I appreciate that postJonathan (43:49): Well, to bring it back to the strategy subject is all of the, we're talking about a lot of decisions and like worldviews and missions and, and our vision for whatever, like the impact that we want to have as all of those, like a million little decisions and tactics and possibilities and all of those things like it's, it gets overwhelming in absence of a strategy. If you have a strategy and you've got the discipline to stick to it, then a lot of these things sort of a lot of like like a majority of them probably will just evaporate. Cause they'll just be like, Oh, that's, that's a distraction. Those are just distractions. And, and people are good at filtering out distractions. We're constantly bombarded with the problem is when some of them don't seem like distractions, but as soon as you know, that this stuff is a distraction, you can shut it out pretty easily.Jonathan (44:38): But I wanted to loop back to something you mentioned earlier, which was the term strategic planning and, and point people to a resource it's a book called good strategy, bad strategy by Richard Rumelt, which is largely the source of what I use as a definition of strategy. It's a little bit bastardized, but you know, the thing about surprise, I think that comes from him and, and it's, I think it's really, really good, but strategic planning is like, I mean, I think Ellen white says strategic planning is an oxymoron. You know, it's like it's yes. Plans will come out of a strategy, but, but acting like acting like your strategy is a plan is, is what room out would call bad strategy? That's bad strategy. That's like,Blair (45:26): Well, I love that. I can, if I hear those two words together, I just rolled my eyes. My reaction is you don't know what you're talking about. And I, and that's, that's just like a guttural reaction. That is, that is not a highly thought through thing, but I love what you just said. You know, how about you just come up with a strategy that you can articulate in a sentence, and then from that we can do some planning and let's keep these two things separate from each other. Right,Jonathan (45:58): Right. Yeah. There's another thing that he talks about. I think it's, I think it's the same book, but another kind of bad strategy is, is is one that has no risk to bring, to bring up risk again. So like, like our strategy is going to be to have the world's best customer service. It's like, well,Blair (46:16): That's like, that's a dream or goal.Jonathan (46:19): Yeah. And it's, and it's like, and it's not there's no surprise. It's not risky. Anybody else would probably like, you know, no end of other companies might say the exact same thing. It's not, it's not an application of a strength against a weakness in a surprising way. It's, it's like a duh, you know, like that's, that's like table stakes for running a business,Blair (46:42): But could you turn that? Like if we took that one as a case study, could we, could we turn that into a strategy or infer a strategy from it? LikeJonathan (46:51): Maybe, maybe a market, maybe a marketplace that is aggressively anti customer service. Yeah. So if there's, if there's like, you know, like there's a sandwich shop near my house, that is like, well, it's like it's like the staff is like incredibly rude, like comically rude on purpose. And that's like, just part of the shtick. If every restaurant was like that, and then you were like, Oh, okay, we're going to are different. We're going to be the nice ones. So like there there's strategy, it's not a strategy. It's just a stick that they do. But, but we are going to here would be a strategy. We're going to have the worst customer service in the industry. Right. I'm not sure how that would help you, but that would be surprising. And it would certainly if for some reason that allowed you to cut your price by 10 X of what everyone else was charging, that might be interesting. So yeah, I could S I could see that happening. Like maybe there's an industry where customer service is a Bismal and that's like a, a strategic advantage or or maybe you, you flip it and say, we're going to have the worst customer service, or like, we're gonna have the worst. We want to have the worst Yelp reviews on the internet, something like that.Blair (47:58): What do you back to this word planning, what do you think listeners of this podcast should do with this information of this definition? These definitions of strategies and, yeah.Jonathan (48:09): I mean, everything starts with an objective. If you don't know what your objective is, you're dead in the water. If you're just like, if your objective is to like, pay the mortgage next month, like think a little bit bigger picture in that, have an objective, like, what's your mission or vision or purpose or impact that you're trying to make your big idea come up with something that is usually it's most helpful if it's other focused and not if it's outward, focused, not inward focused like your bank account numbers or something like that. It's not very, it goes like that. Aren't very instructive. It doesn't, it's like, Oh, you want to have a million dollars. But like, it doesn't really tell me anything. It rules out a lot of businesses, but it doesn't tell me it doesn't give me any direction as someone who is trying to coach you.Jonathan (48:48): So I would say, come up with, if you can, some sort of impact goal that is outwardly focused, focused, like an impact that you want to make let's. And if, if you have an easy answer to that, consider yourself lucky because most people don't. But if you could come up with some kind of objective and then S and then make a list of five, three to five possible, mutually exclusive strategies that are one sentence long that are all different high-level approaches to potentially achieving that objective and notice just, and then just like try on each of the different strategies. Like it's a suit. So just try on this strategy, what would the tactics be? If that was going to be my strategy, what are my blind spots? What would I have to get help with? What team members would I need to bring in and then try on the next strategy? What would that look like? What would that implementation look like? What would the action plan be for this strategy? Then go through it with all three to five of these different potential strategies. And I think it'll, it'll internalize how different tactics and strategy are and how they go hand in hand and how the having one strategy versus another strategy gives you this litmus test for, for distinguishing real opportunities from distractions.Blair (50:10): I know we've been at this almost an hour. No, we still haven't talked about too much about positioning versus strategy add, and maybe this is the topic of a future discussion. Where does the strategy and the business model begin? And I think of Alex Osterwalder's work, business model, canvas what's the relationship between strategy and the business model? ThatJonathan (50:40): Is a great question. I personally, I spend most of my time thinking about a specific business model, so I don't have a lot of, I don't have a lot of broad experience with like, like wide ranging types of businesses. Almost everybody I work with is it's like an expertise based business. It's usually one person or a small firm. So I, I would defer any, any information you have on that would be super interesting to me cause I, I kind of solved that problem by only working with one kind of business model. And I don't like the scaling with employees or like a contingency type model or marketplace models. I don't mess with any of that stuff.Blair (51:21): Yeah. And it's interesting when you, I looked into this recently in preparation of a podcast that David Baker and I did, and I'm not even sure if we'd got into it, but as part of the research there, isn't just like strategy there. Isn't kind of a universal agreed upon definition of what a business model is, but these things positioning how you position your brand. So Trenton Reese's book from, I think it was 81 positioning the battle for your mind. How do you, how do you place your brand in the mind of your customer relative to your competitors? That's positioning? So to me, positioning is when it comes to positioning a professional firm that is fundamental business strategy. It's the expression of like, what do we want them to think basically about us relative to these others? And then okay, what are the things that we need to do for us to be thought of that way? So that's tied to positioning, positioning, and strategy are related as, as business model as is our tactics and planning. Totally.Jonathan (52:29): Yeah. I agree. I think, I think positioning is always strategic, but I don't think a strategy is always positioning.Blair (52:37): Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, that's some pretty good progressJonathan (52:46): Now, now, now I'm like, I need to research business models, moreBlair (52:50): Antics episode. Exactly.Jonathan (52:54): Is there anything else we should tackle before we wrap up? I know you've sounds like you've already had a busy day, so you're probably looking forward to lunch or something like that.Blair (53:02): Well, I have to go get in that cold, like, and I'm swimming in the ice cold water,Jonathan (53:09): Better, better you than me and my friend.Blair (53:11): Right? Well, no, I think this is I suspect that the conversation will continue on Twitter and then maybe we'll reconvene again, either here or in some other forum to share what we've both kind of learned since today on the key subject of strategy and the related ones. I'll just throw out one last idea, but just one last thought read a book that has strategy and the title and my experience is the chances less than 50% that the author will offer an a definition of strategy, probably training, master strategy, and the fat smoker read that multiple times does not define strategy. There are lots of books on strategy that don't define it. Yeah. I believe that's true. It's something that as we, we it's like pornography, we know it when we see it.Jonathan (54:10): Yeah. It feels like there's a lot of snake oil out there to be honest, roommates is by far the best book I've ever read on it. It's okay.Blair (54:17): Familiar with it. I've heard it over the years. I've never read it. So when I get back to when my appetite for reading both strategy returns will be at the top of my pile.Jonathan (54:27): Yeah. Great. Well, thanks so much for joining me and the listeners today. Where should people go to find out more about all things BlairBlair (54:36): Win without pitching.com and I'm at Blair ends on the usual business, social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, and now clubhouse, I guessJonathan (54:46): I just signed up.Blair (54:48): See, by the time this goes to air, clubhouse will beJonathan (54:51): Probably gone. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I, so talk about opportunity, distraction. So many people were like, you got to get on this, you got to get on this Blair and Chris are on it. You got to get on it. I was like, Oh, I'll go squat on my username, but I don't know. Anyway, we'll see. Maybe it'll be the next YouTube. I do. Like I do like audio as a format. SoBlair (55:13): While you have the voice for audio,Jonathan (55:15): I've got a face for it. I didn't say that. All right. Well, let's see folks, I guess that'll be it for this time. Maybe we can have Blair back again in the future. Let us know what you think is your favorite definition of strategy on Twitter. So Blair already shared his mine is at Jonathan Stark, of course. And we'll just see you next time. That's it for this time. I'm Jonathan Stark and this is ditching hourly. Bye.

Philip Morgan - Specialization Is Never Boring

Specialization guru Philip Morgan joins me to talk about when to niche down and what to do about the fear of doing so.LINKS philipmorganconsulting.com positioningcrashcourse.com TRANSCRIPTJonathan (00:00):Hello, and welcome to ditching hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today. I am joined by special guest, very special guest and old friend, Phillip Morgan, Phillip, welcome to the show.Philip (00:09):Great to be here, Jonathan. ThanksJonathan (00:11):For having me. So for folks who maybe haven't heard your name before, could you give us a quick 32nd name, rank and serial number?Philip (00:19):All right. Start the timer. My name's Philip Morgan. I help independent consultants thrive. I've arrived at this weird made up job for myself, starting with an interest in how specialization is the beachhead that provides this really outsized advantage. And I've ended up becoming generally interested in how sort of indie experts, you know, folks like yourself, Jonathan me, to an extent like how do we cultivate expertise and turn that into economic output. Hmm.Jonathan (00:51):Awesome. Love it. Yeah, totally aligned. Of course. So the, the sort of impetus for this particular interview was an email you sent out to your list with a subject line perpetually fascinating specialization. And you know, I guess someone sent this question into you.Philip (01:10):Yeah. When folks opt into my email list, I just redirect them immediately to a survey that says, Hey, you know, what's on your mind. What sort of questions do you have? It's totally optional whether they fill it out, but this question came in through that channel.Jonathan (01:23):Gotcha. Cool. And the question was, how do I discover the area of specialization that is both perpetually fascinating to me and valuable to the market? An age old question. Yeah. That's what we all want. Yeah. We, I get this all the time where people, you know, I, I talk about it in the context of positioning and, and, you know, becoming the go-to person for a particular something, you know, and, and it's, you're kind of like with, with me as a solo person or people that work with me who are solo, you're kind of dead in the water. If you don't have some kind of differentiator, because if you're just presenting yourself to the market as a, just another one of these things, you know, coder, developer designer, then you're not meaningfully different from anyone. Then you're going to have really powerful, downward pressure on your prices.Jonathan (02:16):No leverage in the negotiation. It's, this is a terrible place to be. It's much better to be the one and only of something instead of just one of many. And it just has a dramatic effect on the prices that you can charge. And also the impact that you can have, all of your marketing suddenly starts to work. Imagine that so, you know, we're super aligned on this, but the thing, the pushback that this reminds me of is that people have the fear as you coined it many years ago about specializing and, and there's a bunch of different ones, but a bunch of different fears of sort of three or four different fears it'll crop up. And, but this one comes up all the time where say to me I, I totally buy in on the idea of positioning and I understand why that would be good for me, but which position or which specialization, or they're not the same thing, but which focus do I pick? Like how do I pick the thing?Philip (03:15):Yeah. And it's, I mean, it really kind of gets to the heart of, I think, what is intimidating and scary and mysterious about this decision? It's a decision is maybe the first thing we should point out. Like we could, I could make 10 specialization decisions in the next minute. If I wanted to, the decision is free. It costs almost nothing, right? Like I could say, well, I want to specialize in actually the person who asked this question went on to say, I could specialize in underwater basket weaving, but I would not want to sink a lot of time and effort into marketing that unless I have some confidence that there's a market for it. So there's a lot going on there. But the first thing we should point out is like the decision costs, nothing. I think what people are worried about is the potential negative cost of the decision of like, Oh, I made the wrong decision or I made this decision and it looked great on paper and then it didn't pan out.Philip (04:22):So that's one thing I think we should talk about more today. And then the, there's another really, almost headline level aspect to this question, which is the question is saying, I want this to be perpetually fascinating. Yeah. And you know, when these questions come in through this form that I send people to, I don't have all the context. Right. So I feel a little, it feels a little risky to assume too much, but I just don't feel like anyone would use the word perpetually by accident, you know, like that's, that's associated with things like tombstones and, you know, big structures then, you know, in perpetual living memory of so-and-so it's, it's just not a word you toss around casually. So I assume that this person really was looking for a way of specializing. That would for them be always interesting.Jonathan (05:17):Yeah. Never boring. Yeah. Right. Yeah. There's the afraid they're going to get bored.Philip (05:21):Right. The answer is it doesn't exist. Like that's, that's the simple one sentence answer that that specialization does not exist for anybody. Yeah.Jonathan (05:31):It's kind of like, it's kind of like an oxymoron. Like if you're actually specializing it almost can't get boring.Philip (05:38):That's the thing is I I'd be curious about your experience with pricing. It probably like your specialization Jonathan in pricing, because I don't think it'll quite fit the pattern, but if there is a pattern, I think you could say you do need to be prepared for things to temporarily get and I'm pausing on purpose because I'm not sure boring is the right word. Maybe simpler, maybe less chaotic. And then after you get through a phase of that, things will get way more interesting.Jonathan (06:16):Yep. Yeah. It's like S-curves and you keep breaking through, so you go up, you go up the learning curve that you're on and you get to the top and you're like, Oh, I guess, okay. I guess I look right. And then you're like, Whoa, new door opens. Right. And it's, I mean, the S-curve thing is generally in an ascending, you know, learning curve going up. And, you know, if you imagine an S curve, it's sort of like as a steep incline at the beginning, and then it tapers off it plateaus and then it another steep learning curve and then it plateaus. But really there's a reverse metaphor of, you're just going deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole and finding new caverns to explore. Yeah.Philip (06:55):I, I have this sort of mental model of the human skin, this grosses some people out, which makes it even more fun for me to use. But you know, when you specialize, it's like you're getting a hypodermic needle so that you can Pierce the outer layer of the skin, the epidermis, it's mostly dead skin cells. It's very thin. There's not much going on there. There's something there, but you have to get through it to get to the good stuff, which is the dermis and the hypodermis of the skin. I thought, you know, when I first laid hold of some of these ideas about specialization and started exploring them and I was like, Oh, I'm an expert after six months in this. But that was the epidermis that was, you know, the thin dead layer where everything is kind of over simplified. And there's not a lot of nuance.Philip (07:48):And I think anyone who's gone deep into a topic can look back on those early days and maybe they look back on them wistfully and say, well, things got really way more complicated. Once I under really understood what was going on in this domain that I'm focused on, or maybe you like me feel a little bit embarrassed about the kind of advice you were giving then where it was. It was oversimplified. Once you get to the deeper layers of expertise, you start to things get really interesting because you have to learn more from adjacent topics and sort of synthesize a kind of custom medicine that, that you apply to your problem. So let's pick on you, Jonathan, like you're, you're focused on pricing. If you were to just off the top of your head list, two topics that are not explicitly pricing topics that you have to know something about in order to help people with pricing. Oh yeah. What does that list look like? Just name a few,Jonathan (08:49):Top three are positioning is number one. It's the foundation of everything publishing. So that it's broadly speaking that would be speaking at conferences writing books, daily, email podcasting, and the third one is pricing itself. So that would be the, the different ways to price, but you can't do a good job with, with, without all three of those things. So in underneath, underneath each one of those top level topics, there are dozens and dozens of, of considerations. I mean, I teach entire courses on subtopics of one of these top topics. So yeah, it's just endless.Philip (09:28):Yeah. I mean, just to drill into the positioning thing, there's like psychology of, because you're not you and I are both working largely with individuals, solar preneurs. Yeah. So their psychology has this outsized impact on, on their ability to implement. You could give them 10 good decisions. And if it's me, I'll screw up eight of them because I don't have the psychology to implement those 10 good ideas. So there's psychology, there's risk profile. Like how do you respond to risk? There's you know, like in the publishing world, how good do you look on camera? Like your eyes dart around and you look like you're nervous and your skin's a little sweaty and maybe you should choose audio. Like there's all these things that you and I have both had to get up to speed on in order to give advice. That's not over simplified. And I think that maps to almost anybody who has specialized, they get past that outer layer of the, of the expertise. And then they there's this whole world of it's not chasing shiny objects. It's finding the missing pieces so that you can deliver a solution.Jonathan (10:38):Yeah. That's a great way to put it. Yes. That's exactly how it feels to me too. You're looking at you like, cause you know, when you're, when you're coaching people, you've got this real-time laboratory with instant feedback, you know? So you, you can, it's one thing to have all these ideas and like you said, early on, I knew what worked for me and I knew it was, I trusted that it was going to work for me. You know, this process of specialization in my, in what I was focused on when I went solo, right. I was highly confident was going to work because I was copying my ex boss, who I just ran his playbook. It worked for him. And then I did it and it worked for me, but it was, that's kind of like saying, like I stole this car and I knew how to drive it, but I didn't know what was going on under the hood.Jonathan (11:24):I didn't know why it worked. Right. So, you know, I could tell people, look, you need to be, I didn't even, I don't even think I was using the word positioning back then. It was like, you need to become the go-to person for something. At the time, years ago, when I first started coaching people, I was like, just, you know, this exact topic, just pick something. It doesn't matter. Just pick something and be like, but what, anything, what are you most interested in? And then you come to find out that they can't do it. Like they cannot make themselves do so then opens up a whole rabbit hole of me being like, all right, let me lift up the hood on this car and see what's going on in here. Right. And you know, just like a bottomless, well of fun, new things to learn too, to help you be more effective at helping other people get over these hurdles.Philip (12:07):One of the complications that gets introduced then is you have this this decision that you've made, okay, I'm gonna help people with pricing, right? And now, you know, all this really cool stuff, it wasn't shiny object. It wasn't the pursuit of shiny objects. It was the pursuit of the components for a complete solution where you reduce the failure rate of your work. And you're, you're just, you're effective more frequently because you know, you have all these pieces that you can bring to bear on this problem. That's that seems simple at first. And now you realize, Oh, there's a whole engine under here. Eight cylinder internal combustion engine. Anyway. how much of that do you start exposing to people? That's one of the complications that comes up in that middle layer. But you haven't really, you have not to be clear, really changed the specialization and now, and you've, you've got this whole Vista of stuff to learn about and it's exciting because it makes you better at what you do. It's not, it's not like a distraction. It's not a relief from boredom. It's, it's just a quest of something that works more robustly more effectively.Jonathan (13:21):Yeah. It's the relief of tension that has been created through failure. So, so like, it feels like hunting for puzzle pieces, but that's not the greatest metaphor because with a puzzle you can sort of see what's missing. Right. But with the, with what you're talking about, it's almost like you think in the early stage, you think the puzzle is done and then you find that there's a whole section that you missed and the like, and then that creates this tension or like a hunger or itch that you need to scratch. So it's yeah, like you said, it's not like, Oh, I'm bored. Let's learn how to do Kubernetes today. You know, for no reason, just because it's people are talking about it. You're like, what's that, it's, it's very different from that. It's more like it feels much more urgent and there's almost never a question about where to find the piece. It's more like, okay, I see this hole where, how do I fill that hole? It's very directed.Philip (14:14):Yeah. It's, it's innovate. It's innovation work. It's invention. Exactly. But you don't get to do it unless you get through the outer layer. That's the thing is at the outer layer you think, Oh, just, you know, raise your prices, negotiate on value. You know, you have these ideas that are true, but they're simplistic versions of the real thing. Right. But so you don't really know what all that innovation work is going to look like when you're in this early phase of specialization. So I'm really sympathetic to folks who are like, this is a difficult, because I don't know. It's sort of like if you, I guess if you have kids and you're trying to help them learn a form of discipline and you can see all the ways it's gonna pay off later in their life to have this discipline, whatever it is. But they can't.Philip (15:09):And they're like, just why it's a little bit like that, I suppose. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's that quality of like, you don't know what's underneath the skin, the surface layer of the skin. And so you're, you're trying to make this decision about specialization without that knowledge and the thing is, you can't know, you just have to trust yourself, all the, the research skills, all the skills that you've built up this far in your life. You'll get to use them as a, to assemble that complete solution and you'll build new skills as well, but you just don't know exactly what that's gonna look like. The other thing that I think is worth pointing out is something that you mentioned choose anything, just choose anything, just start you were I think it's fair to say giving that advice because you just wanted to help people get over an obstacle. But it was kind of a blunt instrument, right? LikeJonathan (16:09):T hat doesn't work. Yeah.Philip (16:12):There is. You're recognizing something that's true about specializing, which is you get a few years to figure it out as you're doing it. Nothing is set in stone at that early stage. This is less true with larger organizations where you've got a staff and you need to create alignment and you can't whip solve them around every six months with a different direction. But with just you, as a soloist, you can do that for a while. And the whip sawing is an extreme version of what might happen. This might be more like fine tuning. I like using the analogy of something you probably can't really do, which is get in a kayak on Lake Mead and kayak up to the face of the Hoover dam. They probably won't let you do that for a good reason, but along the way, there's some hazards. There's these intake towers that suck, I don't know, thousands of gallons of water a minute into the turbines that at, at Hoover dam.Philip (17:13):And it would be possible I suppose, to steer your kayak and went to the one of those intake towers. Again, reality is not as exciting. You probably wouldn't get sucked in. They have great so over them. But I like to use that analogy because it's really is what it's like. You would have to, to end up getting sucked into the, you know, the intake of the Hoover dam. You'd have to ignore so much information as you were kayaking towards your intended destination. You just would have to like close your eyes and have earplugs. And, and just blindly reality is not like that. Do you get what I'm saying? So, yeah,Jonathan (17:53):You'd almost have to be, you know, it would be, you'd have to have a, I don't want to use the word suicidal, but like, you'd be trying to create commit career suicide. You have to like try to do it, but people are afraid it's just accidentally going to happen. It's like they it's like, they're acting like they're walking on a tight rope between two skyscrapers and really it's on the ground.Philip (18:13):We must have something in our head that gives us this inaccurate model of how it works. Like it. I don't think it's some mass delusion. I think there's something about, I mean, I say, I say much less than half jokingly. This is not a face tattoo that you're getting on your face. When you decide to specialize, where if the tattoo artist is having an off day, you shouldn't have to live with that for the rest of your life. It's not like that at all, but there's something in us. Most of us that makes us think that it is. And I'm not quite sure what I haven't figured that out yet, but I have a hypothesis I'd love to hear it.Jonathan (18:49):I th S specializing, I think it has. I think it has everything to do with standing out from the crowd, which on an evolutionary timescale, that was an extremely risky thing to do. So you want to fit inPhilip (19:02):For the majority of Yardi ofJonathan (19:05):The time, the vast majority of the time that humans have been on the earth, a really bad thing to do would be to go off on your own. And, and it's, it always felt the comfort zone was, this is a Seth Goden ism, but the comfort zone and the safety zone were like the Venn diagram was one circle inside of another circle, completely inside. So like it was both safe and comfortable to stay with the crowd. But now these days, the safety zone is completely outside of the comfort zone. So the things that feel comfortable are not safe for at least in a business sense. If you don't stand apart from the crowd, you are just, you know, I already said, it's like, you're just one of many. So of course people are going to go for the cheapest one. You need to stand apart from all, you know, you need to do something different from everyone else, which feels like career suicide, right? So I suspect that there's a connection there between that sort of tribal mentality. That was her brain stuff. Cause that the reaction that you get, I'm sure you've had the same experience, but the reaction that I get from a non-trivial percentage of people who are facing the idea of focusing down niching down, or getting a more tighter specialization or positioning themselves very tightly, it is an irrational response to the suggestion and your, your rational level of,Philip (20:25):Yeah, it's helpful to remember that one of the just core fundamental problems that the internet poses is this oversupply of information. So, you know, earlier in our conversation, Jonathan, you were talking about the benefits, thank you, by the way, for selling this idea for me, the benefits of specializing, they go even further upstream than where started, which was, you know, all the sort of once you're talking to a perspective, client benefits, but even just earning the visibility needed to get inbound inquiries is dramatically easier when you've specialized, it doesn't happen automatically. It just starts to solve one of these big problems that we all face, which is the internet is, you know, a million fire hoses of information pointed at whoever wants to stand in front of it. So and increasingly that's all of us, all humans anyway. So Jonathan (21:23):How do you break through, how do you it's it's this it's funny because people do want inbound leads. People do want to S to to, to be differentiated. Like people don't mind that idea for some reason, they're okay with like, Oh yeah, I want to be differentiated. But when it, but they're under understood or their imagination of what's going to get them, there is usually like a complete miscalculation, you know, like the differentiation, the typical safe style differentiation with say a software developer that I'll be talking to, they'll say something like they'll point to their competitors and say that they're like, Oh, I'm better than Bob. I'm better than all of these guys, you know, these other guys and gals. And it's like, but the differentiators that they lean on are not meaningful to their ideal buyers. Like even, even though they haven't picked an ideal buyer, I'm positive that anybody who would be willing to, to pay Bob the developer a bunch of money is going to be someone who doesn't understand 99.9, 9% of what Bob does. He just understands the outcome that Bob can deliver this. So for Bob to be better than Alice at something is meaningless to the customer. So that the differentiate so that, so like, yeah, I'm, I'm different in some way that only I understand, or that is that even if I could explain it, my buyers wouldn't understand. Yeah.Philip (22:51):I think you know, a good sort of challenge for listeners would be like, if they hear you talking about that and say, well, what else, how else do you differentiate? You know, like I'm used to running a factory. And I like to brag about the efficiency of the conveyor belt. Right. right. Actually did visit a tile factory in Spain a few years ago. This was connected to work. My wife does. She runs a podcast for this big Spanish tile company. And they had actually a very, I mean, this stuff is interesting. I say this to make us not sound like out of touch jerks. We saw the conveyor belt that took the product from the manufacturing floor to a warehouse that was next door. And it was really cool. They had it on like a tourist three degree incline so that it would use less electricity. There is beautiful, really cool stuff that goes into that level of nuance. But the challenge for listeners, if they're saying, well, you know, what else, how else can you differentiate is I would say, ask yourself, how do I help my clients respond to, or initiate change in a way that it really helps the clients? And that might be an interesting sort of thought experiment that helps take you out of thinking about how many degrees of incliner on the conveyor belt, right?Jonathan (24:14):Yeah. I love that visual. So like just take that one step further and drive it home. If you were buying tile and it's set on the box, some information about the two degree incline on the conveyor belt, in the factory in Italy that is not going to cause you to want to spend more money on the tile. Like if, if you get the tile right next to it, that looks essentially the same to you. You don't see any meaningful difference. It's $5 cheaper per box. And the only difference between the two was delivered to two degree incline conveyor belt, right. You don't care, you don't carePhilip (24:50):Have the context to even understand what that means. Yeah, yeah.Jonathan (24:54):Yeah. So you're not going to pay more for it is the point.Philip (24:57):So yeah. Think, think about how you help your clients respond to or initiate change, because that kind of pulls you up to the level of the business and the profit and loss sheet. You're probably not comfortable there. That's fine. Starting to be sympathetic to those concerns, I think is, is a route out of that kind of Naval gazing, focus on your craft, which is important and beautiful. Not denying that, but you have to say, what does that, and what does that, that excellence of craft in service of, and if the answer really, really, really is, well, I don't know. I just want to be good at this craft. I don't really care about anything else. Then probably you can make that work as a career. It's just, you're going to face some limited.Jonathan (25:44):Yeah. Get a job, you get a job doing it, right. If you're running a business, you can't not do marketing. Like not doesn't doesn't happen. Like there's a reason. Every big company has a CMO. Like the executive suite has a marketer. Yeah. Pretty much. I, you know, if there's an exception, I don't know about it. And the, the other you might like this one where we have like, it's like Metta metaphor, volleyball here. The like, which I guess is a metaphor unto itself. But I was talking to the other day about the sort of navel gazing on the craft. And like you said, I love it. It's great. It's, it's a phase though. And it reminds me of, you know, I, a guitar player performing musician for years, it reminds me of the fees as a guitarist where you're like, you're in your bedroom and you're so new to it that you're like looking at your hands.Jonathan (26:32):You can't even play what you can't even look up. You're just staring at your left hand. And then you look at your right hand and you put the finger, you know, on this fret. And then you plug the string with your right hand. And eventually you get better at it and better at it, better at it. And you know, maybe someday in this progression, you'll be on stage in front of a group of people, but you still might be looking down at your guitar, thinking about your craft instead of looking up and caring about how the audience is reacting to your performance. That's a huge leap. It's a huge leap. When you finally look up and start to at least empathize with the audience, like you said, at least start to think, even if you don't understand, you know, the balance sheet stuff recognize that that's a major concern of the people who are hiring you. And so, you know, I usually talk about, you know, like what's the transformation, what's the transformation that they want you to contribute to? You know, which is basically another way to say what you said already, which is like, what is the change, right?Philip (27:30):That, that can become a sort of magnetic force that takes you to the deepest level of expertise, the hypodermis of expertise to use our skin analogy. And I, you know, I like to say that that's where context goes, supernova. You start to care about the broader context that your work exists in. Hopefully you have, I'm describing this as a linear progression. It's not quite so linear in reality, but hopefully you have a solution that works better than that superficial version did. And then you start to think about context, like, huh? Why does this person in this job role always seem like they resist this kind of change? It's not some, it's not arbitrary. It's not dumb. You're starting to recognize a pattern. That's a by-product of the context that you're working in. And then you realize, Oh, I mean, maybe it's not something so exotic.Philip (28:27):And you're just like, well, their salary depends on them resisting this change. Like it's not going to go well for them. If they do anything other than resistant, it might be something simple. But you start to think about and care about and sort of interact with the larger context that you work with them. And I think that's maybe one of the main things that's going on at the deepest level of expertise. And, you know, if you think about yourself as a performer, trying to connect with an audience that that idea that you could move, the audience kind of becomes a motivating factor.Jonathan (28:59):Sure. Yeah. It's, it's a related but different. Is it a different skill? It kind of is so like the, for any developers listening to this, when, when a developer goes through software developer goes through this phase, it's right around the time when they stop feeling any desire to learn new frameworks, new frameworks come out all the time. And there's always some new shiny hotness. And at a certain point you can tell like when you start to feel the fatigue and it doesn't seem like fun to learn the new, whatever the new flavor of the week, it seems like a, just a hamster wheel. Yeah. I I've, I think that's a fork in the road. That's an opportunity for you to either Chuck it all and go be a garbage man or say like, well, wait a second. How can I, how can I with the tools that I have?Jonathan (29:51):How can I have a bigger impact on the people who are hiring me? So it's, that's the point where you start to think about your craft last you've mastered not the entire Corpus of like software development knowledge. And I doubt anyone because I'm sure no one could sure. Just changes too fast, but at a certain point, you're really, really, you have mastered the tools that you've chosen. And, and you're not, you're a little bit less, I don't want to say bored, but yeah, it's a little bit like bored and you're kind of bored with the tools that you have, but you're amazing at them. And then this new hotness comes out and it's like, do I really want to learn? Do I really want to go all the way back down the learning curve and in like, what's that even going to do for me if I do.Jonathan (30:34):And that's the fork in the road where you can either say, forget it, I'm going to just change careers or I'm going to go in-house and just do, I'm just going to do what I do now until nobody needs it anymore, you know? Or you can start to focus on the audience, you know, and be like, like, Oh, well and, and what that looks like is talking to them and learning things like, well, why did you, you know, reaching back out to an old client, remember that project? We did, you know, why did you even want to do that? You know, like what, what was the benefit? And I, I have the exercise that I had people do. The actionable thing that people can do is reach back out to their clients, say, Hey, I'm updating my website. Could you, you know, could you give me a testimonial for the project that we worked on together?Jonathan (31:19):And here's six questions if they say yes, here are six questions that you could answer and they'll give you a results-based testimonial. And the, the thing about that exercise is it, because the thing, the thing about that exercise is that articulates to the, the software developer, like my student, it articulates to them, their client articulates to them, the value. And it, it has nothing to do with elegant code. It has nothing to do with like, like your mastery of your skill, nothing. It's always really high level stuff. Like it transformed our business. Oh, how well are our conversion rate doubled or are our workflow so smooth that we were able to scale to other regions is really high-level business stuff, you know? And, and it opens the person's eyes to like, Oh, wow. The whole time. You know, I just felt like I was writing amazing code.Jonathan (32:13):But really what I was doing was creating this transformation, you know, and yeah, it's this it's that this is that point when you're kind of bored of what you do or you feel like you've, you've, you have the sense of mastery. It might not be boring. You might still like it. But but you're, you're turned off by the idea of constantly learning a new framework. And then you can, that is the point where you say to yourself, huh? Maybe I should focus. Maybe I should focus on the audience like Bruce, Springsteen's a guitar player and a mediocre singer, but he is so focused on the audience that he creates an amazing experience using this sort of limited tool set that he has. I mean, he's, he's a great musician, but you know, he's, he's a great performer. He's not a virtuoso on the instrument, but he doesn't need to be because he knows how to connect with the audience and get them what they want. That's a great, yeah.Philip (33:00):Example. I have always enjoyed the NPR tiny desk concert series, which you can find on YouTube pretty easily, at least here in the United States. So they've during the pandemic have been inviting artists to, you know, record something at home or in some local venue and, and send it in. And the difference is so interesting. I think it speaks to what you're just talking about Jonathan too, to look at. It's not, I mean, sometimes it's the same artist that has performed physically there at their, I dunno, Washington DC or New York or wherever, wherever those are recorded with a small audience there and then recording usually where the audience is like the camera dude, right. Who's operating the camera. It's palpable. And it really is a nice sort of artsy metaphor for what happens when you start thinking about the, the context where your work exists and how it can, how it did or did not have impact in that context. And then how it could have more impact if you change some things about how you approach it. So that's just a fun thing. Folks can do. It's not exactly a direct teaching instrument to look at some YouTube videos, but it's the same feelingJonathan (34:21):Really? Yeah. Yeah. When you're a performer, like what you're describing. It's nice to know that it is obvious to the audience. Because you know, it's like I used to play a, I literally gave myself carpal tunnel syndrome playing like 18 hours a day. I would like just eat, sleep and drink the guitar for a long time. And it was the same way when I first really got into coding professionally, it was just loved. I just loved the F the, the physicality of it. I just loved everything about it. But now I can't barely make myself play in my bedroom. You know? Like, what's the point? There's no, like, because I've gotten to that point where it's like, yeah, this, this is my set of tools. I'm not going to learn sacks at this point. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna start doing jazz fusion.Jonathan (35:06):I'm like Doby heavy metal, like rock guy. Yeah. So that, that's kind of, not that I couldn't branch out into something else, but it's just not interesting to me at this point. So what would make it interesting is an audience, honestly, and it's not interesting if there's no audience, so it's just like really boring. It's the same, it's the same with this stuff now, like when I do a solo podcast episode, I'm not talking to someone or it's not a webinar with like an audience I have, I was like, ah, I have to start over a hundred times. And it's just like no energy to it. Just like the, there's just no wind in the sail. If you're not connecting, even if you can't see the other people, if you know, they're there, there's like a different kind of energy and it's, it's it's, and it's scary, right? It's scary to look up from your fingers and start and see like a thousand pairs of eyes staring back at you. It's, that can be a lot of pressure, but that's the Mo that's the, you know, you need to muster up the courage to get to, I guess, get over that hump or whatever it is, and start to worry about their experience, the client experience.Philip (36:10):That's what I love about the kind of human beings who hire me to help with some part of this journey and maybe it's most human beings. I'd like to think that it is, you get to that point where bored, you, you are bored. And instead of it being a destructive thing, it's like a, it's a creative thing that leads you to say, what is, okay, I'm good at X, I've gotten past the superficial level with this, but what does it really for, like, for what purpose am I good at X? And one answer. It's not the only answer a one answer is, Oh, I could help a lot more people. If I, if I acquire some new skills, learn some new things, push, push into and beyond an area of discomfort. Wow. I could, it's not that you and I think are not trying to push people to build some kind of audience-based business when we use audience that word. I think folks should not take that too literally, but they, they, they could think of the group, the, the broader, larger group of people that they could benefit you know, their skills could benefit them. And, and that creates this growth that takes you deeper into expertise and into mastery, maybe the mastery of your skills doesn't increase. And it's a sort of a new learning. And that ultimately is why, when someone says, you know, I want to make one decision about an area of focus. That's going to be perpetuallyJonathan (37:39):Fascinating to bring it back, right? Yeah.Philip (37:42):I say, that's not going to happen, but something better will happen. And what, what that better looks like is you'll make a choice. You'll fine. Tune it in the early days. And then you'll find traction because you're listening, you're paying attention to what is happening in the market. And then that traction will take you deeper. You'll become dissatisfied with your simplistic skills. So you'll build this more complex sort of composite of multiple skills, and then you'll get bored again. And then you'll be like, what is this really for? Like, why am I doing this? And know, maybe you'll do the middle-aged man thing. If you're a middle-aged man and get a divorce and a sports car, but maybe instead you will go to that deepest level and you'll start electrifying your audience with something about your expertise. Right. That's what I love about you know, the work that I do. And I think that you do Jonathan is is that it, it, it gets people to these points of frustration and then gets, it, gets them through those points of frustration,Jonathan (38:48):Right? Yeah. It creates tension and release more music metaphor. Yeah. So what's the takeaway here? Are we trying to open people's eyes to those moments that are kind of like full of opportunity where they're kind of bored?Philip (39:03):Yeah. I mean, there's, there's an aspect of that. That probably is a great place to leave it. I mean, I'll, I'll probably undermine myself a little bit here by saying that the kind of system that surrounds where you specialize does seem to matter. I don't have like clear, easy ways of explaining it, but there are systems that are a little bit more open and if you specialize in those, something in the, in those systems, even if they are a platform, they'll probably be more interesting. And there's just more opportunity there.Jonathan (39:39):That's a great point. Yeah. Can I just pile on there?Philip (39:43):Yeah. And let me try to set you up for that. Like you, you specialized in mobile computing when you were doing a strategy consulting. Right. and th that strikes me as an open system, and I think that's why that specialization lasted for as long as it did for you before the system kind of got less open and, you know, the consolidated and the established players were pretty obvious. And anyway, maybe that's the thing to talk about.Jonathan (40:11):Yeah. So that's, yeah, that is perfect. So the previous, my previous specialization to the mobile consulting was was I was a FileMaker consultant and FileMaker is a really, really small closed system. It's powerful thing. If any FileMaker developers are listening, I'm not ragging on FileMaker, but there, there was a point in time where I'd been doing, doing it professionally for like maybe five years. It's just not that complicated a piece of software. And it really felt like months would go by and I wouldn't learn a new thing about it. And it was like, I was totally plateaued at, it was like, nobody knows everything about everything, but there was not a lot that I knew about that. There was not a lot that I didn't know about that software that mattered. Yeah. Right. And so it was a characteristic of closed systems. Yep. Yeah. Very closed system in the scheme of thingsPhilip (41:02):Controlled by one company, right?Jonathan (41:05):Yes. And you couldn't have much influence over it. It didn't change very frequently back then, especially it was very slow moving. You know, it was a shrink wrap software for crying out loud, so that, so then I, then I moved to the mobile consulting, which is a, a more open system, but not as open as what I'm doing now, which is pricing, which is essentially psychology, but which is way more, and I can feel the, I won't live long enough to exhaust the possibilities of exploring pricing. I think it's the most fascinating puzzle or focus that imaginable to me. So I, I absolutely love it, but I just wanted to give examples of like, you know, it's like a spectrum, you know, there's like this really close system, like FileMaker, you can, you can actually get to the edges of it in a few years and be like, huh, okay. I guess that's how that works. And then a bigger system, more players, more complex ecosystem, and then like a giant global like, like pricing touches all 7 billion plus people on the planet every day. Yeah. Yeah. It'sPhilip (42:18):Well, I mean, it's interesting because the hot take of an outsider about pricing might be like, Oh, that seems simple. You just charge more, right.Jonathan (42:27):The case closed.Philip (42:28):Whereas, you know, some even, even a relatively simple software platform platform like Salesforce or FileMaker, or, you know, name your, your sort of closed ish platformJonathan (42:41):G suite, it would takePhilip (42:43):A few years to master that maybe not Trello Trello. Anyway. if I think listeners get the point on the surface pricing seems simpler, but it's an open system and it's massive in scale. And as a heuristic that is almost always going to lead to a more interesting specialization. We might even say perpetually interesting.Jonathan (43:08):Yeah.Jonathan (43:09):Well, there you have it folks. Cool. Geez. I feel like we should do this more often. It's like I don't think we've talked in like over a year, at least. I know that pandemic, man.Philip (43:21):Yeah. This has been great. And I don't know if we have exhausted the listeners patients, but hopefully not. Hopefully this has been really interesting as interesting and hopefully as valuable.Jonathan (43:33):Oh, cool. Well, where can people find out more, maybe join your mailing listPhilip (43:38):Could go to Phillip Morgan consulting.com. There's one L in Philip. If they wanted to, they could go to positioning crash course.com and they could take an email course there that talks about some of this stuff. I'm going to be honest, that course is a little bit out of date. It needs to be updated, but it's a good starting point.Jonathan (43:56):All right, Phillip, thanks so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. And I think people are going to value it.Philip (44:01):Great. Being here with you, Jonathan.Jonathan (44:03):All right. That's it for this time. I'm Jonathan Stark and this is ditching hourly. Would you like to learn how to get paid? What you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? What about making more money without working more hours? We worked through all of this together in the pricing seminar registration starts soon. So head on over to the pricing seminar.com to add your name to the announcement list. That URL again is the pricing seminar.com. I hope to see you there.

Joel Pilger - Fostering a Community of Clients

RevThink honcho Joel Pilger joins me to talk about how and why to consider fostering a community of clients. Joel's BioJoel Pilger helps great creatives run great creative companies. As a RevThinker, Joel has advised hundreds of creative firms based in 23 countries around the world. He is the host of the RevThinking Podcast as well as the host of regular QOHORT retreats and dinners for creative entrepreneurs in New York, Los Angeles, and London.Related Links Joel's website Joel's previous appearance on Ditching Hourly RevThinking Podcast QOHORT

Emily Omier - Finding Clients On LinkedIn

Positioning consultant Emily Omier shares her secrets for finding clients on LinkedIn without being an annoying spammer. Emily's Links Emily's articles: The New Stack Emily's podcast: The Business of Cloud Native Emily's blog: Positioning Open Source Emily's LinkedIn Profile

John Warrillow - The Art of Selling Your Business

Best selling author John Warrillow joins me to talk about what to do when you want to sell a SaaS.Talking Points Why buyers might pay a much higher multiple than normal for a SaaS The pros and cons of annual vs monthly subscription models How to know when to sell your SaaS What to do before you sell your SaaS Business brokers vs M&A professionals What to say when a potential buyer asks, “If your SaaS is so great, why are you selling it?” How to avoid “golden handcuffs” if hanging around is not for you John’s BioJohn Warrillow is the founder of The Value Builder System™, a simple software for building the value of a company used by thousands of businesses worldwide. Offered by a global network of independent advisors known as Certified Value Builders, The Value Builder System™ incorporates several diagnostic tools, including the Value Builder Score. Those businesses that achieve a Value Builder Score of 90 or greater are worth double the average-performing business.His best-selling book Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You was recognized by both Fortune and Inc. as one of the best business books of 2011 and has been translated into 12 languages. John is the host of Built to Sell Radio, ranked by Forbes as one of the world's 10 best podcasts for business owners.In 2015, John wrote another best-selling book, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry. Prior to founding The Value Builder System, he started and exited four companies, including one acquired by a public company. He lives with his family in Toronto. You can follow John's work by signing up at BuiltToSell.com.Related Links: The Art of Selling Your Business by John Warrillow Built to Sell by John Warrillow John's website John's books John's first appearance on Ditching Hourly

Tripp Lanier - Getting Dangerous

Author, podcaster, and coach Tripp Lanier joins me to talk about how to feel more strong, free, and alive. Tripp's BioTripp Lanier is a professional coach, author of This Book Will Make You Dangerous, and host of The New Man Podcast: Beyond the Macho Jerk and the New Age Wimp which — for over a decade — has been downloaded millions of times.Tripp's LInks The New Man Podcast This Book Will Make You Dangerous Tripp's coaching website TranscriptJonathan Stark (00:00):Hello, and welcome to ditching hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I'm joined by special guest Tripp Lanier. Tripp! Welcome to the show.Tripp Lanier (00:07):Thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate the opportunity to talk.Jonathan Stark (00:10):I'm really excited about this. I absolutely loved your book and I want to talk all about that, but first, can you give the listeners a little bit of background on you, who you are, what you do, they might not have heard your name before or just in case they haven't?Tripp Lanier (00:22):Yeah well, most known these days as the host of the new man podcast, which has been publishing for over 13 years, we've had millions of downloads. We kind of started in the wild West days and but my main profession is I'm a coach and I work with primarily men, but forward-thinking men that are like, all right, I've done pretty well for myself, but is this really it, is it really just going to be about chasing money or measuring up or trying to prove something that I didn't get worked out in high school? And so these are guys that are wanting more meaning more alignment, not just in their work, but also in their personal lives and their relationships as well. So I do the work with those guys to really kind of break out of this mold and find the unique thing that that really is. They're like, okay, what am I really here to do or give or provide in my lifetime? And you know, confront the fears that get in the way there and then really start to implement that and then world, and in a way where you don't have to live in your car, my clients tend to do very well for themselves.Jonathan Stark (01:22):Yeah, there's so, so I didn't realize that the podcast had been going that long. I listened to a few episodes, but wow. That's amazing. Yeah. When did the book come out?Tripp Lanier (01:31):The book came out this past year. We're still in the promotion cycle for that. So it's, it's you know, with COVID and all of that kind of stuff, it's like, it's still fresh and brand new and a lot of people's minds.Jonathan Stark (01:41):Yeah, it's really good. I'm just going to go ahead, like right up front and say, folks should definitely read this book. It's it aligns with a lot of the things that listeners here are used to hearing me say particularly staying, getting away from the crowd, standing out from the crowd and not being just another, whatever you want to be. The one and only have something very specific and doing that feels really dangerous to people. It feels like they're taking a huge risk by doing something different and standing out. I suppose it's like an evolutionary thing where fitting in was the safety mechanism, but now it's like the polar opposite of what you'd actually want to do. So the book is the book is not only really useful, but it's hilarious. It's definitely dude oriented. Do, do you have, have you ever, has that caused a problem for you at all? I, I, I asked because one of the things that people tend not to want to do is niche down on any kind of subset. They want to be like a software developer. I can build software for anyone and everyone. And I think that's a bad thing. You obviously think that's a bad thing. Have you had any sort of backlash from focusing down primarily on men?Tripp Lanier (02:49):No. I mean, if you take a look at the world that I'm in and the personal growth, personal development realm, it's a field largely developed largely dominated by women. You know, this was, I mean, this was a field that Oprah really cultivated. And there, I remember being that person going to that section of the bookstore when we actually went to bookstores to buy books and it was like, there's nothing here for me. I'm a guy. And it's awesome that there's a lot of great books for women here, but there was nothing that spoke specifically for me. And so one of the main reasons why I wrote that book was I was like, okay, what's the book I wish I could have read 20 something years ago when I was starting to ask these deeper questions and starting to really get curious about life and what was really involved. And, and and so that was, that was the impetus for this book.Jonathan Stark (03:34):One of the things that I love about the book, first of all, I listened to the audio book, which you read. Thanks, goodness. Because I think it it's, it really, it feels like a missed opportunity to me when authors don't read their own books, especially in a place like, you know, in a, in a, in a space like this or dumb domain like this it's, it's like, you really want it. I don't know. It just makes so much more of a connection for some, especially for someone who does coaching. But what's hilarious about it is, you know, you're super honest in it. There's swearing and stuff. It's there's some, a whole just absolutely like laugh out loud. Funny examples. I'm thinking of like the, the the, the sweat lodge. I don't know if it was a sweat lodge, but it was like, okay, everybody take off their clothes and it's just hilarious, but it's, it's incredibly useful.Jonathan Stark (04:21):And the, the, the thing that I want to drill into a little bit is your ability to the role playing that you did in the book. So, so for the listener, there's a bunch of examples in the book where, where one of trips, I don't know if you call them students or clients, but clients they would have some sort of like, I don't feel it something's wrong. I don't know what's wrong. And listening to the way you unpack that was in every case, it was just mind blowing. I do coaching myself and, and with a lot of engineer mentality type of people and they, and when it comes to the stuff that's re really squishy stuff, I'm like, I'm out, I'm like not, not a shrink. I don't know how to go there. I don't know what questions to ask. So it was incredibly informative as a coach to listen to the way that you would ask those questions.Jonathan Stark (05:09):Can you, can you think of an example from the book where someone might come to you and say, I say something like, I dunno, man. Like something just doesn't feel right. You know, and they're like driving a Ferrari and they're ma you know, they're happily married and, you know, I think there was one word, you know, the guy was like totally happy with his wife or, or felt that way. And was just like, I don't know. And then you ask these series of questions that maybe you could go into a little bit and, you know, touch on the sort of three things that you know, people are looking for in their lives. It seems like almost like the primary colors of what you go after.Tripp Lanier (05:46):Yeah. Yeah. There's a, there's a lot to unpack in that. You know, one thing that I've learned as a coach is that early on, as a coach, it was like, yeah, let's, let's really help people accomplish their goals, whatever they may be, those goals are always or had been at that time were always typically objective. They were things that we could measure. Right. That's, that's part of having a smart goal. Is that something that you could observe you could, you could measure? And what I found was that after a few months, you know, we, we, we finally accomplished this goal and my guy would feel good for a little bit. I mean, really just a little bit, maybe a day, maybe a week. And then he was kind of back into this certain state of mind and I was like, wait a second. That's not, we haven't transformed anything.Tripp Lanier (06:28):We're just, we've just leveled up, but we've carried all the same baggage with us. And so I realized that this makes this, coaching's not really fun when my clients are still staying stuck mentally and emotionally in these things. And so I really started to unpack what is it that we really want when we set a goal. And when I realized was that if we set a goal and we accomplished that goal and we still feel trapped or drained or isolated or bored, overwhelmed, and we, we screwed up, we missed the Mark, right? That no, no guys like, yes, this is it. This is exactly how I want to feel. I want to feel trapped and drained and isolated and stuck and all of this stuff. And it's like, okay, so then what does that mean? What are we, what what's, what does that mean? You know, the flip it around and well, instead of trapped, I want to feel free instead of drained.Tripp Lanier (07:14):I want to feel alive instead of isolated. I want to feel connected, deeply loved. I want to feel instead of border overwhelmed, I want peace of mind. I was like, Oh, okay. Well, what if we started to set goals that were in service of those intrinsic or interior experiences, these things that we, we want to feel, they can't necessarily be observed or measured, but they can be felt inexperienced. And so once I started doing that, then, then I can help a guy break down why he's not feeling okay. And this is where we come back to your original question, which is, I've got a lot of guys that from the outside, I look like they're kicking, that they've got the goals, you know, they've solved all this stuff and it looks really impressive from the outside, but something's off, something's missing. And if you were to ask them, Hey, are you fulfilled and go, Oh, know, I mean, maybe it's too vague, right.Tripp Lanier (08:05):So we can break it down. And I think what you heard in those conversations, I was break it down and say, well, let's go through, let's look at how, how is love in your life, right? How is this? And then, Oh, I got a lot of love. My kids are great. My wife and I are doing really well. That's all, that's all humming along. Okay, great. And lots of stability. Yeah. Lots of stability. Okay, great. Well, what about freedom? Do you feel like you've got flexibility in your life? Do you feel like you've got choice? Do you feel like you get to be who you really are and whatever you're doing? And it's like, Oh, well, maybe not. You know, I'm, I'm always at work or I'm always, my mind is always worrying about family or whatever. Okay. Interesting information. What about a lot? Do you feel alive and what you're doing?Tripp Lanier (08:39):Huh? Not really. I haven't felt alive since I was in my twenties. I haven't felt alive since I took my, you know, I got that first round of investment and, you know, we were able to launch ABC or whatever that thing was. And you start to break things down and said, okay, well, what can we do that would, that would be in service of more freedom, more alive in this, because that's really the doorway to this peace of mind that we say that we ultimately want. And then we can set some really smart goals and we can keep an eye on them as we go, instead of just putting our blinders on and saying achieve, achieve, achieve, or only look at the metrics, but never really check in with this dashboard that we've got in front of us that says, Hey, how am I feeling?Tripp Lanier (09:15):Am I feeling more free, more alive, more loved, more at peace as I go through my day to day life. So that's essentially what you probably, that you heard me breaking down in those conversations. And, and from that place, we can have a coaching conversation. Great. What are you going to do this week? Is there a conversation you got to have, or is it a thing you got to say no to? Or is there a bold thing that needs to be done with your brand or whatever those types of things are? And then I hold them accountable to that.Jonathan Stark (09:40):Yeah. I think one example was, you know one of your clients had a business partner and he was dissatisfied with arrangement. It had been going on for awhile and just never brought it up. Never discussed. It was thinking about buying him out and, you know, you kind of comment. Yeah. And you were like, well, have you talked to him about it? The answer is no. You know, and, and how do you ha but still that, like, it's sort of like, you had a nice sort of neat ball on it where it's like, yeah, I guess I should talk to them. And they went for a hike and had a talk in it and it went well. But do you have, do you have sort of tactics or approaches that people can use to get, it's going to sound stupid, but get them to do the thing that they know they need to do, but still can't get themselves to do so they're, they're still like, how do they, how do you walk them through the fear of having that hard discussion with a business partner or a spouse, or even a kid that, that you probably know maybe consciously know you need to do, or you should do, but you just can't make yourself do it.Tripp Lanier (10:47):I can, I use a salty language always. Okay. All right. Got it. So there's a, there's a technical term for this called dicking around. And we will Dick around to the degree that our system, right? Our, our system, our, our personal lives, our health, our relationships, our work we'll we'll allow it. Okay. Most of the time you can't coach a guy that is totally okay with dicking around. Like, he may say he doesn't like dicking around. He may listen to a podcast. He may, you know, go on a website and look at a coach, but he doesn't pull the trigger. And so it's really hard to coach those guys because they haven't reached this point where yet, where they're like, screw it. It's it's up to me. I've got to do something about this. And I think even Joseph Campbell, I don't know if he used this exact word, but he said, it.Tripp Lanier (11:33):There's that there's the pre it moment. And the post. It, moment. But that, it. Moment is so important where we recognize, Hey, this is up to me. My life is not infinite. My time is valuable. My energy is valuable. My experience of my life is valuable. I am in touch with a deeper why, and I think we can come back around to that, but I am in touch with a deeper way. This is not how I want to live my life, or this is not how I want to steer my business. And unless you're in touch with that stuff, then you are dicking around. You're just kind of putting out fires and you're allowed to just kind of stay in this fog that one day, you know, next month we'll probably get around to that or six months, or now it'd be the right time.Tripp Lanier (12:08):Or the perfect plan is going to fall out of the sky. Or, you know what? My business partner is going to read my mind and he'll take responsibility dicking around all dicking around. So I'm going to say that the person that's dicking around is not really coachable the guy who has said I'm done dicking around my life is more valuable. I'm in touch with a deeper why that that guy is coachable. And that doesn't mean he's not going to have resistance. We still work with that resistance and we go through it. But it is about coming back to that. Why so, what are we doing here is if we're still telling lies to ourselves, or we're still kind of living some fantasy, then you know, it's going to be really, really tough. But if we can poke through that fantasy and say, you know, I've been dicking around for two years, three years, five years, 10 years.Tripp Lanier (12:46):Some people have been tolerating so much and they're just, you know, it's like, what are you going to do? So I think, I think coming back to, I'm done dicking around. They've got to turn that corner on their own. And other than that, it's gotta be in touch with a really deep why, because otherwise taking action, making the phone call, having that conversation drawn up new documents, whatever that is just seems like a pain in the butt. And you'll default to the familiar fires that you're used to putting out on a day-to-day basis instead of taking those, those more necessary actions, even though they may not be very time or energy re you know, require a lot of time and energy that they just might require us to have a lot more courage.Jonathan Stark (13:24):All right. So tell me more about the deeper, why, how do you help people uncover that?Tripp Lanier (13:29):I think it's first, it's essential to get in touch with our mortality. And it's w it's a practice that I, I think it's, it's really important for us to, to just remember that our days are not finite. You know, as I talked to you now, there's someone close to my family in my family. That's struggling, you know, we will die this week, most likely. So there's a reminder that, that we're not, we don't have time to Dick around. And I think it doesn't mean we have to be in an urgent state or a frantic state or in any kind of scarcity, but I think it does wake us up. And I think that we can use our mortality to, to, as a sword, to cut through the and just say, is this really how I want to live? Spend time with people who have wasted their lives and what, and, and, and see their regret.Tripp Lanier (14:14):And it's like, is this really how I want to go about doing things? Most of the guys that I, that I see dicking around have not had some kind of initiation with death. They they're out of touch with the fact that they are going to die there. They're still young boys that believe that there's this next phase it's coming. And then they're going to have permission to really go for what they want in life. What I found is that the guys that really understand death or have had some kind of an experience of death in their lives, it's like, I'm not dicking around. I could go at any time and I want to feel aligned in my day. Now when my head hits the pillow tonight, I, I want to have a sense that, you know what I'm living my life. I I'm doing my best. I could do better share, but I'm my best. I'm not this time away. So I think that's a, that's a powerful place to start with a coaching client and to set that frame. And what that does is just keeps us from leaking energy. It sets a really tight container. So let's, let's, let's come from this place right off the bat. That makes you an extraordinary person though.Jonathan Stark (15:09):Does it map to age as much as I think it probably does?Tripp Lanier (15:16):I, I think it really is a perspective. I've met a lot of 45, 50 year old boys, and there's, it's just, but in what I mean by that is there's this sense of like, I don't really have to take responsibility. My wife will do it or work. I can just kind of plot along and then work will kind of work around me in default to something I don't really have to take the lead. And what I do, you'd be surprised how many people in quote leadership positions can run their businesses from that, that place where they're empowered to be that, that way. But yeah, it's not to do with age. It really is a frame of mind, if you think in terms of kind of this Maslow's hierarchy of needs, right? Th th these deeper questions lie at that top. So, you know, depends on where you are in that, that regard for a lot of us.Tripp Lanier (16:02):And I talk about this in the book, success as a form of survival, having a ton of stuff is a way that we are going to finally feel comfortable, safe, and accepted once. And for all. So we attach a number to that net worth zip code, whatever it might be. And we say, you know, once I get there, I'm good. I'll be fine. I will I'll survive. And we know it's that way, because we end up doing a lot of behaviors that are actually detrimental to us. We, it's not about getting stronger. We actually, we, we our health away. We our mental health away. We our community away. We do all the things that, you know, we live in places that were terrible crime and pollution and all this kind of stuff that there's not, there's not a rational argument that says, yes, striving for this type of success is makes me stronger.Tripp Lanier (16:51):It's really driven by this egoic self image thing. It's just, you know, this is where I'm going to finally feel safe and I'm not bagging on it, but I think it, it helps to understand what am I really striving for. So if we come back to that hierarchy of needs, it's, I need to be okay before I can even entertain some of these deeper questions. So that might happen for a younger person. They've, they've, they've had whatever, you know, insight that needs to happen. And they're starting to ask those deeper questions that happen for me in my mid twenties. But, but for others, it may not happen at all. Or it may, it may happen later on.Jonathan Stark (17:25):Yeah. I was a late bloomer. It probably didn't happen to me until I had kids, which is like early forties. So you talk more about getting stronger. That's a big theme in the book, a recurring theme in the book. Does this make me stronger? Do I feel stronger? It's kind of like a compass that you could use,Tripp Lanier (17:40):Right? Yeah. I think, I think most of us have just checked out of our interior world, right? We, we, we say, well, if I have this amount of money in the bank, I live here, I do this, I've got this title, then, then I'll be okay. But then we are experienced. Doesn't line up with the theory that we have in our mind. If I get to this place, then whether we realize it or not, there's that unconscious theory that I'm going to feel free. I'm going to feel alive. I'm going to feel connected and loved and deeply appreciated once. And for all, I'm going to have peace of mind. So we get to this, we might hit that Mark. And we say, Hey, something's off. I must need more. Right. So we, we look, we look at our behaviors and we look at the things that we're doing on a daily basis, and then say, okay, what about sleep?Tripp Lanier (18:22):Like, am I moving my body? How am I eating? Just the freaking basics, right? And we, we have an excuse me, well, I can't do that stuff. I've got to work. I've got to strive to be quote successful. So again, I want to make sure this is nothing to bag on doing well for ourselves. But when we look at it through this lens and suddenly your health is taken away from you, I mean, I know guys in their thirties or forties that have had a stroke, or they've had some kind of a, you know, a real breakdown in their body because of the stress. And they're just like, this is not worth it. Like, I, I am I'm on my death bed essentially because of how I'm treating myself or the stress or the panic attacks, or, you know, guys at the highest level of having these panic attacks and feeling like they've got to hide it from people come on, this is not strength.Tripp Lanier (19:06):Right. We get to a level of our success. And you think that once we got to this place, that the biggest baddest guys would be willing to start to take chances and really do more in their life. And they're not the tend to be more fragile. They're, they're afraid to be uncomfortable. They're afraid to take risks financially because they can't go backwards. That's a hit. And then there's this third thing it's like, what will people think of me? You know, I can't, I can't fail at this stage in my life. You know, I'm not in my twenties anymore. So I find all of that week, I find that that's, that's a fragile place to be for us. And here I am, I'm 47. I want to raise my hand. Like I love being comfortable. I love being safe. I love being accepted and, and secure in my social standing. So I, I say this to myself as well, but ideally like that real strength is that willingness to go into the places that are uncomfortable or uncertain, or could be a threat to what others may think of us.Jonathan Stark (19:54):Can you go into those three things that you just listed there? Sure does. Yeah. The three things that cause people to not want to, you know, perceive this as a big risk, right.Tripp Lanier (20:04):Working with a coaching client. And he said his trip, I want to do ABC. And it's like, it's like, okay, great. Now, you know, it's all green lights, right? Well, no, we're going to meet resistance. And so the three buckets that I find that we run into is a fear of being uncomfortable. Well, what does that mean? Obviously there's just a fear. Like I'm gonna have to work really hard or, you know, there's just like there could be effort involved with that, that that's just really uncomfortable or and it could also just be, this could be emotionally uncomfortable. I don't want to, I don't want to have to do things where I'm having conversations with people and I'm having to deal with things emotionally that are, that are uncomfortable. So that's a huge one. I don't want to go down this road if it's going to be uncomfortable.Tripp Lanier (20:41):Number two, I'm not okay with uncertainty. I'm not okay with a risk. I don't want to do anything. That's gonna jeopardize my time or my energy or my money. And I think we don't have to look very far. There's a thing that says, yeah, I want ABC and say, great, well, if you could write a blank check for ABC and it would happen, you're like, well, I don't know if I would do it, you know, because we don't want to risk it. We we're not, if we're not sure it's going to, there's going to be, we're going to get what we want. Then we, we balk at it. And then the third one, and it's a big one is that, that fear of looking like a moron for, you know, for lack of a better term, it's that anything that we will do that might invite criticism that might make us look stupid to ourselves or others, that where we might be a failure.Tripp Lanier (21:22):This is where you're kind of, you've alluded to this herd mentality thing. And so it can be, I can't be too big, but it can also be, I can't be too small. We've got our Goldilocks place where our, where our self-image has decided that we belong. And so I've, I, I run into this with my clients where there's guys that do just to not, I call it just enough disease or they do just enough to get right up to that place. And then they stop and then their income will calm down or whatever. And they're back into that scarcity thing, right? There's that in this, Oh, I do just enough, but then I don't want to make the effort to go any further and actually get some altitude and some spaciousness. And there's the other guys that do never enough disease, which is, they're always striving in their mind, it's it?Tripp Lanier (22:03):They, they can never measure up to this. You know, the self image changes once they get to this place, then it's like, well, I need to be that other guy now. And they, they keep adding onto who they're supposed to be. And they exhaust themselves that way. So all of that gets wrapped up in this, who am I you know, bucket and all three of those, those areas are huge. And they are typically what gets gets in our way. It's not the lack of information. It's not the lack of resources, really. It really boils down to those three things. I'm afraid to be uncomfortable. I'm afraid of risk or uncertainty. And I'm afraid to look like a moron.Jonathan Stark (22:38):Mm yeah. Playing not to lose instead of playing to win. It's like the one that, the one that I find people are most willing to articulate when I'm coaching someone is the second one, the risk. I don't know if this is going to work. How's this going to play out? They want some kind of guarantee that, that the strategy is going to definitely work. You know, it's like, well, if it was definitely going to work, it wouldn't be interesting. Like you can't, you know what I mean? Like they want to show me the data that this thing that you were suggesting I do is going to play out. Not everybody, but some people will, they want to see, like, it's almost like they want to see that map of the entire territory before we, you know, we leave. If we're going to drive from New York to LA, they want to know every place they're going to stop, how they're going to get there. What are they going to see along the way? How long is it going to take all of this stuff? And it's almost like they want me to drive them all the way there before they decide whether or not they are going to drive the car. And I mean, is that just dicking around? Is that more digging around or is it like, yeah,Tripp Lanier (23:40):It's a version of it. I did this for years after I sold my first company. I had enough, I had just enough to Dick around for a few years and I sold my house and had, you know, had some money in the bank after that sell. And then it was like, it was probably one of the worst things for me was because I didn't really have to lean in and do anything uncomfortable. I didn't have to really lean in and put anything at risk. And I certainly didn't have to do anything that might make me look like a more on our failure. And so I just circled the drain there and watched my bank account go down, go down. And it was one of the more anxious times that I've ever had in my lifetime, because I was disengaged. I felt rather powerless to do anything. I was looking for the perfect plan, anything that came across and like, okay, here's, here's an idea for the next phase of your life. I was like, well, I could see how it's not going to work out. I could see where it's not going to pan out. And then I would walk. And I was like, you know, there's gotta be the perfect thing. It'sTripp Lanier (24:32):Going to come along here. I just need to wait a little bit more. Meanwhile, I'm looking at the bank account going down and I watch so many of us do this as well. I think, I think it's a, it's a tough thing to wake up to, but it's, it's the truth, which is there is zero certainty about anything. And I think it's a mature stance to say, look, given that we've got to just go with the information that we've got and that step eight is not going to reveal itself until we're at step seven. And one of the things I like about this is that it's a lot easier to have an edge over so many others. If you're willing to walk through life this way, most of us can not tolerate that uncertainty. And so they will stick with kind of the, the safe boxes that give us the illusion of that certainty, but then they're confined as well.Tripp Lanier (25:18):If we're willing to, to approach things more, artistically, more vision, more from a visionary place, then we understand that this uncertainty is part of the equation. And it doesn't mean that we have to be morons and reckless and take a ton w w take on more risk. I think there's a sweet spot here, which is if we're willing to slow down and say, Hey, I'm here. Just need to take this next step. Just need to take this next step. And then mitigate that, that, that voice, you know, pay attention to that voice that says, I need to have that certain certainty. And you say, yeah, great. Got it. And it's just not going to be this path. If we want that path, we can go, you know, get this job. There was a, there was a time when I was struggling with my coaching practice and I hadn't quite put the pieces together at a big audience with my podcasts, but I hadn't quite figured out how to, you know, get the thing going with the, with the coaching and all that stuff.Tripp Lanier (26:05):I had this guy call me. He says, I got an opportunity for you. And I was like, great. Here comes, this is it. Here's my ship is coming in. And he offered me a sales job to sell air conditioners totally random. And I remember just being like, what? Like that, that's it. But if I remember feeling like that was such a test, it was like, here's your certainty. If you want certainty, give up on this mission that you've got to empower guys and to do this work in the world, the thing that you'd sold your other business for and go take your certainty. And I, I just remember being like, thanks so much, because you've really served me more than you'll ever know,Tripp Lanier (26:44):You so much. And I'm, I'm clear. I don't, I don't need to go down that road. Like, it was just like, Oh, okay. Then the uncertainty part is part of the equation. There's no escaping it. If you're, here's a big one. If you're feeling that uncertainty certainty, it doesn't mean something's wrong. And I think that's usually what it's like, I'm feeling all this discomfort, all this uncertainty, I must be doing something wrong. I'm looking at those guys. They seem to have it all figured out. They can go on there, you know, interviews and talk about all this stuff, exponent, you know, how you know, crazy growth and all that kind of stuff. Chances are they're, they're, they're living with a ton of uncertainty too. They just probably don't talk about.Jonathan Stark (27:18):Hmm. Yeah. So there's a, a great segment in a book by, I think it's in linchpin, Seth Godin's book, where he talks about the safety zone and the comfort zone and the, and how for a long time, because things were, you know, sort of industrial end of the industrial revolution, the strong middle-class, the safety zone and the comfort zone overlapped. So like, if you were looking at a Venn diagram, the safety zone was, or the comfort zone was inside the safety zone. But now with everything, you know, sort of new everything just crazy, everything's changing so fast. The, the, those two circles are no longer overlapping. So people are continuing to stay in their comfort zone, which used to coincidentally be in the safety zone as well. But now it's not, you need to get out of your comfort zone to get into, what's actually safe, in my opinion, or at least as a business owner, let's just limit it to business owners.Jonathan Stark (28:14):If you don't get out of that comfort zone, you won't, you are not being safe. So it's almost like it's almost like, and I've internalized this personally long enough that if I'm feeling comfortable, it scares the crap out of me because it's my internal compassing, you're going in the wrong direction. So to me, I think the uncertainty, you can use it, if something scares you, I'm almost always, I agree with you. I don't want to take on too much risky there. I've got little kids in a house and all that. But, but we're not, I'm not talking about taking crazy risks. If I, if something kind of scares, if I have like, Ooh, that's an idea. I'm like, Oh, I've got an idea, but it kind of scares me. I'm like, that's probably a good idea. I should probably do that. And then, you know, generally, sometimes I'll dig around and not get around to it, but I know that's, you know, but other times I'll just do it.Jonathan Stark (29:01):And I just like, yeah, I'm going to do this. I might screw up. It might not work. You know, whatever it's things are going to go wrong. But if you've got, I see the, that internal feeling as a compass and I've got a vision. So I know I want to go in that direction. I want to, I have this vision of the, of this future state. And, and I've got this guy. I don't know what the path is. I don't know where I'm going to stop for gas along the way, but I've got this compass. And I know if I follow the compass, it's going to take me in that direction. But so I'm, I'm just, I could be completely wrong though, but that's the, that's the thing that causes me to do something, you know, and actually it feels like forward. And it seems, you know, if you look back, it's kind of like, wow, I did cover a lot of territory. This seems to be going in the right direction, seems to be going in a direction and not circles. And anyway, so that really, that whole section of the book really resonated with me about the, your, to me, your compass is, does this make me feel stronger?Tripp Lanier (30:00):Yeah. Yeah. And I, I want to be really clear that this isn't a one size fits all thing. I don't think all of us are cut out for this type of livelihood. I don't think it's for everybody. I don't, I don't think that, Hey, that guy, that that's feeling sick in his nine to five right now he can do it if he really wants to. I, I don't believe that. I think it really is going to be up to that person and whether they decide they want it that bad, but I don't think that it's, there's an entitlement to that, that they just need to kind of come out here and follow the steps. It really takes a certain type of person to be able to do this work. And I've, I used to think that it was available to everybody, but I've learned that through conversations that I can, I can kind of smell it in the first 10 or 15 minutes when I'm talking to a guy.Tripp Lanier (30:45):And if he says he wants ABC and I'm like, good luck, I'll be like, call me in a year. Like, why don't you call me in a year and see where you are? Cause I think where you want to be is the, is the place we should start. Like once you get there, then we would start our work. But you've got a lot, you've got a lot to establish for yourself before we get to there. So I don't say that to discourage anybody. But I do say that because I think there's some of us that can beat ourselves up because we're not different. We're not, we're not somebody we say we should be or cut from different cloth. They're, one's not better than the other, but I think it is this, this ability to handle the uncertainty, to find actually actually find a creative flow in it, to get jazzed about it. A willingness to say, Hey, I've got a hunch here. I think this might go some place it's valuable to me. That is not everybody. Right. That's that's not all of us. And so I just want to lay that out there that it, that it's, it's, it's it's a smaller group of folks, men and women that, that tap into that.Jonathan Stark (31:44):Right? Yeah. I mean, I'm trying to, like, I have nothing else to really go on, but my past experience with a lot of this stuff and you know, I was pretty serious about music in my late teens and early twenties actually pretty much through my entire twenties, went to music school. The whole thing, you know, lived in a van too, you know, toured around the Northeast, all that like was like, I want to be a rockstar. And, and that looking back on it, if I was going to do it over again, or, you know, like the older me was going to give advice to younger me, it would, it has a lot to do with me having a vision of myself as like a rock star. And it wasn't a good fit, like, so do you mean like, what do you mean I would have hated it?Jonathan Stark (32:36):Like, I don't like being recognized. I don't like talking to people on the street. It's like, it would have been the absolute worst. I can't stand being on a skit. You know, like a routine, like going on a tour would have killed me like a big tour, like a world tour. It would've been like, this is the worst thing ever. I would have hated it. I can't stand planes. Like the whole thing. It would have been, it would have been terrible. Right. The thing I wanted was more about the, you know, proving it to my, you know, junior high friends that I actually was actually good. You know, like I'm actually a good musician. See, I can prove it. I run, it won a Grammy and I tour the world and it was more about that stuff. And hilariously, you know, for someone who would get up in front of a crowd of people to presumably entertain them, I never thought about the audience at all.Jonathan Stark (33:23):It was all like, how does my hair look? Are these pants tight enough? Blah, blah, blah. You know, like, am I cool? That was, that was it. It was terrible. It was terrible. But the reason I bring it up is because I had a vision of myself as this like cool rock star guy. And I spent a lot of time going after it, but it wasn't, it was, it was bad vision. It was super self centered. And especially in like a performing art, it was bizarre to be that self-centered. And if I had, I reached it, I wouldn't have liked it. I guarantee you, I wouldn't have liked it. I don't care how much money I would have made if any, but it was not my jam. And so I'm kind of tying that into two things. One is that I had a, a weird vision that was very self-centered and I tried to turn myself into that thing, but it wasn't like I was on a journey to help any, I was not trying to help anybody.Jonathan Stark (34:11):I had no, no proving totally outright. It was proving. It was totally would have been completely unfulfilling. But the other thing is, you know, like you were talking about not, everybody's cut out to be, say an entrepreneur. Well, I wasn't cut out to be a rockstar, but I wanted it really bad, but everything got way better for me after I gave up on that idea. And it was just like, you know what, and that wasn't easy. Cause that's like your whole identity, everybody who knows you is like, yeah. You know, singer songwriter tours around it. So I guess two things there. One is like, well here, let me turn this into a question since we're supposed to be talking and just me monologuing what, when someone comes to you with a goal or vision or something that they want to work on that you suspect is proving w how do you unpack that for them? So you can really find out for yourself or maybe help them find out if that's really what they want. Tripp Lanier (35:11):Most of the time I can hear it in their language, right. So if I ask him, you know, if I was coaching you back then, and I had, I had a lot of the similar things, cause I was in a band and we were, we were doing the whole major label courtship thing. So and I was around people that were real rock stars, like, Oh, that guys, he really wants it. Like he's going to make it happen. Like that, that kind of, I'm going to move mountains to be a rock star kinda thing. But the, the thing I would listen for is how much are they focused on that outcome and how much are they focused on the process? Because if they hate it, they hate waking up every day and doing the process. And the only thing they can do is focused on that outcome.Tripp Lanier (35:48):But the image I get is that the person that's depriving themselves of oxygen, it's like, okay, when they go in their water and they're going to hold their breath all day and or months or whatever, to get to this outcome. And then it's like, Oh, you know, and it's like, okay, what about that strengthens you, right? Which is different than I get to get up. Every day, I get to noodle around on my guitar. I get to then talk to people and they tell me how great my record is. And then I get to go on stage. And then I get to work with these guys. And then I get this, I get to, I get to like, isn't this awesome instead of make this stop, I just want, I only, I'm only in it for this one particular thing. And if, if that's it, and it really is this, you can tell the, the, the outcomes that are like, wow, look at how special I'm going to be.Tripp Lanier (36:32):Then I know where we're on the wrong foot there. And sometimes that guy needs to go do that stuff. He actually needs to just that's his karma. He just needs to go exhaust that and get hit with the two by four enough times where he's like, okay, I think I've done with trying to prove that I'm finally special and unique and lovable. So, but the, but it does, it does flip around and to come back and say, wait, do I actually enjoy this process? And, and for the entrepreneurs that I work with, especially developer guys, they're doing this stuff, no matter what, you know, one of my clients is a developer. This was his passion project on the side. You know, this, I, I think he started it, you know, pulled it out of the, out of like, Oh, by the way, I got this thing, I kinda like doing, you know, he was an hourly kind of dude got this thing, a kind of like doing, you know, he's doing a clear and 50 grand a month.Tripp Lanier (37:16):And I think there's over a million users of this, of this product that he's built now. So it's it's, but there was all this stuff in between, which was like, well, this is the thing I love. And I don't want people to tear apart, my baby, and this is my hobby. And that is the place I go to escape to. And, but you couldn't stop him from doing it. Like after a 14 hour day, he would, he couldn't wait to pull up his, his computer and start working on this project. So those are the guys that my money is on. Whereas it's like, you couldn't stop them no matter what, like they love the process. And the only ones that are good that would get motivated by some kind of a carrot. I was like, yeah, you can't,Jonathan Stark (37:48):That's not going anywhere. Yeah. That's a good way to put it. Yeah. And I've, I've gone through, I go through like 10 or 15 year phases, or I have gone through where it's like, I start loving the process and to get into it. And then I [inaudible] with the rockstar thing, that goal kind of came later. It was like, how am I going to, I don't want to be broke. That was, you know, it was like, okay. So while I got to be famous, so but then after a while, I did start to hate the process. I can see, I can give you clear stories of when I, you know, like driving up to it in ATM on a Tuesday night, at three in the morning to deposit seventy-five dollars from sub gig, I just did. And like too drunk to be driving. Anyway, what am I even doing?Jonathan Stark (38:26):And I have to get up early to do my day job the next morning. It was like, I'm like, you just have one of those wake up moments where you're just like, okay, I think I'm done here. This is fun. S I've got a question we're coming up to time here. So we should probably wrap up soon, but I want to ask a question about whatever you want to call it, purpose, mission, vision, your why, your big idea, whatever that is, that, that sort of larger purpose, what, how do you help people? Do they, do they, people need to come to you kind of knowing that, or you help them uncover that. And if so, how do you do that?Tripp Lanier (39:03):I'm not really popular for saying this, but most of the time when people come to me and they say, I need to know my purpose in life, it's usually this, it go show. Like they they've, they've decided that they need to have their ego has decided that this is the thing that's going to make me really unique. It's another form of proving, right? Like this purpose in life makes me somebody, it means my life is meaningful. That means it's worth living. And I mean, I think that that's, you know what man searched for, meaning like, we are struggling for that. Like, it's, it's innate in us to, to want to look for that at some point. And I think it's good to have a sense of humor about it and recognize that it's usually just a story. It's a nice wrapper that we put around ourselves you know, and say, Hey, this just helps me.Tripp Lanier (39:50):It helps me get through the day. It helps me to do the work. Now. It doesn't mean that we don't experience meaning. Cause that's a, that's a different part, but the story it's usually identity oriented. Look at me, I'm a rockstar. Look at me. I'm an author. Look at me. I'm, you know, I'm just, I'm not just another Joe blow. Right. Nobody's ever like my purpose in life is to live on a cul-de-sac in in in this, you know, kind of middle-class neighborhood. Like that's, nobody's like I wake up and that's my purpose, right? It's it's always extravagant or unique or something on that level. So I think most of the time, those stories are like, I take with a grain of salt that said, when I asked him, what has you feel alive? What has you feel deeply rewarded? What has your heart open when you do this thing?Tripp Lanier (40:33):And you just feel like, Oh my God. And usually there is a sense, like, this is why I'm alive. For me, that was coaching, right. For me, it was having those conversations with people and helping them transition from one way of being in the world to another, like, I get this deep sense of like, yes, this is really powerful for me. And it's also really powerful for them. This is awesome. I can't believe I get to do that. I want to help you tap into that. Again, we're more into these process oriented things instead of this identity or, Hey, here's my label kind of thing. So again, if somebody comes to me that big, that big fancy story, I usually am like really? And then I look at their actions. Cause a lot of times they may tell me that their purpose in life is ABC, but they don't put any time or energy into it.Tripp Lanier (41:12):It's just what they like to tell people. So what do we, what do we do on a daily basis that has us feel more expansive? What has us feel stronger? What has this feel free? What has this feel alive? What opens our heart has this field deeply connected with other people? Those are the questions that I tend to ask people. That's really where kind of our whole body is telling us and saying, this is what you're really here for. And that can be surprising to find that that doesn't necessarily align with the conversation we're having about ourselves in our head. So I tell this story in the book, I was coaching a guy, a music producer LA had had his own studio on a fancy lot with a bunch of other fancy names and all that kind of stuff miserable right on the outside looks so cool and hanging out with all these fancy people and all this stuff miserable.Tripp Lanier (41:59):Why is he miserable? Because he hasn't gotten a Grammy and these other people had Graham and that guy over there had a hit and this hit did, he didn't have this hit and like this, all of this comparison. Okay. I didn't get invited that party. Why did he get into that part of that? All of that. And so I said, let's, this is miserable. Right? So I said, what if we actually got in touch with where you actually felt alive and you felt strong and you actually felt had a heart again. And, you know, I said, just track it, just track throughout your week. And let's, let's just see where that happens. And he said he he'd stopped into home Depot or something. And he was getting something, this old lady came up to him and said, can you help me find a light bulb?Tripp Lanier (42:32):And he was like, sure. And he's just chatting her up and they're chatting. And he just like dropped the whole I'm important thing and was just relating with her. And she was so appreciative and it was so sweet and it didn't matter about him being important or anything. And he found himself and he was like, that was the highlight of my, of my week. And he's like, and I'm not even embarrassed. Like he was like, that was so cool. Just to have that experience as a great, we'll use that as data. Let's just see if we can have more of those types of experiences instead of you chasing this idea that you need to be so important.Jonathan Stark (43:01):[Inaudible] Yeah. That's wild. It reminds me about, it reminds me of something dark services too, about, you know, like the best advice is the advice that causes you to do something like you're excited. Like you hear it. You're like, Oh, I'm excited to do that. I'm hearing a lot of echoes of that. Here in what you're saying, it's like, Oh, I get to do this or that I get to do this today. So that can be it's it's, I'm sure it was true in this case, you know, I bet you that guy's not like working in nail Island home Depot now, but you know, it's like it can be a big identity shift. I think when you, you've got this one picture of yourself, rockstar, and then you're like, Oh, actually I like writing books. Like I get up here. I would much rather write books and, and not be an author, but have do this stuff. And author does, which is write books every day. Right.Tripp Lanier (43:49):And I, I think more of that more and more when we just wake up and we were doing that stuff, and we're just in the flow of doing their thing. We're not sitting around navel gazing or looking in the mirror and wondering if our butts too big or, you know, any of that kind of stuff. We're just, it's like I'm living my life and I'm feeling aligned now instead of living from my ears up and worrying about.Jonathan Stark (44:13):Yup. Awesome. Well, that's a great place to leave it. Where can people go to find out more about all things trip? Tripp Lanier (44:19):Let's see, the new man podcast is available anywhere where you get podcasts and there's a ton of free resources@thenewmanpodcast.com. You can pick up the book which is called this book will make you dangerous@dangerousbookstore.com. Amazon also has all the formats as well. And if you want to learn more about the coaching services that I provide, you can go to trip linear.com.Jonathan Stark (44:45):Awesome. Well, thanks so much for joining us. Everybody has got to check out this book. I really it's one of those few books that I think literally anyone could benefit from, from reading. So get out there and buy it. Cool. Thanks Jonathan. Thank you. Thanks for joining me. All right. That's it for this week. I'm Jonathan Stark and this has been ditching hourly. See you next time. Would you like to learn how to get paid? What you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? What about making more money without working more hours? We worked through all of this together in the pricing seminar registration starts soon. So head on over to the pricing seminar.com to add your name to the announcement list that you are L again is the pricing seminar.com. I hope to see you there.

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