Brand Builders Group

Ep 488: Creating Operational Infrastructure with Kelly Roach

Nicole Gale — Tue, 21 May 2024 11:00:26 +0000

RV (00:01):
Well, Kelly Roach is a new friend of mine and who says You don't make real friends on social media because we met on social media and now are becoming real life friends. And I think she's just delightful and really intelligent and very successful, which you're, you're gonna hear this story, which when I saw the arc of her kind of career journey and path, it really impressed me because she started out as it didn't start out, but she was a former NFL cheerleader. Mm-Hmm. . She then was a Fortune 500 executive who built a seven figure business on the side, as I understand it. Yes. She then left that, turned it into an eight figure empire. And now has built y you know, this very successful online business, empowering thousands of people around the globe. Her podcast is a top podcast, the Kelly Roach show.
RV (00:54):
We're gonna talk about that. She also is a, a, a multi-time bestselling author. She has been featured in A, B, C and Fox and Forbes and Inc. 5,000. She's been on Inc. 5,000 list. And one of the other things that I love about her is she's done, she's built this business with no debt, no investors or outside funding, which is also what we believe in how we operate. And it's, it's pretty unusual for a company to get to eight figures in annual revenue without those things. So I was like, yeah, let's, let's talk to Kelly and let's see what she's about. So Kelly, welcome to the show.
KR (01:31):
Well, thank you. Thank you for the intro, and I'm so happy to be here. Thanks for having me.
RV (01:35):
Yeah. So tell me how, first of all, so you were NFL cheerleader, so I want to hear about all these leaps because Yeah. You know, a lot of the people we talk, I mean, we do personal brand strategy. Yeah. So a lot of people are going through a pivot of some type Mm-Hmm. . And you've made like several successful pivots from like the top of one thing to the top of another. So I, I'm really curious, like, so first of all, like, how did you land as an NFL cheerleader, and then how did you move from that to like Fortune 500, CEO? Or not CEO, but executive. Yeah,
KR (02:07):
Absolutely. So I, it, it all started one day on the free lunch line. So I was on the free lunch line. There was five kids in my family. My dad worked for a nonprofit. He decided that he wanted to give his life to that work. My mom was a stay at home mom. You can do the math. Okay. Five kids, right. Stay at home mom, dad worked for the nonprofit. I'm on the free lunch line. No one knows. I'm on the free lunch line holding it all together. One day there's a, a fill-in cafeteria lady, and she rips open my envelope in front of everyone and there's no money in it. And that moment was a turning point for my life because in that moment I was just, so, I call it naked in the lunch line, like vulnerable. And I was like, I'm not gonna live that life.
KR (02:52):
And so I was, you know, early in middle school. And at that moment I was like, I'm gonna do every possible thing that I can to change my circumstances, to live a different life, to make my life what I believe it can be, and I don't wanna be naked on the lunch line again. Right. And so you said, how did I go up an NFL cheerleader? Well, I cleaned the dance studio floors after school almost every day for seven years, so that I could go to the best dance school in the area. I would go, oh,
RV (03:22):
That's like how you paid for your,
KR (03:24):
That's how I paid for my lessons. I would go after school, I would eat my dinner in the car, I would go clean the dance studio, and then I would stay for lessons. And I was able to go to the best dance school in the area. It was a very competitive dance school that produced professional dancers that went on to have careers. And so I did that for seven years. Loved it. I loved performing, I loved entertaining all of those things. Got into high school and college, and I was like, you know, I, I think I had five jobs in college. Being an NFL cheerleader was one of them. So I was the youngest NFL cheerleader
RV (03:58):
People. People don't often realize that the cheerleaders don't make what the players make. Oh my god. Property radical difference.
KR (04:04):
I mean, and, and yeah. And I completely did it because it was, it was an ability to continue my craft, right? Sure. Because I went to the college where I was gonna be in the least amount of debt they had like a D three dance team, D three cheerleading team. I was like, all right, I don't think I can do this. So I was like, I'm either going to shrink back to my circumstances, or I'm gonna leap forward and just go for it and audition for the NFL. And I was like, F it, let's do this. So I auditioned for the NFLI made the team my freshman year. So I was teaching aerobics. I was cheering for the NFLI was a cocktail server. I was babysitting all the things. And it was great because I always had money. I was able to have these amazing experiences, all of that. And, you know, as I was progressing through college, I had been on the, the cheerleading team for a couple years and I was like, okay, it's time to get really serious about my career. And I was going to school for communications because I was like, I have no idea what I wanna do with my life. I just didn't wanna sit in spreadsheet
RV (05:00):
All day. You're using your, of all the people who went to college, I feel like you're actually using your degree, isn't
KR (05:06):
It wild? So I picked a communications degree. 'cause I was like, I just don't wanna sit in a spreadsheet, like in a cubicle. I won't interact with the world. I had no idea what that was gonna look like. So I got the most entry level job in the Fortune 500. 'cause I was like, if nothing else, this girl knows how to put in the work. I was willing to do the work. And I was like, I can get promoted here. I can grow here. I can become financially free, I can learn business. So I was the first one in, last one out basically every day for a decade. I was promoted seven times in eight years. I went from being a single producer in the most entry level job in the company to becoming a senior vice president. I was managing a $50 million portfolio.
KR (05:43):
I built a team from one to a hundred, interviewing, recruiting, hearing, training, and I was managing 17 locations. And so over the course of this journey, I got this amazing business education. Like I fell in love with sales and marketing and teaching people and coaching. And I was like, this is unbelievable. Like, I just was like, I need to share this with others. But when I got to the top of that, you know, ladder corporate, I was traveling all over the place. I mean, I had branches from New York City down into the Carolinas, and I was like, I had been dating my husband at that time. We've been together for 18 years now. And, you know, I was starting thinking about, well, what do I want for my actual life? And I was like, it's not this, right? I don't wanna be on planes and trains and buses and be away.
KR (06:32):
I wanna have a family. I wanna have a life. And I, I loved the work, but I did not feel that I was making the kind of impact in the world that I felt that I was intended to with those skills. And so I said, well, who can I help? Like, who can I share these, these principles, these lessons with? And I was like, I know small business owners because small business owners start a business. 'cause They're graded a think necessarily. Have the operations and the sales and the leadership and the management, which is why 85% of businesses, you know, go outta business. So I started this side hustle. I actually went to my employer and I said, I'm doing this. You can fire me if you want, but I'm doing this. And, and I I said, if you see my performance drop, you can also come back and fire me. And they didn't. They let me because this performing person in my role. So they let me build my business on the side. Even even, you know, while I was working full-time, build it to seven figures, became a full-time entrepreneur, took it to eight. I have six companies now in the portfolio that I'm growing. And here we are now I'm interviewing with you, Rory Uhhuh
RV (07:43):
. So, so how are you? Talk to me about how are you making money, right? Like being an SVP at a company and main, that's a mm-Hmm. , maintaining that sort of level of performance and profile is not easy. Right? That's a pretty consuming situation. So, Mm-Hmm. How were you starting a side hustle and making money on the side? What was your, what was your vehicle for that? And sort of how were you, how were you managing that time without like compromising your performance at the company? So like, how did you start, how did you make your, that's a really question first dollars.
KR (08:21):
Yeah. That's a really good question. Let me answer both sides of it because I think it's, it's pertinent to the conversation that we're having. First and foremost I focused on building and mentoring teams. So over a 10 year period, not only did I coach and hire and manage the entry level people that were gonna be the ground floor producers on my team, but I promoted internally managers, senior managers, pre vice presidents, senior vice presidents. And so what I was doing was I was building autonomy and I was building this very high performance, very systematic high growth team instead of leaders. And so I went from being the manager where I had my hands in everything and I was part of everything day to day. And I needed to be active on the floor, you know, hip to hip coaching producers every day to getting to the point where over, you know, a period of years I was able to elevate leaders.
KR (09:18):
They had worked with me. There was a cadence, there was predictable performance. We had metrics and KPIs and structure to what we were doing. And it got to the point where they really only needed me in a much more consultative capacity day to day versus like the kind of the, the fire, the flames that you have to be in. And so I had breathing room intellectually, and I actually built my business on the side, basically doing an hour before work in the morning. I would go outside and sit in my car on my break, and I would take an hour on my lunch break, and then I would basically service my clients in the evening, like seven, eight o'clock at night. So that's, that's kind of how I got it off the ground in terms of how did I get customers? That's such a great question.
KR (10:03):
I started running ads from literally almost day one, really my business. Wow. Yes. One of the best things I ever did. I, there's three things that I did that I feel fundamentally changed and formed my ability to be where I am today and to do what I've done. One, I hired my first coach before I had my first client. Two, I, I started building a team from day one. So I had, I had support in the business before I had a client and I had a coach before. I had a client, number one and number two. And number three, I started running ads right away. And the simple ads that I started running were for people to book a free consultation. And I would take consultations either on my lunch break or in the evenings. And I started off by selling high ticket one-to-one services until I got to the point where I was like, okay, I can't do that anymore. And then I obviously pivoted into a group program. But running the ads allowed me, when I was at work during the day, I had an automated machine that was building my email list, building my audience, booking consultations for me. So that gave me this duality of, I'm at, I'm at work, I'm managing my team, I'm running the business, but I have ads over here that are working all day, even when I'm not available. What
RV (11:20):
Year was this?
KR (11:23):
Okay, so 20. We're talking 20 12, 20 13. Yeah.
RV (11:28):
Okay. Yeah. So you were running like digital Facebook ads kind of a thing?
KR (11:33):
Yeah, I wasn't running them, but I paid someone to run them. Yes,
RV (11:36):
Sure, sure, sure. Yes. Yes. But yeah, I mean, that was like the heyday of ads, right? Where they were just coming on. Oh, it
KR (11:42):
Was so different. It was
RV (11:43):
So . Were you,
KR (11:45):
Do you even remember those days?
RV (11:47):
I mean, did you, did you even, so were you driving, were you driving ads directly to a free consultation? I mean, you mentioned building your email list. I was, were you trying to drive right your
KR (11:56):
Email first? I was both doing both. It's so funny. I wish I had it. So I had like the cd Did you have the CDs? Did
RV (12:02):
Cds
KR (12:02):
Nice. Of course. Oh yeah. We had couple loads of CDs. So yes. So I had
RV (12:05):
Secret and then we went to SB b thumb drive secret, like mail the thumb drive. We did that for a hot minute. Yep. Secret. Yes,
KR (12:10):
Yes. So I did both, right? So I was always running the opt-in ads where they could get the digital thing and then they could also add a, an address and we would physically ship them. I still remember them with the little sleeves. But yeah, then I also simultaneously was running ads direct to consult. And that's how I got like the majority of my customers in those beginning years was, you know, email list, audience building ads and then running ads directly to consultation. And that kind of was like my salesperson until I was ready to hire my first salesperson. Uhhuh .
RV (12:46):
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's interesting. Like the one-on-one coaching model is what we tell almost everybody. Like, if you're trying to build an escape path from your corporate career, it's like one-on-one coaching is the thing. 'cause Consulting takes absolutely. Time to build. Speaking takes time to build writing books takes time to build. And then a lot of the things like the courses in the eBooks, it's like you can't make enough money selling a $99 widget to, to really leave until you have a monster audience. Yes. You're not making enough. So it's interesting that that's like your exact path
KR (13:19):
And that story. I mean, that's exactly it. And, and that's exactly what I tell people today. Everyone wants to go right to like the digital product, the course, the, the low ticket thing, but they don't realize the size and scope of the brand and audience that you have to build. So I do those things now, but I've had 10 years of audience building behind me to do that. Right. You're absolutely right. I mean, for anyone that's early stage, whether you're working job or whether your business just isn't at the point yet where you can support your family. Like that one-to-one coaching model is beautiful. And the thing that's so powerful about it is you become so so well versed in the exact trends and language and, and break points and all of that, that it's so easy to sell group coaching. When you've done one-on-one, I find people that try to go straight to group coaching really have trouble selling it because they haven't been in the trenches and gotten to the point where it's like they could look at someone's, you know, situation in three seconds, they can pinpoint exactly what the person needs.
KR (14:22):
'Cause They've been there, done that. It's like they can do it in their sleep. And it's so much easier to sell and to scale a product when you understand your avatar to that degree versus trying to do it in theory. Right?
RV (14:34):
Mm-Hmm. you also like, I mean, a lot almost all of the content that we've ever built we, we had an eight figure, we started a sales coaching company in 2006 that became eight figures. We had 200 coaches, we sold that in 2018. And then Brand Builders Group is a coaching model. Even today we do one-on-one coaching. And almost, I mean, not almost like every piece of curriculum we've ever created came from doing a one-on-one coaching call with someone who asked a question Yeah. Who were like, well, let me explain it this way, or let me draw it out this way. And now it's like your content Yeah. Is born out of those conversations.
KR (15:11):
Yeah. It it's, it absolutely is. And it's so funny because I'm sure you get this question from people all the time, and so do I, because like I pump out a ton of content. You do too. Right? And, and people are like, how do you think of your content? How do you know what to create? How do you, how are you always create, I'm like, if you're having conversations with your people, you are never creating, in theory, you're always creating to answer questions and to solve problems Yeah. That people are already pushing to you Anyway. So I think that's kind of the danger of, you know, in today's market, there's so much focus on like automation and digitizing things and all of that. And listen, I have a Black Belt six Sigma operations manager that help like automate and digitize things and like get stuff dialed in. But the human element is so essential to sell with ease. Because when there's connection there and there's congruency and you're not trying to take an idea and force it on the market, but instead you are like in cohesion right. With your people. That's where it is. Like it's fun and it's easy because what you're producing is is what they're already craving. They're just waiting for it. Right? Mm-Hmm. .
RV (16:24):
Well, and it's interesting how simple, like, you know, the other thing about running ads to a consult, which is really great, is we call it chicken on a Stick in the Brand Builders group community, which is, I love, like giving people that sample, right? Is just going like, how do they sell chicken in the food court? They don't say, we've got the best chicken in the world. Yeah. They hand you a piece of chicken on a stick and you eat it and you're like, wow, that was amazing. Like, I think I will have a chicken sandwich. That's
KR (16:48):
So good.
RV (16:49):
Like doing a free coaching call. Even if you don't sell them, you get all these other benefits that you're talking about.
KR (16:55):
For sure. They
RV (16:56):
Get to trust you. They become a referral source, they become a fan, and hopefully they become a client. But even if not, like you get all these other things but it's, you're so right. Like everybody wants to jump to the like, scalable digital empire of reaching millions of people and then they, they, they don't give themself enough financial runway to ever get the plane off off the ground
KR (17:19):
That that's a thousand percent in. And I mean, I go off on my like soapbox about this all the time because, you know, you can, you can do a quick Google search. It, you know, you don't have to spend a lot of time and, and you can look up the fact that, you know, the average business is not profitable for two years. If you go into a business and your only focus is, let me extract every single dollar out of this business as fast as I possibly can, the chances are it's gonna fail. Because you need to be able to love and nurture and invest in that business building a foundation that is gonna be sustainable, that's gonna last a profitable foundation for growth. So number one, I feel like so many people are starting and growing businesses from a place of financial, like dire straits, right?
KR (18:02):
And, and, and then how do you make good strategic decisions? How can you be a visionary if you're making decisions you know, in financial dire straits? But, but also I think people are very quick. Like, I know the whole like, mindset is burn, burn the boat and, you know, don't give yourself any other option. And I tell people all the time, I'm like, if you have a job, like find a way to get your business off the ground on the side before you quit, because you need to fund getting that thing off the ground and you're gonna be a much better CEO if you're making strategic decisions and not very transactional ones because you're trying to survive. Like, it's, it's not a great place to build a company from, you know? Yeah.
RV (18:41):
I mean, it's just desperation. Like very few things are good to do. Like from desperation, specifically financial ones . Exactly. exactly.
RV (18:52):
I love that. So I wanna come back to something you said a few minutes ago, which was that before you had your first customer, you hired your first person. Mm-Hmm. That's the other thing that I think small business owners really struggled to go, well, I can't afford to hire somebody. And it, and it, and it's, it's not just the first person. It typically stays with them for like many years where they're constantly going, I can't afford to hire. I'm not making enough money to hire somebody. Yeah. How did you flip your mindset there and how, how did you, how did you get yourself to do that?
KR (19:22):
Well, I think there's a couple things. And one I got so off about exactly what you just said, that I wrote a book about it. Because no one is teaching entrepreneurs how to build teams. And this is why entrepreneurs are, are so burnout and overwhelmed and frustrated and stressed in their businesses because they don't have the appropriate support. To answer your question specifically,
RV (19:41):
What's that book called?
KR (19:41):
Oh, it's called Bigger.
RV (19:42):
You have 11. You have 11 books. So
KR (19:44):
What's that one? It's bigger than You. The Entrepreneur's Guide to Building an Unstoppable Dream Team. And it literally walks you through step by step by step, the strategy, the thinking, the mindset, and the tactical action plan of how to go through building a team that will be profitable. So to answer your question, almost any role that you hire for, especially in the beginning of your business, you know, you're, you should hire, basically there's a front of the house and a back of the house, right? We, let's just make it really, really simple for people. Front of the house is sales and marketing. Back of the house is operations and client support. One is driving new customer acquisition and one is making sure you get paid. You service the people that are already paying you, you keep them and you grow them. Almost any role that you hire for in your company can be monetized.
KR (20:32):
So when I hired, when I brought on my first person, they had a element of their role that was already built into it that was going to monetize. They were helping me to get referrals. They were helping me to do upsells. They were helping me to do contract renewals. So I knew before I hired this person that yes, they're gonna cost me this amount each month, but this is what I'm gonna do to monetize their roles. That instead of this being an expense, this is gonna be an investment. And that's how I look at any person that I'm hiring in any one of my companies today, before I go and bring someone on board, I'm saying, how is this role gonna be sustainable in my organization? Because as the CEO, your plan is the survival, your responsibility is the survival of the business. It's how does this business stay in business?
KR (21:22):
How does this business stay profitable? How does this business keep growing? And if you start building a team with either a, the mindset that this team is gonna cost me money, then you have a scarcity mindset, and you're probably not gonna hire the right people or the best people, or any people at all. To your point, rari or on the flip side, we have people that go out and they hire all these people, but there's, there's no plan, right? And when you hire people without a plan to monetize their roles, it it's, it's a heavy burden. So now you end up working to pay their payroll instead of them working for you. But I think the beautiful thing, and this is what I remind my clients all the time, is this is all decisions we have free will , right? We're free agents, we have free will. So these are decisions that we get to make before we bring someone on board. We can have a plan for how they're gonna bring profit into the business. And so I
RV (22:14):
Wanna, I wanna, I wanna zoom in on that because Yeah. You know, you, you mentioned like, there's certain roles where you go like, hey, referrals or repeat customers or renewals or you know, collecting cash or like outstanding payments even. Yep. What are some of the, how do you, so, so I I'm curious to know, like you mentioned front of the house, back of the house, sales, marketing, operations, delivery. Have you seen a consistent pattern in who you should hire first versus who you should hire second, who you should hire third? Or is that different? Yeah. For every business, yes. And then, and then also what I really am also curious about is how do you tie operational roles like assistance and, you know, people like that. How do you tie those to a metric to where both, like you can feel like, oh, I'm getting the business is getting the money back for this person.
KR (23:09):
Yeah. These are really good questions. Thank you for asking these questions. I think these can change people's lives that are listening here today. So listening. Totally,
RV (23:16):
Totally.
KR (23:17):
Okay, so, so let's start with the first question that you asked, which is, is there an order of hiring? And this is what I'll say. Obviously there's nuance to every situation, so it's not gonna be like, yes, it's the same for every person, but let's just talk about like, the trend, the pattern of, of what I see with the thousands of clients that I've worked with, right? First things first, you need to buy back your time period, right? Because as the CEO of the company, you need to be doing things that are forward market facing, creating content, getting on podcasts, generating leads, having consultation called, doing launches, right? Which means that the first thing that you need to do is to get your time back on admin operations. Just all that transactional stuff that takes your time during the day that keeps you, I say like, behind the scenes instead of out front.
KR (24:05):
So the first thing to think about is how much of your time is actually being spent out front driving the business forward, versus how much of your time is being spent behind the scenes, basically just maintaining the tasks that have to get done. So that tends to be the very first role. And it doesn't need to be a full-time person. It could be a, a fractional admin, it could be a part-time person. You know, there's all different ways you can slice that, you know, equation. But that's number one. Then number two is you need someone whose only role is gonna be to generate cash. So someone who's gonna probably be a hybrid of sales and marketing with a goal of taking the leads that you're generating, building relationships with them, nurturing them, getting them into consultations or getting them on your calendar for consultations. That tends to be the second one, which then puts you the business and puts you in a position to be able to afford to hire the third person, which is now, oh my gosh, I have more clients than I can service well myself.
KR (25:01):
How do I make this business scalable? Point number three is, okay, now we need someone that can actually do client servicing, that can take your methodology, that can take your, your, you know, scientific approach to what you do and can empower other people to go through that process. It doesn't mean you're totally removed from it, but it means you can elevate your role and then you can have support roles, right? That are taking the nuances and, and helping the application of them. So that tends to be the most effective order. And I'm not saying it's like that with everyone, but I'm saying that is a pattern that tends to work very, very well because first person gives you back time so you can sell more. Second person is selling more directly or indirectly, and then third person is able to then help you to make sure that you retain, upsell, get renewals, get referrals from the people that you've now brought in. Mm-Hmm,
RV (25:54):
. Interesting. Interesting. Now so I love that. So, so take me through the second question, which is, you know, justifying the pay for operations people like sales, even marketing people. It can be tricky to do that. But you can at least measure pretty clearly Yeah. How many leads have come in, how many subscribers have grown and awareness, impressions, et cetera. Sales is the easiest to pay. I feel like hiring a salesperson is, is one of the easiest things to hire because you can do it on an eat what you kill basis. Yeah. and they can make a lot of money if they do a great job. And but when you get into the more administrative and operational roles, which at first might be a fractional assistant, but later one day becomes a COO you know, a director of operations, a account manager, whatever, like how do you attach those roles to profit and money?
KR (26:56):
Yeah. It's such a good question. And, and the answer is that it changes as the business grows very dramatically. So like, I'll give an example of like, here's what this looks like. I have, I have some companies right now that are only 1-year-old. I have my original company that's now 12 years old. So let's talk about the difference between an operations person in a baby company versus an operations person in a a established company. 'cause It's so different, right? Totally. In a baby company that's just getting started, your operations person is very much gonna be in like a hybrid role, okay? So this person is gonna be doing tasks related to scheduling your customers, renewing their contracts. They're gonna be kind of interacting and engaging. They're not servicing your customers, but they are going to be kind of that, that touch point, right? They're doing all of your scheduling, they're coordinating with customers on all different things that come up.
KR (27:46):
They're, you know, managing billing to make sure that, you know, all, all things go in order. All of those things, right? And, and many times, the first time that you hire for any role in your company, when your company's very small, the role is gonna be a hybrid role. Meaning they're gonna be doing a lot of kind of different things because you don't need a full-time person that's gonna sit there all day long to do operations for a little baby business, right? When I was fi first building this role, and I still do this with my newer companies now, I tend to have kind of someone in an operational, hybrid, hybrid role that in many ways, even though they may not be the person that is servicing the customer, they are almost like the customer care person for all intents and purposes, which means that they're getting referrals, right?
KR (28:33):
When I first started doing this, I literally had my ops person send thank you notes and, and touch points for our referral program, and she would generate new referrals every single month. She was a brand new college kid. I hired her as an intern. She had no sales experience, she had no marketing experience, and I was literally training her from the ground up on operations. But I said, what's something that is systematic and can produce profits that someone that's brand new can do well? Anyone can build relationships by caring anyone, right? Sure. And so I said, I'm gonna have this person, I'm gonna look at my client base and I'm gonna say, who are the right people that I could be generating consistent referrals from? And I simply had her manage the monthly touch points for referrals. And we consistently saw that we got sales coming in and introductions coming in because of her just doing these kind of thoughtful monthly touch points to our own customers.
KR (29:30):
And a lot of people think, well, I'm a small business, you know, I'm just getting started. It doesn't make sense for me to have a referral program. If you have one customer and you get one referral, you just double the size of your business. Amen. If you have five customers and you get five referrals, you just double the size of your business. So you can do this on a really small scale, or you can do this on a really large scale. But when I was starting at the very beginning, that was how I monetized that first role. They got us referrals. They got people to renew their contracts and do upsells. Let's say someone was in my group program, they could add a VIP day with me. At the time I was still doing a lot, like, you know it looks different for everyone now when I look at, you know, our operations manager, you know, in my coaching company that's 12 years old, right?
KR (30:18):
He's a black Belt six Sigma, and his job is helping us buy back the time of every other person in the organization by finding efficiencies in the business systematically. And then getting them to work like a well-oiled machine so that every other person in the company's productivity is lifted up so that they can actually open up their bandwidth, open up their productivity to sell more, to serve more clients, to get more leads to, to close more whatever it's gonna be. So it looks, it looks really, really different. It's kind of much more scientific over here 'cause it's like deep dive, like systems efficiencies, you know, process orientation. Whereas in the beginning stages it's just like, well, what are the things that most small businesses don't do? And, and Rory, this is what, if I can just take one minute on this. Most small businesses, they do not consistently reach out to their customers for referrals.
KR (31:14):
They do not consistently reach out to their past customers. This was the other thing I had my operations manager do. Whenever someone rolled off a contract, she would stay with in touch with them every month. And then we would consistently see them come back and they would come back and they would come back. So that was the other thing. It was just she wasn't selling, she was just literally staying in touch with them. Right. We would put together mailers or a handwritten note or whatever the case. So I'll just pause there. I know that was kind of a lot.
RV (31:41):
No, that's great. I I was actually gonna ask you what are these monthly touchpoints that you're systematizing for referrals? Yeah. Like what are, what are they doing? 'cause Like you say you is intern fresh outta college, like not the sales and marketing wizard. Yes. But clearly you've developed some type of process or system that they're able to run.
KR (31:59):
Yeah. Yeah. So we do everything digitally now because we run much larger scale programs. But back then, and even I would say if you're running a small business and you're just getting off this off the ground and you're not talking about you know, hundreds of people that you're reaching out to you know, we sent handwritten notes. You know, we might share an interesting article with them and say, you know, I thought of you this, you know, I thought you would enjoy this. She might share a resource with them. We did send out gifts, we sent physical gifts. So I mean, again, I'm in the high ticket world, primarily that this business that I'm talking about is in the coaching consulting world. So when someone works with you, you, and, you know, the equivalent of a relationship is a hundred, $200,000 over the lifetime of the business, it makes sense to spend 50 bucks on a gift for someone, right?
KR (32:49):
So we did gifting, we did thank you notes, we sent out articles we would make connections if there was someone that we thought that it would be relevant and meaningful for them to, you know, have a connection with you know, she would answer questions here and there. So it, it was nothing genius. It was just literally the consistency of doing it at all. And that's kind of what my point was. Most small businesses never follow up with their past customers. Your past customers know you. They like you, they trust you, and they've gotten a result working for you. But if you don't care enough to reach back out to them and say, Hey Rory, I saw we haven't worked together for two years. What have you been up to? I'd love to see you back in our world again. Why would you come back to us?
KR (33:32):
Right. You're gonna go to someone who's pursuing you and saying, I'd really like to work with you. Right? So that's one of the easiest money makers that sit in every single business that most small businesses, they don't have any cadence to how they're going after that business. And that's free money. That's free money because most people buy things cyclically and habitually, meaning they're gonna buy in that category for life, but they're not gonna buy every day for forever. And people buy from top of mind awareness, which means they're gonna buy from one of the last three people that they interfaced with. So if you put those two things together, people buy habitually, meaning they buy typically in a category for life. If you're a person that believes in coaching, you're probably gonna keep investing in some way, shape or form in expanding your education and growing and whatever. Right? So we know that people, when they buy in a category, tend to buy in that category long term. We also know that people's lives go like this. They're, they're not ups and down, they're not
RV (34:33):
Ups and downs. Yeah.
KR (34:34):
There's constant ups and downs and season
RV (34:37):
Have kids, you go to college, you move da, you get a new job, you start a new company, whatever, Uhhuh,
KR (34:43):
That's exactly it. So where someone might be your best customer spending 50 grand, a hundred grand, $200,000 with you for three years straight, something might happen in their life where they don't work with you for three or four years. I've actually had this happen. And, and then, and then when it's time because we maintained a relationship, they'll come back again. Right? And it's not to say that people never will if you don't maintain a relationship, it's saying that you'll 10 x 20 x 50 x the amount of people that will if you focus on just maintaining a relationship, right? Mm-Hmm.
RV (35:14):
. Yeah. I love that. I mean I I love what you said. It's just like the, the magic is not in how you do your follow up. No. It's just that you do the follow up. It's just touching base for whatever ever reason you can find to, like that's stay in touch with them. It's
KR (35:33):
Amazing. Uhhuh And, and you know what's so funny, Rory, to your point, people will come back to us all the time now and they will literally say, thank you so much for following up with me. Like, I'm, I'm just here 'cause you followed up with me. And like, they'll come back and they'll buy again and they're, they're just simply there because we like reminded them. Mm-Hmm. . But people's lives are so busy. Right? But this is the thing, and, and this is what I would say to everyone is like, the internet world has a tendency to make you think in very short windows of instant gratification and the thing that's gonna allow you to build a wildly profitable business that sustains right over, over years, decades, whatever the case is, thinking about customers as people that you have relationships with and setting your strategic foundation of your business around lifetime value of the customer, not acquisition.
KR (36:28):
Most people focus singularity on customer acquisition and the bottom of their business is like a funnel and it's just pouring out the bottom. And so they're just on this constant hamster wheel of they have to sell just to maintain. There's no continuity of building the brand because they're only focused on customer acquisition. They're not focused on retention, renewals, referrals, upsells the lifetime value that creates really nice stability in the business. And no one's selling you that course. No one's selling you that methodology because it's not like the bright, shiny Right. You know, exciting thing. No one's
RV (37:04):
You to like how to be successful eventually one day through Exactly. Long-Term relationships and long-term strategy, you know? No, exactly. I'll teach you how to quadruple your revenue over the next 10 years . And like, not exciting.
KR (37:17):
No, it's not exciting. But the thing is, it's what it, it's what will keep you in business and it's what will make you a multi, multi multimillionaire. I mean, it's, it's, it, it, listen, it's very hard to retain really high level performance in a company if you don't get the backend right. Totally. Most will never scale because they figure out the front end, but they never figure out the backend. So it falls out the bottom as fast as it comes in the top. Mm-Hmm. . And that's all, that's all I can say. And so like, I get people to come into my world a lot of times 'cause they wanna learn how to launch, they wanna learn social media marketing, they wanna learn strategy for scale. And I'm like, great. But once I get 'em in there, I'm like, okay, now we're gonna have the real conversation, right? Let's talk about how we're gonna actually build a business that's gonna be here, right? Because yes, I can give you all this on the front end, but we also need to make sure that the back end is right too. Mm-Hmm, .
RV (38:06):
Absolutely. Well you know, I'm sitting here thinking to go you know, I've interviewed so many different people on this show, amazing, amazing thought leaders. But if like someone asks me to say, Hey, who's a, who's a business coach you would recommend, like, there's not somebody that I really go like, ah, this people share same philosophies and similar things. And I think so much of what you shared is so similar in our philosophy and what we've, our experience more than our philosophy, just our, our experience. So I love that. So Kelly, where do you want people to go if they wanna connect with you learn about you, obviously you've got your podcast, which I know is really important to you and, and is a great show. We've had so many of our, our clients on there. So many of my friends have have been on there. So you got the podcast. Is that the best place or where else should they go?
KR (38:53):
Yeah, I mean, definitely come listen to the Kelly Roach show. I bring it, you know, there's a thousand episodes you can literally grow your business for free. Just come and listening to the show or connect with me on Instagram, Kelly Roach official come DM me. My team's in there all the time, but I pop in too. And, and they're there as themselves. So if it comes from Kelly, it's coming from me and I love to meet you. So come say hello.
RV (39:13):
I love it. Well, we will link up to all that. Thank you so much for this. It just never amazes me. You know, I can, I can always tell when I meet a real eight figure entrepreneur because they're not talking about the flashy tactics and trending things. They're talking about the principles that have always worked and will always work that are not sexy. But they are simple and they're not, they're not easy, but you can execute on 'em and they will make a big difference. And that's what I think today has been all about. So we really appreciate it, Kelly and so great to connect and we wish you all the best.
KR (39:49):
Thank you. Thanks for having me.

The post Ep 488: Creating Operational Infrastructure with Kelly Roach appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 487: Fastest Ways to Grow Your New Business | Sara and Ben Jensen Episode Recap

Nicole Gale — Fri, 17 May 2024 11:00:57 +0000

AJV (00:02):
are you trying to figure out how do you turn your mission, your message, your passion, your calling whatever you would like to call it, . But if you're trying to figure out how to turn that thing that you feel called to do into the thing that makes you money, this is a quick conversation that I would like to have with you. So I was able to interview the founders and also a married couple, Sarah and Ben Jensen, who have founded and started the company, Hugh & Grace, which is a products company, skincare products supplements, as well as household care products that help you keep your hormones in check, right? So clean products that help you with all the things in on and around your body. And I had this conversation with them on the influential Personal Brand podcast around why did they start this?
AJV (00:56):
How did they start this? Where did the idea come from? It's a very fast growing company. They only founded it three years ago. Although the idea started 14 years ago. And I thought this was a, a, a great inspiration to have a conversation today about how do you do that? Like, how do you take something that you've been through in your life that was challenging or scary or traumatic or just painful and go, but there is purpose in this, and I want to help other people who have experienced this, that same thing. I want to help them find a better way, experience a better way of getting through it living, coming out on the other side better. In other words, I feel like I have a message put on my heart that must get out into the world, and I would love to turn that into a business that helps me create an abundant life for me, my family generations beyond me as well as making a huge impact by doing something that I know matters.
AJV (01:59):
And so I, I thought this was like a really great inspiration conversation. So here are a few things that may help you as you figure out the transition between doing what you're currently doing and doing the thing that you feel called to do, right? And how do you turn your passion into your full-time business? So number one, I thought this was very insightful is success is about making as many mistakes as humanly possible as quickly and as inexpensively as possible so that you can learn, pivot, and grow, right? I, I, I think that's so powerful for us all to remember that success is not a foundation of our victories. success is built on the foundation of many, many mistakes and failures and not giving up, but instead of taking every mistake and learning from it, taking every failure of going, that wasn't a failure,
AJV (02:59):
That was a learning experience, that was a growth opportunity. It was learning what not to do again that, that is where growth happens. That's where success happens. Success is a byproduct of being willing to make a ton of mistakes, but make 'em quickly, make them as inexpensive as possible, and then learn, pivot, and go. And I think that's just so important for all of us of knowing whatever it is that you think it's going to be, it likely won't be what you end up with. , if I can just share the evolution of brand builders group over the last, you know, almost six years that, you know, we've formally been an entity and where it started. There's a lot of the foundational pieces that are still there with our community and membership and intensives. But I will also tell you that we quickly expanded into a lot of things and then very quickly condensed them all back in when we realized we have expanded beyond our capacity beyond our ability to serve in the way that we wanna serve.
AJV (04:03):
And so our offerings grew really quickly, and then they all got cut back just as quickly. And that was a, that was a part of going, it's like, man, we don't have capacity to do all of this in the way that we want it. And there are certain areas that had natural momentum that we made a decision of going, although there's this thing that could get us there, that could be the thing, it's not right. And it felt very forceful. It felt like we were just pulling it along behind us versus these other things that we're just taking off without a ton of effort. And our, and the point of that being is like your audience will tell you what it is they need from you, if you'll just listen. And the way that they tell you is what they buy, what they buy again, what they renew with, what they tell their friends about.
AJV (04:48):
It's in their feedback. And they'll also tell you what's not working by the fact that they don't buy it again or they don't renew or they don't tell their friends about it. And I think a lot of that just has to do with us as business owners, as entrepreneurs, as team members, to slow down enough and pay attention and listen. And that's really hard to do when you're doing a hundred different things and you're pulled in a million different directions. It's hard to do when you're distracted and when you're busy. Yep. B word, busy. 'cause We can get busy and when we're busy and in a hurry and multitasking, it is hard to see the things right in front of you. You often push them aside and you don't pay attention because there's too many other things to get to. And I would encourage you that as you're figuring this out, if you slow down and you ask and you listen, it'll become so obviously clear.
AJV (05:44):
People will tell you exactly what it is that they are willing to buy from you, and that they need to buy from you. And that also it gives you confidence and conviction that you're the right person to offer it to them. Them. If you just slow down and listen intuitively, ask, pay attention and just get into the data, right? That's a really important part of this right? Now. That leads to the second thing, what you do, right? Your passion, right? And your business, what you do has got to be both logical and emotional, right? It should emotionally move you to go like, I can't not do this. Like, if I didn't do this, it would be the biggest regret of my life. Like, I have to do this. That's the emotional side of like, I feel convicted in this. I can't not talk about it.
AJV (06:34):
Like it just bubbles out of me regardless. Like this is who I am and it's what I was put on this earth to do. There's passion, right? That's the emotional side. But then there's also the logical side. And sometimes we let our emotions overtake the logic. And this is a discipline, it's an obedience of pulling that back in, of going, these are the things I feel called to do, but that's honestly sometimes a little me centered. And we have to pair that. We have to balance that with, and what are people asking for from me, right? What are people willing to buy from me? What are people willing to learn from me? What are they asking to learn from me? Rather, you know, intrinsically or verbal or verbally that it's like, where am I most positioned to help and serve people? Passion? And what are people most willing to buy from me?
AJV (07:31):
And how much are they willing to spend with me? Logically, that's market evaluation, that's core target audience that's pairing with what you have to offer versus what the market is saying that they want. And that is both an emotional and logical conversation, and they both have to happen. One is not higher or lower than the other. They are both equally important to figure out a business model that serves both your passion and your calling and create something that is viable and sustainable that can actually make you money. So it is both about your passion and what you want to do and what the market is willing to buy from you and at what price. So it is both things. And so I think a part of that is sometimes you don't know until you know. And that's where you gotta be flexible and nimble and be willing to just get out there and make some quick mistakes cheaply, right?
AJV (08:22):
Quickly. and then pivot. I go, wasn't that wasn't that. Let's try it again. Let's tweak it again. That was too much. That was too low. Whatever it is. And the best way to know those things is not to ideate and it's not to brainstorm, it's to do it. . you're ready right now. If you know you can help someone, then you are ready. And sometimes you just gotta get it out there. And whatever it is, it's fine. 'cause It will change no matter what it is. Your first launch is going to be a different offering, a a different price point, a different product, a different description and probably less than a year from now. Because once you're out there doing it, you tweak it and fine tune it, and you make it better as you go. You cannot make it what it is meant to be before you do it.
AJV (09:09):
You just can't. Nobody knows what they're doing before they do it. So the best thing you can do is to do it and to adjust accordingly as you go. Okay? That is how you turn your passion into your business at, at a very high level, right? Now three other quick things I wanna share with us is that now how do you get people to buy it? Well, one, you sell it, right? Selling is fast. Marketing is slow. Marketing is the long game. So selling is the short game. So if we think it's like, okay, now I've got this idea. I need to build the website, I need to launch a podcast. I need to do social media, I need da, da, da, da, da. That is the long, expensive route. And many of you don't have the runway to do it. Some of you do awesome, but most of us don't.
AJV (09:56):
And what you have to do is you have to get out there and talk to people. You have to tell them your story. Why? 'cause your story is what helps you connect to your audience, not your product. Your story, IE your personal brand. So knowing why you do this, how you do it, what makes it different, what problem you're solving what message are you delivering, right? And products and services doesn't matter what makes it unique. And a lot of times it's you, you are what makes it unique. The struggle, the story is what people connect to and remember why? Because they have similar ones. That's why they resonate. And so you've gotta be willing to get out there. Now, social media is a platform. Podcasts are a platform. But don't forget the power of proximity. And that is a real thing.
AJV (10:46):
You being live in person in a room, talking to people, explaining it to people, showing it to people, helping people experience it, skin to skin, shoulder to shoulder, like that goes faster. So be willing to get out there and talk about it. Do not let it be the world's best kept secret secret because you don't know what to say or how to say it. It's like that's, that's your job. Like you have to know how to explain it because you've been through it, you know? And then you've got to find anyone anywhere who's willing to listen for free or not. Like if you get paid, great, but don't expect to be paid, right? But willing to get out there and speak to any group who's willing to gather together churches, associations, memberships, masterminds, whatever. Right? there are all types of people who are looking for speakers for free all over the place.
AJV (11:39):
Business journals, chambers of Commerce, rotary Clubs, right? Yeah, that's old school stuff. But you know what? They need speakers. They have monthly meetings and you know who come to those meetings? People. And that's what you need. So be willing to talk to anyone about the thing because it matters. It matters to you. 'cause You know it's gonna matter to the people, right? So just wanna encourage that. Sales is fast, marketing is slow. And the best way for you to sell is to be in front of people, to explain it, to walk people through it, and to share your story, right? And then community is what helps things spread. It is finding a group of people who can rally behind your products and your services and shop them to the rooftops, right? Because why? Because they work, right? . So a part of the prerequisite for all of this is actually having a product or a service that does what it says, right?
AJV (12:31):
It's undeniable. If you get someone results, it is hard not for that person and for others to talk about it. Make sure you are focused on being better before you focus on being bigger. Make sure that you know how to get people results and you have documented proof of it. You have testimonials of it, you've got case studies of it, right? And those don't have to be formally and designed like I'm talking about on a Word doc, right? A quick iPhone video, but have it have proof. Third party validation that you are who you say you are, and you do what you say you're gonna do. And that could be in a email from a client, a testimonial. And clients don't have to be paid clients. FYI don't be afraid to offer your products and services for free to test it. That's required. In most cases, any big product that's having a launch has been tested many, many, many, many times for free before anyone paid for it.
AJV (13:25):
I think about this often. I fly a lot and thank gosh that anytime I am on a new airplane, that is not the first time that pilot has been in the plane. That is not the first time that plane has been the air. Thank the lord. This thing has been up for thousands of miles and this pilot has tens of thousands of miles under their belt. The first time they do it is not with paying customers in the seats. That would be crazy. But yet somehow we think that the very first time we launch our business, launch our products, people should pay for 'em. Why? Why do we think that? I don't know. Someone said it one time. I don't know. That's not true. Be willing to do what you do for free to get market feedback, to get testimonials, to fine tune to tweak before you go live.
AJV (14:09):
Then when you do go live, you do launch. You got all the validation and the conviction and the confidence and the market validation and testimonials that this does what it says it does. This gets results. This helps people. And it, I'm not just saying that all these other people are saying that community is what helps your business spread. So build it, share it, and don't forget about it. And then last, but not le lightly, I think this is also important, is that many of us see the attraction of entrepreneurship starting our own business because we think it's gonna allow us to build a lifestyle that caters to our, our family, our personal needs, our our marriages, our kids.
AJV (14:51):
And then you actually get in it and you realize you have less time than you did before, and you are more stressed and more overwhelmed. And that's because we let the business become the main thing. And so I would just encourage you as you're thinking about like this passion thing that you have, that you feel called to do and how you could turn it into a business, don't forget the important part of also talking about like, what is the life that you wanna have while doing this? How much time do you want for your marriage time that you want? Spiritually in my case, it's like I gotta ti I have to prioritize my time with the Lord first. And then time with my husband, then time with my kids and my family, and then comes, you know, times with friends and community.
AJV (15:38):
But if I make the business first, it sucks up all the time. , right? It's like if the business comes first, there's always enough to do where I do not have time to pray, read the Bible. I do not have time to hang out with friends or go to yoga or go on date nights, or I don't have the time if I let the business come first. My point is the business cannot come first, right? You have to prioritize it. And the business has to fit in around that. I only share that because I did it the wrong way for about 15 years. And I'm only now figuring out the right way, a better way to do it. I'm not saying that I don't work hard, I work hard. But it fits within the confines of keeping the main thing, the main thing, and the priorities first.
AJV (16:18):
And if I do that, the business works. If I don't, nothing works. I struggle. My marriage struggles my faith struggles my family struggles. But when I put all those other things, first, business just works. And so make sure that as you're crafting this, you make sure that you're crafting your life in addition to your business. Because both matter , right? Your work matters and your life matters. IE your family your faith and yourself and your marriage, those things matter. So keep the priorities first, and you have to set those first, and the business fits in around that. So again, if you're thinking about how do you go from passion to business a couple of quick things to be thinking about. And I know that if you've got that calling on your heart, it's there for a reason. It's not there by accident and you're not crazy. God put it there and you're meant to do it. So don't be afraid. Make mistakes. Just keep going. Give it time. Don't rush it and just stay at it. Because if it's there, it's there for a reason and eventually you'll know why. So build that business. Turn that passion into something that's gonna create an abundant life for you and those around you. Make an impact and make great money while doing it.

The post Ep 487: Fastest Ways to Grow Your New Business | Sara and Ben Jensen Episode Recap appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 486: Turning Your Passion Into Your Business with Sara and Ben Jensen

Nicole Gale — Tue, 14 May 2024 11:00:07 +0000

AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody, welcome to the influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here, and y'all, I'm so excited to introduce you to two. Yep, you heard me Two new friends. It's very rare that I get to do another podcast episode with a husband and wife couple, and it's super sweet and special to me since I'm in business with my husband, Rory, as most of you listening, know that. So to get to introduce you guys to Sarah and Ben today, is this going to be a sweet, sweet story? But before I do a formal introduction to Ben and Sarah, I want you to know why you need to stick around for this episode. So before you decide if this is for you or for not, here's what I would tell you is number one, if you have been delving into the idea of going full-time into that thing that is tugging at your heart, this is the episode for you.
AJV (00:50):
If you've been trying to figure out how do you turn your passion into your business or how do you figure out how to weave your message and this calling that you have on your life into the thing that makes you money, then this is an episode that you want to listen to. 'cause You're today gonna get to hear from two people who have done and who are doing that right now, taking their life experiences, things that they feel called to do and said, you know what? We're gonna go all in and we're not just gonna take this information for ourselves. We're gonna turn it into a business and we're gonna make it useful and helpful for other people. So that is why you wanna stick around. Today is one of those unique episodes that doesn't matter who you are or where you're at in your journey, you want to stick around and listen.
AJV (01:31):
So without further ado, now, let me give you a quick introduction Ben and Sarah Jensen, and then we will get into having this awesome episode. So Sarah and Ben have founded Human Grace, which is a lifestyle wellness brand that promotes hormone health with life-changing skincare, health and home products. Y'all, I'm already interested in this and I don't even know what you do. So , I'm so excited you know that it's gonna be a good episode when you're like yes. Or maybe I'm just your avatar. So y'all, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to have you.
BJ (02:04):
Thank you. So excited to be here.
SJ (02:05):
I know this is, this is great. Love your audience.
AJV (02:08):
Well, and I love too that we got introduced by mutual friends 'cause that already carries so much weight and you know, we talk a lot about the power of reputation and personal brand and trust. And when other people are reaching out to me on your behalf, already says a lot about the good work that you do. So help our audience get to know you a little bit. What I'd love to do is just start, is just to hear a little bit about your story. Why don't you kick us off, Sarah
SJ (02:36):
So, so Ben and I, we've, we found our company almost three years ago, but we, it was really, the genesis was a very long personal struggle. So we got married young, we married for almost 22 years. And we, but we spent 14 of those years struggling with unexplained infertility. Got married young. I was 23 and Ben was 26, you know, started trying to get pregnant. I was around 25 and we were very healthy. I think outside looking in, you know, I was an ultra marathoner. Ben was doing CrossFit, you know, didn't drink smoke, you know, had, you know, all the green drinks and all the, all the protein all did everything quote unquote right. But, but we could not get pregnant and being diagnosed with unexplained, it was like, find something and just wrong and fix it. So we just did a ton of research.
SJ (03:20):
It was after I think my sixth round of IVF where our doctor said like, what chemicals do you spraying around your house? What skincare are you using? What wellness stuff? And that's what really kind of triggered us going deeper into research. And even, even the thought, like from I, my rounds of IVFI read a hormone cream on my leg, get my blood levels tested the next day and my hormones had spiked. And just not dunno why we didn't earlier put two and two together that what you put on your body actually can impact your hormones. The amazing part of our story is Ben's sister volunteered to be our surrogate and gave birth to our little hue. And then when he was almost one, my sister called and said, I wanna try to give Hugh a sibling. And so she volunteered to be our second surrogate. So gave birth for our little grace. The name Hugh means heart, mind, and spirit and grace means goodness, goodness, generosity and love and which the things that brought us our kids. But it was after having our kids and realizing that, so when we were learning about these hormone disrupting chemicals and hormone health topic of hormone health and hormone disruption, we were just thinking of infertility. 'cause That was just our sole focus,
BJ (04:23):
That that was our pain. Yeah.
SJ (04:24):
Yeah. But then looking at the data and looking at the research, these chemicals, they are linked to infertility, but they're also linked to autoimmunity, diseases and anxiety, depression, cancers, obesity, strokes,
BJ (04:35):
The, and the list goes on. Yeah.
SJ (04:36):
And then the, the then thinking the flip side, what is hormone health? And that's better sleep, less stress, their skin better like no joint pain. So just thinking like, these are things benefits that everyone needs and wants. And so that's when we decided that we should create human grace.
BJ (04:54):
So yeah, I, I'll tell you and, and give it right back to you. But Sarah came to me, we have our two children and I'm finally at peace and I'm holding our, you know, our daughter at this point. She says, Ben, you know, we have to do something about this. I said, what are you talking about? We have our kids. We, we don't have to do anything. I would hold my kids. You know, we had very comfortable careers. You know, we, we knew the path that we were on and it was, it was, I dunno, easy is the right word, but it was clear like we, we kind of knew what we were doing. And she just felt this passion kept coming back to me. And after she kind of explained to me the, the vision that she had had and, and, and that we could help other people while helping build something meaningful while earning an income on it, it became interesting as, as we dived into the research she talked about, we started looking at the market opportunity instead of focusing specifically on infertility, which is our, you know, you always hear the best businesses are solving pain or solving a problem.
BJ (05:48):
That's what led us to do this. It wasn't wasn't 'cause I necessarily wanted to start a business 'cause we kind of had to, felt, felt compelled. I
SJ (05:57):
Just felt this huge responsibility because what Ben and I went through nearly broke us, us individuals, us our marriage many, many times. And like, we're, we're, we're strong. Like we, you know, Ben was, Ben's being modest about his career. He started, he's very successful. He was operating a multi-billion dollar family office out of Beverly Hills. I had my MBA from USC and I was working with our top alumni, my parents in philanthropy. So raising transformative gifts from the university. And I said, Ben, what we went through nearly broke us. And we're strong individuals. And I said, and this really impacts everyone and no one really knows about it. And I said, between, like, between our professional networks, we can get to anyone. You know, I'm a professional fundraiser. I can ask for help if I feel like it's meaningful. And we said, what can, what can we do where we can actually also spend time with our kids? 'cause We were working long hours traveling a ton, and we said, we wanna be with our kids now. So what, what can we do to help? That's, that's really meaningful.
AJV (06:50):
Yeah. So this is what I was gonna ask earlier because lots of people discover things, make life changes and then move on. So I need to know like, what was this vision? What was this passion like? What was so convicting about what you went through and what you learned that said, no, we have to do this. We can't not do it.
BJ (07:15):
Yeah. It's, it, it, it's interesting. I think there, there were a few things when we had our family, we, we started looking, put it this way, until we had our children, we were thinking about having children, right? That was the only thing we could do is, is think of that, that thing in the future, right? We weren't thinking about our lives. We were living our lives. We didn't sit on our hands. We got graduate degrees, we traveled the world. 'cause We, you know, but we, we always wanted to have a family, even though the two of us rarely talked about that. Like, it was too painful. But when we got to the other side of it, now we have our kids. Now what kinda life do we wanna live, right? How do we want to spend time with our family? And as she was saying, we were working a lot and we were working for other people, which was great.
BJ (07:57):
But, you know, cynically, my, my the definition of my job was to make very wealthy people wealthier. And Sarah's job was to make a wealthy university wealthier. And we thought we've got talent and ability. We, we, you know, I've, I've operated businesses, had a hundred employees and, but I've never done it for, for us. And if we had pain that deep, there's gotta be other people that are going through it. And maybe we can prevent something. Maybe we can help something. Maybe we can provide community, provide support. And so our whole business is, is built around that concept. It's actually, when we started talking about how we would go to market is when I got interested in it. 'cause If we could help people, products are one thing, right? Yes. We have great products that work really well, but then there's education, then there's community building and then support.
BJ (08:45):
We could put all those things together. We're creating almost a movement. And that, that was interesting. And then if we could do it in a, in a profitable format where it's, you know, she talked about fundraising, charity's amazing. But charities are often not self-sustaining. Almost never are they. And so if we're creating community and there's profit built in, that's a sustainable business model. That means the people that are, that are, are selling our products, the people that are you know, affected by, in a positive way by our products, we could build something that would be built to last. So that, that got interesting.
SJ (09:15):
I think also, you look at your life, we look back at this 14 years of hell. But you look back and like, you know, we were put in this position, we went through, we learned what we did, and it was almost like, this is what we're supposed to do. I, I couldn't sleep at night. Not 'cause I daughter was a newborn, but like, I just, just kept me up saying like, we need to do something and we can do something. And just that, I think that drive of, you know, you talked earlier just about like, you feel like there's a calling in life and what, what we could do and what we could bring together and who we could have help us. Like we, we need to do this. We cannot, we can't not do it.
AJV (09:50):
I love that. Hasn't been either
BJ (09:52):
. We can talk about that too.
AJV (09:55):
. What I love
BJ (09:57):
Starting business during a pandemic is awesome.
AJV (09:58):
. Oh yeah. I mean that, I think everyone's got an interesting story from that. But what I love about what you guys are saying so much is it, it is one of those things like, when you really find your calling, when do you really find it? It's something that you can't not do. And if you know anyone is out there listening going, well, I mean maybe I should do this. And it's like, if it's a, maybe it's not. It, it's gotta be that thing that keeps you up at night. It's gotta be that thing that's like, oh, like I have to do this. I can't not do it. And just to even hear you guys say that is so re it's such a great reminder and convicting to me, like even in our own business, it's like that's how we felt. It was like, God literally showed up and gave us this business and all we had to do is follow him.
AJV (10:43):
And it was like, we couldn't not do it. We would've been stupid to not do it with such clarity of what, you know, like what our giftings were and what we were able to do. And to find other people who have found that is one, it's really special. So congratulations to you. But it's also really hard, right? Like starting anything is not easy. So I would love to hear from you, from both of you, because I'd love to hear both perspectives of, for the person who's listening, who's going, that's great. I know this thing that I'm called to do, but what do I do? Like, yes, I, I know that there's something in my heart, there is something that is calling me, but I'm also like pretty successful. I'm comfortable and doing this over thing, this other thing over here. And to leave that and just like cold Turkey do something else, feels kind of like irresponsible. What would you say to that person of going like, here's the, the the first step that you should do. Or here's what you should be asking. Here's what you should be doing. Here's what you should be thinking. And I would just love to hear it through what you guys did.
BJ (11:47):
You wanna start or you want me to start? You guys?
BJ (11:53):
I'm gonna speak on her behalf. 'cause She, she, she's, I think the thing that is probably the most important is whatever you do is not gonna be perfect, but if you do nothing, you'll get nothing. Right? So the the first step is to take action, right? You, you don't have a plan, you don't have a clear path. I think what held me personally back at the beginning was, you know, this idea of, well, I don't wanna do this unless it's really, really good. Unless it's perfect. And what I've learned about a startup, the definition of a startup is can you make and learn, make enough mistakes and learn from those mistakes to, to get to profitability before you run outta capital , right? It's, it's literally that simple. You're gonna make mistakes. The whole, the whole process is to make 'em quick, make them inexpensive, and make sure you have enough resources to get through the mistake making process.
BJ (12:45):
And so if you, if you look at that, the definition of success is making those mistakes. And so it's okay. And that was hard for me to accept. And you know, I remember working on this financial model for weeks and weeks and not being one to, to to, to put it in front of everybody in case it wasn't right. Well, of course it's not right. You're guessing about the future, it's not gonna be right. But it took many, many months for me to kind of work through that. It took us a few months to figure out how to work together. Unfortunately we have very complimentary strengths. We don't compete. You know, I I I'm on the operations and the finance and the strategy side, and she's very much people and passion and community and pr I mean, she's great at all of those things. And so it works for us. But I, if I had distill it down, it is just move right? Take a step, take another step, take another step, make a mistake, turn a little bit. The word pivot is probably overused, but it's exactly right. You know, w when we were started looking at doing this business, it was gonna be an infertility support business, but we couldn't figure out how to make that work.
SJ (13:47):
Not this business business concept.
BJ (13:49):
Correct. But when we started down this path, that's what we were looking at. And then we started looking into different research and our eyes open. And so I think it's also good to remember what you think you're gonna start with is not where you're gonna end. And that's okay. Right? Don't fall in love with something so much that the, the, the numbers and the data and your customers, they tell you what you are if you listen.
AJV (14:09):
Mm-Hmm. That's wise.
SJ (14:11):
No. And so I was working at a university. I would go and hear amazing speakers. So billionaires come to speak and they, they talk about like your, think of the end of your life, your eulogy, what you want your eulogy to be. And so while we said like we, I made a wealth university of wealthier. Yes. It was fil Phi philanthropic. And I, I got a lot of grad, a lot of meaning from that. Like, we knew we could do better. And I think also the, the more you learn, the better you do. And so we couldn't unlearn, we couldn't say like, just keep it to ourselves. We said we, this truly impacts everyone. And so, and we have, we have resources. We, we can do this. And so, but it is taking that first step and then like, write it down, write down what you want and look at it, power of manifestation, say it, and, and then just go for it. And you, people always doubt themselves. We doubt ourselves plenty of times. But it's that belief daily,
BJ (15:04):
Daily
SJ (15:04):
,
AJV (15:05):
I relate.
SJ (15:06):
But no, it's the belief and then, and then doing the work. 'cause It is, that is work.
AJV (15:12):
You know, I love what you, I I love that you said that because you said it's you know, we all doubt ourselves. But you just gotta go. And I, I think a lot of people are stuck. They can't get beyond their doubting, they can't get beyond the what ifs. But you did, so how did you do it? Like how did you go like, this is good enough? Like we are good enough, we can figure this out. Like, because I, I don't think that's common. An everyday mindset to go, I got this. I can figure it out.
SJ (15:42):
I, I joke. I said, Ben, we were able to figure out how to have two genetic children without us giving birth. Without me giving birth. , . We can figure anything out. .
BJ (15:54):
Yeah. I, you know, in my prior role working in a family office, I did lots of different things. And I always looked at that as a liability. Everybody says, you know, to to, to really be successful, you gotta be specialized deep in one skillset. And that's true. If you, if you're a doctor, if you're, you know, even an attorney, you wanna be, you know, specialized. But if you're an entrepreneur, being able to do a lot of different things comes in helpful. 'cause You're not, you don't quite know. Like, I'm still, I excel models and fortunately I have that skillset and sometimes we have to put together presentations and I can do that myself if I have to. And so I think often what we think are liabilities, if we reframe it can be the asset that you need. And that can give you the confidence.
BJ (16:37):
I, I have all kinds of, you know, doubts. We all have our personal struggles, but I know I'm extremely resourceful. And if I'm put in a situation, I can fix just about anything. I can figure just about anything out. So while I may doubt other things, I know I can figure stuff out if I just give it a little bit of time and then I'd, I'd add a second piece to it. Nobody achieves success on their own. So find yourself either a partner or somebody that's an accountability person, a partner or or friend, somebody that that's got your back that that can support you. And that was one of the things too. When we made the decision, it was who are we gonna surround ourselves with to make us better people and to make the world a better place? And it's gotta be positive people, right?
BJ (17:25):
We need to create a work environment that's positive and and uplifting. And if, if we don't have that in our lives, let's go. Let's go build it. Let's build, let's build the environment that we want. Let's build the life. And, and that was another thing. We, we decided let's be intentional about how we live. And now that we have this family, I wanna spend time with them. And if I have to go and I have a desk job and I have certain things that take me away from that family, I, I don't get to control that. And we worked so hard to have a family. We decided let's, let's figure out how to write our own, our own future. And that meant for us, we needed to, to create a business so we could mix our lifestyle with our livelihood.
AJV (18:02):
Mm. All right. So there's like so many thoughts in my head, right? I have right now. So I'm gonna try to organize them. All right, so my next question, and then I have like three other topics and I'm like, oh my gosh, I wanna know this so much. But my first question is, you guys kind of mentioned like, we kind of started down this whole first concept of, you know, kind of like fertility support, infertility support, education. But eventually you have ended and a very different lane with, you know, hormone products. And so how did you end up there? And then tell us about, tell us about your products. Like how did you come up with this?
BJ (18:38):
I'll take part one and I she'll take part two. I think that would be a great setup. So you know, again, in my prior role I did a lot of different things from operating businesses to investing in, in venture capital opportunities to private equity investing to real estate. And so you start seeing patterns and you start seeing things and you start understanding that a key to a successful business is making sure that you have a large enough market. 'cause You're never gonna own a market. So if you're gonna get a small slice of something, it better be a big slice. You know, a small piece. Let's make it a big pie, right? And we had these challenges. We, we knew that the infertility journey and process was, was painful and was confusing and felt helpless. And we thought if we could create a system, if we could create an app, if we could create this, we create that.
BJ (19:25):
All of that sounded good. And it felt good. The problem I was having as I was looking at the market size and saying, wait, if you think about it, you know, only 20 or 30% of the population at any given time is trying to have a family right? Of childbearing age. And then only 20% of that has infertility problems. And then nobody wants to talk about infertility, which means you're not gonna get a word of mouth recommendation. And as soon as they get pregnant, they're gonna churn out. So it was that process, and this is a little bit maybe more analytical, but this, this is literally, I went through it and chopped it all the way down. I'm like, man, in order for us to make this a profitable endeavor, we're gonna have to charge a lot of money, which is the opposite of what we wanna do.
BJ (20:03):
So then it was, well, if we can't do that, what attached to our problem, our pain, what else could we do? So we flipped it around and started asking a different question. And it was that process. And reading the same studies and the same research with a different lens, instead of just infertility, what other things could we attach to, well, the studies that talked about hormones and hormone disruption and even hormone health next to infertility would be cancers would be weight would be developmental disorders, would be correlations with depression. And, you know, even autoimmune things. And then I was like, wait a second. Those are all of the things that all of us are dealing with one way or another. Either on a first order ourselves or second order our families. So that means this is everyone. When we're talking about hormones, everybody has an endocrine dis endocrine system.
BJ (20:54):
A hormone system. Hormones are the chemical messengers that tell our bodies what to do and when to do. It tells us when we're tired, tells us when we're hungry, tells our muscles to build or for not build, right? The testosterone there bone density, it regulates our temperature, right? All of these things happen through our hormones. And when they are in what's called homeostasis, when they're in balance, good things happen. And when they're out of balance, bad things happen and we don't feel well, and we don't look well. Right? And over time, if they happen repeatedly, that's when you have things like cancer that creeps in. 'cause You're turning these switches on and off. It's like, like you flip a light switch enough times, the light will fail. It's the same kind of thing. You're turning these, these switches off and on. And then hormone disruptors, this will lead into the products piece.
BJ (21:39):
But hormone disruptors, they're, they're chemicals in our environment that can mimic the, the hormones. So think of like a lock and key system. Well, there's some chemicals that can go and turn open up a door that it shouldn't, right? Or close it when it shouldn't. And that, that has un unintended consequences. And so when that happens enough during key developmental times, like in utero, right? If you, if the mother's exposed to chemicals that can be passed on to the baby mm-Hmm. And if it's a male baby, there's too much estrogen. Now you see sperm counts that are declining around the globe. And it can sound scary or it can be hopeful. Like, okay, well I know some of these things, nobody knows about this. If I share that with them, knowledge is power. And if we provide some products that help people make better choices, that's positive too.
BJ (22:23):
We should have smiles on our faces, not scare people, right? So that, that was once we started looking at that and said, okay, if we can make this a positive thing, not point people and tell 'em, you're, you're, you're making bad choices. No, let's give you, let's give you some information so you can make better choices. And then let's provide some products that help on these, these, these health principles of, of better hydration and better sleep and less stress you know, better nutrients you know, reduction of inflammation. Those are the pillars that we, we build all our products around. Well,
SJ (22:52):
So we read a study that said the average American woman puts on 12 products a day, which is over 160 chemicals a day. Average man puts on over 80 chemicals a day. And then we're surrounded up to hundreds of chemicals every day in
BJ (23:03):
Our environment. In our
SJ (23:03):
Environment. Yeah. And so we said, if we can really simplify this, and let's just talk about what was, what goes on, in and around your body. So are three product pillars we can make these are make better choices. We have world renowned doctors on our medical advisory board, and one of our doctors, Kareem, is Dr. . And she founded the very first personalized chemical exposure test is a urine test. And so she can actually, you can actually do urine tests and text your your chemical exposure. And we were saying, how do we go to market? What do we do first? And she said, well, the fastest way is to help reduce your chemical exposure. Promote hormone health is through skincare. Mm-Hmm. . Because your largest organ, you don't think about what you put on on a daily basis. Well,
BJ (23:42):
Yeah. And this, this was, we don't think about that. What you put on your skin gets in your bloodstream. She talked about hormone cream, but think about a pain patch, right? Literally put a patch on your, on your lower back and you, it it's absorbing through your skin a nicotine patch. All of those things, medicine absorb. So the the, the corollary or the alternative to that is also bad things get absorbed into your skin. Right?
SJ (24:05):
And so we, we launched with skincare and Ben's prior career, he, he ran a, a very big wine company. Large.
BJ (24:12):
And I knew, I knew nothing about wine, but I, yes. And
SJ (24:14):
So, but he was looking, we we didn't drink alcohol growing up. We didn't know that wine. It was like the number one wine store on the west coast. And he said, why is there a $5 bottle of grape juice and a $5,000 bottle of grape juice? Like what, what what actually goes in it? It's, so we,
BJ (24:27):
That's what happens when you don't know anything about something . You look at it
SJ (24:30):
Analytically, but then we start learning. It's, it's the quality of the products. Yeah. Yeah. Where, where everything's grown. It's the soil. It's, it's how, how it's crafted. And so we actually had that mentality when we were saying skincare. So it's crafted, it's making sure you have the right quality ingredients, but also the right amount of each ingredient when, when you're formulating. And so really looked at that process. And so we have incredible skincare. We try to, everything we have is gender neutral, it's safe for kids, safe for pregnancy. And we looked at that chemical number of people, products, people are putting in their bodies and said, let's make everything really versatile. So people say they, you know, we have a two step regimen. So our, our more, our J serum people say it replaces their moisturizer, their serum, their eye cream, their vitamin C serum, and their toner all with one product, which is amazing because rate performance, but then also you're now reducing the number of chemicals you're putting on your body every day
BJ (25:24):
With us, without us having to preach about it. We just create a product that solves, solves multiple pro problems. 'cause You know, too often products are the result of just marketing efforts, another way to sell things. And if you strip it back, well, can I get the same results with fewer things? Yeah. That does two things. It gives you back time. Oftentimes it gives you back money, right? And it reduces the number of chemicals so that then you, you're, you're doing something better for your health. So that was kind of our initial premise.
AJV (25:52):
You know, what I love about what you guys have just said is it's both a passion focused endeavor, but also with some logical business minded decisions. Which is why, you know, you know, one of the things that we talk a lot about at Brand Builders Group is like, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should Mm-Hmm. and not everything that you're passionate about means people will buy it from you. And so it's this, this subtle art of figuring out what is my passion and what would people buy from me? What could I sell and what would people buy? And so I think that's a really important discussion for all of the people listening today of going, there's gotta be a, you know, kind of a checks and balances with what you feel called to do and what the market is also showing by demand that is needed if you really wanna make it right.
AJV (26:46):
And it's like, not all passion projects make it. And I think a lot of that is because the business piece of it, which is a part of it doesn't come into consideration sometimes. It's like you gotta, you gotta go through the thought process that you guys thought process that you did of how big is this market? And you know, if we zone in here, what's the tertiary, and, you know, the secondary. And, but I think there's a really important part of that, of going, it's one thing to be feel called to do it, which should be like, you know, the act, the activator. But then there's also gotta be the analysis part to go, is it viable? Right? Will it last? Can I make it? And you guys have done both of those things really successfully because you did both of those things.
BJ (27:30):
I what, what I'm hearing you say is it's gotta make sense in your heart, but also in your mind. Yeah. If it's, if it's one without the other, it's not gonna work.
AJV (27:38):
Yeah. And I think that's, it's, it's rare, but when it comes together, like magic happens. And so here's my next question for you guys. You just, you said earlier, you guys started this three years ago. Can you tell us a little bit about the journey from three years ago to today?
BJ (27:54):
Yeah. Our, our three year anniversaries, well our, our 22 year wedding anniversary is May 2nd, but our, our three year business anniversary is May 22nd. So it's coming up in 23 days. The journey, well, I'll, I'll kick us off. It starts with a concept, starts with an idea, and, and then you have an idea of how you're gonna take it to market. And you fall in love with that idea. And we're gonna have plenty of resources. We're gonna have all the money we need, we're gonna find investors, we're gonna go to market and it's gonna work. And we had that all lined up and it was we actually were concepting this a year before we launched, right? So we were trying to get, we were hoping to launch four years ago. So we concepted this thing. We had a partner that was a, a large family office that was gonna back us.
BJ (28:43):
And they said, look, we'll look programmatic approach, which means I'll give you a check now at a certain valuation and when you hit these milestones, we'll give you another check. And then it was ideal. Like we could not have to go out and worry about cash. And we're getting deeper and deeper into conversations. It's looking very promising. We're not looking at any other potential investors. We hire our first two employees and Covid hits, this is March, right? All this stuff in March of 2020 Covid hits. And we are, we have our products that we have figured out, but now the lead time goes from like, you know, six weeks to six months. And what it did it forced us to do a whole bunch of testing. 'cause We didn't really have product. So we, we, we took us a different approach to get to market.
BJ (29:28):
We had to go hands on. We didn't have the capital that we thought we would have, so we had to be extremely scrappy. So we, you know, we developed a business model that was really powered by word of mouth, mouth. And then we went out and started building community to support the overall message. And we did a lot of in-person events, you know, even, even even during covid, like we would do it in a safe way. And things got better as, as our products came in. The, the wave had had slowed down. There was a lot more education and, you know, you could start traveling. You just wear a mask and things like that. But it took, it took months to get there. So maybe Sarah could talk about this, like the, the community building element of it. 'cause I think it's, it's interesting when you're doing live events, when we're talking to people and we're sharing our brand and our story, we would learn by the response on people's faces. If we're saying words, like, we started talking about endocrine disrupting chemicals and toxic load and all these things, and people's eyes would nod, but their eyes were off. ,
AJV (30:29):
You just got way too fancy from me. . Yeah. And print it down.
BJ (30:32):
Yeah. And then we have a, this kind of affiliate, affiliate plus program where people can sign up and sell our products and they, you know, they get their own links and all this stuff. Well, they'd say, I, I love your story. They love hearing our infertility story. But, and I'm, I'm gonna sign up and sell these products, but I need about two weeks to study all this stuff before I open my mouth. You know? And so that's the exact opposite. You want it to be so easy that it comes out naturally. So we learned that by testing and our form of testing was in person. Other people you can learn it from doing, you know, you, you, you talk about building a business. How do you do it? Test, test without, you know, make your mistakes, learn what works and what doesn't. Try not to spend a lot of resources and do it efficiently. We were forced to do that because of you know, what, what would've been the worst thing is we thought we had it all figured out. We had all the money that we needed, and we went out and spent a bunch of money going down a path that ultimately wouldn't have worked. Yeah, you can, you can convince yourself. But when you're standing in front of people having a conversation, the feedback is live. Like, so we tell 'em, tell her how, how we started. Well, I
AJV (31:30):
Wanna clarify one thing really quickly. These, all these events you were doing with community building, I'm gonna make a big assumption that those events were free, but tell me if they were paid.
BJ (31:40):
No, we, they were free and we would, so
SJ (31:43):
Go ahead. So I'll tell you what, we chose our business model. So we were learning about these chemicals and just like, I had no hormone, hormone health, but also like the fact, like I had no clue that my products were causing me not to get pregnant. Like, or, or could, could, yes. But like, oh my gosh, I had no clue the importance. And so we said, you know, we are gonna create products, but if we're just gonna sell them at a store, that doesn't solve the solution because people don't know. So we, we need to create awareness, we need education, content, community with products. That's really the holistic solution. And when I was at graduate school, my favorite Harvard business case study was on a lady named Brownie Weiss. She invented the Tupperware party back in the fifties. And so she created a platform for women back in the fifties when they, no one was working outside the home.
SJ (32:26):
She'd be able to, to have, bring in resources. And at the end of her video, we watched this black and white the case study watched a black and white film of her recognizing woman on stage and seeing these men just cry. They were so imp impacted. And so I actually flew and went to her museum in Orlando after I graduated 15 years ago-ish. But then we were saying, you know, Ben, like our go-to-market strategy, it's more than just selling products. We need, we need this. And how do we elevate this? How do we modernize it? Where we make it? Where, you know, you're already asking your friends for product recommendations. I mean, if I'm gonna buy something I, you know, see my friend's leg. And so like, people are already spending that way. They're, and they, they're recommending products already. How do we make this modern?
SJ (33:10):
How do we make it elevated? How do we do it where you can go? And so when we first launched, we had 200 advocates. They have 21. And we, we said, Hey, if you guys get 50 people in a room, we will fly in and support you and we're gonna show up. And so we gave 'em some budget. She was to help pay, you know, for, you know, some products or charcuterie, whatever it was. But then they were in 60 cities the next few months. And then we, we came back and we said, well, we wanna actually be in this business so we can see our kids .
AJV (33:39):
So,
SJ (33:40):
So how do we do this where we can have our kids go with us? And
BJ (33:43):
We grew really rapidly but we were out hustling. And I think that's another lesson. Like it doesn't just happen. It doesn't just happen. Some people get lucky and those are the stories that everybody wants to hear, but it doesn't happen, especially if you're gonna build a brand and you're gonna build about a topic that's not, not widely known. You gotta, you gotta really, you know, move the needle yourself.
AJV (34:02):
I wanna, I wanna highlight two things 'cause I think this is so important and it's what nobody talks about. Because everyone wants to figure out how do you make mailbox money? How do you build it one time and then make money while you sleep? I still don't know how people do that. . Like, once somebody actually figures it out, let me know. But at the same token, what everything is being promoted is digital. This, digital this, digital this. And at the end of the day, what I know to be true and what you just said is that lives are changed in person. Community is built in rooms, hand to hand, side by side with real lives interacting with real other human lives. And for everyone who is listening, if you think just posting something on social media or just building a website or just building a course is gonna get you to where you wanna be.
AJV (34:52):
I just like to be sharing some honest truth that likely won't happen. But if you're willing to get on a plane and go 60 places for free to go, I care about this so much, I'll be there. And you get other people to come along with you, guess what? It's gonna work. Maybe not on your timeline, but eventually it's gonna work. And so I just wanna like one, say kudos to the both of you. 'cause I know what it's like to be that person along with my husband. And that is not a message you hear from a lot of people today. And so I just, one, thanks for sharing that and calling some spotlight to what you actually did and are doing, because that is actually how business is still built today. And I think it's really important to highlight in rooms with people building community, sharing it and making it where it's this human relationship again.
SJ (35:40):
It's so interesting you're saying that. So we have our story, our story really enables other people to share their stories. And whether it's simple swaps, these are, you know, great products or whether, you know, we've had an event last summer, this lady had her child had cancer and just saying like, this, these are products I'm already using, but being in there and showing up and then also what you're talking about, bus building a business that's makes money while you sleep. So like, all of our products are consumable. So these are products people, like we have over 50% of our, our revenue comes in from subscriptions because people try our products, they love it, and then they just have it every month since them.
BJ (36:16):
Yeah, yeah. But we also build systems to encourage that and to encourage the conversation. And I think one of the rewarding parts though of building a business, we just, so our, our, we call 'em advocates, our human grace product advocates. Our advocates can earn money, but they can also earn, like we set up a point system and they can earn into a, an incentive trip, right? Mm-Hmm. . So we just from Hawaii where we hosted a hundred of our top people.
AJV (36:38):
Awesome. Love that.
BJ (36:40):
It was incredible. Yeah. And they had a, we had an amazing time and came together. And what is is cool is we knew that we wanted to build something. We wanted to be surrounded by people that were good people. And so we needed to build a foundation of community that way. And we have an incredible community of advocates who support each other, cheer each other on, you know, they're, they're in theory, they're in competition trying to outperform, but they're also, they're all doing it in a, in, in a positive way. Like, we have such a great culture. And, you know, I think some of that, they, they, our advocates have told us it's because we have showed up and we didn't really realize what we were doing. But I think when you lead by example, the, it comes through in your brand and it, it, it bring, brings a brand of, of both authenticity and integrity. Hmm. And that's that's something that's super important.
AJV (37:28):
Yeah. I think one of the other things that you guys mentioned that I, I wanna circle back to is this whole idea of getting to start a business with one, something you're passionate about and you're helping people, but also being able to design how you want your family to run is a really important part of that. And then you just mentioned that again, of like, well, after doing 60 events in just a few months, we realized maybe we'd like to see these kids of ours. And so I'd like to hear about what are you guys doing to create a family, right? As a business. And I think that's why so many people are attracted to entrepreneurship is because there is this idea, this dream of creating your own schedule, designing your life the way you want it. And then unfortunately, if you're not super intentional about it, all of a sudden that ain't happening.
AJV (38:15):
Right? And you're like, why am I doing this again? This is, I'm working longer hours and seeing my family less than I was before I did this. And it does take some intentionality of working together as a married couple, right? So I'd love to hear about how that's been the last three years, but also making the decision of like, no, how do we, how do we grow this? How do we commit to this and design a family and a marriage and a life that fits within what we said we wanted? So I'd love to hear both of those things
BJ (38:46):
Start. Mm-Hmm. Talk about rrb. Oh, so it was his idea, Richard. Yeah. We, we did that first summer. And summer summertimes are typically when we, we would go out because in our business we have a, it's mostly women who sell our products. So o often I'm the only guy in the room actually, . But it's, it's, it's, it, it's fantastic. They incredible community. But in the summertime, a lot of these are women that have children. They're home from school, so the summertimes get a little bit busy. So we go out in the summers and that's helps kind of keep people engaged and excited and activated. Plus, you know, our kids didn't have school in summer, so so we did it that first summer, mainly because that's right when we launched the business and it was just taking off and, and we flying, flying around.
BJ (39:27):
But then I, I started thinking, well, what we're doing is we're reacting to demand instead of scheduling it, right? So it was too much, I mean, you talk about this, we, we weren't intentional. We were reacting to what was working right? And trying to do more of that. And then we didn't think, well, if it's working, we, we could still do that. But what if we said, we're going to be here in this city on this date. If you wanna host something, let's coordinate it there and then just put it out in advance. And if we did that, we still could. And we wanted to bring our kids, well, it doesn't make sense to have four plane tickets. And then since we work together, we have to have somebody come with us, a help, a babysitter, a nanny. So now you're talking about five, which means now you got two hotel rooms and, and I just got this idea, maybe we should just buy an RV and just kind of flip it around.
BJ (40:15):
So it was Black Friday of 2021. We looked at RVs one day we came back and we'd figured out a floor plan. Like if we, if we have to travel with some help, we need to set it up. We need two bathrooms, we need this, we need that two hours walk or dryer, . Yeah. We wanna, we wanna be able to do this. So we came back two days later to go look for a second time. We'd only done looked once. As we're driving in, we get a call from the, this guy, he says Hey, sales agent. Yeah, the sales agent. And he says, you described to me what you're looking for. And this was, if you remember, during Covid, everybody bought RVs. There was no inventory left in the whole country. Prices went up like crazy if you could get one.
BJ (40:57):
So we we're, we're driving in, we're 15 minutes out from the dealership and he says the RV that you described to me just pulled in from the factory and it, it still got its stickers all over it. You guys want to come take a look? And we said, we'll be there in 15 minutes. don't show anybody. Don't show anybody else. And so we took a look, we had no idea what we're getting ourselves into, but we bought it right then. And it turned out to be a good investment from a tax perspective. It was a good investment. And we had had some income come in, I could, it actually operates as a second home. You can depreciate it because it's heavy duty, heavy duty vehicles. So you go back to that, you know, put some logic behind it. So it helped us out in that regard. But then it also put us on, in the driver's seat, so to speak, of setting it up so that, that summer we went to 32 states I don't know how many
SJ (41:41):
From LA to Seattle, Boston, DC and back. Oh my gosh.
BJ (41:45):
Yeah. It was too much it nearly killed me. I didn't, I had no idea what I was doing. They drove this whole time. I, yeah, it was too much. And you learn we learned that you need, you need to have more downtime between your setup and take down is the same whether you're there for one day or one month. And so we, we decided we need to amortize that setup and take down for longer periods. So now we, we we're, we're doing it again right now and we've got our kids with us, and we've decided, oh, go ahead.
SJ (42:15):
Well, so the topic of hormone health is trending, which is super exciting. And, but, and especially our business grows. But, so in November, Ben and I didn't get to see our kids for 20 nights. We are housed, the kids are in private school with nanny. But like, we wait, so I came back back, it's like after Thanksgiving and Ben's like, okay, you could find a new nanny who will homeschool travel. Oh, be fine. Living an rv, going anywhere we go. And I,
BJ (42:39):
It's because we work together, we, it's, you can't, you can't, you can't shift it. Like we we're cover the mornings
SJ (42:44):
Co CEOs 24 7. And so I started calling universities, universities didn't wanna have, you know, graduates go to private family. And so put an add out on care.com and found, I found her, but I think it's, it's okay. We have,
BJ (42:58):
She had spent, she had spent the prayer year backpacking around the world. So she was fine with it, that she had grown up in a small community. She had been homeschooled, so she knew how to, to homeschool. So, but it's, we thought let's test it. Let's try it. Yeah.
SJ (43:09):
But it's also love that I think say like, what kind of life do I wanna live? Mm-Hmm. . And then I usually over New Year's Eve, my, my parents treat the kids and we go flipping a two or three night retreat and we read books. And remember a few years ago we were up in Napa,
BJ (43:23):
This was before we started the business.
SJ (43:24):
Yeah. Went pro walk. And we said, what would our lives look like if we had zero restrictions, no jobs, no house, no. Like what, what
BJ (43:32):
Life do we money is not an issue. What does it, what does it look like? What does it feel like? How, where are we? How, how, you know.
SJ (43:38):
And so it was really that exercise of saying, okay, we want, I wanted to work with him. He didn't really want work with me originally , but I wanted to spend more time with him. I want, like, we wanna be with our kids, we wanna travel, we wanna have experiences, we wanna make meaningful impact. And what, and you know, 'cause we have a lot of friends who are billionaires and have these lifestyles, but that, that that lifestyle,
BJ (43:59):
We, we are not let's just No, no,
SJ (44:00):
We we're not true. Not, but it's not private jets that make us feel whole, you
BJ (44:06):
Know, it's, it's clearly, it's, it's an RV , it's our land
SJ (44:11):
Drugs for different folks.
BJ (44:12):
It's our, it's Orlando. There we go. But, but
SJ (44:14):
Truly like, like we're so much more present and intentional our rv because we'll go somewhere. We'll be there for a week. So we wanna go explore all the, the local farmer's markets and, and show our kids. And so that has been like, and so we've had this dream. We wrote it out. We said, this is okay, now how do we backfill this? So we got rid of our house. We, we did different things that, you know, but this, like, we, I'm so much more fulfilled in my life now and like being able to be in Hawaii, we're Grand Wale, which is incredible hotel.
BJ (44:46):
This is a little plug for my wife. So Grand Wale is a Waldorf Astoria property, and she built a relationship with the executive team and eventually got introduced to the spa. So Grand Wale in their new $55 million spa that just finished a renovation is selling Hu and Grace products, our wellness products. That's amazing.
SJ (45:06):
Yeah. It was so incredible to go be there with a hundred of our top advocates with our cue and our grace to walk into saw, see the kids. But the very last night we did a white party and we had one of our advocates speak and she said, you know, I, I said, what if she goes, I never thought I could do anything like this. But she goes, I saw Hawaii, I love the products. She goes, what if I could do it? And so I think it's saying, what if, and then what can I do to get there?
AJV (45:33):
I love that. And I think just the whole concept of actually spending time to go, what kind of life do I want? Right? I, you know, you hear statistics all the time about people spend more time planning their annual vacation than they do their life. Like what would it be like if you actually said, this is the life that we want. So how, how do we get there? How do we build it? And I love, I love hearing stories like that. Now how old are your kids now?
BJ (46:00):
Grace just turned five. Hugh is six, about to turn seven. And my, you
AJV (46:04):
Guys are traveling the country with a 5-year-old and a 6-year-old. Yeah.
SJ (46:08):
And it was started when they were two and four. So Yes. . Yeah. But
BJ (46:12):
We just, we just had some friends over, we're currently in California, in Malibu, and we, we were from, we lived in LA for 15 years. So this is, this is, you know, home if, if we pick a home that's not on wheels. But, so we came into town, we're, we're, we've got a, a ocean view lot in right off the PCH and our kids are out riding their bikes. We invite some friends over, they bring their kids over our kids instantly make friends because they, they're, I think kids like a schedule, but they also like to be free. Hmm. And so while they're this age, you only get this shot once. And we've, that, that's what we decide is we're not gonna wait to be parents and we're not gonna wait. We're gonna, we're gonna just do it now. We're gonna be here and be present.
BJ (46:50):
So every single morning they have, we have our, our, our master bedroom in the back, you know, a quarter of the, of the rv. It's got a door and the kids have bunk beds on the other side of that door. And every single morning we wake up before the kids and we just lay in bed and we hear the, the, the door open. 'cause They're kinda like closet doors. And we hear footsteps. And then our son rushes in through the door, jumps on us laughing, and we hold him every single morning. Mm-Hmm. And it's the absolute best thing. And when we, we, you know, we have a house in Utah and it's a good sized place. When we're there, they kind of get distracted and they go do other things. They don't come up to the, to the room. But in the rv it's just, it's, it's so small and intimate. So every morning we have that family time. We don't, you know, and it's not, it's not late. We start our days on time, you know, but we, we start with that, that does mean I'm not up exercising. I'm just laying there taking hugs. But that's, that's not gonna last. And so we're just trying to take, take it while we can, how we can.
AJV (47:47):
That's a great reminder of the, the power of proximity.
BJ (47:50):
Yeah.
AJV (47:51):
Right. For family, for friends, for whatever. But there's a lot of power in proximity. That's a great reminder. Sarah, what were you gonna say?
SJ (47:59):
No, you said, you asked how we do marriage and parenting and, and business owners. So mornings are our kids and like we, we go, we'll do that. We'll try to go for a walk, you know, be with them in the morning, then we go to work and it's work time. And then at night we really try to shut it off. I'll leave my phone in the other room. If I have an idea or need to tell Ben, I'll actually go send him an email and he can check it the next day. She,
BJ (48:24):
She ping, she pings me all night long. I'm like, why are you doing this?
AJV (48:28):
Spilling up your inbox.
SJ (48:29):
But you need, but you need a mean, we need to have our marriage too.
BJ (48:33):
You know? And, and I think you, you just have to be open. Like this morning we were, we were actually driving in here, we're at a, a an office building. We were driving from Malibu to, to la and Sarah was on her phone plugging away. And I just said, Hey, can, can I have my wife for a minute? You know, can , you know, and you just say it like, I, I need you. I need my wife. Can you put your phone down? Just be here because we're all, you know, we're all doing the best we can. But I think it's important to vocalize that. Like
AJV (48:59):
Absolutely.
BJ (49:00):
Otherwise you build resentment. If you don't, if you don't say it, she can't, she can't know it. Mm-Hmm. . She doesn't know it. And I think she should be able to read my mind. Well, that, that doesn't work. You know?
AJV (49:10):
Well, I, you guys have learned a lot in only three years of working together because my husband,
BJ (49:15):
Well, it was also, there's
AJV (49:16):
Together for 17 years and it took us way longer than three years to learn those lessons.
BJ (49:21):
Yeah. Way longer. We're still, we're still learning them.
AJV (49:25):
Y'all, this is, I I, I have loved all the different assets or facets of this conversation. And one of the things that I wanna make sure we get to before we run outta time is I want people to know about, you know, just the humane and grace products, right? So you mentioned the skincare line. What else do we need to know when it comes to finding high quality products that are, that are healthy and good for you, that don't do more damage than they do good. And then where should people go to learn more about human grace? So tell us a little bit about what are the products, right? And then where do we go?
SJ (49:58):
So we also have, we have skincare, which is amazing. We just got, actually, we just got picked up in Forbes for Best Bo one Top five Body Butters. We had no clue that you don't have pr. So kind of cool. And we have an incredible wellness line. And so we have a morning supplement, we have a which helps detoxify your liver, it helps with energy, it helps mental clarity. We have a drink. Our number one selling product is called Hydrate Detox. And Ben actually worked with Formulators who did two really huge brands that everyone knows. That, but you know, one brand's just all sugar one's all salts. And we said, we actually wanna create a drink that's a lot of functional benefits. And so we have the most bioavailable l glutathione on the market. It's patent prebiotic,
BJ (50:39):
Which, which, which is the Master de detoxifier reduces inflammation.
SJ (50:42):
Patent prebiotic probiotic. There's magnesium's fiber, electrolytes. But we said, going back to the premise, excuse me, it's like all in one mm-Hmm. , we said people need to do simple swaps. They, we don't wanna say you have to take these five products today. You know? So we actually partnered that. So we have our bestselling products called the Routine. And it's the morning supplement. You can take an empty stomach, you take our hydrate detox drink, and then we have our collagen that mixes completely clear in water, which is odorless, tasteless, which is great 'cause you can put it in your coffee. You can also put your hydrate detox drink. But you take those three things in the morning and like you feel good for the day. Like, okay, I, I did something good. I, I feel good. There's mental clarity, there's reduced stress.
BJ (51:27):
You have more energy. I mean, it's, it's natural. None of this is caffeine based. This is natural energy production. So coq 10, which helps your mitochondrial activity. And, and I think part of the premise too was people, we all need to drink water, but we like to drink stuff that tastes good. So if we drink water that tastes good, why wouldn't we put something in it that's functional? So we need an electrolyte complex. And if we're gonna do that, why don't we put a couple other things in there that we all need. We need a reduction of inflammation. Mm-Hmm. The, the body needs to be detoxified, not on monthly basis, on a daily basis. You, you need to be flushing things outta your system. And to do that, you need hydration. And then you need things that help reduce inflammation. And then our guts need to perform well.
BJ (52:07):
And when our guts perform well, we look better, we feel better, we think clearer. So we put all of that into one product. And that hydrate detox product is become our number one seller. And interestingly, we talked about this. We had a vision of, of what our company would look like and what, you know, initially it was a skincare company. Well, if you look at our numbers, we're a wellness company. Mm-Hmm. . So we, we have the skincare vertical or, or, or call it our on vertical. The in vertical is, is leading the way right now. And then the around vertical, we have a, a beautiful home care product that makes a ton of sense. 'cause It's a single concentrate that you can either dilute more with water or dilute less with water to have co higher concentration. So think less water, more concentrate for bathrooms have a deep, clean and multipurpose. Yeah. Deep clean, multipurpose. And
SJ (52:51):
So some of the most toxic chemicals are under your kitchen sink. And so our one house, house clean product replaces every chemical in house. Yeah. Amazing. We been really intentional. We've been fortunate through our networks to be able to get introductions to some of the best formulators in the world. Like our home cleaner. They do all of like the top of the line home, clean home cleaners, non toxic cleaners,
BJ (53:12):
Formulation group.
SJ (53:13):
And they now exclusively use our human grace products to clean their lab. So it's also fun to hear, like, because people, they want, they want to help others. I think even formulators, they, they fall in love with what we're building. Because it isn't just Sarah and Ben's business. These are thousands of people that they're impacting. And we were able to tell those really cool ingredient stories, product stories, how it's impactful. It's, it's fun. It's exciting.
AJV (53:38):
Well, and I love the simplification of what you guys have created. It's like, you don't need all these products. We need better products that consolidate into one. And so cool. I lo and, and the fact that you guys are not even three years old yet is simply phenomenal. So just a major congratulations on rapid success. And part of that is like, you know that you're onto the right thing when it can't help but spread. And so I can't wait to see what the next three years look like for you guys. I'll, I'll probably likely become a customer this afternoon, so I'll be, I'll be doing that in my off hours today, .
AJV (54:21):
And then also I just wanna share this with all of our listeners, and this will be in the show notes as well, that Sarah and Ben have been so gracious and so kind. To also give us a very special link just for all the influential personal brand listeners. So if you would like to learn more about these products, if you go to Hugh and grace.com/brand builder, that is where you can learn about these. And if you go to that place, you're gonna get an opportunity to also get 10% off, which is so generous and so kind. So if you're looking for cleaner and better products to help you with your skincare in, on and around, you know, that's good. If I can remember it go to Hugh and grace.com/brand builder, check it out, get some products. And then Sarah, Ben, if they just wanna connect with you as individuals, what's the best platform for people to go to you
SJ (55:17):
Probably Instagram or LinkedIn, but
BJ (55:19):
We, yeah. Go to our Instagram page and you, what you'll see if, if you follow the stories, we have our advocate community. We now have 6,000 people who are selling our products or have signed up over time. And you'll get to see their stories and what they're doing and things demonstration. RV , you'll see, you'll see some of that too.
SJ (55:39):
And, and yeah, HelioScope, HUGH people do ask that question.
BJ (55:42):
Yeah. Hugh and Grace, H-U-G-H-A-N-D-G-R-A-C e.com. Or you can find the same thing on Instagram and
AJV (55:50):
I'll be sure to put all those in the show notes as well. Yeah. Awesome. Y'all, thank you so much. Such an awesome conversation. And for y'all listening, I'll put all the links, all the handles on the show notes. So go there, grab 'em, connect with them, check out these products, and then stick around for the recap episode. That will be coming up next. We'll see you next time on the influential personal brand.

The post Ep 486: Turning Your Passion Into Your Business with Sara and Ben Jensen appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 485: Set Free from Post-Abortive Shame – Part 2 with Rory’s Mom

Nicole Gale — Fri, 10 May 2024 11:00:54 +0000

So that's what we would do. And we had, we had friends, but the biggest, the biggest friend was one of my other coworkers. Dan Dan's been in your life since you were born. And you know, he didn't have a family at the time. And you know, he, he, he spent a lot of time helping me with you guys paying for jackets at Christmas. And, you know, it was the reason you went to kung fu school. So, so yeah. I mean,
RV (00:39:44):
So these people, these are your coworkers and your friends are the ones buying us Christmas presents?
TG (00:39:49):
Yeah. Yeah. Well, one year we, we were all on the, see, the, the, the challenge for me, for us was that I, I would not make enough money to cover our expenses, but I could not, I didn't qualify low income housing. I was on the list for five years. And after you turned two, we were no longer eligible for wic. And we weren't eligible for, for the, the gas leap and the oil that there was a lot of stuff we were not eligible for because I made too much money, like $20 sometimes they would raise the guideline. So $30 more than the guideline. That was all, I was not getting any child support from Tom and very little from Dan. So I never received a dime of child support from Tom. Ever. Ever.
RV (00:40:50):
And so you're, you're not, you're working and so you're, you're making enough money that we don't qualify for a lot of the low income stuff, but you don't make enough money to cover really the expenses. And so basically what I hear you saying is like, that gap was really covered by friends. It was really covered by colleagues, coworkers.
TG (00:41:13):
Absolutely. And God, I mean, God provided, you know, my faith was at this, this is also a point in time that I went, went back to church. Now I did not. We went to the Methodist church. Don and Shelley wanted me to go to the Methodist church, and Lety Love did it. So we went, we went to the Methodist church and I started teaching Bible study. And I, I loved being back in church. I started, I started teaching third grade Bible. And and so we did that. And then when we moved to Louisville, you know, we went to St. Louis, we went back to Catholic church. So we were, we were in church, although the shortfall never came from the church. Mm-Hmm. . It just came from the network of family of friends that I worked with, the people that I worked with, you know. But I, one of the things your mom always loved people.
TG (00:42:14):
I always knew I was gonna, I wanted to be a, a coach and I always wanted to be a counselor, you know? And, and I don't know if this is a good time to say, you know, dreams get shattered by words. Words are so powerful. When I was 14, 15 years old, my mama said to me, how could you be a counselor? You can't even help your own sister. 'cause I had a sister that was very bipolar and a lot of issues. And so I was like, okay, I guess that's not what I'm gonna be.
RV (00:42:57):
Well, just like that. She said that one thing and you internalized it and you're like, I can't, I'll never be a counselor to take care of other people.
TG (00:43:06):
Yeah. Mm-Hmm. .
RV (00:43:08):
So, so we've got all these people, uncle Charlie, Don and Shelly, Dan, Eric Chuck, Chuck,
TG (00:43:20):
Becky,
RV (00:43:21):
Becky. They're, these people are taking care of us. They're providing us helping with Christmas presents, stuff like that. I know that you mentioned one time that there was somebody that you worked with who Oh, that was Eric. Yeah. So Eric was like, your, your, your, your bank. My bank
TG (00:43:41):
Bank of
RV (00:43:41):
Eric. And then, and so does this all, does the story really, really start to turn when we meet dad?
TG (00:43:52):
Yes. I guess, I guess that is the case. You know, I think the, the, yeah, I guess it does. I, I guess I would say yes.
RV (00:44:04):
Like financially.
TG (00:44:05):
Well, we met, we met the Phillips' though, see before, right. And well at the same time almost. So what happens is, so now I finally get to get our own place on Lin, on Cleveland Circle. Mm-Hmm. and I, it was a low income housing project, not project, but government program. And so I was able to qualify to purchase this place. And so this was in Lafayette and so, which is like the next town over. And so you were in, in you were little, you were, you were, you were going to St. Louis and then you had to go to Lafayette Elementary. So you were like in fourth grade or something like that. I think when we, when we were able to do fourth or fifth grade.
RV (00:44:58):
Mm-Hmm. , I remember I went through, I went to St. Louis Elementary
TG (00:45:01):
Just up until
RV (00:45:02):
Through third grade. And then, yeah. And
TG (00:45:04):
Then went third grade. You didn't, I don't even know if you, did you go third grade or just second? I thought it was just Ms. Kava.
RV (00:45:11):
No, it was third grade. 'cause I transferred to, yeah, maybe it was halfway through third grade. I think
TG (00:45:15):
I, yeah, I think it was like halfway through third grade. So anyway and the only reason you got to go there was because the priest at the time allowed me to work my tuition off. So like I cleaned, I would clean the daycare and I
RV (00:45:28):
Would, in addition to your normal job.
TG (00:45:30):
Right.
RV (00:45:31):
Okay. So you had a, your job is storage tech, but then you were working extra hours to basically pay for tuition for us to go to school there
TG (00:45:37):
For
RV (00:45:37):
You to go, for me to go to school there. Yeah. And so then we meet the Philips, who you met through storage tech.
TG (00:45:44):
Right. But this is the thing about the Philips is this is why God works in mysterious ways. I was able to, I had to move outta my apartment. We had to move outta our apartment on Mead in May. And because of the government and all the issues with the house and all that stuff, it wasn't gonna be ready until July. So for two months, we didn't have a place to live. And Kris was, she had just started working for Chuck, my boss's boss, Frank . So she was an executive admin. She was working for the vp. And I walked into her office after I found out that they had to extend the paperwork and everything, and we weren't going to get the house until July. I'd already given notice. We were already gonna be out by May, had be out by May 1st.
TG (00:46:45):
So she, she sees that I'm upset and distraught. I I, I knew her maybe for like less than a week. And she, she asked me, you know, what's the matter? And I told her, we don't have a place to live. I don't know what we're going to do. And that's when she said, you can move in with us. Your house is right around the corner from us. Went your new place. And you know, she had two girls, Katie and Britt. They were your age, and Randy's are close to it. And a wonderful husband, dad, Dave,
RV (00:47:18):
She knew you, known you for a week and said, come live with us. Yeah.
TG (00:47:22):
We, we, I hadn't even met her husband or her kids. She didn't know who you guys were. She said, I always, we always wanted to know what it'd be like to have sons. They weren't brothers.
RV (00:47:33):
Yeah. Clearly they hadn't met us because they were in for a rowdy, they were in for a rowdy , a rowdy route awakening from me.
TG (00:47:39):
Yes. That's when Brittany broke her arm,
RV (00:47:41):
Remember? And Randy moved in. Yeah. That's amazing. So she just said, come live with us.
TG (00:47:48):
And I, she hadn't even asked her husband.
RV (00:47:51):
And that shows you who runs the show in families, doesn't it? Yes. , we got people moving in, by the way,
TG (00:47:58):
But Well, they, and, and I guess they, they had had some, you know, exchange students. And again, she loved people. And, and even though we were only living with them for two months, it was right down the street. And so they had a big home. And so we would have, you had your birthday parties there, and we had Easters and Thanksgivings there, and, and we became very close and, and you know they were your sisters and you know, that's kind of but we had to live in their basement.
RV (00:48:29):
Yeah, we lived in their basement, but that was a lot better than the dungeon. And then basically Dan O had gotten me started into martial arts when I was five. And then when I
TG (00:48:39):
Well, yes, actually when you were three, you came out kicking when you were three, he started, he started teaching you front kicks and sidekicks and all that kind of stuff. And then when you were five, five sixes, I was able to afford to put you in community TaeKwonDo classes. However, when you were about seven and a half, eight years old your teacher, Nina said you needed special. You were a special kid and you needed special instruction and private lessons. Mama couldn't afford that. And so Dan stepped up and said, we will find a school that and I will pay for it. And that's when we went to she kung fu It was all adults, just a couple women, mostly men. And you, you wanted to go there. You went there and, and Dan paid for a month because they had never had any kids even want to go. And this just a couple years, Sharon, I don't even remember the other name of Sharon
RV (00:49:41):
And David Sword were the, they owned it and they ran the, they ran. They
TG (00:49:44):
Were your senses. Yeah.
TG (00:49:46):
And so they said, well, we, I guess we could give it a try. And Dan paid for a month and said, if, if, if he can't keep up after a week, you could keep the money and we'll go to find another place. And after the first night, everybody forgot you were a kid, they called you sponge because you could absorb the, the forms. And that first night is where you met dad. And because of timing, if you have not read the story about Rory and his dad, go by the book, take the stairs. 'cause Rory does a really good job about that. Mm-Hmm. .
RV (00:50:23):
Yeah. You can also look, you can also hear that story in my Ted talk. Mm-Hmm. you know, if you Google Rory Vaden Ted Talk or How to Multiply Time, I tell the whole story of dad coming in on his motorcycle with his leather jacket and his tattoos and his long hair and his goatee, like, and, you know, he was like,
TG (00:50:40):
Was not my type.
RV (00:50:41):
He, he was scary to me and not your type. And he just was this gentle kind man. And we became basically best friends. We advanced through the belt levels together. He starts taking me home, dropping me off. We would practice forms together on the weekend. He starts taking me to the movies. We
TG (00:51:03):
Start, no, no, no, let's stand corrected.
RV (00:51:05):
Oh, okay. Let's correct the story.
TG (00:51:06):
Let let go back. Let's correct the story. Please,
RV (00:51:08):
Let's correct the story. Once and for all months, by the way, that's what this is. This is a media correction. . Yes. That's what this podcast is. We're, we're, we're documenting the details. Okay. So correct the story. Okay.
TG (00:51:20):
So six months after you guys are doing your, your show line thing, and you were right about that. I go in because, you know, I figure, okay, I can, I need to, to somehow, this is your friend. He was your friend. But he would help me because I couldn't be at the football field in the karate studio at the same time. So he was basically your, your taxi service. So one day he comes over to me and he says to me are you, what about lunch? You know, this weekend? And I looked at him and I said, what about a movie? And your dad goes, for the first time, he looked me up and down as Tessie, not as Rory's mom. And he said, what about a movie? So that night when we get home, I tell you, you're, you're eight and a half years old, not, no, you're nine. By this time you're nine. And I said, we're going to a movie. This is right before Thanksgiving, November. And, and you said, great, what movie are we gonna go see ? And I said, no, you're not invited. And you put your hands on your hips. And he looked at me and you said, you're going on a date with my friend . I said, Rory, it's not a date, it's just a movie. And you go, don't you make my friend mad at me, mama
RV (00:52:59):
.
TG (00:52:59):
And I said, oh, Rory, I'll try not to. But, but it's just a movie. And as you turned, walked down the steps, you went Yes. . And that was at the first moment that I thought maybe your dream would come true and you would get a dad. And basically Kevin Vaden and I have been together ever since that night. And yes, we as a family had gone to lots of movies since then. But you had never gone to a movie without me and just him before that.
RV (00:53:38):
Hmm. So we test for our black belts together when I'm 10 mm-Hmm. . You guys get married. He adopts me. Mm-Hmm. . I changed my last name from Rory McLaughlin to Rory Vaden. Mm-Hmm. . You guys have been married over 25 years ever since.
TG (00:53:55):
We're gonna be married 30 years this August.
RV (00:54:00):
Uhhuh . And dad changed. Dad changed everything for us. I mean, well,
TG (00:54:05):
It did, except we need to tell the story about Dad real quick. Okay. So my faith is growing and, and, and, and we didn't know if we were gonna make it. We can make it work. And one night we, Kevin and I stayed up till two in the morning and we talked about our differences and we talked about kinds of things, and we agreed that if we didn't talk politics or religion, that the marriage could work. And so we didn't. But at that time, my faith was, was still shattered because I was still carrying all that guilt. And I still didn't believe that the Lord could forgive me or had forgiven me.
RV (00:54:46):
You're talking about from the abortions.
TG (00:54:48):
Yeah. And yeah. And you know, and getting married and divorced twice doesn't exactly go along with 10 commandments either, so. Sure. So yes. So all, all of that,
RV (00:54:59):
What year is that?
TG (00:55:01):
That was in 1994 that we got married.
RV (00:55:07):
Okay. And that's when you had that talk?
TG (00:55:10):
Oh, no, we had that talk in 1991 or 1992
RV (00:55:14):
Was shortly after you were married?
TG (00:55:16):
No, it was shortly after. We, it was when we were started dating. Oh, it was before we got married. November. Yeah. And then we had that talk. I gotcha.
RV (00:55:24):
Because you're going to church and he wasn't, he wasn't into that.
TG (00:55:27):
Right. Exactly.
RV (00:55:28):
And the deal was you can go to church, do your thing, but don't ask me to come, don't like, you know, do do whatever you want to do, but don't ask me into that part of your life, basically. Correct.
TG (00:55:37):
And he had been raised in Nazarene in the church in Nazarene by his grandma. And he went to church till he was 16. And then he studied Buddhism and all of that, and he was not for organized religion. He's like, Nope, this isn't for me. I don't care about Jesus. I don't wanna know about Jesus, you know? And I'm like, fine. And he's like, I will support you and you could take the kids, but don't ask me to go. But he agreed to go to one Christmas thing a year, but it couldn't be church. It had to be like a Christmas concert, you know, go see a Christmas movie, something like that.
RV (00:56:11):
Gotcha. I gotcha. So you guys make that packed and you get married he starts making more money. You start making more money. Me and Randy are getting a little bit older. Like, we're starting to become a little bit more a, a a little bit more sustainable. You're still carrying the guilt and the shame of your abortions.
TG (00:56:37):
Right.
RV (00:56:39):
When, what happened? And how did you, at this point, I didn't even know you'd ever had an abortion. No. And I didn't know that till years later. What, what happened when
TG (00:56:53):
Nobody knew? How did you 25 years?
RV (00:56:56):
Nobody knew. Nobody
TG (00:56:57):
Knew. When I would go in for the doctor's appointments, I had two live births and two miscarriages. If you go back to the records, that's what all the records said.
RV (00:57:10):
So for 25 years, you're carrying this secret. Mm-Hmm. these secrets.
TG (00:57:15):
Mm-Hmm. .
RV (00:57:16):
When does that get resolved? And how, how does that get resolved to where you start to talk about it? And I mean, here you are, like, you know, being open about something very intimate and shameful, embarrassing, whatever word you want to use, like very private. What, what happened? How did you, how did you get to this place emotionally and spiritually about that, those two incidents?
TG (00:57:40):
Okay. Well, a lot happened, but I'm gonna just try to give the highlights. The biggest thing was in 2002 after you had started college and you had gotten that full scholarship. And I had told you guys that, you know, you had to, you always had to have a dream. You always had to be something. Because of my brother's death. My boys were not, they were always gonna have goals. That's why you set goals. They were, they were gonna know how to read and write and they were gonna always have goals. Randy wanted to be a cop. And so I'm like, great. Even though I didn't really want 'em to, kept up from drugs, kept him from stealing when he was in high school, all of that junior high. And then Do you remember what you wanted to be?
RV (00:58:25):
Yeah, I mean, I went through a few phases, but I remember wanting to be a dentist because of Dr. Wayne Lingo, who was my dentist years. I remember wanted to be a pilot because Top Gun was cool. And then I wanted to be, I wanted to be a karate guy 'cause I was into Karate Kid and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. But mostly it was, I wanted to be a dentist, like Dr. Lingo. I remember that.
TG (00:58:42):
Yeah. For, for, yeah. You started going to him when you were three, until you were like 13.
RV (00:58:47):
So now I'm in college.
TG (00:58:49):
So now you're in college. You got that, you got, you got this scholarship. So
RV (00:58:53):
I'm outta the house. Randy Randy's outta the house. Randy, he's, Randy becomes very successful. He joins the Navy
TG (00:59:00):
Right now. He's in the Navy, so he hasn't done anything except be in the Navy right now.
RV (00:59:04):
Yeah. So he, but he graduates school, he plays football. Like he, he's, he's the starter varsity football player. Mm-Hmm. Finishes college or finishes high school, goes to the Navy and then you are
TG (00:59:18):
So I'm married. We're in Frederick. I had started my Mary Kay business after we got married. So I was starting to be around positive women. Right. I was starting to, you know, we would go in church. We had gone to a church. There was the new now a little Catholic church in, in in Frederick. I was going to there, meeting friends and stuff like that. So, so what happened was, in 2002, you said to me, when are you going to go start your dream? Because I had always shared with you that I wanted to go to college. And so I started college. I went to Front Range community college for a couple years and got my associate's. And you know, I was in my forties at the time. And then basically it took me seven years to get a four year degree, but then I went to the University of Phoenix. And so my last year, my degree was in Human Services and management. I always, this
RV (01:00:17):
Is from the University of Phoenix,
TG (01:00:19):
Right. I always wanted to, to help people. I, people used to be drawn to me and, and, and I would, you know, I know my family thinks I talk too much, but I actually would listen and, and ask questions and, and stuff like that. And so people, people just liked me. And to,
RV (01:00:43):
And you had the dream of being a counselor, like you had that from the time you were a little girl. Right?
TG (01:00:49):
Right, right, right. Yeah. Even when we were, I was growing up, people would to me tell me about their parents or whatever, going through divorces. I didn't know what that was. Anyway, so, so I had to do a paper and I had to do it on a nonprofit. And this was in probably, it wasn't until 2005. No, it was in, it was in 2000 and, and eight. But before this happened, before I, I was doing that. Let's talk about your dad for a minute. So we're going along. My faith is growing. I'm teaching bible studies. I'm actually facilitating, I'm actually volunteering at LifeBridge. I got baptized when we moved there, a to across the street and, and then you came and, and started going when you were in college, I got to baptize you. That was the highlight of my life. But in 2007, the bottom fell out. And we had been married since 1994, so almost 13 years. And it was the worst year of our marriage, but it was the strongest year of my faith up until then. And so what happened was I got tired of going to church by myself. I got tired of, you know, not being able to have my church friends over or, or when they would invite me to do things. I always, as couples, I had to go by myself.
TG (01:02:39):
And so my pastor, he wasn't the head pastor, he was my pastor of my LifeBridge group, pastor David. I went to him and I said, I can't do this anymore. I, I, I don't know, I I, I can't do this anymore. Your dad had lost his job, you know somebody accused him of hit and run. Your, that's the year your grandma died. I mean, there was a lot going on. You were gone. And so he told me, he said, Tessie, it doesn't matter. You know what the Bible says? It doesn't matter that you've had two divorces and been married twice. It doesn't matter about the abortion. It all your sins are forgiven.
TG (01:03:23):
What matters now is that you are in this marriage. And you know what that means? You cannot walk away. You need to be the example. You need to love him. If he chooses to walk away, that's different. But as a believer and a follower of Jesus, you can't do that. You need to stop praying for him. I know, by the way, my hus, my wife Ruth Ann's been praying for Kevin's salvation for the last three years. This is what he told me. And so he said, and one more thing. You will not be the one that brings Kevin to faith. You, you probably won't, but your example will. So anyway, so let's fast forward to 2000 and, and, and eight.
RV (01:04:14):
Okay. 2000. So two, fast forward to 2008,
TG (01:04:19):
Right? It, okay. Yeah. And so, so then, so what happened was, I, I end up going to life Choice Pregnancy Center to do this paper. And, and I walk in there and Connie gave me a tour, asked me for a tour, and she brings out this box of embryos, plastic, little baby embryos. And my eyes immediately go to the 11 weeks. Hadn't thought about it for a long time, consciously, it was all subconscious and my eyes filled with tears. I couldn't even speak. And she put her arm on me and said, have you, are you post the board? I didn't know what that meant. She said, have you ever had an abortion? And I couldn't speak. I was afraid she was gonna kick me out. I just shook my head. Yes. And
RV (01:05:18):
She said, your eyes went to 11 weeks. 'cause That was, you were 11 half weeks pregnant during the second abortion. And so your eyes went, started straight to that
TG (01:05:27):
Baby,
RV (01:05:28):
That baby in the, in in the model. Yeah.
TG (01:05:32):
And so then she, she proceeded to tell me she had to, and that God forgives. And and she introduced me to Lisa Coates, and she said, you need to meet Lisa. And Lisa was the counselor that did the forgiven and set free classes. And I did that for 11 weeks. And then I did it for 20 more weeks in training. And then I was able to start helping others accept, you know, that. And, and, and I started, I, I was also, after that, I was able to counsel women. So I was starting to work at the pregnancy center, and I was able to help women that came into the pregnancy center scared and afraid and not knowing what to do and, and, you know, that kind of thing. So I did that. And then I graduated in 2000 and, and, and I started working at LifeBridge Christian Center, LifeBridge Christian Church on staff. I've been there for f you know, 14 years volunteering when you, you know, number one volunteer, but on staff as the director of single parents and grew that ministry to about 150 women. And, you know, I had great mentors. Nancy was a great mentor, and Abby, and, and so that's where my faith started to just really grow and take shape. And that's when the Lord revealed to me that his plans and his purposes are always gonna prevail. And, you know, he ha it has, has,
RV (01:07:15):
What year was that? So what year does that forgiven and set free class happen? Like what year is it that you finally experience the freedom, feeling free from the weight and the guilt and the shame of those
TG (01:07:30):
2009?
RV (01:07:31):
So that's 2009. So how many, it was 25. Was it 25? So 25 years is what ended up being the full, was it, is that right?
TG (01:07:40):
Whatever, 2009 is from 1976 .
RV (01:07:43):
Okay. So that would be 86. 96, 2006. That's 33 years. So that dec that decision stayed with you for 33 years, even though it was a secret. And then you were finally set free of that in 2009,
TG (01:08:03):
Right. And through the, before 2009, starting in 2000 or whatever, as my faith grew, I told a, you know, a couple more people, you, you learned about it, I think in 2004 or two, whenever after you were baptized, stuff like that. Your dad knew about it. You know, your sister knew about it.
RV (01:08:19):
Well, so for 25 years nobody knew about it.
TG (01:08:21):
No. And my parents never, they went to the grave not
RV (01:08:24):
Not knowing about either one.
TG (01:08:27):
Correct.
RV (01:08:30):
And then it sort of gradually starts to happen. So all right. So we gotta land the plane here. Okay. I, I want to hear the story. I, I, I, we need to have Randy on the podcast. I'm gonna have Randy on the podcast because I wanna hear his story. We haven't gotten to hear much about my brother's story, and my brother has an amazing story especially here. Like recently, some of the things he's done with his bodybuilding competition, I'm realizing going, we need to have Randy on too. But I, I want to hear, tell me, fast forward, you have all these friends, you're resourceful, you're building relationships, people are helping us. We're start, you're starting to get on your feet, dad comes into the picture. We start growing your faith is, is strengthening, you know, you have your faith all along. Quickly walk us through what happened to dad on his faith journey. And then tell us where are you at now?
TG (01:09:20):
Okay, well, so, so with dad basically the climate in, in Colorado started getting the political climate started to turn and stuff like that. And people started, you know, the government was infringing on his, on his rights, gun rights and stuff like that. And the world was getting dark. And, and so dad and I started actually having some conversations on religion and politics and so deep conversations. And, you know, I just remember one day saying that, you know, I understand, but I know where I'm going. I know where I'm headed, and I have joy and peace, and I will always have that. And so anyway, he started going to church a little bit more and wanted me to pray at meals and stuff like that. And then he started, you know, listening to Phil Robertson and that their sermons and you know,
RV (01:10:12):
For Phil Robertson, for those of you that don't know. So my dad starts watching Duck Dynasty the show, right?
TG (01:10:19):
The show.
RV (01:10:20):
And he's watching Duck Dynasty and he learning about this family. And then from there he starts watching Phil Robertson's sermons.
TG (01:10:28):
Right, right, right, right. But, and yeah. Yeah. But you know, I don't believe that it was just a TV show that changed your dad's heart, although it did. But the, of course not. Jesus was ch working on his heart all this time. Your dad used to be the most Christian, non-Christian man. And that's how I used to introduce him to people that I knew. And he loved his family.
RV (01:10:52):
And just meaning the way that he, he exhibited the virtues of like you patience and kindness and love and self-control. Yeah. All the
TG (01:10:58):
Fruits of the spirits. Yeah.
RV (01:10:59):
All the fruits of the spirit. Whatever that gala verse, I think it's Galatians verse. Yeah. That, that was my dad all along. That's why you fell in love with him. And then, but he was not a Christian, but he exhibited those. But then he starts watching Duck Dynasty Duck Dynasty leaves in Phil Robertson. He's going to church you ch he sees he's seeing you set free, you know, he's seeing my faith, which has always, always been like, for the most part, strong, especially when I was going door to door like him called. Well,
TG (01:11:24):
That's when it got stronger
RV (01:11:26):
Uhhuh. It got really stronger.
TG (01:11:27):
Right, exactly. So, so yeah. And so then we go, he starts coming to church Easter and Christmas, a a year. And then, anyway, he, he wanted to get baptized and we were just about ready to celebrate 20 years of marriage. And we, we got back from church and and I'll never forget. And, and he said, you know, he wanted to, and I was just thrilled. And, and he said, thank you for never giving up on me. And I said, you know, how, how could I, you know, God never ever, ever, ever gave up on me. And so he got baptized on your 32nd birthday, and do you remember what you said when you were, unfortunately you were in Paris at the time. Do you remember what you said to him when he told you, because we, he wanted to, we zoomed you. He wanted to tell you right away.
RV (01:12:30):
I remember a poem that I wrote about him when I was in middle school called The God, would you Lord, would you let him in? I remember, I remember writing that poem
TG (01:12:40):
For him. Well, you had had said, dad, this is the best birthday present you will ever be able to give me. Mm-Hmm. ever. So
RV (01:12:47):
That was 20, so 20 years, basically, you've been praying for him for 20 years.
TG (01:12:51):
Well, Ruthann had been praying for him for 10 years. I, that was the other thing. I never prayed for his salvation until after I had that conversation with Dave, pastor David, I had never prayed for your father's salvation.
RV (01:13:05):
So how long between that, when you started praying for it and when it happened?
TG (01:13:09):
2007 to 2016.
RV (01:13:12):
So nine years,
TG (01:13:13):
Somewhere around there. Yeah, somewhere around there. Mm-Hmm.
RV (01:13:16):
. Yeah. And it's always a, it's a series of, it's always a series of events. And so, so you and
TG (01:13:22):
Dad's always chasing after us. Always. Right? He's always putting people in there. Mm-Hmm.
RV (01:13:26):
. And so you and dad are married, you know, you stay in Colorado when Randy has his grand babies or his babies, your grand babies. And then as they got older and started to get the teenage years, AJ and I have our two babies. And so you moved to Tennessee. Well,
TG (01:13:44):
We, we always knew, I always knew that we were gonna move to Tennessee because that's where you were gonna land. So
RV (01:13:50):
We moved to, well, and Dad wanted to be, dad wanted to move back.
TG (01:13:53):
No, dad. Well, dad only didn't wanna move. He wanted Mo moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky once the political climate Yeah. Changed. He never real, he never thought, like with me, that we would ever leave Colorado. And so that's kind of what happened. And so since then, what I've been doing is I, I truly believe you know that you're spiritual and your men, your physical health are tied together. I always have believe that. And so many times, you know, people bottle up all of this. We all have a story. We all made poor choices. And God has, you know, he can free any of us. And so I have I have a counseling, a biblical counseling practice. And I also help people with their nutrition through, through plant powders. And so I'm doing that now, and I get to do that from the comforts of my home here in Pulaski. And I get to be with my grandkids and, and with you all. And, and yeah. So that's kind of what I'm doing now. And we go to a great church and, and faith church. And I believe that the Lord still has more for me to do. And so I am just trying to listen and follow. And
RV (01:15:07):
You are. And so you effectively are a life coach. You've got this Bibi Biblical counseling practice. You're coaching people on their nutrition, so they're spiritual and physical health. And so that dream you had all the way back, you got your degree, by the way. Mm-Hmm. . So you end up surviving all those years, breaking free from the guilt surv managing to raise two kids,
TG (01:15:34):
Awesome kids, by the way, two awesome kids, both of you, awesome
RV (01:15:38):
Kids of you
TG (01:15:38):
Guys awesome kids. You guys
RV (01:15:40):
Will have to be my brother for sure. I gotta bring Randy on. I'm
TG (01:15:42):
So proud of you both.
RV (01:15:43):
And then, then Kevin has the son. So we get, you know, right. Sean comes into our family. Yep.
TG (01:15:48):
So I get three kids,
RV (01:15:49):
You start to own, you guys start to own your own property. We make it through college. Sean has a family. He gets married, he's got kids and grandkids, and like and then now you are I biblical counseling, life coaching and talking to a lot of women who are going have going through some rendition of some hard time.
TG (01:16:13):
Right? Right. Exactly. You know? Exactly. So one of my people gave me this a long time ago, and it says, only God can turn a mess into a message. This was one of my single moms gave this to me, and it sits on my desk because I also, you know, oh, I did say that about that single mom. And so anyway, I think that that's what he has done, and we'll continue to do. So I just have one final thought that, you know, I, you asked me one time ago how, how I did this. Yeah.
RV (01:16:45):
So before we do that, so where should people go?
TG (01:16:47):
Oh, okay. Yes.
RV (01:16:48):
If, if they want to connect with you. Right. And, and, right. I mean, I love it. I am quite certain that somebody listening either is going through some of this or knows someone who is in a rough time in their life, particularly maybe like, you know, a single mom or, or someone struggling with, with, you know, things, decisions, choices they made in the past that they're struggling to get past. Where, where should people go if they want to connect with you?
TG (01:17:13):
Tessy Gale at msn. Just my email. So my name, T-E-S-S-I-E-G-A-L e@msn.com or my Facebook page. And also my affiliate website, which is tessie gale dot juice plus.com.
RV (01:17:35):
Mm-Hmm, . So we'll put, we'll put links to that. So you can just e you can just e email my mom and you could talk directly to her which is great. So yeah, and before you just share your last, you know, thought, mom, I just, I, I, I, I want to, I want to know how you did it, but I, I also just wanna make sure that I don't let this opportunity to slip by without saying thank you. Thank you for figuring it out. Thank you for finding a way. Thank you for being faithful. Thank you for taking care of me. And Randy, thank you for the choices, the decisions that you've made. And you know, I also wanna say to our friends and family, so many people in this story, thank you, you know, thank you to all the people that we, we mentioned here, the people who are buying us dinner and buying us Christmas presents, and just covering the gap and covering that, that spread of our practical needs.
RV (01:18:43):
I'm just so grateful for them and I'm so grateful, mom, for your resourcefulness to build relationships. You know, what, what if of all the, of all the superpowers to have, I mean, building relationships, is a, is a good one. And so many people just covered that gap for us. And I'm just so grateful and I'm grateful for dad, and I'm grateful for Randy be raise me and, and Danno and the Phillips and Uncle Charlie and Don and Shelly, and you know, Eric and Betsy and all, I mean, just all of the, all of the so many people that we didn't even name, you know, teachers and my story friends who, you know, some were there for, you know, seasons some just for a moment. But so many people who, and this is this, this is why I wanted to share the story, is it's like there's, there is no such thing as a self-made person.
TG (01:19:42):
There is not,
RV (01:19:43):
There's no, there's no such thing as a, a self-made entrepreneur, A self-made millionaire, a self-made bestseller. Like there's, there's no such thing as a self-made. It's a, it's a series of people over generations that make choices that help somebody become the person that you one day see. And so, in the case of my life, mom, thank you for being the, the point person. You know, for me, I'm, I'm so grateful for that.
TG (01:20:13):
Well, you, I'm, you're welcome. You're welcome, Laurie. And you know, I always knew that, that, that God had a plan, you, I mean, he did. And he does. And so I'm just grateful that I don't ever want you to forget that it's that there's so many people in our life that made us our life possible, right? And always will be, you know, and faith, hope and love. You know, Rory came to me one time and said, you should be a statistic. How come we're not a statistic? And I said to you, this was when you and high freshman in college,
RV (01:20:54):
Right? 'cause Everything in your story, I mean, that's part of why I wanted to share this is like, everything in your story points to our life should have gone a totally different direction. I mean, we meet, we met all the criteria in many ways of like a life that would be far, far different from the life that we have now. We always had love, but like we, you know, we could have gone a different direction. So yeah, I mean, how do you do that?
TG (01:21:20):
Well, I had faith the size of a mustard seed in the beginning. And due to all the trials in my life, I took Mark 9 23 from the head to the heart, right? And I started to believe that all things are possible for him who believes all things. And that grew with roots. And then I had Hope 29, Jeremiah 29 11 was, became my life first in, in the early two thousands. And it was like, you know, he has a plan. He knew his plans for us, and he still has one for the my future. And he always, always was there. Its plans. Were always there. And you mentioned love. I am a firm believer. I've seen it through thousands of children. We didn't even talk about the, the coaching for five years that I did as a single parent with those boys for soccer five years.
TG (01:22:25):
But I've seen it in all my life. Is that his deep, deep love for me? I began to trust him and continue to bring love and surrounding me with love of others. And I was able to trust him once I finally did learn to love and be set free freely completely. So he has made my path straights to grow in love for myself and for you boys, and for others. The love from just one person can change a person's circumstance in life. That's the other lesson that I hope you and all, all of those listening understand one person and the love of Jesus, which there is no greater love will change one life for all eternity. I have lived and learned this and will share it until the day he takes me home. Thank you, Lord, for this day. May your blessings come our way. Keep us safe, whatever we do, and let us never forget to keep our eyes on you.

The post Ep 485: Set Free from Post-Abortive Shame – Part 2 with Rory’s Mom appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 484: Overcoming Impossible Odds with Rory’s Mom Part 1

Nicole Gale — Tue, 07 May 2024 11:00:02 +0000

I think, one of the most dramatic, compelling, true stories of, of a person who has made a huge impact, not just in my life, but in the whole world. So what other introduction can I do except say I'm so grateful for this woman and everything that she's done for me and all the sacrifices she has made in my life for me and my brother, and my dad and our family. So, welcome to the show, Rory's mom, Tessie Gale. Hi, mom.

Hi, Rory. Well, thank you so much for having me. I feel very honored and blessed and, and yeah, I'm glad to be here. And if my story can impact anybody, even one person to, to, to have hope and, and you know, know that, that whatever they're going through right now is, is for a reason. And, you know, the Lord has a plan for every each one of us.

Yeah. And, and I, that is what I, I I wanna, I wanna start by understanding the real story of where you were at when you became a mom and what was going on in your life. So be, because I think, you know, I think a people look at, you know, me and AJ and our family and where we're at today, and they might assume like, Hey, you guys have always been successful and had nice things and lived in nice homes and traveled the world and dah, dah, dah. Even our own grandkids or, you know, your grandkids, my kids, right? Yeah. Jasper and Liam. I, I remember we, we went to a we went to a, a sporting event not that long ago, and I remember we walked in and Jasper looked at us and he said mommy, where's our room? Because we got free tickets from our bank to have box seats.

And they have had so many of sporting events they've been to where they've sat in a box. And I'm like, you little spoiled brats. I never ever had box seats ever until like my, my late twenties. And, and then I, I compare that and contrast that with how I grew up, and then really how you grew up and, and where you were. And so I wanna share that story. So, so talk us through, let's start with high school. I think, and you can go back a little bit, but, but tell me about when you got pregnant and kind of walk me through what your life was like in high school when you first got pregnant and kind of like up through those, you know, the first five years of Randy being born, and then, you know, you having me.

Sure, sure. Well, I, you know, I was the oldest of five children, and I was born to a lower middle class Latino family. My dad was an iron worker, and my mom was a nurse's aide and, and cooked for the, the priest. And growing up Catholic, we went to Catholic school and I went to Catholic school for 11 years. And my, I was junior class president and very involved in school. And my junior year of high school, I, I went to I started working at Winchell's Donuts, was my first job. Nice. And, and I met Danny who was not you know, wasn't part of my, my circle of friends or anything like that were very different anyway, so we were in love, right? And so at 17 ending my junior year, I got pregnant with my first child with Randy.

And I was going to be obviously I didn't sit very well with my folks. However I was going to be 18 and, and by the time Randy was born, and so we, my dad gave us a wedding in backyard, and that's summer in 76. And we got married and he joined the Navy so that we could, so we could pay for our child, right? I mean, how, how are we gonna pay for him? So, so we did that. And then soon after, I, I, I had left high school my senior year because of obvious reasons. However, I was really close to getting my high school diploma. I was short like a couple credits. And so I was able to go to the local adults night school and actually receive my high school diploma right after Randy was born. And so I, I got my high school diploma, and I made a commitment that someday I would go to college. And

And so just to be so, so you got pregnant when you're 17?

About 17 and a half, almost

17 and a half. But so when, when Randy was born, you technically were 18, so you had, you got to determine whether or not you were gonna raise him. So you were very, very young, but they, you didn't have to put him up for adoption or into the system 'cause you were an adult. You got to make that decision technically by the time he was actually born.

Absolutely. And that was a, that was a very very important, very important. But

That had to be a tough dec decision. I mean, I mean, not knowing what you know now, like, like having a son, but I mean, I mean, being, being pregnant in high school like that can't, couldn't have been an easy, that can't be an easy circumstance.

No, no. But I, I was the oth the other thing too was I, being the oldest of five, I raised my, my siblings Mm-Hmm. And so I had, I mean, I was changing diapers with your aunt when she was a baby. I was seven years old. So I've been changing diapers and playing mommy with kids since I was seven years old. Yeah. basically, and that, I think that is where my love for children come from, was one of the places. Right.

So then walk me through what happens next? And, and so in your first, in your first marriage, I know that there were a couple difficult things that happened over the subsequent years. So obviously you and your first husband didn't have a lot of money. You pregnant, you had a baby. You're 18 years old, you finish, you get your high school diploma by going to night school, and then what happens those next couple years?

So then Randy Dan and I moved down to San Diego, and he gets out of the service. He just basically did bootcamp and he was able to get outta service and got a job at Winchells. And I was eight weeks Randy was eight weeks, I'm sorry, Randy was eight weeks when I got pregnant again. And you're right. I mean, we had no money, nothing. And so he drove me down to San Diego, downtown San Diego to the abortion clinic. And I had my first abortion there. And it was really awful. I was really scared. And, but there was no way, I mean, in my mind, at that time, there was no way. And the, when he picked me up, he just said that, you know, we would never, ever talk about this again. And that, you know, we wouldn't tell no one, not even our parents, nobody. And if I ever got pregnant again, that he would leave me. And so, of course, you know, 18 years old and, and you know, so, so you gotta remember I was raised in the church. I knew that that was wrong. And yet I had no network, no family, nobody around me except him at that time. So we did that. And then you know, our marriage was always a struggle. And then what happened was in

I mean, clearly, I mean, that I, that's understandable, right? Your young, your young kids, kids, you have a child, you go through this abortion experience. You, you have no college education at this point. You're trying to make it, you're working at,

I didn't have a job.

You didn't have a job. He's working at, I didn't have

A job at this point.

He's working at Winchell's Donuts, right? You get pregnant, have an abortion, then what happens?

Then we ended up moving to Colorado. We came for Thanksgiving. And I didn't wanna go back. And so he went back, got our stuff. And so we ended up his parents lived here, or his mom and, and his mom's wife, or his mom's, not wife husband. And so Grammy Elaine and Mike lived here and in Colorado. And then they leave, we are there only, they're only there for six months, and then they get transferred to Texas. So now I'm alone. And we're 19 years old, 20 years old, and they leave. So in January of 1980, we end up moving to, to Boulder, Colorado. And we get a donut shop to manage, and we, we become the managers of that in, in Boulder. And we, we had enough money to get a mobile home at this time.

And so we moved in next door to Don andShelly, which, you know, God, God blessed us with these neighbors. And we, we, we ran the donut shop for probably a year, couple years maybe, and that one, probably a year or so. And so then again, we were growing apart. We were growing apart. And I think that I had that resentment from, I always wanted another child. I mean, I always wanted another child. And, and Randy wanted a sibling. I mean, Randy wanted a, a sibling. So at three and a half years old, I get pregnant again, but this time I don't tell my husband right away.

And then at 11 and a half weeks so almost three months, he drives me to the hospital. And for the second time, I have a second abortion. And I, I remember waking up and the nurse saying to me, she's gone, and you can go back to your life now. And so that day, I, I, I cried out to God, and I promised that I would never, ever allow this to happen again. And the little love that I had for Dan was gone, died that day. But the shame and guilt stayed with me for a long time. But I do want you to know, Rory, that on that bed, before I left that hospital, I also begged God that if I ever got pregnant again, that I would offer that child to him uhhuh to share and to help me his will or whatever.

So, so then what happens with Danny, so you, so you have a, we split up second abortion, you split up and then what?

So we split up, and my mom used to always say, it's too bad you guys couldn't have stayed business partner. But we split up and he went back to California. And this time, it was like around 1981. And he went back in the summer, well, there was a man, his name was Tom McLaughlin, who was a customer, a local customer. He, he worked at the CU Boulder. He was the paint foreman at the time, and would come in. And so we started dating. I mean, he was handsome and and tall. He was 12 years older than me. So at this time, I'm like 23 years old. And, you know, he, he was intelligent. He had huge dimples, and he was a very, very handsome man. And he was from New York. I, I had never been anywhere west east of Colorado up to this point. And so we started dating and I got pregnant with you. And he was thrilled. He was absolutely thrilled. So he was 35 years old, somewhere around there. Never been married, never had any children. However, the, the, I was eight months pregnant when I walked down the aisle with you. And that was the month that he lost his job. And so what I didn't realize was that he was an alcoholic. And that day that, or that time period, he started becoming very verbally and emotionally abusive when he wasn't drinking. He was wonderful. He was wonderful.

And when you, when you talk about verbally and emotionally abusive, what are the, I mean, this is now your second marriage. Mm-Hmm. , you're 23, still no college education. You're Mm-Hmm. Working at Winchells,

Oh, oh, oh, oh, no, let's back up. So, you know, God always provides a way, and God works in mysterious ways. I've told you that your whole life. And so one of the things was when Dan went back to California, Randy and I stayed, and I got a job because of a customer of mine at a company called Storage Tech. And so they were a computer-based company, and I ended up getting a job in their cafeteria at that time. And I was the banquet coordinator. I used to serve, serve the lunches to all the c-suite executives, and, you know, the high-end clients, Xerox, Honeywell, you know clients like that. 3M how

Much are of you, how much are you making in that job? Because now you're your ex, your fir, your ex-husband left. Mm-Hmm. , his parents left. Mm-Hmm. , you've got no family in Colorado. You're staying there. Mm-Hmm. You have no college degree. You have some work experience at Winchell's, but you're a single mom. You've been through two, two abortions, and now you get a job. How much are you making?

$5 and 64 cents an hour.

Gosh.

But I had life insurance and I had medical benefits, and that's what I paid to have you. That's how I was able to have you. And so Tom and I are struggling at this point. I had moved in, or he had moved in with, with me and Randy while I was pregnant with you, and, you know, had my mobile home and didn't like my mobile home. And you know

So you had me. So he moved in with us. So you had, so, so you had me, you guys got married?

I got married at eight. We got married when I was eight months pregnant with you. And so he moved in. Okay. And then you were born one month later? Just one month later.

Okay. And when you say abusive, can you just, like, what exactly does that mean? So he wasn't physically abusive, but he was

Right? No, he was not. He'd never, he had never hit me. He had never hit me up to this point. And he would just be, he was always ranting and raving. His father died, his father committed, committed suicide when he was older, when, when he was in his fifties or whatever. And, and Tom was older. He was in his twenties, and he, that affected him a lot, I think. And well, I know. Sure. And, and he was drinking. And so he would just get very belligerent very argumentative, call me names. Which by the way, the first one used to do that too. But anyway, so, so, you know, my self-esteem is starting to go into the toilet. Right. And but again, I had the Lord, even though I knew that I had, had been separated from him and, and walked away from, from my values, and I, at this time, I wasn't going to church.

Right. The church kind of disowned me. I mean, I wasn't going to church. And so but I, I, I knew, I just knew that I had, that there was something better. And so we, we struggled too. But Don and Shelly, I mean, and at this time also, you know, Charlie, you know, you know him as Uncle Charlie. I mean, he had a print shop next to Win's Donuts, and we became friends. He was a single dad. And and we were just friends. And he had a boy that was just a year older than Randy. And so you know, he, he was in the picture, I guess, you know, the three of them were pretty much, and Betsy, I mean, from, from from work. So before I left Tom, so at this time I'm working in storage tech as cafeteria. In the cafeteria.

Six months later, I meet who I call my Colorado dad, Chuck Tillman. And he needed to create a job because of the rule breaking cowboys that engineers, he used to call 'em, that were losing all these parts all over the country. And it was costing the division a lot of money. And so he had to find the right person for this position. This was a brand new position, never been cre hadn't been created. And so he interviewed me because he, he liked, he liked the fact that if I could work at a donut shop and deal with all these personalities, that sure surely I could corral these guys.

I mean, clearly that's one of the things, like, you've always been very resourceful with relationships, being adaptable to people and environments. Like even in high school, I know you were the, you were friends with the, like, the, the, the Latinos, and you were friends with the nerds and friends with the jocks and friends with the popular, like, and, and then at Winchell's you're meeting all kinds of people. And here at Storage Tech, you go from basically being cafeteria

Marketing

Person to marketing and managing like a bunch of engineers, and then, you know, making friends with, you know, the neighbors and, and all that sort of stuff. So, so when does, so when does Tom leave? So, so, so Tom never hits you or anything like that, but you guys split up when,

Okay, so, so so, so Tom did hit me, but before that, so, so one time he trashed our house. I came home and he was just, you know, he, he was drunk and he just trash, it was trashed our house. So we, you were a baby. And Randy was five and a half. So he remembers this. And so we went to the Boulder Safe House for three days, just for three days. And when we came back, I told him, you know, he apologized and all that, but I told him, if you ever raise your hand to hit me or my child, Randy, we would be gone. And of course, he's like, I would never do that, da da da. So in right, right after your first birthday, so in August of eighty, eighty three, we, we moved because he didn't like my mobile home, so he talked me into leaving it. So now I have to declare bankruptcy. So now I'm working at, at Storage Tech, and I've started creating a network of people and friends, and we move to, to a rental house. And my brother died. Okay. So this was right, this was actually right after you were born from back up, but right after you were b you were born in July of 1982. And my brother, my only brother committed suicide in October of 1982. So here I am with a tiny infant and a five and a half year old, and an alcoholic husband. We go to California, and that's how your parents, that's when your grandparents met you, that's when the whole family met you. I mean, you were the bright light of that whole

Is that Chuckie's funeral?

Yeah. You were the bright light of that.

How old? So Chucky, how old was Chucky when he committed suicide?

He was 20 years old.

So I never met, I never, I literally never met him. No. I was there at his funeral, but I had never met him when he was living.

Right. He never got to see you. Mm-Hmm. But he did call the day before to congratulate me or you. And he used to live with us in Boulder. He came for a little bit, and then him and Danny left. And, and Tom, Tom and him didn't get along, and he was into drugs and stuff. So he, he went back home. He went back to California and he wasn't even there. He was there about a year. He was there about a year.

So, and so then, did you, so that, so that's a couple months after I was born. And then, and then you and Tom split up shortly after that.

We split up the net. The, the no, we split up the following year after that. We were still together. 'cause You weren't, you weren't a year old yet. But then we moved in August of 83 to, to Boulder to the house. But that whole time, right, I'm, I'm working full time. He's trying at storage tech. He's trying to get his paint business off the ground because he decided that he didn't want to, you know, be, they offered him a position that I didn't know till years later. They offered him a position as a painter, and he didn't take it. It was beneath him, I guess. And so instead he, he said, no, I'm going to start my own thing. And so that's what he did during this time. But he was mismanaging money, you know, he had a, he had a champagne taste on a beer budget.

And then when did you guys separate? So

Then we, so we finally separated and, and moved out on my 25th birthday. So that was December of 1983.

All right. So I'm a year old. I'm a year, like a year and a half old. Year,

Year a year, almost a year and a half old. My sister Letty, your Aunt Letty, she came to live with us. And she was living with us in the, in the mobile home, or not in the mobile home, but in the rental house. She came in October and we left on my birthday night, December, we were at Don and Shelly's, no cell phones at this time. He's supposed to, Tom's supposed to come over. He calls, he's at the bar. He tells me to come and pick him up. I could tell he'd been drinking. And I said, we are in the middle of dinner, and I, I'll come and pick you after that. Well, obviously that didn't go over real well, right? So we get there and we're all in the car. We're all in the car. And he throws my cake out of, out in the birth my birthday cake out the window while we're driving. And, you know, he, it's very tense. Your brother now is almost, it's like six and a half or whatever. And he, he's old enough to know that it, it's not a good scene. I told him and Letty to take you upstairs, and then when we get home, we proceed to have an argument and it gets very heated. And he swung at me and clipped the head of, top of my head, just with his hand. But I called the police and I'm like, I'm done. I'm done. And so this

Is on your birthday?

Yeah, yeah. So on my birthday, so the 25th, yeah, I, I try not think about that one too much . But this is on my birthday. And

So he missed your birthday. So what happened was he missed your birthday dinner. He was at the bar, then you go get him, then all this stuff unfolds. Then he hits you because this is, you know, these are the stories that Randy tells me about. He remembers those encounters. He remembers being at the safe house. He remembers the yelling. Like the only thing I really remember is I remember being at the bar with Tom very young. I remember, because I remember eating cherries, which is funny 'cause that's what Jasper and Liam liked to do. They liked to eat the cherries. And I used to eat the cherries out of the like, little thing that would sit up on the bar. And then I would play like the video games. And

You were, see, you were little. You gotta remember that. So that's when we left that night is when we physically never, we never lived with him again. Yeah. But he was still in the, you know, he was still there at that time. He was still living in car, still

In the area. And like, it's

Occasionally, but I, I had to work all day. So he would take you, he would take you with him. 'cause I'm not gonna pay for a babysitter. He's not working.

I see. That makes more sense. 'cause I, I mean, I must have been still, I, so I must have seen him still when I was like three or four, like old enough to remember the bar because he wasn't So he didn't have a job then. Really? For like years. You're working during the day He's watching me taking the bar. Yeah. And then I got it. So, so there, so at this point, you're 25, you've been divorced twice. You have two children, two abortions. Single mom, you're making go ahead.

$5 and 65. Oh no, I had, you're starting to

Make more money.

I was making, when I started working for Chuck, I was making almost $7.

All right. So Chuck pulls you outta the cafeteria roll. And he goes like, Hey, you're gonna come like, join me. So now you're making seven bucks an hour. But he had insurance. And then were we on food stamps?

Yes. We were on, we, you know, we were able to get on WIC and a little bit on, and, and you know, what happened was, do you wanna know what happened?

So, and then, you know, I remember we used to live in the dun the dungeon. So this must have been before. So this was after you left Tom? We lived in a dungeon, or we lived in

The dungeon. Okay. And you don't remember it because you were less than two years old? I,

I only remember Randy telling me about it.

So, so the night we left, after the cops came, we all went to Uncle Charlie's house. And we stayed in his basement. You know, his, his, his basement was finished. We stayed in his basement for two weeks. This was gotta remember, this was in December in Colorado. Mm-Hmm. the first December that your Aunt Letty's there. And it's actually in 83. And we had worst blizzards ever that year. And so we end up going to Charlie's and I wanted to, to get my own place. And so we, we needed, we needed to find our place. And so I did, we found a place. And so, so Letty and I call it the dungeon. It was the dungeon. And basically it was in downtown Boulder. It was under a business. And the front door was in the back alleyway. It had no walls in your aunt letty's room, just one by twos and installation.

It had no ceilings. It was just the wires and the insulation like exposed. It was all exposed. And there was just a little closet walk-in closet. And that's where Randy had a bed. That was it. He had a little twin mattress on the floor. And then the kitchen didn't have any formica. It was actually duct taped. The counters were duct taped. We had a tiny little little table, but you, they had, we had this big furnace in the middle of what was our kitchen. And you were crawling around at this time. And I was always so afraid you were gonna burn yourself because it was big and it was in the middle. And you and I had another room to ourselves. And, but you slept with me in the bed. That we had a mattress on the floor. And I don't even know if we had a couch. We, it had, it had two chairs and a tiny table. I don't, I don't even think we had a couch. I don't remember. Couch. And we were there for four months.

Wow.

Your grandpa came, he wanted us to move back to California. I didn't, I didn't wanna leave. I had a net network. I had a good job. And I wanted to raise you guys in Colorado. I rem I, I I didn't wanna leave again. And so Letty got a job at Littleton and took the bus. And then we finally moved to Louisville. That's when we moved to Louisville, and we moved in with a bus driver friend of hers. And then we weren't there very long. And then we just started moving. And, and the thing was, Louisville was real close to our job, my job. And so we moved for the record, let's get the records right? Yeah.

How many times did we, so how many times did we move because we were bouncing around a bit, right?

So from the time you were born and until the time you were 11 years old, we moved nine times in 11 years. Wow. But this is the thing, Rory, the reason we moved so much was every year your mom would get, make a little bit more money and we would get a litter. Better, better place. Mm-Hmm. . You know, I mean, we

Were, we were upgrading. Well, the mobile home, you abandoned and went Yeah. And declared bankruptcy, but then

. Right? And so I didn't have any credit for seven years. Right. For seven years I didn't have any credit. And I, it, and, and I, I had to learn to pay Paul, Rob Paul, pay Peter. And I got really good at that. And I was trying to build my credit back up.

So how did we m how did we make it right? Like, I'm trying to do the math here, going like, you know, six bucks an hour raising two kids. Well, like, I, I mean, we have, you know, AJ and I have more resources. We've got, we have people to help. And I'm just going, I don't, how do you raise two kids, work during the day, raise these two kids. Letty is there, but like, oh, but

Letty's not living with us anymore. she moved out.

No, let out.

sHe's moved out

Some somewhere in those first, in those five years. I mean, you know, Tom is gone. Dan is gone, parents are gone. Your family is, you got, how are you covering the spread here?

Well, there was several things. First of all, life was a lot simpler back then. You gotta remember that life was a lot simpler back then. You didn't need, I didn't need a lot of money. We didn't need a lot of money. But God provided, he always provided, you guys never slept in the car. You never went to bed hungry. Now we did a lot of Top Ramen. We did mac and cheese. And your mom was very you know, in, smart in in, I did a lot of improvising. And I made mac and cheese casserole with tuna and hot dogs and all kinds of things. And so, so that was one thing. And, and Don and Shelly in the early days, I mean, we would go over at dinner time, they would invite us for dinner. But the biggest factor was all the guys I worked at Tech support, remember with these engineers and, and, and Chuck, he, he was your godfather. And you know, he, he loved us. I mean, they would, him and Maryanne his wife, we would, you know, we'd go out to dinner. You guys went everywhere with me. Everywhere. We didn't have babysitters. You went with me. And so we would go to the pizza, whether we went to the pizza bar place or wherever. Trail dust. Do you remember the trail dust? I

Do remember the trail dust. Yeah, I

Do. Ken Campion used to pay for us to go to the trail dust. And and you guys loved that place. And, and so, so I had a, a family

And and this is your boss. So this is your boss. That's

My boss. And all the looking after

My coworkers and all their friends, all their

Coworkers, my coworkers. So Eric he was my banker. He was, he was, he was our banker. He, he, he was, he was one of my meaning.

He's loaning you my not an actual banker, meaning he's loaning you money.

No, he's making me money. Right. So, so one of the things was, I never had to pay interest, but I always paid him back. And so that taught you guys how, you know, you need to pay your debts. And one, one year you wanted to go see the faces. You were like,

Oh, in South Dakota, Mount Rushmore.

Yes. Seven. And you were like, mommy, I wanna go see the faces. Can we go see the faces for, for, for our summer break? And so I saved enough money, $200, and we were gonna go. But at that time, the car that I had needed tires and one tire blew up. And, and, the guy was like, you, you can't go anywhere on these tires. And it's definitely not with two kids in the car. So I had to take that money and buy four sets of, you know, a set of tires. And Eric, Eric gave us the money to go on vacation. And at $25 a week, I paid him back. It took me six months to pay him back. But you got to go see the faces. And we got to go camping, which he didn't like. But Randy likes camping.

I still don't like camping. I mean that, maybe that's why I don't like camping. It was like, you

Don't like camping.

You like being the freezing to do, you

Like being

Outside you all dirty. Right? but

We went to a lot of parks when you were little. That was the other thing we did. We visited all kinds of parks. They were free. We went to dollar movies. We would, we would go to McDonald's and Rob your piggy banks. That's how we would go. I would get the, the change out of my, do you remember pulling the change outta my car and my console?

Uhhuh . And so, and

The post Ep 484: Overcoming Impossible Odds with Rory’s Mom Part 1 appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 483: 5 Techniques to Gain Thousands of Social Media Followers | Ryan Pineda Episode Recap

Nicole Gale — Fri, 03 May 2024 11:00:42 +0000

RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I'm the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well-known. I know you're gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let's get started. Here's how I grew by 3000 followers in three weeks. It was actually five simple ideas that I just wanna share with you. The first thing was to focus on starters. Another term for this would be the hook, but it's really paying attention to the opening first few seconds of your videos. And I don't know if you're like me, but everyone throws that word around like, you gotta have a great hook.
RV (00:58):
It's all about the hook. Start with hook. And I'm like, what exactly is a hook? Because nobody seems to be able to explain what that means. I've heard that term for years, but something finally clicked in the last few weeks, and I'm gonna share now what I'm using as my definition of a hook to see if it helps you. And a hook is simply this. Tell people what you're about to tell them. Tell them what you're about to tell them, right? Think about how they advertise the news. They say, A new study reveals a food that causing cancer will tell you what it is to tonight at nine, right? Like they tell you what they're gonna, they they tell you what they're gonna tell you. And in Toastmasters, where I started my professional speaking career, Toastmasters used to have a phrase where they said, tell the audience what you're gonna tell 'em, then tell 'em, then tell 'em what you told 'em.
RV (01:48):
And now I'm realizing, oh, that's the same opening formula for a great video. Tell 'em what you're about to tell 'em. You'll notice that I started this video saying, here's how I grew my followers by th here's how I grew by 3000 followers in the last three weeks. I'm telling you what I'm about to tell you. I don't launch in to telling you how to do it. I'm telling you about what I'm about to tell you. And that's what the key to a hook is. It's super duper simple. So focus on your starters. Focus on the opening first three seconds of your videos. Tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em, and I think you'll see an immediate improvement. The second thing is screen quality. And by screen quality, I just mean production value. We got my main man, Chris, over here. We finally invested to get a good camera and get a a, a, a decent, decent microphone.
RV (02:43):
And I think that's made a really big difference. If you go look at some of my old videos, they're just not as visually capturing because they're not as quality in terms of the resolution. The content, I would argue, is just as good as it has ever been. But the production value is definitely up a notch. And I think at this point, if you're trying to compete online, you need to make that investment. Why? Because all the other people who are doing it are doing that. And so you're not, you're competing not just on the quality of your ideas, but you're competing also on the quality of your production value. And so it's time to make that investment if you're ready to really get serious. So that's the screen quality. The third thing is stimulus stimuli. We have increased the cuts in our video editing dramatically.
RV (03:33):
Again, my man, Chris, over here rocking the camera is doing cuts every one or two seconds. And when I mean cut, if you just watch a video and count how many seconds go between each time the screen changes, something moves, right? A talking head video is just me here talking. The camera is not cutting. It's the same view for an extended period of time. But adding stimulus means you're adding cuts. You're showing other pictures, other you know, it can be captions. It can be moving things around on the screen. It can be having pullout quotes. It can be dropping in emojis. It can be dropping in B-roll footage. It can be dropping in stock footage of other things. You can be referencing news media articles, but the camera is cutting every couple seconds. And again, this is just a tactic to hold people's attention, which is a huge part of what growing your followers is all about.
RV (04:31):
The algorithms reward people who hold people's attention on the platform. The fourth thing is stories. Tell stories. Stories from your life are an automatic great format and formula for capturing attention. There's something about the human brain that we are drawn to stories. So for example, I spoke at the Keller Williams National Convention. There were 17,000 people there, and I had an opportunity to share the stage with Tony Robbins, Mel Robbins, and several other speakers. Well, I told the story when I came back of how I watched Mel Robbins speak. And I stayed two days longer in Vegas than I planned to, just so I could get to see her. And I just shared the story of what I thought of her presentation. Well, unbeknownst to me or unplanned by me, she saw the post and she reshared it. So part of the, the value was certainly the size of her audience.
RV (05:29):
But what really was powerful was the story. It was, it was sharing a story of what did I do and what did I learn? And that's really the simple format for a story is what happened to you and what did you learn? And I've got other videos that talk about the four parts of telling a great story. But every picture in your phone is a story. If you just kind of go through your phone, camera roll, every single photo is a story. Tell the story of who was there, what were you doing, what happened, what did you learn? And how does that apply to the people who are in your audience tell great stories because they automatically serve as great hooks and great lessons and great attention grabbers and attention keepers. And finally, number five is stages. Getting on stages. As I mentioned, I was at a very large event, and to this day, the fastest way that I have ever seen to grow my email list, my social media following my customers or just new friends and fans, is to be out speaking on stages.
RV (06:36):
This is one of our expertise at Brand Builders Group. This is one of the things I've spent my life learning and that our team specializes in teaching you how to do, is to get on stages. Now, they don't have to be thousands of people. You don't even have to be paid to be on 'em. But the shortest distance between someone who is a complete stranger, becoming a lifelong fan is a world class one hour presentation after seeing you on stage. And by the way, if you'd like to talk to someone on our team about some of the strategies we use to help personal brands get on more stages, just click the link that is somewhere around this video and we'll set you up with a free call. But there you have it. The five strategies that I've used to grow my followers more than 3000 in the last three weeks. It starts with the starts have great hooks, then it's all about screen quality up your production game. Third, have more stimulus, more jump cuts, and more advanced editing happening inside of your videos. Fourth, tell more stories. And fifth, get on more stages. If you do those five things, I promise, you'll see your followers grow.

The post Ep 483: 5 Techniques to Gain Thousands of Social Media Followers | Ryan Pineda Episode Recap appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 482: Launching a Live Event Business with Ryan Pineda

Nicole Gale — Tue, 30 Apr 2024 11:00:59 +0000

RV (00:02):
I'm so excited to introduce to you one of my favorite new friends. Also one of my favorite people in all of social media to follow. His name is Ryan Pineda. And Ryan was a former pro baseball player. We're gonna talk about his journey. He went from professional baseball to real estate investor. And that started in like 2010. And he since has invested over a hundred million dollars in over a hundred million dollars of real estate. And then he became an entrepreneur. And he has founded seven different businesses that have gone on to generate seven or eight figures in annual revenue. He also has 2 million social followers online, has generated over a billion views with his his videos. He lives in Vegas with his wife, Mindy. They got three kids. And he's just a really amazing guy. We've got some fun stuff going on together that will tell you about if you stick around to the very end. Ryan has a, a conference that I will tell you about and we'll talk a little bit about that. But we wanna hear the journey of how all of this happened. Ryan, welcome to the show.
RP (01:11):
Thanks for having me, Rory. And man, I just appreciate, by the way, all your help behind the scenes, you know your willingness to, to answer questions and all the different things I got going on and serve and everything else, dude. So it means a lot.
RV (01:24):
Yeah. Well, it's my pleasure, man. I, I you know, I love helping people as much as I can and, and obviously networking and you know, people know that I'm a hardcore bible thumping Jesus freak. And especially when I find other believers out there in the business world, I'm always like, Hey, like, I wanna help. I wanna help however I can. So, walk me through this story. You, so you were playing for the Oakland A's, right? Is what the, the story was. So how do you go from pro baseball to real estate investor? Take me on that journey quick.
RP (01:57):
Yeah, so I grew up just wanting to play baseball my whole life. It was all I ever did, and I was fortunate to be, you know, a really good player. Every step along the way. You know, I was on varsity as a freshman, then I get a D one college scholarship and become an All American, all those things. And then I get drafted by the Oakland A's in 2010. The only problem is in pro baseball, you have to start in the minor leagues. It's not like the NBA and the NFL, where, you know, you go straight to the top and you start making millions. And the minor leagues in baseball, you make 1200 bucks a month. Yeah, that's what it was back when I was playing. Wow. And you only get paid while you're playing, so it's six months outta the year.
RP (02:38):
So I was essentially making seven grand a year in the minor leagues. Wow. Yeah. So I didn't have a choice. I did not want be an entrepreneur. I didn't want to do real estate. I did wanted to eat , you know, and so I ended up getting my real estate license the same year I got drafted. 'cause I knew I was gonna need to do something to make money in the off season. So, you know, I became a realtor. And what I didn't realize back then was that was literally the hardest time, pretty much in history to be a realtor. The market had just crashed. Prices were at all time lows, which was great if you were an investor. The problem was no one had money. Everyone just got wiped out from, you know, the great recession. And as a realtor, I'm just selling the deals.
RP (03:25):
And so when, you know, your commission is based on the sales price and prices are at all time lows and no one has money to buy, it becomes really tough. And you're 21 years old and you don't even know what you're doing. So it was a really hard time. You know, the average price of a home back in 2010 in Vegas, which is obviously a big market, was a hundred thousand dollars. Wow. So if I was lucky, I could make $3,000 selling a home that was super hard to sell back then. And I quickly learned, I hated it. As far as representing, you had a, you had an early knack for picking careers to go broke, it sounds like. . Yeah. That's what you, yeah. Yep. So I realized quick. I was like, dude, this ain't for me. I sold a couple of houses.
RP (04:08):
I got really mad, honestly, because I knew these were great deals. You know, I and I, after a couple of years, one deal just finally put me through the edge. You know, it was a house that was built in literally two years before, 1800 square feet in Vegas, four bedroom, three bath. It was a hundred thousand or it was $90,000. That's was the list price. Wow. Literally never been lived in. And I'm telling this guy, I'm like, dude, this is a crazy deal. Like, you can't lose, you know, you could go rent this right now for 1200 bucks, you know, like you can't lose. And he's like, ah, I don't know, man. I think it's gonna go down. And I'm like, what's it gonna go down to? Is it gonna be free ? I don't understand. I'm like, what? How do you lose on this?
RP (04:51):
Where do you go down from zero? Yeah. Like, yeah, this house just sold for 400,000 a couple of years ago, and you, you think it's going down from 90, you can't even build a house for 90 grand. So, you know, he is like, you don't get it, kid. One day you'll get it. And you know, at that point, that was the tipping point for me. I was like, all right, this ain't for me. So I actually quit real estate along this path. What ended up happening was I, I met my now wife and so, you know, we get engaged. And, and while we're engaged, I actually get released from the Oakland A's. So, you know, I I spent three years in the minor leagues with them, and I get released in spring training. And so we're engaged and I'm like, well babe, I really don't know what I'm gonna do because I thought I was gonna, you know, make it in baseball.
RP (05:40):
I've already, you know, failed at that. I failed at real estate and now we're about to get married and you're in college not making any money and getting in debt. And she was gonna school to be a teacher, so she was never gonna make money. And I was like, I really don't know what I'm good at or what I'm gonna do, but I'll figure it out. So we ended up getting married and I end up furnishing our apartment with all of our wedding money. You know, we got some gifts and stuff, Uhhuh, . And I bought all this furniture on Craigslist. And I remember looking at the apartment, I was like, man, I got a really good deal on all this furniture. I bet you I could flip it and make some money. 'cause I was always a hustler growing up. I flipped Pokemon cards, I was flipping cell phones, I was flipping anything I could make money at.
RP (06:25):
So like, I just had this knack for finding deals and flipping, which is why it frustrated me as a realtor because I was finding great deals and people weren't buying 'em. That's why I got so mad. So I look at the furniture and I was like, what if I just bought one piece of furniture a day and I flipped it, I could make great money. So I was like, you know what, I'm just gonna do it. So I buy a couch and I bring it back to our little apartment. She's like, why did you buy another couch? Like, trust me. Okay. I, I have this idea. I ended up selling the couch and making 200 bucks, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna just do this like every day. If I just buy one couch a day, I'm gonna make six grand a month. And sure enough, that's exactly what happened.
RP (07:09):
I ended up interesting. I ended up starting my first business flipping furniture. You know, I, I got a storage unit. I was putting all the couches there. I was cleaning 'em, posting 'em on Craigslist, offering free delivery. And sure enough, it went from 2000 a month to 4,000 to 6,000 to 8,000. I was like, we are freaking rich. This is crazy. I'm making more in a month than I was making it a year as a minor league player. And, you know, that was my first successful business. Now, during this time too, I was also still playing baseball. So I ended up signing a deal with an independent team, and I ended up going to play five more seasons. So I played eight seasons overall in professional baseball. Cool. But during every season I was always hustling, you know, making money in weird ways, .
RP (07:56):
And so from there, 2015 happens. So this is five years after the fact. We're on our one year anniversary and well, this is late 2014, early 2015. And I'm praying, and I'm like, God, you know, I'm grateful that I, you know, I'm providing for my, my family. Now, my wife, we didn't have kids yet. You know, I'm grateful for this couch flipping thing, but I know I'm called for more. You know, I'm not supposed to just flip couches the rest of my life. And I was like, what should I do? And it was the first time I ever like really heard God, like, audibly tell me something. And I just heard like this whisper of real estate. And in my mind I'm like, real estate, I already did that and failed. I'm not gonna do that again. Like, it sucked being a realtor.
RP (08:45):
And sure enough, I see this TV commercial pop up like no more than an hour later. And it's like, you wanna learn how to flip houses today, this big infomercial, you know, with no money, no credit, nothing. And I'm like, scam, I'm not doing that. And I just felt like the Holy Spirit in me telling me to look further into it. So I get on Google and I'm like, I'm like, what's, what's, can you buy real estate with no money? Nobody ever taught me this in realtor school. Like, that's not true. And so I look it up and I find this website called BiggerPockets, and it's like, oh yeah, you can totally buy real estate without money. Here's how you know, you can do wholesaling, private money, all these different things. And I was like, holy crap. This is exactly what I've been looking for.
RP (09:29):
I always knew how to find deals. That was never my problem. I just didn't have money. If I could just sell these deals and make money, I'll kill it. So sure enough, I told my wife, I was like, Hey, we're flipping houses. And she's like, all right. It's just like flipping couches, but with more zeros. I mean, what could get wrong? Yeah. , what could go wrong? Right. You know, I'm just gonna max out our credit cards and get, you know, high interest loans. But what could go wrong? Uhhuh. . So , you know, we I came back and went back to Vegas and on the flight home, actually, this was the first time I ever encountered prophecy. And I didn't know what it was at the time because I grew up in the Baptist church. So they never talked about these things. And this guy's sitting on the plane next to me.
RP (10:10):
My wife and I weren't sitting together 'cause we were so cheap, we didn't want to want to pay for a signed seating. So forget about that. Right. That's, that was the old me. All right. Now this guy sitting next to me and I'm sitting here reading this book about how to flip houses with no money. And it was by my friend Brandon, my now friend Brandon Turner, who's a great dude. And he's basically like, you know, talking about all these ways you can flip houses. And the guy goes, Hey, what are you reading? I was like, well, I'm reading you know, about flipping houses. I'm, I'm about to go into this business. And he's like, so I don't talk to people a lot like on planes and stuff, but God wants me to tell you that you're gonna be very successful in this and you're gonna change a lot of lives.
RP (10:54):
Wow. By doing this. Mind you, I'd never flipped the house. You know, this was just an idea. This is some random guy on the airplane. And he goes, and on top of that, I wanna give you my information. He's like, 'cause I flipped hundreds of homes. He was an older guy. He's like, I've done all these different things that the book was explaining that I didn't even understand yet. He was talking about seller finance and all these weird terms. He's like, dude, I've been doing that forever. He's like, you need any help? Here's my stuff. And it wasn't that I wasn't gonna do it, but that was like the confirmation I needed of like, alright, it's about to go down. Fascinating. Yeah. So we ended up getting back home. I find my first deal I had to max out all my credit cards to get a down payment. So I maxed out our credit cards between me and Mindy for 50 grand. Wow. And got a hard money loan at like 13% and bought our first flip. Now fast forward through it, you know, we ended up making good money. We made 25 grand on that first deal. And
RV (11:58):
Walk me, walk me through that a little bit. So you're, you're putting, you're putting $60,000 down on a $300,000 house or something?
RP (12:07):
Well, prices weren't that high yet. So what happened was we had 50 grand in credit. So I'm like, well, we might as well just get it all, you know, even if we don't need it, like, let's just have cash in the bank. So I cash advanced, I had like these 0%, you know, credit offers and balance transfers. And so I'm like, let me just get it all at 0%. So we got it all at 50 grand in the bank to show liquidity for a hard money loan. And then, you know, I find this deal for $99,000 in Vegas. And so we buy that first home. I sold it in 51 days for 135,000. And I, I put like a thousand bucks into it. So we made money really quick and during that time I bought a second home with the rest of the cash and another hard money loan. That ended up making me 15 grand. And so did really good on the first two rolled that into every dollar back into another deal and another deal. I kept my credit cards maxed out for years. You know, just continuing to roll cash into new deals. You know, flipped five houses that first year in 2015. The next year I flipped 20. The next year after that I flipped 50. And then I flipped 150 in the fourth year. Wow. And then we've been doing over a hundred ever since, even to this day.
RV (13:23):
Wow. That's pretty ballsy . That's to, I mean, that's max, that's like laying it all on the line.
RP (13:32):
That's how I always have operated though. You know, at the end of the day, it's like, if I feel this convicted about an idea, you know, we're either all in or we're not doing it. There's no in between.
RV (13:42):
Fascinating. Yeah. So then you go from that. So you're learning how to flip houses, you're learning how to basically secure financing. You're doing this, you're good at, you're good in making deals. So you're basically just buying them, fixing them up, turning around, selling them. Yep. Making a profit on the difference.
RP (13:58):
Yep.
RV (14:00):
And then all of a sudden, what, what, where does social media come on the scene? Like, why do you start going, oh, let's do a podcast and let's put a bunch of time and money into social media. Like where does that show up?
RP (14:11):
Yeah, so let's say from 2015 to 2019, all I really did was flip houses. And a lot of people don't know that. You know, most people think, oh, this dude just had a bunch of businesses all at once and like, they grew. It's like, no, that's not what happened. Like, I pretty much spent five years only focused on flipping houses and becoming really, really good at it. Now, during that time, like I learned how to run a business. Like I was raising millions of dollars of capital. I was hiring people, we were marketing, we were selling, I was handling construction projects like anything with running a business, I was learning it. I was also still playing baseball at this time too. I retired in 2017, so I probably flipped 80 homes while I was playing. Which people don't know either. So I had to learn how to delegate in order to keep playing baseball. 'cause That was still my dream, dude. Like real estate was plan B, you know, getting to the big leagues was plan A and for many years. So anyways I ended up retiring and you know, real estate's going great. And I ended up opening up our real estate brokerage 'cause that was a logical thing to do. And we grew that to over 200 agents. So that was a success. Then I ended up opening a, a
RV (15:24):
Regular retail real estate brokerage. Yeah.
RP (15:27):
Because I was selling all my flips anyway on the ml. I'm like, why not get my own brokerage? All the exposure from all my own deals. And so that was the thought process. So then I ended up opening a tax firm because so many people were starting to ask me, dude, where do you do your taxes? You know, all this crap. I, 'cause I was developing influence locally, and I ended up opening a tax firm, not really thinking anything of it. I was just like, you know what, if I could just own the tax firm, I'll like have control of our finances, our bookkeeping, and if we make enough money where it's like basically pays for itself, that would be great. That was literally my mindset. But that's not what happened. What ended up happening was it, it built into a multimillion dollar firm, you know, that made millions of dollars. And, you know, we had hundreds and hundreds of clients. I actually sold that company last year to my partner. So that was very successful. But long story short, where social media enters is in 2020 during the pandemic. Yeah. And
RV (16:28):
Hold on a second. So just backing up on the tax firm, like nowhere in your history do I hear accounting , would I hear? But yeah, yeah. You, you ended up making money from these deals and you're trying to figure out how to minimize your tax liability. And so you figured that out in an entrepreneurial sense. And then you hired some accountants to help you build a tax firm and then sold it even though you never sat for a CPA exam or anything like that.
RP (16:53):
Correct. You know, I ended up going through a bunch of accountants over the years, and I finally found one young guy too that I really liked. And he was working for another tax firm at the time. And you know, I remember this was back in late 2019, he was just, you know, we were doing one of our quarterly parties and he was like, man, you know, I, I really want to quit the firm and start my own. And I was like, why don't we just start one together? Like, I, I know how to get clients like that won't be a problem. And we're like, all right, deal. Let's do it. Like, that was literally it, . And then we started it at the end of 2019. So it was literally going into the pandemic that we started it. And social media is really what helped it explode because social media ends up, you know, being the, the lead catalyst for all the businesses I've started, essentially.
RP (17:42):
But yeah, you know, I never, I know a ton about tax, obviously from having a tax firm now and being in real estate. It's real estate's the most tax efficient mechanism like in the world today, period. There's nothing that gives you more tax benefits than real estate. So it all went hand in hand. But anyways, you know, 2020 happens in March and you know, obviously the world gets shut down. And dude, at the time I had 50 house flips going, so, you know, I got like $20 million of debt on the streets, you know? Wow. Just sitting there and I'm like, huh, I wonder what's about to happen? You know, like they're saying that the world might crash, the economy might crash. Like, I don't know man, and I can't really do anything about it. You know, these properties are here and there's nothing I can do.
RP (18:29):
I've already bought 'em and I can't do, like, I can't go to the office. I can't do anything. So this is probably the second big God moment I ever had in my life. The first I told you about with flipping houses. The second was, I had multiple people during this time tell me, Ryan, you should make YouTube videos. You should do TikTok. I'm like, dude, what am I gonna do TikTok this stupid kids app? Like, what are we doing here? And I'm like, who watches YouTube? Honestly, that's what I thought. I was like, who literally watches YouTube? They're like, people watch YouTube. What are you talking about? I'm like, I go to YouTube to learn how to tie shoes or something. Like how to tie a tie. I don't go there to like watch stuff. And I soon learned that obviously people go to YouTube to like, watch stuff.
RP (19:14):
And I start watching all these entrepreneurs well I wouldn't even call 'em entrepreneurs. They're more just like content creators at that time. So I started seeing these real estate guys. 'cause I was like, who do you guys watch? Just tell me who you think sure is the best. So they start telling me these guys who are now my friends, like Graham Stefan and meet Kevin and, and these other YouTube guys. And I was like, okay, so what have they done? And the reality was at that point, they hadn't really done much. Like they couldn't hold a candle to anything I had done in the real estate world. And I was like, so you guys get all your information from them when it comes to real estate. You know, they own like 10 houses. Like I flipped hundreds of homes. And they're like, yeah, but they're great.
RP (19:58):
I was like, okay. So I start watching their videos and they start talking about how much they're making just from like YouTube AdSense and sponsors. They're making hundreds of thousands a month. And I was like, wait a minute. These guys have no overhead, no office, no debt, no employees, none of this crap that I gotta deal with. And they make more money. Explain to me how this makes any sense. Like, I'm just thinking in my head, I'm like, I'm not gonna be a hater. Like I'm in the wrong business. I need to be where they're doing media is the business. Like, it just clicked. And it was only because, like I said, I, I know God's trying to speak to me when I ignore things. And then it just keeps coming up over and over again. And so that's what happened. I was like, YouTube's stupid.
RP (20:52):
Then another person's like, Hey, you should look into YouTube. Hey, you should look into YouTube. And I was like, all right, fine. Lemme look into it. So anyways, long story short, during the pandemic, I start making YouTube videos in tiktoks. Now, dude, at that time people were laughing at me because I was this real estate guy making tiktoks and nobody understood it at that time. Entrepreneurs weren't on it yet, but I was like, dude, let me tell you, I think this thing's gonna be big. 'cause I'm not even a social media guy, but this is addicting watching this stuff. So I just start frigging making videos, it pops off, I get like 400,000 followers in 90 days or something crazy. Like it went nuts fast. And then YouTube starts to pick up, actually my most famous video was about flipping couches, which I told you that story before.
RP (21:39):
And people were like, dude, this helped me so much during the pandemic. How, because I just went through a tutorial. I'm like, this is how you flip couches. And you could go all make five grand plus a month easily. I guarantee it. And people are like, this changed my life. I still, people, I see people to this day who are like, bro, I flipped couches and it really helped me out. So, you know, long story short, I make these videos, YouTube's tiktoks, everything. My following grows pretty quickly in 2020. And 2021 I launched the podcast and that thing grows pretty quickly. And you know, now it's basically like I'm four years in the game of taking media seriously. And it was probably the smartest move I ever made. And, you know, that stemmed into, you know, other businesses raising more capital learning, digital marketing, learning, you know, all the tricks of the trade. And you know, it's opened up the doors to so many relationships. And so you know, that's kinda like how it all came about to where we're at today.
RV (22:43):
Amazing. So, so on social, how do you think about social media today? Like h how, how do you think about the strategy for how frequently you're posting what you're posting? Because you do have multiple businesses going on, but you found a, you found a banner and a container for all of this, which is basically money, right? The wealthy way, which is like so that isn't, is an, is a nice container that holds real estate and tax and entrepreneurship and, you know, whatever, all things business. But like strategy wise, what, what, what, what's working on social media? How are you doing it now? How are you thinking about it? Like, talk to me about some of that. So
RP (23:32):
I think social media is always changing, right? Just like business. And so what worked four years ago does not work today. And so you gotta kind of always be at the forefront of testing new things, trying new things and everything else. So what I can say is this, okay, as an entrepreneur the number one way that social media helps us obviously is our business. And so the first thing to understand is what's the goal of your social media? Are you trying to drive leads to your business or are you trying to become like a straight up influencer and make new streams of income from ad revenue and sponsors and all that stuff? That was never my intent, you know, I was always like, I'll make far more money pushing traffic to my business. I don't need to be an influencer. So I think number one, staff clarity on what you're doing it for as far as business goes.
RP (24:26):
Now here's the other part. Social media leads to a lot of other things too with relationships. That's how we got connected, right? Yeah. It leads to opportunities would just different businesses that you otherwise wouldn't have been in different streams of income. So like, there's a lot of benefits to doing it. The question is, what's the best way today? That's basically what you're asking. My my philosophy is this, for somebody to become a customer in your company, the number one thing they have to do is trust you. That's how somebody buys. They have to first trust you. So then the deeper question becomes, well, how do you build trust? Right? And I I you're a branding expert, so what do you think? How do you build trust with somebody?
RV (25:13):
I mean, the way that part of how we describe it is we trust people that we see, we trust people that we know intimate details about their life. Mm-Hmm. . And we trust people that we learn from. So those are like, kind of like three of the quickest things of just going, like, people gotta see you, they gotta learn from you, and they have to feel like they know you the way that they would know a real person in real life.
RP (25:35):
So how would you go about learning those things about them?
RV (25:40):
I mean, you're sharing 'em on social, I mean that basically turned Yeah. That, that, that inverts into like a social strategy, right? Is like teaching what, teaching what, you know, sharing who you are, like sharing some of your belief systems Yeah. And then physically them seeing you, right? As a matter of like, basically video and photography is like, they have to be able to see you. Like
RP (26:01):
Yeah. They trust you. So I would, I would take it in a step even deeper, right? So I'll ask this with another que this is what Jesus did, right? He just asked a bunch of questions all the time. He never gave a straight answer. So like, with aj, your wife, how long did you guys date before you got married? Mm. I know the answer 'cause I listened to your podcast, but just for
RV (26:22):
Everyone you listened to our Eternal Life podcast.
RP (26:24):
Yeah. Yep. Yeah.
RV (26:27):
The yeah. So we started dating in 2007 and then we got engaged in the fall of 2009. So it was like two and a half years.
RP (26:37):
So you had two and a half years to get to know each other. Yeah. And then you got, you got engaged and, and you got married. So the simple answer is, in order to trust somebody, it requires time. You have to spend time with somebody. That's literally the number one thing. Like all those things that you described happen by just spending time. Sure. And so the question then becomes not necessarily how many views you can get somebody to watch you or how many impressions you can get, but how much time do they actually spend? Because there are people that see me, let's say on a reel or something or an ad, but they've never spent time with me. They, they could recognize me and they could be like, oh yeah, I, I know that guy with the hair, right? But they don't know me. Like you said, they don't know the intimate side of me.
RP (27:27):
What I believe they've never learned from me. They could just, I'm recognizable to them. The key is for somebody to become a customer, they have to spend time with you. That's it. Right? And so we know from like sales and stuff that, you know, there's like the seven hours, if somebody spends seven hours with you, you know, there's a good chance they're gonna buy. And this is why events are so effective. 'cause It's like a hyper way to spend time with somebody. If I throw a full two day event, dude, you just spent 48 hours with me, you know, like, we're gonna really get to know each other. You're gonna develop a lot of trust. So how this plays into the social media strategy is very simple. The number one way to spend time with somebody in today's world of social media is a podcast.
RP (28:08):
There's no other form of content that's long form like that, that's raw, that you actually get to hear what they're really like. It's not scripted. You truly get to know the person through a podcast. And the beauty of a podcast is you can chop it up, repurpose it, get all your other short form clips and everything else that you need too. So it's not only like the best way to build trust, it's also the most efficient way to film content. And then the way we look at it is we simply just use our short form repurpose clips as like marketing to get them to watch the long form. And so through our research, what we have discovered is that the longer your podcast is, the better. Most people have the wrong idea about podcasts thinking that, oh, well, you know, people don't wanna listen to like a super long podcast.
RP (29:01):
It's not true. Joe Rogan's been doing three hour podcasts for a long time. Patrick vda, his podcasts are going ultra long. You go look at the biggest podcast in the world right now, they're all an hour and a half to three hours every episode. And you just start to think about how much trust these guys are building with their audience because of the time spent. And so now the new thing that we look at is not followers or views, but it's watch time. That's our most important metric. And so last year on YouTube, we had 1.2 million hours of watch time on YouTube. Wow. Wow. And when you think about that, that's 150 years almost. So people spend 150 years with me in one year. And so you start to think about the concept of leverage in that way. It's like, man, if I could go get 10 million hours, you know, in the next year or two, that's 1500 years that people are gonna spend with me.
RP (30:02):
That's an insane number. Is your YouTube the podcast also? I mean, is that how you think of it as like, it's this video podcast. Now I doing that and that's not even counting the audio downloads and 'cause audio downloads don't tell you watch time and the way YouTube does, you know, they just go by downloads. So it's actually the number's a lot higher than that. But that's just the, the clear number. I know that YouTube tells me that's the most important metric because I know if you spend time with me, we're gonna do something together. Like that's all that it comes down to. So we just want to get people spending time with us as much as possible. And that's the game of social media and business. Now, you know, we're in competition with Netflix, we're in competition with books, we're in competition with YouTube.
RP (30:48):
We're in competition with literally anything that's entertainment. Here's another thing to think about. For all the entrepreneurs listening, we know that money can be printed. And so there's an infinite supply of money at the end of the day. But time is the one thing that we, it it is truly capped per person. Basically the studies have found that we have about four hours per day of discretionary time. You know, think about it, we're gonna sleep eight hours, we're gonna work eight hours the other four hours, you know, we gotta go eat. We gotta, you know, put our kids to bed. We gotta, you know, do things. But we basically have four hours a day to do whatever we want. Those of you with toddlers know that you spend four hours a day trying to put your kids to bed. Exactly. . Exactly. So guys like us have less, and then other people maybe have eight, right?
RP (31:37):
Yeah. So, but the average is four hours and that's never gonna change. It just isn't. Unless they figure out how to make people not work and not sleep. So four hours is literally capped per person. So if I'm like Rory, like when you tell me that, you're like, dude, you're one of my favorite people to watch. That means a lot to me because I know you have four hours to go spend on whatever you want. You could go watch Netflix, you could go watch a movie, you could go watch a TV show, social media, a podcast, a listen to an audio book. They're all competing for the same four hours. And so the fact that you chose to listen or watch something of mine says a lot about, you know, what you value. And, you know, it means a lot to me because I know like the cost of it, it's easy for you to go pay me a thousand dollars. That's not as significant as choosing to go spend hours consuming content. Mm-Hmm. . And that's what people don't understand yet, is that the money is easy, it's the time that we're all after. And that's why Facebook and YouTube are, are so valuable because of that.
RV (32:46):
So I wanna come back to the events conversation. Yeah. So this is something else that you do really well. When we started our first business, so we started in 2006. You know, we ultimately grew it to 200 people. It was eight figures when we sold in 2018. But for the first four years, from 2006 to like 2010, all we did was live events. Like we, all we did was put like 750 to a thousand people in a room. And it was grueling, right? Like we did not do digital marketing, we did all human sales force, like calling outta the phone book. Then we'd go to their office, we'd do a free one hour presentation, we try to convince 'em to buy tickets to come. And we would do that for four months and we would generate revenue, right? We would generate a few hundred thousand in revenue. But like when you add up the venue, the, the av, the speakers, the coffee, the like workbooks, like we would lose money at least a third of the time. Mm-Hmm . And if we made anything, it usually wasn't that much. You're doing an event right now, almost, is it once a quarter you're doing an event
RP (33:54):
For our big events? Yeah. But we'll even run little workshops at the office like, you know, once a month or every other month.
RV (34:00):
So how are you doing events once a quarter. So tell us about the event. First of all, give us a sense of the order of magnitude here of like how many people are coming to these events and where are they? Yeah. And what it looks like and who the speakers are, et cetera. And then I want to hear about like how you're doing that and not losing your tail constantly.
RP (34:20):
I know people, it's, it's an interesting thing, right? So we have an event called Wealth Con, which you're talking about, so anybody can go look it up. Wealth con.org is the website and we hold it once a quarter. And if you look on it, it's advertised as a real estate business and social media event, right? So we have speakers on all three topics. I would say 50% is real estate and then the other 50% is business slash social media. So anyone who wants to learn content, you're gonna learn some content, you're gonna wanna learn some business principles, and then you're gonna learn a lot about real estate. Now the way all this started to just backtrack a little bit, is that back in 2020 when I got on social media, I started doing coaching too. So I never wanted to be a guru or anything.
RP (35:05):
I hated gurus. I don't know why. I was just like, eh, you don't need to learn. Like you can learn for free. And yeah, sure I learned for free, but I never leveled up until I started paying people. And very few people are good enough to learn for free. That's just the reality. So once my mindset shifted you know, we started doing coaching and that first year with no marketing or anything, we made 700 grand. And with that, I just randomly was like, Hey, we should meet to all of our students. And they're like, yeah, that'd be great. So we had our first ever, well what's now known today as Wealth Con at my house with eight people in my living room. That was my first group of students. This. Yep. This was right before the pandemic. So this was in like February, late February of 2020.
RP (35:58):
We didn't know we were about to get shut down. So anyways, I was like, guys, we should just meet. 'cause I think it would be cool. That was it. It was one day. So the next event, the pandemic, you know, they let people out and stuff. And so we meet in like June of 2020 and we meet at my office this time and we have about 50 people or 40 people I can't remember. And they're like, yeah, this is great. So once again, this isn't costing me anything. I'm not making anything. It's just kind of part of fulfillment for coaching, even though they were never promised it. I was just like, this would be cool. So then August hap or like August, September happens and sure enough, we have another one at the office, but this time the program's growing.
RP (36:36):
We have like a hundred people and I'm like, dude, we can't even fit everyone in here. This is too big. So the next meeting in like January of 2021 we get this space downtown with like this big classroom and stuff, and people come, they love it. We go to the bars afterwards downtown Vegas, and it's great and we just have a good time. So then we do that again one more time and we outgrow that space. So then now I'm in a dilemma. I'm like, all right, well I gotta actually go pay now to have a venue. Up to this point. I've never paid anything other than like food costs, like nothing crazy. And I'm like, I'm gonna have to like go spend some coin to go throw this event. So , we get this little casino called the D in Vegas, it's 50 grand to, to go do the whole event.
RP (37:23):
It could fit like 250 people. And I'm like, all right, well I don't know. We got 150 students, so I could sell like a hundred tickets. Let me just see if I could kind of break even on my cost. That was my mindset. And so didn't do any ad spend or anything. But yeah, we go sell a hundred tickets. We make some money on the front end and then at the event, because most of it are students, I don't wanna pitch or anything. So I'm just like, Hey, if you're new, join us. Just talk to the team, whatever. That was it. And sure enough, people join and it's cool. Like we, we make, I don't know, let's say a hundred grand profit. And I'm like, wow, now this event actually makes money. It's not just like hanging out with the current students. That's cool.
RP (38:02):
So we go and do it again. Well, the next quarter it gets bigger. And so I gotta run a bigger hotel. So we rent the Sahara, which is like a, a little south now. So we're moving from downtown, which is like the ghetto is part of Vegas South towards now we're getting to the nice places. So this event has like 500 people now. And now it's like, all right, well crap, if we're gonna do it like this, let's do two days. So we do a two day event now. And same thing, right? We're not spending any money on marketing the, the, the venue cost for that venue. I don't even remember now. Maybe it was like a hundred grand or something. And it's great. We end up making money. Not nothing crazy. I'm not like pitching. When you say
RV (38:43):
You're not spending money on marketing, you're just selling these seats through your own direct email and social basically like your own podcast, your own like, just directly to your existing audience and
RP (38:52):
Exactly. Yep. No traffic. Other than organic, right? So we do that two times. So at this point though, they're starting to get pretty big. And I'm like, all right, this next one, let's get like, we need a bigger venue. We're gonna do this legit. I'm gonna get like a speaker lineup. 'cause The other ones were literally like me and three friends. I would just head up three of my buddies. I'm like, come speak, whatever. So this is the first one. This was I think October of 2022. We get 700 people in the Mandalay Bay. I got Alex and Layla Hormoze. They did it for free. They were just friends. And you know, they were already blowing up, but this was obviously like even before they got super, super big. And they killed it. I had other speakers. It was just crazy. And I think we made a million bucks at that event net. Wow. And now you're saying
RV (39:47):
You're making a million bucks 'cause you're selling your coaching at the, at on,
RP (39:51):
At the Yep. So that was my first time ever doing a real pitch, structured the way an event would be. And, you know, I did a real pitch. We structured it, you know, we made money on the front end with ticket sales. Like, everything about it was just, it was a great event. And the value was great. It, and by the way, it wasn't called Wealth. It still was not called Wealth Con at this point, you know, it was just like the Future Flipper Mastermind. That was what I called it. 'cause My, the company used to be called Future Flipper. That was my real estate education. So then going into 2023, I was like, all right, I'm becoming more than real estate. And I just published The Wealthy Way. And I was like, I'm going all in on this wealthy brand and I'm, I'm rebranding everything to be wealthy.
RP (40:34):
And so we ended up what's it called? Changing Future Flipper to Wealthy Investor. And then basically all of our other things became wealthy. So eventually we launched Wealthy Creator, which was for teaching people content creation. And we have Wealthy business, and now we have Wealthy Kingdom for Christians. And so everything went around this overall brand, and we changed the event name to Wealth Con. And yeah, you know, in 2023, every single event had over a thousand people. You know, we had, you know, great speakers like Louis House, who's I know a friend of yours you know, Cody Sanchez, ed Millet the list goes on. Like we've had so many crazy great speakers at each event. And this next one's gonna be at the Caesars Palace April 18th of the 20th. And I think we can get 2000 now. And really all that's changed is the last about, let's call it three events.
RP (41:33):
We actually finally started doing paid ads. We never did paid ads up to that point. We sold 'em all organically to that point. So that was why we were always profitable because number one, we didn't have the ad spend cost that everyone else had. Number two, I just have so many friends in the industry. I never paid for a speaker for years. So we didn't have that cost. Three, I'm in Vegas, so people don't mind coming to Vegas. It's freaking easy to get people here. I, you know, four, we, we just, I I I would say our team is really good at just getting deals for the venues and everything else. So we usually sign two event deals with the venue and get better costs that way. So, you know, overall, I would say now, for example, with the Caesars event, we're gonna be, let's just say hard cost all in like 400 grand on hard cost for 2000 people, which is a great, in my opinion, a super good deal. And like our production's crazy, you know, like the room is sick, we got after parties, we got all this cool stuff. And then whatever I wanna spend on ads, we'll be on top of that. But we're gonna spend multiple six figures in ads over the next, you know, 90 days between events.
RV (42:47):
What do you spend the money on ads too? Do you just take them directly from an ad to a sales page? Like directly from an ad to a page that says, here's the event, here's the speakers, here's the video.
RP (42:57):
You know? Yep. So this is where people make the s
RV (42:59):
Platinum, whatever.
RP (43:00):
Yeah. So here's where people screw up in events is they think people are gonna self select buying a ticket. That's not true. We sell probably 95% of our tickets over the phone. Hmm. So what happens is, in order to see the price, you have to give us your information. And so within a minute you're getting a call and we're gonna hit you up about the event because most people will just not buy a ticket on their own. Especially our tickets. Our tickets are priced from a thousand to $10,000. So these are not, you know, a a hundred dollars event where yeah, people will self-select for a hundred dollars event. You know, like the event that we're gonna be doing together. That one, we're not gonna do sales calls 'cause like there's gonna be tickets for 27 bucks. You know, like people will self-select buying those. But overall, if it's a higher price ticket event, you have to have a sales team.
RV (43:54):
Got it. So you drive an ad to the page, get 'em excited about the event to, in order to, you know, learn about the ticket prices, click here, request a call, and we'll call you and figure out what's right.
RP (44:05):
Yeah. So to give some context too, like at the end of the day, the event space and everything's changing pretty dramatically. So is the coaching space overall I am, look, I haven't been in this industry for a long time, but I'm fortunate enough to know the top people who have and just get their feedback about everything.
RP (44:30):
The days of just, you know, structuring these events for a pure pitch and like doing NLP and, and all this stuff. I think it works for guys like Tony Robbins and everything else. He's been doing it for 30, 40 years. But that's not how I've built my events. My events have always just been new speakers. Every event they're given just tremendous value. And will that hurt conversion on like, at the event? Sure. Because if I had structured it in a way to like get people in the mindset of buying coaching, then yes, there we, we could potentially do better. But I look at the brand and lifetime value of it. Like Wealth Con is becoming a brand in itself where people are like, bro, like that event, that's a sick event. Like yeah, they're gonna sell you something. Every event's gonna sell you something.
RP (45:20):
People are savvy enough to know that. But it's not overtly just like fluff like people, you're gonna go, you're gonna know the quality of the room is really high because the tickets are expensive. You're gonna know that the speakers are gonna give great game. 'cause You could see who they are and you know that yes, even though I'm gonna be sold something either way, I'm gonna have a great experience whether I buy or not. And so for me, what I know is, hey, you know what? Even if they don't buy at the event, it's all good. 'cause Guess what, back to what we talked about, you know, 20 minutes ago with trust, you just spent two full days with me. We're gonna do something at some point. You know, I don't need you to commit to me that event you're gonna commit down the road.
RP (46:02):
'Cause You can't just stop you. It's inevitable. That's my point. And so I don't need to monetize at the event itself and, and go crush it. But just to give you some rough context and numbers, you know, like I said, I think the event let's just say we're all in hard costs, like 400 grand. And once again, like other events, they got 400 grand on speakers. You know this Mm-Hmm. like, so it, dude, yeah, it makes 400 grand is coming to me buddy. Yeah. Rory needs 400 on his own , right? So that's tight. Like, it, it becomes, you do have to do things different when your costs are that high. Like, okay dude, if I'm into the event for a million bucks before ads and everything, well heck, dude, I do need to structure it in a way to pitch and make sure we convert or else I'm gonna lose a crap load of money.
RP (46:51):
So my model has always been, well, how can I make sure you know, like that we do this the right way. So my my costs are really low relative to pretty much every other event. And there's no way anyone can really replicate it because it just, it's, it's relationship based. So that's that. Number two, I don't chase shiny objects. I do 'em all in Vegas. I don't really care. People are like, well bro, don't people get tired of it? Like, don't you need to switch city to city? And I'm like, yeah, if, if you're trying to just get local people, right? So like I got friends for example, my friends run the Aspire tour and we talk all the time about events, like obvious it's what they do. You know, their tickets are very cheap to go to their events. And let's say 80% of their people are local.
RP (47:38):
So yes, if you're only getting local people, you have to keep switching cities. But 80% of our audience is not even in Vegas. They fly to come to this event 'cause it's so good. And so it's different. Nobody else really has it. And it's because I, I really value the experience and the value and everything else. So anyways, if my hard costs are like 400 grand to throw it it's then just a matter of how much I wanna spend. And for us, we, and this is unheard of in the event space, but we are doing about two and a half to three x on the front end of ticket sales on ad spend. So if I go spend 200 grand, 300 grand, I'm gonna make 500 to 800 grand, you know, on ticket sales in revenue.
RV (48:26):
You're saying in revenue.
RP (48:27):
In revenue. And so if you just start to think about that, you're like, all right, well, you know, if I spent let's say two 50 and I made 700, you know, now my all in cost is six 50 between ad spend and hard cost, and then I made 700 grand in ticket sales. So I'm already in the green, like going into the event.
RV (48:51):
Going into the event, right?
RP (48:53):
Which very few people ever are. And so whatever we sell at the event, it's all gravy. And that way I'm not stressed about, man, dude, we gotta like hitting numbers. We're we're a million bucks in the hole going to this event, which by the way many people are. And so it, it changes the dynamic of what we can do at the event because we're not stressed out. And that's what's allowed us to have longevity and build brand because of the business model, which I don't know that's replicatable, but the only way we're able to really get a two and a half, three x on ticket sales is because brand, you know, we've, we've proved it at quarter after quarter that it's a great event. And then two, just, I'm really good at sales and marketing. So like I, I know that they gotta call 'em, they gotta hit 'em up to sell that many tickets.
RV (49:41):
Yeah. So, and
RP (49:42):
We know that by the way, we know 10% of the room is gonna buy something from us at the event.
RV (49:48):
Uhhuh. Yeah. That's awesome man. I think so why don't we tell 'em, so let's land the plane. This has been awesome, Ryan. Like it's so cool just to, to hear your philosophy on podcasts and long form and time spent and everything we do at BG is request a call. Right? That's our whole model is just like everything we do request a free call and then our team talks to 'em, right? And figures out. 'cause We, we basically have like three different programs at three different tiers. One that's very affordable, one that's kind of mid, and then one that's like private clients that are extremely customized. The so we, we really believe in that. So let's tell 'em about the event that we're doing. Because this, this is an event that I'm doing. I'm speaking at it for free, which I never do. Mm-Hmm. , I'm doing it because it's you and mostly because of the topic of the event. And because you have asked me to speak on something that I have never spoken on before. Mm-Hmm. publicly. Mm-Hmm. . Yep. So tell everyone about, tell everyone about this.
RP (50:53):
Yeah. So, you know, wealth Con is our secular event and, you know, we run it every 90 days. It's great. It's a business event. One aspect that we included in Wealth Con was we started doing this two events ago, was a full on worship service. And so on the last day at nine o'clock, I freaking, we rock out and it, it's optional. I tell people, I'm like, Hey, we're gonna do this worship service. A pastor's gonna come speak if you don't wanna participate, come at 10 30. But if you do come at nine and 80% of the room comes at nine just to see what it's all about. And so it's been crazy seeing the feedback from that. You know, I did an altar call at the last one, and we literally had 400 people come up on the altar call. I'm like, Hey, if you wanna give your life to Jesus, or you want prayer, you wanna rededicate your life, come up to the stage in the side.
RP (51:46):
Half the room did it. Like we could, we, we had to like, delay the event for 30 minutes, praying for all these people. It was nuts. And so, anyways I've seen the change in that. And you know, I mentioned like the, the two things that God, I feel like audibly spoke to me first was real estate back in 2015. The second was social media back in 2020. The third is this movement with Wealthy Kingdom. And so to give two minute context of this, 'cause I know we're coming up on time. I've been holding Bible studies in my office, in my home for eight years straight. And it's just something I've been doing for a long time that has really helped me, helped people around me and everything else. And back last year, I was like, man, we need to bring this to the masses.
RP (52:34):
I've had enough people now ask me where they can find this. And it doesn't exist. Like, churches just don't have these bible studies or groups for entrepreneurs. And I was like, I'm gonna change that. So we start Wealthy Kingdom with the whole goal of getting people into local Bible studies led by entrepreneurs and business people. And so last year we launched 50 bible studies nationwide. This year I think we can launch hundreds and every week you just meet up. We got men's groups, women's groups and we all follow the same curriculum, you know, so we create a curriculum. So it's super easy to lead. You don't have to be a theologian. You don't have to be an apologist. You just gotta be willing to show up as you are and lead the group. Now with that, you know, we finally got nonprofit status last month.
RP (53:27):
And so I'm like, oh, we're at nonprofit now. It's go time, baby. We're about to go crazy with this. And you know, part of it is I already know how effective events are for life change and getting people bought in. So I'm like, all right, so we're gonna start holding events for Wealthy Kingdom. And, you know, the mission of the event, well, the goal of the event is obviously life change at the event, but you know, from there, funnel them into local Bible studies nationwide. And once they get into these local Bible studies, they're gonna have friendships, relationships, they're gonna have spiritual growth. And then the third level from that is, all right, great, now let's get them serving. Okay, so how do we get them serving? Well, one way is let's get 'em into their local church now. 'cause So many people are not gonna step foot in the local church the way it is today, but they would show up to a Bible study at an office, right?
RP (54:18):
Especially your coworkers and everyone are there. Like, that's much easier to step into than a Sunday service where you'll never talk to anyone, right? You'll show up and then you'll usually leave. That's kind of how it goes in America today. So if I can get them in a more small environment, I know that's where life change happens. 'cause I've just seen it personally in the last eight years. And then they will funnel into the local church. They will start giving, they will start tithing, they will start going on mission trips. You know, they will start serving in their local community and different charities and other things. Like all that will happen. But for me, it all starts with that top funnel of like awareness and where does awareness come from. I mean, events, groups, all that. Then we get 'em into Bible studies, then we get 'em into serving Mm-Hmm.
RP (55:03):
So that's our mission at Wealthy Kingdom. And with this event, this is gonna be our first event. You know, I'm hoping for just like all the other events, we throw a thousand plus people. It's called the Kingdom Summit. The website's not up, but it might be by up, by the time that this is released, you can go to kingdom revivals.com. So all of our events are gonna be there. I'm, I'm basically gonna restart the Billy Graham Crusades and go full force at this. And with that, you know, Rory's gonna be speaking with everything he did with his Eternal Life podcast and everything, which by the way, you asked me like, did I listen to the whole thing? I did listen to the whole thing. It was like 15 hours. You listened to all 15 episodes of the Eternal Life podcast.
RP (55:49):
I did. I listened to all of them. Wow. So they were great, by the way. I think the way that you laid it out. I also think that the references you gave, you know, and I know you pulled a lot from Case For Christ from Randy Alcorn a lot of great sources. Like I'd never read Randy's book. So I'm actually now listening to Randy's book too. So it's led me to other things as well. But you know, you're gonna be speaking ed Millet is also gonna be speaking for free, which he never does either. Like, you know, once again, it goes back to a business model that can't really be copied. It's like, dude, when people resonate with the mission, they want to come out and support. So like Ed's gonna come out and support. Tim Ross is coming out to support rulan, who's a big YouTuber's coming out. Girls Gone Bible are coming out. My friend Jordan Feliz, huge Christian singer is gonna be doing a full set.
RV (56:42):
Oh yeah. I love him.
RP (56:44):
Yep. So he lives in Nashville too. Uhhuh . And so he's gonna close it out with a massive concert and we're gonna have, you know, worship throughout the day too. So it's gonna be just a one day jam packed event. Unlike Wealth Con where the ticket's a thousand bucks, you're gonna be able to get a ticket for 27 bucks. So there's no reason you can't come. And dude, I'm just excited for it. I'm also slightly, and look, this is from a guy who's like really good at the event game. Like I know the experience is gonna be sick. That part doesn't concern me. You know, my only concern is like how much money I'm gonna lose, like throwing the event because this one, I will lose money. Like, because at 27 bucks, just the math doesn't add up. You know, it's gonna cost a lot to go and logistically do all this stuff. And I don't know how much I'm gonna have to spend to market this event, but I know that God's gonna supernaturally work it out. And so I don't know how we're gonna go sell thousand, 2000 tickets. You know, but it's gonna happen and the event's gonna have a ton of life change and it's gonna be epic.
RV (57:49):
Yeah, man, I love it. I really love it. So I, I am going to be speaking on Eternal Life. The Eternal Life podcast, which if y'all don't know, that was where I basically walked through seven questions every intelligent skeptic should ask about Jesus of Nazareth. And I started a separate podcast to house all that content, which is 15 episodes, which Ryan has made his way through. And so I'll be crafting a one of a kind, never before, first time ever, a keynote version of that just for this event. 'cause I'm, I'm so excited about it. And I believe in Ryan and, and, and I think the, the, it's not replicatable, but kind of it is. Mm-Hmm. because relationships, the strategy of relationships is replicatable.
RP (58:34):
Yeah. True.
RV (58:35):
If, if people build relationships and they add value to people who, whoever's next to them and whoever is in their life and whoever they have access to, and they overdeliver to the people in front of 'em, they'll build brand, they'll build relationships. And then that opens up different opportunities and, and, and and different things. So, you know, we'll, we'll link to that, Ryan. So kingdom revivals.com is the place to go look for that particular event, which is this summer, and then yeah, A 31st. Where else do you want people to point? Where do you, where else do you wanna point people to Ryan to like, learn more about you and what you're up to?
RP (59:11):
Yeah, just follow me on social media, Ryan Pineda. I mean, we got so many things going on that , I, I can't even dive into all the businesses, man. So it's, yeah, just follow me on social and we'll, we'll help you out one way or another.
RV (59:24):
It's really cool. Well, we are, we're praying for your event and grateful for your knowledge and your wisdom, man. Love what you're up to. Thanks for sharing, sharing some of the, the insider kind of philosophies and strategies. Really, really cool man. So we're pulling for you, praying for you. And I'll see you in a, I'll see you in a couple months. Yep.
RP (59:43):
Thanks for having me, man.

The post Ep 482: Launching a Live Event Business with Ryan Pineda appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 481: How to Know When You Should Write a Book | Bill Blankschaen Episode Recap

Nicole Gale — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 11:00:07 +0000

AJV (00:03):
I get asked all the time, when should I write a book or more often I get told I'm going to write a book. This is the year, this is the month, this is the time of my life that I am ready to write that book. And this little 10 minute video here is all about when do you know when it's time for you to write that book? And here's just a couple of things that I thought would be helpful and insightful is I process a conversation that I just had with a good friend, bill Blank Shane, who is the founder of a company called Story Builders, who works with aspiring authors to become the author that they want to be and produce a book that they are proud to call their own. And I think it was a really important conversation because there is no right time.
AJV (00:55):
There is no better time, there is no worse time when it comes to actually expressing your content. Now, yes, there are times in your life that it makes sense to dedicate time, energy, and effort to writing a book. And there are times in your life where maybe it doesn't like, right? That has everything to do with capacity, that you have to give it the time it deserves. Because writing a book is like starting a business, and it requires that amount of time, energy, effort, and resources in order to do so. And I think before I even start on this and just realizing if you actually want people to read your book, writing the book is just step one. And after you write the book is when the additional work, most of the work actually begins writing the book is just step one to a mini step process to launch and get that book out into the stratosphere.
AJV (01:46):
So when is it time to write your book? Number one, I want you to remember that the book is the very last thing you do, not the first thing. It is the conclusion, not the hypothesis. So do not rush the process to actually organize and clarify your thoughts, your stories, your points, right? This is a body of work that is meant to represent something that you think is needed in the world to help a group of people, right? Your audience, your readers, with something that you know, that you are well positioned to help them with. And that does not come quickly, right? In fact, I had a guest on the influential personal brand podcast earlier this year, and her name is Maury. And she wrote a book about negotiations, and I asked her, I said, so how long did it take you to write this book?
AJV (02:42):
And she was like, you mean like putting words on the pages? Or How long did it take me to figure out this is the book I was meant to write? And I said, both. And she said 10 years, right? 10 years. It took me 10 years to figure out what I had to say on this topic, what I was meant to say on this topic. Now, the process of actually writing the book was probably a year to two years, right? Still a fair amount of time, but it was 10 years. Why? Because she was looking for a conclusion. She was looking for the facts, right? The end points the ends of the case studies, the ends of the stories, not ideas. She was looking for conclusions, not hypotheses. So the book is the last thing you do. Once you have cemented your ideas, your thought leadership, this is once you have come up with the stories and the points and the frameworks, this is the last thing, not the first thing.
AJV (03:37):
So don't rush the process. There are plenty of ways to get content out into the world. You can blog, you can create video content, you can podcasts, you can host a podcast, you can guess on podcasts. You can do medium, you can put LinkedIn posts, like the list goes on and on and on. There are many ways for you to be testing and piloting your content before you go through the painstakingly expensive and time consuming process of writing a book. Okay? So that's number one. Number two, you have to know the purpose and intent of your book before you begin, because that dictates how you write it, how you decide how to publish it, how you market it, how you sell it. Knowing how you want to use this book actually is the beginning of making a lot of decisions that will be very impactful for you, your brand and your business, right?
AJV (04:29):
Is this a traditionally published book because we just, we just added a whole bunch of time to the process between finding an agent, shopping a publisher, getting bids, writing the book, publishing the book, selling, marketing, the book, right? It just added a lot of time that you may not have been prepared for, right? Versus, hey, is this really more a statement of cementing my thoughts, ideas, frameworks for my business? So maybe traditional or hybrid is a better route? And then it's like, okay, well if I actually want people to read it, like how am I gonna market it? Right? And all these different things matter. So knowing the purpose of the book, right? Is this your your life's work? Or is this a, you know, a solidification of a set of ideas, but not your life's work? Those things matter. Is this to support a business model or a coaching framework that's more better to do in a self-publishing route? Or is this a a statement piece that you are using for credibility and notoriety and you're going for, you know, a hybrid or a traditional knowing the purpose and the use of the book, not just the content within, but the purpose of it. Are you doing it to increase fees, expand your business? What are you doing it for? Matters a lot in how you write it, how you publish it, and who we are going to market and sell the book to. And then the last, but not the least is are you
AJV (05:56):
Willing to talk about this book for the next two years at minimum, nonstop ad nauseum, right? Are you in love with this topic enough that for the next two, or in some cases 10 or 20 or 50 years, are you willing to continue to talk about the stories and the points and the frameworks and the content for the next two 10 decades ahead of where you are? 'cause That's what you need to be willing to do because in order to actually help people find the book or read the book, you have to talk about the book, speak about the book, interview about the book, go on podcasts, about the book. You have to post content and make videos and do all the things about the book, which means it needs to be content that is meaningful to you, that's not going to drain you and be like, oh my gosh, I'm so tired of this.
AJV (06:53):
It should also be content that's not extraordinarily trendy, right? And so this needs to be something that has some weight to it and that you can continue to talk about it. And I'll give you two quick examples. My husband, Roy Vaden, his first book has now been out for almost 14 years. He still does the same keynote that he did 14 years ago when the book came out. Take the Stairs. The content of that keynote has not tra changed extraordinarily. So, I mean, he's gotten better at delivering it. But the content there in and of itself is the contents of the book. And he still loves giving that keynote and telling those stories. In fact, he just released, I, I take the Stairs kids book called Be The Buffalo because it still resonates and it's still meaningful and it's still important. This was a piece of his life's work.
AJV (07:44):
And it doesn't matter that he printed that book, published it 14 years ago. It still as relevant today as it was then, if not even more so in our lives. And we find it so relevant. It's like we, we want our kids to learn this. So we, we published be the Buffalo, which is a kid's book. 14 years later, he is still doing the same talks, telling the same stories, sharing the same points on a piece of work that was done 14 years ago. So can you do that with this work? That's how you know when you're ready, right? And the sample the second example I was gonna give you was my husband's second book Procrastinate on Purpose, which has now been out 10 years almost or even more so maybe 11 years. And it's the same. It's like he still gets comments on different frameworks in the book.
AJV (08:32):
And the Ted Talk is growing even though it's now been out for 10 years plus. And it's like he still gets booked to speak for that. He still loves talking about it. Why? Because it's evergreen content, it's life content, it's not going away, it's leadership, it's productivity, it's time management, it's business. And he will be talking about these topics for the rest of his life. I guarantee you the fact that we're now producing new versions of those works that is just proof. But over the course of time, it was started as a book and then it was a keynote. And now we have courses and there's kids' books now. Like it is content that continues to grow. Why? Because it is a part of who he is. And that is what you need to be considering when you go, am I ready to write this book?
AJV (09:20):
It should be work that you are still proud of and excited to talk about 10, 14 years later. And that you're still adding to and adjusting and building things around because it's evergreen. That's how you know when you are ready to write the book, it's the last thing you do. It's not the first thing, it's the conclusion, not the hypothesis. You know, the purpose and intent, the use of the book, and you're gonna be willing to continue to talk about it for years and years to come. That's how you know. So are you ready to write that book.

The post Ep 481: How to Know When You Should Write a Book | Bill Blankschaen Episode Recap appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 480: How to Become a Great Writer with Bill Blankschaen

Nicole Gale — Tue, 23 Apr 2024 11:00:51 +0000

AJV (00:02):
Hey, everybody, and welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here, and I'm so, so, so super excited to introduce you to a good friend today. But I'm equally as excited about this conversation. So before you decide whether or not this is the episode episode for you, let me tell you why you probably wanna stick around no matter where you're at in terms of building your business and building your personal brand. Because today we're gonna talk about the process of writing a book. And you might be in that process right now, or you dream of being in that process, or maybe you just left this process thinking, I'll never do that again. And if you're feeling that way, it's probably because you went out of order. And today, we're gonna just break it down into when should you start writing your book? What does it look like?
AJV (00:52):
How, how do you publish? What are the options for publishing? What makes a good writer? And how do you systematically do that? And if you know this about yourself and that you're not a quote unquote good writer, which is your opinion only what are the other options out there for you, right? Because there are other options to help you get your message out into the world and your voice be heard. And that's what we're gonna talk about today with my good friend, bill Blanken Shane from Story Builders. And so, before I formally pass it over to him to share all of his expertise and his knowledge, I'm gonna give you just a little bit of a formal bio because it's worth it, right? So Bill is the founder and chief story architect of Story Builders, which is the coolest company that we get to be affiliated with as well at Brain Builders Group.
AJV (01:40):
And Bill is actually helping Rory and I architect our next book for Brand Builders Group. So I can speak personally when I talk about how awesome him and his team is, but he is a New York Times bestselling writer. They have worked with very well known people like the John Maxwell team, Kevin Haring, Lewis Howes, Michael Hyatt as well as us, and not as well known as those other peoples but entrepreneurs, corporate leaders influencers, consultants, political figures. The list goes on and on. And I share that because writing a book is not some for someone who just is a influencer. And if you can't see me, I'm doing bunny quotes right now or just someone who is famous. It is for anyone who has a message that deserves to be heard. And that's what we're gonna talk about right now. So, bill, welcome to the show.
BB (02:33):
Well, thank you, aj. My goodness, I'm so excited to be here. You and Rory are some of my favorite people, and we're talking about storytelling. I mean, what, what could be better than this? I'm excited to be here.
AJV (02:43):
Yes. Well, the first thing I want to talk about and help our audience get to know you a little bit is how'd you get into this? Like, how did you get into the business of writing books for other people and helping get their stories out there?
BB (02:57):
That's a great question. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna go on the way back machine here to, to my early days even. You know, I think a lot of us have these dreams inside of us when we're children and, and we kind of have a sense of what we really are good at and what we love to do. And then somewhere along the way, we, we kind of, kind of lose our focus. We find other dreams. We, we, we end up with what Steven Pressfield calls the, our shadow calling, right? We're, we're doing something that's kind of similar, but not exactly what we're really called to do. And I ended up in I've always had a love for storytelling, right? So I majored in English and history, right. Stories and how to tell them. But I ended up going into education and helping start a private school and leading that for a dozen years.
BB (03:37):
And what I was really doing was helping other people learn how to write well and learn how to tell stories well, and that's really what that was about. And learning a lot about leadership along the way. But it wasn't until probably about 13 years ago now that I just had this stirring with NI felt like there was more that I was supposed to be doing on a wider scale in and around telling stories. And so I stepped out from the school. We had six kids stepped out from the school, went a year with no income as we navigated that place. But I, I've never worked harder in my life than during that year, actually, when we were going through that. And really just becoming a student of story, a student of storytelling, a student of writing, of publishing, of this whole process that you mentioned.
BB (04:22):
And, and then navigating those, you know, turns over the years building what became story builders, really one relationship at a time is how it happened, right? And that's something I know you and Rory talk about a lot, right? The power of your reputation, which is about your relationships that you have. And, and so that's really how it came to be, just me following my passions and my skills and where those came together at a place where there was a need, where people who had great messages, great ideas, they just struggled to tell them. Well for a lot of reasons. And I found I could come alongside and really help them to do that in an exceptional way, build a team around it to really truly tell stories that make the world a better place.
AJV (05:03):
You know, I think one of the things that I'm so curious about always, because we have so many people who are in our community and who listen to this podcast that are trying to figure out that next thing they're going to do. And what I always love asking people is, how'd you get that first client? Right? So you're transitioning out of something seemingly different, although lots of connectedness, but how did you pick up that very first client that's like, yeah, bill I know you've never done this before, but I'm gonna trust you to get this book out into the world.
BB (05:37):
Sure, sure. Well, I think one of the first ones that we had actually was John Maxwell and working with his company. And it was because of both my leadership experience and my deep knowledge of John's content and my education background. So we were, what, we've created a lot of a content for John's company ever since then, and it's really around instructional design and so forth. So, in other words, I think I leaned into the strengths that I had to develop those and began to realize they could transfer into other areas. On the book front, there were someone I encountered in the ministry space where I had written my own book, and I realized, well, actually, I'm pretty good at doing that , and then encountered this person who had a need, wanting to get a message out. And I said, let me help you. Right? We got in, we figured we didn't do it perfectly, but we did it. Well, he's actually still using that book as part of his ministries activities and began to learn and grow. But it, it kind of began with that on, on both fronts kind of, right? What, what's, what proven skills do I have that I can lean into? And then where's the need? And, and just finding that and genuinely seeking to serve in that way.
AJV (06:51):
Hmm. I love that. 'cause I think at the end of the day, it's using relationships, leaning into what you're good at, leaning into what you're passionate about, solving a problem other people have, it's not rocket science. Yeah.
BB (07:03):
Right. And, and if, actually, if I can add, now that you add mentioned that, that reminds me, I, I can point back to one instance in particular when I was still running the school, that I can trace just about every connection I have today. Even my connection with you and Rory, I can connect back to this one project that I tackled on the side. I didn't get paid a dime for it. It was a passion project. I had worked with a book in the school and developed curriculum around it and so forth. And I encountered the author and I pitched him on the idea, Hey I really believe in your message. I'd be willing to do this to help republish the book with this thing included and so forth. And really make it even even more useful just to be of help. And so, you know, I worked late at night, worked, put in all the extra hours, and, and again, I did it from a place of mission-driven perspective of, I'm not getting paid for this, I just love to do it. Mm-Hmm. . And that one interaction ended up being what really opened the floodgate to so many relationships, even though that wasn't my intent, I was just trying to serve and be of help. But just simply being generous in that way contributed to so much of the opportunity.
AJV (08:13):
Actually. I'm really glad that came to mind because I think, like, the biggest thing that sticks out to me is what are you willing to do just to be of service? Mm. It doesn't matter if you get paid, you're just like, I can help. Yeah. How, and here's how I can help knowing that. And it's like give, to give mindset, right? Right. Versus a give to get. And I love that. And I think that's very representative of what we're trying to be about and getting these messages out into the world. And so, you guys have been doing this for a long time, and you've helped get a lot of books out there and a lot of messages into the pages of those books. And so I would love to hear it from you for all of these people out there, regardless if they're in the process or dream of being in the process of writing a book one day, what would you say is a good overarching process of when is it time for you to write a book? Like, how do you know this is the year or this is the time? But then also, how do you know when it's time to start thinking about the publishing options? 'cause We're in a world today where you can self-publish, hybrid publish, traditionally publish, and how much writing needs to be done before you start thinking about that thing.
BB (09:27):
Sure. Big questions. big, but let, let's dive in and unpack them. So the first question of how do you know when it's time to write a book to, to me, that, that that's a much larger life and business question, right? So you, in order to answer that question, you first of all have to have to have clarity on where you want your life to go. You have to have some clarity around your goals, what the, the plan is for your life, essentially. So if you find that you're feeling, I'm really kind of scattered, I'm not very intentional, that's probably not the time to write a book, because a book requires a lot of support and strategic planning around it to be successful, right? So I've encountered many authors who've come to me and said, oh, I've been wanting to write a book for years.
BB (10:11):
I think now's the time. Let me do it. I've got like 30 days. I can just crank this out. , right? And I told, well, you, I, you know, you might wanna take a few steps back and get a little more thought around what you're doing. Think strategically. You know, I remember there was a, a, unfortunately when I was living in Ohio, there was a school shooting in our town, and it was a small town America feel. And the town really responded in a way that I was proud to be part of the town and how they responded. And, and I thought about writing a book about that, about the experience and the lessons from that, that and I had a good friend in the publishing space who said who actually was in the publishing space, took a close look at the book proposal and said, you know, if you're gonna write this book, you need to plan on talking about school shootings for the next two years.
BB (10:57):
That needs to be your focus. That needs to be what you talk about. So make sure that this is where your heart is, this is where your passion is. And frankly, it wasn't. I, I wasn't, that wasn't my calling to be, like, my calling was the story. It wasn't that topic as important as that topic is. And so I, I decided not to pursue it at that time. And I think that's the kind of, you have to know where you want to go in order to know what that timing is. But then I think you need to look at, from a business perspective as well, this is one of the first questions I ask someone when we start talking about putting a book together is, is where do you wanna go with this? What, what are you trying to do? What, what's the big picture that you're trying to accomplish?
BB (11:35):
Paint that vision for me. And if they can, and it makes sense to, I see how the book fits in. I see it feeds into your business model. I see how it helps open these doors. That makes sense. Let's keep talking. If not, my advice to them is, again, take a few steps back, get clarity on that strategically. Otherwise, you're just gonna, you're gonna jump, jump in, you're gonna get a lot of activity, and you, the author and anybody helping you is gonna get frustrated because we don't have a clear end in mind. Right? So that's a little bit from a timing standpoint on the process standpoint. You know, one of, one of the things that we really love as story builders is when authors come to us, having gone through your captivating content session with brand builders, with the brand, DNA and so forth, because they come to us with great clarity already around the main pillars that they want to talk about.
BB (12:27):
Mm-Hmm. What their behaviors are, are what their stories are. They, they have a lot of clarity around that. So I think the first place you need to start is get clarity on what exactly do you wanna talk about? What, what is it? And, and what is the uniqueness of that? What really makes it, makes it special and different from everybody else. And, and it's not that the topic you want to talk about has to be completely different. It, it's that what is it about your story, your unique approach to that that gives it an angle that maybe not everybody has. No book is gonna resonate with everyone, right? You're looking to write a message that will resonate with the people you really want to connect with, right? So getting clarity on that, I think is huge on the front end from that, then, okay.
AJV (13:11):
Before you go on. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because I think this is important. Like, how many people would you say come to you without even really knowing what they want to write about?
BB (13:24):
Not as many as you might think. There have been some, I've had some, I've had somebody, you know, text me from the beach kind of, Hey, here's what I'm thinking of writing. And from that text, we build a whole book around it. But, you know, a lot of people have some thing that they thought about writing about. Maybe they haven't done the work to really clarify it though. Mm-Hmm. and get it in the clarity that it needs. Some do. Some come to us with very well thought out plans and strategy that we can add value to and help make better and improve. You know, but I think everybody has an idea that the, the challenge comes when people think they have a well thought idea, and they really just have a half baked idea. Right? They really haven't thought it through.
BB (14:09):
And that's okay, as long as you're open to being teachable and open to in, you know, in, in input on that and shape it and really make it exceptional. That's what we're about, is if we're gonna do a project, we're gonna do it with excellence, or we're not gonna do it at all. And so, you know, we're not, we're not, we're not, we're just not motivated by helping people crank out some word widgets, you know? We want it to be a meaningful message, something that can actually impact the world, make it a better place. So yeah. I, I short answer. I would say not too often, and when they do, it's really about, you need to get clarity on what that is. Yeah.
AJV (14:45):
Okay. Now, one of the other things that I hear a lot from just people in the Brand Builders Group community, and just even just in the larger audience at hand of, there's just so many different ways to publish these days, and some people are cranking out self-published book that they did write in a 30 day period, and boom, here it is. Even though that is more rare. But I would love to know when it comes to writing and the relationship to publishing, like what are those timelines? Sure. Like, how much of the book needs to be started completed before you think about publishing?
BB (15:22):
Sure. Well, let me, let me answer that by filling that gap between clarity and publishing. I think that'll help fill in that timeline a little bit. Because yes, there are people out there who said, oh, I did my book in 30 days. And, and you, you usually can tell that it was done in 30 days, quite candidly. But even if you can't, my response is, well, imagine how good it could have been if you had brought expertise to the table if you'd really thought, thought it through. Ideas need time to percolate, right? They need time to develop and grow to really be maximized and unique. So that process, and once you get clarity, you need to build a, a story structure, a for the book, a, a a framework for the book of, of what, as you guys use the term pillar points.
BB (16:09):
So what, what is that structure gonna be? And then, you know, we use what we call the storytelling structure method. It's, it's a five point process that that really walks people through. It's just proven storytelling structure that has been used for millennia in the human race, right? Of, and we follow that five point process, both to build the book itself, the framework, and then each chapter, each component, we, we componentize it, essentially break it down into small pieces that you can then write. If, if the author's writing themselves and we're coaching them, we, we, they go through that process. If we're doing the writing for and with them, we go through that process. And, and typically I think you know, a lot of authors make the mistake of thinking, I have to have the publisher nailed down before I can do anything. I have to have to begin with the end in mind.
BB (16:57):
And, and that's good advice to begin with, the end in mind. But you can't really decide your publishing path until you have a really good sense of where the book is going. Mm-Hmm. , is it gonna be worth reading? What, what, what's it gonna, what's gonna be the best publishing path? Right? So typically, you know, you can get started on the writing process and developing that. I always suggest working with someone to really make it sparkle, really make it awesome. You know, but I don't, you know, about midway through that process is where you can turn and look at, all right, what are my best publishing paths? I'm about, you know, 30, 40%, 50% through the book. Let me start doing that. Maybe that's a proposal to shop it to traditional publishers. Maybe that's a hybrid imprint, like mission-driven press and, and, and things like that.
BB (17:43):
You know, maybe you're going a different hybrid brow. It can, there, there's all kinds of factors that affect all of those things, kind of what you're doing, what you want to accomplish. But you need to know what the book is going to be. Otherwise you're going to publishers and saying, Hey, I have a little bit of an idea. Do you buy it? Do you wanna be part of it? , you know, none of us would do that if someone came to us and said, Hey, I've got a car. I got the idea of a car. I'd like to sell it to you, you know, right now, and then I'll put it together later. They need to know at least what, what, what, what's the blueprint? How's the book coming? Mm-Hmm. , is there actually gonna be a book? What's the substantive, is it a fit for us? To give some, 'cause some of that kind of timing.
AJV (18:21):
You know, that's interesting because being in this world for such a long time, you know, we have such a personal experience with, you know, we've done the traditional routes, right? We're now hybrid publishers ourselves. And then we just have tons and tons of friends who've gone the, you know, self-publishing route. And what I have found is there's no necessary right nor wrong. It has everything to do with what are you trying to accomplish with this book, right. With the purpose of it, in addition to getting the message out in the world. But Right. How you get that message out into the world means a lot in terms of someone actually reading the book, which is goal and intent. Usually. It's like, I want someone to read the book. Sure. And one of the things that I had found, you know, when we went the traditional route and all, although, and this was almost 10 years ago when we shopped our last book to a traditional publisher, but it's like, you gotta have at least a few sample chapters.
AJV (19:19):
We had to have all of the book outlined, all of the chapters had to have titles, and we didn't have just one chapter. It was a few chapters. And so we're talking 30, like what you said, 30% plus of the book was written. And, and the outline was complete for them to even acknowledge, like, this is something that represents us, something that we think most importantly will sell. Right? Which is what kept coming back to, it's like, do we think the market will buy this? Right. And an idea wasn't enough. But even in the hybrid publishing space now, I have people come to us at Mission-Driven Press saying, Hey I'm just trying to get failures of how I wanna publish this. I don't have anything done yet. And I'm like, well then I don't know if we're a fit for you based on your timelines, our timelines, how long is it gonna take you to get the book done so that I can actually review it and decide if it's a fit for us and vice versa.
AJV (20:14):
And it's, you know, one of the prerequisites for us to even go, yeah, this looks like something that we'd wanna help get out there and I wanna see at least a few sample chapters. Sure. I wanna see the outline, the overview. Whereas, you know, in the self-publishing route, you don't have that. Right. But at least with hybrid and traditional 30% minimum, I would say has been our experience so that people can go, do I think the market will buy this? Do do I think this is a, a big enough topic for the masses to be interested in? Is it something we wanna align ourselves with? Does it fit, you know, our published house or imprint or whatever? Would you say that's similar to what you've seen?
BB (20:55):
Oh, a absolutely. 'cause We help people develop book proposals, like if they're going their traditional route, they wanna shop that. We help people do that all the time. But, and that's the same process, exactly what you said. It's several chapters. It's the framework. Usually it's an annotated outline. It's basically making the case for the book. It tells the publisher, you've done the thought work behind this. Right? and, and, and what was really popular actually for us, when people aren't sure what publishing path they want to go yet that they don't, they don't have to figure that out to get started. Like, we can help them get clarity on that, begin building that actually drafting a manuscript, putting that, getting it to that place where they know they're putting their best foot forward, their their best representation to publishers, whatever that might be.
BB (21:41):
Because you usually only get one shot at that, right? So if, if you're pitching it to publishers or presenting it to someone, you, you don't want to give them like your C level work. You want your A level work. Mm-Hmm. . You wanna bring your best to the game. And that's where we really excel, is helping to shape that best into something that publishers then get excited about. And regardless, again, regardless of that publishing spectrum, where you are, where you end up on that publishing spectrum, there's pros and cons to all of it. And we are, we're like publishing ambivalent. We really passionately want what's best for the author. We're working with that. At the end of the day, that's all that matters. And so that's where we try to work from to build out that story.
AJV (22:23):
Yeah. Well, I think that's a great transition into talking about making sure that what you put forth is excellent and making sure it's the best of what you have, not an idea of what might be the best of what you have. So Right, right. High level, what makes a great writer?
BB (22:40):
Hmm. Yeah. I think the first thing that makes a great is almost too, it sounds too simple, but if someone is actually gonna be a writer, they've gotta put their butt in the chair and do the work, right? They've gotta show up and write. And so a lot of people have this perception that they are a writer, or they could be a writer if they wanted to, they just never do it, right? and candidly, that was me for a long time. I, I talked about myself as being a writer when I was younger, and I always told her, oh, I'm a writer, but I wasn't actually writing anything . And so a writer who's not writing isn't actually a writer, right? They could be, but they aren't. And so actually doing the work, first of all, you have to do the work.
BB (23:30):
You have to actually do the writing. So just showing up every day. I think the second thing is to understand that writing is a process. And many people think that the first draft of what they do is writing, but it's not, that's just the beginning of the writing process, right? So good writing becomes great writing through editing. So simply putting something on a page that just gives you raw material to work with that you can then evaluate. You can edit, you can cut a lot of stuff. If you're a good writer, a lot of what you write will get cut and left on the editing room floor, even though it's really good, it just doesn't fit. Mm-Hmm. . And so there, there, it's that level of work of, I, I can often tell when a book has just been like, first run, maybe review it a little bit and I'm done.
BB (24:23):
It, it, it lacks depth. Often it lacks detail. It lacks clarity. It doesn't get to the point in a powerful way. It kind of rambles a little bit here and there. You know, so thinking about that, a third thing I would say too is understand that writing is a unique medium. So speaker, for example, if you're a speaker and you, you like to give keynote speech and maybe really good at that, but recognizing that giving a speech and putting words on a page are two different mediums for conveyance. Just like video is different than speaking, right? We, there are different mediums and you need to understand the nuances of them. So writing, for example, here's the challenge of writing. You have to put words on a page and then put it out into the world. And then someone who you don't even know has to open that page, read it, and understand what you intended to say, and have the same emotional impact that you intended to say as if they were in the room with you talking with you, .
BB (25:26):
But they're not , right? And so you're getting no feedback. You don't know if we're, have, we're having this conversation, you know, you're nodding, right? I fourth dynamic. And in writing, you don't get any of that, right? So you have to, it's one way communication that needs to feel like it's two way mm-Hmm. . And so that, that takes a lot of editing and a lot of work, and a lot of being willing to, you know, that expression, kill your darlings, if you will, right? Being willing to let go of things that might be cluttering that process or getting in the way of a reader, or that feel clever to you. I know, you know, you guys talk about that a lot, right? That clear is better than clever, right? And so it's that kind of idea of writing with clarity takes place there.
BB (26:15):
The the fourth thing I would add is that it takes time and effort to become a really good writer. And you have to become a writing. And a lot of people simply don't have the time to do that, right? They're, they're professionals. They're entrepreneurs, they're speakers. They're building their influential brand. They've got business going on. They don't have time to do that. And that's okay, right? This is what a lot of people don't realize is you don't actually have to become a writer to create a, an incredible book. You can partner with someone like me, like my team, who we, we do the work of becoming the writers and understanding your ideas to help turn them in to something that, that is really cool.
AJV (26:56):
I love that. And I wanna go back and touch on each of these points because I think there's a lot of wisdom and depth into each of these. And then on that last one, I think it's a grand a grand transition into, okay, well, if you know you're not a writer Yeah. Tell me about that. What, what, what, how do we do that? But I wanna hop all the way back to that first thing you said, which is the first thing that takes to become a great writer is showing up. Mm-Hmm. Right? But in the feet. Right? And so what I'd love to hear is, do you have any tips or best practices of what's the best way to actually get yourself to write the book? Is there like an ideal schedule or timeline? I have my own, you know, experiences of what I've seen happen in my house as well as with others. Sure. But like, what would you say would be a good schedule for writing?
BB (27:43):
Yeah. What I find is using something like our storytelling structure method that would help break it down, right? If you think, I gotta write this big book, so easy to stare at the screen and have no idea what to write next, but when you break it down into small enough parts, anything can be done If you break it down to small enough parts. And so breaking it down into, all right, I need this chunk. It's, it's, I don't know, three or four or 5, 6, 7 paragraphs, maybe a page and a half. That's all I need, right? That's what I need to do today. Mm-Hmm. . And so having that kind of mindset I think helps considerably to get started. The other thing that I, I wanna really push back on is this myth, myth of writer's block. Hmm. People talk about it as if it's a real thing, .
BB (28:26):
And, and I just, I just don't believe that's true. Having written so much and, and all this, I, what I find is that writer's block isn't really a thing provided we are simply willing to do it messy, right? That's something you guys talked about at brand builders also. Right? Just do it messy. And so when you have it broken down into small enough pieces, then it's Right. All right, where does it feel right for me to begin? Where do I have clarity within this? Well, I have this one statement I wanna make. Start with that statement, and then give yourself, as a writer, the freedom to go wherever that takes you. And, you know, we, we think about creating and editing, we're talking about two different sides of the brain. And so you have to give your creative side freedom to say, this is a creative session.
BB (29:16):
I'm not editing, I'm not perfecting, I'm not polishing. I'm just allowing myself to get out what's in my heart and head and, and approach that session with that in mind of this. I, I'm, I'm, this is gonna be messy. It's not gonna be perfect. It's first draft, and that's okay. There'll be another time that I'll come back and I'll switch to the other side of my brain and do the editing and bring the critical eye and apply that. But for this session, it's gonna be about creativity. I'm gonna have it, whatever, wherever I do have clarity, I'm gonna push forward. I'm gonna start putting words on a page. Even if they don't even make a lot of sense to me, I'm just gonna do it. 'cause Motion creates momentum, right? So going through that process allows you to do that and not get hung up on this you know, idea of writer's block. And then we grab that as an excuse, well, I can't write because I have writer's block, you know, air quotes. Right? Whatever that means. And I just, I've just found, put it on the page, be creative. Get in the right mindset and let it flow.
AJV (30:17):
I love that because I think that comes back to if you have a robust outline and you have clarity on what you're writing about, right? There isn't, well, I don't know what to do today. I have writer's block. It's like, no, we've already done that work. Right? We know exactly what we're writing about. We know the pillars, we know the points. We know the stories, right? So I hear what I hear you saying is that if people quote unquote struggle with writer's block, it's probably due to a lack of clarity of what they're writing about. And they haven't done the strategy work and the larger picture work in order to do the, Hey, I need to do this one chapter, or I need to, you know, do X, Y, and Z.
BB (30:55):
Exactly. And if, for instance, if we apply our storytelling structure method to a 12 chapter book, I can pretty much right now, without knowing anything about the book, know that you pretty much have at least 60 sub components that you need to build out. It's actually a little more than that. And some of it can shift and change, and there's nuance to all of it, but it's pretty much what it is. And then once you know what those pieces are, you can schedule those. This is my creative time to work on that. It's probably gonna take X amount of time. And then you get to know, give yourself the freedom if you're doing the writing yourself, get yourself, give yourself the freedom to get to know how you work best, right? Yeah. There are no, no two writers are alike. You know, I think of famous writers who, you know, might be approached it one way, others approach another. No. Two writers are like, so don't think that, oh, I have to be like Bill, or I have to be like Ernest Hemingway, or I have to be whoever. Right? no, you define your own style and what works best for you.
AJV (31:51):
Yeah. I love that. You know, and it's interesting 'cause I've had the privilege to watch my husband go through the process of, of writing two books. And as we are heading into the process of writing our signature book for Brain Builders group, it's been really interesting of going, how he does it and how I do could not be more completely different on this planet. Like, his whole thing is, I gotta block two weeks and I just gotta get it done, you know? And it's like, Mm-Hmm. it just all has to happen at once, right? And he's like, I need all 80 hours, nothing on the schedule. And it's like, I couldn't be more different. And I'm like, oh, that's, that's a luxury, but not all of us possess. And so if you've got all these other things, not that he has lots of extra time but it's just, again, it's finding, it's like, Hey, I can break it down into chunks, and it doesn't have to to happen in a certain timeframe. I just have to go, these are the chunks and this is where I fit it in. And it'll get done when it gets done. But when it gets done, it'll be right. Right,
BB (32:47):
Right, right. Yeah. I love that. Yeah. There, there's no single right way to do it. It's just, there there is wisdom and guidelines that can help you get there faster and better. I love that. That's what it's about.
AJV (32:58):
It's flexible. Right. All right. Second thing. Yeah. And I loved what you said, and I just wanted to call back out. And this is something that we say a lot at Brain Builders Group. So no one take offense to this, but there are no great writers. Mm-Hmm. Only great editors. Mm-Hmm. Right. It's like when we write Mm-Hmm. If you do it, you know, if you do it often and you do it well, it's like you're verbose , there's too much. Yeah, sure, sure. And it's all over the place. Sure. And that's what a great editor does, is it makes it more succinct and clear. And that's not necessarily the writer's job. The writer's job is to get it all out. Right. The editor's job is to tighten it up, clean it up, and bring it together. And I think that's just a great reminder to everyone. It's like, you don't have to be a great writer. You just need great editing. Mm-Hmm.
BB (33:44):
. Mm-Hmm. . Absolutely. I totally agree with that. And the writer and the editor can be the same person, provided they realize they need to switch the sides of their brain and their focus of what they're doing. Right. Because I, I do both, but I, you have to approach it intentionally. I'm here to edit. That's why I'm here. I'm not here to write, I'm here to edit. Although I think you could, you could switch out that word writer and put a definition next to it and just put editor. Yeah. Right. 'cause That's really what it is. You don't get to greatness by accident. Mm-Hmm. . And I think there's a lot of lessons for life in this as well. If we approach life like we do writing, the key to great writing is ruthless editing. Well, the key to great living is also ruthless editing.
BB (34:28):
Right. The ability to know, Hey, this is our objective. This is what I'm trying to accomplish. And so because of that, I'm gonna cut that out. I'm gonna cut that out. I'm cut that out so these things in my life can flourish. Right. And giving space for those ideas to take place and, and not trying to do so much that you know, I think of your, what the analogy you and Rory use about Sheehan's wall, right? That in order to get out of obscurity and part become well known, you have to get focused and punched through that wall. I think it's, I mean, it applies to larger vision of life, right? In order to live the life you truly want, I like to say live a story. We're telling, like, you have to get clear on what you do want focus, so you can punch through that resistance and enjoy what you're seeking on the other side.
AJV (35:13):
Yeah. So true. Okay. Third thing is just the process of getting words on a page. And so I was curious, I've just got two quick things here that I jotted down, is what's your take on the trend of people just audio, they're audio ing? Is that a thing? I'm making it a thing. Audio ing their book, right? Doing everything Voice Right. And then having it transcribed and edited from there. Sure, sure. And then also, what's your take on using ai?
BB (35:42):
Oh, great question. Great question. Yeah. First of all, on the transcript side you know, we, we don't do that. And again, it goes back to the medium conversation, right? A speaker is going to speak things one way, and and that's fine in a conversation, but it doesn't necessarily translate into the, into the written word. And so there are services out there that will say they actually tout the fact that, oh, you, you just answer these questions. We take your answers, we make sure they're grammatically correct. And boom, you gotta book it's magic. The, again, the problem is, first of all, it, it hasn't gone through the filter of translating into that medium. Secondly the ideas, any one of us all by ourselves only has certain ideas and only has a certain perspective. And so when you bring in other voices into that process, who can bring fresh insights strategically raise the value of that perspective, and cause you to realize other things.
BB (36:41):
We have one gentleman incredible business consultant. We've written several books with him and what he has said, I come into a book project, I have a good idea of what I wanna say, but by the time I leave, that book has been improved so dramatically because of the ideas that we've developed through that process. I could never have gotten there on my own. I, and so that's, that's what we look for. That's the value of what we do. You know, so this kind of outta the box plan if that's a fit for you, great. We, our focus is more does it actually serve your audience or is it more about easy for you? And if you're here to serve, then you gotta make sure that book is really strategically powerful. So that's the one question on the AI front.
BB (37:28):
It, it, it is like, it's not even the wild West yet. It's, it's even messier than the Wild West on the AI front of books and so forth. Obviously there's a lot of legal stuff going on. One of the things that's becoming evident is that if you create a book using ai, you actually don't own the copyright on that book. You don't own the content. So trying to build any intellectual property around that becomes really troublesome. 'cause This is one of the things we bring to the table, as you know, as well. We help people develop ways to monetize their ideas into digital courses, instructional design, workshops, trainings, all those kind of things. And if the ideas aren't actually yours, then whatever you build is on really shaky ground from a legal perspective. The other problem is that, you know, you know, I think it was the writer of Ecclesiastes said, there's nothing new under the sun .
BB (38:22):
What is new and different is your ability to bring unique perspective, your story, your, your unique approach to it that only you can bring. And AI doesn't know that. And so it, it just spits out whatever other people have said. And, and it removes that uniqueness on the one hand. On the other hand what AI cannot do is it cannot make connections. It hasn't already made that already haven't been made. And this is the, the genius of the human mind is that we can put thoughts together that no one has ever put together before. Right? We, we can bring fresh ideas and insights into all that in a way that, you know, no machine ever will be able to do. Right? Mm-Hmm. , no matter what the limits of that are, whatever that looks like it simply won't have the ability to pull all that together. So all that being said, I think AI has its place. It can be used to curate content, be used to pull research and so forth, where we've run into struggles with authors onis when they start relying on it to do the lifting for them. And then, you know, they end up just stuck in this mediocre place that nobody really wants to read.
AJV (39:31):
Yeah. And it's interesting, I think most of us have encountered enough AI content at this point where it's like, yeah, I think that's ai Right? Versus right , I can tell. And I think it'll continue to improve over the next, you know, months and years and we'll see where it ends up. But I agree that there's just some things that, you know, technology can never replace the human heart. And writing and storytelling, I believe are two of those categories. It's right, the importance of the nuances of a story that really can only come from the human heart. So let's talk, transition a little bit into then, what is it that you guys do to help humans bring humans into this place of becoming, you know, great writers and produce great writing? And so what is a ghost writer and what do they do?
BB (40:23):
Sure. Well, I, I usually don't even use the term ghostwriter. I don't mind it at all. I like to use the term collaborative writing. Mm. I like that. 'cause It's really how I view it as really coming alongside. Yeah. An author not replacing them, not pretending that they did something they didn't. But a lot of the big names and big books you see out there, not all of them by any means were written with collaborative writers or ghost writers, whatever the case may be. The key, I think a lot of people tend to, this is another reason why I use that name is people think of ghost writing as almost like it's a fake writing. Mm-Hmm. And that's not what the collaborative process is at all. In fact, it really relies on authenticity. You know, that the people I work with on books we, we go deep into, into content and our team goes deep with them to develop that content.
BB (41:13):
You know, so it is very much the author's ideas. That's another thing some people think is, well, it won't actually be what I have to say. It won't be my message. No, not if you have a good collaborative writer, it will be your method. We, we have a priority of preserving that and adding value to it, not not replacing it. Right? so we serve as that sounding board for ideas and value add for ideas. And we just go through that process. I mean, we, a lot of times the authors I work with, we become good friends 'cause we get to know each other really well. Our team becomes good friends and so forth. And we have a whole process laid out where we help people really turn their ideas into compelling books and compelling manuscripts that they can then decide what's the best publishing path for me? What do I do with this now that I have a book I can be proud of? Right? So that, that's really where, where the heart of that comes in. And that's really where our passion is. 'cause You know, we've seen so many people who have ideas and they either take them half baked into the world and regret it, or they don't take 'em at all. 'cause They're afraid they don't know how. And we believe the world needs to hear what these leaders need have to say.
AJV (42:19):
You know, it's interesting 'cause I liken what you just said to something that I also experience when the red light on the camera goes on. Because we do so much video work. And what I've noticed that even with our team at Brand Builders Group, they will have the most amazing ideas and eloquent conversation and wisdom. And then I'm like, we gotta get that on camera. And we put the camera in front of them and that red light comes on. It's like, . I'm like, what just happened? Like, like, just repeat what you just said. And they're like, what did I say? Right? And what I have noticed, it's because it's in an interview conversation format. When people have to move into monologue mode, which is what happens when you are writing or you're talking to yourself, so much of that disappears. And it's like, wait, I don't, what did you ask?
AJV (43:09):
What? I don't know what I said. And it's because what came to them was in the form of the question. And so what I see that you do so well is it's helping the writer get into dialogue mode in conversation mode. Because you're asking the questions that help them get to the root of the story or the point, or what they're trying to share. Where when you're just looking at a camera screen, it's like what, what was that? Or, or you start questioning yourself like, wait, is this really good? And what you have an hour to write and you're like, yeah, it'll sucked. And it's like, says who? And it's because you don't have that dialogue and conversation. And so to hear you use the term collaborative writing makes a lot of sense because it's that dialogue. It's that conversation that allows the author, the, the content creator to flow more naturally, which is how it would in real conversation versus putting words on a page or talking to a blank screen.
BB (44:06):
I completely agree. Again, pushing back against that myth that people think it, I I have to do it myself, or it's not my ideas. Mm-Hmm. . Well, the reality is none of your ideas are truly your ideas in the first place. You've got the, the seeds of those from elsewhere anyway, right? . Totally. You've brawn those in and you've pulled them together in a unique way. And so this is what we do is really about, let's be intentional about that. Let's be intentional about for busy people who, frankly they don't have time to become experts in writing. They don't, they have other priorities and they should have other priorities. Frankly. They have, they do things that only they can do extremely well. And I was just talking to one of our mutual friends, right? Lewis Howes the other day about this idea is he's a huge fan of, you know, delegating ruthlessly. Like whatever is not in your strength spot, find someone else who can do it better. Right? And hence our partnership. I know he partners with you guys for the same reason, right? So it's, it's that kind of idea that if, if this isn't your thing, find somebody who can add value and collaborate with you to help, to help you be more creative. Yeah. Because you have those ideas. We can just help them get them out of you and share 'em with the world.
AJV (45:18):
And it doesn't matter who you are and at what level. Everybody still needs coaching. Rightly, the best athlete in the world still have coaches, absolutely the best anything in the world Absolutely. Are seeking never and constant, yeah. Improvement. you know, so I think that's back to the process. We all need to coach in something in our lives. And if you're going through this process that's a lot of what it is. It's collaborative writing, body coaching questions and the, and, and making time and having accountability to the time, which we all need that too. So bill, if people wanna learn more about Story Builders, where should they go?
BB (46:05):
I would say the best. Sorry about that. My internet stuttered for a minute there, I think.
AJV (46:10):
Okay. I'm almost gonna start that little sentence over. So Bill, if people wanna learn more about Story Builders, where should they go?
BB (46:17):
We would love to connect with people who have a story that they, maybe they're wondering, is my story worth telling , do I have a book? Do I need, do I even need help? We're here to help you figure that out. So the best way to get in touch with us is to schedule a book, idea session with one of our story strategists, and we'll get you answers to those questions. It's free, no obligation session with them. Veteran Book, people who have worked on thousands of books, thousands of authors. We would love to help you figure that out. Go to my story builders.com/story. So my story builders.com/story. And you can easily right now schedule time on your calendar, put in a spot we want to come alongside and help you. If we can be a fit for you and help you, great. If not, we want to get out of your way so you can tell your story and live it out in the way that you feel called to do.
AJV (47:10):
Hmm. I love that y'all, my story builders.com/story. I will put that in the show notes, at least vet the idea of, is this the route for me? What is this idea I have? And have some conversation around what that looks like. Now, bill, people wanna connect with you personally. What's the best platform for them to connect with you personally?
BB (47:31):
Best one is gonna be LinkedIn. We, we put a lot of focus in actually serving the clients and story partners as we call 'em, that we're serving. But LinkedIn's probably the best place. Just look me up, bill Blank Shane, or Story Builders, one of the two. And or, you know, schedule some time with our story strategist and say, Hey, I'd really like to talk to Bill. I'd, you know, got a project. I'd like to explore what it would look like to have him help me personally or anything like that. It's fine, whatever that takes. And yeah, just, just reach out and we're here.
AJV (48:00):
And I'll put your LinkedIn link in the show notes as well. This was so helpful, so insightful, so many good nuggets. And for everyone else who is listening, stick around for the recap, which will be up next. And we will see you next time on the influential personal brand.

The post Ep 480: How to Become a Great Writer with Bill Blankschaen appeared first on Brand Builders Group.

Ep 479: 3 Tips for Awkward-less Networking | April Garcia Episode Recap

Nicole Gale — Fri, 19 Apr 2024 11:00:44 +0000

RV (00:00):
You know how when you go to events and they give you a name tag and you always feel awkward meeting new people, I'm gonna share with you three simple steps in three different environments to make it easy for you to meet new people so that you can grow your business. All right? So first of all, let's talk about events. What do you do at events? Well, here's what you don't do. I'm not a fan of walking up and saying, hi, I'm Rory, nice to meet you. Mm. Like, I always feel weird, and, and it's not wrong to do that. It's not bad to do it, but it just feels very abrupt and sharp. So lemme give you the three part formula that works really at any event or any in-person environment, anywhere you go, it's compliment questions and then free compliment question and free. So here's how it starts.
RV (00:53):
Start with a compliment. Don't walk up and say, hi, my name is, walk up and compliment somebody on something. Hey, I love your smile. I love your hair, I love your shoes, I love your outfit. And if you can't find something honest to compliment them on, then what you should do is comment on the environment, right? Rather than introduce yourself to the person, comment on the environment. So you would say like, man, it's freezing in here. Or you know, do you have any idea what that food is? The the point is to break the ice of the conversation by not having such direct eye contact and such an, an abrupt opening to the relationship. So either compliment somebody on something genuinely, or comment on the environment. The second thing that you should do to meet new people is you should ask questions. This is the easiest secret tip of building relationships with new people.
RV (01:50):
And it takes all the pressure off of you when you feel like you have to meet people. Like you have to be somebody, you have to share something magnificent, or you have to like, show up and impress people. That's gonna put pressure on you. And it's also not the way to actually build relationships quickly. The way to build relationships quickly is to ask questions. Just simply ask questions. So where are you from? How did you find out about this? Have you been to this event before? Do you know? Who do you know here? Did you come with somebody? How did you hear about this? And then from that question, go to the next question to the next question to the next question. The key to meeting people is to not be so focused on yourself, but just be focused on asking great questions. Then how does this turn into creating new business for you? Well, that's step three, which is offer something for free. Remember the formula, compliment questions, and free. That means offer something for free. Offer them free help, free advice, a free call. Offer them to, to connect
RV (02:58):
Them to somebody for free. A vendor, perhaps a friend of yours that might be useful for them, or a contact that you have. Or send them an article or send them a video or, or send them send them something, right? Give them something valuable that is free and it might just be free time with you, a free assessment, something like that. So we wanna be thinking about whenever you transition from a meeting somebody for the first time, usually you're asking them questions. A lot of times that will show up as them asking you questions back. But when you transition into your business, think about what can you give them for free. That's the, that's the most gradual, safe, easy, smooth way to transition into talking about your business. And this works in person at events, it can work on an airplane, right? If you're sitting next to someone on an airplane, you might feel awkward saying, hi, my name is, and, and immediately breaking the physical barrier of shaking hands, right?
RV (03:59):
Not everybody is prepared initially to, to make physical contact. They're also not prepared to make eye contact. So if you instead compliment them and say, Hey, I love your shoes. Or hey, I love that show. If they're, if they're, if they're, if they're watching something on their iPad or comment on the situation, right? Like, comment on the airline, comment on how small the plane is, comment on the tray, comment on the flight attendant, comment on the environment as a way of breaking the ice. Then ask questions, then offer something for free that will work in any sort of in-person environment. The second place that you can really meet people, and you can follow this same three part process, is online on social media. So how do you build a relationship with somebody digitally in the interwebs on social media? Same exact formula, compliment question, and offer something for free.
RV (05:04):
So you show up and you leave a genuine compliment. Now it's, if you just go to somebody's profile and you comment on their post and you say, great post, they're not gonna notice that. But if you write a genuine compli compliment as a comment on one of their posts, they're gonna see it. I'm telling you, we work with some of the fam most famous personal brands in the world. These people have millions of followers. When you write genuine compliments, they see them. Here's a secret tip. Realize nobody ever gets tired of hearing how awesome they are. Nobody, doesn't matter how rich, how famous, how successful. You might think, oh my gosh, everyone tells 'em this. I'm telling you, there's not a person in the world. Whoever gets sick of having other people tell them how
RV (05:56):
Awesome they are. So don't do this in a fake way. Do it in a genuine way. Tell them what it is about them that you love. Tell them why you follow that person. Tell them what was awesome in the video or in the thing they just shared. And by the way, the other way to compliment people online is to share their content, right? You should retweet them. Or what do we call a retweet now for X? I don't know. Rex them. I, I actually don't know. But you can share their post, you can send it to a friend. And they'll often see that as well. But leave a genuine compliment. Then if and when they respond to you, ask them a question. And this is a mistake that people make, is if they ever get a response from the person, they often immediately launch into their pitch of like, Hey, can, can I come on your podcast?
RV (06:52):
Or can I, can we go to lunch? Or can you know? They asking them for something? Don't do that. Just ask them questions about something going on in their life. The key is to ask questions and not for those questions to be about something that they can do for you. And then the third thing is, if the opportunity presents itself, offer something for free. Now, I wanna say this, in the online world, where you wanna build relationships is not in the comments. You wanna do it in the dms. The, the goal of content is to create comments. The goal of comments is to create dms. And then once you have dms, then you can build offline relationships and then you can get stuff done. So you don't wanna do this back and forth in comments. You wanna tell 'em, Hey you could leave a compliment publicly on their post.
RV (07:41):
And then if they respond, you can say, Hey, I just dmd you a question. And then move them into the dms. Ask them questions, go back and forth. And if the opportunity presents itself for some way for you to potentially, possibly, maybe might do business with them, do it in a way of offering them something for free. Give them free value. Don't try to sell 'em something. Don't try to pitch them on. You. Offer something for free. If you do that, then you have a chance of building the relationship. Now, the third place that you can meet people is through referrals. Referrals, referrals, referrals. I promise you that referrals from humans to other humans is the fastest way to build your business and to build relationships. And on this one, I'm just gonna give you one really quick line. One simple technique and tactic that works for asking with for referrals. And it all comes down to how you tee it up. The reason why most people are terrible at asking for referrals is because they think that if they ask for referrals, they're going to come across somehow as needy or annoying or unsuccessful
RV (08:54):
Or weak. But in reality, you should be none of those things. People love to do business with friends. We all understand that we all prefer to do business by way of referral. So when you ask for referrals, I want you to use that line or to use this line that I'm gonna give you. And here's the transition as you say, Hey, you may not realize this, but I really only prefer to do business with friends or friends of friends. And because of that, I was wondering if you might be open-minded to introducing me to, and then you explain the kind of people that you're trying to meet. But that key transitional phrase is, is where the magic is. You may not realize this, but I really prefer to do business with friends or friends of friends. And so I was wondering if you might be open-minded to introducing me to people who are, and then you describe the type of people that you're looking for.
RV (09:53):
If you can get past that part, if you can get past that awkwardness that, that opening moment, then there's a good chance that your friends, your family, your active clients, your past clients will introduce you to people. They will refer you to people when you simply explain that's how you prefer to do business. So there you have three different environments, live events, social media, and referrals. If you're meeting new people for the first time, remember compliments questions and offer things for free. And if you're asking for referrals, just explain that you prefer to do business with friends or friends of friends. Hey, if this video is valuable for you, make sure to hit the subscribe button and share this with somebody who you know in your life that needs some tips on meeting more people.

The post Ep 479: 3 Tips for Awkward-less Networking | April Garcia Episode Recap appeared first on Brand Builders Group.