← Mondays with Matt
Mondays with Matt
#3: People Follow People: Building a Founder Brand
00:41:21
Building a compelling Founder Brand rooted in authenticity and storytelling can help entrepreneurs attract clients and grow their businesses. Follow these actionable strategies for overcoming fear, creating consistent content, and shifting focus from price to value to stand out in a crowded market.
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- [00:02]
A
You're listening to the build you'd business podcast powered by Turnkey Coach, where we help business owners find freedom over fear. I'm Matt Reynolds and I'm his brother, Chris Reynolds.
- [00:12]
B
Join us as we help build your business and move from fear to freedom together. I'm here with my brother, Chris Reynolds. Hey, man. Welcome to the show.
- [00:31]
A
What's up? Thank you.
- [00:32]
B
And we're going to dive right in as we always do. We're not going to remember, dad used.
- [00:37]
A
To use the word folderol all the time. We use it in the house. It's a joke to make fun of the.
- [00:43]
B
Dad used to say it, but God rest his soul, our past father, folderal. We're not going to. We're not going to screw around with folderal today. We going to dive right in as we always do. And this is a question I get more than anything else in business, mentorship. You probably do, too. Business owner says, how do I get more clients?
- [01:03]
A
Yeah.
- [01:03]
B
And we're really talking about that early business owner. Right. In that first year or so.
- [01:08]
A
Yeah. So I get this question literally all the time. I think it is probably the primary question that I get just somewhat related to the content that I produce. So one of the things that I think is really important, as you said, like, this is early. This is. I don't know where to start. What do I do? There's like a bajillion things that are out there about this. So there's books, there's all these things. And I think most people just are overwhelmed with it. There's too much and I just don't know where to start. What do I do? We're going to talk about that today. So let's start with this really simple principle and a lot of what I learned about this area of marketing and how you actually start. How do you get from zero to something? Comes from a book called Founder Brand. I highly recommend the book. It is an excellent book. And the overall movement around the founder brand you'll find all over social media. And so you can sort of deep dive this if you want to, but the concept is very simple and you'll get it the second I start talking about it. It's essentially this idea that people do not follow brands on social media. They follow people. Right.
- [02:14]
B
You just think about.
- [02:15]
A
Think about who you follow. Right. Like, so, like, it's just no one follows brands. You don't go around and, like, pick the stores you want to follow. You pick the people that are, you know, like a clothing brand or something. You're following the people that are, that are wearing the clothes. If it's, you know, if it's athletic stuff, you're normally following the athletes. You just don't follow brands. You follow people. And in our world, one of the things that makes this really effective is that being a founder at all. And I know that not everybody even thinks of themselves as a founder. They, you know, they think about, you know, Matt, we talk a lot about like online coaches and people that are doing, you know, building that business sometimes don't think of themselves as a founder. But they are a founder.
- [02:53]
B
Yeah, they're a business owner, but they don't. Yep. They don't think of themselves as a founder exactly.
- [02:58]
A
In that world, the thing that you want to lean on is that being a founder in today's world is a celebrity position. And you think to yourself, like, but nobody knows I exist. Not yet they don't. But this is what we got to do. Right? And so everyone, if you've made the leap at all, even if you still have a full time job and you're doing this as sort of on the side and you're. And you dream every night about what if this was my full time gig, I even. That is a transition that most people have not made, don't have the guts to do. And so. And they all dream of it too, right? It's like so many of them dream of it too. They will listen to what you have to say just because they're interested in that story. They're thinking about themselves going into that type of role and doing that themselves. What would it be like if I did this? And so what you want to do is you want to lean into this idea of the founder brand. The way the founder brand works is you try to tell your story on social media, the right platforms. On social media. You try to tell your story essentially from the beginning. So the simplest method of doing this is go do something awesome for someone and then go tell people what you did.
- [04:09]
B
Yeah, that's it.
- [04:10]
A
Like that's basically the whole game.
- [04:11]
B
It's the creation story of the brand. Is the creation story of the founder.
- [04:17]
A
That's right.
- [04:17]
B
That's key. And so the connection between the founder and the brand, like that is the bridge. The story is the bridge. Because if I think about, I don't follow Coca Cola, I don't follow Walmart, I don't think I even, I don't think I follow Tesla or, or SpaceX, but I follow Elon Musk, I don't follow Amazon, but I follow Bezos. I don't follow Facebook, but I follow Zuckerberg. I don't like, whatever. The thing is, people don't attach themselves to brands. They attach themselves to the founder creation story, which is the founder creation story of those things.
- [04:50]
A
That's right.
- [04:50]
B
As a matter of fact, probably my favorite book that's come out this past year is a book called the founders from PayPal, which is about the PayPal mafia. About, about all of those amazing guys, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and David Sacks and whatever. All those guys, there's, there's seven or eight of them. They're amazing. And the founding story of PayPal is the founding story of the founders. Yeah, that's the thing you attach yourself to when you think of Apple. You think of Steve Jobs. And Apple is one of those few brands that has maybe now transcended its original founder because he's passed. But Apple is still Steve Jobs's baby, even though he hasn't been there for what, 15 years, like however long it's been. But you cannot separate the brand from the founder. That's the issue.
- [05:38]
A
That's such an important point. Even today, most people that have been around for long enough to, to have seen Steve Jobs alive still think of Apple as Steve Jobs baby. And yet, and yet I talk to founders who are brand new, no one knows who they are, and they're trying to get out there with the brand first and not the founder. And I'm like, what are you doing? This is never going to work. Like, no one cares about your brand. They might care about you. You can make them care about you if you get on and be really honest and tell your story. And so I think this is a really important piece of the puzzle. The first thing that you need to understand is that there's some element of vulnerability involved. You need to be, don't try to play a role, try to just be honest. And so like some of the things that play the best to actually get some viewership is because it's got to be relatable. At the end of the day, you're talking to a bunch of people who also want the thing that you're starting to go down the path you're going down. Right. Whether it's a transitionary moment into a founder brand or whether it's, I'm all the way in and I've left my full time job and this is what I'm doing, they want to relate to that. And so in order to do that, you need to tell some of the stories that are painful. You need to say, like, I tried this thing. It didn't work. I failed at this thing. And, you know, so don't be afraid of telling those pieces of the story, because I think that's what makes the relatability really work.
- [07:06]
B
Yeah, absolutely. With the Undoing Urgency book coming out, the intro, which you've read, is. It's pretty hard.
- [07:15]
A
It is hard. Yeah. I mean, you're telling some harsh stories there.
- [07:18]
B
Yeah. I had to reach out to mom and say, I need. Ooh, I'm getting choked up. I was like, I need you to prepare for this. Because it wasn't stories she didn't know, but it was probably stories that she maybe didn't want public. Yeah, Mom's a boomer. My wife's parents are like. And when I say boomer, like, I love them all. They're incredible people, but they're like, middle of the bell curve boomer. They're a boomer. Boomer, boomer. Like, you don't tell those stories. I'm like, well, if I don't tell those stories and nobody relates to the book.
- [07:45]
A
Yeah, we don't talk about that stuff. That's right. That's got to go out the window. You got to be. The only way to do it is to say that there's a fear. Everybody's going to be fearful. So if you're listening to this and you think, oh, my God, I don't like heart palpitations. Just thinking about, like, putting my face on, you know, LinkedIn or, you know, Instagram or something. Look, this is something that you train at. I'm going to tell a little story here. I feel like this is one where I feel like people will. Will relate to this. So I was always a big consumer of social media, like, probably many of you, and not a producer. I made nothing. I mean, nothing. I mean, I was just.
- [08:25]
B
Never posted.
- [08:26]
A
Just online stalker. All I was. That's exactly right.
- [08:29]
B
Yeah.
- [08:29]
A
I was terrified. I was terrified, I think, to be seen, to be perfectly honest. I mean, I think if I really just told the story the way it was, like, it's. I was nervous that people would see who I was and, like, criticize or whatever. Like, that's. That's what it is. Right. And if you're on the other side of this thing and you're listening to. To me talk about it, you know exactly what I'm talking about. Because if you're not posting stuff either, part of the reason that you're doing that is that you're afraid, and that's okay. It's okay to be afraid. So I ended up working with a company that helped me produce content. And this company is fan freaking tastic. They are really, really good compound social call out to that company. They're great. We work with them quite a bit on the certain side of the business. But one of the things that was really interesting is as they would interview me on podcasts like this, they would, you know, produce some of the content that would go out into my LinkedIn profile. One of the things that was interesting was the very first post they did. I was staring at that thing all day long. I had a hard time doing anything else that day.
- [09:31]
B
It's like the script, like, oh, the actual how the LinkedIn performs.
- [09:35]
A
When they released the LinkedIn post, I was like, you know, And I'm like, refresh, refresh, refresh. I'm like, so nervous about it. Second day, probably refreshed it, half that. Third day, half that. There are many posts that go out today because we do posts every single day. Five days a week we do posts on that. And there are most days at this point, I don't look at it at all. I don't look at it. I will go comment back to the people that comment. And that's it. I'm not going in and rewatching my stuff. And so that's my way of telling part of the story. That is you can't be constantly nervous about the same thing for very long. Like, eventually you just kind of get used to it. You're like, it's fine. Like, this is not as scary as I thought it was. You got to get over that hill, and that's a hard hill to get over. And when you're very first starting, it's easy to forget. I'm close enough to it that I remember. Matt, you've been doing this for so long now, you probably don't even remember what that's like.
- [10:29]
B
No, yeah, it doesn't bother me. But I would say that is. I think there's a core value lesson here that is even maybe a little bit separate from the podcast, which is that the only way to really overcome anxiety is to do the thing you're scared of.
- [10:41]
A
That's right. Run straight at it.
- [10:42]
B
You gotta go. And so. Oof. I don't know why I'm so emotional today. When you do those things over time, people are more scared to public speak. That's the number one fear in the world. And number two is dying. Which means that they are actually more terrified to give the eulogy than to be in the casket. That's a Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld joke. I've never been in the casket. I'd like to hold that off a little bit longer. But the more you do the thing, the more you give the eulogy, the more you give the public speaking, the more you, you speak into authentic stories and self deprecating humor, which I use a lot. Like the best person to make fun of for me is me because like rather than, rather than being the asshole that makes fun of other people, it softens that and makes you relatable. And so what people want with your brand is they want to be able to relate it to a real human that is fallible and not perfect. And this is, this is why I could never go into politics, by the way. Like, you know, again, we just got through the election, won't speak on it. We'll stay apolitical and a religious as much as possible as we can in this. I think about these people who have spent their entire life to go into politics and they've just been so polished their whole life.
- [11:52]
A
Yeah.
- [11:53]
B
And that ain't me. I can't do it. Like there's, to me the best stories are the most human relatable. Like there's the humanity in. So when I tell, like we got sued in 2019 in federal court for trademark infringement. And I'm not allowed to really speak on the details of that, but it was probably the most painful thing I've ever done in business. Speaking on those things or speaking on the times that like, you know, you've told stories about laying in bed at night and you know, you didn't think you could make payroll in three days and your eyes were wide open, you're looking at the ceiling and just like.
- [12:27]
A
Cold sweat, I remember.
- [12:28]
B
Yeah, sweat. Sweating profusely. People relate to that dude because they, they struggle with like maybe it's not paying. I think at the time you had 150 employees or something. Maybe it's paying two employees. Yeah, maybe it's keeping the electricity on at the house to do the thing. But that is a relatable story. And so when you show yourself as sort of like on a pedestal, perfect all the time, all this sort of stuff, there's no relation there. And you can't relate for, from the person to the founder into the brand. And because people don't care about brands, they care about people, they have to relate to the founder. That's the key.
- [13:05]
A
Yeah, that's exactly right. You get this idea. I Think at the end of the day, to be relatable, it's okay to expose the parts that you might not want everybody to hear and you may not want everybody to see, but the reality is that's actually the stuff that sells. And they will. If they can't see themselves in you, then you have no audience.
- [13:26]
B
Yep.
- [13:27]
A
To see themselves in you, like, they know that they're not perfect, and so they need to see some of that in you that they can attach to. It's really important. So now let's talk about, like, a couple practical bits. So, first of all, if you're a B2B business, so that means you're business to business, you sell to a business. The two platforms that you want to be on are LinkedIn and X. Okay. Those are the two that you want to be on if you. And you can expand over time. And I would also argue that you should pick one and just do it for a while and then you can move over to another. I think that's the way to go.
- [13:59]
B
Yeah. I always say if you're B2C, the other side, it's Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and also probably X. Twitter probably is the crossover one. Yeah, right. Is the one that applies to both. And so for us, we've gone from B2C to B2B. So you've seen a transition from out of some of those major, like, straight to consumer pieces to more business to business. LinkedIn and X are the thing if you're promoting to other businesses.
- [14:25]
A
No question. And I think if I was to pick one, I would say LinkedIn, because in general, that's where the businesses are. For many people, that's actually one of the scariest places to go post stuff because that's where their business acquaintances are. Certainly was the case for me. I had a pretty big business network from coming out from my. My last business. And so, you know, it's just nervous. I was thinking about the people that, you know, know me and that are sitting there reading my content and the judgments and all those things or whatever. But again, that's the place you want to be when it comes to the way that you actually generate this content. Let's talk about that. Because I think that's maybe something that's the next step that people will miss. Okay. Like, but what do I talk about? And I can't envision that I would have something new to say that frequently. So I get that a whole lot. People talk about that all the time. So let's talk about. Let's first get this to the first one. Depending on how you actually tackle your day, you can make this easier or harder on yourself. All right, so let's talk about. Let's just get into that for a second. So we talked about. We've had an episode. Episode one was episode about efficiency. One of the things that you can do is that you can kind of keep a running log of your day in notes, which I do this, and I've been doing it for a really long time. We can talk about that at some point. But if you don't, and let's say that your calendar is a. Is a way that you keep track of that, I actually think it's a very useful way to do it. Uh, I, I use that method as well when I need to actually schedule tasks because it forces me to schedule how long am I going to do this and when am I going to do it. It's not enough for me to say, like, hey, I need to do this someday. Someday doesn't matter. When am I going to do it? When am I going to do it? How many hours am I going to do?
- [15:56]
B
Back to the time box, like what we talked about in episode one. You, time box, the thing you can.
- [16:01]
A
You should be able to come up with content just by looking at your calendar. Go back, look at your calendar last week. What did I do? What were people interested in? Walk through, in your mind, the conversations you had with customers, the conversations you had with your business associates, the conversations that you had with people that they were just like, huh, that's interesting. What questions did they ask? Because the questions that they ask are the questions everybody else is asking too, especially for your customers.
- [16:26]
B
Right.
- [16:26]
A
It's a perfect example of questions your customers have. And those are the questions that need to be answered. So go answer them. Right. And so this is where a lot of the content is ultimately going to come from. Now, the second aspect of this is a question about what? About, you know, not repeating myself. And this one was. This one took me a while to really deeply understand, but I deeply understand this. Today you are going to post things on social media that almost no one is going to see. Okay? They are busy. People are crazy busy. This is a market for attention, right?
- [17:04]
B
That's right.
- [17:04]
A
And so because it's a market for attention, everyone is trying to get their attention. And so the attention is like this all the time. So you post things and. And most of your audience is not ever going to see it.
- [17:15]
B
Right.
- [17:15]
A
There's an algorithm that you're. We're playing to these Days that. First of all, when you release, people talk about this too. Like, when should I release? It doesn't matter, right? Here's why it doesn't matter. Because at the end of the day, when you say publish, that's not when everybody's going to see it. The algorithm feeds it out a little bit at a time and it waits to see how people respond, and then it'll do it even more. So you don't need to worry about the scheduling of bits. None of that stuff matters. What you really want to do is make sure that the content that you're releasing is really, really relevant. And there is nothing bad about repeating yourself. But because most of the time, people didn't see the first bit of content anyway. No one is looking at your content going, they repeated themselves. They already said that yesterday. Because if you said it yesterday, the algorithm's probably not gonna feed it to that same person anyway.
- [18:02]
B
Well, think about. So when you're an owner of a business, how often do you have to repeat the primary mission statement, like vision statement, like what we're doing, what the goal is? Here's the thing, it's multiple times a week, every week to the employees you work with who for 40 hours a week work with you. What about the people who only 8 or 10% of your followers even see that content? So if 8 or 10% see it twice, they're probably not going to get turned off by it.
- [18:32]
A
That's right.
- [18:32]
B
But the other 92% are only going to see one of them once. So.
- [18:36]
A
And the math is just crazy on it. I mean, and then let's take that to one further level. And that level is go watch. If Jeff Bezos is your guy, go watch interviews with Jeff Bezos. Go watch, like, six of them. How frequently does he say the same thing? Yep, in those six? Every time?
- [18:58]
B
Yep.
- [18:59]
A
Why? Because he has very specific talking points that he is trying to communicate to his audience. And so that repetition builds up these very valuable nuggets of truth. And then people start talking about that. That's a thing they can kind of cling onto and say, it does not hurt you to say the same thing over and over and over. It's completely fine. And over time, what happens that I think is kind of interesting is the content might be very similar. You may have something similar to say, or the topic may be the same, but the longer you're in business, you're going to have a new spin on it. And so there are elements of that content that will change over time. It will mature in the way that you talk about it in the, in the color, in the, how it applies at the size I'm at today versus the size I was at a year ago. And so you'll sort of hit a different market segment as you talk to different audiences across different time.
- [19:57]
B
Yep, agreed. So let's just back up a tiny bit and let's talk about really specific takeaways that people can have. So. So number one is that specifically if you're in a service business, whether that's SaaS, software developers, online coaching, whatever, it's very broad, relatable, content is king. Right. And, and that content should be free and it should be put out free. I want to tell everything I know about strength coaching, online coaching, business ownership, all that stuff. And I'm never going to charge for it. It's not behind a paywall. Now, if you're a content company, then at some level you have to figure out how to monetize the content. I'm not monetizing the content. The content sets me apart as an expert in the field that then drives people down the funnel to convert to clients of my service business or of your service business, which are very different. In fact, I'm a client of your service business, you're a client of my service business. Like, and we actually pay, like, we didn't ask for the brother discount.
- [20:58]
A
No full price.
- [20:59]
B
You pay full price, I pay full price. Right. Which is another thing that I'll probably do a whole nother episode on about, like don't ask for the brother in law discount sort of thing. But the content is the thing that sets you apart, that if it's relatable, it's focused on the humanity of the founder and the founder story and the creation story is the bridge from the client to the brand. If there was a way to move client to brand without the founder, I would do it tomorrow. Let me be clear. If I could do it and no one knows who Matt Reynolds is. So like, I do want to talk a little bit about the advantages and disadvantages of this, but like, I don't really want to be a celebrity. I don't want to be like, I don't need to have 100,000 followers on my personal social media because ultimately I want to build a brand that is got value beyond Matt Reynolds. But I have to understand that Matt Reynolds or Chris Reynolds for your business is the bridge from the client to the brand. And so you have to play the game of the bridge. Well, the bridge is can you tell a story? Can you Be transparent? Can you be authentic? Can you be vulnerable? And here's the other thing that I don't think we mentioned yet, is that in the beginning, so few people are going to see it, it's not going to actually matter. And so there is a process that social media has that you can get better at this. You and I have done a handful of quite a few podcasts together, but this is the third episode of this podcast. We're still figuring out our back and forth. And I've done. I mean, I've done probably a thousand podcasts and with different host, co hosts and whatnot. Over time, you figure out the flow of the thing. And in the beginning, if it ain't that great, it's okay. Because there's no way to get great without the experience. So the experience is the thing you can't buy or read or learn. You just have to do. Right. I've often said, like, if you had a brain tumor, which our sister had, if you had a brain tumor, do you want the guy that graduated number one from Harvard Medical School last year? I'm in Missouri. Do you want the guy from University of Missouri Columbia Medical School who's been doing it for 30 years and has performed 10,000 brain surgeries? I want number two.
- [23:05]
A
Yep.
- [23:06]
B
Right. And so part of this is just getting the reps of just talking. And so I do want to dive in on it. I know you've got some notes about, like, decent camera, decent microphone. One of the things that's interesting to me is one of the things that we've been careful about at Barbalogic is we try to put highly produced stuff out. Good camera, good microphone. We've got great microphones and cameras and things like that. But the iPhone or I'm sure, high end Android, same sort of thing. Like, the camera's great. The quality of the production value is actually far less important than it used to be compared to the quality of the value of the content you put out.
- [23:45]
A
That's right.
- [23:45]
B
You've got to put out valuable content. Not for three days or three weeks or three months or maybe even three years. You have to put it out for a decade. There's a long tail to this. That is the number one thing I see. I see people come out, I see tons of great content. I'm like, my God, this is fantastic. And then like two months later, they never put out another podcast, or they never put out another video, or they never like. It is very hard. It's far harder to be consistent for 3, 5, 10, years than it is to put out good content for three, five, ten weeks.
- [24:25]
A
Yeah, no, that's absolutely true. And I think one of the keys here is building systems that allow you to generate this content. And there's probably episode after episode that we could do around systems too. So we'll get into that, I think, at some point. But you've got to get to the point where you can do this for a long time. Now, one of the things I will tell a little bit of a story here that might help sink this in and make it feel like it's worth it. Earlier than later, when I started producing content for LinkedIn almost exclusively video. We do some other stuff as well, but most of it's video. I got an immediate kick up on my, on my inbound leads. Immediate. Now, part of the reason that I had an immediate kick up was not because I had inbound leads coming in from random people that didn't know me. I got inbound leads from people who did know me. Because I had people in my network that were like, we forgot you exist. Now this is a hard reality for most people to face. Like, you know, you know that you exist. You're the center of your universe. Everybody else doesn't. They're busy. And so the reality is they don't ever think about you at all. I know it's tough, like, who got a good tear on that one? But it is what it is. Get used to it. Now, the thing is, the first time you start showing up consistently and talking about what you're doing, there are going to be people who think the world of you who have forgotten about you. They're like, you know what? Such and such asked me about this service the other day. I'm going to send them to Chris. Like, great. So I had a whole bunch of inbound come from current customers, current relationship. Folks like that just sent me new stuff. So that was an immediate kick up that felt really nice, like, okay, this sort of justifies why this is happening. And then it was about two or three months afterwards that I had completely random strangers that started coming into my funnel. And the way that we do this, just a really practical way, is we put them right into a Typeform. If you're not familiar with it, it's a great tool. There's a couple other tools. There might be some that are less expensive than Typeform. I'm looking into that soon. But anyway, some inbound lead forms where you basically qualify the lead, right? So what you want to do is this is simple funnel stuff. Somebody's coming in, they caught your content, they're interested. Let's make sure that they're actually a good customer for you.
- [26:42]
B
Like name, email, three questions.
- [26:44]
A
Yeah, name, email, three questions, 60 seconds.
- [26:47]
B
They can, they're, they qualify the lead quick, right?
- [26:50]
A
And you're just trying to make sure that they are the type of customer that you actually want to get. Then bring those into either a wait list, which is what we do, or you can bring them in and you can have an immediate phone call and say, you know what's going on. So that's sort of some of the practical bits around this. Now, when it comes to actually generating the content, let's talk about sort of two different approaches to generate this. One of them is video is kind of king right now. Video plays on almost every platform at this point. And we are so used to seeing video that it is by far the best type of content you can produce. And there's a good reason that you should lean into it. The first one is you can do these kinds of conversations. Matt and I, sitting here talking will prod, could produce tons of additional content. We're going to do a long form that goes, let's say this, this podcast might go, you know, 30, 40 minutes or something, and there's a million little small bits of content that we can get out of this and go put in other places. You can do the same. And if you're not on a podcast yet, because you don't know anybody that will podcast you, phone a friend and have them interview you. Right? Send them the questions and just have them shoot you interview questions and you answer the questions. It's easier to talk to somebody else who's looking at you on the other side of the screen than it is to just talk to an empty screen.
- [28:04]
B
Yeah, sure.
- [28:05]
A
So it's not a bad way to generate content.
- [28:07]
B
You just set up a zoom call, have a buddy ask you questions, record that. And again, this is a place where you could actually hire the lower wage person from upwork or fiverr or something to then cut that up into 30 to 60 second clips and put that out. And you're like, look, I've got a 45 minute long form video that I can put still put out on YouTube or podcast feeds or whatever. But that also gives me 10 or 12 short form clips, which is what the world is attracted to at this point. And what tends to drive in general, the competition for attention comes there so often. What used to be people would be deeply ingrained in or feel like they have a relationship with the podcast host, which still happens for the big podcast for like the Joe Rogan podcast and the Tim Ferrisses and the whatever. But in general, what tends to happen now is the short form content leads to the long form consumption.
- [29:04]
A
Yeah.
- [29:04]
B
And the long form consumption builds the trust in relationship and integrity and all those things which leads to the conversion. So there is, that's what it is. That is the funnel. The funnel is short form content to long form content to trust and relationship to conversion. That's the thing you can do. And here's the deal. You can do it with literally like we're both, I assume we're both and just basic MacBooks. Basic MacBooks. And we have a little nicer cameras and a little nicer microphones, but they're not that expensive. And we'll put some stuff in the, in the show notes for stuff you can do for a long time. I used an HD camera that was probably $80, $100, something like this, you know. And the microphones, again, $100 microphone. The difference between $100 microphone and a thousand dollar microphone is not that much unless you have my producer F you, Steven, who will complain to me. So no, a great producer will be like, you gotta get the best microphone in the world. Like, they'll be fine. Right. And then that you can then cut and you can hire somebody out for very cheap to cut into short form content. And that short form content then becomes the driver to the long form content, which becomes a driver to the trust and relationship and expert building and seeing you as the expert in the field, which becomes the conversion eventually for the how do I get more clients?
- [30:15]
A
And I think the trust aspect is really important. You think about all the different things that we're inundated with in terms of like inbound email.
- [30:21]
B
Right.
- [30:21]
A
Like you get inbound email. What do you say? You say like bullshit. That's what you say.
- [30:24]
B
Right. Delete block.
- [30:26]
A
This person is lying to me. And there's no way that I'm, you know, this is like a Nigerian prince situation, like no chance. Right? Right. Everybody approaches your business that way that doesn't know you right off the bat.
- [30:38]
B
That's right.
- [30:38]
A
They assume that you're lying about whatever. And the reason they assume that is because we just have tons of evidence that that's what happens. So the way that you get over it is by creating this trusting relationship. Well ahead of time I have all these people on LinkedIn that have listened to my content, watched my videos, whatever, feel like they know me.
- [30:58]
B
Right.
- [30:58]
A
I don't Know them, but they feel like they know me. And so when I get on my very first sales call, the trust thing is done.
- [31:04]
B
So when you do the email or when you do the call, it's no longer a cold email or cold call. It's a warm email or warm call. It doesn't have to be a hot lead. Like, those will come. That's fine. But the goal is to, like, how do we. You've got this frigid, cold group of people. Our goal is to warm them up so that they're open to taking the email, reading the email, responding the email, responding the call, whatever. The thing is, like, cold is cold, man. It's like, it's extremely low conversion.
- [31:33]
A
Do not let anyone tell you that you should just go straight out to cold. I know that's a. That's a common thing. I'm here to tell you that I think that is a terrible plan. Yeah. Yeah. I think there are ways to approach cold for people who really, really know how to do it. That'd cold outreach by email or phone or whatever. And there are ways to warm that up. There are people who are really good at it. I'm not one of them. One of the other things that. That I think is really important here is just to remember that the.
- [31:58]
B
That.
- [31:58]
A
That you're building on that trust relationship. That is why we're doing this. We're doing everything that we're doing so that we get over that trust hurdle and we can start talking about, you know, whatever. So the other aspect of it that I want to make sure we get this in, because I think this. This could drive some concern for some people. It drove some concern for me at the beginning is we are trying to build a trusting relationship with our potential customers, but we are trying to repel, not our customers.
- [32:28]
B
Right.
- [32:29]
A
Okay, that's right. Now that for some of you, that's going to be, like, shocking. Like, wait, what? You need to have a point of view. Some of what you say needs to be somewhat controversial.
- [32:41]
B
A little need. Got to have a little grit, right? Yeah.
- [32:45]
A
Right.
- [32:45]
B
Little grit, little edge.
- [32:47]
A
Yeah, little edge. Like, you should have an opinion that some people look at and say, not me. That is dead wrong.
- [32:54]
B
Yeah.
- [32:55]
A
Hate that guy and be like, great. The sooner that I can separate those people from my potential customers, the better. Think about the cost of getting that guy on the phone with you and being like, go down the path for a while and maybe they become a customer. But then they find out that you do all the stuff that they hate, and then you got A separate. It's just a mess, right? Do that early, right? Get rid of them early. So you want to repel some people. I think it's really important.
- [33:21]
B
Yeah, for sure.
- [33:22]
A
The next piece of this is. I'm just going to mention that when you get these long form and they go into short form, you think about this right now with big video, small video. And Matt, like you said, the cost of getting this edited is actually incredibly low at this point. There's a lot of really good editors out there that can cut this stuff for you. But also, the longer you do this, the more content you have, the more you can build it back into long form. Things like long form blog posts can come out of the conversations that you had with somebody else. And you can use these little short form bits to figure out what's hitting with the audience. You kind of want to read a little bit of that signal. Like I said this thing and I was super excited about it. Nobody even liked the post. Like, they're just awful, right? And then I said this one thing on a whim and I got 500,000 views and like, okay, well I should probably do a long form blog post about this or, or dig into it more. So you're looking for a little bit of signal there. It's a little bit difficult to do because the algorithm is changing frequently. And so sometimes you're getting an algorithm bump and sometimes you're getting a, you know, sometimes it's, it's real signal. So it's a little bit difficult to determine the difference. But all of this is just try to build the trust, get people start reaching out to you. Hey, I'm really interested in what you said. Have your DMs open. That's a huge thing, right? You're going to get a lot of stuff in a d, have your DMs open and just start chatting with people. Comment back when they comment to you. Be a good citizen of the Internet, right? Don't give trolls any bait. This is another aspect. I see trolls fairly frequently. When the trolls come in, they don't get a response from me at all. I say nothing. I just don't.
- [34:55]
B
I delete blog. Yeah. So the big takeaway here is just make content understand that in the beginning you don't have a big name, you don't have a big following. That's a great. It's very low risk, it's potentially high reward. You put out a ton of these short form pieces and you see what hits and the thing that hits. You can then you can do more of that. And at some point down the road, as you continue to build your audience, that would be the thing you would throw money behind on, like paid ads and things like that. We do the same thing. We don't just put out paid ads, like blind. We put out a ton of content. And the thing that hits, we're like, that's the thing we can spend some money on. And so I don't want to put the cart before the horse because it's really for kind of business owners who are starting this process. But if you have a post that gets like 10x what you normally get, throw $20 at it, throw $40 at it, like not very much, like, because it hit well. And the only thing you really need to change of the post that you made is to put a very short, very tiny CTA at the end, like call to action at the end, send them to your website. So what we try to do is 80 to 90% of our posts are just content based, value driven posts. No cta, no call to action, no ask for the sale. And then 10 to 20%, depending on the time of season. We maybe we asked for the sale. Right. But you're talking about a very short. And so the last major point I want to make in this podcast is this, because I think it's the other part that people are uncomfortable with. So they're number one. They're uncomfortable with like being public, being transparent, being vulnerable, being themselves, you know, showing their humanity. I think all those things like that creation story, founder story, the bridge from the founder to the brand is so important and it forces you to kind of step out on a limb and be like, okay. And by the way, there's advantages there. Because when you, I did this years ago. When you take all the skeletons out of your closet and you tell it to the world and you don't have to worry about it coming out from somewhere else.
- [36:47]
A
That's right.
- [36:48]
B
You control the narrative. Like, here's. Yep, I was a piece of shit ten years ago, Whatever the thing is, right. Or I did this thing, or I screwed up, or I got sued or I, like, I made this mistake and I sued. You know, whatever the thing is, that will be relatable. But then the other thing that you have to do that you're probably uncomfortable with is that you have to be okay with making the ask.
- [37:07]
A
Yeah.
- [37:07]
B
For the sale. Like, it's okay to let people know what you do, that you're looking for new clients, and be upfront about your price points when possible. Like, people respect transparency. I hate it when I see a thing on social media. I'm like, that looks cool, I want that. And I can't find the price. Yeah, I have to put in an email for the price. No, you don't have to put an email for the price. Maybe I have to put an email for the lead. That's okay. Like there's, I understand lead gen, but like just be transparent with your price in general. Here's what we do, here's what we're trying to get. Don't lie to people. Like strength coaching's famous. Online coaching is famous. Like I have three, you know, I've opened up three things, three client openings for this month. I, one or two are filled. I only have one left. You're full of shit. You'll. If 10 people sign up, they'll sign up. Then just be honest. I'm trying to do this thing, you know, here's what I normally charge and that better be what you normally charge. And if you're given a deal, a break, whatever, like that should be real, that should be authentic. But it's okay to be transparent and honest about your price point, what you're asking for, right? Content alone will not drive many conversions. It will set you apart as the expert in the field. And that's the thing that content does. But then once regarded as the expert in the field, it's okay to ask for the conversion. Now I want to be clear. You can be over the top and you can, if every single post you make asks for a sale, you're going to lose a bunch of followers. And so again it's that 10 to 20%, 1 to 10 to 1 in 5 range. You can ask for a CTA, but it kind of needs to be a soft, a soft piece. And then for us it's almost like quarterly. Like four times a year we do a big heavy sales push and it'll be like heavy on sales. But because we want everybody to understand when we do that there's a significant discount, it's a significant value to the client. Mostly what we do again is just over at the top is like lots and lots of value driven content. Just underneath that is value driven content with a little bit of a cta. Like we want to let you know, this is what we do. This is where you go to like learn more about us or sign up or whatever. And then very, very rarely, probably 1 in 50 posts, 1 in 25 posts. We actually, it's just a direct sales post, but if you don't make the content, you're not going to get the sale. If you make the content and don't ask for the sale, you're not going to get the sale. You have to make the content and you have to be okay with making the ask to convert those clients, those potential clients to actual clients.
- [39:45]
A
That's what it is. Awesome. Perfect.
- [39:47]
B
There's another build your business podcast with Matt and Chris Reynolds. Thank you for listening. If you've gotten value from this, we would love to get a five star review on Apple podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcast. We're making the ask. This is our ask. We're putting out this content for free. The thing you do to help us is you don't have to give us money, just give us a no, give us an authentic review. If we suck, give us a one star review. Just give us an authentic review. We would prefer the five stars, but if we're terrible, the ones are fine. So just be honest. Give us a good review. That helps us with the algorithm and puts us out there. If you have a friend or family member or business acquaintance that could get value from this and, and taking their fear to freedom in business ownership, we'd love for you to share the podcast on social media, wherever you are, again, X, LinkedIn, Instagram, wherever that is. And man, we hope that you're enjoying the podcast. We talked about making the list earlier. I think we got a list of what, like 50 or 60 podcast episodes to make.
- [40:45]
A
So we're loaded up and I think every podcast we come up with new things to talk about too, so.
- [40:49]
B
That's right. That's right. So appreciate you guys. Thank you so much for giving us your time and we'll see you next Friday.