How To Interview Founders & CEOs (Ghostwriting Secrets)

Summary

Summary of "How To Interview Founders & CEOs (Ghostwriting Secrets)" Coffee With Cole: The Digital Writing Podcast
Host: Nicolas Cole
Release Date: November 6, 2024

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Introduction

In this insightful episode of Coffee With Cole: The Digital Writing Podcast, host Nicolas Cole delves deep into the art and science of interviewing founders and CEOs for ghostwriting purposes. Joined by Katrina, Cole shares invaluable strategies for building strong client relationships, identifying and managing difficult clients, and operationalizing the role of account managers to ensure seamless content creation and client satisfaction.

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1. The Importance of Strategic Hiring

Strategic hires can transform an organization’s efficiency and client management.

Cole begins by recounting the pivotal role Katrina played in scaling Digital Press. As one of the first few employees, Katrina streamlined operations, transitioning chaotic processes into organized systems.

“We transitioned everything to Google. We set up Trello, organized everything. It was, I mean, for all of you who know Cole, he's not the operations organization's mastermind, but it was great.”
— Katrina [00:28]

This example underscores the critical impact of hiring individuals who not only excel in their roles but also enhance the overall workflow of the company.

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2. Managing and Handling Difficult Clients

Selecting the right clients minimizes difficulties; however, challenges can still arise.

Katrina shares her experience with a particularly challenging client, aptly named "Ron." Despite being a successful tech CEO, Ron's dominant personality and constant rants made interactions strenuous.

“He would miss calls. He wouldn't show up when he got on a call. He would rant for 20 minutes and talk about whatever issue he was having that day.”
— Katrina [04:22]

This anecdote highlights the importance of recognizing when a client may not be the right fit and understanding when it's best to part ways to preserve both parties' well-being.

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3. Identifying Red Flags in Client Interactions

Early identification of red flags can prevent prolonged difficult relationships.

During client interviews, certain behaviors signal potential challenges. Katrina emphasizes observing how clients interact during initial conversations.

“Are they domineering the conversation? Are they really quiet? Do they respect your process?”
— Katrina [07:19]

These indicators help in assessing whether a client is likely to be cooperative or problematic, allowing for informed hiring decisions.

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4. Building Strong Client Relationships

Proactive relationship-building fosters trust and long-term collaboration.

Katrina and Cole discuss the significance of being proactive in client interactions. By setting clear expectations and maintaining consistent communication, ghostwriters can cultivate meaningful partnerships.

“We set boundaries and expectations both for your team and for your clients. ... I'm going to have the piece back to you in X amount of days.”
— Katrina [08:28]

This approach ensures that clients feel valued and understood, leading to higher satisfaction and retention rates.

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5. Proactive Communication and Setting Boundaries

Clear communication and defined boundaries are essential for smooth operations.

Cole and Katrina emphasize the necessity of proactive communication in managing client relationships. Regular updates, setting deadlines, and clarifying expectations help in mitigating misunderstandings.

“If you have their phone, like text them an article or like something that went viral ... It's the simple stuff just executed consistently that matters.”
— Cole [40:53]

Such practices not only keep clients informed but also demonstrate a commitment to their success.

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6. Ensuring Client Engagement and Retention

Engaging clients through meaningful conversations enhances content quality and loyalty.

The duo explores techniques for engaging clients effectively. Asking insightful questions and showing genuine interest can encourage clients to share valuable stories and perspectives.

“What are some pivotal life events that have shaped who you are today?”
— Katrina [14:49]

This method not only enriches the content but also strengthens the client-writer bond.

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7. Operationalizing Client Management Roles

Systematizing account management ensures consistency and quality in client interactions.

Katrina discusses the challenges of hiring Account Management Executives (AMEs) and the importance of detailed training protocols. By creating comprehensive training materials and checklists, companies can ensure that new hires meet the required standards.

“You have to have really good prompting to try to get them to say something different.”
— Katrina [24:45]

Operationalizing these roles helps maintain a high level of service and consistency across client relationships.

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8. Handling Client Leave and Maintaining Content Flow

Effective content strategies can sustain client engagement during their absence.

When clients go on extended breaks, maintaining content flow becomes crucial. Cole shares strategies such as repurposing existing content and pre-planning posts to ensure continuity.

“We took every article that we had written for her ... we just keep re-swizzling things around.”
— Cole [52:43]

Such tactics ensure that clients remain active in their content strategy, even when they are temporarily unavailable.

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9. Conclusion and Key Takeaways

Successful ghostwriting hinges on strategic hiring, proactive communication, and deep client relationships.

Throughout the episode, Cole and Katrina provide a wealth of knowledge on navigating the complexities of ghostwriting for high-profile clients. Their insights emphasize the balance between operational efficiency and personal connection, underscoring the multifaceted nature of effective content creation.

Key Takeaways:

• Hire Strategically: Prioritize candidates who excel in client interactions and organizational tasks.
• Set Clear Boundaries: Establish and communicate expectations to prevent misunderstandings.
• Build Relationships: Engage clients with genuine interest and proactive communication.
• Identify Red Flags: Recognize early signs of potential client difficulties to make informed decisions.
• Operationalize Roles: Develop detailed training protocols for consistent client management.
• Maintain Content Flow: Implement strategies to sustain content creation during client absences.

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Notable Quotes

• Katrina [00:28]:
  “We transitioned everything to Google. We set up Trello, organized everything. It was, I mean, for all of you who know Cole, he's not the operations organization's mastermind, but it was great.”

• Katrina [04:22]:
  “He would miss calls. He wouldn't show up when he got on a call. He would rant for 20 minutes and talk about whatever issue he was having that day.”

• Katrina [07:19]:
  “Are they domineering the conversation? Are they really quiet? Do they respect your process?”

• Katrina [14:49]:
  “What are some pivotal life events that have shaped who you are today?”

• Cole [40:53]:
  “If you have their phone, like text them an article or like something that went viral ... It's the simple stuff just executed consistently that matters.”

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This episode serves as a comprehensive guide for ghostwriters and digital content creators seeking to enhance their client interactions and content strategies. By implementing the strategies discussed, professionals can foster stronger relationships, produce higher quality content, and ensure sustained client satisfaction.

Transcript

[Cole]

All right. I did a little soft intro of Katrina earlier. Again, I think she was employee number two. Two or three? I think it was two. When I was building Digital Press was a monumental hire. I'll give you a quick little story to demonstrate the importance of this. We onboarded Katrina and we were like, here's all the clients that we're working with. We're probably working with like, I don't know, 10 at the time or something.

[Katrina]

A dozen or so.

[Cole]

And I was like, here's what we do. We get on the phone, we record the calls, we take the transcripts, we write the pieces. And she was like, cool, where do you store all of this stuff? We were like, we don't. She was like, so where can I find the transcripts? We're like, they should be in this software called Rev. This was back in the day before we had AI tools, this company. You would take the sound recording and then they would send it overseas and someone would sit there and transcribe it and then send you back the transcription. So. So we've come a long way. And then she's like, where can I find the previous articles? I'm like, well, just poke around online like they're somewhere online. We literally didn't have anything organized. So she came in in the, what, first week, first month.

[Katrina]

Oh, you guys were using word docs. You were emailing iterations of V1, V2, V4, V10. Final, final one.

[Cole]

That sounds right.

[Katrina]

So we transitioned everything to Google. We set up a trello, or organized everything. It was. I mean, for all of you who know Cole, he's not the operations organization's mastermind, but it was great. And I think it helped us build the team and get everybody organized so we could. I mean, where were at the end, 20 people or so?

[Cole]

Yeah, I think we peaked at 23 people.

[Katrina]

Yeah, 23 people.

[Cole]

Like 80 or 100 clients at a time. And yeah, it was. The metric I like sharing is that there was a point where we were producing more articles each month than Forbes and Inc. Magazine. And we did the math on it and we. And we knew and we were trying to strike partnerships with all of them to be like, hey, we have all of these CEOs that are writing articles like, do you want them? And all of them said, we don't take ghost written articles. So then we, like created Alia. I don't think I've ever shared this story.

[Katrina]

I don't know.

[Cole]

I don't think. Then we created aliases and Drew made up a fictional person and Then started, like, saying, I don't know. Like, I represent these executives, and they write these articles. Would you like them? And the same contact person was like, we would love some content. And Drew played this up for, like, a year. And they took so many of our pieces that the person at the publication was like, I've loved building. This is to the alias. They're like, I've loved building the relationship with you. Are you free for a call this week? Just so we could get to know each other. And the alias was a female, and my co founder is a male, and he was like, I can't get on the phone. They're gonna. They're gonna know. So for, like, months, he just kept being like, I'm so sorry you just missed me. I'm about to get on vacation. Like this. We did some serious shit to get.

[Katrina]

But then we built our own publication, so it didn't matter.

[Cole]

Yeah. So that was. That was a whole chapter. The reason I wanted to dig into this is because talking to clients is such a skill in and of itself. Matthew. We had this conversation, like, intimately, like, before you were about to hire someone, and the fear. There's like a fear when you start working with clients, and then you go, I'm going to pass this along to someone else. And you almost have this belief that no one could possibly talk to clients as well as you. You're, like, the only person in the world that could do it, and they won't trust anyone else. And I had that same belief. And then I hired Katrina, and, like, in two weeks, I realized that she was way better at it than me. And that's ultimately the goal. I think, like, two things to look out for is, one, you want the person that you're hiring to be better at the thing than you are. And two is you want them to take some sort of accountability and ownership. Like, they come in and they go, you don't have any of this stuff set up. I just went ahead and set it up. Like, we didn't ask you to do that. You just did it because that's what needed to be done. And so for everyone here, as you're looking to work with more people, those are two things that I always look for in the people that we hire and that we work with. So maybe to start with some fun stuff, who was the most difficult client?

[Katrina]

Ooh. I didn't have many difficult clients, to be fair.

[Cole]

Yeah, we gave you all the good ones.

[Katrina]

So there is something to be said here about choosing your clients. Well, and this is something that I've learned from you and Drew because you guys had a pretty amazing roster of clients. But then when I went out on my own afterwards and started working with more clients and doing my own consulting and contracting. If you do not have good clients, they will always be difficult. And so really vetting the people that you work with, really making sure that you're aligned on the process, expectations, boundaries, all of these things are going to make it so much easier that hopefully you don't really have many difficult clients. So that's the pre step. Right. But if you do find yourself with a difficult client, there's a couple things that you can do. And I think the biggest thing here is, why are they difficult? Right. What's the problem? That they're like, why are they giving you issues? And there's a couple reasons. So one story is there was this guy. I will call him Ron. He was your typical tech CEO, Silicon Valley guy. Probably drove a sports car. No offense to. Yeah, sorry, no offense. But he was just one of those, like, very dominant personalities. He had had a couple of exits from companies, so he was pretty prolific. And he was originally working with you and Drew. He was handed off to me, and we just did not get along. And there are reasons why I can say that that's true. But he basically, he would miss calls. He wouldn't show up when he got on a call. He would rant for 20 minutes and talk about whatever issue he was having that day. It would take me a long time. Like, it was very difficult for me to interrupt him and interject. And eventually it came to a point where he made a comment about, I travel a ton. I've been traveling and working remotely since 2015. And he made a comment about, like, how I can afford travel and working remotely on a call. And I was like, all right, this is the end of this relationship, essentially. And I just realized he was an unhappy person. He was a difficult client. There was never anything that I could do or our team could do to really make him happy with things. And I think it's just because he wasn't a happy person. He just wasn't a great fit for us. And he ultimately ended up. He wasn't my client for very long. He ended up dropping digital press, and then we got new, better clients. But it's just one of those things, like, you can try to set boundaries with people. You can try to set expectations. There will always be people who are difficult, and we can get into specific strategies. But the big thing is try not to get them don't attract them. Really try not to attract them in the first place. And I understand the difficulty of that sometimes because maybe you feel like you really need money and they seem willing to give it to you and, you know, you can probably do good work for them, but if you're struggling the entire time, you're going to have difficulty having really good content. You're not going to build a great relationship with them and everybody is going to be frustrated.

[Cole]

Yeah, something too. Just to give everyone here permission.

[Katrina]

Vicki's got a question, too.

[Matthew]

Oh, I was going to follow up.

[Tristan]

What are some signs to look out.

[Cole]

For when you're doing that initial interview.

[Tristan]

Sales pitch to avoid those PP based.

[Cole]

On what's going on. Yeah, the red flags.

[Katrina]

Yeah, red flags. It's going to depend on every single person. Right. Because everybody has different personalities and maybe something like that I can put up with, you can't put up with. And something you can put up with. You did great with this guy. I didn't do great with this guy. And so sometimes it's a personality match. So, like, are they domineering the conversation? Are they really quiet? You know, do they seem like they respect your process and trust you to a certain degree, or are they questioning everything that you're saying to them when you're trying to speak to them about what your pitch. I've had people ask me my age before and how old I am and how much experience I have, even though they were the one who reached out to me. And so it's just little things that maybe they tried to, like, undermine you or test your mettle a little bit. Because if you're attracting the right people, they should come into the call respecting you, at least respecting what they think that you can do for them and hear you out. So if they're nitpicking a little bit or if they seem like they know exactly what you need to do for them, those are some red flags.

[Cole]

Yeah. What I was going to say, too, is just to give everyone here permission. We did this when we were building the agency, and honestly, we do the same thing in pga. It's just a very much zero tolerance policy. Like, we would have a couple really difficult clients and I would hear either from you or from another account manager that the client just over and over again. It's one thing to be difficult and difficult to manage, and it's another to just be like, you're impossible to work with or now you're starting to say things that are rude. And we just always had a zero tolerance Policy, just like whatever was in your best interest and other people's best interest. Like, we fired clients all the time. And I think I noticed that people have a lot of fear of doing that, when really you should think of that as your business is the most precious thing, you wanna protect it. And especially as you hire other people, you wanna protect them. You don't want them to just sit on calls with people that are saying things that are inappropriate or something like that.

[Katrina]

Yeah. And part of that, which what you all were really good at at Digital Press, and what I've seen work really well for people is you set boundaries and expectations both for your team and for your clients. So when I came into Digital Press, I think for the first two weeks I joined calls with you. I saw how you communicated with people. I saw how you followed up. You were literally on, I remember a call with Sam and you were on the call with me. And if I was fumbling a little bit, Cole would step in and help me out. And he just. You really set the expectation for how you behave on the team, as part of the team and how you communicate with clients and then also what those clients should expect from you. Right. You're going to see an email from me 24 hours before our call with a list of topics and questions we're going to cover. I'm going to have the piece back to you in X amount of days. Right. Like, if I don't have it back to you in X amount of days, like, I'm going to be following up as to the reasons why I'll be asking you questions. Like, just very. And part of the thing I really want to talk about today is just proactivity, because that is, you talked about it a little bit and you're how, like you're very proactive in trying to find the next offer for people. And if you're very proactive in your conversations, setting boundaries, setting expectations, hopefully you won't have bad clients and they'll know right from the start, like, okay, I'm going to respect you, you're going to respect me. It's a mutual relationship.

[Cole]

Yeah. I would say for everyone here who struggles with churn or retention, the vast majority of the time it has nothing to do with the result and everything to do with what you. If you are proactively communicating things, the client will trust you and the client will tolerate a lot because they ultimately, the thing that the person values the most is feeling like they have someone in their corner. You hire people that you want to work with, you Hire people that you want to spend time with, you know, and so if the only time that you're hearing from the agency that you hired is like, well, we did this thing and you're not communicating anything else, like, they don't see you as a friend, they don't see you as a collaborator.

[Katrina]

Yeah. And that's if you all get anything from this. Today is everybody here is a ghostwriter writer working for a pga. And it takes so much more than just writing really good content or really good AI prompts, because you're great at those. But really it's about building relationships with people. And if you want great content, if you want great personal stories, if you don't want people to ghost you on calls, if you want to have good rapport with them and get really great stories, you have to be proactive and you have to build relationships with them. And I think a lot of people overlook that because they're so focused on writing the best social post or writing the best email sequence, and they miss the personal part of the relationship. Like, I think Neil's. One time, when we were Neil's, works with our company and has been creating some email sequences for us. And there was one time we were on a call, you were giving me an update. We had to. We were troubleshooting something, I think. And you were like, oh, I'm in Norway and check out this view today. And he flipped over his laptop and it was like this gorgeous lake scene. And I said, ok, one, I'm very jealous that you're there. Two, I now know that you're on vacation and I shouldn't expect a ton from you for the next week, but that's awesome. And we talked about traveling, so it's just the little things like that can go a long way.

[Cole]

Yeah. What are some of the other things that you did just to make people feel more comfortable or make them feel like you were friends?

[Katrina]

Yeah. You have to be a really good listener and you have to not care if anybody. If people know nothing about you. Right. So I worked with some of the clients at Digital Press for two years, and some of them probably never even knew really where I was living or they didn't always know a lot about me, but I knew a lot about them. And as long as they knew that and they knew that I cared, that was probably one of the best ways to build a relationship. As far as specific things that you can do, like, very tactical things. During onboarding, we always have a list of questions. So if you're trying to get to know a client, you can ease your way into getting to know them. So we can go into a list of questions, too. So one of my favorite questions to ask people is, what are some pivotal life events that. That have shaped who you are today? And it's such a good question because I don't think people think about that a lot. They're not always like, wow, what's happened to me in my life that has turned me into the person? And why do you care about it? I'll just give you one example. So we had a client, his name was Sam, he's from Finland. And he was a sales guy, was working for this blockchain company. And I asked him this question during onboarding, and he told me a story. When he was a new entrepreneur, I think he was 19 or 20, he just started his first business and he was still living in Finland. And he bought himself a brand new BMW and he was so proud of it, and it got destroyed within two days. People came to his house and destroyed his car. And it was a sign of wealth. It was individual culture versus collective culture. And he eventually moved to the States a year or two later because he wanted to be an entrepreneur. He wanted to build businesses. And he. It was just like a pivotal moment for him that kind of shaped how he views the world, how he views business, how he views himself. And we ended up talking. It opened up a thread for like, oh, okay, I know this thing happened to you in your life, and I know that you're going to be an advocate for entrepreneurs. You're going to talk about, like, how to be comfortable with success. Right? How to embrace that part of you. And so that's one question I love to ask people. You get really good answers.

[Cole]

Yeah, that's an amazing one, by the way. Taken to the extreme, what happens and what we saw happen is as you get better and better at asking questions and you ask more intimate questions, clients fall in love with getting on the phone with you. And many of them would come back and tell us, like, this is business therapy. And I mean, I ran into. I'm sure you did, too. I ran into times where I would get on the phone with clients and they would be like, I don't even know if I wanna turn this into a piece. I just wanna talk about it. And that, like, you talk about retention, that that is the ultimate. And you. There's no, like, secret to doing that. Like, the secret is you just are genuinely interested, even if they aren't asking you questions back. I think that that was A really great point. I've ghostwritten for so many people who, like, don't know a single thing about me. But that's okay, you know. Yeah.

[Tristan]

On sales calls is we say props to you. We always try to find reasons to give someone that props. It's typically one of the first times they've ever even heard that in their life. Right.

[Matthew]

So if you just give someone a.

[Tristan]

Compliment or say props to you for something that they did, it'll just go so much further than. And even if we ask someone, like, what are your goals for the next six months? It's like, oh, that's a great question. No one's asked me that before. Right. And so just simply asking those questions.

[Matthew]

And giving someone to open up will.

[Tristan]

Do far more than the best pitch in the world. Like, getting to know that person, knowing that before is going to go so much.

[Cole]

Yeah. Ghostwriting is very much a exercise in selflessness, you know, like the you are a better and better ghostwriter, the less you need to make yourself part of it or make yourself the center of attention, you know? And I honestly feel like that was the reason why we attracted so many high profile clients. Like, it might sound really official, like what we did, and it couldn't have been further from the truth. It was a fucking disaster, like every day, you know, and like in hindsight, it's like, oh, so official. We built this agency. We had all these high profile clients. Like, I was 27 years old. I didn't know anything. I didn't know anything. But I feel like the one thing that both me and my co founder did really, really well is when we would get on the phone with someone, especially on a sales call, we would ask questions because we were genuinely interested. Like, we weren't actually trying to convince anyone of anything. I was like, I'm on the phone with this guy who built a billion dollar company. Like, tell me everything I want to know. And because we oozed curiosity, they were like, well, this kid's crazy. But sure, like, I'm game to just tell you everything because you're just going to listen and turn it into content. And I feel like that's the superpower.

[Katrina]

Yeah, absolutely. And you also have to realize sometimes, depending on the people that you all are working with, I'm assuming they're business owners or they want to have. They want to become a thought leader is what seems mundane to them or that they've said it a million times. Could be really interesting to you because you've never heard it before. And it could be really interesting to other people. So I would have clients, I would ask them a question like, oh, what are some of the challenges you're having in your business, your industry right now? And they would kind of give me some of the basic answers. You dig a little bit deeper, then they start to get into things that they're like. We had one client who was the CEO of a biotech and they were developing new drugs and he started getting into a little bit of the complexity of how you develop drugs in clinical trials. And it turned into an amazing piece, I think that we wrote about it. But for him it was such. He'd said it 50, 100, 200 times. But for me, I was so interested and fascinated in it. That was a fresh perspective on something that he's talked about so often. So if you find it interesting and you find it fascinating and it like they say it, and you're like, oh, that's kind of. That could be like a cool piece. It probably could be a cool piece. So dig into it a little bit.

[Cole]

Yeah. Your content strategy is basically, what are all the things you want to know?

[Katrina]

Sometimes for sure, sometimes for sure, sometimes for sure. It depends. It depends. And it can be a little tricky with clients who are in industries. We had a couple clients who were in blockchain, and I didn't know anything about blockchain before I started at Digital Press. And so there will be topics and there will be industries that are trickier to deal with than others. You just have to find the piece that you just have to like, follow your curiosity and try to always keep an open mind and ask deep questions, like the goals. Tristan, that was a really good one. Ask them about their goals. That's like a future looking one. You can ask them about their challenges. You, you can ask them if you had a magic wand and you could change things and everything would be different six months from now in your business, what would that be? You can ask them about something that they've achieved recently, like, what's the success you've had and how did you go about achieving it? And that people are usually happy to talk about things that they did well. So that's another way to open people up a little bit and then once they get to know you, you can start diving a little bit deeper.

[Cole]

Yeah. One of my favorite questions was always, what do you feel like everyone else gets wrong about your industry? And the answers you would get, I mean, some people would, you know, you wouldn't get very much. And other people would go into a 45 minute rant about how nobody understands XYZ. And it was just awesome. Like, and the best is when you would get someone that was. That would rant so hard that they would at the end go, okay, can you send me that? Because, like, I need to bleep out like, half of the things that I just said, you know? But, like, that's how much you want them to open up to you. What else? Like, how do you dig with someone who doesn't give you very much?

[Katrina]

Yeah, yeah. So you have to figure out. So there's kind of two different ways. So they're not giving you much because they're not showing up to calls. Right. That's one issue. Or maybe they're like skipping out on you and you have to try to pull that information just to get them to talk to you. Or maybe you're on the phone with them and they're just not giving you a lot of information. So we'll cover the first one and we'll cover it in two parts. So the first thing is, if you're having people not showing up to calls with you, you kind of have to look at yourself first and say, am I setting expectations and am I setting boundaries? Do they know how to get on the call? Did I send them the reminder email? Are they prepared to come and talk to me and answer my questions? What are the things that potentially could be roadblocking them from getting on the call in the first place? And if you've done that, well, which I'm assuming that all of you do because you're a part of Cole and Dickie's course, is like, what's. Why aren't they on the call? Do they think that you don't need them? Are they super busy? Would they rather have their answers in a voice message versus getting on a call with you? Do they want to write it out? Some people are really good at talking on the phone, and some people are really good at writing their thoughts out. So maybe they don't want to do a call. Maybe they would rather send you an 800 word piece on the topic. So, I mean, maybe not because they're hiring you, but there's different ways.

[Cole]

We had people send notes all the time.

[Katrina]

I had people send me voice messages all the time. And I would just transcribe them. Like, I had people who. They were like, hey, I'm traveling, but I can type out my answers on the plane. So you just have to be a little bit flexible for, like, why aren't they showing up? And how can you Start to be proactive and try to solve that before they miss three calls. And all of a sudden they're like, I don't think this is worth it anymore. So we're done real quick.

[Cole]

One big objection that people had all the time was they wouldn't jump on the call and they wouldn't admit it right away. You had sort of had to dig. But the root result of why they wouldn't get on the call is they thought, well, I hadn't thought about anything this week, so I don't have anything to say. And so they would just skip the call. And so you have to slow down and go, okay, so how do we solve that? And I remember when we started seeing that, we immediately just made it the default that every account manager would send like two or three topics and some high level bullets before the call. So it's like, hey, even if you think, there's nothing to think and talk about, we already did the work. We already did the thinking. Here are some topics. So every time the client doesn't do something, you have to take accountability for it and be proactive and go, how do I serve it up to them? On a silver platter.

[Katrina]

Yeah, and just remove as much friction as possible. Right. If you want someone to get on a call with you or book a call with you, send him a calendly link. Make it super easy. Like, I work with someone right now who is not tech savvy. And every single time we get on the zoom, I have to get on a zoom with him. I have to send him the zoom link to his email five minutes before the call. And obviously you try to avoid some of these roadblocks, but some people just need something a little bit different. So remove the friction and be proactive about what that person specifically needs.

[Cole]

What if. So a very different problem, which I remember so intimately, is like you would get on the phone with someone, you'd be like, all right, so what's your framework for whatever problem building this thing? Like, you're say you're working with a SaaS entrepreneur and you're like, how do you think about making customers happy? How do you think about onboarding? And they would be like, well, you know, I mean, the first thing is like, you just got to really care. You got to really care about the customer. And I'm like, okay, what else? Step two, like, you gotta give them something they love and like they're not giving you anything. Right. And so what do you do in that situation?

[Katrina]

Yeah, there's two reasons that this can Happen, I think so. One reason is they want to be a thought leader and they hired you to help them with that. And they do not have thought leadership thoughts. Like, as horrible as that is to say, I have worked with a handful of people who. They will repeat things that they hear. They want to take a case study or a white paper or somebody else's LinkedIn post, and they want that for themselves, and they want you to copy that and replicate it for them. And they have a really hard time coming up with their own ideas. Those are the people to avoid, if you can, because they will always be looking to you to come to ideas for them. Like, you need to do the thinking for them, essentially, in a lot of ways. And you have to have really good prompting to try to get them to say something different. Sometimes that you can get there, and sometimes you really can't. And so, like, for example, let's say this person is like, oh, yeah, you need to care and you need to have something they love. I'd be like, all right, what does it look like to you to care? What does it mean to care about a customer? And then they will give an answer, right? Well, it means that you solve their problem. Okay, what problem do you think that they have that you're solving? So you just have to try to peel back the layers and go a little bit deeper. So they're not just giving you one or two word answers and get to some. Sometimes that'll be enough to get people talking to you. And sometimes they just. You're talking to a brick wall, and those are the red flags. Sometimes people just aren't comfortable opening up to you yet. So if you're doing like a more. You're trying to get more, like, intimate topics, or you're trying to talk about, like, the leadership lessons that they've learned from their kids, or you're trying to talk about, like, a personal challenge. Maybe they just don't feel comfortable sharing that with you yet. So you have to try to warm them up and get to know them a little bit better first. But the big thing is just try to dive deeper and be curious and give them something to react to, too. That's another thing. So if they're like, you already have ideas, you already have topics, you already have questions. And if you hand that to them and you're like, do you like this idea? Here's a list of 15 ideas. Which one do you want to talk about today? Here's the top three that I think, which one are you most interested in? And they'll be like, oh, I want number three. You're like, great. So they wouldn't even be interested in talking about number one or two. So avoid those at all costs. Try to give them something to react to and talk about what they're interested in. Because it's really hard to pull information out of people if they don't want to talk about something that day.

[Cole]

Yeah, I've been really obsessed recently with this idea. Has anyone here heard Hormozi talk about, like, unbundling terms? Like, unbundling words? Like, what does it mean to be confident? That is a bundled term. And you don't really understand what that means until you start unbundling that term. And I feel like so much of extracting content is helping people unbundle the words that they use. And what took me and us and everyone in our company a long time to understand is that thought leadership is a skill. Like, it is a skill to be able to articulate your perspective in the world. And I think a lot of times, if you're the writer, you think if I just get on the call with this person, they're just gonna say smart shit. And some do. Like, some you get on the call and you're like, every bar of that was fire. Like, I am going to use every single thing you said. And other people, you have to dig. And I started to reframe that as the calls are really them showing up to the gym, you know, you are training them to build that muscle. And that we saw clients fall in love with that. Like, Heidi was a great example of that. Praveen was a great example. Like, they started to fall in love with getting on the phone and going, ask me questions like, I haven't thought of. I haven't articulated my thinking. And that's. If you approach it that way and you just keep helping them unbundle terms. And I think just to close the loop, like, there's a difference between a client who might not be very good at it, but they're game to go on the journey with you. So they start in a place of, like, you just have to care, but it's clear they want to get better. And, like, each call, you can sort of see them taking steps in that direction. Those are great. Those are clients where, if you get over the hump, they'll want to work with you forever. Forever. The bad clients are the ones where you dig and then you dig and you dig. And, like, by the third, why, they start to get, like, upset, you know, and they're like, it's just the way that it is, you know? And, like, usually those never resolve themselves. And so eventually you just. You have two choices. You're like, I either ghost think for you or I fire you and you move on.

[Katrina]

And if you're ghost thinking for someone, raise your price 100% by a lot.

[Cole]

Yeah.

[Tristan]

Is it going back to what you're saying a minute ago when they're working on the surface and they're like, oh, but it's, you know, we just care more or whatever? Is it worthwhile to ask? Okay, what's a great example of a client where you felt like you really showed up with that care?

[Cole]

Totally.

[Tristan]

Or is that putting them at the risk where they're like, well, I don't really have an example of that. So talk about that.

[Katrina]

But if they don't move on to something else. Right. Like, what's. Okay, give me an example. Oh, well, I can't really think of one right now. Okay, well, how does your team do that? Then? Think about your customer service. How do you guys show up and care in that way? So you almost have to always. One thing that I would always do is just you have to really listen to people. Like, if you're trying to take notes, and luckily, we recorded every conversation, so I would kind of take some notes. But you can't be preparing yourself to ask the next question. You have to react to what they say. So if they're like, ah, well, I'm not sure. I don't have an example. You're like, all right, obviously they're, like, a little bit flustered now. What's a pivot that I can make? Right. Okay, let's talk about your team. Let's talk about maybe the product for a little bit. You just have to be able to try to pivot in that way and keep them calm and open to talking to you.

[Cole]

Yeah. Close listening. That is the ultimate skill of skills. Because what happens. And it takes a while to build this muscle, but what happens is the client will say something. Like, we ask, okay, well, what does it look like to care? And then the client goes, I mean, you just really have to take care of people. And, like, honestly, that's not really a problem that we have in our business. And, like, the average person would go, well, I guess it's not a problem. And then they would just move on. But if you're listening really closely, what I would follow up and ask is, oh, so you've never had a difficult customer ever? And then they're like, oh, well, I mean, we Have. And I'm like, okay, so what happened? And then all of a sudden, then they start talking. And so much of it is like, yeah, it's great that we have all of this transcription software now where, yeah, you can jot down little notes, but I would actually encourage you not to actively do very much on calls. And instead, you have to really treat it like you are sitting down with someone. You haven't seen your friend in 10 years, and you want to ask questions to understand their life and go, what happened these past 10 years? You know, and the more that you care and the more that you dig, the more that they divulge.

[Katrina]

Yeah, tell. What happened is a great one. Tell me more is a great one. Even if they say something interesting and they kind of breeze past it. I've had people thought they'll just drop an awesome quote, and I'm like, okay, well, I'm glad I'm recording that. But also, let's backstep for a second, because what you just said was amazing, and I want to dive deeper into that. So tell me more. And so, like, reassuring people and letting them know when they gave you something great, they're like, oh, okay, maybe I should talk about this more. Or I have these stories, or I have a couple more examples like that, and that's you kind of, like, priming them and training them to give you more content, like, stuff that you'll need and will be useful to you.

[Cole]

That. Just real quick, I think that is an extremely, like, talk about an unfair advantage. I noticed that people don't do this very often, but we all want validation. Like, every single person wants validation, right? And so imagine if you're giving a talk and no one moves their head at any point, or no one laughs or no one smiles, or no one does anything, right? Like, eventually you're gonna be like, this sucks. Right? And that is how most clients feel on calls with people, right? And you get so much out of them when they say something, and you react, and you're like, that is fascinating. And they're like, really? You're like, I've never heard that before, right? And, like, you're not even gassing them up. You're just, like, genuinely reacting, you know? And you're just. It's like you're just validating and nurturing them, and all of a sudden, you see them come out of their shell. I can't tell you how many times we worked with someone where the first, like, five calls, I was like, this is gonna be painful. Like, this person is not willing to share us anything. And then you start asking the right questions and they're telling you about their life. They're telling. We have recordings of people being like, I just. I'm struggling at home. I feel like my wife's gonna divorce me. Like, I'm just working too much. Like just full guts all over the table. But five, ten calls before that it was, you know, everything's fine. Right. So you just validate and ask questions.

[Katrina]

Yeah. And just try to be a person. Right. Like, everybody's a person. I remember when I got on the phone with some of these people at Digital Press and they were running Silicon Valley startups and they've raised $80 million and they're, you know, I've got 30 minutes of their time. I was so nervous for the first month or so until I got to know these people. But they're all people, you know, maybe they're a little bit more trained or they're better at public speaking, or they're great at running a E commerce startup. But everybody, like, if you just go back to your basics of like, how am I as a human going to treat you as a human and build this personal relationship with you? Just, like, treat them like that. And oftentimes they'll be able to open up to you in that way. I have a lot of good stories about that, but.

[Cole]

Well, we have. Yeah, we have some time if anyone has questions, so we can, we can dig into it.

[Tristan]

Yeah, so I have a client where, like, he'll tell me, like, personal stuff or like, open up and like that kind of stuff, but very little on, like the technical how you. How he does stuff.

[Matthew]

So then.

[Tristan]

And then, like, what the ghost thinking on that. So is there any way to dig into like the, like, get his knowledge, like, spider stuff? But like, I want.

[Katrina]

I don't want to be like, yeah, too far. Too. Too personal. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you want to take this? I'll go after you.

[Cole]

I mean, the thing is everyone's passionate about something. I always like thinking the example of you're at. You're at a dinner party, you know, and you're just randomly talking to someone, and then it pops up in conversation that someone's like, oh, yeah, I like, you know, I paint miniatures. I paint like Dungeons and Dragons, little things. And. And you're like, really? That's cool. And then all of a sudden, for two hours, they're talking to you about Dungeons and Dragons. And so for each person, you have to figure out, what would they be willing to nerd out about for hours. And sometimes it's the really. Like, we worked with CTOs who didn't want to talk about anything but, like, technical infrastructure. And I was like, cool, I don't know anything about that, but I'm going to be excited. And I'm just going to keep asking you questions. And a lot of the questions are just like, oh, how does that work? Oh, why do you do that? When did you first get started doing that? And just figuring out what they want to nerd out about.

[Katrina]

Yeah. As far as getting a little bit, that's a great one. If they are nerds about their product or business, and hopefully they are, that you can get them to nerd out about a topic that's helpful to you. But if they're sharing too much personal information, you're like, okay, great. I've got all of the stories and none of the technical content is maybe just taking. And it depends, like, we can talk about this a little bit later for your nuanced situation. But you almost have to set a boundary and an expectation that, okay, we can talk about this. Like, cool, let's dive into that for five minutes. Great. Like, I would love to hear that story. Like, we have a little bit of time. Let's talk about it. And then maybe it's just knowing the point to try to interrupt them politely. Like, there's like that one guy I talked about who would rant for 20 minutes about nothing. Like, eventually there's going to be a point where you're going to be like, I really appreciate you sharing this with me. Let's talk about it more later. But right now, I'm going to get us back on track so we can get what we need from this call. So typically, at the very start, maybe just, like, preface them with what you're planning to talk about that day. Be like, hey, thanks for. Before you even ask them, how are you? Like, hey, thanks for hopping on the call today. I'm really excited to talk about XYZ technical thing before we get started. Like, how are you doing? You know? And maybe they'll like, you have to give them the opportunity to share personal things, but you have to stop them if it goes a little bit too far. And that just becomes comfortable. Interrupting people in a way that's polite and respects what they just shared with you, but redirects because ultimately, you know that, like, you need specific things from them and they're not. Maybe they're not giving it to you in that specific situation.

[Cole]

Yeah, yeah, makes sense.

[Tristan]

Yeah, yeah. I think I need to Just set?

[Katrina]

Yeah, just like set, set that expectation right from the start. And you know, it depends on the story too. Like, I had a client one time, I got on the call with her, she was pretty good at sharing, like sharing business information and staying on topic. And we started the call and I could just tell she was like super flustered. And I was like, what's going on today? And she was in Costa Rica with her family and her five year old daughter ran through a glass door that wasn't like protected glass, sliced open. Her face had to be airlifted to a hospital for surgery without anesthesia. And I was like, all right, we got an hour to talk, you know, and she was just so rattled. And we talked about it for like 10, 15 minutes because she was processing it, she was flustered, she was trying to manage all these things at once. And I don't think we got quite all of the content that I would have liked to get that day. But I followed up with her and maybe she sent me a voice memo later or I asked her, hey, can you just write out some more thoughts on this? Or. Here's what I have so far. Let's fill in some gaps. But you have to understand, okay, when can I interrupt you? And we need to stop this and when do you need to talk about this? And in order for us to get to where we're going.

[Cole]

Yeah, another great frame. And then Matthew is, yeah, saying I think this would be a great topic, but something I would say over and over again is I think this is a topic a lot of people would be interested in. So you're setting the frame as like, it's not just me. Like, I think a lot of people would be curious to hear how you think about hiring or how you think about building this type of company, you know, and almost giving them that frame. I found triggers most people into being. Like, people care what I have to say and then they're ready to share, you know, so just another little one liner. Yeah. Matthew, just curious if you found like.

[Tristan]

An ideal cadence of like, is it weekly, biweekly, monthly? And then is it 30 minutes or 60 minutes?

[Matthew]

You can go a little deeper.

[Tristan]

And then over time, maybe when they're a new client, you have nothing, but after they've been a client for six months, you have a lot of content. Does that cadence change? Just curious what your thoughts are on that.

[Katrina]

Yeah. What do you mainly write about? What are you writing for clients?

[Tristan]

Mostly B2B services in different industries.

[Katrina]

Okay.

[Cole]

Social content.

[Katrina]

Social content like LinkedIn, Twitter posts, kind of a thing. So do you have a pretty good idea at this point how much like, okay, if I get on a call for 30 minutes with someone, I can create X amount of pieces from that potentially, do you generally have a good idea? So I'd say you have to figure out your parameters for that specific content you're writing. Like you're writing social posts. I was writing 800 word articles once a week for people. So oftentimes if I was doing two big ink articles a month or four a month, I would talk to them for an hour once a week. I think we had slotted like 30 minutes. 30 minutes per article was kind of what we landed on. And sometimes you can get more, sometimes you can get less, but you have to figure out your parameters for them. And like, okay, I know that I can in 20 minutes, I can kind of get this amount of content from them, typically. And maybe if you get to know them over time and you know more of their style and their voice, it becomes a little bit easier because you can see a topic and you can say, I know what they probably will say about this. And I can come up with a couple of posts and send them to them to edit and see if I was on track and if I was on track now, that's 10 less minutes I need from them in the next call. So just trying to, like, over time, you might not need as much from them. You just have to judge at client and content. It depends.

[Cole]

Yeah, a little. For everyone here, for every client, I would just add this into your weekly cadence. But something that I found that really builds relationships is once a week, email them. Or even better, if you have their phone, like text them an article or like something that went viral or something, and just go, hey, I thought this idea would be really cool. Maybe we could do something like this. If you do that consistently, it's impossible for the person to not be like, wow, look at how much, look at how on top of things this person is, you know, and it's such a simple thing. Like we all, as I say that everyone here is probably like, yeah, that makes sense. But it's the simple stuff just executed consistently that matters.

[Katrina]

Being proactive.

[Cole]

Yeah, being proactive for sure.

[Katrina]

It's really, it's being proactive and understanding. Like for that specific person, what do they want? Maybe they want, they need some ideas. And so you're sending them a trending tweet and you're asking them, hey, hey, what are your thoughts on this? I thought you would be interested in it. Maybe you need to email them 15 minutes before the call with the zoom link. Maybe you, like, you kind of have to figure out what that person needs and try to deliver it for them. Because over delivering can very easily go into a lot of work for you and it can take a lot of your time. The goal is to try to figure out what are the little things that they like and they would appreciate that. Don't take a ton of my time.

[Cole]

You know, a big. A big one, too is if you have a really opinionated client, like someone who has really strong opinions about their category or industry, find other things that performed really well that are the opposite of that, and send it to them and be like, can you believe this bullshit? And then they'll be like, we should do a piece about that. Like, I mean, I'm a great example. Like, if anyone on our team was like, this just went viral. And they're talking about why blogging is such a great idea, like, immediately I would sit up in my chair and be like, all right, I know what to do. Trigger points, you know, like, and so.

[Katrina]

What'S for their trigger points?

[Cole]

Yeah, that's such a great. Just like, you gotta fan the flames a little bit. Yeah, there's quite. Yeah, yeah.

[Tristan]

So for clients that are very resource oriented, let's say you're writing about a certain topic a bunch of times and it's just not performing well. How do you kind of navigate like this? This is not working at all. I don't want to write about this anymore. Anymore. I want to write about this. And you just don't have any conviction that that's going to do well. How do you kind of navigate when your ideas aren't doing. Aren't getting the results that everyone's looking for?

[Cole]

So I have a little story.

[Katrina]

Go ahead, go ahead, I'll go to you.

[Cole]

So first of all, I always come back to. At the end of the day, it's your job to give them the answer and you educate them, but they're the one paying you. So, like, if they wanna go right about that thing, you can educate them, but ultimately it's their choice. The real question, though, is, what's the goal? And I think a lot of times, especially for B2B companies in B2B, the performance of any piece of content literally doesn't matter. It has nothing to do with going viral. And a great example was one of our biggest clients. We started with her, and then we scaled to her entire executive team. So there was a point where we were ghostwriting for five or Six of their Sam. Yeah, like, their whole exec team. And the main one, she had become a friend, and she was a big believer. She was like, okay, let's do thought leadership articles. Everyone else on her team was like, this is a giant waste of money. Like, why are we doing this? And we would write these articles and they would come back and they'd be like, this article we put on medium got like 38 views. We put on Quora, it got 40 views. Like, this isn't working. And she was like, just trust. Like, she was the decision maker. So she was like, just trust we're going to keep doing this. Two months later, they all walk into a meeting and they were, like, pitching another company because they were providing a blockchain service, like a really expensive B2B blockchain service. And the other exec team walks in, and one of the guys, the moment he walks in, he turns to one of the execs who had been shitting on the service that we were doing for months, and he goes, hey, I just read your article about this thing. Just wanted to say I thought you worded that really, really well. And then because of that, they walked in with a completely different frame, and then they became a huge client, and that was worth, like, millions of dollars to them. And after that call, I remember she called me and she was like, I finally got them to understand. And so a lot of times you have to pick apart, like, what is the goal? You know, and why are we. Like, who cares if this thing got 38 views? Like, what are we doing with this asset? Who's reading it? You know?

[Katrina]

Yeah, all good points. I think another thing is understanding how long it can take for people to get traction who are new to ghost writing. Like, we had a lot of people. Some people were pretty prolific, and some people had never posted on, really, LinkedIn or Twitter before or written an article. And we found it took at least three months, usually three to six, for people to actually start engaging with their piece and sharing things and commenting. So one maybe remind them of the timeline that results. It compounds over time, but it takes some time to get them started. And also, if you're really convinced that they should talk about something and they don't really want to talk about it, if you can maybe try to reframe it from a couple different angles, see if you're okay, maybe you don't want to talk about leadership, but will you talk about, you know, how you hire? Right. Or try to find a couple different angles and if they're really Hesitant, you're not going to get good content from it anyways. So maybe like try to move on. Or maybe when they see that their ideas aren't getting traction, you could be like, look, we've written, you know, you've written 10 posts about this at this point, or we've been talking about this for two months. We can kind of see, like you're getting a little bit, but you're not getting a lot of results. So my suggestion is to pivot. Let's spend the next two weeks or month or whatever it is. They're, you know, 15 posts and let's talk about something different and let's compare the two and then you have a little bit more tangible evidence of, here are your ideas, here are my ideas. Which ones worked better? And sometimes people just need to, if they're really results oriented, they just need to see the data and they say, oh yeah, you kind of were right. And they're going to be super happy if your ideas work because that means they're going to be getting more engagement and things like that. So you have to guide them and you have to educate them, but you also have to respect what they don't want to talk about because it probably won't be good content.

[Cole]

Yeah. And going back to the paid ads thing, like, if they're a total beginner and you're on X or LinkedIn or something like throw, like throw 20 bucks at a post, like it's not, it eats into your margin a little bit. But if it increases the retention by three more months, like it was totally worth it, you know. All right, we'll do a couple, a couple of questions and then we'll keep going.

[Tristan]

Yeah, one little thing on this. Matthew wrote about this just the other day. That anchor Nutcall, who's like the guy, when you search for solo 401k, the guy that comes up. So if your client is the guy who wants to be known for this thing, you just gotta keep putting it in. And eventually he's like, you know, the SEO and everything else just points back to that one.

[Katrina]

It takes time.

[Tristan]

The timeline is. I'm glad you mentioned that because it's. What's the timeline for these results? You know, determines a lot of what's possible.

[Matthew]

But yeah.

[Cole]

We were always super transparent with people about that. Like people who had no presence on the sales call. We would be like, okay, just so you know, like, it is going to take three months to start seeing something. Are you okay with that? And they would like, do the runaround and I'd ask it again and I'd be like, are you okay with this? You know, and so you just. You got to weed people out that way. Yeah. Caroline.

[Caroline]

I just love some recommend best practices and advice from your clients all the way for a long time. So for context, I write for LinkedIn for two co founders of an eventec company who are co founders and partners in real life, which is actually very fascinating. They've just got married, they're on their honeymoon right now, and then they're away for a month. So my last two months have been full fulfillment and I'm basically both of their meetings for the next six weeks. And so the way I kind of. That the first thing, the first thing that I wanted to. You don't have to think about LinkedIn for the next six weeks. That's my goal. But then I also encourage them, you know, just WhatsApp me some pictures or like some cool things that happen on your travels. It would be nice to interject them into the post and change up the scheduling a little bit. So this is the first time I've experienced, like somebody going to people going away for such a long period of time. So I'd just love to get some advice on that. Your experience on is that the goal? Like, so they don't have to even. And I guess it's like a little bit contextual for each kind. But is that the goal?

[Cole]

Like, we don't want to think about.

[Caroline]

Lifting at all or are you trying to kind of stay? Because I also don't want them to forget.

[Katrina]

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you handled it really well. First of all, it can be really hard when people go away because you have to do so much more work than you're used to, to try to prepare for that. Yeah. Now you're chilling. So it's good. Yeah. I would say, you know, what really works well, that I've seen work well. And I don't know if any of you know Lenny, who he does product. He runs a product substack. He's like one of the business biggest paid substacks. And one thing that he'll do is when he's going on vacation with his family, he will say, hey, guys, just so he'll make like a little note at the top of his thing. He'll post about it on social. Hey, I'm gonna be gone for the next two weeks. I'm spending time with my family. We're gonna be in Mexico. Super excited to have this break and be talking to you guys when I come back and he won't post for two weeks. And maybe they'll do some posts here and there and not that you want to go quiet for six weeks, but I think priming the audience and just like letting people know, hey, we just got married and we're going on our honeymoon and we're going to take the next four months or whatever it is and just take a little bit of a break. We're going to have some content that we've prepared, but don't expect the same cadence and flow from us. That way. Their audience is prepared for that. It sounds like you did everything. Yeah, you did everything right. But if for some reason someone doesn't give you enough content before they leave, for example, or like, you know, they're going to be gone for a month or two and maybe you won't quite have enough, like, trickle it out a little bit or yeah, maybe check in with them, be like, hey, would you be okay two weeks from now if I just check in with you and maybe you can send me a voice memo from this, you know, whenever you have the time to send it. See if you can get a little bit of content while they're gone. I think you handled it well, though. Just be honest with people.

[Cole]

Yeah. Something we did with. I feel like it was Heidi that comes to mind. Heidi was the CEO. I can talk about it because she was like one of our best clients and she ended up giving us a testimonial. She was the CEO of ThirdLove, if anyone knows. ThirdLove, the lingerie company. Fun fact. They were the first one to create half cup sizes. So I learned a lot about that as I was ghost trading for Heidi.

[Katrina]

I did much better as a. I.

[Cole]

Was like, anyway, here's Katrina. Bye. She's a woman, but really cool company, like, heavily funded, grew like crazy. And there were times where she would travel and was just super busy. And the thing is, every problem can always be framed as an opportunity. And so if someone's traveling, I would go, well, that's the benefit of building a library of content. So what we can do is I can go back through the things that we've created and I can recreate new versions. So I remember there was a point where she was gone for like a month or something. And we basically just took every article that we had written for her. But we took like, main point from article one, main point from article two, main point from article three. That created article four. And you just keep re. Swizzling things around. And I find that when you Explain that to clients that they're like, oh, so this compounds over time. Like, that's the thing you want them to get excited about.

[Katrina]

And you can also use their time off too, to write pieces about that. Like one of the biggest pieces that we ever wrote for Praveen, who was the CEO of a biotech startup he went on to for his 50th birthday, he went to the Sahara desert and did a motorcycle rally. And when he came back from it, I was like, we are talking about this 100%. And one of the pieces that came out of it became one of his biggest 50 lessons I learned from becoming 50 or something like that. So oftentimes you can use their time away if they're reflecting, if they're going on a big book tour, if they're trying to raise money, plan for it and repurpose content, but also plan to use whatever they were doing as content when they come back.

[Cole]

Totally. It's a great point. All right, one more. Yeah, Lev, I think the biggest struggle.

[Matthew]

We'Ve had with hiring Ame is the multifaceted nature of the role. So like, for example, like we were doing the first approach, like one service like LinkedIn posts for beauty founders. That's our thing. So for writers, there's like a system we have like specific way of like step one, once you get the call finished, like do this, this, this, this, this. But for Ame, it becomes so much more tricky because like you mentioned, like in the beginning for pre call prep, for example, you look at like comments on LinkedIn for ideas and topics, you prepare the questions, you think of the books and posts, you do some research on xyz, you think about previous conversations, all those things, and have the call itself, which is a whole other skill set of like how to build Benton, how to Casper questions, how to be personable, how to know what to smile, what to laugh, xyz then post calls.

[Cole]

How to smile, how to laugh.

[Katrina]

Well, Cole told me at one point when I first started working at Digital Press, you need to use more smiley faces in your emails. And I was like, all right, I'm not going to do that. But it's a good point. How do you look for somebody who has all those skills.

[Matthew]

Kind of systematize it a little bit, like you mentioned as well. It's like, and then sometimes you have an idea that you for a cool post and then you send them like a message.

[Cole]

Right.

[Matthew]

So if I want to hire somebody to replace that role within us, how.

[Katrina]

To like actually build that entire training.

[Matthew]

Yeah, the training system or is the nature of the role so, like, just unstructured?

[Cole]

No, if I've learned anything, it's that anytime that's what you tell yourself, that's a mistake. If you think, oh, it's just an unstructured role, that just means you don't know how to operationalize it. So, I mean, I found. And I'll let you weigh in on it, too, but I found that it was always way easier to teach someone about the writing than it was to teach them about the interaction with a client. Like, a lot of what I ended up looking for, and. And I think you might be a little bit of an outlier just because you did have, like, that unique combination of skills. But a lot of what I looked for were people that were just comfortable and good on the phone, you know, because I could teach them about the writing. Everything else, really. Thank you, Luca. I agree. Everything else was really like, you have to be so detailed about these are the things that I expect. And getting granular. I mean, we joke, but, like, we got granular to the level where it was like, every time you send an email, you do not start an email with two sentences. Every single email is 1. 3. 1. The first sentence is a single sentence. And if I saw emails come through that were like, eye open with a blocky paragraph, I would be like, we don't do that. You know, when you finish an email, put a smiley face. Like, literally, Katrina didn't like that one. But, like, you have to just make a checklist. Every Tuesday, you're going to send every client an idea. Every Wednesday before the call, you're going to send them. Here are the three ideas. Here's a couple notes. Which one would you like to send? Here's the template of the email. Here's what time we send the email. You have to be the one to operationalize it.

[Katrina]

Yeah. And so I'll answer this from all great points. And when I came into digital press and I was responsible for training all of the new AMEs, like, hiring and training all of the new AMEs, most of them. And you guys didn't really have a system when I came in and Cole, basically, we knew each other, and he hopped on some calls with me and it took off, and luckily it worked out just because of the skills that I had. But when we were hiring other AMEs, like, when I was hiring my team that I eventually managed, we created training for them. Like, they had to. Not only did they have to hop on calls with us, and see, like, how we manage clients, how we talk to clients, how we start calls, how we end calls, how we follow up. Like, you have to give them insights into how you're doing everything and have them. It's almost like you're mentoring them, right? A little bit. But they also need to, like, I would have them edit a piece, right? I'm like, okay, you just joined this call with me. We just spent 30 minutes talking to this client. I'm gonna have you edit this piece this time, and then you're gonna send it to me for feedback. And it's a lot of work up front to train somebody new, but if you show them and you're, like, very meticulous about what you want them to get good at, like, okay, you really need to follow up in this way. Or you really need to make sure that you're asking these types of questions, whatever it may be, like, one, write it down. Or have them go through some sort of training, whether it's like you recording videos of yourself doing it. Like, oftentimes Cole would send me videos. He'd be like, here's how I'm editing a piece, and it was a five minute video of things that he would change, and I would watch the video, and then I would have to implement that into my next piece that I was writing or editing. So it's like showing, don't tell. Show them exactly what you're doing and how they're supposed to be doing it until you get comfortable enough with them that you're like, okay, you got that. You know how to write headlines. You know how to follow up with clients. I'm comfortable with you on calls. And like, one skill at a time, and they'll eventually get it.

[Cole]

Yeah, yeah. It's like unbundling the terms again, you know, and account management is just like sales. Like, on the sales side. You all have heard me talk about this. You get on the call, hey, where are you tuning in from today? We had all of our AMEs say that get on the call, hey, where are you tuning in from today? Like, you have, like. That is the level of detail that. Because otherwise if you don't do that, what you're doing is you're like, go be on the call and be confident. And the person doesn't know what that means, you know, so. All right, I want to keep it rocking. Everyone, thank you to Katrina for coming out. Thanks, Katrina.

[Katrina]

Thanks.