← Escaping the Drift with John Gafford
Loading summary
Transcript152 lines
- [00:01]
A
Guys, thanks for helping me carry my Christmas tree. Zoe, this thing weighs a ton.
- [00:04]
B
Drew Ski, lift with your legs, man. Santa.
- [00:07]
A
Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you britches. I'm not. Of course he did.
- [00:12]
B
Right, Santa, you know my elf, Drew Ski here. He handles the nice list.
- [00:16]
A
And elf, I'm six' three. What everyone wants is iPhone 17 and at T Mobile. You can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies, right, Mrs. Claus. Hi, Mrs. Claude Claus, much younger sister. And AT T Mobile, there's no trade in needed when you switch, so you can keep your old phone or give.
- [00:33]
B
It as a gift.
- [00:33]
A
And the best part, you can make the switch to T Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.
- [00:37]
B
Nice.
- [00:38]
A
My side of the tree is slipping. Kimber, the holidays are better. AT T Mobile, switch in just 15 minutes and get iPhone 17 on us with no trade in needed. And now T Mobile is available in U.S. cellular stores with sweet monthly bill credits for well qualified customers, plus tax and $35 device connection charge credits and imbalance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel financing agreement. 256 gigs. $830. Eligible for it in a new line. $100 plus a month plan with auto. Check out 15 minutes or less per line.
- [01:00]
B
Visit key mobile.com so you're using the data points to find pattern recognition that gives you who you're looking.
- [01:05]
A
That's exactly right.
- [01:07]
B
Norm MacDonald had a joke about that. You remember the Norm MacDonald joke? No.
- [01:09]
A
No, was it?
- [01:15]
B
And now, Escaping the Drift, the show designed to get you from where you are to where you want to be. I'm John Gafford, and I have a knack for getting extraordinary achievers to drop their secrets to help you on a path to greatness. So stop drifting along, escape the drift. And it's time to start right now. Back again. Back again for another episode of like it says in the opening man, the podcast that gets you from where you are to where you want to be. And today, live in the studio. This is going to be a banger today, man. This is going to be something really interesting. At least I'm really interested in it. Today in studio, we have the founder and CEO of rmc, which is a data driven public relations and political strategy firm that operates nationwide and international. This is a dude who is a contributor regularly to outlets like Newsmax, Fox News, L.A. times, the New York Post, Politico, campaigns, elections, and more and more and more and more. Today, what we're going to dive into is kind of how the science of getting people elected, the science of what that works and how you can implement that in your everyday life. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the podcast. This is Rory McShane.
- [02:22]
A
Rory, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it, Appreciate being here. How are you doing?
- [02:26]
B
Yeah, no, good. When I got this and you were, you were a referral from Jeff Iverson, who we love Jeff, Jeff's great dude. And when I saw that this was on here, the political strategy thing, I thought to myself, man, this is a guy that helps people use media to get elected. And so you must understand branding in a way that has to resonate with you.
- [02:45]
A
So not just get elected. So. So we also have a fairly large corporate side of the business. We do, we do corporate customers, all that kind of stuff. And really what we've penetrated and we've built a lot of success in, right, Is, is so starting in the political area, if you're running for a political office, let's say in Clark county, right? There's 2 million people in Clark county, right? And of those 2 million people, roughly, roughly 75% of them are registered to vote. Of those 75%, you've got, let's say, another 75% who actually show up to vote. Now, of, of that fraction of the population, you've got only a very specific segment who are actually persuadable, right? You've got a lot of people who are very loyal Democrats or very loyal Republicans, but you have a very specific segment population that's actually movable as a voter. So in a county of 2 million people, you really are less. You're really interested in talking to less than 10% of the overall population, right? So similarly, then we took that and we applied it to marketing, right? One of our largest clients ever was a medical device manufacturer, right? So they're not interested in targeting everybody with advertising. They're not even interested in targeting every doctor, just like one specific segment of the medical industry that is a qualified customer for their product, right? So that's really been what we've done that's been innovative, is taking kind of the data that goes into political campaigns and saying, okay, how do we apply this to corporate customers, public affairs projects, so on and so forth.
- [04:04]
B
So how do you locate people that are movable? So how do you do that?
- [04:09]
A
Sure. So the worst kept secret in the world is your credit card companies sell your purchase history.
- [04:13]
B
No.
- [04:14]
A
Yes.
- [04:14]
B
Never.
- [04:14]
A
Absolutely. Damn it. There you go. TransUnion, Equifax, Experian, they all sell it, right? So I, I have access to about 200 individual data fields on, on every voter, every consumer. Right. So if I'm, and we'll use a political example because it's easy. If, if I'm, if I'm running a campaign for a Republican and I want to target Democrats who might be willing to vote for a Republican, well, I'm going to look at people who might drive American made pickup trucks or SUVs, people who donate to their church, people who subscribe to Field and Stream magazine, stuff like that. And similarly, those same socioeconomic qualifiers can be applied in any corporate situation to find people who would be your ideal customer.
- [04:54]
B
So you're using the data points to find pattern recognition that gives you who you're looking.
- [04:58]
A
That's exactly right.
- [04:59]
B
You know, Norm MacDonald had a joke about that. You remember McDonald joke?
- [05:02]
A
No. Was it?
- [05:03]
B
So it was a, it's a joke Norm MacDonald told. It's not about probability, it's about logic. So he goes and sits down to meets his neighbor and his new neighbor. He says, hey, so what do you, what do you do? And the neighbor says, oh, I'm. I'm a professor of logic down at the university. He's like, logic, what is that? He goes, well, that's where I look for a series or chain of events that creates a pattern of recognition that I can deduce things. And he's like, well, I don't understand, what does that mean? He goes, well, here, let me ask you a question. Okay, sure. He goes, do you have a doghouse? He goes, well, yes, I do have a dog house. He goes, okay, well the fact you own a doghouse, I can deduce you probably own a dog. And he's like, yeah, I do own a dog. Okay, cool. Then if I have a dog, I could probably. Do she have a family? He's like, yep, I do have a family. And he goes, okay, cool. Well, if you have a family, I can probably deduce that you have a wife. And he's like, yes, I do have a wife. And he's like, okay, cool. Then from that I can deduce that you are probably heterosexual. And he goes, yes, I am heterosexual. So he goes, so the fact that you have a doghouse, I can deduce through logic that you're also so heterosexual. He goes, oh man, that's good. So he walks away and he's thinking about it and he goes down to the bus stop and he's waiting for the bus and he starts talking to this guy next to him. And the guy says, hey, what's new with you. And he goes, man, I just had this, just met my neighbor and you know, just had a really weird conversation. He's, he's a professor down at the university, a professor of logic. And he's like, what is, what does logic mean? You go, what does that mean? He goes, well, here, I'll give you an example. He goes, do you have a dog house? And the guy said, no, I don't have a dog house. And he said, oh well, you must be one of them gays.
- [06:30]
That was my bad rendition.
- [06:33]
A
Well, one a great comedian, but, but actually that's, that's where we start, right? I'll give you another example. I was, I was doing an interview with, with a magazine here in town and I was trying to explain to them what we do, right? And, and I, and the woman's doing the interview brought up a friend of hers who owns a business installing commercial grade garage doors, right? And I was like, okay, so. And she's like, my friend's having trouble with advertising marketing. I was like, okay, how are they advert advertising, radio, TV? I was like, that's stupid. Right again, counting at 2 million people, how many people own real estate that needs commercial garage doors for freight shipping, right? I mean, so where are we going to start? We're going to start with property records, right? And then we're going to match those property records to Facebook accounts, mobile device id, so on and so forth, right? So, so it kind of, it kind of follows that same train of logic.
- [07:24]
B
Do you think that, so every, if you have any type of a business, dude, you're a marketing. You got to figure this out. How is big data becoming more readily available to your small individual business owner? Or is this still just kind of out of reach?
- [07:38]
A
No, it is. And that's, that's kind of what we've built our whole business on, right? It's, we, we built our whole business on saying, okay, if you're a, you know, let's say medium sized business, you're doing between 1 and 10 million in revenue a year, right? To you, big data in your mind is so far out of reach. It's like, that's stuff that, like, you know, Microsoft does that stuff that Apple does that's available to me. But it is and it, and it's, it's not super expensive either. And what I tell clients all the time is I don't care if your marketing budget is $10,000, spend 2,000 of that to get the right data to make your next 8,000 more effective. Right. And what's making it more effective is, I mean, we're on our phones all day long. Right. We're liking things on Facebook, we're looking at buying things online, we're checking in at the gym. Whatever, whatever. The amount of data points that we as consumers are providing is just exponentially more than it was 10 years ago.
- [08:27]
B
Is all of that corralled into, into one place or do you literally have to buy multiple places and then you guys are figuring out how to enter?
- [08:34]
A
So not one place, but there's a handful of data warehouses that, that corral it together that we tend to buy from.
- [08:40]
B
Okay, all right, well, let's go back to this. So let's say now you've got this data. You've, you've identified. Let's talk about from a political standpoint. You've identified the voters that can be swayed. How do you craft a message that sways them?
- [08:54]
A
Well, so I'm going to go even a step further than that. The data is not just going to tell me who can be swayed, but it's going to tell me what they can be swayed on. Right. So if I've got someone who's an upper middle class voter. Right. What does that tell me about them? That tells me that their, their kid is, is, is probably in a public school. Right. They probably live in a decent community, but probably not a gated community. Right. They're them and their wife both work. Right. They're both commuting. Right. And if they have children in the home beyond below a certain age, they're worried about crime. Right. So I'm going to use that data not just to, not just to target the voter, but also to craft a message. The, the, you know, if you look back at political campaigns 25 years ago, every campaign had one message. Right. Whatever that message was. Now campaigns, a good campaign has 10 or 15 messages. You're looking for voters that are persuadable and you're only serving them a message they already agree with.
- [09:50]
B
Okay. So you're trying to keep an on brand to what they're on brand.
- [09:53]
A
That's exactly right. You're not trying to change minds. American voters are the most tribalistic they've ever been. Right. And are least willing to change their minds than they've ever been before. Right. And I'll give you an example of the last election. Yeah, I don't know. There's a professor at the University of Virginia, Rachel Bitcover, who just did an interesting thesis that there are no more undecided voters left Right. What there are, are there are decided and unmotivated voters. And ask yourself, do you know anyone in the last election who is sitting at home thinking, wow, I love Donald Trump and I love Kamala Harri.
- [10:21]
B
I just can't pick now. There was nobody sitting, there was nobody sitting, sitting there doing that 100%. So if you're a product, like, does that work the same way with brands? Like, like, because brands, obviously you're, you're not undecided, how do you find a brand that you can move?
- [10:39]
A
So that's a, that's a good question. And the, you have to define, with our corporate customers, we have to define very specifically what you're selling. And I'll give you an example. Right. We work with a IT company in the Dallas area and they're, they're a mid sized IT company. Right. They service, they service predominantly customers in the Dallas Fort Worth area, a few in Arkansas, Oklahoma, couple in New Mexico. But they're not, they're not one of the major national leaders. Right. So what is the, what is the service that they are selling in competition with a national competitor? They're selling a level of service that a national, that a national IT company can't compete with. Right. So you know, if you have a problem at your, at your company with your IT in Fort Worth, you're not going to get on a live chat with somebody in New York, somebody's going to drive out in a van and help you fix it. Right. So for that customer, we're going to try to sell, we're going to try to sell to other individually owned businesses. Right. Mom and pop, so to speak. You know, sole proprietors or partnerships where the value of customer service matters.
- [11:43]
B
Okay. So it's not, it's not necessarily about moving from brand. It's about finding something within the brand that's important.
- [11:48]
A
That's exactly right.
- [11:49]
B
So you're not selling like for example, if your shampoo, you're not selling our shampoo makes your hair shinier. You might find out that they like that it's a sustainable product. You're selling it, you're finding out exactly the message that it appeals to.
- [12:00]
A
That, that's a beautiful analogy to use. Right. If your shampoo is that. I'm sure. You ever seen the show Mad Men?
- [12:06]
B
Sure.
- [12:06]
A
Okay. You know the scene where they talk about our tobacco is toasted, right?
- [12:09]
B
Yeah.
- [12:10]
A
And they say everyone's tobacco is toasted. No, everyone else's tobacco has chemicals. Yours is toasted. Right. We're finding something that's true of the product or the service or whatever it is that you do already. And then we're finding a consumer subset that already has that value system, right? And if you wanted to go all the way back with, look at the first successful marketing campaign that Apple ever did, right? The 1984 campaign, right? Where they, they where the, where the woman's running and she throws the sledgehammer into the screen, right? They were, they were saying this is who we are and we're going to extricate from the general population people who already agree with what we're saying.
- [12:43]
B
Well let's, let me ask you this. What's more important brand or actual functionality and feature?
- [12:49]
A
What's more important brand overwhelmingly. And the best example for this is the iPhone, right? We all, we all carry around iPhones. VRBO helps you swap gift wrap time for quality time. Go to VRBO now and book a last minute week long stay and save over $390 this holiday season. Book your next vacation rental home on VRBO. Average savings $396. Select homes only phones today 90 odd percent of the population has them.
- [13:14]
B
Don't be the green bubble, right?
- [13:15]
A
No, no one wants to be the green bubble. I don't even, I don't even like.
- [13:18]
B
Texting someone the grass smartest thing they ever did I think was just because you just get ostracized.
- [13:22]
A
It's and it's and I don't, I, I, you know, I grew up, you know, middle class, I'm not a snob but it's like I'm and I'm trying to, I travel 100 days a year, right. So I'm like on an airplane, I'm trying to text someone and a green bubble and an X and I'm like just get an iPhone. Just be a person, come on. But like if you look at the features in the iPhone, Microsoft released a product that had all those features like 10 years. Oh sorry, it was about five years earlier, right? So it wasn't that people needed the features of the iPhone. They liked what the iPhone said about them. It had style, it had independence, it had creativity, it had all, it had all of those sort, it had all those sort of things. Microsoft had unveiled a basically equal product at a similar price point five years earlier and it never went anywhere.
- [14:05]
B
What do you do for brands that have lost their cachet, right? Because there's some brand like you look at, we most notably now you've got, I guess you know, there's somebody that's in massive trouble for a Ponzi scheme. Because he tried to buy a bunch of brands that went, lost their cachet and was said he was going to bring them back. And that, I guess, has got him in a lot of trouble. But how do you, has anybody ever come to you and been like, hey, we're losing our shine a little bit. How do you shine this back up? Yeah.
- [14:28]
A
So, yeah, and it's a tough question because sometime, because there's not one universal answer. There's not one fit here. Right. Maybe the answer is you're targeting the wrong demographic. Right. Like if you're selling, you know, I don't, this is a tough, it's, it's a tough analogy to make here. But if you're selling a product that you know is reminiscent of the 90s, there's nothing we're going to do from a branding perspective to help.
- [14:53]
B
You can't fix Hooters is what you're saying.
- [14:55]
A
Cannot fix Hooters, Right. The only thing that you could do is target a market, market segment. Let's use this analogy here, right? Like, you know, guys, and it's probably an unfortunate thing in our society, but guys who are 18 to 25 aren't going to go to Hooters because they can get on their phone and they can see way more than they can see at a Hooters, right. Without talking to a woman. And that's probably a really bad thing for like the future. But let's deal with that another time. But what can we do here is we can change your targeting parameters.
- [15:19]
B
Okay.
- [15:19]
A
We're going to target men who are, you know, 38 to 50 who like the idea of going out with their buddies and having a beer and some chicken wings and seeing a good looking gal that, that really appeals to them. And they don't, and they don't want to get on their phone and see a naked girl on an app. Right. So there are some brands that you can't fix. All you can do is shift their targeting parameters.
- [15:39]
B
So I don't know where those guys, Utah, I don't know where those guys would be. We'll figure it. I'm not sure. So let's talk about how you built this business. So how it started. Where did you start? How did you get into this?
- [15:51]
A
Some combination of desperation, idiocy and refusal to quit. I mean, you know, some, some combination of, of, of piss and vinegar and bullheadedness. I, I, I, I, I've been in this industry the majority of my working life, right. Worked in a, you know, as a kid, worked in a window Factory work, construction. Did that stuff. Kind of climb my way up this industry. I was, I, I was a senior. I was an executive at, at what at the time was the largest political media firm in the country, based in Austin, Texas. Got a phone call on Christmas day. Hey, so and so. Remember we used to date? Yeah, vaguely. Anyways, you're going to be a dad. Oh, right, yeah. You know, at this, at the time that, that job at that advertising firm was best job had in my life. You know, made six figures for the first time, all that, all that cool stuff. And it was 24, and that was a cool spot to be in, living in Austin. So then I'm flying back and forth from Austin to Vegas, you know, to be, to be a dad and try to run this, you know, this division of this company. I was running a pretty large division of it, and owner of the company, guy's a good friend of mine today, said, look, this isn't working. Like, I hired you to run this division of my company, and you're at best in the office two, three days weight parted ways very amicably. Still good friends today. Started calling around to competitors, started to see, you know, who wanted to hire me. Didn't nobody jumped on that. The wonderful offer that was me, you know, right away. And I, I kind of, you know, there's an old joke that consulting is a fancy word for being unemployed. Right. And I, I, I put a desk in my son's nursery and in like the first few, I did some interviews with Sky News London. And you could see like the little mobile of the nursery in the back.
- [17:29]
B
Back.
- [17:29]
A
Yeah, Y. And, and just started jamming the phones and calling everybody I knew trying to get business. And within a couple of months, hired one employee and we moved to the, we moved the official corporate headquarters to my living room. And then a couple, maybe three months after that, hired employee number three and we moved to the garage. And then, you know, and it kind of just, you know, took off like wildfire. Between 2019 and 2020, we grew 500%. We grew another 200% between 2020 and 2022.
- [18:01]
B
So when they're coming to you, are they wanting, are they wanting just data, audience stuff, or they want creative, they want the whole thing?
- [18:08]
A
It depends. And one of the biggest lessons I've had to learn in my career is stop telling people what they need, right? Listen for what they want, right? Because I always want to be like, no, no, you're screwing up everything and pay me to do it. Right. There are some people who just they just want the data. They're like, they, they, they are very confident in what they want their message to me to be. They want to know who to take it to. There's other people who, they want the message and the data. But, but you know, their co, their cousin's son's brother once produced a video, so they want him to do the creative. There's other clients who say, here's the check, call me when it's done, tell.
- [18:39]
B
Us what we need to do.
- [18:40]
A
Yeah, exactly. So, so I all, all gambit of those services.
- [18:44]
B
Yeah. It's funny, I always find that people that just trust the process more than anything else always have the best results rather than people that want, want to tell, you know. Yeah, it's like in real estate when people come here and they're like, like, like, look, there's two ways we can do this. We can lean on my 20 years and thousands and thousands of homes sold, or we can do it your way because you've bought two in your life. Three in your life. Promise you if you do it my way, you're gonna have a better experience and it's gonna go smooth. But I think people just think they have their an opinion on what they want it to be and it's harder. How hard is it to take somebody else's message that's already crafted and build an audience around it?
- [19:19]
A
It's very difficult. Well, so, so let me me one, I just wanted second what you said a thousand percent. Right. And yeah, I, I, my side business is, you know, I own a lot of rental properties both here and in Texas. And like it took me a long time in that area to learn that. Right. Like I'm a reasonably successful guy in other area areas of my life and I know a little bit about running rental properties. I know nothing about real estate purchase other than I've done it a number of times. Right. You know, and people in, I think every field assume that their expertise in whatever field it may be, they're a great doctor. Great doesn't make you a great real estate guy. You're a, you know, you're a great pilot. It doesn't make you great at advertising. Right. But they assume that a competency in one area of their life translates to another one and is a disaster.
- [19:59]
B
Well, that's, that's the entrepreneurial red flag. Which is, which is, you'll hear somebody say something and be like, I could totally do this. I can, I can figure this out.
- [20:06]
A
Yeah.
- [20:07]
B
That's honestly why when I have a big project going Coming up or something. I'm really hyper focused on. I purposely remove myself from like my mastermind groups from going to those for going to events and doing stuff like that or move myself in that because I'll go down a rabbit hole of like, oh, this dude's got this. You know, here's. They're making all this money doing credit repair. I can do credit repair. And I'm like, you know, tell my wife, you got to get a license to do that. You're gonna take this course. And it's all sudden, it's like, what are you, what are you doing? Like, you gotta stop and stay focused on what you're doing.
- [20:36]
A
My vice president will often at times run into my office and look at my whiteboard to see what I have on the whiteboard that isn't like in any way related to what I'm supposed to be doing.
- [20:46]
B
You gotta train your people. I mean, I definitely got to a point where I was like, listen, I'm gonna go to this event and I'm going to come back and I'm going to throw up all our view. I'm just going to come out here and just. We should. And it's all going to. Everything that I got excited about over the last two days is going to come spilling out of my mouth. We're probably going to implement maybe 5% of it because it's practical and applicable to what we are actually doing. So when I start spilling out all of this stuff that I heard, please don't start working on stuff because I'm probably just going to unwind it in a day anyway.
- [21:15]
A
So stop argue with me about this. Please tell me why I'm wrong.
- [21:19]
B
Yeah, yeah, tell me why. Have to.
- [21:21]
A
I have, I have almost wrecked my business multiple times doing that. And we had a project one time in Florida doing signature collection, right? Not a, not a marquee service we offer. But there was a huge corporate client. They, they desperately needed people on this project. They like, we had the conference call at like 7 o' clock at night or something and they were like, we will wire you 100 grand by the end of the call. Like we will send you the wire confirmation before the end of the call. And I'm a businessman, so I'm like, abs and I got payroll at the end of the month. So it's like, absolutely. This is the best thing ever. My COO is like furiously texting me like, we don't do this. We're not insured for this. We have to buy another insurance policy. We got 17 other projects going on, and I'm like, shut up. I'll make it work.
- [22:02]
B
Yeah.
- [22:03]
A
And then I lost a bunch of money on it, you know?
- [22:04]
B
Yeah, it's. It's. It's funny. The. I have in my life, I've just thrown some ridiculous terms out on deals that I didn't want to do just because I was like, you know, this is whatever. And I'll just throw some ridiculous term, and people be like, yep, we'll do it. I'm like, oh, man. Well, now I got to figure this out. I mean, I've got buddies of mine that are in the trades here, because. Trade, you know, you've got some real estate, but the trades are really difficult, especially in Vegas right now. Just not enough people here doing the work. And I got some buddies of mine that are contractors. Same thing. They'll go look at a project and be like, do this bathroom $85,000. And the people are like, yes. They're like, now I got to figure out how to find the guys to come actually do the work.
- [22:40]
A
That's. That's how you build a great business, though. Sell. Sell the jobs to figure out the labor on the back end.
- [22:45]
B
Well, gosh, man. Yeah, I. That's how you lose a bunch of money, which I have been known to do one time. Time from house to house. Which is it? So in your business, man, was there a time, like, as you're scaling up, where you. You had to say, like, whoa, hang on a second. Let's stop. And I'm going to rip this apart and rebuild it to make it more efficient.
- [23:02]
A
Yeah. I mean, so we had. We had. Like I said, we had an incredibly successful 2022. And, you know, I. I've always had a bit of a strain of tell, you know, tell me I can't do this through me. Right. And I decided I was going to take the money we made in 22, which was a lot of money, and I'm the next big thing, right? I'm. I'm going to be one of the biggest players in this business in two years, and I take all that money and I start hiring people. I start buying up firms around the country. I start hiring people in markets we'd never worked in. We opened an office in Oxford, Mississippi, for a little bit of time, you know, And. And I hired an executive team to manage all of this. And. And it got, you know, good people. Wrong team. Yeah. You know, hiring people that. That weren't aligned with the goal, with just the goal of, like, I want to be Bigger I want to be, you know, I want, I want to go to the next level. I want to compete on that level. And it got to the point where, you know, maybe four months into that process, I'm getting customers complaining like, they paid for ad buys that weren't delivered. Right. Like, and, and I hate that. Like, I feel like when a cut, when a customer gets. I feel like it's me personally stealing from you. Right. Like you pay me for something and it doesn't happen. I think field. So I held my entire staff, which at that point we had probably about 33 people on a Zoom call till 2 o' clock in the morning, where I went through every single invoice that had been paid in like the last 90 days. Was it tracked? Was it delivered? Was a report delivered to the client afterwards? Why isn't this in the system? Do, do, do, do. And we just had to, you know, and we really had to go back to square one. And we had to kind of admit that, like, that we failed at that. We, we, we tried to. We tried to do something. We tried to do it the wrong way for the wrong reasons, and we, and we failed at it.
- [24:46]
B
Yeah. It's funny you talk about personal responsibility, because I think one of the things that, God, it's been. It's just been getting worse, I think, as time goes on, especially since COVID was so many people. One of the challenges that I've had in my business. Right. Is accountability cannot be the enemy of enthusiasm. And I finally gotten it to a point where I, you know, I was letting some apathy creep into my organizations at different levels. And we have several different companies, but there was apathy, all of them at a certain level. And I'm finally, today, as I sit here, can say, like, I don't think I have that anywhere. Like, we've gotten rid of all of that. So you just, you can't account it. Like I just said, accountability cannot be the enemy of enthusiasm. You've got to be okay with it. And ratable, radical accountability, I think is in short order. Like, I had somebody that worked for me then when they would make a mistake, look, and I'm not looking for, for blood on anybody, although I always say one of the best compliments I ever got was somebody called me a bleeder once. One of my bosses, years ago, when I actually was an employee somewhere, asked me a question about something. You was something that was screwed up. And I said, Yep, 100% I did that. That's my fault. This is what, this is what happened. This is how I fixed it. This is how I made sure it's never going to happen again. My boss just looked at me and said, gafford, that's why I love you, man. He goes, you're a bleeder. You just stick your chin out, take it right on the chin. No duck, no ducking and weaving, no nothing. It's like, it's like that power slap competition. Just let me smack me right in the face.
- [26:04]
A
It's so important because when someone's willing, I had early on in my business, right, somebody had like, somebody bought like $300 of Google Ads. Like, like such a small ad buy, we wouldn't even take that business today, right? And, and the guy who ads place $3,000 of Google Ads, right? And you know, and, and this is like, I don't know, maybe we're 10 months in at this point. 3,000 bucks was a lot of money at that time, right? And, and just was like, yep, I screwed up. I, I, I was working on a million things. I saw the invoice come in, I placed it, didn't check it again, right? So what did that, so what did that? And, and the fact that they were like, yep, this is how I screwed up. This is how I screwed up. I hope you don't fire me, but I did it, right? We didn't fire him. And we're like, okay, we need better checks on this. We need weekly reports. We need like, we need these trackers to be updated on a daily basis. This is the budget. This is how much has been spent. This is what's required before an ad can run, right? That's how you fix a business or how you take a business to the next level. When someone's willing to be like radically accountable about, this was the mistake, this is why the mistake was made. How do we stop that from happening again?
- [27:05]
B
And I think so many business owners get so comfortable in their surroundings and comfort with the day to day. And like, yeah, maybe this person's not the best person, but it's familiar and they've been here forever. And this is just how we've always done things. And that perpetuating those problems into the future is, like you said, what wrecks your business. And what I have always found is when I am even, even when every fiber of my being is saying, man, getting rid of these people is going to make your life difficult for a while. It's going to make it harder. I have always found that my business has come out on the other side of that so much better. Because when you really start getting into, to those places, like you said, where apathy is creeping in or efficiency is not there, there, and you're like, wait a second, this is how we do this. This is dumb. Or maybe there's a tool now that was available, that wasn't available eight years ago when you set this system up that you're like, why are we doing it this way when we could do it this way? And I've always found that kind of tearing it apart makes it better. And now the speed of things are changing. With technology, you can get better fast, 100%, really fast.
- [28:06]
A
I'm a big believer in upper out, right? You know, for years, I'm not sure if it's policy, but for years the military had a policy. It was like you had so many years to get a promotion or else you were out, right? And I'm a believer in that. Like, if I have someone in my organization that they're making the same money they were three, four, five years ago, that's a problem. Because what that shows me is they don't have a desire to learn new skills, right? They don't have a desire to.
- [28:30]
They don't have a desire to move things forward. They're happy with what they make and that's fine. I'm not, not everyone is money motivated like I imagine you or I are to some extent. But like they don't have a desire to improve their craft, right. Or improve their systems. And that's a, that's a, that's a huge problem. I just literally got out of a meeting with my assistant and my vice president. We've been doing these one on one meetings with everyone and I, and I just love the meeting so much because we're like, Robin, your great assistant, you know, she travel, books my travel, does my appointments, everything. She's the one who's telling me like, you have to leave by 1 o' clock to be, you know, and we're like, what do you want to do here? She's like, I don't want to just be an assistant. Like, I want to. Like she. And she turns to our vice president, she's like, there's a lot of things, things that you do that I could do, right? I can learn how to run the payroll, I can learn how to program the 401ks, I can learn how to, how to keep track of all of our company internal systems. Like I have to be in the meetings anyways. Why are you spending time on this? And I love that and was like, okay, cool. Let's, let's have a meeting again in one month and in the next month, I want you to take this one responsibility off the vice president's plate. Like, I want people who want to go to the next level because that's how you keep a business going.
- [29:34]
B
I call that philosophy grabbing the mop. So a million years ago, a million years ago, when I was in the corporate, corporate restaurant, restaurant world, another life ago, I would train managers for this restaurant chain. And I always kind of had one little litmus test that I just, it was my little personal, little thought to see if people were going to succeed. So I had these MIT's managers in training run around. They would always start in the kitchen because you had to start your training kitchen because you know how to cook everything. And I would always, towards closing, I would grab a mop. Me as the, is the, is the multi unit guy. I would grab a mop and I would just start walking around mopping in the kitchen. And I would, would let, I would, I just want to see how long they'd let me mop because that's the lowest, that's like the lowest common denominator job. And I'm like, dude, if you see your boss mopping, grab the mop. If it's something he's doing or she's doing, that you can do, take it from them. I had a, that's how you get ahead 100.
- [30:26]
A
I had a job years ago doing, doing construction, right. And you know, home remodels and stuff like that. I was, I was working for a guy and, you know, I was, I was painting whatever. My job was to paint the upstairs of this townhouse this one day. So I paint do, do, do, do, do, do, do the painting. And then I, I'm done and I'm just kind of chilling out. And he's like, what are you doing? I'm like, oh, I got everything painted. I did it exactly the way you want. He's like, yeah, there's. You could sweep. There's, you know, we got to start working on the deck. There's d. It's like if you. He's like, I'm not a huge business, right? Like, if you want to stay here, you have to make yourself indispensable to me.
- [30:57]
B
Yeah.
- [30:58]
A
Right. You have to do things that I would otherwise have to hire someone else to do. And, and it made a lot of sense. And that's what I tell my guys who work for me now. I'm like, you become indispensable to me. You'll never need another job again.
- [31:07]
B
Yeah, I. I don't remember where I heard this the first time. I can't remember remember. I'm gonna try to attribute. Was either Kent Clothier or my friend Cody Sperber, one of the two? No, I think it was. Kent said this. He said, this is the philosophy you have to have with your employees. And. No, it might have been Cody. I don't know. It was. They said, this is the philosophy you have to have your employees. And it's fair. As long as you're honest about it. It's fair. They were like, I leave job advertisements up for every job in my position all the time, because my job is the steward and CEO of the company. Me is to the company, and I have got to provide the absolute best talent for every seat that I have. So my job is to try to replace everybody in my network or in my. In my ecosystem as often as I can with better talent. Their job is to make that impossible.
- [31:53]
A
That's right. That's exactly right.
- [31:54]
B
That's their job. And as long as you're clear with that, with everybody, like, your job is to make me look at you and be like, there's no way I can get rid of this person.
- [32:01]
A
Your. Your job is to make me. I mean, I. I like the quickest way to get ahead in. In. In my organization has always been like, be a. Wants to learn the next task and always puts their hand up. The guy who's my vice president today started as an intern years and years ago. And, like, we had a.
- [32:16]
B
We.
- [32:17]
A
We.
- [32:17]
B
We.
- [32:17]
A
I needed a new assistant, and he was like, yep, I'll take it. If. If it gets me out of being an intern, I'll take it. And he became my assistant, and he traveled with me everywhere. It was like, well, we need someone to take over this tiny little department. I'll take it. I'll take it. Like. And he just learned every skill. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I hate to say it, but, like, now I'm in a place where it's like, when I go into salary negotiations with that guy, I'm disadvantaged because it's like, wow, this guy knows everybody, every facet of my company because he's volunteered every time, and that's how an employee gets better.
- [32:44]
B
Yeah, well, let's back up a little bit, because you said somebody. You said you were painting houses, working construction. So to go from obviously, that job, tell me, where did you. Did you go to college or.
- [32:53]
A
No, no, never. I.
- [32:54]
B
Cool.
- [32:54]
A
I. I went to college. Like, three weeks.
- [32:56]
B
Okay.
- [32:56]
A
And they wanted me to pay money to go there and I wanted to make money. So we were at like a philosophical logger.
- [33:01]
B
Philosophical loggerhead.
- [33:02]
A
And that was the end of my college experience.
- [33:03]
B
What was your, what were you, what was your grades like in high school?
- [33:05]
A
Oh, it's terrible. I think I graduated high school with a 1.6, something like that.
- [33:09]
B
1.6.
- [33:10]
A
I actually did not have enough attendance days to graduate high school. And I was a little bit of a problem child. And the vice principal of the school was like, we're gonna say you were here for two more days, so you can leave. Like that was, that was how that went, dude.
- [33:23]
B
Yeah. Similar. I mean, I, I, I was probably pretty similar. I, I was that kid that I can always get like A's on the test, but I always got like a straight F across the board in homework because I just figured if I can get A on the test, why do I need to do the homework? And the teachers never saw it that way. So it would blend your grade average down. Like C +B minus is the best you would do. But I just, you know, if you're somebody out there that you, you know, I just, I take the excuse away. Right. So many people want to look at the past and what they had and the education level they have or how they did it. Maybe I didn't do good in high school. Maybe this. And they use it as a, as a crutch to not take that next step forward. So how do you, you know, in the world that you're in? I mean, obviously, it's funny, the world is changing less. Nobody's asking about education anymore, especially in a specialized field like this. But how do you find the belief system in yourself? That first job at the advertising gig, right? Like, how do you, how do you go from painting houses to that gig?
- [34:16]
A
Sure. Well, one, knowing that I couldn't do a job never once stopped me from trying to do it. Right.
- [34:23]
B
Yeah.
- [34:23]
A
And, and, and I was just a guy who was going to figure it out on the way. Right. You know, basically, I, I, I, I went from that job to the window factory, and I went from that job to knocking doors on a political campaign for something like $9 an hour. Right. And whatever task it was that I had ahead of me, I would figure out how to do it come hell or high water. And the guys who were ahead of me saw that, and I think they liked it. I'll give you an example. I was, I was working on the political, on a political campaign. This is, I don't know, 12, 15 years ago. And we, and we were going to have an event. We're going to have this big whatever town hall you call it, I guess. And we sent out all these flyers, all these mailers with where we were. The event was supposed to be at this community center in Virginia. And I had put the flyers together wrong and they had the wrong address on them. And they were an address for some art gallery. Right. And it's the day of the event and we realize this is screwed up. And I'm the one who screwed this up. I can't blame anyone else. So I drive to the art gallery, I bring a copy, copy the flyer with me. And I'm like, hey, this is what happened. I sent out 30,000 of these flyers with your address on them. So we have two options here. Either A, you can agree to rent me this art gallery tonight, or B, you can call the police and just drag me out of here, because that's. And they did. They. So we had this. It looked ridiculous. We had like chairs and there's a painting and everything.
- [35:43]
B
Oh, wow.
- [35:43]
A
We had, we had the event at the art gallery. Right. But it's. I, I think especially in today's world.
- [35:50]
B
Don'T jump, jump over that. Because you had a boss, right? So you had to go to your boss and say, this is what happened. But, but I'm assuming you had the solution in your pocket before I did.
- [36:02]
Wow. And so you take a massive screw up, but they've got to look at that. Your boss got like, this is pretty ingenuity. Like, not just like, we're screwed. He went out and fixed it.
- [36:11]
A
Yeah, they, the, the guy I worked for at the time was a guy by the name of Zach Conjury. Really, really successful in the public relations field. Um, and he went on to be a vice president, Edelman and a bunch of stuff. And, and he like, took me aside after that night. He's like, you're gonna do really well in this. Like, and, and I, I thought I was. When he pulled me aside, I thought it was gonna be fired. And he's like, everything, Things get fucked all the time. The guys who make it here are the guys who know how to dribble. Right? And.
- [36:39]
And that's. Know how to dribble, right?
- [36:43]
B
Know how to dribble. Yeah, that. No, that. Because you're right, dude. Things are gonna get screwed up. And again, I, I think you're going to screw stuff up in life, but I think it's how you handle what it is. I had somebody that worked for me. That would make a mistake. And I would say like, hey, you screwed this up. And again, I'm not looking to nail anybody the cross, but I expect a little. I take full responsibility. That's my fault. I'm really sorry. Blah, blah, blah. This person was like, yeah, that's not good. Yeah, yeah. I'm like, what in the world? So I just, I could not work with that person because there was no accountability there.
- [37:15]
A
You got to work. I think there's two types of people in the world, man. There's people, people, you know, if you ever saw that movie Tombstone, right? Wyatt Earp says you're the born a willow or you're born an oak. Right. And I don't know what makes someone some way, but there's people who seem to have a hunger and a desire to do better. And those people are the people you want your organization and there's people who don't. Right.
- [37:37]
B
I think a lot of that probably trends from what people see. I think if people don't see a path forward and they don't see this, I think, I think the people that come through and look at obviously. This podcast is so funny. I got a book coming out November 11th, and I'll tell you, I've never shared this on the podcast, but I'll share it now. I got a review from Publishers Weekly, which is like a house that reviews books for book buyers, right? So my publisher sent them, they gave me. They gave me a review, and a lot of it was complimentary, but at the end of it, it said that it found the reviewer, whoever wrote it said, I find the advice trite because something like, I failed to acknowledge the institutional limitations that would pro. That would cause people problems or something to that effect. And I was like, yeah, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna acknowledge some boogeyman that's out to get you because of where you grew up. And the reason I can say that is because of the people that have sat in that chair that have no business being near the success they've had. I.
- [38:37]
A
Sorry. Yeah. I mean, that is an absolute bullshit statement. And that's not to say that there aren't people who are.
- [38:43]
B
I loved it. It was a bad read. I'm like, yeah, if somebody believes this, that my book is not.
- [38:46]
A
You're never gonna be. Be successful.
- [38:47]
B
My book's not for you.
- [38:48]
A
Like, I. I grew up in a, you know, reasonably like, you know, moderate, modest, moderate level of, of of potential. Right? In that middle class family, like, you know, not super Wealthy, not super poor, you know, So I grew up with advantages that some people don't have. Like, that's absolutely a true statement. Very grateful to my parents for how hard they were to do that. But I was at a Burger King in Kingman, Arizona, last week, right? I was. I had a. It was a crazy week. I started my week in D.C. then I had to fly on a red eye to get to Arizona for a meeting in Phoenix. And I. Then I had to be back here at like 7am for a meeting in Vegas. So I'm driving back and we stopped at a Burger King to get a bite to eat. And there was this kid, I, 18 something, right? I have. I've eaten some of the nicest restaurants in the country. And this kid was more motivated as a waiter at the Burger King than I've seen at, like, the Capitol Grill. This kid's coming out like, can I refill your drinks, gentlemen? At a Burger King in Kingman, Arizona. I gave him my card. I said, you ever want a job, I'll put you somewhere in my organization, right? And I don't know what that kid's going to do in his life, but that kid. Kid at the Burger King in Kingman, Arizona, is going to be on this couch one day because he's that type of guy with that attitude, and opportunities will attract them to him.
- [39:55]
B
Yeah, I agree. I think. I think if you put out that vibe to the universe, the universe will respond. If you put out, you know, this is all there is for me, then the universe is going to provide that as well, 100% without question. What if you had to pick. If you had. Let's get into philosophy. So if you had to drill down, like, a life philosophy, what are you going with?
- [40:12]
A
That's a tough. That's a.
- [40:15]
It's. It's. It's an interesting question. And I would say that there are almost. It's almost two competing answers. So I did a podcast last week, and I had two major takeaways from the podcast. And, and the first one is. And a lot of, you know, a lot of questions about kind of how I built the business and stuff. And I was. And I was kind of sitting and thinking, meditating a little bit on what are the two biggest takeaways I've had from Mike career. And the first one is you have to be completely undefeatable, right? And what I mean by that, like, like, like you said, like I said, we all have problems in business. There's all the deals that fall through. There's the Employees who betray you. There's the loan that doesn't come through. Like, we all have that stuff. And the only difference between those of us who succeed and those of us who don't is the pure complete unwillingness to quit. Right. The absolute unwillingness to say, okay, say I'm not going to jump off the bridge, I'm going to figure this the out, right. And the second one is, and, and I don't have, I haven't codified this as well in words is I spent a lot of my career because we had a lot of success when I was very young, not giving people the respect that they deserved. Right. And what I mean by that is like people who I didn't agree with or people who I thought were, were wrong or, or I didn't, I didn't take the time to listen to them and respect their ideas. And I used to have a guy who worked for me, he was chief of staff at our company. His personality, very good friends personality is very different from mine. And, and I kind of poo pooed his ideas, right? And, and I did it with the idea of like, well, I'm so successful, I've built this, you haven't do it my way. And that guy started a competing firm. They're doing very, very well right now, based out of D.C. guys doing wonderful. And I don't know, maybe had I given his ideas a little bit more of a chance, a little bit of a Runway to prove themselves, that business would be part of my business today instead of being a competing business.
- [42:06]
B
It's funny, it's the second time I've heard that almost exact story and hear from somebody else. Somebody else sold that almost same story about their business. And it was there, I think that the question was, what's your biggest regret in your business? It was like somebody, a young person that was very bright, they wanted to put forth their ideas and they shot them all down all the time. And then eventually, because they didn't feel inclusive to the mission of the business. And if like they were contributing to the mission of the business, they wanted to go off and form their own mission. And that's what happened. He says, man, that was always my biggest regret with that.
- [42:35]
A
Yeah.
- [42:35]
B
And I love what you said about, you know, the refusal to quit because, because I love what Alex Hermosi recently said about that, which was, you know, what drives him is when things get really hard and you want to quit. He doesn't really think about quitting. He thinks this is the moment, moment when all my competitors, this is when.
- [42:51]
A
Everybody else quits right here, where everybody else quits.
- [42:53]
B
This is when everybody else quits right here.
- [42:55]
A
You know, one of the things I think about a lot is, you know, like, both successful business guys, we both had our fair share of hardships, right? But I, I think back about like, you know, my ancestors and my bloodline, like these guys who overcame the potato famine in Ireland. My grandfather washed dishes in Hell's Kitchen, enlisted to go to Vietnam, right, so he could build a better life for his family. Because, you know, child of Irish immigrants, you know, you got no education, you're poor. That's the only way you're going to get out of that life. And it means you got to go to the hellhole of the world for a couple of years to do it. And like, I have an obligation, I think, to my bloodline, to the people who sacrifice, so that I could be here today, right? And if I'm going to quit when the loan doesn't come through, the customer backs out, the employee starts his own company, whatever, right? I think that's a betrayal of the people who sacrifice so that I could sit here today and this interview.
- [43:45]
B
Well, I think more people should look at it that way. I mean, I, I think you have a responsibility not just to the people that came before you, but you have a responsibility to your future self 100%. And I mean, again, like with my book, people ask me, like, what's the concept of it? I'm like, it's, it's user's manual to my 27 year old self. I could go back and smack myself in that with a book and say, just do all this, you'll be fine. This is the book 100%.
- [44:05]
A
And, and, and it's funny because I think that life kind of works that way, right? It's like, it's like, if only we could have had these lessons when we were younger. Younger. And, and you know, I love the title of your podcast and the title of your upcoming book because that's so much of life. It's like being able to keep yourself from drifting into this place of complacency and irrelevancy, right? And, and, and a level of, of discipline, of fortitude, whatever you want to call it, to keep yourself from doing that.
- [44:29]
B
Well, the biggest problem, I love whatever Manus, who was in here said about this. Erwin goes, man, I love, I love what you talk about when you talk about the drift. Because he goes, the reason that the drift is scary is because, because you're still moving. So most people feel like, oh, I must be making progress. This must be. I'm must something good must be happening. Until they look around and realize, oh, my gosh, wait a second. I'm way away from where I thought I was going.
- [44:49]
A
You know, I heard, I heard an expression when people say they're coasting, you can only coast downhill. That's right.
- [44:54]
B
Yeah, I love that statement. You can only coast downhill. All right, well, brother, if they want to find you, how do they find you?
- [44:59]
A
Our website, rmcstrategy.com Twitter, RK McShane. Instagram Rory K. McShane. Easy guy to find.
- [45:07]
B
Cool. Well, man, thanks for coming in. I appreciate it.
- [45:09]
A
Hey, I really appreciate you having me. This has been a lot of fun.
- [45:11]
B
Listen, if you watch this today, it's pretty simple for what we're doing. If you wanted your brand to go well, f don't market to the masses, find people that can be resonant to what you're saying. Find a message that resonates with them and then your product should take off. And then also the second part of the this, be accountable to yourself. Be accountable to others, because accountability is what's going to get you where you want to go. We'll see you next week.
- [45:42]
What's up, everybody? Thanks for joining us for another episode of Escaping the Drift. Hope you got a bunch out of it or at least as much as.
- [45:49]
A
I did out of it.
- [45:50]
B
Anyway, if you want to learn more about the show, you can always go over to escaping the drift.com you can join our mailing list. But do me a favor, if you wouldn't mind, throw up that five star review, give us a share. Do something, man. We're here for you. Hopefully you'll be here for us. But anyway, in the meantime, we will see you at the next episode.