Transcription
Yeah, so I'm Daniel Priestley, not Jason Priestley. I'm an entrepreneur and an author. I've been an entrepreneur since I was 21 years old. I've built a number of different companies around the world. I was born in Australia; I currently live in London in the United Kingdom. I have an entrepreneur accelerator that we run with offices in Sydney, London, and Toronto. I've got a group of growth services companies—about seven companies in the group—that provide growth services, mostly agencies, and I've got a technology company that does, uh, marketing technology for small business. Okay.
And so for all the future fans who are listening, you're gonna want to really lean in and possibly—when this is a warning—and when I say possible, I mean go get a pen and paper if you can. This is one where you're gonna want to really pay attention to because I'm gonna be digging into this book called Key Person of Influence. Uh, you've written many books, but the one I want to focus on today is Key Person of Influence, for a lot of different reasons. As I'm reading this book and Matthew's talked about this several times, I'm like, okay, okay, I'll get the book. All right, God, you know you're getting paid by Daniel here, so I buy the book and I'm reading it, and as I go from chapter to chapter, I start to feel like we're talking about the exact same things, except for you're smarter and you've sat down and written the book about what I truly 100% believe in. Quite literally, I'm reading through this and I'm like, oh, it's about building personal brand, being clear, communicating your message and having a product ecosystem and translating what you do into intellectual property so you can scale and become a person of influence, the KPI. Like, Daniel just wrote the book about what I think, but you beat me to it many years ago.
Well, you know, if a red Ferrari drives past, a couple of people are going to notice it; they're going to describe it the same way. I would dare say what's happening is that you and I just started seeing the same stuff around the same time. We noticed what was going on in the world, and we noticed some truths that were popping up, and you know, we we probably had some shared experiences along the way, and we just started noticing what what is happening all over the world since 2010. You're giving me way too much credit because I was just doing it because, as a creative person, I'm intuitively moving my way through the world. I'm stumbling from one business to the next, and a business idea emerges; I'm like, okay, this is cool, I'm just going to do it. Your story is a little bit different, and I do want to go back in time a little bit about how you even came to this concept of a key person of influence. Tell us a little bit of back story about how you started to notice these observations or patterns about certain types of people.
I'll take you back before my first business, because it's probably a little bit relevant. I was employed number three at a startup before they even had a name or a bank account, and I spent two years working with a startup that was very fast growth. It went from zero to six million of revenue in two years, and I got to be extremely close with the founder from 19 to 21. So I had this incredibly intense start to my career that was an apprenticeship, and a lot of what I would do in those two years was I was running introduction events, and I was promoting introduction events. I was getting advertising campaigns and direct mail campaigns, and a big part of what we're doing was those introduction events to drive new business. When we got two years in, my boss—I went to him and I said, can I get shares in the company? Because I was there at the beginning, and he said, look, if you want shares in the company, you need to go start your own company. And I was like, oh, but I'm only 21, and he said, well, it's too late for shares in this company; you better figure that out for yourself. I actually did quit, and I went and started my own company, and I started an agency specializing in introduction events. So the whole concept was running two-hour introductions. We worked with financial planners, software companies, uh, franchisors, and we would do road shows of introduction events. So if someone wanted to introduce a new concept to the marketplace, we would put on two-hour intro events to do that. We would roadshow hundreds of these per year. So I built that business from zero to a couple of million in the first year, or 1.3 million in the first year, and then it went very quickly up to 10.7 million in year three. So it was a very fast-growth business that I built in Australia.
One of the things that we did to fill those events is we would have draw card speakers. So we would hire top-level best-selling authors, and we would have award winners, and we'd have people who'd built and sold companies that were very valuable companies. We'd have celebrities. So we were bringing a lot of those people as draw cards, uh, to get people to come along to to some of the events that we're running, and I would spend a lot of time behind the scenes with these people, and I would see what life was like if you're a best-selling author, and I would see what life is like if you're on television or if you you know you're a shark on Shark Tank or something like that, and it was just always incredible to me to see how just the ferociousness of inbound opportunities that would come in. So people would turn up to these events with ready-made business plans and thrust the business plans; they would climb over themselves. When I was doing an event with Richard Branson, it was literally 5,000 people queuing up to have a photo with him, and it was just kind of craziness around these people. So I I started seeing that this idea of having a personal brand was really something that completely changed the game. And around the same time, so prior to 2006, 2007, it was really people who had been on television or who had book contracts that could put themselves in that position. You had to, you know, work really hard, and it was very rare. And then along comes social media—you know, MySpace, and then YouTube, and then Facebook—and suddenly there's these engines, these digital engines that are personal brand engines; their job is to actually get you connected with anyone else in the world who thinks what you think or who wants to talk about what you want to talk about. And I I just see this and I go, whoa, okay, the world is changing here. And there was a turning point moment when Barack Obama did the 2008 campaign; he had this section on his website called Obama Everywhere, and you could connect with him on Twitter and Facebook and, you know, LinkedIn, and you could interact with him, and it was a turning point because prior to that Obama campaign, everyone thought social media was a toy for teenagers, and then after he won the election, everyone went, oh wow, we've got to get on to this; we've got to be doing this as well. So I started sharing the key insights that I'd learned from working with these top people, and one of the big insights is that technology is not necessarily your friend, and I use an analogy, which is the singer in the microphone—that a microphone is only valuable if you know how to sing. If you're a terrible singer, then a microphone actually amplifies bad singing and and doesn't help you very much. So I basically said the people who are going to succeed here are the ones who know how to show up as a key person of influence.
Okay, that was—you've obviously done this a couple of times before—that was super succinct and smooth, and it kind of gives me a lot of things to talk about. I wanted to circle back really quickly about this idea—your 21-year-old you start this business—basically, you wanted to own a piece of the company to do this thing that you were doing, and they said no, so you just did it for yourself. And it was probably the best advice that you probably got, or you know, basically their rejection, saying no, we're not going to do this, force you to make a decision—you do this. And when you say intro events, it's a product or a service that somebody's launching—what is the relationship with the draw card speakers? Are they there to headline and then pull an audience in so then you can then do the intro thing?
Yeah, so some of the events were um stock standard two-hour introduction events, so it might be introduction to financial planning concepts or introduction to a software company, and then some of the ones that we would do, which were a bit more advanced, were two or three-day conferences where we would actually get multiple speakers and we would really do deep dives, and we'd kind of be trying to activate partnerships and we're trying to sort of get a lot done in two or three days with the company, and we would always hire a draw card speaker—a reason to show up for those two-day events. Without a drawcard speaker, you could maybe get 50 people, and with the drawcard speaker, you get three or four hundred people. And was it you who is going to bear the brunt of the risk of producing this, or did these—whoever had an intro event to to benefit from—did they just pay for this and you produce and coordinate the entire event?
We would take risk. We would have a combination of setup fees, retainers, success fees, and sometimes cost splitting. So there was several different ways that we'd work with clients depending on the level of risk we were happy with and they were happy with, but the reason that it was such a profitable business is we would take a lot of risks. So we would have a much smaller number of clients—maybe two or three at any given time—but we would be in on everything they were doing. So if they were selling franchises, we would get a cut of the franchises they would sell; if they were signing up software, in some cases we even got equity in the companies. It was an interesting model because we knew how to turn on the tap.
As a young person in his early 20s, how were you able to book and get someone that was one of your draw card speakers even to pick up the phone to agree to talk to you, and how you navigate and negotiate these fees because they can be very expensive to bring somebody like that in?
Well, thinking back—and mind you, I'm 41 now, so um we're going back uh 20 years ago—okay, back to the start of this, if I remember correctly, it was just purely and simply we mostly just paid their fee. So what would you like to get paid to turn up and speak? Five grand? Ten grand? Fifteen grand? If it was within budget, we'd just get that done. And in many cases, I would get discounts because I would go looking for people who had a book to launch and that they were on a promotional tour of some sort and they wanted to be in front of audiences anyway. So I would I'd kind of time things where if someone had a new book out, I would normally be in a position to negotiate a better rate, but you know, we were working with pretty reasonable budgets to do these rollouts, um so it was never really a big challenge to do the five grand or the ten grand speaking fee.
What—that's an excellent opportunity to point out something that you talk about in the book—which is when you're working with people, you have to think about what kind of partner you would make. And so you're thinking, okay, I'd love for you to do this thing, but you're also thinking, what can I do for you? So lining the schedule up with the book that they're promoting is a win for them; it's a win for you, and I just love that kind of mindset. Is that something that you intuitively knew how to do, or did someone teach you, or did you learn that from your previous gig?
I think I learned a lot from the mentor that I had when I was 19 to 21; that was huge. But the other interesting thing is that every single week almost, I was literally sitting there listening to people who had built and sold multi-million, multi-billion dollar companies. Some of the speakers had sold billion-dollar-plus businesses, and um I was getting an MBA on the side from just having these speakers come and share. So I was hearing a lot of those concepts around win-win partnerships. The other thing, too, is I would just watch the way they are behind the scenes. One thing you notice is that what they do and say on on stage is normally a very rehearsed keynote speech, but what's far more interesting is the phone calls that they're having off to the off the side and what they're, you know, the way they negotiate and the way they keep in touch with you, and some of the things that they're involved in and also the business opportunities that they're fielding as people are thrusting things um towards them.
It didn't occur to me to ask you this, but when you said you were kind of getting your MBA by working with these high-net-worth super successful people, what is the level of education you completed?
So I uh went to a pretty rough high school in in Australia, um 1600 kids, average class size of about 40 people, and and pretty rough in terms of, you know, bullying and fighting and those kind of things. It was not an up-market school by any stretch. I went to university uh when I was 18, and I did one year of university, and I thought that university was going to be a place where you'd meet real-life entrepreneurs, people who'd built successful companies, and turns out in year one you don't meet many of those people, um but I was so impatient that I I quit to join the startup at 19.
I see, and what were you studying currently before you kind of just quit school?
I I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur, so I had experiences in my teenage years. I worked at McDonald's, and the guy I worked for was a guy called Randy, and he was an American guy living in Australia. He owned six McDonald's franchises; he'd gotten in right at the start with McDonald's in Australia, and he really kind of explained to me the difference between working versus owning businesses, and he made it seem so cool that you could own a business instead of working a business, and I was just really um excited by the idea of being a business owner and and being able to build something and do a startup before I even knew what a startup was. I just had heard this idea called entrepreneur. He had recommended a book called The E-Myth, and um and I kind of, you know, became hooked on this idea that one day I want to own businesses and be an entrepreneur.
It seems like you are like the perfect person to be doing what you're doing because it seems like you're paying attention to not what's only happening on stage but the off-stage conversations and just soaking all this stuff up and then incorporating into how you run your business. Okay, now I kind of understand the business and where you came from. I want to get back to the this concept of the key person of influence, KPI. Why is it important that we should desire to be a person of influence? What are the benefits of being a person of influence?
Everything changed when digital came along, and up until digital, you had to be doing business in a local geography; you had to be a local person, right? So if you're an accountant, you're in competition with maybe a few accountants on the local scene, and you know, you've got a local area of maybe 50 or 100,000 people who live around your area, and that's your market, right? That's where your patch is. And then digital came along, and it basically said you can do business with anyone in the world, but anyone else can also come and do business with your people as well. The geography thing doesn't matter anymore, and essentially we used to niche the business or niche the business based on this local geography, and then suddenly it's like, how do I grow my business or how do I find traction within an industry now? The thing that I noticed was this personal brand and the fact that personal brand engines—social media technology—was amplifying these personal brands, and I started to see it everywhere. I started to see that Steve Jobs had actually had cut through in a massive industry using his personal brand, and Elon Musk is having cut through right now in a massive industry using his personal brand. I started to see that when you take an example like Twitter, you'll have Tim Cook, who's been the CEO for just over 10 years, and he'll have twice as many followers as Apple, which is considered to be one of the most important brands. You'll see Richard Branson with 12 million followers versus Virgin with a quarter of a million followers. So you start to realize that people really buy into the person behind the business; they want to know who's behind this business, and then they'll buy the products and the services, and they'll buy into the products and the services. However humans are wired, we really resonate this way; this is how we're built; this is how we're programmed. We want to buy from businesses when we feel like we know the person.
One of the activities I do when I'm talking to a group is I will say, without looking, what color is the G in the Google logo? So you take that Google logo and you say, what color is the first letter G? And I'm curious, actually, do you know off the top of your head what color it is?
No, I'm going to guess, and I'm going to say green.
Yeah, so it's like red, green, or blue, or yellow. It's actually always blue, and it always has been blue, but our human our human brains don't really connect with logos in the same way that we connect with faces, right? So it's the people in the faces that really capture us, and then we're excited about the business and the brand. We're excited about people first, and then businesses and brands. So I kind of started basically telling people the fastest way to grow your business is to build this key person of influence brand and then transfer that positive energy onto a business brand that can take on a life of its own, but it all starts with that personal brand.
Some of the reasons that you should be a key person of influence is inbound opportunities, right? You don't want to be chasing opportunities; you want people to identify and know who you are and what you stand for, and you want people to come to you as opposed to having to go running around facing them. And one of the big things that happens when you become a key person of influence is you make a switch from functionality to vitality. So functionality is the ability to perform a task, perhaps to even do it quite well. Vitality is is a very different phenomenon. So vitality has two definitions, which is irreplaceable and life force. So if something is vital, it's irreplaceable, and if it's vital, it's got life force to it. So what happens when you become that key person of influence is you get to work as an irreplaceable life force within your business and within your industry, and you tend to get energized by the work and you get energized by the things you're invited to do as opposed to being worn down by that stuff. You know, one of the main reasons is just the type of work you end up doing is the fun stuff, the stuff you feel like you're born to do. Those are very compelling reasons why you want to be a key person of influence.
Okay, so you told me I need to be this person; I've just woken up to 2022 and just realize this with your words kind of just tickling my brains. Okay, so what are the traits that make up people who have this special thing that you're talking about—this the key people of interest? What is it that is common to all of them?
So what they're doing is they're doing five things really well, and these are the five things that were common to every one of the ones that I was working with. It's important to do them in a particular order as well. So the first thing is that they are phenomenally good at pitching. So they know how to pitch their own value; they know how to pitch the value of what they're doing; they know how to enroll people into new ways of thinking and behaving. So pitching is a skill that great entrepreneurs have, and it's essentially—it's code for enrolling people into new ways of thinking and behaving, and it's not about answering people's questions; it's not about telling people your backstory or your history; it's not about telling them necessarily even about your vision for the future or your mission or any of that. It can be those things, but it's actually the true test as to whether you're pitching or not is have you enrolled someone into a new way of thinking or behaving? That's part one. The second thing that all key people of influence do is they publish content. They often have books, but they will have podcasts and videos and blogs and articles, and they're prolific in their output. They make it very easy for you to deep dive on their content. If you want to spend seven hours in a row watching things, reading things, listening to things, it's very easy to do that. So any of that stuff is published content, and we want to have a lot of published content that is along a narrative that reinforces the pitch. The third thing is what I would call the product ecosystem. You mentioned it earlier. So the way key people of influence tend to behave is if you think about the Eiffel Tower in Paris, it doesn't actually make a lot of money, right? People pay maybe a couple of euros to go up the Eiffel Tower and down, but what makes an a huge amount of money is the cafes, restaurants, and hotels that are positioned around the Eiffel Tower, and if you're positioned near the Eiffel Tower, then you get huge amounts of opportunities because people come to see the Eiffel Tower and then they stay in the hotels and the cafes and the restaurants. So the way key people of influence behave is very much they become the Eiffel Tower for a product ecosystem. So they're not selling themselves; they're not selling their time for money, but what they do do is they position products and services and businesses around themselves so that all they have to do is just show up and tell stories and have fun, and as if by magic, everything that's going on around them just gets lifted. So that's the product ecosystem. The fourth one is profile. So they're fastidious about their profile; they guard their reputation; um they amplify their message on multiple platforms; they want to be in traditional media; they want to be in social media; they want to win awards; they want accolades; they want associations with other key people of influence, and they want to do live events; they want to be on on stages and platforms. All of that is profile-building activities. However, there's a catch to that, and they're truly great key people of influence are never chasing the spotlight; they're not saying, look at me, look at me, look at me; they're always becoming a spotlight and saying, look at that, check that thing out, have a look at what's going on over here. So even though they show up on platforms, the truly great ones divert the attention from themselves onto a trend or onto an idea, onto something that they want you to pay attention to. So that's important; they're not they're not narcissistic; they're channeling that energy somewhere important. And then the final thing is um partnerships. So they access resources beyond their control. So rather than trying to save up the money to do something, they partner with people who already have the money, and then they do it with them. Rather than necessarily getting a million followers, they might find someone who already has a million followers and partner with them to amplify the message. Maybe they don't have to develop a hot product; maybe they partner with someone who's already got the hot product but needs more attention on the hot product, and they partner with them to amplify that. So in summary, pitch, published, product, profile, partnership—the five Ps—that uh that are covered. And you're saying this sequence really does matter, so you start with having a clear pitch, and what it sounded to me like pitch is this ability to
Persuade like how influential you are in getting people to do or adopt different behavior or to have a new way of thinking. So when I think of that, is that like a coach or a therapist? Because they do really work in that space; they help people have a new way of thinking or behaving. Does that align with what you're saying?
I would say there's definitely an overlap in the skill set, the influential skill set. When I think of pitching, it's normally one to a group, or it can often be one to a group, and you're really trying to enroll someone into something they hadn't really maybe considered before. The people who do really great pitching, they get you to see something mundane in a brand new light, somewhere a way you'd never seen it before, and you, they, and you act upon it, or they get you to notice a trend that you hadn't noticed before, and you then act upon it. You can't unsee it once you've seen it. So I'm sure there is an overlap in skills with therapists or coaches, definitely. And a lot of key people of influence make great coaches. Think Steve Jobs bringing people around to the idea of the personal computer. Think about Elon Musk bringing people around to the electric car and like standing there talking about Cybertruck. And right up until the minute before you saw Cybertruck, you never had it in your head that you wanted a Cybertruck. That's just not even—if I got you to draw a hundred different types of vehicles that you wanted to own in your life, you would never have drawn a Cybertruck. And then suddenly Elon says, "This is the thing that I want you to consider," and you go, "Oh, I might put a $100 deposit down for one of those things." So that's what I think of when I think of the truly great pitching, key people of influence delivering a pitch.
I'm glad you clarified because you added another variable to that. So it's not that you're only able to enroll or influence the way that people think or their behavior, but you need to be able to unite larger groups of people, on a, at scale. Because you could be the world's greatest coach or therapist, but if you're working one-on-one, your level of influence, impact, is going to be pretty finite; you're actually not moving enough people.
Right. Yeah, yeah. That's a great distinction. It's that ability to kind of enroll groups and to, and to unite thinking, you know, to get a group of people lined up at the same time. Okay, so for everybody who's listening, do you pass the first test? And if you don't, let's just talk a little bit about, like, okay, I want to do this, Daniel. How do I become better at pitching? How do I become better at being able to, to influence the way people think and behave? What can I do to develop this skill?
So there are some tactical things that you can do, superficial things, and then there are some deeper things you can do. So the deepest stuff is that you really need to understand, in what way do you want to impact the world? So what's your, what's your deeper purpose? What's your purpose beyond making money? What is it you actually want to enroll people in? So for you, it's really clear that you want to get a billion people to do what they love. And you only have to spend a few minutes on your social media profile, and you start seeing, okay, this is the game that this, this guy is playing. He's playing a game called, "Enroll a billion people into doing what they love." That is the deep work. The deep work is to make up a game worth playing. And when I say, "Make up a game worth playing," you know, a lot of people go out there and they're like looking for a lightning bolt to hit them. But having worked with some of the world's most innovative and amazing entrepreneurs, they just literally sit down and make up a game worth playing. They say, "It's a blank canvas; let's come up with 10 ideas and pick the best one, and let's get on with it." So making up a game worth playing, coming up with something that you want to enroll people in, is, is part, is a deeper part of it. Tactically, you want to be able to rehearse and practice what's called a social pitch, which is a 30-second pitch to just test whether someone's interested in playing that game and learning, learning some of the deeper insights around that game. You want to rehearse and practice what I would call a scheduled pitch, when you're scheduled to, to be presenting to someone or you're presenting to a group. You want to have a scheduled, an approach in that situation. And then essentially you want to do lots of role-playing and get good at it and get comfortable about it. And that's the tactical side, you know, figuring out the right stories, the right analogies, the right facts, the right research that kind of persuades people to see things in a new light. Everything you say resonates with me. So you need to have an idea that's bigger than you, like what kind of impact do you want to make? And I think you use the word "dent" as part of your company name, right?
Yeah.
What kind of dent do you want to make on the universe?
That's exactly where we got the name "Den" from, the quote, the Steve Jobs quote that an entrepreneur's job is to go make a dent in the universe. And yeah. So the first part is, what dent do you want to make? Okay, so every leader needs a parade. And so you have to kind of say, "We're interested in this thing," so now you have a whole group of people who say, "I believe what you believe; I want to do what you, you're doing. Tell us how." And then you kind of bring them—
Okay, I think you made it really tangible and super clear, and I think that's part of being a key person of influence, to be able to bring things into clarity for others, right? And to be able to communicate—
A really important distinction on that is it's important to get other people clear even when you can't do it for yourself. One thing that I can tell you is that some of the greatest entrepreneurs at any given time, they're feeling around in the dark looking for the light switch themselves. They're at best directionally correct; they're trying to figure it out; they're trying to work it out; they're trying to solve problems. And even on days where they're completely at a loss as to how to move their, the company forward or to move their own personal mission forward, they have the ability to get other people clear even on days they're not clear themselves. So that's an important distinction. The superpower is that you can do this for others even if you don't, even on the day you can't do it for yourself.
I'm curious why you make a distinction and point that out.
The reason I point that out is because I deal with a lot of entrepreneurs who feel that they need to have this absolute crystal clarity themselves, and that they don't have the right to be getting a group of people aligned to a big idea until such time as they've figured out the whole path themselves. And the reason I wanted to make that point clear is that actually it's the opposite, that as the entrepreneur at the front of the ship or the key person of influence who's trying to lead the, lead the movement, you're going to be in the murky waters; you're going to be in the, in the dark, and you're going to be directionally correct at best, and you have to be able to get the others clear even when you're not. And you're not meant to sit around waiting until you've got clarity yourself.
I love that. That's, that's a very good visual there. So I'm thinking, okay, so if you're in the front forging a path into the unknown woods or on a ship in the murky waters, of course it's not clear to you, but you've blazed a path for them, and so they can see, like, okay, it's still safe; you didn't hit a rock; you didn't fall off the earth; you're still okay. And so they can follow the beat of your drum, if you will.
I love that. Yeah, beautiful. Okay, to kind of continue moving down this path here, you talk about publish; you need to be able to be a prolific content creator. This is where a lot of people get stuck. How do you help to get them unstuck because they're afraid, like, "I don't know enough," all those imposter monster syndrome things keep popping up, or "I'm just not good on media," I don't know, and who, who wants to show up for my writing or my talks anyways? How do you help people get unstuck there?
Well, the key idea is that prolific beats perfect. And that if you look at anyone who is hugely successful, they're prolific, not perfect. So Dolly Parton has written something like three or four thousand songs, and she's got, I don't know, a dozen hits. I was at a concert the other night, a band called Muse, and their catalogue goes right back into the 90s, and you know, they've got two or three really great songs off of each of seven or eight albums. And the concert that they do now is an incredible concert, but it's taken 25 years of prolific output to come up with that level of content. The Beatles, on average, when you work out how many songs the Beatles wrote, they wrote a new song every 12 days for eight years straight. They have a prolific catalogue, not a perfect catalogue. So prolific beats perfect is the first mantra to kind of live by that mantra. The second thing I would point out is some research, and there's a guy called Professor Robin Dunbar who came up with something called Dunbar's numbers, and he worked out the way the human brain organizes groups of people is into about five people in a family and 15 people who are very close friends, and then 50 people who are your friendship circle, and then you've got 150, then 500, then 1500, and there's these kind of concentric spheres that you have around you of, of people. And he realized that in order for you to trust someone, to feel that you know who they are, you like them, and you trust them enough to perhaps purchase something from them, he found that there was a significant amount of time that someone had to spend getting to know someone, and it was about seven hours to make it into the acquaintance sphere. Within a short space of time, something like three months at most, you've got to clock up seven hours with someone for them to be in the acquaintance sphere. So Google came along and did some research as well, called "Zero Moments of Truth," and they found that people buy from brands that they've had 11 touch points with. So when they look at someone's purchasing history on Google, and then they work backwards, "How many times did that person get to know the brand in the lead up to the purchase?" The average number was 10.7. When you think about publishing, it's a very human and essential ingredient that people need to warm themselves up to buying from, from somebody. So they tend to have to do seven hours and eleven interactions in order to feel comfortable and confident that they know you, like you, and trust you. There's only a couple of ways that you can do that. You can do it in an analog way, taking people out for dinners and coffees and, and do it one at a time or in small groups, and it has to be synchronous, that you both in the same place at the same time, or you can use digital technology; you can publish, and you can have asynchronous. So, for example, what happened with you and I is that in 2010, I wrote a book called *Key Person of Influence*. I was literally a different person; there's not one cell in my body that is alive today that was alive back then. But in 2010, I write a book, and then in 2022, you discover that book and read that book. Twelve years later, we have an asynchronous communication, and when we jump onto this podcast, you're feeling quite warm to talking to me, and it's because you've had this opportunity to read the book, and you're, you've warmed up to the idea that we're on the same page. So essentially that's a method that scales, and it's a method that is asynchronous. So you know, essentially that's going to be the, the method for building seven hours, 11 interactions with a lot of people across time and space.
You've done this before, Daniel. I suspect that was very important.
That was very smooth. It was really smooth. I'm very impressed with you for a number of different reasons. Okay, so you kind of took me as, as a skeptical audience member from, like, "No, I don't want to do this," and you're like, "Okay, that works," and he makes a good argument there. And you mentioned Muse, which one of their songs is one of my favorite songs of all time, my top 10 songs. I'm like, okay, mention the Beatles; you kind of got it all worked in there very well done. And then you said, through proving it to me 12 years later, the person that you were time-traveled and met me here so that you and I can have this conversation. You're proving it to us the value of writing something and putting out content out there. And you're also saying to people, "Get over this idea that you need to put out this perfect thing," because as you cited person after person, if we just keep doing the work, eventually we'll find our hit.
Yeah, we will. And on top of that, finding a hit is not even necessarily how people build trust. You've probably never had a huge hit with your best friend. When you think about why is your best friend your best friend? It's because you've clocked up time together, lots of time together. So it's not like your best friend has been sitting there judging everything that came out of your mouth and saying, "Was that a good conversation? Was it not a good conversation? You know, was that the best thing that they've, that I've heard today?" It's, it's an ongoing conversation; it's time spent. So when we think about putting stuff out there prolifically, you may never have a hit, right? Let's say you never have an amazing piece of content that comes out, but the truth is that actually that's not how humans work. We work based on just clocking up consistent time together. And if you clock up consistent time with people, they will like you, and they'll know you, and they'll want to work with you. One quick example that I think illustrates this is that if you walk down a busy street and there's hundreds of people going past you, and I stop you at the end of the street and I say, "Describe for me some of the people you walk past," you're not going to remember anyone you walk past. But if you're walking down that same busy street, and let's say a friend from high school was on the other side of the road and they just, you just caught them out of the corner of your eye, your brain just lights up, and you're like, "Oh my goodness, there's Luke!" And you go across, you cross the road, you almost get hit by a bus, right? And you go, "Hey Luke, how you going? I haven't seen you for ages," right? And you suddenly, you, there's a connection. This is how humans work; we work based on the time we clock up with each other. It's not that this person on the other side of the road was remarkably different from every other person on the planet; it's not like they were super tall or super good-looking or any of that stuff; it's just you clocked up time with them.
You said that you, you left uni after a year, but I suspect that you are probably a prolific reader, and you just learn a lot. So I mean, correct me, I mean, you're pointing out different studies; you're referencing things; you're very articulate. I consider a young man, I'm nine years, you're a senior. So as a young man, you're very articulate. How is it that you're able to get this information and retain it? What's your secret?
I would say the secret is just I'm interested, interested in people, interested in how the world works. It's just, it's just time, my values, so it's aligned to the stuff that I care about. We'll just leave it like that. All right, we're powering through some really big ideas. I've been talking to Daniel Priestley; he's the author of *Key Person of Influence*; he's written a couple other books, *Oversubscribe*, *24 Assets*, *Entrepreneur Revolution*, and there's another book I think you co-authored called *How to Raise Entrepreneurial Kids*. That's a separate episode; I need to talk to you about that, but I don't want to muddy the waters right now. Let's go on to point number three, the product ecosystem. You gave us the overview; I totally get this; I see it; I understand how this works. I want to be able to persuade people and unite others; I'm going to start to become a prolific creator because one of your maxims, "Prolific beats perfect." Tell me a little bit more about this product ecosystem idea; how do I turn these things into other things, especially if I'm in the service space?
Well, let me get really specific on this one, and I'll kind of get into what we've discovered works best. So we've discovered that there are four types of products that a business needs to have in order to scale, and there's four categories, and a business needs to have something in each of the four categories if it really wants to maximize its performance. So the four product categories is: the first one is called a gift, something you can give away for free, asking nothing in returns, no, no strings attached. Normally it's digital; podcasts make great gifts. The trick to it being a great gift is that people receive it as a gift; they feel that it was well packaged, well timed, thoughtful, and it was freely given with nothing really asked in return. So that's a very powerful product for getting scale and for getting a lot of attention, and everything's downstream from attention. So then the next product is something called a product for prospects. A product for prospects is an easy way to engage; it's a first thing that people can do. It could be an introduction workshop, like my first business was all about; it could be an online diagnostic or an online scorecard or a test. From a business point of view, you want something that scales pretty easily and doesn't take up a lot of time. You don't want to have a product for prospects which is like a first 10 hours of your time working with someone cheaply. You want something that sits out there that is an easy first thing that people can buy, or they don't even have to buy it; they just engage with it. So a free, a free webinar is actually a great product for prospects, but it should be productized; it should have a package that, you know, "Ticket plus this plus this," it should, you know, it should feel like a product that you, that you're engaging with. So then after the product for prospects, you've got your core offering. This is the, the main thing that you do; it could be a service; it could be a product; it could be an offer; it could be a productized service; it could be a decommoditized product that has additional services with it; could be gold, silver, and bronze version type thing. But that's the core product; that's the main thing that you do. And then the final product is called a product for clients, and this is something where you take people on an extended journey, and you go on a long journey with them; you, you really look after them for years at a time, and it's different to the core product. BMW has cars as its core product, but it has finance and insurance as its product for clients. It actually makes about 40% profit margin on finance and insurance and about three or four percent on cars, but the only reason it makes 40 on finance and insurance is because they covered all the costs of winning the client through the cars, and then they have, you know, blue ocean after that. So it's the ecosystem that bubbles up the profit. Now here's the interesting thing with ecosystem: if you sliced it up and just simply said, "I want to get rid of, I only want to do the core product," well, then the core product's no longer profitable because you've got to somehow absorb all the other costs into just the price of the core product. If you said, "Oh, you know, I'm making 40 off the finance and insurance, let's stop doing the cars," then you stop doing the cars in the following year, the finance and insurance stops. So it's actually the ecosystem; it's the gift, the product for prospects, the core offering, and the product for clients, all working together to perform different roles of, of building trust and attention and fulfilling an initial need and then an ongoing need. And it's that ecosystem that makes the business profitable. So these four products, they're interconnected; you should not try to remove one because they work in harmony and unison with each other.
I want to ask you about your business a little bit here, so I understand the concepts. So for you, the gift is probably things that you release, a podcast, doing content like this, so others can experiences; there's no strings attached. Take me through the KPI ecosystem; what is your product for prospects, your core offering, and then your product for client?
As a little bit bigger business, we have a few things in each category. So in the product for prospects, you'll have books. So I've got some books that people tend to buy on Amazon if they want to have an easy first experience. I've got what we call scorecards. Scorecards are self-diagnostic tests that people take, so they go online, they answer a series of questions, and it spits out a PDF report telling them where they can improve and how they can make some changes, and it's based upon them answering 40 questions, which then leads to a customized report. And that's a really powerful product for prospects because it's free, it's available 24/7. I get all that data; they get a personalized experience. The third type of product for prospects is we have workshops, initial workshops, two-hour Zoom workshops that we run where people jump on; it's free to attend; they get an introduction to the type of work that we do, and they can kind of evaluate whether they resonate with that or not. So those are the three main things that we have as our product for prospects, and it's often the case that a lot of our clients will have read the book, taken the scorecard, and attended the workshop before becoming a client. And then the client is what, your business accelerator? Yeah. So the core product is we launched an entrepreneur accelerator back in 2010, and now we have a set of entrepreneurial accelerators for startups; we have one for people who are scaling their business, and then people who are running a business and that they actually want to run a smooth business. And we've packaged that up with software, and we've packaged it up with mentoring and coaching, and we've packaged it up with an online learning system that we've got vetted suppliers, tools, and resources, a peer group and network, all packaged up really nicely so that you actually join an accelerator, and you're accepted into a community, and you've got an accountability group and a coach. Every two weeks you've got sessions to attend. So all of that's the accelerator program that we run. So that's our call, that's the core business. The ballpark price of it, so we have for startups, we work on around three grand, and then for more scale-ups, we work on about seven grand for the year. And actually, to be honest, that's not like, it's not even where we really make the money; that's for 12 months worth of, like, we do three-hour sessions every, every two weeks. We have phenomenal, world-class trainers who come in and deliver the training. So you know, for us, that's not where we're trying to make a lot of profit.
And I think I heard on a different uh episode that you did 3,500 or so people have gone through this already. Did I get that number right?
Yeah. Yep, that's right.
Okay, wonderful. You made it super clear. So you talk about the ecosystem; when I think of ecosystem, I look at it as a circular thing, but it also sounds quite similar to some kind of marketing funnel. So there's a big broad audience who's just going to get what you put out there; they're going to get value, but they don't become super curious, and that they, the journey ends there for them. And each time they're becoming more and more enrolled; they're developing those warm feelings that you're talking about. And so you arrive, kind of, they, they're at this point, must be—
Pre-sold, because if you're listening to this podcast sometime, and if you're in the future, dear future you, you're going to listen to this and then you're like, "This guy is super smart; I really like what he's saying," and he's saying it in a way that I can hear, because you do have—it could be the Australian accent, but I think it's just really—you have a pleasant way of saying things that doesn't turn or alienate people, you know, turn people off or alienate them. So then they're gonna go, "You know what, fine, fine Chris, I'll buy the book, *Key Person of Influence* by Daniel Priestley," and you're gonna buy that, and you can read through it. I'm like, "Whoa, okay, I had a deeper dive; I need to sign up for this two-hour workshop. It's free, low risk to me," and they're going deeper and deeper into the relationship because you've said this before: you kind of need something like seven hours of interaction to become acquainted with someone so that you're in a space that you're ready to buy. Plus, now we've not maybe hit 11 touch points, but you're hitting a lot of touch points.
Yeah, that's true. And look, one thing I feel strongly about is I really don't like the words "funnels." I feel like the word "funnel" is really dehumanizing, and it also—it—it kind of is removed from the value. The reason I think about product ecosystems is because at every single step, I want people to feel they got value, and even if they walked away at that point, they say, "I had an amazing product; I had that product was great; it was a standalone valuable use of my time; it was a valuable product." So when we create an online scorecard, if we never hear from them again, and it's that's all they ever do, they go, "Wow, that was really great; that little experience, I enjoyed that product." So for me, when I think about funneling, it's like, I wouldn't want someone to funnel my friend or funnel my grandma uh into a thing like that. By the way, I want people I know and like to go through a good journey where they enjoy products and good products that are that are good for them.
Do you think this concept—like I was reluctant to use the word "final book"; I was just envisioning there's different touch points and it gets smaller and smaller—so I apologize for using that; I was trying to find another one—is it maybe like overlapping circles or something? I like to think of it as an ascending transaction model, right? So it's an ascent; I like ATM, right? Because ATM has another connotation, but you enjoy something, so you want to ascend to the next thing; you want to kind of get more value; you want to have an ascending exchange of value. So each step makes you feel comfortable that you'd like more value with this particular company or this organization or this individual.
So then the final part of our thing, just to kind of finish that off, is the product for clients. This is actually where we do make a lot of money on the back end of the accelerator. We have a group of service companies that do a lot of implementation work uh with our clients. We have film production, animation; we have IT services, front-end and back-end developers; we have fundraising, capital raising, so financial forecasts and slide decks and and all of that sort of stuff. We've got Facebook and Google advertising support. So we actually have a group of companies that each provide services that people want when they're growing and scaling their business at different phases of that journey. Now, because those businesses are plugged into our accelerator, and because the accelerator covers its costs and makes the whole engine cost neutral, our agencies become extremely profitable because they don't have to worry about winning business; they've always got great clients; they've got plenty to choose from. So now we have the this group of agencies that are always growing with great clients, and they can charge, you know, reasonable prices, but much more profitable than in any other agency in the same space. These are companies you either own or you partner up with. Uh, we own—so we've we've actually gone on a court—yeah, we acquired companies into the group. So we went and bought um a group of agencies.
And then the other final thing is we spun out our own technology. So we identified some intellectual property that we had developed in-house; we thought it was well suited to be a tech company, so we spun that into its own company, and that's been a very fast-growth technology company that was launched in the pandemic and has become a really great hit. What is that company called? So that company's called Score App, and we were building the technology for running the online assessments, the scorecards for ourselves, and I launched three scorecards, and 90,000 people took my scorecards, which flooded us with leads, and basically we had incredibly data-rich leads, and we were able to have very sensible conversations with people based on the scorecard data. And a lot of my clients said, "How do I get one of those?" We sent it to our developer team, and they would build them for about ten thousand dollars because they were building them from scratch, and we started to realize there was just a process to this; there was a creative process to creating scorecards, and it could be turned into a tech platform. So we turned it into a technology platform. Um, so now we have about two thousand clients globally who are using uh online scorecards; they are using it as a way of generating data-rich leads, and it's an automatic system that collects data and then delivers a personalized report.
Do you see that Score App needs its own product ecosystem, or is it part of the KPI ecosystem? So Score App is being designed as a standalone business, and I've just written a book just for Score App in the last couple of weeks; I just wrote a 27,000-word book for an introduction to scorecard marketing, and we've started running some introduction workshops that are standalone workshops for Score App, and we're building out its own product ecosystem. The Score App in two years is like—it's becoming—we raised money recently at a 15-million-dollar valuation, so it was it was kind of like a very quick spin-out and has become valuable quite quickly. So because it's valuable, it needs to become its own ecosystem; it's being built as a standalone business. I see, so you'll follow the model that you're talking to people about, which is you have the product, and then you're going to build up the the gift, the product for prospects, and the core offering and do the same thing. And so now it's in exactly—exactly—beautiful. Wow, I'm glad I asked you about this because the example you gave with BMW, and that you have to have the BMW, which isn't a giant profit center, but it's necessary to be able to sell the financing, whatever else, where they make the 40% profit. So you're saying that when you do this entrepreneur or accelerator, it's not a giant money maker for you because it's a big commitment; it's a lot of value you're delivering, but on the back end, you've got a suite of tools, services, coaches, consultants who can service you, but the onboarding is fairly painless because they're so deep into that ascending model that you're talking about.
Yeah, it's—if I was to talk to my CFO, my CFO would say some things make money and some things don't, but I would always look at it and just say it's the ecosystem that's working or the ecosystem that's not. And yes, it turns out that the profit ends up typically on the P&L of the agencies that we have, but ultimately it's the ecosystem that has produced the profit. So, and we all know that as a as a group of companies, we we know how what the game is that we're playing. And the other thing too that's nice about an ecosystem is that you don't have to try so hard with clients in terms of there's no arm-twisting that needs to go on when you've got a good ecosystem; the ecosystem produces the result. And if people want to slow down, they can slow down; if they want to speed up, they can speed up; if they want to take on services, they can; if they don't want to do it themselves, that's totally fine as well. So you're not trying to rush people or kind of funnel them to a particular outcome; you're just letting the ecosystem work.
A lot of people do have their core offering or their products for clients, so if they're listening to this, this sounds wonderful. So do they go back in and start to say like, "How do I begin this relationship with people, and how do I give them value?" One of the easiest ways that they could do is just a monthly introduction to blank. So if you just seem like—let's say you're a website designer—an introduction to high-performing websites, an introduction to using Shopify. So if you were to just simply have a monthly, fortnightly, weekly introduction presentation, and you put together that first step, so someone can spend an hour with you on Zoom with a group of people, so it's a group presentation—let's say that is a really powerful—that's how I got my start, right? That was my first business was introduction to blank. That's a great place to start, and we used to do those in physical locations, but now you can do that online. And I would also say, of course I would say this, right, an assessment or a scorecard or a quiz that people can take any time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. What we want with an assessment is that they can self-diagnose: "Do I need you or not?" Like, for example, do you need a new logo? Do you need a brand refresh? Take the quiz, find out. You answer a series of questions; it says your brand strength is 45, and you could improve quite a lot—your the strength of your brand uh if you were to take these following steps. So essentially people could self-assess: "Do I need this product or service?" So the Score App helps me to engineer these questions and then to do the analytics and reporting and collecting and scraping the data for everyone, right? It does four things really well: it does a beautiful landing page that explains why you should take a quiz; it does the questionnaire where the feed feeds a questions to you one at a time with yes or no or yes/no/maybe, your sliding scale answers; and then it has a point system attached to each question; and then it presents the results. So it has a beautiful kind of reveal where it says, "Da da, this is who you are, and this is your score, and here's—" and then it actually has dynamic content on the page, so a low score will look different to a high score, and it will have special offers based on how they answer the questions, and it'll send them a PDF that is dynamic content as well. And then the final thing it does is it shows you their scorecard owner, all that data, so it shows you the individual person's data and how they answer the questions, aggregate data and statistics for how everyone answers the questions, so it helps you make sense of the data once you've got it.
Incredible. No wonder you're having such great success; it sounds like something—I don't know if Ben Burns, who's my chief operating officer, has read the book because I told him to read your book, but we just launched a very similar thing—quite literally 40 questions, too. I don't really know—is this the magic number, 40 questions? And it spits out one of four results, like you're more likely in need of this or that or something like that, and then the person can decide, "Okay, great, I don't need this product; I might need something else entirely." Crazy powerful; it'll be it'll be a total game changer. Okay, so what I want to do is I'm going to come back to this whole concept of personalization and data analysis, but if people are data analytics and people listening to this, like, "Chris, don't let him get off the hook," it's been so great so far; there's still the profile on the partnership; maybe you can just give us that in a bundle so we can go to the data analytics part.
Yeah, so um, profile is essentially—if you start with the question, "What does Google say about you?" If I Google your name, what comes up? What images? What videos? What—what happens on page one of Google if I Google you? More and more every major opportunity that you're going to get in the next five years, 10 years, 20 years is going to involve Google search; someone's going to Google you before they go ahead and do something big with you. I'm sure you probably Googled me to see if there's any, you know, weird complaints or if there's any—has—is he, you know, "He wrote the book all this time ago; what's he doing now?" Perhaps you wanted to know. So there's that Google search, and essentially that's the main test for your profile: what happens when I Google you? So what typically happens for most people is it's either really quiet; there's not a lot there, or it's boring—like it's a LinkedIn profile and a Twitter account—or it's confusing; there's a serial killer in Florida with the same name or something like that, um, and uh or it's great, you know, it's it's really good; it looks like you're you're an amazing person; you perhaps you've won awards; maybe you've written a book; maybe you've uh, you know, interviewed some interesting people, right? So all of that comes up on the front page, and and that's profile. So the important thing for everyone to know is that you're in charge of that; like you're not the victim of Google; you can put that stuff together; like all of the engines are there; they're free; takes a little bit of time, but you can you can build and improve that; you can you can improve what comes up with Google. So that would be profile. And then the final one is partnership, and partnership is essentially how we overcome the illusion that we're living in a scarce and resource-poor world, and we realized that actually there's more money on the planet than ever before; there's more PhDs on the planet; there's more technology; there's more amazing talented people than ever before, and really we don't need to have the resources; we just need to partner with the people who have the resources. So a simple example is one of my clients said to me, "Do you think I should go get a PhD at university? It'll take me three years and 90,000 pounds." And I said, "Um, why don't you see if you can get some existing PhDs to join an advisory board?" So within a couple of weeks, she had an agreement for I think two or three PhDs to join an advisory board; it was 4,000 pounds per person per year as the kind of fee, and it was amazing because within one month, this person who was going to spend 90,000 pounds in three years now has two PhDs on an advisory board, and it turns out the PhDs already existed; they were already in the world; the world didn't need necessarily another PhD; it just needed those resources to come together. So you can partner with someone who's got a brand; partner with someone who's got money, et cetera. The key to partnership is knowing how to structure partnerships, and the hard thing that most people don't know is how do you structure these deals? It's beyond the scope of today's conversation, but essentially every single partnership has already been done before by somebody, and there are established structures. So there are ways to structure a brand partnership; there are ways to structure a speaking gig; there are ways to structure a finance deal or like angel investment, seed investment, venture capital, private equity; these are all essentially just alluding to types of investment structures that are very well-worn parts. So when people feel overwhelmed that they don't have the resources they need, it's actually just that they don't know how to structure a deal with the person who has the resource.
I think you you also talked about this in the book; I think you're like, "People are confused that they want to find an original problem; it's like—somebody's already worked through this problem, right? Yours is not so unique in the world that no one has ever seen it before."
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like 95% of all businesses are exactly the same, and there's a little bit that's different, but go find the person who's already done it, right? And so it's a hard pill for creative people to swallow, like you're not a unique unicorn that you think you are, because all businesses uh deal with marketing, customer service, client acquisition, those kinds of things, and that's the 90—that's the same. It's not to say that that 5 to 10% that's different doesn't matter; I mean, look at human beings; human beings are 95% the same; I think we're 97% the same as chimpanzees or something like that, um, there's, you know, like, but the 3% makes a big difference. It does. If you talk to a doctor, a doctor is going to say that humans are very much the same, you know, everyone's kidneys are in the same place, and elbows are in the same place, but it's slight differences that actually do make a big difference between people. And about the profile thing, that's really about credibility, about social proof, and people asking themselves, "Can I trust you?" And I just want to just tee it up for you because you do talk about this about what are the markers of trust, like what do I need to work on in case I want to elevate my profile? So um, clarity and credibility are the two big ones that people are looking for; they want to know clarity: "What is it that this person actually does, and is it consistent across the profiles? Does it make sense to me?" Credibility is—it can be things like, "Have they done this before? Do other people trust this person? Do they have great results? Um, are they, you know, aligned in values, and and those sorts of things?" So um, I don't know, there might have been something I said in the book, but remember I wrote that 12 years ago, so I might have to I might have to read it.
You've been around; you have a unique take; there's thought leadership that you've done; these things help to build up your profile, right? Spot on. Yeah, yes, I agree with myself. Yeah, yes. Now that you now that you mentioned that, now that you mention it, yes, those are brilliant; that's a great idea. Who said that you should buy his book? Okay, all right, let's get back to I think what you were uh alluding to before in in this Score App and personalization; you're talking about something about it used to be about social media, and things are changing; tell us about what you're seeing.
Yeah, so there's something that's big that's changing right now, and I mentioned that the turning point was Obama for social media; that was a turning point when the Obama '08 campaign happened. So it turns out that the U.S. presidential elections are very big trend predictors when it comes to marketing trends, and the reason for that is because the U.S. presidential election is like the Formula One of the marketing world; it's high-stakes, winner-take-all, big budget, so it's—and there's four years of campaign planning that goes into it; all this stuff happens around the U.S. presidential election. So I'll give you some examples: Franklin Roosevelt, he did something called the fireside chat, which was a national radio campaign that he did weekly, and that was the absolute turning point for him to become president, and that was the moment that print newspapers was replaced by radio stations, and radio stations became the dominant media over print newspapers at that particular moment, and he drove that. And then in 1963, I think it was, JFK did a televised debate with Richard Nixon, and the people who listened to the radio, they thought that Nixon had won, but the people who watched the television thought that JFK won, and it was actually that way more people watched it on television, and it was the televised debate, and that became the moment that TV was the phenomenon, and uh and everything became about television for decades. So then fast forward to Obama 2008; he was the guy who said, "Hey, actually it's about social media engagement," and his whole campaign was all about social media engagement, and that was the moment where big brands went, "Hey, we got to do this social media thing." So if you think back to what happened in 2016 with Trump, what actually happened is that it was data analytics, because it came out later on that the key to these successful campaigns that were happening around that time was a data analytics company called Cambridge Analytica, and they were doing something called hyper-personalization. So they would collect huge amounts of data from Facebook, and then they would create mini, tiny campaigns that were just for tiny little segments of that data set, and they would talk to people about exclusively about the things that they knew mattered to that person. So, for example, if they knew that you're a creative entrepreneur in LA, they're gonna say, "Hey, these are the issues that relate to create, you know, creative entrepreneurs in LA, and like here's here's why our candidate is the best," and they're not going to talk to you about stuff that's just not relevant to you. If they know that you've got kids, they're like, "Hey, here's here's what we're doing about the schooling system," and it's like, "Oh, wow, you're really talking my language." But the person who lives next door who's really interested in guns and healthcare, they're talking to that person about guns and healthcare. So this was called hyper-personalization, and it really got started in 2016 with the Trump campaign, and it's the dominant strategy now. So if you look at the most recent election, it wasn't at all about social media engagement; it was about playing the numbers; it was all about the data. And what's happening now is that most entrepreneurs are still playing the social media content game, which was from 2008 to 2016 was it was its peak, and they're not playing the data analytics game, and the trend is about to really go into full swing that it doesn't really matter; there's so much content on the online now that if you're not combining content with data analytics and creating personalized recommendations and personalized experiences, then you're really, you know, only got one arm tied behind your back in that competition. So it's the rising trend for small businesses is to try and figure out how do we collect more data and do something with the data. Now the final thing I'll say on this is that if I went back in time to 2006 and told most small businesses and said, "Look, in a decade, you're going to be running your business like a media business; your little hair salon, you're going to have an Instagram account; you'll do videos, and you'll do before and afters, and you will just be thinking about media all the time," they go, "That's impossible; we'll never be doing that as a hair salon." Right now, if I say, "In 10 years' time, your business is going to be a data analytics business; you're going to go, 'What do you mean? We don't do data analytics; that's where we're just a small business; we couldn't possibly be doing data analytics and personalization.'" So what's going to happen is we're all going to be doing data analytics and personalization, and it's going to be as easy as social media to do data analytics and personalization. So what we need to do is to be able to figure out what our customer base is interested in so that we can create that customized experience for them, right? And so how do we do that? Friendship is a data problem, right? So the reason you you're friends with your friends is you know a lot about them; you've got you've got data. If I said to me—if I said to you, "What do you think your best friend would like to see as a movie?" Or, "Do you think your best friend would like to see *Top Gun*, right? The new *Top Gun* film's coming out; do you think your best friend would like to see that or not?" And you're going to go, "Oh, yeah, my friend loves *Top Gun* 1; of course, he's going to love *Top Gun* 2." So you know that about your friend, so you've got the data to then make a decision as to whether you should make that recommendation or not. So it's a data issue. So what we need to do is we need to stop thinking about data as this clinical thing that is name, email, and location type stuff, and we now need to start thinking about it as a humanizing thing—like knowing people, understanding people, having ways of being able to look at people and understand what they like, what they don't like, what they're—
Interested in what their hopes are, what their fears are, what they're fascinated by, and to be able to interact with them based on the data. There's a movie called Her where he talks to his operating system, and he falls in love with his operating system. And it's like Siri, and he and she—she sounds really flirty to him, and he likes it, and he gets emotionally connected to his operating system.
There's a part at the end of the movie where he says, "How many other people are you talking to right now?" And she says, "Oh, like, I don't know, two million," and he's—and he's crushed. Right? But the computer system is able to have a very deeply personalized conversation with him and make him think, feel like he's in love because she's got all the data, and she's able to talk to him. So that's the dystopian reality. It highlights the idea that if you've got enough data, you can actually have that personalized conversation at scale.
Are we talking about machine learning at this point? Machine learning will sit behind it all. So what? So, so at a very, very simple level, when we run scorecards, when we have people fill in quizzes—when you've got people filling in your quiz, you're going to end up with a dashboard. And the dashboard is going to say, "I think you've mentioned there's four boxes," and says, "This is which box you fit into." So you will have very different conversations with people based on the different boxes that they fit in.
So you're going to say, "Uh, hey, look, I, you know, your sales team will say, 'We looked at your scorecard data, and it said that you've got a really established brand that you've been around for more than 30 years, and that you've got traditional values attached to the brand, and that you've got family values, and that you've got raving fans and customers, and um, and it said that you're thinking about reinventing the brand. And one of the things we want to talk to you about is actually making sure that you capture the brand equity that you have and that you don't overdo it, and that you—we want to make sure that you maintain the asset that you've built up over the last 30 years.'" And they go, "Oh, wow, how did you know all of that?" And it's like, "Well, you answered the questions, and we know all of that because you answered the questions." Extremely rapidly, within minutes, you can be having a conversation that is immediately deep. So that's an example as to how—how that would actually happen in practicality.
I love it. You dropped a tremendous amount of value. I pretty safely predict this is going to be probably one of our top episodes of the year. And if you've enjoyed this conversation—I've been talking to Daniel Priestley—you've now received your first gift from him. I suggest that then you move on to the next part of this uh, and ascend in your transcendence and buy it—the cop—a copy of his book. It's called Key Person of Influence. And after you listen to this episode and after you read this book, if you want to hear more from Daniel, I want you to do something for me on social media, especially if you want to talk about how to raise entrepreneurial kids. I'd love to be able to invite him back, but only if you, dear listener, tell me, "Please bring him back. I want to hear more. I have to hear more."
And until then, how do people find out more about you and what you're up to, Daniel? On all of the social media platforms at Daniel Priestley. So Twitter and Instagram and um, Facebook at LinkedIn. So @DanielPriestley. We'll—we'll get you there. And uh, yeah, I'm quite—feel free to message me and connect if—if you've got any questions that relate to this episode and you want to kind of clarify any points, just shoot me through a message or—or uh, you know, any of that sort of stuff. Twitter, I'm pretty fast. I quite—quite like Twitter uh, for fast interaction. So feel free to connect, and um, I'd be more than happy to.
Thank you so much, Daniel. It's been a real pleasure. My notebook is filled up, and just to show to you and the audience, in case you guys heard me writing, it's like I filled up three pages of notes. I've already read the book, I've already taken notes, but these are just additional layers on top of what I've already taken notes on. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you so much for doing this.
My absolute pleasure. Thank you for having me on the show. I'm Daniel Priestley, the author of the book Key Person of Influence. You're listening to the future.