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John Jantsch (00:03.288)

You know, many firms out there today spend a fortune on perks, culture programs, and engagement surveys, and still sometimes feel like they’re maybe one meeting away from their entire team disengaging. Today’s guest tells us maybe we’ve been aiming at some of their own targets. The most powerful force in business isn’t strategy, compensation, or even flexibility. It’s love. So hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Marcus.

Buckingham. Marcus is a long time researcher of high performance at work, a pioneer of the strengths movement and the author of multiple bestselling books. We’re going to talk about his newest book, Design Love in How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. So Marcus, welcome to the show.

Marcus (00:49.669)

Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (00:51.244)

So I’ll get the first easy softball question out of the way. I’m sure pretty much everybody asks you this, but, love doesn’t seem like a business term or certainly, hasn’t seemed like a business term for a lot of folks. are you, are you getting pushed back there or are you trying to redefine how people even think?

Marcus (00:56.666)

Hmm.

Marcus (01:10.479)

Well, no, you’re right. I mean, it isn’t really a good business term, but my background as a researcher is just, I’m always studying extreme positive outcomes. So for teams, it’s productivity or retention and for customers, it’s loyalty, obviously, and advocacy for your brand or your product. And when you study people that have an extreme positive experience, the word that people reach for

instinctively as humans is love. People will say, I love working on that team. I love that leader. I love that product. I love that restaurant. I love that hotel. And for the longest time, mean, you know, may I culper, but for the longest time, I listened to what people say. And of course, there’s two different kinds of research. You can do quantitative research where you’re actually measuring people’s experiences and relating it to performance. And you can do qualitative research. And when you’re doing qualitative research, you’re supposed to really just listen to the words people use and then take them at their word. And I kept changing it.

John Jantsch (01:39.384)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:52.91)

Right.

Marcus (02:03.779)

I kept changing the word love to things like satisfaction or engagement or joy or passion, which are good words, but it’s not the words people use. When people are trying to describe some extreme positive experience they want to repeat, the word we naturally reach for is, love that. I love it. I love that. And I think for the longest time I would try to change it in order to make it more palatable. But if you actually look at the data and I start this book really diving into the data on love, there’s no question that

John Jantsch (02:03.982)

Mm.

Marcus (02:33.089)

Love is the most powerful driver of all productive human behavior. If you want productivity, if you want retention, if you want somebody going, you got to come work here, it’s the best place I’ve ever worked, or you got to come shop here, it’s the best place I’ve ever shopped. Then you’ve got to take them at their word love. And that’s the, that’s the word that drives our behavior. And the strange thing is nothing else does. If you say, respect that leader, that’s fine, but I don’t know how hard you’re to work on the back of that.

John Jantsch (02:49.88)

Hmm.

Marcus (03:00.441)

If you say, really enjoyed that movie. can’t tell if you’re to go back and see it again or tell anyone else to see it. Other positive emotions are positive, but they don’t drive behavior. Only love is predictive. So that’s why I wanted to zero in on this, this very specific feeling in this book, cause it’s so predictive of positive human behavior.

John Jantsch (03:07.15)

me.

John Jantsch (03:16.109)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:21.974)

So I’m guessing some leaders the next question is going to be, well, how are we going to measure that? mean, surveys for measuring connection or outcomes or things like that I think are pretty easy to do. What’s the simplest way that somebody is going to measure? Is it that they’re hearing that word anecdotally?

Marcus (03:41.337)

Well, that’s a big question because you can unpack that into all sorts of conversations about, know, mystery shoppers and employee opinion surveys. Probably the best question to measure it actually that we found over the years is I can’t imagine a world without. Just finish that sentence. I can’t imagine a world without. I can’t imagine a leader without. I can’t imagine a team without. And if you get, if people are providing your company name, I can’t imagine a world without. mean, there’s very few companies, if you think about it, that actually meet that level.

John Jantsch (03:46.755)

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus (04:08.165)

But when you get people saying, can’t, you’re on a, on a scale of one to five, on a Likert scale, five being strongly agree, one being strongly disagree. If you put your company name in there or you put your name as a leader in there, I can’t imagine a world without, which I know is a very high standard. But when you get people saying strongly agree to that statement about your company or your leadership or your brand or your product, you’ve reached into their heart and somehow touch them in such a way that you’re actually going to drive their behavior. So all the data.

on the scale of one to five shows us that, that fives in terms of the experience of a product or experience of a team, fives are qualitatively and categorically different than fours. Fives aren’t just lots and lots of fours. In fact, if you actually plot it out, John, the relationship between experiences, extreme experience experiences and behaviors is what’s called curvilinear, which basically means moving somebody from a two experience to a three.

John Jantsch (04:59.896)

me

Marcus (05:07.501)

or a three to a four doesn’t actually get you any behavior change at all. It’s only when you do something with your team or something with your customers that moves them from a four to a five on that scale, that you actually see a change in behavior. Which of course means that we should never top two box ever again. Never put a four with a five ever. Because you’re lumping apples with oranges. should, as leaders, should look at the fives on a question, an extreme question like, can’t imagine a world without. And then only then are you beginning to get to a proper measure.

John Jantsch (05:24.524)

Huh. Yeah.

Marcus (05:37.315)

of how much love is in the system for you, your team, your product, your company.

John Jantsch (05:41.804)

I’m glad you mentioned the word experience because as I listen to you talk about it, I’m guessing the companies that I can’t imagine a world without are actually creating or at least thinking intentionally about experiences over delivery, results, over perks.

Marcus (05:59.149)

Absolutely.

Absolutely. mean, it’s one of the defining characteristics of the best leaders. They have a capability that when you actually look closely, it’s been hiding in plain sight. You don’t see it taught in any business school. And yet it’s really the primary driver of anything productive that we humans do, either as customers or as team members. I call it experience intelligence, which is based upon two fundamental understandings that leaders should have. Number one is that experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes.

So often as leaders, think the directives drive behaviors, drive outcomes. If we set goals and then give corrective feedback to our people, we’ll get the outcomes we want. Or for customers, if we define prices and loyalty programs, that we’ll get the outcomes we want. And we do in the short term. But if you want sustainable behavior change, if you want people to tie their identity to your team or to your product or brand, you got to create an experience. You’ve got to understand how to reach into someone’s feelings and create for them an experience which somehow then changes their behaviors.

And the second part about that is the part we just talked about. If you really unpack what are the most powerful experiences, they’re the experiences that people say that they love. And that’s, that’s just part of the human condition. yeah, experience intelligence is a much more powerful leadership capability than we give it credit for.

John Jantsch (07:21.646)

So, and there may not be any true answer to this other than mindset change, but how do we keep experiences going? A lot of times in experiences, I went to this restaurant I’ve never been to, amazing experience. Went back the next time, not as good. Next time, not as much, because I’d already experienced the experience, right? I mean, so how in a living, breathing organization do we kind of keep that level of experience something that…

keeps people wanting to come back or keeps people experiencing something new.

Marcus (07:55.546)

Yeah, it’s, it’s one of the funny things over the last sort of years I’ve been talking about experienced intelligence. I thought the, I thought the hardest lift was going to be, could you please take love seriously? Cause love is a predictor of positive human behavior. But actually, John, it’s been more that getting people to understand that the driver of behavior is experience. Just getting people to think about, what makes up an experience? Cause normally we design for process.

John Jantsch (07:59.694)

you

John Jantsch (08:11.054)

Hmm.

Marcus (08:22.767)

We don’t design for experiences. Even if you have a restaurant, you have a reservations process. You have a food preparation process. You have a food delivery to the table process, which is really a set of disconnected processes with one hand off after another. We don’t actually design for a holistic experience in which a person, a human is going through that experience at the restaurant. Although actually that is what’s happening. And so what the first big lesson for leaders is you are an experience maker.

John Jantsch (08:23.213)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:47.437)

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus (08:53.275)

The question isn’t are you one or not? The question is are you a skilled one? And then once you can get people’s minds that we’re totally totally Here’s the thing about human beings we pick up what you’re putting down even if what you’re putting down you just dropped But we’re picking up what you’re putting down and turn it into an experience and it’s that experience then determines whether or not we come back whether we tell anyone else to come back So the first thing is you are an experience maker. Please don’t say you’re not you are the question is can you do it? Well? second is that the

John Jantsch (08:57.74)

Right. Yeah, because you could also be making bad experiences, right? Because you… Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:13.836)

Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus (09:23.183)

The raw material of experience making isn’t moments. mean, weirdly enough, a moment is jolting. A moment doesn’t change behavior. Like we should have magical, magical, delightful moments. Well, yes, but a moment is like somebody held the door open for you or a moment is somebody remembered your name, which is someone waved you into the traffic on the freeway. And those are lovely, but they’re jolting. They don’t change your behavior. And experience is different because it’s been internalized by the person. The person has picked up all the different touch points.

of that experience and made for them a story. And it’s that story, the experiential story that changes their behavior. And to your question, the raw material of making an experience are all of the different, and this is why it’s difficult, but all of the different touch points that the person’s picking up. And those touch points might be the voice on your interactive voice response on your reservation line. It might be the smell of that restaurant. It might be the lighting of that restaurant. It might be the name.

person that remembered your name, but it also might be the fact that you’ve designed a system whereby there isn’t three or four different people who you get handed off to when you sit at the table from the busser to the host to the waiter to the person who brings the food, which is, if you think about it, a really unloving thing to do for someone because they’re being handed off from one person to another. So every single touch point does work in experience making. And most leaders, frankly, are blind to this. They don’t see the

the the smell, the taste, the feel of those chairs against the back of your leg. But actually, if you are a skilled experience maker, and you think about the companies that we would almost immediately go, can’t imagine a world without, like say Disney. I mean, I’m not saying Disney is perfect by any means, but they have taken the skill of experience making very seriously indeed. So that all five senses and the touch points associated with all five senses,

are taken seriously by really every single cast member. And I suppose that’s the last thing I would say about experience design. Everybody’s got a voice and a responsibility in it. can’t, it’s so amazing to think that there’s so many businesses where the frontline people who are touching the customer every day, no one’s ever told them that they’re actually making an experience with every single, every single glance, every single behavior change, every single look in the eye or not look in the eye. All of those things are experience making.

John Jantsch (11:39.768)

Yeah.

Marcus (11:47.448)

You have that power. We don’t ever really talk about our frontline roles in that way. And yet that’s exactly what they’re doing.

John Jantsch (11:57.23)

And you know, it’s interesting. We, lot of our clients, lot of the work we do is, is really digital. It’s not necessarily, you know, human interactions. but it’s, it’s interesting because it’s still an experience. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve, you know, gone into looked at organizations. It’s like, well, this is broken. And when somebody clicks on this thing, they don’t get to where you thought they were going. Cause nobody’s looked at it for five years. You almost could make the case. I hate goofy titles.

But couldn’t you almost make the case for having an experience maker, you know, title that somebody who is looking at all the, know, the way a customer goes through our business.

Marcus (12:32.314)

Yeah, it’s interesting that you are beginning to see chief experience officers. You’re beginning to see that because people are beginning to realize that if you want sustainable behavior change, then you have to be a designer of experiences because the opposite of design is drift. And we drift a lot because we design for process. I mean, to take a silly example, which isn’t a digital example, like some of your clients, but if you take the restaurant example, or you could take a hospital example. If you think about

John Jantsch (12:36.31)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus (13:02.63)

how we’ve designed hospitals, the person who checks you into the hospital is not the person who takes your vitals, who is not then the person who makes sure that you’re okay during the middle of the night, who’s a different than doctor who you see in the middle of the night, who’s then a different healthcare provider or practitioner first thing in the morning. You’re handed off through a series of vertical processes and yet you, the human, you’re the poor person who’s supposed to hold the coherence of your narrative through all of it.

John Jantsch (13:17.774)

Thanks

John Jantsch (13:29.646)

You’re right.

Marcus (13:30.012)

trying to remember all the details that matter when in fact you have no flipping idea what details really matter. And then we wonder why our healthcare outcomes are so poor relative to the amount of costs we put in. We’ve designed healthcare experiences that are fundamentally unloving because we haven’t designed them as experiences. We haven’t seen the human going through all of them. That’s in healthcare, it’s true in schools, it’s true in restaurants and hospitality. And to your point, it’s certainly true in the digital environment. We’ve designed for the wrong, well not the wrong thing,

But when you just design for process, you become blind to the actual holistic experience of the person and you drift. And then we wonder why we don’t get any loyalty or we don’t get any advocacy. We don’t get usage. It’s like we’re humans are experienced feelers and our behavior is changed through the way in which we pick up what you put down in terms of an experience.

John Jantsch (14:17.198)

you

John Jantsch (14:23.692)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s almost sometimes feels like, you know, friction, you’re, you’re designing for like, what’s easy for us, you’re almost automatically going to make it harder for the customer, right? Yeah. So let’s, let’s, I don’t know if you’re capable of doing this because every business is different, but let’s, let’s take one step in a typical customer journey, like onboarding a new customer.

Marcus (14:34.65)

Yes.

John Jantsch (14:47.574)

Again, that’s another one that’s typically done for efficiency sake. How would you design love into something like that? I know that’s a random example, but give me a thought of how somebody would think about onboarding a new client having love in it.

Marcus (15:01.532)

So when you, this is gonna sound really weird, but love isn’t a coating. It’s not a, if you’re leading lovingly, it doesn’t mean that you’re being nice, although you may be. There’s no kumbaya, yeah. What you’re trying to get to, if you think about something like onboarding, a customer or an employee, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to have that onboarding process, do the work, a big part of the work of getting a customer to go, I love that, I love that, okay?

John Jantsch (15:12.214)

Yeah, so we’re not going to there’s no hugging going on yet, right?

John Jantsch (15:29.474)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus (15:30.778)

So if you reverse engineer that, how do you get someone to that outcome where they actually would walk around with love in their heart, which I know sounds like a weird expression, but they’re walking around with love in their heart. I love that. Not like it was fine. Not a four, not a three, but a five. I love that. Well, if you reverse engineer that, John, you bump into a sequence of five feelings, which are sequential. This is not mass loving. It’s not hierarchical. It’s sequential. that sequence of five is like a blueprint for your design process.

John Jantsch (15:42.413)

Yeah.

Marcus (15:59.6)

The first feeling is control. So if you imagine this, a person is trying to lean into an experience at which point, at the end of which they go, I love that. So the first feeling they’re bumping into is control. I don’t mean control over someone else. I mean, they want an answer to the question, what is this world and how do I work it? Anytime you are unclear about what this world is that I’m walking into, anytime you lack vividness about what’s there in the world and how can I use it, I as a human, I lean out.

because I tend to go through life like all humans wrapped up like an armadillo, protected against the world. If you can show me what is this world and how do I work it, I take off one piece of armor. The next feeling is harmony. Basically, as I move into an experience, most experiences are emotional experiences first. So I need to have an answer to the question, does this experience know what I’m feeling and does it care? Have you designed any touch points that could communicate to me, I know what you’re feeling,

And I care about it. Third feeling is significance. Every human being at some point in an experience wants that experience to know my story. Do you know my story and do you care? I don’t want you to start that way. I want you to start with control. Tell me the rules. I don’t mind the rules. Tell me the rules. But at some point, I want you to know, do you know who I am uniquely and does that then change anything about my experience? The fourth feeling is the warmth of others. Humans don’t do well in experiences where they’re isolated.

At some point they pop their little head above the parapet and they go, who is here to help me? Either as a person going through an experience together or as somebody on the company side of things who’s helping to guide and navigate me. And then the last feeling is growth because love is a forward facing emotion. If you love someone, you never think they’re finished. You are always aware they’re going to have to wake up tomorrow and go and experience the world again. And so the last feeling answers the question, am I slightly more capable tomorrow than I was today?

Well, if you use those five feelings as your blueprint, you would start to design an onboarding experience incredibly intentionally so that you would deliberately in sequence cultivating those feelings. Now to your question, right? How you do that would depend upon the exact onboarding experience you were building. But what we need to give leaders is like, this is a blueprint for experience design to get to a place where a person’s going to go. I love that.

John Jantsch (18:25.932)

Yeah.

Marcus (18:26.448)

Without the design, it’s a bit hit and miss really in terms of what you’re trying to create for people.

John Jantsch (18:29.677)

Yeah.

You know, as I listen to you describe those, I mean, that’s, we were putting it in the context of onboarding, but frankly, you know, when somebody’s out there looking for a new resource, you know, that’s probably a process they go through, right? It’s like, I want to know who’s out there. I want to like them. I want to start to trust them. And it is sort of sequential, right? Before we’re even going to pick up the phone or, you know, fill out a form.

Marcus (18:49.574)

Mm.

Marcus (18:56.24)

Yeah, well that sequence of feelings, mean, you’re trying to, it’s simply said, you’re trying to just get people to say, love that. Whether you’re trying to sell them something, whether you’re trying to get them to join your community, whether you’re trying to onboard them into a company like an employee process, that outcome is a very strong, super vivid human outcome.

John Jantsch (19:04.546)

Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus (19:20.656)

what we could do in every situation. Like if you were trying to design a sales process, you’d go, well, we should actually design it around those five feelings, control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth. If we could design a process, we wouldn’t get it right perfectly every time. We wouldn’t get every single, but we would at least be intentional about experience design. And we would see it as a person moving through that sequence of feelings. Well, gosh, if we could do that, we wouldn’t feel like we do so often today,

Today we feel transactional. The world feels extractive. Leaders are directive, which put it another way. We’re living in an increasingly unloving world. And what we know from everything to do with human psychology is humans don’t flourish in an unloving world. And I think the data would suggest very strongly neither do businesses.

John Jantsch (19:52.952)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:13.176)

Yeah.

Marcus (20:13.742)

So if you really want a flourishing business where you’ve got a lot of customers or a lot of people walking around with love in their heart for your brand or your company, you got to design it in. And you’ll only do that if you take love seriously, which frankly at present we don’t.

John Jantsch (20:30.392)

You know, as I listened to you describe that, and given the state of the world that you just described as well, it sounds like it’s also a very significant potential differentiator. Because if I’m not getting that in eight out of 10 places, the two places that are giving me that are probably really going to get my business.

Marcus (20:49.038)

No, that’s a great point. It’s a huge, I know this sounds really strange to say it because love should be a genuine intention toward another human being’s flourishing. But that aside, it is a huge strategic advantage. Because if you’ve got a whole bunch of leaders who have experienced intelligence, who know how to intentionally try to design love into the experiences they make, then they will stand out because frankly, so many other companies, so many other organizations are loveless.

John Jantsch (20:55.95)

You’re right.

Marcus (21:16.166)

where human beings who work there aren’t even called human beings, they’re called headcount or FTEs, full-time equivalents, or customers aren’t a real human, they’re their average basket size or their lifetime customer value. We have been reduced as humans to amoral elements of financial equations, which isn’t terrible, it’s just super uninspiring and not very intelligent. So for the best companies, they’ll look at the current…

John Jantsch (21:16.29)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:27.52)

you

John Jantsch (21:41.315)

Yeah.

Marcus (21:44.348)

playing field, you will, John, go, yeah, we could, even if we began to think about how to design experiences that people would say that they love, we would be so materially different in the feelings that we would be creating in our people or in our customers. you know, it’s not, experience intelligence is one of those strange capabilities that’s easy to start, hard to master, fine, but easy to start. And as you said, if you did start,

John Jantsch (22:09.986)

Yeah.

Marcus (22:13.456)

Gosh, you’d stand out from the

John Jantsch (22:15.47)

Yeah, 100%. So Marcus Buckingham is the author of Design Love In, How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. I appreciate you taking a few moments to join us. Where would you invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work in Design Love In?

Marcus (22:31.568)

Well, rather unsurprisingly, if you go to designlovein.com, you can find everything to with the book there. We’ve also in partnership with Harvard Business Review, we created a discovery series for folks that ordered or pre-ordered the book that basically describes the 10 key discoveries underpinning it. So if you’re interested in learning both from books or from video, go to designlovein and there’s a whole discovery series for you and as well as everything that you might want to know about the book itself.

John Jantsch (22:56.174)

Well again, I appreciate you spending a few moments with us. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Marcus (23:01.84)

I’d love that.

John Jantsch (00:03.288)

You know, many firms out there today spend a fortune on perks, culture programs, and engagement surveys, and still sometimes feel like they’re maybe one meeting away from their entire team disengaging. Today’s guest tells us maybe we’ve been aiming at some of their own targets. The most powerful force in business isn’t strategy, compensation, or even flexibility. It’s love. So hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Marcus.

Buckingham. Marcus is a long time researcher of high performance at work, a pioneer of the strengths movement and the author of multiple bestselling books. We’re going to talk about his newest book, Design Love in How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. So Marcus, welcome to the show.

Marcus (00:49.669)

Thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (00:51.244)

So I’ll get the first easy softball question out of the way. I’m sure pretty much everybody asks you this, but, love doesn’t seem like a business term or certainly, hasn’t seemed like a business term for a lot of folks. are you, are you getting pushed back there or are you trying to redefine how people even think?

Marcus (00:56.666)

Hmm.

Marcus (01:10.479)

Well, no, you’re right. I mean, it isn’t really a good business term, but my background as a researcher is just, I’m always studying extreme positive outcomes. So for teams, it’s productivity or retention and for customers, it’s loyalty, obviously, and advocacy for your brand or your product. And when you study people that have an extreme positive experience, the word that people reach for

instinctively as humans is love. People will say, I love working on that team. I love that leader. I love that product. I love that restaurant. I love that hotel. And for the longest time, mean, you know, may I culper, but for the longest time, I listened to what people say. And of course, there’s two different kinds of research. You can do quantitative research where you’re actually measuring people’s experiences and relating it to performance. And you can do qualitative research. And when you’re doing qualitative research, you’re supposed to really just listen to the words people use and then take them at their word. And I kept changing it.

John Jantsch (01:39.384)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (01:52.91)

Right.

Marcus (02:03.779)

I kept changing the word love to things like satisfaction or engagement or joy or passion, which are good words, but it’s not the words people use. When people are trying to describe some extreme positive experience they want to repeat, the word we naturally reach for is, love that. I love it. I love that. And I think for the longest time I would try to change it in order to make it more palatable. But if you actually look at the data and I start this book really diving into the data on love, there’s no question that

John Jantsch (02:03.982)

Mm.

Marcus (02:33.089)

Love is the most powerful driver of all productive human behavior. If you want productivity, if you want retention, if you want somebody going, you got to come work here, it’s the best place I’ve ever worked, or you got to come shop here, it’s the best place I’ve ever shopped. Then you’ve got to take them at their word love. And that’s the, that’s the word that drives our behavior. And the strange thing is nothing else does. If you say, respect that leader, that’s fine, but I don’t know how hard you’re to work on the back of that.

John Jantsch (02:49.88)

Hmm.

Marcus (03:00.441)

If you say, really enjoyed that movie. can’t tell if you’re to go back and see it again or tell anyone else to see it. Other positive emotions are positive, but they don’t drive behavior. Only love is predictive. So that’s why I wanted to zero in on this, this very specific feeling in this book, cause it’s so predictive of positive human behavior.

John Jantsch (03:07.15)

me.

John Jantsch (03:16.109)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:21.974)

So I’m guessing some leaders the next question is going to be, well, how are we going to measure that? mean, surveys for measuring connection or outcomes or things like that I think are pretty easy to do. What’s the simplest way that somebody is going to measure? Is it that they’re hearing that word anecdotally?

Marcus (03:41.337)

Well, that’s a big question because you can unpack that into all sorts of conversations about, know, mystery shoppers and employee opinion surveys. Probably the best question to measure it actually that we found over the years is I can’t imagine a world without. Just finish that sentence. I can’t imagine a world without. I can’t imagine a leader without. I can’t imagine a team without. And if you get, if people are providing your company name, I can’t imagine a world without. mean, there’s very few companies, if you think about it, that actually meet that level.

John Jantsch (03:46.755)

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus (04:08.165)

But when you get people saying, can’t, you’re on a, on a scale of one to five, on a Likert scale, five being strongly agree, one being strongly disagree. If you put your company name in there or you put your name as a leader in there, I can’t imagine a world without, which I know is a very high standard. But when you get people saying strongly agree to that statement about your company or your leadership or your brand or your product, you’ve reached into their heart and somehow touch them in such a way that you’re actually going to drive their behavior. So all the data.

on the scale of one to five shows us that, that fives in terms of the experience of a product or experience of a team, fives are qualitatively and categorically different than fours. Fives aren’t just lots and lots of fours. In fact, if you actually plot it out, John, the relationship between experiences, extreme experience experiences and behaviors is what’s called curvilinear, which basically means moving somebody from a two experience to a three.

John Jantsch (04:59.896)

me

Marcus (05:07.501)

or a three to a four doesn’t actually get you any behavior change at all. It’s only when you do something with your team or something with your customers that moves them from a four to a five on that scale, that you actually see a change in behavior. Which of course means that we should never top two box ever again. Never put a four with a five ever. Because you’re lumping apples with oranges. should, as leaders, should look at the fives on a question, an extreme question like, can’t imagine a world without. And then only then are you beginning to get to a proper measure.

John Jantsch (05:24.524)

Huh. Yeah.

Marcus (05:37.315)

of how much love is in the system for you, your team, your product, your company.

John Jantsch (05:41.804)

I’m glad you mentioned the word experience because as I listen to you talk about it, I’m guessing the companies that I can’t imagine a world without are actually creating or at least thinking intentionally about experiences over delivery, results, over perks.

Marcus (05:59.149)

Absolutely.

Absolutely. mean, it’s one of the defining characteristics of the best leaders. They have a capability that when you actually look closely, it’s been hiding in plain sight. You don’t see it taught in any business school. And yet it’s really the primary driver of anything productive that we humans do, either as customers or as team members. I call it experience intelligence, which is based upon two fundamental understandings that leaders should have. Number one is that experiences drive behaviors, drive outcomes.

So often as leaders, think the directives drive behaviors, drive outcomes. If we set goals and then give corrective feedback to our people, we’ll get the outcomes we want. Or for customers, if we define prices and loyalty programs, that we’ll get the outcomes we want. And we do in the short term. But if you want sustainable behavior change, if you want people to tie their identity to your team or to your product or brand, you got to create an experience. You’ve got to understand how to reach into someone’s feelings and create for them an experience which somehow then changes their behaviors.

And the second part about that is the part we just talked about. If you really unpack what are the most powerful experiences, they’re the experiences that people say that they love. And that’s, that’s just part of the human condition. yeah, experience intelligence is a much more powerful leadership capability than we give it credit for.

John Jantsch (07:21.646)

So, and there may not be any true answer to this other than mindset change, but how do we keep experiences going? A lot of times in experiences, I went to this restaurant I’ve never been to, amazing experience. Went back the next time, not as good. Next time, not as much, because I’d already experienced the experience, right? I mean, so how in a living, breathing organization do we kind of keep that level of experience something that…

keeps people wanting to come back or keeps people experiencing something new.

Marcus (07:55.546)

Yeah, it’s, it’s one of the funny things over the last sort of years I’ve been talking about experienced intelligence. I thought the, I thought the hardest lift was going to be, could you please take love seriously? Cause love is a predictor of positive human behavior. But actually, John, it’s been more that getting people to understand that the driver of behavior is experience. Just getting people to think about, what makes up an experience? Cause normally we design for process.

John Jantsch (07:59.694)

you

John Jantsch (08:11.054)

Hmm.

Marcus (08:22.767)

We don’t design for experiences. Even if you have a restaurant, you have a reservations process. You have a food preparation process. You have a food delivery to the table process, which is really a set of disconnected processes with one hand off after another. We don’t actually design for a holistic experience in which a person, a human is going through that experience at the restaurant. Although actually that is what’s happening. And so what the first big lesson for leaders is you are an experience maker.

John Jantsch (08:23.213)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (08:47.437)

Yeah, yeah.

Marcus (08:53.275)

The question isn’t are you one or not? The question is are you a skilled one? And then once you can get people’s minds that we’re totally totally Here’s the thing about human beings we pick up what you’re putting down even if what you’re putting down you just dropped But we’re picking up what you’re putting down and turn it into an experience and it’s that experience then determines whether or not we come back whether we tell anyone else to come back So the first thing is you are an experience maker. Please don’t say you’re not you are the question is can you do it? Well? second is that the

John Jantsch (08:57.74)

Right. Yeah, because you could also be making bad experiences, right? Because you… Yeah.

John Jantsch (09:13.836)

Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus (09:23.183)

The raw material of experience making isn’t moments. mean, weirdly enough, a moment is jolting. A moment doesn’t change behavior. Like we should have magical, magical, delightful moments. Well, yes, but a moment is like somebody held the door open for you or a moment is somebody remembered your name, which is someone waved you into the traffic on the freeway. And those are lovely, but they’re jolting. They don’t change your behavior. And experience is different because it’s been internalized by the person. The person has picked up all the different touch points.

of that experience and made for them a story. And it’s that story, the experiential story that changes their behavior. And to your question, the raw material of making an experience are all of the different, and this is why it’s difficult, but all of the different touch points that the person’s picking up. And those touch points might be the voice on your interactive voice response on your reservation line. It might be the smell of that restaurant. It might be the lighting of that restaurant. It might be the name.

person that remembered your name, but it also might be the fact that you’ve designed a system whereby there isn’t three or four different people who you get handed off to when you sit at the table from the busser to the host to the waiter to the person who brings the food, which is, if you think about it, a really unloving thing to do for someone because they’re being handed off from one person to another. So every single touch point does work in experience making. And most leaders, frankly, are blind to this. They don’t see the

the the smell, the taste, the feel of those chairs against the back of your leg. But actually, if you are a skilled experience maker, and you think about the companies that we would almost immediately go, can’t imagine a world without, like say Disney. I mean, I’m not saying Disney is perfect by any means, but they have taken the skill of experience making very seriously indeed. So that all five senses and the touch points associated with all five senses,

are taken seriously by really every single cast member. And I suppose that’s the last thing I would say about experience design. Everybody’s got a voice and a responsibility in it. can’t, it’s so amazing to think that there’s so many businesses where the frontline people who are touching the customer every day, no one’s ever told them that they’re actually making an experience with every single, every single glance, every single behavior change, every single look in the eye or not look in the eye. All of those things are experience making.

John Jantsch (11:39.768)

Yeah.

Marcus (11:47.448)

You have that power. We don’t ever really talk about our frontline roles in that way. And yet that’s exactly what they’re doing.

John Jantsch (11:57.23)

And you know, it’s interesting. We, lot of our clients, lot of the work we do is, is really digital. It’s not necessarily, you know, human interactions. but it’s, it’s interesting because it’s still an experience. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve, you know, gone into looked at organizations. It’s like, well, this is broken. And when somebody clicks on this thing, they don’t get to where you thought they were going. Cause nobody’s looked at it for five years. You almost could make the case. I hate goofy titles.

But couldn’t you almost make the case for having an experience maker, you know, title that somebody who is looking at all the, know, the way a customer goes through our business.

Marcus (12:32.314)

Yeah, it’s interesting that you are beginning to see chief experience officers. You’re beginning to see that because people are beginning to realize that if you want sustainable behavior change, then you have to be a designer of experiences because the opposite of design is drift. And we drift a lot because we design for process. I mean, to take a silly example, which isn’t a digital example, like some of your clients, but if you take the restaurant example, or you could take a hospital example. If you think about

John Jantsch (12:36.31)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus (13:02.63)

how we’ve designed hospitals, the person who checks you into the hospital is not the person who takes your vitals, who is not then the person who makes sure that you’re okay during the middle of the night, who’s a different than doctor who you see in the middle of the night, who’s then a different healthcare provider or practitioner first thing in the morning. You’re handed off through a series of vertical processes and yet you, the human, you’re the poor person who’s supposed to hold the coherence of your narrative through all of it.

John Jantsch (13:17.774)

Thanks

John Jantsch (13:29.646)

You’re right.

Marcus (13:30.012)

trying to remember all the details that matter when in fact you have no flipping idea what details really matter. And then we wonder why our healthcare outcomes are so poor relative to the amount of costs we put in. We’ve designed healthcare experiences that are fundamentally unloving because we haven’t designed them as experiences. We haven’t seen the human going through all of them. That’s in healthcare, it’s true in schools, it’s true in restaurants and hospitality. And to your point, it’s certainly true in the digital environment. We’ve designed for the wrong, well not the wrong thing,

But when you just design for process, you become blind to the actual holistic experience of the person and you drift. And then we wonder why we don’t get any loyalty or we don’t get any advocacy. We don’t get usage. It’s like we’re humans are experienced feelers and our behavior is changed through the way in which we pick up what you put down in terms of an experience.

John Jantsch (14:17.198)

you

John Jantsch (14:23.692)

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it’s almost sometimes feels like, you know, friction, you’re, you’re designing for like, what’s easy for us, you’re almost automatically going to make it harder for the customer, right? Yeah. So let’s, let’s, I don’t know if you’re capable of doing this because every business is different, but let’s, let’s take one step in a typical customer journey, like onboarding a new customer.

Marcus (14:34.65)

Yes.

John Jantsch (14:47.574)

Again, that’s another one that’s typically done for efficiency sake. How would you design love into something like that? I know that’s a random example, but give me a thought of how somebody would think about onboarding a new client having love in it.

Marcus (15:01.532)

So when you, this is gonna sound really weird, but love isn’t a coating. It’s not a, if you’re leading lovingly, it doesn’t mean that you’re being nice, although you may be. There’s no kumbaya, yeah. What you’re trying to get to, if you think about something like onboarding, a customer or an employee, what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to have that onboarding process, do the work, a big part of the work of getting a customer to go, I love that, I love that, okay?

John Jantsch (15:12.214)

Yeah, so we’re not going to there’s no hugging going on yet, right?

John Jantsch (15:29.474)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marcus (15:30.778)

So if you reverse engineer that, how do you get someone to that outcome where they actually would walk around with love in their heart, which I know sounds like a weird expression, but they’re walking around with love in their heart. I love that. Not like it was fine. Not a four, not a three, but a five. I love that. Well, if you reverse engineer that, John, you bump into a sequence of five feelings, which are sequential. This is not mass loving. It’s not hierarchical. It’s sequential. that sequence of five is like a blueprint for your design process.

John Jantsch (15:42.413)

Yeah.

Marcus (15:59.6)

The first feeling is control. So if you imagine this, a person is trying to lean into an experience at which point, at the end of which they go, I love that. So the first feeling they’re bumping into is control. I don’t mean control over someone else. I mean, they want an answer to the question, what is this world and how do I work it? Anytime you are unclear about what this world is that I’m walking into, anytime you lack vividness about what’s there in the world and how can I use it, I as a human, I lean out.

because I tend to go through life like all humans wrapped up like an armadillo, protected against the world. If you can show me what is this world and how do I work it, I take off one piece of armor. The next feeling is harmony. Basically, as I move into an experience, most experiences are emotional experiences first. So I need to have an answer to the question, does this experience know what I’m feeling and does it care? Have you designed any touch points that could communicate to me, I know what you’re feeling,

And I care about it. Third feeling is significance. Every human being at some point in an experience wants that experience to know my story. Do you know my story and do you care? I don’t want you to start that way. I want you to start with control. Tell me the rules. I don’t mind the rules. Tell me the rules. But at some point, I want you to know, do you know who I am uniquely and does that then change anything about my experience? The fourth feeling is the warmth of others. Humans don’t do well in experiences where they’re isolated.

At some point they pop their little head above the parapet and they go, who is here to help me? Either as a person going through an experience together or as somebody on the company side of things who’s helping to guide and navigate me. And then the last feeling is growth because love is a forward facing emotion. If you love someone, you never think they’re finished. You are always aware they’re going to have to wake up tomorrow and go and experience the world again. And so the last feeling answers the question, am I slightly more capable tomorrow than I was today?

Well, if you use those five feelings as your blueprint, you would start to design an onboarding experience incredibly intentionally so that you would deliberately in sequence cultivating those feelings. Now to your question, right? How you do that would depend upon the exact onboarding experience you were building. But what we need to give leaders is like, this is a blueprint for experience design to get to a place where a person’s going to go. I love that.

John Jantsch (18:25.932)

Yeah.

Marcus (18:26.448)

Without the design, it’s a bit hit and miss really in terms of what you’re trying to create for people.

John Jantsch (18:29.677)

Yeah.

You know, as I listen to you describe those, I mean, that’s, we were putting it in the context of onboarding, but frankly, you know, when somebody’s out there looking for a new resource, you know, that’s probably a process they go through, right? It’s like, I want to know who’s out there. I want to like them. I want to start to trust them. And it is sort of sequential, right? Before we’re even going to pick up the phone or, you know, fill out a form.

Marcus (18:49.574)

Mm.

Marcus (18:56.24)

Yeah, well that sequence of feelings, mean, you’re trying to, it’s simply said, you’re trying to just get people to say, love that. Whether you’re trying to sell them something, whether you’re trying to get them to join your community, whether you’re trying to onboard them into a company like an employee process, that outcome is a very strong, super vivid human outcome.

John Jantsch (19:04.546)

Yeah. Yeah.

Marcus (19:20.656)

what we could do in every situation. Like if you were trying to design a sales process, you’d go, well, we should actually design it around those five feelings, control, harmony, significance, warmth of others, growth. If we could design a process, we wouldn’t get it right perfectly every time. We wouldn’t get every single, but we would at least be intentional about experience design. And we would see it as a person moving through that sequence of feelings. Well, gosh, if we could do that, we wouldn’t feel like we do so often today,

Today we feel transactional. The world feels extractive. Leaders are directive, which put it another way. We’re living in an increasingly unloving world. And what we know from everything to do with human psychology is humans don’t flourish in an unloving world. And I think the data would suggest very strongly neither do businesses.

John Jantsch (19:52.952)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:13.176)

Yeah.

Marcus (20:13.742)

So if you really want a flourishing business where you’ve got a lot of customers or a lot of people walking around with love in their heart for your brand or your company, you got to design it in. And you’ll only do that if you take love seriously, which frankly at present we don’t.

John Jantsch (20:30.392)

You know, as I listened to you describe that, and given the state of the world that you just described as well, it sounds like it’s also a very significant potential differentiator. Because if I’m not getting that in eight out of 10 places, the two places that are giving me that are probably really going to get my business.

Marcus (20:49.038)

No, that’s a great point. It’s a huge, I know this sounds really strange to say it because love should be a genuine intention toward another human being’s flourishing. But that aside, it is a huge strategic advantage. Because if you’ve got a whole bunch of leaders who have experienced intelligence, who know how to intentionally try to design love into the experiences they make, then they will stand out because frankly, so many other companies, so many other organizations are loveless.

John Jantsch (20:55.95)

You’re right.

Marcus (21:16.166)

where human beings who work there aren’t even called human beings, they’re called headcount or FTEs, full-time equivalents, or customers aren’t a real human, they’re their average basket size or their lifetime customer value. We have been reduced as humans to amoral elements of financial equations, which isn’t terrible, it’s just super uninspiring and not very intelligent. So for the best companies, they’ll look at the current…

John Jantsch (21:16.29)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (21:27.52)

you

John Jantsch (21:41.315)

Yeah.

Marcus (21:44.348)

playing field, you will, John, go, yeah, we could, even if we began to think about how to design experiences that people would say that they love, we would be so materially different in the feelings that we would be creating in our people or in our customers. you know, it’s not, experience intelligence is one of those strange capabilities that’s easy to start, hard to master, fine, but easy to start. And as you said, if you did start,

John Jantsch (22:09.986)

Yeah.

Marcus (22:13.456)

Gosh, you’d stand out from the

John Jantsch (22:15.47)

Yeah, 100%. So Marcus Buckingham is the author of Design Love In, How to Unleash the Most Powerful Force in Business. I appreciate you taking a few moments to join us. Where would you invite people to connect with you or find out more about your work in Design Love In?

Marcus (22:31.568)

Well, rather unsurprisingly, if you go to designlovein.com, you can find everything to with the book there. We’ve also in partnership with Harvard Business Review, we created a discovery series for folks that ordered or pre-ordered the book that basically describes the 10 key discoveries underpinning it. So if you’re interested in learning both from books or from video, go to designlovein and there’s a whole discovery series for you and as well as everything that you might want to know about the book itself.

John Jantsch (22:56.174)

Well again, I appreciate you spending a few moments with us. Hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Marcus (23:01.84)

I’d love that.

John Jantsch (00:01.936)

What if the career setback you’re still replaying is actually the best wealth strategy you’ll ever stumble into because it forces you to build new skills, new discipline, and maybe a new plan that finally makes you unstoppable. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jack Oujo. He’s the founder and lead advisor of Oujo Wealth Strategies, one of the nation’s largest tax

focused wealth management firms. holds multiple professional designations, including a whole bunch of letters and a master’s in taxation. But before starting the firm, he was a major league baseball umpire advancing to AAA and winning the Joe Ryan Award as the highest rated minor league umpiring prospect. But today we’re going to talk about both his journey and his new book, Two Smart

to be an umpire. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack D. Oujo (01:00.182)

Thanks, John. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.

John Jantsch (01:02.332)

All right, so the first question we just need to get out of the way is, what do you think of the rule change on balls and strikes this year that’s going to go to the majors?

Jack D. Oujo (01:13.038)

I am actually in favor of it. And the reason why I’m in favor of it is because you’ve had, you have three boxes on the TV, one from the home team, one from the visiting team, and they’re normally set by some intern that works there. It’s not the actual strike zone, by the way. You have the one from Major League Baseball and the human being. So let’s get one right.

John Jantsch (01:15.003)

Yeah?

John Jantsch (01:28.104)

is that right?

John Jantsch (01:32.368)

Yeah, yeah. Do you feel umpires feel that way too? Because again, I know they’re going to they’re going to test it with here we’re to do the whole show on this. I know they’re going to test it with you know, only get a couple challenges. But you know, every batter thinks it’s a ball and every pitcher thinks it’s a strike. So

Jack D. Oujo (01:42.382)

Sure.

Jack D. Oujo (01:49.87)

I was going over with one major league umpire, his retirement plan. was in his late fifties. And I told him he was financially independent, was working because he wanted to. said, how much longer do you want to go? And he goes, Oh, a few more years, Jack, till I’m 59. He goes, they bring in the electronic strike zone. goes, I’ll go till I’m 79. Won’t be under any pressure, nothing along those lines. So I think they like it. creates more jobs.

It makes the job less valuable in my view. Why do you need to pay somebody $400,000 a year when you have a phone that can get the pictures right? So it’s like anything else in our society, AI, you’d be taking away another job.

John Jantsch (02:24.794)

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about your journey. had, I mean, you, while it sounds like you loved umpiring, it was a bit of a career disappointment. So how did you turn that into where you are today?

Jack D. Oujo (02:41.346)

Well, yeah, during the eight years I was in the minor leagues, I was smart enough, no pun intended, to work in the off seasons as an accountant. I had good accounting jobs in New York City, and so I was gaining experience.

And when I got my release, I was surprised because I was on the verge of the major leagues and there was, I write about it too smart to be an umpire. But nevertheless, I decided to focus on getting as much education as I could. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I was so hurt from the baseball experience that I’d work nine to five.

And then at night, I spent the next four years getting my CPA, CFP, master’s in taxation, securities and insurance license, not knowing where it would lead. And so that was the focus, getting education and try to reinvent myself from the ground up.

John Jantsch (03:21.03)

Mm.

John Jantsch (03:31.526)

So, I mean, did you look at it then as that’s plan B? I don’t know what plan B looks like, but that’s plan B.

Jack D. Oujo (03:39.768)

Plan B was always a career in public accounting, but as I was in public accounting, I realized how boring that was. You your professional baseball umpired 30,000 people in the stands and I found myself counting hats one day verifying an inventory. so that’s how I transferred into wealth management.

John Jantsch (03:58.11)

it is a, is a minor league umpire in particular not paid enough for that to be their full-time job. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you’re getting on the buses with them, huh? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you, so most of them were doing like you were, another gig, which was, some mechanic work, right? Tax prep.

Jack D. Oujo (04:04.032)

It’s poverty. It’s an absolute disgrace. And that goes for the players too. Managers. We drive our own cars. We drive our own transportation. It’s even worse than people think. Yeah, it’s bad.

Jack D. Oujo (04:23.798)

In my case, was accounting work. A lot of people in baseball work for UPS, it seemed, in the off seasons. But unless you had the resources from family, which most people did not, you had to find something to do once the season ended.

John Jantsch (04:35.958)

I, when I was in high school, a friend of mine worked at, worked for the Royals as a clubhouse attendant. and, so every now and then I got to fill in and do that. And one of my favorite things to do was bring the, the after game meal to the umpires because it always slipped me five bucks or something. so even in poverty, they were taking care of the little guy. So.

Jack D. Oujo (04:57.482)

Absolutely, The manager of the Padres now, I don’t know why his name escapes me, but he was actually our clubby in Charlotte in double A and actually rose to become a major league manager, current manager of the Padres.

John Jantsch (05:11.378)

wow. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. So now fast forward a bit. You’ve built one of the nation’s largest tax focused wealth firms. Talk a little bit about, I mean, was there a secret sauce? Was there an approach to client relationships? Did your past kind of really guide you? What was your, what do you attribute to your success, I guess?

Jack D. Oujo (05:35.082)

I think people like the honesty and I think that’s from the umpire in me. I don’t know if they think I’m the brightest bulb, but they know they can trust me. And after going through the baseball experience, I did believe in protecting against worst case scenarios. When the terrorist attack took place in 2001, if you remember back then, the thinking was, will there be another attack? It’s a question of when.

John Jantsch (05:39.43)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:00.016)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (06:00.202)

And I prepared my clients for worst case scenarios. When 2008 hit, they were prepared, although I didn’t know what a reverse credit default swap was at the time. And the business really prospered, like went to a whole nother level after 2008, growing by 400%. But I think just emphasizing client service, a four seasons type of service with clients was probably.

John Jantsch (06:24.828)

So I’m sure that you are very aware of this. Certainly a lot of business owners that we work with, tax planning means giving their stuff at the end of the year to their accountant, as opposed to anything that would be proactive. What’s the biggest misconception you hear from clients, especially businesses, when it comes to taxes and wealth planning?

Jack D. Oujo (06:47.256)

Sure, when I meet with a client for the first time, I always ask them what their biggest expense is and they say their mortgage and I go, no, isn’t. And they argue with me until I explain to them it’s their income tax. Everybody knows their refund or what they owe, but they don’t know they have much greater control over that expense than they think. I think people also think that wealthy people don’t pay taxes when they do. And arranging your affairs,

to reduce your taxes in a way that’s consistent with your goals and objectives is critical for clients. again, maximizing retirement accounts, having a side hustle, I think helps employees. But arranging your affairs to pay the least possible tax in a way consistent with your goals is important.

John Jantsch (07:32.432)

So do you want to get into the nitty gritty on that a little bit? mean, are there specific things, again, a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs, small business owners. Are there things that you just consistently see they’re not doing or that they clearly could or need to stop doing or they could do better?

Jack D. Oujo (07:51.906)

Well, one huge idea, if you’re dealing with a sole proprietor with no employees or few employees that makes a lot of money, they ought to consider a defined benefit pension plan. We’ve had clients that have million dollar incomes that we’re able to get five or $600,000 write-offs by having defined benefit plans. So figuring out the best pension plan for yourself is critical for a business owner. The second thing would be entity structure.

John Jantsch (08:02.118)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (08:17.068)

Should you be an S-corp, LLC, what have you? Should you have your children on the payroll and things along those lines? What type of accounting method you should have, cash or accrual, to get into the nuts and bolts of those things. But again, realizing you want to make as much money as possible.

John Jantsch (08:17.146)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:22.459)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:30.972)

Well, I yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, are there, again, I know that people are in different situations, but when somebody came to you with a blank slate and said, what should my entity be? know, should I have a 401k? I mean, what is kind of your standard advice?

Jack D. Oujo (08:48.014)

Yeah, I think if your income is over $100,000, $150,000 a year, you should be an S corporation because you can play around with what reasonable compensation is and be able to avoid social security taxes. If you’re making under $20,000 a year, just being a sole proprietor is fine. But you can avoid a lot of taxes just with a single 401k plan, things along those lines. So it depends.

John Jantsch (09:06.533)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (09:15.374)

over when you get over $200,000, then we could have some fun with other types of pension plans. And if you’re in a service business, you should probably never be an accrual based taxpayer because your payables are going to be greater than what your receivables are. So again, it’s not one size fits all.

John Jantsch (09:37.616)

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So are there what people might call creative or lesser known deductions or credits that you see people are really not even aware of or certainly are underutilized?

Jack D. Oujo (09:52.97)

I’m just harping on these pension plans again. I hate to say it, but they’re missed by everybody. They’re missed. And the timing of income at the end of the year, being able to postpone receipts, things along those lines. There isn’t a magic thing. A lot of loopholes have been closed. What used to be pretty cool in the 70s and 80s, they’re gone now. again, those are the things you have to look at. Start with pension plans and then we can talk after that.

John Jantsch (09:55.014)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:21.958)

So I work with lot of entrepreneurs that end up having really great year, really bad year, really banner year. It seems to be kind of up and down. And so a lot of them come to the end of the year and it was like, crap, we’ve had a banner year this year, which is great, but I’m an S corp and now I’m going to get a giant tax bill. What are some things that people can do when they have more revenue than expected?

Jack D. Oujo (10:46.84)

Well, you’re looking to buy equipment and take a big section 179 deduction. So if you have a big income, example, you could buy a vehicle. it’s over 6,000 pounds, you can write, off a very large vehicle. I would look at things that you want to buy for your business and that you can write off in one year would probably be the biggest thing. On the other hand, have you ever really lousy year where you actually lost money for the year on a personal basis? And we’ve done this for many clients is looking to do Roth conversions.

John Jantsch (10:51.036)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:16.144)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (11:16.238)

where you’re taking your IRA, you’re paying taxes on it, it never gets taxed again, and you’re kind of creating income where there isn’t any that exists and utilizing that negative opportunity for something positive for the old age version of yourself.

John Jantsch (11:30.714)

Yeah, another hot topic that I run across a lot is, especially for owners, obviously, is salary versus distributions. You know, you have a lot of people giving the advice of, pay yourself just enough that the IRS thinks that’s OK, and then distribute, because you’re going to save on some taxes. Is it that cut and dried?

Jack D. Oujo (11:50.188)

No, not at all. The tax system is always going to be complicated because we derive our income in different ways. I’ve represented clients in many audits over the year. You’re trying to sell a reasonable person on what is reasonable in this situation. So you have to pay yourself a quote unquote reasonable salary.

John Jantsch (12:05.725)

Alright.

Jack D. Oujo (12:11.214)

So if you made $100,000 for the year and paid yourself $10,000, most people would say that’s BS, that’s not correct. But if you paid yourself 40 or 50,000, $50,000 in distributions, now you could kind of make a case that that’s reasonable. So again, it depends on the situation. There’s people, you you don’t want to be a pig with this stuff. I found the IRS auditors.

John Jantsch (12:33.607)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (12:37.174)

to be very reasonable people, believe it or not. You can always get one that’s an exception, but most of the time they’re trying to be reasonable. And most times you can settle these things in minutes, quite frankly. If you’re a pig, you’re gonna get slaughtered, know, that’s the way I see

John Jantsch (12:49.959)

Yeah.

So talk a little, I know this might be a little dry, make it, try to make it sexy if you can for me, but depreciation, equipment purchases, like you’re talking about vehicles. So let’s say, this probably is gonna verge on the pig, but let’s say somebody buys a recreational type of vehicle, $100,000 conversion van type of thing, and they also own a business. Where’s the line on…

Are they using that for business? Are they not using that for business? Where does that get a little fuzzy?

Jack D. Oujo (13:30.11)

If you’re using your car and your business, again, we have to sell this reasonable person that we’re using this for business and painting a sign on the side of it is not, you you’re going to fly with not the IRS is playing a game of where does this number come from? How many miles did you drive? And there’s, there’s apps that I use one called mileage IQ, and you don’t have to think about it. So they’re looking for how many miles did you drive and improve it?

John Jantsch (13:39.975)

you

John Jantsch (13:50.695)

Mm.

John Jantsch (13:55.965)

Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (13:56.142)

And if you have this documentation, you’re starting to sell the auditor that these things are real. So again, if the vehicle’s over 6,000 pounds, you write the whole thing off in one year. And then I would strongly advise people to use some kind of documentation tool. Mileage IQ is excellent. If you’re lazy and don’t do that, then having your oil changed at the of the year where you could document odometer readings.

John Jantsch (14:20.925)

All

Jack D. Oujo (14:25.026)

That would be a good thing to do, but you’re playing a game of documentation, I found, with the office. As long as you can document things and, again, sell a reasonable person on things, you’re going to be okay. That’s the line.

John Jantsch (14:29.241)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:38.917)

Have you seen a lot of organizations have distributed workforce these days? So people working out of their homes in 15 states. What does that do for the business entity tax picture? And then also, what does it do for the individual? So if an individual is employed, they have to keep an office to say, I mean, is that a deduction for that individual?

Jack D. Oujo (15:00.248)

Sure, the way I would do that if they want to be smart about it, if they can get with their employer, they can change their compensation structure around so that part of this is salary and part of it is a direct employee business expense. So if your office is in New York City and you work in Idaho, let’s say.

you make $100,000 a year, you could restructure your salary. So $15,000 of it is reimbursement for office expenses, non-taxable to the person and item, deductible for the employer. then again, I use an app called Domicile 365 because I spend most of my time in Florida and some of it in New Jersey. So if I was examined by New Jersey, this app tracks me every 15 minutes.

John Jantsch (15:30.007)

I see,

Jack D. Oujo (15:47.574)

and I attached a summary to my New Jersey return. I report New Jersey income, but only for the days that I worked in New Jersey. So again, this documentation game comes in the play, but structure, I advise the umpires and Major League Baseball to do this, to try to restructure their salary so part of its expense reimburses.

John Jantsch (16:03.847)

Yeah. Would health insurance fall into that category? Let’s say somebody gets their spouse is they’re able to get on their spouse’s plan, but it’s $300, you know, to add, could the employer pay that and actually deduct that? And that would be pre-tax or not.

Jack D. Oujo (16:18.221)

The could use some sort of section 125 plan or if there’s a high deductible plan, something along those lines could be a win for the employee and the employer. In my business, I’ve had high deductible medical plans and I contributed money to our employees HSA accounts that they could take with them. It was not a use it or lose it feature. And that was good for both me and for them.

John Jantsch (16:27.421)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (16:44.411)

Yeah. Where do you fall on 401k? they, I, again, I know it’s people probably trying to sell another tool, but I see a lot of, I’d see a lot of people kind of bashing 401k’s as not a great business tool or not a great employee tool.

Jack D. Oujo (17:01.396)

Anybody that bashes 401Ks you should run away from, like the place with non-fire. For people, it’s one good thing that Jimmy Carter did as president was put in the 401K plans. Sorry to say that, but…

Everybody should make almost everybody should make maximum use of 401k plans where they’re missed by people is a lot of times I’ve seen us two spouses working where one person makes big money and another one has some sort of part-time job and they have this mental accounting on money They should both be utilizing maxing out 401k plans because I found that a lot of people in America when they go to retire end up with a paid-off mortgage Which I’m a huge fan of by the way I’m a big believer in paying off your mortgage when reasonable to do so I have

John Jantsch (17:28.775)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (17:45.168)

haven’t had a mortgage on my house in 25 years. But they come in with these 401k plans that are seven figures and then they live off of them. They up and downsize their home and they have more money to play with. But that’s the, for most Americans that make under $400,000 a year, $500,000 a year, you’re crazy not to max out your 401k plans. And my three adult children, I preach that to them and I’m glad they listen to me on it. go, max it out, max it out, max it out.

John Jantsch (17:53.445)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (18:15.088)

reducing, in my opinion, your largest expense, which is your income tax. You’re cutting that down and building up this lump sum of capital you need to retire. And this business that you have large taxes and retirement is also a bunch of malarkey. You know, the tax rate under $90,000 is 12%. You have $3 million in your IRA take out 4 % a year, 120 grand. You got 90,000 at 12 % and the $30,000 standard deduction. How is that wrong? that’s

John Jantsch (18:19.314)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.39)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:42.172)

Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (18:43.692)

That’s how I feel, very strong mistake.

John Jantsch (18:44.869)

Yeah, well, so talk to talk one more time about employer putting children or spouses on the payroll, because I think that’s a that’s something that a lot of people overlook as well.

Jack D. Oujo (18:54.798)

Sure. First of all, children can only be on the payroll if you’re a sole proprietor or a single member, LLC, if you want to avoid payroll taxes on them. And they have to do work and it should be documented. But if you pay your child that works in the business $10,000, let’s say, you avoid all the social security taxes.

John Jantsch (19:07.549)

Okay, yeah, right. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (19:19.086)

They get taxed at that rate, which is hardly anything. And then you put that in your 529 plan. So the regular business owner that goes, I make too much money for any child aid. That’s your own loophole to get, you you probably save three to $4,000 just having your kid on a payroll for $10,000.

John Jantsch (19:23.975)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:36.605)

And you’re giving them money that you would have probably given them anyway, right?

Jack D. Oujo (19:41.431)

My kids were on the payroll for a long time. I remember my son, is my youngest, who’s now 30 years of age when he was four years old. My wife got a letter from Social Security saying, here, Mr. Financial Advisor.

Social Security wants to know what my son Matthew did for work. And I said, my son worked on the shredding machine in the office. He stuffed envelopes and he told everybody at his preschool what his father did for a living, which significantly resulted in new business and sent them in and never heard from them again. know, but he did work in the business, you know, the question of what is it worth? know, the tax law for a millionaire is the same for a poor person. And you make that argument.

John Jantsch (20:10.267)

Ha ha.

John Jantsch (20:16.071)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (20:23.726)

My son modeled for the firm brochure. How is his modeling different than somebody else? Unless you’re the laws for them and not for me. So that are the arguments you could make there. But again, you have to, you can’t put them on the payroll for $100,000 for you.

John Jantsch (20:23.869)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:37.775)

Yeah, well, I will say, you know, for a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, spouse, particularly a spouse that is doesn’t have another career outside the home. mean, they’re there. I guarantee it. They’re working.

Jack D. Oujo (20:51.864)

My spouse, my wife Eileen has been on the payroll for 30 years, always maxing out the 401k plan and she could tell anybody what she did because she did work in the office and work very hard. But it’s two pension plans, one for me, one for her and now they’re telephone.

John Jantsch (21:00.369)

Yep. Yep.

Well, and, she contributed to social security, I suspect. Right. So she’s going to get a social security check that she wasn’t going to get otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, for those of you that, like it, when we talk about AI and marketing and creative things, I’m sorry, we had to get down into the weeds on, on another really important, as you said, the biggest expense for a lot of businesses or certainly a lot of business owners. Jack, before we let you go,

Jack D. Oujo (21:07.63)

Yes, also.

Jack D. Oujo (21:12.302)

100 % absolutely correct.

John Jantsch (21:33.495)

Is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work, find out about too smart to be an umpire?

Jack D. Oujo (21:40.076)

Yeah, there’s a website, TooSmartToBeAnUmpire.com. They can go on Amazon and read all the reviews that are on Amazon right now. I’m thrilled. I’m a first time author. So when TooSmartToBeAnUmpire came out, I wasn’t sure I was going to go over. And it’s borderline bestseller list right now. So there’s a website, TooSmartToBeAnUmpire.com and also Ojo Wealth Strategies, which I’m the founder of. People can check out that website. Jason Gordon and Anthony Sandimerski are running the firm now.

Jason’s 35 and he’s worked in my office since he was 16 years old. So they’re well credentialed and great guys, so that’s where they can find out.

John Jantsch (22:16.605)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Jack D. Oujo (22:22.242)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.936)

What if the career setback you’re still replaying is actually the best wealth strategy you’ll ever stumble into because it forces you to build new skills, new discipline, and maybe a new plan that finally makes you unstoppable. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jack Oujo. He’s the founder and lead advisor of Oujo Wealth Strategies, one of the nation’s largest tax

focused wealth management firms. holds multiple professional designations, including a whole bunch of letters and a master’s in taxation. But before starting the firm, he was a major league baseball umpire advancing to AAA and winning the Joe Ryan Award as the highest rated minor league umpiring prospect. But today we’re going to talk about both his journey and his new book, Two Smart

to be an umpire. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack D. Oujo (01:00.182)

Thanks, John. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.

John Jantsch (01:02.332)

All right, so the first question we just need to get out of the way is, what do you think of the rule change on balls and strikes this year that’s going to go to the majors?

Jack D. Oujo (01:13.038)

I am actually in favor of it. And the reason why I’m in favor of it is because you’ve had, you have three boxes on the TV, one from the home team, one from the visiting team, and they’re normally set by some intern that works there. It’s not the actual strike zone, by the way. You have the one from Major League Baseball and the human being. So let’s get one right.

John Jantsch (01:15.003)

Yeah?

John Jantsch (01:28.104)

is that right?

John Jantsch (01:32.368)

Yeah, yeah. Do you feel umpires feel that way too? Because again, I know they’re going to they’re going to test it with here we’re to do the whole show on this. I know they’re going to test it with you know, only get a couple challenges. But you know, every batter thinks it’s a ball and every pitcher thinks it’s a strike. So

Jack D. Oujo (01:42.382)

Sure.

Jack D. Oujo (01:49.87)

I was going over with one major league umpire, his retirement plan. was in his late fifties. And I told him he was financially independent, was working because he wanted to. said, how much longer do you want to go? And he goes, Oh, a few more years, Jack, till I’m 59. He goes, they bring in the electronic strike zone. goes, I’ll go till I’m 79. Won’t be under any pressure, nothing along those lines. So I think they like it. creates more jobs.

It makes the job less valuable in my view. Why do you need to pay somebody $400,000 a year when you have a phone that can get the pictures right? So it’s like anything else in our society, AI, you’d be taking away another job.

John Jantsch (02:24.794)

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about your journey. had, I mean, you, while it sounds like you loved umpiring, it was a bit of a career disappointment. So how did you turn that into where you are today?

Jack D. Oujo (02:41.346)

Well, yeah, during the eight years I was in the minor leagues, I was smart enough, no pun intended, to work in the off seasons as an accountant. I had good accounting jobs in New York City, and so I was gaining experience.

And when I got my release, I was surprised because I was on the verge of the major leagues and there was, I write about it too smart to be an umpire. But nevertheless, I decided to focus on getting as much education as I could. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I was so hurt from the baseball experience that I’d work nine to five.

And then at night, I spent the next four years getting my CPA, CFP, master’s in taxation, securities and insurance license, not knowing where it would lead. And so that was the focus, getting education and try to reinvent myself from the ground up.

John Jantsch (03:21.03)

Mm.

John Jantsch (03:31.526)

So, I mean, did you look at it then as that’s plan B? I don’t know what plan B looks like, but that’s plan B.

Jack D. Oujo (03:39.768)

Plan B was always a career in public accounting, but as I was in public accounting, I realized how boring that was. You your professional baseball umpired 30,000 people in the stands and I found myself counting hats one day verifying an inventory. so that’s how I transferred into wealth management.

John Jantsch (03:58.11)

it is a, is a minor league umpire in particular not paid enough for that to be their full-time job. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you’re getting on the buses with them, huh? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you, so most of them were doing like you were, another gig, which was, some mechanic work, right? Tax prep.

Jack D. Oujo (04:04.032)

It’s poverty. It’s an absolute disgrace. And that goes for the players too. Managers. We drive our own cars. We drive our own transportation. It’s even worse than people think. Yeah, it’s bad.

Jack D. Oujo (04:23.798)

In my case, was accounting work. A lot of people in baseball work for UPS, it seemed, in the off seasons. But unless you had the resources from family, which most people did not, you had to find something to do once the season ended.

John Jantsch (04:35.958)

I, when I was in high school, a friend of mine worked at, worked for the Royals as a clubhouse attendant. and, so every now and then I got to fill in and do that. And one of my favorite things to do was bring the, the after game meal to the umpires because it always slipped me five bucks or something. so even in poverty, they were taking care of the little guy. So.

Jack D. Oujo (04:57.482)

Absolutely, The manager of the Padres now, I don’t know why his name escapes me, but he was actually our clubby in Charlotte in double A and actually rose to become a major league manager, current manager of the Padres.

John Jantsch (05:11.378)

wow. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. So now fast forward a bit. You’ve built one of the nation’s largest tax focused wealth firms. Talk a little bit about, I mean, was there a secret sauce? Was there an approach to client relationships? Did your past kind of really guide you? What was your, what do you attribute to your success, I guess?

Jack D. Oujo (05:35.082)

I think people like the honesty and I think that’s from the umpire in me. I don’t know if they think I’m the brightest bulb, but they know they can trust me. And after going through the baseball experience, I did believe in protecting against worst case scenarios. When the terrorist attack took place in 2001, if you remember back then, the thinking was, will there be another attack? It’s a question of when.

John Jantsch (05:39.43)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:00.016)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (06:00.202)

And I prepared my clients for worst case scenarios. When 2008 hit, they were prepared, although I didn’t know what a reverse credit default swap was at the time. And the business really prospered, like went to a whole nother level after 2008, growing by 400%. But I think just emphasizing client service, a four seasons type of service with clients was probably.

John Jantsch (06:24.828)

So I’m sure that you are very aware of this. Certainly a lot of business owners that we work with, tax planning means giving their stuff at the end of the year to their accountant, as opposed to anything that would be proactive. What’s the biggest misconception you hear from clients, especially businesses, when it comes to taxes and wealth planning?

Jack D. Oujo (06:47.256)

Sure, when I meet with a client for the first time, I always ask them what their biggest expense is and they say their mortgage and I go, no, isn’t. And they argue with me until I explain to them it’s their income tax. Everybody knows their refund or what they owe, but they don’t know they have much greater control over that expense than they think. I think people also think that wealthy people don’t pay taxes when they do. And arranging your affairs,

to reduce your taxes in a way that’s consistent with your goals and objectives is critical for clients. again, maximizing retirement accounts, having a side hustle, I think helps employees. But arranging your affairs to pay the least possible tax in a way consistent with your goals is important.

John Jantsch (07:32.432)

So do you want to get into the nitty gritty on that a little bit? mean, are there specific things, again, a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs, small business owners. Are there things that you just consistently see they’re not doing or that they clearly could or need to stop doing or they could do better?

Jack D. Oujo (07:51.906)

Well, one huge idea, if you’re dealing with a sole proprietor with no employees or few employees that makes a lot of money, they ought to consider a defined benefit pension plan. We’ve had clients that have million dollar incomes that we’re able to get five or $600,000 write-offs by having defined benefit plans. So figuring out the best pension plan for yourself is critical for a business owner. The second thing would be entity structure.

John Jantsch (08:02.118)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (08:17.068)

Should you be an S-corp, LLC, what have you? Should you have your children on the payroll and things along those lines? What type of accounting method you should have, cash or accrual, to get into the nuts and bolts of those things. But again, realizing you want to make as much money as possible.

John Jantsch (08:17.146)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:22.459)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:30.972)

Well, I yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, are there, again, I know that people are in different situations, but when somebody came to you with a blank slate and said, what should my entity be? know, should I have a 401k? I mean, what is kind of your standard advice?

Jack D. Oujo (08:48.014)

Yeah, I think if your income is over $100,000, $150,000 a year, you should be an S corporation because you can play around with what reasonable compensation is and be able to avoid social security taxes. If you’re making under $20,000 a year, just being a sole proprietor is fine. But you can avoid a lot of taxes just with a single 401k plan, things along those lines. So it depends.

John Jantsch (09:06.533)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (09:15.374)

over when you get over $200,000, then we could have some fun with other types of pension plans. And if you’re in a service business, you should probably never be an accrual based taxpayer because your payables are going to be greater than what your receivables are. So again, it’s not one size fits all.

John Jantsch (09:37.616)

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So are there what people might call creative or lesser known deductions or credits that you see people are really not even aware of or certainly are underutilized?

Jack D. Oujo (09:52.97)

I’m just harping on these pension plans again. I hate to say it, but they’re missed by everybody. They’re missed. And the timing of income at the end of the year, being able to postpone receipts, things along those lines. There isn’t a magic thing. A lot of loopholes have been closed. What used to be pretty cool in the 70s and 80s, they’re gone now. again, those are the things you have to look at. Start with pension plans and then we can talk after that.

John Jantsch (09:55.014)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:21.958)

So I work with lot of entrepreneurs that end up having really great year, really bad year, really banner year. It seems to be kind of up and down. And so a lot of them come to the end of the year and it was like, crap, we’ve had a banner year this year, which is great, but I’m an S corp and now I’m going to get a giant tax bill. What are some things that people can do when they have more revenue than expected?

Jack D. Oujo (10:46.84)

Well, you’re looking to buy equipment and take a big section 179 deduction. So if you have a big income, example, you could buy a vehicle. it’s over 6,000 pounds, you can write, off a very large vehicle. I would look at things that you want to buy for your business and that you can write off in one year would probably be the biggest thing. On the other hand, have you ever really lousy year where you actually lost money for the year on a personal basis? And we’ve done this for many clients is looking to do Roth conversions.

John Jantsch (10:51.036)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:16.144)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (11:16.238)

where you’re taking your IRA, you’re paying taxes on it, it never gets taxed again, and you’re kind of creating income where there isn’t any that exists and utilizing that negative opportunity for something positive for the old age version of yourself.

John Jantsch (11:30.714)

Yeah, another hot topic that I run across a lot is, especially for owners, obviously, is salary versus distributions. You know, you have a lot of people giving the advice of, pay yourself just enough that the IRS thinks that’s OK, and then distribute, because you’re going to save on some taxes. Is it that cut and dried?

Jack D. Oujo (11:50.188)

No, not at all. The tax system is always going to be complicated because we derive our income in different ways. I’ve represented clients in many audits over the year. You’re trying to sell a reasonable person on what is reasonable in this situation. So you have to pay yourself a quote unquote reasonable salary.

John Jantsch (12:05.725)

Alright.

Jack D. Oujo (12:11.214)

So if you made $100,000 for the year and paid yourself $10,000, most people would say that’s BS, that’s not correct. But if you paid yourself 40 or 50,000, $50,000 in distributions, now you could kind of make a case that that’s reasonable. So again, it depends on the situation. There’s people, you you don’t want to be a pig with this stuff. I found the IRS auditors.

John Jantsch (12:33.607)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (12:37.174)

to be very reasonable people, believe it or not. You can always get one that’s an exception, but most of the time they’re trying to be reasonable. And most times you can settle these things in minutes, quite frankly. If you’re a pig, you’re gonna get slaughtered, know, that’s the way I see

John Jantsch (12:49.959)

Yeah.

So talk a little, I know this might be a little dry, make it, try to make it sexy if you can for me, but depreciation, equipment purchases, like you’re talking about vehicles. So let’s say, this probably is gonna verge on the pig, but let’s say somebody buys a recreational type of vehicle, $100,000 conversion van type of thing, and they also own a business. Where’s the line on…

Are they using that for business? Are they not using that for business? Where does that get a little fuzzy?

Jack D. Oujo (13:30.11)

If you’re using your car and your business, again, we have to sell this reasonable person that we’re using this for business and painting a sign on the side of it is not, you you’re going to fly with not the IRS is playing a game of where does this number come from? How many miles did you drive? And there’s, there’s apps that I use one called mileage IQ, and you don’t have to think about it. So they’re looking for how many miles did you drive and improve it?

John Jantsch (13:39.975)

you

John Jantsch (13:50.695)

Mm.

John Jantsch (13:55.965)

Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (13:56.142)

And if you have this documentation, you’re starting to sell the auditor that these things are real. So again, if the vehicle’s over 6,000 pounds, you write the whole thing off in one year. And then I would strongly advise people to use some kind of documentation tool. Mileage IQ is excellent. If you’re lazy and don’t do that, then having your oil changed at the of the year where you could document odometer readings.

John Jantsch (14:20.925)

All

Jack D. Oujo (14:25.026)

That would be a good thing to do, but you’re playing a game of documentation, I found, with the office. As long as you can document things and, again, sell a reasonable person on things, you’re going to be okay. That’s the line.

John Jantsch (14:29.241)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:38.917)

Have you seen a lot of organizations have distributed workforce these days? So people working out of their homes in 15 states. What does that do for the business entity tax picture? And then also, what does it do for the individual? So if an individual is employed, they have to keep an office to say, I mean, is that a deduction for that individual?

Jack D. Oujo (15:00.248)

Sure, the way I would do that if they want to be smart about it, if they can get with their employer, they can change their compensation structure around so that part of this is salary and part of it is a direct employee business expense. So if your office is in New York City and you work in Idaho, let’s say.

you make $100,000 a year, you could restructure your salary. So $15,000 of it is reimbursement for office expenses, non-taxable to the person and item, deductible for the employer. then again, I use an app called Domicile 365 because I spend most of my time in Florida and some of it in New Jersey. So if I was examined by New Jersey, this app tracks me every 15 minutes.

John Jantsch (15:30.007)

I see,

Jack D. Oujo (15:47.574)

and I attached a summary to my New Jersey return. I report New Jersey income, but only for the days that I worked in New Jersey. So again, this documentation game comes in the play, but structure, I advise the umpires and Major League Baseball to do this, to try to restructure their salary so part of its expense reimburses.

John Jantsch (16:03.847)

Yeah. Would health insurance fall into that category? Let’s say somebody gets their spouse is they’re able to get on their spouse’s plan, but it’s $300, you know, to add, could the employer pay that and actually deduct that? And that would be pre-tax or not.

Jack D. Oujo (16:18.221)

The could use some sort of section 125 plan or if there’s a high deductible plan, something along those lines could be a win for the employee and the employer. In my business, I’ve had high deductible medical plans and I contributed money to our employees HSA accounts that they could take with them. It was not a use it or lose it feature. And that was good for both me and for them.

John Jantsch (16:27.421)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (16:44.411)

Yeah. Where do you fall on 401k? they, I, again, I know it’s people probably trying to sell another tool, but I see a lot of, I’d see a lot of people kind of bashing 401k’s as not a great business tool or not a great employee tool.

Jack D. Oujo (17:01.396)

Anybody that bashes 401Ks you should run away from, like the place with non-fire. For people, it’s one good thing that Jimmy Carter did as president was put in the 401K plans. Sorry to say that, but…

Everybody should make almost everybody should make maximum use of 401k plans where they’re missed by people is a lot of times I’ve seen us two spouses working where one person makes big money and another one has some sort of part-time job and they have this mental accounting on money They should both be utilizing maxing out 401k plans because I found that a lot of people in America when they go to retire end up with a paid-off mortgage Which I’m a huge fan of by the way I’m a big believer in paying off your mortgage when reasonable to do so I have

John Jantsch (17:28.775)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (17:45.168)

haven’t had a mortgage on my house in 25 years. But they come in with these 401k plans that are seven figures and then they live off of them. They up and downsize their home and they have more money to play with. But that’s the, for most Americans that make under $400,000 a year, $500,000 a year, you’re crazy not to max out your 401k plans. And my three adult children, I preach that to them and I’m glad they listen to me on it. go, max it out, max it out, max it out.

John Jantsch (17:53.445)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (18:15.088)

reducing, in my opinion, your largest expense, which is your income tax. You’re cutting that down and building up this lump sum of capital you need to retire. And this business that you have large taxes and retirement is also a bunch of malarkey. You know, the tax rate under $90,000 is 12%. You have $3 million in your IRA take out 4 % a year, 120 grand. You got 90,000 at 12 % and the $30,000 standard deduction. How is that wrong? that’s

John Jantsch (18:19.314)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.39)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:42.172)

Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (18:43.692)

That’s how I feel, very strong mistake.

John Jantsch (18:44.869)

Yeah, well, so talk to talk one more time about employer putting children or spouses on the payroll, because I think that’s a that’s something that a lot of people overlook as well.

Jack D. Oujo (18:54.798)

Sure. First of all, children can only be on the payroll if you’re a sole proprietor or a single member, LLC, if you want to avoid payroll taxes on them. And they have to do work and it should be documented. But if you pay your child that works in the business $10,000, let’s say, you avoid all the social security taxes.

John Jantsch (19:07.549)

Okay, yeah, right. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (19:19.086)

They get taxed at that rate, which is hardly anything. And then you put that in your 529 plan. So the regular business owner that goes, I make too much money for any child aid. That’s your own loophole to get, you you probably save three to $4,000 just having your kid on a payroll for $10,000.

John Jantsch (19:23.975)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:36.605)

And you’re giving them money that you would have probably given them anyway, right?

Jack D. Oujo (19:41.431)

My kids were on the payroll for a long time. I remember my son, is my youngest, who’s now 30 years of age when he was four years old. My wife got a letter from Social Security saying, here, Mr. Financial Advisor.

Social Security wants to know what my son Matthew did for work. And I said, my son worked on the shredding machine in the office. He stuffed envelopes and he told everybody at his preschool what his father did for a living, which significantly resulted in new business and sent them in and never heard from them again. know, but he did work in the business, you know, the question of what is it worth? know, the tax law for a millionaire is the same for a poor person. And you make that argument.

John Jantsch (20:10.267)

Ha ha.

John Jantsch (20:16.071)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (20:23.726)

My son modeled for the firm brochure. How is his modeling different than somebody else? Unless you’re the laws for them and not for me. So that are the arguments you could make there. But again, you have to, you can’t put them on the payroll for $100,000 for you.

John Jantsch (20:23.869)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:37.775)

Yeah, well, I will say, you know, for a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, spouse, particularly a spouse that is doesn’t have another career outside the home. mean, they’re there. I guarantee it. They’re working.

Jack D. Oujo (20:51.864)

My spouse, my wife Eileen has been on the payroll for 30 years, always maxing out the 401k plan and she could tell anybody what she did because she did work in the office and work very hard. But it’s two pension plans, one for me, one for her and now they’re telephone.

John Jantsch (21:00.369)

Yep. Yep.

Well, and, she contributed to social security, I suspect. Right. So she’s going to get a social security check that she wasn’t going to get otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, for those of you that, like it, when we talk about AI and marketing and creative things, I’m sorry, we had to get down into the weeds on, on another really important, as you said, the biggest expense for a lot of businesses or certainly a lot of business owners. Jack, before we let you go,

Jack D. Oujo (21:07.63)

Yes, also.

Jack D. Oujo (21:12.302)

100 % absolutely correct.

John Jantsch (21:33.495)

Is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work, find out about too smart to be an umpire?

Jack D. Oujo (21:40.076)

Yeah, there’s a website, TooSmartToBeAnUmpire.com. They can go on Amazon and read all the reviews that are on Amazon right now. I’m thrilled. I’m a first time author. So when TooSmartToBeAnUmpire came out, I wasn’t sure I was going to go over. And it’s borderline bestseller list right now. So there’s a website, TooSmartToBeAnUmpire.com and also Ojo Wealth Strategies, which I’m the founder of. People can check out that website. Jason Gordon and Anthony Sandimerski are running the firm now.

Jason’s 35 and he’s worked in my office since he was 16 years old. So they’re well credentialed and great guys, so that’s where they can find out.

John Jantsch (22:16.605)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Jack D. Oujo (22:22.242)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.936)

What if the career setback you’re still replaying is actually the best wealth strategy you’ll ever stumble into because it forces you to build new skills, new discipline, and maybe a new plan that finally makes you unstoppable. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Jack Oujo. He’s the founder and lead advisor of Oujo Wealth Strategies, one of the nation’s largest tax

focused wealth management firms. holds multiple professional designations, including a whole bunch of letters and a master’s in taxation. But before starting the firm, he was a major league baseball umpire advancing to AAA and winning the Joe Ryan Award as the highest rated minor league umpiring prospect. But today we’re going to talk about both his journey and his new book, Two Smart

to be an umpire. So Jack, welcome to the show.

Jack D. Oujo (01:00.182)

Thanks, John. It’s a pleasure to be with you today.

John Jantsch (01:02.332)

All right, so the first question we just need to get out of the way is, what do you think of the rule change on balls and strikes this year that’s going to go to the majors?

Jack D. Oujo (01:13.038)

I am actually in favor of it. And the reason why I’m in favor of it is because you’ve had, you have three boxes on the TV, one from the home team, one from the visiting team, and they’re normally set by some intern that works there. It’s not the actual strike zone, by the way. You have the one from Major League Baseball and the human being. So let’s get one right.

John Jantsch (01:15.003)

Yeah?

John Jantsch (01:28.104)

is that right?

John Jantsch (01:32.368)

Yeah, yeah. Do you feel umpires feel that way too? Because again, I know they’re going to they’re going to test it with here we’re to do the whole show on this. I know they’re going to test it with you know, only get a couple challenges. But you know, every batter thinks it’s a ball and every pitcher thinks it’s a strike. So

Jack D. Oujo (01:42.382)

Sure.

Jack D. Oujo (01:49.87)

I was going over with one major league umpire, his retirement plan. was in his late fifties. And I told him he was financially independent, was working because he wanted to. said, how much longer do you want to go? And he goes, Oh, a few more years, Jack, till I’m 59. He goes, they bring in the electronic strike zone. goes, I’ll go till I’m 79. Won’t be under any pressure, nothing along those lines. So I think they like it. creates more jobs.

It makes the job less valuable in my view. Why do you need to pay somebody $400,000 a year when you have a phone that can get the pictures right? So it’s like anything else in our society, AI, you’d be taking away another job.

John Jantsch (02:24.794)

Yeah. Yeah. All right. So let’s talk a little bit about your journey. had, I mean, you, while it sounds like you loved umpiring, it was a bit of a career disappointment. So how did you turn that into where you are today?

Jack D. Oujo (02:41.346)

Well, yeah, during the eight years I was in the minor leagues, I was smart enough, no pun intended, to work in the off seasons as an accountant. I had good accounting jobs in New York City, and so I was gaining experience.

And when I got my release, I was surprised because I was on the verge of the major leagues and there was, I write about it too smart to be an umpire. But nevertheless, I decided to focus on getting as much education as I could. I didn’t know where it would lead, but I was so hurt from the baseball experience that I’d work nine to five.

And then at night, I spent the next four years getting my CPA, CFP, master’s in taxation, securities and insurance license, not knowing where it would lead. And so that was the focus, getting education and try to reinvent myself from the ground up.

John Jantsch (03:21.03)

Mm.

John Jantsch (03:31.526)

So, I mean, did you look at it then as that’s plan B? I don’t know what plan B looks like, but that’s plan B.

Jack D. Oujo (03:39.768)

Plan B was always a career in public accounting, but as I was in public accounting, I realized how boring that was. You your professional baseball umpired 30,000 people in the stands and I found myself counting hats one day verifying an inventory. so that’s how I transferred into wealth management.

John Jantsch (03:58.11)

it is a, is a minor league umpire in particular not paid enough for that to be their full-time job. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So you’re getting on the buses with them, huh? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you, so most of them were doing like you were, another gig, which was, some mechanic work, right? Tax prep.

Jack D. Oujo (04:04.032)

It’s poverty. It’s an absolute disgrace. And that goes for the players too. Managers. We drive our own cars. We drive our own transportation. It’s even worse than people think. Yeah, it’s bad.

Jack D. Oujo (04:23.798)

In my case, was accounting work. A lot of people in baseball work for UPS, it seemed, in the off seasons. But unless you had the resources from family, which most people did not, you had to find something to do once the season ended.

John Jantsch (04:35.958)

I, when I was in high school, a friend of mine worked at, worked for the Royals as a clubhouse attendant. and, so every now and then I got to fill in and do that. And one of my favorite things to do was bring the, the after game meal to the umpires because it always slipped me five bucks or something. so even in poverty, they were taking care of the little guy. So.

Jack D. Oujo (04:57.482)

Absolutely, The manager of the Padres now, I don’t know why his name escapes me, but he was actually our clubby in Charlotte in double A and actually rose to become a major league manager, current manager of the Padres.

John Jantsch (05:11.378)

wow. That’s awesome. Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. Yeah. So now fast forward a bit. You’ve built one of the nation’s largest tax focused wealth firms. Talk a little bit about, I mean, was there a secret sauce? Was there an approach to client relationships? Did your past kind of really guide you? What was your, what do you attribute to your success, I guess?

Jack D. Oujo (05:35.082)

I think people like the honesty and I think that’s from the umpire in me. I don’t know if they think I’m the brightest bulb, but they know they can trust me. And after going through the baseball experience, I did believe in protecting against worst case scenarios. When the terrorist attack took place in 2001, if you remember back then, the thinking was, will there be another attack? It’s a question of when.

John Jantsch (05:39.43)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (06:00.016)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (06:00.202)

And I prepared my clients for worst case scenarios. When 2008 hit, they were prepared, although I didn’t know what a reverse credit default swap was at the time. And the business really prospered, like went to a whole nother level after 2008, growing by 400%. But I think just emphasizing client service, a four seasons type of service with clients was probably.

John Jantsch (06:24.828)

So I’m sure that you are very aware of this. Certainly a lot of business owners that we work with, tax planning means giving their stuff at the end of the year to their accountant, as opposed to anything that would be proactive. What’s the biggest misconception you hear from clients, especially businesses, when it comes to taxes and wealth planning?

Jack D. Oujo (06:47.256)

Sure, when I meet with a client for the first time, I always ask them what their biggest expense is and they say their mortgage and I go, no, isn’t. And they argue with me until I explain to them it’s their income tax. Everybody knows their refund or what they owe, but they don’t know they have much greater control over that expense than they think. I think people also think that wealthy people don’t pay taxes when they do. And arranging your affairs,

to reduce your taxes in a way that’s consistent with your goals and objectives is critical for clients. again, maximizing retirement accounts, having a side hustle, I think helps employees. But arranging your affairs to pay the least possible tax in a way consistent with your goals is important.

John Jantsch (07:32.432)

So do you want to get into the nitty gritty on that a little bit? mean, are there specific things, again, a lot of our listeners are entrepreneurs, small business owners. Are there things that you just consistently see they’re not doing or that they clearly could or need to stop doing or they could do better?

Jack D. Oujo (07:51.906)

Well, one huge idea, if you’re dealing with a sole proprietor with no employees or few employees that makes a lot of money, they ought to consider a defined benefit pension plan. We’ve had clients that have million dollar incomes that we’re able to get five or $600,000 write-offs by having defined benefit plans. So figuring out the best pension plan for yourself is critical for a business owner. The second thing would be entity structure.

John Jantsch (08:02.118)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (08:17.068)

Should you be an S-corp, LLC, what have you? Should you have your children on the payroll and things along those lines? What type of accounting method you should have, cash or accrual, to get into the nuts and bolts of those things. But again, realizing you want to make as much money as possible.

John Jantsch (08:17.146)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:22.459)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (08:30.972)

Well, I yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, are there, again, I know that people are in different situations, but when somebody came to you with a blank slate and said, what should my entity be? know, should I have a 401k? I mean, what is kind of your standard advice?

Jack D. Oujo (08:48.014)

Yeah, I think if your income is over $100,000, $150,000 a year, you should be an S corporation because you can play around with what reasonable compensation is and be able to avoid social security taxes. If you’re making under $20,000 a year, just being a sole proprietor is fine. But you can avoid a lot of taxes just with a single 401k plan, things along those lines. So it depends.

John Jantsch (09:06.533)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (09:15.374)

over when you get over $200,000, then we could have some fun with other types of pension plans. And if you’re in a service business, you should probably never be an accrual based taxpayer because your payables are going to be greater than what your receivables are. So again, it’s not one size fits all.

John Jantsch (09:37.616)

Yeah, sure, sure, sure. So are there what people might call creative or lesser known deductions or credits that you see people are really not even aware of or certainly are underutilized?

Jack D. Oujo (09:52.97)

I’m just harping on these pension plans again. I hate to say it, but they’re missed by everybody. They’re missed. And the timing of income at the end of the year, being able to postpone receipts, things along those lines. There isn’t a magic thing. A lot of loopholes have been closed. What used to be pretty cool in the 70s and 80s, they’re gone now. again, those are the things you have to look at. Start with pension plans and then we can talk after that.

John Jantsch (09:55.014)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:21.958)

So I work with lot of entrepreneurs that end up having really great year, really bad year, really banner year. It seems to be kind of up and down. And so a lot of them come to the end of the year and it was like, crap, we’ve had a banner year this year, which is great, but I’m an S corp and now I’m going to get a giant tax bill. What are some things that people can do when they have more revenue than expected?

Jack D. Oujo (10:46.84)

Well, you’re looking to buy equipment and take a big section 179 deduction. So if you have a big income, example, you could buy a vehicle. it’s over 6,000 pounds, you can write, off a very large vehicle. I would look at things that you want to buy for your business and that you can write off in one year would probably be the biggest thing. On the other hand, have you ever really lousy year where you actually lost money for the year on a personal basis? And we’ve done this for many clients is looking to do Roth conversions.

John Jantsch (10:51.036)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:16.144)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (11:16.238)

where you’re taking your IRA, you’re paying taxes on it, it never gets taxed again, and you’re kind of creating income where there isn’t any that exists and utilizing that negative opportunity for something positive for the old age version of yourself.

John Jantsch (11:30.714)

Yeah, another hot topic that I run across a lot is, especially for owners, obviously, is salary versus distributions. You know, you have a lot of people giving the advice of, pay yourself just enough that the IRS thinks that’s OK, and then distribute, because you’re going to save on some taxes. Is it that cut and dried?

Jack D. Oujo (11:50.188)

No, not at all. The tax system is always going to be complicated because we derive our income in different ways. I’ve represented clients in many audits over the year. You’re trying to sell a reasonable person on what is reasonable in this situation. So you have to pay yourself a quote unquote reasonable salary.

John Jantsch (12:05.725)

Alright.

Jack D. Oujo (12:11.214)

So if you made $100,000 for the year and paid yourself $10,000, most people would say that’s BS, that’s not correct. But if you paid yourself 40 or 50,000, $50,000 in distributions, now you could kind of make a case that that’s reasonable. So again, it depends on the situation. There’s people, you you don’t want to be a pig with this stuff. I found the IRS auditors.

John Jantsch (12:33.607)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (12:37.174)

to be very reasonable people, believe it or not. You can always get one that’s an exception, but most of the time they’re trying to be reasonable. And most times you can settle these things in minutes, quite frankly. If you’re a pig, you’re gonna get slaughtered, know, that’s the way I see

John Jantsch (12:49.959)

Yeah.

So talk a little, I know this might be a little dry, make it, try to make it sexy if you can for me, but depreciation, equipment purchases, like you’re talking about vehicles. So let’s say, this probably is gonna verge on the pig, but let’s say somebody buys a recreational type of vehicle, $100,000 conversion van type of thing, and they also own a business. Where’s the line on…

Are they using that for business? Are they not using that for business? Where does that get a little fuzzy?

Jack D. Oujo (13:30.11)

If you’re using your car and your business, again, we have to sell this reasonable person that we’re using this for business and painting a sign on the side of it is not, you you’re going to fly with not the IRS is playing a game of where does this number come from? How many miles did you drive? And there’s, there’s apps that I use one called mileage IQ, and you don’t have to think about it. So they’re looking for how many miles did you drive and improve it?

John Jantsch (13:39.975)

you

John Jantsch (13:50.695)

Mm.

John Jantsch (13:55.965)

Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (13:56.142)

And if you have this documentation, you’re starting to sell the auditor that these things are real. So again, if the vehicle’s over 6,000 pounds, you write the whole thing off in one year. And then I would strongly advise people to use some kind of documentation tool. Mileage IQ is excellent. If you’re lazy and don’t do that, then having your oil changed at the of the year where you could document odometer readings.

John Jantsch (14:20.925)

All

Jack D. Oujo (14:25.026)

That would be a good thing to do, but you’re playing a game of documentation, I found, with the office. As long as you can document things and, again, sell a reasonable person on things, you’re going to be okay. That’s the line.

John Jantsch (14:29.241)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:38.917)

Have you seen a lot of organizations have distributed workforce these days? So people working out of their homes in 15 states. What does that do for the business entity tax picture? And then also, what does it do for the individual? So if an individual is employed, they have to keep an office to say, I mean, is that a deduction for that individual?

Jack D. Oujo (15:00.248)

Sure, the way I would do that if they want to be smart about it, if they can get with their employer, they can change their compensation structure around so that part of this is salary and part of it is a direct employee business expense. So if your office is in New York City and you work in Idaho, let’s say.

you make $100,000 a year, you could restructure your salary. So $15,000 of it is reimbursement for office expenses, non-taxable to the person and item, deductible for the employer. then again, I use an app called Domicile 365 because I spend most of my time in Florida and some of it in New Jersey. So if I was examined by New Jersey, this app tracks me every 15 minutes.

John Jantsch (15:30.007)

I see,

Jack D. Oujo (15:47.574)

and I attached a summary to my New Jersey return. I report New Jersey income, but only for the days that I worked in New Jersey. So again, this documentation game comes in the play, but structure, I advise the umpires and Major League Baseball to do this, to try to restructure their salary so part of its expense reimburses.

John Jantsch (16:03.847)

Yeah. Would health insurance fall into that category? Let’s say somebody gets their spouse is they’re able to get on their spouse’s plan, but it’s $300, you know, to add, could the employer pay that and actually deduct that? And that would be pre-tax or not.

Jack D. Oujo (16:18.221)

The could use some sort of section 125 plan or if there’s a high deductible plan, something along those lines could be a win for the employee and the employer. In my business, I’ve had high deductible medical plans and I contributed money to our employees HSA accounts that they could take with them. It was not a use it or lose it feature. And that was good for both me and for them.

John Jantsch (16:27.421)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (16:44.411)

Yeah. Where do you fall on 401k? they, I, again, I know it’s people probably trying to sell another tool, but I see a lot of, I’d see a lot of people kind of bashing 401k’s as not a great business tool or not a great employee tool.

Jack D. Oujo (17:01.396)

Anybody that bashes 401Ks you should run away from, like the place with non-fire. For people, it’s one good thing that Jimmy Carter did as president was put in the 401K plans. Sorry to say that, but…

Everybody should make almost everybody should make maximum use of 401k plans where they’re missed by people is a lot of times I’ve seen us two spouses working where one person makes big money and another one has some sort of part-time job and they have this mental accounting on money They should both be utilizing maxing out 401k plans because I found that a lot of people in America when they go to retire end up with a paid-off mortgage Which I’m a huge fan of by the way I’m a big believer in paying off your mortgage when reasonable to do so I have

John Jantsch (17:28.775)

Mm-hmm.

Jack D. Oujo (17:45.168)

haven’t had a mortgage on my house in 25 years. But they come in with these 401k plans that are seven figures and then they live off of them. They up and downsize their home and they have more money to play with. But that’s the, for most Americans that make under $400,000 a year, $500,000 a year, you’re crazy not to max out your 401k plans. And my three adult children, I preach that to them and I’m glad they listen to me on it. go, max it out, max it out, max it out.

John Jantsch (17:53.445)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (18:15.088)

reducing, in my opinion, your largest expense, which is your income tax. You’re cutting that down and building up this lump sum of capital you need to retire. And this business that you have large taxes and retirement is also a bunch of malarkey. You know, the tax rate under $90,000 is 12%. You have $3 million in your IRA take out 4 % a year, 120 grand. You got 90,000 at 12 % and the $30,000 standard deduction. How is that wrong? that’s

John Jantsch (18:19.314)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:32.39)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:42.172)

Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (18:43.692)

That’s how I feel, very strong mistake.

John Jantsch (18:44.869)

Yeah, well, so talk to talk one more time about employer putting children or spouses on the payroll, because I think that’s a that’s something that a lot of people overlook as well.

Jack D. Oujo (18:54.798)

Sure. First of all, children can only be on the payroll if you’re a sole proprietor or a single member, LLC, if you want to avoid payroll taxes on them. And they have to do work and it should be documented. But if you pay your child that works in the business $10,000, let’s say, you avoid all the social security taxes.

John Jantsch (19:07.549)

Okay, yeah, right. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (19:19.086)

They get taxed at that rate, which is hardly anything. And then you put that in your 529 plan. So the regular business owner that goes, I make too much money for any child aid. That’s your own loophole to get, you you probably save three to $4,000 just having your kid on a payroll for $10,000.

John Jantsch (19:23.975)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:36.605)

And you’re giving them money that you would have probably given them anyway, right?

Jack D. Oujo (19:41.431)

My kids were on the payroll for a long time. I remember my son, is my youngest, who’s now 30 years of age when he was four years old. My wife got a letter from Social Security saying, here, Mr. Financial Advisor.

Social Security wants to know what my son Matthew did for work. And I said, my son worked on the shredding machine in the office. He stuffed envelopes and he told everybody at his preschool what his father did for a living, which significantly resulted in new business and sent them in and never heard from them again. know, but he did work in the business, you know, the question of what is it worth? know, the tax law for a millionaire is the same for a poor person. And you make that argument.

John Jantsch (20:10.267)

Ha ha.

John Jantsch (20:16.071)

Yeah. Yeah.

Jack D. Oujo (20:23.726)

My son modeled for the firm brochure. How is his modeling different than somebody else? Unless you’re the laws for them and not for me. So that are the arguments you could make there. But again, you have to, you can’t put them on the payroll for $100,000 for you.

John Jantsch (20:23.869)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (20:37.775)

Yeah, well, I will say, you know, for a lot of entrepreneurs, you know, spouse, particularly a spouse that is doesn’t have another career outside the home. mean, they’re there. I guarantee it. They’re working.

Jack D. Oujo (20:51.864)

My spouse, my wife Eileen has been on the payroll for 30 years, always maxing out the 401k plan and she could tell anybody what she did because she did work in the office and work very hard. But it’s two pension plans, one for me, one for her and now they’re telephone.

John Jantsch (21:00.369)

Yep. Yep.

Well, and, she contributed to social security, I suspect. Right. So she’s going to get a social security check that she wasn’t going to get otherwise. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, for those of you that, like it, when we talk about AI and marketing and creative things, I’m sorry, we had to get down into the weeds on, on another really important, as you said, the biggest expense for a lot of businesses or certainly a lot of business owners. Jack, before we let you go,

Jack D. Oujo (21:07.63)

Yes, also.

Jack D. Oujo (21:12.302)

100 % absolutely correct.

John Jantsch (21:33.495)

Is there some place you’d invite people to find out more about your work, find out about too smart to be an umpire?

Jack D. Oujo (21:40.076)

Yeah, there’s a website, TooSmartToBeAnUmpire.com. They can go on Amazon and read all the reviews that are on Amazon right now. I’m thrilled. I’m a first time author. So when TooSmartToBeAnUmpire came out, I wasn’t sure I was going to go over. And it’s borderline bestseller list right now. So there’s a website, TooSmartToBeAnUmpire.com and also Ojo Wealth Strategies, which I’m the founder of. People can check out that website. Jason Gordon and Anthony Sandimerski are running the firm now.

Jason’s 35 and he’s worked in my office since he was 16 years old. So they’re well credentialed and great guys, so that’s where they can find out.

John Jantsch (22:16.605)

Awesome. Well, again, I appreciate you taking a moment to stop by and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Jack D. Oujo (22:22.242)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.371)

Welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. And my guest today is Steve Cunningham. He’s a former agency owner, startup founder, and now AI native business strategist. He built a successful book summary platform called ReadIt.ForMe, backed by billionaire investor, read a book a day for 10 years. I feel like I do that sometimes. But when AI disrupted his industry, it nearly wiped him out. So now he coaches.

Steve (00:01.71)

I’m to you to sign up for the presentation. I’m ask you to for the I’m going ask to up for I’m going ask sign up for I’m you to I’m to ask you to I’m going you to sign up presentation. I’m going to sign the presentation. I’m going you to going I’m

John Jantsch (00:30.425)

solo consultants, agency owners, and service professionals to make more money faster and easier by becoming AI native through his company, Simple and his brand new book, the AI native full stack consultant. So Steve, welcome back to the show. I say welcome back. think this is your first time actually on the show, but, you and I tried to record and I was like in a hurricane and it didn’t work out. so I’m glad you were able to come back.

Steve (00:31.822)

Thanks for having me, John.

Steve (00:56.622)

Good to be back for the first time.

John Jantsch (00:58.683)

So, I mentioned the AI destroyed your business. You want to talk a little bit about it or tell that story as I’m sure you have a number of times.

Steve (01:08.75)

Yeah. So read it for me was a business that I hoped would last the rest of my life. I loved that business. I like to joke if I could get in the time machine, travel back to 2022 and destroy all the AI, I would do it. That’s how much I love that business. I got to read books from my favorite business authors like yourself. I live here in San Antonio, Texas by the Riverwalk. I would literally go outside.

John Jantsch (01:24.283)

Ha ha ha.

Steve (01:37.134)

I would take my, I would read on the phone. So I read Kindle on the phone and that was my job. Uh, so I loved it. And so when Chad GPT came out, um, you know, this is a content business, right? So it would take me about eight hours to read a book and summarize it, take notes and do all the, all the stuff from beginning to end. And when I realized that you could get a passable book summary, which is by asking for it and maybe, then with some good prompting.

get a finished product in much less way less time than it would take for me to read and summarize the book. I knew that we were in trouble. so it didn’t happen overnight. We still have people reaching out wondering, can they bring Rita for me into their business? I, two and a half, three years later, it baffles me that people still have not figured out that they don’t need us anymore for that. But

John Jantsch (02:31.579)

you

Steve (02:34.478)

Yeah. So the revenue went down, not overnight, slowly but surely. And so we realized that we had to do something about that and saw the writing on the wall transformed our operations with AI. Then lots of folks wanted to know how we were doing it and started showing them. And here we are two and a half years later and we’re fully AI native and doing lots of fun and exciting things.

John Jantsch (03:01.231)

So I suspect, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m naive, but that most marketers today are consultants have figured out, know, yeah, I need to use this AI thing. You use the term AI native full stack consultant. How does that differ from someone who say just uses it in their workflows?

Steve (03:18.798)

Well, one of the things that has happened in the last few months is that the easiest way to put it is the AI has gotten really good. So there was this, we were on a short timeline for the podcast. We don’t have time to dive into it deep, but there were studies done through OpenAI. So take that with a grain of salt, but it’s called the GDPVAL. And what they did was they took…

bunch of subject matter experts. got a bucket of tasks across most knowledge work. And they said, give us your best blank. And there would be a task. And so they would do it. And then they would have the AI do the exact same task. And then they would give it to another subject matter expert. And they would say, which one of these is better? And so 2024, wins or ties by the AI was like a 10%. Now it’s a caveat that the AI has all of the context it needs in order to do

the job. And most people don’t get anywhere close to giving the AI all the best, all the contacts they need. So 10 % like people would say, yeah, it’s not a 10%. Well, it’s probably not a 10 % because you didn’t give it all the context. anyways, move forward into 2025, middle of 2025, we’re approaching 50 % wins or ties by the AI. So we’re getting close. We call that the AI tipping point. As of a couple of months ago, the wins and ties by AI were

John Jantsch (04:17.56)

Yeah, right,

Steve (04:42.414)

70 % and since then you can feel if you’re using AI, this is getting better and better and better. So what we mean by full stack consultant is if you understand what good looks like across any subject matter expert domain, you can get pretty close to doing an incredible job for your clients in all functional areas of a business. So a marketing agency can do

sales enablement, but they can also do some CFO work. They can do some strategy work. And that is what we mean by the full stack consultant. And the idea is that if you get very good at some new skills, which are not obvious to most people, like how to produce a really good, robust context library for your clients, you and the company can do amazing work. It can be done.

John Jantsch (05:15.385)

Mm-hmm.

Steve (05:41.166)

incredibly quickly and we’re learning more and more every day about what that looks like. So today, this morning, I did about, and this sounds ridiculous when you hear it from the outside and I understand that it sounds ridiculous, but I did about, in about two hours with 30 minutes of my work and an hour and half of just waiting around for the AI to finish its work, about 260 hours of design, interface work, copywriting.

and development. I don’t do any of those things in the past life. I have no skills in those things, but I know what to ask for. I know what I want and I know what good looks like and now I can get it. So it’s an amazing time that we live in.

John Jantsch (06:14.232)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:24.731)

I want to go back to a point you made there because, I have jokingly, but seriously said, you know, marketing is everything. And what I really meant by that was in a lot of small businesses, I would go into, there were a lot of things I had to fix that weren’t under the, you know, the heading of marketing a lot of times, because if marketing was going to work or we were going to grow the business, I had to get involved in this area over here. Sales was a typical one. Customer service is another one that, know, that you don’t always hire a marketing agency for.

But I would get into it out of necessity. And I think what you’re really pointing to is a great point, this idea of, you go into a business, it’s not just a matter of offering a suite of like, what do you need? It’s more like I can be more effective at doing my job that you hired me for if I can actually easily fix an area over here that I may not have true expertise in, or I couldn’t spend the time because I wasn’t being paid to fix their P &L, for example.

so I think that’s a great point. Let me back up again, because I I circled, I wanted the word context. that, let’s spend a little time talking about that. Cause I think AI has gotten better, but I also think prompters are getting better. and we’re realizing, you know, we get better output with, context. how do you give a, how, how in your view is probably a really long answer. How in your view, do you give AI the proper context?

Steve (07:52.408)

So when most people talk about context and there’s a term called context engineering, they’re mostly talking about it in the terms of like a single task that’s going on. What we mean by context engineering is how does the AI know everything about your business? that whenever you pull up a task to do that you actually, the AI can, it’s really hard to explain without getting into the weeds, but here’s my best shot.

John Jantsch (07:58.512)

Mm-hmm.

Steve (08:22.668)

So imagine that you have like the world’s best employee on every single task that could be done in your business, but they have amnesia. Every single time you give them a new task, they know nothing. So you have to train them. And that sounds like a really painful thing to have to do. But if you build a context library and only has to be done once to start, you can train that, you can give that AI like,

10 years of training in about 10 seconds. So it forgets all the time, but it learns like years in seconds. So all you gotta do, like this is how I boot up my instance of how I’m AI in my world as the CEO of our company. I onboarded the AI, I go look at the, I literally create an onboarding file. I say, go look at the onboarding file and get yourself onboarded. And 10 seconds later, it knows exactly like,

John Jantsch (08:54.629)

Mm-hmm.

Steve (09:20.418)

from a meta perspective, how we’re going to do our work today. And I’ll say, go look at that folder and let’s do this task, like redesign our interface for this page in our system. And knows exactly how I like to work. It knows exactly how I want design options. And as a marketer, you’ll appreciate this. you can go in and you’re doing, let’s say you’re doing ad variations. You go and ask for

You don’t even have to be that specific. If it knows everything about your business, you just say, give me five ad variations on this one topic or this one offer we’re making. Sends it back. You look at it. You’re like, like that one the most. And I’ve had the AI give me like the rationale for like, is scored it and ranked it. Then I could give me five more variations on that one. And then five more on that one. And one of the things that’s not obvious to people is that the cost of variations is almost zero.

John Jantsch (10:05.177)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:10.768)

Right.

Steve (10:17.58)

So you can ask for an infinite number of variations of.

John Jantsch (10:17.594)

Yeah.

Yeah, I do that with subject lines for emails. mean, same thing. It’s like, kind of like the idea of this one. Iterate on that 10 more times. Yeah.

Steve (10:27.31)

Yeah, but you can do it for really big things too. So it’s not just like a single subject. You can do it for an entire interface, like an entire set of code. so like, because it works so fast and the cost of its work is so low, it transforms the way you approach the work. so customizing campaigns down to the individual level, not a problem anymore.

John Jantsch (10:31.193)

Yeah, yeah. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Steve (10:57.25)

Like I can find your LinkedIn profile, can scrape it and I can send you like an entire landing page that’s speaking directly to you. And it cost me a penny to do. And so there are things that we can do that were quite literally impossible before that now makes sense.

John Jantsch (11:16.543)

This might be good time to talk platforms and technologies a little bit. Are you agnostic or have you really gone all in and maybe it’s so complex that you can’t really say it in one sentence, but is like, are you a Gemini person? Are you a Chad’s EBT person or have you really building your own stuff?

Steve (11:36.942)

We’re definitely not building our own stuff. We have a very particular point of view, which is we’re serving companies and companies will eventually choose their LLM of choice. And that’s what they’re going to do all of their work on. So we are, we’re not hitching our wagon to any one LLM. We also have the point of view that for the most part, most AI rappers go away. So an organization is going to build their own software.

John Jantsch (12:01.679)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve (12:06.894)

So that’s our long-term bet. And so we’re just using whatever one is most productive. I personally have the max subscription on Claude, OpenAI and Gemini. I’m mostly using Claude right now because Claude Cowork and Claude Code just came out. And so if you listen to this like a month later, maybe I’m on something else by then, but Claude Cowork has been that tool alone.

John Jantsch (12:28.558)

You

Steve (12:33.548)

has transformed our operations in two weeks. Like we literally operate day to day differently now because of that tool. So, whatever one’s working the best when the next time we talk is the one we’ll be on then.

John Jantsch (12:36.346)

Yes.

John Jantsch (12:45.349)

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I contended for a long time that just what you said, it’s, it’s going to be plumbing. It’s not going to be, Oh, I use this tool or that too. It’s going to be, no, this already works with what I use. And I really feel like, doesn’t that give Microsoft and Google because of their installed user base? mean, you know, I fire up Gmail and all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, there’s a new tool. Um, you know, I can opt into, you know, I mean, doesn’t that give them an advantage? And also I think the other thing, the first version of AI tools.

Is there better kind of use them by themselves? Well, now all of sudden we got collaboration built in, which I think was a big missing part. And so it’s like working the way people work already.

Steve (13:27.214)

Yeah, I think the like all other things being equal, Microsoft and Google have the biggest moat around it. However, for the longest time, Chad GPT was the best tool. And now Claude is by far the best tool. so I would have thought that if it was true that Microsoft and Google would be like for sure would win, it would have happened.

John Jantsch (13:34.372)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:51.525)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve (13:52.224)

I know because they had not only they have the user base, they have all the documents and that’s, that’s what the AI needs for context. But as it turns out, the AI does not read and work with the file formats that we all produced over the last 20 years, which was PowerPoints and Word documents and all of those kinds of things. So there’s, there’s going to be a shift around that as well, which I think will loosen.

John Jantsch (14:08.995)

the

Steve (14:18.382)

the moat that they have because we’re not going to be stuck on PowerPoint anymore. Like I, the, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on this kick of, and I think this is just true. I will never use keynote or PowerPoint ever again. Um, and I’m not using like another AI tool. just build HTML documents and it does exactly what I want. And I, that’s my presentation style. Um, we do SOPs in our business. Everybody in our company builds HTML.

John Jantsch (14:32.155)

Mm.

Steve (14:46.132)

S O P S because you can just speak into a computer. HTML files open everywhere. And it’s also a good language for the LLMs to understand because it’s way easier to read than, than a PowerPoint. There’s others. If you pay attention to how software engineers are using AI, you’ll have a, you’ll have a glimpse of the future. They’re mostly using file formats that they’re comfortable with and that are, that work well for.

John Jantsch (14:57.147)

yeah.

Steve (15:15.182)

development, like markdown files and things like that. So that’s what you’ll see them suggest. Like you have to use markdown files for these things. And, what our point of view around this, and I think this will just prove to be true is that we need to be building like artifacts or deliverables, whatever you want to call it for humans and AI, not just humans. Like humans only is like PowerPoint, like LLMs hate PowerPoint. I hate word document.

John Jantsch (15:17.722)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:43.201)

can’t can’t can’t read them at all.

Steve (15:44.878)

There’s so much code around it, right? So then you have the like markdown files and things that most humans they look at it. Like I can’t, I can’t, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a real thing. Like we need to see visuals and workflows and all those things. And so HTML happens to do both of those incredibly well. So whether or not we’re right on that, I don’t know, but for now it’s like transforming the way that we do work because we can now.

build things that both our humans understand, the LLMs understand, and also there’s this magical thing that happens when a non-technical person speaks a website into existence, and just presses a button and it’s live. So it’s also a really good AI adoption tool, because it’s cool, right? Like it’s cool to like, you build something beautiful. So as a marketer, if you have a design system,

Most companies would never spend 30, 40, $50,000 on. You can speak one of those into existence. Like you can do it right now. Then everything that gets designed looks great in your company. And now everybody’s sharing beautifully designed. SOP documents. Like that’s, that’s a weird thing to think about, but it’s like, I like doing it. It looks nice. it explains what I explains my thoughts and my process. And so, yeah, I think, I think this year is going to be.

transformative in how we all do work and I don’t think it’s going to look the same by the end of the year.

John Jantsch (17:17.11)

So, and I know you have an answer for this, but this, I’m guessing listeners are out there going, okay, if I can just speak this stuff into existence, am I going to just start creating stuff without any kind of guardrails and without any human intervention? where’s the, you know, the pushback you’re getting from people that hate AI. So imagine the people that love AI, but don’t want to be embarrassed.

Steve (17:43.31)

What do you mean by guardrails specifically?

John Jantsch (17:46.123)

just, just meaning like, if I can design all these things, who’s going to actually go and make sure that they’re, they’re being done right. That they look good, that they say what they’re supposed to say. Cause you know, some of, particularly some of the image, you know, generates today. I mean, there’s, it’s just like appalling. Some of the things that show up in, in some of those.

Steve (18:06.478)

Well, I think there’s trying to figure out the 32nd way of answering this question. So the way we look at how work is done is by deliverables. you can look at it as a process, you can look at it as tasks, you can look at it as deliverables. But if you look at it as a deliverable, is that that’s when the thing ends. And that’s when the human has to look at it. It’s when the deliverable is done.

John Jantsch (18:18.864)

Right.

Steve (18:31.182)

First of all, should have the AI do a QC process on itself. You can do that. And it actually does a really good job of QCing its own work. So that’s the thing that most people don’t understand. But then once it comes off the press, whatever metaphor you want to use, and a human looks at it and says, are we sending this out? And if you treat it, and this is a language that most knowledge workers don’t like, it’s a factory now. And so you don’t QC every

energy drink can that comes off the line. But you look at some of them, right? And you know that if this one is this one’s off, well, we got to look at the ones that just went out the door because maybe they have a defect as well. So it becomes more of a factory mindset, knowing that if you if you have a good manufacturing process and that this again, like marketing agencies will hate this like, but that is that it but

John Jantsch (19:02.97)

Right.

John Jantsch (19:22.297)

Yeah. Yeah. Even the word factory there, they’re going to cringe at. Right.

Steve (19:26.894)

Like if you do not turn your marketing agency into a factory in 2026, you will be out of business. Like let’s go have a, we’ll do it next year and we’ll see whether or not that’s true. Like you have to, you’ll have to learn good workflows. You need to learn good work instructions. You need to learn good QC process. And so, and once you do, you can start mass producing things that are top notch and

John Jantsch (19:37.403)

Yeah.

Steve (19:56.138)

knowledge work will be turned into a factory. And then what gets layered on top of that is a new skill set, which is not 100 % clear what that is yet, but we will invent new things to do that will just add value on top of that.

John Jantsch (20:14.085)

Fascinating, Steve. Appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where do you want to invite people to find out more about, I think it’s simpleconsultants.ai and obviously about your book?

Steve (20:26.978)

Yeah, well, if you’re up for it, I would love to give everybody in your audience free access to our BlackBelt training. We’ll create a page specifically for your network. It’ll be roiassociation.ai.

John Jantsch (20:47.931)

Awesome. And we’ll put that in the show notes as well. So that was ROI.association, is that what you said?

Steve (20:54.824)

roiassociation.ai.

John Jantsch (20:56.973)

dot, dot A. Okay. Got it. Awesome. Well, as I said, we’ll put that in the show notes as well. So Steve, again, appreciate you stopping by. This is awesome. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Steve (21:11.662)

Absolutely. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.371)

Welcome to another episode of the Duck Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. And my guest today is Steve Cunningham. He’s a former agency owner, startup founder, and now AI native business strategist. He built a successful book summary platform called ReadIt.ForMe, backed by billionaire investor, read a book a day for 10 years. I feel like I do that sometimes. But when AI disrupted his industry, it nearly wiped him out. So now he coaches.

Steve (00:01.71)

I’m to you to sign up for the presentation. I’m ask you to for the I’m going ask to up for I’m going ask sign up for I’m you to I’m to ask you to I’m going you to sign up presentation. I’m going to sign the presentation. I’m going you to going I’m

John Jantsch (00:30.425)

solo consultants, agency owners, and service professionals to make more money faster and easier by becoming AI native through his company, Simple and his brand new book, the AI native full stack consultant. So Steve, welcome back to the show. I say welcome back. think this is your first time actually on the show, but, you and I tried to record and I was like in a hurricane and it didn’t work out. so I’m glad you were able to come back.

Steve (00:31.822)

Thanks for having me, John.

Steve (00:56.622)

Good to be back for the first time.

John Jantsch (00:58.683)

So, I mentioned the AI destroyed your business. You want to talk a little bit about it or tell that story as I’m sure you have a number of times.

Steve (01:08.75)

Yeah. So read it for me was a business that I hoped would last the rest of my life. I loved that business. I like to joke if I could get in the time machine, travel back to 2022 and destroy all the AI, I would do it. That’s how much I love that business. I got to read books from my favorite business authors like yourself. I live here in San Antonio, Texas by the Riverwalk. I would literally go outside.

John Jantsch (01:24.283)

Ha ha ha.

Steve (01:37.134)

I would take my, I would read on the phone. So I read Kindle on the phone and that was my job. Uh, so I loved it. And so when Chad GPT came out, um, you know, this is a content business, right? So it would take me about eight hours to read a book and summarize it, take notes and do all the, all the stuff from beginning to end. And when I realized that you could get a passable book summary, which is by asking for it and maybe, then with some good prompting.

get a finished product in much less way less time than it would take for me to read and summarize the book. I knew that we were in trouble. so it didn’t happen overnight. We still have people reaching out wondering, can they bring Rita for me into their business? I, two and a half, three years later, it baffles me that people still have not figured out that they don’t need us anymore for that. But

John Jantsch (02:31.579)

you

Steve (02:34.478)

Yeah. So the revenue went down, not overnight, slowly but surely. And so we realized that we had to do something about that and saw the writing on the wall transformed our operations with AI. Then lots of folks wanted to know how we were doing it and started showing them. And here we are two and a half years later and we’re fully AI native and doing lots of fun and exciting things.

John Jantsch (03:01.231)

So I suspect, maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m naive, but that most marketers today are consultants have figured out, know, yeah, I need to use this AI thing. You use the term AI native full stack consultant. How does that differ from someone who say just uses it in their workflows?

Steve (03:18.798)

Well, one of the things that has happened in the last few months is that the easiest way to put it is the AI has gotten really good. So there was this, we were on a short timeline for the podcast. We don’t have time to dive into it deep, but there were studies done through OpenAI. So take that with a grain of salt, but it’s called the GDPVAL. And what they did was they took…

bunch of subject matter experts. got a bucket of tasks across most knowledge work. And they said, give us your best blank. And there would be a task. And so they would do it. And then they would have the AI do the exact same task. And then they would give it to another subject matter expert. And they would say, which one of these is better? And so 2024, wins or ties by the AI was like a 10%. Now it’s a caveat that the AI has all of the context it needs in order to do

the job. And most people don’t get anywhere close to giving the AI all the best, all the contacts they need. So 10 % like people would say, yeah, it’s not a 10%. Well, it’s probably not a 10 % because you didn’t give it all the context. anyways, move forward into 2025, middle of 2025, we’re approaching 50 % wins or ties by the AI. So we’re getting close. We call that the AI tipping point. As of a couple of months ago, the wins and ties by AI were

John Jantsch (04:17.56)

Yeah, right,

Steve (04:42.414)

70 % and since then you can feel if you’re using AI, this is getting better and better and better. So what we mean by full stack consultant is if you understand what good looks like across any subject matter expert domain, you can get pretty close to doing an incredible job for your clients in all functional areas of a business. So a marketing agency can do

sales enablement, but they can also do some CFO work. They can do some strategy work. And that is what we mean by the full stack consultant. And the idea is that if you get very good at some new skills, which are not obvious to most people, like how to produce a really good, robust context library for your clients, you and the company can do amazing work. It can be done.

John Jantsch (05:15.385)

Mm-hmm.

Steve (05:41.166)

incredibly quickly and we’re learning more and more every day about what that looks like. So today, this morning, I did about, and this sounds ridiculous when you hear it from the outside and I understand that it sounds ridiculous, but I did about, in about two hours with 30 minutes of my work and an hour and half of just waiting around for the AI to finish its work, about 260 hours of design, interface work, copywriting.

and development. I don’t do any of those things in the past life. I have no skills in those things, but I know what to ask for. I know what I want and I know what good looks like and now I can get it. So it’s an amazing time that we live in.

John Jantsch (06:14.232)

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:24.731)

I want to go back to a point you made there because, I have jokingly, but seriously said, you know, marketing is everything. And what I really meant by that was in a lot of small businesses, I would go into, there were a lot of things I had to fix that weren’t under the, you know, the heading of marketing a lot of times, because if marketing was going to work or we were going to grow the business, I had to get involved in this area over here. Sales was a typical one. Customer service is another one that, know, that you don’t always hire a marketing agency for.

But I would get into it out of necessity. And I think what you’re really pointing to is a great point, this idea of, you go into a business, it’s not just a matter of offering a suite of like, what do you need? It’s more like I can be more effective at doing my job that you hired me for if I can actually easily fix an area over here that I may not have true expertise in, or I couldn’t spend the time because I wasn’t being paid to fix their P &L, for example.

so I think that’s a great point. Let me back up again, because I I circled, I wanted the word context. that, let’s spend a little time talking about that. Cause I think AI has gotten better, but I also think prompters are getting better. and we’re realizing, you know, we get better output with, context. how do you give a, how, how in your view is probably a really long answer. How in your view, do you give AI the proper context?

Steve (07:52.408)

So when most people talk about context and there’s a term called context engineering, they’re mostly talking about it in the terms of like a single task that’s going on. What we mean by context engineering is how does the AI know everything about your business? that whenever you pull up a task to do that you actually, the AI can, it’s really hard to explain without getting into the weeds, but here’s my best shot.

John Jantsch (07:58.512)

Mm-hmm.

Steve (08:22.668)

So imagine that you have like the world’s best employee on every single task that could be done in your business, but they have amnesia. Every single time you give them a new task, they know nothing. So you have to train them. And that sounds like a really painful thing to have to do. But if you build a context library and only has to be done once to start, you can train that, you can give that AI like,

10 years of training in about 10 seconds. So it forgets all the time, but it learns like years in seconds. So all you gotta do, like this is how I boot up my instance of how I’m AI in my world as the CEO of our company. I onboarded the AI, I go look at the, I literally create an onboarding file. I say, go look at the onboarding file and get yourself onboarded. And 10 seconds later, it knows exactly like,

John Jantsch (08:54.629)

Mm-hmm.

Steve (09:20.418)

from a meta perspective, how we’re going to do our work today. And I’ll say, go look at that folder and let’s do this task, like redesign our interface for this page in our system. And knows exactly how I like to work. It knows exactly how I want design options. And as a marketer, you’ll appreciate this. you can go in and you’re doing, let’s say you’re doing ad variations. You go and ask for

You don’t even have to be that specific. If it knows everything about your business, you just say, give me five ad variations on this one topic or this one offer we’re making. Sends it back. You look at it. You’re like, like that one the most. And I’ve had the AI give me like the rationale for like, is scored it and ranked it. Then I could give me five more variations on that one. And then five more on that one. And one of the things that’s not obvious to people is that the cost of variations is almost zero.

John Jantsch (10:05.177)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (10:10.768)

Right.

Steve (10:17.58)

So you can ask for an infinite number of variations of.

John Jantsch (10:17.594)

Yeah.

Yeah, I do that with subject lines for emails. mean, same thing. It’s like, kind of like the idea of this one. Iterate on that 10 more times. Yeah.

Steve (10:27.31)

Yeah, but you can do it for really big things too. So it’s not just like a single subject. You can do it for an entire interface, like an entire set of code. so like, because it works so fast and the cost of its work is so low, it transforms the way you approach the work. so customizing campaigns down to the individual level, not a problem anymore.

John Jantsch (10:31.193)

Yeah, yeah. Right.

Mm-hmm.

Steve (10:57.25)

Like I can find your LinkedIn profile, can scrape it and I can send you like an entire landing page that’s speaking directly to you. And it cost me a penny to do. And so there are things that we can do that were quite literally impossible before that now makes sense.

John Jantsch (11:16.543)

This might be good time to talk platforms and technologies a little bit. Are you agnostic or have you really gone all in and maybe it’s so complex that you can’t really say it in one sentence, but is like, are you a Gemini person? Are you a Chad’s EBT person or have you really building your own stuff?

Steve (11:36.942)

We’re definitely not building our own stuff. We have a very particular point of view, which is we’re serving companies and companies will eventually choose their LLM of choice. And that’s what they’re going to do all of their work on. So we are, we’re not hitching our wagon to any one LLM. We also have the point of view that for the most part, most AI rappers go away. So an organization is going to build their own software.

John Jantsch (12:01.679)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve (12:06.894)

So that’s our long-term bet. And so we’re just using whatever one is most productive. I personally have the max subscription on Claude, OpenAI and Gemini. I’m mostly using Claude right now because Claude Cowork and Claude Code just came out. And so if you listen to this like a month later, maybe I’m on something else by then, but Claude Cowork has been that tool alone.

John Jantsch (12:28.558)

You

Steve (12:33.548)

has transformed our operations in two weeks. Like we literally operate day to day differently now because of that tool. So, whatever one’s working the best when the next time we talk is the one we’ll be on then.

John Jantsch (12:36.346)

Yes.

John Jantsch (12:45.349)

Yeah.

Yeah. You know, I contended for a long time that just what you said, it’s, it’s going to be plumbing. It’s not going to be, Oh, I use this tool or that too. It’s going to be, no, this already works with what I use. And I really feel like, doesn’t that give Microsoft and Google because of their installed user base? mean, you know, I fire up Gmail and all of a sudden it’s like, Oh, there’s a new tool. Um, you know, I can opt into, you know, I mean, doesn’t that give them an advantage? And also I think the other thing, the first version of AI tools.

Is there better kind of use them by themselves? Well, now all of sudden we got collaboration built in, which I think was a big missing part. And so it’s like working the way people work already.

Steve (13:27.214)

Yeah, I think the like all other things being equal, Microsoft and Google have the biggest moat around it. However, for the longest time, Chad GPT was the best tool. And now Claude is by far the best tool. so I would have thought that if it was true that Microsoft and Google would be like for sure would win, it would have happened.

John Jantsch (13:34.372)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:51.525)

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Steve (13:52.224)

I know because they had not only they have the user base, they have all the documents and that’s, that’s what the AI needs for context. But as it turns out, the AI does not read and work with the file formats that we all produced over the last 20 years, which was PowerPoints and Word documents and all of those kinds of things. So there’s, there’s going to be a shift around that as well, which I think will loosen.

John Jantsch (14:08.995)

the

Steve (14:18.382)

the moat that they have because we’re not going to be stuck on PowerPoint anymore. Like I, the, in the last couple of weeks, I’ve been on this kick of, and I think this is just true. I will never use keynote or PowerPoint ever again. Um, and I’m not using like another AI tool. just build HTML documents and it does exactly what I want. And I, that’s my presentation style. Um, we do SOPs in our business. Everybody in our company builds HTML.

John Jantsch (14:32.155)

Mm.

Steve (14:46.132)

S O P S because you can just speak into a computer. HTML files open everywhere. And it’s also a good language for the LLMs to understand because it’s way easier to read than, than a PowerPoint. There’s others. If you pay attention to how software engineers are using AI, you’ll have a, you’ll have a glimpse of the future. They’re mostly using file formats that they’re comfortable with and that are, that work well for.

John Jantsch (14:57.147)

yeah.

Steve (15:15.182)

development, like markdown files and things like that. So that’s what you’ll see them suggest. Like you have to use markdown files for these things. And, what our point of view around this, and I think this will just prove to be true is that we need to be building like artifacts or deliverables, whatever you want to call it for humans and AI, not just humans. Like humans only is like PowerPoint, like LLMs hate PowerPoint. I hate word document.

John Jantsch (15:17.722)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (15:43.201)

can’t can’t can’t read them at all.

Steve (15:44.878)

There’s so much code around it, right? So then you have the like markdown files and things that most humans they look at it. Like I can’t, I can’t, a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s a real thing. Like we need to see visuals and workflows and all those things. And so HTML happens to do both of those incredibly well. So whether or not we’re right on that, I don’t know, but for now it’s like transforming the way that we do work because we can now.

build things that both our humans understand, the LLMs understand, and also there’s this magical thing that happens when a non-technical person speaks a website into existence, and just presses a button and it’s live. So it’s also a really good AI adoption tool, because it’s cool, right? Like it’s cool to like, you build something beautiful. So as a marketer, if you have a design system,

Most companies would never spend 30, 40, $50,000 on. You can speak one of those into existence. Like you can do it right now. Then everything that gets designed looks great in your company. And now everybody’s sharing beautifully designed. SOP documents. Like that’s, that’s a weird thing to think about, but it’s like, I like doing it. It looks nice. it explains what I explains my thoughts and my process. And so, yeah, I think, I think this year is going to be.

transformative in how we all do work and I don’t think it’s going to look the same by the end of the year.

John Jantsch (17:17.11)

So, and I know you have an answer for this, but this, I’m guessing listeners are out there going, okay, if I can just speak this stuff into existence, am I going to just start creating stuff without any kind of guardrails and without any human intervention? where’s the, you know, the pushback you’re getting from people that hate AI. So imagine the people that love AI, but don’t want to be embarrassed.

Steve (17:43.31)

What do you mean by guardrails specifically?

John Jantsch (17:46.123)

just, just meaning like, if I can design all these things, who’s going to actually go and make sure that they’re, they’re being done right. That they look good, that they say what they’re supposed to say. Cause you know, some of, particularly some of the image, you know, generates today. I mean, there’s, it’s just like appalling. Some of the things that show up in, in some of those.

Steve (18:06.478)

Well, I think there’s trying to figure out the 32nd way of answering this question. So the way we look at how work is done is by deliverables. you can look at it as a process, you can look at it as tasks, you can look at it as deliverables. But if you look at it as a deliverable, is that that’s when the thing ends. And that’s when the human has to look at it. It’s when the deliverable is done.

John Jantsch (18:18.864)

Right.

Steve (18:31.182)

First of all, should have the AI do a QC process on itself. You can do that. And it actually does a really good job of QCing its own work. So that’s the thing that most people don’t understand. But then once it comes off the press, whatever metaphor you want to use, and a human looks at it and says, are we sending this out? And if you treat it, and this is a language that most knowledge workers don’t like, it’s a factory now. And so you don’t QC every

energy drink can that comes off the line. But you look at some of them, right? And you know that if this one is this one’s off, well, we got to look at the ones that just went out the door because maybe they have a defect as well. So it becomes more of a factory mindset, knowing that if you if you have a good manufacturing process and that this again, like marketing agencies will hate this like, but that is that it but

John Jantsch (19:02.97)

Right.

John Jantsch (19:22.297)

Yeah. Yeah. Even the word factory there, they’re going to cringe at. Right.

Steve (19:26.894)

Like if you do not turn your marketing agency into a factory in 2026, you will be out of business. Like let’s go have a, we’ll do it next year and we’ll see whether or not that’s true. Like you have to, you’ll have to learn good workflows. You need to learn good work instructions. You need to learn good QC process. And so, and once you do, you can start mass producing things that are top notch and

John Jantsch (19:37.403)

Yeah.

Steve (19:56.138)

knowledge work will be turned into a factory. And then what gets layered on top of that is a new skill set, which is not 100 % clear what that is yet, but we will invent new things to do that will just add value on top of that.

John Jantsch (20:14.085)

Fascinating, Steve. Appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Where do you want to invite people to find out more about, I think it’s simpleconsultants.ai and obviously about your book?

Steve (20:26.978)

Yeah, well, if you’re up for it, I would love to give everybody in your audience free access to our BlackBelt training. We’ll create a page specifically for your network. It’ll be roiassociation.ai.

John Jantsch (20:47.931)

Awesome. And we’ll put that in the show notes as well. So that was ROI.association, is that what you said?

Steve (20:54.824)

roiassociation.ai.

John Jantsch (20:56.973)

dot, dot A. Okay. Got it. Awesome. Well, as I said, we’ll put that in the show notes as well. So Steve, again, appreciate you stopping by. This is awesome. And hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Steve (21:11.662)

Absolutely. Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.218)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kyle Austin Young. He’s an award winning strategy consultant, speaker and writer who helps leaders, entrepreneurs and high achievers accomplish big, meaningful goals. His work centers on a unique decision-making and goal achievement framework that he calls probability hacking, a method designed to analyze and intentionally improve the odds of success in any pursuit. We’re going to talk about his newest book.

Success is a numbers game. Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds. So Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Austin Young (00:37.348)

Thank you for having me. Honored to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.278)

So I’m going to start with the premise that I’m sure you, I won’t be the first person to ask this question. I think a lot of times when people talk about goals, they think about hustle or mindset or heck even luck. You are saying it’s more about odds. What’s different in that shift?

Kyle Austin Young (00:59.15)

Yeah, let me give you sort of an example. Let’s say that we’ve set the goal of training to run a marathon. Let’s say that’s something that we’ve decided we want to accomplish and we hire a running coach and she says, I can get you ready in time, but you’re gonna have to do three things. I need you to eat, sleep, and train according to some specific regimens that I’m gonna create for you.

John Jantsch (01:02.872)

me

John Jantsch (01:14.829)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (01:16.334)

So let’s say that we know that one of these prerequisites is we’re to have to train according to some certain parameters. And so we identify some of the things that could go wrong, some of the things that might happen instead of what we want. And maybe we identify bad weather as something that could derail a training regimen. I’m currently preparing for a big wintery snowstorm. Let’s say that we identify injury as a potential risk, or maybe we identify that our kids might have a crisis that could overwhelm our schedule. So the question that I like to ask people is,

tell me how wanting to run a marathon is an antidote to any of those threats to our success. How does wanting to run a marathon change the weather? How does wanting to run a marathon prevent injury? How does wanting to run a marathon keep a crisis from happening in our kids’ lives? Certainly, we’re going to need a measure of commitment and hustle in order to be successful. But ultimately, what we’re going to really need is we need some creative solutions to the things that could keep us from getting what we want.

So I believe that we can understand probabilities similar to the way we’ve traditionally understood matter. It can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred and rearranged. The odds of success, the odds that we want for our goal are currently hiding in our potential bad outcomes. When we identify what those things are and what we can do about them, we can tilt the odds in our favor.

John Jantsch (02:30.488)

So it’s all about quantum physics. Is that what you’re saying? So when you talk about moving matter around, was the first thought I had. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (02:33.54)

Very little physics in the book. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a physics class.

Kyle Austin Young (02:40.418)

Well, I do think that there’s a lot of truth in the idea that a lot of people want to conjure good odds out of thin air. This idea that maybe I can wish myself into a better position. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that a lot of times when we’re pursuing a goal, we’re encouraged to think positive. Don’t worry about what could go wrong. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. Just focus on the positive. I encourage people to do the exact opposite. I tell people to think negative. I tell people, for everything that has to go right in order for you to get what you want, identify the potential bad outcomes. Identify the things that could happen instead of what you want.

John Jantsch (02:55.8)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (03:09.464)

and use your creativity to systematically de-risk your goals.

John Jantsch (03:13.826)

So in your bio, and I know in the book itself, you talk a lot about probability hacking. So let’s talk about what that is or how you define

Kyle Austin Young (03:22.916)

Yeah, I define probability hacking as doing exactly what we just did. It starts with getting an idea of what’s going to have to go right and then identifying what could go wrong and then looking for creative solutions. I’ll tell a different example. You know, when I first graduated from college, I wasn’t excited about the entry level positions that I was seeing. I wanted to try for something more ambitious. So I actually applied to become the product development director at a growing health organization. I was 21 years old. If hired, I was going to be managing people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people with PhDs and master’s degrees.

a crazy thing to do, but I got an interview and I wanted to make the most of it. So even at that time, I did what I essentially do now for a living. I created what I call a success diagram. I only needed to get a job offer at that point. That was the only step left, but I looked at what are the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of me getting that job offer. And so I identified three. And so I’m giving this example. You kind of had the quantum physics concern because there’s no numbers here. I’m just going to show you how we can do this at a story level. One of the risks I identified was they might not hire me because of how young I looked.

John Jantsch (04:15.054)

Bye.

Kyle Austin Young (04:21.54)

I might walk in and they take one look and say, he can’t lead this team. So one of the very practical things I did to combat that is I just grew a beard. I still have the beard today. It was something that made me look about 10 years older than I was. And I knew that if I could do that, it would maybe take the edge off of that concern a little bit. A second bad outcome that I identified, a potential bad outcome rather, was there might be concerns over my lack of experience, which were valid. I didn’t have a deep resume. I had just graduated from college. So what I did was I couldn’t lie. I wasn’t going to

John Jantsch (04:22.126)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (04:49.54)

pretend that I had experience I didn’t have, but I wanted to show the quality of my thinking. So I actually typed up a plan for how I was going to turn this department around. It was so thick, I had to have it spiral bound. It was a book. And every person I went to and interviewed with, I gave them a copy of it. And the goal was when they would ask me questions about my past, I would just redirect it to be a conversation about the future. What experience do you have with whatever the case might be, product development? Great question. Here’s my plan for product development. Let’s talk about the vision that I have for this role if I’m given the opportunity.

The third potential bad outcome I identified was maybe they would be concerned that I couldn’t really get along with the existing team because there was just such a big generational gap. So I used a strategy that I’m still using today. It’s worked really well for me. I asked one of the people in the organization if the product development team had read any books recently as a group. She listed a few titles, I think it was three or four, and I went out and read every single one of them. And what that did is it gave me the ability to have conversations with the team that no other applicant could have. I understood their goals, I understood their jargon, I could make inside jokes.

John Jantsch (05:25.538)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (05:48.56)

There was a group interview where it was me and a bunch of people 20, 30 years older than me with a lot more experience trying to decide who was going to ultimately win the opportunity to lead this department. And one of the books that they read was called The Wuffy Factor. I don’t know if you remember that. was a book about how to, you remember the Wuffy? It was about how brands are in social capital. This was close to 15 years ago. And I remember being in that interview and I said, you know, I think this idea that we’re discussing could help us get a lot of Wuffy.

John Jantsch (05:57.934)

Right.

I remember saying that, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (06:11.632)

And I remember looking around and these other applicants, their eyes are bugging out of their heads. What on earth did he just say? You know, is he feeling, okay, what does he mean? We’re going to get a lot of wealthy out of this. But the existing team members, they were all laughing and nodding along. They knew exactly what I was talking about. We were reading the same books. So when all was said and done, I got that job. At 21 years old, I became the product development director for a health organization. It dramatically accelerated my career, but it started with this idea of probability hacking. It started with getting clear on what I wanted and getting clear on what was going to have to go right. Then thinking negatively,

identifying the risks to my success and not resorting to desire as an antidote to uncertainty, but instead using my creativity to solve those problems.

John Jantsch (06:49.006)

So you gave very specific details and steps of what you did, but it sounded, it started to sound a bit like a framework, which I know you have in the book. So were those steps that you gave me a part of that framework? Do you want to outline what that framework is?

Kyle Austin Young (07:04.41)

Sure, I encourage people to start by creating what I call a success diagram. A success diagram is you write down what’s the goal, what do I want to accomplish? I do that at the top right of the page. And then to the left, I just try to list out everything that’s gonna have to go right in order for me to get what I want. So it might be run a marathon. And what I call critical points, the prerequisites to my success are eat according to the regimen my coach gives me, sleep according to the regimen she gives me, train according to the regimen she gives me. So now I have the path, I have the destination.

And then for each one of those things that has to go right, I try to identify the potential bad outcomes. These aren’t just things that could go wrong, they’re alternate outcomes to success. Things that would be so significant they would completely derail the goal if any of them were to come true. After I have those mapped out, I try to just assign a level of risk to each of them. Is this a low risk potential bad outcome, a medium risk, a high risk, so they know how to prioritize? And then probability hacking again is using our creativity to try to find solutions to that. If I’m concerned about

you know, inclement weather derailing my training routine, I might need a treadmill indoors or need to find some alternate exercises that can allow me to build my fitness on days when I can’t go for a run. If I’m concerned about scheduling issues, something happening at my kid’s school, then I might want to train first thing in the morning or I might want to buy an extra pair of running shoes to keep in the car so that I can train at a park if I need to, if my day gets derailed.

John Jantsch (08:20.034)

In a lot of ways, what I’m hearing you describe is, I mean, think there are a lot of people that have mapped out the plan to run the marathon. mean, you can buy books, entire books, will tell you exactly what to do on day one, day two. But what you’re saying a lot of people miss is integrating the whole, you know, of life. And I think in a lot of ways, you’re really just asking people to step back and you’re calling it what could go wrong. But what you’re really doing is saying, hey, you have to have a grasp of reality.

Kyle Austin Young (08:31.29)

Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (08:49.764)

I think you do have to have a grasp of reality. I think that when we consider these statistics that are floating around all the time, just how many people fail at their New Year’s resolutions, how this vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to create lasting value for shareholders, how many new businesses will ultimately fail in the first few years after their existence, we start to recognize that it’s because we haven’t stopped to consider the things that could go wrong. And I’ll demonstrate that with just a little bit of numbers. Let’s use that marathon example. There’s three things that have to go right. I need to eat, sleep, and train according to a certain regimen.

John Jantsch (08:51.307)

me

John Jantsch (08:57.139)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (09:13.763)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (09:19.14)

Well, let’s take some imaginary numbers and try to estimate how likely we are to accomplish each of those three things. Maybe we think it’s 70 % across the board. 70 % chance I’ll stick with the diet, 70 % chance I’ll sleep the way I’m supposed to, 70 % chance I’ll train the way I’m supposed to. What a lot of people do is they fall into a trap called averaging. If they feel good about the individual prerequisites, they feel good about the goal as a whole. That’s not actually logically sound, it’s not mathematically sound. What we have to do is multiply those numbers together to find our overall odds of success.

John Jantsch (09:45.261)

Yes.

Kyle Austin Young (09:47.204)

And if we do that, we find that even though we feel really good about each of these things, 70 % across the board, our overall odds of being ready on race day are only 34%. And that I believe explains a lot of the dysfunction in our world. Why are people failing at goals and wondering, how did this not go the way that I expected it to? I felt good about each individual step. Well, you averaged in your head. You didn’t take the time to understand what your overall odds were. And because of that, maybe you didn’t pay as much attention to your opportunity to change your odds as you could have. Maybe you didn’t get that grasp on reality exactly like what you said.

John Jantsch (10:14.926)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (10:16.27)

and try to the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (10:18.766)

Is there any, do you ever run the risk or do you find that people might, like if I sat down thought, oh, my odds of actually being prepared on race day is only in the 30 % range, is there any chance that I say, why bother?

Kyle Austin Young (10:32.538)

There could be, but if we’re taking the time to think negative and identify the bad outcomes that are dragging those odds down, then we can use our creativity and see if we can’t change those numbers, at least in how we understand them, to look like something that’s more optimistic. You if we are using our creativity to address the risk of bad weather when we need to train, or address the risk of injury, or address the risk of our schedule being sabotaged, then we can ultimately run the numbers again. And maybe by the time we’re done optimizing this plan,

John Jantsch (10:33.902)

Yeah

Kyle Austin Young (10:59.812)

we end up feeling like it’s 90 % across the board. That’s still not a 90 % chance of success, but I believe it’s in the 70s. It’s a lot better.

John Jantsch (11:05.166)

Yeah. So, so do you find that you have to help people reframe this idea of failure even?

Kyle Austin Young (11:14.426)

Give me an example of what you mean by that.

John Jantsch (11:16.844)

Well, I mean, in some ways you’re, as I listened to you talk about the steps, you’re, you’re, you’re not saying that’s failures of possibility, but that it’s part of the equation. and a lot of people, you know, would have, I think some people would, would struggle with that idea. I, I’m not saying what you’re talking about doesn’t make sense, but just the mindset that a lot of people have that might be hard to overcome.

Kyle Austin Young (11:41.37)

Sure.

Absolutely. Failure is going to be part of the equation. One of the things that I encourage people to consider in the book is the power of multiple attempts. If you’re chasing a goal that’s really unlikely, often one of the most reliable ways to ultimately succeed is to try more than one time. I tell the story of the miracle on ice in the first chapter of the book. I got to interview Jack O’Callaghan who played on that 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviet Union. And a lot of people consider that a miracle. It’s been called the greatest sporting event of the 20th century, I believe, by Sports Illustrated.

John Jantsch (11:57.518)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (12:14.028)

And as an individual event, it was really miraculous. But when you recognize that over the course of this Olympic rivalry, the United States played the Soviets nine times and won two, that’s not that remarkable. Winning two times out of nine isn’t unheard of. So was it surprising that they won the game they won? Sure. But the odds told us that we would expect them to win some games. And that’s ultimately what they did. And what’s interesting is when I interviewed Jack, he told me that in the locker room before they went out to take the ice for that game,

John Jantsch (12:23.842)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (12:35.18)

Yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (12:42.244)

Coach Herb Brooks gives this speech and there’s a movie about it and the movie has some quotes that are really powerful. What Jack told me is he said he doesn’t remember the exact words that were spoken. But he says he remembers that when he left the locker room, they’re trudging down to take the ice. He says he remembers leaving with the idea that his coach believed if we played them 10 times, they might beat us nine times, but they’re not going to beat us tonight. And so there was an expectation that failure was going to be a part of that, but they had an opportunity for tonight to be the exception. And ultimately it was.

John Jantsch (13:10.446)

I remember vividly watching that in my dorm room in college. does this, like a marathon I would call a long-term goal, particularly for somebody who hasn’t run one, right? They should start early, right? Can this be applied to short-term decisions as well?

Kyle Austin Young (13:14.956)

Amazing. I missed it by a few years, but I’m jealous.

Kyle Austin Young (13:24.666)

Sure. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (13:33.166)

absolutely. You know, in the context of me trying to get that job, I just did this as I headed into an interview. It was going to all take place in a day. When we have something that needs to go right, one of the best things we can do to help it go right is think about what could go wrong. Ultimately, that’s what’s dragging our probability down. If you think about flipping a coin, let’s say you need it to land on heads, you have a 50 % chance of success. Why? Why don’t you have a 100 % chance of success? Well, because it might land on tails, and there’s a 50 % chance of that happening. Now, I don’t know how to rig a coin to make it…

do what I want it to do. But in life, a lot of times we can rig it or we can re-rig it in our favor. We can try to take the risk out of the bad outcomes, bring those odds over to our side.

John Jantsch (14:11.448)

So if somebody hasn’t thought this way, what’s kind some of the first things you try to help people? And again, I don’t know if you actually consult on this or teach courses on this as well, but what are some of the first things you try to do to get people to start putting this way of thinking? Because I think a lot of times these things are just mindset. So what do you get them to start thinking this way? What are some of the first things?

Kyle Austin Young (14:32.784)

Well, in the book, I tell people that I think there are four paths to success. One of them is some people just get lucky. I tell the story of Norma Jean Doherty. She’s working at an aviation munitions factory in the war, and a photographer comes to take pictures for a military magazine to inspire the troops. He notices Norma Jean, thinks she’s really beautiful, says, can I take some pictures for you for magazines that don’t have anything to do with the military? And she said, sure. She ultimately finds a lot of success as a model and then goes on to star as an actress under the name Marilyn Monroe, has just this enormously successful career.

That is certainly a success story. Is it a success story we should reverse engineer though? If I meet a young woman who’s coming to me for training or coaching rather, can you tell me what I can do to become a successful Hollywood star? Would I say, well, the first thing you need to do is get a job at an aviation munitions factory and hope that someday a military photographer stops by and notices how pretty you are and says, can I take some pictures of you? No, that probably wouldn’t be a very reliable path to success. So some people succeed through luck. They succeed even though the odds are bad, simply because we expect unlikely events to happen sometimes.

Some people succeed, they don’t beat the odds, but they play them. We think about entrepreneurs, there are some really famous examples of people who heard that nine out of 10 businesses fail, and that was actually what inspired them to start 10 businesses or 15 businesses, was the belief that they were going to experience those predicted failures, but they would also experience the predicted successes. Some people succeed because they have advantages, they have areas of tremendous strength in their lives, and so they try to lean into those goals.

John Jantsch (15:41.314)

you

Kyle Austin Young (15:54.084)

That can often be something that’s really wise for us is asking the question, what are some goals that are pretty high probability goals for me right now that might bring bigger accomplishments within reach? One of the goals that I had for years was ultimately getting a book deal and hopefully getting a big advance and being able to publish that to a mass audience with a major publisher. At the time when I set that goal, it wasn’t really realistic for me, but I was able to pursue smaller goals that changed my odds. One of them was writing for major publications.

John Jantsch (16:01.42)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (16:21.04)

As you mentioned, I’ve written for sites like HBR, Fast Company, Psychology Today. But one of my favorite things and one of the reasons I was so excited to have the opportunity to come on is it’s an exciting full circle moment for me. When I first decided that I was going to try to write for some of these respected publications, get my voice out there and ultimately position myself for things like a book deal, the first site that took me was the Duct Tape Marketing Blog. It was in 2015. I remember I was in my grandmother’s house at the time. They were having a garage sale. I was helping out when I got the response. I couldn’t even tell you where I was sitting.

John Jantsch (16:31.63)

You

John Jantsch (16:42.292)

the

Kyle Austin Young (16:49.742)

and it was such an exciting thing. So it’s an honor to be with you here today. So that’s the third path of success is people making the most of areas where they have good odds. The fourth path is probability hacking, doing everything you can to tilt the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (16:50.286)

you

John Jantsch (17:01.006)

So, you know, I was going to ask you about resilience. And then you kind of threw in that story about the entrepreneurs starting 10 businesses, but what, what connection do you think with the framework and just the whole mindset of resilience? What does it play?

Kyle Austin Young (17:17.774)

Well, it’s incredibly important if you’re going to especially be pursuing the path of repeated attempts. In the book, I tell the story of Thomas Edison. He’s in a race to try to get valuable patents surrounding the incandescent lamp. If he can get them, it’ll be something that’s transformational for his career. And what this race came down to is he and these other people were all trying to find a practical filament. They needed something that could glow hot enough to emit light without catching on fire and without snuffing out really quickly to the point where it wasn’t worth it. What Edison did that was different than these other people…

John Jantsch (17:23.0)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:29.709)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (17:47.376)

is he actually experimented with 6,000 different plant materials to find the one that worked best. He didn’t try to divine the right answer. He didn’t try to guess the right answer. The answer turned out to be, in his context, carbonized bamboo. And I don’t know about you. That would not have been my first guess. If you said, what are we going to use as a filament? I would have said, I bet it’s carbonized bamboo. That’s not where I would have started. It’s not where he started either. It took 6,000 attempts. But ultimately, he had a clear definition of success. He had a stopwatch, so to speak. And he was able to run more experiments than anyone else. And because of that,

John Jantsch (17:54.144)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:04.718)

the

Kyle Austin Young (18:15.364)

he found these unlikely answers. so resilience is a big part of that. Some of it comes from, we need to be confident that there is going to be a best answer out there. And in his case, it wasn’t, you know, it was comparative. He could be confident that one option out of the 6,000 would be the best out of the 6,000. And he liked his chance of creating a great product with a wider net when it came to ultimately trying to find the best filament than he did with somebody who’s only trying two or three things.

John Jantsch (18:27.982)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:41.526)

Yeah, and there’s obviously, I don’t know that it’s all true, but you hear these stories that people would ask him, gosh, aren’t you tired of failing so much? He said, no, I just have one more thing out of the way that I know is not the answer.

Kyle Austin Young (18:55.116)

He has a quote attributed to him that’s, to have a great idea, have a lot of them. And I think it’s that exact same mentality. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room necessarily. A lot of times it’s being the most generative. It’s being the person who’s the most prolific and who ultimately uncovers that unlikely good idea.

John Jantsch (18:58.936)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:12.396)

Yeah. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s certainly a mentality out there. People want to, you know, take the easy path, get rich quick, you know, be famous, all the things that, people aspire to. And I don’t, you know, the, people that really get there, you know, they just show up and do the work every day for a long time. Sometimes.

Kyle Austin Young (19:29.614)

Well, it’s one of the dangers of reverse engineering, like I mentioned, you know, the Marilyn Monroe story, we kind of chuckle at that, but I think we’re doing similar things in our daily lives. We’ll find somebody who started a successful organization and turns out he drives a blue convertible. So I should buy a blue convertible because clearly that’s got to be playing a role in his success. What if he just got lucky? I’m not saying that they did, but we need to be really careful about what we reverse engineer because just because someone is seeing good results doesn’t mean that they got there through good decisions.

John Jantsch (19:31.874)

Yeah, yeah.

Right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:46.924)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:54.646)

Yeah. Well, and I think a lot of times we miss the 10 years before, before they blew up, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, Kyle, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to find out more about your work and to perhaps pick up success is a numbers game.

Kyle Austin Young (19:58.778)

Sure, yeah, that kind of quote that most overnight successes are 20 years in the making, sure.

Kyle Austin Young (20:14.0)

You can get a copy of the book pretty much anywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, directly on the Penguin Random House website. Be honored if you did that. If you want to connect with me personally, I think we’ll probably put my website in the show notes, just kyleaustinyoung.com. But what I’d prefer you do, honestly, this was something that was just kind of an unexpected blessing of this journey, is I heard someone who was encouraging people to find them on LinkedIn, and I thought, that’s a strange thing to do. I’ll throw that idea out too. And that was many interviews ago, but it’s turned into one of just the best parts of this, is pretty much every day I wake up and someone has

John Jantsch (20:25.134)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (20:43.118)

sent me a message saying, I heard you here, I heard you there, can I ask you a question? It’s led to some really engaging conversations that I’ve really enjoyed, some fun opportunities for collaboration for me. So feel free to find me, Kyle Austin Young on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.

John Jantsch (20:45.1)

Okay.

John Jantsch (20:56.618)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll maybe we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road.

Kyle Austin Young (21:02.16)

That’d be great. Thanks.

John Jantsch (00:01.218)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kyle Austin Young. He’s an award winning strategy consultant, speaker and writer who helps leaders, entrepreneurs and high achievers accomplish big, meaningful goals. His work centers on a unique decision-making and goal achievement framework that he calls probability hacking, a method designed to analyze and intentionally improve the odds of success in any pursuit. We’re going to talk about his newest book.

Success is a numbers game. Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds. So Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Austin Young (00:37.348)

Thank you for having me. Honored to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.278)

So I’m going to start with the premise that I’m sure you, I won’t be the first person to ask this question. I think a lot of times when people talk about goals, they think about hustle or mindset or heck even luck. You are saying it’s more about odds. What’s different in that shift?

Kyle Austin Young (00:59.15)

Yeah, let me give you sort of an example. Let’s say that we’ve set the goal of training to run a marathon. Let’s say that’s something that we’ve decided we want to accomplish and we hire a running coach and she says, I can get you ready in time, but you’re gonna have to do three things. I need you to eat, sleep, and train according to some specific regimens that I’m gonna create for you.

John Jantsch (01:02.872)

me

John Jantsch (01:14.829)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (01:16.334)

So let’s say that we know that one of these prerequisites is we’re to have to train according to some certain parameters. And so we identify some of the things that could go wrong, some of the things that might happen instead of what we want. And maybe we identify bad weather as something that could derail a training regimen. I’m currently preparing for a big wintery snowstorm. Let’s say that we identify injury as a potential risk, or maybe we identify that our kids might have a crisis that could overwhelm our schedule. So the question that I like to ask people is,

tell me how wanting to run a marathon is an antidote to any of those threats to our success. How does wanting to run a marathon change the weather? How does wanting to run a marathon prevent injury? How does wanting to run a marathon keep a crisis from happening in our kids’ lives? Certainly, we’re going to need a measure of commitment and hustle in order to be successful. But ultimately, what we’re going to really need is we need some creative solutions to the things that could keep us from getting what we want.

So I believe that we can understand probabilities similar to the way we’ve traditionally understood matter. It can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred and rearranged. The odds of success, the odds that we want for our goal are currently hiding in our potential bad outcomes. When we identify what those things are and what we can do about them, we can tilt the odds in our favor.

John Jantsch (02:30.488)

So it’s all about quantum physics. Is that what you’re saying? So when you talk about moving matter around, was the first thought I had. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (02:33.54)

Very little physics in the book. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a physics class.

Kyle Austin Young (02:40.418)

Well, I do think that there’s a lot of truth in the idea that a lot of people want to conjure good odds out of thin air. This idea that maybe I can wish myself into a better position. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that a lot of times when we’re pursuing a goal, we’re encouraged to think positive. Don’t worry about what could go wrong. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. Just focus on the positive. I encourage people to do the exact opposite. I tell people to think negative. I tell people, for everything that has to go right in order for you to get what you want, identify the potential bad outcomes. Identify the things that could happen instead of what you want.

John Jantsch (02:55.8)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (03:09.464)

and use your creativity to systematically de-risk your goals.

John Jantsch (03:13.826)

So in your bio, and I know in the book itself, you talk a lot about probability hacking. So let’s talk about what that is or how you define

Kyle Austin Young (03:22.916)

Yeah, I define probability hacking as doing exactly what we just did. It starts with getting an idea of what’s going to have to go right and then identifying what could go wrong and then looking for creative solutions. I’ll tell a different example. You know, when I first graduated from college, I wasn’t excited about the entry level positions that I was seeing. I wanted to try for something more ambitious. So I actually applied to become the product development director at a growing health organization. I was 21 years old. If hired, I was going to be managing people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people with PhDs and master’s degrees.

a crazy thing to do, but I got an interview and I wanted to make the most of it. So even at that time, I did what I essentially do now for a living. I created what I call a success diagram. I only needed to get a job offer at that point. That was the only step left, but I looked at what are the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of me getting that job offer. And so I identified three. And so I’m giving this example. You kind of had the quantum physics concern because there’s no numbers here. I’m just going to show you how we can do this at a story level. One of the risks I identified was they might not hire me because of how young I looked.

John Jantsch (04:15.054)

Bye.

Kyle Austin Young (04:21.54)

I might walk in and they take one look and say, he can’t lead this team. So one of the very practical things I did to combat that is I just grew a beard. I still have the beard today. It was something that made me look about 10 years older than I was. And I knew that if I could do that, it would maybe take the edge off of that concern a little bit. A second bad outcome that I identified, a potential bad outcome rather, was there might be concerns over my lack of experience, which were valid. I didn’t have a deep resume. I had just graduated from college. So what I did was I couldn’t lie. I wasn’t going to

John Jantsch (04:22.126)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (04:49.54)

pretend that I had experience I didn’t have, but I wanted to show the quality of my thinking. So I actually typed up a plan for how I was going to turn this department around. It was so thick, I had to have it spiral bound. It was a book. And every person I went to and interviewed with, I gave them a copy of it. And the goal was when they would ask me questions about my past, I would just redirect it to be a conversation about the future. What experience do you have with whatever the case might be, product development? Great question. Here’s my plan for product development. Let’s talk about the vision that I have for this role if I’m given the opportunity.

The third potential bad outcome I identified was maybe they would be concerned that I couldn’t really get along with the existing team because there was just such a big generational gap. So I used a strategy that I’m still using today. It’s worked really well for me. I asked one of the people in the organization if the product development team had read any books recently as a group. She listed a few titles, I think it was three or four, and I went out and read every single one of them. And what that did is it gave me the ability to have conversations with the team that no other applicant could have. I understood their goals, I understood their jargon, I could make inside jokes.

John Jantsch (05:25.538)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (05:48.56)

There was a group interview where it was me and a bunch of people 20, 30 years older than me with a lot more experience trying to decide who was going to ultimately win the opportunity to lead this department. And one of the books that they read was called The Wuffy Factor. I don’t know if you remember that. was a book about how to, you remember the Wuffy? It was about how brands are in social capital. This was close to 15 years ago. And I remember being in that interview and I said, you know, I think this idea that we’re discussing could help us get a lot of Wuffy.

John Jantsch (05:57.934)

Right.

I remember saying that, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (06:11.632)

And I remember looking around and these other applicants, their eyes are bugging out of their heads. What on earth did he just say? You know, is he feeling, okay, what does he mean? We’re going to get a lot of wealthy out of this. But the existing team members, they were all laughing and nodding along. They knew exactly what I was talking about. We were reading the same books. So when all was said and done, I got that job. At 21 years old, I became the product development director for a health organization. It dramatically accelerated my career, but it started with this idea of probability hacking. It started with getting clear on what I wanted and getting clear on what was going to have to go right. Then thinking negatively,

identifying the risks to my success and not resorting to desire as an antidote to uncertainty, but instead using my creativity to solve those problems.

John Jantsch (06:49.006)

So you gave very specific details and steps of what you did, but it sounded, it started to sound a bit like a framework, which I know you have in the book. So were those steps that you gave me a part of that framework? Do you want to outline what that framework is?

Kyle Austin Young (07:04.41)

Sure, I encourage people to start by creating what I call a success diagram. A success diagram is you write down what’s the goal, what do I want to accomplish? I do that at the top right of the page. And then to the left, I just try to list out everything that’s gonna have to go right in order for me to get what I want. So it might be run a marathon. And what I call critical points, the prerequisites to my success are eat according to the regimen my coach gives me, sleep according to the regimen she gives me, train according to the regimen she gives me. So now I have the path, I have the destination.

And then for each one of those things that has to go right, I try to identify the potential bad outcomes. These aren’t just things that could go wrong, they’re alternate outcomes to success. Things that would be so significant they would completely derail the goal if any of them were to come true. After I have those mapped out, I try to just assign a level of risk to each of them. Is this a low risk potential bad outcome, a medium risk, a high risk, so they know how to prioritize? And then probability hacking again is using our creativity to try to find solutions to that. If I’m concerned about

you know, inclement weather derailing my training routine, I might need a treadmill indoors or need to find some alternate exercises that can allow me to build my fitness on days when I can’t go for a run. If I’m concerned about scheduling issues, something happening at my kid’s school, then I might want to train first thing in the morning or I might want to buy an extra pair of running shoes to keep in the car so that I can train at a park if I need to, if my day gets derailed.

John Jantsch (08:20.034)

In a lot of ways, what I’m hearing you describe is, I mean, think there are a lot of people that have mapped out the plan to run the marathon. mean, you can buy books, entire books, will tell you exactly what to do on day one, day two. But what you’re saying a lot of people miss is integrating the whole, you know, of life. And I think in a lot of ways, you’re really just asking people to step back and you’re calling it what could go wrong. But what you’re really doing is saying, hey, you have to have a grasp of reality.

Kyle Austin Young (08:31.29)

Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (08:49.764)

I think you do have to have a grasp of reality. I think that when we consider these statistics that are floating around all the time, just how many people fail at their New Year’s resolutions, how this vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to create lasting value for shareholders, how many new businesses will ultimately fail in the first few years after their existence, we start to recognize that it’s because we haven’t stopped to consider the things that could go wrong. And I’ll demonstrate that with just a little bit of numbers. Let’s use that marathon example. There’s three things that have to go right. I need to eat, sleep, and train according to a certain regimen.

John Jantsch (08:51.307)

me

John Jantsch (08:57.139)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (09:13.763)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (09:19.14)

Well, let’s take some imaginary numbers and try to estimate how likely we are to accomplish each of those three things. Maybe we think it’s 70 % across the board. 70 % chance I’ll stick with the diet, 70 % chance I’ll sleep the way I’m supposed to, 70 % chance I’ll train the way I’m supposed to. What a lot of people do is they fall into a trap called averaging. If they feel good about the individual prerequisites, they feel good about the goal as a whole. That’s not actually logically sound, it’s not mathematically sound. What we have to do is multiply those numbers together to find our overall odds of success.

John Jantsch (09:45.261)

Yes.

Kyle Austin Young (09:47.204)

And if we do that, we find that even though we feel really good about each of these things, 70 % across the board, our overall odds of being ready on race day are only 34%. And that I believe explains a lot of the dysfunction in our world. Why are people failing at goals and wondering, how did this not go the way that I expected it to? I felt good about each individual step. Well, you averaged in your head. You didn’t take the time to understand what your overall odds were. And because of that, maybe you didn’t pay as much attention to your opportunity to change your odds as you could have. Maybe you didn’t get that grasp on reality exactly like what you said.

John Jantsch (10:14.926)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (10:16.27)

and try to the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (10:18.766)

Is there any, do you ever run the risk or do you find that people might, like if I sat down thought, oh, my odds of actually being prepared on race day is only in the 30 % range, is there any chance that I say, why bother?

Kyle Austin Young (10:32.538)

There could be, but if we’re taking the time to think negative and identify the bad outcomes that are dragging those odds down, then we can use our creativity and see if we can’t change those numbers, at least in how we understand them, to look like something that’s more optimistic. You if we are using our creativity to address the risk of bad weather when we need to train, or address the risk of injury, or address the risk of our schedule being sabotaged, then we can ultimately run the numbers again. And maybe by the time we’re done optimizing this plan,

John Jantsch (10:33.902)

Yeah

Kyle Austin Young (10:59.812)

we end up feeling like it’s 90 % across the board. That’s still not a 90 % chance of success, but I believe it’s in the 70s. It’s a lot better.

John Jantsch (11:05.166)

Yeah. So, so do you find that you have to help people reframe this idea of failure even?

Kyle Austin Young (11:14.426)

Give me an example of what you mean by that.

John Jantsch (11:16.844)

Well, I mean, in some ways you’re, as I listened to you talk about the steps, you’re, you’re, you’re not saying that’s failures of possibility, but that it’s part of the equation. and a lot of people, you know, would have, I think some people would, would struggle with that idea. I, I’m not saying what you’re talking about doesn’t make sense, but just the mindset that a lot of people have that might be hard to overcome.

Kyle Austin Young (11:41.37)

Sure.

Absolutely. Failure is going to be part of the equation. One of the things that I encourage people to consider in the book is the power of multiple attempts. If you’re chasing a goal that’s really unlikely, often one of the most reliable ways to ultimately succeed is to try more than one time. I tell the story of the miracle on ice in the first chapter of the book. I got to interview Jack O’Callaghan who played on that 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviet Union. And a lot of people consider that a miracle. It’s been called the greatest sporting event of the 20th century, I believe, by Sports Illustrated.

John Jantsch (11:57.518)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (12:14.028)

And as an individual event, it was really miraculous. But when you recognize that over the course of this Olympic rivalry, the United States played the Soviets nine times and won two, that’s not that remarkable. Winning two times out of nine isn’t unheard of. So was it surprising that they won the game they won? Sure. But the odds told us that we would expect them to win some games. And that’s ultimately what they did. And what’s interesting is when I interviewed Jack, he told me that in the locker room before they went out to take the ice for that game,

John Jantsch (12:23.842)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (12:35.18)

Yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (12:42.244)

Coach Herb Brooks gives this speech and there’s a movie about it and the movie has some quotes that are really powerful. What Jack told me is he said he doesn’t remember the exact words that were spoken. But he says he remembers that when he left the locker room, they’re trudging down to take the ice. He says he remembers leaving with the idea that his coach believed if we played them 10 times, they might beat us nine times, but they’re not going to beat us tonight. And so there was an expectation that failure was going to be a part of that, but they had an opportunity for tonight to be the exception. And ultimately it was.

John Jantsch (13:10.446)

I remember vividly watching that in my dorm room in college. does this, like a marathon I would call a long-term goal, particularly for somebody who hasn’t run one, right? They should start early, right? Can this be applied to short-term decisions as well?

Kyle Austin Young (13:14.956)

Amazing. I missed it by a few years, but I’m jealous.

Kyle Austin Young (13:24.666)

Sure. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (13:33.166)

absolutely. You know, in the context of me trying to get that job, I just did this as I headed into an interview. It was going to all take place in a day. When we have something that needs to go right, one of the best things we can do to help it go right is think about what could go wrong. Ultimately, that’s what’s dragging our probability down. If you think about flipping a coin, let’s say you need it to land on heads, you have a 50 % chance of success. Why? Why don’t you have a 100 % chance of success? Well, because it might land on tails, and there’s a 50 % chance of that happening. Now, I don’t know how to rig a coin to make it…

do what I want it to do. But in life, a lot of times we can rig it or we can re-rig it in our favor. We can try to take the risk out of the bad outcomes, bring those odds over to our side.

John Jantsch (14:11.448)

So if somebody hasn’t thought this way, what’s kind some of the first things you try to help people? And again, I don’t know if you actually consult on this or teach courses on this as well, but what are some of the first things you try to do to get people to start putting this way of thinking? Because I think a lot of times these things are just mindset. So what do you get them to start thinking this way? What are some of the first things?

Kyle Austin Young (14:32.784)

Well, in the book, I tell people that I think there are four paths to success. One of them is some people just get lucky. I tell the story of Norma Jean Doherty. She’s working at an aviation munitions factory in the war, and a photographer comes to take pictures for a military magazine to inspire the troops. He notices Norma Jean, thinks she’s really beautiful, says, can I take some pictures for you for magazines that don’t have anything to do with the military? And she said, sure. She ultimately finds a lot of success as a model and then goes on to star as an actress under the name Marilyn Monroe, has just this enormously successful career.

That is certainly a success story. Is it a success story we should reverse engineer though? If I meet a young woman who’s coming to me for training or coaching rather, can you tell me what I can do to become a successful Hollywood star? Would I say, well, the first thing you need to do is get a job at an aviation munitions factory and hope that someday a military photographer stops by and notices how pretty you are and says, can I take some pictures of you? No, that probably wouldn’t be a very reliable path to success. So some people succeed through luck. They succeed even though the odds are bad, simply because we expect unlikely events to happen sometimes.

Some people succeed, they don’t beat the odds, but they play them. We think about entrepreneurs, there are some really famous examples of people who heard that nine out of 10 businesses fail, and that was actually what inspired them to start 10 businesses or 15 businesses, was the belief that they were going to experience those predicted failures, but they would also experience the predicted successes. Some people succeed because they have advantages, they have areas of tremendous strength in their lives, and so they try to lean into those goals.

John Jantsch (15:41.314)

you

Kyle Austin Young (15:54.084)

That can often be something that’s really wise for us is asking the question, what are some goals that are pretty high probability goals for me right now that might bring bigger accomplishments within reach? One of the goals that I had for years was ultimately getting a book deal and hopefully getting a big advance and being able to publish that to a mass audience with a major publisher. At the time when I set that goal, it wasn’t really realistic for me, but I was able to pursue smaller goals that changed my odds. One of them was writing for major publications.

John Jantsch (16:01.42)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (16:21.04)

As you mentioned, I’ve written for sites like HBR, Fast Company, Psychology Today. But one of my favorite things and one of the reasons I was so excited to have the opportunity to come on is it’s an exciting full circle moment for me. When I first decided that I was going to try to write for some of these respected publications, get my voice out there and ultimately position myself for things like a book deal, the first site that took me was the Duct Tape Marketing Blog. It was in 2015. I remember I was in my grandmother’s house at the time. They were having a garage sale. I was helping out when I got the response. I couldn’t even tell you where I was sitting.

John Jantsch (16:31.63)

You

John Jantsch (16:42.292)

the

Kyle Austin Young (16:49.742)

and it was such an exciting thing. So it’s an honor to be with you here today. So that’s the third path of success is people making the most of areas where they have good odds. The fourth path is probability hacking, doing everything you can to tilt the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (16:50.286)

you

John Jantsch (17:01.006)

So, you know, I was going to ask you about resilience. And then you kind of threw in that story about the entrepreneurs starting 10 businesses, but what, what connection do you think with the framework and just the whole mindset of resilience? What does it play?

Kyle Austin Young (17:17.774)

Well, it’s incredibly important if you’re going to especially be pursuing the path of repeated attempts. In the book, I tell the story of Thomas Edison. He’s in a race to try to get valuable patents surrounding the incandescent lamp. If he can get them, it’ll be something that’s transformational for his career. And what this race came down to is he and these other people were all trying to find a practical filament. They needed something that could glow hot enough to emit light without catching on fire and without snuffing out really quickly to the point where it wasn’t worth it. What Edison did that was different than these other people…

John Jantsch (17:23.0)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:29.709)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (17:47.376)

is he actually experimented with 6,000 different plant materials to find the one that worked best. He didn’t try to divine the right answer. He didn’t try to guess the right answer. The answer turned out to be, in his context, carbonized bamboo. And I don’t know about you. That would not have been my first guess. If you said, what are we going to use as a filament? I would have said, I bet it’s carbonized bamboo. That’s not where I would have started. It’s not where he started either. It took 6,000 attempts. But ultimately, he had a clear definition of success. He had a stopwatch, so to speak. And he was able to run more experiments than anyone else. And because of that,

John Jantsch (17:54.144)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:04.718)

the

Kyle Austin Young (18:15.364)

he found these unlikely answers. so resilience is a big part of that. Some of it comes from, we need to be confident that there is going to be a best answer out there. And in his case, it wasn’t, you know, it was comparative. He could be confident that one option out of the 6,000 would be the best out of the 6,000. And he liked his chance of creating a great product with a wider net when it came to ultimately trying to find the best filament than he did with somebody who’s only trying two or three things.

John Jantsch (18:27.982)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:41.526)

Yeah, and there’s obviously, I don’t know that it’s all true, but you hear these stories that people would ask him, gosh, aren’t you tired of failing so much? He said, no, I just have one more thing out of the way that I know is not the answer.

Kyle Austin Young (18:55.116)

He has a quote attributed to him that’s, to have a great idea, have a lot of them. And I think it’s that exact same mentality. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room necessarily. A lot of times it’s being the most generative. It’s being the person who’s the most prolific and who ultimately uncovers that unlikely good idea.

John Jantsch (18:58.936)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:12.396)

Yeah. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s certainly a mentality out there. People want to, you know, take the easy path, get rich quick, you know, be famous, all the things that, people aspire to. And I don’t, you know, the, people that really get there, you know, they just show up and do the work every day for a long time. Sometimes.

Kyle Austin Young (19:29.614)

Well, it’s one of the dangers of reverse engineering, like I mentioned, you know, the Marilyn Monroe story, we kind of chuckle at that, but I think we’re doing similar things in our daily lives. We’ll find somebody who started a successful organization and turns out he drives a blue convertible. So I should buy a blue convertible because clearly that’s got to be playing a role in his success. What if he just got lucky? I’m not saying that they did, but we need to be really careful about what we reverse engineer because just because someone is seeing good results doesn’t mean that they got there through good decisions.

John Jantsch (19:31.874)

Yeah, yeah.

Right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:46.924)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:54.646)

Yeah. Well, and I think a lot of times we miss the 10 years before, before they blew up, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, Kyle, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to find out more about your work and to perhaps pick up success is a numbers game.

Kyle Austin Young (19:58.778)

Sure, yeah, that kind of quote that most overnight successes are 20 years in the making, sure.

Kyle Austin Young (20:14.0)

You can get a copy of the book pretty much anywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, directly on the Penguin Random House website. Be honored if you did that. If you want to connect with me personally, I think we’ll probably put my website in the show notes, just kyleaustinyoung.com. But what I’d prefer you do, honestly, this was something that was just kind of an unexpected blessing of this journey, is I heard someone who was encouraging people to find them on LinkedIn, and I thought, that’s a strange thing to do. I’ll throw that idea out too. And that was many interviews ago, but it’s turned into one of just the best parts of this, is pretty much every day I wake up and someone has

John Jantsch (20:25.134)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (20:43.118)

sent me a message saying, I heard you here, I heard you there, can I ask you a question? It’s led to some really engaging conversations that I’ve really enjoyed, some fun opportunities for collaboration for me. So feel free to find me, Kyle Austin Young on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.

John Jantsch (20:45.1)

Okay.

John Jantsch (20:56.618)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll maybe we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road.

Kyle Austin Young (21:02.16)

That’d be great. Thanks.

John Jantsch (00:01.218)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kyle Austin Young. He’s an award winning strategy consultant, speaker and writer who helps leaders, entrepreneurs and high achievers accomplish big, meaningful goals. His work centers on a unique decision-making and goal achievement framework that he calls probability hacking, a method designed to analyze and intentionally improve the odds of success in any pursuit. We’re going to talk about his newest book.

Success is a numbers game. Achieve bigger goals by changing the odds. So Kyle, welcome to the show.

Kyle Austin Young (00:37.348)

Thank you for having me. Honored to be here.

John Jantsch (00:39.278)

So I’m going to start with the premise that I’m sure you, I won’t be the first person to ask this question. I think a lot of times when people talk about goals, they think about hustle or mindset or heck even luck. You are saying it’s more about odds. What’s different in that shift?

Kyle Austin Young (00:59.15)

Yeah, let me give you sort of an example. Let’s say that we’ve set the goal of training to run a marathon. Let’s say that’s something that we’ve decided we want to accomplish and we hire a running coach and she says, I can get you ready in time, but you’re gonna have to do three things. I need you to eat, sleep, and train according to some specific regimens that I’m gonna create for you.

John Jantsch (01:02.872)

me

John Jantsch (01:14.829)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (01:16.334)

So let’s say that we know that one of these prerequisites is we’re to have to train according to some certain parameters. And so we identify some of the things that could go wrong, some of the things that might happen instead of what we want. And maybe we identify bad weather as something that could derail a training regimen. I’m currently preparing for a big wintery snowstorm. Let’s say that we identify injury as a potential risk, or maybe we identify that our kids might have a crisis that could overwhelm our schedule. So the question that I like to ask people is,

tell me how wanting to run a marathon is an antidote to any of those threats to our success. How does wanting to run a marathon change the weather? How does wanting to run a marathon prevent injury? How does wanting to run a marathon keep a crisis from happening in our kids’ lives? Certainly, we’re going to need a measure of commitment and hustle in order to be successful. But ultimately, what we’re going to really need is we need some creative solutions to the things that could keep us from getting what we want.

So I believe that we can understand probabilities similar to the way we’ve traditionally understood matter. It can’t be created or destroyed, but it can be transferred and rearranged. The odds of success, the odds that we want for our goal are currently hiding in our potential bad outcomes. When we identify what those things are and what we can do about them, we can tilt the odds in our favor.

John Jantsch (02:30.488)

So it’s all about quantum physics. Is that what you’re saying? So when you talk about moving matter around, was the first thought I had. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (02:33.54)

Very little physics in the book. I don’t think I’ve ever taken a physics class.

Kyle Austin Young (02:40.418)

Well, I do think that there’s a lot of truth in the idea that a lot of people want to conjure good odds out of thin air. This idea that maybe I can wish myself into a better position. And I don’t think that’s true. I think that a lot of times when we’re pursuing a goal, we’re encouraged to think positive. Don’t worry about what could go wrong. If it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. Just focus on the positive. I encourage people to do the exact opposite. I tell people to think negative. I tell people, for everything that has to go right in order for you to get what you want, identify the potential bad outcomes. Identify the things that could happen instead of what you want.

John Jantsch (02:55.8)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (03:09.464)

and use your creativity to systematically de-risk your goals.

John Jantsch (03:13.826)

So in your bio, and I know in the book itself, you talk a lot about probability hacking. So let’s talk about what that is or how you define

Kyle Austin Young (03:22.916)

Yeah, I define probability hacking as doing exactly what we just did. It starts with getting an idea of what’s going to have to go right and then identifying what could go wrong and then looking for creative solutions. I’ll tell a different example. You know, when I first graduated from college, I wasn’t excited about the entry level positions that I was seeing. I wanted to try for something more ambitious. So I actually applied to become the product development director at a growing health organization. I was 21 years old. If hired, I was going to be managing people in their 50s, 60s, 70s, people with PhDs and master’s degrees.

a crazy thing to do, but I got an interview and I wanted to make the most of it. So even at that time, I did what I essentially do now for a living. I created what I call a success diagram. I only needed to get a job offer at that point. That was the only step left, but I looked at what are the potential bad outcomes that could happen instead of me getting that job offer. And so I identified three. And so I’m giving this example. You kind of had the quantum physics concern because there’s no numbers here. I’m just going to show you how we can do this at a story level. One of the risks I identified was they might not hire me because of how young I looked.

John Jantsch (04:15.054)

Bye.

Kyle Austin Young (04:21.54)

I might walk in and they take one look and say, he can’t lead this team. So one of the very practical things I did to combat that is I just grew a beard. I still have the beard today. It was something that made me look about 10 years older than I was. And I knew that if I could do that, it would maybe take the edge off of that concern a little bit. A second bad outcome that I identified, a potential bad outcome rather, was there might be concerns over my lack of experience, which were valid. I didn’t have a deep resume. I had just graduated from college. So what I did was I couldn’t lie. I wasn’t going to

John Jantsch (04:22.126)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (04:49.54)

pretend that I had experience I didn’t have, but I wanted to show the quality of my thinking. So I actually typed up a plan for how I was going to turn this department around. It was so thick, I had to have it spiral bound. It was a book. And every person I went to and interviewed with, I gave them a copy of it. And the goal was when they would ask me questions about my past, I would just redirect it to be a conversation about the future. What experience do you have with whatever the case might be, product development? Great question. Here’s my plan for product development. Let’s talk about the vision that I have for this role if I’m given the opportunity.

The third potential bad outcome I identified was maybe they would be concerned that I couldn’t really get along with the existing team because there was just such a big generational gap. So I used a strategy that I’m still using today. It’s worked really well for me. I asked one of the people in the organization if the product development team had read any books recently as a group. She listed a few titles, I think it was three or four, and I went out and read every single one of them. And what that did is it gave me the ability to have conversations with the team that no other applicant could have. I understood their goals, I understood their jargon, I could make inside jokes.

John Jantsch (05:25.538)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (05:48.56)

There was a group interview where it was me and a bunch of people 20, 30 years older than me with a lot more experience trying to decide who was going to ultimately win the opportunity to lead this department. And one of the books that they read was called The Wuffy Factor. I don’t know if you remember that. was a book about how to, you remember the Wuffy? It was about how brands are in social capital. This was close to 15 years ago. And I remember being in that interview and I said, you know, I think this idea that we’re discussing could help us get a lot of Wuffy.

John Jantsch (05:57.934)

Right.

I remember saying that, yeah, yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (06:11.632)

And I remember looking around and these other applicants, their eyes are bugging out of their heads. What on earth did he just say? You know, is he feeling, okay, what does he mean? We’re going to get a lot of wealthy out of this. But the existing team members, they were all laughing and nodding along. They knew exactly what I was talking about. We were reading the same books. So when all was said and done, I got that job. At 21 years old, I became the product development director for a health organization. It dramatically accelerated my career, but it started with this idea of probability hacking. It started with getting clear on what I wanted and getting clear on what was going to have to go right. Then thinking negatively,

identifying the risks to my success and not resorting to desire as an antidote to uncertainty, but instead using my creativity to solve those problems.

John Jantsch (06:49.006)

So you gave very specific details and steps of what you did, but it sounded, it started to sound a bit like a framework, which I know you have in the book. So were those steps that you gave me a part of that framework? Do you want to outline what that framework is?

Kyle Austin Young (07:04.41)

Sure, I encourage people to start by creating what I call a success diagram. A success diagram is you write down what’s the goal, what do I want to accomplish? I do that at the top right of the page. And then to the left, I just try to list out everything that’s gonna have to go right in order for me to get what I want. So it might be run a marathon. And what I call critical points, the prerequisites to my success are eat according to the regimen my coach gives me, sleep according to the regimen she gives me, train according to the regimen she gives me. So now I have the path, I have the destination.

And then for each one of those things that has to go right, I try to identify the potential bad outcomes. These aren’t just things that could go wrong, they’re alternate outcomes to success. Things that would be so significant they would completely derail the goal if any of them were to come true. After I have those mapped out, I try to just assign a level of risk to each of them. Is this a low risk potential bad outcome, a medium risk, a high risk, so they know how to prioritize? And then probability hacking again is using our creativity to try to find solutions to that. If I’m concerned about

you know, inclement weather derailing my training routine, I might need a treadmill indoors or need to find some alternate exercises that can allow me to build my fitness on days when I can’t go for a run. If I’m concerned about scheduling issues, something happening at my kid’s school, then I might want to train first thing in the morning or I might want to buy an extra pair of running shoes to keep in the car so that I can train at a park if I need to, if my day gets derailed.

John Jantsch (08:20.034)

In a lot of ways, what I’m hearing you describe is, I mean, think there are a lot of people that have mapped out the plan to run the marathon. mean, you can buy books, entire books, will tell you exactly what to do on day one, day two. But what you’re saying a lot of people miss is integrating the whole, you know, of life. And I think in a lot of ways, you’re really just asking people to step back and you’re calling it what could go wrong. But what you’re really doing is saying, hey, you have to have a grasp of reality.

Kyle Austin Young (08:31.29)

Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (08:49.764)

I think you do have to have a grasp of reality. I think that when we consider these statistics that are floating around all the time, just how many people fail at their New Year’s resolutions, how this vast majority of mergers and acquisitions fail to create lasting value for shareholders, how many new businesses will ultimately fail in the first few years after their existence, we start to recognize that it’s because we haven’t stopped to consider the things that could go wrong. And I’ll demonstrate that with just a little bit of numbers. Let’s use that marathon example. There’s three things that have to go right. I need to eat, sleep, and train according to a certain regimen.

John Jantsch (08:51.307)

me

John Jantsch (08:57.139)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (09:13.763)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (09:19.14)

Well, let’s take some imaginary numbers and try to estimate how likely we are to accomplish each of those three things. Maybe we think it’s 70 % across the board. 70 % chance I’ll stick with the diet, 70 % chance I’ll sleep the way I’m supposed to, 70 % chance I’ll train the way I’m supposed to. What a lot of people do is they fall into a trap called averaging. If they feel good about the individual prerequisites, they feel good about the goal as a whole. That’s not actually logically sound, it’s not mathematically sound. What we have to do is multiply those numbers together to find our overall odds of success.

John Jantsch (09:45.261)

Yes.

Kyle Austin Young (09:47.204)

And if we do that, we find that even though we feel really good about each of these things, 70 % across the board, our overall odds of being ready on race day are only 34%. And that I believe explains a lot of the dysfunction in our world. Why are people failing at goals and wondering, how did this not go the way that I expected it to? I felt good about each individual step. Well, you averaged in your head. You didn’t take the time to understand what your overall odds were. And because of that, maybe you didn’t pay as much attention to your opportunity to change your odds as you could have. Maybe you didn’t get that grasp on reality exactly like what you said.

John Jantsch (10:14.926)

Thank

Kyle Austin Young (10:16.27)

and try to the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (10:18.766)

Is there any, do you ever run the risk or do you find that people might, like if I sat down thought, oh, my odds of actually being prepared on race day is only in the 30 % range, is there any chance that I say, why bother?

Kyle Austin Young (10:32.538)

There could be, but if we’re taking the time to think negative and identify the bad outcomes that are dragging those odds down, then we can use our creativity and see if we can’t change those numbers, at least in how we understand them, to look like something that’s more optimistic. You if we are using our creativity to address the risk of bad weather when we need to train, or address the risk of injury, or address the risk of our schedule being sabotaged, then we can ultimately run the numbers again. And maybe by the time we’re done optimizing this plan,

John Jantsch (10:33.902)

Yeah

Kyle Austin Young (10:59.812)

we end up feeling like it’s 90 % across the board. That’s still not a 90 % chance of success, but I believe it’s in the 70s. It’s a lot better.

John Jantsch (11:05.166)

Yeah. So, so do you find that you have to help people reframe this idea of failure even?

Kyle Austin Young (11:14.426)

Give me an example of what you mean by that.

John Jantsch (11:16.844)

Well, I mean, in some ways you’re, as I listened to you talk about the steps, you’re, you’re, you’re not saying that’s failures of possibility, but that it’s part of the equation. and a lot of people, you know, would have, I think some people would, would struggle with that idea. I, I’m not saying what you’re talking about doesn’t make sense, but just the mindset that a lot of people have that might be hard to overcome.

Kyle Austin Young (11:41.37)

Sure.

Absolutely. Failure is going to be part of the equation. One of the things that I encourage people to consider in the book is the power of multiple attempts. If you’re chasing a goal that’s really unlikely, often one of the most reliable ways to ultimately succeed is to try more than one time. I tell the story of the miracle on ice in the first chapter of the book. I got to interview Jack O’Callaghan who played on that 1980 hockey team that beat the Soviet Union. And a lot of people consider that a miracle. It’s been called the greatest sporting event of the 20th century, I believe, by Sports Illustrated.

John Jantsch (11:57.518)

Right.

Kyle Austin Young (12:14.028)

And as an individual event, it was really miraculous. But when you recognize that over the course of this Olympic rivalry, the United States played the Soviets nine times and won two, that’s not that remarkable. Winning two times out of nine isn’t unheard of. So was it surprising that they won the game they won? Sure. But the odds told us that we would expect them to win some games. And that’s ultimately what they did. And what’s interesting is when I interviewed Jack, he told me that in the locker room before they went out to take the ice for that game,

John Jantsch (12:23.842)

Mm-hmm. Right.

John Jantsch (12:35.18)

Yeah.

Kyle Austin Young (12:42.244)

Coach Herb Brooks gives this speech and there’s a movie about it and the movie has some quotes that are really powerful. What Jack told me is he said he doesn’t remember the exact words that were spoken. But he says he remembers that when he left the locker room, they’re trudging down to take the ice. He says he remembers leaving with the idea that his coach believed if we played them 10 times, they might beat us nine times, but they’re not going to beat us tonight. And so there was an expectation that failure was going to be a part of that, but they had an opportunity for tonight to be the exception. And ultimately it was.

John Jantsch (13:10.446)

I remember vividly watching that in my dorm room in college. does this, like a marathon I would call a long-term goal, particularly for somebody who hasn’t run one, right? They should start early, right? Can this be applied to short-term decisions as well?

Kyle Austin Young (13:14.956)

Amazing. I missed it by a few years, but I’m jealous.

Kyle Austin Young (13:24.666)

Sure. Sure.

Kyle Austin Young (13:33.166)

absolutely. You know, in the context of me trying to get that job, I just did this as I headed into an interview. It was going to all take place in a day. When we have something that needs to go right, one of the best things we can do to help it go right is think about what could go wrong. Ultimately, that’s what’s dragging our probability down. If you think about flipping a coin, let’s say you need it to land on heads, you have a 50 % chance of success. Why? Why don’t you have a 100 % chance of success? Well, because it might land on tails, and there’s a 50 % chance of that happening. Now, I don’t know how to rig a coin to make it…

do what I want it to do. But in life, a lot of times we can rig it or we can re-rig it in our favor. We can try to take the risk out of the bad outcomes, bring those odds over to our side.

John Jantsch (14:11.448)

So if somebody hasn’t thought this way, what’s kind some of the first things you try to help people? And again, I don’t know if you actually consult on this or teach courses on this as well, but what are some of the first things you try to do to get people to start putting this way of thinking? Because I think a lot of times these things are just mindset. So what do you get them to start thinking this way? What are some of the first things?

Kyle Austin Young (14:32.784)

Well, in the book, I tell people that I think there are four paths to success. One of them is some people just get lucky. I tell the story of Norma Jean Doherty. She’s working at an aviation munitions factory in the war, and a photographer comes to take pictures for a military magazine to inspire the troops. He notices Norma Jean, thinks she’s really beautiful, says, can I take some pictures for you for magazines that don’t have anything to do with the military? And she said, sure. She ultimately finds a lot of success as a model and then goes on to star as an actress under the name Marilyn Monroe, has just this enormously successful career.

That is certainly a success story. Is it a success story we should reverse engineer though? If I meet a young woman who’s coming to me for training or coaching rather, can you tell me what I can do to become a successful Hollywood star? Would I say, well, the first thing you need to do is get a job at an aviation munitions factory and hope that someday a military photographer stops by and notices how pretty you are and says, can I take some pictures of you? No, that probably wouldn’t be a very reliable path to success. So some people succeed through luck. They succeed even though the odds are bad, simply because we expect unlikely events to happen sometimes.

Some people succeed, they don’t beat the odds, but they play them. We think about entrepreneurs, there are some really famous examples of people who heard that nine out of 10 businesses fail, and that was actually what inspired them to start 10 businesses or 15 businesses, was the belief that they were going to experience those predicted failures, but they would also experience the predicted successes. Some people succeed because they have advantages, they have areas of tremendous strength in their lives, and so they try to lean into those goals.

John Jantsch (15:41.314)

you

Kyle Austin Young (15:54.084)

That can often be something that’s really wise for us is asking the question, what are some goals that are pretty high probability goals for me right now that might bring bigger accomplishments within reach? One of the goals that I had for years was ultimately getting a book deal and hopefully getting a big advance and being able to publish that to a mass audience with a major publisher. At the time when I set that goal, it wasn’t really realistic for me, but I was able to pursue smaller goals that changed my odds. One of them was writing for major publications.

John Jantsch (16:01.42)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (16:21.04)

As you mentioned, I’ve written for sites like HBR, Fast Company, Psychology Today. But one of my favorite things and one of the reasons I was so excited to have the opportunity to come on is it’s an exciting full circle moment for me. When I first decided that I was going to try to write for some of these respected publications, get my voice out there and ultimately position myself for things like a book deal, the first site that took me was the Duct Tape Marketing Blog. It was in 2015. I remember I was in my grandmother’s house at the time. They were having a garage sale. I was helping out when I got the response. I couldn’t even tell you where I was sitting.

John Jantsch (16:31.63)

You

John Jantsch (16:42.292)

the

Kyle Austin Young (16:49.742)

and it was such an exciting thing. So it’s an honor to be with you here today. So that’s the third path of success is people making the most of areas where they have good odds. The fourth path is probability hacking, doing everything you can to tilt the odds in your favor.

John Jantsch (16:50.286)

you

John Jantsch (17:01.006)

So, you know, I was going to ask you about resilience. And then you kind of threw in that story about the entrepreneurs starting 10 businesses, but what, what connection do you think with the framework and just the whole mindset of resilience? What does it play?

Kyle Austin Young (17:17.774)

Well, it’s incredibly important if you’re going to especially be pursuing the path of repeated attempts. In the book, I tell the story of Thomas Edison. He’s in a race to try to get valuable patents surrounding the incandescent lamp. If he can get them, it’ll be something that’s transformational for his career. And what this race came down to is he and these other people were all trying to find a practical filament. They needed something that could glow hot enough to emit light without catching on fire and without snuffing out really quickly to the point where it wasn’t worth it. What Edison did that was different than these other people…

John Jantsch (17:23.0)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:29.709)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (17:47.376)

is he actually experimented with 6,000 different plant materials to find the one that worked best. He didn’t try to divine the right answer. He didn’t try to guess the right answer. The answer turned out to be, in his context, carbonized bamboo. And I don’t know about you. That would not have been my first guess. If you said, what are we going to use as a filament? I would have said, I bet it’s carbonized bamboo. That’s not where I would have started. It’s not where he started either. It took 6,000 attempts. But ultimately, he had a clear definition of success. He had a stopwatch, so to speak. And he was able to run more experiments than anyone else. And because of that,

John Jantsch (17:54.144)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:04.718)

the

Kyle Austin Young (18:15.364)

he found these unlikely answers. so resilience is a big part of that. Some of it comes from, we need to be confident that there is going to be a best answer out there. And in his case, it wasn’t, you know, it was comparative. He could be confident that one option out of the 6,000 would be the best out of the 6,000. And he liked his chance of creating a great product with a wider net when it came to ultimately trying to find the best filament than he did with somebody who’s only trying two or three things.

John Jantsch (18:27.982)

Thanks.

John Jantsch (18:41.526)

Yeah, and there’s obviously, I don’t know that it’s all true, but you hear these stories that people would ask him, gosh, aren’t you tired of failing so much? He said, no, I just have one more thing out of the way that I know is not the answer.

Kyle Austin Young (18:55.116)

He has a quote attributed to him that’s, to have a great idea, have a lot of them. And I think it’s that exact same mentality. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room necessarily. A lot of times it’s being the most generative. It’s being the person who’s the most prolific and who ultimately uncovers that unlikely good idea.

John Jantsch (18:58.936)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:12.396)

Yeah. And, and, you know, there’s, there’s certainly a mentality out there. People want to, you know, take the easy path, get rich quick, you know, be famous, all the things that, people aspire to. And I don’t, you know, the, people that really get there, you know, they just show up and do the work every day for a long time. Sometimes.

Kyle Austin Young (19:29.614)

Well, it’s one of the dangers of reverse engineering, like I mentioned, you know, the Marilyn Monroe story, we kind of chuckle at that, but I think we’re doing similar things in our daily lives. We’ll find somebody who started a successful organization and turns out he drives a blue convertible. So I should buy a blue convertible because clearly that’s got to be playing a role in his success. What if he just got lucky? I’m not saying that they did, but we need to be really careful about what we reverse engineer because just because someone is seeing good results doesn’t mean that they got there through good decisions.

John Jantsch (19:31.874)

Yeah, yeah.

Right? Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:46.924)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:54.646)

Yeah. Well, and I think a lot of times we miss the 10 years before, before they blew up, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, Kyle, I appreciate you stopping by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there someplace you’d invite people to find out more about your work and to perhaps pick up success is a numbers game.

Kyle Austin Young (19:58.778)

Sure, yeah, that kind of quote that most overnight successes are 20 years in the making, sure.

Kyle Austin Young (20:14.0)

You can get a copy of the book pretty much anywhere, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, directly on the Penguin Random House website. Be honored if you did that. If you want to connect with me personally, I think we’ll probably put my website in the show notes, just kyleaustinyoung.com. But what I’d prefer you do, honestly, this was something that was just kind of an unexpected blessing of this journey, is I heard someone who was encouraging people to find them on LinkedIn, and I thought, that’s a strange thing to do. I’ll throw that idea out too. And that was many interviews ago, but it’s turned into one of just the best parts of this, is pretty much every day I wake up and someone has

John Jantsch (20:25.134)

Mm-hmm.

Kyle Austin Young (20:43.118)

sent me a message saying, I heard you here, I heard you there, can I ask you a question? It’s led to some really engaging conversations that I’ve really enjoyed, some fun opportunities for collaboration for me. So feel free to find me, Kyle Austin Young on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear from you.

John Jantsch (20:45.1)

Okay.

John Jantsch (20:56.618)

Awesome. Well, again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’ll maybe we’ll run into one of these days out there on the road.

Kyle Austin Young (21:02.16)

That’d be great. Thanks.