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John Jantsch (00:01.184)

What if the very thing most adults dismiss as frivolous is actually the key to better ideas, deeper connection and more resilient work? Hello and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Piera Ghilardi. You know, I’m going to do that over again because I practiced that and I got it wrong. So yeah, Ghilardi, like gelato or something.

Piera Gelardi (00:23.822)

It’s like hair gel, it’s gel already. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, like gelato, exactly.

John Jantsch (00:31.636)

Yeah. Okay. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantz and my guest today is Piera Jalardi. She’s an entrepreneur, speaker and co-founder of Refinery29, whose new book, The Playful Way, argues that play is not a distraction from meaningful work and life, but a practical mindset that can help us navigate creativity, change, relationships, and even adversity.

with more curiosity and possibilities. So, Piero, welcome to the show.

Piera Gelardi (01:03.886)

Thanks for having me. Let’s play.

John Jantsch (01:05.546)

So I’m sure one of the first questions that you get asked all the time is, because so many of us, especially people of my generation, it’s like, you didn’t get to play it till you got your homework done. And so how, or when for you, I should actually ask it that way. Cause you argue that it’s not something that we earn, that it’s actually something that enhances how we work. When did that become true for you?

Piera Gelardi (01:30.776)

So I was fortunate to grow up in a really playful family and to have parents who were playful while they navigated growing businesses, having families, dealing with illness and loss. And so I got to see how playfulness could, and the curiosity and creativity that comes with playfulness could actually weave into every aspect of our life. So playfulness was something that was sort of baked into me. But then of course, like most adults, I rubbed up against

know, teachers that wanted me to do things a certain, you know, straight line way, wanted me to, to, you know, sit still and go from point A to point B. I went into workplaces that also expected a certain degree of seriousness and, you know, seriousness in terms of rigidity. And so I did definitely rubbed up against places that, you know, told me that play and playfulness was something frivolous with something that we do, you know, after our homework is done, after our hard work is done.

But what I found in my life and in my work was that integrating play created the best results. It created the most innovative ideas, the best relationships, and the most resilience for me to work through the problems that came up.

John Jantsch (02:44.028)

Is, I believe you a hundred percent and totally agree with it. Is there any research that you’ve done or that you’ve studied that kind of backs this up scientifically as well?

Piera Gelardi (02:54.466)

Yeah, there’s a lot of research about the power of play. also there’s research about play deprivation, which is something that I experienced in a period of work where I was trying to present in a serious way. So I packed up my playfulness and tried to kind of show up in a way that was zipped up in my serious suit, basically. And

Play deprivation leads to us being less resilient, having less of a solutions minded attitude, having less of a big perspective on what there is in life. And so we end up not having that intrinsic motivation that helps us to drive us forward, that helps us to feel, to find joy and excitement in our day to day, to find connection with each other. There’s also a lot of science also around like the neuroscience of.

sort of that playful experimental mindset and how when we try something new, you know, these neural pathways are reshaping our brain. So when we’re in that play state, we’re in a much more open-minded experimental framework where we can actually learn and grow versus getting really stuck and being set back by failure, which is when we’re in that perfectionistic, serious mindset, we’re trying to control the outcome. We’re trying to, you know,

get it exactly right, we tend to be less open-minded, we tend to not be able to deal with the change, the uncertainty, the setbacks in the same sort of pliable, resilient way that we can when we’re in that playful mindset.

John Jantsch (04:32.893)

So, I think a lot of business owners, we’ve come a long way, I think a lot of business owners get the idea of doing creative exercises, kind of opens up dialogue and different things. But when you use the word play, do you sometimes get pushback because people have a bias about, that’s goofing around, that’s not serious, that’s not who we are? mean, so does the word play itself actually cause some issues for you?

Piera Gelardi (04:57.676)

Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of anti-play sentiment because we sort of associate play with one mode of play, but there’s a lot of ways to be playful. So we sort of think of, and in the book I have these eight archetypes of play. So I think the one that people most associate with play is the joyful gesture, right? That’s like the class clown. That’s the one that, you know, making things light, that’s bringing humor.

John Jantsch (05:00.661)

Yeah.

Piera Gelardi (05:22.594)

And that person actually can be so powerful in diffusing tension and helping to relieve stress and helping us to laugh so that we can actually get to a solution faster. But they’re definitely the one that people feel is, I think it’s the most controversial in the workplace. And though they really are powerful and there’s also a lot of research about the power of humor in problem solving, in stress relief.

in relationship building. But there’s so but there’s that’s only one way of being playful, right? That being humorous, being light, there’s, you know, curiosity is a huge element of play. So there’s the curious question that someone that asks a lot of questions that’s intellectually going down these rabbit holes, and they’re really powerful to have in the workplace, because they help you to think differently by introducing, you know, introducing questions and new ways of thinking.

There is the visionary dreamer. That’s the person that is, you know, we might think of them as having their head in the clouds, right? They’re often the negative side as they’re seen as the dreamer, the unrealistic one, but they’re also the one that’s looking beyond what is immediately in front of us. They’re not trying to just replicate the same thing over and over again. They’re really opening up possibility in new ways. So there are lot of different ways to be playful. And so I think

One thing that I’m trying to do is educate people about these different modes of play so that we can understand how to value them and how to bring them into the workplace in different ways.

John Jantsch (06:57.184)

So I imagine a lot of people, one of the use cases a lot of people probably can relate to is the idea of team building. You there’s nothing sort of, you let your guard down, you’re vulnerable, you do something that’s not you necessarily, you don’t think it’s you and team building. But talk to me a little bit about innovation because I’m guessing that that’s a place where this really shines as well because, know, innovation takes meaning.

You can’t fail. can’t make a mistake. And you know, I think that that’s probably inherent in some play, isn’t it?

Piera Gelardi (07:32.172)

Yeah. So I think of it sort of, there’s the pressured way and there’s the playful way. And the pressured way is when we’re trying to control the outcome. We are rigid. We might feel like tight in our body. and that is often like when we’re really zipped up tight in our serious suit and we’re very, very afraid of failure. the playful way is when we have that curiosity to us, when we’re looking at a problem from multiple different angles.

John Jantsch (07:36.746)

Mm-hmm.

Piera Gelardi (08:01.218)

we’re floating unexpected ideas. And it allows us to really find these innovative ways to move forward. And so, yeah, play is the, mean, the most effective brands and companies integrate some sort of play into what they do. The companies that are the most innovative know that that’s how you create experiences that people feel. That’s how you go outside of the cookie cutter idea.

Often when we go in that pressured way, we’re just replicating past, you know, past success or replic or copying other people’s formats. We’re not creating something new. And when you think about a kid, right, like they’re looking at a cardboard box and they’re seeing that it can be a pirate ship. can be, you know, it can be a spaceship. It’s a closet. It’s all these different things. And that’s divergent thinking. And of course that’s, you know, we might not think that’s a very practical example in the workplace, but

If you’re looking at a problem, you want someone that can think about all the different ways you could go about it. And so what play does is it opens up our minds to that divergent thinking. And that’s where the big solutions, the big unlocks come from.

John Jantsch (09:12.118)

So I imagine, I’m just guessing, that you have a series of exercises that you could bring to people and say, OK, for the next 10 minutes, we’re going to do X, Y, and Z. Can you showcase a couple of things that you find to be really effective at getting people to do whatever behavior it is the company’s trying to support?

Piera Gelardi (09:32.662)

Yeah. So a couple of really simple ones, you know, that I, I did a lot at Refinery29 were, one is actually a physical shake break. which, you know, can be controversial in the workplace because people feel really self-conscious and, know, it can be hard to get people to move, but honestly, I found it to be so effective because so often you’re going into a meeting, right? And you’re holding onto whatever frustrating conversation you had, or you’re still thinking about.

you know, how you’re going to deal with the thing on your to-do list. Also, there can be a power dynamic, like often when people were coming into my office, have a meeting with me, you know, I’m the boss, they’re feeling, you know, nervous about like, are they going to say the right thing? And so as the leader, I think it’s really important to be the one that’s making a fool of yourself to a certain extent, you know, doesn’t have to be huge, but you, yeah, you need to be vulnerable. You need to be the one that shows that it’s okay to play.

John Jantsch (10:25.398)

Lead by example.

Piera Gelardi (10:33.541)

because that’s the only way to get people to do it. I would, when people would come into my office, I would say, okay, we’re gonna do a 30 second shake break. I would do this improv exercise called crazy eights where you shake, you count down from eight, like shaking your one arm, the other arm, one arm, one leg, the other leg. And what would happen is, know, it was like I’m…

I’m being silly, so then everyone else is following suit. And at the end, no one’s cool. No one is serious. And we all kind of have let our guard down. It evens the playing field. It opens us up. It allows us to create a certain space where ideas can flow a little bit more easily. I’m also a big fan of just simple curiosity questions. So these can be, you know, these can be.

really silly and just unexpected or they can you know, they can be on topic but introducing questions that force people to You know think in a new way I think is a really simple and sort of low stakes way to bring play in Another one is imagination. So a question I loved to float to my team was what would what would need to be true for this to happen?

Because so often we’re sort of stuck on a problem. We’re stuck on the old ways of doing things. We’re stuck on the obstacles. So sometimes, yeah, why it won’t work. So sometimes asking a question like that, like what would need to be true in order for us to do this is a great way to open up that possibility, that possibility thinking.

John Jantsch (11:58.186)

Yeah, right. Why it won’t work.

John Jantsch (12:17.12)

Talk to me a little bit about Refinery29. I know the book is kind of drawn from some of your experiences there, but talk a little bit about what Refinery29 does.

Piera Gelardi (12:28.194)

Yeah, so Refinery29 is a global media company focused on 360 degrees of a woman’s life. So everything from health and wellness to beauty, fashion. we started as a, we basically essentially started as a blog and we grew into a company that was doing experience, these huge experiential events across the US and internationally doing video film.

John Jantsch (12:39.99)

Mmm.

Piera Gelardi (12:56.942)

all kinds of different media outlets. So yeah, it started, you know, it started, I started it when I was 24 and it was this small niche thing and it grew into a company that had a hundred million dollars in revenue and 500 employees globally.

John Jantsch (13:00.67)

And so.

John Jantsch (13:15.274)

So did some of the work that shows up in the book, did it come from those experiences and from how you kept those playful and energetic?

Piera Gelardi (13:25.612)

Yeah, so the book is full of stories from a lot of different moments in my life. But some of the ones are from my time at Refinery29, the problems that we solved and the innovation that we unlocked through bringing play into the workplace.

John Jantsch (13:44.032)

So I’m sure there’s a fine line. mean, people may listen to this, read the book and go, you’re right, we need to bring more play in. How do you make it part of the culture and not a gimmick? We’ve all seen that. The CEO goes off to a conference and listens to a workshop and the next thing you know, for five minutes we’re doing this now. So how do you bring it in as something?

that has value, that’s not forced, that’s not gimmicky, not performative.

Piera Gelardi (14:14.99)

Yeah, that’s so critical. think so often companies when they want to integrate play, they sort of do that forced fun. The moment that employees feel is forced fun, right? And it’s a one-off thing. In the book, I really talk about how play is something, you we think of play as sort of this time out or this thing that we do as a reward for hard work, but play is the most effective when it is integrated into the day-to-day in small moments. So I think…

One is understanding the different modes of play and starting to understand within your team what the different archetypes of play that people are so that you can really leverage those and you can understand, you know, what is going to light those, light those people up. you know, a curious questor who’s, who’s following those intellectual threads and curiosity is going to be, you know, going to light up from something really different from a mover and shaker that’s more someone who finds

who finds play in their physical body through movement. So there’s very different modes of play. So I think the first thing is understanding within the team, what are the different play strengths that people have? What are the powers of play that you have that you’re working with? The next is to, I do this thing called plork, which is how do we fuse play and work in small moments? So that can be really small. can be, you know,

John Jantsch (15:15.595)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (15:35.722)

Mm.

Piera Gelardi (15:41.55)

introducing a curiosity question at the beginning of a meeting. can be renaming meeting invites with something that’s a little bit more whimsical. So it doesn’t feel like an anxiety attack when you see your calendar. It’s these little moments that you commit to and you brainstorm as a team. So you think about, okay, once you understand these powers of play that the team has, how can you integrate those day to day in small ways?

John Jantsch (15:52.352)

Right.

Thank

Piera Gelardi (16:11.554)

what are those play plus work moments that become part of the culture so that you are really integrating it and finding those moments of connection, creativity, curiosity in the day to day versus just putting a play bandaid on like at that one offset.

John Jantsch (16:29.352)

Right. Yeah. It’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought of people having play personalities, but it sounds like that’s a bit what you’re describing. So we’ve talked mostly about internal team and culture. How could people use this in a marketing sense? So in other words, be more playful in their public, you know, what they’re putting out there to be perceived as, you know, a fun and playful company.

Piera Gelardi (16:34.861)

Yeah.

Piera Gelardi (16:56.002)

Yeah, I think in terms of bringing it into a marketing context, it’s really about how can we do something different? How can we bring an experimental mindset to how we market? I tend to find that when we think of things as an experiment, and again, there’s this neuroscience around this, but when we think of something as an experiment, we open up a lot more possibility and we stop.

John Jantsch (17:09.206)

Mm-hmm.

Piera Gelardi (17:24.13)

having it stops feeling so high stakes that we can’t fail that we can’t try new things. So I think one thing is, you know, thinking about what are the experiments that we want to run here? What’s something that would be interesting to try? You know, can we try it in a can we try it in a small way? And then build off of that. That was something we did a lot of refinery. We were constantly experimenting. So we’d say

You know, for example, we did this huge experiential event called 29 rooms that went to seven cities, hundreds of thousands of people came through. but it started from just one event where we said, you know, we’re noticing this behavior of how people are using Instagram. And so why don’t we do, why don’t we do something in our photo studio at the office where we invite photographers to come in, we give them all kinds of props, access to models and access to clothes and let them, you know,

express their creativity and tag us. And so that was the experiment, was just doing that. So it was a very low stakes, low cost experiment. And we saw this huge Instagram sharing that came from this one office event. And so then we said, okay, do we do that again and make it a little bit bigger? So then we did it in partnership with.

museum in New York, we brought in a fashion brand to provide the looks and we tried it again and we again saw this huge like exponential return from it. And then, you know, then it was like the next piece, okay, like let’s pop up an event. It was a smaller scale event. Again, saw huge success. And so that was when we decided to take the gamble and put on this huge, this huge event where we brought in brands, celebrities, you know, it was like, and that that became something that was

huge, we were hugely known for and that became really copied. was on every, you know, every brand was referencing it and trying to replicate the 29 rooms, you know, effect. So, but it came from that experimental mindset of saying, okay, what if we tried this and what’s the smallest, what’s the smallest way we can try it within our resources to see if this has legs.

John Jantsch (19:18.901)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (19:31.638)

All right, now that you’ve written the book and it’s, upon when people are listening to this, it’s going to be out there for public consumption. Is there anything that you hope, especially adults, relearn about themselves by considering this topic?

Piera Gelardi (19:50.306)

Yeah, I think in adulthood, through the course of having the strict teacher that tells you to sit still, having the boss that shuts down your humorous aside, there’s through feeling the weight of responsibility and thinking that play is antithetical to being the responsible adult. There’s all these moments where we start to shut down our playfulness. And as a result, we lose that curiosity.

we lose that resilience and we lose the flexibility that play brings into our lives. And that makes us lose touch with ourselves really. It makes us like lose touch with our true essence. when we think about our relationships too, right? Like what are the things that you remember the most about your friends, your family? It’s often these inside jokes, these silly moments, these playful pieces.

And so when we start to become that very serious adult, we start to shut down what really makes us authentic, what makes us connect authentically and what makes us come alive. So, you know, in adulthood, starting to reconnect with that playful spirit, you know, even just in small ways, I tell people, go back to the lost and found. Like think about your childhood and what made you lose track of the hours, what completely immersed you.

and see if there’s something in there that you want to re-explore. So, you know, maybe it was dancing when you were a kid and you want to like think about going to a dance class again, or maybe it was beach combing and you were just like, loved looking at, you know, looking for sea glass on the beach. You know, is there, do you want to go for a walk in your neighborhood and see if you can, you know, turn it into a wonder wander and find, you know, these moments of delight. So re-engaging, like starting in small ways, but just.

being open to the fact that playfulness is going to unlock a lot of richness and joy and aliveness in your life. So it’s really worthwhile to pursue it. Play is not the opposite of seriousness. It’s what makes seriousness bearable. It’s what makes you find joy in the day to day and the mundane.

John Jantsch (22:09.178)

Well, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the podcast. Where would you invite people to find out more about your work? Find out where they can pick up a copy of the book.

Piera Gelardi (22:19.522)

Yeah, so they can pick up the book, The Playful Way. It’s at all major booksellers starting April 7th. And you can find me on Instagram and Stub Stack at Pierrealuisa and my website, pieragillardi.com.

John Jantsch (22:33.878)

Awesome. Well, again, Pierre, I appreciate you stopping by and hopefully we’re running into you one of these days out there on the road.

Piera Gelardi (22:38.646)

Yeah, thanks so much. Thanks for playing.

John Jantsch (00:01.582)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and another solo show. I’m just going to ramble at you for a bit. Again, I’d love to hear your feedback. I get feedback from lot of folks that they enjoy these shows where I just kind of share some things that I have in mind. I’m just going to start off with no shocker here. I’m going to talk about strategy.

Talk about strategy before tactics. I’m going to talk about marketing as a system. These are things that if you’ve been listening for, I don’t know, even a couple of weeks, but let alone a couple of years, you have heard me say repeatedly something I’ve written about in pretty much every one of my books. And it’s a challenge or a problem that I haven’t cracked yet. I haven’t gotten the entire world, even the marketing world, to really come fully on board. But I will tell you this.

I’ve worked with hundreds now of business owners and I have seen the impact when they will step back and look at their business from a strategic point of view and certainly their marketing from a strategic point of view and really proceed to develop the tactics that they are going to develop around that strategy first. Nobody’s short on marketing activity. I mean, there’s more to do from a marketing standpoint. There seems to be.

more every day, that we can get into more channels, more platforms, more tactics that we can get into every day. So that’s not really the challenge. The real challenge is that they’re short on the clarity that actually might let them do less. Right. I mean, they’re doing a lot of things. Maybe you’re doing a lot of things that feel like marketing or under the heading of marketing. but those things don’t always connect. so.

My experience is there’s a great deal of inconsistent messaging, shifting priorities, right? It’s like, well, let’s try this this month. Teams, vendors, not allowed, not aligned, I’m sorry. I’ve come into a lot of organizations. have five, six people, there are five, six companies even doing stuff, but they’re not actually even coordinating with each other, which I certainly find rather difficult to imagine. Money gets wasted, time gets wasted. You burn your people out.

John Jantsch (02:20.718)

Let’s face it, the promise of AI is it was supposed to automate all this stuff. And I keep talking to people to say they’re working harder because they’re now trying to figure out all this new stuff. so growth gets really harder to do when we’re really just, it’s like we’re running on the hamster wheel. I’ve said I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses over the years and I have many, many examples of case studies where we have doubled, tripled quad.

quadrupled. We’d work with them for years and we’ve double tripled, quadrupled their business. But it really started with a pretty significant change. We did strategy first. We helped them identify who was an ideal client, who is an ideal client for the business. And maybe more importantly, who’s not. Because most businesses are content to say, hey, I do X service, X product, and anybody who has money is my ideal client. And not only is that

inaccurate, it’s really costing a lot of growth because we are accepting or chasing the wrong clients. We’re not actually being very narrow in our messaging to say, here’s who we can help and here’s the value we deliver to help those folks. So it really creates a lot of lost opportunity, even if you feel like, well, you we got a client out of it. It wasn’t the right client or it was a not a profitable engagement. Certainly that happens all the time.

Probably the biggest thing that I find from no strategy is there’s no real point of differentiation. There’s no message that clearly communicates to somebody. Here’s what we do and we do it better than anyone else. In fact, we’ve got proof that we do that thing better than anyone else that ever thought about. And when you get that, when you clarify that message, says, here’s who we’re for. And your ideal client reads that message and says,

Finally, you’re talking about me, aren’t you? As I said, this is something that we have done for many, many years. It’s not new. I mean, it’s continued to evolve, but it’s continued to be something that we’ve licensed now to well over 400 agencies and consultancies who also get the power of this systemized approach that we’ve been able to create to develop strategy. But today I want to tell you about a new way that we are going to deliver it. And this may have some

John Jantsch (04:40.174)

some appeal. the past, ideally it took 30 to 45 days, quite frankly, to do this because we do a lot of in-depth research. We actually interview your clients as part of it and really then develop the messaging, develop the ICP, develop the customer journey, develop the priorities that are going to be really the next 90 days worth of work to kind of restructure the foundation and really get the business

pointed in the right direction. while businesses that understand the idea of investing in strategy sometimes would grumble about 30 to 45 days, it’s like, why can’t we do it now? But once they were through the process, there’s no question the value that they received and they gush about the value they received. They gush about, it’s not just, I mean, in 30 to 45 days of doing strategy first, all of sudden the phone’s not ringing.

off the hook now with new business, but all of a the team has some clarity. Certainly the founder and the owner has some clarity about, here’s why things haven’t been working. Here’s why we’re spinning our wheels. Here’s how we have to actually get very clear about who we serve and who we don’t serve. that frankly, just having that has a tremendous amount of value.

frankly relieves a ton of stress for the business owner. But what we decided is, or asked ourself or challenged ourselves is, how can we do that faster? How could we actually deliver strategy first in a day? That is something that I’m introducing today. That is something we’re going to lean in very heavily because I believe there are some distinct advantages to actually compressing

that time. have the ability, let’s face it, we have the ability with a lot of the AI tools that we’ve mastered to actually do the research, to actually do the analysis in a way that allows us to do this in a much faster timeframe. But here’s probably the biggest, I think, advantage to doing this. Quite often we would do this over a series of meetings that were required. Two weeks maybe would go between those meetings and quite often

John Jantsch (07:05.646)

It would really just be the founder. But imagine if we could come into your business, especially if you have a team, and we could bring everybody that you thought needed to be in that room, in that room for an entire focused day. Now we will certainly do a lot of work on the front end. We’re not just going to show up and say, tell me about your business. We are going to do a lot of

work on the front end, the research that we can do on your industry and on your specific business and what we see out there that you’ve been doing in marketing already. But then we are going to spend a very focused day with you and your team creating what I would say is as much an experience as it is a strategic.

exercise or strategic engagement. This is not a workshop, this is not consulting. This is actually with your team building the components that we know will really kind of launch your business or launch your marketing in a much more effective way. So as I said, we do tons of prep ahead of time to get the context. And then we need all of your key decision makers or frankly, people that are doing stuff on behalf of your business in the name of marketing.

to be in the room, people that you wanna level up, people that you wanna actually experience as a group, what it’s like or what it means to develop marketing strategy and to have the discussion around that. frankly, it’s going to be as much a learning experience for them as it will be a deliverable for the business itself. So we’re gonna identify where there’s friction, we’re gonna identify

the business objectives that you need to go, we’re going to define that ideal customer and customer journey. We’re going to tighten your positioning. We’re going to actually create and sharpen messaging and really set the priorities for the next quarter or next two quarters as a big part of this. thing, some of the other advantages of have the output in this fashion in one focused day is that yes, you’re going to get a clear strategic foundation. You’re going to actually understand your business

John Jantsch (09:19.384)

probably better than you ever have. You’re going to have a shared language. Some of the tools that we’re going to give you and in part during this are going to be tools that you’ll now be able to continue to work with with your team. And it won’t just be, you went off to another thing and read a book and brought it back to the business. Everybody’s going to be on the same page. And you’re going to have a roadmap, a very practical roadmap in the short term for the next 90 days. And I think that this focus

The lack of delay, the lack of overthinking, mean, getting people aligned, I think it’s going to have tremendous value. Now, this won’t be for everybody. Ideally, is strategy in this fashion actually works better for a business in a one to $25 million range, for example. I mean, you’ve got traction, but you’ve also got growing complexity. And so it’s time to professionalize your marketing in a way.

You know, the ad hoc marketing is just not going to really cut it anymore. Maybe you’ve already started to feel that. And you’ve got teams or people or even outside vendors that really need more alignment instead of more activity necessarily.

If your growth feels messy, the problem may not be effort. Usually isn’t actually effort. In fact, you’re probably working harder than ever. It’s the absence of a shared strategy inside the business. And that’s really what Strategy First was completely designed to solve. And Strategy First today, I believe solves that in a very unique kind of shared experience way. So.

If you want to learn more about this, if this kind of lights you up a little bit, we have a page. You can go read all about the very specifics. It’s just dtm.world slash one day, all one word, one day. DTM is like duct tape marketing. So it’s dtm.world slash one day. Love to come to your business, learn about how we can build this for you and really kind of have your marketing take off, not.

John Jantsch (11:29.986)

just this quarter, but really in a one day experience. So take care. Thanks for tuning in and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:01.582)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and another solo show. I’m just going to ramble at you for a bit. Again, I’d love to hear your feedback. I get feedback from lot of folks that they enjoy these shows where I just kind of share some things that I have in mind. I’m just going to start off with no shocker here. I’m going to talk about strategy.

Talk about strategy before tactics. I’m going to talk about marketing as a system. These are things that if you’ve been listening for, I don’t know, even a couple of weeks, but let alone a couple of years, you have heard me say repeatedly something I’ve written about in pretty much every one of my books. And it’s a challenge or a problem that I haven’t cracked yet. I haven’t gotten the entire world, even the marketing world, to really come fully on board. But I will tell you this.

I’ve worked with hundreds now of business owners and I have seen the impact when they will step back and look at their business from a strategic point of view and certainly their marketing from a strategic point of view and really proceed to develop the tactics that they are going to develop around that strategy first. Nobody’s short on marketing activity. I mean, there’s more to do from a marketing standpoint. There seems to be.

more every day, that we can get into more channels, more platforms, more tactics that we can get into every day. So that’s not really the challenge. The real challenge is that they’re short on the clarity that actually might let them do less. Right. I mean, they’re doing a lot of things. Maybe you’re doing a lot of things that feel like marketing or under the heading of marketing. but those things don’t always connect. so.

My experience is there’s a great deal of inconsistent messaging, shifting priorities, right? It’s like, well, let’s try this this month. Teams, vendors, not allowed, not aligned, I’m sorry. I’ve come into a lot of organizations. have five, six people, there are five, six companies even doing stuff, but they’re not actually even coordinating with each other, which I certainly find rather difficult to imagine. Money gets wasted, time gets wasted. You burn your people out.

John Jantsch (02:20.718)

Let’s face it, the promise of AI is it was supposed to automate all this stuff. And I keep talking to people to say they’re working harder because they’re now trying to figure out all this new stuff. so growth gets really harder to do when we’re really just, it’s like we’re running on the hamster wheel. I’ve said I’ve worked with hundreds of businesses over the years and I have many, many examples of case studies where we have doubled, tripled quad.

quadrupled. We’d work with them for years and we’ve double tripled, quadrupled their business. But it really started with a pretty significant change. We did strategy first. We helped them identify who was an ideal client, who is an ideal client for the business. And maybe more importantly, who’s not. Because most businesses are content to say, hey, I do X service, X product, and anybody who has money is my ideal client. And not only is that

inaccurate, it’s really costing a lot of growth because we are accepting or chasing the wrong clients. We’re not actually being very narrow in our messaging to say, here’s who we can help and here’s the value we deliver to help those folks. So it really creates a lot of lost opportunity, even if you feel like, well, you we got a client out of it. It wasn’t the right client or it was a not a profitable engagement. Certainly that happens all the time.

Probably the biggest thing that I find from no strategy is there’s no real point of differentiation. There’s no message that clearly communicates to somebody. Here’s what we do and we do it better than anyone else. In fact, we’ve got proof that we do that thing better than anyone else that ever thought about. And when you get that, when you clarify that message, says, here’s who we’re for. And your ideal client reads that message and says,

Finally, you’re talking about me, aren’t you? As I said, this is something that we have done for many, many years. It’s not new. I mean, it’s continued to evolve, but it’s continued to be something that we’ve licensed now to well over 400 agencies and consultancies who also get the power of this systemized approach that we’ve been able to create to develop strategy. But today I want to tell you about a new way that we are going to deliver it. And this may have some

John Jantsch (04:40.174)

some appeal. the past, ideally it took 30 to 45 days, quite frankly, to do this because we do a lot of in-depth research. We actually interview your clients as part of it and really then develop the messaging, develop the ICP, develop the customer journey, develop the priorities that are going to be really the next 90 days worth of work to kind of restructure the foundation and really get the business

pointed in the right direction. while businesses that understand the idea of investing in strategy sometimes would grumble about 30 to 45 days, it’s like, why can’t we do it now? But once they were through the process, there’s no question the value that they received and they gush about the value they received. They gush about, it’s not just, I mean, in 30 to 45 days of doing strategy first, all of sudden the phone’s not ringing.

off the hook now with new business, but all of a the team has some clarity. Certainly the founder and the owner has some clarity about, here’s why things haven’t been working. Here’s why we’re spinning our wheels. Here’s how we have to actually get very clear about who we serve and who we don’t serve. that frankly, just having that has a tremendous amount of value.

frankly relieves a ton of stress for the business owner. But what we decided is, or asked ourself or challenged ourselves is, how can we do that faster? How could we actually deliver strategy first in a day? That is something that I’m introducing today. That is something we’re going to lean in very heavily because I believe there are some distinct advantages to actually compressing

that time. have the ability, let’s face it, we have the ability with a lot of the AI tools that we’ve mastered to actually do the research, to actually do the analysis in a way that allows us to do this in a much faster timeframe. But here’s probably the biggest, I think, advantage to doing this. Quite often we would do this over a series of meetings that were required. Two weeks maybe would go between those meetings and quite often

John Jantsch (07:05.646)

It would really just be the founder. But imagine if we could come into your business, especially if you have a team, and we could bring everybody that you thought needed to be in that room, in that room for an entire focused day. Now we will certainly do a lot of work on the front end. We’re not just going to show up and say, tell me about your business. We are going to do a lot of

work on the front end, the research that we can do on your industry and on your specific business and what we see out there that you’ve been doing in marketing already. But then we are going to spend a very focused day with you and your team creating what I would say is as much an experience as it is a strategic.

exercise or strategic engagement. This is not a workshop, this is not consulting. This is actually with your team building the components that we know will really kind of launch your business or launch your marketing in a much more effective way. So as I said, we do tons of prep ahead of time to get the context. And then we need all of your key decision makers or frankly, people that are doing stuff on behalf of your business in the name of marketing.

to be in the room, people that you wanna level up, people that you wanna actually experience as a group, what it’s like or what it means to develop marketing strategy and to have the discussion around that. frankly, it’s going to be as much a learning experience for them as it will be a deliverable for the business itself. So we’re gonna identify where there’s friction, we’re gonna identify

the business objectives that you need to go, we’re going to define that ideal customer and customer journey. We’re going to tighten your positioning. We’re going to actually create and sharpen messaging and really set the priorities for the next quarter or next two quarters as a big part of this. thing, some of the other advantages of have the output in this fashion in one focused day is that yes, you’re going to get a clear strategic foundation. You’re going to actually understand your business

John Jantsch (09:19.384)

probably better than you ever have. You’re going to have a shared language. Some of the tools that we’re going to give you and in part during this are going to be tools that you’ll now be able to continue to work with with your team. And it won’t just be, you went off to another thing and read a book and brought it back to the business. Everybody’s going to be on the same page. And you’re going to have a roadmap, a very practical roadmap in the short term for the next 90 days. And I think that this focus

The lack of delay, the lack of overthinking, mean, getting people aligned, I think it’s going to have tremendous value. Now, this won’t be for everybody. Ideally, is strategy in this fashion actually works better for a business in a one to $25 million range, for example. I mean, you’ve got traction, but you’ve also got growing complexity. And so it’s time to professionalize your marketing in a way.

You know, the ad hoc marketing is just not going to really cut it anymore. Maybe you’ve already started to feel that. And you’ve got teams or people or even outside vendors that really need more alignment instead of more activity necessarily.

If your growth feels messy, the problem may not be effort. Usually isn’t actually effort. In fact, you’re probably working harder than ever. It’s the absence of a shared strategy inside the business. And that’s really what Strategy First was completely designed to solve. And Strategy First today, I believe solves that in a very unique kind of shared experience way. So.

If you want to learn more about this, if this kind of lights you up a little bit, we have a page. You can go read all about the very specifics. It’s just dtm.world slash one day, all one word, one day. DTM is like duct tape marketing. So it’s dtm.world slash one day. Love to come to your business, learn about how we can build this for you and really kind of have your marketing take off, not.

John Jantsch (11:29.986)

just this quarter, but really in a one day experience. So take care. Thanks for tuning in and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

John Jantsch (00:02.075)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Peter Holtz. He’s a former Big Four accountant and multi-company CFO turned founder of Peter Holtz CPA, a fast growing firm recognized on the 2025 Inc and 5,000 at number 3075 and named to…

The top 25 IPA, top 500 with decades of experience in tax accounting and CFO advisory. He helps business owners legally reduce their tax burden through proactive year round planning. So Peter, welcome to the show.

Peter Holtz (00:38.318)

Thank you very much. You got it exactly right.

John Jantsch (00:40.635)

Yeah. So we are recording this. People may be listening to this at other times of the year, but we’re recording this right around the March 15th deadline for a lot of businesses to file taxes. So it kind of leads me to teeing up this question is, what’s the real cost in waiting till now to think about or have this tax conversation?

Peter Holtz (01:05.29)

It could be like tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. if you, you know, the problem is you got to structure yourself and make sure you take, all your write-offs in place before year end, most of the time, right? So that December 31st timeframe is very, very important. And what’s critical about what we do and what business owners should be doing is they should be like planning their taxes year round. They should be having quarterly meetings with their tax preparers, tax advisors, whatever.

and really tax strategists. we recommend is a solid tax strategy to make sure that of where they are, where they’re going, how much money they’re going to make, what they need to set aside, and everything else that they need to.

John Jantsch (01:46.747)

So, particularly folks that they have an accountant or a CPA that really kind of just does their compliance with tax reporting, where do you see companies like that leaking the most money? And I guess the follow-up question is, why isn’t there a CPA telling them?

Peter Holtz (02:05.294)

Well, that’s one of the biggest problems in the industry, right? And there are 1.2 million people in the United States license, prepare taxes with the IRS. And only about 1100 of us are certified tax planners. it’s an additional education you can get if you’re really interested in helping your business clients. It’s not that difficult to do, but it teaches you some of the more…

basic and more advanced tax planning techniques to really reduce taxes. And when you think about it, it’s basically 99.993 % of that 1.2 million are basically compliance guys. They put the numbers in boxes. Sometimes they don’t even think about the numbers they put in the boxes. Like I’ve seen businesses with no assets. Like I’ve seen a gas station tax return filed with no assets. And I’m like, how do you not have any assets?

John Jantsch (03:01.115)

You

Peter Holtz (03:01.58)

Like you take everything out with your hands and pour the gas and the, mean, it’s just impossible. So, and that’s really a shame. think it, I think the industry to a certain extent has been more compliance oriented in terms of putting the numbers in the boxes and do it. That’s it. And they’ve not thought about really what can I do to save the client’s money? And there’s a lot, there’s a lot of stuff that the tax code lets them do in terms of depreciation, bonus depreciation.

John Jantsch (03:03.919)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (03:26.53)

You know, the Augusta rule, paying your kids, how to structure things, should you be a C-Corp, S-Corp, LLC, those are all really important questions.

John Jantsch (03:34.223)

Well, and I want to come back to the, I do want you to address where you commonly see companies leaking, you know, places, but I want to follow up on what you said about the CPAs. Is there also an element of the industry that is sort of risk averse? And even if something’s in the tax code, it might get looked at harder than that. I mean, I’ve heard that from accountants. It’s like, we probably don’t want to do this, even though it’s in the tax code and it’s legal.

It’s going to get your return looked at. mean, is there, is there sort of an overarching attitude that leans towards that?

Peter Holtz (04:09.134)

There is, there’s a lot of real conservatism when it comes to that. you know, I don’t know what to say about it, but it’s wrong. mean, it really, if it’s in, you know, Congress writes the tax code. And last year we had the big, beautiful bill, for example, that allows you, they do it so that people will do certain things so that the economy gets better. You know.

John Jantsch (04:19.375)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (04:36.398)

You know, you think about just think about depreciating, depreciating real estate, the long term real estate appreciates every year at 4%. Right over the long term 4%. But yet we can write it off. We can depreciate it. Right. It is the only appreciating asset we can depreciate. And the reason the government does that is because they want places for people to live because a civilian population that’s living inside is much happier than when it’s living outside and they want people to work.

They grow the economy by offering these tax rules to incentivize investment, and incentivize certain things. Low income housing credits, solar tax credits that we had and a lot of were eliminated. The electric vehicle tax credit that we put in place. All of these things were so important to the changes that the government wants to make in economy in leveraging really the entire economy.

to try to move in the direction that they wanna move. And a lot of it’s built into the tax cut.

John Jantsch (05:37.527)

So the tax code is what? Upward 700, 800 pages? Nine to 10,000. Okay. So how does somebody like you keep up on the fact that it may change, I mean, change dramatically this year?

Peter Holtz (05:41.998)

No, like minor 10,000 pages. Minor 10,000 pages.

Peter Holtz (05:51.221)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what we do is we it’s continuing professional education. We make sure we understand and focus on on on the things we need to focus on for our business owners. We just continue to study, study, study. Right. And I think what’s interesting is I think now we know with AI and so forth, it’s going to allow us to leverage to study even more. Right. And to get into the nitty gritty and really expand our range of services and help people save even more money.

things like, you know, more exotic things like certain types of trust, property trust, revocable trust, irrevocable trust, all those other things, I think are gonna become more and more important as we continue to grow and increase complexity.

John Jantsch (06:35.557)

So, let me loop back to what are maybe less three or four of the most common things that you see all the time. You’ve mentioned assets a couple of times, so depreciation is probably one of them. But what are some of the things that you just see time and time again?

Peter Holtz (06:45.826)

Right. Yeah.

Peter Holtz (06:51.852)

I see people that don’t reimburse themselves for home office. I see people that don’t take the Augusta rule, which is ability to rent out your personal residence 14 days a year to your business and create tax-free income. I see people not paying their kids. I’ve heard other CPAs saying, that’s a red flag. Well, nonsense, OK? The tax law was established that any child above age seven can work in your business. You can pay them a fair amount.

for the work that you’re doing and you’re gonna have to do payroll or create the time records and give them a job to actually do it. But to them, to a child, if you pay them $15,000 a year and they’re monitoring your social media, maybe they’re helping you with whatever, to them it’s at their standard deduction. So it’s essentially tax-free income. yeah, exactly. I see people. Yeah, I see people.

John Jantsch (07:43.919)

Yeah, and you were going to give it to them anyway. Because they needed the money, so they were going to get it one way or another,

Peter Holtz (07:51.694)

I see people spending money on their kids, sports, their music lessons, their schooling, whatever it is. And these people are using after-tax money instead of pre-tax money. The more you can shift from after-tax to pre-tax, the more money you save. And if you use all the rules properly, if you’re a business owner, let’s say you’re making $150,000 a year in a business, which is okay, right? But you’ve worked your business, you’ve made yourself a decent profit.

John Jantsch (07:57.221)

Right.

Peter Holtz (08:20.633)

probably you can turn close to $100,000 of that $150,000 into tax-free money. If you use every, and you properly manage and control your business, you’re gonna have your home office be, I mean, I see, every time I see a contractor, right? You know their primary storage facility for a contractor is a garage.

John Jantsch (08:42.299)

The garage.

Peter Holtz (08:43.183)

Right? Every single contractors garage is full of stuff. And it’s funny when I talk to clients who are contractors and the husband and wife is there, it’s like I always mention that. Oh, was like, oh yeah, for sure. Or I’ll have guys that deliberately, maybe they have a bigger piece of property and build a barn on their backyard in the backyard to store their equipment, their trucks, their extra materials, whatever. And they never write it off because nobody asked. This is really where it gets in my profession. Really, really is a problem.

John Jantsch (08:47.227)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (09:12.705)

is people don’t ask questions. Like every time I start talking to somebody I’m asking, know, what’s your business like? What are you actually doing? How do you do it? Where do you work? Are you working out of your home? You know, are you paying your kids or whatever? How many of this? How many? And it’s like you would be, I literally have people who are still, they have their parents living with them, supporting them, and the parents are helping in the business and they’re giving their parents money and supporting them.

they’re not taking it out, but even though the parents are doing stuff to help them. it is, know, trying to think of everything is about asking. It’s not about the answers, it’s about asking the right question.

John Jantsch (09:53.603)

Right, right, right. So I should hold, I actually have my office in my home. So you just gave me a hint. should hold a retreat once a year for 15 days and lease or rent the home to my business.

Peter Holtz (10:04.099)

Yeah. Yeah.

Peter Holtz (10:12.119)

Absolutely. Well, you know what? Quite honestly, I have I have an attorney in the Northeast that’s a client of mine that does major events and the and like he’s got a very large place, a very large house, and he does major catering events out of his house for clients that are business building. And if he would go to a Hilton or Four Seasons or a large hotel, you know, the Augusta rule still applies. It’s what you

what you would pay for an equivalent space outside. sometimes we’re taking very large, you know, imagine 12 events at $20,000 an event, a tax free income, because it’s like, and a lot of, man, you know, there’s a lot of people that can benefit by that.

John Jantsch (10:52.379)

Sure, Yeah. Yeah.

You

John Jantsch (11:01.563)

So when you first sit down with a business owner, are there some pretty telltale signs that they’ve probably got a tax problem versus a cashflow problem?

Peter Holtz (11:09.805)

Yes, absolutely. Well, what we do is we, when we sit down with the business owner, get your last two years tax returns, business and personal, we study them. We understand exactly what we see on the tax returns. Then we kind of go back and we ask them questions about what we see for the business and everything else like that. And there are some telltale signs. I made that point about the gas station with no assets, right? Or it’s like, hey, you know, you’re, and it’s always the balance sheet that you can really find a lot of mistakes. Like they may, you know,

John Jantsch (11:31.055)

Yeah.

Peter Holtz (11:39.182)

We know they may use this type of business where they may use credit cards, but yet there’s no credit card liability for what they’ve already spent money on. Lots and lots of stuff that we can see in the numbers that just look weird compared to other businesses, other people in the same industry. So those telltale signs are really, all in the numbers. And I’ll have people come to me and start talking to me and say, and I’m like, I got to look at your numbers. And once you start,

John Jantsch (11:56.303)

Mmm.

Peter Holtz (12:08.655)

I mean, I’ve been doing this for near 40 years, right? So once you start looking at a business and you kind of know what to expect in terms of margins and everything else like that, and in terms of bottom line, and when it’s not there, you’re going to figure out why.

John Jantsch (12:23.867)

So you also offer CFO services on a virtual base. Is there a point at which a small business needs that level of thinking, or is it like day one?

Peter Holtz (12:27.011)

Okay.

Peter Holtz (12:38.093)

I mean, to a certain extent, you need some financial acumen, certainly from day one. Certain elements of the tax code from a business owner are really, really tricky. Probably the trickiest one is sales tax, right? And every state has auditors that go out there that try to find additional money. Everybody tries to find additional money for their people. And the sales tax can be really, really tough.

John Jantsch (12:59.547)

shoot every city.

Peter Holtz (13:08.119)

that’s a regular tax start hard enough, but, you know, Yeah, but really as a business gets bigger and really they’re thinking about growing really they’re thinking about, you know, what they’re going to do next. Should I buy this next vehicle? Should I buy my competitor? Should I get a building? Should I do, you know, what’s going to be the long-term impact to me, not only from a tax receptor, but also financial perspective is really, really important.

Can I afford to do this? What does my business look like? How is my marketing paying off for me? You know what I mean? And just all the different questions that you want to ask as a business owner, having another person who knows numbers, right? Because here’s the thing, most business owners understand what they do, right? They know how to fix a car. They know how to pump gas. They know how to do a restaurant. They know how to do catering. They know how to do construction, whatever it is that they know how to do it,

John Jantsch (13:55.407)

Yeah, right.

Peter Holtz (14:05.486)

But when it comes to the numbers and the compliance and the, you know, how are my numbers going to fall in the next couple of years? Studying that is really, really important. Having just another set of eyes to say, hey man, you know what? I think I want to buy my building. And I’m like, okay, well, what’s the, what’s the, what’s, what’s your current rent for your building? Right? Okay. Whatever. was 10, $4,000 a month. If you buy the building, how much is your loan payment going to be?

$3,000. Well, that’s an easy one, right? Because you’re buying a building, you’re getting depreciation, you get the write-offs or whatever. Looking at those breakeven, even understanding breakeven and what you have to do and what your margins are can really, really, I mean, can be night and day for a business owner.

John Jantsch (14:36.392)

Right.

John Jantsch (14:45.189)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:55.973)

Talk to me a little bit about the mindset that you see. know I’ve worked with thousands. I’ve done this 30 years too. I’ve worked with thousands of businesses and profit seems to be a really misunderstood and often maligned word. The relationship that businesses have with profit really seems screwed up. How do you help fix that?

Peter Holtz (15:15.68)

I think you have a very, very good point. And I think it relates to, I think that mindset relates to the fact that when most people get, if they start their own business, most people get started in business and they come with the attitude of, know, I just need to make, I just need to pay my bills. I just need to pay my bills. So they’re kind of going along, working their butts off, trying to get to this level. Then they start paying their bills and they level off, right? Then they don’t say, wait a minute, I should make this building pay for my retirement.

John Jantsch (15:18.491)

Thank you.

Peter Holtz (15:45.585)

I should make this business pay for my retirement, make this business put money away for my healthcare, put money away from the college education. And what I’ll see is that people go along and suddenly they got a kid that’s got to go to college and they need find another 30 grand a year. They step it up. So why not step it up and push it all along the way and factor in your retirement, factor in your medical, factor in your kids’ care.

factor in everything as part of your utilities for your business. And you rarely see people factoring in a savings plan into their business operations. And that is really the-

John Jantsch (16:18.607)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (16:27.387)

Sure. Well, we talked about it before we jumped on recorded here. You know, we’re both fans of Mike McCallowitz’s work, Profit First. And I think as simple as that idea was, it really did, you know, the idea of actually instead of paying all the bills and going, I hope there’s some leftover, it was really more of just what you said. It’s like, no, this is a bill, profit’s a bill. You pay it first.

Peter Holtz (16:34.542)

Yep.

Peter Holtz (16:55.563)

Exactly.

John Jantsch (16:57.392)

There does tend to be a real kind of, we’ll work to the level of what’s left, right?

Peter Holtz (17:04.172)

Exactly. it’s not, there’s nothing bad about that. It’s just people’s understand, you know, they know what they know. You know what I mean? And that’s one of the things I like about Profit First and what Mike has done is that he’s educated people on, got to pay yourself first, man. That’s what you’re in business to do. Right? A lot of people love the freedom and being in their own business. They love not being their own boss. But it can, if they don’t take care of themselves, it can be…

You know, a heavy, heavy load. remember once I met a pool contractor that was in his sixties and he spent his life, good 20, 30 years building pools for rich people in one of the wealthiest communities in the United States. And he ended up broke because he never watched his numbers and he never took care of it. And it was like, it was sad. You know what I mean? I would see pictures of the works of art that he built and, you know, it, I never want to see in my clients go down that

John Jantsch (17:44.539)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:04.709)

So if you were advising people, whether they call you or anybody they’re working with currently, what are a handful of questions that they, regardless of the relationship they have with their tax advisor, they should be saying, hey, wait a minute, ask me about these four things to get better sort of strategic picture rather than just like add up the numbers and fill out the forms.

Peter Holtz (18:29.487)

Yeah, I think you want your tax person or your business advisor or accountant basically to ask you questions like, tell me about your business plan. What do you think you want to do? Are you going to grow? Are you going to stabilize? You’re going to sell? What are you thinking about doing in the next three to five years? I think you want them to ask them about your…

family and your personal life and who you support and everything else like that so they can maximize their your deductions. I think they want to get in they want to get into your business and talk to you a little bit about how they’re planning to grow their business. Okay. And I think they want to you want them to ask you questions about this is an interesting way. What have you paid for outside the business that you may be using in your business?

I will run into plenty of times where it’s like, you know, I bought this pickup truck and I never really put it in the business, even though I use it for the business. It’s finding those misplaced assets. You know what I mean? And it’s really what you want is somebody that’s going to ask a lot of questions. And really get it out of spending not only your business life and your personal life and where you spend your money.

John Jantsch (19:43.067)

All right.

John Jantsch (19:49.861)

So this is a tricky question, the only tricky question I’m gonna ask you. How far do you think people should push it? So there’s some things that’s like, that’s kind of gray or I mean, it’s in the code, but you really would have to document every second you did that or so. I mean, how far do you just kind of say, let’s take advantage of what they’re giving us without killing ourselves?

Peter Holtz (19:53.242)

Okay.

Peter Holtz (20:12.847)

Yeah. You know, I think,

You know, the line is tax law, right? I think you want to go up to that line. Okay. In all cases, right? I’ll give you a good example. have an airline pilot that once wanted to claim to be a real estate professional, yet he was getting a very substantial W-2 from the airline business. Well, upon further research, airline pilots can only fly 20 hours a week. And when this guy was on layover or waiting to fly, he was doing his real estate portfolio.

He had multiple properties. He was managing contractors. He was collecting rents. was doing this. So we got him declared a real estate professional, even though under full-time W-2. And it worked. And now he can take all the depreciation from his real estate against his W-2. And it was pushing the limit because the IRS came back. And they said to us, this guy’s got a six-figure W-2. What are you guys crazy? And it’s like,

John Jantsch (20:46.715)

Yeah.

Peter Holtz (21:13.563)

Federal law says he can only fly 20 hours a week. It’s a part-time job. And we were able to prove that he was working 25 hours a week on his real estate portfolio.

John Jantsch (21:23.109)

Yeah, well, that’s a great one too, because you had the backing of that. You know, it wasn’t him just saying, I only work 20 hours a week. was literally like, I can’t.

Peter Holtz (21:31.396)

Yeah, exactly. you know, the other great news, he was an airline pilot and you know, airline pilots are fastidious about keeping records. So he was very, very, he had all the contemporaneous records that we could possibly need. And the IRS was like, well, we got nothing. Right. So sometimes it’s worth the challenge when you think, and once you, once you get through that challenge in one year, he’s, he’s, he’s been able to do this now for five, six, seven years.

John Jantsch (21:38.491)

Yeah, yeah, yeah,

John Jantsch (21:48.027)

Yeah

Peter Holtz (21:58.694)

which has been amazing. So I think you want to take it to the tax law. I don’t think you want to break the tax law. I think everybody needs to understand where the Internal Revenue Service is right now too. They’re in a mess. It is a, I would say, unqualified disaster, the Internal Revenue Service. Their staff has been cut 25%. They’re on, and these are not my opinions, these are facts.

John Jantsch (22:10.074)

Yeah, yeah.

Peter Holtz (22:26.329)

when they, and you can chat GBT this stuff or whatever from their announcements, when the government is shut down, half their operation is shut down. They’ve actually told people, when you file, you need to have your refund direct deposited, otherwise you’ll wait another six to eight weeks to get a paper check, because they’re not processing paper. And they’re letting their automated systems run, but they’re not processing the paper that would feed into the automated system.

52 % of the letters that are being sent by the IRS are incorrect. It’s probably much higher now because of the current situations. I mean, there’s nothing the people in the IRS can really do about it because we’ve had conversations we’ve never had with the Internal Revenue Service before where it’s like, hey, we need to talk to a revenue officer to help this client take care of a balanced past due and to work out a payment plan. And the IRS will tell us, well, there’s nobody available.

John Jantsch (22:59.803)

You

Peter Holtz (23:23.665)

So it is, that’s one of the things you want to factor in, in terms of what you decide what to do and understanding that the Internal Revenue Service is not the efficient organization. I won’t, I’m not even gonna say it that way. It’s not as good as used to be and it never was the efficient organization. I mean, COVID, during COVID there, so much stuff disappeared. So many things disappeared. Paper that was filed and it was just a nightmare.

John Jantsch (23:40.482)

Right?

John Jantsch (23:54.299)

Hmm.

Peter Holtz (23:54.405)

I mean, millions upon millions of documents at once.

John Jantsch (23:58.533)

Well, I’m fearful we’re going to go down a rabbit hole here that we won’t be able to recover from. So Peter, where would you invite people? I appreciate you stopping by. Where would you invite people to learn more about the work that you do and connect with you?

Peter Holtz (24:03.493)

We definitely could if we want to.

Peter Holtz (24:14.039)

at go.peterholtz.com.

John Jantsch (24:22.765)

Awesome. Backslash Ducktape, because he’s going to have all kinds of freebies for you there if you go there, right?

Peter Holtz (24:27.791)

Yeah, we got some goodies in there. have self-assessment PDF we have in there. We also offer a free tax strategy meeting with our team. And it’s not really anything to do with the IRS, but we can definitely take a look at that tax strategies you currently have in play and look at the last couple of years tax returns and see what we can do to help you out.

John Jantsch (24:46.127)

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

Peter Holtz (24:51.398)

Sounds good. Thanks, John. Great meeting you.

John Jantsch (00:03.266)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rob Levin. He’s a serial entrepreneur and business growth expert with more than 30 years of experience helping small and mid-sized businesses thrive by solving their most persistent talent challenges. He’s the chairman and co-founder of Work Better Now, a company that empowers US-based SMBs to access highly skilled remote professionals, particularly.

from Latin America to overcome hiring bottlenecks and build teams that drive growth and innovation. But today we’re going to focus on his newest book, the new talent playbook, the ultimate guide for building your dream team. So Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Levin (00:46.516)

Thanks, John. Great to see you.

John Jantsch (00:48.632)

So.

You were before we even got started, you were talking about the speed of change and that’s really what’s going to be my first question. I mean, you’ve worked with, I’ve worked with small businesses for decades. in your view, what’s changed the most about hiring in the last, I was going to say five years, but I I could say five months, I guess. And what, what prompted you to write the new talent, playbook?

Rob Levin (01:14.184)

Yeah, and I’m going to if it’s okay, John, I want to go beyond hiring. I just want to talk about talent in general. And a ton has changed. And in fact, what the reason the reason I wrote the book is I still I saw how the talent market changed. And I can talk a little bit about that. But I also saw how business owners were still

John Jantsch (01:18.638)

See you soon.

Rob Levin (01:35.142)

running the same talent playbooks, if you will, as if it was 2016. And a lot really changed in the pandemic. So let’s talk about what’s changed. There’s such a long list. I’ll mention a few things. Number one, younger, let’s put it this way. And now it’s arguable whether this happens every generation or so or not. But younger generations in the workforce, at least I’m hearing this from business owners like myself, Gen Xers.

baby boomers, the younger generations of the workforce work differently than the older ones do. And I think a lot of business owners are having trouble understanding that. The biggest change perhaps out of all of them, and I have so many of them, but the one I think to focus in on is…

It’s and you wouldn’t know this from reading the headlines, but it’s there’s I used to call it a talent crisis. In fact, in the book, I call it a talent crisis. I’m not calling it a talent shift where it’s really hard for small and mid-sized businesses to find the talent that they need. And this cascades to the point where it also means that they may be holding on to employees that are not the right people for them to grow going going forward. And and one way to think about

how people’s mindsets have not yet changed is you and I are old enough to remember when you used to hear bosses say something like, they’re lucky to have a job, right? And there’s still people with a similar type mentality and that has totally changed. A lot of the power, if you will, and I don’t really like to look at it that way, but it’s a way that people understand has shifted the employee side, particularly those top performers that we all want in our business.

John Jantsch (03:07.862)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (03:20.32)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:26.638)

You know, it’s interesting you met at the outset of that. You mentioned the idea that, you know, probably every generation thinks this and I, and I, I suspect there’s some truth to that, but it feels like the gap’s bigger now because it’s, it feels like a bigger shift. Again, I’ve only been through one generation, so to speak. Uh, but it feels like it is, um, you know, talk to me a little bit about the fact that I like, I’m talking to a lot of people, uh, uh, a lot of my peers, a lot of your peers, you know, have kids getting out of college. Um, and.

They’re saying, you know, it’s terrible out there. The job market’s, you know, absolute disaster out there, you know, for people coming out of college. And yet, you you just referenced the idea that the leverage is actually kind of with the job seeker. So how do you kind of balance that?

Rob Levin (04:11.624)

That’s a great, great question. I have two kids in college and I’m worried about their job prospects. I’m actually telling them to start their own businesses. So if you look at the headlines, the headlines are mass layoffs, right? True. The headlines are AI is going to take jobs away, which I believe is true. And it may even start, it may start to be happening right now. That said,

John Jantsch (04:20.7)

I’m

Rob Levin (04:39.634)

You know, in a business, when you’re running your own business, you don’t have an HR department, you don’t have a training department, or most companies don’t have a training department. What are you dealing with? You need people that have experience, that have an owner’s mentality, you need that in a small business, you don’t get that, you know, somebody working in a large business rarely has that, you don’t necessarily need that skill set. In fact, you probably don’t want that skill set in a larger business.

And you need somebody you you meet need somebody with at least some experience Those people are hard to find and the thing also thing to remember is like well, you know, you might say well All of these layoffs are happening So these people are now available the skill sets that you need to thrive in a large business are not necessarily the same skill sets That are needed in a small or mid-sized business and the data backs this up You’re probably familiar with NFIB National Federation and it’s been around forever. They do they do a survey or poll. I think it’s

John Jantsch (05:31.79)

Sure.

Rob Levin (05:36.682)

every month. And you’ll routinely see, I think it’s about a third of small and mid-sized businesses cannot fill roles.

John Jantsch (05:45.198)

Thanks

John Jantsch (05:48.504)

So one of the things you talk a lot about and you mentioned it a couple of times, I wonder if you could kind of lay out this idea of the hidden talent crisis that you’ve really been speaking so much about.

Rob Levin (06:02.418)

Yeah, it’s pretty much what we’re talking about. It’s just really hard to find great talent, at least within the US, and we could talk about.

One of the chapters of book is about, you know, expanding your reach, not only expanding it so that you can hire people remotely throughout the U.S. or maybe throughout North America, but also Latin America, even even Asia. So you have that and a lot of companies also where they’re struggling is the other thing that’s changing beyond talent is everything else in business, right? So technology is driving so much change. A.I. is, of course, a great example. I don’t have to tell you marketing has changed how much in the past five years.

John Jantsch (06:34.638)

Yeah, yeah.

Rob Levin (06:43.408)

compared to the past 20 or 30 years, right? And what does this mean for small and mid-sized businesses? It means that they need new capabilities. And their current employees, if they…

John Jantsch (06:45.102)

Sure. Yep.

Rob Levin (06:54.79)

Hopefully there’s an opportunity to upskill them, which is a big part that I think I dedicate about half of a chapter to upskilling your current employees to bring in those new capabilities in your company. if your people are not upskillable, if you will, then you have a serious problem on your hands, especially if it’s hard to hire the people that have those capabilities that you need to bring into your company.

John Jantsch (07:10.894)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:20.558)

Yeah, so there’s a couple of things to unpack there. I would suggest, you know, a lot of people talking about all these jobs going away. In one hand, they are, but I think what they’re doing is they’re shifting to a new set of, you know, capabilities that somebody needs to have. So yeah, some of the routine stuff that you just needed somebody that, you know, that could put in the hours to do the tasks, those are certainly are going to be things that AI does pretty well. And those jobs are going to go away, but

by the same sense, this idea then of who’s making decisions about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s the right decision, what’s not, what’s on brand, what’s not. I I think those people are going to remain humans, but they might either need to be different humans than you have today, or as you said, upskill. So how do you take somebody that you hired essentially to do tasks, because that’s how you saw the role, who now really needs to do something that

you didn’t hire them for, they may be capable of doing, but you didn’t hire them for that. I mean, how do you make that assessment, but then also how do you make that leap?

Rob Levin (08:27.24)

Yeah, so let’s do this in a general sense and then we can drill down to AI because I think AI is very specific.

situation, although AI probably has a lot to do with the new capabilities that a lot of companies, need. So the first thing to do is identify the new capability you need in your company. So, you know, I’m talking to Mr. Marketing here. So, you know, the marketing capabilities have are, are, changing. And the first thing you have to do is recognize, well, what is it that you need? And then the question is, is, you know, do I have somebody on the marketing team that is up skillable? Do they have the.

Do they have the desire to learn something new? Do they have that ability? Do they have the ability to not only learn it, but then bring that capability internal? And here’s the good news about all of this is that

the training, you if it’s a new capability, you’re have to look external for training, which is totally fine. In fact, companies should get really aggressive about this because there’s so much good training out there. Much of it is low cost, if not free. You know, for example, on the marketing side, HubSpot, all of the major CRM and marketing platforms are all offering training, teaching you exactly what needs to be done. Because a lot of this a lot of the changes in marketing, of course, are technology based. So again, identifying what you know, what is

John Jantsch (09:27.224)

Yes.

Rob Levin (09:46.146)

it that I need and then finding the person in your company, giving them the time to do it, obviously paying for any fees that might be there and having an understanding with that person that look, I’m going to invest in the training for you. This is good for you and your career. I do expect that you bring those capabilities in and then when they do that, be prepared to give them a promotion and the raise that they’re probably looking for. Everybody wins. talking about AI, AI in

particular, my personal opinion on this, having done this myself, is that I think every business owner needs to go through a hands on AI course first, you need to really understand what the capabilities of AI are. Before you can start to look at people on your team. All right, I need you to, you know, pick up this AI capability, let’s say with marketing or with operations or, etc. I think the owner needs to have some level of understanding

And in my opinion is that you need to do some hands-on AI training yourself first. I think everybody needs to do that.

John Jantsch (10:53.646)

Well, I think in a lot of ways, what’s holding some people back is it’s going to require, I think, a total mindset shift. You know, there are definitely people who are looking at AI and just saying, oh, we can do that task that used to be done by this person faster, you know, as opposed to like restructure how they even think about their organization. And so I think, I think in some cases, you know, instead of diving into how does this tool work, it’s more how do I structure my entire organization, you know, for a new reality.

Rob Levin (11:23.698)

Right, and that’s why I think.

that the owners AI training that they should go through has to be hands on because then you’ll actually start to see what the when you actually start to build something with AI, a light bulb will go will probably go off in your head and you’ll see what what what AI is capable of. And then we’re using the term at work better now. We’re using the term AI first. We’re now which which what that means is not to use AI to improve an existing workflow. But let’s have let’s have that workflow totally

John Jantsch (11:29.934)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:36.13)

Right.

John Jantsch (11:47.726)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rob Levin (11:56.304)

redesign where AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And of course, that’s going to come with a lot of retraining of our team to go from doing the work to managing the AI agent or what bot or whatever you want to call it that’s going to be doing the work. you know, there’s another fundamental thing that really should happen.

before all of this. And this is a big part of how the talent game has changed a lot over the past 10 years with an emphasis on the past few. So culture in your group that has always been important, it is by far more important than ever. It is so important today. And why is that? Well, number one, I just give you a few data, not data points, but sound bites for this. Number one, the younger generations, and there are, there’s plenty of good workers

John Jantsch (12:30.051)

Yes.

Rob Levin (12:47.082)

those younger generations. Culture matters a lot to them. Culture, meaning, right? So that alone should wake everybody up and say, hey, this isn’t something maybe I focused on in the past, but I’m gonna start focusing on it now. And I dedicate a whole chapter in the book on it.

But also, not only just having a healthy culture, but let’s have a culture of accepting change and figuring out how to harness change as opposed to, you know, kind of push it off to the side, which a lot of people are still doing.

John Jantsch (13:20.366)

So there’s a couple issues I was going to bring culture up. So perfect segue. There’s a couple of things that I know are dear and dear, dear and dear to you because it really impacts the business work better now structure. So when you mentioned culture, you know, a lot of organizations, small businesses today, you know, this used to just be, you know, a foreign thing, but today have fractional just about everything. They bring in contractors to do certain jobs.

Certainly Work Better Now’s entire business model is placing employees who are remote. So how do you manage culture? It’s obviously one way to do it in an organization where everybody’s there, they’re all in the seats, you have the company lunches. I mean, you do a lot of the things that can build some of that. How do you manage that when you have part-time people, you have remote people, you have…

you folks that are from different cultures, you know, for example, as Work Better Now really supports them. I’m curious if you ever get any pushback from that, you know, that very thing.

Rob Levin (14:23.604)

We used to get a little bit, it’s going away rapidly. So in terms of our experience, but what I will also tell you is that in my opinion, and this has worked for us, it worked better now, in my opinion, the starting point is defining your core values, right? So in other words, your core values are essentially like, what do want our culture to be?

John Jantsch (14:40.334)

All right.

Rob Levin (14:45.364)

So for example, some of ours is we put our talent first, we believe in excellence, and so on and so forth. And we recognize on those, we hire based on them. When we have to fire, we fire based on those. So there’s a little bit of clarity there, starting with those core values. Then the next thing you do in a remote environment, and by the way, it doesn’t matter whether somebody’s in three states over or the next continent over, remote’s remote, is we over-communicate.

We over communicate. we have a weekly staff meeting that we have. We have teams. have updates on teams. We reiterate anything that’s important on email. It’s really, really important to over communicate. Then I’ll also add that KPIs in a remote environment, KPIs are important period, but KPIs for every job and several KPIs when possible for every single role in the company is extremely

important because at least now you have something you can measure people on. And then also, this is one that I only talk a little bit about it in the book, but it’s been coming up in conversations a lot more lately, is something as simple as clarity.

You know, I was talking with a business owner last week. can’t remember what the role was that they were discussing in their company. It was actually in my, in one of my CEO peer groups. And I said, you know, the way you’re talking about this, I don’t think you made it very clear. And this is a very polished business owner. I don’t think you made it very clear what your expectations were. And then I don’t think you had the proper check-ins to make sure that this person was on track. So when people are in the same office.

It’s a little easier, right? There’s the water cooler. You just kind of roll your chair back and say, hey, how are we doing with this project? In a remote environment, you need a little bit more structure. That’s also where the communications come into play.

John Jantsch (16:41.72)

Yeah. You you mentioned that KPIs and I think a lot of people don’t realize that those are a two way street as well. You know, I mean, lot of business owners are like, I’m giving you these so that, you know, I know if you’re on track measuring you, but I’ve talked to a lot of employees. They’re like, thank God you gave me these. I have, so I know what I’m supposed to do here. I know how to win. Because I think a lot of times it’s just like, do the work and you know, hope everybody’s happy. And so I think that,

Rob Levin (17:01.748)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (17:11.22)

we sometimes probably underestimate those KPIs are as much for that employee as they are for us.

Rob Levin (17:17.492)

think they’re actually more for the employee. And if anything, when I see a company that doesn’t have KPIs, more often than not, what has happened is that the employer or the manager, whomever it is who has the responsibility of overseeing somebody, has not really figured it out themselves what’s important in its role. So how can you have clarity?

John Jantsch (17:20.13)

More? agree.

John Jantsch (17:36.812)

Right? Right. Right. Yeah.

Rob Levin (17:41.172)

you know, when you yourself don’t know. And it’s not okay to say, I know it when I see it, because it doesn’t work when you’re on the receiving end.

John Jantsch (17:47.438)

Yeah. You know, and one of the beauties of AI quite frankly is that you can go to a chat GPT or whatever tool, you know, even if it hasn’t been trained that much and you can actually ask it what here’s our goal. You here’s what we’re trying to do. What should we be measuring? I mean, instead of trying to sit around and go, okay, I need to write all these job descriptions and KPIs or whatnot, you know, just, just have a conversation with these tools and, and it, you know, it,

may not be tuned 100 % to you because it’s kind of doing the average of what the world does out there, but it may be a great way to start rather than you just saying, don’t know where to start.

Rob Levin (18:26.514)

Yeah. You know, I, what, what, one of the things that frustrates me even pre AI, but certainly now in this AI world is when somebody’s like, well, I’m going to do it this way, as opposed to actually trying to research the best practice, which pre AI you can do based on an internet search now with AI, right. it’s, it’s inexcusable to not have tapped into this wealth of knowledge, right.

John Jantsch (18:42.914)

Sure.

John Jantsch (18:51.554)

Benchmark your industry no matter what the size your business is, right? Yeah, exactly.

Rob Levin (18:54.098)

Yeah. And by the way, you know, yes, absolutely, you should be doing this and for every role and that’ll help you come up with the KPIs and projects and even qualitative ways to assess people and communicate what the role is all about. But let’s also be clear, John, and you and I know this and I hope everybody’s understanding this. You’re only scratching the surface about what with what AI can do for your company by using it as a thought partner, which is what we’re talking about.

John Jantsch (19:21.966)

Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, what have you learned since you wrote the book and since you’ve been out there talking to people about the book? I asked that question specifically or maybe because I’ve written books and I just always know that like I’ll have conversations or I’ll go on speaking and somebody will say something to me. I’ll go, dang, I wish I would have put that in the book. That’s great. I’m curious if you had any of those a-ha’s.

Rob Levin (19:45.78)

Well, it’s slightly different. The biggest aha I have is what we were just talking about. the AI chapter of my book was written a little over a year ago. you know, now what’s in there still applies, which what I said a little over a year ago was experiment and encourage everybody to experiment. By now, yeah, you have to do that, by the way, you should do that. Now it’s take a course and figure out.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have in your business and how can AI help you with those challenges, not only as a thought partner, but actually in doing the work? then you have to start to think about…

And if I was writing the book today, this is what would be in it regarding AI is how do you get your team to go from doing the work to managing the AI, refining it, checking the results? Because AI is not going to get it perfect all the time, but it’s going to do a great job in a lot less time. And again, we’re only scratching the surface on what the capabilities are.

John Jantsch (20:52.152)

Well, it’s interesting. mean, you could, you could really point to that as maybe the major mind shift that the companies need to have is to start encouraging employees to, to do just what you said. How can you get AI to do this work? Especially a lot of the routine kind of stuff. But I’m sure you’re hearing from people that are, you know, the employee is like, yeah, work myself out of a job. Great. So I do see that fear, you know, is that a lot of companies are just going into people and saying,

figure out how to use AI to do your job. And I think the implied issue with that is like, then I won’t have a job.

Rob Levin (21:28.884)

Right. Which, which, you know, I guess it’s on us employers to, to manage that. And I can tell you what we’re doing at Work Better Now, which is we’re telling everybody, look, this is the direction we’re going in. We’re going to provide the training and then it’s on the employee really to pick up the ball and to do it. And we told everybody we are not, we have no plans on any layoffs. We are expanding, we’re growing. And with AI, we just hopefully are not going to have to add.

John Jantsch (21:35.939)

Yeah.

Rob Levin (21:58.46)

a lot of headcount, right? And yet, you know, we’ll we should see improved outcomes. And I think this is an opportunity for all of our employees, because we are going to work, I guess you can say kind of like pioneering, you know, company or space in our size. And, you know, we we’re making it very clear, like, look, as long as you figure this out, again, we’re providing the training, you know, your your job is safe. In fact, your job is going to be more important

John Jantsch (22:12.812)

Yes.

Rob Levin (22:28.374)

than ever.

John Jantsch (22:29.944)

Yes, be more productive. Well, Robert, I appreciate you taking the moment to stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast, anywhere you want to invite people to find out more, to connect with you, of course, but then also find out more about your work and find out more about your writing.

Rob Levin (22:42.472)

Yeah, you can just search for New Talent Playbook if you want to pick up a copy of the book or New Talent Playbook Substack or podcast. Just Google that in and it’ll pop right up. And of course, if you are looking for offshore talent, near shore talent in our case, that’s WorkBetterNow.com.

John Jantsch (22:59.286)

Well again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully you’ve dug out of that snowstorm in New York.

Rob Levin (23:04.936)

Yeah, thanks, John, and great to see you. Thanks for having me on show.

John Jantsch (00:03.266)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Rob Levin. He’s a serial entrepreneur and business growth expert with more than 30 years of experience helping small and mid-sized businesses thrive by solving their most persistent talent challenges. He’s the chairman and co-founder of Work Better Now, a company that empowers US-based SMBs to access highly skilled remote professionals, particularly.

from Latin America to overcome hiring bottlenecks and build teams that drive growth and innovation. But today we’re going to focus on his newest book, the new talent playbook, the ultimate guide for building your dream team. So Rob, welcome to the show.

Rob Levin (00:46.516)

Thanks, John. Great to see you.

John Jantsch (00:48.632)

So.

You were before we even got started, you were talking about the speed of change and that’s really what’s going to be my first question. I mean, you’ve worked with, I’ve worked with small businesses for decades. in your view, what’s changed the most about hiring in the last, I was going to say five years, but I I could say five months, I guess. And what, what prompted you to write the new talent, playbook?

Rob Levin (01:14.184)

Yeah, and I’m going to if it’s okay, John, I want to go beyond hiring. I just want to talk about talent in general. And a ton has changed. And in fact, what the reason the reason I wrote the book is I still I saw how the talent market changed. And I can talk a little bit about that. But I also saw how business owners were still

John Jantsch (01:18.638)

See you soon.

Rob Levin (01:35.142)

running the same talent playbooks, if you will, as if it was 2016. And a lot really changed in the pandemic. So let’s talk about what’s changed. There’s such a long list. I’ll mention a few things. Number one, younger, let’s put it this way. And now it’s arguable whether this happens every generation or so or not. But younger generations in the workforce, at least I’m hearing this from business owners like myself, Gen Xers.

baby boomers, the younger generations of the workforce work differently than the older ones do. And I think a lot of business owners are having trouble understanding that. The biggest change perhaps out of all of them, and I have so many of them, but the one I think to focus in on is…

It’s and you wouldn’t know this from reading the headlines, but it’s there’s I used to call it a talent crisis. In fact, in the book, I call it a talent crisis. I’m not calling it a talent shift where it’s really hard for small and mid-sized businesses to find the talent that they need. And this cascades to the point where it also means that they may be holding on to employees that are not the right people for them to grow going going forward. And and one way to think about

how people’s mindsets have not yet changed is you and I are old enough to remember when you used to hear bosses say something like, they’re lucky to have a job, right? And there’s still people with a similar type mentality and that has totally changed. A lot of the power, if you will, and I don’t really like to look at it that way, but it’s a way that people understand has shifted the employee side, particularly those top performers that we all want in our business.

John Jantsch (03:07.862)

Right, right.

John Jantsch (03:20.32)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:26.638)

You know, it’s interesting you met at the outset of that. You mentioned the idea that, you know, probably every generation thinks this and I, and I, I suspect there’s some truth to that, but it feels like the gap’s bigger now because it’s, it feels like a bigger shift. Again, I’ve only been through one generation, so to speak. Uh, but it feels like it is, um, you know, talk to me a little bit about the fact that I like, I’m talking to a lot of people, uh, uh, a lot of my peers, a lot of your peers, you know, have kids getting out of college. Um, and.

They’re saying, you know, it’s terrible out there. The job market’s, you know, absolute disaster out there, you know, for people coming out of college. And yet, you you just referenced the idea that the leverage is actually kind of with the job seeker. So how do you kind of balance that?

Rob Levin (04:11.624)

That’s a great, great question. I have two kids in college and I’m worried about their job prospects. I’m actually telling them to start their own businesses. So if you look at the headlines, the headlines are mass layoffs, right? True. The headlines are AI is going to take jobs away, which I believe is true. And it may even start, it may start to be happening right now. That said,

John Jantsch (04:20.7)

I’m

Rob Levin (04:39.634)

You know, in a business, when you’re running your own business, you don’t have an HR department, you don’t have a training department, or most companies don’t have a training department. What are you dealing with? You need people that have experience, that have an owner’s mentality, you need that in a small business, you don’t get that, you know, somebody working in a large business rarely has that, you don’t necessarily need that skill set. In fact, you probably don’t want that skill set in a larger business.

And you need somebody you you meet need somebody with at least some experience Those people are hard to find and the thing also thing to remember is like well, you know, you might say well All of these layoffs are happening So these people are now available the skill sets that you need to thrive in a large business are not necessarily the same skill sets That are needed in a small or mid-sized business and the data backs this up You’re probably familiar with NFIB National Federation and it’s been around forever. They do they do a survey or poll. I think it’s

John Jantsch (05:31.79)

Sure.

Rob Levin (05:36.682)

every month. And you’ll routinely see, I think it’s about a third of small and mid-sized businesses cannot fill roles.

John Jantsch (05:45.198)

Thanks

John Jantsch (05:48.504)

So one of the things you talk a lot about and you mentioned it a couple of times, I wonder if you could kind of lay out this idea of the hidden talent crisis that you’ve really been speaking so much about.

Rob Levin (06:02.418)

Yeah, it’s pretty much what we’re talking about. It’s just really hard to find great talent, at least within the US, and we could talk about.

One of the chapters of book is about, you know, expanding your reach, not only expanding it so that you can hire people remotely throughout the U.S. or maybe throughout North America, but also Latin America, even even Asia. So you have that and a lot of companies also where they’re struggling is the other thing that’s changing beyond talent is everything else in business, right? So technology is driving so much change. A.I. is, of course, a great example. I don’t have to tell you marketing has changed how much in the past five years.

John Jantsch (06:34.638)

Yeah, yeah.

Rob Levin (06:43.408)

compared to the past 20 or 30 years, right? And what does this mean for small and mid-sized businesses? It means that they need new capabilities. And their current employees, if they…

John Jantsch (06:45.102)

Sure. Yep.

Rob Levin (06:54.79)

Hopefully there’s an opportunity to upskill them, which is a big part that I think I dedicate about half of a chapter to upskilling your current employees to bring in those new capabilities in your company. if your people are not upskillable, if you will, then you have a serious problem on your hands, especially if it’s hard to hire the people that have those capabilities that you need to bring into your company.

John Jantsch (07:10.894)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (07:20.558)

Yeah, so there’s a couple of things to unpack there. I would suggest, you know, a lot of people talking about all these jobs going away. In one hand, they are, but I think what they’re doing is they’re shifting to a new set of, you know, capabilities that somebody needs to have. So yeah, some of the routine stuff that you just needed somebody that, you know, that could put in the hours to do the tasks, those are certainly are going to be things that AI does pretty well. And those jobs are going to go away, but

by the same sense, this idea then of who’s making decisions about what’s good and what’s bad, what’s the right decision, what’s not, what’s on brand, what’s not. I I think those people are going to remain humans, but they might either need to be different humans than you have today, or as you said, upskill. So how do you take somebody that you hired essentially to do tasks, because that’s how you saw the role, who now really needs to do something that

you didn’t hire them for, they may be capable of doing, but you didn’t hire them for that. I mean, how do you make that assessment, but then also how do you make that leap?

Rob Levin (08:27.24)

Yeah, so let’s do this in a general sense and then we can drill down to AI because I think AI is very specific.

situation, although AI probably has a lot to do with the new capabilities that a lot of companies, need. So the first thing to do is identify the new capability you need in your company. So, you know, I’m talking to Mr. Marketing here. So, you know, the marketing capabilities have are, are, changing. And the first thing you have to do is recognize, well, what is it that you need? And then the question is, is, you know, do I have somebody on the marketing team that is up skillable? Do they have the.

Do they have the desire to learn something new? Do they have that ability? Do they have the ability to not only learn it, but then bring that capability internal? And here’s the good news about all of this is that

the training, you if it’s a new capability, you’re have to look external for training, which is totally fine. In fact, companies should get really aggressive about this because there’s so much good training out there. Much of it is low cost, if not free. You know, for example, on the marketing side, HubSpot, all of the major CRM and marketing platforms are all offering training, teaching you exactly what needs to be done. Because a lot of this a lot of the changes in marketing, of course, are technology based. So again, identifying what you know, what is

John Jantsch (09:27.224)

Yes.

Rob Levin (09:46.146)

it that I need and then finding the person in your company, giving them the time to do it, obviously paying for any fees that might be there and having an understanding with that person that look, I’m going to invest in the training for you. This is good for you and your career. I do expect that you bring those capabilities in and then when they do that, be prepared to give them a promotion and the raise that they’re probably looking for. Everybody wins. talking about AI, AI in

particular, my personal opinion on this, having done this myself, is that I think every business owner needs to go through a hands on AI course first, you need to really understand what the capabilities of AI are. Before you can start to look at people on your team. All right, I need you to, you know, pick up this AI capability, let’s say with marketing or with operations or, etc. I think the owner needs to have some level of understanding

And in my opinion is that you need to do some hands-on AI training yourself first. I think everybody needs to do that.

John Jantsch (10:53.646)

Well, I think in a lot of ways, what’s holding some people back is it’s going to require, I think, a total mindset shift. You know, there are definitely people who are looking at AI and just saying, oh, we can do that task that used to be done by this person faster, you know, as opposed to like restructure how they even think about their organization. And so I think, I think in some cases, you know, instead of diving into how does this tool work, it’s more how do I structure my entire organization, you know, for a new reality.

Rob Levin (11:23.698)

Right, and that’s why I think.

that the owners AI training that they should go through has to be hands on because then you’ll actually start to see what the when you actually start to build something with AI, a light bulb will go will probably go off in your head and you’ll see what what what AI is capable of. And then we’re using the term at work better now. We’re using the term AI first. We’re now which which what that means is not to use AI to improve an existing workflow. But let’s have let’s have that workflow totally

John Jantsch (11:29.934)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:36.13)

Right.

John Jantsch (11:47.726)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rob Levin (11:56.304)

redesign where AI is doing a lot of the heavy lifting. And of course, that’s going to come with a lot of retraining of our team to go from doing the work to managing the AI agent or what bot or whatever you want to call it that’s going to be doing the work. you know, there’s another fundamental thing that really should happen.

before all of this. And this is a big part of how the talent game has changed a lot over the past 10 years with an emphasis on the past few. So culture in your group that has always been important, it is by far more important than ever. It is so important today. And why is that? Well, number one, I just give you a few data, not data points, but sound bites for this. Number one, the younger generations, and there are, there’s plenty of good workers

John Jantsch (12:30.051)

Yes.

Rob Levin (12:47.082)

those younger generations. Culture matters a lot to them. Culture, meaning, right? So that alone should wake everybody up and say, hey, this isn’t something maybe I focused on in the past, but I’m gonna start focusing on it now. And I dedicate a whole chapter in the book on it.

But also, not only just having a healthy culture, but let’s have a culture of accepting change and figuring out how to harness change as opposed to, you know, kind of push it off to the side, which a lot of people are still doing.

John Jantsch (13:20.366)

So there’s a couple issues I was going to bring culture up. So perfect segue. There’s a couple of things that I know are dear and dear, dear and dear to you because it really impacts the business work better now structure. So when you mentioned culture, you know, a lot of organizations, small businesses today, you know, this used to just be, you know, a foreign thing, but today have fractional just about everything. They bring in contractors to do certain jobs.

Certainly Work Better Now’s entire business model is placing employees who are remote. So how do you manage culture? It’s obviously one way to do it in an organization where everybody’s there, they’re all in the seats, you have the company lunches. I mean, you do a lot of the things that can build some of that. How do you manage that when you have part-time people, you have remote people, you have…

you folks that are from different cultures, you know, for example, as Work Better Now really supports them. I’m curious if you ever get any pushback from that, you know, that very thing.

Rob Levin (14:23.604)

We used to get a little bit, it’s going away rapidly. So in terms of our experience, but what I will also tell you is that in my opinion, and this has worked for us, it worked better now, in my opinion, the starting point is defining your core values, right? So in other words, your core values are essentially like, what do want our culture to be?

John Jantsch (14:40.334)

All right.

Rob Levin (14:45.364)

So for example, some of ours is we put our talent first, we believe in excellence, and so on and so forth. And we recognize on those, we hire based on them. When we have to fire, we fire based on those. So there’s a little bit of clarity there, starting with those core values. Then the next thing you do in a remote environment, and by the way, it doesn’t matter whether somebody’s in three states over or the next continent over, remote’s remote, is we over-communicate.

We over communicate. we have a weekly staff meeting that we have. We have teams. have updates on teams. We reiterate anything that’s important on email. It’s really, really important to over communicate. Then I’ll also add that KPIs in a remote environment, KPIs are important period, but KPIs for every job and several KPIs when possible for every single role in the company is extremely

important because at least now you have something you can measure people on. And then also, this is one that I only talk a little bit about it in the book, but it’s been coming up in conversations a lot more lately, is something as simple as clarity.

You know, I was talking with a business owner last week. can’t remember what the role was that they were discussing in their company. It was actually in my, in one of my CEO peer groups. And I said, you know, the way you’re talking about this, I don’t think you made it very clear. And this is a very polished business owner. I don’t think you made it very clear what your expectations were. And then I don’t think you had the proper check-ins to make sure that this person was on track. So when people are in the same office.

It’s a little easier, right? There’s the water cooler. You just kind of roll your chair back and say, hey, how are we doing with this project? In a remote environment, you need a little bit more structure. That’s also where the communications come into play.

John Jantsch (16:41.72)

Yeah. You you mentioned that KPIs and I think a lot of people don’t realize that those are a two way street as well. You know, I mean, lot of business owners are like, I’m giving you these so that, you know, I know if you’re on track measuring you, but I’ve talked to a lot of employees. They’re like, thank God you gave me these. I have, so I know what I’m supposed to do here. I know how to win. Because I think a lot of times it’s just like, do the work and you know, hope everybody’s happy. And so I think that,

Rob Levin (17:01.748)

That’s right.

John Jantsch (17:11.22)

we sometimes probably underestimate those KPIs are as much for that employee as they are for us.

Rob Levin (17:17.492)

think they’re actually more for the employee. And if anything, when I see a company that doesn’t have KPIs, more often than not, what has happened is that the employer or the manager, whomever it is who has the responsibility of overseeing somebody, has not really figured it out themselves what’s important in its role. So how can you have clarity?

John Jantsch (17:20.13)

More? agree.

John Jantsch (17:36.812)

Right? Right. Right. Yeah.

Rob Levin (17:41.172)

you know, when you yourself don’t know. And it’s not okay to say, I know it when I see it, because it doesn’t work when you’re on the receiving end.

John Jantsch (17:47.438)

Yeah. You know, and one of the beauties of AI quite frankly is that you can go to a chat GPT or whatever tool, you know, even if it hasn’t been trained that much and you can actually ask it what here’s our goal. You here’s what we’re trying to do. What should we be measuring? I mean, instead of trying to sit around and go, okay, I need to write all these job descriptions and KPIs or whatnot, you know, just, just have a conversation with these tools and, and it, you know, it,

may not be tuned 100 % to you because it’s kind of doing the average of what the world does out there, but it may be a great way to start rather than you just saying, don’t know where to start.

Rob Levin (18:26.514)

Yeah. You know, I, what, what, one of the things that frustrates me even pre AI, but certainly now in this AI world is when somebody’s like, well, I’m going to do it this way, as opposed to actually trying to research the best practice, which pre AI you can do based on an internet search now with AI, right. it’s, it’s inexcusable to not have tapped into this wealth of knowledge, right.

John Jantsch (18:42.914)

Sure.

John Jantsch (18:51.554)

Benchmark your industry no matter what the size your business is, right? Yeah, exactly.

Rob Levin (18:54.098)

Yeah. And by the way, you know, yes, absolutely, you should be doing this and for every role and that’ll help you come up with the KPIs and projects and even qualitative ways to assess people and communicate what the role is all about. But let’s also be clear, John, and you and I know this and I hope everybody’s understanding this. You’re only scratching the surface about what with what AI can do for your company by using it as a thought partner, which is what we’re talking about.

John Jantsch (19:21.966)

Yeah, yeah. I’m curious, what have you learned since you wrote the book and since you’ve been out there talking to people about the book? I asked that question specifically or maybe because I’ve written books and I just always know that like I’ll have conversations or I’ll go on speaking and somebody will say something to me. I’ll go, dang, I wish I would have put that in the book. That’s great. I’m curious if you had any of those a-ha’s.

Rob Levin (19:45.78)

Well, it’s slightly different. The biggest aha I have is what we were just talking about. the AI chapter of my book was written a little over a year ago. you know, now what’s in there still applies, which what I said a little over a year ago was experiment and encourage everybody to experiment. By now, yeah, you have to do that, by the way, you should do that. Now it’s take a course and figure out.

What are some of the biggest challenges you have in your business and how can AI help you with those challenges, not only as a thought partner, but actually in doing the work? then you have to start to think about…

And if I was writing the book today, this is what would be in it regarding AI is how do you get your team to go from doing the work to managing the AI, refining it, checking the results? Because AI is not going to get it perfect all the time, but it’s going to do a great job in a lot less time. And again, we’re only scratching the surface on what the capabilities are.

John Jantsch (20:52.152)

Well, it’s interesting. mean, you could, you could really point to that as maybe the major mind shift that the companies need to have is to start encouraging employees to, to do just what you said. How can you get AI to do this work? Especially a lot of the routine kind of stuff. But I’m sure you’re hearing from people that are, you know, the employee is like, yeah, work myself out of a job. Great. So I do see that fear, you know, is that a lot of companies are just going into people and saying,

figure out how to use AI to do your job. And I think the implied issue with that is like, then I won’t have a job.

Rob Levin (21:28.884)

Right. Which, which, you know, I guess it’s on us employers to, to manage that. And I can tell you what we’re doing at Work Better Now, which is we’re telling everybody, look, this is the direction we’re going in. We’re going to provide the training and then it’s on the employee really to pick up the ball and to do it. And we told everybody we are not, we have no plans on any layoffs. We are expanding, we’re growing. And with AI, we just hopefully are not going to have to add.

John Jantsch (21:35.939)

Yeah.

Rob Levin (21:58.46)

a lot of headcount, right? And yet, you know, we’ll we should see improved outcomes. And I think this is an opportunity for all of our employees, because we are going to work, I guess you can say kind of like pioneering, you know, company or space in our size. And, you know, we we’re making it very clear, like, look, as long as you figure this out, again, we’re providing the training, you know, your your job is safe. In fact, your job is going to be more important

John Jantsch (22:12.812)

Yes.

Rob Levin (22:28.374)

than ever.

John Jantsch (22:29.944)

Yes, be more productive. Well, Robert, I appreciate you taking the moment to stop by the Ductate Marketing Podcast, anywhere you want to invite people to find out more, to connect with you, of course, but then also find out more about your work and find out more about your writing.

Rob Levin (22:42.472)

Yeah, you can just search for New Talent Playbook if you want to pick up a copy of the book or New Talent Playbook Substack or podcast. Just Google that in and it’ll pop right up. And of course, if you are looking for offshore talent, near shore talent in our case, that’s WorkBetterNow.com.

John Jantsch (22:59.286)

Well again, appreciate you stopping by and hopefully you’ve dug out of that snowstorm in New York.

Rob Levin (23:04.936)

Yeah, thanks, John, and great to see you. Thanks for having me on show.

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.