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John Jantsch (00:00.773)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jim Murphy. He’s a high performance coach, author, speaker, and the creator of the Inner Excellence Methodology. He’s coached world-class athletes, Olympians, and business leaders, helping them achieve breakthrough results by mastering their inner game. His own journey from minor league baseball player to elite coach led him to develop a practical spiritual approach to peak performance.

that goes beyond tactics and into mindset, heart, and presence. We’re going to talk about his book, Interpresence, or I’m sorry, Interexcellence, Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life. So Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim (00:44.194)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:45.851)

Few years ago, I had Captain Sullivan on the show. You may recall he is the airline pilot that landed his airplane after taking off in New York City in the Hudson River. Do you remember that a few? Sully, right. And then I turned it into a movie. Of course he had a book. So I had to start that show, you know, as he said, well, I have, you know, I have to tell that story, you know, every time I now am asked to talk about, you know, how that went. So he certainly had the story down. Not nearly as dramatic, but.

Jim (00:57.336)

So weak.

John Jantsch (01:15.451)

You have a bit of an AJ Brown story. want to, I’m sure people are asking you and I’m sure you love telling it. You’re probably getting tired of telling it, but you want to tell us kind of your kind of moment happened. Gosh, what was that now? Eight, nine months ago.

Jim (01:30.254)

Yeah, John, I’m very grateful to tell it. So on January 12th, uh, AJ Brown was a, he’s a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s a wild card game Packers versus the Eagles. Um, Sunday night football, the only NFL game on and, um, in middle of the game, he’s reading the football reading, reading inter excellence on the sidelines during the football game. And so the TV station zooms in on it’s like, what is AJ Brown doing? And then, oh my gosh, he was reading a book and Kevin Brown and

John Jantsch (01:37.051)

me.

John Jantsch (01:57.435)

you

Jim (01:59.81)

Tom Burkhart made a big deal about it afterwards. They asked him, what were you doing? Were you bored? Were you? He said, no, it’s a book that I read before I bring to every game. Read it before the game to get centered and read it after every drive to get re centered. My teammates call it the recipe. And so that was the first time I actually heard about him doing this. I saw a picture of him on social media of like a month earlier, but I had no context. didn’t know anything about it. And so I found out what the rest of the world.

that he was doing this at that time. And just an amazing thing for him to do to be true to himself, that find something that helps him be better at what he does and to be more fearless and show all of us that we all have time to read.

John Jantsch (02:40.687)

Well, and then of course the punchline, I suppose, what happened to you next?

Jim (02:48.424)

a few things, john, a few things. Yeah, my world changed a lot. The you know, the message that selfless is fearless, as you know, spread around the world now, love, wisdom and courage. And so the book had sold maybe seven or eight or 9000 copies in nine years. mean, sorry, 16 years, initially was was published in 2009 by McGraw Hill. And then I

John Jantsch (02:49.563)

Hehehehehe

Jim (03:18.329)

put out a revised edition self-published in 2018 or 2020. And then so that’s the book AJ Brown has been reading. And since then, it’s sold, I don’t know, close to half a million copies, I would say.

John Jantsch (03:32.123)

So, I’m curious, how did you print the books without that sort of immediate demand?

Jim (03:42.21)

Yeah, so it’s amazing how the world is now with Amazon and they print on demand. so if

John Jantsch (03:44.645)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:48.527)

Yeah, but they were able to print on that kind of demand. Yeah, yeah.

Jim (03:52.27)

Well, apparently they did run out at some point. So they’ve got print centers all over the world. And so there was a time when the demand was so high, it’s sold tens of thousands of copies every day for the first few weeks that they did run out at one point.

John Jantsch (04:09.435)

Yeah, that’s a crazy story. Well, good for you. know, frankly, I love to hear stories like that. Persons out there doing their work and you know, as a magical moment happened, I think we all deserve it. You start the book talking about your own struggles as a minor league player, the mindset, you know, performance anxiety, self doubt. Would you say that that was instrumental to you developing kind of your own framework?

Jim (04:37.78)

yeah, yeah, absolutely. My whole life since I was a little kid, I obsessed about being a superstar. I was going to play in the NFL like A.J. Brown or I was going to be in the NBA or Major League Baseball. And so when I got drafted by the Cubs, it was a dream come true. But I had a vision problem that was with me for my entire professional career. I played five years in the minors and then eventually had to retire because of it. And my identity was completely wrapped up in my role as a pro athlete. And when I lost it, I felt like I lost everything. And so

I got a job with him. asked got out asked to coach a high school baseball team in inner city Seattle and I had no interest in coaching but I took the job was driving a truck for FedEx and we went undefeated and I realized wow I love coaching. Who knew? And then so I went on this journey to become a pro baseball coach. I got went to grad school got a job with the Texas Rangers two weeks after graduation. So now I felt like I was somebody again and then I quit six months into the first season and so.

devastated again my identity, you know, I was somebody and I lost it and then somebody again I lost it and so I kind of got tired of this merry-go-round of feeling like I was someone and no one and end up leaving for the desert to go live a life of solitude to figure out what to do with my life and that’s where Interactionless was born. I spent five years full-time writing and researching how to have peace and confidence under the most pressure and what I found John was that that The path to having the most peace and confidence under the most pressure is the same path of building an extraordinary life

when filled with deep contentment, joy and confidence, independent of circumstance. It’s a wholehearted path where you understand what the human heart deeply needs and wants and how to get it.

John Jantsch (06:15.611)

So you started touching on this idea of your identity and you spend a lot of time or one of the core principles really is kind of this idea of letting go of the need to control the outcome, which is, you know, being very attached to the outcome. Can you, do you have a client story, executive athlete, I suppose you don’t want to name names, but where, you you help somebody kind of overcome that control of the outcome.

Jim (06:41.582)

Yeah, I’ll tell you. When I was at the Ryder Cup years ago, it’s one of the biggest events in golf pro golf. You have the team USA versus Team Europe. And one of the players top 10 in the world said Jim, I’m too attached to the results of my my performance. You know, I get too tense. What can I do? And I said, Well, imagine there’s a little kid who loves lollipops, and he’s got a lollipop and you want to take it from him, but you don’t want to struggle. Is there any way you could get him to give you the lollipop?

by volunteering it to give it to you. And he said, you know, I don’t know. And I said, well, what if you had a bigger lollipop and asked him to trade? And he said, he’d probably trade. What kid wouldn’t trade a small lollipop for a bigger one? I said, that’s what you need. Your lollipop is too small. Your lollipop is, I just want to get birdies and I want to win the tournament. And I, you know, I want to be successful. I want to get some tangible results. That’s way too small. First of all, you don’t even know if that’s good for you to get birdies and

Good results and have more success. Is that going to be good for you in the long run and your family? You don’t know what you need is to pursue fullness of life and develop yourself in that way, which we know is good for you where you feel fully alive and make that your your Pursuit go for the whole candy store. Don’t settle for these little these 10 these tangible things that you don’t even know if will make you happy let alone fulfilled

John Jantsch (08:06.651)

You talk a lot about fear. You identify a number of them. Um, one of them of which is true. don’t care what you’re doing. Fear of failure shows up in a lot of people’s lives when they pursue anything. Um, I’m curious. I’m a huge baseball fan. That’s, that’s my sport. Um, and you know, it’s very cliche to say, but I’ll say it anyway. You know, the best baseball players fail 70 % of the time, right? In the, in the, uh, hitting world. Um,

So, so how does, I mean, how do they get through that and you know, that, that idea of I’m, afraid to fail, but you know, and, what’s weird about it is 20 hits in a season might make the difference between being seen as a failure or being seen as, as a superstar. So, you know, how do you, how do you, how do, how did you, or how do you see baseball players in particular? This would apply to all athletes, I suppose, but I just.

I feel like baseball has more failure in it than any other sport. So, you know, how do, how do you, they deal with that?

Jim (09:11.534)

You got to redefine success to something that’s meaningful to you and then break it down into smaller components Specifically, how do I want to feel in my life? How do I want to live? Who do I want to become? Who am I meant to become? And What is my purpose? What do I value most if you’re not clear on those things then the default is I just need more success I need more base hits and But that’s too far out of your control. It’s just you

John Jantsch (09:37.115)

Mm-hmm.

Jim (09:40.844)

Now you’re just happy if you get hit, sad if you don’t, and stressed when you need it, and you’re never gonna be your best when you’re stressed. We need to have freedom to fail to be your best. There needs to be an element of joy and excitement to be your best. In order to have that joy and excitement, we need to focus on the reason why you want the base hit. Why do you want the base hit? Well, so I can have a good batting average. Why do I want that? So I can become an all-star. Why do you want that?

So I can make more money. What do you want that? Well, I want a great life. Really. I want a more comfortable life. Well, what is it that you really want? Is it just a $10 million house on the water? Is that what you want? Or is it what you think that will give you, which is great experiences and deep enriching relationships where you’re learning and growing and making a difference, where you feel fully alive? Is that what you okay? That’s what you want? Well, I’m going show you how to go for that directly and let everything else be added to you.

John Jantsch (10:33.932)

So we have been talking mostly about athletes, but you coach a lot of business leaders who are certainly not performing in the same way. Is it any different or is it really basically get down to the same bottom line?

Jim (10:49.582)

Exact same thing. I don’t teach people what to do, how to do their job. Unless it’s pro baseball, I might have had a few couple things there, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO of Google or you’re a pro athlete or Olympic swimmer or anybody. It’s really how do you be fully engaged in the moment when you’re performing unattached to what you’re trying to do? How can you expand what you believe is possible? How can you perform with freedom and passion?

John Jantsch (10:58.361)

Yeah.

Jim (11:18.848)

unattached to what you’re trying to do. And that’s, that’s everything I’m telling you about is really clarifying these things that are most meaningful to you and, pursuing them.

John Jantsch (11:28.123)

So athletes today, I mean, obviously they’ve trained their body. mean, that’s kind of a lot. That’s, that’s what comes with the deal. Increasingly, you’re seeing sports psychologists. You know, you’re actually seeing people in the dugout, uh, that are, you know, mindset related. Business owners don’t necessarily, well, a lot of them don’t train their body like an athlete, even though they need to perform, but they certainly don’t have the same idea of training their mind. Are there exercise? I know there are exercises in your system. Uh, you want to talk a little bit about.

ones that are really geared towards entrepreneurs or even have a lot of marketers on this show that would help them train their mind.

Jim (12:08.684)

Yeah, well, with the InterEx Lancers, the number one goal every day is to learn and grow. If you want to be great at business, we need to be creative. We can’t be attached to the results and circumstances. We need to think clearly. We have to have a clear mind and unburdened heart. If you want to be great at anything, business included, we can’t be caught up in the past and future. so learn and grow every day is the number one goal. And then within that, we have four daily goals.

Give the best of what you have some days it’s not going to be good. Be present, be grateful, focus on your routines and only what you can control.

John Jantsch (12:46.575)

There certainly is, you talk openly about the spiritual elements of what you teach, presence, gratitude, acceptance, in addition to like performance metrics. Do you ever, especially with business leaders, do you ever get any skepticism, pushback that, just like give me the tools, give me the, you I don’t need that woo-woo stuff.

Jim (13:09.68)

yeah, yeah. Pro athletes, business leaders. Yeah, definitely. If you’re a high achiever, then you don’t want the woo woo. You want tangible results. You don’t want to mess around. You don’t want to waste your time. And I get it. The question is if something is really important to you, if this is the biggest year of your career, maybe your free agent or maybe you have a massive deal you’re working on or just trying to get a job and you need the money.

The more important it is to you, then the more important the process of how you live and what you do every day is, you know, then it’s more important. So the question is, what’s the best process for you to be your best every day? And that’s what InterEx is, is I present to you what I think, what I’ve learned is the best process for the majority of people to be fully engaged in the moment, heart, mind and body on a test and what they’re trying to do.

John Jantsch (14:02.297)

You talk about in the book embracing, excuse me, vulnerability and even failure in some cases. You want to talk a little bit about whether it’s on your own personal life or with the client where you’ve helped, we’re embracing that imperfection has kind of led to a breakthrough.

Jim (14:21.922)

Yeah, I define humility as an accurate view of self, not overinflated and not under inflated. And so

John Jantsch (14:25.563)

Right.

Jim (14:34.382)

pro athletes and most people they come to me because they’re underperforming and essentially they come to me wanting they’re obsessing about things that they want can’t control and then they just try harder and then the trying harder causes them to be more tense more anxious and worse performance and so then they just that causes more stress and then they feel like they need to become more needy and so it’s just this endless loop and so essentially

They’re coming to me for low level needs and desires. Become world number one. Be the best in the industry. That’s a low level need is, well, one, I call it low level because you don’t even know if it’s good for you, let alone gonna make you happy. Say you got a million followers or $10 million or $10 million house on the water. Is that gonna make you happy? You might think so and hopefully, but it may not. And so, but that’s people come to me because I’ve helped people achieve extraordinary success.

John Jantsch (15:09.275)

Mm-hmm.

Jim (15:32.438)

generally most people their first year together, they have the best year of their careers. It’s because we focus on developing themselves as people giving inner strength and inner peace, let everything else be added to them. So, this is the crucial thing.

John Jantsch (15:48.773)

So how do you balance the fact that, especially in the field that you’re working with, mean, that people are taught their entire lives to strive for excellence, to hustle, to work harder, to outwork everybody else. I how do you balance that? Because you’re not, I mean, they obviously have to have the skills they have to put into work, but you’re telling them something completely different than what society is probably pumping in.

Jim (16:14.998)

Yeah. Society says the only thing that matters is the results, bottom line, black and white, zero sum score. Like it’s either win or lose. There’s only only so many pieces to the pie. And I’m saying, we live in an unstable, unfair world that has a lot of, horrible things in it. And, if you don’t have a clear system, you’re going to get sucked into negativity and because of all the instability and even evil and violence.

So we need to have a clear system to make sure we’re focusing on who you can become and what’s possible in your life. And so, Inter Excellence is about developing the habits of thought and action every day where you can be fully engaged in the moment more often, unattached to the results of what you’re trying to do. And we do that by training your heart to love most what’s most empowering.

John Jantsch (17:03.493)

So I’m guessing a fair amount of people you work with need like you need to strip some stuff away, you know, because they come to you with being full on being doing. What’s kind of the first step to get somebody to shift their mindset from that, you know, away from doing and more towards, I guess you would call it being.

Jim (17:25.762)

how they speak. The first thing we do is we make sure that we’re speaking the truth. That’s Inter Excellence has nine disciplines and one of the disciplines is to speak the truth about the past to create possibilities in the future. So people come to me and they want to perform better. they’re, they often will talk to me about how they’re struggling with something. And, but the thing is your subconscious is what’s running your life and creating these beliefs that are limitations on what’s possible.

It’s really, really hard to outperform your beliefs, the subconscious comfort level with what you feel is possible in your life. And so, Inter-Excellence is largely about expanding what you believe is possible by getting yourself to see possibilities and feel it as if it’s real. And so we need to be able to come to edge of our feelings and beliefs and not resist those moments where we’re super uncomfortable.

John Jantsch (18:18.393)

Because your work went from being exposed to X amount of people to a much larger X, has that changed just because I’m guessing you’re getting a lot more feedback, you have more people reaching out to you saying, hey, I want a piece of you. Has that changed not you, but has that changed anything, how you think about your system, how you think about the work, or is it only validated?

Jim (18:46.894)

Oh yeah, it’s changed a lot. My life has changed a lot. Um, I think of what if I would have died January 11th or before, you know, I, the majority of the things in the book that I wrote 16 years ago are the same. And it was selling one to two copies a day before January 12th. And then, um, you know, now it’s like I said, it’s going to be in 26 or 27 languages and it’s sold half a million copies or whatever. And so, um,

John Jantsch (18:58.255)

Right.

Jim (19:14.646)

what’s changed is is well, I want to more definitely more confidence in the message. Like in the past, I you know, I believed in the message for sure. But there’s always a wonder like, why don’t more people? Why isn’t the book more popular? didn’t understand it. And so now it’s just kind of that’s really cool. But I don’t think of myself as as the originator of this.

John Jantsch (19:32.304)

Yeah.

Jim (19:41.876)

or even author. I’m just a lowly messenger. And so because it’s so extraordinary, everything that’s happened, it’s, I mean, it’s, there’s no way that I could say, I did this. And so the moment we start to think that I’m doing it and that I’m somebody because I’m doing these great things, then we start to get afraid of, what if I make mistakes? But when you can take yourself completely out of the picture,

John Jantsch (19:52.123)

Thanks

John Jantsch (20:06.521)

Yeah.

Jim (20:10.904)

there’s no concern for self, then you can be fearless. God’s given me this gift that I realized, you know, at the very most I’ve added maybe one or 2 % to anything good that’s happened in the last six months. And since I know that there’s no like, I’m somebody now. I know I’m nobody.

John Jantsch (20:30.873)

Yeah. Well, Jim, I appreciate you taking a moment to share with our listeners. Is there some place you would invite people to connect with you? Obviously the book’s available everywhere, but if people want to learn more about your coaching or just really, you know, anything, explore anything deeper from the book.

Jim (20:53.09)

Yeah, I would go to interexcellence.com and sign up for the newsletter. We have a VIP newsletter that talks about our retreats and workshops. We’ve got a retreat coming up in Mexico here very soon. and then social media, Instagram, InterExcellence, InterExcellence, Jim Murphy, and other social media outlets. You’ll find me.

Jim (21:16.28)

Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:00.773)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guest today is Jim Murphy. He’s a high performance coach, author, speaker, and the creator of the Inner Excellence Methodology. He’s coached world-class athletes, Olympians, and business leaders, helping them achieve breakthrough results by mastering their inner game. His own journey from minor league baseball player to elite coach led him to develop a practical spiritual approach to peak performance.

that goes beyond tactics and into mindset, heart, and presence. We’re going to talk about his book, Interpresence, or I’m sorry, Interexcellence, Train Your Mind for Extraordinary Performance and the Best Possible Life. So Jim, welcome to the show.

Jim (00:44.194)

Thanks, John.

John Jantsch (00:45.851)

Few years ago, I had Captain Sullivan on the show. You may recall he is the airline pilot that landed his airplane after taking off in New York City in the Hudson River. Do you remember that a few? Sully, right. And then I turned it into a movie. Of course he had a book. So I had to start that show, you know, as he said, well, I have, you know, I have to tell that story, you know, every time I now am asked to talk about, you know, how that went. So he certainly had the story down. Not nearly as dramatic, but.

Jim (00:57.336)

So weak.

John Jantsch (01:15.451)

You have a bit of an AJ Brown story. want to, I’m sure people are asking you and I’m sure you love telling it. You’re probably getting tired of telling it, but you want to tell us kind of your kind of moment happened. Gosh, what was that now? Eight, nine months ago.

Jim (01:30.254)

Yeah, John, I’m very grateful to tell it. So on January 12th, uh, AJ Brown was a, he’s a wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. It’s a wild card game Packers versus the Eagles. Um, Sunday night football, the only NFL game on and, um, in middle of the game, he’s reading the football reading, reading inter excellence on the sidelines during the football game. And so the TV station zooms in on it’s like, what is AJ Brown doing? And then, oh my gosh, he was reading a book and Kevin Brown and

John Jantsch (01:37.051)

me.

John Jantsch (01:57.435)

you

Jim (01:59.81)

Tom Burkhart made a big deal about it afterwards. They asked him, what were you doing? Were you bored? Were you? He said, no, it’s a book that I read before I bring to every game. Read it before the game to get centered and read it after every drive to get re centered. My teammates call it the recipe. And so that was the first time I actually heard about him doing this. I saw a picture of him on social media of like a month earlier, but I had no context. didn’t know anything about it. And so I found out what the rest of the world.

that he was doing this at that time. And just an amazing thing for him to do to be true to himself, that find something that helps him be better at what he does and to be more fearless and show all of us that we all have time to read.

John Jantsch (02:40.687)

Well, and then of course the punchline, I suppose, what happened to you next?

Jim (02:48.424)

a few things, john, a few things. Yeah, my world changed a lot. The you know, the message that selfless is fearless, as you know, spread around the world now, love, wisdom and courage. And so the book had sold maybe seven or eight or 9000 copies in nine years. mean, sorry, 16 years, initially was was published in 2009 by McGraw Hill. And then I

John Jantsch (02:49.563)

Hehehehehe

Jim (03:18.329)

put out a revised edition self-published in 2018 or 2020. And then so that’s the book AJ Brown has been reading. And since then, it’s sold, I don’t know, close to half a million copies, I would say.

John Jantsch (03:32.123)

So, I’m curious, how did you print the books without that sort of immediate demand?

Jim (03:42.21)

Yeah, so it’s amazing how the world is now with Amazon and they print on demand. so if

John Jantsch (03:44.645)

Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (03:48.527)

Yeah, but they were able to print on that kind of demand. Yeah, yeah.

Jim (03:52.27)

Well, apparently they did run out at some point. So they’ve got print centers all over the world. And so there was a time when the demand was so high, it’s sold tens of thousands of copies every day for the first few weeks that they did run out at one point.

John Jantsch (04:09.435)

Yeah, that’s a crazy story. Well, good for you. know, frankly, I love to hear stories like that. Persons out there doing their work and you know, as a magical moment happened, I think we all deserve it. You start the book talking about your own struggles as a minor league player, the mindset, you know, performance anxiety, self doubt. Would you say that that was instrumental to you developing kind of your own framework?

Jim (04:37.78)

yeah, yeah, absolutely. My whole life since I was a little kid, I obsessed about being a superstar. I was going to play in the NFL like A.J. Brown or I was going to be in the NBA or Major League Baseball. And so when I got drafted by the Cubs, it was a dream come true. But I had a vision problem that was with me for my entire professional career. I played five years in the minors and then eventually had to retire because of it. And my identity was completely wrapped up in my role as a pro athlete. And when I lost it, I felt like I lost everything. And so

I got a job with him. asked got out asked to coach a high school baseball team in inner city Seattle and I had no interest in coaching but I took the job was driving a truck for FedEx and we went undefeated and I realized wow I love coaching. Who knew? And then so I went on this journey to become a pro baseball coach. I got went to grad school got a job with the Texas Rangers two weeks after graduation. So now I felt like I was somebody again and then I quit six months into the first season and so.

devastated again my identity, you know, I was somebody and I lost it and then somebody again I lost it and so I kind of got tired of this merry-go-round of feeling like I was someone and no one and end up leaving for the desert to go live a life of solitude to figure out what to do with my life and that’s where Interactionless was born. I spent five years full-time writing and researching how to have peace and confidence under the most pressure and what I found John was that that The path to having the most peace and confidence under the most pressure is the same path of building an extraordinary life

when filled with deep contentment, joy and confidence, independent of circumstance. It’s a wholehearted path where you understand what the human heart deeply needs and wants and how to get it.

John Jantsch (06:15.611)

So you started touching on this idea of your identity and you spend a lot of time or one of the core principles really is kind of this idea of letting go of the need to control the outcome, which is, you know, being very attached to the outcome. Can you, do you have a client story, executive athlete, I suppose you don’t want to name names, but where, you you help somebody kind of overcome that control of the outcome.

Jim (06:41.582)

Yeah, I’ll tell you. When I was at the Ryder Cup years ago, it’s one of the biggest events in golf pro golf. You have the team USA versus Team Europe. And one of the players top 10 in the world said Jim, I’m too attached to the results of my my performance. You know, I get too tense. What can I do? And I said, Well, imagine there’s a little kid who loves lollipops, and he’s got a lollipop and you want to take it from him, but you don’t want to struggle. Is there any way you could get him to give you the lollipop?

by volunteering it to give it to you. And he said, you know, I don’t know. And I said, well, what if you had a bigger lollipop and asked him to trade? And he said, he’d probably trade. What kid wouldn’t trade a small lollipop for a bigger one? I said, that’s what you need. Your lollipop is too small. Your lollipop is, I just want to get birdies and I want to win the tournament. And I, you know, I want to be successful. I want to get some tangible results. That’s way too small. First of all, you don’t even know if that’s good for you to get birdies and

Good results and have more success. Is that going to be good for you in the long run and your family? You don’t know what you need is to pursue fullness of life and develop yourself in that way, which we know is good for you where you feel fully alive and make that your your Pursuit go for the whole candy store. Don’t settle for these little these 10 these tangible things that you don’t even know if will make you happy let alone fulfilled

John Jantsch (08:06.651)

You talk a lot about fear. You identify a number of them. Um, one of them of which is true. don’t care what you’re doing. Fear of failure shows up in a lot of people’s lives when they pursue anything. Um, I’m curious. I’m a huge baseball fan. That’s, that’s my sport. Um, and you know, it’s very cliche to say, but I’ll say it anyway. You know, the best baseball players fail 70 % of the time, right? In the, in the, uh, hitting world. Um,

So, so how does, I mean, how do they get through that and you know, that, that idea of I’m, afraid to fail, but you know, and, what’s weird about it is 20 hits in a season might make the difference between being seen as a failure or being seen as, as a superstar. So, you know, how do you, how do you, how do, how did you, or how do you see baseball players in particular? This would apply to all athletes, I suppose, but I just.

I feel like baseball has more failure in it than any other sport. So, you know, how do, how do you, they deal with that?

Jim (09:11.534)

You got to redefine success to something that’s meaningful to you and then break it down into smaller components Specifically, how do I want to feel in my life? How do I want to live? Who do I want to become? Who am I meant to become? And What is my purpose? What do I value most if you’re not clear on those things then the default is I just need more success I need more base hits and But that’s too far out of your control. It’s just you

John Jantsch (09:37.115)

Mm-hmm.

Jim (09:40.844)

Now you’re just happy if you get hit, sad if you don’t, and stressed when you need it, and you’re never gonna be your best when you’re stressed. We need to have freedom to fail to be your best. There needs to be an element of joy and excitement to be your best. In order to have that joy and excitement, we need to focus on the reason why you want the base hit. Why do you want the base hit? Well, so I can have a good batting average. Why do I want that? So I can become an all-star. Why do you want that?

So I can make more money. What do you want that? Well, I want a great life. Really. I want a more comfortable life. Well, what is it that you really want? Is it just a $10 million house on the water? Is that what you want? Or is it what you think that will give you, which is great experiences and deep enriching relationships where you’re learning and growing and making a difference, where you feel fully alive? Is that what you okay? That’s what you want? Well, I’m going show you how to go for that directly and let everything else be added to you.

John Jantsch (10:33.932)

So we have been talking mostly about athletes, but you coach a lot of business leaders who are certainly not performing in the same way. Is it any different or is it really basically get down to the same bottom line?

Jim (10:49.582)

Exact same thing. I don’t teach people what to do, how to do their job. Unless it’s pro baseball, I might have had a few couple things there, but it doesn’t matter if you’re a CEO of Google or you’re a pro athlete or Olympic swimmer or anybody. It’s really how do you be fully engaged in the moment when you’re performing unattached to what you’re trying to do? How can you expand what you believe is possible? How can you perform with freedom and passion?

John Jantsch (10:58.361)

Yeah.

Jim (11:18.848)

unattached to what you’re trying to do. And that’s, that’s everything I’m telling you about is really clarifying these things that are most meaningful to you and, pursuing them.

John Jantsch (11:28.123)

So athletes today, I mean, obviously they’ve trained their body. mean, that’s kind of a lot. That’s, that’s what comes with the deal. Increasingly, you’re seeing sports psychologists. You know, you’re actually seeing people in the dugout, uh, that are, you know, mindset related. Business owners don’t necessarily, well, a lot of them don’t train their body like an athlete, even though they need to perform, but they certainly don’t have the same idea of training their mind. Are there exercise? I know there are exercises in your system. Uh, you want to talk a little bit about.

ones that are really geared towards entrepreneurs or even have a lot of marketers on this show that would help them train their mind.

Jim (12:08.684)

Yeah, well, with the InterEx Lancers, the number one goal every day is to learn and grow. If you want to be great at business, we need to be creative. We can’t be attached to the results and circumstances. We need to think clearly. We have to have a clear mind and unburdened heart. If you want to be great at anything, business included, we can’t be caught up in the past and future. so learn and grow every day is the number one goal. And then within that, we have four daily goals.

Give the best of what you have some days it’s not going to be good. Be present, be grateful, focus on your routines and only what you can control.

John Jantsch (12:46.575)

There certainly is, you talk openly about the spiritual elements of what you teach, presence, gratitude, acceptance, in addition to like performance metrics. Do you ever, especially with business leaders, do you ever get any skepticism, pushback that, just like give me the tools, give me the, you I don’t need that woo-woo stuff.

Jim (13:09.68)

yeah, yeah. Pro athletes, business leaders. Yeah, definitely. If you’re a high achiever, then you don’t want the woo woo. You want tangible results. You don’t want to mess around. You don’t want to waste your time. And I get it. The question is if something is really important to you, if this is the biggest year of your career, maybe your free agent or maybe you have a massive deal you’re working on or just trying to get a job and you need the money.

The more important it is to you, then the more important the process of how you live and what you do every day is, you know, then it’s more important. So the question is, what’s the best process for you to be your best every day? And that’s what InterEx is, is I present to you what I think, what I’ve learned is the best process for the majority of people to be fully engaged in the moment, heart, mind and body on a test and what they’re trying to do.

John Jantsch (14:02.297)

You talk about in the book embracing, excuse me, vulnerability and even failure in some cases. You want to talk a little bit about whether it’s on your own personal life or with the client where you’ve helped, we’re embracing that imperfection has kind of led to a breakthrough.

Jim (14:21.922)

Yeah, I define humility as an accurate view of self, not overinflated and not under inflated. And so

John Jantsch (14:25.563)

Right.

Jim (14:34.382)

pro athletes and most people they come to me because they’re underperforming and essentially they come to me wanting they’re obsessing about things that they want can’t control and then they just try harder and then the trying harder causes them to be more tense more anxious and worse performance and so then they just that causes more stress and then they feel like they need to become more needy and so it’s just this endless loop and so essentially

They’re coming to me for low level needs and desires. Become world number one. Be the best in the industry. That’s a low level need is, well, one, I call it low level because you don’t even know if it’s good for you, let alone gonna make you happy. Say you got a million followers or $10 million or $10 million house on the water. Is that gonna make you happy? You might think so and hopefully, but it may not. And so, but that’s people come to me because I’ve helped people achieve extraordinary success.

John Jantsch (15:09.275)

Mm-hmm.

Jim (15:32.438)

generally most people their first year together, they have the best year of their careers. It’s because we focus on developing themselves as people giving inner strength and inner peace, let everything else be added to them. So, this is the crucial thing.

John Jantsch (15:48.773)

So how do you balance the fact that, especially in the field that you’re working with, mean, that people are taught their entire lives to strive for excellence, to hustle, to work harder, to outwork everybody else. I how do you balance that? Because you’re not, I mean, they obviously have to have the skills they have to put into work, but you’re telling them something completely different than what society is probably pumping in.

Jim (16:14.998)

Yeah. Society says the only thing that matters is the results, bottom line, black and white, zero sum score. Like it’s either win or lose. There’s only only so many pieces to the pie. And I’m saying, we live in an unstable, unfair world that has a lot of, horrible things in it. And, if you don’t have a clear system, you’re going to get sucked into negativity and because of all the instability and even evil and violence.

So we need to have a clear system to make sure we’re focusing on who you can become and what’s possible in your life. And so, Inter Excellence is about developing the habits of thought and action every day where you can be fully engaged in the moment more often, unattached to the results of what you’re trying to do. And we do that by training your heart to love most what’s most empowering.

John Jantsch (17:03.493)

So I’m guessing a fair amount of people you work with need like you need to strip some stuff away, you know, because they come to you with being full on being doing. What’s kind of the first step to get somebody to shift their mindset from that, you know, away from doing and more towards, I guess you would call it being.

Jim (17:25.762)

how they speak. The first thing we do is we make sure that we’re speaking the truth. That’s Inter Excellence has nine disciplines and one of the disciplines is to speak the truth about the past to create possibilities in the future. So people come to me and they want to perform better. they’re, they often will talk to me about how they’re struggling with something. And, but the thing is your subconscious is what’s running your life and creating these beliefs that are limitations on what’s possible.

It’s really, really hard to outperform your beliefs, the subconscious comfort level with what you feel is possible in your life. And so, Inter-Excellence is largely about expanding what you believe is possible by getting yourself to see possibilities and feel it as if it’s real. And so we need to be able to come to edge of our feelings and beliefs and not resist those moments where we’re super uncomfortable.

John Jantsch (18:18.393)

Because your work went from being exposed to X amount of people to a much larger X, has that changed just because I’m guessing you’re getting a lot more feedback, you have more people reaching out to you saying, hey, I want a piece of you. Has that changed not you, but has that changed anything, how you think about your system, how you think about the work, or is it only validated?

Jim (18:46.894)

Oh yeah, it’s changed a lot. My life has changed a lot. Um, I think of what if I would have died January 11th or before, you know, I, the majority of the things in the book that I wrote 16 years ago are the same. And it was selling one to two copies a day before January 12th. And then, um, you know, now it’s like I said, it’s going to be in 26 or 27 languages and it’s sold half a million copies or whatever. And so, um,

John Jantsch (18:58.255)

Right.

Jim (19:14.646)

what’s changed is is well, I want to more definitely more confidence in the message. Like in the past, I you know, I believed in the message for sure. But there’s always a wonder like, why don’t more people? Why isn’t the book more popular? didn’t understand it. And so now it’s just kind of that’s really cool. But I don’t think of myself as as the originator of this.

John Jantsch (19:32.304)

Yeah.

Jim (19:41.876)

or even author. I’m just a lowly messenger. And so because it’s so extraordinary, everything that’s happened, it’s, I mean, it’s, there’s no way that I could say, I did this. And so the moment we start to think that I’m doing it and that I’m somebody because I’m doing these great things, then we start to get afraid of, what if I make mistakes? But when you can take yourself completely out of the picture,

John Jantsch (19:52.123)

Thanks

John Jantsch (20:06.521)

Yeah.

Jim (20:10.904)

there’s no concern for self, then you can be fearless. God’s given me this gift that I realized, you know, at the very most I’ve added maybe one or 2 % to anything good that’s happened in the last six months. And since I know that there’s no like, I’m somebody now. I know I’m nobody.

John Jantsch (20:30.873)

Yeah. Well, Jim, I appreciate you taking a moment to share with our listeners. Is there some place you would invite people to connect with you? Obviously the book’s available everywhere, but if people want to learn more about your coaching or just really, you know, anything, explore anything deeper from the book.

Jim (20:53.09)

Yeah, I would go to interexcellence.com and sign up for the newsletter. We have a VIP newsletter that talks about our retreats and workshops. We’ve got a retreat coming up in Mexico here very soon. and then social media, Instagram, InterExcellence, InterExcellence, Jim Murphy, and other social media outlets. You’ll find me.

Jim (21:16.28)

Thanks so much, John.

John Jantsch (00:01.026)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch and my guest today is Victoria Downing. She’s the president of Remodeler’s Advantage. It’s the leading peer group and business improvement resource for remodeling company’s owners. For more than two decades, Victoria has helped thousands of remodelers improve profitability, leadership and work-life balance. Remodeler’s Advantage has really been known as

probably the leading peer group network, certainly in the industry for training and for helping folks grow their businesses. I actually have a couple of clients over the years that have been in this group and it really led me to wanting to interview Victoria. So welcome to the show.

Victoria Downing (00:47.33)

Well, thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (00:48.984)

So I guess let’s just start with kind of somebody said, so Victoria, what is Remidler’s advantage? Maybe just kind of set the baseline for what the group is and does.

Victoria Downing (00:56.581)

Okay, the baseline, let’s talk about the vision first, right? Our vision is to be the company that all remodelers turn to for a better life. We are all about looking at your business as a tool to help you build the life you want for yourself and for your employees while delivering a fantastic product to the community. So that’s our focus when we deliver that in a lot of different ways.

John Jantsch (01:21.902)

Well, it’s interesting to hear you say, because it, you know, I think I led in the bio, they’re talking about making companies more profitable, but you kind of led with work life balance. Do you feel like that’s those two are very, very intrinsically connected? Yeah.

Victoria Downing (01:36.349)

Absolutely. I mean, again, your business is a tool. So I always encourage our members, especially when they first come in, where are we trying to take you? What finances do you have to have to live your life now and into retirement and for your family and for college and all the stuff for your goals? How much money do you need to live that life? Well, that we back into that and say, OK, now how can we modify, manipulate this business to get you the funds you need? again, your employees, it’s not about

just the owner being greedy and taking every penny, it’s building a wonderful culture and future and lifestyle for the employees as well.

John Jantsch (02:15.704)

So the primary tool, guess, and correct me if I’m wrong on that, really is these peer groups. Talk a little bit about how that structure of bringing non-competing folks from all over the country together to really form a community.

Victoria Downing (02:33.775)

Well, I actually realized I have to update my bio because I’ve actually been doing this for since 1990. So for 35 years, I’ve been doing this. And it was, we started, started, I had a business partner at the time, Linda Case. She was very big in the industry for years and years and years. And I joined her then. And we would speak at trade shows and talk to a lot of people, write magazine columns and books and so on. And people started coming up to us saying, we’re looking for the next level.

John Jantsch (02:40.334)

30, mean, yeah.

Victoria Downing (03:02.341)

We’ve been coming to trade shows and listening to the speakers for 10, 15 years. We want more. What can we do? So we started a peer group. It was fantastic. And we slowly just added people and added groups over the years till now. We have over 200 companies across the U S and Canada that altogether produce over a billion dollars in revenue annually. So that’s a, they’re representing a lot of renovations, a lot of remodeling.

John Jantsch (03:02.872)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:32.27)

So, I’ll give you a softball question here, because I know the answer to this, but I want to hear you answer it. know, people that get coaching, that participate in peer groups, participate in their community, participate in their industry, tend to be the cream of the crop of an industry. I’ve just seen that across the board. How have you seen that play out with the RA groups?

Victoria Downing (03:47.033)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (03:52.537)

Well, it certainly is the case that we have a number of people. So let me back up a step. We have two different sort of levels of our round table peer groups. And peer groups makes up about a little bit more than half of our business in total with the others being master classes and events and consulting and coaching. So, but in round tables, there’s the base membership and then we have the mentor membership. The mentors tend to be larger, more profitable.

and they tend to have been members of Round Tables for many years. I can’t tell you how many people in the mentor levels have been with us for 15, 20 years. And they just keep coming because they know that they’re always going to learn something. You know, and yes, is there some diminishing returns over from the first fire hose, those first five years to 20 years in? Certainly. But they know that they can still get the bits and pieces that’ll make the difference between

John Jantsch (04:31.566)

You

Victoria Downing (04:49.613)

a good year and an exceptional year. So it really does play out that way.

John Jantsch (04:55.254)

And one of the things I’ve seen you do that, that I think of course, I’m sure evolved or people asked you for was that, you you, these are owners initially in a lot of the peer groups, but then you’ve started to put together all of your marketing people are in a peer group, you know, with them or all of your finance people are in a peer group. And how I’ve got to believe that, that that gets everybody talking the same language, you know, pulling the same direction. Have you, have you found that that, if nothing else is an amazing retention strategy as well.

Victoria Downing (05:08.911)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (05:23.909)

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, most of the people that are in those what we call tactical groups, there are people in positions in the companies. Most of those people are from member groups, but we do have some that are from outside the community. Right now we have nine groups for production managers, two groups for design managers, a group for CFOs. And then we also have a variety of what we call power meetings. We’ll bring administrators and office managers together for two days of intensiveness.

John Jantsch (05:29.326)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:53.39)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Downing (05:53.539)

And that’s another way they pick up the language. But we have found that the companies that are the most successful, and again, I got to go back to some of our longer term members, they invest in their team, right? We can see it. The people who were buying masterclasses, investing in consulting and coaching and all this stuff had better returns than the rest. So what we did about four years ago, I guess it was right around COVID time.

John Jantsch (06:05.592)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:16.856)

Yeah.

Victoria Downing (06:22.179)

We changed our membership to include what we call professional service credits. So people get, I don’t know, $5,000 worth of credits that they can use for all sorts of other trades. They can use it for production manager round table membership dues. So that we’re encouraging them to follow the lead of the best of the best and invest in their people with, you know, dollars that they have in their pocket from us.

John Jantsch (06:50.606)

So I’ve worked with a lot of remodeling contractors and every business to some extent, it has a lot of this where people got into business because they knew how to do something. I think remodeling contractors in some cases are the ultimate technicians. mean, they were the ones building the walls and putting in windows and things. And then also had to try to build a business. Do you find that in many cases that kind of technician mentality holds them back a little bit? It’s like, I know how to do all this stuff.

Victoria Downing (07:20.128)

Well, it does in a couple of ways. One of the things I’ve found is that when people come to us at the beginning of their relationship with us, that one of the things that is almost 100 % true is that their financial reporting is a mess. You can’t tell what’s going on. So if I’m telling them your business is a tool, well, I got to be able to read the story in that tool, right? I to be able to tell what’s going on. So we have to start by

John Jantsch (07:34.607)

Mmm, yeah.

Victoria Downing (07:46.447)

helping them organize and learn how to read and understand the information that’s in those reports. So then we can say, I always tell people the numbers tell the story. And if they are clear and accurate, the reports can almost tell you what your next move is gonna be. But you gotta have them in a format that we can read and that their peers can read and understand. So that’s one way that being a technician holds them back, because they haven’t had that business training. But another way,

happens a lot with the area of control. The companies that grow, and you know this as well as I do, it’s nothing new under the sun, but those companies that are able to delegate tend to be able to grow. If one of these owners has their fists around every decision that’s made in the company, it makes it very difficult to grow beyond yourself.

John Jantsch (08:20.536)

news.

You

John Jantsch (08:39.884)

Yeah. They become the, they become actually the bottleneck for, for, for growth, even though they claim that that’s what, what they ultimately want. How has, how have you seen also, I know one of the things that you do, I have a little advantage of hearing a little bit more about what, you do from a very tactical standpoint. You know, you make people bring their numbers, you know, they, they, know, in front of their peers have to say, here’s where we’re.

Victoria Downing (08:43.481)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:08.728)

winning, here’s where we’re losing. How does that kind of peer pressure, or if for lack of a better term, actually help them grow?

Victoria Downing (09:10.371)

Right.

Victoria Downing (09:17.455)

Well, it’s that there are nine other company representatives from nine other companies sitting there and looking at them and they’re saying, well, here’s where you’re down, but look at this guy over here, he’s really high in that, let’s get you two together. Or this guy who’s doing really well in that area gives advice. So it not only helps them get ideas and strategies for improving the lower levels, but…

It also helps these owners figure out what to work on first. You know, there’s that whole thing about just picking the things that are the most important things to work on. And a lot of business owners get confused. They they see them the next shiny object. They take their eye off the ball. They’re not watching their pipeline. They’re not monitoring the financial statements to know what carpenter’s producing profitable jobs and which one’s losing jobs. All of that stuff.

These groups help them pinpoint. Every time a member leaves their peer group, they have two or three written commitments that they have to report back to their group who hold them accountable for achieving those commitments. And then they’ve got the whole team of the peer group, as well as the support staff of us. If they’re having challenges in meeting those commitments, we’ve got resources. One of the beauties, as you know,

in being in the business for as long as we’ve been in the business, that you have a pretty good network of people and resources that you can share and you can help. So we’ve got a lot of that at hand.

John Jantsch (10:52.002)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:58.946)

Let’s talk about technology a little bit. know, I mean, when I started my business, you’ve been in business as long as I have, you know, we didn’t have the web. Right. We didn’t have, yeah, exactly. And so obviously not only that kind of technology has changed, but even how you run, run their businesses. mean, everything from, you know, quoting to tracking, you know, some of the things that they do, know, inventorying. So, I mean, it’s all kind of technology driven today. How, how have.

Victoria Downing (11:07.257)

Yeah, I know. I can remember those days.

John Jantsch (11:28.386)

How have you been able to kind of keep up with that and not just keep up with it, but probably be seen as a leader in helping people adopt new technologies.

Victoria Downing (11:38.117)

Well, one of the things that happens is we try to stay a little bit agnostic on what technology they want to use. There are some outstanding project management softwares focused on the industry. There’s two major ones in our space right now. I listen to our members. I’m constantly reading. We receive information from them all day, every day. I get emails from every group. Every group has their own email thread.

John Jantsch (11:42.35)

Mm.

John Jantsch (11:48.302)

Maybe. Sure.

Victoria Downing (12:03.993)

and I get all those emails all the time. So I’m constantly reading about what’s working, what’s not working. Then I can reach out and ask questions and use that information to compile suggestions and share that information with the rest of the community. So I really relaxed. I mean, I don’t do estimates, right? But I pay attention to those who do and what’s working and what new things they’re finding. you know, so there’s, that’s a big, big one. The whole CRM sales management thing is a big one.

John Jantsch (12:04.129)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (12:25.422)

Yeah. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (12:32.737)

Recently, we had a members only webinar where we featured three of our members and how they use AI in their business. That was pretty fascinating. And now AI has taken over how marketing works and how all those searches and all that work. So we’re getting information on that and sharing it with our community as well. It’s just everywhere. It’s amazing.

John Jantsch (12:41.068)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:53.826)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is evolving. You know, not obviously all my listeners are modeling contractors or in the home services business, but it was, so I really, again, it’s this peer group idea that I think is really fascinating. I’m curious, how do you manage some of the dynamics? mean, I’m sure you’ve had times where like people just weren’t getting along in the group or somebody shouldn’t be in that group or, know, somebody’s dominating that group or something. Again, I, I’m sure you’ve seen it all.

Victoria Downing (13:07.343)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (13:22.895)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:23.819)

How do you kind of manage some of the dynamics of making sure that you’ve got a really gelled group?

Victoria Downing (13:31.183)

Well, right for the last probably six years, my colleague Steve Wheeler has been managing the roundtable groups and he is excellent at first of all placement. When we’re placing someone in a group, we have to start out by making sure there’s nothing competitive in the match. Then we try to match them up with similar volume levels and similar job sizes and similar business models, like are they using all subs?

John Jantsch (13:38.083)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:43.117)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.984)

Right. Right.

Victoria Downing (13:59.043)

or they have their own in-house labor, that sort of thing. And then we also look at a personality profile of each of the members that tells us how they like to give and receive information. We use DISC. All of our members take it. We use it internally. We use it for hiring. It’s all over the place. So that helps us also determine where to place people. So are you familiar with DISC at all? OK, so, you know, for example, it’s D, I, S, and C.

John Jantsch (14:05.944)

you

John Jantsch (14:12.023)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (14:23.425)

yeah, sure. Yes, I’m.

Victoria Downing (14:28.547)

The S people are slower to make decisions. They’re a little bit less outgoing. They like to do more one thing at a time. You get a whole group of S people. It’s pretty flippin’ quiet. So we gotta throw a D in there to ramp it up or throw an I in there to give it some jazz, you know? But we’re constantly monitoring that. And our members, first of all, it’s not a class. We’re not pablum feeding them.

John Jantsch (14:39.699)

Hehehehehe

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (14:54.53)

Yeah, yeah.

Victoria Downing (14:54.671)

We’re setting up an environment for them to use the resources we make available. Our mission statement is to light the path of greater success for motivated remodeling professionals. We don’t do it for them. We show them the way. We give them the resources. We light the path. They have to do the work to get where they want to go. So we talk a lot about that. And that’s part of the process. making a commitment.

So anyway, so this is a group of peers that need to be holding one another accountable. And overall for things like commitments, they do a pretty good job. Like, hey dude, you made the commitment, we didn’t hear from you, you didn’t ask for an extension, why are you coming here without your commitment done? That works pretty well. It’s when they don’t like someone or there’s a personality conflict that then it gets a little bit dicey. It’s awkward oftentimes to address that within the group.

So they’ll go to their facilitator or they’ll come to the staff and we’ll help fix it or move somebody to a group that’s a better fit. So we do that when they, because we have 25 owner groups, we can do that.

John Jantsch (16:05.218)

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have, and you don’t need to name names here at all, but do you have some examples of businesses that you’ve just really seen grow and flourish, you know, by directly by being a part of a peer group? Yeah.

Victoria Downing (16:21.727)

Absolutely. So as a matter of fact, I got an email this week and I printed it out so that I could read you some of the things that they said. Every year or as somebody’s been with us a year, I will reach out to them and ask them what are the changes, improvements that they have made since their time with Roundtables. So I did that with this particular company, which is a Canadian company. We have a number of Canadians in our community.

John Jantsch (16:37.698)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Downing (16:47.439)

They sent me a list of 18 items that they have improved upon since they joined in one year. You know, I always tell people, like in our mission statement, we talk about greater success. I’ll tell people, we know you’re going to be successful, but this will cut your time in half. So just to give you a couple of things, revenue growth of 30 % on our rolling 12 month report, gross profit growth of 36%, complete company overhaul. We rebuilt every department in the company.

John Jantsch (16:50.702)

You

Victoria Downing (17:17.509)

We implemented the work in progress process and we meet monthly to review all key financials. We have 100 % better understanding of the financials, WIP, budgeting, et cetera. We’ve created department scorecards to track and manage KPIs and on and on and on and on. So then the owner goes on and he says,

RA, Remodeler’s Advantage, has certainly opened my mind as to what’s possible in this business. I feel we have a strong foundation to continue to build upon and our potential is just starting to be realized. We have a long way to go and RA is going to be an integral part in making that happen. That we get dozens of letters like that all the time.

John Jantsch (18:02.958)

You know, because you’ve been a pioneer in this particular business model, are you familiar and it’s okay if you’re not, but are you familiar with other industries or other groups similar to RA that you’ve run across?

Victoria Downing (18:13.871)

Well, funny you should ask, I belong to something called the Council of Masterminds, which is a peer group for companies that do peer groups. We think it’s kind of meta, you know? So in that, we’re all different industry verticals that we just came back from our meeting. We have peer groups for dentists, optometrists, computer service companies, insurance brokerages, and on and on. And there’s about 12 of us that come to this. And I’ve been going to that meeting.

John Jantsch (18:19.48)

okay.

Okay. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (18:43.429)

twice a year for 20 years. So I am walking the talk and I come back with pages of notes, just like I do even from our peer groups. It’s a different industry, but business management is business management is business management. So many ideas fit.

John Jantsch (18:59.416)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was thinking that I’m sure that a lot of your members kind of keep you, you know, like what’s going on in the industry. What’s the future look like? What’s the technology changes? I’m sure you hear a lot of that from your members and that probably helps keep you abreast of things because you’re hearing from kind of the cream of the crop. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (19:14.714)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (19:19.833)

Yes, yes, that does too. But again, we also follow all of the studies like the leading indicator of remodeling activity in Harvard and all of those things to try to stay on top. know, House just did a survey talking about what the future looks like for remodeling. We’re having a session at the summit on looking forward and how to deal with the uncertainty now and what to expect as we go through the next several years. we try to compile all that information for our members and make it readily available.

John Jantsch (19:24.44)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:49.612)

Yeah, awesome. Well, Victoria, I appreciate you spending a few moments to share with my audience. Is there someplace you’d invite somebody to, whether they’re in the industry or not, to learn more about what you do and connect with you?

Victoria Downing (20:04.837)

Well, I’d love them to visit our website, which is RemodelersAdvantage.com. I’d love to them to come to the summit, RemodelersSummit.com. And they can always write to me for more information. I’ll steer them in the right direction. And my email is Victoria at RemodelersAdvantage.com.

John Jantsch (20:25.155)

Well, again, I appreciate you spending a few minutes with us and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

Victoria Downing (20:26.959)

Thank you.

Victoria Downing (20:31.139)

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

John Jantsch (00:01.026)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is Jon Jantsch and my guest today is Victoria Downing. She’s the president of Remodeler’s Advantage. It’s the leading peer group and business improvement resource for remodeling company’s owners. For more than two decades, Victoria has helped thousands of remodelers improve profitability, leadership and work-life balance. Remodeler’s Advantage has really been known as

probably the leading peer group network, certainly in the industry for training and for helping folks grow their businesses. I actually have a couple of clients over the years that have been in this group and it really led me to wanting to interview Victoria. So welcome to the show.

Victoria Downing (00:47.33)

Well, thank you for having me.

John Jantsch (00:48.984)

So I guess let’s just start with kind of somebody said, so Victoria, what is Remidler’s advantage? Maybe just kind of set the baseline for what the group is and does.

Victoria Downing (00:56.581)

Okay, the baseline, let’s talk about the vision first, right? Our vision is to be the company that all remodelers turn to for a better life. We are all about looking at your business as a tool to help you build the life you want for yourself and for your employees while delivering a fantastic product to the community. So that’s our focus when we deliver that in a lot of different ways.

John Jantsch (01:21.902)

Well, it’s interesting to hear you say, because it, you know, I think I led in the bio, they’re talking about making companies more profitable, but you kind of led with work life balance. Do you feel like that’s those two are very, very intrinsically connected? Yeah.

Victoria Downing (01:36.349)

Absolutely. I mean, again, your business is a tool. So I always encourage our members, especially when they first come in, where are we trying to take you? What finances do you have to have to live your life now and into retirement and for your family and for college and all the stuff for your goals? How much money do you need to live that life? Well, that we back into that and say, OK, now how can we modify, manipulate this business to get you the funds you need? again, your employees, it’s not about

just the owner being greedy and taking every penny, it’s building a wonderful culture and future and lifestyle for the employees as well.

John Jantsch (02:15.704)

So the primary tool, guess, and correct me if I’m wrong on that, really is these peer groups. Talk a little bit about how that structure of bringing non-competing folks from all over the country together to really form a community.

Victoria Downing (02:33.775)

Well, I actually realized I have to update my bio because I’ve actually been doing this for since 1990. So for 35 years, I’ve been doing this. And it was, we started, started, I had a business partner at the time, Linda Case. She was very big in the industry for years and years and years. And I joined her then. And we would speak at trade shows and talk to a lot of people, write magazine columns and books and so on. And people started coming up to us saying, we’re looking for the next level.

John Jantsch (02:40.334)

30, mean, yeah.

Victoria Downing (03:02.341)

We’ve been coming to trade shows and listening to the speakers for 10, 15 years. We want more. What can we do? So we started a peer group. It was fantastic. And we slowly just added people and added groups over the years till now. We have over 200 companies across the U S and Canada that altogether produce over a billion dollars in revenue annually. So that’s a, they’re representing a lot of renovations, a lot of remodeling.

John Jantsch (03:02.872)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (03:32.27)

So, I’ll give you a softball question here, because I know the answer to this, but I want to hear you answer it. know, people that get coaching, that participate in peer groups, participate in their community, participate in their industry, tend to be the cream of the crop of an industry. I’ve just seen that across the board. How have you seen that play out with the RA groups?

Victoria Downing (03:47.033)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (03:52.537)

Well, it certainly is the case that we have a number of people. So let me back up a step. We have two different sort of levels of our round table peer groups. And peer groups makes up about a little bit more than half of our business in total with the others being master classes and events and consulting and coaching. So, but in round tables, there’s the base membership and then we have the mentor membership. The mentors tend to be larger, more profitable.

and they tend to have been members of Round Tables for many years. I can’t tell you how many people in the mentor levels have been with us for 15, 20 years. And they just keep coming because they know that they’re always going to learn something. You know, and yes, is there some diminishing returns over from the first fire hose, those first five years to 20 years in? Certainly. But they know that they can still get the bits and pieces that’ll make the difference between

John Jantsch (04:31.566)

You

Victoria Downing (04:49.613)

a good year and an exceptional year. So it really does play out that way.

John Jantsch (04:55.254)

And one of the things I’ve seen you do that, that I think of course, I’m sure evolved or people asked you for was that, you you, these are owners initially in a lot of the peer groups, but then you’ve started to put together all of your marketing people are in a peer group, you know, with them or all of your finance people are in a peer group. And how I’ve got to believe that, that that gets everybody talking the same language, you know, pulling the same direction. Have you, have you found that that, if nothing else is an amazing retention strategy as well.

Victoria Downing (05:08.911)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (05:23.909)

Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, most of the people that are in those what we call tactical groups, there are people in positions in the companies. Most of those people are from member groups, but we do have some that are from outside the community. Right now we have nine groups for production managers, two groups for design managers, a group for CFOs. And then we also have a variety of what we call power meetings. We’ll bring administrators and office managers together for two days of intensiveness.

John Jantsch (05:29.326)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (05:53.39)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Downing (05:53.539)

And that’s another way they pick up the language. But we have found that the companies that are the most successful, and again, I got to go back to some of our longer term members, they invest in their team, right? We can see it. The people who were buying masterclasses, investing in consulting and coaching and all this stuff had better returns than the rest. So what we did about four years ago, I guess it was right around COVID time.

John Jantsch (06:05.592)

Yeah. Yeah.

John Jantsch (06:16.856)

Yeah.

Victoria Downing (06:22.179)

We changed our membership to include what we call professional service credits. So people get, I don’t know, $5,000 worth of credits that they can use for all sorts of other trades. They can use it for production manager round table membership dues. So that we’re encouraging them to follow the lead of the best of the best and invest in their people with, you know, dollars that they have in their pocket from us.

John Jantsch (06:50.606)

So I’ve worked with a lot of remodeling contractors and every business to some extent, it has a lot of this where people got into business because they knew how to do something. I think remodeling contractors in some cases are the ultimate technicians. mean, they were the ones building the walls and putting in windows and things. And then also had to try to build a business. Do you find that in many cases that kind of technician mentality holds them back a little bit? It’s like, I know how to do all this stuff.

Victoria Downing (07:20.128)

Well, it does in a couple of ways. One of the things I’ve found is that when people come to us at the beginning of their relationship with us, that one of the things that is almost 100 % true is that their financial reporting is a mess. You can’t tell what’s going on. So if I’m telling them your business is a tool, well, I got to be able to read the story in that tool, right? I to be able to tell what’s going on. So we have to start by

John Jantsch (07:34.607)

Mmm, yeah.

Victoria Downing (07:46.447)

helping them organize and learn how to read and understand the information that’s in those reports. So then we can say, I always tell people the numbers tell the story. And if they are clear and accurate, the reports can almost tell you what your next move is gonna be. But you gotta have them in a format that we can read and that their peers can read and understand. So that’s one way that being a technician holds them back, because they haven’t had that business training. But another way,

happens a lot with the area of control. The companies that grow, and you know this as well as I do, it’s nothing new under the sun, but those companies that are able to delegate tend to be able to grow. If one of these owners has their fists around every decision that’s made in the company, it makes it very difficult to grow beyond yourself.

John Jantsch (08:20.536)

news.

You

John Jantsch (08:39.884)

Yeah. They become the, they become actually the bottleneck for, for, for growth, even though they claim that that’s what, what they ultimately want. How has, how have you seen also, I know one of the things that you do, I have a little advantage of hearing a little bit more about what, you do from a very tactical standpoint. You know, you make people bring their numbers, you know, they, they, know, in front of their peers have to say, here’s where we’re.

Victoria Downing (08:43.481)

Yes.

John Jantsch (09:08.728)

winning, here’s where we’re losing. How does that kind of peer pressure, or if for lack of a better term, actually help them grow?

Victoria Downing (09:10.371)

Right.

Victoria Downing (09:17.455)

Well, it’s that there are nine other company representatives from nine other companies sitting there and looking at them and they’re saying, well, here’s where you’re down, but look at this guy over here, he’s really high in that, let’s get you two together. Or this guy who’s doing really well in that area gives advice. So it not only helps them get ideas and strategies for improving the lower levels, but…

It also helps these owners figure out what to work on first. You know, there’s that whole thing about just picking the things that are the most important things to work on. And a lot of business owners get confused. They they see them the next shiny object. They take their eye off the ball. They’re not watching their pipeline. They’re not monitoring the financial statements to know what carpenter’s producing profitable jobs and which one’s losing jobs. All of that stuff.

These groups help them pinpoint. Every time a member leaves their peer group, they have two or three written commitments that they have to report back to their group who hold them accountable for achieving those commitments. And then they’ve got the whole team of the peer group, as well as the support staff of us. If they’re having challenges in meeting those commitments, we’ve got resources. One of the beauties, as you know,

in being in the business for as long as we’ve been in the business, that you have a pretty good network of people and resources that you can share and you can help. So we’ve got a lot of that at hand.

John Jantsch (10:52.002)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (10:58.946)

Let’s talk about technology a little bit. know, I mean, when I started my business, you’ve been in business as long as I have, you know, we didn’t have the web. Right. We didn’t have, yeah, exactly. And so obviously not only that kind of technology has changed, but even how you run, run their businesses. mean, everything from, you know, quoting to tracking, you know, some of the things that they do, know, inventorying. So, I mean, it’s all kind of technology driven today. How, how have.

Victoria Downing (11:07.257)

Yeah, I know. I can remember those days.

John Jantsch (11:28.386)

How have you been able to kind of keep up with that and not just keep up with it, but probably be seen as a leader in helping people adopt new technologies.

Victoria Downing (11:38.117)

Well, one of the things that happens is we try to stay a little bit agnostic on what technology they want to use. There are some outstanding project management softwares focused on the industry. There’s two major ones in our space right now. I listen to our members. I’m constantly reading. We receive information from them all day, every day. I get emails from every group. Every group has their own email thread.

John Jantsch (11:42.35)

Mm.

John Jantsch (11:48.302)

Maybe. Sure.

Victoria Downing (12:03.993)

and I get all those emails all the time. So I’m constantly reading about what’s working, what’s not working. Then I can reach out and ask questions and use that information to compile suggestions and share that information with the rest of the community. So I really relaxed. I mean, I don’t do estimates, right? But I pay attention to those who do and what’s working and what new things they’re finding. you know, so there’s, that’s a big, big one. The whole CRM sales management thing is a big one.

John Jantsch (12:04.129)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (12:25.422)

Yeah. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (12:32.737)

Recently, we had a members only webinar where we featured three of our members and how they use AI in their business. That was pretty fascinating. And now AI has taken over how marketing works and how all those searches and all that work. So we’re getting information on that and sharing it with our community as well. It’s just everywhere. It’s amazing.

John Jantsch (12:41.068)

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:53.826)

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It is, it is evolving. You know, not obviously all my listeners are modeling contractors or in the home services business, but it was, so I really, again, it’s this peer group idea that I think is really fascinating. I’m curious, how do you manage some of the dynamics? mean, I’m sure you’ve had times where like people just weren’t getting along in the group or somebody shouldn’t be in that group or, know, somebody’s dominating that group or something. Again, I, I’m sure you’ve seen it all.

Victoria Downing (13:07.343)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (13:22.895)

Yes.

John Jantsch (13:23.819)

How do you kind of manage some of the dynamics of making sure that you’ve got a really gelled group?

Victoria Downing (13:31.183)

Well, right for the last probably six years, my colleague Steve Wheeler has been managing the roundtable groups and he is excellent at first of all placement. When we’re placing someone in a group, we have to start out by making sure there’s nothing competitive in the match. Then we try to match them up with similar volume levels and similar job sizes and similar business models, like are they using all subs?

John Jantsch (13:38.083)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (13:43.117)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (13:48.984)

Right. Right.

Victoria Downing (13:59.043)

or they have their own in-house labor, that sort of thing. And then we also look at a personality profile of each of the members that tells us how they like to give and receive information. We use DISC. All of our members take it. We use it internally. We use it for hiring. It’s all over the place. So that helps us also determine where to place people. So are you familiar with DISC at all? OK, so, you know, for example, it’s D, I, S, and C.

John Jantsch (14:05.944)

you

John Jantsch (14:12.023)

Hmm.

John Jantsch (14:23.425)

yeah, sure. Yes, I’m.

Victoria Downing (14:28.547)

The S people are slower to make decisions. They’re a little bit less outgoing. They like to do more one thing at a time. You get a whole group of S people. It’s pretty flippin’ quiet. So we gotta throw a D in there to ramp it up or throw an I in there to give it some jazz, you know? But we’re constantly monitoring that. And our members, first of all, it’s not a class. We’re not pablum feeding them.

John Jantsch (14:39.699)

Hehehehehe

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch (14:54.53)

Yeah, yeah.

Victoria Downing (14:54.671)

We’re setting up an environment for them to use the resources we make available. Our mission statement is to light the path of greater success for motivated remodeling professionals. We don’t do it for them. We show them the way. We give them the resources. We light the path. They have to do the work to get where they want to go. So we talk a lot about that. And that’s part of the process. making a commitment.

So anyway, so this is a group of peers that need to be holding one another accountable. And overall for things like commitments, they do a pretty good job. Like, hey dude, you made the commitment, we didn’t hear from you, you didn’t ask for an extension, why are you coming here without your commitment done? That works pretty well. It’s when they don’t like someone or there’s a personality conflict that then it gets a little bit dicey. It’s awkward oftentimes to address that within the group.

So they’ll go to their facilitator or they’ll come to the staff and we’ll help fix it or move somebody to a group that’s a better fit. So we do that when they, because we have 25 owner groups, we can do that.

John Jantsch (16:05.218)

Yeah. Yeah. Do you have, and you don’t need to name names here at all, but do you have some examples of businesses that you’ve just really seen grow and flourish, you know, by directly by being a part of a peer group? Yeah.

Victoria Downing (16:21.727)

Absolutely. So as a matter of fact, I got an email this week and I printed it out so that I could read you some of the things that they said. Every year or as somebody’s been with us a year, I will reach out to them and ask them what are the changes, improvements that they have made since their time with Roundtables. So I did that with this particular company, which is a Canadian company. We have a number of Canadians in our community.

John Jantsch (16:37.698)

Mm-hmm.

Victoria Downing (16:47.439)

They sent me a list of 18 items that they have improved upon since they joined in one year. You know, I always tell people, like in our mission statement, we talk about greater success. I’ll tell people, we know you’re going to be successful, but this will cut your time in half. So just to give you a couple of things, revenue growth of 30 % on our rolling 12 month report, gross profit growth of 36%, complete company overhaul. We rebuilt every department in the company.

John Jantsch (16:50.702)

You

Victoria Downing (17:17.509)

We implemented the work in progress process and we meet monthly to review all key financials. We have 100 % better understanding of the financials, WIP, budgeting, et cetera. We’ve created department scorecards to track and manage KPIs and on and on and on and on. So then the owner goes on and he says,

RA, Remodeler’s Advantage, has certainly opened my mind as to what’s possible in this business. I feel we have a strong foundation to continue to build upon and our potential is just starting to be realized. We have a long way to go and RA is going to be an integral part in making that happen. That we get dozens of letters like that all the time.

John Jantsch (18:02.958)

You know, because you’ve been a pioneer in this particular business model, are you familiar and it’s okay if you’re not, but are you familiar with other industries or other groups similar to RA that you’ve run across?

Victoria Downing (18:13.871)

Well, funny you should ask, I belong to something called the Council of Masterminds, which is a peer group for companies that do peer groups. We think it’s kind of meta, you know? So in that, we’re all different industry verticals that we just came back from our meeting. We have peer groups for dentists, optometrists, computer service companies, insurance brokerages, and on and on. And there’s about 12 of us that come to this. And I’ve been going to that meeting.

John Jantsch (18:19.48)

okay.

Okay. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (18:43.429)

twice a year for 20 years. So I am walking the talk and I come back with pages of notes, just like I do even from our peer groups. It’s a different industry, but business management is business management is business management. So many ideas fit.

John Jantsch (18:59.416)

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I was thinking that I’m sure that a lot of your members kind of keep you, you know, like what’s going on in the industry. What’s the future look like? What’s the technology changes? I’m sure you hear a lot of that from your members and that probably helps keep you abreast of things because you’re hearing from kind of the cream of the crop. Yeah.

Victoria Downing (19:14.714)

Yes.

Victoria Downing (19:19.833)

Yes, yes, that does too. But again, we also follow all of the studies like the leading indicator of remodeling activity in Harvard and all of those things to try to stay on top. know, House just did a survey talking about what the future looks like for remodeling. We’re having a session at the summit on looking forward and how to deal with the uncertainty now and what to expect as we go through the next several years. we try to compile all that information for our members and make it readily available.

John Jantsch (19:24.44)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (19:49.612)

Yeah, awesome. Well, Victoria, I appreciate you spending a few moments to share with my audience. Is there someplace you’d invite somebody to, whether they’re in the industry or not, to learn more about what you do and connect with you?

Victoria Downing (20:04.837)

Well, I’d love them to visit our website, which is RemodelersAdvantage.com. I’d love to them to come to the summit, RemodelersSummit.com. And they can always write to me for more information. I’ll steer them in the right direction. And my email is Victoria at RemodelersAdvantage.com.

John Jantsch (20:25.155)

Well, again, I appreciate you spending a few minutes with us and hopefully we’ll see you one of these days out there on the road.

Victoria Downing (20:26.959)

Thank you.

Victoria Downing (20:31.139)

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Sara Nay (00:01.635)

Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host, Sarah Nay. And today I’m stepping in for John Jantsch and I am joined by Rhea Allen. So Rhea Allen is the president and CEO of Pepper Shock Media, host of the Marketing Edition Podcast and a business owner who knows what it’s like to build a brand from the ground up. So welcome to the show, Ray. I’m glad you’re here.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (00:23.064)

Well thank you so much for having me, Sarah. This is exciting.

Sara Nay (00:26.145)

I know and fun backstory, right? And I met online through a different group and actually figured out that we’re both in Idaho about 25 minutes away from each other. And I haven’t met a ton of business owners online from Idaho. So it was really exciting to connect with you, right?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (00:42.03)

We had to go global to come local, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (00:45.015)

Exactly. Exactly. Well, let’s dive on in. We’re going to focus on the topic really of branding and culture today, because that’s one of your specialties as I know. And so I’ve heard you say before, culture and brand go hand in hand. And so can you break down what does that mean exactly to small business owners?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (01:04.268)

Well, what I always try to emphasize most is that your culture starts with your brand from the inside out. And sometimes culture can’t necessarily be controllable. It’s what it is, the experience that both your employees and the people who come to you for that experience of what you serve and in an agency setting, culture is so important because it is our brand. It’s who we are and how we represent what we do.

And when we work with other companies that want to understand how they can continue to build and grow their culture in a positive way, in the way that they would like to see their brand exuded into the world, whether it’s recruiting new employees or new customers, and retention is always a huge part of it. So that’s why I say culture and branding go hand in hand together for sure.

Sara Nay (01:55.718)

Yeah, and it’s great. I love that thought process. And what I’ve been doing for years at Duct Tape Marketing is whenever we hire someone new for a role within our company, we always start with the job description and we lead with here’s our mission, here’s our vision, here’s our values. And so I want someone to read through all of that first on the job description. Then I’ll get to here’s the role and the tasks and all the other details because

I want someone to be aligned culturally, like that to me is one of the most important things because as you said, it helps people stick around for a long time and also represent our brand in the way we want to be represented. And then, you know, when we’re going through the interview process, our first interview is always based on values. And so one of the things we’re always trying to hire for is growth minded people because in the marketing space, it’s always continuing and evolving.

And so I’m asking questions to identify if they’re growth minded and then asking them skills specific questions. So that’s just one of the ways that we’ve leaned into making culture and hiring aligned with our brand long term.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (02:58.446)

Absolutely, and we do a variety of things, but one of the things that we set up is we call it culture and brand camp. So this one time at brand camp, we go through a process and it really is about aligning the HR roles and the marketing roles together so that they’re not siloed and they’re working together to create the culture and brand that they really want to be.

Sara Nay (03:06.276)

nice.

I love it.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (03:26.688)

known for and have that experience that they want people to walk away from and, feel the feelings that you want when you’re in that process and going through that process. So, we go through culture and brand camp and, do a number of exercises to work together, to understand both internal and external messaging. And when everyone’s singing from the same sheet of music and saying similar terminology and, able to articulate that in a way that is, is.

Sara Nay (03:45.962)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (03:55.636)

mindful of how they all can own it and have ownership in their, their own branding and how other people are going to perceive them because of the way that they have been able to articulate it and what experiences they want to have. and so going through that process and doing some team building exercises and some branding exercises and, bringing the two sort of areas that are sometimes really siloed in companies and they don’t always come together and work together.

but then when we bring them together and they are in that mode of like, we, we are in control of our own culture and we are in control of our brand that we have out there. So, it’s a, it’s a fun exercise to go through and do that with companies to, to, have them walk through those processes together and have that experience of their own together as well.

Sara Nay (04:31.906)

Yeah, I love that. And I think that gets, I’m assuming it gets buy-in from the whole team and support behind the whole team. One of the things that we did fairly recently is we used to have values that John and I are, our founder identified as like our core values.

and we kind of made those up on our own and then we would like tell the team about them. We’re like, that doesn’t feel right. And so we did a session as a team where we had everyone identify like what they wanted the values to be. And we then collaborated and crafted our core values together. And to me, that was so much more of a rewarding but also buy-in experience for the team because they were part of the process versus being here’s our values, go live by these ultimately. Yeah, go do this.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (05:24.888)

Yeah. Now go do this. Yeah. And whenever you can include the team into that decision making process, they have so much more ownership in it. And to take it even a step further, having them tell stories around those values that you’ve selected and where maybe there’s a, an example of something that occurred because of that value. And then having them tell you about a time when, now give me, give me an example of one of the values that you and your team came up with Sarah.

Sara Nay (05:48.59)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (05:53.093)

Well, one of them is growth minded, like always being leaders and innovators and ahead of the game. So it’s that whole idea of just like growth and always learning and evolving.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (06:02.35)

So one of the activities that you can do just as an icebreaker to get people in the mode, um, anyone who cares to share, tell me about a time where this value came through. What was the occurrence? What happened that you had this growth minded mentality or somebody else can share about somebody else on the team. And now storytelling becomes this a part of the culture, right? We know back in ancient history that storytelling was.

how culture was being able to get passed along to generation to generation. have the hieroglyphs on the walls that were drawn. so storytelling is such a huge part of culture, no matter what kind of culture we’re talking about, whether it’s company culture or if it’s your indigenous people and the culture, the stories that are being told is the way that that continues to happen. And it’s really great for new people coming in to hear those stories when something has happened.

Sara Nay (06:55.14)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (06:57.71)

And, you can exemplify it and also makes people feel really good when they have an opportunity to share about others and in circumstance that occurred, that can help continue those stories.

Sara Nay (07:09.218)

Yeah, I love it. And so a lot of what you’re talking about there is like storytelling as a team, as a culture. Do you take any of that storytelling and bring it, you know, as a marketing or a branding initiative as well?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (07:19.95)

Absolutely. And where it really can shine through is when you now involve your customers and they have testimonials and you can have them share a story about the circumstances or experiences that they’ve had with people that they’ve interacted with on your team. So we know it’s all about the people sometimes more than anything else, the people that work with you. And, and so when you can bring that full circle and then you have stories that you can tell of, of the values that also shown through with your

your customers, your clients, then it really does start from the inside out.

Sara Nay (07:54.819)

Yeah, I love it. A lot of what’s happening in the marketing space specifically right now is a lot of people are putting out a lot of content at scale because of the evolution of AI. And so one of the things that I’m seeing growing and importance is storytelling and being more human, but also being authentic and maybe even making some mistakes in the stuff you’re putting out there because it just feels everything feels so polished right now. So can you touch on

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:04.44)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:15.758)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (08:24.746)

Do you see storytelling and authenticity growing in importance these days as well?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:29.548)

Absolutely. In fact, I just did a panel discussion, and actually it was HR, the HR, sorry, public relations and then, advertising coming together. So mine was all about personal branding and, I created an acronym of keeping it real. so real, obviously, you know, being authentic and having that realness about you. Right. And then, being able to.

Sara Nay (08:48.494)

Nice.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:57.086)

extend that to others and have and share that consistently. And then of course, authenticity and then leveraging your network to be able to share that with others and showing up and keeping it real. yeah, authenticity is definitely, I think more valued than some of the AI that really at Nausium comes out. That’s just not real, right? I mean, it’s, it’s artificial. It’s artificial intelligence. So

Sara Nay (09:08.793)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (09:22.882)

Having your own spin on your own words sometimes really does help with the content that’s coming out. And I see that that’s a shift. Everyone was kind of, we’re going to use AI to replace the people, the human touch of what we’re putting out there. And I really think that you can tell somewhat now. And I mean, it’s getting really good where you can’t necessarily, and it’s trying to write in your voice. But there’s still some quirkiness about the AI.

still say it takes HI to use AI, so human intelligence. Yeah.

Sara Nay (09:54.626)

Yes, it does. I love it. Yeah. And I think that’s what I’m experiencing on LinkedIn specifically, just because I spend a lot of time there. I’m not saying it’s not having anywhere else, but like on LinkedIn, there’s just a lot of generic content being published right now. And so I’ve, you know, shifted to try to be more authentic and more human. And so I’ve shared posts recently that like I shared a post last week or so ago that was like my desk.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (10:08.15)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (10:20.705)

and it was my kids, had decorated my desk just because and that’s just, it’s getting like that human content is getting so much more traction because people are like, that feels more unique and more personal than this other post that anyone could have written.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (10:32.76)

Yep. Well, and it’s true. I mean, you can just take a look at, you know, the history of what you’ve posted. you, if we post pictures of our actual team and not just stock images or, know, if we do behind the scenes from video shoots that we’re doing, or if we, you know, show real people in action, we get so much more engagement and traction and follows than we do if it’s just a stock image or an inanimate, you know, object. And I love

Sara Nay (10:56.77)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:00.332)

Being able to showcase our people. again, it’s about the culture and showing what we’re doing and, and the volunteer activities that they’re about, or, know, showing, showing when they were little and, know, kind of what became of them and, and, know, just, fun things like that. There are so much more, I think engaging and authentic and real.

Sara Nay (11:18.702)

Yeah, I agree. And kind of a funny story on that. posted a new book coming out and I posted a JPEG of the cover and luckily it hasn’t gone to print yet, but someone pointed out that there was a typo on the cover. But her response to me was like so kind. She sent me a direct message and she was like, you know what I love about this? It shows that you’re human and you’re not just using AI for this content.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:29.561)

no!

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:37.698)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:40.875)

And so she actually was like very kind, but she like appreciated a little bit of an error because everything is feeling very polished at this point. And so I thought that was kind of funny.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:46.582)

Mm-hmm, right? Nice. Well, I’m glad that you were able to get that. I was like, there’s always something, and you’ve been so closely tied to it, you’re always gonna overlook something. There’s always gonna be something.

Sara Nay (11:54.851)

I know, I was like.

Sara Nay (12:00.683)

Yeah, always. like three people on my team looked at it, but still we missed it. yeah, I talk a lot about, because when I’m training marketing agencies, building and scaling a business and hiring team, I talk a lot about what we do for building culture. And so a lot of that is like, we do show and tell on Slack every Wednesday and we do happy Fridays and we have team meetings where it’s just kind of fun. And so I talk about all that stuff. And sometimes I get the question of,

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:04.534)

Of course. That’s how it works, of course.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:21.036)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (12:28.887)

What’s the ROI for all of that? Like you’re paying people to do these fun things. And so I’m curious, what would be your answer to a question like

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:30.83)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:36.718)

my gosh. well, first of all, if you don’t have a little bit of fun and incorporate the human aspect of living and working together all the time, and we spend more time with our work coworkers than we do with our spouses. Well, not in my case, cause I work with my spouse, but a lot of times, like, you know, if you look at how much time is spent with the people that you are, you know, with every day, it’s your coworkers. So I feel like if you are just,

Sara Nay (12:52.003)

Yeah

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (13:03.478)

robotic in what you’re doing and not engaging and not being, you know, that team player or having being a part of the culture, you’re going to make life miserable for yourself. Right. And so I feel like having time that you can naturally and be okay with spending some of that. It is an ROI in your, you know, you’re investing in your people and you’re investing in them wanting to stay, right. Can that retention. And we know that when somebody leaves a company, it takes

just twice as much or even more to replace them. And then all of the, knowledge that they’ve, that has just been left behind because they’ve left the company. So you want to do the things that are going to help retain those people. And, know, we, we spend time. We, we also do once a month. Now we do, we used to do it every week, which is a little, little, okay. I get it. You know, but now we do, so originally started out as Friday fun lunch, but then people take Fridays off. so, you know, some, some, some of us do, you know, summer Fridays off.

Sara Nay (13:55.076)

Thanks.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (14:03.176)

and have the four day work week fine. So then we moved it to Wednesdays. So then it become lunch instead of funch. So Friday, fun lunch, and then lunch. And now everybody is only, I mean, all of us are all in the office on Mondays. So now it’s munch. And so we, once a month go, we celebrate work anniversaries where I like to call workversaries or birthdays or something that we’re celebrating. And we actually came up with some things that we always go through. it’s,

Sara Nay (14:08.835)

I love it.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (14:32.334)

successes and frustrations, celebrations and appreciations, new technologies, or book or blog reports, or any, you know, anybody that’s reading a book, tell us a little bit about it or a blog or something, you know, new technology, something like that. And then a question of the day. And so we always come up with a random question, you know, what’s your favorite cereal as a kid, or what was your favorite cartoon to watch or, you know, who are you rooting for, for the Super Bowl? Right. I mean, so, so we always come up with something fun.

Sara Nay (14:50.003)

Thanks.

Sara Nay (14:58.965)

Yeah, yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:01.542)

And, we all participate and, you know, successes and frustrations. you know, if we’re in a public place, we are careful about our frustrations, but, but it’s important to acknowledge, you know, big successes, big wins all the time. And also if there is something, you know, that is frustrating people, I want to hear about it. And it’s a safe space to be able to share that if there is some sort of frustration or something that needs to be acknowledged. and then we can talk about it, but, then of course, celebrations, appreciations, and then.

Sara Nay (15:10.275)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:29.92)

The new technology book or blog reports is helpful because if people are learning about new things that are coming up or new tools or maybe a client wants to investigate a new tool or there’s a new Adobe plugin or who knows what, we’re talking about it and sharing that and it’s purposeful and intentional so that we can make sure that we cover those things. It’s a fun thing to do. The other thing that we do every year, and this is one of the questions I ask when I hire people.

Sara Nay (15:44.696)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:58.062)

is if they like to go camping or not, or if they’re a glamper or like, absolutely not. Because every year all of us with our spouses, our, you know, kids, pets, everybody, we go camping together, um, as a bit one big, huge pepper shock family. And, um, if you’re not a camper, you’re probably not going to really appreciate the culture that we’ve built. I mean, it’s not mandatory. I mean, you know, it has happened, but.

Sara Nay (16:00.72)

No.

Sara Nay (16:17.744)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (16:21.742)

Um, it’s, it’s really important to us because we love the outdoors and especially here in Idaho, we have all the seasons and it’s definitely, you know, we live here on purpose. can do work anywhere. Uh, but we purposely choose to, have, you know, Idaho is our back, you know, our back door. So, um, that’s a really important part of our culture to, to enjoy hiking and, know, those types of things. so, um, it’s, it’s fun and people look forward to it. It’s, know, what are we going to do this year? What are we, you know,

Are we gonna go rafting? Are we gonna go hiking? What are we doing? And so it’s something fun and it’s always been a part of our culture since we started and it’s definitely something that we really enjoy. So yeah, there’s definitely things we do. The other things that we do, Kristy helps, our graphic designer, we do volunteer time together and we’ve boxed food up at the food bank.

next week we’re going to go to, there’s a local place called the Idaho Botanical Garden. So we’re going to get our horticulture on and bring our favorite planting tool. And we’re going to go help the landscapers and do some fun things there, but it’s just a part of the culture. And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s otherwise paid time, but, you know, I want them to be involved in the community. want us to feel and come together as a team and doing some things that are not your typical.

Sara Nay (17:23.742)

Nice.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (17:42.89)

average workday all the time is really enriching for our people. So we want to continue to do that.

Sara Nay (17:49.492)

Yeah, that’s great. And that’s how I mean, I answered that question as well. When people ask about ROI, it’s you’re going to retain people longer, they’re going to be happier, you’re going to enjoy work more. And to me, that’s like the best kind of ROI you can get. So I think that’s great. And I love your examples, because a lot of what you shared are in person opportunities, because you work in person where I run a virtual company. And so we’re trying to do some of that stuff virtually, which is really interesting as well.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:00.364)

Absolutely.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:08.174)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (18:13.482)

And so we do things like I mentioned, like the show and tell on Slack, that’s just like such a small thing. And all we do is we ask a random question every single Wednesday at a scheduled time. And then people answer the question. But when you’re remote, you don’t get time to, know, what’s your favorite movie? What’d you do this weekend? What’d you, know, you don’t have time for like all of those things. And so that question, then, you know, someone might ask, what’s your favorite movie? And then like three people are like, my gosh, that’s my favorite movie. I can recite every line. And now they have this like bond that they wouldn’t have had.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:26.338)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:40.814)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (18:42.05)

just through work meetings and going through the motions. Cool.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:44.526)

Yeah, I know during pandemic, we definitely all worked remote and I even had a couple of people move out of state to go live out their homes and with their families. And I can relate to trying to keep the company culture alive through zoom. And, you know, there’s different things that, that we, we did. we, we played, pandemic reindeer games, came up with some fun things for them to do some trivia things and things like that, but.

Sara Nay (19:08.034)

Ha

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:13.282)

Yeah, I mean, it’s important to keep your team together even if they’re not in the same room or same building. Yeah, for sure.

Sara Nay (19:18.208)

Yeah, those pandemic times were weird times, weren’t they? Well, we talked a about a lot of great stuff today when it relates to culture and branding. If anyone’s just kind of feeling stuck on this topic, how they actually create a culture and how they tie it to their branding, are there any final thoughts or any action items you would share with them?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:22.056)

Yeah

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:39.086)

Yeah, absolutely. I think the important thing to remember is that culture is gonna be there whether you help guide it or not. The culture can be what you wanna mold it and grow it into or it’s going to become something that you have no control over if you don’t participate in the culture that you want your company to have. And so I think if you can identify

that there might be some needs in the areas of bridging the gaps between the different departments that come together and how they can work together to help build the culture that you want between HR and marketing and ops and all of the different areas that you have in a company. How can you make it to where everyone is singing from the same sheet of music and it’s all in tune, right? You all have the same goals in mind together that they build together.

just recognizing that there is a need for that and it’s an ongoing thing. It’s not an overnight like, well I did a company picnic. I’m good for a while. No, no, Yeah. You’ve got to continuously build it, continuously grow it, and do things to continue to, to have your employees engaged. And I always say, if you’ve got happy campers.

Sara Nay (20:43.167)

Check that box.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (20:57.846)

Right? You’re going to have happy customers. so keep your campers happy. And you know, at Culture and Brand Camp, that’s one thing we focus on is happy campers then creates happy customers.

Sara Nay (20:58.023)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Sara Nay (21:09.525)

I love it. Well, thank you for sharing all your insights. Lots of good stuff in this episode. If people want to continue to learn from you, where can they connect with you online?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (21:18.408)

so couple of different places. of course, the marketing expedition podcast is free to listen to on pretty much every podcast platform. And then, which is powered by pepper shock media, our company, and, you can visit pepper shock.com and we’re on all the social platforms, LinkedIn, all of that. So, you can find me in Ray is R H E a Alan a L L E N. So Ray Allen.

And I would look forward to chatting with anybody that would like to talk about their company culture and branding.

Sara Nay (21:51.073)

Thank you so much Ray for being here and thank you everyone for listening to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Again, this is your host, Sarenée, and we will see you next time.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (22:00.792)

Thank you.

Sara Nay (00:01.635)

Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host, Sarah Nay. And today I’m stepping in for John Jantsch and I am joined by Rhea Allen. So Rhea Allen is the president and CEO of Pepper Shock Media, host of the Marketing Edition Podcast and a business owner who knows what it’s like to build a brand from the ground up. So welcome to the show, Ray. I’m glad you’re here.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (00:23.064)

Well thank you so much for having me, Sarah. This is exciting.

Sara Nay (00:26.145)

I know and fun backstory, right? And I met online through a different group and actually figured out that we’re both in Idaho about 25 minutes away from each other. And I haven’t met a ton of business owners online from Idaho. So it was really exciting to connect with you, right?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (00:42.03)

We had to go global to come local, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (00:45.015)

Exactly. Exactly. Well, let’s dive on in. We’re going to focus on the topic really of branding and culture today, because that’s one of your specialties as I know. And so I’ve heard you say before, culture and brand go hand in hand. And so can you break down what does that mean exactly to small business owners?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (01:04.268)

Well, what I always try to emphasize most is that your culture starts with your brand from the inside out. And sometimes culture can’t necessarily be controllable. It’s what it is, the experience that both your employees and the people who come to you for that experience of what you serve and in an agency setting, culture is so important because it is our brand. It’s who we are and how we represent what we do.

And when we work with other companies that want to understand how they can continue to build and grow their culture in a positive way, in the way that they would like to see their brand exuded into the world, whether it’s recruiting new employees or new customers, and retention is always a huge part of it. So that’s why I say culture and branding go hand in hand together for sure.

Sara Nay (01:55.718)

Yeah, and it’s great. I love that thought process. And what I’ve been doing for years at Duct Tape Marketing is whenever we hire someone new for a role within our company, we always start with the job description and we lead with here’s our mission, here’s our vision, here’s our values. And so I want someone to read through all of that first on the job description. Then I’ll get to here’s the role and the tasks and all the other details because

I want someone to be aligned culturally, like that to me is one of the most important things because as you said, it helps people stick around for a long time and also represent our brand in the way we want to be represented. And then, you know, when we’re going through the interview process, our first interview is always based on values. And so one of the things we’re always trying to hire for is growth minded people because in the marketing space, it’s always continuing and evolving.

And so I’m asking questions to identify if they’re growth minded and then asking them skills specific questions. So that’s just one of the ways that we’ve leaned into making culture and hiring aligned with our brand long term.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (02:58.446)

Absolutely, and we do a variety of things, but one of the things that we set up is we call it culture and brand camp. So this one time at brand camp, we go through a process and it really is about aligning the HR roles and the marketing roles together so that they’re not siloed and they’re working together to create the culture and brand that they really want to be.

Sara Nay (03:06.276)

nice.

I love it.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (03:26.688)

known for and have that experience that they want people to walk away from and, feel the feelings that you want when you’re in that process and going through that process. So, we go through culture and brand camp and, do a number of exercises to work together, to understand both internal and external messaging. And when everyone’s singing from the same sheet of music and saying similar terminology and, able to articulate that in a way that is, is.

Sara Nay (03:45.962)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (03:55.636)

mindful of how they all can own it and have ownership in their, their own branding and how other people are going to perceive them because of the way that they have been able to articulate it and what experiences they want to have. and so going through that process and doing some team building exercises and some branding exercises and, bringing the two sort of areas that are sometimes really siloed in companies and they don’t always come together and work together.

but then when we bring them together and they are in that mode of like, we, we are in control of our own culture and we are in control of our brand that we have out there. So, it’s a, it’s a fun exercise to go through and do that with companies to, to, have them walk through those processes together and have that experience of their own together as well.

Sara Nay (04:31.906)

Yeah, I love that. And I think that gets, I’m assuming it gets buy-in from the whole team and support behind the whole team. One of the things that we did fairly recently is we used to have values that John and I are, our founder identified as like our core values.

and we kind of made those up on our own and then we would like tell the team about them. We’re like, that doesn’t feel right. And so we did a session as a team where we had everyone identify like what they wanted the values to be. And we then collaborated and crafted our core values together. And to me, that was so much more of a rewarding but also buy-in experience for the team because they were part of the process versus being here’s our values, go live by these ultimately. Yeah, go do this.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (05:24.888)

Yeah. Now go do this. Yeah. And whenever you can include the team into that decision making process, they have so much more ownership in it. And to take it even a step further, having them tell stories around those values that you’ve selected and where maybe there’s a, an example of something that occurred because of that value. And then having them tell you about a time when, now give me, give me an example of one of the values that you and your team came up with Sarah.

Sara Nay (05:48.59)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (05:53.093)

Well, one of them is growth minded, like always being leaders and innovators and ahead of the game. So it’s that whole idea of just like growth and always learning and evolving.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (06:02.35)

So one of the activities that you can do just as an icebreaker to get people in the mode, um, anyone who cares to share, tell me about a time where this value came through. What was the occurrence? What happened that you had this growth minded mentality or somebody else can share about somebody else on the team. And now storytelling becomes this a part of the culture, right? We know back in ancient history that storytelling was.

how culture was being able to get passed along to generation to generation. have the hieroglyphs on the walls that were drawn. so storytelling is such a huge part of culture, no matter what kind of culture we’re talking about, whether it’s company culture or if it’s your indigenous people and the culture, the stories that are being told is the way that that continues to happen. And it’s really great for new people coming in to hear those stories when something has happened.

Sara Nay (06:55.14)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (06:57.71)

And, you can exemplify it and also makes people feel really good when they have an opportunity to share about others and in circumstance that occurred, that can help continue those stories.

Sara Nay (07:09.218)

Yeah, I love it. And so a lot of what you’re talking about there is like storytelling as a team, as a culture. Do you take any of that storytelling and bring it, you know, as a marketing or a branding initiative as well?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (07:19.95)

Absolutely. And where it really can shine through is when you now involve your customers and they have testimonials and you can have them share a story about the circumstances or experiences that they’ve had with people that they’ve interacted with on your team. So we know it’s all about the people sometimes more than anything else, the people that work with you. And, and so when you can bring that full circle and then you have stories that you can tell of, of the values that also shown through with your

your customers, your clients, then it really does start from the inside out.

Sara Nay (07:54.819)

Yeah, I love it. A lot of what’s happening in the marketing space specifically right now is a lot of people are putting out a lot of content at scale because of the evolution of AI. And so one of the things that I’m seeing growing and importance is storytelling and being more human, but also being authentic and maybe even making some mistakes in the stuff you’re putting out there because it just feels everything feels so polished right now. So can you touch on

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:04.44)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:15.758)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (08:24.746)

Do you see storytelling and authenticity growing in importance these days as well?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:29.548)

Absolutely. In fact, I just did a panel discussion, and actually it was HR, the HR, sorry, public relations and then, advertising coming together. So mine was all about personal branding and, I created an acronym of keeping it real. so real, obviously, you know, being authentic and having that realness about you. Right. And then, being able to.

Sara Nay (08:48.494)

Nice.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:57.086)

extend that to others and have and share that consistently. And then of course, authenticity and then leveraging your network to be able to share that with others and showing up and keeping it real. yeah, authenticity is definitely, I think more valued than some of the AI that really at Nausium comes out. That’s just not real, right? I mean, it’s, it’s artificial. It’s artificial intelligence. So

Sara Nay (09:08.793)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (09:22.882)

Having your own spin on your own words sometimes really does help with the content that’s coming out. And I see that that’s a shift. Everyone was kind of, we’re going to use AI to replace the people, the human touch of what we’re putting out there. And I really think that you can tell somewhat now. And I mean, it’s getting really good where you can’t necessarily, and it’s trying to write in your voice. But there’s still some quirkiness about the AI.

still say it takes HI to use AI, so human intelligence. Yeah.

Sara Nay (09:54.626)

Yes, it does. I love it. Yeah. And I think that’s what I’m experiencing on LinkedIn specifically, just because I spend a lot of time there. I’m not saying it’s not having anywhere else, but like on LinkedIn, there’s just a lot of generic content being published right now. And so I’ve, you know, shifted to try to be more authentic and more human. And so I’ve shared posts recently that like I shared a post last week or so ago that was like my desk.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (10:08.15)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (10:20.705)

and it was my kids, had decorated my desk just because and that’s just, it’s getting like that human content is getting so much more traction because people are like, that feels more unique and more personal than this other post that anyone could have written.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (10:32.76)

Yep. Well, and it’s true. I mean, you can just take a look at, you know, the history of what you’ve posted. you, if we post pictures of our actual team and not just stock images or, know, if we do behind the scenes from video shoots that we’re doing, or if we, you know, show real people in action, we get so much more engagement and traction and follows than we do if it’s just a stock image or an inanimate, you know, object. And I love

Sara Nay (10:56.77)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:00.332)

Being able to showcase our people. again, it’s about the culture and showing what we’re doing and, and the volunteer activities that they’re about, or, know, showing, showing when they were little and, know, kind of what became of them and, and, know, just, fun things like that. There are so much more, I think engaging and authentic and real.

Sara Nay (11:18.702)

Yeah, I agree. And kind of a funny story on that. posted a new book coming out and I posted a JPEG of the cover and luckily it hasn’t gone to print yet, but someone pointed out that there was a typo on the cover. But her response to me was like so kind. She sent me a direct message and she was like, you know what I love about this? It shows that you’re human and you’re not just using AI for this content.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:29.561)

no!

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:37.698)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:40.875)

And so she actually was like very kind, but she like appreciated a little bit of an error because everything is feeling very polished at this point. And so I thought that was kind of funny.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:46.582)

Mm-hmm, right? Nice. Well, I’m glad that you were able to get that. I was like, there’s always something, and you’ve been so closely tied to it, you’re always gonna overlook something. There’s always gonna be something.

Sara Nay (11:54.851)

I know, I was like.

Sara Nay (12:00.683)

Yeah, always. like three people on my team looked at it, but still we missed it. yeah, I talk a lot about, because when I’m training marketing agencies, building and scaling a business and hiring team, I talk a lot about what we do for building culture. And so a lot of that is like, we do show and tell on Slack every Wednesday and we do happy Fridays and we have team meetings where it’s just kind of fun. And so I talk about all that stuff. And sometimes I get the question of,

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:04.534)

Of course. That’s how it works, of course.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:21.036)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (12:28.887)

What’s the ROI for all of that? Like you’re paying people to do these fun things. And so I’m curious, what would be your answer to a question like

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:30.83)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:36.718)

my gosh. well, first of all, if you don’t have a little bit of fun and incorporate the human aspect of living and working together all the time, and we spend more time with our work coworkers than we do with our spouses. Well, not in my case, cause I work with my spouse, but a lot of times, like, you know, if you look at how much time is spent with the people that you are, you know, with every day, it’s your coworkers. So I feel like if you are just,

Sara Nay (12:52.003)

Yeah

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (13:03.478)

robotic in what you’re doing and not engaging and not being, you know, that team player or having being a part of the culture, you’re going to make life miserable for yourself. Right. And so I feel like having time that you can naturally and be okay with spending some of that. It is an ROI in your, you know, you’re investing in your people and you’re investing in them wanting to stay, right. Can that retention. And we know that when somebody leaves a company, it takes

just twice as much or even more to replace them. And then all of the, knowledge that they’ve, that has just been left behind because they’ve left the company. So you want to do the things that are going to help retain those people. And, know, we, we spend time. We, we also do once a month. Now we do, we used to do it every week, which is a little, little, okay. I get it. You know, but now we do, so originally started out as Friday fun lunch, but then people take Fridays off. so, you know, some, some, some of us do, you know, summer Fridays off.

Sara Nay (13:55.076)

Thanks.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (14:03.176)

and have the four day work week fine. So then we moved it to Wednesdays. So then it become lunch instead of funch. So Friday, fun lunch, and then lunch. And now everybody is only, I mean, all of us are all in the office on Mondays. So now it’s munch. And so we, once a month go, we celebrate work anniversaries where I like to call workversaries or birthdays or something that we’re celebrating. And we actually came up with some things that we always go through. it’s,

Sara Nay (14:08.835)

I love it.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (14:32.334)

successes and frustrations, celebrations and appreciations, new technologies, or book or blog reports, or any, you know, anybody that’s reading a book, tell us a little bit about it or a blog or something, you know, new technology, something like that. And then a question of the day. And so we always come up with a random question, you know, what’s your favorite cereal as a kid, or what was your favorite cartoon to watch or, you know, who are you rooting for, for the Super Bowl? Right. I mean, so, so we always come up with something fun.

Sara Nay (14:50.003)

Thanks.

Sara Nay (14:58.965)

Yeah, yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:01.542)

And, we all participate and, you know, successes and frustrations. you know, if we’re in a public place, we are careful about our frustrations, but, but it’s important to acknowledge, you know, big successes, big wins all the time. And also if there is something, you know, that is frustrating people, I want to hear about it. And it’s a safe space to be able to share that if there is some sort of frustration or something that needs to be acknowledged. and then we can talk about it, but, then of course, celebrations, appreciations, and then.

Sara Nay (15:10.275)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:29.92)

The new technology book or blog reports is helpful because if people are learning about new things that are coming up or new tools or maybe a client wants to investigate a new tool or there’s a new Adobe plugin or who knows what, we’re talking about it and sharing that and it’s purposeful and intentional so that we can make sure that we cover those things. It’s a fun thing to do. The other thing that we do every year, and this is one of the questions I ask when I hire people.

Sara Nay (15:44.696)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:58.062)

is if they like to go camping or not, or if they’re a glamper or like, absolutely not. Because every year all of us with our spouses, our, you know, kids, pets, everybody, we go camping together, um, as a bit one big, huge pepper shock family. And, um, if you’re not a camper, you’re probably not going to really appreciate the culture that we’ve built. I mean, it’s not mandatory. I mean, you know, it has happened, but.

Sara Nay (16:00.72)

No.

Sara Nay (16:17.744)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (16:21.742)

Um, it’s, it’s really important to us because we love the outdoors and especially here in Idaho, we have all the seasons and it’s definitely, you know, we live here on purpose. can do work anywhere. Uh, but we purposely choose to, have, you know, Idaho is our back, you know, our back door. So, um, that’s a really important part of our culture to, to enjoy hiking and, know, those types of things. so, um, it’s, it’s fun and people look forward to it. It’s, know, what are we going to do this year? What are we, you know,

Are we gonna go rafting? Are we gonna go hiking? What are we doing? And so it’s something fun and it’s always been a part of our culture since we started and it’s definitely something that we really enjoy. So yeah, there’s definitely things we do. The other things that we do, Kristy helps, our graphic designer, we do volunteer time together and we’ve boxed food up at the food bank.

next week we’re going to go to, there’s a local place called the Idaho Botanical Garden. So we’re going to get our horticulture on and bring our favorite planting tool. And we’re going to go help the landscapers and do some fun things there, but it’s just a part of the culture. And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s otherwise paid time, but, you know, I want them to be involved in the community. want us to feel and come together as a team and doing some things that are not your typical.

Sara Nay (17:23.742)

Nice.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (17:42.89)

average workday all the time is really enriching for our people. So we want to continue to do that.

Sara Nay (17:49.492)

Yeah, that’s great. And that’s how I mean, I answered that question as well. When people ask about ROI, it’s you’re going to retain people longer, they’re going to be happier, you’re going to enjoy work more. And to me, that’s like the best kind of ROI you can get. So I think that’s great. And I love your examples, because a lot of what you shared are in person opportunities, because you work in person where I run a virtual company. And so we’re trying to do some of that stuff virtually, which is really interesting as well.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:00.364)

Absolutely.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:08.174)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (18:13.482)

And so we do things like I mentioned, like the show and tell on Slack, that’s just like such a small thing. And all we do is we ask a random question every single Wednesday at a scheduled time. And then people answer the question. But when you’re remote, you don’t get time to, know, what’s your favorite movie? What’d you do this weekend? What’d you, know, you don’t have time for like all of those things. And so that question, then, you know, someone might ask, what’s your favorite movie? And then like three people are like, my gosh, that’s my favorite movie. I can recite every line. And now they have this like bond that they wouldn’t have had.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:26.338)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:40.814)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (18:42.05)

just through work meetings and going through the motions. Cool.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:44.526)

Yeah, I know during pandemic, we definitely all worked remote and I even had a couple of people move out of state to go live out their homes and with their families. And I can relate to trying to keep the company culture alive through zoom. And, you know, there’s different things that, that we, we did. we, we played, pandemic reindeer games, came up with some fun things for them to do some trivia things and things like that, but.

Sara Nay (19:08.034)

Ha

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:13.282)

Yeah, I mean, it’s important to keep your team together even if they’re not in the same room or same building. Yeah, for sure.

Sara Nay (19:18.208)

Yeah, those pandemic times were weird times, weren’t they? Well, we talked a about a lot of great stuff today when it relates to culture and branding. If anyone’s just kind of feeling stuck on this topic, how they actually create a culture and how they tie it to their branding, are there any final thoughts or any action items you would share with them?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:22.056)

Yeah

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:39.086)

Yeah, absolutely. I think the important thing to remember is that culture is gonna be there whether you help guide it or not. The culture can be what you wanna mold it and grow it into or it’s going to become something that you have no control over if you don’t participate in the culture that you want your company to have. And so I think if you can identify

that there might be some needs in the areas of bridging the gaps between the different departments that come together and how they can work together to help build the culture that you want between HR and marketing and ops and all of the different areas that you have in a company. How can you make it to where everyone is singing from the same sheet of music and it’s all in tune, right? You all have the same goals in mind together that they build together.

just recognizing that there is a need for that and it’s an ongoing thing. It’s not an overnight like, well I did a company picnic. I’m good for a while. No, no, Yeah. You’ve got to continuously build it, continuously grow it, and do things to continue to, to have your employees engaged. And I always say, if you’ve got happy campers.

Sara Nay (20:43.167)

Check that box.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (20:57.846)

Right? You’re going to have happy customers. so keep your campers happy. And you know, at Culture and Brand Camp, that’s one thing we focus on is happy campers then creates happy customers.

Sara Nay (20:58.023)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Sara Nay (21:09.525)

I love it. Well, thank you for sharing all your insights. Lots of good stuff in this episode. If people want to continue to learn from you, where can they connect with you online?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (21:18.408)

so couple of different places. of course, the marketing expedition podcast is free to listen to on pretty much every podcast platform. And then, which is powered by pepper shock media, our company, and, you can visit pepper shock.com and we’re on all the social platforms, LinkedIn, all of that. So, you can find me in Ray is R H E a Alan a L L E N. So Ray Allen.

And I would look forward to chatting with anybody that would like to talk about their company culture and branding.

Sara Nay (21:51.073)

Thank you so much Ray for being here and thank you everyone for listening to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Again, this is your host, Sarenée, and we will see you next time.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (22:00.792)

Thank you.

Sara Nay (00:01.635)

Welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is your host, Sarah Nay. And today I’m stepping in for John Jantsch and I am joined by Rhea Allen. So Rhea Allen is the president and CEO of Pepper Shock Media, host of the Marketing Edition Podcast and a business owner who knows what it’s like to build a brand from the ground up. So welcome to the show, Ray. I’m glad you’re here.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (00:23.064)

Well thank you so much for having me, Sarah. This is exciting.

Sara Nay (00:26.145)

I know and fun backstory, right? And I met online through a different group and actually figured out that we’re both in Idaho about 25 minutes away from each other. And I haven’t met a ton of business owners online from Idaho. So it was really exciting to connect with you, right?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (00:42.03)

We had to go global to come local, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (00:45.015)

Exactly. Exactly. Well, let’s dive on in. We’re going to focus on the topic really of branding and culture today, because that’s one of your specialties as I know. And so I’ve heard you say before, culture and brand go hand in hand. And so can you break down what does that mean exactly to small business owners?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (01:04.268)

Well, what I always try to emphasize most is that your culture starts with your brand from the inside out. And sometimes culture can’t necessarily be controllable. It’s what it is, the experience that both your employees and the people who come to you for that experience of what you serve and in an agency setting, culture is so important because it is our brand. It’s who we are and how we represent what we do.

And when we work with other companies that want to understand how they can continue to build and grow their culture in a positive way, in the way that they would like to see their brand exuded into the world, whether it’s recruiting new employees or new customers, and retention is always a huge part of it. So that’s why I say culture and branding go hand in hand together for sure.

Sara Nay (01:55.718)

Yeah, and it’s great. I love that thought process. And what I’ve been doing for years at Duct Tape Marketing is whenever we hire someone new for a role within our company, we always start with the job description and we lead with here’s our mission, here’s our vision, here’s our values. And so I want someone to read through all of that first on the job description. Then I’ll get to here’s the role and the tasks and all the other details because

I want someone to be aligned culturally, like that to me is one of the most important things because as you said, it helps people stick around for a long time and also represent our brand in the way we want to be represented. And then, you know, when we’re going through the interview process, our first interview is always based on values. And so one of the things we’re always trying to hire for is growth minded people because in the marketing space, it’s always continuing and evolving.

And so I’m asking questions to identify if they’re growth minded and then asking them skills specific questions. So that’s just one of the ways that we’ve leaned into making culture and hiring aligned with our brand long term.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (02:58.446)

Absolutely, and we do a variety of things, but one of the things that we set up is we call it culture and brand camp. So this one time at brand camp, we go through a process and it really is about aligning the HR roles and the marketing roles together so that they’re not siloed and they’re working together to create the culture and brand that they really want to be.

Sara Nay (03:06.276)

nice.

I love it.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (03:26.688)

known for and have that experience that they want people to walk away from and, feel the feelings that you want when you’re in that process and going through that process. So, we go through culture and brand camp and, do a number of exercises to work together, to understand both internal and external messaging. And when everyone’s singing from the same sheet of music and saying similar terminology and, able to articulate that in a way that is, is.

Sara Nay (03:45.962)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (03:55.636)

mindful of how they all can own it and have ownership in their, their own branding and how other people are going to perceive them because of the way that they have been able to articulate it and what experiences they want to have. and so going through that process and doing some team building exercises and some branding exercises and, bringing the two sort of areas that are sometimes really siloed in companies and they don’t always come together and work together.

but then when we bring them together and they are in that mode of like, we, we are in control of our own culture and we are in control of our brand that we have out there. So, it’s a, it’s a fun exercise to go through and do that with companies to, to, have them walk through those processes together and have that experience of their own together as well.

Sara Nay (04:31.906)

Yeah, I love that. And I think that gets, I’m assuming it gets buy-in from the whole team and support behind the whole team. One of the things that we did fairly recently is we used to have values that John and I are, our founder identified as like our core values.

and we kind of made those up on our own and then we would like tell the team about them. We’re like, that doesn’t feel right. And so we did a session as a team where we had everyone identify like what they wanted the values to be. And we then collaborated and crafted our core values together. And to me, that was so much more of a rewarding but also buy-in experience for the team because they were part of the process versus being here’s our values, go live by these ultimately. Yeah, go do this.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (05:24.888)

Yeah. Now go do this. Yeah. And whenever you can include the team into that decision making process, they have so much more ownership in it. And to take it even a step further, having them tell stories around those values that you’ve selected and where maybe there’s a, an example of something that occurred because of that value. And then having them tell you about a time when, now give me, give me an example of one of the values that you and your team came up with Sarah.

Sara Nay (05:48.59)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (05:53.093)

Well, one of them is growth minded, like always being leaders and innovators and ahead of the game. So it’s that whole idea of just like growth and always learning and evolving.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (06:02.35)

So one of the activities that you can do just as an icebreaker to get people in the mode, um, anyone who cares to share, tell me about a time where this value came through. What was the occurrence? What happened that you had this growth minded mentality or somebody else can share about somebody else on the team. And now storytelling becomes this a part of the culture, right? We know back in ancient history that storytelling was.

how culture was being able to get passed along to generation to generation. have the hieroglyphs on the walls that were drawn. so storytelling is such a huge part of culture, no matter what kind of culture we’re talking about, whether it’s company culture or if it’s your indigenous people and the culture, the stories that are being told is the way that that continues to happen. And it’s really great for new people coming in to hear those stories when something has happened.

Sara Nay (06:55.14)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (06:57.71)

And, you can exemplify it and also makes people feel really good when they have an opportunity to share about others and in circumstance that occurred, that can help continue those stories.

Sara Nay (07:09.218)

Yeah, I love it. And so a lot of what you’re talking about there is like storytelling as a team, as a culture. Do you take any of that storytelling and bring it, you know, as a marketing or a branding initiative as well?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (07:19.95)

Absolutely. And where it really can shine through is when you now involve your customers and they have testimonials and you can have them share a story about the circumstances or experiences that they’ve had with people that they’ve interacted with on your team. So we know it’s all about the people sometimes more than anything else, the people that work with you. And, and so when you can bring that full circle and then you have stories that you can tell of, of the values that also shown through with your

your customers, your clients, then it really does start from the inside out.

Sara Nay (07:54.819)

Yeah, I love it. A lot of what’s happening in the marketing space specifically right now is a lot of people are putting out a lot of content at scale because of the evolution of AI. And so one of the things that I’m seeing growing and importance is storytelling and being more human, but also being authentic and maybe even making some mistakes in the stuff you’re putting out there because it just feels everything feels so polished right now. So can you touch on

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:04.44)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:15.758)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (08:24.746)

Do you see storytelling and authenticity growing in importance these days as well?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:29.548)

Absolutely. In fact, I just did a panel discussion, and actually it was HR, the HR, sorry, public relations and then, advertising coming together. So mine was all about personal branding and, I created an acronym of keeping it real. so real, obviously, you know, being authentic and having that realness about you. Right. And then, being able to.

Sara Nay (08:48.494)

Nice.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (08:57.086)

extend that to others and have and share that consistently. And then of course, authenticity and then leveraging your network to be able to share that with others and showing up and keeping it real. yeah, authenticity is definitely, I think more valued than some of the AI that really at Nausium comes out. That’s just not real, right? I mean, it’s, it’s artificial. It’s artificial intelligence. So

Sara Nay (09:08.793)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (09:22.882)

Having your own spin on your own words sometimes really does help with the content that’s coming out. And I see that that’s a shift. Everyone was kind of, we’re going to use AI to replace the people, the human touch of what we’re putting out there. And I really think that you can tell somewhat now. And I mean, it’s getting really good where you can’t necessarily, and it’s trying to write in your voice. But there’s still some quirkiness about the AI.

still say it takes HI to use AI, so human intelligence. Yeah.

Sara Nay (09:54.626)

Yes, it does. I love it. Yeah. And I think that’s what I’m experiencing on LinkedIn specifically, just because I spend a lot of time there. I’m not saying it’s not having anywhere else, but like on LinkedIn, there’s just a lot of generic content being published right now. And so I’ve, you know, shifted to try to be more authentic and more human. And so I’ve shared posts recently that like I shared a post last week or so ago that was like my desk.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (10:08.15)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (10:20.705)

and it was my kids, had decorated my desk just because and that’s just, it’s getting like that human content is getting so much more traction because people are like, that feels more unique and more personal than this other post that anyone could have written.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (10:32.76)

Yep. Well, and it’s true. I mean, you can just take a look at, you know, the history of what you’ve posted. you, if we post pictures of our actual team and not just stock images or, know, if we do behind the scenes from video shoots that we’re doing, or if we, you know, show real people in action, we get so much more engagement and traction and follows than we do if it’s just a stock image or an inanimate, you know, object. And I love

Sara Nay (10:56.77)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:00.332)

Being able to showcase our people. again, it’s about the culture and showing what we’re doing and, and the volunteer activities that they’re about, or, know, showing, showing when they were little and, know, kind of what became of them and, and, know, just, fun things like that. There are so much more, I think engaging and authentic and real.

Sara Nay (11:18.702)

Yeah, I agree. And kind of a funny story on that. posted a new book coming out and I posted a JPEG of the cover and luckily it hasn’t gone to print yet, but someone pointed out that there was a typo on the cover. But her response to me was like so kind. She sent me a direct message and she was like, you know what I love about this? It shows that you’re human and you’re not just using AI for this content.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:29.561)

no!

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:37.698)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (11:40.875)

And so she actually was like very kind, but she like appreciated a little bit of an error because everything is feeling very polished at this point. And so I thought that was kind of funny.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (11:46.582)

Mm-hmm, right? Nice. Well, I’m glad that you were able to get that. I was like, there’s always something, and you’ve been so closely tied to it, you’re always gonna overlook something. There’s always gonna be something.

Sara Nay (11:54.851)

I know, I was like.

Sara Nay (12:00.683)

Yeah, always. like three people on my team looked at it, but still we missed it. yeah, I talk a lot about, because when I’m training marketing agencies, building and scaling a business and hiring team, I talk a lot about what we do for building culture. And so a lot of that is like, we do show and tell on Slack every Wednesday and we do happy Fridays and we have team meetings where it’s just kind of fun. And so I talk about all that stuff. And sometimes I get the question of,

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:04.534)

Of course. That’s how it works, of course.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:21.036)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (12:28.887)

What’s the ROI for all of that? Like you’re paying people to do these fun things. And so I’m curious, what would be your answer to a question like

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:30.83)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (12:36.718)

my gosh. well, first of all, if you don’t have a little bit of fun and incorporate the human aspect of living and working together all the time, and we spend more time with our work coworkers than we do with our spouses. Well, not in my case, cause I work with my spouse, but a lot of times, like, you know, if you look at how much time is spent with the people that you are, you know, with every day, it’s your coworkers. So I feel like if you are just,

Sara Nay (12:52.003)

Yeah

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (13:03.478)

robotic in what you’re doing and not engaging and not being, you know, that team player or having being a part of the culture, you’re going to make life miserable for yourself. Right. And so I feel like having time that you can naturally and be okay with spending some of that. It is an ROI in your, you know, you’re investing in your people and you’re investing in them wanting to stay, right. Can that retention. And we know that when somebody leaves a company, it takes

just twice as much or even more to replace them. And then all of the, knowledge that they’ve, that has just been left behind because they’ve left the company. So you want to do the things that are going to help retain those people. And, know, we, we spend time. We, we also do once a month. Now we do, we used to do it every week, which is a little, little, okay. I get it. You know, but now we do, so originally started out as Friday fun lunch, but then people take Fridays off. so, you know, some, some, some of us do, you know, summer Fridays off.

Sara Nay (13:55.076)

Thanks.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (14:03.176)

and have the four day work week fine. So then we moved it to Wednesdays. So then it become lunch instead of funch. So Friday, fun lunch, and then lunch. And now everybody is only, I mean, all of us are all in the office on Mondays. So now it’s munch. And so we, once a month go, we celebrate work anniversaries where I like to call workversaries or birthdays or something that we’re celebrating. And we actually came up with some things that we always go through. it’s,

Sara Nay (14:08.835)

I love it.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (14:32.334)

successes and frustrations, celebrations and appreciations, new technologies, or book or blog reports, or any, you know, anybody that’s reading a book, tell us a little bit about it or a blog or something, you know, new technology, something like that. And then a question of the day. And so we always come up with a random question, you know, what’s your favorite cereal as a kid, or what was your favorite cartoon to watch or, you know, who are you rooting for, for the Super Bowl? Right. I mean, so, so we always come up with something fun.

Sara Nay (14:50.003)

Thanks.

Sara Nay (14:58.965)

Yeah, yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:01.542)

And, we all participate and, you know, successes and frustrations. you know, if we’re in a public place, we are careful about our frustrations, but, but it’s important to acknowledge, you know, big successes, big wins all the time. And also if there is something, you know, that is frustrating people, I want to hear about it. And it’s a safe space to be able to share that if there is some sort of frustration or something that needs to be acknowledged. and then we can talk about it, but, then of course, celebrations, appreciations, and then.

Sara Nay (15:10.275)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:29.92)

The new technology book or blog reports is helpful because if people are learning about new things that are coming up or new tools or maybe a client wants to investigate a new tool or there’s a new Adobe plugin or who knows what, we’re talking about it and sharing that and it’s purposeful and intentional so that we can make sure that we cover those things. It’s a fun thing to do. The other thing that we do every year, and this is one of the questions I ask when I hire people.

Sara Nay (15:44.696)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (15:58.062)

is if they like to go camping or not, or if they’re a glamper or like, absolutely not. Because every year all of us with our spouses, our, you know, kids, pets, everybody, we go camping together, um, as a bit one big, huge pepper shock family. And, um, if you’re not a camper, you’re probably not going to really appreciate the culture that we’ve built. I mean, it’s not mandatory. I mean, you know, it has happened, but.

Sara Nay (16:00.72)

No.

Sara Nay (16:17.744)

Yeah.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (16:21.742)

Um, it’s, it’s really important to us because we love the outdoors and especially here in Idaho, we have all the seasons and it’s definitely, you know, we live here on purpose. can do work anywhere. Uh, but we purposely choose to, have, you know, Idaho is our back, you know, our back door. So, um, that’s a really important part of our culture to, to enjoy hiking and, know, those types of things. so, um, it’s, it’s fun and people look forward to it. It’s, know, what are we going to do this year? What are we, you know,

Are we gonna go rafting? Are we gonna go hiking? What are we doing? And so it’s something fun and it’s always been a part of our culture since we started and it’s definitely something that we really enjoy. So yeah, there’s definitely things we do. The other things that we do, Kristy helps, our graphic designer, we do volunteer time together and we’ve boxed food up at the food bank.

next week we’re going to go to, there’s a local place called the Idaho Botanical Garden. So we’re going to get our horticulture on and bring our favorite planting tool. And we’re going to go help the landscapers and do some fun things there, but it’s just a part of the culture. And yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s otherwise paid time, but, you know, I want them to be involved in the community. want us to feel and come together as a team and doing some things that are not your typical.

Sara Nay (17:23.742)

Nice.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (17:42.89)

average workday all the time is really enriching for our people. So we want to continue to do that.

Sara Nay (17:49.492)

Yeah, that’s great. And that’s how I mean, I answered that question as well. When people ask about ROI, it’s you’re going to retain people longer, they’re going to be happier, you’re going to enjoy work more. And to me, that’s like the best kind of ROI you can get. So I think that’s great. And I love your examples, because a lot of what you shared are in person opportunities, because you work in person where I run a virtual company. And so we’re trying to do some of that stuff virtually, which is really interesting as well.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:00.364)

Absolutely.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:08.174)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (18:13.482)

And so we do things like I mentioned, like the show and tell on Slack, that’s just like such a small thing. And all we do is we ask a random question every single Wednesday at a scheduled time. And then people answer the question. But when you’re remote, you don’t get time to, know, what’s your favorite movie? What’d you do this weekend? What’d you, know, you don’t have time for like all of those things. And so that question, then, you know, someone might ask, what’s your favorite movie? And then like three people are like, my gosh, that’s my favorite movie. I can recite every line. And now they have this like bond that they wouldn’t have had.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:26.338)

Mm-hmm.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:40.814)

Mm-hmm.

Sara Nay (18:42.05)

just through work meetings and going through the motions. Cool.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (18:44.526)

Yeah, I know during pandemic, we definitely all worked remote and I even had a couple of people move out of state to go live out their homes and with their families. And I can relate to trying to keep the company culture alive through zoom. And, you know, there’s different things that, that we, we did. we, we played, pandemic reindeer games, came up with some fun things for them to do some trivia things and things like that, but.

Sara Nay (19:08.034)

Ha

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:13.282)

Yeah, I mean, it’s important to keep your team together even if they’re not in the same room or same building. Yeah, for sure.

Sara Nay (19:18.208)

Yeah, those pandemic times were weird times, weren’t they? Well, we talked a about a lot of great stuff today when it relates to culture and branding. If anyone’s just kind of feeling stuck on this topic, how they actually create a culture and how they tie it to their branding, are there any final thoughts or any action items you would share with them?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:22.056)

Yeah

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (19:39.086)

Yeah, absolutely. I think the important thing to remember is that culture is gonna be there whether you help guide it or not. The culture can be what you wanna mold it and grow it into or it’s going to become something that you have no control over if you don’t participate in the culture that you want your company to have. And so I think if you can identify

that there might be some needs in the areas of bridging the gaps between the different departments that come together and how they can work together to help build the culture that you want between HR and marketing and ops and all of the different areas that you have in a company. How can you make it to where everyone is singing from the same sheet of music and it’s all in tune, right? You all have the same goals in mind together that they build together.

just recognizing that there is a need for that and it’s an ongoing thing. It’s not an overnight like, well I did a company picnic. I’m good for a while. No, no, Yeah. You’ve got to continuously build it, continuously grow it, and do things to continue to, to have your employees engaged. And I always say, if you’ve got happy campers.

Sara Nay (20:43.167)

Check that box.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (20:57.846)

Right? You’re going to have happy customers. so keep your campers happy. And you know, at Culture and Brand Camp, that’s one thing we focus on is happy campers then creates happy customers.

Sara Nay (20:58.023)

Mm-hmm. Yes.

Sara Nay (21:09.525)

I love it. Well, thank you for sharing all your insights. Lots of good stuff in this episode. If people want to continue to learn from you, where can they connect with you online?

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (21:18.408)

so couple of different places. of course, the marketing expedition podcast is free to listen to on pretty much every podcast platform. And then, which is powered by pepper shock media, our company, and, you can visit pepper shock.com and we’re on all the social platforms, LinkedIn, all of that. So, you can find me in Ray is R H E a Alan a L L E N. So Ray Allen.

And I would look forward to chatting with anybody that would like to talk about their company culture and branding.

Sara Nay (21:51.073)

Thank you so much Ray for being here and thank you everyone for listening to the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Again, this is your host, Sarenée, and we will see you next time.

Rhea (“Ray”) Allen (22:00.792)

Thank you.

John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sara Nay. Sara is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she spent over 15 years helping small businesses build strategy-first marketing systems that actually work. Now being my daughter, Sarah has lived the small business reality from every angle as a teenager, as a team member, as a fractional CMO, and now as the CEO. In her new book,

Unchained, she makes the case that traditional agency model is broken, both for the clients and agencies and lays out a practical AI enabled strategy first approach she calls the anti-agency model. We’re going to touch on that. Permission helps small business owners stop renting their marketing and start owning it. Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models. So Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sara Nay (00:53.858)

Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (00:55.778)

So you and I have been talking about marketing models for a long time. Was there a time when you kind of said, you know what, the agency model is broken and I got to create something different?

Sara Nay (01:06.455)

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been part of the agency space for about 15 years. And in that journey, I’ve moved from intern to community manager, account manager, fractional CMO for our clients among other roles. And so I’ve really been in all the different areas of the agency space. And throughout that journey, there’s definitely been times where I’ve noticed things that didn’t quite feel right in the agency space. And even further than that,

there have been several moments over the last 15 years where I’ve been burnt out and on the brink of saying, does this make sense to pursue even more, even further? And so I’ve lived a lot of challenges along the way and there’s no secret in the challenges I’ve seen. think a lot of people experience this in the agency space. And so starting on that side, on the agency side of things, there’s challenges with meeting client demands and managing scope creep and scaling and maintaining profitability and

retaining great talent and those are a lot of the things that I’ve heard from other agency owners struggling with, but I’ve also experienced it myself. Also in my roles, I’ve been on in the sales side of our business for a while now. So I’ve spoken with hundreds of small business owners who have worked with different agencies or outsourced solutions over those years. And I have heard all of their stories of

things along the lines of marketing doesn’t work or I’m paying this agency for X and I have no idea if I’m getting results or if anything’s happening with my marketing efforts. And so there’s been a lot of this going on for years in the agency space. But I think it’s becoming more more heightened now with the evolution of AI.

John Jantsch (02:49.518)

So you actually use the term anti-agency model. Now know you’re not an agency hater. so, so what makes this anti or, and not just a better agency.

Sara Nay (03:02.379)

Yeah. So the whole play with the anti-agency model, as you identified, like obviously we’re not anti-agency. We’re an agency ourselves. We have been for 31 years. We love agencies. And so I do keep, I keep explaining that because I don’t want people to think this book is against agencies, but what it’s with the anti-agency, what it’s saying is the model is broken essentially for some of the points that I had highlighted just a second ago. So it’s anti-agency model specifically.

And so the way we have been doing and functioning for years as agencies were being forced in some ways to evolve because of the evolution of AI. so previously to AI, it made sense for agencies to hold onto things like marketing, execution, content, social, SEO, paid ads, all of the execution elements. But with the evolution of AI, I believe small businesses are able to take some of that stuff in-house.

They still need strategic leadership and direction, but they now have an opportunity to stay a little bit more lean with their in-house marketing team by layering in AI systems below them to help with the heavy lifting of execution. And so that’s the whole idea of stop renting your marketing and taking back ownership of your marketing. You still need strategy. You still need direction. You still need leadership.

But now you can build a marketing department or team that is a bit leaner because they’re overseeing orchestration of marketing, which is done by AI systems.

John Jantsch (04:39.086)

So one of the things you and I talk about a lot, cause I say it all the time is I, you know, I’ve been doing this 30 years and while a lot of new shiny things have come along, the fundamentals of marketing have not really changed or what we’re here to do as marketers has not really changed that much. What timeless principles do you think from, our system? As you know, it’s still worked today.

Sara Nay (04:59.085)

Yeah. And so that’s the second really section of the book we get into the timeless after the intro and all of that, we get into the timeless principles. And so some of the things that I touch on there are things like target market, identifying your clients on a very deep level. I think that’s becoming even more and more important with the evolution of AI, because what I see is a lot of small businesses bringing in something like a chat, GBT or a clod or whatever their tool of choices. And they’ll start just like,

creating content and so it’s all over the place. It’s not consistent. It’s not on on brand. And so in your original book duct tape marketing, you talked a lot about identifying your ideal client on a deep level, understanding them emotionally, what keeps them up at night, what drives them. And so with the evolution of AI, you still need to understand your clients on a very deep level. But then if you’re going to bring in an AI tool, you then need to train the chat, you’d be to your tool of your choice that you bring in.

on that information. So when you’re creating content moving forward, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal client on a deep level and isn’t just generic. Another timeless foundational principle is core messaging. We talk a lot about that over the years. So identifying your core message or we’ve talked a lot about talking logo as well. And so that’s really identifying what makes you unique, but also what messaging resonates with that ideal client.

That is still incredibly important today, but it’s also important to take that messaging and train your AI tools of choice on that messaging as well. So again, you’re not creating generic content, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal clients with the messaging you’ve identified is really important. And so those foundations are still the same, but the way we’re using them is evolving a bit because of the technology that’s now available.

John Jantsch (06:48.733)

So, you know, we’ve, we’re all seeing people run into AI and just like, look what it can do, makes life faster, better, cheaper. Um, where do you think the danger of this, that like eyes wide open, you know, jump in and start using the tools? What do you think the danger of that is for many small businesses?

Sara Nay (07:07.987)

It complicates things that causes confusion. causes inconsistency. It causes noise. It amplifies the chaos that’s already there. It causes so many issues for the internal team or the team using the program, but also for the clients and prospects that you’re putting out content to as well. And so it’s causing confusion in both of those areas. And so a lot of what I encourage small businesses to do is take a step back.

John Jantsch (07:12.916)

amplifies the chaos that’s already there, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:33.767)

And if you’ve been following duct tape marketing for any period of time, you’ve heard us say strategy before tactics. But it’s now strategy before tactics and technology is the conversation we’re having with clients. And so if you’re thinking about, okay, we need to be using AI tools instead of just diving into tools first, take a step back and answer some very important questions as to what’s the business actually trying to accomplish? What’s the marketing strategy look like based on that?

What’s the team strategy or what’s our current team structure look like? And then you can say, okay, what tools can help us accomplish our goals? And then once you identify what the tools are, you then need to train the tools on your strategy that you would have created to then get to the point where you’re ready to execute on them efficiently. So don’t dive into tools, take a step back, create the strategy, and then answer the question of what tools are gonna help us get from where we are today to where we’re trying to go.

John Jantsch (08:30.936)

So, you know, the fractional CMO plus concept is a big part of our model. what do you tell that small business owner that’s got kind of a smaller budget and it’s thinking, I really just need somebody to do stuff rather than like, you know, I can’t really afford or I, or maybe I’m not big enough to even think about the idea of having fractional leadership. What do you say to that business as to why they need to maybe change their mindset?

Sara Nay (08:55.403)

Yeah, I mean, think, again, I keep going back to AI, but it’s causing small business owners or small businesses an opportunity that we haven’t had before. so, you previously, let’s think of traditional marketing org chart. You would have a CMO in a company and then you would have a lot of different executors under them, essentially. So you’d have like a paid specialist, an email marketing specialist, a social, you know, all of the different channels and categories. That’s never really been feasible to small businesses because

they wouldn’t even have a budget for a CMO, let alone all the other people that are involved in that story. And so I think the best opportunity that small businesses have is right now in terms of the org chart, because you can bring in a fractional CMO. So you’re not paying a full-time salary. You’re paying a set fee every single month. That fractional CMO is then tasked with creating the overall strategy, managing the budget, owning the metrics.

overseeing all of the marketing department essentially. And then under that fractional CMO, believe instead of, I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but the direction I believe we’re going is instead of having a specialist in all the different channels, small businesses can have marketing executors that are familiar enough in writing great copy and understanding social media, but they’re really systems oriented and technology first people.

where you can bring in AI systems below them to help them execute at a higher level than they’ve ever been before. And so now you’re getting a marketing org chart with all of these different roles that you previously probably couldn’t even think about affording as a small business.

John Jantsch (10:35.832)

So going back to the theme of renting, mean, the opposite of renting is owning. and so to a large degree, you know, what you’re describing there is kind of that path towards owning your, your marketing, you know, as a business, as opposed to maybe it wasn’t even renting. was abdicating like going here, you do it. I don’t care what you’re doing over there, but how does that change the business owners mindset in terms of.

Sara Nay (10:54.124)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.262)

people in terms of structure, in terms of process, if they’re actually, you know, now they’re going to have those people in their organization or they’re going to have those functions in their organization. Who manages that? How do they hire for that? Are they, are they bringing in more overhead that makes sense for their business if they’re going to start thinking that way, or is this the ultimate path to, truly scaling a business?

Sara Nay (11:16.557)

It obviously depends on the business situation, revenue size, long-term growth goals. And so there’s a lot of factors that I would need to consider to answer that specifically. But for me, if you’re a small business and you’re looking to scale up,

when you’re doing a certain level of revenue, you’ve been in business for a few years, let’s say you’ve passed the 1 million revenue mark, I think it’s time to start considering you need marketing leadership of some extent. And so when small businesses scale up to a certain point, if they haven’t looked for marketing leadership, the CEO becomes the CMO and they either have marketing experience or they learn marketing. And now it’s this necessary evil that

they’re having to spend a lot of their time on where they never wanted to become a CMO in the first place. And so if you’re scaling up and you have high growth goals, looking for someone like a fractional CMO, I think makes a lot of sense because the whole idea is as the CEO or founder, you stay in your zone of genius. You stay focused on the why behind you building the business in the first place. then you… In selling, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:34.798)

or in selling, you know, stuff that actually is going to make money for the business rather than you having to figure out how to manage the technology.

Sara Nay (12:46.121)

Exactly. And then you bring in a fractional CMO or a marketing leader of some extent that then is tasked with what you identified earlier in terms of managing team, bringing in partners or hiring full-time team, running the technology, building the systems and processes, running the budget and the metrics. so the fractional CMO is really tasked with leading the marketing department and working alongside you to help you reach the specific business goals that you would have laid out.

John Jantsch (13:15.566)

You know, if somebody, whoever you’re working with is going to bring you strategy first, you know, as the first step, it doesn’t really matter what you call that person, right? What their role is, right? I mean, it’s really more the idea of thinking strategy first, isn’t

Sara Nay (13:21.901)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:31.137)

Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ll throw out all different terms. I mean, we talk a lot about fractional CMO, but if that feels like too elevated of a term, know, marketing leader, marketing strategist, marketing advisor, you know, the point is what they’re doing. They’re, leading the marketing initiatives and not just being an order taker.

John Jantsch (13:51.672)

So let’s flip to agencies that are listening, because I know we have agencies listening as well. How do they have to shift their mindset to really stay relevant? mean, I think in some agency, you look at some of these agencies that are providing SEO and content and social media, that’s their package, right, of done for you services. There might be a time in the very near future where that’s just not that relevant.

Sara Nay (14:19.372)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:19.423)

or people aren’t going to be willing to pay what you need to run a profitable business. So how do agencies need to shift their mindset?

Sara Nay (14:26.705)

Yeah, and there’s been a lot of stuff coming out there that I’ve seen on LinkedIn and different articles about how many agencies are going to shut down in the next few years. I think a lot of that stuff’s hard to predict, but I do think if you just keep offering execution, it’s a race to the bottom in a lot of cases because small businesses, even if they’re not doing it that effectively yet, they are bringing in AI solutions to cut costs in certain areas. And I think that marketing execution is one of those.

areas. And so, you know, I think if agencies keep offering execution as their core services, it’s going to be very challenging in the next few years moving forward, because AI is becoming more sophisticated. So you’re basically competing against AI in that scenario versus if agencies shift their offering and they step more into this leadership role, where they’re, you know, focusing on strategy.

they’re elevating team, it can be their own team or it can be internal team, but they’re elevating humans essentially with AI systems below them. Then they’re working alongside AI versus competing against it.

John Jantsch (15:35.64)

So if I’m a small business owner listening and.

Obviously picking up and reading the book is going to be step one. But what are a couple steps towards taking this ownership mentality that somebody could start this week? If you’re stuck in the old kind of way of thinking, here are a couple things you can do this week to start changing your mindset or maybe even changing your marketing.

Sara Nay (16:06.165)

Yeah, of course. There’s two things that come to mind right off the bat. One of the first things, and I talk about this in the book as well, is the marketing strategy pyramid. We talk a lot about it at Duck Tape Marketing, but it’s really taking a step back and answering some business strategic questions first. So really analyzing what are your business goals? What are your objectives? What’s your revenue? Where are you growing towards? What are your mission, vision, values? And so really analyzing some of those things.

And then thinking through what is your marketing strategy to help you move in the right direction. And then thinking through what is your team strategy. So you have to have those two bottom layers of the pyramid first to then think about team. But, know, to the question of how can businesses take back ownership when you’re analyzing your team structure, think through like, these internal roles? Are we relying on outsourced vendors? If we’re relying on outside outsourced vendors or solutions.

Do we have clarity and confidence and control or ownership as to what they are doing or are we kind of left in the dark? I if you’re left in the dark through some of your partnerships, that’s when it’s time to analyze, does it make sense to continue on with this partnership or is there a way where we can get more ownership and control? So that’s where I would start is kind of going back to the basics there and analyzing your current structure, your current relationships, your current team.

and making sure that you have clarity in what everyone is doing.

John Jantsch (17:35.672)

So I’m going to go a little in the weeds here on AI, mainly because it’s on everybody’s mind right now. There are a lot of some of these agencies that we’re talking about are shifting their whole model to being calling themselves AI agencies, where they want to come in and show you how to put in agents and how to automated this and automated that. How do you think small businesses should be looking at?

Sara Nay (17:51.703)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:02.806)

I mean, I don’t think we have to convince them that it’s not going away, but how do you think they should be looking at getting the most out of AI as really the end to end solution or the end to end assistant at this point that it can be rather than just looking at it as, here’s how I can automate stuff and or worse yet, here’s how I can fire people and do more with less.

Sara Nay (18:08.909)

Yeah, a big part of that I think is doing an analysis of who’s currently on your team and you’re not asking the question.

How can we get more work out of them or how can we get them to move faster or be more productive? What you’re answering is how can we elevate them to make more of an impact? And so one of the exercises that we’ve done with our team fairly recently, and this is also in the book as well, is we had everyone on our team analyze what skills are they doing on a regular basis. And then we basically had them identify what are human-led skills that they should continue to focus on, things that light them up, that they love.

And then we also had them identify what skills can be AI assisted and what skills and tasks could be executed by AI. And so we went through that exercise so people could essentially analyze their roles and think about how they could future proof their careers moving forward. And so I think that’s a really great exercise for anyone listening as a business leader or for your whole entire team is you should all be thinking about how can we future proof the business as a whole.

And that’s a lot of what you and I talk about when we talk about shifting our model in a new direction. But you also need to be considering everyone on your team. How can you help them elevate with AI instead of be replaced by it? And then how can you help them continue to grow and focus on the skills that are becoming more important because of the evolution of AI?

John Jantsch (19:54.414)

talking with Sarah Ney, the author of Unchained. Sarah, I appreciate you spending a few moments to talk about Unchained. Is there a place that you’d invite people to go to find out more about the work you do, of course, but then also the new book?

Sara Nay (20:08.269)

Absolutely, so unchainedmodel.com is the book’s website, so love for you to check that out and also connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Sarah Ney.

John Jantsch (20:18.23)

Awesome, well again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the

Sara Nay (20:24.589)

Thank you.

John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sara Nay. Sara is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she spent over 15 years helping small businesses build strategy-first marketing systems that actually work. Now being my daughter, Sarah has lived the small business reality from every angle as a teenager, as a team member, as a fractional CMO, and now as the CEO. In her new book,

Unchained, she makes the case that traditional agency model is broken, both for the clients and agencies and lays out a practical AI enabled strategy first approach she calls the anti-agency model. We’re going to touch on that. Permission helps small business owners stop renting their marketing and start owning it. Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models. So Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sara Nay (00:53.858)

Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (00:55.778)

So you and I have been talking about marketing models for a long time. Was there a time when you kind of said, you know what, the agency model is broken and I got to create something different?

Sara Nay (01:06.455)

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been part of the agency space for about 15 years. And in that journey, I’ve moved from intern to community manager, account manager, fractional CMO for our clients among other roles. And so I’ve really been in all the different areas of the agency space. And throughout that journey, there’s definitely been times where I’ve noticed things that didn’t quite feel right in the agency space. And even further than that,

there have been several moments over the last 15 years where I’ve been burnt out and on the brink of saying, does this make sense to pursue even more, even further? And so I’ve lived a lot of challenges along the way and there’s no secret in the challenges I’ve seen. think a lot of people experience this in the agency space. And so starting on that side, on the agency side of things, there’s challenges with meeting client demands and managing scope creep and scaling and maintaining profitability and

retaining great talent and those are a lot of the things that I’ve heard from other agency owners struggling with, but I’ve also experienced it myself. Also in my roles, I’ve been on in the sales side of our business for a while now. So I’ve spoken with hundreds of small business owners who have worked with different agencies or outsourced solutions over those years. And I have heard all of their stories of

things along the lines of marketing doesn’t work or I’m paying this agency for X and I have no idea if I’m getting results or if anything’s happening with my marketing efforts. And so there’s been a lot of this going on for years in the agency space. But I think it’s becoming more more heightened now with the evolution of AI.

John Jantsch (02:49.518)

So you actually use the term anti-agency model. Now know you’re not an agency hater. so, so what makes this anti or, and not just a better agency.

Sara Nay (03:02.379)

Yeah. So the whole play with the anti-agency model, as you identified, like obviously we’re not anti-agency. We’re an agency ourselves. We have been for 31 years. We love agencies. And so I do keep, I keep explaining that because I don’t want people to think this book is against agencies, but what it’s with the anti-agency, what it’s saying is the model is broken essentially for some of the points that I had highlighted just a second ago. So it’s anti-agency model specifically.

And so the way we have been doing and functioning for years as agencies were being forced in some ways to evolve because of the evolution of AI. so previously to AI, it made sense for agencies to hold onto things like marketing, execution, content, social, SEO, paid ads, all of the execution elements. But with the evolution of AI, I believe small businesses are able to take some of that stuff in-house.

They still need strategic leadership and direction, but they now have an opportunity to stay a little bit more lean with their in-house marketing team by layering in AI systems below them to help with the heavy lifting of execution. And so that’s the whole idea of stop renting your marketing and taking back ownership of your marketing. You still need strategy. You still need direction. You still need leadership.

But now you can build a marketing department or team that is a bit leaner because they’re overseeing orchestration of marketing, which is done by AI systems.

John Jantsch (04:39.086)

So one of the things you and I talk about a lot, cause I say it all the time is I, you know, I’ve been doing this 30 years and while a lot of new shiny things have come along, the fundamentals of marketing have not really changed or what we’re here to do as marketers has not really changed that much. What timeless principles do you think from, our system? As you know, it’s still worked today.

Sara Nay (04:59.085)

Yeah. And so that’s the second really section of the book we get into the timeless after the intro and all of that, we get into the timeless principles. And so some of the things that I touch on there are things like target market, identifying your clients on a very deep level. I think that’s becoming even more and more important with the evolution of AI, because what I see is a lot of small businesses bringing in something like a chat, GBT or a clod or whatever their tool of choices. And they’ll start just like,

creating content and so it’s all over the place. It’s not consistent. It’s not on on brand. And so in your original book duct tape marketing, you talked a lot about identifying your ideal client on a deep level, understanding them emotionally, what keeps them up at night, what drives them. And so with the evolution of AI, you still need to understand your clients on a very deep level. But then if you’re going to bring in an AI tool, you then need to train the chat, you’d be to your tool of your choice that you bring in.

on that information. So when you’re creating content moving forward, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal client on a deep level and isn’t just generic. Another timeless foundational principle is core messaging. We talk a lot about that over the years. So identifying your core message or we’ve talked a lot about talking logo as well. And so that’s really identifying what makes you unique, but also what messaging resonates with that ideal client.

That is still incredibly important today, but it’s also important to take that messaging and train your AI tools of choice on that messaging as well. So again, you’re not creating generic content, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal clients with the messaging you’ve identified is really important. And so those foundations are still the same, but the way we’re using them is evolving a bit because of the technology that’s now available.

John Jantsch (06:48.733)

So, you know, we’ve, we’re all seeing people run into AI and just like, look what it can do, makes life faster, better, cheaper. Um, where do you think the danger of this, that like eyes wide open, you know, jump in and start using the tools? What do you think the danger of that is for many small businesses?

Sara Nay (07:07.987)

It complicates things that causes confusion. causes inconsistency. It causes noise. It amplifies the chaos that’s already there. It causes so many issues for the internal team or the team using the program, but also for the clients and prospects that you’re putting out content to as well. And so it’s causing confusion in both of those areas. And so a lot of what I encourage small businesses to do is take a step back.

John Jantsch (07:12.916)

amplifies the chaos that’s already there, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:33.767)

And if you’ve been following duct tape marketing for any period of time, you’ve heard us say strategy before tactics. But it’s now strategy before tactics and technology is the conversation we’re having with clients. And so if you’re thinking about, okay, we need to be using AI tools instead of just diving into tools first, take a step back and answer some very important questions as to what’s the business actually trying to accomplish? What’s the marketing strategy look like based on that?

What’s the team strategy or what’s our current team structure look like? And then you can say, okay, what tools can help us accomplish our goals? And then once you identify what the tools are, you then need to train the tools on your strategy that you would have created to then get to the point where you’re ready to execute on them efficiently. So don’t dive into tools, take a step back, create the strategy, and then answer the question of what tools are gonna help us get from where we are today to where we’re trying to go.

John Jantsch (08:30.936)

So, you know, the fractional CMO plus concept is a big part of our model. what do you tell that small business owner that’s got kind of a smaller budget and it’s thinking, I really just need somebody to do stuff rather than like, you know, I can’t really afford or I, or maybe I’m not big enough to even think about the idea of having fractional leadership. What do you say to that business as to why they need to maybe change their mindset?

Sara Nay (08:55.403)

Yeah, I mean, think, again, I keep going back to AI, but it’s causing small business owners or small businesses an opportunity that we haven’t had before. so, you previously, let’s think of traditional marketing org chart. You would have a CMO in a company and then you would have a lot of different executors under them, essentially. So you’d have like a paid specialist, an email marketing specialist, a social, you know, all of the different channels and categories. That’s never really been feasible to small businesses because

they wouldn’t even have a budget for a CMO, let alone all the other people that are involved in that story. And so I think the best opportunity that small businesses have is right now in terms of the org chart, because you can bring in a fractional CMO. So you’re not paying a full-time salary. You’re paying a set fee every single month. That fractional CMO is then tasked with creating the overall strategy, managing the budget, owning the metrics.

overseeing all of the marketing department essentially. And then under that fractional CMO, believe instead of, I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but the direction I believe we’re going is instead of having a specialist in all the different channels, small businesses can have marketing executors that are familiar enough in writing great copy and understanding social media, but they’re really systems oriented and technology first people.

where you can bring in AI systems below them to help them execute at a higher level than they’ve ever been before. And so now you’re getting a marketing org chart with all of these different roles that you previously probably couldn’t even think about affording as a small business.

John Jantsch (10:35.832)

So going back to the theme of renting, mean, the opposite of renting is owning. and so to a large degree, you know, what you’re describing there is kind of that path towards owning your, your marketing, you know, as a business, as opposed to maybe it wasn’t even renting. was abdicating like going here, you do it. I don’t care what you’re doing over there, but how does that change the business owners mindset in terms of.

Sara Nay (10:54.124)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.262)

people in terms of structure, in terms of process, if they’re actually, you know, now they’re going to have those people in their organization or they’re going to have those functions in their organization. Who manages that? How do they hire for that? Are they, are they bringing in more overhead that makes sense for their business if they’re going to start thinking that way, or is this the ultimate path to, truly scaling a business?

Sara Nay (11:16.557)

It obviously depends on the business situation, revenue size, long-term growth goals. And so there’s a lot of factors that I would need to consider to answer that specifically. But for me, if you’re a small business and you’re looking to scale up,

when you’re doing a certain level of revenue, you’ve been in business for a few years, let’s say you’ve passed the 1 million revenue mark, I think it’s time to start considering you need marketing leadership of some extent. And so when small businesses scale up to a certain point, if they haven’t looked for marketing leadership, the CEO becomes the CMO and they either have marketing experience or they learn marketing. And now it’s this necessary evil that

they’re having to spend a lot of their time on where they never wanted to become a CMO in the first place. And so if you’re scaling up and you have high growth goals, looking for someone like a fractional CMO, I think makes a lot of sense because the whole idea is as the CEO or founder, you stay in your zone of genius. You stay focused on the why behind you building the business in the first place. then you… In selling, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:34.798)

or in selling, you know, stuff that actually is going to make money for the business rather than you having to figure out how to manage the technology.

Sara Nay (12:46.121)

Exactly. And then you bring in a fractional CMO or a marketing leader of some extent that then is tasked with what you identified earlier in terms of managing team, bringing in partners or hiring full-time team, running the technology, building the systems and processes, running the budget and the metrics. so the fractional CMO is really tasked with leading the marketing department and working alongside you to help you reach the specific business goals that you would have laid out.

John Jantsch (13:15.566)

You know, if somebody, whoever you’re working with is going to bring you strategy first, you know, as the first step, it doesn’t really matter what you call that person, right? What their role is, right? I mean, it’s really more the idea of thinking strategy first, isn’t

Sara Nay (13:21.901)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:31.137)

Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ll throw out all different terms. I mean, we talk a lot about fractional CMO, but if that feels like too elevated of a term, know, marketing leader, marketing strategist, marketing advisor, you know, the point is what they’re doing. They’re, leading the marketing initiatives and not just being an order taker.

John Jantsch (13:51.672)

So let’s flip to agencies that are listening, because I know we have agencies listening as well. How do they have to shift their mindset to really stay relevant? mean, I think in some agency, you look at some of these agencies that are providing SEO and content and social media, that’s their package, right, of done for you services. There might be a time in the very near future where that’s just not that relevant.

Sara Nay (14:19.372)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:19.423)

or people aren’t going to be willing to pay what you need to run a profitable business. So how do agencies need to shift their mindset?

Sara Nay (14:26.705)

Yeah, and there’s been a lot of stuff coming out there that I’ve seen on LinkedIn and different articles about how many agencies are going to shut down in the next few years. I think a lot of that stuff’s hard to predict, but I do think if you just keep offering execution, it’s a race to the bottom in a lot of cases because small businesses, even if they’re not doing it that effectively yet, they are bringing in AI solutions to cut costs in certain areas. And I think that marketing execution is one of those.

areas. And so, you know, I think if agencies keep offering execution as their core services, it’s going to be very challenging in the next few years moving forward, because AI is becoming more sophisticated. So you’re basically competing against AI in that scenario versus if agencies shift their offering and they step more into this leadership role, where they’re, you know, focusing on strategy.

they’re elevating team, it can be their own team or it can be internal team, but they’re elevating humans essentially with AI systems below them. Then they’re working alongside AI versus competing against it.

John Jantsch (15:35.64)

So if I’m a small business owner listening and.

Obviously picking up and reading the book is going to be step one. But what are a couple steps towards taking this ownership mentality that somebody could start this week? If you’re stuck in the old kind of way of thinking, here are a couple things you can do this week to start changing your mindset or maybe even changing your marketing.

Sara Nay (16:06.165)

Yeah, of course. There’s two things that come to mind right off the bat. One of the first things, and I talk about this in the book as well, is the marketing strategy pyramid. We talk a lot about it at Duck Tape Marketing, but it’s really taking a step back and answering some business strategic questions first. So really analyzing what are your business goals? What are your objectives? What’s your revenue? Where are you growing towards? What are your mission, vision, values? And so really analyzing some of those things.

And then thinking through what is your marketing strategy to help you move in the right direction. And then thinking through what is your team strategy. So you have to have those two bottom layers of the pyramid first to then think about team. But, know, to the question of how can businesses take back ownership when you’re analyzing your team structure, think through like, these internal roles? Are we relying on outsourced vendors? If we’re relying on outside outsourced vendors or solutions.

Do we have clarity and confidence and control or ownership as to what they are doing or are we kind of left in the dark? I if you’re left in the dark through some of your partnerships, that’s when it’s time to analyze, does it make sense to continue on with this partnership or is there a way where we can get more ownership and control? So that’s where I would start is kind of going back to the basics there and analyzing your current structure, your current relationships, your current team.

and making sure that you have clarity in what everyone is doing.

John Jantsch (17:35.672)

So I’m going to go a little in the weeds here on AI, mainly because it’s on everybody’s mind right now. There are a lot of some of these agencies that we’re talking about are shifting their whole model to being calling themselves AI agencies, where they want to come in and show you how to put in agents and how to automated this and automated that. How do you think small businesses should be looking at?

Sara Nay (17:51.703)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:02.806)

I mean, I don’t think we have to convince them that it’s not going away, but how do you think they should be looking at getting the most out of AI as really the end to end solution or the end to end assistant at this point that it can be rather than just looking at it as, here’s how I can automate stuff and or worse yet, here’s how I can fire people and do more with less.

Sara Nay (18:08.909)

Yeah, a big part of that I think is doing an analysis of who’s currently on your team and you’re not asking the question.

How can we get more work out of them or how can we get them to move faster or be more productive? What you’re answering is how can we elevate them to make more of an impact? And so one of the exercises that we’ve done with our team fairly recently, and this is also in the book as well, is we had everyone on our team analyze what skills are they doing on a regular basis. And then we basically had them identify what are human-led skills that they should continue to focus on, things that light them up, that they love.

And then we also had them identify what skills can be AI assisted and what skills and tasks could be executed by AI. And so we went through that exercise so people could essentially analyze their roles and think about how they could future proof their careers moving forward. And so I think that’s a really great exercise for anyone listening as a business leader or for your whole entire team is you should all be thinking about how can we future proof the business as a whole.

And that’s a lot of what you and I talk about when we talk about shifting our model in a new direction. But you also need to be considering everyone on your team. How can you help them elevate with AI instead of be replaced by it? And then how can you help them continue to grow and focus on the skills that are becoming more important because of the evolution of AI?

John Jantsch (19:54.414)

talking with Sarah Ney, the author of Unchained. Sarah, I appreciate you spending a few moments to talk about Unchained. Is there a place that you’d invite people to go to find out more about the work you do, of course, but then also the new book?

Sara Nay (20:08.269)

Absolutely, so unchainedmodel.com is the book’s website, so love for you to check that out and also connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Sarah Ney.

John Jantsch (20:18.23)

Awesome, well again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the

Sara Nay (20:24.589)

Thank you.

John Jantsch (00:00.866)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Sara Nay. Sara is the CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, where she spent over 15 years helping small businesses build strategy-first marketing systems that actually work. Now being my daughter, Sarah has lived the small business reality from every angle as a teenager, as a team member, as a fractional CMO, and now as the CEO. In her new book,

Unchained, she makes the case that traditional agency model is broken, both for the clients and agencies and lays out a practical AI enabled strategy first approach she calls the anti-agency model. We’re going to touch on that. Permission helps small business owners stop renting their marketing and start owning it. Unchained, breaking free from broken marketing models. So Sarah, welcome to the show.

Sara Nay (00:53.858)

Thanks for having me on.

John Jantsch (00:55.778)

So you and I have been talking about marketing models for a long time. Was there a time when you kind of said, you know what, the agency model is broken and I got to create something different?

Sara Nay (01:06.455)

Yeah, I mean, as you mentioned in the introduction, I’ve been part of the agency space for about 15 years. And in that journey, I’ve moved from intern to community manager, account manager, fractional CMO for our clients among other roles. And so I’ve really been in all the different areas of the agency space. And throughout that journey, there’s definitely been times where I’ve noticed things that didn’t quite feel right in the agency space. And even further than that,

there have been several moments over the last 15 years where I’ve been burnt out and on the brink of saying, does this make sense to pursue even more, even further? And so I’ve lived a lot of challenges along the way and there’s no secret in the challenges I’ve seen. think a lot of people experience this in the agency space. And so starting on that side, on the agency side of things, there’s challenges with meeting client demands and managing scope creep and scaling and maintaining profitability and

retaining great talent and those are a lot of the things that I’ve heard from other agency owners struggling with, but I’ve also experienced it myself. Also in my roles, I’ve been on in the sales side of our business for a while now. So I’ve spoken with hundreds of small business owners who have worked with different agencies or outsourced solutions over those years. And I have heard all of their stories of

things along the lines of marketing doesn’t work or I’m paying this agency for X and I have no idea if I’m getting results or if anything’s happening with my marketing efforts. And so there’s been a lot of this going on for years in the agency space. But I think it’s becoming more more heightened now with the evolution of AI.

John Jantsch (02:49.518)

So you actually use the term anti-agency model. Now know you’re not an agency hater. so, so what makes this anti or, and not just a better agency.

Sara Nay (03:02.379)

Yeah. So the whole play with the anti-agency model, as you identified, like obviously we’re not anti-agency. We’re an agency ourselves. We have been for 31 years. We love agencies. And so I do keep, I keep explaining that because I don’t want people to think this book is against agencies, but what it’s with the anti-agency, what it’s saying is the model is broken essentially for some of the points that I had highlighted just a second ago. So it’s anti-agency model specifically.

And so the way we have been doing and functioning for years as agencies were being forced in some ways to evolve because of the evolution of AI. so previously to AI, it made sense for agencies to hold onto things like marketing, execution, content, social, SEO, paid ads, all of the execution elements. But with the evolution of AI, I believe small businesses are able to take some of that stuff in-house.

They still need strategic leadership and direction, but they now have an opportunity to stay a little bit more lean with their in-house marketing team by layering in AI systems below them to help with the heavy lifting of execution. And so that’s the whole idea of stop renting your marketing and taking back ownership of your marketing. You still need strategy. You still need direction. You still need leadership.

But now you can build a marketing department or team that is a bit leaner because they’re overseeing orchestration of marketing, which is done by AI systems.

John Jantsch (04:39.086)

So one of the things you and I talk about a lot, cause I say it all the time is I, you know, I’ve been doing this 30 years and while a lot of new shiny things have come along, the fundamentals of marketing have not really changed or what we’re here to do as marketers has not really changed that much. What timeless principles do you think from, our system? As you know, it’s still worked today.

Sara Nay (04:59.085)

Yeah. And so that’s the second really section of the book we get into the timeless after the intro and all of that, we get into the timeless principles. And so some of the things that I touch on there are things like target market, identifying your clients on a very deep level. I think that’s becoming even more and more important with the evolution of AI, because what I see is a lot of small businesses bringing in something like a chat, GBT or a clod or whatever their tool of choices. And they’ll start just like,

creating content and so it’s all over the place. It’s not consistent. It’s not on on brand. And so in your original book duct tape marketing, you talked a lot about identifying your ideal client on a deep level, understanding them emotionally, what keeps them up at night, what drives them. And so with the evolution of AI, you still need to understand your clients on a very deep level. But then if you’re going to bring in an AI tool, you then need to train the chat, you’d be to your tool of your choice that you bring in.

on that information. So when you’re creating content moving forward, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal client on a deep level and isn’t just generic. Another timeless foundational principle is core messaging. We talk a lot about that over the years. So identifying your core message or we’ve talked a lot about talking logo as well. And so that’s really identifying what makes you unique, but also what messaging resonates with that ideal client.

That is still incredibly important today, but it’s also important to take that messaging and train your AI tools of choice on that messaging as well. So again, you’re not creating generic content, you’re creating content that speaks to your ideal clients with the messaging you’ve identified is really important. And so those foundations are still the same, but the way we’re using them is evolving a bit because of the technology that’s now available.

John Jantsch (06:48.733)

So, you know, we’ve, we’re all seeing people run into AI and just like, look what it can do, makes life faster, better, cheaper. Um, where do you think the danger of this, that like eyes wide open, you know, jump in and start using the tools? What do you think the danger of that is for many small businesses?

Sara Nay (07:07.987)

It complicates things that causes confusion. causes inconsistency. It causes noise. It amplifies the chaos that’s already there. It causes so many issues for the internal team or the team using the program, but also for the clients and prospects that you’re putting out content to as well. And so it’s causing confusion in both of those areas. And so a lot of what I encourage small businesses to do is take a step back.

John Jantsch (07:12.916)

amplifies the chaos that’s already there, right? Yeah.

Sara Nay (07:33.767)

And if you’ve been following duct tape marketing for any period of time, you’ve heard us say strategy before tactics. But it’s now strategy before tactics and technology is the conversation we’re having with clients. And so if you’re thinking about, okay, we need to be using AI tools instead of just diving into tools first, take a step back and answer some very important questions as to what’s the business actually trying to accomplish? What’s the marketing strategy look like based on that?

What’s the team strategy or what’s our current team structure look like? And then you can say, okay, what tools can help us accomplish our goals? And then once you identify what the tools are, you then need to train the tools on your strategy that you would have created to then get to the point where you’re ready to execute on them efficiently. So don’t dive into tools, take a step back, create the strategy, and then answer the question of what tools are gonna help us get from where we are today to where we’re trying to go.

John Jantsch (08:30.936)

So, you know, the fractional CMO plus concept is a big part of our model. what do you tell that small business owner that’s got kind of a smaller budget and it’s thinking, I really just need somebody to do stuff rather than like, you know, I can’t really afford or I, or maybe I’m not big enough to even think about the idea of having fractional leadership. What do you say to that business as to why they need to maybe change their mindset?

Sara Nay (08:55.403)

Yeah, I mean, think, again, I keep going back to AI, but it’s causing small business owners or small businesses an opportunity that we haven’t had before. so, you previously, let’s think of traditional marketing org chart. You would have a CMO in a company and then you would have a lot of different executors under them, essentially. So you’d have like a paid specialist, an email marketing specialist, a social, you know, all of the different channels and categories. That’s never really been feasible to small businesses because

they wouldn’t even have a budget for a CMO, let alone all the other people that are involved in that story. And so I think the best opportunity that small businesses have is right now in terms of the org chart, because you can bring in a fractional CMO. So you’re not paying a full-time salary. You’re paying a set fee every single month. That fractional CMO is then tasked with creating the overall strategy, managing the budget, owning the metrics.

overseeing all of the marketing department essentially. And then under that fractional CMO, believe instead of, I don’t know if we’re quite there yet, but the direction I believe we’re going is instead of having a specialist in all the different channels, small businesses can have marketing executors that are familiar enough in writing great copy and understanding social media, but they’re really systems oriented and technology first people.

where you can bring in AI systems below them to help them execute at a higher level than they’ve ever been before. And so now you’re getting a marketing org chart with all of these different roles that you previously probably couldn’t even think about affording as a small business.

John Jantsch (10:35.832)

So going back to the theme of renting, mean, the opposite of renting is owning. and so to a large degree, you know, what you’re describing there is kind of that path towards owning your, your marketing, you know, as a business, as opposed to maybe it wasn’t even renting. was abdicating like going here, you do it. I don’t care what you’re doing over there, but how does that change the business owners mindset in terms of.

Sara Nay (10:54.124)

Yeah.

Yeah.

John Jantsch (11:05.262)

people in terms of structure, in terms of process, if they’re actually, you know, now they’re going to have those people in their organization or they’re going to have those functions in their organization. Who manages that? How do they hire for that? Are they, are they bringing in more overhead that makes sense for their business if they’re going to start thinking that way, or is this the ultimate path to, truly scaling a business?

Sara Nay (11:16.557)

It obviously depends on the business situation, revenue size, long-term growth goals. And so there’s a lot of factors that I would need to consider to answer that specifically. But for me, if you’re a small business and you’re looking to scale up,

when you’re doing a certain level of revenue, you’ve been in business for a few years, let’s say you’ve passed the 1 million revenue mark, I think it’s time to start considering you need marketing leadership of some extent. And so when small businesses scale up to a certain point, if they haven’t looked for marketing leadership, the CEO becomes the CMO and they either have marketing experience or they learn marketing. And now it’s this necessary evil that

they’re having to spend a lot of their time on where they never wanted to become a CMO in the first place. And so if you’re scaling up and you have high growth goals, looking for someone like a fractional CMO, I think makes a lot of sense because the whole idea is as the CEO or founder, you stay in your zone of genius. You stay focused on the why behind you building the business in the first place. then you… In selling, yeah.

John Jantsch (12:34.798)

or in selling, you know, stuff that actually is going to make money for the business rather than you having to figure out how to manage the technology.

Sara Nay (12:46.121)

Exactly. And then you bring in a fractional CMO or a marketing leader of some extent that then is tasked with what you identified earlier in terms of managing team, bringing in partners or hiring full-time team, running the technology, building the systems and processes, running the budget and the metrics. so the fractional CMO is really tasked with leading the marketing department and working alongside you to help you reach the specific business goals that you would have laid out.

John Jantsch (13:15.566)

You know, if somebody, whoever you’re working with is going to bring you strategy first, you know, as the first step, it doesn’t really matter what you call that person, right? What their role is, right? I mean, it’s really more the idea of thinking strategy first, isn’t

Sara Nay (13:21.901)

Yeah.

Sara Nay (13:31.137)

Yeah, absolutely. And so we’ll throw out all different terms. I mean, we talk a lot about fractional CMO, but if that feels like too elevated of a term, know, marketing leader, marketing strategist, marketing advisor, you know, the point is what they’re doing. They’re, leading the marketing initiatives and not just being an order taker.

John Jantsch (13:51.672)

So let’s flip to agencies that are listening, because I know we have agencies listening as well. How do they have to shift their mindset to really stay relevant? mean, I think in some agency, you look at some of these agencies that are providing SEO and content and social media, that’s their package, right, of done for you services. There might be a time in the very near future where that’s just not that relevant.

Sara Nay (14:19.372)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (14:19.423)

or people aren’t going to be willing to pay what you need to run a profitable business. So how do agencies need to shift their mindset?

Sara Nay (14:26.705)

Yeah, and there’s been a lot of stuff coming out there that I’ve seen on LinkedIn and different articles about how many agencies are going to shut down in the next few years. I think a lot of that stuff’s hard to predict, but I do think if you just keep offering execution, it’s a race to the bottom in a lot of cases because small businesses, even if they’re not doing it that effectively yet, they are bringing in AI solutions to cut costs in certain areas. And I think that marketing execution is one of those.

areas. And so, you know, I think if agencies keep offering execution as their core services, it’s going to be very challenging in the next few years moving forward, because AI is becoming more sophisticated. So you’re basically competing against AI in that scenario versus if agencies shift their offering and they step more into this leadership role, where they’re, you know, focusing on strategy.

they’re elevating team, it can be their own team or it can be internal team, but they’re elevating humans essentially with AI systems below them. Then they’re working alongside AI versus competing against it.

John Jantsch (15:35.64)

So if I’m a small business owner listening and.

Obviously picking up and reading the book is going to be step one. But what are a couple steps towards taking this ownership mentality that somebody could start this week? If you’re stuck in the old kind of way of thinking, here are a couple things you can do this week to start changing your mindset or maybe even changing your marketing.

Sara Nay (16:06.165)

Yeah, of course. There’s two things that come to mind right off the bat. One of the first things, and I talk about this in the book as well, is the marketing strategy pyramid. We talk a lot about it at Duck Tape Marketing, but it’s really taking a step back and answering some business strategic questions first. So really analyzing what are your business goals? What are your objectives? What’s your revenue? Where are you growing towards? What are your mission, vision, values? And so really analyzing some of those things.

And then thinking through what is your marketing strategy to help you move in the right direction. And then thinking through what is your team strategy. So you have to have those two bottom layers of the pyramid first to then think about team. But, know, to the question of how can businesses take back ownership when you’re analyzing your team structure, think through like, these internal roles? Are we relying on outsourced vendors? If we’re relying on outside outsourced vendors or solutions.

Do we have clarity and confidence and control or ownership as to what they are doing or are we kind of left in the dark? I if you’re left in the dark through some of your partnerships, that’s when it’s time to analyze, does it make sense to continue on with this partnership or is there a way where we can get more ownership and control? So that’s where I would start is kind of going back to the basics there and analyzing your current structure, your current relationships, your current team.

and making sure that you have clarity in what everyone is doing.

John Jantsch (17:35.672)

So I’m going to go a little in the weeds here on AI, mainly because it’s on everybody’s mind right now. There are a lot of some of these agencies that we’re talking about are shifting their whole model to being calling themselves AI agencies, where they want to come in and show you how to put in agents and how to automated this and automated that. How do you think small businesses should be looking at?

Sara Nay (17:51.703)

Yeah.

John Jantsch (18:02.806)

I mean, I don’t think we have to convince them that it’s not going away, but how do you think they should be looking at getting the most out of AI as really the end to end solution or the end to end assistant at this point that it can be rather than just looking at it as, here’s how I can automate stuff and or worse yet, here’s how I can fire people and do more with less.

Sara Nay (18:08.909)

Yeah, a big part of that I think is doing an analysis of who’s currently on your team and you’re not asking the question.

How can we get more work out of them or how can we get them to move faster or be more productive? What you’re answering is how can we elevate them to make more of an impact? And so one of the exercises that we’ve done with our team fairly recently, and this is also in the book as well, is we had everyone on our team analyze what skills are they doing on a regular basis. And then we basically had them identify what are human-led skills that they should continue to focus on, things that light them up, that they love.

And then we also had them identify what skills can be AI assisted and what skills and tasks could be executed by AI. And so we went through that exercise so people could essentially analyze their roles and think about how they could future proof their careers moving forward. And so I think that’s a really great exercise for anyone listening as a business leader or for your whole entire team is you should all be thinking about how can we future proof the business as a whole.

And that’s a lot of what you and I talk about when we talk about shifting our model in a new direction. But you also need to be considering everyone on your team. How can you help them elevate with AI instead of be replaced by it? And then how can you help them continue to grow and focus on the skills that are becoming more important because of the evolution of AI?

John Jantsch (19:54.414)

talking with Sarah Ney, the author of Unchained. Sarah, I appreciate you spending a few moments to talk about Unchained. Is there a place that you’d invite people to go to find out more about the work you do, of course, but then also the new book?

Sara Nay (20:08.269)

Absolutely, so unchainedmodel.com is the book’s website, so love for you to check that out and also connect with me on LinkedIn. Again, my name is Sarah Ney.

John Jantsch (20:18.23)

Awesome, well again, I appreciate you stopping by. Hopefully we’ll see you one of these days soon out there on the

Sara Nay (20:24.589)

Thank you.