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John Jantsch (00:00): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Hey, I want to give a shout out to another member of the HubSpot Network, the success story podcast, hosted by Scott D. Clary. It’s one of the most useful podcasts in the world. Success story features Q & A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, conversations on sales marketing. Hey, and if you’re a freelancer, his episode on how to make seven figures freelancing on Fiverr is a must listen to the success story podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:46): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Gino Wickman. He is the founder of EOS worldwide, an organization that helps tens of thousands of businesses implement EOS the entrepreneurial operating system with the aid of international and the international team of professionals and certified EOS implementers. He’s also the author of the award-winning best-selling book traction, get a grip on your business, which has sold now over a million. He’s got a new book today. We’re going to talk about the EOS life, how to live your ideal entrepreneurial life. So Gino, welcome to the show.

Gino Wickman (01:23): Pleasure to be here, John. Glad to be with you again. Yeah,

John Jantsch (01:26): That’s right. It’s been too long. So let me let’s set the table, uh, kind of the, you know, there’s obviously some people, not many probably out there that don’t know what EOS is necessarily. So maybe set the table between kind of the relationship between EOS life and EOS sort of the professional organization, kind of the context of, of where that came together and for this book.

Gino Wickman (01:49): Yeah, for sure. I’d love to. So I’m going back 20 years ago, I basically took a leap to help entrepreneurs. I realized that that was my calling. That was my passion. That was my gift. It’s been a total of 30 years of doing this, but 20 years is when I started to create an operating system to help entrepreneurs and their leadership teams run a better business. And so for five years, I did that with 50 companies, 500 sessions, put the finishing touches on what is now EOS. And then I decided I was going to leverage it. So I put it in a book called traction, found a great partner in Don Tinney. He and I joined forces, started EOS worldwide, and that’s about 15 years ago. And so then he and I basically built EOS worldwide one EOS implementer at a time. And so we’ve now as implementers, there are 450 implementers around the world.

Gino Wickman (02:42): We’ve taken about 14,000 companies through the process. We have about 130,000 companies that are using the tools and running on EOS. And, and, and so that’s the big picture and the backstory and that’s EOS. Well, what happened? I just gave kind of a 20, 21 year timeline that is EOS well there’s then this other piece that kind of percolated along all of those years. And that’s what led me to writing the EOS life. And the way that that worked is it’s very interesting because when Don and I joined forces and I decided to rebrand EOS, it was originally known as the business accelerator. Now known as the entrepreneurial operating system, I engaged a real high-end marketing firm and they interviewed my top seven clients. And the owner of the firm went out and sat with each owner and asked them very specific questions. And that the owner of the marketing firm came back kind of in awe, because he said to me, Gino, he said, we, we, we got the same answer from all seven clients, seven out of seven.

Gino Wickman (03:50): And what they would talk about is how EOS has given them a better quality of life. And I kind of shrugged that off because I’m so obsessed about helping the entrepreneur build a great business. I kind of ignored the fact that they’re living this great ideal life. Then what happened is my partner, Don Tinney started to live the EOS life, his ideal life, ideal life. And he saw the effect on him and he came to call it the EOS life. And as we were building this community of implementers, he would share this with them. And again, I shrugged it off and then shoot forward to probably five years ago when the community are EOS, implementer community really started to embrace this idea of the EOS life. Don described it as five points, doing what you love with people. You love making a huge difference, getting compensated appropriately and having time for other passions.

Gino Wickman (04:40): And so I finally gave in and at our conference, our EOS conference five years ago, I decided to deliver the EOS life talk. And it was so unbelievably well received. I did it the following year and then ultimately out of a pandemic with extra time, not being on a plane, you know, S you know, 18 times a year, not being in a hotel 40 nights a year, I had some excess capacity and I decided, you know, it’s time to write this book. And it just kind of flowed out of me and so long, long story, but that’s how the EOS life was birthed. And that book just launched 30 days ago.

John Jantsch (05:18): Yeah. And I, you know, it really makes a lot of sense while you talk about in EOS, you know, delegation and having a vision and creating systems and processes, those all should lead to at least less stress and things like that. So it, so it makes a ton of sense. And, you know, over the years, I’ve worked with a lot of entrepreneurs and help them get some control of their marketing. And they’ve actually kind of expressed that, that gives them their life back a little bit. And I think, I think there’s certainly a lot to that. So since you mentioned the five points, um, one of the things I love is that you are very tool driven. I mean, you, you produce lots of tools. You give them away freely. This book is no exception. And so I thought maybe we’d take each of those five points and let you just kind of unpack the tool that makes that happen. So the first one you mentioned, do what you love. And, and if you’re an author like me, who sometimes forgets what you wrote in a book, I’ll remind you that, you know, that’s the delegating.

Gino Wickman (06:11): Oh, yes. Yeah. You don’t have to remind me, believe me, I intimately know this content, you know, and I would say one other thing as I answer your question. Yeah. The reality is I have been living this EOS life. I have been living my ideal life for at least 20 years. And that’s another thing that Don saw in me. But for me, I kept shrugging it off because it’s so natural for me. And, and so for what that’s worth, you know, I don’t teach one ounce of theory. I’ve been living all of this, but, but to your exact point, I then realized it’s kind of the tool or tools that we teach our client that help kind of expedite move the needle toward them living each point on the EOS life. So to your point, I always love to start with a question and then share the tool.

Gino Wickman (06:54): So the first point again is doing what you love. Okay. And so that’s the whole idea here. And I start by asking you the audience out there. The question is, what kind of work do you love to do? And I urge you in, in this book, it’s, it’s a, it’s a thinking exercise. I urge you to work from a journal and you spend 5, 10, 20 minutes thinking about that and writing that. But the tool that we then have every client use in the EOS process is something called delegate and elevate. And the way that delegate and elevate works is it’s an exercise where if you cut a sheet of paper or a document into four quadrants, it’s also lovingly known as the four quadrants. And then you write the words and I’ll try and share this quickly in the bottom right hand quadrant. If you write, don’t like not good at, in the bottom left-hand quadrant, if you put don’t like good at, in the upper right-hand quadrant, if you write the words like and good like to do in good at it.

Gino Wickman (07:53): And then the upper left hand quadrant love to do and great at it, obviously where we want you is in that upper left hand quadrant. But the exercises where you literally list everything you do all day, every day on a document, and you’ll write 10, 20, 30, 40 things. And then you take each one of those things that you do all day everyday and put it in one of the four quadrants. And just be really honest, the way it works is once it’s all filled out, we then just urge you to delegate one thing in the bottom two quadrants to elevate yourself more to the top two quadrants, with a focus of someday getting you to that upper left-hand quadrant. And so the whole idea here is a process. It’s a journey, and it’s about moving the needle. As you’re probably going to hear me say 10 times in this conversation, because if you will delegate one thing every quarter, you’ll look up in 2, 5, 10 years, and you will be living in heaven. And I’m the testimony because for the last 25 years, I have delegated one thing every quarter, and I fully live in that upper left-hand quadrant, even. So that three and a half years ago, I sold EOS worldwide because I needed to delegate an entire company to free me up to go to the next level and do what I wanted to do to free up my energy, my creativity, so long dissertation, but there’s the,

John Jantsch (09:06): We had some pushback from some people or, or not just even pushback the realization that a great at love to do, but that doesn’t really serve the company. You know, for me to be doing that work. I love it. I’m great at it, but I should delegate it. I mean, how does somebody wrestle with that? Yeah,

Gino Wickman (09:23): Well, let’s start with, you know, the primary audience for this book is the entrepreneur is the business owner. And so that entrepreneur and business owner has the most freedom to design their life. And, but in saying that my dream is that then leadership team members live this life, which they can employees, which they can and then families, but we’ve got to start with the entrepreneur. So I would challenge that because that visionary entrepreneur at the helm of the organization, they kind of get to write their own ticket and live in their sweet spot and then build a structure around them, bring in talent to do all of those things that they don’t like to do. So I would challenge that as possible. And the beauty is I get to prove that it’s possible because I’ve proven it now with 14,000 companies and entrepreneurs with the work that we’ve done.

Gino Wickman (10:12): And certainly the intimate 135 clients I’ve worked with, it’s absolutely doable. But I will say this, John, just to hit probably the most important barrier and that is people not feeling they’re worthy, not feeling they deserve this life. And so I go right at that psychology in this book, and I always say to the audience, and so if you’re out there and listening, I just want to say this, you deserve it. You deserve it. And you really truly do. And if we can get you past whatever psychological barrier is making you feel unworthy, oh, then you’re just absolutely gonna take off. And again, if you keep moving that needle every quarter, you’re going to look up very soon and be living your ideal life again, starting with doing what you love. Okay.

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John Jantsch (11:55): All right, let’s move on. Number two with people you love.

Gino Wickman (12:00): Yeah. So again, opening question, I urge you to answer and ponder for 5, 10, 20 minutes is who are the people you love to work with? Okay. And so it starts there spend some time, think about that, ponder that, but the tool that we help our clients accomplish this with is something called the people. Analyzer sounds incredibly cold, but it is one of the top five tools in the EOS process because it’s helping you surround yourself with great people. Great people are defined by the right people in the right seats, right? People means they have your core values, right? Seat means they get it, want to have the capacity to do the job. Every one of these tools we’re talking about are downloadable free on the website. So EOS life.com. So there’s nothing you have to go by. It’s there waiting for you, but I would urge and ask a couple things here.

Gino Wickman (12:52): First, you must discover your core values you out there. You got to decide the three to seven characteristics that describe you, that, that, that, that make up who you are as a person. And a way of thinking about as the antithesis of those things are the things that you have in life, or have in people. And so let’s pretend though you discover your core values. I would suggest one way to do that is amazing core value cards think to perform as a company that has great core value cards, but you can buy them online. A few bucks, 52 cards, 52 core values. And in 15 minutes you will discover your core values, lots of ways to do it. But with that, once, you know, your core values, your job, if you want to be happy is to surround yourself in your company with people that have your core values and the ones that don’t, you’ve got to part ways they will thrive somewhere else.

Gino Wickman (13:49): And then the last little point I’ll make, and then I’ll shut the heck up. And let you respond is once you’ve mastered that because it takes about a year or two to help our clients get to that point where everyone is the right person in the right seat at or above the bar in the people analyzer. Then I urge them to expand their circle. Now that they got all of their employees to be the right people, right? Seats matching core values, then expand the circle to your vendors and suppliers to your clients and customers. And then all, ultimately the icing on the cake is to your family and friends. And I go into great detail on how to do that in the book and countless real world stories. Because when you cross that line into family and friends, Ooh, that one gets scary.

John Jantsch (14:35): Well, I think for a lot of people probably just crossing into customers and clients, you know, it’s like they, they showed up, they need what we sell, you know, but, but if you’re a particularly a professional service business have a one or two bad clients can, can be a real issue

Gino Wickman (14:49): Here, here. And if, and if your audience will listen to you, John they’ll have so much business coming at them that they can be selective and they can fire some clients that just don’t fit. You know, we EOS implementers. I’m an EOS implementer. I have clients, I have the luxury of handpicking, every single one of my clients, the ones that I just love being around. And so we all have that luxury because we get to pick and choose our clients because of this awareness that we have, that life’s too short, not to work with people that you don’t love working with.

John Jantsch (15:19): So I think we’re on to making a huge difference. So we’re going to get into some, some vision.

Gino Wickman (15:25): Got it. So opening question here is how do you make a difference? And so again, urging you to ponder for 5, 10, 20 minutes. And so really think about how you make a difference, but I’ll give kind of two contexts here. And so the tool is something called the vision traction organizer. It’s a tool I created that helps an entrepreneur in their leadership team, capture their vision and plan by answering eight questions about the company. They captured them in the VTO and you’ve got a vision and plan to take to the organization. Well, the first context is when you fill that tool out, the answers are all there. The way that you and your company are going to make an impact is by executing what’s in that vision traction organizer. But in addition to that, if you’re not an entrepreneur or maybe not a leadership team member, or maybe you are, there is a second context, and that is you can make a huge impact on the people in your company and your community on your family.

Gino Wickman (16:21): So there’s so many ways to make a difference, make an impact. And so you just have to think about that. But one example I always like to share is if you’re a leadership team member of an entrepreneurial company, there’s a great quote by Simon banks. That goes, you are a leader when you produce a leader who produces a leader and so very profound. So if you’re sitting there going, I don’t know how to make a difference. Well, if you’re a leader or a manager in an organization, focused on achieving that goal, focus on helping others around you become great leaders and then therefore help them help others become great leaders. But that’s the mark of a true leader is when you’ve created an left that legacy where you’re creating lots of leaders in the world. Yeah.

John Jantsch (17:04): I do think a lot of people get hung up on that idea of impact, meaning, oh, I have to cure world hunger or something. And it’s like, gosh, I could make two or three or 10 people’s lives better. That’s pretty special to this.

Gino Wickman (17:14): How even one person’s life, just imagine one. And, and, and the point about the VTO is if your passion is that customer or client to provide them tremendous value to solve their need, that makes an impact. That makes a difference. So you’re exactly right. Don’t overthink this, this, this isn’t about solving world hunger, unless that’s your thing, but there are lots of ways to make a difference. So there’s,

John Jantsch (17:37): It’s kind of an entrepreneurial myth. I think that that’s out there that you’re a founder of this company. You start this thing, you put your sweat and blood into it and, and you don’t take any money out until it’s producing at a certain level. Or there’s a lot of folks that do that to themselves. And let’s goes right into number four being compensated for

Gino Wickman (17:55): Here, here. Right. So yeah. I urge you to pay yourself first, generate big profits. Certainly, hopefully you will share those profits with your people, but there’s nothing wrong with making a lot of money. So that’s exactly what this one gets to. So the, we call this point, number four, being compensated appropriately. Again, this was my partner, Don tinnies wording. I like to call it getting paid very well, but nonetheless, whatever you call it, this is what we call it. The question to ponder here is, and this one always comes out of this like a curve ball, but how are you adding value for people? That’s what it all comes down to. If you don’t feel like you’re making enough money, you’re not adding enough value in the world. So really think about how do I add value? How do I add value for people? And, and you’ll start to get to your answer with that.

Gino Wickman (18:45): The tool we teach here, I already shared, which is delegate and elevate. So ironically, the more you delegate and elevate what’s in those bottom two quadrants and elevate yourself to the top. To again, working toward that top left quadrant, the closer you are to that, the more money you will make because you are adding more value. And, and the, the, the discipline I would leave you with on this one is something that I learned from one of my business partners in my twenties. And it was, don’t do $25 an hour work. Okay? And so if you’re sitting there frustrated with your situation and you’re making 50 grand a year or 40 grand a year, whatever the number is, and you want to make six figures. So the DISA, the, the, the philosophy here is that you want to earn six figures because we need people earning 15 bucks an hour, 20 bucks an hour, 25 bucks an hour. I’m not knocking it, but for the people that want to make six figures and beyond you, can’t do $25 an hour work. And so everything you’re delegating in those bottom two quadrants, typically that is $25 an hour work. And you need to build support around you to delegate that work. So you can elevate yourself to doing hundred dollars, $250, $500 an hour work. That’s how it works. You got to add value.

John Jantsch (19:56): Yeah. And I think, uh, I, I heard a great quote. I can’t remember who said this. I said that, that, you know, business owners tend to think, look at all the work that needs to be done and figure out how do we get it all done? And entrepreneurs, truly entrepreneurs look at all the work and say, how do I get other people to do all this? You know? And I think that’s a great distinction. A lot of people are in this mindset of, oh, I’ve got the time I can do this. But as you say, I think we undervalue the, the lost opportunity cost in that.

Gino Wickman (20:21): Yeah, exactly. And, and, and, you know, a way to, sometimes people don’t quite grasp what I mean by, you know, you got to add more value. So it’s very simple. If you flip burgers that pays 15 bucks an hour, if you cut a lawn that pays 25 bucks an hour, if you’re a supervisor that pays 40 bucks an hour. So the point is, if you want to make 100 grand a year and you’re cutting lawns, you’re never going to make a hundred grand a year. So you’ve gotta be doing hundred dollars an hour plus work. You’ve got to solve a bigger problem for people cutting along. That’s worth 25 bucks that you’ve solved a $25 problem. You gotta solve bigger problems for people.

John Jantsch (20:57): All right. Let’s move on to another number five and with time for other passions,

Gino Wickman (21:03): You bet. So let’s start with the opening question, which is what are your passions outside of work? Okay. And so again, please ponder that, give it a good few minutes, 5, 10, 20 minutes. And this one, the tool that we offer here is something called the personal or family VTO. So there were, there was a VTO for the business. There’s also a VTO for the family or for the individual. And so what I urge here are a couple of things. First of all, what we’re having them do in the EOS process in the tool is called EOS time management. And so when we get to create the structure for your organization and what we call your accountability chart, when all that work is done, there’s then the seat that you sit in in the organization. And like we said, you gotta have the right people in the right seat.

Gino Wickman (21:55): Well, once your seat is clear, you then have to decide what your hundred percent is, how much time per week. You’re going to devote to this business, how much you’re going to work. And I’ve got clients that they are 35 hour a week people, and I’ve got clients that are 85 hour a week. People I’m like a 50, 55 hour a week guy. So that’s that you got to figure out the amount of time that you feel fulfilled, but you have time for other passions. And so that’s my formula. Everyone has their own formula. The reason we start there is then you need to protect that because if you don’t protect it, your time is going to be this ever expanding amalgamation nation that you’re just going to completely burn out. But if you will protect your a hundred percent, put a stake in the ground, it will help, you know, when it’s time to delegate and elevate, but it will also help you protect the time.

Gino Wickman (22:45): So you have time in your personal life to pursue those other passions. And then just so everybody knows that this isn’t like some revolutionary thing. It’s not a, it doesn’t have to be jumping out of planes and hella skiing and all that kind of stuff. So for me, my passions are simply going for a walk with my wife, going for a bike ride, golfing gambling with my buddies, traveling with family, friends. These are the things I love to do. These are the things that give me energy and light me up when they’re on my schedule to do. And so it’s a matter of just having time to do those things that you love doing. And then I give like 50 to a hundred things you could do if you can’t figure out your passions, but I don’t know that I’ve met anyone that can’t figure out what they’re passionate about.

John Jantsch (23:27): And, and, and the thing that people realize pretty quickly when you have that time and you do recharge doing that. You’re just, you’re 100% time, so much more effective to,

Gino Wickman (23:37): Yeah, well, that’s the secret formula is you recharge your batteries. You come back into work and you’re literally twice as productive. So

John Jantsch (23:45): You did a sneaky thing. You put a bonus, a book inside the book, which for those people that like the little kind of mini snack size, a great added addition to attend disciplines for managing and maximizing your energy. I’m not gonna, we’re not gonna have time to go through them, but I’m a, I’m an audio book listener. And I must admit, I, I made the mistake of listening to that section while I was on a walk. And I found myself wanting to write a bunch of stuff down. Just really, just as you said, there are things in there many, much of which we’ve talked about, tenure thinking is sort of revolutionary idea. Don’t do $25 hour work. We’ve talked about no, you’re 100%, but you really organize them. I think in a way that, that probably everybody that consumes that part of it would look at say, five of them and go, I’m not, I need to do that.

Gino Wickman (24:32): Yeah. And, and if I may just take 30 seconds on that. So what I did is I put this mini 30 page book inside of a book, which is very unconventional, but that was the place to do it. Cause I didn’t want you to have to buy another book. And so where this evolved is two years ago, I decided to get vulnerable. And I taught this at our EOS conference. And it’s for anyone, that’s a hard charging individual. It’s 10 ways to manage and maximize your energy. They’re so powerfully simple, but this is how I’ve done it for 20 years. And I just kind of put myself out there and said, this is how I absolutely optimize my energy. And again, the reaction has been so incredible. I decided what the heck I’m going to put that in this book.

John Jantsch (25:12): Well, and what I love about this too, is, is there’s so many books on managing your time. And I think that that’s really the wrong approach. You can’t actually manage that. Couldn’t agree more. So I love that you focused on energy because that’s really, that’s how we make time. If you will. All right. Tell people where they can find out you’ve, you’ve shared some of the, the links and the websites. And I of course will have them in our show notes, but maybe just invite people to where they can find out more about the book and about all the resources. Yeah.

Gino Wickman (25:39): Fantastic. Well, I’ll share four things. You know, the first is that the primary is to go to EOSlife.com. So that’s where you’ll go to learn about the book and the content and download the tools we talked about. Second thing I would say is if you’re intrigued by the 10 disciplines, go to the 10disciplines.com, it’s the number ten one zero. You’ll see that there. The third thing I would say is if you’re curious on everything, I’m up to everything. I’ve created all of the content in one place. Cause there’s really five major pieces of content that I’ve taught the world. Just go to Gino, wickman.com. If you want to see what I’m up to. And then the last thing I would suggest is if you’re going to buy the book, the EOS life, you know, it’s in all forms. But what we did with the audio book, if you’re an audio book, lover is an in-depth more than two hour interview with me from an incredible interviewer friend and client Rob do bay. And so if you really want to kind of get into the, behind the scenes on all of this EOS life content and the 10 disciplines, the audio book will take to take you to a really fun

John Jantsch (26:42): Place and think we’ll also learn that you are a wild and

Gino Wickman (26:44): Crazy guy when you were young. I still am. Yes, I very much so was when I was young.

John Jantsch (26:50): So, um, I will say one thing, you know, on your, your whole delegate, obviously you’ve taught people to get executive assistants and things of that nature. I will say that your executive assistant is one of the most efficient I’ve ever worked with most effective I’ve ever worked with. Oh, that’s so nice.

Gino Wickman (27:05): And she’s been with me for almost 30

John Jantsch (27:07): Years. Yeah. Yeah. Well, she, you can tell that because she kind of channels you and your energy, you know, in her responses, even though you’d know it’s not you, which you just told her,

Gino Wickman (27:17): You made her day in my day with that comment.

John Jantsch (27:19): Thank you so much for that. That’s a hard thing to teach. So it does, it does take a while. All right, thanks so much for coming back to the duct tape marketing podcast and hopefully we’ll run into each other one day soon out there on the road. Always a pleasure, John.

John Jantsch (27:32): All right. So that wraps up another episode. I want to thank you so much for tuning in and you know, we love those reviews and comments. And just generally tell me what you think also did you know that you could offer the duct tape marketing system, our system to your clients and build a complete marketing consulting coaching business, or maybe level up an agency with some additional services. That’s right. Check out the duct tape marketing consultant network. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that ‘Offer our system to your clients’ tab.

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Duct Tape Transcript

John Jantsch (00:01): This episode of the duct tape marketing podcast is brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network. Hey, I want to give a shout out to another member of the HubSpot network, the success story podcast, hosted by Scott D Clary. It’s one of the most useful podcasts in the world. Success story features Q & A sessions with successful business leaders, keynote presentations, conversations on sales marketing. Hey, and if you’re a freelancer, his episode on how to make seven figures freelancing on Fiverr is a must listen to the success story podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

John Jantsch (00:47): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. This is John Jansen. My guest today is Dr. James Richardson. He’s the founder of premium growth solutions, a strategic planning consultancy for early stage consumer packaged goods brands. As a professionally trained cultural anthropologist turned business strategists. He has helped nearly 100 CPG brands with their strategic planning. And he’s also the author of ramping your brand, how to ride the killer CPG growth curve. He also hosts his podcast, startup confidential and routinely appears in trade magazines, serving CPG, the CPG industry. So with that, Dr. Richardson, welcome to the show.

Dr. James Richardson (01:34): Thanks for having me,

John Jantsch (01:35): John. So for those of everybody, generally speaking has a knowledge of concepts of marketing. Anybody that listens to my show. What w what would you say are the significant kind of critical distinctions between considering a CPG brand versus say, like marketing a service?

Dr. James Richardson (01:51): I think you, it’s easy for founders to underestimate the challenge of changing habitual patterns of consumption. So consumer packaged goods, if you’re intending to, to scale quickly is about changing habits. And whereas services tend to be purchased fairly sporadically or on a longer time cycle. So it’s just a very different animal.

John Jantsch (02:15): We’ll talk a little bit about the, you just said changing habits. So it would probably two challenges. If I I’m just gonna throw out goofy names. If I sell Coke, getting somebody to want to drink Sprite or something already in the category is one challenge. Right. But what if I’m creating, there’s so many drinks I’m thinking like hard kombucha or something that like, that’s not even a category that existed a few years ago. So how do you convince somebody that this is something you’ve never had before and you’re going to love it? Okay.

Dr. James Richardson (02:43): So I think this is what I tell my clients is that first of all, you’ve just got to, you’ve got to shove your, your thing into the marketplace in some, in the local context where you have easy access, uh, to your fans, and then you need to listen. Cause usually early on in the first, even the first months and certainly the first year or so, your fans will probably do a better job than you, the founder of articulating why it matters. And so I’m, I’m a big believer in using those fans to figure that out early on, and then whatever that, why is that something that you get to them selectively pick from, if there’s more than one, I use the language of outcome, but there’s more than one outcome that people are seeking from your thing. Then you get to, you get to use the marketing flywheel to reach more people who may not intuitively get it.

Dr. James Richardson (03:38): If that makes sense. So like the heart kombucha is a good example because I don’t know if you’ve ever had any of those brands theirs, but they taste a lot like wine. Yeah. And so we know when you, when you’re creating a new category, it’s really important to figure out where you’re sourcing volume from and what is the, what’s the logic of figuring out where you’re sourcing volume from and what is the, what’s the logic or linguistical linguistic frame you can use. You can either do that with language, but I’m also a big believer in just inserting, because in my industry, we’re selling widgets, these are physical art, they’re physical artifacts, right? And in some cases they’re, they’re status symbols, they’re extensions of personal identity or their claims about your identity. And so sometimes you want to just show up in the right social space.

John Jantsch (04:29): So though, are you saying, are you saying it’s a little bit, you, you have to make a connection that they already have everybody when they come up with a new services, it’s like Uber, but for lawn mowers, is it that same thing? You were just saying it, it fills the space of IRD like wine. So I’ll like this, or at least already you’re looking at,

Dr. James Richardson (04:48): Well, what you’re looking for actually, John is, is a late what I call a latent dissatisfaction that there may not be articulating until they have your thing. And this is really quite common actually in consumer packaged goods because Americans have two to 300 different products stored in their homes or apartments at any one time. And that crosses 50 to 80 categories. Right. It’s just, we, we refuse to think very consciously about those things, because it, it would be insane. I pick an attorney I’ll think of hard and long about that, but so you have to you’re, you’re, you’re hoping to tap into symbolism language or social context to nudge people into saying, Hey, here’s, here’s this key attribute that my brand delivers we’re chasing, we’re offering the same outcome as the thing you’re already drinking will be, but here’s, what’s better about ours. And that has to be done in, in my, like a really simplistic fashion.

Dr. James Richardson (05:49): So like for instance, a lot of hard can boosters are lower and vastly lower in calories than a glass of wine. Yeah, yeah. Right. So you start to get down into some serious nuance. Yeah. But when you get into the nuance and you can unlock what it is, and usually it takes your fans for you to figure this out, because you may have created the company for some other reason. Right. But it’s, it’s in the nuance details where you can say, I have the new, so instead of saying, I’m the Uber of blankets, forget Uber. I’m more modern than,

John Jantsch (06:21): Yeah. So are you saying that a lot of ways you shouldn’t even try to define it’s almost again it out there, and you may find that there are unintended sort of pathways that open up that you really wasn’t what you were thinking it was going to be.

Dr. James Richardson (06:37): Yeah. I, I think we, I have found that in most of my clients businesses, and in most of the case studies I’ve reviewed there, I talk about my book. There were pivots and those pivots were based on, oh, oh yeah. I had no idea that that’s what, this was kind of a kind bar was a weight management product. Yeah. Yeah. But, but Dan Lubetsky created it as a status symbol, but that the fact that it’s in a, in a clear wrapper, really isn’t the reason it’s scaled it scaled because there’s no sugar and it was the, there never was an issue. Yeah. So sometimes you, because the founder is the worst source of bias and consumer packaged goods, you have to let the consumer and the market basically reeducate you on what you have and then run with that. And I think, I personally think that’s true in B2B. It’s been true in my business, my consulting business, I’ve done the same thing. I went to market for four and a half years ago with one idea what I was going to be doing. And I’m not doing that.

John Jantsch (07:40): I think you, you ended up discovering, I think a lot of times when you’re starting out, you’re, you’re guessing for the most part and, and being open to discovering how often are, are big hits rather than cooked up in a laboratory are cooked up because somebody couldn’t find a weight management product. So they started making their own flavored waters and all of their friends liked it. And then it turned out Kara golden was on the show, the creative hint to the water, the fruit flavored waters. And that really is her story. She wanted to create a product that tasted better than water. I was wanted to stop drinking sodas. And so she was baked cooking it on her stove top and or somebody told her at some big consumer packaged company told her she was crazy. He’d go back to just being a housewife. And she now has a a hundred million dollar product. So how often do you think that happens to where somebody is just trying to scratch an itch? They have personally.

Dr. James Richardson (08:36): Oh, I th I think it’s, it’s most of the folks who don’t have a prior background in the industry, it’s the vast majority of them. The problem though, John is most of those, not all those itches actually have any, any scalability. Right. So the biggest problem that I was just listening to one of your episodes before I got on, about finding your ideal customer. And then I, because I only work with my ideal customer, I literally throw away 50% of my leads every year I screen about. Yeah. So I’m in part of that is just finding people who, who really are going to benefit from what I can do. Yeah. As a consultant. I think that that has value as a B2B service provider, but for consumer packaged goods founders, what I found is a lot of folks are tempted by stakeholders to chase a whole bunch of trial.

Dr. James Richardson (09:24): Let me just get a ho if I can just get there, they all believe they’re the next kind bar with when the other 98% conversion rate or whatever he claims in his book, men, very few of them are, most of them need some kind of tweak in the product experience. They’re halfway there. They need to get better. And those are all fixable problems, but you have to be, you have to be coachable and you have to be coachable by the market for like, if you can’t learn from the market, right. I don’t want to work with you. Yeah, yeah. And no, and stakeholders, or they may take your money though. That’s, what’s funny.

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John Jantsch (10:58): So, so I want to unpack one thing that comes up in the book a bunch, and you, you use the metaphor of scare skate ramps. So you must have been a skater. I’m guessing that’s my son I’ll use that is so, so, so talk about how you use that metaphor.

Dr. James Richardson (11:15): So I, it literally came out of the mathematics of the, of a big study I did on the brands that scaled in the last 10, 15 years, the ones who got to a hundred million and beyond, and consumer packaged goods, which isn’t very common. And they all rode this curve, which is an expedite. It’s really just the sigmoid curve that you learn about in business school textbooks, but which rarely happens today at the grocery store because of the dynamics of the major players and the beauty of this curve is that, that it does two things. One is that it allows arrogant competitors to ignore you because they think you’re failing. But every year they look at your numbers and you’re like, well, he’s still small, whatever. Meanwhile, you’re actually doubling, but because you’re doubling off of a small base, and this is the key to the math, you’re, you’re buying time to do it. We’re just talking about, which is learned from your fans, iterate, finished the experiment, essentially finished your product line in market, or you make a big pivot.

Dr. James Richardson (12:22): And that gives you if actually buys you the time to pivot. And you’re pivoting at a lower, lower scale, which in my industry is sort of, it’s almost critical because if you say you’re like $50 million, you do discover, oh, I’m running out of consumer. Oh no, you now are going to have to spend you have money. So that’s great. But you’re now going to have to, you’re not going to wind down a $50 million business and replace it with something else. And that mathematic, you’re never going to find an investor sign on there. Yeah. So that’s going to be very painful. Probably won’t happen, but you can completely pivot like a two or $3 million business. Yeah. Birth something else out. And then within two years, everyone’s forgotten the original thing. And sometimes that original business gives you the right thing. It gives you access to a consumer audience. Spindrift is a great example of that. They launched premium soda pop all natural, yada yada, yada, but there’s no market for it. Believe it or not. When people want a Coca-Cola Pepsi, that’s what they want. They don’t need an artisan version of, and when they do, it’s like a goofy Christmas gift or something, what he discovered was people wanted, they wanted a different kind of sparkling water and that took off. Yeah. Yeah. So, but he did it at the right time. Now I’m talking about bill Creelman, but he did at the real, at the right time in the business. In other words, he killed the first idea early based on data.

John Jantsch (13:52): Yeah. So how big, how big is design in the package, the colors, the box, it comes in the bottle. It’s in how thinking of like method, for example, a very design driven product taking on Procter and gamble products. How, how big a role is that? Maybe more so even than what’s in the box.

Dr. James Richardson (14:13): Yeah. Design is, is important and can serve package goods for premium products, which is sort of my world, but it’s, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t say it’s up to the importance of Dyson and that category of durable goods, um, where the user experience actually is incredibly complex and people are super demanding and they have a million ways to attack you. Right? When you’re just selling a beverage, there isn’t much going on there. There’s very specific uses. This is the thing that’s counterintuitive about design. It’s not so much about being the next coach handbag of beverages. That’s not really, you can do that to get attention. That’s, that’s great. But that just gets you trying. What really matters is able to use your packaging to signal. And this is what I help folks with using just the right words, just the right symbols and deleting everything else. And it’s the leader, it’s the removing the clutter, which is a big thing too.

John Jantsch (15:05): Well, it probably accentuates the brand promise or the brand story too, obviously. Right?

Dr. James Richardson (15:10): Yeah. I think there’s something that you’ll notice that most, most premium brands across industries, I’m sorry, across production verticals that chase the consumer, the premium ones tend to have very clean websites. They don’t have a lot of IX. They’re not like the used car dealer with the 75 pop-ups it’s. So they, they assume, you know why they’re cool. Yeah. And, and if you don’t know, they’re going to rely on your social network to tell you that, and that gets really extreme in the fashion world. But I think it’s a mix of that in CPG word of mouth. John is huge in driving the initial years of growth like you need. And that’s what, and that’s, what’s funny is that the word of mouth storytelling about your premium CVG brand, that’s actually where the secret sauce is for paid marketing later. You’re going to, if you can learn from them and then fund that story once you get the right one.

John Jantsch (16:07): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, and that’s, I mean, obviously the role of influencers for good or bad, frankly, certainly plays a role in, in a lot of cases. That’s a page story too. Yeah. But, but how important is that role, if you want your brand to be seen as cool, does it have to be seen certain places?

Dr. James Richardson (16:25): Yeah. I think social insertion is something that matters in certain sub categories. Beverages is one of those certainly liquor and because, and it also depends what the outcome is. You’re selling. If you’re a liquor brand, you are selling a mixture of, of class status sex, basically. Right. And so you’re trying to be the new thing at the bar. Yeah. And so you have to be at the right clubs now, in other categories, you may want to be showing up at surfing events. Right. Right. Because you’ve got a group of people who are into fitness and because they’re into fitness, they are into weight maintenance because these people were never fat. They just don’t want to get fat. So when they drank, they want boom, heart kombucha. That’s a story of June shine right there.

John Jantsch (17:11): Well, let’s, let’s talk about how distribution has changed. There was a day when, if you couldn’t get three feet of shelf space at no bubble block chain, you really couldn’t exist. But today there are a lot of brands that are direct to consumer. So how has the distribution piece sort of changed? Because on the flip side of that, you see whole foods going out and saying, oh, you can only get this at this whole foods in Austin, Texas, because the person that makes it lives right around the corner. So there seems to be a real hunger to get micro that way. But direct to consumer seems to be driving a lot of these startup brands.

Dr. James Richardson (17:45): Yeah. I, I, so my, my general takeaway is direct consumer for all. Initially it works really well for all, but the frozen refrigerated temperature stay category, which is eliminates a chunk of the grocery store. I, what I found working with my clients is that it’s a great learning laboratory to do what, to reduce the time John, in which you accumulate that massive early fans who can then educate you on what you created. Yeah. Right. So you can now do that in three to six months, not 18 months. Yeah. Which is what used to happen. People would go out and they’d sell it even locally. And it would take time to gather the negative feedback. Well, the positive feed, right. D to C allows you to create this flywheel communication. If you know how to use it, plus you can, you can stare at your repeat rate.

Dr. James Richardson (18:33): And if it’s really bad, if you can’t hide from that truth for very long, right. That’s what I like is it’s a brutal laboratory in CBG. It’s sort of mixed results on how much you can scale and certain categories. And they tend to be not that traditional grocery ones, their beauty and personal care. That’s where I’m seeing people create huge businesses. I don’t have the, I don’t know. Perfect. I don’t have the perfect behavioral explanation for why it is with those categories, but I don’t think it’s, I don’t think it’s, it’s certainly not shipping cost or anything like that. I think there’s something cultural about people willing to, they’re willing to see a Facebook ad and buy a $180 beauty cream or wrinkle cream almost instantaneously. And you won’t see, you won’t see P well, John, you won’t see people switch their case packs, soda habit, right. Like instantaneously that takes weeks or months to change that.

John Jantsch (19:28): And it’s partly it’s because sort of maybe the, the dream that’s being sold by that I was never fulfilled. So it’s, well, maybe the next one. Or

Dr. James Richardson (19:36): I could, if I, if I channel my evolutionary anthropological training, beauty is sex. Beauty is mating and reproduction. It pretty much has the highest stakes like behavior of the species. Right. So deep down in your unconscious, if you have anxious, if you have insecurity about how you appear, it’s not that hard to monetize that insecurity. Yeah. I think it’s, like I said, it’s a little harder to find that group of people who hate diet Coke, like Kara and they need her solution that took her time. Yeah,

John Jantsch (20:07): Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. Yeah. So, um, you have a number of case studies, so I’m wondering if there’s, you could pick out one that you think is, was a little tiny brand that you worked with that now might be a name, or w w I, I guess I’m asking for your biggest hit, what’s your, what’s been your biggest that we maybe would, that listeners might recognize or be familiar with or any story that you want to share that you think was a great case study? Well,

Dr. James Richardson (20:36): That’s a good question. I just, uh, wrote, I’m going to pick the one I can publicly talk about. Okay. I said, that’s a good idea. You’re a big name podcast. I don’t need lawyer letters. So we’re, I started working with John Forker, who’s the CEO of once upon a farm, the baby started as a baby food brand for the last two or three years. And they were, you know, they were doing okay, they’re doing okay. But they, they had this, he had this nagging suspicion that something was off. And part of part why can’t. So I came in and we worked together just for a day. I did a little of my shamanistic sort of data analysis and stuff like that, which sort of in my book as well. And I discovered that we had a velocity problem. The problem was that it was selling, but it was, it was really, it’s not the kind of a loss.

Dr. James Richardson (21:33): I won’t get into the details of why not the kind of a loss city, that velocity trend is more important. I not growing, that’s going to create scale. So the key behind the skate ramp is that the velocity is actually growing every year. It’s sort of like, it’s the investor’s dream and in investing right as your, your industry keeps growing. And so you get richer and richer and richer, and then it explodes. This is what exponential growth is in CVG. And so I think he wants to get on that track, but was struggling with, they had always wanted us to be a kids brand. Okay. They organic HPP sort of fruit and vegetable. It’s a fruit and vegetable, a smoothie, basically a pouch. You stick it in your mouth like goo. Yup. Yup. So babies have no problem with doing that. Kids don’t have any problem with doing, doing that, but actually a lot of adults don’t have a problem.

Dr. James Richardson (22:26): So they had always fought the investors as well. That we’re going to be a big kid’s brown, but they had always seen that as down the line. Right. And I think what I helped them figure out is look, the baby food category is probably when you didn’t even want to have to start with. Yeah. Which, which is it’s okay to discuss now. But I think it was hard to swallow at the time. Cause you raised money on the basis. So we’re going to take over baby food. But the reality is that the behavior, the demographics, the cultural trends, all the stuff that I’m trained to intersect and synergize, it was all bad, bad, bad, bad. I, as pretty much the worst case scenario, John of a category review of every death, it was like, I don’t think these people you’re going to run out of these people so fast.

Dr. James Richardson (23:10): It’s basically what I told them. So switch to a kid brand now. And they made that decision. Basically he had half made it already and he, by the end of the day he was sold. So they did. And they had to make a whole bunch of changes. Yeah. They had originally thought that they were going to have to launch all these new lines. This is my favorite thing in CPG is new audience, new product lines. And when you’re, I guess, $5 billion brand, maybe that makes sense because you have a bunch of segmentations that tell you that that’s, that’s real. But if you’re starting a business, that’s a 1520, if you’re 15 to 20 million, you need to still stay focused. John. Yeah. Yeah. Right. So what we found in the data was that kids were already older kids already in the pouches. So they just rip the baby food label right off and re did a new brand identity that doesn’t cost too much money. Right? Yeah. Put some cartoon characters on there and suddenly, boom, this end, the ad do some basic things in CPG. Like moms hate picking up four packs, put four of them in a box.

Dr. James Richardson (24:16): So once you stay focused and you listen to the data, then you can actually, that was, so that was an example of a pivot and they’re growing like crazy now. That’s awesome. And part of that was just not getting distracted by solving growth problems with like new products, which is a big temptation. Sure.

John Jantsch (24:31): Yeah. Yeah. We’ll we’ll

Dr. James Richardson (24:32): We’ll yeah. I, I can’t tell you how many brands I’ve encountered that are between 25 and 50 million. John they’re still here and they have a 50 UPC. Nobody knows what they stand for. Right. And they basically, to me, what they have is that they have, they have concatenated like five little niche, consumer basis, nothing to do with each other. Yeah. It’s a marketer’s nightmare

John Jantsch (24:58): Because it’s worth creating the new stuff’s where the fun is. So, so James can tell people where they can find out more about your work. We have run out of time. So tell people where they can find out more about your work and, and obviously a pickup ramping your brand.

Dr. James Richardson (25:12): So wrapping your brands on amazon.com, you can also order it for libraries on Ingram. And if you want to learn more about me to follow me on LinkedIn, go to premium growth solutions.com, where I house my blog and that’s updated three times a week. Okay.

John Jantsch (25:29): Well, I appreciate you something by the duct tape marketing podcast, and hopefully we’ll run into you one of these days out there on the road.

Dr. James Richardson (25:34): Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Joe. All right.

John Jantsch (25:36): That wraps up another episode of the duct tape marketing podcast. I want to thank you so much for tuning in. Feel free to share this show. Feel free to give us reviews. You know, we love those things. Also, did you know that we had created training, marketing training for your team? If you’ve got employees, if you’ve got a staff member that wants to learn a marketing system, how to install that marketing system in your business, check it out. It’s called the certified marketing manager program from duct tape marketing. You can find it at ducttapemarketing.com and just scroll down a little and find that tab that says training for your team.

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