495. Matter More So You Can Hustle for Attention Less with Jay Acunzo

Don't market more, matter more, because if you matter more, you need to hustle for attention less, think resonance over reach. Like that stuff is built and it's discovered and honed and sharpened, not just sort of a lightning strike moment where it's found or realized. You're a videographer, you do like wedding video, I'm like, "No, no, no, no." Well, you know, we're trying to create, we're trying to get people to lean in, right? They hear something, they feel something. I think that our obsession with trying to be the best at our thing or in our space is very silly. That's not how people make choices, they play favorites and you need to be their favorite and there's different ways to do that. On episode 495 of the podcast, we talk about why chasing reach keeps you broke and how resonance is what actually drives results and referrals. We go over the six part framework for moving a client from, "Wait, who are you to, I have to work with you?" This is an amazing framework and I've already applied it to a workshop that I'm hosting. It's good. And then finally, why being their favorite beats being the best? So you can finally get off the price, spread sheets, all that and a lot more in today's episode. What is up my friend? Hey, welcome to the Grow Your Video Business Podcast. This is the show where I help you build a profitable video business without burning out. And maybe even falling back in love with your business, I'm Ryan Corle your host and I am happy to be here again. I keep saying this the last couple of weeks, I've said this. I have, there have been multiple times where I've fallen out of love with my production business, tell studios. And I'm back, I'm back, I'm back. Back in love, you know, I think it's normal, at least it's normal for me to fall in the fall in and out of love with this thing. So I'm not going to go totally into it, but you know, I think having a renewed purpose, refreshed vision for what I do and why I do it is so healthy. And you know, keep talking about it, but weeks on the Camino with a lot of time to think about what I have where I'm headed all the things. I just, I don't know if I'm ever going to shake this, this, this story teller that's inside of me and the fact that I get to do this as a business is incredible. So, you know, I continue to dedicate my time here to help you, hopefully help you learn from mistakes that I've made to help you feel like you're not alone in this. So if you have fallen out of love with your business, you can at least feel like we're in good company together, you and me. So that's cool. I know it just even in our mastermind, I may have mentioned this recently a couple of guys were in that same spot or are in that same spot of like just not loving or things are at we had a text read toward the end of last week. And then one guy actually was over the weekend, one guy was just asking us, should I keep the wedding brand around I've contemplated killing this thing five years ago, but I hung on to it because I still make some money from it. And it's just fascinating the conversation, the questions that the group is asking him, it's actually really super interesting to just see how wise the people are in this group, not just me, you know, I might not even be the wisest one in the group. But then also the same person started listening to the book traction, which I've talked a lot about over the years, and he's realizing that his passion has not been in the wedding stuff for a long time. And so he's just realizing like how it has been dragging him down. And I think that's a brilliant insight for us all to take note of maybe we are hanging on to a part of our business that isn't bringing us life that isn't bringing us like maybe it's bringing some revenue, but the amount of revenue, it's not worth the stress and the frustration and the lack of passion and all that stuff. So something to consider if you are in that spot where you need insight, where you wish you could lean on other people. Good news for you. We are in the early bird phase of the onwards summits. So you can get your ticket to my in person event where they're going to be other people like the people in my mastermind, they're going to be there. There's going to be other people there that want to help you that want to serve you that also want to be helped, but we a lot of us know that in helping we are helped ourselves. So you can get a super discounted price, super discounted tickets for the onward summit right now for the next couple of weeks. If you go to studio sharpas.com/onward, that is the name of the event. It's the onward summit. I'm hosting it at my studio in Lake Orient, Michigan. This will be our sixth annual event. And I'm really excited to bring the band to get the band back together again. So if you thought about it now is the time let's get signed up and I do think that we're going to fill out this year fill out fill up sell out. That's the word. So it's going to be good be there or be square studio sharpas.com/onward grab that discounted ticket. Don't come to me like in a month from now and like ride. Can I get that discount because I'm going to be like no, bro. You had your chance. So sign up, get all the extra goodies. And there's only limited. There are very limited amount. There are very limited spaces available for the VIP upgrade, which is where we're going to hang out some extra times throughout our time together. It's October 4 through the 6th, but the very last night, if you're VIP, you get to come hang out at my house. And we'll have cocktails and conversations around campfire and all the good stuff. So that's all I got. Let's jump into today's episode. Thank you so much for being here. Let's roll the tape. What's up my friend? Hey, welcome to another episode of the show with me today is Jay. I'm just Jay, a Conzo who is a public speaking and storytelling strategist and also like as I'm reading Jay's buy on like he's worked for like all of the big companies he's done like so amazing stuff. He's like, oh, you're in Detroit. Yeah, you did this like cool like mini docky series. I'm like, oh, okay. So this guy's like just he's really cool. Jay, how did you get here? I'm so explain. I'll be on the show. I'm happy to be here, but you have to explain why that why I just belly left at that comment. Otherwise, your listeners are going to be like, let's go. Oh, funny. No, we were we were kind of joking before we got rolling here because we both have been in the podcast world for a few seconds and have seen a lot of podcasts or been on shows where the hosts are they're just they're not they're not born to be a podcast host. Is that the nicest way to say it? They're not born to and they haven't yet learned how to actually do it decently. So how did you get here? Jay, why don't you introduce yourself? Who are you? Why did I invite you on my show? I have no idea. Some days I don't know who I am or what I am or what I'm doing here. Why why me why us what's what is life? You can understand me through a very simple premise, which is the premise of my whole platform and business, which is think residents over reach. I think a lot of people obsess over reach today. And I see it, but residents is how much they care. And my money as a storyteller as a longtime professional speaker, somebody who advises others on those topics and even in house when I was working as a marketer for companies like Google and HubSpot. A lot of people that I've been surrounded by it's so obvious they have lost sight about why we communicate why we tell stories what actually works, whether it's to teach or to build your business or both. And it's residents, residents drives results. So I first learned that as a sports journalist, I wanted to write columns about athletes. And I've always loved the type of storytelling you find from my storytelling hero Anthony Bourdain or my favorite comedian Mike Bribiglia or Bill Lawrence, you know scrubs and rooster and Ted Lasso and shrinking and all these stories that they blend together all emotions on the human spectrum to make you think make you care. Change something in your head or your heart and ultimately maybe take an action in your life. If it's a commercial setting. That's what you want is someone to take an action subscribe by share refer. And so I've pursued that in my career and as an independent about 11 years ago, I started a full-time keynote speaking business. I was on the road. It's like a road warrior professional speaker which people don't quite understand how that works and I'm happy to talk about. But in the last few years since starting to have little kids, now they're seven and five, but for the last few years I've been at home teaching it advising it, training it, running organizations or cohorts doing the behind the scenes. I joke that like musicians get Rick Rubin, maybe professional speakers can get me. I'm Mark. That's great. I so much of that I love our tagline is video with soul as I am chatting with people are like, well, what do you do? You know what like what you're a videographer? You do like wedding video? I'm like, no, no, no, no. Well, you know what we're trying to create. We're trying to get people to lean in. right, they hear something, they feel something, you know, you say, uh, resonance drives results. I'm like, Oh, dude, like that's, that's it. Like those, that's where I spend my money. Like, if I'm going to spend money, it's going to be, and I've got two options. If somebody's like making me lean in or, or just making my heart resonate with their message and how they go about sharing it, that's, that's where I want to spend my time and money. And so to, uh, for, for that to be the focus of your work, I'm like, Oh, dude, that's so good. What, what was the, what, like for you to realize that that was something, right? Because it, for me, like, I think I just always felt it. I didn't know how to, like, I don't want to say, like monetize it. But like essentially, like, as I look, you know, we did wedding filmmaking for the first almost decade of my career. And that was really easy. It was like, yeah, we were just going to make these beautiful little films that are going to make people cry. Like, because why not? You know, this is a powerful story. And then when we transitioned in 2012 to like, okay, how do we do this for businesses? Got, it got more challenging. Sure. Right. Just like, all right, do a 30 second commercial. Like, no, no, that's not, at least that format we were thinking that's not going to get people to like cry. At least how we were going to walk. So like, what is that thing? So then I just started learning like, Oh, there is a strategy here. And it's, it's like, how do we get people to, to feel what it is that we're trying to communicate? So at what point did you realize that this was like, this was a thing? This could be a strategy or just a way of life. You know, it's funny. As someone who likes to tell stories, you do, in a story, you, you have moments where you say, and that's when they realized, and that's when I realized, because you have to fit a lifetime into some, into your speeches, runtime or your episodes runtime. Like, so you make choices like that where you kind of compress a messy thing into a clean thing, a lot of stuff into one moment. So say, I realized, because to answer your question, I don't think there's a moment where you realize, like the profound insight that can become your entire premise. And this is what I do with speakers and entrepreneurs and service providers. In part, is I help them develop that ownable premise and turn that premise into their message and content and IP. And what it looks like at first is a real mess of confronting your frustrations, your curiosity. You go on this kind of investigative journey, asking questions about how you feel or how you see your space. Why don't they do it that way? Why aren't they seeing what I see? What's the real problem causing those symptomatic pains? You know, you have these questions and then you go investigate through content and conversation. And so I think that's how it happened for me is like when I became a speaker at my last in house job, I was the VP of content at a venture capital firm, a really small firm called Next View, best in house job I ever had. They were a seed stage, RSE stage, investment firm. And I remember, you know, I had started wondering what is it about my marketing kin, this community that I was in of content marketers was like you're settling, you're creating this commodified mediocre content and lo and behold, a lot of people are now using AI to create mediocrity at scale. Congratulations to you. That's no good for you. You're just making our work easier if you know how to stand out, if you know how to be truly you, a wall of gray behind you is very helpful. So thank you to those people. But for many years, I was just angry. I was just frustrated and petulant about why do marketers insist on producing such mediocre content? And there's a lot of reasons some justified some excuses. And so I ran at the marketing world and I launched a blog at one point called Sorry for Marketing. And I would just rail against but never really fight for. And then that turned into okay, my curiosity is now peaked by my frustration. Why are we that way in marketing and anyone creating content? What's going on here? Why don't they see the soul in the art part as actually being really important for everything they're trying to do not just to serve the audience. They should want that too. And it's okay. Well, it's these best practices. The best practices are basically just average practices, although they call them the best. And so you go down this journey. Oh, wait, why do we cling to best? Oh, because in school, we're told that we have to have the answer or else we have no worth. We're not told to ask the question or a good one or investigate or muck around and figure things out. So you go on this journey, which in some cases can look like an existential spiral. In other cases, it looks like being a journalist or just being a curious person and a sensitive creative. And over time, you build not just the insight but the language for it to at which point you get to say things like everybody's running around trying to market more, more don't market more matter more. Because if you matter more, you need to hustle for attention less, think residents overreach. Like that stuff is built and it's discovered and honed and sharpened, not just sort of a lightning strike moment where it's found or realized matter more. Yeah, as you're saying that, I'm like, maybe that's where I saw that. I saw you say that somewhere and I was like, that's really good. Do you know, do you know Matthew Dicks story, where the guy? Yeah, we're both from Connecticut actually. We've never met and never spoken, but I've seen him from a distance and I admire his work. Yeah, yeah. Just like as we were talking, I'm like, this is what you're reminding me of. Yeah. That's that's fun. What you know, you've got you say your kids are five and seven? Five. Yeah. So my kids are 19 16 and I just went to fifth grade graduation today from my life. Wow, nice. Two times I've cried today. One, where you were making me laugh and then a little bit earlier when I was watching Hazel. Anyway, my point is probably for a dozen years when my kids were like at their youngest for the longest time, I really said I'm not doing like the networking stuff that I was doing. Man, when I launched my business, I was I feel like I was at something at least at least once a week. Oh, yeah. And it was great. Like man, it built my business. And I am reaping the rewards on a lot of that work that I did 20 years ago still today. Sure. But as we started having kids, I was like, I don't want to do that. Like I want to be around as much as possible. And then, you know, my kids, you know, now, you know, we're I've got a kid in middle school or it was just going to be a middle school in the fall. And it's just different, right? Home home is different. I want I walked the Camino in Spain a couple of weeks ago. I was gone for two and a half weeks. I think the kids barely noticed that I was gone. Oh, wow. Yeah, yeah. I think my wife kind of noticed that I was gone. But anyway, I digress vision casting here. You know, your work has changed. I have a point to all of this program. 10 years from now, right? You're doing a lot of like coaching consulting. Probably a lot of virtual, whatever. Has the kids get bigger and older and don't need you or maybe don't want you hand raised just because that's my story. What's like what's what's the dream? Like what's what's where do you want things to be if you're to say 10 years or now, which would be 2036? You're 10 years ago. I got a lot of this. And we're a little different than my kids will never not want to hang out with me and be best friends. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Right. Please say right. Anyways, the I got punched in the mouth as many of us did in many different ways at the beginning of the pandemic. But as a professional keynote speaker with a business at the time that was built on travel and large groups. Like few things are more perfectly tailored to be destroyed by a pandemic. Maybe if somehow you were in like the face licking business, but I don't know. I don't know. I think it monetize is very well. But so it just collapsed. And it collapsed for my friends and peers. But the one of the differences between most of those people and me is when the world came back online and people went out there again, I did not because I was having little kids because my wife has a career because you cannot tell me that speech to any amount of people. And I've been on some really big glossy stages. Can make me feel the high that I feel when my kids do something pretty routine in the morning hours, right? Like I just I don't want to leave. I still give my fair share of speeches, but the volume is much less now. Yeah. Long way of saying, I need to figure out what else I could do from home. And it was always part of the plan. But I thought I had time to figure it out while still earning from the stage. And all the stages went away in an instant. And then if it was time to go back to high volume, you fast forward a couple of years and how we had kids. And so I didn't want to do that. So in the intervening years, kind of 2023 through today, I've been building this advisory business doing one-on-one in group programs and training some corporations and picking up some brand deals and giving some speeches for a fee. There's some opportunistic or lower level income streams. But the big two are the one-on-one in the group. And I don't want to build like a 20 person, 30 person, 50 person staff around me. I look at some folks and I'm like, they're a potential model to build an agency. And then I talk to some of them because thankfully I've gotten to know them over the years. And almost to an individual they're miserable and hate their best. And I know of myself what that looks like. The way you spend your time there is not I'm a creator. I'm a writer, a speaker, a storyteller, a tinkerer. I've always had some kind of side project or two or three not monetized side hustle side project. Because I kind of came up in the OG RSS blog era of the internet, the good kind of the internet. Not good all day. Cancer we're dealing with now. That's right. And so I think my short answer to your question would be if I fast forward, I want to have become my own biggest patron. And what I mean by that is I want my business to be systematized, and enjoyable and enjoyable, but systematized and have enough margin and dollars, but also my time and headspace such that I can fund projects I want to fund. Because my fund doesn't look like going out and gardening, like I like it, launch in the show, trying an original limited series, writing the book, trying an internship program, I meant to write, I don't know, my projects are always like vaguely related to my work, but I don't want to have those things tied to the business. I don't want it to have to generate a lead or justify it with some kind of metric to grow the services that I'm selling. So I want my business to be in such a place where I can say yes to a collaborative opportunity or can cock some kind of crazy grand illusion of a project and be able to fund it as my own biggest patron. I think the I'm a control freak and a creative and I think that's where it leads. Yeah. That's really cool. It's just reminding me of what you were saying about. We've just gotten into the trap of believing you got to have six figures and subscribers or your email list or whatever in order to build a super successful business and to make an impact on all that. But the last six months of my life has been unlearning that and realizing that I've built two very successful businesses, two profitable businesses with like 1500 email list and 89 YouTube subscribers and more sizable like 3500 but not out of reach. 3500 people on an email list and it's like, yeah. Both of those businesses are very successful in their own right. But I still, I think for the longest time, we get caught in a trap of seeing like, well, this person has like 100,000, 200,000 subscribers and must be nice. But that comes with its own challenges and its own things. If you can be really dialed in with what it is that you do and how you bring value to the world, there are a certain amount of people. There's only a certain amount of people that you need to hire you in order for you to be like, oh, I've got a full book of business and I've got me reaching all of my financial goals. Right. Right. Well, it comes back to this idea. I heard this summarized nicely from the stage. I was at a creator conference a couple of years ago in Cleveland and there was a comedian. I don't think he's, he's not quite famous. You know, he doesn't have the Netflix special, but I think he was on the stage being interviewed by somebody at the event because he's just a great philosopher on being a creator and a creative. And his name is Mike Paramore and he said, you know, because I'm a comedian, a lot of people assume that my job is to make you laugh. And he said, no, my job is to find the people who think I'm funny. Yeah. And I have not heard a tighter explanation. Like if somebody who deals in clarity of messaging in part and public speaking, I was, I was like, I'm taking that with me. That's great. And credit where it's due, I will forever cite that man. And he, what he was saying was something I think a lot of people need to hear because I hear this from a lot of people where it's like, well, you know, I believe this about this space or this work or I, I'm interested in this idea or I am against the trend in some kind of macro level sense in my industry or whatever, but then they walk back because they're like, I have to talk about that because that's what the market cares about. I have to be like this because that's what sells or whatever. And I'm like, listen, it's, it's hard either way. It's hard to show up like a commodity who looks and sounds like everybody else, glomming on the trends, saying whatever the market will quote unquote bear, right, commodify yourself. And now you got to race harder and hype harder and shout louder because you got to reach your buyer before everybody else who looks like you. You can't charge a premium. It's hard, right? It's also hard to have conviction about your ideas and philosophies and the way you see the world and whatever. The hard work there is not standing apart. You begin that way. The hard work there is developing your expertise and ideas into the commercialized resonant version of that, a distinct signature idea, framework stories, finding a way to get people to see what you see. That's the hard work on that side. But if you can do that part and be this kind of inside out thinker and communicator versus outside in, now you have real advantages. Not only can you sleep at night, which is a huge one, but you also have differentiation. You can charge a premium. You stop chasing constantly and you become the one that your clients seek. And I'm like, I want to be over there. I learn how to be over there as a speaker and author. Now I want to equip people who sell other things, including speeches, but not just speeches to do the same kind of work because we need higher conviction thinkers and creators in this world. Mm hmm. I made it know. I want to ask you later, unless you know the name of that creator conference because I'm in Detroit and I should probably get sunset. It's called it was called the content entrepreneur expo or CX. They sold it to Lulu, which is a hybrid book publisher. And I think Lulu wanted the list more than they wanted the event. And so now it's dead. There's real I am experiencing this a lot. There's a real need for kind of like a mid-sized grouping of creative entrepreneurs meeting up, not like VidCon, not massive, not tick tockers, but like folks like what we do where it's like it is creative entrepreneurship. I don't think we have an event that we call home quite I mean like Kit is trying to fix that a little bit. They have they've had for many years. They're summit, but it's a little harder because it's, you know, it's a software company. So like they have a agenda. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Stop chasing. I think that's that is one of the most powerful beliefs that as as a owner of video production business, I am hungry. I'm hungry for work. You know, I've done whatever to for the most part, whatever it takes to get the job to, you know, survive through COVID, try to thrive. But I think there's a sense of people can tell there's a there's a different energy when you're chasing for work versus when you believe in how you help people. Yes. In the way that you do. In the way that you're set. And what I've sensed is like when as soon as somebody starts like, you know, they don't necessarily start backing up, but I, but I can almost tell like by a look or just a scent of like, I'm like, oh my gosh, they feel like I'm trying to sell to them. I'm like, so, so maybe in this moment, I'm feeling like I'm, or I'm coming across like I'm chasing. I think that as I've noticed that in, in it's, it reminds me of when I had somebody brand us for the very first time, went from just doing kind of any, any wedding that somebody would hire us for back in like 2005 and six and in 2007, my buddy DJ branded us, built this brand and we got this sweet logo, but not just a logo. We got like this like copy that was like powerful that we put on our website that it elevated my confidence that we started selling. We went from like $2,000, $3,000 package to selling a five in a $10,000 in a 15 and eventually a 20 and $25,000 wedding package wedding film packages. But it was like my confidence was like, oh, yeah, you don't have the money. Like don't worry about it. Like it's fine. There's somebody else out there for you, right? It was just a different energy. It was this confidence. And I would say that the majority of filmmakers that I'm friends with that are, you know, they're doing more than weddings, they're, you know, in their corporate commercial space. Most everybody, it feels like they're chasing and that, that probably why as you're listening, you're, you're feeling like is Ryan talking about me? Yeah, it's like I feel it's an act. And that's, that's, that's man, if you can figure out. So that's my question for you, Jay. How, how do we get to a spot where we do believe that what we, what we have to offer is, it's, we're unique, right? We're all in here. Totally. The best news yet is the, and this entire episode for people is there's real method to this. It doesn't have to be like a lightning strike moment where I was born with the, like, gift to speak that way. No, no, there's, it's a craft. It's something you can master. Like this is why I love watching comedians and actors and people at a high level who are creative when they get together around a table and they're filmed or they talk shop on a podcast and they go really deep wrestling with a single thing of a project, a piece because they're, they're picking it apart and making sense of it. And I'm like, oh, I do that too. I do my friends, the fellow speakers do that with my, you know, myself, my business coach, etc. It's like, oh, they're doing what I do. They're just better at it, which means I can get better at it. Like that's good news. Yeah. So I come with, you know, great tidings of joy here. Like it's, you can do this. It's a method. So here's, here's the where it starts, I think. I find that creative, which I identify as is often similar to an academic, a scientist even an engineer, people who are so steeped in their thing and it's hard one to be good at that thing. And it's part of your identity too. You're not just like, I do accounting for work, but I don't really feel like I identify as I get, no, it's like you wander the earth as you don't shut it off when you love film, when you love stories, when you love creativity. And so it's so tied to you and you're so proud and it took you a while to get there that you're at letter Z. You're at the conclusion. You understand why the craft matters. You understand why your ideas matter. You understand why you should be their pick or your offering should be purchased or hired by those people, right? You're at letter Z. They are at letter A. And mostly we communicate with the world X, Y, Z. And when people don't care, we like, ah, they don't get it. It's not what the market wants. It's like, no, you did a bad job of getting people to the same conclusion that you have reached. But you have reached it over your entire life. - Oh, yeah. - You got 30 minutes with these people. You got a quick scan of the website with these people. Like you don't have an entire life's journey to get to the same conclusion, so you have to replicate it. You have to take them on the same journey. And I find the most effective way to go out and meet them at A and move them to Z is imagine you're having a dialogue with your market. This is like an idea development tool. And people use it in speaking. It's called a dialogue outline. Everybody's wondering the same thing, based on the stage of carrying and understanding that they're at. They have a question on their mind. And you have to answer it first. If you don't, if you miss it, which we often do, they're gonna be like, so out on your idea or you and pick somebody else. And so that's the problem is we don't anticipate their side, but you can have this faux dialogue in a notebook and like assess how you're explaining things and then go validate the best way to explain it and build it. So I'm happy, should we go through the dialogue? - Yeah, it's cool. - It's great. Should we do that? - Okay. - Yes. - I'm hungry. Imagine this is an easy comp. Imagine you're giving a keynote address. You're giving a keynote speech to your entire ideal market, existing clients, perspective clients, influencers in your space. Like you're the keynote. Congratulations. This is an easy way to think about this. First, you build that keynote by having this dialogue. It is the underpinning structural logic. It's an argument for people to buy in to your ideas and or you. And the first thing they're all wondering in the moment you hit the stage is how is this gonna help me? So I first learned this from a great speaker named Andrew Davis, who helped me figure out my speaking career in like 2015, '16. So how is this gonna help me? And you have to respond somewhere early on with here's your goal. This is what you want, this is what you're going through, this is what you believe, this is your goal. And they say, "Yes, that is my goal." It's really quick. For me, I would say you want people to pick you, stick with you and refer you despite the noise, despite the competition. I've made it musical, yours could be messy. At first it really is messy, just vomit onto a page. Your answer to the question, how is this gonna help me? What do they want? Here's your goal. Then they're wondering, yes, okay, that is my goal. Number two, aren't I trying to achieve that already? Yes, here's your current approach. Yeah. Now let me pause there. All we've done is align with them. And the science of resonance shows us that resonance is an energy transfer that only happens when two frequencies are aligned. They're considered resonant frequencies. So if you want your words, your message, your stories to transfer that energy that people need to take an action to care about you, well, you have to first align. It's like pitching a boss in a corporate setting. If you don't start with, "Hey boss, you know that goal you said we have? I have an idea for it." You can pitch a great idea all the live long day. They won't hear it, right? You have to align. Here's your goal. Here's your current approach. Their follow-up question now is, why not keep doing it the current approach? The same way. And now you move from alignment to agitation. Align, then agitate. Because here are the problems with the current approach. And if you're really good, you're like, and here's the root cause of those problems. We're not even talking about that. It's a deeper problem. That's when you become a true leader. And they're like, okay, I get it. You have my best interests in mind. That's my goal. Yep. That's my current approach. I see the problems. Well, what should I do differently? That's number four. Here's my premise. Think resonance overreach. Stop creating content. Create IP, right? You need a premise, a distinct, onable idea for how to solve the problem that they're trying to solve. In a better way than they're currently doing it. And so an example of like a popular one right now is James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. There's like an inherent before and after moment in that phrase, or in think resonance overreach. It like reframes a familiar topic. Habits for James Clear, marketing for me. So that's where you give it. Fourth, goal, current approach, problems with the current approach. Maybe the cause of it. And then here's the change to make. Here's my premise for what is better. And then they go, okay, what does this look like? Here's a story to illuminate it. Someone who did the same thing you're trying to do and what it looks like. And then the final thing they're wondering after all that work you've done is, okay, I'm in. How do I do this too? And this is where the rant ends, Ryan, because that's where we leap. We go to, here's how to do it. And we haven't done any work to ensure that they really care or that they see us or our ideas as the inescapable next step for them. And so all the work feels hard. - Oh, yeah. - You just described the first dozen or so years of my production business sales experience where I'm trying to pitch ideas, like great ideas, like kill our ideas to clients. And I'm at X, Y and Z, like I'm looking, this is what will work, right? And I'm like, hey, what have you guys thought about this or this or this? And they're like, no, no, like we're, like that's, no, that's not what we're hiring. - It's frustrating as all hell. - It's frustrating. - Yeah, it's a very simple way to never forget this. Have you ever had a green smoothie? Have you had a smoothie, bright green or dark green, you ever had one of those green smoothies? - Yes. - Okay. You know, they're all different flavors, right? But like, I remember when that wasn't a thing that people drank, where you never saw a green, unless it was like a bright neon smoothie for like a kid, right? - Go as much as you can. - We create, when we communicate to people, what I call the green smoothie problem, where we just shove the smoothie at them. And we're like, here, it's a green smoothie, it's great, wanna drink it? And then they start anchoring, they start anchoring to like, no, it's too sugary or it looks gross, gross, like a health drink or whatever. Like you have to say, hey Ryan, you know how you told me you wanted to be healthy? - Goal. - And the way you've been doing that is eating all this like health junk, like this food that's like professing to be healthy, but you think it tastes bad and blah, blah, blah. Okay, now here's what I did. And then you walk them through how you made this smoothie and at the very end of the whole journey, you go, it's a green smoothie. Wanna drink it? 'Cause you close that context gap. Instead, what we do is shove the idea at people. So my message to avoid the green smoothie problem is you should not pitch your ideas, you should pitch why your ideas should exist. And then the idea itself comes last. 'Cause by then they actually care. - Yeah. And this big struggle in our industry is, people love storytelling, they love video. And so whatever video Bob's like, bring new, exciting opportunities. I don't wanna get pigeon-hold in this particular industry. Therefore I will not niche. I'm not gonna niche down. Ryan's always talking about niching down and the riches are in the niches and blah, blah, blah. But as we listen to this structure that you just shared, it will work most effectively if you create that resonance. And you can only create resonance with an audience. There's gonna be a super broad audience that might resonate. But the more dialed in you get that audience, the more resonant it's going to be. The more they're like, oh, this guy's speaking our exact language. And that's gonna be a lot different than just like a broad, everybody needs story, everybody needs video for their storytelling or whatever. It's like, as soon as you can find a market and speak to, I mean, I just, I think about our websites, most of them are terrible. We're not taking people on a journey, we're sharing Z, hey, a video production, you know, specialists, whatever we can do. - Yeah, if you remove the brand. And you like replace all the fonts with Helvetica and you made everything white and black, then all of a sudden, you are everyone else in your space with just looking at that site and that copy. And that's a real problem. You cannot charge a premium, you get lumped onto a spreadsheet with whatever other quotes your competitors are quoting. And if that competitor has no kids, has no mortgage, is just figuring out, is desperate. They all undercut you on price and now it's a race to the bottom, right? It's like, I wanna get off the spreadsheet. I teach my clients, you gotta get off the spreadsheet. You wanna become the one they seek out. A referral is one way to do that. Another way to do that is while they're scanning three or four or five people like you, they encounter you like something, and you, again, you can do that. It's sorcery, our words can impart that urge to act. And mostly it's just commodified positioning and content. And that's the problem. - Yeah. - Man, as filmmakers, we're also, we're bad at telling our own stories, right? We're like the cobbler doesn't have time. - I've got it, no shoes. - Yeah, and so I spoken at an event last year and I was like, you guys, I know it was filmmakers. I was like, if you don't have your story on your website and that's what you're trying to sell the clients, make your life so much easier by starting to tell your story, sharing that so that you become, that is your biggest differentiator. Somebody's looking at you or me. And guess what, I've got story. And so that's gonna win eight times out of 10. Like if they're looking at you versus me. The work, your work probably looks a little bit better than mine, but I'm trying to connect here. As we think about this very particular audience that should be telling their story, the framework that you lay out, I mean, I'm seeing this as website copy of seeing this as a video, right, of their story. I mean, there's lots of things. It's not just, okay, this is a framework that I use on a discovery call. Okay, this, you know, or next time I'm trying to pitch something, sure. Yes, but so much more than that. How can you help my friends here? And me, I won't exclude myself, but how can you help us to just get off the belief that I'm just not sure that going narrow is his for me. I mean, I have a strong stance on this because as a professional speaker, you meet a lot of people who are like, I'd love to be a speaker, or at least I wanna give a keynote once in a while. And I think I have a really great story to tell. [laughs] I brought this request up to a friend of mine. I was talking to him on my podcast. I host a show called Why They Resonate, where speakers either tell their stories from the trenches or analyze a piece of their own speech in public. It's a show that gets you close to the craft. And so I was talking to the speaker, unbelievable. The joke is he's Canada's most booked keynote. His name is Ron Tite, and he runs a branding agency in Canada. And Ron said, I get that question a lot, Jay. He's like, I have a great story. I want to tell it on stages. And Ron says his response is, okay, cool. Let's play this out, shall we? You know Captain Phillips, you know, like the movie, Captain Phillips? Okay, see down the hall there, that's the next speaker. That's the real Captain Phillips, right? See that woman over there? She went to outer space. Like she's about to tell that story. Okay, so that's who you're speaking, that's who you're up against, or aligned around on the agenda. Okay, now what's your story? And so the message is that we don't tell our stories. We tell lots of stories, informed by our own, perhaps. And when you're like, if I just tell the founding story of my firm, or how I got here, what you're hoping happens is delivered in that story, is my taste, is something human that they connect to, is an insight for how I see this space or this need or this topic, and how I can uniquely solve their problems in a way that my competitors can't. And I'm like, cool, so don't leave it the chance. Identify those things overtly, and then tell your story and lots of stories around it, because chances are, if I told my story, I could make the same details of my own life, sound way more compelling than if I handed the entire summary to you. And it goes both ways. I couldn't tell your story. So it's not actually the story. It's something else. It's where we're trying to get them. It's how we see the world, right? And then our story becomes one tool. And so like the scaffolding, that I would give people, is what is something you have realized? Or would today assert about the work your clients are trying to do, that your competitors would freely and openly disagree with? And mostly we don't have that. Or if we do, we invent it like a hot take or something like that, right? And it's like, I think that our obsession with trying to be the best at our thing or in our space is very silly, 'cause A, that's not how people make choices. They play favorites and you need to be their favorite. And there's different ways to do that. And B, what do you mean? B, the bet, I'm not pulling up like basketballreference.com. And I'm like, who is hit the most three point shot than NBA history? Oh, it's Steph Curry. By the way, if I switch that from most NB, most three point shots to best shooter ever, some people would debate whether or not it's in fact Curry. So this idea of the best is silly, possibly in all areas, but definitely in our own. Don't be the best, be their favorite, right? That's something I would assert that by the way, a lot of my peers who sell similar services would actively disagree with. And I can make the case and logically reason out why you should arrive to that same idea if you're in my market. So that's my rant about like tell my story. Yeah, sure, tell lots of stories, but you have to go somewhere with these stories. Yeah, yeah, that's great. I mean, at the beginning of this year, I made a decision to finally stop fighting social media and start sharing stories and trying to go somewhere with the stories. Yeah. And it has been, you know, it's been one of the most rewarding experiences like writing, the practice of like just practicing finding, you know, what are the stories all around me? And then the stories that have made me who I am, identifying those and actually sharing those in public, I can't believe I've been holding back because of, because of like seeing other people that are, you know, the marketing bros and just the people that I wouldn't normally draw into hanging out with, you know, kind of like them owning the internet. That's what I felt like. And I'm like, I don't want to take part in that. And as I've been sharing people are like, this is refreshing because it's not, it doesn't feel like, right? 100% that's right. You're too. Yep. Well, it resonated because you used the word refreshing because a lot of people say you need to be different. And I'm not, you know, we can, we can debate whether or not this is just semantics. I think that's some degree it is. But a lot of people take the word different and they go, I'm going to pull a stunt. I'm going to have a gimmick. I'm going to wear that type of clothing on stage. I'm going to like always do this when I sign off, you know, you always use this emoji, or I'm going to pull some random marketing stunt to get attention different. And I'm like, when you say I want to be different, you're implying a question that I don't think is the right one to ask or answer in your business. The question implied different from whom the competition. So you face sideways and you're like, how do I separate from them? I don't think that's ever really a good question to ask. I mean, maybe if you're this like late stage, you know, PNG commodity product type of company and you're like, you can at like a tiny little percent difference is like billions of dollars. That's not our business. And so I think a better word is refreshing because the implied question there is not different from whom it is refreshing to whom. And that's your market. That's your clientele. That's the audience you're trying to serve. And it's different, but it's different in a welcome way. It's different in a specific way. It's different based on their expectations and desires and where they struggle. And this, this is, sorry, you're just shoving soap boxes out me and I'm stepping on top and shouting the world. Great. But like, this kills me because my home base is creative entrepreneurs. And most creatives, they like wait around with like baby birds in a nest, with their mouths open for the market to deliver them demand. And then they compete with others that look and sound like them. And I'm like, why are you waiting? Don't be a ticket system that happens at the last mile. Why are you, you shouldn't be surprised that clients either run roughshod all over you or you haven't done the most fulfilling work yet. You need to go out there and influence how people see this space. You need to go out there and have an effect about whether or not they need something like you. How to think about something like you. Like a lot of people are at the last mile of a road race. And when their buyer comes to the last mile, they leap out and they're like, finish the race with me. And the best communicators and entrepreneurs know I could get into the race earlier with them and like shape how they see this space and their work or this one thing. And then by the end, they're going to say to that person leaping out like, I'm good man. I've been running with Ryan this whole time. I think I'll just finish the race with my running buddy. And so we like, we have to be better running betties. We have to go up earlier in their journey and not just wait around and be like, well, I run this services business. I am building this whatever filmmaking studio for brands. And I cannot wait until brands realize film, you got to go convince them film. You got to go this type of film or why film or whatever. Go further up there and influence the space. Don't just wait to like capture demand because now you've been a commodity waiting around for some kind of gift. - That's beautiful. Cherry on top here is last week, I was on a call with my mastermind and we were talking about, I had this very influential guy at my studio. He wasn't there for me. He was, we had a woman who's actually the president of EOS, the entrepreneur operating system. - Oh yeah, sure. - She's a little to us. She rented our conference room, had this guy come in and lead a strategy session, all day strategy session for her. I was there, I saw Kelly, I kind of wait that her, like just passing the door. She comes out, she opens the door, she's like, "Ryan, I want you to meet John." And so I like shake this guy's hand and she goes on and tell me like, you know, what he does, whatever, then he starts asking me questions and he's like, his first question is like, what is this place? What do you guys do here? And I was so frustrated and annoyed because right there in the lobby, there's like a big TV with like, my guy's holding video camera, you know, filming stuff and then when he walked through the front door, it says like, tell studios, video with soul. Like, I'm like, why are you asking me this question? Like, it's all over the place, like, why don't you know what we do? I told my master run, I was like, here's the thing, nobody cares about us, nobody's waking up, like I got a call Ryan, like, you know, he, I'm pretty sure he does this kind of video for this guy. So here's, it is our job, exactly like what you've just said. It's our job to tell the people and I said, I don't remember the last time, I mean, if I asked my mom, or I asked my kids, what does that do to make money? What does your son do to make money? I think they would struggle to kind of come up with the answer. And those are the closest people to me in my life. Okay. I'm so, love that. Well, so, so I just challenged the group. I said, why don't we just go on Facebook or wherever you hang out and people? And I'm like, I had the most family friends, like that's been like a, I've protected people from my work on that Facebook in particular. Yesterday, I posted just a photo of me holding a video camera. I hope that people could see that in a clapboard, like a thing that directors hold. And I just said, hey, this happened in my studio last week where somebody is like, what do you guys do here? And then I'm realizing, nobody knows. And you probably don't know, not even my mom knows. So I just had a post. I'm like, I run this agency. These are the kind of clients. This is the kind of work. This is what I care about, blah, blah, blah. I just basically just barfed up. Here's the thing. This is what I challenge everybody to do. Last evening, last night. So I posted on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Last night, I got a DM that said, hey, Ryan, and it was from this organization that I've followed for a long time. But I've been posting somewhat regularly since beginning this year and engaging a little bit, but just liking a post of theirs or whatever. I got a message from them, first message from them. Said, hey, Ryan, what's the best email or best way to contact you? I've got a couple of people here at our organization that I think you need to meet. - Yep. - And I was like, day one of that post. And I'm like, oh my gosh, I think we've been over thinking this waiting. Hope my marketing the whole thing. So anyway, go ahead. And two things. Like one, that is an example of you, not when I say what I just said before that about like you got to go, you know, be a better running buddy, influence the market. Don't just wait around for the market to come to you and all these things. You know, and people go, what? Yeah. There's a lot of big influencers in my space. I don't want to be an influencer. I'm like, that's what I'm saying. Not saying be an influencer. The current social media area is sending the wrong message. I'm saying you need to communicate with influence, which means you change how they see. You change how they feel. You change how they act, right? And if you can do that and teach, it doesn't have to be 200,000 followers. It can be to one person. And then one person turns into two, turns into three, turns into 17, turns into a business, right? It doesn't have to be like the word influence has been commandeered by people who are talking about followers. Followers has never been a concept further from actual influence coming out of the marketing space. I know people who post like little copyrighting hacks, which is like catnip for corporate marketers. They have 100,000 followers on LinkedIn and very little influence because not a single executive who holds the purse strings to spend money on stuff would be influenced by this person, right? And so it's different. So that's the first thing I love. And here's the second that you told your family. And it was like, or you said, like, I don't even know if my family. Because the other day, my daughter and I went to the aquarium in New England here in Boston in New England aquarium. She asked me, why do we have aquariums? And it's like, I think about that all the time because I'm like, what? I have to explain this. Like, oh, okay. Yes. And so of course you do, but your market is asking questions like that too. And then it's on us not to just shove a wall of smarts, but to like meter where we're at and where she's at and her understanding and like a mover to mine. So I was like, they're, oh, they're three parts of this. We want. We need our hope. We want. We need our hope. So we want to save animals to make sure the world is great for animals to live in and to study them and learn from them. That's what we want. That's the stuff we want. And she's like, oh, yeah. So what we need is to get lots of people interested in that. Oh, okay. And our hope is when they see the animals up close, like in aquariums, they will donate money. They will elect people who pass the right laws. They will become scientists themselves. And my daughter's like, oh, I think I want to be an underwater scientist teacher who helps people in animals. And I'm like, yes, parenting win. But I think that's the work. It's like, we want. We need our hope. And you meet them where they're at in what they currently want and what they're currently going through. And then you influence by saying, okay, given what you already want, I think that what we most need is this. And it's not we need to make branded films or we need more creativity. It's your perspective on that that you think they need. And we don't often share that at all. And then our hope is, and then here's the aspiration of what you can achieve made possible by that previous part. So that's like a messaging ladder. I call it laddering your message where you get them deeper and deeper into your world from a cursory understanding to something more in depth. Jay, I'm so inspired right now. I'm like, it's always fun when I when I have fun on an interview and I'm like, where did we find this person? I can't remember. Was it a book? I read a podcast or her or whatever. You have far exceeded my expectations. See, man, I appreciate that. Yeah. I think we've the internet. I think it's where you found me. I'm on the internet. You might have heard of it. What is this thing? It's the internet. What's the best place for people if they want to follow along? Listen to your podcast and any of that stuff. Yeah, the show is why they resonate. Again, it's a show about the craft of storytelling and speaking where we try to put elements of it on display, stories from trenches, but also dissecting the real work. And then jacons.com for all my writing, my services, everything that I do, all my projects are on there. Jconno.com. I love this. I'm so glad we got to do this. Thank you for bringing the heats. Thanks for inspiring me and I was just really, really good. So appreciate you, man. Appreciate you. Thanks, Brad. Hey, thanks so much for tuning into this episode of the Grow Your Video Business Podcast. If you got something out of today's conversation, do me favor, share it with a friend or post it on your socials, tag me @RionCoral or @GrewYourVideoBusiness. I'd love to know what resonated with you. If you've got a question or take away, drop a comment wherever you're listening or watching this. You can also shoot me a message. I read every single one. And hey, if you haven't already, make sure to subscribe so you don't miss the next episode. We've got more stories, strategies, and behind the scenes insights come in your way to help you build a business that you love. Keep creating. Keep sharing your story and keep showing up. I'm cheering you on. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. See you next time. [Music]