Today on the More Cheese Less Whiskers podcast, I'm going to share part 2 of a 3 part podcast series that Joe Polish and I did way back in Episode 12 of the I Love Marketing podcast, talking about the concept of the self milking cow.
It's particularly relevant now because Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy have just released their new book 'Who Not How' and this concept was the genesis of that idea. So it's a great time to listen to the behind-the-scenes thinking that evolved to their big concept.
If you haven’t listened to the first part of the series, I'd recommend going back to the last episode, but more importantly, go get a copy of Who Not How. It truly is a revolutionary book that will make a big difference in your life.
You've heard me talk a lot about this idea of being the cow and not succumbing to the temptation to be the self milking cow, trying to do it all yourself. Well, this is the framework and the philosophy that gets you there.
It's a great time of year to contemplate going into 2021 with a real Who Not How plan to multiply your efforts in the coming years. daily routines and a lot of really cool stuff. There is great information here that I think you will find valuable.
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Transcript - More Cheese Less Whiskers 207
Dean: Hey Everybody it's Dean.
Joe: And, Joe.
Dean: Joe.
Joe: Like nail polish.
Dean: Almost like that.
Joe: I've said that, I think, hundreds of times just on this podcast. If you'd factor in if I had a nickel for every time I've said that in my life ...
Dean: You'd be rich.
Joe: Yup, and wouldn't be able to do this nonsense, huh? We don't get paid for doing this, so I would not be running-
Dean: Uh oh. Wait a second. Something's missing. Something's wrong. Well, welcome back.
Joe: Well, thank you. So, here's the deal. You did an episode with Jennifer and Brian that I was not able to be part of, and let's clarify why that's the case. Our last episode on iTunes prior to this one, there was an episode with Brian Franklin and Jennifer, and I heard it was really good but I haven't listened to it yet.
Dean: It really is good.
Joe: Yeah, now the deal is we had that originally schedule at the time where I could be on it but you screwed up the following up with Brian to verify it, so Brian was ready to do the call but you were not, or something along those lines. But, you are the culprit. You're the reason-
Dean: It all comes down to me.
Joe: Well, no, no. It truly was in that particular case.
Dean: And then after trying and trying ...
Joe: Yeah, so you just did it without me because I was at, I think, the Conscious Capitalism conference, which started with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods. That was actually really good. Brene Brown. Have you ever seen her TED talk?
Dean: I have, yes.
Joe: The one on vulnerability?
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Joe: She did a four and a half session, which was great. I hit it off with her. She was awesome, and there was the CEO of Whole Foods there and my friend, Tony Schwartz, who wrote a whole bunch of different books, Powerful Engagement. He gave a stellar talk. We'll talk about that stuff in a future episode because I'm going to write some articles about it with JR's help. The magical, mysterious JR.
Dean: The magical, not so mysterious anymore.
Joe: Well, here's the thing. There was a comment about the Brian and Jennifer episode and I wanted to get your clarification on it because someone said they talk about the delegating of marketing and Joe says not to delegate marketing in the -.
Dean: Oh, I saw that, too. Yeah, yeah. I think there we go, okay? That's a great thing to talk about because there's the kind of thing that ties in with what we want to ultimately talk about today, which is to carry on the conversation about the self-milking cow but when you say you don't delegate the marketing or the checkbook, I know that what you mean is that you don't just abdicate that to somebody. You don't just say, "Oh, you do the marketing, or you run the checkbook." That's not it at all. There's a big distinction between delegating and abdicating.
What Brian and Jennifer are all for is setting up marketing that you can delegate, that you can delegate the execution of it. I don't know that you and I have talked about this. I had a really great distinction in Chicago at Eben's Accelerate event when Wyatt Woodsmall was talking about the difference between ... There are two types of challenges. He calls them adaptive challenges and technical challenges. A technical challenge is something that the answer is known and you just need to know how to do it. You just need to learn how to do it, like installing a new mic into your audio system, or installing a new operating system, or recording a podcast.
The answers to those things are known and you just need to know how to do it. That's a technical challenge. Then, the other types of challenges are what he calls adaptive challenges, which are things that the answer is not known and you need to figure it out. That was a really key distinction because the thing ... It's really like adaptive challenges are the things that are unique about ... They would tie in with being a cow, actually. When you start talking about the marketing, if you take the adaptive challenge of marketing is trying to figure out what's going on in the mind of your prospect, what are the conversations that they're having and figuring out what do you say to those people? What words do you put on paper or in an email or on a website that will get them to raise their hand?
And then, how do you communicate with them to educate and motivate them and make an offer? Those kinds of things, those are adaptive challenges because you need to figure out what to say to them, but once you've cracked that code, once you know what to put on the website or what to say in the email or what to say on the website, you've solved the adaptive challenge of that and now executing that, ramping it up, scaling like Brian and Jennifer would talk about, is a technical challenge then. You already know what to say, what to do. You can now show somebody how to execute that, and that is something that you most definitely should delegate.
Because once you've solved the problem, there's no need for you to be the one that executes on that.
Joe: Yeah, and I've always said a million times with the distinction that I make about it is you don't ever delegate the marketing or the checkbook until or unless you have checks and balances absolutely on top of it.
Dean: Right, and I know that you always say that whenever you say it. You're absolutely right. And the same thing with the checkbook, once you've got your reporting systems in place and you've got your tracking systems and your accounting system and all of that, certainly you should delegate all of that. It's not saying that you should be crossing ... You're not paying every bill and inputting every receivable into the system, but you can't take your eye off of it.
You set up checks and balances so that all you need to do is oversee those things, to watch and keep, make sure that somebody is doing what needs to be done.
Joe: Let me mention this, too. From years of having run a business ... over the years, I've probably had 75 employees, and basically people take their eye off the ball all the time. We get on track, we fall off track, we stay on track, depending on how your brain works. To use Michael Gerber terminology from way back when, how much of your time you're spending in the technician role, the entrepreneur role, the manager role, and of course, most of my roles are entrepreneur because I don't really like the technician role and the management role as much.
But everybody has those different sides to themselves. You can take your eye off the ball and people certainly do, but what happens is you suffer the consequences. If you don't pay attention, the consequences could be complete devastation, loss of your business and a waste of your life and your life's savings and everything that goes along with the nightmares of people that have really tried to make a business work and then haven't.
What I will say as it relates to marketing is a lot of people think they're delegating marketing by getting a marketing department, or hiring a marketing director, and they think that's actually delegating marketing, and I guess you can argue that it is but what happens if someone that is the business owner does not own at least the aspect of making sure the sales come in the door, that the marketing is being done effectively ... and, the keyword is effectively. Many business owners, the vast majority of them are continually dealing with rude awakenings all the time because they think they're delegating when they're really abdicating.
That's an important distinction. So important that hearing it, everyone's like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah." But really, you and me can go to 100 businesses and if we sat down with them, we could find dozens, if not hundreds, of areas where they think they're delegating but they're just abdicating or they're just oblivious. As it relates to direct response and direct response being what we teach and what we use, and what we know, is the best way of marketing and selling anything. You got to understand the power of words. You've got to understand the power of offers. You've got to understand the importance of your list. You got to understand the importance of recency of contact with you and communication and bonding and all of that.
If you don't have a good handle on that, if you really don't understand it, you're not going to delegate marketing all that effectively. You're going to abdicate it. Those are my thoughts.
Dean: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Well, and that makes sense because it really ties into what this idea ... I noticed in the comments on the first episode that we did about the self-milking cow that some people, they were wondering about the role of the farmer, wondering about that. Some people maybe feel like-
Joe: Well, let's do this. Let's do this, too, in case someone popped onto this episode and they hadn't heard that other one, just go through and define it again, the self-milking cow. I'd love to have you explain who is the farmer, who's the cow, what's that work? What do you even mean by self-milking cow? Let's do a refresher on that and then say what you're going to say because I know it's really important.
Dean: Here's the thing, and really I think the best thing that they're going to be able to do is certainly go and listen to episode 127 to see what that's all about, but generally the idea is that there are two types of people. There are cows and there are farmers. This realization came to me as I was thinking about and reflecting on this process of setting up these what I'm calling 90 minute books. I'd been working with some people in my mastermind group to create books, create space, nice paperback book, 50, 60 pages that get a whole idea across and realized that what I had done was set up a process where the entrepreneur, all they really need to do is be present for 90 minutes.
We would do a little half hour brainstorm and clarifying to get the content down, get all the ideas that we're going to talk about, come up with a great title and some chapter headings. Then, schedule a one hour podcast interview. The best example of that is exactly the last episode that I did with Brian and Jennifer. That's in the process of being turned into a book called Rapid Growth right now. We did exactly that format. We talked for 30 minutes ahead of time. We scheduled the time to do the interview and we talked for an hour about all of those concepts.
Because they got so much great information, such a depth of knowledge of it, they really did a great job of distilling it into one hour and getting those thoughts out there. Now, most people who are going through the process of creating a book, the adaptive challenge is what's easy for them. They already know what they want the book to be about. They already know what they want to say. They've been carrying it around in their utters for years. You could just sit them down and start milking right away and all of this great content would come out. But, they get crippled by, or tipped ... I love how you say getting cow tipped ... by the technical challenges of not knowing, "Well, I'm not that good a writer or how do I set it up? Or, what format do I use? Or, where do I find and create space? Or, how do I get the cover designed?"
All those technical challenges. How do I record it? Where do I get it transcribed? All those things that the answer is known and you just need to figure it out. If you haven't figured it out, it's crippling because it seems overwhelming when you don't even know where to start.
So, that requires a farmer. I've been thinking a lot about the roles of both, and I want to be crystal clear that there's not anything lesser about being a farmer. A farmer is ultimately the one who is needed to make all of this happen, and there are very successful people who build organizations completely around being farmers. We used Dan Sullivan as an example of the prototypical cow. One guy, 100 farmers, and they're all rallied around the milk of Dan Sullivan and he's got a whole team around him to support spreading and distributing and processing the milk, and all he does is basically come up with the ideas and work with a project manager to get that project out into the world, and let the farm take the rest of it.
You can point to lots of other people who are creatives who have set up whole organizations around them. You look at somebody like Martha Stewart as another example of a cow who's got brilliant ideas and lots of stuff to get out there. She's got 680 people at Omni Media that are completely rallied behind getting her ideas out into the world. And, she's got a such a successful farm operation that now she can bring other people into that farm operation. She finds people like Mario Batali or these other chefs that she can plug into her system.
Even Oprah Winfrey is the perfect example of a cow. She's got a whole organization around her that can ... She brings people into her farm, people like Dr. Phil, Dr. Oz. all of these things are plugging them into her existing farm operation and getting them jump started. I think if we take it even down to-
Joe: Okay, so wait, wait. For distinction for our listeners, though, what would make Oprah a cow versus a farmer?
Dean: Okay, this was really interesting because if you look at what Oprah's milk is, you think about this idea, if we think about the mind milk as the content, the ideas, the output, her milk is her ability to be with people, interviewing them and sharing their stories, drawing out their stories, shedding a light on something, talking. Her opinion, her view. You look at even her Favorite Things episodes. People want to rally and be ... Oprah is really good at spreading ideas. When you look at Oprah's book club, she's very influential. If somebody was in book club, then it was a sure New York Times bestseller with life changing results for people.
Now, when you look at ... I got a chance to watch, there was a show, Oprah Behind the Scenes, when she was opening O, her network. They followed around her behind the scenes for the filming of season 25, her 25th season, which was her last. And you got a real inside look at what it really takes to create that type of body of work. You look at a show, the milk of the show is putting together the episode and she's there and being on stage, and being with the people, but behind the scenes, she's got five or six, or more, production teams that are episode production teams. So there's five or six executive producers, production team, that goes into creating each episode of the show.
And, it was amazing to see how Oprah would be talking about ... They would together decide what the show is going to be. She was the creative guidance behind all of it, the guiding light. It was her vision, her guiding the direction, and then she was rallied behind, kind of like these project managers in a way, with each episode being a project. They would have a lead producer and then they would have an assistant lead producer and they'd have three or four associate producers on that one team, and all of them would get together with Oprah and they would talk about her vision for this show. And, they would go to work making that happen so that on the day that that show was filming, Oprah would come in and she'd get in her makeup chair and they'd put on her makeup and the production team would come in and they'd do a final rundown of what's going on for the episode, all the checks and balances.
And, then she would go on stage and they would record the show and the show would end, and that's it. Now, Oprah, she's not behind the camera filming the show and she's not editing the show, and she's not making sure the audio is right and she's not doing the lighting or filling the crowd, or doing any of the things that it requires to make that episode happen. She's focused 100% on the adaptive challenge of what she's going to say on camera, how she's going to make this episode memorable, what she's going to ask the interviewee, the guest, what she's going to say to draw them out, what she's going to do in that conversation to make them feel comfortable enough to share things.
You look at that whole organization behind that episode are all the farm team that's making that a reality. She couldn't do it without all of those farmers, but doing it at the highest level requires having those farmers. You know?
Joe: Okay, and I made all of the milk jokes and every sort of twisted thing I could think of mostly on the first episode that we did, so I'll refrain a little bit from that. The milk would be everything that is produced, be it a product, a service or in Oprah's case, a performance. Correct?
Dean: Exactly. Right, that's exactly right.
Joe: Everyone that's around there that is doing something to help that milk, or milking that cow, is the production people. Although they're producing, they're really not what you would consider cows, they're farmers, correct?
Dean: Exactly. Right, right, right.
Joe: Okay, so she's bringing a Dr. Phil, Oprah ... She's a curator. Oprah curates-
Dean: Well, that can be exactly. She's a happy cow roaming the pastures, looking for and finding other cows who don't have a farm. When she found Dr. Phil, he was a legal consultant, working in communication, but he didn't have an outlet. He didn't have any way to get his milk out into the world, so she can bring him onto the farm. She can put him in the chair. She can make him a recurring guest, make him very popular and then set him up with the farm team that is going to create his own show so that all he has to do is think about and solve the adaptive challenges of what are we going to do shows about? What do we want to address? What's my unique perspective on this?
Dr. Phil's milk is his time spent with people on camera, going through that whole interviewing process or coaching them, or giving his opinion on those things. Everything else around that, all the technical challenges of finding guests and arranging so that they're on the stage at the right time, he could ... We mentioned in the first episode about the self-milking cow this test of can you go through your day with your cow hoof mittens on? Because, the real things, the adaptive challenges are more about thinking and communicating than they are about the technical things of using or needing opposable thumbs.
Joe: Right. Could you say those opposable thumbs again? What does that mean?
Dean: Well, I think it's just a way of drawing attention to the idea that doing things like all the technical things that most creative entrepreneurs get trapped up in are the things that let you know that you're going out of the cow realm. You're going into now the realm of trying to be a farmer, and cows don't know how to do that kind of stuff, or don't want to do that kind of stuff. It's where they get tripped up, or tipped, as you say. I love that.
Joe: Cow tipping.
Dean: Where do you get tipped? It's been amazing because everybody I've heard from or talked to, that was really a good thing for them. They have an awareness now. They're going through their day and they're thinking, "How much of this was really things that I could have had somebody else do?" One of the comments in the things saying, as he was talking about doing tasks with cow hoof gloves on, I realized everything I did yesterday was being an imitation farmer. I had the concept complete but I ended up doing the transcription, the PowerPoint, editing and the audio recording for Camtasia.
More than half the hours I spent were not cow work, but specialty farmer tasks. Truly enlightening, thank you. I think that's the thing, if you really look at it, what are the things that are ... Where's the line drawn between the adaptive challenge and the technical challenge?
Joe: For our listeners, what do you think is the greatest takeaway and action that this concept, this model, could and ... to use the guilt word ... should bring to them if they fully engage with it, understand it and apply it?
Dean: Well, I think that the world is full of people who are cows who are roaming around needing farmers, and a lot of them are roaming around and they're wishing and hoping and waiting that these things are going to resolve themselves. Or, they're fretting, or worrying or there's a lot of anxious of, "Oh, I don't know how to do this." Or, they're spending a lot of time and money trying to figure out how to do things that somebody already knows how to do expertly.
I think that bringing it even closer to us, to our world, I think that what Vishen Lakhiani has done with Mind Valley is set up a very happy environment for cows. Really essentially at its heart, he's a publishing organization where he's finding content producers, especially in the personal development and spiritual world where the people, they want to get their ideas out into the world. They are good at ... They've got a lot to say. They've got a lot to share but they don't have an interest in, or an aptitude for learning all the things it takes to really get your life changing message out into the world.
So, what Vishen's whole organization is set up around, and we heard him talk about when we had him as a guest on the show, all the lengths that they go to to really perfect the art of farming for information, to get that as a publishing thing out into the world, even just as far as getting traffic and getting conversions and all of those kind of things. Handling customer service and building apps, and creating products, and all the things that are in support of brilliant cows, who we may never have ever heard from if they hadn't aligned themselves with or gotten in a relationship with somebody like Vishen. Or, figured it out for themselves.
It's much more likely that there's a bigger opportunity to find those cows and help get them out into the world than to hope that somebody's going to find you as a cow.
Joe: Right, right. How many entrepreneurs, and of course there's no exact answer ... I don't even know if you could even guesstimate this but how many entrepreneurs do you think are mostly cow versus how many mostly farmers?
Dean: I wonder myself. It would be really interesting to see, and I had this vision of if we had a conference or something to have people wearing either cow t-shirts or farmer t-shirts to match people up like that, but I wonder it myself. I would think that there might be fewer cows than farmers, maybe, but I don't know. I don't know. What do you think intuitively? I've never thought about it like that. I just know that the ratio certainly seems to be tipped in that there needs to be more farmers in support of one cow than there is that a farmer can handle cows.
Joe: Well see, it's a much easier question to ask than to answer, of course. It's like the saying it's a lot easier to deal with other people's marketing problems than dealing with your own.
Dean: Right. That's true.
Joe: I think, even as I asked it ... It's funny asking a question that you know you're never going to get an exact answer to but it just makes you think about it, which is really the purpose of asking it. Not that we even per se need the exact answer even anywhere close. It's just something to think about. I think a lot of it has to do with industries. If you take all of the people that are most of our close friends, most of them are authors or they do public speaking. So, there's a lot of cows in our world but then you branch it out into different industries ... The tech industry is filled with cows. Very innovative people that are in desperate need of farmers and then you go to a lot of declining industries where there's a lot of farmer left, but the cows have left and they've abandoned their farm, per se.
It's interesting. I think a lot of it has to do with industry sectors. I think a lot of it has to do with just what business you've decided to pursue, be it a product, a service, a knowledge-based expertise business. It's interesting to think about.
Dean: Yeah, I think you go to ... and you're going to speaking at Brendan's ... Which one are you speaking at?
Joe: - Expert Industry Association.
Dean: Okay, so you look at that, the Experts Industry Association, people identifying themselves as experts are most likely cows. The millionaire messenger, all the people that Brendan attracts are probably inherently cows. They've got a message that they want to get out into the world. Then, there are other conferences and there are other things that are ... I'll give you a perfect example. I went to the Future of Web Apps conference a few years ago. Jesse and I went in Miami. It struck me, I was thinking, "Okay, we're going to have this great discussion about the future of web apps and all the ideas and the future industry trends." Web app ideas.
They had some great breakout sessions and great titles on them. I sat in one of the breakout things, and we would talk about this one particular type of app, and then the guy put up the first slide and it was all code. I realized it was holy cow, these guys are ... They might as well be talking Chinese. I have no idea what this is or what they're talking about. I realized that I have no business in what I call behind the screen. I think that there's a good distinction is if you're the guy who's deciding what should be on the front on the screen, what it should say and what it should do, and answering the question, "What?", that's really the question of a cow.
And all the behind the screen are the things that are the technical things of how to make that work because there's varied programming and things like that, are by their nature very technical challenging because you have to follow a very precise set of rules that make a programming language work, that's already been set out. Somebody created that language, and everybody can follow that language because they know how to use that language to make things happen. But somebody is telling them what they want to have happen.
I think that if your preference is to think of what things, what do I want? What do I want to say? What do I want to get out there? Or, if your favorite question is how than trying to figure out something, knowing how to do something, how to edit audio, how to do graphic design or how to layout a book format, or how to program a website, or how to code a website for SEO. All of those things are really an opportunity to take an idea and execute it.
I think that's really the thing. That could be one of the things is ideas are the cow world and execution is the farm world. That might be a good way to think about it. And again, it's really valuable to have this discussion about it because it's evolving as we're discussing it, and I'm hoping everybody will get involved in the conversation there. But, I realize that there's got to be ... If you can set up something that is going to completely solve a problem for somebody, if you think about a particular cow that you could serve, and it doesn't have to be one cow. But let's say your audience is a cow, web designers or web developers.
Somebody can come to them and say, "Oh, this is what I want", and then be able to execute on that.
Joe: Let's talk about how this applies to Dan Sullivan's Unique Ability concept. He talks about -
Dean: There you go. It's similar but there's a distinction. Because somebody's unique ability could be doing technical work.
Joe: No, absolutely. The thing I was going to say, Dan Sullivan talks about four different areas to operate out of; incompetence, competence, excellent and unique ability. Incompetent is you're not good at it. You're never going to be good at it. You don't get any energy from it. It's draining. You're probably the worst person to do it. When you're first starting out in business, or if you fall back into it or you lose a key person, you may find yourself stuck with the responsibility of having to handle something that you're completely not equipped with, capable of, in over your head constantly. That's how many business owners just go under and get completely overwhelmed. There's just too many things, and of course, that's happened many, many times in my life and in my business.
So, you try to stay out of those areas as much as humanely possible. Then there's competence where you can get by but it's draining. It doesn't give you any energy and at a performance level, you're just competent enough to do it but that's about it. Then excellence, where you can be extremely skilled and extremely good at something. For instance, public speaking. I'm pretty good at public speaking. Most people would consider me excellent when I do presentations. However, I have to limit it, though, because there are certain types of public speaking that I don't like. I like my 25K group. I like doing events like that. I like preaching to the converted. I don't like preaching to the unconverted, having to sell people.
So, I'm excellent but it really takes a lot of energy from me. And then of course there's unique ability, which I would put into the way that I actually facilitate doing just genius networking. Going out and doing genius networking is one of my unique abilities.
Dean: I think there's something about that. I don't think that it should go without noting that your 25K event in New York was a huge success, and all these 10 minute talks and all these somewhat longer talks, and you didn't even talk at your own event.
Joe: No, no. I mean, I talked but not that much. I facilitated.
Dean: You facilitated. Exactly, which is-
Joe: I emceed. I intro'ed. I made jokes. I'm the glue that's holding it all together, but I'm certainly not the big tapestry. I'm like a hinge. So in that particular case, am I a cow or am I a farmer?
Dean: Well, that's a great question. Let's work it out because what your unique ability is organizing these events and organizing all of the people to come around. You're out wandering the fields and you're meeting cool people and you're flying to Austin to have lunch with John Mackey and you're going to Singularity University and meeting all these cool people, and you're out in the field meeting people and bringing them, facilitating these groups but you're not reserving the room and dealing with the banquet facilities and organizing lunch and making sure the audio is going to be right and the stage is all set, all of that stuff.
You are a cow with farmers who are making that vision a reality. They're executing on that. You're the what of what you do is you're going to have the highest level summit of the world's leading direct marketers. You know?
Joe: Yes, exactly. And, most of the people there are very ... They're golden cows.
Dean: They are cows. That's exactly it. That is exactly right
Joe: They are golden cows. Do you know what the distinction is?
Dean: That's like going to 11.
Joe: No, I'm just making that shit up anyways. Golden cows -.
Dean: It's good. But there's the thing, I think that everybody has the potential if they are a cow to be a golden cow. You know there are lots of people who have their ideas. Their ideas are bigger than their ability to get them out into the world, and you know when you run into people like that and discover them.
Joe: Or, if you're one of them.
Dean: Or, if you're one of them. Exactly. I think you're absolutely right. I think that the first stage is awareness and you have to realize that to build a really high level farm, a really high level farm requires having that awareness and knowing what that's going to take. And, knowing that you're going to set up the farm to accommodate you.
Joe: Let me give you a couple thoughts on this, too, because for all of our listeners out there that are listening, they could either perceive this as listening to a couple of guys talking about cows and farmers and trying to fit in these analogies and put people into some label in order to identify certain behaviors, which would be absolutely accurate. The bigger takeaway that I would like is to gain perspective, is to question really what it is you're doing, how you're doing it, what is the highest leverage activity. I remember this thing I used to have, this line I had on an old Apple computer. Remember those desktops that they had the round bottom base and the swinging monitor and it would swivel around? Remember that one? It would go up and down. I still think it was most of the artistically cool Apple computers that they made. Do you remember that one?
Dean: I do. Yeah, yeah.
Joe: Okay. I put that line that Steve Jobs had from his Stanford speech, and this was right after I heard it, not after it got played a bazillion times on YouTube after he passed away. Where he said, "If today was the last day of my life, would I do what I'm about to do?" Something along those lines. I didn't say it right.
Dean: Yeah, yeah, look in the mirror, right.
Joe: Would I do what I'm about to do today. The biggest takeaway from these conversations is there is so much potential that human beings, especially entrepreneurs, have sitting dormant inside of them ready to be awakened. Potential, people get all excited, "Oh, I want to reach my potential." Well, potential just means you haven't done it yet so I don't give a shit about potential if it's never realized. What I give a shit about is unlocking it, expressing it, packaging it, communicating it, giving people strategies, methodologies on how to connect that potential with something that makes it real because you don't build a great reputation by talking about what you're going to do.
Dean: Oh, boy.
Joe: You build a great reputation by actually doing what you're capable doing - and you become better by becoming more capable and three of my favorite words from strategic coaching that really defines what I've always focused on selling, starting with carpet cleaners and various different business owners and a lot of service businesses originally and now obviously, industry transformers and some of the world's leading entrepreneurs is direction, confidence and capability where what I want is someone to have more direction, more confidence, more capability and of course, another strategic coach word is clarity.
I've heard Dan Sullivan talk about all of those things numerous times and I've had numerous conversations with him. One of the big takeaways, even when you and me started this podcast going back to episode one, when we started it, one of our original conversations before we did it is we had this great conversation ... I think it was in December of 2010 ... that's when it was, right? I think it was December 2010.
Dean: Yep.
Joe: I said, "Dean, imagine if the conversation we just had was recorded and other entrepreneurs were able to hear it, how useful that would be for them." You agreed. That's when we-
Dean: Yeah, because we had been having those conversations for years, you know?
Joe: Yeah, yeah. For 15 years. And the thing was was we would have those conversations. We didn't use cow and farmer analogies back then, but we were identifying what each other skillsets were, and we were talking to each other because we were trying to help each other get better and figure things out. Should we do this? Should we do that? The same shit that all human beings are trying to do all the time and whatever area they're trying to do it in.
The thing is, every time someone listens to one of our episodes on I Love Marketing, they may on a scale of 1 to 10 think it's a 10 is the best and 1 is lame, or they're in the middle. So, I think people are going in the middle and hopefully closer to 10 as much as we can talk about stuff that opens up their minds. Most of it, though, is I just want people after listening to it going, "Yeah, I got more direction. I got more confidence. I got more capabilities as a result of this." A lot of what we talk about are tactics. Some of it is strategies, but a big part of is just giving a way to think about thinking. And that's what I think one of your biggest skillsets is.
Dan Sullivan, that line the problem is not the problem, the problem is how you think about the problem-
Dean: Right, I think that's exactly right and I think the awareness, what I'm seeing, and this is exactly our wish is that I think if you look at it from the perspective of you're a cow, if you're a cow, and looking at your day and realizing how many things could I do with my cow hoof mittens on? How many things could I do? Where the challenge is, where the frustration, where the friction comes is when you're doing things that are technical challenges usually, things that you don't know how to do as well as somebody else could do, or certainly something that somebody else could do period.
You look at, there's so much evidence and we've heard it again and again from all kinds of people. Even Richard Branson said, when Yannik asked him, "What's it take to run 300 or 400 companies and run billions of dollars?" And, Richard just said immediately, "Well, you can't really do anything." There's a guy who is a cow who has incredible ideas about the way things should be and incredible ability to spot opportunities, and to bring his approach about what it should be, how to approach the airline industry, or how to approach the cellphone industry or any of the companies that Virgin goes into, and then he finds great farmers who can run those organizations or run the operation of them and gets out of their way.
He gets together with them to maybe talk about the vision and talk about the strategy, but not get involved in the operation of it.
Joe: Yep, exactly. - Well, let me say this, too, is maybe in the beginning he did a lot of farming, but if you really plow properly, if you really get the right seeds and you get the right equipment and you get the right people and the right plan, you can do a lot of what but it'll turn you into a who. There's also comments on there, like the last episode, saying, "This was so much better than the interview with Richard Branson." And, it's funny how many different comments we have on our episodes on iTunes and also on ILoveMarketing.com, the comments were so many different people have what their version is of a favorite episode.
I always think it's funny when someone's like this is the best one you guys have ever done. Well, that's either that's the most recent one we've ever done, if they've listened to all of them because it's fresh in their mind or they just got something out of this one that was better than that one. Why does somebody like one song and hate another, while many people hate one song ... It's all how it hits your taste buds and our brains have different taste buds. Our brains respond to what they're hearing and it just resonates and it makes sense.
This is ongoing conversation that you can have with yourself the rest of your life as it relates to your behavior and to your skills and to who you decide to associate with and bring into your company and all that. The last thing I'll say about your Branson conversation, if there's anything that he said to me that was the most interesting in the time that I've known him, because Richard has a hard time unless he really doesn't want to share it, he has a hard time explaining what he does and how he does it. He's an intuitive entrepreneur. I've done more interviews with Richard on business stuff than probably anyone, at least that I know is recorded.
I was in his kitchen in Necker Island not the last trip, but the trip prior to that. I was asking him ... This was before the main house burnt down. Now the main house is rebuilt and we're doing our next trip in March of next year. But basically, you've heard me talk about this on previous episodes. I was like, "When's the last time you went to a grocery store, Richard?" And, he's like, "I don't think I've ever been to a grocery story." I'm like, "What are you talking about? That's impossible. What about your signing the Sex Pistols? You had to go get a six-pack or something for Sid Vicious or Johnny Rotten?"
He was like "I don't remember being in a grocery store." I was like "When's the last time you've done laundry?" He looked up, really thinking. He's like, "I don't think I've ever done laundry." Who the hell has never done laundry? I said, "What about when you were growing up?" He's like, "My mom did my laundry." He's like, "Joe, you hire people to do that stuff. You have to delegate."
Dean: Exactly.
Joe: I thought that was so fricken funny. Just the willingness to take this on versus the unwillingness, and I'll tell you, unwillingness has caused me more stress and angst and pressure and loss than anything, and willingness, also, has done that too because being willing to try certain things has also had its fair share of ups and down but the willingness to try on a different hat with intelligence, with strategy, with thought, not just blindly, is what changes your life.
It's what changes your business. Me and you have encountered luckily, and we are doing this with our podcast now with people we've never even met before, because we meet them in person when we run into them at conferences and stuff, is someone will be chugging along, or barely surviving. They're in this survival state and they'll get an idea, they'll get a concept. It'll click and then all of a sudden their business will explode. I believe that most human beings won't change. I mean, if someone's who they're at right now, 10 years from now they're just going to be an older version of where they're at. If they're mediocre, they're going to be a 10 year old mediocre version, maybe even worse because they're going to be less energy or maybe burnt out.
But occasionally, you'll see a tiger change its stripes. People believe that a tiger can not change its stripes. I'm using it for analogy purposes. I have seen people absolutely change. I've done that myself. I have seen people become butterflies that have been caterpillars for a long ass time, and one of the greatest examples of this that really shifted my thinking was when I was doing the Better Your Best contest that I've done for years with professional carpet upholstery cleaners. The second year that I was giving away a brand new Hummer. I had given away my convertible Jaguar that Bill Phillips gave me at the first year that I did it, so the second year, a guy named Steve Cameron, who is a professional cleaner out in Georgia ... Stone Mountain ... basically for 22 years, this guy had averaged I think it was $122,000 a year. Average, if he took the total of 22 or 23 years he had been in business.
Within one year of joining my group, the Better Your Best, entering the contest, being a part of my platinum group, this guy doubled his revenue to over $250,000 and then the next year it was over $300 something thousand. He gets up to the half a million mark, but it was all one big shift. If you were to ask him, I think the biggest shift is not did you learn anything more about cleaning carpets? Did you become a spectacular marketer? Yeah, that was part of it. He became a much better marketer. Did you get off the truck more? Did you teach your employees how to be more professional? Did you institute training and meetings? Yeah, he did all of that stuff.
But none of that started, though, until he shifted the one thing that needs to be shifted first, which is your mindset. When you get the right mindset, everything can fall into place. This is just my mention that hopefully this self-milking cow and farmer concept shifts your mindset so you truly can leave this episode and you can get insanely great results. Or, if you don't get that, at least get a little bit better or hopefully a lot better.
Dean: And, I think two takeaways, number one would be to just look at the things that you're doing. Make a list of all the things that you are doing and see is it cow or farmer? Is it producing milk or is it processing, packaging and distributing milk? Getting that all out there.
Now, the other thing is that the real value is realizing that there are so many cows out there that you can create a product or a service that is making it easy for a cow to just come in and get milk and have something done for them. I look at it, this whole 90 minute book process of setting up a process in place that an entrepreneur could come in and spend 30 minutes getting an outline and a great title for a book, and then spend an hour being interviewed and getting that information drawn out and then that's it. And then, seven days later, have a paperback book in their hand. That is the type of service that is farm services for a cow, but I think about ...
So, I look at it that I'm the one that set that up but I'm not a farmer, but I saw that that's something that needs to be done and have set up, created those opportunities to fill those roles. The opportunity is in a person to draw out and organize the information and then a transcriptionist to transcribe and the facility to record the conversation, and a designer to make the cover and a layout person to lay it all out and format it for the paperback formatting, getting set up as a publisher on CreateSpace, and being able to handle all of the steps aside from creating the milk. That is a great example of creating something that allows cows to be cows.
Joe: Allows cows to be cows.
Dean: Just allow cows to be cows.
Joe: Well, we got to wrap this episode up so here's what I want to do-
Dean: There's probably more to talk about.
Joe: On the next episode, we can probably even continue on this if you want a little bit, and we can do maybe a hodgepodge of the next episode because there's a bunch of various experiences that I've had recently that are great that I'd like to talk about. Also, I'd like you to put it up on I Love Marketing, but I decided to create a blog, a written blog-
Dean: I saw that.
Joe: ... which will include audios from me and you, of course, that I'll post on there occasionally. And I don't know, I haven't decided how I'm going to update this thing or how frequently but I want to talk about the subject of the very first post on it, which is about Tesla. Elon Musk wrote a letter to Tesla customers and clients, and of course, I'm on the list because I put a down payment on a Tesla a long, long time ago, before anyone ever got one, and I just haven't gotten my Tesla yet because I've been busy and contemplating different vehicles along the way.
I made that lovely decision to buy a Fisker, which I ended up giving away to John Benson because what's happened to Fisker and all that jazz, but that being said, I'd like people to go check out the blog and read it because I want to talk about it on the next episode that me and you do on I Love Marketing. It's GeniusNetwork.com/blog. And, you'll read the article about Tesla Motors and the letter that Elon Musk sent to his clients, and it literally was a billion dollar letter. Their stock had dropped drastically after this news - of this fire.
Dean: I saw that. That was a great article, by the way. I'll put a link to it under this episode, too.
Joe: Yeah, and while we've been talking here, talking about cows, I have gotten a text from Net Hallowell, the ADD/ADHD doctor, from Brendan Burchard, from David Holloway, who is Brian Holloway's ... it's so funny, Net Hallowell and David Holloway both texted me. Very similar last names, but Brian Holloway's son who is a professional football player. And, they got all that media attention from their home getting vandalized. It was on TMZ. He texted me because he wants to talk to me about strategies. They've got literally hundreds of thousands of hits to the site.
Then, John Carlton left me a message, so I've got all these goofballs all within the span of us recording this, and it just occurred to me that there's been a lot of ... With all these relationships I have with cows, I'm out there ... If you want to meet cows, you got to go out and you got to mingle in the fricken fields.
Dean: That's exactly right.
Joe: At least, I think. I don't know what the hell I'm even talking about right now, but it seems-
Dean: No, but that's great. I think it's good. I think next episode, we talk about advanced strategies for cows and advanced strategies for farmers. I would love to get everybody's comments, though. What their perspective on it is because I think that's the thing, people are seeing that they're doing a lot of things that are frustrating, that are not making milk. The frustrations of a farmer might be creating things that are ... It's right there. Their frustration might be, "It's right there." I've created it for them but their customers are cows and they're expecting them to maybe do too much.
Joe: Right, and you have fricken swollen udders that need bag balm put all over them because all these people around you are just fricken ... They're trying to just drain you of every ounce of milk you have, so you really need to share your production and your value with people that actually give a shit and support you and don't kill you. You need to feed the cow proper nutrition, give it proper rest, let it do its thing. What I learned recently is how burnt out there are certain things that I'm doing have created for me and how I have to even step back and be like, "My God, in order for me to be a good cow, you got to just take care of yourself."
I'm a very clean eater, very big into exercise, sleep has been lately one of my archenemies and I'm really working on just better sleep, but all in all, to be really good at producing, not only do you need to be clear on what you do really well and spend as much of your time doing that, but simultaneously build a support structure that allows you to do that and not spend your time ... If you want to be an 8, 8 or a 10, you can't spend your time with 1, 2 and 3's, or 2, 3's and 4's, or 4, 5 and 6 activities, people, projects, things like that.
Hopefully this episode has helped you think about that and that you leave with more direction, confidence, capability and clarity and that you'll go to ILoveMarketing.com and leave a comment about what you got out of this episode, what your thoughts and perspectives are, and anything else you'd like to share. We would very much appreciate it, and that's it for me, Dean.
Dean: Awesome. That's it for me. Talk to you next time.
And there we have it, another great episode. Thanks for listening in. If you want to continue the conversation, want to go deeper in how the profit activators can apply to your business, two things you can do. Right now, you can go to MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com and you can download a copy of the More Cheese, Less Whiskers book and you can listen to the back episodes, of course, if you're just listening here on iTunes.
Secondly, the thing that we talk about in applying all of the eight profit activators are part of the Breakthrough DNA process. You can download a book and a scorecard and watch a video all about the eight profit activators at BreakThroughDNA.com. That's a great place to start the journey in applying this scientific approach to growing your business. That's really the way we think about breakthrough DNA as an operating system that you can overlay on your existing business and immediately look for insights there.
So, that's it for this week. Have a great week and we'll be back next time with another episode of More Cheese, Less Whiskers.