Ep 139- Chief Marketing Officer To Entrepenuer Author With Vince Warnock

Transcript

all right we're here with vince out of new zealand from across the ocean or people call it

costa lake across the pond if you're in australia yeah right across the pond there you go

so uh vince out of new zealand that is a world's way quick story i went to

fiji and i didn't realize how close i was

to sydney i i was kind of mad i didn't go i was your i was yeah i must have met we had our honeymoon in fiji um but

anywhere in australia new zealand fiji tonga all those kind of areas we're relatively close we're literally just

quick flight away from any of those beautiful beautiful islands so i was i was kind of i was in fiji for

two weeks and i'm like man i wish we'd cut it a few days short went to sydney for a couple days and called the day but

that's a side note not now that you said you're from new zealand so my mind's working now that was my first time out

of the country and it was a great experience and then we met a lot of australian and uh new zealand folk from out there as

well on holiday right well we we we had our we have our honeymoon in fiji we've

been married for almost 27 years now so that was 27 years ago um but two

things happen one when we're in fiji we were like celebrities because the fijians love the all blacks they love

the new zealand rugby team so any kiwis any new zealanders that were over there we were treated like royalty which was

amazing but the other thing that happened is we actually got kidnapped on our last day of our honeymoon it was

super scary super short and super exciting all at the same time because we we did the unthinkable like um one of the fijian

guys that was in our resort he would tell us all about his village he took us down their horseback riding went to his

village it was beautiful and everyone they're so friendly his dad was the chief of the village uh he really got us mandarins by climbing up these trees

like this giant fiji fijian guy i swear he was like nine foot tall but apparently he wasn't

so so he got us all these mandarins and there and we thought everybody's so friendly i know we were told not to

leave the resort but we'll be pretty safe and we're on our last day so we thought we'll just go for a quick wander down the road so we walked down the road

next thing you know we found ourselves sitting on this bench with these like huge fijian guys around us um telling us

that we need to respect their need for carver which is like an alcohol drink there um and that they want all our money and we're going dude you picked

the wrong people we are broke like that was our honeymoon we had spent every cent like on our last day there we were

planning on leaving with no money um and and then it started getting really scary i was looking these guys going man like

in a good situation i could probably take one of them or at least cause some damage but there's a half dozen in there and every single one of them are going

to hurt me badly and then all of a sudden one of them just turned around and said go time to go go i'm like what he goes just go go

go and shuffled us off and just as we were heading down to the exit area we saw the van from the place that we were

staying and the fijian guy there he said he just had this hunch he knew that something was wrong he knew that we weren't where we should be so he went

looking for us and they saw his van coming so they panicked and let us go so uh so it was really scary for a short

amount of time but gave us the coolest honeymoon story ever like honestly we got to go back and say we got kidnapped

on our honeymoon how many of you have done that that is crazy i will have to tell my

wife about that story because she'll kind of like it okay last time we go to fiji jimmy fiji

is a beautiful place and it is it is safe we just did what we were told not to do because well to be fair i don't

like being told not to do things so that's probably why you went you went for an adventure and

you had your adventure exactly we've got exactly what we asked for so yeah

no harm no foul no that's an amazing story yeah i i had a great time in fiji and

it was so i've been married six years so it's been six years some defeat awesome congratulations yeah

yeah it's pretty crazy man but it's a small world when you when you when you start traveling it you know yeah

definitely so i the one thing i do regret is not going to sydney maybe next time

you can so i do i do have some australian friends now that i do want to travel so

i think he's coming here this year and we might go there i don't know i might make a trip out of

it but we're excited about that um off of that tangent

everybody got the fiji story this time out of two people from across the pond yeah yeah

that's awesome so tell us a little about yourself um you want to take your drink go ahead man

i was listening i was like i just pulled myself a whiskey and i thought you know what i just want a quick mouthful while it's talking then you quickly finished

i'm like no no go ahead go ahead go ahead so tell us a little bit how you came in entrepreneurship um

your past how long you've been an entrepreneur all that good stuff oh wow so many so many aspects to that

question there so my entrance into entrepreneurship was um what i call survival mode when i was 11.

and i i don't share this too much in in podcasts and things but i grew up in a really abusive household um i grew up in

poverty and it was just really unsafe environment so one of the things i realized very early on is i need to fend for myself

so at age 11 or age 10 i got given and this is going to really date me here but i got given

these little sinclair zx81s they were some of the first personal computers very very limited personal computers

that came out but what had happened was a company had imported them into new zealand and they were faulty so to them

it was a tax write-off so not a problem we'll just throw these things out i managed to get these things out of the bin and suddenly i realized i can fix

them because they had rubber membrane keypads they're really really terribly designed so i realized if i take them

apart and just kind of realign everything then they'll start working so of the three i got two of them working

and then i asked around at school and turns out some of my some of my schoolmates their parents really really

wanted these so i sold them to them for a good bit of money and and from that i bought myself a commodore 64 which is

one of the greatest kind of personal computers to ever be made i mean it's so dated now but it was just glorious in

the day so then at age 11 i discovered something i looked at all the software and all of

the the games that you needed on a commodore 64 were all on cassette tape and i was like wait a minute cassette

tape is just like a ferrite based thing so therefore you can copy this technically so now bear in mind i had no

moral compass i had a very i grew up in a really dodgy family i grew up in a really horrible area surrounded by gangs

and everything so i didn't know right from wrong but all i knew was i could probably make money from this so i

started this little pirate game ring really where i would hire these games and software from the local video store

um and then what i would do is i would take it into a department store that had tape decks with high speed dubbing i'd get my

friend to kind of distract them while i go in there with a whole pile of cassette tapes and quickly copy all these things and then sell them to all

my friends for a profit and and i managed to make a considerable amount of money from that like honestly as an 11

year old i was pretty self-sufficient after that so that was my first kind of entrance into entrepreneurship after

that point though i will highlight every every company i've had from there's been ethical and be moral and i have a moral

compass now so please don't judge me on that um but then from there i kind of went in and out of both

corporate world and entrepreneurship and and even did a stint on radio here on one of our top radio stations as an

announcer for a number of years which to be fair was my dream job uh and and when

i got the job i realized it really is my dream job i'd wanted it since i was a little kid except for one aspect of it which was

the lack of pay like it's one of the worst paid jobs in the world so so i moved away from radio and got into

marketing which was kind of the convergence of my passion for technology with my passion for people and people's

behavior um so from there i'd create and fail a lot of businesses early on

then i go back into corporate with my tail between my legs and then i create and get some success from a company and

i just come off the back of my largest acquisition ever so it was a company that we grew over three and a half years

of extreme stress extreme anxiety wanting to kill my co-founders them probably

wanting to kill me as well it was just a crazy crazy journey but it turned out to be really worthwhile in the end because

we exited with a multi-eight-figure exit after only three and a half years and when you're the majority shareholder

that's a pretty sweet position to be in so i was very happy with that but then left there and joined the team

at cigna insurance and became the chief marketing officer there um and that's what started a whole different kind of chapter of my life

daniel where i i had this job that on paper was was brilliant it was perfect

you know like the pay was ludicrous you never even never ever needed to look at your bank balance that was a crazy

feeling um and you were working on some incredibly awesome projects like some really advanced ai projects some really

cool stuff in the marketing team that we were doing um also i was getting the results took the online sales from nothing to to just

about half their revenue it was insane um so but pretty much double the revenue of a fortune 100 company in five years

which is which is nuts um and and got the recognition for that got to travel the world speaking on

stages going different signal markets going all these different places teaching people the methods that i was

implementing uh published my first book when i was there as well uh which which became a bestseller so that was awesome

and got the recognition so i've won a number of awards and even got recognized by adobe as one of the top 50 marketers

in the world so all of that looks amazing i had the second largest office in our building uh

the ceo obviously had a bigger office than me otherwise i had some chance to do um and i had i had it was so sweet i

had this beautiful view over wellington harbour here in new zealand um i had the madman style cabinet in the corner with

all my whiskey and everything and and i would sit at my desk look out at that view look at the whiskey look at this

list of accomplishments and feel incredibly guilty because i hated it i

did not want to be there and i felt an incredible strength incredible sense of guilt and shame over having this job

that every marketer wanted every marketer would cover i mean in new zealand that's pretty much one of the biggest chief marketing officer roles

you can get there's probably only one bigger than that um and yet i was like i i don't want to

do this and i couldn't figure out why at first until i realized i was completely unfulfilled

i had this job that didn't didn't connect with who i am as an individual and that's when i realized that the

things that were important to me in life weren't in that job at all they were helping people they were impacting

people they were actually making a difference in people's lives in particular entrepreneurs i have a huge soft spot for entrepreneurship and

having gone in and out of entrepreneurship for most of my career it was really important to me so got to

november december 2019 um started having a conversation with our ceo who thought

i'd gone completely bonkers like legitimately thought i was having a breakdown i said do i don't i don't want to work here anymore i need to move on i

want to become a full-time author and that was my goal was just to leave there and become a full-time author

and she just went i i don't understand are you aware of how much we pay you and i said yes i'm aware but it's not about

the money and she goes well that doesn't make sense to me and i went well that's partially why i'm going to leave um so i

left there in january of 2020 so all still pre-covered uh left there in january january 2020 to become a

full-time author that lasted about one week when i realized having adhd and writing one single book full time is not

good for your mental health trust me on that one i'd walk around the house going loopy just going ah distraction

distraction so so one book became mini books it became launching my podcast which is the chase in the insights podcast uh and

then accidentally led me to being a marketing invisibility coach and by that i mean that covert kind of hit the world

while i was doing all this yeah and the moment that that happened every business that i was dealing with every every

entrepreneur i was talking to all said something along the same lines which was look man we want to be able to help you

but we can't we have no revenue coming in the door we have all the same overheads we don't even know if we're

going to exist in two months time and when you have a passion for entrepreneurship that genuinely broke my

heart and i remember turning to my wife leanne she looked at me and said you you can't let this go can you i went nah she

goes you're going to have to help aren't you yeah and she gets go for it so jumped in and and helped them all out

and every single one of them said yes to my help which was always awesome and managed to have not a single casualty turn them all around to

profitable got them to think different a couple of the businesses pivoted a couple of them just did a different way

of delivering their product and their offering to their customer and in other cases they really didn't even realize what they were sitting on so by helping

them with that we actually ended up doubling their revenue so so that was really exciting for me because i had

this strange bubbly feeling on the inside and i'm going what is this what is this oh my goodness i feel fulfilled this is

incredible so so yeah so that was the the next kind of phase of my career and

then from that i've grown that coaching business and that visibility business into helping entrepreneurs to to get

seen helping them to get on stages helping them get on podcast helping them to become published authors which is a big part of

what i'm doing at the moment and just having a whole pile of fun like honestly i have the best clients in the world

bana and i won't hear any argument on that i've got the best clients by none they're all just the most amazing human

beings and they're all they're all really impact driven so they're all people that really want to make a difference in this world so yes and that

leads me to here now which of course the pinnacle of my career talking to you

right here man i said that we should end it i mean after that where do i start

and you really covered everything a lot i kind of i kind of want to backtrack about this because a lot of people a lot

of people you're bootlegging oh yeah yeah i was bootlegging all right

i did not know that it was even illegal at that age at age 11 i just thought hey i can make money this is fantastic so

yeah i and i i the reason i want i want to cover this because a lot of people they overlook they think that they they carry

that that weight with them for the past whether they went to prison or whatever because i've interviewed people that went to prison for a long time and i'm

like neutral hey you were young you were dumb you were making money you had a passion the crazy thing about

entrepreneurs is that they a lot of people that come from that life they're really born to be entrepreneurs they're

just in the wrong field yeah i agree totally and and i often say because one of the things i mean

there's a mixture of things when i was a kid okay so when you when you're a child that grows up in an abusive household you

want to be invisible you don't want to be seen and i'm an extroverted person i'm a highly extroverted person so for

me i felt like i always needed to hide at home because if you stood out you got a beating it's as simple as that so

school was my really happy place that was where i got to be myself let my guard down a little bit and kind of express myself there but also i had adhd

and well still do have adhd and as a result rsd as well which is rejection sensitivity dysphoria so

this kind of shaped how i behaved but it always made me feel like an outsider and and a lot of neurodivergent people

will tell you this you grow up feeling like you don't fit in and when you don't fit in at home because you just

constantly feel like you you're a nuisance you're you're just this this thing that doesn't have any value and

then at school you're constantly getting told off for talking in class or jumping around the room and just you know like

being overexcited all the time um then you really don't feel like you fit in at all and i think for a lot of

a lot of people that go through the prison system a lot of people that make mistakes and things a lot of the time it's because they're trying to fit in in

a world that they don't feel like that they do and and i think that is genuinely quite sad and it comes from a lot of

environmental stuff and things as well but what happens at that point is you also learn to survive and that's where

that entrepreneurial spirit kicks in and for me like i said it was a survival mechanism to make money to be

independent to be able to know that i can do something with my life that was really important to me but also i still

remember daniel i i do have to share this because it was a really pivotal moment in my life um i

i was going through a pity party i tried to build a business early on and i failed miserably this is when i was quite young like in

my uh your early 20s probably even just 20 i think and and i remember

feeling really sorry for myself and i was having a a bit of a pity party with a friend of mine and i just said to him

oh it's not fair man like all these other entrepreneurs and all these people they grow up in these stable families where they they teach them all these

lessons about money and about life and everything and they're surrounded by people who are starting businesses and i

i've none of that none of that at all i didn't grow up with any of this i didn't even i didn't even realize you could

aspire to be anything right and that's not fear and i remember thinking to myself this

is not fear like all of the stuff i had to go through is not fair and i remember him turning to me i think he was just

really peed off that i kept moaning uh we turn around against look you do realize that everything you've gone through in life counts for something

and i didn't know what he meant so he explained he said look the good the bad the ugly they have all helped to shape

you into who you are now he said the bad stuff that you've gone through i wouldn't wish on anybody but

the fact is they help to shape you into the human you are now and i happen to think you're an awesome human being

and that's what made me realize that i can either choose to be a victim on these things or i can choose to accept

that even the stuff i don't like has helped to shape me into somebody who understands people who understands

behavior but it also is highly empathetic towards others and i always say if i hadn't have gone through

the trouble i went through if i hadn't gone through the issues and the abuse and all those kind of things i wouldn't know what it's like for other people

going through that so therefore i wouldn't know how to be there for them but now i get to help so many different

entrepreneurs they're going through mindset problems and going through all these limiting beliefs and that and going you think that's a limiting belief hold

my bear i'll show you what a limited belief is so i get to actually help them from my own experience and i think that's really really special

it's it it gives you a step up because there's always somebody that's had it worse no matter how bad you've had it

someone always has had it worse and it kind of gives you perspective like man yeah thank you just an interesting

perspective too daniel because a lot of people look at that and go oh yeah well you know that's them but what they don't

realize is everything you go through you feel like like for example if you're facing a major obstacle often you look at that

obstacle and you think there's no way i can get through that obstacle or get around or get over that obstacle like that is a huge obstacle it's not till

you're looking in the rearview mirror where you realize that obstacle wasn't as big as i thought it was but the thing i always take courage from

is is looking at other people that have gone through way worse than me and realized that they probably felt the same way yeah every level those

obstacles probably felt like they were insurmountable but what happens is we dig deep as human beings we are way

stronger and way more powerful than we actually realize we are so so yeah i

look at other people they've gone through worse and go you know what if they can go through that i can go through this

it's uh there's a there's a rap party this has more money more problems but the more money you make the bigger the problems

get and you learn how to overcome those problems at different levels so there's i heard a quote from somebody else's

that he's like i want million dollar problems because that's something i'm in a space to receive them

oh i like that i like that yeah we looked at it from we just had a

friend of ours uh this is a while back we had a couple friends of ours that just got married and they had gone through in their their

first month of marriage they had a massive fight and they were like oh my goodness it's the end of the world i

can't believe this has happened oh it's the end of my marriage it's all blah blah blah we're just looking and getting you amateurs but what we realized is

that for them was the worst thing that had ever happened that one argument which by the way in

hindsight you've been married six years seven years you'd know that that was just like if i told you where i was you'd just be going oh that's just

nothing uh and we've been married for a lot longer then and we just logged in and went for them this is the worst

thing in the world what they don't realize is they've got way worse ahead of them and i don't mean that in a really pessimistic kind of way but what

i mean is you're going to face challenges and obstacles but guess what you get through that as a couple that's what marriage is so so it's all relative

um yeah the only times i find it interesting is we had friends of ours who were struggling to conceive a child

as they were going through ivf and i remember that the husband was talking to me and he was just a wreck and i looked

at him and i just realized and i had to say to him look man i don't know what it's like going through what you've been through like

seriously i just gotta blink in the aunt's pregnant you know we can be careful with that um so so i don't know what it's like to not be

able to conceive in things but i can imagine that it would be tearing you apart on the inside and that's the only

time i could really but having not gone through those challenges and not really be able to relate to him but certainly

can relate to pain in that way yeah yeah it uh you get perspective you get perspective

you get older and wiser by your experience i i hope so my wife would argue the wiser parts

questionable well you're not supposed to ask your wives that question yeah yeah yeah true [Laughter]

they'll uh they'll think otherwise oh definitely she will give you a laundry list of reasons why that's not

true oh man that's funny um i really want to

talk about your marketing background because that is interesting because i

had i did podcast earlier today and she was corporate america too so i'm like yep

pivoting from corporate america to entrepreneurship is like the hardest thing because if you're high up in corporate america you get all the

benefits and and i've heard so many stories where like you have an entrepreneurship for years but i just

get so much benefit over here for all the other stuff paid travel cars cars whatever it may be and high

pay and it's just like and i think you mentioned it earlier there was a higher purpose

yeah absolutely and i generally do believe this and and don't get me wrong there are people that are genuinely cut

out for corporate i'm just not that person and and by that i mean i can serve somebody else's vision that's not a

problem um but the challenge i have was at that level when you're a chief marketing

officer in a fortune 100 company you you you answer the front line you know we're near the front line of where

you're helping others in fact we literally had to think of staff and team members and people and even our clients

as dollar signs and figures they were literally just numbers to us and i remember

crunching numbers you know sitting down as a senior leadership team you know with all the other chief ex officers you know like the

chief executive and the chief financial officer and all these people sitting there just going okay

what are we going to do here and they said well we need to make some cuts in this area and they were treating everything as a formula and i'm looking

at this formula going these are lives these are people that have stories that have families that have children that

have all of these different kind of things this doesn't sit okay with me and i even remember

i'm trying to think how much of this i can share without getting in trouble here but after i left there were some decisions that were made that i didn't

agree with uh now i have no say over those decisions obviously but i remember bumping into some of the senior

leadership in the airport and i was flying up to auckland they were flying out somewhere else and i caught up with them and i said and

i confronted them on that and i said like what the hell was was that with that decision that was i i morally question why i

don't agree with what you did there and they turn around and say but you weren't there vince you're our moral compass and

i said well don't you dare ever put that on me because that absolves you of a responsibility of treating people as

human beings and they were being kind of half cheeky to be honest they were being kind of cheeky with me and saying that

but also there was an element behind that which i really didn't like which was saying well if you were there you could have saved these people and i'm

like that's not how life works treat every human as a human so so for me i

definitely don't fit into that culture at all and i realized that more and more that's why i was so dissatisfied with

that job and if i look back a little back over my career the the companies that i've created have

been really stressful obviously you know because you you you know your runway is running out you've taken you know with

with our latest kind of company that we had we took a million dollars worth of seed funding and then we raised another million dollar round in there as well

and and we've got a team we've got a runway that's running out and we've got to get the clients signed we've got to build those clients up and we're going

to get all this kind of stuff all these moving parts at the same time that's a lot for people to deal with

right so there is a high amount of stress for that but you are in control and you get to treat those people the

way that you want to treat them you get to be authentic to who you are and then i work in small teams so i work in like

not-for-profit sector and that gave you a bit more freedom which was really really good but corporate world i've worked in corporate

banks and that was just so stifling i absolutely hated it the one thing i did like about cigna when i joined there was

when they hired me they hired me for my expertise in um startups and creating companies so they said to me we want you

to challenge us and challenge our corporate nature and challenge the way that we approach things because their

solution you know as every corporate is there's there's a problem over here let's get a whole pile of money and throw it at their problem rather than go

how do we think different how do we use constraint as our advantage and not our

disadvantage you know so so yeah it's just a very different way so i i do think though there are

different wide people there are people that are wired for corporate life um and that's they're happy to do that they don't really hold a vision of their own

they don't really understand what's important to them in that aspect but for those of us that are you know and the

terms over you so many times daniel but for those of us that are heart-centered so those of us that genuinely want to make an impact on this world there's no

way we're going to last in the environment we have to create something ourself we have to birth something into this world that's going to make an

impact

wow i forgot to meet myself there you go [Laughter]

that happens every once in a while sometimes i'll mute myself just to kind of i need to drink man my first ever

facebook live i got 15 minutes in and realized not a single person could hear me it was the most embarrassing

it was going very well the feedback was amazing [Laughter]

that's funny that's funny um i really want to talk about marketing because i don't know i'm i'm a natural

i'm not a natural born marketer but i liked enjoying marketing because that's it's a very pivotal part of every

business is marketing because you have to bring in new clients and keep the current ones you have so

what what's let's talk about some marketing tips what are some marketing tips that some people can easily implement to

build up uh user confidence or to get new customers love it well the first marketing tip i'm

going to give you is going to irritate everyone because they're going to go oh no i don't want to do that but trust me

when i tell you this is the best tip you're ever going to get in your marketing career and your

entrepreneurial career and that is um get in front of your customers as early and as much and as frequent as possible

and by that i mean um not even like there's this temptation say for example you're you're a coach or you run a

course or a program and there's a temptation to go right i'm going to create this program it's going to be the best program in the world it's going to

have all these features and all these benefits and everyone's going to be really amazed at this and i'm going to price it really really well as well and

then you get it out there and realize not a single person is buying it and the reason for that isn't because your marketing is not working is because you

built something that is designed for your perception of what the market wants not what the actual market wants and

i'll give you a good example of this with um with that startup that i was in common ledger um our clients were

accountants and accounting firms and i remember um purely through an accident actually we i did a

presentation to senior leadership at pricewaterhousecoopers so pwc and they were dialing in multiple

different countries around the world so i had to do this live demo of our software of the thing that we created and how it was going to impact all of

their lives it was going to change their whole business forever blah blah blah and i got there you know about 20

minutes early and i'm sitting in the cafe downstairs and i thought right a bit a bit of log into our system just make sure it's all working well

and our system was down and i'm like what's going on so i quickly called my co-founder who's our cto our chief

technology officer and he goes oh you know i've just i've rebooted the server and i said oh okay cool how long until it's back up and running oh probably

another 45 minutes i was like dude it's on the calendar i am doing a live demo and he goes

whoops and it was that moment of going i can't talk to you right now i'm fuming i don't want to have to postpone this

they've got all these people dialing in from around the world but i realized i had taken screenshots of every aspect of

our product because i was putting together some user documentation so i thought right so for in 15 minutes i put

together the fastest demo powerpoint presentation you've ever seen in your life i just took all these

screenshots put them on there and i went and did this smoke and mirrors demo i got there and i said i'm going to demonstrate how this works and i would

just like click through the slides and they would they thought that it was you know a live piece of software even down

to i'm going to put my password and everyone look away now and then just click to the next slide and they're like oh cool um but anyway through that whole

presentation i was talking about the time savings that we're going to give them as a business thinking this is

exactly what every large accounting firm needs you know when we take a process that normally takes two

hours and boil it down to less than two minutes that's going to save them a lot of time a lot of money on a large number

of their clients okay but when but when i was talking with them one of them turned around and just said to me

question i said yeah and he goes do you map the chart of accounts see because that's a pain in the ass and i'm telling

you now if you guys did that that is that is the game changer and we would have gone into building

this product with the assumption that it's purely about time saving purely about piping the data from one place to

another and putting it in the right location but actually having that understanding from him and actually getting in front of these clients and

going uh you know like them asking that question i i did turn around and i said it's funny you ask that i said because

we're literally beta testing that at the moment and he goes well we want in we want to we want to do the beta test we

want to do the babysitter i said i'll have a talk to my team and i'll see if we can squeeze you in and i walked out of there and i rang my

co-founder i said i'm still not talking to you but you've got one chance to redeem yourself i'm walking back to the office now because it was in walking

distance walking back to the office now think about how we can map the chart of accounts because we need to do a live

beta of this in the next week and by the time we got back there he had thought of a solution in fact what we

did was another smoky mirrors we literally created a upload your file here where they upload their chart of

accounts we were already connecting to their clients chart of accounts so we just had an intern sit overnight and map these things manually and they gave us

the intel we need to build a product that actually serves their needs and that was the key takeaway from this was

if we had assumed what we wanted we would have built something that added some value and was kind of useful for

accounting firms but by listening to them by hearing what their actual needs

are in their words that gave us the best tool that we had to grow the company and then to be able

to you know with multi-eight figures as i mentioned so so one of the things i say to people is get in front of your customers as

much as possible if you can ask if you can record the session and the reason for that is your your goal is to get in

front of them and get them to tell you stories tell you about times that they've put purchase anything similar to

yours tell them about the fears that they had the concerns they had what they liked about it what they didn't like

what was the thing that really surprised them just really get in their words all that information there because

that's your marketing material right there when they're telling you the words that you can use that is what you're going to

use in all of your marketing and that that will accelerate you far beyond most of your most your peers

and i've got one more i've always got examples of these but one of these is a very embarrassing example daniel where

um i was doing some work with one of those companies that really struggled uh when kogan hit

there was these two little old ladies in melbourne australia and they'll kill me for calling them the old ladies but they

are so they will get over it now they're the loveliest two people but

they i'd help them to get their entire business online because their entire business was a bricks and mortar store and we took that we put it online in a

weekend it was incredible and they had huge success from that but one of the things i realized is that success is

built around momentum and that's not sustainable long term we need to be able to grow their search engine optimization

for example so i went back to these two little old babies and i said them okay right here's the problem we've got is i need to make

sure that you long term you're going to reap the benefits from all of this so one thing i notice is that your results

on google are not performing very well um so therefore we need to do what's called as seo audit so i thought i was

explaining this really well so seo audit which is a search engine optimization audit so in that we'll find out what's

going on and then i'll put together a strategy to help you get higher in the rankings yeah and they both just looked at me

completely blank and one of them kind of lent in over zoom and she just said look love we don't care about any of that

and my heart sunk i'm like what like this is one of my areas of expertise how can you possibly not care about that and

she goes all we want to do is get found on google and that's when i realized all of the

terminology all of the words all the ways that i was using to explain this were in my head in my experience as a

marketer they're not marketers they are your clients getting in front of them gave me the exact wording i needed in

fact i pivoted on the spot and said well how about this you're not getting found on google she gets no we're not i said

so how about i find out why you're not getting found on google she's like yes that would be great and i said and then we'll put in place a plan to get you

found on google and that was it sign on the dot alone take my money uh it was one of those moments where it was so

damn obvious but i would never have seen that if i didn't talk to the customers as much as possible

it's um sometimes you have to break it down in the simplest simplest way possible that yeah no matter what

level they'll get it they'll understand because they they don't they don't they don't they

don't know you're they don't speak your language yeah exactly and and to be fair like to be really clear for those of you

that aren't marketers they mean let me let me let you in on a little secret here the only reason we use those

terminology as marketers we use these fancy words and lots of acronyms is because we're really insecure like

honestly as marketers we're worried that people think we're the colouring in club you know we just go out and make fancy pictures put an ant out there like

it used to always greet me down here watching friends right and i love friends when it came out but when chandler decided he was going to get

into marketing and it was all i've got to come up with a quirky saying for a product that's marketing i'm like that's

not even the surface level marketing you um but we're always worried that people won't think that you know we're

intelligent or won't think we're you know we're not lawyers we're not doctors any of those kind of things so we make it complex to try and explain it to

people but in reality if you're a good marketer if you're a good entrepreneur you're going to speak the voice of your

customers and yes that means you've got to let go of your ego you've got to let go of your really cool terminology like

seo for example and you're just going to have to accept that now it's just getting found on google

that's funny the uh it's funny because like most like every business has like its

own language and phrase gallery when you're talking to other marketers or listening for those keywords to make sure you know what you're talking about

but if you're talking to clients don't do that to your clients because your clients need to need to understand what

you're saying exactly you need like this intuitive translator yeah yeah you just need like this um rosetta stone

in your head where you can just translate all of this geeky rubbish that's in there into plain english that

your clients will understand it makes it so much easier yeah that's uh that's definitely a lot

of people missed that one they missed that one yeah that was that was a really good tip

speaking speaking their language because yeah we learnt this um i i came up this

concept called coffee line tests and this came from one of my early startups which was um which had potential but was

a bit of a failure and it was a failure because i misread the market at the time and also i hired a really useless developer um and hopefully he's not

listening to this podcast but um but one of the things i realized i need to validate this offering and it

was a mobile game it's called mobile combat and it was android users versus iphone users versus i think the three

people in the world that used windows mobile at the time or whatever but the idea was you would be walking along and your phone would bleep and it would tell

you there's iphone users near you that are registered in the game so you would battle them like a top trump style game

and you would take your city your town for your platform so it was really exciting and the potential of this was

huge but i needed to validate it would people buy micro purchases in game and things like that so i went out there on the street with a

clipboard and a pen i thought i'm gonna i'm gonna haste this this is gonna be easy i'm just gonna walk up to people and ask their advice ask your opinion

but it turns out when you're in the street where people are walking from point a to point b and you're interrupting them they're with

especially if you've got a clipboard and a pen in hand they either think you're a crazy street preacher or you're a charity asking for money and either way

i learned a lot of new swear words and it wasn't helpful for the project at all so i was feeling sorry for myself i

walked away and i thought this is not fair oh man where am i i need to find a captive audience not people that are

moving from a to b so i'm standing in this coffee line you know waiting to get all of my coffee and i'm there for about

five minutes because it's a massive queue and i'm thinking oh man where am i gonna find a captive audience this is this is

this is challenging you know i can finally go out to the counter and i order my coffee and i had to wait for another five minutes i'm standing there

and they called my name and just they called my name i went wait a minute you you're just standing for 10

minutes in a coffee line right you know to order your coffee and then wait for your coffee you stood for 10 minutes in

a line with a whole pile of other people that are standing there staring at their phones so we came up with a concept called

coffee line test where you just go up you find a cafe like that that's really busy you say to the manager there look

i'll put my credit card on there and any people that we flag in the line will pay for their coffee if you are okay with

that and we'll just pull them over there at that table and just ask them a few questions and honestly 9.99 times out of 10 the

manager is fine with that and then what you do is you get a friend to help you you get them to pull people out online and say hey look i'll buy the

coffee for you if you just give us a minute of your time just to give us some feedback and it's a great way to get really good

qualitative feedback from random individuals on the street now obviously if you're in the b2b space it's not quite as simple because you don't know

if they're in your industry or not but if you're b2c if you're business to consumer there's a whole pile of consumers standing there that can give

you really good valuable feedback so so we would get them to tell us stories we would get them to read a piece of copy

and then explain it back to us and things like that as well so anything that could challenge our assumptions

about what we were trying to build and about our products and services and things so it is a fantastic way in fact

i took that even into cigna i remember going into our um chief finance officer's office i just said well we

just got this qualitative research we had like you know 20 different people giving us really good quality feedback

and you saw him roll his eyes and go oh god how much does that cost i was like oh it's about 80 dollars

and he's like what he was expecting like you know 50 000 which is usual for that kind of research and i'm like no 80 and

explained to him what we had done he was like honestly i was his favorite person after that for about a month it was crazy

you're you're creative you thought outside the box you found a way to connect your customers a lot of people you got to find out

where your customers are and that's your t your te analogy works out great because like if you for like for us in

real estate you're always trying to find business people like where do you find business people you go to the golf course you go to the cigar bar you go to

the gym you go to the bar because that's where people in the midday they go to waste time you know yeah well

if you can find that captive audience that's beautiful if we translated it for the b2b space with um with common legion

with that accounting company well what we did was we said okay well if we go to our conference like zerocon which is

where zero and a bunch of their add-ons and things were doing these big demos we knew there was going to be about ten thousand people there and we're like

okay we're going to this conference we can either pay you know ten to twenty thousand dollars for a booth there and

then try and entice people to come over to you and the reason they're coming over to you is probably just to get a freebie anyway and they don't really

want to hear from you or we can capture them where they're captive and that was the lunch lines so

i armed my team we all had an ipad each we had a survey on the ipad which was seven questions right those seven

questions were all designed to have a conversation with that person to be able to filter to see if they're a potential customer of ours or not and every

question was designed to be a press release because suddenly if you've got a few hundred people answering all these different surveys all these different

questions you've got this really good qualitative data a quantitative data rather that you can use to put a press

release out there so we would walk with the lunch line and what we do is we go up to people and say hey do you want to fill out a quick survey and go in the

draw to win a bottle of scotch and they're accountants so of course they're going to say yes because you know every every accountant loves scotch

and you go down you have these conversations and by the time we finish i walked one lunch line in an hour and a

half period and i had 115 different people sign up for our beta release 115

different people uh who had now given us information that was going to be used in our press releases and everything as

well so you can adapt it to any environment you just got to get creative and think where are they captive

what value am i adding to them and how am i doing this in a way that's not just basically not blatantly selling to them

at all interesting you got my mind working now because

there's an event space and they want to charge twenty thousand dollars and i'm like i'm like oh no heck of it man hack that event space like i i

and i apologize to all my friends that are in the event management business but um i never pay for a booth i never pay

for a table or anything i just go there i turn up and i own that conference and you can do the same it's not that

difficult surveys are your friend surveys i'm after i'm have to do that do

a quick survey i'm i'm going to do this because i definitely not paying 20 000

and usually what we do is we'll send a bunch of people over there let me look at this man i'm giving it

away on the podcast you'll have to censor that everyone think you're just swearing non-stop

yeah but the i call those surveys poly purpose surveys because they're a survey that fits multiple different purposes um

because like i said they are there to gather information on your target market they are also there to filter them and see if there are potential they're also

there as a conversation starter like for example one of the questions was for us was what's the biggest challenge

you face with all this new software in market and honestly that's all you had to say and you got a lecture for probably the

next two minutes and then go don't get me started i've got 1500 customers all on different systems none of their

software talks to each other nothing connects to each other at all it's a real pain in the ass and everyone keeps telling me my life's so much simpler now

but it's not true vince it's not true and you're going well what would be the solution to that and go i don't know i

just want something that makes it all play nicely together no well we're literally beta testing something like that now

they go you're kidding i said no no seriously i want in and they'll grab me by the scruff and go i want them because

they've immediately gone to that point of pain and you've now told them that there's a potential solution out there but by the way they may not make the cut

of that list so now they're going to fight you to make sure they get on your beta test and it's a paid beta so you've

suddenly got a whole pile of new clients and you're proving the value of your product to them it was a no-brainer man

and then on top of that you get a whole pile of free press around it as well i mean it was win win win win

i'm gonna have to do i'm gonna i'm gonna you got my wheels turning i'm gonna have to implement something because i'm the i'm the person that implements stuff i'm

that guy yeah man there you go i love this let me know how it goes let me go we have to do a follow-up episode where you

give me your rundown of how things we i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna do it because it's just

and that's what that's why like when you said you're you're a marketing exactly i'm like okay i'm gonna i'm gonna get some something out of this one for

myself that's the whole point of the podcast is i'm trying to get it for me

i love it it's very selfish to me sorry for everybody in the audience if this isn't for you it's just for me uh

we're just leading them in on the inside secret announcements what do you think i have a podcast it's just because i get to learn from all these amazing

entrepreneurs around the world i mean hello like if you can see the video versions are half of mine i'm sitting there listening to them taking heaps of

notes and then having to remind myself you're the host vince you're supposed to be listening you're supposed to be responding i'm like whoops oh i can

listen to this later on uh yeah it's purely selfish but it's so much fun so surveys

um we we did ads we did ads over the event like if you want twenty thousand dollars

we might just run two three thousand over your event and then we'll send people there yeah or not another heck you can do we

used to do this all the time although a lot more people have gotten on to this now but in the early days we were the kind of pioneers of it

we would turn up there we would contact every accounting firm that we knew was going to the conference and we'd just say to them hey we're going to have a

pre-conference breakfast um it's all on us come and join us and it would cost us you know a couple

of thousand dollars to get a whole pile of accounting firms together um tell them about what we're doing feed them

give them free drink and everything then they'll turn up to the conference and they're all talking about us so we've

already kind of pre-hacked that entire conference you know so yeah it was funny though because one of the other

providers there who had paid for a booth kind of heard from a number of people what we were doing and he bumped into me

there and he goes you dick he goes we spent twenty thousand dollars to get here and all anyone's talking about is

you guys i went hey that's what happens when you're good knocking a man you mean oh

yeah you gotta think outside the box you gotta think outside the box as a marketer to get to get through to your audience

um one of the biggest reasons why i started a podcast was i i contacted one of the biggest podcasts in my niche and

they wanted uh ten thousand dollars for a three month commitment to put put put marketing on in their

platform through ads and through the blog and stuff like that wow maybe i need to rethink my policy on advertising

on my podcast but yeah that gives you perspective because like if if people are paying 10

000 a month just for just for marketing space in that in that in that podcast

space i'm going to build my own nice i like that own your own platform yeah i'm going to own my own platform

i'm going to put my own ads i'm going to put my my own product out there because if i'm instead of paying for i'd rather

i'd rather own 100 of it yeah and then you get the added advantage of course of thought leadership and and this was a very

strategic thing for me i mean this is why i write books this is why i have a podcast is because i know that when

people look at that they they position you as a thought leader which doesn't make sense if you think about it from a superficial perspective you go well

why does having a podcast why does writing a book make you a thought leader but then when you step back and you

realize particularly for writing a book when you step back and go okay well this person has taken the time to

articulate their thoughts to put their thoughts and their methodology and their their learnings down in a book uh something that most

people won't do in their lifetime right 50 to 60 000 words get yourself in a book and get it published that must mean

that what you've got to say is important enough that you've made that effort so for a lot of people just the fact that

you're a published author means you're a thought leader you're you're somebody who has an opinion in this industry and likewise with podcasts obviously and you

get the added advantage as well of you get a really good guest on your show and people go oh hey i had johnny dumas on

my show and people go oh you hang in johnny doomester circles of course i don't i don't even know the guy i just

reached out to him one day and said look i know you charged to be on people's podcast and i know you got this long process but i don't want to go through

all that because i think you need to be in front of my audience and you went you know what let's do this once so so

actually getting him on the show helped my brand helped his brand all those kind of things as well you never know what people will say yes

if you don't ask a lot of people exactly it's a podcast thing it kind of opens the doors because people have a

conversation with you that they normally wouldn't have if it's not being recorded and if you don't have a platform that you don't take seriously yeah 100

let's kind of talk about the book uh we got a couple of minutes here um damn it talk about your book company uh book

release if uh yeah you're doing make people become a bestseller all that kind of stuff

well look um i'll give a quick background on it is when i published my first book um i when i'm one of those

people that i don't want to go i was in conversation with like the likes of hay house and some of the traditional publishers and i saw that the challenges

that come with those platforms and don't get me wrong getting published by those kind of companies is amazing right but

you don't control the narrative necessarily of your book they have people that are professionals that will tell you how it should go how it should

be structured etc and you don't have much say on that yourself plus they actually do

um they actually do things like you know um all the marketing and things like that as well and they're not they're not

me they're not my marketing they're not my style of marketing so i wanted to control that so i set up

my own publishing company hired really good proofreaders editors designers etc

and they've helped me to publish my books but they've also helped my clients to publish their books as well and

coming off the back of last year i realized i helped 20 of my clients to become published authors and that for me

was the highlight of the year seeing their face and their big cheesy grin every time they held their book that was incredible so i decided 2022 is going to

be the year where i double down on that i'm going to help 200 entrepreneurs to become authors this year and then

realize there's no way i can do that with a traditional solo book so i launched a series of collaboration books

and these are books where you pay you pay a very little fee you pay 1500 you write three to five thousand words

so it's very accessible for most entrepreneurs but then we take care of the rest for you i've got my team will

make that a better seller my team will publish it they'll put the formatting together they're editing together all those kind of things they'll create the

author copy for you and they'll give you 10 copies of the print book 10 copies of

the ebook as well so you get all those to force your family to have his presence over christmas et cetera um and

then one month after the publication date you then get all of the ebook versions of it you get the pdf the epub

the mobi and a strategy document showing you how to use that to make real money

because you don't make money off the book sales themselves nobody does unless you're jk rowling or tim ferriss or someone like that you don't make much

money off that so what we do is we give all of that profits to charity we give it all to a social good campaign or a

not-for-profit and you get the files and you get a strategy document on how to turn that into leads turn that into

revenue turn that into something that's going to add value to you as a business so yeah so we're working on that this

year i've got about three titles left at the moment that i'm i'm finding the last authors for for one of them is called

the heart centered entrepreneur one of them is called screw the hustle it's an anti-hustling grind um book and then the

other one's called love your marketing it's for marketers to talk about how to brand their business and how to market

their business in a way that doesn't feel like they're making a sellout so yeah so that's that's where i'm at

with that having a heap of fun tested that over christmas just thought not sure if people are interested in that

launched with nine books which i was told off and one of my coaches said launch with one book vince phillip

you're trying to find teen entrepreneurs to fill a book why would you launch with nine and i said well because you told me

i can't and i don't like being told i can't do something but i filled five of those books within the first week and now

another one's filled and now we're finding the last for those so so that's kind of where i'm focused we'll be doing more throughout the year but i just need

now those last little um authors co-authors for those books themselves i i like that um

the books gives you positioning into other other stuff to actually make oh man yeah it's it's a positioning tool

and it carries whatever product or service you're actually selling i'm telling you now man when i put my first

book out there i went from charging like two to five thousand dollars for a keynote speech to speak at someone's

conference to twenty thousand dollars um even down to just pre-coverage and i was

kind of gathered because covert kind of destroyed this one but i had a conference reach out to me from san francisco they said we really want to

fly you over here you can speak at this but we can't pay your fee because we can't afford that because we've got a

number of different speakers but we do have budgets set aside to add value to all our attendees so how about instead

of paying you 20 grand we pay you five grand and we buy 5 000 copies of your book and that way you can do a book

signing there so i'm like quick mental calculation realize i'm actually making more money doing it this way than just

paying the fee and they get me in front of all of their clients and all the attendees for the summit and i become

the kind of brand hero from there so it just opens an incredible amount of doors so honestly if you want to speak

at a summit they'll take you more seriously if you're an author you want to get on a podcast same again it's nice and simple

no that's awesome uh where can people find you online um oh man i make it so hard for people now joking um i make it

real easy just go to chasingtheinsights.com that's the home of my podcast it's the home of my books

it's also where you'll see every link to connect with me on social and do that come and join my facebook group come and come and just connect with me on every

platform unless you're a spammer then please don't um but it's also where you'll see two links on there you'll see

the link to become an author that's in the menu and that's where you can find out about the books that we're launching

at the moment if you're interested in those please do register now because they are selling out really really quickly

and then you also see a link to a free strategy call so this is where you can book half an hour with me no obligation

totally free where i can give you some clarity and give you some wisdom around your marketing roadmap

um i might pick you up on that i know it's probably yeah go ahead and book it man you know you want to

i i really do because i i like insight from different people and i think my partner talks about uh

we get advice from many counselors so yeah perspective perspective perspective is priceless yeah that's my my other

theory is too every coach has a coach every marketer has a marketing person they learn from every salesperson there's a sales person they learn from

that's just how it should be uh one last thing what is a quote that you resonate with that is yours or

somebody else's uh i'll give you one that's mine it's from my first book chasing the insights it is we don't chase the winds we chase

the insights and it's used to reframe your mindset around experimentation and reframe your

mindset around when you test something so it's not that you win or lose it's not that you succeed or fail it's that

you either get the result that you hypothesize or you learn a huge amount of insights from the result

and with that we'll end it that's amazing that's a good quote i like that one we appreciate you coming on thanks for your time thanks so much for having

me man cheers