Personal Branding Masterclass w/ Daniel Priestley

yeah so i'm daniel priestley not jason priestley i'm an i'm an entrepreneur and an author i've been an entrepreneur since i was 21 years old i've built a number of different companies around the world i was born in australia i currently live in london in the united kingdom i have an entrepreneur accelerator that we run with offices in sydney london and toronto i've got a group of growth services companies about seven companies in the group that provide growth services mostly agencies and i've got a technology company that does uh marketing technology for small business okay and so for all the future fans who are listening you're gonna want to really lean in and possibly when this is a warning and when i say possible i mean go get a pen and paper if you can this is one where you're gonna want to really pay attention to because i'm gonna be digging into this book called key person of influence uh you've written many books but the one i want to focus on today is key person of influence for a lot of different reasons as i'm reading this book and matthew's talked about this several times i'm like okay okay i'll get the book all right god you know you're getting paid by daniel here so i buy the book and i'm reading it and as i go from chapter chapter i start to feel like we're talking about the exact same things except for you're smarter and you've sat down and written the book about what i truly 100 believe in quite literally i'm reading through this and i'm like oh it's about building personal brand being clear communicating your message and having a product ecosystem and translating what you do into intellectual property so you can scale and become a person of influence the kpi like daniel just wrote the book about what i think but you beat me to it many years ago well you know if a red ferrari drives past a couple of people are going to notice it they're going to describe it the same way i would dare say what's happening is that you and i just started seeing the same stuff around the same time we noticed what was going on in the world and we noticed some truths that were popping up and you know we we probably had some shared experiences along the way and we just started noticing what what is happening all over the world since 2010. you're giving me way too much credit because i was just doing it because as a creative person i'm intuitively moving my way through the world i'm stumbling from one business to the next and a business idea emerges i'm like okay this is cool i'm just going to do it your story is a little bit different and i do want to go back in time a little bit about how you even came to this concept of a key person of influence tell us a little bit of back story about how you started to notice these observations or patterns about certain types of people i'll take you back before my first business because it's probably a little bit relevant i was employed number three at a startup before they even had a name or a bank account and i spent two years working with a startup that was very fast growth it went from zero to six million of revenue in two years and i got to be extremely close with the founder from 19 to 21 so i had this incredibly intense start to my career that was an apprenticeship and a lot of what i would do in those two years was i was running introduction events and i was promoting introduction events i was getting advertising campaigns and direct mail campaigns and a big part of what we're doing was those introduction events to drive new business when we got two years in my boss i went to him and i said can i get shares in the company because i was there at the beginning and he said look if you want shares in the company you need to go start your own company and i was like oh but i'm only 21 and he said well it's too late for shares in this company you better figure that out for yourself i actually did quit and i went and started my own company and i started an agency specializing in introduction events so the whole concept was running two hour introductions we worked with financial planners software companies uh franchisors and we would do road shows of introduction events so if someone wanted to introduce a new concept to the marketplace we would put on two hour intro events to do that we would roadshow hundreds of these per year so i built that business from zero to a couple of million in the first year or 1.3 million in the first year and then it went very quickly up to 10.7 million in year three so it was very fast growth business that i built in australia one of the things that we did to fill those events is we would have draw card speakers so we would hire top level best-selling authors and we would have award winners and we'd have people who'd built and sold companies that were very valuable companies we'd have celebrities so we were bringing a lot of those people as draw cards uh to get people to come along to to some of the events that we're running and i would spend a lot of time behind the scenes with these people and i would see what life was like if you're a best-selling author and i would see what life is like if you're on television or if you you know you're a shark on shark tank or something like that and it was just always incredible to me to see how just the ferociousness of inbound opportunities that would come in so people would turn up to these events with ready-made business plans and thrust the business plans they would climb over themselves when i was doing an event with richard branson it was literally 5 000 people queuing up to have a photo with him and it was just kind of craziness around these people so i i started seeing that this idea of having a personal brand was really something that completely changed the game and around the same time so prior to 2006 2007 it was really people who had been on television or who had book contracts that could put themselves in that position you had to you know work really hard and it was very rare and then along comes social media you know myspace and then youtube and then facebook and suddenly there's these engines these digital engines that are personal brand engines their job is to actually get you connected with anyone else in the world who thinks what you think or who wants to talk about what you want to talk about and i i just see this and i go whoa okay the world is changing here and there was a turning point moment when barack obama did the 2008 campaign he had this section on his website called obama everywhere and you could connect with him on twitter and facebook and you know linkedin and you could interact with him and it was a turning point because prior to that obama campaign everyone thought social media was a toy for teenagers and then after he won the election everyone went oh wow we've got to get on to this we've got to be doing this as well so i started sharing the key insights that i'd learned from working with these top people and one of the big insights is that technology is not necessarily your friend and i use an analogy which is the singer in the microphone that a microphone is only valuable if you know how to sing if you're a terrible singer then a microphone actually amplifies bad singing and and doesn't help you very much so i basically said the people who are going to succeed here are the ones who know how to show up as a key person of influence okay that was you've obviously done this a couple times before that was super succinct and smooth and it kind of gives me a lot of things to talk about i wanted to circle back really quickly about this idea your 21 year old you start this business basically you wanted to own a piece of the company to do this thing that you were doing and they said no so you just did it for yourself and it was probably the best advice that you probably got or you know basically their rejection saying no we're not going to do this force you to make a decision you do this and when you say intro events it's a product or a service that somebody's launching what is the relationship with the draw card speakers are they there to headline and then pull an audience in so then you can then do the intro thing yeah so some of the events were um stock standard two-hour introduction events so it might be introduction to financial planning concepts or introduction to a software company and then some of the ones that we would do which were a bit more advanced were two or three day conferences where we would actually get multiple speakers and we would really do deep dives and we'd kind of be trying to activate partnerships and we're trying to sort of get a lot done in two or three days with the company and we would always hire a draw card speaker a reason to show up for those two day events without a drawcard speaker you could maybe get 50 people and with the drawcard speaker you get three or four hundred people and was it you who is going to bear the brunt of the risk of producing this or did these whoever had an intro event to to benefit from did they just pay for this and you produce and coordinate the entire event we would take risk we would have a combination of setup fees retainers success fees and sometimes cost splitting so there was several different ways that we'd work with clients depending on the level of risk we were happy with and they were happy with but the reason that it was such a profitable business is we would take a lot of risks so we would have a much smaller number of clients maybe two or three at any given time but we would be in on everything they were doing so if they were selling franchises we would get a cut of the franchises they would sell if they were signing up software in some cases we even got equity in the companies it was an interesting model because we knew how to turn on the tap as a young person in his early 20s how were you able to book and get someone that was one of your draw card speakers even to pick up the phone to agree to talk to you and how you navigate and negotiate these fees because they can be very expensive to bring somebody like that in well thinking back and mind you i'm 41 now so um we're going back uh 20 years ago okay back to the start of this if i remember correctly it was just purely and simply we mostly just paid their fee so what would you like to get paid to turn up and speak five grand 10 grand 15 grand if it was within budget we'd just get that done and in many cases i would get discounts because i would go looking for people who had a book to launch and that they were on a promotional tour of some sort and they wanted to be in front of audiences anyway so i would i'd kind of time things where if someone had a new book out i would normally be in a position to negotiate a better rate but you know we were working with pretty reasonable budgets to do these rollouts um so it was never really a big challenge to do the five grand or the ten grand speaking fee what that's an excellent opportunity to point out something that you talk about in the book which is when you're working with people you have to think about what kind of partner you would make and so you're thinking okay i'd love for you to do this thing but you're also thinking what can i do for you so lining the schedule up with the book that they're promoting is a win for them it's a win for you and i just love that kind of mindset is that something that you intuitively knew how to do or did someone teach you or did you learn that from your previous gig i think i learned a lot from the mentor that i had when i was 19 to 21 that was huge but the other interesting thing is that every single week almost i was literally sitting there listening to people who had built and sold multi-million multi-billion dollar companies some of the speakers had sold billion dollar plus businesses and um i was getting an mba on the side from just having these speakers come and share so i was hearing a lot of those concepts around win-win partnerships the other thing too is i would just watch the way they are behind the scenes one thing you notice is that what they do and say on on stage is normally a very rehearsed keynote speech but what's far more interesting is the phone calls that they're having off to the off the side and what they're you know the way they negotiate and the way they keep in touch with you and some of the things that they're involved in and also the business opportunities that they're fielding as people are thrusting things um towards them it didn't occur to me to ask you this but when you said you were kind of getting your mba by working with these high net worth super successful people what is the level of education you completed so i uh went to a pretty rough high school in in australia um 1600 kids average class size of about 40 people and and pretty rough in terms of you know bullying and fighting and those kind of things it was not a up market school by any stretch i went to university uh when i was 18 and i did one year of university and i thought that university was going to be a place where you'd meet real life entrepreneurs people who'd built successful companies and turns out in year one you don't meet many of those people um but i was so impatient that i i quit to join the startup at 19. i see and what were you studying currently before you kind of just quit school i i knew i wanted to be an entrepreneur so i had experiences in my teenage years i worked at mcdonald's and the guy i worked for was a guy called randy and he was an american guy living in australia he owned six mcdonald's franchises he'd gotten in right at the start with mcdonald's in australia and he really kind of explained to me the difference between working versus owning businesses and he made it seem so cool that you could own a business instead of working a business and i was just really um excited by the idea of being a business owner and and being able to build something and do a startup before i even knew what a startup was i just had heard this idea called entrepreneur he had recommended a book called the e-myth and um and i kind of you know became hooked on this idea that one day i want to own businesses and be an entrepreneur it seems like you are like the perfect person to be doing what you're doing because it seems like you're paying attention to not what's only happening on stage but the off-stage conversations and just soaking all this stuff up and then incorporating into how you run your business okay now i kind of understand the business and where you came from i want to get back to the this concept of the key person of influence kpi why is it important that we should desire to be a person of influence what are the benefits of being a person of influence everything changed when digital came along and up until digital you had to be doing business in a local geography you had to be a local person right so if you're an accountant you're in competition with maybe a few accountants on the local scene and you know you've got a local area of maybe 50 or 100 000 people who live around your area and that's your market right that's where you your patch is and then digital came along and it basically said you can do business with anyone in the world but anyone else can also come and do business with your people as well the geography thing doesn't matter anymore and essentially we used to niche the business or niche the business based on this local geography and then suddenly it's like how do i grow my business or how do i find traction within an industry now the thing that i noticed was this personal brand and the fact that personal brand engines social media technology was amplifying these personal brands and i started to see it everywhere i started to see that steve jobs had actually had cut through in a massive industry using his personal brand and elon musk is having cut through right now in a massive industry using his personal brand i started to see that when you take an example like twitter you'll have tim cook who's been the ceo for just over 10 years and he'll have twice as many followers as apple which is considered to be one of the most important brands you'll see richard branson with 12 million followers versus virgin with quarter of a million followers so you start to realize that people really buy into the person behind the business they want to know who's behind this business and then they'll buy the products and the services and they'll buy into the products and the services and however humans are wired we really resonate this way this is how we're built this is how we're programmed we want to buy from businesses when we feel like we know the person one of the activities i do when i'm talking to a group is i will say without looking what color is the g in the google logo so you take that google logo and you say what color is the first letter g and i'm curious actually do you know off the top of your head what color it is no i'm going to guess and i'm going to say green yeah so it's like red green or blue or yellow it's actually always blue and it always has been blue but our human our human brains don't really connect with logos in the same way that we connect with faces right so it's the people in the faces that really capture us and then we're excited about the business and the brand we're excited about people first and then businesses and brands so i kind of started basically telling people the fastest way to grow your business is to build this key person of influence brand and then transfer that positive energy onto a business brand that can take on a life of its own but it all starts with that personal brand some of the reasons that you should be a key person of influence is inbound opportunities right you don't want to be chasing opportunities you want people to identify and know who you are and what you stand for and you want people to come to you as opposed to having to go running around facing them and one of the big things that happens when you become a key person of influence is you make a switch from functionality to vitality so functionality is the ability to perform a task perhaps to even do it quite well vitality is is a very different phenomenon so vitality has two definitions which is irreplaceable and life force so if something is vital it's irreplaceable and if it's vital it's got life force to it so what happens when you become that key person of influence is you get to work as an irreplaceable life force within your business and within your industry and you tend to get energized by the work and you get energized by the things you're invited to do as opposed to being worn down by that stuff you know one of the main reasons is just the type of work you end up doing is the fun stuff the stuff you feel like you're born to do those are very compelling reasons why you want to be a key person of influence okay so you told me i need to be this person i've just woken up to 2022 and just realize this with your words kind of just tickling my brains okay so what are the traits that make up people who have this special thing that you're talking about this the key people of interest what is it that is common to all of them so what they're doing is they're doing five things really well and these are the five things that were common to every one of the ones that i was working with it's important to do them in a particular order as well so the first thing is that they are phenomenally good at pitching so they know how to pitch their own value they know how to pitch the value of what they're doing they know how to enroll people into new ways of thinking and behaving so pitching is a skill that great entrepreneurs have and it's essentially it's code for enrolling people into new ways of thinking and behaving and it's not about answering people's questions it's not about telling people your backstory or your history it's not about telling them necessarily even about your vision for the future or your mission or any of that it can be those things but it's actually the true test as to whether you're pitching or not is have you enrolled someone into a new way of thinking or behaving that's part one the second thing that all key people of influence do is they publish content they often have books but they will have podcasts and videos and blogs and articles and they're prolific in their output they make it very easy for you to deep dive on their content if you want to spend seven hours in a row watching things reading things listening to things it's very easy to do that so any of that stuff is published content and we want to have a lot of published content that is along a narrative that reinforces the pitch the third thing is what i would call the product ecosystem you mentioned it earlier so the way key people of influence tend to behave is if you think about the eiffel tower in paris it doesn't actually make a lot of money right people pay maybe a couple of euros to go up the eiffel tower and down but what makes an a huge amount of money is the cafes restaurants and hotels that are positioned around the eiffel tower and if you're positioned near the eiffel tower then you get huge amounts of opportunities because people come to see the eiffel tower and then they stay in the hotels and the cafes and the restaurants so the way key people of influence behave is very much they become the eiffel tower for a product ecosystem so they're not selling themselves they're not selling their time for money but what they do do is they position products and services and businesses around themselves so that all they have to do is just show up and tell stories and have fun and as if by magic everything that's going on around them just gets lifted so that's the product ecosystem the fourth one is profile so they're fastidious about their profile they guard their reputation um they amplify their message on multiple platforms they want to be in traditional media they want to be in social media they want to win awards they want accolades they want associations with other key people of influence and they want to do live events they want to be on on stages and platforms all of that is profile building activities however there's a catch to that and they're truly great key people of influence are never chasing the spotlight they're not saying look at me look at me look at me they're always becoming a spotlight and saying look at that check that thing out have a look at what's going on over here so even though they show up on platforms the truly great ones divert the attention from themselves onto a trend or onto an idea onto something that they want you to pay attention to so that's important they're not they're not narcissistic they're channeling that energy somewhere important and then the final thing is um partnerships so they access resources beyond their control so rather than trying to save up the money to do something they partner with people who already have the money and then they do it with them rather than necessarily getting a million followers they might find someone who already has a million followers and partner with them to amplify the message maybe they don't have to develop a hot product maybe they partner with someone who's already got the hot product but needs more attention on the hot product and they partner with them to amplify that so in summary pitch published product profile partnership the five ps that uh that are covered and you're saying this sequence really does matter so you start with having a clear pitch and what it sounded to me like pitch is this ability to persuade like how influential you are in getting people to do or adopt different behavior or to have a new way of thinking so when i think of that is that like coach or a therapist because they do really work in that space they help people have a new way of thinking or behaving does that align with what you're saying i would say there's definitely an overlap in the skill set the the influential skill set when i think of pitching it's normally one to a group or it can it can often be one to a group and you're really trying to enroll someone into something they hadn't really maybe considered before the people who do really great pitching they get you to see something mundane in a brand new light somewhere a way you'd never seen it before and you they and you act upon it or they get you to notice a trend that you hadn't noticed before and you then act upon it you can't unsee it once you've seen it so i'm sure there is an overlap in skills with therapists or coaches definitely and a lot of key people of influence make great coaches think steve jobs bringing people around to the idea of the personal computer think about elon musk bringing people around to the electric car and like standing there talking about cyber truck and right up until the minute before you saw cyber truck you never had it in your head that you wanted a cyber truck that's just not even like if i got you to draw a hundred different types of vehicles that you wanted to own in your life you would never have drawn a cyber truck and then suddenly elon says this is the thing that i want you to consider and you go oh i might put 100 deposit down for one of those things so that's what i think of when i think of the truly great pitching key people of influence delivering a pitch i'm glad you clarified because you added another variable to that so it's not that you're only able to enroll or influence the way that people think or their behavior but you need to be able to unite larger groups of people on a at scale because you could be the world's greatest coach or therapist but if you're working one-on-one your level of influence impact is going to be pretty finite you're actually not moving enough people right yeah yeah that's a great distinction it's that ability to kind of enroll groups and to and to unite thinking you know to get a group of people lined up at the same time okay so for everybody who's listening do you pass the first test and if you don't let's just talk a little bit about like okay i want to do this daniel how do i become better at pitching how do i become better at being able to to influence the way people think and behave what can i do to develop this skill so there are some tactical things that you can do superficial things and then there are some deeper things you can do so the deepest stuff is that you really need to understand in what way do you want to impact the world so what's you what's your deeper purpose what's your purpose beyond making money what is it you actually want to enroll people in so for you it's really clear that you want to get a billion people to do what they love and you only have to spend a few minutes on your social media profile and you start seeing okay this is the game that this this guy is playing he's playing a game called enroll a billion people into doing what they love that is the deep work the deep work is to make up a game worth playing and when i say make up a game worth playing you know a lot of people go out there and they're like looking for a lightning bolt to hit them but having worked with some of the world's most innovative and amazing entrepreneurs they just literally sit down and make up a game worth playing they say it's a blank canvas let's come up with 10 ideas and pick the best one and let's get on with it so making up a game worth playing coming up with something that you want to enroll people in is is part is a deeper part of it tactically you want to be able to rehearse and practice what's called a social pitch which is a 30-second pitch to just test whether someone's interested in playing that game and learning learning some of the deeper insights around that game you want to rehearse and practice what i would call a scheduled pitch when you're scheduled to to be presenting to someone or you're presenting to a group you want to have a scheduled an approach in that situation and then essentially you want to do lots of role playing and get good at it and get comfortable about it and that's the tactical side you know figuring out the right stories the right analogies the right facts the right research that kind of persuades people to see things in a new light everything you say resonates with me so you need to have an idea that's bigger than you like what kind of impact do you want to make and i think you use the word dent as part of your company name right yeah what kind of dent do you want to make on the universe that's exactly where we got the name den from the quote the steve jobs quote that an entrepreneur's job is to go make a dent in the universe and yeah so the first part is what dent do you want to make okay so every leader needs a parade and so you have to kind of say we're interested in this thing so now you have a whole group of people who say i believe what you believe i want to do what you you're doing tell us how and then you kind of bring them okay i think you made it really tangible and super clear and i think that's part of being a key person of influence to be able to bring things into clarity for others right and to be able to communicate a really important distinction on that is it's important to get other people clear even when you can't do it for yourself one thing that i can tell you is that some of the greatest entrepreneurs at any given time they're feeling around in the dark looking for the light switch themselves they're at best directionally correct they're trying to figure it out they're trying to work it out they're trying to solve problems and even on days where they're completely at a loss as to how to move their the company forward or to move their own personal mission forward they have the ability to get other people clear even on days they're not clear themselves so that's an important distinction the superpower is that you can do this for others even if you don't even on the day you can't do it for yourself i'm curious why you make a distinction and point that out the reason i point that out is because i deal with a lot of entrepreneurs who feel that they need to have this absolute crystal clarity themselves and that they don't have the right to be getting a group of people aligned to a big idea until such time as they've figured out the whole path themselves and the reason i wanted to make that point clear is that actually it's the opposite that as the entrepreneur at the front of the ship or the key person of influence who's trying to lead the lead the movement you're going to be in the murky waters you're going to be in the in the dark and you're going to be directionally correct at best and you have to be able to get the others clear even when you're not and you're not meant to sit around waiting until you've got clarity yourself i love that that's that's a very good visual there so i'm thinking okay so if you're in the front forging a path into the unknown woods or on a ship in the murky waters of course it's not clear to you but you've blazed a path for them and so they can see like okay it's still safe you didn't hit a rock you didn't fall off the earth you're still okay and so they can follow the beat of your drum if you will i love that yeah beautiful okay to kind of continue moving down this path here you talk about publish you need to be able to be a prolific content creator this is where a lot of people get stuck how do you help to get them unstuck because they're afraid like i don't know enough all those imposter monster syndrome things keep popping up or i'm just not good on media i don't know and who who wants to show up for my writing or my talks anyways how do you help people get unstuck there well the key idea is that prolific beats perfect and that if you look at anyone who is hugely successful they're prolific not perfect so dolly parton has written something like three or four thousand songs and she's got i don't know a dozen hits i was at a concert the other night a band called muse and their catalogue goes right back into the 90s and you know they've got two or three really great songs off of each of seven or eight albums and the concert that they do now is an incredible concert but it's taken 25 years of prolific output to come up with that level of content the beatles on average when you work out how many songs the beatles wrote they wrote a new song every 12 days for eight years straight they have a prolific catalogue not a perfect catalogue so prolific beats perfect is the first mantra to kind of live by that mantra the second thing i would point out is some research and there's a guy called professor robin dunbar who came up with something called the dunbar's numbers and he worked out the way the human brain organizes groups of people is into about five people in a family and 15 people who are very close friends and then 50 people who are your friendship circle and then you've got 150 then 500 then 1500 and there's these kind of concentric spheres that you have around you of of people and he realized that in order for you to trust someone to feel that you know who they are you like them and you trust them enough to perhaps purchase something from them he found that there was a significant amount of time that someone had to spend getting to know someone and it was about seven hours to make it into the acquaintance sphere within a short space of time something like three months at most you've got to clock up seven hours with someone for them to be in the acquaintance sphere so google came along and did some research as well called zero moments of truth and they found that people buy from brands that they've had 11 touch points with so when they look at someone's purchasing history on google and then they work backwards how many times did that person get to know the brand in the lead up to the purchase the average number was 10.7 when you think about publishing it's a very human and essential ingredient that people need to warm themselves up to buying from from somebody so they tend to have to do seven hours and eleven interactions in order to feel comfortable and confident that they know you like you and trust you there's only a couple of ways that you can do that you can do it in an analog way taking people out for dinners and coffees and and do it one at a time or in small groups and it has to be synchronous that you both in the same place at the same time or you can use digital technology you can publish and you can have asynchronous so for example what happened with you and i is that in 2010 i wrote a book called key person of influence i was literally a different person there's not one cell in my body that is alive today that was alive back then but in 2010 i write a book and then in 2022 you discover that book and read that book 12 years later we have an asynchronous communication and when we jump onto this podcast you're feeling quite warm to talking to me and it's because you've had this opportunity to read the book and you're you've warmed up to the idea that we're on the same page so essentially that's a method that scales and it's a method that is asynchronous so you know essentially that's going to be the the method for building seven hours 11 interactions with a lot of people across time and space you've done this before daniel i suspect that was very important that was very smooth it was really smooth i'm very impressed with you for a number of different reasons okay so you kind of took me as as a skeptical audience member from like no i don't want to do this and you're like okay that works and he makes a good argument there and you mentioned muse which one of their songs is one of my favorite songs of all time my top 10 songs i'm like okay mention the beatles you kind of got it all worked in there very well done and then you said through proving it to me 12 years later the person that you were time traveled and met me here so that you and i can have this conversation you're proving it to us the value of writing something and putting out content out there and you're also saying to people get over this idea that you need to put out this perfect thing because as you cited person after person if we just keep doing the work eventually we'll find our hit yeah we will and on top of that finding a hit is not even necessarily how people build trust you've probably never had a huge hit with your best friend when you think about why is your best friend your best friend it's because you've clocked up time together lots of time together so it's not like your best friend has been sitting there judging everything that came out of your mouth and saying was that a good conversation was it not a good conversation you know was that the best thing that they've that i've heard today it's it's an ongoing conversation it's time spent so when we think about putting stuff out there prolifically you may never have a hit right let's say you never have an amazing piece of content that comes out but the truth is that actually that's not how humans work we work based on just clocking up consistent time together and if you clock up consistent time with people they will like you and they'll know you and they'll want to work with you one quick example that i think illustrates this is that if you walk down a busy street and there's hundreds of people going past you and i stop you at the end of the street and i say describe for me some of the people you walk past you're not going to remember anyone you walk past but if you're walking down that same busy street and let's say a friend from high school was on the other side of the road and they just you just caught them out of the corner of your eye your brain just lights up and you're like oh my goodness there's luke and you go across you cross the road you almost get hit by a bus right and you go hey luke how you going i haven't seen you for ages right and you suddenly you there's a connection this is how humans work we work based on the time we clock up with each other it's not that this person on the other side of the road was remarkably different from every other person on the planet it's not like they were super tall or super good looking or any of that stuff it's just you clocked up time with them you know you said that you you left uni after a year but i suspect that you are probably a prolific reader and you just learn a lot so i mean correct me i mean you're pointing out different studies you're referencing things you're very articulate i consider a young man i'm nine years you're a senior so as a young man you're very articulate how is it that you're able to get this information and retain it what's your secret i would say the secret is just i'm interested interested in people interested in how the world works it's just it's just time my values so it's aligned to the stuff that i care about we'll just leave it like that all right we're powering through some really big ideas i've been talking to daniel priestley he's the author of key person of influence he's written a couple other books over subscribe 24 assets entrepreneur revolution and there's another book i think you co-authored called how to raise entrepreneurial kids that's a separate episode i need to talk to you about that but i don't want to muddy the waters right now let's go on to point number three the product ecosystem you gave us the overview i totally get this i see it i understand how this works i want to be able to persuade people and unite others i'm going to start to become a prolific creator because one of your maxims prolific beats perfect tell me a little bit more about this product ecosystem idea how do i turn these things into other things especially if i'm in the service space well let me get really specific on this one and i'll kind of get into what we've discovered works best so we've discovered that there are four types of products that a business needs to have in order to scale and there's four categories and a business needs to have something in each of the four categories if it really wants to maximize its performance so the four product categories is the first one is called a gift something you can give away for free asking nothing in returns no no strings attached normally it's digital podcasts make great gift the trick to it being a great gift is that people receive it as a gift they feel that it was well packaged well timed thoughtful and it was freely given with nothing really asked in return so that's a very powerful product for getting scale and for getting a lot of attention and everything's downstream from attention so then the next product is something called a product for prospects a product for prospects is an easy way to engage it's a first thing that people can do it could be an introduction workshop like my first business was all about it could be an online diagnostic or an online scorecard or a test from a business point of view you want something that scales pretty easily and doesn't take up a lot of time you don't want to have a product for prospects which is like a first 10 hours of your time working with someone cheaply you want something that sits out there that is an easy first thing that people can buy or they don't even have to buy it they just engage with it so a free a free webinar is actually a great product for prospects but it should be productized it should have a package that you know ticket plus this plus this it should you know it should feel like a product that you that you're engaging with so then after the product for prospects you've got your core offering this is the the main thing that you do it could be a service it could be a product it could be an offer it could be a productized service it could be a decommoditized product that has additional services with it could be gold silver and bronze version type thing but that's the core product that's the main thing that you do and then the final product is called a product for clients and this is something where you take people on an extended journey and you go on a long journey with them you you really look after them for years at a time and it's different to the core product so bmw has cars as its core product but it has finance and insurance as its product for clients it actually makes about 40 profit margin on finance and insurance and about three or four percent on cars but the only reason it makes 40 on finance and insurance is because they covered all the costs of winning the client through the cars and then they have you know blue ocean after that so it's the ecosystem that bubbles up the profit now here's the interesting thing with ecosystem if you sliced it up and just simply said i want to get rid of i only want to do the core product well then the core products no longer profitable because you've got to somehow absorb all the other costs into just the price of the core product if you said oh you know i'm making 40 off the finance and insurance let's stop doing the cars then you stop doing the cars in the following year the finance and insurance stops so it's actually the ecosystem it's the gift the product for prospects the core offering and the product for clients all working together to perform different roles of of building trust and attention and fulfilling an initial need and then an ongoing need and it's that ecosystem that makes the business profitable so these four products they're interconnected you should not try to remove one because they work in harmony and unison with each other i want to ask you about your business a little bit here so i understand the concepts so for you the gift is probably things that you release a podcast doing content like this so others can experiences there's no strings attached take me through the kpi ecosystem what is your product for prospects your core offering and then your product for client as a little bit bigger business we have a few things in each category so in the product for prospects you'll have books so i've got some books that people tend to buy on amazon if they want to have an easy first experience i've got what we call scorecards scorecards are self-diagnostic tests that people take so they go online they answer a series of questions and it spits out a pdf report telling them where they can improve and how they can make some changes and it's based upon them answering 40 questions which then leads to a customized report and that's a really powerful product for prospects because it's free it's available 24 7. i get all that data they get a personalized experience the third type of product for prospects is we have workshops initial workshops two hours zoom workshops that we run where people jump on it's free to attend they get an introduction to the type of work that we do and they can kind of evaluate whether they resonate with that or not so those are the three main things that we have as our product for prospects and it's often the case that a lot of our clients will have read the book taken the scorecard and attended the workshop before becoming a client and then the client is what the your business accelerator yeah so the core product is we launched an entrepreneur accelerator back in 2010 and now we have a set of entrepreneurial accelerators for startups we have one for people who are scaling their business and then people who are running a business and that they actually want to run a smooth business and we've packaged that up with software and we've packaged it up with mentoring and coaching and we've packaged it up with an online learning system that we've got vetted suppliers tools and resources a peer group and network all packaged up really nicely so that you actually join an accelerator and you're accepted into a community and you've got a accountability group and a coach every two weeks you've got sessions to attend so all of that's the accelerator program that we run so that's our call that's the core business the ballpark price of it so we have for startups we work on around three grand and then for more scale-ups we work on about seven grand for the year and actually to be honest that's not like it's not even where we really make the money that's for 12 months worth of like we do three hour sessions every every two weeks we have phenomenal world-class trainers who come in and deliver the training so you know for us that's not where we're trying to make a lot of profit and i think i heard on a different uh episode that you did 3 500 or so people have gone through this already did i get that number right yeah yep that's right okay wonderful you made it super clear so you talk about the ecosystem when i think of ecosystem i look at it as a circular thing but it also sounds quite similar to some kind of marketing funnel so there's a big broad audience who's just going to get what you put out there they're going to get value but they don't become super curious and that they the journey ends there for them and each time they're becoming more and more enrolled they're developing those warm feelings that you're talking about and so you arrive kind of they they're at this point must be pre-sold because if you're listening to this podcast sometime and if you're in the future dear future you you're going to listen to this and then you're like this guy is super smart i really like what he's saying and he's saying in a way that i can hear because you do have it could be the australian accent but i think it's just really you have a pleasant way of saying things that doesn't turn or alienate people you know turn people off or alienate them so then they're gonna go you know what fine fine chris i'll buy the book key person of influence by daniel priestley and you're gonna buy that and you can read through i'm like whoa okay i had a deeper dive i need to sign up for this two-hour workshop it's free low risk to me and they're going deeper and deeper into the relationship because you've said this before you kind of need something like seven hours of interaction to become acquainted with someone so that you're in a space that you're ready to buy plus now we've not maybe hit 11 touch points but you're hitting a lot of touch points yeah that's true and look one thing i feel strongly about is i really don't like the words funnels i feel like the word funnel is really dehumanizing and it also it it kind of is removed from the value the reason i think about product ecosystems is because at every single step i want people to feel they got value and even if they walked away at that point they say i had an amazing product i had that product was great it was a standalone valuable use of my time it was a valuable product so when we create an online scorecard if we never hear from them again and it's that's all they ever do they go wow that was really great that little experience i enjoyed that product so for me when i think about funneling it's like i wouldn't want someone to funnel my friend or funnel my grandma uh into a thing like that by the way i want people i know and like to go through a good journey where they enjoy products and good products that are that are good for them and do you think this concept like i was reluctant to you use the word final book i was just envisioning there's different touch points and it gets smaller and smaller so i apologize for using that i was trying to find another one is it maybe like overlapping circles or something i like to think of it as an ascending transaction model right so it's an ascent i like atm right because atm has another connotation but you enjoy something so you want to ascend to the next thing you want to kind of get more value you want to have an ascending exchange of value so each step makes you feel comfortable that you'd like more value with this particular company or this organization or this individual so then the final part of our thing just to kind of finish that off is the product for clients this is actually where we do make a lot of money on the back end of the accelerator we have a group of service companies that do a lot of implementation work uh with our clients we have film production animation we have it services front end and back-end developers we have fundraising capital raising so financial forecasts and slide decks and and all of that sort of stuff we've got facebook and google advertising support so we actually have a group of companies that each provide services that people want when they're growing and scaling their business at different phases of that journey now because those businesses are plugged into our accelerator and because the accelerator covers its costs and makes the whole engine cost neutral our agencies become extremely profitable because they don't have to worry about winning business they've always got great clients they've got plenty to choose from so now we have the this group of agencies that are always growing with great clients and they can charge you know reasonable prices but much more profitable than in any other agency in the same space these are companies you either own or you partner up with uh we own so we've we've actually gone on a court yeah we acquired companies into the group so we went and bought um a group of agencies and then the other final thing is we spun out our own technology so we identified some intellectual property that we had developed in-house we thought it was well suited to be a tech company so we spun that into its own company and that's been a very fast growth technology company that was launched in the pandemic and has become a really great hit what is that company called so that company's called score app and we were building the technology for running the online assessments the scorecards for ourselves and i launched three score cards and 90 000 people took my scorecards which flooded us with leads and basically we had incredibly data rich leads and we were able to have very sensible conversations with people based on the scorecard data and a lot of my clients said how do i get one of those we sent it to our developer team and they would build them for about ten thousand dollars because they were building them from scratch and we started to realize there was just a process to this there was a creative process to creating scorecard and it could be turned into a tech platform so we turned it into a technology platform um so now we have about two thousand clients globally who are using uh online scorecards they are using it as a way of generating data rich leads and it's an automatic system that collects data and then delivers a personalized report and do you see that score app needs its own product ecosystem or is it part of the kpi ecosystem so score app is being designed as a standalone business and i've just written a book just for score app in the last couple of weeks i just wrote 27 000 word book for an introduction to scorecard marketing and we've started running some introduction work workshops that are standalone workshops for score app and we're building out its own product ecosystem the score app in two years is like it's becoming uh we raised money recently at a 15 million dollar valuation so it was it was kind of like a very quick spin out and has become valuable quite quickly so because it's valuable it needs to become its own ecosystem it's being built as a standalone business i see so you'll follow the model that you're talking to people about which is you have the product and then you're going to build up the the gift the product for prospects and the core offering and do the same thing and so now it's in exactly exactly beautiful wow i'm glad i asked you about this because the example you gave with bmw and that you have to have the bmw which isn't a giant profit center but it's necessary to be able to sell the financing whatever else where they make the 40 profit so you're saying that when you do this entrepreneur or accelerator it's not a giant money maker for you because it's a big commitment it's a lot of value you're delivering but on the back end you've got a suite of tools services coaches consultants who can service you but the onboarding is fairly painless because they're so deep into that ascending model that you're talking about yeah it's if i was to talk to my cfo my cfo would say some things make money and some things don't but i would always look at it and just say it's the ecosystem that's working or the ecosystem that's not and yes it turns out that the profit ends up typically on the p l of the agencies that we have but ultimately it's the ecosystem that has produced the profit so and we all know that as a as a group of companies we we know how what the game is that we're playing and the other thing too that's nice about an ecosystem is that you don't have to try so hard with clients in terms of there's no arm twisting that needs to go on when you've got a good ecosystem the ecosystem produces the result and if people want to slow down they can slow down if they want to speed up they can speed up if they want to take on services they can if they don't they want to do it themselves that's totally fine as well so you're not trying to rush people or kind of funnel them to a particular outcome you're just letting the ecosystem work a lot of people do have their core offering or their products for clients so if they're listening to this this sounds wonderful so do they go back in and start to say like how do i begin this relationship with people and how do i give them value one of the easiest ways that they could do is just a monthly introduction to blank so if you just seem like let's say you're a website designer an introduction to high-performing websites an introduction to using shopify so if you were to just simply have a monthly fortnightly weekly introduction presentation and you put together that first step so someone can spend an hour with you on zoom with a group of people so it's a group presentation let's say that is a really powerful that's how i got my start right that was my first business was introduction to blank that's a great place to start and we used to do those in physical locations but now you can do that online and i would also say of course i would say this right an assessment or a scorecard or a quiz that people can take any time 24 hours a day seven days a week what we want with an assessment is that they can self-diagnose do i need you or not like for example do you need a new logo do you need a brand refresh take the quiz find out you answer a series of questions it says your brand strength is 45 and you could improve quite a lot your the strength of your brand uh if you were to take these following steps so essentially people could self-assess do i need this product or service so the score app helps me to engineer these questions and then to do the analytics and reporting and collecting and scraping the data for everyone right it does four things really well it does a beautiful landing page that explains why you should take a quiz it does the questionnaire where the feed feeds a questions to you one at a time with yes or no or yes no maybe your sliding scale answers and then it has a point system attached to each question and then it presents the results so it has a beautiful kind of reveal where it says da da this is who you are and this is your score and here's and then it actually has dynamic content on the page so a low score will look different to a high score and it will have special offers based on how they answer the questions and it'll send them a pdf that is dynamic content as well and then the final thing it does is it shows you their scorecard owner all that data so it shows you the individual person's data and how they answer the questions aggregate data and statistics for how everyone answers the questions so it helps you make sense of the data once you've got it incredible no wonder you're having such great success it sounds like something i don't know if ben burns who's my chief operating officer has read the book because i told him to read your book but we just launched a very similar thing quite literally 40 questions too i don't really know is this the magic number 40 questions and it spits out one of four results like you're more likely in need of this or that or something like that and then the person can decide okay great i don't need this product i might need something else entirely crazy powerful it'll be it'll be a total game changer okay so what i want to do is i'm going to come back to this whole concept of personalization and data analysis but if people are data analytics and people listening to this like chris don't let him get off the hook it's been so great so far there's still the profile on the partnership maybe you can just give us that in a bundle so we can go to the data analytics part yeah so um profile is essentially if you start with the question what does google say about you if i google your name what comes up what images what videos what what happens on page one of google if i google you more and more every major opportunity that you're going to get in the next five years 10 years 20 years is going to involve google search someone's going to google you before they go ahead and do something big with you i'm sure you probably googled me to see if there's any you know weird complaints or if there's any has is he you know he wrote the book all this time ago what's he doing now perhaps you wanted to know so there's that google search and essentially that's the main test for your profile what happens when i google you so what typically happens for most people is it's either really quiet there's not a lot there or it's boring like it's a linkedin profile and a twitter account or it's confusing there's a serial killer in florida with the same name or something like that um and uh or it's great you know it's it's really good it looks like you're you're an amazing person you perhaps you've won awards maybe you've written a book maybe you've uh you know interviewed some interesting people right so all of that comes up on the front page and and that's profile so the important thing for everyone to know is that you're in charge of that like you're not the victim of google you can put that stuff together like all of the engines are there they're free takes a little bit of time but you can you can build and improve that you can you can improve what comes up with google so that would be profile and then the final one is partnership and partnership is essentially how we overcome the illusion that we're living in a scarce and resource poor world and we realized that actually there's more money on the planet than ever before there's more phds on the planet there's more technology there's more amazing talented people than ever before and really we don't need to have the resources we just need to partner with the people who have the resources so a simple example is one of my clients said to me do you think i should go get a phd at university it'll take me three years and 90 000 pounds and i said um why don't you see if you can get some existing phds to join an advisory board so within a couple of weeks she had an agreement for i think two or three phds to join an advisory board it was four thousand pounds per person per year as the kind of fee and it was amazing because within one month this person who was going to spend 90 000 pounds in three years now has two phds on an advisory board and it turns out the phds already existed they were already in the world the world didn't need necessarily another phd it just needed those resources to come together so you can partner with someone who's got a brand partner with someone who's got money et cetera the key to partnership is knowing how to structure partnerships and the hard thing that most people don't know is how do you structure these deals it's beyond the scope of today's conversation but essentially every single partnership has already been done before by somebody and there are established structures so there are ways to structure a brand partnership there are ways to structure a speaking gig there are ways to structure a finance deal or like angel investment seed investment venture capital private equity these are all essentially just alluding to types of investment structures that are very well worn parts so when people feel overwhelmed that they don't have the resources they need it's actually just that they don't know how to structure a deal with the person who has the resource i think you you also talked about this in the book i think you're like people are confused that they want to find an original problem it's like it somebody's already worked through this problem right yours is not so unique in the world that no one has ever seen it before yeah yeah exactly like 95 of all businesses are exactly the same and there's a little bit that's different but go find the person who's already done it right and so it's a hard pill for creative people to swallow like you're not a unique unicorn that you think you are because all businesses uh deal with marketing customer service client acquisition those kinds of things and that's the 90 that's the same it's not to say that that five to ten percent that's different doesn't matter i mean look at human beings human beings are 95 percent the same i think we're 97 the same as chimpanzees or something like that um there's you know like but the three percent makes a big difference it does if you talk to a doctor a doctor is going to say that humans are very much the same you know everyone's kidneys are in the same place and elbows are in the same place but it's slight differences that actually do make a big difference between people and about the profile thing that's really about credibility about social proof and people asking themselves can i trust you and i just want to just tee it up for you because you do talk about this about what are the markers of trust like what do i need to work on in case i want to elevate my profile so um clarity and credibility are the two big ones that people are looking for they want to know clarity what is it that this person actually does and is it consistent across the profiles is it does it make sense to me credibility is it can be things like have they done this before do other people trust this person do they have great results um are they you know aligned in values and and those sorts of things so um i don't know there might have been something i said in the book but remember i wrote that 12 years ago so i might have to i might have to read it you know you've been around you have a unique take there's thought leadership that you've done these things help to build up your profile right spot on yeah yes i agree with myself yeah yes now that you now that you mentioned that now that you mention it yes those are brilliant that's a great idea who said that you should buy his book okay all right let's get back to i think what you were uh alluding to before in in this score app and personalization you're talking about something about it used to be about social media and things are changing tell us about what you're seeing yeah so there's something that's big that's changing right now and i mentioned that the turning point was obama for social media that was a turning point when the obama 08 campaign happened so it turns out that the u.s presidential elections are very big trend predictors when it comes to marketing trends and the reason for that is because the u.s presidential election is like the formula one of the marketing world it's high stakes winner take all big budget so it's and there's four years of campaign planning that goes into it all this stuff happens around the us presidential election so i'll give you some examples franklin roosevelt he did something called the fireside chat which was a national radio campaign that he did weekly and that was the absolute turning point for him to become president and that was the moment that print newspapers was replaced by radio stations and radio stations became the dominant media over print newspaper at that particular moment and he drove that and then in 1963 i think it was jfk did a televised debate with richard nixon and the people who listened to the radio they thought that nixon had won but the people who watched the television thought that jfk won and it was actually that way more people watched it on television and it was the televised debate and that became the moment that tv was the phenomenon and uh and everything became about television for decades so then fast forward to obama 2008 he was the guy who said hey actually it's about social media engagement and his whole campaign was all about social media engagement and that was the moment where big brands went hey we got to do this social media thing so if you think back to what happened in 2016 with trump what actually happened is that it was data analytics because it came out later on that the key to these successful campaigns that were happening around that time was a data analytics company called cambridge analytica and they were doing something called hyper personalization so they would collect huge amounts of data from facebook and then they would create mini tiny campaigns that were just for tiny little segments of that data set and they would talk to people about exclusively about the things that they knew mattered to that person so for example if they knew that you're a creative entrepreneur in la they're gonna say hey these are the issues that relate to create you know creative entrepreneurs in la and like here's here's why our candidate is the best and they're not going to talk to you about stuff that's just not relevant to you if they know that you've got kids they're like hey here's here's what we're doing about the schooling system and it's like oh wow you're really talking my language but the person who lives next door who's really interested in guns and healthcare they're talking to that person about guns and healthcare so this was called hyper personalization and it really got started in 2016 with the trump campaign and it's the dominant strategy now so if you look at the most recent election it wasn't at all about social media engagement it was about playing the numbers it was all about the data and what's happening now is that most entrepreneurs are still playing the social media content game which was from 2008 to 2016 was it was its peak and they're not playing the data analytics game and the trend is about to really go into full swing that it doesn't really matter there's so much content on the online now that if you're not combining content with data analytics and creating personalized recommendations and personalized experiences then you're really you know only got one arm tied behind your back in that competition so it's the rising trend for small businesses is to try and figure out how do we collect more data and do something with the data now the final thing i'll say on this is that if i went back in time to 2006 and told most small businesses and said look in a decade you're going to be running your business like a media business your little hair salon you're going to have an instagram account you'll do videos and you'll do before and afters and you will just be thinking about media all the time they go that's impossible we'll never be doing that as a hair salon right now if i say in 10 years time your business is going to be a data analytics business you're going to go what do you mean we don't do data analytics that's where we're just a small business we couldn't possibly be doing data analytics and personalization so what's going to happen is we're all going to be doing data analytics and personalization and it's going to be as easy as social media to do data analytics and personalization so what we need to do is to be able to figure out what our customer base is interested in so that we can create that customized experience for them right and so how do we do that friendship is a data problem right so the reason you you're friends with your friends is you know a lot about them you've got you've got data if i said to me if i said to you what do you think your best friend would like to see as a movie or do you think your best friend would like to see top gun right the new top gun films coming out do you think your best friend would like to see that or not and you're going to go oh yeah my friend loves top gun one of course he's going to love top gun too so you know that about your friend so you've got the data to then make a decision as to whether you should make that recommendation or not so it's a data issue so what we need to do is we need to stop thinking about data as this clinical thing that is name email and location type stuff and we now need to start thinking about it as a humanizing thing like knowing people understanding people having ways of being able to look at people and understand what they like what they don't like what they're interested in what their hopes are what their fears are what they're fascinated by and to be able to interact with them based on the data there's a movie called her where he talks to his operating system and he falls in love with his operating system and it's like siri and he and she she sounds really flirty to him and he likes it and he gets emotionally connected to his operating system and there's a part at the end of the movie where he says how many other people are you talking to right now and she says oh like i don't know two million and he's and he's crushed right but the computer system is able to have a very deeply personalized conversation with him and make him think feel like he's in love because she's got all the data and she's able to talk to him so that's the dystopian reality it highlights the idea that if you've got enough data you can actually have that personalized conversation at scale are we talking about machine learning at this point machine learning will sit behind it all so what so so at a very very simple level when we run scorecards when we have people fill in quizzes when you've got people filling in your quiz you're going to end up with a dashboard and the dashboard is going to say i think you've mentioned there's four boxes and says this is which box you fit into so you will have very different conversations with people based on the different boxes that they fit in so you're going to say uh hey look i you know your sales team will say we looked at your scorecard data and it said that you've got a really established brand that you've been around for more than 30 years and that you've got traditional values attached to the the brand and that you've got family values and that you've got raving fans and customers and um and it said that you're thinking about reinventing the brand and one of the things we want to talk to you about is actually making sure that you capture the brand equity that you have and that you don't overdo it and that you we want to make sure that you maintain the asset that you've built up over the last 30 years and they go oh wow how did you know all of that and it's like well you answered the questions and we know all of that because you answered the questions extremely rapidly within minutes you can be having a conversation that is immediately deep so that's an example as to how how that would actually happen in practicality i love it you dropped a tremendous amount of value i pretty safely predict this is going to be probably one of our top episodes of the year and if you've enjoyed this conversation i've been talking to daniel priestley you've now received your first gift from him i suggest that then you move on to the next part of this uh and ascend in your transcendence and buy it the cop a copy of his book it's called key person of influence and after you listen to this episode and after you read this book if you want to hear more from daniel i want you to do something for me on social media especially if you want to talk about how to raise entrepreneurial kids i'd love to be able to invite him back but only if you dear listener tell me please bring him back i want to hear more i have to hear more and until then how do people find out more about you and what you're up to daniel on all of the social media platforms at daniel priestley so twitter and instagram and um facebook at linkedin so at daniel priestley we'll we'll get you there and uh yeah i'm quite like feel free to message me and connect if if you've got any questions that relate to this episode and you want to kind of clarify any points just shoot me through a message or or uh you know any of that sort of stuff twitter i'm pretty fast i quite quite like twitter uh for fast interaction so feel free to connect and um i'd be more than happy to thank you so much daniel it's been a real pleasure my notebook is filled up and just to show to you and the audience in case you guys heard me writing it's like i filled up three pages of notes i've already read the book i've already taken notes but these are just additional layers on top of what i've already taken notes on it's been a real pleasure thank you so much for doing this my absolute pleasure thank you for having me on the show i'm daniel priestley the author of the book key person of influence you're listening to the future