#305: How To Recover from Corporate Damage and Condemn the Prestige Cult w/ Prateek Sanjay
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people business talk podcast norway hear email marketing outkast linkedin livestream ive streaming day thinking warby parker influencers person hololens work email signature
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sweat equity podcasting streaming show we've got our new friend.
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Son Jay Yeah, he did it all the way from Norway.
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He was from Norway did yeah. I don't know if I was there for my coffee you Polly dell.com interesting gas is a good talk
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let's get into it. Number one comedy business podcasts in the world pragmatic entrepreneurial advice with real
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loose by me last missing to my right you're less than the to Eric Readinger Some people call me cool, Eric. Was that your new thing real raw dog? I don't I keep saying it. I don't know. Where did that come from? I tried to take out the D jokes in the beginning. So we're you know why? Because we're 20 2020 toys best small medium enterprise business advisory podcast in the United States. That's a real award.
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Once global Excellence Award proudly hosted by looks like magazine. Hey, if you liked this show, make sure to tell a friend a loved one co worker tell someone Hey, you want some real business years saved just like that though. Go to sweat equity pod.com or go in iTunes Apple podcasts. Subscribe. Subscribe watch scribe rate rewind. Write a little comment. Even if it's a jerky one. We'll probably read it and we'll read it like the jerky boys on this podcast.
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Spotify Yeah, cuz our period sick Okay, I know synchronicities. We're on Spotify. Some people call me cool Eric Google Play amazon music everywhere you can find podcasts. This episode of sweat equity is sponsored by Warby Parker Warby Parker. trial.com. forward slash sweat by free pairs to try to own if you're watching this on video, wearing my Warby Parker's on my fat head. And man, do I have a fat head Warby Parker trial.com. forward slash sweat hooks up this show. We need some shekels back. We do this for the love of the game. But of course with us in flow. Five for pressure try on at home sunglasses, eyeglass What? You're getting ripped off if you're not buying from Warby Parker. Yeah, you heard me want to pay $300 at lenscrafters are you paying for oakleys Ray Bans? Yep, they're all owned by the same Italian company like Sonic cars or lotto.
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That's a call back in the future. Oh, yeah. Warby Parker trial.com, forward slash LED light key sweat. link will be in the description of this episode if you forget. But pause right now if you want check it out. It helps the show gets a little shekels back here. Five free pairs to try at home. don't like them. send it back. get five more. I did it. Not only am I
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an advertiser, I'm a user, whatever that means. Definitely how it goes. Yep, pretty much. Are we ready to get this party started?
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Woody.
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Woody.
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What about my sweat is
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gone. Oh, we're good. All right. Let's do this before I forget. And how do I say I want to make sure I say your name without sounding racist. So So don't say it.
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critique Sanjay.
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Perfect. First go. Alright, fatigue. I shouldn't have prepped You are the ethnic names. Am I? I can't Yeah, like the last?
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Well, that one took a lot of coaching. If you go back in episodes, I definitely have said her name wrong for almost three years of knowing. And she's like, nice, nice person Hall of Fame. And so she never corrected me. And I never heard the difference when anybody else has said it. So I can't read. So I have to hear it. And then sometimes when you hear stuff, it gets imprinted.
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And so it's tough. So give me shoot us your plugs. You're doing this from Norway right now you're talking to us about midnight, as we're recording at 6pm our time.
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Polly delic calm.
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Yeah, I work at play play delic, which is a development company. And that's my full time job. And it just also started a a side gig which is you know, working with live retail. And that's only because one of our customers approached us with that thing, you know, and said, Hey, we saw that you guys have built something in live streaming. Can you also do live retail and we thought, you know what, we don't have anything existing in live retail. But when we started looking into the market, we thought, you know what, let's just give this a shot. You know, so I want to hear about that. But first my narcissism
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begs to ask, why did you hear about us? How'd you find us? You know, we're, yeah, we're self self proclaimed batted around marketing yet we talk a lot of marketing.
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I mean, I don't remember. But I think what I've been doing is that I have been simply look
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I'm looking up anybody who has any kind of rise in growth, growth, hacking a marketing or expanding your online reach all the time. That's always what I'm googling, always trying to figure out and that's why my LinkedIn feed is always full of stuff about that. I believe when I reached out to you via LinkedIn, something had popped up in my feed and I think that's how I came across your profile and decide okay, this guy onto onto the podcast, let me check out and when I saw some really funny episodes that I saw you guys are not just doing pure business, you will also just doing lots of joking and banter and just being regular people that thought, yeah, I can vibe with these guys. I want to talk to them. Love that. That. I mean, that's, that's what we're trying to go for. I mean, in a LinkedIn, very nerved kind of content atmosphere. I really think just like podcasting in general, I think there's a real need for real talk in the business community, where it's not all just super self promotion. Or like, we're scared to say the wrong thing. Or like, although we did just give
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we just to give a gag order to protect before the show started. Yeah, that what we're not gonna say we got funny court cases out there. Okay. So we can't talk about No, but I'm saying I find podcasting. You know, we're in this duality world now with media Where is it's short clips, it's sound bites, we get the news, we can only take in so much. It's so fragmented. And so it's getting even grosser in that direction. And then people are really seeking out more long form conversation because that's, sadly, some of the only real talk people are listening to, or kind of engaging with. And so when you when you hit us up, I can tell you through sciatic and you actually listen to the episode. And not realize, but also didn't just listen to a part of it. Like the one guy in the Philippines dude. The guy who outsources Oh, yeah, middle management, right, Philippines research for seven minutes. Yeah. And then he's like, found like one little clip and I was like, Okay, this guy seems like he's legit. He listened to us. That's nice. We'll have him on. And he's like, actually, listen to like, five seconds. Yeah, just he. He made a Filipino guy. Listen to the rest. Right? Yeah. So that's, that's the thing. Like, you know, I noticed that these days, a lot more people are on Twitch than on YouTube. And you know, I'm 30 now, I still remember when YouTube was something new. It feels like yesterday, but the funny thing like between teenager and 30 is like an eyeblink. I'm old. I don't realize it but back when YouTube is new was sensational. Everybody was on it. But now YouTube looks to manufactured whereas twitch you know you there's more people taking interest in twitch because that's authentic. You know, and I think I like attend to city because I want to see who the business person is when they're not reading off a script when the mega dumb mistakes and made the cafes and see all the silly things. As Papa John's guy does, you know? Yeah, Eric's all about pot. He loves that guy. Only after he got fired.
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He loved he became a legend after he became fire. Shira. Yeah. Before that, he was like a little grandma on TVs like he was one of those guys look. So much plastic surgery. He kind of started looking like one of those like, yeah, those figurine dolls. Yeah. Face permanent mascara on kind of sad to be in every commercial has had to be Yeah. And then he dropped the N bomb. And Eric's like I like this guy. Yeah, he originally said the forbidden Voldemort word. I just I love that he has to take like classes to get that out of his lexicon. He's like, right, and he's doing rehab to get rid of it. Wow. That's it's really great. I'm sure he's taking it drops a dime on him to was the marketing agency hire for Papa John's. They're like, hey, this ain't cool. And we're gonna get this out everywhere. Yeah. And he was he was mad at them. But here's the thing. Wasn't he referencing someone else saying the word? I don't know. You brought it up. I I'm fascinated. Because it's a racial slur. Instead of you know the N word. And I don't know.
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Some of the older people just don't care. They just the older generations makes a lot of weird jokes like people are 50 and subject. I think the Overton window has changed so much that you know, even I think, Hey, you can't joke about that. I was looking at that Ace Ventura movie. And I'm like, wait a minute, this transgender. This can't fly in this day. Yeah, yeah. What are they're all throw. They're all barfing from it. By the way, I was having this conversation the other day. I mean, I'm on the dating apps and
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You're like, Oh, well, I just swiped right on, on a trans j, trans guy chick guide that turned into a chick happens a little way more.
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Unless you're in totally, um, I know your time. But you know, I'll play through I'm a gamer. So, I, the video you sent us was that kind of what you're working on, it seems interactive like Twitch, I'm going to try to explain it because we don't have it set up to show on our video, but it looks like you're showing us a cooking video where it had like an overlay of the ingredients, and you'd be able to click on them to buy it is that is that what I'm gathering? It's literally just an interactive live video, you know, like, what you have is that you can just go live on a video and take questions from your own loyal fans or customers. And, you know, they get enthusiastic about what they're seeing, they can shop things from the same livestream, without having to go through a link, you know, because going through a link via smartphone or the other browser that just breaks the focus. And, you know, it's like, when you're going to a shopping mall or something, you're having an intelligent meet time. And some of the most fun you have is just talking to the shopping assistant, you know, sometimes like, you go to the mall, and this very charismatic cosmetic seller tells you to sit down and starts doing free work on you or no that that happens in America. But it does happen in Spain where I used to live. And you just think like, that's part of the fun and experience of you know, going out shopping, and just putting on a show is it just makes things more fun for the buyer. And, and actually, they've been doing this in China for a long time. Even the people who used to do TV home shopping in China back in the 90s. They're becoming stars, again in the world of live streaming. That's why in China, they did $600 billion of sales via Livestream. And that's why people in Europe started asking why can't we have it here? So we started looking into building it here as well. Hmm. So you're building the platform? Is that how were you? I didn't actually I watched it I did actually wasn't Facebook that I saw a Facebook video. Okay, I didn't. So I did watch it. Yeah. But I is that. Were you just going you had to do something other than just through Facebook. Well, what else are you adding in there in terms of the Oh, no, no, no, it was not done. While Facebook. Here's how it was. A while ago, we first had our live streaming project for a client or development company. Somebody said, Hey, all our singer, songwriter and musician friends, they had to refund the tickets during COVID. And they had to, you know, cancel all their concerts and lose all their main source of income. So maybe having live streamed concerts could be a way of doing enough for them to get back in business. So we built this live streaming content platform for them. And that chorus attention as we were talking about it, and people said, Hey, you built a live streaming platform for musicians. In this live streaming platform, you already have those ecommerce elements that you buy tickets or do donations inside the live stream. So why can't you apply this to retail. And we started looking into it and realized that it's you could literally just have a live stream play like a web link. And that kind of web URL link, you can just embed into your own web page. And this way, you don't need to download an app, when you just go to the live stream, which is happening inside the web browser on that page. And you can just see it right from there and just make the purchases right from there as well. And
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the thing is that Facebook does not allow third parties to do not discount things on their own platform. Because if they want to do something like live shopping themselves, and I believe they are looking into it, they want to control that kind of revenue. And that's kind of like one of the iffy things about it that everybody's trying to create these silos, these barriers, you know, that okay, you have a like a video streaming thing on Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever, but you don't want that to bring that traffic or, you know, revenues to third parties. But that's that which is why I like with his bio like you are there you are, link is a good way to go. That it this is so interesting. So I've been saying about Pinterest for I don't know five years. They're gonna discover how to close that gap between you upload, I don't know, Jimmy Choo shoes. And as as something on your pin board, right. And we've said on this show, it is it's the best social media for advertisers of like b2c stuff, to get to women who have like 80% of the household.
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purchasing power, an 80% of what women pin at our house? Well, not anymore. We have Exorcism of the the lady the working lady. But I'm saying that just sounds like we've just moved in together.
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One day one day hope. But no, we're gonna Full House it for sure it's gonna happen. But the the
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Yeah, well as blossom, you can get out you can. I do look like Uncle Joe. But so each what 80% of what women pin to their boards they buy, which I always used to tell people, anybody in the in the retail aspect of trying to market like, boom, that's right. That's your quickest route to getting it to the people that want it that don't know about it that want it and buy it right there. And now what they've worked on in slowly doing it is uploading it like you would do on Facebook with the face analyzer kind of stuff. But with products. So eventually, it'll be like you hover over anything user uploaded. And it'll be like, is this Jimmy Choo shoes? Yeah. And that yeah. So you're doing that, in a sense. Yours is the way I picture yours from the video you sent us. You brought up Twitch, it felt more like that, where you had like, kind of pop ups coming up where you could just click right there as it's coming up. Is that a little bit closer?
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Well, okay, that's a fair point. Because right now, it's just uploading a product sticker in front of the video, right? You just have the Ragu sauce, or the cutlery stuff as a single static image, and you click on it again, purchase. But we're you know, we've, we've had actually access to the SOC, Google owns YouTube. And because it owns YouTube, it has lots of computer vision data and machine learning already done. And of course, it has all the other stuff already done. Google via YouTube is pretty good at recognizing objects on video. And they have given that kind of, you know,
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those kind of AI modules out to the public. So, you know, my boss, our CEO, he actually in his free time style, building something to detect objects while on camera. So if I literally just hover my Android phone on screen, it will just take us an Android, and then you can just click on that and purchase that. That's the the next level which which we also have funding for, it's not something that we can do today, but I think that would be really some kind of sort of is used to see in the futuristic movies in the early 2000s. You know, like, Minority Report.
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Report. Yeah. I swear to God, I always I know I always think of that, that. Bring it up.
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This is gonna happen. No, I love the that it's a web link. Just click on the web link. You don't have to install an app, because that's the connector to older people make it simple find like zoom, right? The minute you can just any sort of installation of anything is gonna be a pain in the ass and you want to be able to just go click points. And that's it. That's where that I mean, there's no barriers. disintermediation. Yes, you know, that you're that's a, that's an awesome, that's such an awesome thing to be able to do. It sounds like right now you have to kind of preload it. But eventually, the idea is like, we bring up Captain Morgan rum that we're drinking right now. And it comes out, and it'll go, it'll populate be like, right here. If we wanted to monetize this episode, right? Ideally, that's where you want to get to.
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Oh, yeah, in fact, I have been speaking to people who are in the influencer marketing space as well. And many people are trying to find ways to make sure that people who are influencers, they get paid for promoting products better. And that's also something that, you know, I want to bring with light livestream video, which is the kind of like an influencer toolkit, which is okay, if I ever promote this face mask on camera, or these headphones, fine. If somebody sees me on social media, on Instagram or whatever, on these livestream videos, and they say, Hey, we're entrepreneurs, our check that up, I should probably get paid for a share of the sales in there. And I think that kind of affiliate marketing will be the future. There's a company in Norway called optimal print, which does you know, custom printed t shirts, mugs, posters, and everything and the formal name is culture lado as and when they Yeah, I don't know why that they have
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the desert gelato You got it? Yeah. Yeah, like ice cream and Italian gelato. But I don't know why they call that but, but you see they get all their
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Marketing on their traffic via influencers as their main source of traffic, they don't do ads. They don't do SEO. It's all via in. Yeah, I can just write down in the chat optimal print.no like, and I just trying to realize, okay, if big corporations, their annual sales by $15 million a year, this notion company and they are doing this via influence and I'm thinking, hey, it's good that companies are making
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this kind of money because of influencer marketing. But now then influencers to start getting the full value of their paycheck, the value they're bringing to,
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you know, companies and there should be a strong way to recruit, monetize and incentive incentivize them. And I think livestream video will be well complemented with ways to recruit influencers or just regular people who just talk, talk about things because, you know, a salesman's pitch and I speak to the person whose job the salesman is not as credible as a regular customer pitching to other customers. Well, let's I want to, I want to help you out by your CEO, should be giving you employee of the month for going out of your way to do an interview. Yeah, talk about all this, right? You're, you're, you're the utility player here, the five tool guy, you're doing this on your free time, right?
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Well, that's the thing like our CEO, he's, he's actually a very charismatic guy who if he was here, he'd also be bringing a lot energy. But I think he is really sunk in a lot of work, which he also cannot delegate because at first he learned as a small business owner is that, you know, you have to do everything yourself. And if you try to hire anyone that a small business can afford, well, it tends ends up being much worse than doing it yourself for more work. So I'm taking up the charge of doing things like finding ways to get new kind of growth for the business and the one thing we're realizing is that ads suck cold calling cold emailing sucks, although I call approach you guys as well, but that sort of thing but worked out. I mean, I wouldn't call it just cold call really, because you're you sought it out. It wasn't like you got a leads list and just sent up boy, maybe maybe did maybe that but I don't even care at that point. We don't they'll tell us after the point. But once you made a point of contact, I don't know it's cold is straight cold. Like, hi, I get all these people that scrape my email we get once a week. Oh, I get I get eight five emails. I just started a position. I get five emails every day. I'm talking about for the podcast. Yeah, for the podcast, too. Because I put my I put my email publicly on LinkedIn or whatever, just to let it be scraped, and just to see what comes in because I like to see the approaches. It's like, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. That's like the beginning of the day looking at the emails. No, no, no, no, no. And then I get frightened. I probably gotten 15 messages every day for the last month. Just like you and then you know, they do that thing. We've talked about it where they nag you where they talk like, like the the pickup artists where they, they'll do a bot in LinkedIn. And they go they go like, hey, haven't heard from me and what's going on? Yeah, you okay? I got one today. That was I literally have not responded to this person one time. And they said, it's been a pleasure talking to you. Like, I got one today that said, Okay, cool. I'm glad you're enjoying yourself. Keep at it. I got one that said, I guess this conversations Not gonna happen or something, right? Like something like little pity me like, Yeah, and I almost got me and all I said what back was like, that's pretty good bot script. apprec. I appreciate that. But for for you reaching, I'm just saying I'm trying to fluff you up. So you can send a clip, you can pull out a clip, send it to the CEO and go, hey, maybe employee of the month, what's up, you know, you're doing everything.
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You're doing that sweat equity, which is the titular part of the show is you know, it's one of those things that you're doing. You give up a 40 hour week to do an 80 hour week when you're kind of in if you're in a startup community like that. You're just saying it like you got to do it. All right. And so yeah, I saw even in your email signature, it says you're in a startup campus, which I think's kind of cool, too. It's a good kind of branding in there.
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Yeah, well, in my email signature, oh, this Yes. on campus, I need to update my email signature because I moved out of storage campus to another co working space but I thought like we've been jumping co working spaces because every month or two because there's always a better one. But uh
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yeah, about what you mean about cold approaching. You know, I at one point realized I was making
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These very mechanical pitches to people. And I realized, hey, if I was approaches,
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how would I speak to them? And have common sense struck me. Or I would never shove a corporate presentation in people's faces. Never started a pitch deck or one pager, I would never start talking about how wonderful or how achieved I am do is talk to somebody to say, hey, you caught my interest, because you were talking was really interesting topic. And I have some inputs there. We should talk. The moment aside kind of people on the internet today, I would do them if I met them in real life. Everything changed, the response rate showed up. And I realized,
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my boss says that a lot of us have been a victim of what he calls corporate damage, where you have been so over professionalized that you start doing the exact opposite. divorcing women call common sense to me. Yes.
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You feel it? Yeah, I don't want to offend anybody, because that could hurt the bottom line. That's just no way to live, or just are just going these, these like automation tools are going to do it for me. And there's no actual connection trying to be made, you know, like, you're like, well, and you can talk, you can justify it by going well, we're really busy. We got a lot of stuff going on, right? So we need these things to do this for us. But it's not really doing the thing you want it to do. Like you're doing it with intention. And you set your I mean, our mentor talks about, he sends snail mail, thank you cards, birthday cards, everybody. And that. He's like, what's, what's your open rate for email? And you're like, industry average, like 18%. He's like, what is it? When I send these cards? You're like, it's 100% 100. Sir, because you're all you get in the mail over here is junk. Unless you know, it's coming from Amazon or something. Right? Yeah. So his whole thing is like, that means so much more. And I started implementing it, and God bless him. He's true. It's true. It's like, you know, people are like, I can't believe you sent me a thank you handwritten Thank you. Like if they if the envelope is addressed by hand, which they try and fake too, by the way with those special printers. But if you don't, I mean, you're opening. Mine looks like a ransom note, you know, for me. Oh, yeah. You got Yeah, maybe maybe I shouldn't glue magazine letters together, boy, yeah, no fun.
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But I spoke to a very gifted, smart guy, a bit younger than me, who raised $1 million from Mark Cuban via a single cold email. Maybe you've heard of him. I've heard of this story, I want to say but go on.
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Well, I spoke to him in person, because I wanted to, like, you know, work on some projects. And, you know, he never wrote more than three sentences in that email, you know, what all he said was, Hey, Mark Cuban, I noticed that you were talking in the media about the need to fight fake news. And working with a team of PhDs and AI we're trying to build on solve this. So we talked about this, because we have the same problem we need to solve in within three sentences. He got that, because what people start doing normally when they try to approach a stranger in the business world, is that they start pitching themselves, they go straight to the pitch, going straight to the pitch about where you study what you accomplished, what your business has accomplished. All the traction, you've done, we call that the resume brag. Like, guys, guys do this with women on dates, and they don't give a like, it's like, oh, yeah, well, you know, it was over here we go, baby. I hear like, No one likes that. You know? Yeah, it's bad social skills, it's bad business skills, is bad dating skills. In general, when we talk to other people, we're the one thing that gets a conversation going is to talk about something which is of interest to the other person, for reasons relevant to them, number one, and number two, we don't talk to other people without earning their permission to tell them more, you know, which is so you I also think that I meet a stranger in real life or the internet, okay, I got a small window to get their interest, or they're just gonna walk away and just not talk to me. And I think that's nice, short window, I just turned them off the reason relevant to them, and it's something that I had to work on myself, because I have a history of like, you know, going to a complete stranger, doing an info dump, rambling on them, and then wondering why this person I tried to win over just walked away silently. And I will never realize, you know, people don't care about what you think is exciting about you and just hearing you talk about yourself. They want to hear about, you know, something that's interesting to them about you for reasons relevant to them and just understanding that changes everything. Yeah. So let's take
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Email. There's also empathy of sending it to the user, right? Because this guy's been second read along email, can get drunk. Can I get?
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Can I get? Can I get his attention and keep it concise, but I'm sending it to solve a problem. I, so there's a lot to actually unpack. So he goes, I see you're doing this. We're working on this call to action I'd like to get if we can get some if we could talk, you know, he knows the guy's busy. He's not going to read anything that's like, now here's our whole business plan in the email in line of the email, right? It's like, he really go I bet. I wonder if he bullet pointed it? Yeah, I wonder if he just really calculated that out like a copywriter was like, let's save this. But what intrigues the other side, he figured out. It's what OutKast used to say, about Here we go, ceiling fans go ram
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bombs over Baghdad. No, I saw an interview with OutKast, and they're just like, they just talk generally about business and how they did well. And it's like, find the need, and take care of it. And so I mean, it made it where the need is kind of thing. And so, I don't know what that has to do with OutKast, but that they put into my head fuckin 30 years ago, when I, whatever, 20 years ago when I saw an interview, but that's business one on one and a lot of ways, right, right, you know, find the need and, and solve it. Like y'all stuff is, hey, we could be a dis intermediary, a disruptor. In this kind of retail to video kind of market that, you know, you obviously have some big barriers of, you know, Google, Facebook, Amazon, oni, Twitch, whatever, you know, whatever those big, maybe, maybe the idea is to sell it to one of them eventually. But
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at the same time you go, that's the need. And that's where we're going to strike. And we know it exists. By the way, I now my brain is going on fire, because I'm thinking about y'all. VR, y'all could crush it in VR with what you're doing. Eric loves the VR OMG get into it. But oh, but I would say that is we don't know when that's going to be kind of more commonplace a bandwidth issue. Yeah, really, I mean, think about how much you gotta be bringing in, you know, just if you're looking around all that, and it's got to react and all that. But we are, you know, like some kids in Switzerland approached our company A while ago, and they said that they know they were working with a huge industrial client and they needed somebody to manage safety remotely. So the worker on site for Sunday's HoloLens is doing the HoloLens. You try those no boundaries as a cool idea. You could just be around to see what you need to see.
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Like the guy or the monitor, wait for the guy to remotely see what the guy's seeing by the HoloLens. And just maybe while the instructions pop up, to you know, start fixing this thing, the textbook opening up next to the object. And then, you know, maybe what they need is some guided supervision, where, you know, the guy actually takes his marker on his own computer tablet screen says, you know, on his own vision, hey, pick that up, you know, like my circling. Hey, what's it? Yes, rebar popping out? What is this? Yeah, that's the blue wire. Yeah, that's the thing that's almost trippy. If I saw that. You know, like, if I'm wearing goggles, I see that somebody is drawing on my own vision. Hey, go to that alternate pick it up. That's, that's like those video games like how Call of Duty started becoming after a while when you saw the compass tell you where to go right before gates did not have a compass to tell you where to go with kids these days or not? Or that
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except there won't be a person on the other side where in the later would be a robot doing it. You know, you'll be walking your robot around the warehouse fixing stuff and doing all that you don't need another person there. So I don't want to forget, I don't want to forget you said you're 30 right. Correct. Yeah, I just turned 30 on 17. March St. Patty's Day. Nice. you celebrate that Norway? I guess what you celebrate St. Patty's Day Norway? I guess you would? I don't know. I feel like that's something we glommed on here. That's not celebrated really. And even Ireland.
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Should fucking do it. Yeah. You know.
34:24
We got your frozen morbido celebrated. Irish people don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day. From what I've seen it. Yeah. I think like, Irish friends I've ever sent to St. Patrick's Day, none of them on social media or in real life. I think it's an entirely Irish American thing. Interesting. Ah, yeah. But we always want to ask everybody the first time on the show. What advice would you give your 13 year old self?
34:49
Oh, you can time travel while you go back in time. You find 13 year old you living in Norway? I don't know. We're ready. Where'd you grow up? I'm from India. I was born.
35:00
In India, I moved to Norway about three or four years ago. But yeah, what advice can I give to my 13 year old self? You know, yeah, I would tell my 13 year old self to, you know, just ignore all the helicopter parenting, ignore all the pressure to, you know, get into Oh my God, my parents really wanted me to get into Ivy League schools. There's like a lot of Indian and Asian kids, both inside and outside the US but like, I'm just thinking now look back, you know, the in the Asheville business world it's Asheville people skills at count, notch a great help you get. And I think I was pretty stunted in developing my social skills because of this helicopter parenting which focused on grades, grades, grades, school, school, school, college concert college and getting into the best prestigious companies. Because doing well in business is actually about understanding people's needs and understanding people's needs is about reading them. And a lot of us, people in the workplace simply do not read people. I'm shocked by how many people that come from prestigious universities, they are not able to see the obvious lack of interest on the other person the meeting room, and they don't know, oh, I have lost attention. And I need to get back. No, they continue on the reading the PowerPoint, continue on with their pitch. And
36:30
I would just tell my younger self, those social skills are the actual business because you learn need to learn. Making a financial model is not a business skill. It's just number crunching. Well, you came from a finance background right to where you're at, as I looked at your LinkedIn.
36:48
Well, exactly I started with with a finance background, I wanted a master's in finance in Spain. And I actually had my first full time job in Spain right after graduation. So like, I worked in mergers and acquisitions in Barcelona, that was interesting. Like my first full time job was in Spanish and before in 2015, and before 2013, I never spoke Spanish, but a very nice thing. But you know, like, initially, I was studying finance, because I just heard everybody say, well, you should work for Goldman Sachs or for JP Morgan, or last child, you know, and why? Because it's Goldman Sachs. This was a strange circular logic that when I look back and think like, okay, what's the sense in it? Like, okay, if you could work 140 hours and make twice the money? would you do it? No, because a lot of people who were in the same class who said, No, I still want to do this, Goldman Sachs, I want the GS on my resume. Sure, the prestige count is so weird. And I will also warn my younger self against that, like, there's no sense in that Christie's call. I like that. Yeah, I love that. I want to make sure if you have anything else to plug or get to that we get to it any, because we try to keep these around 33 minutes or so. So I want to make sure
38:09
we're getting
38:11
back on, you know,
38:14
what I wanted to learn from you guys, what's a good way to do a call to action to a customer, whether it's an email, copy, or video, or any kind of sales or marketing outreach you do? You already said it. Talk real? Yes. You know, I make it interesting. The firt I feel the first mistake everybody does is doesn't have one. Right? Yeah. You know, like, you always want the second date.
38:39
And so it's like, you know, if you're too eager to if you're too thirsty, as the kids say, that comes off bad. Like you're talking about reading people, you got to kind of play it off. Kind of like that email, hey, here's what we're about. Here's what it is. Here's we're working on, boom. You know, if you're talking on the phone, they say, keep asking questions. So you can kind of what you want to do is kind of regurgitate their needs. So they feel listened to which a lot of people don't do, right? They just move on there because it's like you're talking about with a PowerPoint presentation. Like they're so self absorbed with the presentation. They're not thinking about, you know, when they walk in, you ever see someone tried to do a presentation, and the fucking clicker doesn't work. Or the mics busted? Yeah. And they can't, they can't, they can't recover. Thankfully, I've done I failed at stand up so many times that I have to walk into a room, you just kind of just move on from it and just go whatever, we'll just do it. So it's like that. That's not an easy thing. I think a lot of people have to get out of their own head. And if you're worried about a presentation, memorize this shit out of it, you know, backwards forwards, because something's gonna let you down. It's never gonna be like you think when you walk in there, but I think the call to action. If we're talking copy in a an ad, it needs to be there. I mean, they have
40:00
It's kind of predictive now. Right? Like, download, sign up that kind of thing. If you're talking about relationship marketing, like you're doing, you know, it might be more of just keeping the conversation going. Or if you already reached out to us with a tent, and it was like, You played my narcissism. I was totally works. Yeah. But I'm a huge fan, and I'm totally fine. Yeah, we're in. So it's like, I was like, why don't you come on, you know, talk about what you're working on. So, you know, it's kind of like, it's almost like a decision tree. If you're doing it in that relationship marketing, see how it goes? And go, Okay, well, how about we talk for the Don't try to close a deal.
40:40
You know, coffee's for closers kind of shit, like, of course, eventually, you want to do that. But try to have some, some kind of, maybe, sometimes it helps to think about the next thing. If you're thinking about before you're talking to someone. All right, when can I maybe get to the I'm not going to close on him here. But hey, would it be cool if we have a continuing talk? I'm going to look up the things you talked about. And I'm going to come back to some answers. There's a cool free talk again, kind of thing. I always feel like that's the best.
41:09
Okay, continue the conversation. Yeah. Because that's where the challenges I face because sometimes I feel like, okay, the meetings over an hour, just have to sit and wait to see the person if they get back or respond now, but like, at least some excuse to keep talking is important. Yeah, curiosity, you know, I find that natural curiosity, if it's the meeting example, it's like, I try to think now what do I want to get out of this meeting? Like, at the end of it, what would be the ideal thing? Like we went into a radio station that was chewing on us for our show? I go, what's the best case scenario we can get out of this? Don't cry, don't cry, don't try to make fun of them. Because we're gonna get, we're gonna get crushed by five mics
41:54
that are in a radio station. And, and play with them? And get out of that, you know, I it went almost as good as we could imagine it went, yes. Because we went in it like, well, what's the strategy to get the thing we want desired out of it? Except for you not getting hired there. But oh, yeah, that is so good. That wasn't the plan going in, though. Just don't cry. That was the plan.
42:19
But but don't attack them. Let's play with them. Let's eat any of the shit. They're talking to us. And just spin it back. Because we were fed. So don't come at it. Like, we're, we're gonna go into a roast battle. Let's get out of this. Yeah, let's just have a good time. And that really is the best. So like, a work meeting. It's like, Alright, what do we want to get out of this meeting? Is it to eliminate worthless meetings, and make this quick, even that in itself can be its own kind of goal, right? So I think you have to look at a call to action from a goal or objective standpoint, before you get into, you're doing a video. What, what, what maybe is the thing that a subscribe rate review is kind of almost fucked out now. So it's like, I know, you know, hey, if you'd like this, just tell a friend about it. That's kind of what we try to say on this podcast.
43:08
Yeah, yeah. That's great advice. And I think that's why I really like the idea of like live video, because, you know,
43:17
a lot of us are just oversharing our life on the internet social media these days, well, why not just get paid for it as well, you know, and I think, once you at least be what's nice for live videos like that, because once you're on camera, you just start talking. And once you start talking, there's no script, there's no awkwardness as mistakes, it would be the gap fees, but at least keeping the conversation going keeps that interest in. And that's why podcasts are popular, at least when they're done like we're not in a not so scripted manner, because it's all authentic, and it's a genuine flow of words. And the listeners have intent. They listened to it. They usually just listen to it purposely right. So you're meeting them where they want to hear something. All right, we can keep going for hours, man. Let's have you on like two or three months again, and tell us where you're at. We'll be getting paid for your live streaming stuff. I'm I'm wildly it's cool.
44:16
to have you back on maybe
44:18
we could do a midnight party.
44:21
On team on as well.
