Clockwork is the latest book by business author Mike Michalowicz.

To get the low-down on the book, on the tweak that the Queen Pixie inspired (seriously, she’s mentioned on pp. 204–5), and what it all means for your business, Leticia and Mike got together for a chat.

The audio is above, and the transcript below. Remember to subscribe and rate it if you enjoy it!

Podcast transcript

Mike: I had the belief that my life was designed to support my business and I am happy to say I now have a new realisation that my business is designed to support my life.

Mike: I had the belief that my life was designed to support my business and I am happy to say I now have a new realisation that my business is designed to support my life.

Leticia: Hi, listeners. If you don’t recognise that voice, it’s Mike Michalowicz, who is an American author, entrepreneur and doesn’t say on his Wikipedia page, but Def Leppard fan. He’s the author of such books as the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur, The Pumpkin Plan, Profit First, Surge and Clockwork, which is his latest book. Mike’s books have largely been written as he’s developed in his own entrepreneurial journey and his forthcoming book is even more exciting than what Clockwork was. I am a little bit of a fan. I’m lucky to count Mike among my friends, so I wanted to get together with him to have a chat about Clockwork to give you a bit of an insight into the book and also into his life and from that little snippet in just after the intro, you can see from where the impetus came. For this book, Mike now has a lifestyle design that supports his business, but also supports his life. And if you’re one of those business owners that is really looking forward to the time when your business supports your life and not the other way around, this episode is for you. So buckle your seat belts, this is a bit of a longer episode. It’s reminiscent of our very earliest seasons on the Pixie Podcast. So without further ado, let’s get into it.

Mike: I don’t aspire to work more. I aspire to be of more service through my business, but for the business to find its own legs, to run on its own and give me the freedom to do the things that I’m most impactful at and get the most joy from.

Leticia: It’s almost like entrepreneurs chase the wrong Holy Grail, don’t they? They want to be busy and they want to be seen as this person who is doing lots of stuff because it kind of validates the reason why they’re in business to other people

Mike: To be really honest, there’s a lot of ego associated with that. The more we’re doing, the outside world, we hope, receives this as more successful because there’s so much demand for us. Now it’s our own demand on ourselves, but the more the business needs us, clearly the more important we are, and so we have this pride in that and it feeds our ego. There’s another kind of insidious thing that happens is when we start a business and when we’re the sole practitioner, we have to work hard. We have to do everything because there’s no one else to depend on. So the beginnings of any business when you’re in the solopreneur phase and the solopreneur phase can last a few months, a few years or it can last a lifetime. But during that phase we have to do everything and we think that is the solution. As we grow our business, if we so decide to bring on employees and stuff, we’ve already been in this kind of mindset of doing all the work, and so we actually retain the work. We don’t bring on employees to actually take on responsibility as much as to take on tasks that we still control. We answer all the things for them. We manage the entire business. In our head,

Just because technology enables your marketing, remember it isn’t the only way to do things.

‘We tried everything to reach these young people,’ a friend was saying to me over lunch a few weeks ago. ‘We ran campaigns on Facebook and Instagram. They’re not on LinkedIn. We did some emails. We ran ads. We got nothing.’

Over the pot plant and the basket of bread, I asked him for the age range of his program’s target market. It turned out that they were in that tricky spot between 16 and 23.

He was bashing his head against a wall that was never going to break.

These people use ‘dark’ platforms: The platforms where their content disappears. Facebook is for their grandmas; Instagram is where they get inspo, not training. They’re not mainlining social media like older people are; they tend to lurk for what they want, and then go talk to people about it more directly, on Snap or by messages.

When I suggested he should go old-school and do a letter-drop like an old-school sales letter, in his target suburbs, this friend regarded me seriously, buttered knife suspended mid-action.

‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ he asked.

Here’s why:

Technology is seductive.

Technology is easy.

Everyone has bought into the immense lie that technology is environmentally friendly.

Everyone assumes that everyone else is online, and not just because tech is sexy.

What my friend didn’t do was stand in his audience’s shoes, get inside their heads, understand how they live and why they live that way.  If he had, he would have seen instantly that the way to get their attention would be in a cleverly crafted letterbox drop. That generation doesn’t know what it’s like to get personal, intriguing mail. 

Once he understood what he’d been missing, he started spinning idea after idea about how to make it work; how to involve his audience.

You see, your defaults will get in your way when you design and run your business’s publications. If your business coach is telling you to do this or that online thing, and you don’t ask why online, then if it fails, it’s your fault.

Great content, marketing, and publication design requires great (as in big amounts of) thinking. Careful thinking. Understanding your biases.Nowhere is this more critical than in the very basics. 

This type of advisory is something that you get access to when you work with our team of expert writers.

More info:https://brutalpixie.com/amazing-copywriting

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Attractive businesses are attractive for a reason.

‘Oh my god did you see that girl in there?’ she asked, eyes wide. ‘She’s the one I told you about.’

‘The annoying one?’ I raised my eyebrows.

‘She is SO needy. She thinks we’re friends,’ she touched my arm in emphasis as we walked out of a dance class and towards our cars. She glanced behind herself, nervously, checking that the offending creature wasn’t either following or within earshot.

She lowered her voice. ‘You know, she friended me on Facebook. She sends me messages all the time.’ The young woman had pulled out her phone and gestured towards it helplessly. ‘But, like, you can’t force friendship on people. It just happens. You know, you dance together, you start chatting. And then after a while a friendship develops and when it does, it’s awesome. You don’t just — thrust! — yourself on people.’

Neediness makes people run away. Fast.

Or, at least, they’ll try to run away.

You’ll know this yourself if you’ve ever desperately needed a sale because you’ve had a shyte month. The scent of neediness wafts off you and makes you stink; whatever prospect you’re in front of knows that you need them, and suddenly they aren’t sure whether to work with you or not.

Why? Neediness smacks of “high maintenance”. And high maintenance clients do not make good clients.

The business publishing equivalent has two parts.

The first is begging. 

You’ve seen those emails you get from stores or businesses that appear more desperate with every issue, right? The never-ending sales; the desperate “hurry up” of “webinars” that are actually video recordings; the artificial deadlines that try to force your hand. They’re sent in branded emails in a scattershot approach. 

The second is just smashing content at you.

Businesses do this with some kind of desperate hope that you’ll read it and care about it.

Most of the time, you don’t. A great example is every accounting or law firm email that pretty well yells look at me! And doesn’t give you any valuable information.

The one thing that immediately makes your business attractive is an absence of neediness.

For example, I could smash you with requests to please buy our things, please buy my things. But I know that you are reading this mostly because it’s (a) useful and (b) mildly entertaining.

Are you going to buy every day? No.

Do you want to read about what we are doing every day, in an endless regurgitation of wanky spin? Hell no!

Will you buy when you have a need and are ready? Yes, it’s likely you will.

In fact, you might have noticed that on our landing pages we will do our level best to stop you from buying.

My company only wants to work with you if you really want to work with us, AND can afford to do so. That’s why we have warnings galore plastered everywhere!

Don’t be needy.

Find a way to create a publication that is helpful, useful, insightful, entertaining. 

Confidence is the sexiest thing in the world: And that applies to businesses as much as to people.

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The world’s best kept secret to business health is to write every day.

Before we get to that, I want to tell you a story about profitability.

When a fella that I know — let’s call him TT — was at a conference in the UK recently, he was live-tweeting the event. It wasn’t a particularly interesting conference to me: It was about the accounting industry in the Kingdom.

Scrolling past all the photos and usual things that people talk about, something caught my eye:

50% of the accountants in the UK are profitable.

Fifty. Per cent.

‘These don’t seem like the best people to be advising businesses?’ I said to him.

He replied: ‘I’m still so shocked.’ (Except, he used emojis rather than words.)

How honest do you think that these people are to their clients about their own situations? It reminded me of something a business coach said to me years ago, which was: ‘If accountants are so good at business, where are their yachts?’

The critical thing about this situation is that the 50% of the unprofitable accountants will have websites, and blogs, and social media, and maybe even email lists. They are probably running ads, advertising their “expertise”!

What expertise! 

This is exactly the same problem as most marketing experts who chase every trend — and then tell everyone else to do the same thing. There is a huge problem in the marketing world today, which says “do these things that everybody else does and you’ll make money”. 

Which is great, except for the fact that when I talk about the ROI of content, and the mathematics of nailing down precisely how much your content is adding (or not) to your business, marketers come back with: But you can’t measure brand awareness. The funny thing is, they don’t work at it until they can.

Every time they say these things, I realise how much they have invested in “expertise” that doesn’t create a return.  

Sales you can measure; if your sales are profitable, you have a healthy business.

Brand awareness, in contrast, is the cream you put on top of a fluffy sponge. You can start with the cream if you like, but all you’ll do is have a squishy pile of sweetness that makes a mess.

The challenge for the unprofitable businesses, especially those that are advisors, is that telling the world of their ‘expertise’ is dishonest.

Getting back to honesty is as simple as sitting down to write about the small things impacting your clients. 

If you strive to write something every day, to solve your clients’ problems, you might start to realise you have them yourself.

Reflective writing is hands-down the fastest way to problem-solve your own business’s problems.

It’s the type of trick that you only discover if you’re a writer. So, as a team of writers, take our advice: Write!

But unless you’re in the mindset of writing to solve problems, to work out the pathway, you’ll never discover this incredibly simple method of plugging gaps.

It is, in fact, the ultimate side-benefit of committing to content creation.

If you’ve done that for a while and really want to level up, then we recommend working with a team of pros:

https://brutalpixie.com/amazing-copywriting

If you had mugshots of your audience looking at you every time you wrote something, how would it change your content work?

You know, the internet does special things for you when you begin publishing anything — whether on a blog, or in a social media platform.

Chief among them is the sense that you’re talking to yourself.

I learned this morning that, in terms of internal communications, the Basecamp platform tells you not just how many people will see your post: It shows you their faces.

All of them. In a huge cluster. Like a giant group of little people, all staring straight at you.

A colleague of mine, who used to work at Facebook (which probably tells you something) said that one of his team members found it intimidating. He suggested to the person that he should write on another platform, and then just post on Basecamp.

But that’s like trying to hide the issue under the carpet.

The biggest issue with huge, faceless platforms like Twitter or Facebook is that it’s easy to feel like you’re just talking to yourself! 

You don’t have any sense of who else is in the room with you. 

Or think about what they might think.

Or consider how it might impact on what you might say.

If you have 70+ people in your organisation looking at you when you write something, you will naturally be much more careful about what it means. 

Publishing is fraught with risk. It isn’t just the risk of offending your professional association (like in the legal industry). It’s the risk that you can start writing whatever you bloody well like, without thinking about your audience.

Marketers use “personas” to stay focused on what they do. But a persona isn’t quite the same thing as a mugshot, is it!

One of my own mentors suggests that you need to profile your audience ‘like an FBI agent’, which goes way beyond persona-creation.

But imagine if you had a photo board with your audience’s mugshots on the wall in front of you every time you wrote something, with pull-quotes of their feedback.

Wouldn’t that instantly give you clarity?

When it comes to risk management in particular, get out of your documents-and-spreadsheets comfort zone. 

If you want help to do so, book a strategic advisory session with us. For just $197, you can get an entire hour with our expert content advisors.

Book now:

https://calendly.com/brutalpixie/strategy-consultation

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The question is, how do you use time as a tool? How long should your content activity take you, actually?

The short answer is: As long as it takes. 

I’ll illustrate what I mean with a story. Stay with me.

Back in about 2006, I was intensely bugged by the need to develop an alternative to a publication for which I was writing. It wasn’t being what I’m going to call ‘genre inclusive’ (it was in the music industry). I’d started dreaming of a publication that would tick all my boxes, and all my readers’ boxes. I knew what I’d do, how I’d do it, what kinds of things would make the readership tick. I knew what the team would need to feel like family. I dreamed about it for probably a year.

The opportunity to do it finally slid onto my desk in 2007.

I didn’t hesitate. I didn’t do any of the usual, financial due diligence. I just grabbed the opportunity and got moving.

Taking action almost every single day, getting that beast moving took a long time.

Like, a year, maybe more, to build. 

Meaning: From idea to execution was at least two years.

The payoff was completely worth it: The promotion yielded fans before they’d even seen hide or hair of the product; everything we published was picked up and promoted by our robust fanbase; and we scaled fast. That publication was launched beginning of 2008, and acquired by another company around the end of 2010.

To go back to the build: Two years is a long time in anyone’s books! It’s a lifetime in today’s move-fast-and-break-things society. 

It’s true that I could’ve done it more easily, more quickly, probably more cheaply. I could have gotten that baby up off my desk and functioning within three months, no problems.

Would it have yielded the uptake and growth if I had? 

Hell no.

Using time as a tool meant that I achieved a whole lot of critical things. These included:

* audience and user research* effective structures and taxonomy* governance and policy* custom functionality* custom design for multiple marketing applications, and a known, planned promotional cycle* a full year of promotion, pre-launch, to build excitement (and buyers)* testing* forward planning* editorial rules* the best contributors I could find.

The result? It went off like a firecracker for the three years from launch to acquisition.

Ok, so if this seems like it doesn’t apply to YOU, then you have missed the lesson.

The lesson is: When you view your publication as a product, your perspective completely changes.

How long would you spend developing a product for your business?

Right. You’d do it for as long as it takes to ensure success. Product success and publishing success are the same thing: Both exist to make you money.Rushing into a publishing product of any kind is not going to win you the hearts and minds that you need to win. Inside a business, those hearts and minds are both internal AND external.

Time allows you to learn, and test, what it is that’s going to form your blend of persuasive honey. Conceiving publication products is one thing; executing on them so that you have a drooling audience waiting for their release is quite another.

Now, a warning. 

You can use time as a tool. But you can also use it as a crutch.

I say ‘as long as it takes’ — but not any longer. If you don’t prioritise the work,

Escape rooms are games where you are put into a situation with a team, locked in, with clues you have to solve in order to escape the situation. Committing to publishing is exactly like that, except it’s all in your head.

Why? Deciding to stop publishing is a much bigger decision than deciding to begin.  

In entrepreneurship, founders are encouraged to think about their escape (exits). This is most often because thinking about an exit forces people to go through a visioning exercise. In order to properly consider an exit, you must be able to see it, feel it, and smell it.

But I’d like you to consider your escape from publishing for a different reason. That is: If you don’t know the exit process, it’ll just dribble off and you’ll feel dissatisfied and incomplete. 

It’s kind of like when you have a bad sexual experience. You’ve been promised (or may you set your own expectations of) the world, only for it all to fizzle and get awkward or uncomfortable. What do you say? Thanks?

So that’s why, deciding to cease publishing something, means that you need to know how to do it. 

Not knowing how to do it will lead to you resisting your own escape, even when getting out is for your own good!

Here are some of the reasons why escaping is tough:

* You have an audience. Even if it is a very small audience (under 30 members), a percentage of those people will be rabid readers. They will be fans. They’ve followed you because they really believe in what you’re doing, or you give them value, or you inspire them, or whatever the case may be. Which means…* You don’t want to let your audience down. But this is also, partly, the default effect. Faced between continuing to publish and ceasing to publish, if you are already publishing then you will tend to favour the default (which is to keep publishing).* The outcome is ambiguous: You started, and that was unfamiliar; but what will happen when you stop?* You’ve invested loads of personal time, effort, and (probably) self into the work. Ceasing publication may cause you to experience grief, because it feels like it’s a part of you.* It may be one of the ways that you started leading your field. If you were to cease publishing this thing, wouldn’t that mean that you’d lose your fans, stop being followed, stop being viewed as a leading light of consistency?

Working to become a thought leader is one thing.

But then what? What happens if you hate it? What happens if you aren’t seeing the results you expected?

What happens if you do end up with thousands of people on your list, media attention, and all of the golden glory, but you’re stressed out, hating everything that you’re doing, and want to stop publishing so that you can just go and get a job in a plant nursery in the sunshine?

Do you see, now, why being able to orchestrate your escape is such a critical thing?

Know your decision-making criteria for assessing your exit. Make sure that it’s robust enough that it forces you to consider all your options, not just the obvious one. Because, if you are honest with yourself, you’ll know that the “logical” solution to stress is just to stop doing things, instead of fixing your resilience (for example). 

In content marketing and business publishing, bailing out because of stress is the cheap way out. You stop doing it instead of building the systems to support it.

If you’re one of those people without the guts to persist solving the problem, just don’t start. Great! You know that ahead of time. Go do something else,

Content marketing is equal parts publishing and distribution. You’ll run into trouble when you think that both functions fit the same role.

Raise your hand if you’ve run a blog (or more) in the past, but then discovered it got really hard to maintain the activity?

You’re not alone.

It sounds like a simple activity. It seems like the dumbest, easiest thing in the world. It doesn’t matter whether you do it for fun or money, the overwhelming attitude (in my experience) in relation to blogging is “well it’s easy”.

Sometimes, people think it’s easy because they know their business.

Sometimes, people think it’s easy because the interface is easy.

You might even think it’s easy.

If you do, I’d love it if you could tell me what’s easy about shaping a publication that has a strategic imperative, selling it to the right people, making it visible, coordinating a team of writers (if you have one), keeping the voice on point, maintaining its consistency, finding the topics, finding the time, coordinating governance so that it doesn’t screw up your timing, working out the return on investment, or reporting on the activity?

Caveat: A blog that is literally an ‘idea came to me — I will publish’ clearly falls outside of what I’m talking about. 

But for every other publication, especially one that has a thought leadership remit, the foregoing applies.

It’s a far bigger scope than simply a production plan. If you want to really make it fly, that’s where you need publishing smarts.

Now, if you’re expecting your marketer to be able to do this, and they haven’t been a publisher, what problems might you run into? 

I’ll give you a hint.

They tend to think in campaigns.

Because they think in campaigns, their thinking is short-term. They go from ideas to execution way too fast, start thinking in keywords and ad spend and channels.

Which is great — for your distribution, not your publishing. 

The publishing part comes before the distribution, and is what gives your distribution a focus. 

Wouldn’t you be better off approaching all of your publishing activity as a publisher? Wouldn’t the marketing activity then make sense, because you’re driving visibility over your publication?

Damn right it would.

Why? Because a publication is a product, not a marketing activity.

One thing you can do right now is to start building your content publishing toolkit.

The first piece of that is a publishing checklist. With a good checklist, the process of going from draft to published is a no-brainer every time.

If you don’t have one, then you’re in luck! You can get one here: http://brutalpixie.com/downloads/download-business-publishing-checklist/

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Early one morning, standing in front of his team in cycling knicks at an all-hands meeting, CEO of Reynholm Industries, Denholm Reynholm, announced that he was declaring war.

The war was on stress.

He said, ‘we have to deal with it!’. He pointed out that there have been 80 million people who died from stress.

He clicked his fingers. ‘That’s another one.’

He clicked his fingers again. ‘That’s another one.’

He clicked his fingers again. ‘More!’

He clicked his fingers faster, faster, faster. ‘Mayhem! We’ve got to deal with it!’

Then he paused. Only to appear right up in the face of an employee, asking if they want to deal with stress?

Well, he didn’t so much ask, as yell.

Denholm Reynholm, if you don’t recognise his name (or this scenario) was a fictional CEO, in a fictional company, in the UK’s classic comedy series The IT Crowd. 

While he was forever declaring war on things, which made the organisation groan and sigh whenever he announced something new, he was intense and passionate about his business.

He had no idea about what most of the people in his business did. He was great for employing experts and letting them do their jobs. He was, actually, pretty clueless. 

But the real lesson for you? Denholm Reynholm is a study in contrasts. Those contrasts aren’t just in his method of orating, to which you yield your attention almost without realising; but in everything he does. 

Your business’s strategic content activity is also a study in contrasts. 

You are forever trying to resolve a taut paradox: That in order to attract, engage and sell to your target market, you have to stop focusing on what you want.

There are many ways you can do that. The best way to break your reliance on your own narrative is to publish case studies.

Not only are they the smartest spend you’ll make, but it gives you permission to pause.

And, like Denholm Reynholm, inspire precisely the action you want to get.

More info:http://brutalpixie.com/case-studies

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I’m a potential client

Marketing isn’t selling, but if you don’t sell then you don’t have a business.

I had the good fortune this morning to sit down with a young entrepreneur over coffee. he’s got an exciting offering, he’s butting up against a challenging industry, and he has big dreams.

But there’s one thing that raised red flags for me. They’re the kind of red flags that would stop me from investing anything into the venture — time, or money.

He’s not selling.

His venture has been around for six months. He talks the talk. He’s been out of the building, talking to people. He’s already pivoted a few times.

But he’s focused on things that don’t touch the customer: Partners, and marketing.

This is a key failing in many young businesses, run by people of all ages.

Look, I get it: Sales makes people run screaming. I could tell it made this guy uncomfortable, because his body language changed. When I pushed him a little bit, he admitted to me that he’d been frightened of it.

‘What’s worse?’ I asked. ‘Getting itchy about it now, or being in a situation that is dire and not being able to make a sale? Turn your discomfort into excitement. The learning approach alone will make you more attractive to buyers, because you’ll ask more questions.’

That was when he began writing notes.

Then I pointed out to him that even if he gets partners, even if he can spend money on “marketing” (sigh), he’s still going to have to sell every single day. Sales never ends.

When you view your content and content publishing activity as “marketing”, instead of being a useful interaction of some kind with your audience (which becomes part of either your service or sales pathway) then you’re already fighting a losing battle.

Spend money where it touches your customer. Use every aspect of your marketing — which, yes, encompasses your content publishing activity — to drive sales. 

One of the things you might consider doing is putting your marketers (if you have them) on a sales beat and seeing how they perform.

If they can’t do it in person, how can you expect them to sell in any other format? Linking ads together is great knowledge! Learning how to craft a pitch, inside an ad, that is totally irresistible, is an altogether different skill-set. Your sales guys will probably do it better. You could even put your sales team in a marketing role, and see what kinds of ideas come out the other side.

This is the kind of thinking that underpins any strategic content activity:

1. Ask, where does this fit?2. Ask, what is my offer?3. Ask, who is buying?

It’s a short step from there to working out what your strategic content publishing landscape looks like. But until you can do it, double down on your sales, because that’s where everything stops.

Case studies are the one piece of content that becomes a smart spend. A well-crafted case study:

1. Answers prospects’ questions2. Illustrates your offer, without you begging3. Draws in people who are like the ones in the study.

In other words, it’s a spend that touches your customer.

You can learn more about this and why they’re the smartest content spend you can make, at http://brutalpixie.com/case-studies/

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