James Schramko Podcast

In the podcast:

03:13 – Our biggest driver

05:35 – Can you be guided?

10:01 – The role of experience

12:33 – The mental side of physical sport

17:37 – That thing called flow

20:30 – Some effective anchors

28:52 – Protecting our emotional horsepower

30:35 – If others can do it…

32:56 – Do you want to be in, or out?

36:45 – Picking your board of directors

41:24 – A quick summary

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today, I’m speaking with an expert in mindset. His name is Nam Baldwin from Equalize.com.au. Welcome to the call.

Nam: Thanks, James. Great to be here.

James: Now, we have a mutual friend. Someone who’s been on a previous episode or two on SuperFastBusiness, Brenton Ford. He’s a swim coach, and he introduced us.

Nam: Yeah, great guy. I’ve been doing a session with him not so long ago.

James: I’ve been working with Brenton for many years. It’s been fun for me to get an insight into his world because as we get to develop products and look at how we package his business and sell training workshops, it’s been interesting just to develop an understanding of things like paddling technique, breathing technique, and as someone who’s taken up surfing in the last few years, I’ve been more and more interested in that. I’ve often wondered how some large, old dude can just paddle straight around me on a tiny, little shortboard when I’m struggling to make it out to the back, especially a year or two ago when I was on those Mini Mals as my training.

It seems that there can be quite different results gotten from just changing the way that you do things and especially the way that you think about things. Would you say that’s true?

Nam: Oh absolutely. Thoughts create feelings and feelings create the way in which we perform. The better the state, the better the feeling that we have within us, the better we allow ourselves to tap into the potential that we have.

James: So let’s talk about the things that you’ve been focusing on. From what I’ve read, you are an emotional and stress-control management specialist. You especially help people with breathing techniques. I noticed you help some big-wave riders and some Olympic kayak gold medalists, some footballers and even a world-surfing champion, Mick Fanning. That piqued my interest tremendously because of course he’s so popular in Australia that even regular people would know who he is. They would have seen him on TV, especially yesterday because he announced he’s going back on tour, and he’s ready to take on another world title campaign. Have you been working with Mick?

Working with Mick Fanning

Podcast highlights:

00:36 - A bold move

03:03 - Picking only a good fit for your audience

05:13 - The curse of knowledge

09:22 - What complexity does to your brain

10:43 - Why explainer videos work

14:17 - What you need to be

17:44 - The importance of surveys

23:30 - It’s not about you

24:46 - Bridging to better understanding

29:40 - Why let others make your video?

31:57 - Is YouTube the strategy?

35:28 - Measuring explainer video success

40:40 - Face-to-face or virtual client encounter?

41:42 - An action step for listeners

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness. Today, we're going to be talking about story. To do that, I brought in a story expert by the name of Eric Hinson from Explainify.com. Welcome.

Eric: Thanks so much for having me, James.

James: You actually reached out to me, Eric. That was somewhat bold. But I appreciated your straightup-ness.

Eric: Yeah, absolutely. I've never been really afraid to reach out to anybody. Kind of a quick story, I reached out to Rand Fishkin of SEO Moz a few years ago, and he reached out to me. What he did was tweeted us and put us on Quora and really kind of just threw us on the map. That day that he tweeted, we had a good 200 or 300 leads for business. I've just kind of like moved on with that mentality of 'let's just keep doing this and keep talking to people.' Honestly, most times, people reply. I think a lot of people are afraid to email people. I'm not. I think it actually works.

James: I think what you did is quite rare. Most people do something once that works well and then they forget to do it again. So that's a great technique. It's one that I always look for when I'm coaching someone. What sort of profits have you been making and what caused that? We're looking for the root cause. And if it turns out they're on a podcast, I ask them, "So how many podcasts have you been on this week?"

I like a direct approach. The fact is, people who come on this show end up with lots of exposure. I don't run this podcast purely for commercial gain off these podcasts. I'm interested in connecting with my market and continuing on this developing body of work. We're over 500 episodes now, and we've covered everything, from copywriting through to getting your DNA sample done.

But I tell you what, story is a recurring theme. We've talked to Andre Chaperon about it - how to use it in emails. We've covered video marketing on YouTube with Tom Breeze. We've had numerous copywriting experts from John Carlton through to Kevin Rogers.

But something that keeps comin...

Get content marketing tips to level up the storytelling in your internet marketing.

Video highlights:

00:10 - How do you organize your schedule?

00:45 - How do you deal with speakers who go over time?

01:48 - Never say THIS (It is a sure sign of an unprofessional)

02:28 - Getting your audience into the room on time

03:55 - Should you film an event for content?

05:45 - Is a five-day event overkill?

06:55 - The live exercise portion

08:26 - How big a crew should you have?

09:37 - Why the food costs so much

See James’s live event tips in action at SuperFastBusiness Live 2017

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Transcription:

James here, and today, I've got some follow-up questions from the last video I did, which was about running a live event.

Organizing sessions

The first question is: You do short sessions. Do you have a session and then a break? Or do you stack sessions together?

Well, I like to start the event around nine o'clock. We do a maximum of 90-minute session, then we go into morning tea. And then after morning tea, we do two blocks of 50, and then we have lunch. Then we do another two blocks of 50. We have afternoon tea. And then we have a shorter session at the end of the day and finish around about five. I don't want to have people starting at eight. I don't want to have people finishing at seven. At least, there's plenty of time to do other things to catch up with each other and socialize. But keep the blocks fairly short.

When speakers go over time

So, what do you do if a speaker runs over time?

Well, unfortunately, you have an unprofessional speaker. Make sure you're very clear with your speakers that your times are set. You need to give them some things that will help them - like put the time on a countdown in front of them. Have someone in the front row with an iPad. Have some time cards saying, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 10 minutes, 5 minutes. And ask them to acknowledge. Just a little yes or a thumbs up so that they know that they're on time.

Now, if they happen to be still talking at the time that you're supposed to be finishing, just go up and help them off the stage because you need to be strict with your times. I'll cover this more in the next little tip.

The other thing to do is if they finish early, throw it open to Q&A. Just get ready to rescue them. Get up there with your microphone and throw open the questions. And then a final strategy is if they do finish a little bit early, then break early. Give people more time to talk to each other. What a bonus - you got through the material in time.

"Advanced Event Tips"CLICK TO TWEET

A speaking tip

By the way, here's a speaking tip - never say, “I don't have much time. So I'm going to go really fast.” The audience will just groan like, 'Oh, gosh, they're not professional enough to structure their presentation. All that time they had to prepare and to get it right, and now they're making me have to be overloaded?' Don't shift it across to the audience.

The audience will never know what you didn't tell the...

Get answers to the questions you always wanted to ask about event planning and running your own live event.

Can you grow a successful jewelry business working away from an office? Ben Katzaman shows it can be done.

In the episode:

00:50 – Accidental discovery

03:25 – How Wanderer Bracelets came about

04:57 – Fitting the product to a market

06:55 – The SCAMPER method

09:21 – The mindset that makes it work

10:59 – Building the team

13:07 – How important are live events?

16:23 – A couple of essential tools

19:13 – Working the system

21:55 – Some challenges of working remotely

25:35 – The layout of day-to-day

28:32 – A brief call recap

29:19 – Knowing who to hire next

32:19 – SuperFastBusiness Live from Ben’s viewpoint

Ben and other world-class business experts will be sharing insights live on stage at SuperFastBusiness Live 2017 – Join  them

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here. Welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. It’s my absolute pleasure to introduce our guest today, Ben Katzaman from WandererBracelets.com. Welcome to the call.

Ben: Thanks, James. Excited to be here.

James: The reason for our call is in just a few weeks from the time of recording this, you’re heading over to Australia to talk about how to scale an e-commerce business at my SuperFastBusiness Live event, which we’ll also record, in case someone listening to this wants to catch up with that session.

The real story behind your introduction to me is that we were sitting beside each other at a dinner in San Diego at Ezra Firestone’s conference afterwards, and you were just sharing with me this incredible journey you’ve been on with your own business. I said to you, “Please come and share this story with our audience.”

There are a couple of things there. Firstly, a lot of people are, I think, trying to find out what they should do with their life or what they want to sell is a big, common question. In your case, it just was there. It was surrounding you, and you recognized it. So that was one part of it. The second part is, you’re quite a young man, and you’ve scaled a significant business producing hundreds of thousands of units, selling e-commerce, and you’ve got a large team. You have 40 people in your western team, the United States, and then you’ve got 150 people in your Bali team. So that’s a significant impact that you’re having on the universe in terms of creating stuff. So that’s how this came about.

Today, we’re going to talk about what’s involved in growing a business quickly and at scale, but also, and most importantly, remotely. Because you’re not sitting in an office every day, are you Ben?

Why work remote?

Ben: No, I’m not. I’ve got an office in Florida now as we’ve grown. We just opened a full office a couple of weeks ago. But over the last two years since I started the business, I’ve spent a lot of time in Bali, Florida, Hawaii, Seattle, Oregon, San Diego, San Francisco, LA, Austin, New York, Australia, Bangkok, the Gili Islands.

So I’ve spent more time remote than I have been in one place or with one team or the other. And that allows me to spend a lot of time with people I care about and meet people that I would never be able to meet otherwise, tap into new communities and nurture relationships.

In this podcast:

02:55 - Should you deliver a live workshop alone?

04:58 - THIS is what you might focus on

05:30 - The whole point of having an event is…

07:16 - How do you take care of your best customers?

07:56 - A streamlined event checklist

08:45 - Avoid THESE mistakes

10:30 - Is there an ideal number of attendees?

15:39 - When working with suppliers and crew

16:50 - What makes an event good?

17:17 - Leveraging before and after the event

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Transcription:

Hey, James Schramko here. Today, I'm just making a quick little episode about events. I've got this on my mind at the moment because I'm coaching a few people in SilverCircle, and they run events.

They run high-level events. I've been doing debriefs. A friend of mine, Kyle Gray, called me up and he wanted to talk to me about events and what's involved with those. It sort of brought out a few memories. I wanted to share those because I think the story around that might be interesting as I'm in the lead up to my own event, SuperFastBusiness Live. That's actually the 12th event, the big event that I've run over a decade.

There are probably some ideas that I could share with you that might help you if you're thinking about running an event, that's why this might be interesting. I'll cover some specific differences that I think are different about the events that I run and how I advise my students that maybe if you're running events, you could see if there's something there for you. If you've never run an event, then this might save you a whole bunch of stress.

Running events then

So in terms of what we teach in SuperFastBusiness Live is very different to the old days. Before, we used to encourage people to bring a laptop. My very first event was pretty much a nightmare to organize. I thought that I would sell maybe 10 or 20 people a ticket to this event from stage at World Internet Summit. But it turns out, there were 550 people in the room at this event, and I had over a hundred people come along to my event. There were about 130 something people. They were bringing along their laptop. I had to organize WiFi.

I was going to show them how to research a niche, find a product to promote as an affiliate, get an affiliate link, and then write the sales copy, find an image, put all of that onto a website, and make it go live on day two. I was told it was impossible. 'This is not going to happen.' But with the help of my clever friends like Dave Wooding, who is a genius technology guy, and Sean who helps me out with my events, we managed to bundle together some software that helped people build a website online. I was able to get a server from Liquid Web, and I was able to hook up WiFi somehow. All of the students were able to build a website.

My guarantee, by the way, just in case you're wondering how I made the offer so compelling, was that if you can't build your own website, I will build it for you. I didn't want to build 130 something websites. Even though I could have,

Some things to consider to run a successful event minus the stress. Includes handy live event checklist and event planning.

Podcast highlights:

01:15 - James’s eye view of Dale’s background

02:35 - Business advice and artificial intelligence

03:38 - What AI is doing to the internet marketing landscape

06:22 - The technology you should pay attention to

10:53 - What do the changes mean for business owners?

15:54 - Entering the messenger space

18:57 - E-commerce via messenger

19:50 - Is world domination next for Facebook?

22:06 - Earpieces and implants

24:15 - Some of the tools you can use today

26:15 - What’s going on with BRiN

28:52 - Possible first steps after hearing this podcast

33:09 - Last thoughts for the listener

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Transcription:

James: James Schramko here, welcome back to SuperFastBusiness.com. Today I have a special guest, a friend of mine I've known for many, many years. In fact, I've known my guest today for probably over 20 years, which is a long time, actually. Welcome, Dale Beaumont.

Dale: Thanks so much, James.

James: In the early days, I remember you were this little kid on the news publishing books. That's how I first heard about you. What a journey it's been.

Dale: It has. It's been quite incredible. That publishing journey was over 10 years ago now, but I've been doing lots of other things since and looking forward to having a chat and to seeing how I can add some value to the audience.

James: So just a quick overview from my lens. I've known you first as this little kid publishing books. Then I actually went and had a chat to you at some point in your office up on the Northern Beaches, when I was asking you about how I might go about structuring a book, and you were quite an expert in publishing and you had a subscription model back then where you were helping people with business education.

Then you developed a big platform called Business Blueprint, which is I guess a live event/membership hybrid program that's been very successful. And I've seen you in different places all around the world now. Whenever I go to a conference or an event, you're often there. And you're one of the big players in Australia, at least for CRM software sales, and I've known you through that community.

And here we are. Watching you now, I'd have to say you're a bit of a trendspotter, and your newest venture is into this new area of technology. And the bullet points I've made about our chat were, "chatbots, voice-powered search, and artificial intelligence." And you've got this new project called brin.ai. Why don't you tell me what brought you to this point and what is BRiN?

What BRiN is

Dale: Yeah, OK great. So for the last 10 years after publishing all those books, I've been working in the space of business education, and we've built Business Blueprint into one of the largest and most successful business education companies, and it's been a wonderful journey. However, in terms of their worldwide audience, we did some research and found out that there are 500 million small business owners around the world, and only one percent of those business owners have access to a business adviser. And we looked at the reasons why, and a lot of the reasons are kind of proximity, also the cost as well, and the fact that it's simply not sort of scalable.