Identifying and Developing Your Next Experts

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Your hosts are Jason Malicki and Jeff McKay.

Speaker C: Jeff, I have a question for you. And this is off the top of your head. I don't expect you to have statistical data at the ready. What percentage of firms do you think survive a founder's retirement? And when I say founder, I mean the type of firm where you have a really visionary founder who is highly visible. They're very intertwined with the reputation of the firm. They're that really strong visionary with a strong point of view on the market and where it's going, and people sort of follow them when they retire. What percentage do you think actually survive? I don't know the answer. Uh, like, uh, I said, this is off the top of your head. What do you think?

Speaker A: A third.

Speaker C: A third? Yeah. I think it's interesting you think about small, um, businesses in this sense we're talking about. They say, I think less than half survived to the second generation. Right? Yeah.

Speaker A: The number is, uh, really low.

Speaker C: Yeah. And then even fewer survived the third.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: And you think about. I was thinking about this as we were chatting. Wendy's. Wendy's is headquartered in Columbus and found the hamburger place. Yeah. What other Wendy's is there? What are you.

Speaker A: Well, this is a podcast about professional services. You just threw me off there.

Speaker C: I was like, I'm teasing you. They were just in the nude. Yes. So, uh, Dave Thomas founded Wendy's back in, I don't know, 70s or 80s. First restaurant was downtown Columbus. That's an organization that I think has always struggled since he passed away. It's never really found its footing the way it had when he was there. And you just think about big companies like that, with huge organizations and massive brands, struggle when the visionary steps away. How much harder is it? When the visionary is intertwined is the Persona that is the marketing, and is the. You call it the insight engine and the relationship hub and everything else.

Speaker A: Yeah, the product.

Speaker C: Yeah. I mean, the percentage. So the percentage has to be small. It's got to be maybe a third as generous.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think it may be.

Speaker C: So it's a problem, right? Um, I guess that's kind of what we're talking about today is what do you do about this? How do you survive this? When you have a founder leave, or if you're a founder, how do you prepare the firm for your departure? Or, uh, maybe it's not the founder, really. We've encountered some firms. Years ago, we met a firm in New England where there was a prolific thought leader that wasn't the founder of the firm, but, but he was definitely the voice and everything sort of was built around this guy. And him leaving would be a major problem.

Speaker A: Right, but you're talking about an issue where the brand and in particular the point of view is one in the same with the founder. Yeah, we're not just talking operationally, we're talking the market face.

Speaker C: Well, I think it's both, isn't it? I mean you have situations where you've got a strong voice that is very public facing, that's maybe an author or a podcaster or they're very out in front and everybody's visible and everybody knows who they are. And then you have situations where maybe you don't see that as publicly, you don't see them as visible from a marketing sense, but they're certainly in the market driving the conversation with prospects. They're the lead on the relationship, they're the trusted advisor and everything is supporting them. By the way, this is a funny story. One of my friends worked in uh, hedge fund type on Wall Street. He'd always would tell me the story about this fund and I don't know the name of the fund, I don't even know who it is. And he's like literally, Jason, he goes, you go to this fund, the way it operates. There's a guy, the guy that is the lead on this thing, the visionary. And he stands in the middle of a giant warehouse basically and around him it's a circular table all around him with screens and keyboards everywhere. Imagine this guy and he's got a headset in and there's like 200 people in this room around him. And he is basically just this architect running at everything. He's running everything. He's telling everybody what to do. And he's just sitting in the middle of this giant hub of stock tickers.

Speaker A: Just buy, sell on a whim.

Speaker C: Yes. You would not believe this. This was years ago. I don't know if it's still around. And this is a highly successful fund where the fund lead basically was, uh, he was the show. If he didn't come back tomorrow, that place shuts down because nobody knew what to do without him.

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds like Warren Buffett.

Speaker C: Well, we're going to find out, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. So let's jump into this topic, uh, of what to do when your whole brand and firm is built around a single individual. How do you move forward from there?

Speaker C: And it could be a Single practice. Right. It might not be the whole firm. It might be, you have a practice built around an individual. And what do you do about that? I've framed it as the working subject or the working title. Finding and developing your next spirits. Right. Figuring out who your next spurts are and then developing them so that they can be successful. Because there's another half of this that we didn't talk about. The other part of this problem is that if you are that person and you want to exit, you want to sell, then your firm is worth less if that's how it's built. Because no one wants to buy it for the best employee to leave. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, it's exactly right.

Speaker C: That's a problem.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. That's kind of the standard, um, entrepreneurial challenge when you start to build a business. Right. And setting it up to scale beyond yourself. This one that we're talking about today just tends to focus on a thought leadership perspective, a point of view perspective that moves from founder is inside engine to institutionalized expertise, I think is kind of the fundamental issue that we're talking about.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's funny, because the inclination that I hear when we talk about this with clients is that they'll say to me often the same thing. They'll say, well, there's no one person that can replace so and so, whoever so and so is. Right. And they see that as a problem. It's like, wow, man, if we just had that one person who could step in and be Jeff. And it's like. And maybe that's not the goal. Maybe you're better off having three or four people, because for so many reasons. We could maybe talk about that later, but maybe it's. You don't want the one because you have a single point of failure. Why create another single point of failure? Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. It reminds me of, uh, the movie Moneyball when, uh, they were trying to replace, um, you know, key players. They just couldn't do it. They couldn't afford to replace the key players, so they built them in the aggregate. And I think that's a fascinating analogy for us to consider. Who can get on base for the people that have watched the, uh, movie. God, I love that movie. It's a great movie.

Speaker C: Yeah, it's a great movie. It's really incredible story, just in general.

Speaker A: All right, so let's knock this topic out of the park.

Speaker C: Okay, so here's the thing where I started, by the way, is I said, okay, if you want to identify your nextperts, then you got to start by understanding the characteristics of a great expert. What are you actually looking for? Right. And as you know, I mean, uh, you're sure you follow the same bucket. We've worked with hundreds of subject matter experts over the last decade, decade or two, to help them bring out their best thinking and help them figure out what their point of view is on the market and raise their visibility. And so I thought back to that, and I just thought through all the different people that we've worked with over the years to do that, and I thought about who is most successful and who's least right. And then I just, uh, kind of put that into a bucket of characteristics. What I see from the people that are best at this and have the most success with this. And I came up with five, and I actually have them in priority. So I actually think that these five are the priority in which you need to think about them. Because the inclination for a lot of people is to look for someone who's magnetic, someone who can command the stage, who's like alpha dog or something, someone that's just a bit larger than life Personas. And I actually don't think that that's the starting point.

Speaker A: Somebody like you.

Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Handsome, tall. That's it. Uh, that's all I get.

Speaker A: Intelligent.

Speaker C: So anyway, my first one with one of my favorite quotes, and, uh, oddly enough, I had to end up doing some research on this quote because it wasn't from who I thought it was to I thought it was. It's actually a quote that was delivered to Jim Collins by a guy by the name of John W. Gardner. And so when Jim Collins was early in his Stanford preaching career, he asked this guy Gardner for advice, who Gardner, by the way, is super interesting guy that you could do a whole, whole story about. And his quote was, it occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested? M One of my favorite quotes, and what I love about that quote is that it's, again, the first trait to me is being interested. It's not trying to be like, you talk a lot about this, where you say, well, when someone would come to you and say, I want to build my personal brand, that's sort of like, uh, that was a red flag for you that this isn't the right person, because that means they're trying to make themselves visible and you become more visible essentially by being just curious and interested in others.

Speaker A: The market, and people more specifically, they see through that. It's disingenuous and it makes it really hard, I think, to build credibility if you're just trying to be interesting versus interested. I mean, that is just great counsel. I love that. And what a great characteristic to start with in, uh, an expert. So good choice.

Speaker C: Yeah. It's funny because I would argue what's funny about that. Obviously it made a big impact because Collins wrote two of the greatest business books of all time, in my opinion. And the fundamental aspect of those books that are so compelling is that they are based on being interested. They're entirely research driven, data driven, and they're just curiosity explorations. Why do great companies become great? How? It's a super open ended question that he goes to try to, um, unlock. So. So I actually think that that's really cool that it ends up being this piece of advice he gets that clearly had an impact on his life and led us to, I would argue, one of the best thought leaders of all time in the hall of fame. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah, he's good.

Speaker C: Now my second one, you're going to laugh, is kind of the opposite. It's actually being interesting. So oddly enough, when you get interested in the world, you become insanely interesting. Right. There's this notion of T shaped individuals. So people that are super deep subject matter experts on something, but they're sort of well read, well traveled, they can connect disparate things together sort of easily. They're just interesting to talk to and you want to spend time with them. Um, people like that make for great thought leaders. The ones that can say, well, Jason, when I was in India, I saw this, this and this, or when I was backpacking in the Andes or whatever. It doesn't have to be a travel related thing. It could be anything. But it's just the people that are the best subject matter experts are the best at becoming, uh, visible experts, whatever you want to call it, tend to have those two things together. They're interested in the world and that makes them interesting.

Speaker A: Yeah, it's an interesting tension that exists. Right. I like that one as well. And I like that imagery of the T shaped individual because that broad based experience allows you to kind of weave a tapestry, be a great storyteller, give context, be able to relate to many different people. You can always contextualize ideas so that they resonate with people. I think that that's a powerful combination.

Speaker C: Yeah, good.

Speaker A: You're coming out of the gate fast, buddy.

Speaker C: Well, that's why I said these are sort of declining order. I mean that because, like, I've got five here. It doesn't mean you have to have all five. You might find that there's a person that has one or two of these things and you feel like you can build something around them or you can help them in the other areas. You know, it's not like people just show up with all these innate characteristics. You don't just show up one day and decide you're interested in the world and then you're interesting. Sometimes that happens over time. But this third one could, uh, be more than one. Honestly, I kind of mashed them together mainly because I wanted five, but also because I do think they sort of go together. And it's this idea of being both sort of flexible and cooperative and confident all at the same time. I open this by saying your inclination is to look for someone who's magnetic and owns the stage. Some of the greatest thought leaders, subject matter experts, are actually very introverted and aren't super comfortable with that unless they're in their domain where they're most successful. But at the same time, you can't be afraid to be wrong. Uh, and they have to be comfortable admitting when they're wrong. They have to be confident enough to take some arrows on their back, as you would say. When I say flexible and cooperative, what I mean is you're looking for people that are, I call them yes and people not no, but people that have very much a growth mindset and can ingest new information and pivot and say, well, um, I think this is my view on the world. And then new information shows up and they say, well, oh, I didn't thought about that or I hadn't seen that data before. Okay, well let's think about it differently. And they're okay with that. They don't kind of dig their heels in and get set in their ways and refuse to acknowledge new information. One, because they're super difficult to work with, which means it makes it hard to get high quality perspective into the market, and two, because it's damaging. At the end of the day, the world's complex and we're learning every day. And if you're not doing that, you're not going to be a very effective thought leader.

Speaker A: Well, uh, the confidence would definitely make my list because you do have to take risk, you do have to put yourself out there and you need to be okay when you're attacked. So confidence goes without, uh, saying, but as you're describing this characteristic, what I'm hearing is they have a desire to pursue truth.

Speaker C: Yes.

Speaker A: They're looking for what is right, what is correct, what is true. And when you have that mindset, you're open to adjusting your perspective. Your. What is it? Strong opinions, loosely held is kind of a mantra, I think, of, uh, real learners. But they're pursuing truth and they're open to new inputs as a result of that. And the litmus test is, does this move us towards truth? And I think that's the characteristic on top of the confidence. Um, you know that in the end, that's the goal.

Speaker C: Yeah, I really like the way you put that, that it's pursuing truth. It's funny, as you were talking, I was thinking to myself, in politics, if you change your mind, you're a flip flopper. You're branded as a flip flopper forever. You have to show up on day one of your political career with all the perfect positions already aligned and you can never deviate off them for the rest of your life. But in this, that's a huge weakness. You want the opposite of that. You want that person who's like, well, actually, it turns out I was wrong. I thought this was truth, but, oh, uh, truth looks a little differently than I thought. And it's actually also a super powerful skill to m employ in thought leadership. Being able to admit that you were wrong. It makes that person that much more powerful in delivering a message. Okay, my, uh, fourth one. You need to be articulate. And when I say that there's a belief that great thought leaders are exceptional writers. Some are Most are not. In fact, many are not. I guess most is more than many. So most are not. What I mean by that is that they're good at distilling complex ideas down and simplifying them in a way that people can understand. They're good at logically structuring their thinking. Ideally, they understand the foundations of a defensible argument and they know how to make one. If not, you can teach, people can learn that, but it's really just this idea of there's so many experts that we end up working with that really struggle just to get anything out of their head that's coherent for other people to really interpret. So someone that already has some of those skills naturally is going to be more successful than someone that struggles with those skills. I'm, um, not saying you can't develop them because I firmly believe you can. But you're looking for that person that maybe already has that now. In fact, for years, our development partner that we worked with, um, the head of that firm that led web development, I always felt like you could ask him about any piece of technology and he could give you a coherent explanation of what it was and how it worked in a way that you as a non technologist, could understand. He wasn't a visible thought leader. He wasn't out in the marketplace writing and speaking and doing all kinds of stuff, but man, he was incredibly articulate and he was a thought leader in all of his interactions with clients. Right.

Speaker B: You're listening to Rattle and Pedal Divergent thoughts on growing your professional services firm. Your hosts are Jason Malicki, principal of Rattleback, the marketing agency for professional services firms, and Jeff McKay, former CMO and founder of strategy consultancy Prudent Petal. If you find this podcast helpful, please help us by telling a friend and rating us on it. Thank you. Now back to Jason and Jeff.

Speaker C: That's my four.

Speaker A: I think that's a really good one. And my high school English teacher, Ann Richmond, would agree with you on this point. She would be succinct and to the point, Jeff. And while you don't have to be an exceptional writer, writing helps you formulate your thoughts and be succinct and to the point. And it's painful for everyone. Sure, some people can write faster than others because they have a gift, but if you're going to be a thought leader, you're going to have to write because that's how you formulate succinct arguments and get on point.

Speaker C: And it's also how you develop your thinking. I listened to a great interview this morning with Cal Newport, who wrote the book Deep Work, and he was talking about how he's greatly concerned, as others are, that AI is sort of destroying the critical thinking skills of young people, mainly because they don't feel like they have to read or write as much anymore. AI can summarize it. AI can draft a short piece, and sometimes it's that act of researching, reading, learning, and trying to write it down. Write down what you think about it is how you learn and how you develop expertise, which is, again, so again, it's almost a loop back to that notion of being interested again. Right,

Speaker A: Yeah, I agree with that one. That's a good one. All right, last one.

Speaker C: What's that? My fifth and final. Uh, there's probably more, but it's just you're looking for someone who's a great storyteller. And that's why I said these are in declining order, because that's something that I'm sure can be taught to some extent. But there are people that we know that they just know how to hold someone's attention and entertain and inform and guide all at the same time. I think back to, um, you remember that we had. I can't think of Gunnar Branson. Is that his last name?

Speaker A: Yeah, Gunnar. He's a great storyteller.

Speaker C: What a storyteller that guy is. You could sit and listen to him all day, talk about anything, and you wouldn't really. You know, he was. He was a guest on years ago. Um, and there are people like that that are just such great storytellers that if you have that person and you see that person, that's something you definitely want to lean into. I'm not going to say that that's something that's frequently there, nor is it easily identifiable, but it's a skill, uh, that if someone has, you want to take advantage of that.

Speaker A: Oh, my gosh, that one is so important. And it is both a gift and a skill. Gunner is gifted in this regard. He actually wrote a book about his childhood up in Alaska, which, when you think about a carve out for a story, what a great story. To tell. To tell. But how he tells it is incredible. But if you ask Gunner, Gunner's done a lot of writing and he's done a lot of storytelling in order to build that skill. And I think he would argue that it is gift and skill. And you're going to be starting from some point, but you need to be able to tell a story. I wish I had that gift. I wish I had the skill. Because when I look at myself, I feel like that is a characteristic. Uh, I wish I had that. I do not. But you know somebody who's a storyteller when you're sitting around them.

Speaker C: Yeah. And some of it, I think, to your point, is it's not only a gift or a skill. It's a. It's a love and a desire. Um, there are people that love to tell stories. They love to entertain. And when you have that mindset that can spill over into this work, you know, there's a belief. I've battled this belief sort of for years, which is that, uh, you know, B2B marketing is boring. Right. It's got. It's boring stuff. You know, it can't be entertaining, which is just not true. Like, you know, you can. You can find all kinds of ways to engage and entertain people while you're educating and informing them, but you got to have the confidence to do it. And as a firm, you also have to have the comfort to let it happen. A lot of firms aren't comfortable with that. They want to be suit and tie all the time, buttoned up. And anything that looks not like that is a problem that's less than it used to be. But there's still a lot of that rolling around.

Speaker A: Yeah. And I think this is also an area where your marketing team can and should be helping you. Uh, if you don't have the storytelling chops, maybe somebody on the marketing team does. Be open to letting them help you formulate a good story and let it

Speaker C: evolve, which circles back to point three. Being open to that collaborative approach to. Cooperative approach to getting a better way to get it, to get your thinking understood. Anything I missed? Those are my key five. I'm sure there's hundreds more you could come up with, but is there a key one that I missed for you? Like Jason, how did you miss this?

Speaker A: I cannot think of what it would be. Uh, I liked your list. My only addition would have been the pursuit of truth, which just built on

Speaker C: what you said, which I love, by the way. I love that notion of pursuit of truth because, uh, it comes back to that falling in love with the problem that we always talk about. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: Not the solution. We're not here to redress the solution as thought leadership and try to get the M market to think our widget is superior. We want to lead them to that conclusion. Okay, so how do we develop them? So let's retrace to the start of this conversation real quick because I think at the end of the day, like we said, you've got this problem. You're trying to decouple the firm from this visionary voice or this, uh, founder leader or whatever for one of many reasons. Now, you've identified some people, you've got some things you're looking for. And you said, okay, here's three or four people that we think are the right people to do this. Or maybe, maybe it's more. Maybe it's 10 or 15. I don't know. I mean, it all depends on the size of the firm and how widely you want to look at this process. So how do we develop them? So I came up with five things here too. And I think these are in sequential order. Uh, they might not be, but.

Speaker A: You mean we actually have to develop them. We can't just find them with those characteristics and be done and just designate them thought leaders.

Speaker C: So correct, back to point three. We can't take a fixed or, uh, point. What was it?

Speaker B: Point.

Speaker C: Yeah. 0.3. We can't take a fixed mindset to a growth oriented problem. Growth mindset oriented problem.

Speaker A: And you're telling me with these five, this is A science. So this is perfect. You identify them and every time we identify them, we're going to absolutely hit it out of the park because, uh, the criteria are so solid. And nobody's going to fail at picking a thought leader. Right?

Speaker C: 100% correct. This is an audio only podcast, but if you were watching Nvidia, you would see me in my lab with my lab coat on and there's a whole behind me. There's just walls of beakers and gear. Everything you can imagine in a science setting. I'm like Mr. Wizard here. And, uh, everything is perfectly exactly so that's the image I want everyone to take away from. This is Jason in his Mad Science Lab concocting the perfect process for minting the next Jim Collins. Because it's really easy. I don't think easy take anybody.

Speaker A: You could literally guarantee it comes with the, uh, Jason Malicki rattleback. Guaranteed to work. That's good. All right, let's jump into these five because I'm waiting with bated breath.

Speaker C: Uh, I know you're not, but. So, okay, the first one is, uh, I think music to your ears is. It all starts with culture, right? You have to make sure that you have a culture that rewards what I'm calling controlled risk taking and experimentation. Some of this is like, you just have to have a culture where it's okay for someone to have the space and time to do deep thinking and explore that thinking and try to develop perspective. If you've got a culture that is super utilization driven and all you care about is billability, it's really hard for nexperts to emerge because they don't feel like they've got the permission to do so. So you have to start with that. Do people feel like they have permission to do so? Back when I had a pretty large. Well, I'm saying large, but we had 10 or 12 people in our agency at one time. And when I started to push our thought leadership program off the ground 10, 15 years ago, that was the first thing that people would ask me is where's the time come from? When I would say, well, let's create time in your calendar and just agree on you have X amount of time in a given week that you're. You can work on this. At least that's what I try to do. There's probably better ways, but that was the first question that people were asking me, which means that our culture at the time was not set up to allow for that yet. And we had some work to do. Right. That's step one. That in place, you can't really do anything else.

Speaker A: Right, I agree, I agree. Right. Culture, yeah, slam dunk.

Speaker C: Okay. So the second thing is you have to give people a safe space. And what I mean by a safe space is a space where they can develop their voice, hone their skills, get their thinking into the marketplace without a whole lot of perceived risk or fear. Um, a few large firms I've seen do this. I really like a couple things I've seen. Um, there's a huge architecture firm called hok and years ago, what they did is they had built, they have their public facing thought leadership, which was sort of like everything you would imagine. Articles and insights, the kind of key market shaping narrative that they're trying to take. And then they had a blog. And in their case their blog was more culture oriented. Uh, lower risk spoke more to talent. But you would notice that it was a great place for a junior person to sort of build their voice and get comfortable putting themselves out there in a less risky way. And I've seen other firms do similar things. So you have to create a space where they can do it, where they don't feel threatened or at risk or they're going to get chopped off at the knees somehow by accident, whatever that is. It doesn't have to be a blog. That was just an example of one that I thought for years was a really smart way to approach it. I don't know if that was the thinking of what they were doing, but that's what I saw and what they were doing.

Speaker A: Yeah, there's a lot of different venues for doing this and they can even be internal facing. It's about building up the muscles and the muscle memory of refining your storytelling capability of being succinct and to the point. And you can do that focused internally as much as you can externally as well, which feels a lot safer for people.

Speaker C: Yeah, no, uh, you're absolutely right. I hadn't even thought about that. You think about healthy social intranet these days. That's a great place for this to happen. And a decent sized firm, quite frankly. For junior staffers, raising their visibility in the firm is really important. And it's kind of hard to do in a hybrid distributed workforce. Kind of tricky. So I love that. That's great. Uh, my third one is I said provide collaborators. And what I mean by that is I always try to tell clients that thought leadership is a team sport. There is this perspective, I think sometimes from marketers that, uh, thought leadership is the subject matter expert's job and vice versa. That's just not the case. So you can't just toss them a ChatGPT license and say go figure it out, good luck. You have to give them access to comms people and designers and videographers and editors and people that can help them develop an argument, understand the flaws in that argument, tell a story, that kind of stuff. So uh, if you want people to be successful, they need support, they can't do it on their own. And sometimes I see in firms where we have the problem, we're talking about that larger than life Persona, did it on their own, they figured it all out and they can't understand why other people can't follow that vein. And that's just usually not very realistic.

Speaker A: I think one of the most important support capabilities that a firm needs to have is a business minded marketer. Mhm. If you don't have a business minded marketer who's helping to shape the story and the argument from a business perspective, you're not well served. And I think too many firms have marketers without the business acumen required to really help take their thought leadership to the, to the next level. The marketer should not be the one doing all of the writing and formulating of the point of view. That would be just contradictory to what we're saying here. But they should be core to formulating the point of view. And most firms don't have that. And that's because they're not investing in marketing at the level that they should be. So if you don't have a marketer that can raise your thought leadership game, consider getting a new marketer or making an investment in that marketer so they can.

Speaker C: Yeah, and sometimes you talk about this, but there also has to be a desire from that marketer or marketers to want to learn the business and understand the business. Some just don't really want to um, they want the line as you call it, the practices, the folks that work in to explain the business to them and then they'll window dress it. I'm not saying that's everybody, but there are people that just aren't interested in doing it. And going back to uh, point one, you also need your marketers to be interested. They can't just be waiting for the answer. In this m portion of marketing. I'm not saying, I don't know, maybe in consumer marketing it's different, I have no idea. But in this world I think it's important for them to want to understand the business. And I'm not convinced everybody does. Some people just don't want to. And that's okay. That doesn't make them bad people, flawed human beings just means that that's not what they want. So make sure you discern that. So I love that you brought that up because that's how a healthy relationship needs to work again, as a team sport. Which leads me to the next one, which is process. Uh, we talked a lot about, you got to put a process in place for this stuff. I just think way too many firms, it's very loosey goosey. It's here's a topic. We scheduled an interview, let's talk and show up and brain dump. And that's not really very effective. You have to have a process governing how you go from this is an issue in the market. We need to take a position on to finished product, podcast, article, speaking event, whatever it might be that frames how you get from point A to point B. And when you do that, when you establish a very clear, structured process, what you do for your subject matter experts is you make their life easier because they know what's expected of them. And that's the biggest problem we see in most firms is they just don't know what's expected of them. They think they show up, you give them a topic and then you walk away and come back with some finished, crisp, complete HBR ready article. And that's not how it works. It never works like that.

Speaker A: That's right. Making sausage, uh, is, uh, an ugly task. But there is a method to the madness that might actually be a great episode for us to do at some point is what does that process look like?

Speaker C: If you don't think we'll bore everybody to sleep, I'm happy to do it.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about that.

Speaker C: We'll talk about that. You know what, we could record that. You know, if you go on, there's, uh, a, you know, water dropping or rainfall podcast. We could produce that. It could be our version of that. Could be the process. 3 o' clock in the morning and

Speaker A: need some help getting back to sleep.

Speaker C: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Here you go.

Speaker C: See Jason talk partial process. Oh my God, this is the worst.

Speaker A: No, because you're such a great storyteller, it would be compelling.

Speaker C: Kind of you to say, I'm not so sure. But

Speaker A: anyway, let's bring this thing home.

Speaker C: Okay. And the last one is just give training. I mean, it's really just teach people the elements of a well made argument. Teach them the process for developing one. Give them coaching and support along the way. Just kind of loops back to number two. Giving people safe space. One of the best ways to give them safe space is to put them into groups and give them the opportunity to work together to bring out their thinking on an issue with again, the help of a collaborator. So when we do training for clients, that's how we structure it. We structure it as you assemble people into groups, you let those groups work on an issue and give them support along the way. It's experiential learning. They're learning how to do something in a, in a safe space, in a controlled way in which they're taught process and all those things. So I can't emphasize enough how valuable that is for firms that actually invest in it. Most firms don't because they don't invest in process or training. They just don't see either ones as super important here. They just think, well, we just need a good writer in the room who can capture all my brilliant ideas and turn them into something. I need a great videographer to film everything and edit it down, AI weighted it down and it's like kind of. But I don't know if you're going to get to lasting, meaningful insight. Uh, that's my five or my ten.

Speaker A: I think one of the things that's really important and I don't know this pulls together a couple of your items. But if you're going to develop um, thought leaders, you need to get as many at bats as you possibly can in terms of formulating ideas. But the delivery of those ideas, if we separate the two, although it's a Venn diagram in my mind, because the more you talk about, write about, teach around this given topic, you're going to evolve the ideas. So get as many bats as possible. And when you think about a channel mix, writing, podcast, webinar, those are all different contexts for is context is the plural context.

Speaker C: I,

Speaker A: um, different contexts in order to present. But one of the things that I always tell my thought leaders to do, they don't all do it because it's a time requirement, but to join organization, uh, like Toastmasters, where you're up in front of people always presenting ideas, they may not be your thought leadership ideas, but it's amazing what Toastmasters methodology does to developing confidence and articulation for thought leaders. So if you live in a geography that has Toastmaster chapters, I would strongly suggest that you become a part of that because it will make a big difference in your thought leadership, creation and

Speaker C: delivery and in your career in general. Right. I mean, just getting more comfortable in front of. I mean, what's that Famous Seinfeld line is that people's two biggest fears, number one is public speaking, and number two is death. So essentially, if you're at a funeral, they'd rather be in the casket than delivering the eulogy. One of his greatest lines, right? It's like, so, yeah, it's a big fear. Big fear for people. So, um, anyway, so get some advantage. Yeah, I like that a lot too. If you bring more repetition to things, it becomes easier the more you practice. I still remember I've been writing our weekly newsletter now for, I think, I don't know, almost 15 years missed this week, by the way. So for listeners, anybody who reads it. Sorry. But, um, I still remember the first time I wrote the very first piece that went into that, and being so nervous and so scared to put this thing into the marketplace. And now I've written I don't know how many of these things. A thousand.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker C: I've lost track. Um, that's a great newsletter. Thank you. Um, but you get more comfortable over time. You get more comfortable in your voice and you get more comfortable and you get better at it as you go. Right. So that's a great piece of advice. And the Toastmasters, both of them are great pieces of advice. All right, well, thanks for going on this journey. Hopefully this was an enlightening story and not a rainfall, uh, episode for listeners.

Speaker A: So, you know the best time to start formulating your nextperts?

Speaker C: Um, yesterday.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Get started on it. Um, inertia is strong around this, particularly if you have a strong founder who's already doing the task. And that, ah, founder's probably a control freak and a perfectionist. You gotta let go of that and you have to start formulating, um, your next.

Speaker C: I'm looking forward to meeting the founder that's not a control freak and not.

Speaker A: Hey, I'm raising my hand on that front.

Speaker C: Yeah, that's a tricky one, right? I think it's hard. I think it's hard to not beat those things. I think it's such a rarity.

Speaker A: So if you're having trouble letting go, give one of us a call. We'll help you.

Speaker C: Fair ask.

Speaker B: All right.

Speaker C: Uh, man. See you next week, buddy.

Speaker B: Thank you for listening to Rattle and Pedal, Divergent thoughts on marketing and growing professional services firms. Find content related to this episode@rattleandpedal.com Rattle and Pedal is also available on itunes and Stitcher.