Succession Strategies for Founders to Retain Clients Using Sniper Marketing with Ben Baker

- Back in the 1990s, I was George Clooney. I was up in the air 200 days a year, and we both looked at each other. This is a divorce waiting to happen. I was far more comfortable in a hotel room than I was in my own bed.

I went up to my boss and I said, well, you got two choices. You could double my salary to pay for the divorce, or you can cut my travel days in half. They said, why don't we buy you out? I said.

- Ben Baker, strategic leader at. I am Ben Baker, an account developer at Get to Know Ben Baker and host of the no. On this Business Bites podcast. With 25 plus years bridging strategy, story and experience, he helps teams align, engage, and grow through meaningful change.

Most companies do a reasonably decent job marketing to their clients. They do horrific job communicating internally. I have a saying that says your brand is only as valuable as your unhappiest employee on their worst day. How do you convey that without being either an authoritarian and just saying suck it up, or being wishy washy and actually giving employees the false impression that they could change your mind.

You just say why? This is why we're doing this. Because - if you're like most of our listeners, you love the idea of running the show, but you're constantly second guessing yourself if you're ready or the person for the job. Are you missing a key skill?

Are you aware of the things you need to know? Like reading a financial statement or financing the operations of a business? We are here to solve that for you. Our new Free Ownership Readiness diagnostic will rank you from 1 to 4 on five foundational pillars of successful business ownership.

It is the ultimate confidence builder that will tell you, yes, it is time to have that conversation or know these are the areas that you might need a little bit more time to develop. If you're interested in taking that assessment, you can find the link for that down in the description below. Welcome to the Art of succession podcast with Barrett Young. Join us as we explore the strategies, stories and insights that shape the journey of leadership, transitions and business success no matter where you find yourself along the journey, this is the podcast where you'll find the tools to make it happen.

My name is Barrett Young and this is the Art of succession podcast. My guest today is Ben Baker, former president of your Brand Marketing, specializing in internal employees communication and engagement. And he's now exploring what's next. Ben, welcome to the Art of succession, Barrett.

Thanks for having me on the show. I've been excited about this conversation. Very good, I appreciate that. I'm looking forward to it.

So I wanted to ask, like, what is it that excites you about this conversation? What brings you to the art of succession? What do you really want our listeners to to gain from this episode? You know what?

For me, it's all about communication. And I find that organizations live, die, succeed, fail, you know, and grow because of communication. And you'll just because you've said it doesn't mean that people have listened to it, understood it, valued it, internalized it, and can recall it. And we need to look at organizations and say, okay, what is our purpose, mission, vision and goals?

And it just can't be laminated and put in a book somewhere. It has to be lived and how we live, that is through communication and storytelling. So I figured that would be a great place to start the conversation. Yeah.

So you explored this with your own marketing agency that you've run for the past 17 years. I mean, just share with me just a brief history. What brought you to that point? Um, around 2008 or so.

And then we'll get into, you know, how communication can help our my audience. Yeah. I'm. I am a recovering high tech sales guy.

Uh, back back in the 1990s, I was George Clooney. I was up in the air 200 days a year, and I literally woke up some mornings, got to the airport and had no clue where I was going. My secretary would send me tickets and I would head off and the way I would go, and a lot of it is, is I had $100 million client and my job was to make things right, to take care of things, build new programs, bring new products online, a whole bunch of other things. And, you know, it got me flying around North America.

I got up to the million, million and a half mile club somewhere, somewhere in that range. And my wife and I looked at each other when we got married. And that was, what, 96 and early 97. And we both looked at each other.

And this said, this is a divorce waiting to happen. I'm never home. I was literally gone 250 plus days a year. And, you know, I was far more comfortable in a hotel room than I was in my own bed.

And so I went up to my boss and I said, look, you got two choices. You can double my salary to pay for the divorce, or you can cut my travel days in half. They said, why don't we buy you out? I said, perfect.

And so I spent the next six months hiring my replacement, flying them around North America, introducing them to everybody. And then I got a six month override to just sit around and play golf. And so I did. I played golf, and I met a guy, and we played golf for about a week, and he says, well, what are you doing right now?

And I says, well, I'm in between opportunities. I don't know what I'm going to do. He says, well, we're in the direct mail business. We need people who understand how to deal with large enterprise level companies.

We need people that understand tech. I can teach you the direct mail business. I said, let's have a conversation. So one conversation led to five, which led to ten and led me coming on board and working with them for a number of years in a capacity.

I had a, you know, I had a territory and I had a piece of small piece of business, and it allowed me to really get in there and understand brand message, vision, purpose, you know, differentiation, how to create emotional ties and how to create the situation where people not only understand and value, but want to engage. And that was that was great. And that was that was a lot of fun. And it was fun until it wasn't fun.

Uh, the guy who owned the majority of the company was getting older, and he was looking to sell the company, and it was evident they didn't want to sell it to me. Uh, for some reason, he just decided that he didn't want to sell it inside the company. He wanted to sell it to somebody who didn't know the history of the company. He didn't know anything.

So I basically went up to him and said, look, I'm leaving. I'm starting my own business, and I'm going out on my own. And that was January 2008, and that was the start of your brand marketing. Okay.

So your experience was in sales and marketing up to this point? Absolutely. Very traditional, like in-person travel and direct mail at this point. What did what did your brand marketing look like for you at that point?

Did it start off doing the same kind of thing like we're going to you're going to build a competitor to your prior prior job? Yeah. It was it was basically I mean, I went out into the marketplace and I sent an email to all my clients says same great service, brand new name. Gotcha.

And 90% of my clients followed me. And we're talking, you know, provincial governments, police departments, health authorities, fairly large enterprise level companies. And the reason they followed me is because they had no idea who the company was or what the company did. They knew me.

Oh, okay. Gotcha. I was the one that they had the relationship with. I was the one that they had built a level of trust with.

I was the one that knew birthdays and anniversaries and kids names and all those sort of things. So there was no reason for them to stay with the old company. What I was able to do, everything that they were able to do, but just do it on my own, which I was doing on my own anyway. What I did is I built a set of vendor partners.

So instead of having all those services in the house, I built it with a set of vendor partners. And the business expanded, expanded into brand storytelling, into trade show development, into social media marketing and social media came online and a variety of other things. But it's always been brand messaging, messaging and messaging. It's always about how do you differentiate it?

How do you tell a story that people care about? How do you tell a story that tells people why they should deal with you compared to your competitor? And how do you get that story not only told by you, but by your staff? And through them, through to your customers so they can tell it and retell it and build champions for your brand.

So, I mean, we think of direct mail nowadays, and direct mail companies basically sell you a list. You're you're actually going into the companies at this time and saying, what's your message? What are the pain points. What are.

What's the offer that we're that we're producing here. So you're really handling the entire campaign? Oh yeah. I mean in the in the here's the perfect example.

One of our clients was a large 35 or 40 store, uh, grocery store chain. So they were, you know, they're not enterprise level, but they were certainly they were big in their in in their neck of the woods in Washington state, especially northern Washington state, you would know who they were. And they their competitors was Albertsons. And every time Albertsons dropped a flier, they I would get this panicked phone call and said, oh my God, they dropped the flier.

You need you need to do this. And I went, no, actually we don't. Let's stop. Let's let's pull back a little bit.

Let's figure out, okay, how do we cause them pain instead of them causing us pain in us being reactive? How do we cause them pain? What can we do that they can't do? Well, we have a better relationship with our clients.

We have a better and a more well known, you know, in-store brand. We have a better database than they do. Believe it or not, we did. And because of that, we were able to do a lot more sniper marketing and be able to create a lot of campaigns that left Albertsons, you know, on their heels rather than us being chasing the bigger, the bigger fish.

So this is like really targeted marketing at this extremely extreme. There were apps and getting collecting everybody's email addresses and everything like that. It's like this target segment of who we have and we're going to speak directly to them. Yeah.

So how do you gain attention in something as crowded as direct mail? How do you gain the right eyeballs to that piece of content? And then, you know, how do we'll modernize that as we get on in the discussion, but I'm just interested in hearing like that's the hard part. Even for businesses today, there's so much content.

It's not physical paper anymore, but it just scrolls right by you. It's got to be some of the same principles without being hokey or without being, you know, fat. It is chasing fads. It's a matter of sitting there going, what does your client care about?

It's not about what you care about. It's not about what you want to sell them. It's what do they want to buy? In particular in this grocery store chain.

And then I'll tell you about a casino client of mine that we did. We had a 45% response rate for three years running. But for the grocery store chain, we found out when the women were on prenatal vitamins. Well, guess what?

We were able to chase them for the next 2 to 3 years with diapers and pablum and, you know, and all the sort of things that need that women need as the as they go through pregnancy and the first 2 or 3 years of raising a kid and be able to create sniper based coupons that were targeted directly at them. So we were able to come up with things like that. How how do you sit there and say, what are what are my clients looking for? What's the pain point that they have?

What what enables them to to want to come to us instead of our competitor? And a lot of it is people want to feel listened to, understood and valued. And when we can do that, we do. We have the ability to differentiate ourselves in a crowded marketplace with the casino clients.

The first time I walked into their into their server room and I looked at their database, I almost drooled and they said, what's going on? I said, do you know what you have here? They said, no. They said, well, we've we've got players cards.

I said, no, you got birthdays, you got anniversaries. You know who comes, how often they come, you know what games they play. You know how much they spend. You know how much time they spend at the casino.

Yeah. - We created a monthly birthday card program that went out where we sent out 50,000 variably printed direct mail birthday cards every single month, inviting them and their friends to come down. They got a free, free lunch. Everybody that they brought down got a free piece of birthday cake.

They got an offer based on how much money that they spend there. Everybody that came with them got $10 in free play. - Not only did they come down by themselves, they also came down with all their friends. Their friends who didn't have players cards, got players cards.

And all of a sudden we're starting to collect data on their friends. So we built that list from 50,000 people a month to 85,000 people a month. Wow. We went from getting sending out direct mail that was getting 3 to 5% response rate to 45% response rate.

We were making millions of dollars a month, - and it was all based on making the customer feel special. Yeah, I mean, it's very relational what you're dealing with there. And you said they were dealing with you. They weren't dealing with the company.

How do you help a company going through a transition like that? You know, I'm thinking direct mail at the time. There's probably like, we've got a new partner coming in. This is the new partner introduction postcard or something like that.

How do you target that towards succession planning, even, um, to allay fears and reassure and say, you know, still the same kind of company, uh, just new face, something like that. I think a lot of that has to do is that, hey, what do we want to achieve? What who do we want to be seen as 3 to 5 years down the road? Both internally and externally.

Now let's innovate from the company. From that point backwards. And we have to sit there and say, how do we want people to feel about us within the corporation? Where are we today?

Where do we want to be? Where is the dichotomy? Where, where, where's the bridge that we need to build, and how do we build that bridge? And every single situation is different because it depends on what is the culture that you're, that you're going into.

Are you in a fast driving culture that is all about get stuff done at any and all cost, or you had a culture that is about the human beings are the essence of the organization and truly mean it, never mind what it says on the placards. Who are you truly as an organization and who do you want to be as an organization? Because you may sit there and say, we're a hard driving company, we're realizing this isn't working for us to move that to a human based, purpose driven organization is months and years of work, more years and work than months.

And it's done step by step, slowly, by building champions within the organizations it's build through, you know, building new leadership, building new leadership skills training and a constant communication of mission, vision, purpose and values. And it's not just placating people. It's showing people along the way that we don't just. We're not just saying this.

We're doing it from a leadership point of view. The leaders have to be bought in on this, and they have to be making decisions about, you know, how the company is run, the investments that they make, the training that they provide, the services that they do, the type of clients that they work with, the type of employees that they put up with and, and all of those need to be brought to bear to be able to enable that transition happen. How do you get the leadership on board? I mean, obviously, if you're increasing a mailing list 50,000 to 85,000.

That's pretty convincing. Millions of dollars or new revenue is pretty, pretty convincing. But I would imagine, you know, so much of marketing is just like, here, here's some money. Do something with it.

You know, show us results. They're kind of like throwing it off to the side, or we need to do something. You know, trying to get the the owners, the leaders of the company to buy into their own marketing, to see marketing as a value driver. How do you how do you do how do you convince them of that?

You need to understand to be able to speak in their language. Okay. What are the goals of the organization? Never mind the goals of the marketing department or the communications department, or the internal communications department, or the HR department.

What are the goals of the organization? What are the pain points? What are the challenges? What are the hopes, wants, fears, needs, and aspirations of those people within the C-suite?

You know, what do they want to see over the next five years? What are they sitting there going, wait a second. This is not working. Whatever this is, this is not working.

We need to fix this. Okay. Now, marketing, HR, comms, whatever needs to be brought to bear to be able to provide solutions that fixes that particular problem. It's understanding the language of economics, of business, of the CFO, and also of the other people within the C-suite to be able to understand how do we bring an alliance amongst these different departments to be able to look at a problem from the same side of the desk, looking over the desk to the problem, instead of you being on one side of the desk and then being on the other side.

So there's too many organizations where departments say, well, this is what I'm being budget to do. I'm just going to do it. But they don't ask the right questions. They don't ask the why?

Why are we doing this? What problems does doing this solve? Whose life do we make better by doing this? And when organizations and leaders can sit there and manage 365 and be able to have those conversations at a senior level.

That's when stuff gets done. And that's when people stop being ignored and start being brought to the table. I mean, in a way, your first marketing campaign is the leadership of the company, right? Absolutely.

You're doing the exact same thing to get grab their attention, to see them identify their pain and see you as the solution, as you're also saying, we can we can do for you then. Well, it's building trust. Yeah, it's building trust. I mean, I look at H.

R. for, for, you know, they're they're constantly being ignored. And unfortunately, that's that's a lot of the truth of the matter is that H.R.

tends to be seen as a revenue depleting or part of the organization, and not a revenue generating part of the organization. The trick is, they can be if they took a look and looked at all their programs and say, says, look, by doing this, this and this, this is how we're increasing revenue within the company by doing this, this and this. This is how we're able to afford the objectives to be reached. Then they're going to get a lot more budget.

It's how stuff is couched. It's not what you say, it's how you say it. And people need to be able to speak in the language that's understood, not to speak in their own myopic speaking tone, that that is department centric. Yeah.

I imagine even as a marketing company, that's hard to to do as well, because probably the tendency in marketing is we we work with casinos. We know casinos or. You know. I always feel like marketers, they they come in and they act like they know my customers.

They act like they know me when really, I'm the one with the expertise. I just don't know how to express it in the same way that they do to actually, you know, trigger action. How do you deal with that when you're moving into a new industry, a new field of we have expertise that you need to tap into, but I need you to be engaged as the owner to tell me, you know, your what you know about your clients. You've got the 40 years experience in the industry, and I think it almost needs to be that blunt.

It truly does to sit there and say, look, there's so many organizations that say we're just going to hire somebody with with casino marketing experience because it's easier for us. Yeah, yeah, they speak our language off. But the problem is they're going to present you the same as they did the last 30 clients that they worked with. And it looked like everything's gonna look now.

Every other casino out. There you go. You're going to look like every other grocery store, every other law firm, every other accounting firm, whatever. Better.

It's almost better to hire somebody that has understanding of how to tell a story, and how to build a brand, and how to listen to who you are as an organization than somebody that comes in with preconceived biases and understanding of of what they think the industry is and what it should be. And that's the level of conversation that I come in and says, look, my job is to not know your business as well as you do. You are the expert in your business. My job is to ask why?

My job is to sit there and ask the questions that nobody else within your organization is asking, because everybody assumes everybody knows the answer. And quite honestly, everybody doesn't know the answer. Google doesn't know all the answers. AI doesn't know all the answers.

Okay, we have to test them and find what you know. What we do know is right and what we find out is wrong. Right? Exactly.

Yeah. Marketing is experimentation. Because what worked over here five years ago doesn't work here today. Yeah, because it's always changing, right?

Especially with Covid. I mean, the tactics and techniques that I used in 2019 are not the same tactics that I used in 2021. The world changed. Yeah.

And it's not going back. And you need to look at things differently. You need to communicate differently. You need to approach clients differently because they're thinking differently.

Yeah I want to talk. I do want to get into like how you turned to internal communication, because I think that that's fascinating and has application for for this discussion. But before we do that, like when you are really good at a marketing tactic, how do you, as a business owner of a marketing agency, determine we need to shift like you could be. I mean, there are still companies out there that are still pushing heavy on direct mail.

Some even say it's coming back, but you have to, like, update your tactics as the time goes on. Like you said, you you guys added social media as that started to take off. How do you make that determination rather than just like, we're really good at this and we're going to maximize efficiency on this versus bridging into something completely new. I'll explain to what I explain to clients when I talk to them about promotional marketing.

I used to go for 15 or 18 years. I used to go down to Vegas every year for the PPA show. There was 3500 vendors and probably a half a million different promotional marketing pieces that were down there. Every coffee, mugs, lanyards, pins, you name it.

It's anything and everything you can think of. You can do it. Oh my gosh. A conference for swag promotion.

It's a swag conference. It's the biggest swag conference in North America. It is. It's overwhelming.

Extra suitcases. Oh, absolutely. Forget about that. They got stations that you just dropped stuff with your with a barcode, and it automatically has your UPS code.

And they just shipped stuff home for you. So I used to, I used when I first went to these conferences I would ship home ten boxes. Oh my gosh. Because I had a I had a huge team and they, you know, it was cheaper for me to send stuff home for them to look at than it was to bring ten people to Vegas with me.

So, you know, we used to bring the top 2 or 3 people to Vegas and everybody else got the stuff from the show. But what I tell people is, is, look, there's a half a million. There's now over probably a million promotional products out there. 99.

9% of those pieces are wrong for your particular campaign. Wow. Okay. They're the wrong color.

They're the wrong message. They're the wrong product. They don't tell the right story. They don't align with your brand.

They don't align with your message, whatever. And it's a matter of figuring it out. The same thing goes with any tactics. Like I don't sell B2C anymore.

Heaven for years. For me to be on TikTok is ridiculous. You know, first of all, I'm too old for the TikTok dance. And second of all, it's just it's not my audience.

But it's great for other people. And we need to understand that not every medium is good for everybody. And to sit there and say there is no magical bullet, if you're on LinkedIn, you're going to you're going to make $1 million. No, maybe you won't.

Right. And so what we need to sit there and say, what are the mediums and the tactics that are going to work for you? And let's go out there and explore that and bring those things on board. And because of the way that I ran my business, I was able to bring experts on board on any particular thing, use them for that particular campaign, utilize their expertise, and then send them all their way and pay them well for it instead of having, you know, everything looks like a nail.

Because all I own is a hammer. And if you are an organization that has certain expertise in house, that's all you're going to sell. Yeah. And it works well for you because it keeps these people employed.

But there's no guarantee that that's the right solution for that client. And so marketing companies and you know, companies that are that want to have marketing done need to realize that, say, you know what? In today's world, there is no magic bullet. There is no easy button.

There's no definitive answer. There are tactics and processes that are going to work for you and your clients, and that's what needs to be explored and everything else. Throw on the garbage pile and you may pick it up later. In five years from now, you may pick it up and dust it off and say, hey, wait a second here.

That may work. But for the time being, with limited budget and time and effort. You can only do so much and you can only reach so many people. And better to spend the money and the time and the effort on the people that are going to make you money, then try to be everybody's friend, where all of a sudden nobody's going to see value in what you do.

What about when I guess you have a you have an existing market. This is where our typical client hangs out. This is, you know, has always worked for us. I'm coming into a company.

I've got different ideas. I want aspirational me to reach the clients that are on TikTok. I mean, some somebody is going to do it. I mean, there are tax preparers absolutely that are that are huge on TikTok.

So how do you deal with that? You know, the tried and true is, you know, membership dues at the country club and the local chamber. But I want to try and experiment with something else, like how do you how do you bridge that gap and run those experiments and then decide, nope, it's not paying off. You're not suited for the TikTok.

You need to leave that to somebody else. I think what you need to do is, is allocate a certain percentage of your budget. I say 15 to 20% for those experimental things of your marketing, of your marketing, specifically of your marketing budget. Say, listen, we have $100,000 marketing budget.

We have $20,000. We're going to test those on Facebook ads, or we're going to taste them on 50% on Facebook ads and 50% of them on TikTok ads, which is a better way of doing it? And then what you do is you a B test within that to sit there and say, okay, which is giving me a better poll, which is which is bringing in the audience that is actually spending money with me, which is bringing in the people. And you need to sit there and say, not over a week, not over a month, but over 3 to 6 months to be able to sit there and say, we're going to give this an honest three, and you're looking for trends, okay?

You're not looking you're not looking for absolute dollar amounts. With these things, you're looking for trends, and you may do little tweaks along the way to be able to, you know, say, okay, this is working, but this isn't working. Let's try this instead of that. But you need to be able to sit there and say, I'm going to take a reasonable amount of money.

I know this is working. I'm not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater, but I'm going to take 20% of my funds and I'm going to put this towards AI ads. TikTok just don't spend all the money on one page ad on the New York Times. It's not going to do anything for you.

You know, if you do, it's it was like you might as well buy a lottery ticket. But what you need to do is have consistent, ongoing marketing within a platform and test it and with with serious KPIs. As a matter it says, we want to see this kind of result, this this type of customer, this type of conversation coming in, this type of, um, you know, product being bought or whatever service being bought within this 3 to 6 month period of time. And take a look and sit there and say which one is giving you the better bang for the buck.

And then you double down and you try it again and you sit there and say, okay, maybe it wasn't Facebook ads, maybe it was LinkedIn's ads. All right, let's see if LinkedIn and TikTok work. Which which one works best, LinkedIn or TikTok? Wait a second here.

We thought TikTok was was the bomb. We went over to LinkedIn. We're getting ten times the amount. And so if you're not a B testing this, if you're not, if you're not looking at this in a way to sit there and say compare A to B, you have no way of knowing whether you're doing a good job, you're not doing the job, but everybody should be testing, everybody should be experimenting, everybody should be risking a portion of their marketing budget.

Not all their marketing budgets, certainly not the majority of their marketing budget, but a reasonable amount that that enables you to sit there and say, huh, let's test this theory and see if it works. How do you test that with the other 80% that's doing the tried and true where you. You are starting to pay attention and seeing it's not paying off the way that it used to. Like how do you shift?

It's almost like a reverse experiment or cutting off something that used to work. And it's not. But you're spending 80% of your budget on there. And so if it brings in, you know, one client this year, somebody could say, see, it's successful.

It paid for itself. And I think you need to sit there and say, what happened if we go to 50%? What happens if we go to 60? Get the same.

Do we do we get the same bang for the buck? If if we spend 50% instead of 75% on this particular medium, - what differentiation do we get? Oh, wait a second. Here we went.

We went to 50%. God, we lost our shirt. We all all of a sudden we're not getting anywhere near the type of, uh, you know, context that we wanted. We're not getting the people that we're looking for.

Okay, maybe you need to bump it up a little bit. I look at it like medication. You know. I'm on an acid reflux medication.

You know, I was I was on one pill, and I. And I really wanted to sit there and say, you know, could could, you know, could I go off of it? So I went off of it for six weeks. Well, that was the worst mistake I ever made.

So I went back to one day and I feel much better. - You know, you tried it. You try it within a limited period of time. You you try it with a reasonable expectation in mind.

You don't cut it off saying, I'm never going to do this again. You sit there and say, what happens if we do this? What happens if we augment just a little bit? What happens if we we we take our mix and we mix it up just a little bit and test it and verify and have, you know, ways to to find out whether people you're actually getting the response that you're looking at.

Don't look at it as anecdotally, you need to have data - And be able to say, what kind of pull through are we getting? Are we getting if our customer experience. Well, all of a sudden, our customer service, our customer experience lines will say what kind of conversations are starting to happen when we make this differentiation? What kind of changes are we going to make?

Basically, when we take a look at how stuff is being ordered and in the online ordering, what's what's changed? When we take a look at this, the change in our marketing and be able to look at this from an objective point of view, it says, well, I don't know, my brothers, sisters, cousins, you know, told me that LinkedIn was the bomb. Mhm. That doesn't work.

- It may be the bomb for them. It doesn't mean it's going to be the bomb for you. So far we've talked you know, direct mail and a lot of this stuff is very much about high volume transactional. Like where are you going to eat dinner tonight.

Are you going to go to the casino for your birthday. Kind of low dollar but high high rate response rate kind of transactions. What I struggle with is when you have the higher level services, it's like we need to market something that's going to be at $250,000 investment. How do we do that?

Um, get people to know, like and trust when you are a huge dollar spend on that. Um, like I struggle with like what is your initial offer? What's a low, you know, um, a low barrier to entry or that initial purchase that gets people to test you out? How do you work with brands on that?

To say we need to chunk this or we need to, you know, find ways to test this? Yeah. And that's where I live and die is those B2B, you know, 100,000 to $1 million purchases. And a lot of it comes down to sitting there going, who do we really need to talk to?

We don't need to talk to IBM. Who do we need to talk to at IBM? What do those people care about? You know, it's it's sniper marketing.

It's go to market. It's, you know, it's looking at it going. Account based marketing. And a lot of it comes down to sitting there and say, okay, - years ago and we're talking a lifetime ago, I started off working with Xerox, and one of the best things I ever did in my life was take the Xerox sales training.

And the Xerox sales training said, if you don't have three different contacts in three different departments, you're not in that company. So it's like senior level mid-level manager, for lack of a better word work worker bee. And if you don't have that in three different divisions, three different departments within the organization, you're not in that company. And you need if you're going after 100,000.

Quarter million dollar million dollar. 5 million, $10,000,050 million purchases. Being buddies with the purchasing agent is not going to do it, you know. And that's that's realistic.

Uh, there's a guy that I knew that, you know, and I've been podcasting for 14 years who owned a company out of where he's out of Prince Edward Island in the States. And what they did is they sold million dollar tractor trailers. But instead of the tractor trailer of the trailer raising to dump it had a treadmill on it. So whatever you were trying to do, it, just the stuff would just slide out.

Okay. Yep. He went to a, uh, a meeting with a client in Montana to. And this guy was going to buy millions of dollars of product, and he had brought his pitch deck and all that kind of stuff.

He says, don't worry about your pitch deck. He says, I've already seen your LinkedIn posts. I've already seen your YouTube videos. I've already listened to your podcasts.

I know who you are as a company. Let's talk how we can work together And it was happen drip by drip over time and being able to build that know like and trust. And you know when I'm going after whale clients you expect it's a 12 to 18 month process. It doesn't happen quick.

It doesn't happen. You know with the flash of light. It happens over time because you've built trust not only with one person, but maybe with 30 people within a company. And you know who's on the buying committee and what are the what are their hot, what are their hot buttons?

And being able to build marketing pieces that you can drip into their pockets that talk about how you understand who they are as a company and what their challenges are and how they sell to their clients, and how to make it easier for them to sell to their clients using your product. That does relieve a little bit of pressure for me, because so much of marketing is you need to have a 50 or a $600 offer. You need to have something that's a small, easy purchase. But I'm thinking about to my own purchasing habits, I've bought $39 Excel templates or PDFs or something like that.

And then it came time for the big purchase when somewhere else. Because in my mind, I'm like, no, that's it. Kind of pigeonholed them on this smaller purchases. But but you're saying you just need to be known by the people.

That decision might not ever have any kind of indicator for those 12 to 18 months that they're even looking at you. They've not signaled a buying habit towards you. But when the time comes, you want to be the one that 3 or 4 people in the company are like, this is the one we should go with. And let's face it, your CFO is not going to go to your $50 webinar.

They're going to send some somebody minions minion, to go to go to a $50 webinar. And it all depends where that information gets passed up, up the chain or not. And that's going to matter if that minions minion thinks that this reflects well on them. Exactly.

And yeah. Okay. Gotcha. But by me saying this, I'm.

What am I risking by recommending this new vendor? Yeah. What am I risking? Am I risking my job?

Am I risking my reputation? Am I risking my promotion? Are you. Am I risking my bonus?

Am I risking being fired? I want to shift into internal communication now because a marketing friend of ours that did our website and everything, she. She works with accountants and and she said she was the first one to let me in on this. Like, if you have a hiring problem, if you can't find good team members, you have a marketing problem.

And I'm like, oh my gosh, that's like really good. Um, talk to me about your own shift to internal communication, getting team buy in and, you know, engaged in the mission and everything like that. How that how that insight first came to you and then how you guys shifted. Yeah, I mean, this is going back 15 plus years ago, and the conversation is.

Most companies do a reasonably decent job marketing to their clients. They do horrific job communicating internally. And that came from years of dealing with internal clients and the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing. Seeing the silos, seeing the, you know, the competitive nature within the organization, seeing you know, the all the stuff that goes along with that, that leads to the transition.

I have a saying that says your brand is only as valuable as your unhappiest employee on their worst day, and there are so many organizations that tell a great story outside the company, and the people inside the company have no idea what's going on, and they feel left out. They feel devalued. They don't feel part of this part of the situation and they don't feel that they matter. And that really bothered me.

And I decided 15, 16 years ago something in that range that it was time to bring internal comms into my, you know, quiver. And it's expanded since then. It'll be a very large percentage of the business that I do, but I find that we as organizations need to be able to tell the stories inside our organization, to align teams, to build purpose and vision and get people excited about what they do on a daily basis, and that they feel that they matter. I mean, this is more than just HR.

This is more than just rewards programs and recognition. It really is like this is the marketing message that we have for our outside world, our clients and everything we're are. We're getting them engaged in the same thing. I guess I struggle with this.

So CPA firm, I'm a marketing partner. I have a marketing assistant within the company. I struggle to get the rest of the team engaged in the marketing message because they're like, we're tax preparers. We're bookkeepers.

You know, that's not really our responsibility. Um, I guess where am I going wrong? I think how much of that is their responsible responsibility is the wrong word. Okay.

I think you don't want this to be an obligation. You want this to be something that they want to do, and you need to give them information that's easy to share and in stories that they want to share. Let's face it, if you've got a team of ten people, each one of them on your on if they're on LinkedIn might have 500, 500 connections. I'd be you know, I've got thousands of connections, but let's say they've got 500 connections.

That's 5000. 5000 people seeing a message. If if, if if the LinkedIn algorithm allows everybody to see it. Yeah, that's a different story altogether.

But it's giving them stuff that it shows how the work that they are doing - matters to the company and how this is making the clients lives better. So it's using the marketing to tell the story of your, of your employees and how they're championing your clients and being able to do that, because not only are you giving your your employees reason to champion your cause, but you're giving the employees who see that if they're tagged in that or the customers that are that are in this, that see this, give them reason to share it as well, because they work with those employees.

Exactly. Be thrilled to see them succeed, do so. Yeah. And their name is part of it as well.

Yeah. You know, if you're mentioning client X and you're tagging client X and your LinkedIn post or your or your tweets or your oh, sorry, it's your X, not your tweet anymore. Um, or whatever. People like seeing their name in print.

People share their name. That's in print. People you know, you'll get excited to see their name in print and feel like, oh, what do I have to do to get that, to have that happen again? And it's it's just saying that says, you know what?

We were working on this project and so-and-so, so-and-so and so-and-so with leads on, and we came up with this new idea to do dah dah, dah, dah dah dah. And it enabled our, our clients, you know, our three biggest clients, dot, dot, uh, to be able to, you know, get a 15% return return on something that they, that they weren't expecting and show the wins. And it's not just look at me, look how wonderful I am. And we're look at we're another CPA for nobody cares.

Nobody cares that you know. There's probably 50,000 CPA firms across North America. And I may be out. I may be I might be heavy.

I have no idea, but nobody cares. People care about what problems did you solve and how did you make people's lives better? And if we, through our marketing, can tell those stories and turn the people that are actually doing the work into champions and show, show how because of their hard work. Things were better for the clients than everybody's going to share that.

So it's not, you know, how often you share, it's what you share and why you're sharing it. And the reason to share it is to show how wonderful our team is and how amazing they are and how and what incredible job they're doing for our clients. Mhm. Yeah that's good.

I mean that's so much more than just hey we posted something. Go and repost it on your profile. It's really again, how does this reflect on me? Do I want my connections to know this about me?

Does it you know, internal communication through transition, internal communication through change. - How do you communicate? How much is too much? Is there such thing as too much when the vision is or not?

The vision, but the future result is uncertain. I've had people that I can overcommunicate on some things and communicate on others. It causes some people to worry because they're not entrepreneurial like I am. They don't like fuzzy futures.

They want to know certainty. So how do you work through the and just the different audiences? I can't not tell half the company something because it scares them. And tell the other half something.

No. And not expect them to talk to each other. So here here's the perfect example. This is going back a few.

This is just pre-COVID, like a year and a half or two years pre-COVID. Okay. One of my clients was a 50,000 employee company that bought an 8000 employee company. Yeah.

Okay. Well, and I said to them, this is how are you onboarding these people? And I get this deadpan look, we bought them. We bought.

That's our end. I said, how are you going to get them into the mission? Vision. Purpose, goals.

Bring them into the culture. Get them to understand what differentiates the old company from the new company, how to tell the new story, how to get them aligned with the existing employees and all that kind of stuff. I got more deadpan look and I said, okay, what if we created an internal private and secure podcast and once a week for three years through the pandemic, we told the stories of transition, and we brought people on from different departments talking about different projects, you know, different product lines, people from the old company on with people from the new company with similar roles talking about how you know what, what differentiated, talking about the HR people from the old company of the new company, talking about culture and vision and bringing the see, we brought the CEO on board at least at least once a quarter to talk about what was coming up.

And the thought, thought process is what was what is, what's going to be. And what it led to was a 10% reduction in attrition, less than what they were expecting. They were expecting an attrition rate of X. We reduced it by 10%.

Now, if we had done your traditional onboarding technique and we'd take everybody into a series of rooms and, you know, put them up in hotels and fed them and, you know, basically transport them in, it was going to be 2 to $3000 per person over those, over those 8000 people. So let's let's call it on an easy side. 16 million bucks, you know. 16 million bucks.

We did this for under three. So we saved them 80%. And they had a far better transition, far less loss. And they estimated every employee that they lost by the time they lost them, by the time they hired somebody, by the time they retrained the person, by the time they got somebody back up, you know, to speed was a minimum of $100,000 per employee.

Sure. And you saved them 10% of that lost year, year and a half to get somebody else in that position trained up and everything. Exactly. All right.

How do you do that at a smaller company? So not 50,000 to 8, but exactly I mean, 20, 20 employees. And we just bought another firm with four. I think that you you need to have huddles.

You know, I think you need to have huddles on a regular basis, and you need to have leadership that cares about telling people where you've been, where you are and where you're going. I mean, that's the same way you go through crisis management, the same way you go through crisis management is you don't pull punches and you let people have the mic. You let employees have the mic and say, well, what about this? And then sit there and answer that question, well, what about this?

And then you answer that question and you say, you know what, I don't know. How about we work through this together or I don't know. Let me find out. Let me get back to you.

And a lot of it comes down to open and honest communication, and a lot of it has to do with being available in a smaller organization. It comes down to senior leadership being available and senior leadership acting like they actually really care and not just dialing it in, actually caring and just say, look, you are new people within our organization. We bought this company. We didn't just buy it for the assets.

We want the people who came into this company to succeed. And this can happen through transition of owners. This can happen with a merger, you know, merger and acquisition. This can happen through any of that kind of stuff is that leadership needs to be available.

There needs to be an open door policy through the transition. And this could be six months. It could be two years, depending on how big the organization is and how complex the merger is. And if you have to have a culture of saying, you know what, we're not sure this is new for everybody.

Let's figure this out together and let's make this work. And or you know what? I understand that that's what you want. Unfortunately, with our physical reality is our economic realities, our fiscal realities, whatever.

We can do this, but we can't do that. Can you live with that? Yeah. And you may lose some people, but you can't be afraid to lose some people by being honest with them, because you will lose them if you're not honest with them.

Yeah, I mean, that was going to be my follow up to that is like open door policy. Some things can't change no matter how open door it is, no matter how many, even no matter how many people on the incoming team protest against it, this is the reality. This is the person that's taking over the company. And you, you do need to live with it to a degree.

We're going to be open about it. We're going to be answer questions and concerns, but it's not going to change our mind. Yeah. How do you convey that without being either an authoritarian and just saying suck it up or being wishy washy and actually giving employees the false impression that they could change your mind?

I think you got to just say why. This is why. Okay? You know, this is why we're doing this.

We're doing this because this, this, this and this. And you don't have to give them all the hate in the bargain. You don't have to go into the details that says, look, we're a little fiscally short right now. And, you know, we may not make payroll next month.

You know, if you're going to make payroll, you're going to make payroll. If you're not going to make payroll, that's a different conversation altogether. And that's a conversation you have to have, but that's not a conversation you have until you have to have it. But we need to sit there and say, look, we've invested in this, this, this and this.

There just isn't the financial ability for us to do this, this and this right now. We're willing to do this, but we can't do that. How does that work for you if it doesn't work for you? I'm sorry, but that's the way it is.

As I said, you're going to lose some people every transition. You're going to have somebody whose nose is out of joint, some somebody who didn't get the raise that they wanted, somebody didn't get. The few people were going after a, you know, after a promotion. And only one of them got it.

You know, somebody knows is going to be out of joint. It's how you deal with it and just say, look, this is the reason they got this is because of this. For instance, you know, I was going after a particular client and they said, we're going with the other company because they're aligned with with 3 or 4 of our other clients. It makes for a really easy transition.

They not only understand us, but they they understand our clients as well. And our clients speak very highly on them. Okay. I can't I can't fight that.

You know, there's certain things you just can't fight in life. Yeah. And, you know, you can be upset about it. You can be frustrated about it.

You can maybe think it's not fair. But that's reality. And, you know, you you have two choices. You can either as an individual find the work around to make yourself happy with it still within the organization.

Or you can go find another organization that's going to make you happy. Right. That's your choice. I'm thinking from a marketing perspective, that's still a call to action, right?

Of course, a call to it's a call to be on board or it's a call to get off board either way. Don't just coast. Like make a decision based off of that internal marketing, right? Yeah.

And make making it clear what the call to action is in either case. Yeah. And it's it's tough. You know, it's really tough because you don't want to lose people.

You don't want to lose good people, you know. But the thing is, is that if you can't afford to give somebody a 30% raise, don't give somebody a 30% raise. But don't, you know, not give somebody a 30% raise, they leave. And then all of a sudden you you realize it's going to cost you 40% more to, to bring somebody new on board because you have to pay market rate, you know, know what it's going to cost you to bring somebody on at market rate before you say no to this person, because if it's only going to cost you 30% to to give somebody the raise and it's going to cost you 40% by the time the smoke clears to pay some of the market rate and bonus and, and maybe an HR company to, to fund it on top of that, you might as well pay somebody the 30% because you're going to pay it anyway.

But you need as an organization, you need to be able to have all that information in your hands before you go out and have that conversation. Um, Ben, we're coming up to the end of our time. Yeah. I'll give you an opportunity to.

Thank you so much for the wisdom here. I do have one more question before I ask if there's anything I missed, but sure, I struggle with that. You have to tell somebody something seven times for it to sink in. I feel like that's going to be dependent on the on the person to some extent.

And then I also struggle with, you know, here's an issue we had last year, our clients don't read their engagement letter. We spelled things out in their engagement letter. They didn't read it. Then when they were confronted with reality a lot, some of them got upset.

And how much of that is their responsibility for not engaging with it? How much of that is my responsibility for not properly marketing it or repeating it or, you know, team members that miss something and we've sent seven plus messages about this, but they just they miss it. So how much of that is I, as the speaker, need to make the message clear in the place where they read it and where it matters to them. And how much of that is the responsibility of the of the hearer to hear and read?

Are you asking me as a lawyer? Are you asking me as a. - Marketer? Yes, I'm as a marketer, I'm strictly a marketer.

Yeah. Strictly. This is not legal advice or financing. This is not legal or financial advice, you know, because strictly said somebody signed the contract.

Well, you know that that's for the legal department to deal with, right. Um, they the the feelings, the the upset is real either way. But here here's reality is I'm dealing I'm dealing with the situation right now. Exactly that where a fairly large corporation sold us a television, it showed up damaged.

They're taking forever to to to respond and to deal with this is you know, and they're finally telling me that, you know that it's going to take me. They'll refund the TV, but it's going to take them eight weeks for them to cut me a check. Okay. Yes.

It's in their terms and conditions buried on page 37. It's buried on page 37. I went looking for it, and now they've got somebody that not only is never going to buy their product ever again, I will tell every single person that asks me how horrible they are as a company to deal with, and that's reality. The trick is, do you spend the time in the effort up front, having one on one conversations with clients and highlighting things and going through the contract and say, listen, here are the 5 or 10 things you and it might be having a one page or at the very beginning of the of your terms and conditions that say, here are the five things you should really be paying attention to.

They still didn't read that. And sure. But the thing is, you need. You may end up having to go through them and walking it through them hand by hand.

Yeah. You know, and that's reality. The question is, is how much of a problem is it's on the back side. How much grief is this causing you on the backside having to deal with people and say, well, I didn't read that line, you know?

Well, you signed it. Well, that doesn't matter because in the end they're upset. Yeah. And it doesn't matter whether you're right or you're wrong.

They're going to walk away from the relationship either feeling that they're cheated, that that you don't care, or that you've been deceptive and it's your brand at stake. And the question is, at that particular time, you need to sit there and say, how can I create something that's better that does this? Maybe it's creating a small a one minute video or a three minute video that's funny. You know, some funny video that goes over and say, hey, no one ever reads our terms and conditions here, you know?

So, so what we did is we created this video, it says, here's the five things that you really should pay attention to. They're on page one, three, seven, five and 18. You know what? I'll leave it to you to read through this.

But here's the things in a nutshell of what they should say. And maybe you do. That is something funny that you send send to people. That it's a 1 to 3 minute video that tells tells them that story.

Or maybe you actually have to physically have your people sit there and walk them through it instead of just giving them a document to read. Because how many of us get a new piece of software, scroll right to the bottom, hit accept and start loading it. 99.9% of us.

And guess what? We probably gave away our first born and we don't know it. You know, we've we've accepted all slew of things by that their lawyers have deemed to be important. And 99.

9% of us never read it. - And all that does is when push comes to shove and they start talking about terms and conditions, well, it's said in our terms and conditions that blah blah blah. Nobody cares. They just want their problems fixed.

They just want to know that you're there for them, that you're taking care of things. So the question is, how do you come to a way to be able to sit there and say, look, we really feel it's important for us to actually sit down and go over the terms and conditions with our clients because, you know, we find that like, like you, I don't want to read 30 pages. I just want to I just want to know what the highlights are. - And insurance brokers do the same thing.

The insurance brokers just don't just sign this. Just sign the stuff and you can't. You couldn't understand it even if you did read it. I mean, you would be there for a month if you had to read every document.

And when you're closing on your house. Absolutely. It's like they they plan on you just skimming. Absolutely.

You know, initially when you hope to God, you hope to God that you did it right. You know, so I'm a big believer and says, how important are the client in my attitude is, are you selling them a, you know, a 25 cent piece of chewing gum. Yeah. Let them sign the terms and conditions and fight.

They'll deal with it as it comes there. They're buying a 25% said chewing gum. But if they're doing a 25,000, 50,000, 100,000 quarter million dollar engagement, it might be worth spending 20 minutes with the client face to face, hand in hand, going over these things with them. But that's just me.

Yeah. No. That's good. Um, because, I mean, that answers my second from you know, from the marketing perspective, I always feel like failure to communicate is my problem.

Like, it's my fault for not making it important enough for them to want to pay attention to it. But so many in my profession do just cave and, you know, back out of their own terms and conditions as soon as the clients, uh, protest it. But you're, you're saying here you got to find the right balance and then just say, at some point, I feel like you just have to say, we chalk this year up to a loss, and we're gonna we're gonna. Part of marketing is his experimentation.

And we're going to figure out the 1 to 3 minute video. Like you said, we're going to figure out next year if we can drop that attrition rate based off of, you know, engaging in a different way to and having that video, having that video on your website, having that video at the bottom of your emails, having that video, you know, everywhere that just that just so that way people can and look at it, you'll look at it at their convenience. Maybe having some some way of verifying through IP address or whatever that they've actually watched the video.

Oh man, I mean marketing. I this is why I love it so much, Ben and I it's nice to talk shop with somebody who's actually does this because I'm learning so much as I go. But this is this is the part I love. It's communication.

It's experimentation, it's adventure. I find it to be invigorating. Um, and so I really appreciate you coming on. Um, before we move into the lightning round and wrap up our episode.

Is there anything that you wanted to add that we haven't touched on today? You know what? I just think that most people under communicate, most people assume that people understand things exactly the way that they do. And we all come to the world with our own hopes, wants, fears, needs and desires, our own biases, how we were raised, who you know, what, what we learned along the way, what we didn't learn along the way, and assuming that people think the same way that we do is is a recipe for disaster.

And I think that we need to sit there and verify with people, you know, without being condescending. Did I miss anything? This is I'm not always clear on what I say. It's just, you know, it's perfectly clear in my mind.

Did you. Did you understand what I. You know what I'm saying? It's almost making light of it and finding a way that makes it almost self depreciating, you know, deprecating to be able to give people the opportunity to say, you know what, I really didn't understand this.

Okay, let's go over it again. I had a I had a professor in university who taught me finite mathematics. And Ernie Cockayne. I'll never forget Ernie.

And we're talking 40 years ago. Ernie stood up in the first day, says, right, this is finite mathematics. It's 100% final. You in the back, sit down and they're all 100% final.

You might as well learn from me. You need to be stupid and lazy to to be able to fail my course. One of the two are not going to do it. If what have you doesn't understand it, come to my office afterwards.

I'm happy to explain it to you. If a bunch of you don't understand it, that means I'm stupid and we're going to erase boards and start again. And one day he looked up and there was six of us. While we sat in the front of the room, which is blank stares on our faces, he goes, Baker, did you understand?

Not a - he goes, right? No, he says Right. That means I'm stupid. Erases three boards and starts again.

And we all need to have the humility to understand that just because we get something doesn't mean everybody does. All right, I've got to follow up. I know we said we were wrapping up, but here's where I struggle with over communication. What if the message varies slightly in the various times that I'm communicating it and somebody latches onto something and then they're like, so like I do a video for our terms and conditions.

And something in there is not worded exactly as it is in the letter. And I end up, you know, voiding or negating what's written by what I communicate. Or somebody asked me the plan seven times and I tell them, you know, seven different variations, and they fixate on one of those things. And I'm like, you asked me.

I was like, I was sharing at the spur of the moment. There is no perfect for that. I mean, quite honestly, there is no perfect for that. There is.

We update our terms and conditions and we don't update the video. - Yeah it happens. Yeah. We we.

All of a sudden this video is just sitting on page three of our website and we completely forgot it's up there. Forgot it was there. Yeah. I thought it was up there.

It was. We put it up there four years ago and our terms and conditions have changed. We need to have some level of caveat, either within our website or that says that things may change, verify at a time of agreement, especially when you're dealing with stuff like you do, you know, stuff that could make all. I mean, here's the thing, you know, how do you do policy right now?

I mean, we're talking it's it's still 2025 when, when you and I are talking with with everything that's going on with tariffs, how the heck do you go? Can you be definitive on anything when everything is changing. Yeah. I mean, back during Covid, we were getting updates on employee retention credits and EIC.

On a weekly basis, probably on a weekly basis. And it was like, this is what we have right now. We're going to proceed with this. Oh, nope.

It changed. So. And I think we all need to have caveats somewhere within our comp, within our websites or pop that say based on the information available at the time of the agreement. Yeah.

Or something along those lines. Yeah. I mean, that's that's why marketing is still a human to human thing as well. Um, because you do have to when if you do actually have trust in that relationship, then certain things like that are going to be allowed.

Uh, not huge things. And again, not hiding it in the fine print on page 37, as you said. But my mistake. This is what we need to defer to or this is, you know.

Yeah. Okay. And you need to work with people. Yeah.

You need to work with people that says, look, that was accurate when I told you that. And unfortunately that changed - and I told and by the way, I told you that that changed because we had this conversation on this date. How do we fix this? Yeah.

Okay. There is no perfect there, is there? We're dealing with human beings. There is no perfect.

- Yeah. Because if you try to answer all that stuff, and that's how you end up with a 37 page terms and conditions to. And it just makes it even harder to read and understand. But it's covered every single, every single variable.

So yeah. Except the five. That'll come up next week. So I wanted to create a nondisclosure agreement that says I promised not to tell your stuff.

If you don't promise to tell mine. My lawyers wouldn't let me do that. That would get torn to shreds. So he's like, yeah, my lawyer, my lawyers.

I sent it to my lawyers. He says, you're kidding, right? I said, no. That was my aspiration.

I know what wasn't going to happen. Yeah. When I first when I started my company and my pricing proposal was like half a page or something like that. And as I learned lessons, it just got longer and longer and longer.

So. Yeah. Oh, yeah. So my agreement with my with my accountant I think right now is 15 pages.

- All right. I have room to grow. Good to know. All right, Ben, I appreciate just.

Yeah, sharing this information. I'll let me pick your brain on some stuff. Um, are you ready to get into, like, let's go and wrap this up. Okay.

Um, coffee or tea? And how do you like it prepared? Coffee. Hot and black.

Okay. All right. Um. Pie or cake?

And do you have a favorite kind? Pie and apple? Apple pie. All right.

Very good. Um, do you have a favorite holiday and why? Oh, well, my favorite holiday is Hanukkah. Because it's eight days long.

- Nice. Very good. Um, do you consider yourself a morning person or a night person? And do you have a favorite routine?

I am definitely a morning person. I am one of those 5:36 a.m. guys, and my morning always starts with reading through the news with a cup of coffee.

What is a common belief among entrepreneurs that you would want to challenge? I would say that entrepreneurs need to understand that it isn't what they're experts in, it's what they're not experts in that it should scare them. When you're an accountant, you know accounting, - you may not know marketing, you may not know branding, you may not know logistics and a variety of other stuff. It's all that other stuff that goes into being an entrepreneur that we don't know, that we don't know.

That should scare us because that's the stuff that can trip you up. Fair enough. And I mean, go in with eyes wide open is, I guess, your point. Willing to learn, willing, willing to bring other people around.

You will ask questions. I'm willing to willing to be wrong. Yeah. I mean, I say this in my profession all the time.

Somebody who's a good accountant thinks that I can just go open my own business. Absolutely. Like, there's so much more to this than being a good accountant. So.

Yeah. Fair enough. Um, what's one thing that you would want your successor to remember you for? That I made things right.

Even if things went wrong. My goal was always to make things right in the end. Um, where are you finding creativity right now, Ben? I'm finding creativity in writing on a regular basis.

Uh, you know, I podcast weekly, I write daily, and I enjoy both. Okay. Very good. I mean, I'll get to that.

One more question before we get to where they can find your writing. But, uh, what do you have coming up in the next year that's got you really excited? Right now I'm out looking for next. I'm looking, you know, to join a mid to large size organization where I can create an impact alignment and drive change and coach, mentor and lead the next generation somewhere.

Dealing with customer experience, stakeholder relations and communications. Okay. Very good. Best of luck to you on that job search.

And, um, yeah. Where can people find out more about you, read your writings, find your podcast, all that, all that good stuff. LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to find me for everything. If you go to I am Ben Baker or search manager Ben Baker.

You'll you'll find me both. All right. Very good. We will link that in the show.

And Ben, again, I just want to thank you for being on the show and sharing your wisdom with me and the audience. That was a lot of fun. I really enjoyed doing this, and, uh, you know, that that went really quick. It did.

It did. So yeah, we might have to do a second one. It sounds like. So always awkward.

Very good. Thank you so much, Ben I appreciate it. All right. Thank you.