181 Creating Your Big Idea - Bob Sager

Speaker A: It's time once again for the Go Giver podcast where we explore five timeless principles that will increase the profitability of your business and the joy in your life. Now here's your host, the co author of the Go Giver, Bob Berg.

Speaker B: Hello again, I'm Bob Berg and we have what I hope you'll find to be an interesting and value packed show today. Not focusing on your competition is not the same as ignoring them. We'll look at that in our thought of the day and in our interview segment, Bob Sager shows us how to be creative and innovative as a way of distinguishing our business from the competition in a very crowded and noisy marketplace. That and more on today's show. I thank you for joining us.

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker B: One of my favorite Lessons from the 1910 classic the Science of Getting Rich by Wallace D. Wattles was where he advises his readers to live creative plane as opposed to the competitive plane. In other words, focus on the value you can create for your customer rather than focusing on your competitor who desires to have the same customer as you desire to have. However, it's important to understand that not focusing on your competition doesn't mean not acknowledging your competition, not being aware of them, or not understanding them. As we've discussed in previous episodes, successful people live in truths. They live in the world that is not the world they wish it were. Sure, most of us would love to be the only one in our field we're not. To deny that is to deny reality and rarely does that result in success. Ignoring your competition, not knowing about their products and services, not understanding their strengths, their weaknesses, their opportunities or their potential threats would put your business in a very dangerous situation. Because I can practically guarantee that they know those things about you. So indeed, learn everything you can about them. Just don't focus on them. Focus on creating immense value for those in your target market, those you serve and those you wish to serve. And in today's crowded and often hyper competitive marketplace, in order to create that value, you've often got to be more creative and innovative to just to be heard and paid attention to. Fortunately, today we get to hear from an expert in that regard who will share with us some terrific ideas for beginning that process. Bob Sager Coming up right after this.

Speaker A: Uh,

Speaker B: Imagine being part of a community of business owners, entrepreneurs and professionals who are committed to your success with while supporting one another and co creating the kind of world we want to live in. If you've read the Go Giver and the message resonates with you and you're looking for like minded people who share your values and a mentor to guide you along the way. I invite you to join the Go Giver Success Alliance Community. This is a leading edge, private, global community committed to helping you build practices and habits to master the five laws so that you can be stratospherically successful and and personally fulfilled. This is not a Facebook group. We've created our own private Go Giver community network and you'll be able to join me personally along with other successful Go Givers in our virtual Rachel's famous coffee house. Just visit gogiversuccessalliance.com or click on the link in the show notes and you can see what it's all about. I'd love for you to join us. Bob Sager is the founder of Spearpoint Solutions, a company that helps businesses dramatically increase revenues via word of mouth while spending considerably less on advertising. He has over three decades of experience in sales leadership and training. His forte though, is creative thinking and teaching his clients how to do the same so that they can innovate more readily, develop effective business strategies, get unstuck, um, and thrive in today's competitive marketplace. He's the author of the personal achievement book discovering your greatness as well as the book 101 freaking brilliant business ideas and 10 ways you can create your own. He's the creator of the recently launched business strategies by subscription, which you can find@ spearpointonline.com and is the inventor of the creative thinking game what's the big idea? There's also a game show version of that, which you can find at. Ah, whatsthebigideashow.com all of these links will be in the show notes. Hi Bob.

Speaker A: Hey, Bob. Great to be with you, my friend.

Speaker B: Oh, thank you. Great to have you with us. Your, your fastball, if you will, is really creative thinking and strategizing. And I, I love this. From the beginning of, from the, the very beginning of the preface of your book, 101 freaking brilliant business ideas, you wrote, people only pay attention until they think they know what you're saying. Then they quickly move on. Dive, uh, into that for us, if you will.

Speaker A: Yeah, listen, uh, there's so much noise in the world. Uh, people are marketing, uh, in every aspect of our lives. And so people have a tendency to, uh, go tone deaf. And if you, if in your business, marketing, advertising, uh, your sales script, whatever, whatever you're doing, whatever way you're communicating with people, if you sound just like everybody else, people are going to ignore you. And so you've got to present yourself in a way, if you want to be, if you want to thrive, you've got to present yourself in a way that doesn't sound just like everybody else. So that when you're, when you're communicating in whatever venue, in whatever media, people don't assume that they know what's coming next. And so when they don't, then when you're sounding different, when you're presenting differently, then people are going to pay attention.

Speaker B: And I guess you have to from the very beginning. Right. Because they're not going to give you much of a chance to distinguish yourself. Correct.

Speaker A: There's a reason those, uh, ads at the beginning of YouTube videos are five seconds long. And that's about the amount of time. Five seconds or less is about the amount of time you have to catch someone's attention. And if you don't do it in that five seconds, they're moving on.

Speaker B: Right? Right. So take us through your approach to, uh, creativity. How do these ideas, uh, take form and then how do they develop creativity?

Speaker A: I think there's a big misperception. And what I mean by that is people have a tendency to think that there are quote unquote, creatives.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: And then there are the rest of us. But we're all born as creative thinkers. The challenge is, is people, human, uh, beings are creatures of habit. And what I mean by that is as soon as we learn something and we know it to a degree, we move that to a habit. And thinking, um, and particularly thinking about solving problems is the same way. Once we have solved a problem in the past and we did it in a way that didn't kill us. Mhm. That's the way we're going to continue to think about solving problems and approaching situations. And that's good. I mean, can you imagine, Bob, can you imagine what life would be like if we, um, had to consciously think about everything we did? I mean, we'd never get anything done.

Speaker B: Right? Right.

Speaker A: So habits serve us very well. But the problem is, is when a solution isn't working anymore or not working as efficiently as it once did. And so we think about it and we think about, uh, how can we solve this? But because it's an ingrained habit, it's like the harder we think we're. The analogy I like to use is we're driving 100 miles an hour on a circular freeway. We're going a million, you know, we're putting all of our effort into it, but we're, we're going just around the block and we end up exactly the same place. And so what creative thinking and creative thinking methods that we teach, what they do is they help us take an off ramp. Right.

Speaker B: Love that.

Speaker A: They, they help us take an off ramp off that circular freeway so that we can begin exploring new territory. And it, it sort of short circuits that automatic pilot that we're on.

Speaker B: So when you uh, get together with your client, uh, because I know that you, you put these together for your clients, but you also show them how to do it. And I'm sure a lot of times there is a very much a, a working relationship that you have to have because you have to know what they're, you know, what they're looking to accomplish and, and what they're willing to do and, and so forth. So when you begin the process, you sit down with the client.

Speaker A: What do you ask?

Speaker B: I mean, what, where does it start? Is there a whiteboard? Is there, you know, how does someone like you begin that?

Speaker A: Well, uh, I can tell you that most of the clients I work with have, have problems in three areas. And so, you know, when, when the conversation starts, we're talking about which of those three areas is the most pressing. And the three areas are traffic generation and whether that's digitally to a site or whether that's physically to a brick and mortar location or maybe a combination of both.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Um, the second one, and this is probably the biggest one Bob, is differentiation from competitors.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, and then the third one is finding new markets for their products and services. And so that's typically how the conversation will start. And that's what we'll begin to address. And look, most of the clients that I work with, I would call them small to medium sized businesses. And so, you know, kind of like, uh, kind of like most of the world, people are, people are a lot more alike than we think and businesses are a lot more alike than we think in terms of the problems that they're having. So I hope that answers your question.

Speaker B: Yeah, so we have the three areas that they, that they need to um, work on. Let's say you're going to talk with them about finding a new market that they can expand into. Okay, how would that begin? How would you, how would you approach the process?

Speaker A: What we do is we have a process that we utilize called uh, uh, we put together an instructional piece on that called Finding Hidden Gems. And what we'll do with that is we'll take and we'll list out every one of the assets that an individual or company has. Either they have or they have access to. And then we'll look at each one of those and address them in creative ways and find through that process. And, uh, we do a whole training, ah, fun shop on this as well. Um, and we'll look at each one of those to discover new possibilities for revenue generation. And, uh, it's frankly working together with clients on that. It's astounding. Some of the things that come out of that just by looking at those assets in new ways, in new directions, it really. It's kind of shocking sometimes, you know, what comes out of that, but. But it's fun.

Speaker B: So you had a great example in the book. I don't know if you worked with them or not or if you were citing the story, but it was, it was pretty awesome. On, uh, page 107, you shared the, what you called the principle of magnification, uh, making something really, really big and, and tying it into what you want to do. So here. Here's what basically happened. A small Illinois town, Casey, Illinois, which I, I actually drove through once about four, 40 years ago. Very, very nice people. There was a desire to increase traffic to their retail, uh, stores and their. Their restaurants. Okay, so they made something a lot bigger. Tell us the story.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, I actually discovered Casey, Illinois, quite by accident. My family and I were on vacation. We were driving between Indianapolis and St. Louis, and we're driving west on Interstate 70, and we see this sign. See the world's largest wind chime in Casey, Illinois. And I felt a little bit like Clark Griswold.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: I was just thinking, yeah, yeah. I'm like, well, I can't resist that. You know, I'm, um, talking to my wife and my kids. I'm like, hey, what do you guys think about, uh, you know, taking a little side trip? And they're like, we're not in a hurry. And so we get there, and it literally is the world's largest wind chime. It's in the Guinness Book of world records. It's 55ft tall, Bob. And, um, so, you know, initially we went off the beaten, uh, path to see that. And we discovered, you know, in going to visit Casey, that they also have the world's largest golf tee. They have the world's largest knitting needles, the world's largest mailbox, which you can actually mail a letter from. And so what happened with the impetus for this was, uh, the gentleman who, uh, and his name is escaping me at the moment, but he, he used to be a city councilman. And what they discovered was they had lost a lot of their Manufacturing base. And because of that, the traffic to their other establishments in town was just suffering badly. And he said, what could we do?

Speaker B: Jim Bolan, by the way, I just looked it up. I have the book right now.

Speaker A: Yeah, thank you. Listen, Casey became so famous for these, uh, for these world's largest. That, uh, CBS Sunday Morning did a feature on them. It's fascinating to watch. Um, but, uh, Jim Boland happened to own a company that did metal fabricating and he hit upon the idea to build this wind chime because they had the capability of doing it. Right.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: Um, and we discovered that right next to or on the same property as where the world's largest wind chime was or is, there's a restaurant right there next door to it. Uh, and Jim owned a little piece of that too. So, you know, it kind of worked out really well. But it was. But listen, I mean, that's fascinating. Uh, something that is so dramatically different in scale is just naturally, you know, it sort of goes back to the, to the top of our conversation here where how do you catch people's attention? Right? Well, you've got to be different. You've got to be perceived as different. And that. The world's largest wind chime, 55ft tall. They even have a string, by the way, or a rope, I should say, where you can pull it and make it chime, you know, and it sounds like gigantic church bells as opposed to a wind chime. But fascinating. I mean, that's, uh, I think that was 2013 or 2012 when we saw that. So it's been that many years ago. And, and it, it's. We still talk about it as a family. Yeah.

Speaker B: I think with Chevy Chase and Family Vacation, it was the biggest ball of

Speaker A: yarn, remember it correctly, the world's largest, uh, thing of mud or something. It was just.

Speaker B: So let me ask you this, Bob. How does a, um, you know, some other. It could be an online business, could be a retail business, could be whatever. How do they take an idea like this? Obviously it doesn't have to be the biggest something in the world, but how do you take the basic idea and do something real big? Literally a big idea.

Speaker A: Yeah, listen, you know, when I'm consulting with them, we'll look at all these different aspects of what they do and ask ourselves, you know, in what ways could we magnify something?

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And it doesn't have to be, uh, it doesn't have to be an entire offering. It could be one aspect of an offering. I'll give you another example that I discovered in doing some research to write an article about this back in 2017, the company that makes, I think it's Anheuser Busch that makes Natural Light beer, offered a, get this Bob, a, um, 77 pack of natural Light. Uh, and they did it to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of that brand in 1977. M. And so you talk about something that stands out more of something can

Speaker B: be the same as bigger.

Speaker A: Right? Just exactly, exactly. And so, you know, we'll just, we'll look at that and, and it helps to examine all aspects of an offering. And listen, you could do the same thing internally with, uh, with employee engagement. You know, in what ways could we engage with our employees? Right. So there's a lot of different ways, uh, that you can use that creative thinking method of magnification.

Speaker B: Yeah. And of course you provide a whole ton of them. 101, obviously in your, in your, in your book on how to do that. And many of them you would look at, how can I use the basic principle in my business? Because many of them were for specific businesses.

Speaker A: Right. And that's the point. But listen, uh, I think it was Picasso that said good, uh, artists copy, uh, and great artists steal. You can look at these ideas and ask yourself, and for your listeners who are business people, I would say, you know, if you're, if you're reading the book with each one of those ideas, ask yourself, in what ways might we apply this in our business? Mhm.

Speaker B: Mhm. I want to ask you about your game that you created. It's called what's the Big Idea? Uh, certainly congruent with your theme. Tell us about that. What's the goal of the game and how does it work?

Speaker A: Well, the game is two things. It's a business innovation tool. Uh, but it's also just, you can just play it on family game night and have fun with it. We designed it, uh, that way. At the heart of the game is a creative thinking method called combinatory play. That sounds kind of complicated, but it's really not. I discovered later, by the way, that that combinatory play was both Einstein and Da Vinci's favorite creative thinking method. And so, uh, if I can set this up a little bit. People do not think in words, they think in pictures. And as an example, if I said the word dog to you, Bob, you would not be thinking of the images of the letters D, O and G. Right. He'd be thinking about a dog. Right. A dog you're familiar with, maybe a dog you own. Right. If I said the word kitchen to you, the same thing. You're thinking about a kitchen you're familiar with. But if I gave you both of those together, if I gave you dog, kitchen, and I said, combine those two together and come up with an idea for a product, service, or business using those two words, all of a sudden, now new images start to form in your mind.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: Right. And I'll ask people, combining dog and kitchen, or kitchen dog, what idea could you come up with for a new product, service or business, or a way to improve an existing product, service or business? And people are astounded when we do that, and we use that little exercise at the ideas that start to form in their mind, that start to bubble up from their imagination. And so when I first discovered that method, I said, you know, this is so effective, and if people would use it consistently, they could really do something big because it would help them take that off ramp. And so we created a game that has three teams. It has the inventor or entrepreneur team, the competitor team, and the customer team. And the way the game works is the competitor team and the entrepreneur team get a set of words. They're separate words, and they get three minutes to combine any two words out of those set of words and come up with an idea for a new product, service, or business. And at the end of three minutes, each team takes about a minute and presents to the customer team what their idea is, how it works, and what the benefits are. And then the customer team gets to decide, do I like the entrepreneur team, uh, their idea better, or do I like the competitor's idea better? And I had a client who told me, he said, you know what the greatest thing about this game is, Bob? Is that when you win, you win, and when you lose, you still win. Right? Because you're still coming up with great ideas, even whether the customer team picks your idea or not, huh? And play moves around the board, uh, or around the table, uh, so that everybody plays every role, every as they go. And it has. We've got a scoring system built in, and the first team to 25 wins. And there are some subtle, you know, some subtleties, some nuances in there that it's not always just a, what we call a standard challenge. There's a market challenge, meaning that the idea has to come with a specific, uh, market category. And then there's the. The ever challenging CEO challenge, where in normal play, you get 10 words to combine any two. In the CEO challenge, you only get three, and you have to use any two of those words in combination. So It's a lot of fun. And, uh, two things result from playing this game. One, people laugh their heads off because new ideas, they're a little off center. And so people just have a lot of fun, uh, enjoying those. And the other thing that you hear constantly is that is a really good idea.

Speaker B: That reminds me of something that I wanted to bring up because I, I loved something else you wrote in the, in the preface, you talked about the two reasons why photographers get great shots. And this reminded me of why people come up with the best creative ideas. What are those two reasons?

Speaker A: The two reasons are, One, maybe they have some natural talent. They definitely have some training. Right. But the other one is they take a lot of darn pictures.

Speaker B: Ah, exactly.

Speaker A: Right. You know, it's, it's sort of like the, the machine gun philosophy. More bullets, more hits. Uh, yeah, but you come up with, if you're going to come up with good ideas, you got to come up with a lot of ideas, right? I mean, listen, I'm a little goofy and I, I do that kind of for fun, but I come up with ideas constantly and then I let my subconscious mind kind of stew on them and I'll revisit them. And sometimes I'll revisit them, Bob, and I'll go, that's just a dumb idea. You know, I thought it was good at the time, but, you know, upon further consideration. So in the training that we do on this, Bob, we digitally audio record every idea people come up with. And one of the reasons that we do that is one, so we don't forget anything. But two, what happens is people will go back and they'll revisit those ideas later, and they'll find that sometimes on those ideas they'll think, boy, you know, this is really good in its present form, but if we added this to it or subtracted this from it, it would be even better. And so that really is, uh, it's phenomenal how, you know, when you're coming up with a lot of ideas, you will definitely have some pearls in there.

Speaker B: Wonderful. So I've got to ask you in the, um. Because this is such a creative idea you had in the, the one minute we have left, can you tell us about the subscription service for business strategies you develop? Because I would never have thought of a subscription service for these strategies. So I, I mean, I want people to check it out, but I also want people to understand how you, you came up with that and, and what it is.

Speaker A: How I came up with that, Bob, was, you know, people were pulling back so much during the pandemic. And I said, in what ways could we serve people with strategies and maintain a budget? You know, because if somebody hires me to come in and develop a proprietary strategy for them that's customized to them, you know, the fee for that. A lot of people were finding that during, during, uh, the pandemic to be prohibitive, you know, a little bit prohibitive. But, you know, and some people just, they, you know, they, they're on a budget and they just can't afford me. And I said, how can we serve people on a broader scale? And so those three problems that I addressed, early traffic generation, differentiation in the marketplace, and finding new markets for your products and services, we took each one of those. And every 30 days, our subscribers get one strategy in each one of those areas. And so, uh, it's not, it's not proprietary to them and it's not custom. But, you know, if they've got any bit of business acumen, they can adapt those to their business and fit them into what they're doing.

Speaker B: That is creatively walking your talk. But. Bob Sager is the founder of Spearpoint Solutions. He specializes in creative thinking and teaches teaching his clients how to do the same so they can innovate more readily, develop effective business strategies, get unstuck, and thrive in today's competitive marketplace. He's the author of Discovering your greatness as well as the book 101 freaking brilliant business ideas and 10 ways you can create your own. Bob recently created and launched the business strategies by subscription. You can find out more about that by going to spearpointonline.com and he is the inventor of the creative thinking game what's the big idea? There's also a game show version for you to check out, which you can@whatsthebigideashow.com all these links, of course, will be in the show notes. Thank you so much, Bob. Stay creative and innovative, my brother.

Speaker A: You can count on that.

Speaker B: Main takeaway I received from Bob is that the creative and innovative ideas you need to help distinguish you in the marketplace are indeed there. And by constantly looking for examples both from others and from within your own imagination, you're sure to hit on, um, some winners for your business. What did you learn from Bob? Please feel welcome to write to me@bobatberg.com and let me know. All of John David Man's and my books on the Gogiver series can be found@thegogiver.com or berg.com where you can download chapters one and two or just click on the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, rate and provide a review on iTunes. Visit thegogiver.com reviews I enjoy reading every review and your review will also help others to much more easily find this show. That's all for today. The Go Giver Podcast is brought to you by thegogiver.com visit www.thegogiver.com and get our free special report, Endless Prospects the Go giver way. That's thegogiver.com Stop on by. Thank you so much for joining me. And until next time, I'm Bob Berg. Make it a great day Day.