Personal Branding and Business Growth: Tips for Entrepreneurs with Alex Brogan

Personal Branding and Business Growth: Tips for Entrepreneurs with Alex Brogan
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Alex: [00:00:00] My view is that if you're starting, it makes sense to focus on one platform first.

The reason for that is each platform has their own nuances with the type of content, the time that you post, how you sort of interact on the platform, so on and so forth. And so it ended up being quite a learning curve for any one platform. And similar to if you're a small business and prioritizing three different marketing channels at the same time, you're probably not going to crack any one of them.

Allan: Welcome to the Lean Marketing Podcast where we unpack strategies and tactics to make more profit, build a business you love and do so by doing less marketing. I'm your host Allan Dib.

Today I'm joined by a very special guest. He's a fellow Aussie, but ironically I met him in another country in Canada.

We were at a really cool conference. It was called an interesting people conference. and my experience was very much the case. So, um, Welcome Alex Brogan. Hi, Alex.

Alex: Well Allan, good to see [00:01:00] you again after a month.

Allan: You too, man, you too. had a good time hanging out. We hang out for a couple of days in Victoria in Canada, which was really cool. We got to hang out with some very high level people. There were a couple of billionaires there. There were quite a few people worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars.

And then almost everyone there was at least a multimillionaire or Thereabouts, but what I found really interesting was that Despite the wealth, despite the amount of money that people had made, or were making from their businesses, a recurring theme was people talking about, even some of the billionaires are, how do I build a personal brand?

How do I create a newsletter that a lot of people want to read? How do I get on LinkedIn and start a personal brand presence? And I think those are things that you've done really effectively. And it's interesting, like, people who've kind of got everything wealth wise and now looking at [00:02:00] how do I create influence through personal brand?

So what's been your experience and what would have been your thoughts around that?

Alex: Multi layered Yes. this one. I think in a more jovial spirit, the world we live in is quite a vain world, and so, people tend to want their status reflected in numbers on, online, and

Alex: that's definitely a reality we see. Often people that have, you know, otherwise achieved extraordinary things offline, building businesses.

Or otherwise, there's this discrepancy in the value that other people see in, in what they've done. And,

Allan: Well, do you think it's just vanity? Is it like, Hey I've got all this money now, I want fame or do you think there's more to it? what do you, What do you reckon?

Alex: no I, Ithink there's more to it, I think, or people will very readily rationalize that there is more to it. And what they refer to when they're, saying that is. Things like network, things like building a business on top of existing distribution, things like [00:03:00] being able to generate leads for a business that you're running currently,

or hire exceptional people.

It definitely is a cheat code that we haven't seen before for business building, and I think there's some new models that are emerging now, examples being the Sort of Alex Hormozzi model

of building extraordinary distribution and using that as a top of funnel Lead generation essentially for his private equity business and that having spectacular results.

I think part of this is more and more the cost of creating software is Lowering and the sort of barrier to creating software is lowering

And business building in general, I guess. It's never been more accessible for entrepreneurs, but that also means that there's just more competition than ever.

And so looking for a source of competitive advantage, moat is becoming more and more important. And I think distribution is certainly one of the final remaining [00:04:00] frontiers for that. So above and beyond the vain reasons that people decide to build an audience, there's definitely. tangible reasons. And, you know, I've certainly seen that in my own life with meeting extraordinary people, obviously building a business that is independent of, of location book deal, sort of book, offers from major publishers to name a few things.

And yeah, just my sort of network of extraordinary people has expanded exponentially since taking those steps. So very grateful for the journey, but I, I do think it's important. to recognize that at the end of the day, followers, don't necessarily translate directly to a sustainable business as well.

Allan: Totally. Totally. I a hundred percent agree.

I'll give you my personal experience. So, you'd asked me a few years ago about building a personal brand, I would have said, yeah, look, maybe a nice little addition or whatever. nice thing to do. But I really want to highlight what you said. It is easier than ever for people to start businesses.

It is a lot of the technical barriers are [00:05:00] now gone or going away. AI is making it much easier to create content, to build businesses, to build apps, to build software, all of that sort of thing. So I think today. the face of the business is absolutely essential to building the brand of the business and getting that distribution that you said.

I mean, when you think about Tesla or SpaceX, you instantly think Elon Musk. When you think Virgin, you instantly think Richard Branson. And I think those personal brands drive the business brands, they drive revenue, they drive sales, they drive a lot of attention. And. I think it's a lot harder to do that as, it's not impossible, certainly there are some business brands that have done really well just being a business brand, but I think people connect with people far more than they would with just a brand, and I think now, more than ever, where the, you know, You've got a lawn mowing business, or whether you've got a SaaS business, or whether you've got a construction business, or [00:06:00] whatever.

Someone being the face of that business, and people connecting with that person. I think it's more important than ever before. And The other thing that you said is, yeah, it's not just about followers. We want to build a high value audience, meaning the people who are highly likely to connect with what we've got to offer.

what are some of the key elements, because you've been super successful in building newsletter brands and I think you've sold some and you've built that audience. What's been the strategy there and how are you going about building that audience and that personal brand?

Alex: Yeah. So I guess there's sort of the strategy that I've taken and what I've learned as well along the journey. And certainly with my personal brand initially, I was serving a very general audience. I was posting about self development topics and that has evolved into topics about entrepreneurship, doing profiles of exceptional people and companies.

And that allows you to access a more general audience. But at the [00:07:00] same time, you don't have necessarily as much differentiation when you do so. And so It is easier to build a very large audience when you are serving general topics. But again, this point around speaking very clearly to your customer or the person that you're trying to serve is very different to catering to a general audience.

And so, I think the thing people misconstrue very often about building an audience is there's ultimately so many ways to do it. And The key thing is to actually work backwards from what you were trying to achieve. If you're trying to build or grow an existing business with clearly defined customers who know exactly what type of content they would like to be served, then you're going to have a far more niche strategy relative to if you're just trying to grow your audience to the largest extent possible.

[00:08:00] And often these discussions sort of Come out with people very much talking past each other around competing goals and what they're trying to achieve. But number one is absolutely getting very clear on what you're trying to achieve and then finding examples of people that have actually been successful following that pathway and leaning into that.

I think one of the big misconceptions or limiting beliefs that people face when they start an audience for the first time is What I do has to be completely original. And this is the case when you look across any creative domain, whether it's writing books or whether it's science or whether it's entrepreneurship in every one of these spaces, new things are combined out of old things.

And there is no need to reinvent the wheel or to have completely Most of what you see is [00:09:00] 95 percent someone else's idea, someone that came before, and 5 percent the person that's actually sharing the idea. And so if more people were aware that there's this sort of inside baseball game of creating content and anyone realise that you don't actually have to be completely original, I think a lot more people would benefit.

But it turns out that This word, in general, of creativity has, or creatives, have a vested interest in making that word a very opaque

thing, because they don't benefit from it being a more egalitarian opportunity,

because that ultimately means more competition. I'm sure you'd have some great takes on this, Allan, after publishing an awesome book and being very deep in the publishing world.

Allan: totally. I a hundred percent agree. Almost nothing in my books is completely original, but [00:10:00] what is original is compiling it all together in an easy to understand format, in an easy to understand framework. So I created the one page marketing plan framework. I created the lead marketing system as well.

So, I've absolutely brought my take on it and you know, some people like that, some people don't, which is both are totally fine, but I've made it super simple, super easy to understand and hopefully a little bit entertaining to, to consume because I didn't want these to be just marketing textbooks, right?

Even though ironically some universities actually use that in their university courses. So that's uh, that's been a funny. funny kind of loop, but, I 100 percent agree. I often see that the biggest barrier that people like someone who's running a normal business, when we talk about, creating content, creating a personal brand couple of roadblocks and especially mindset.

It's like, I don't know what to post. [00:11:00] My stuff is just boring. I just do construction or whatever. Why there's nothing unique about, you know, our methods, how we do them and all of that sort of thing. So what would be your advice to someone like that who I'm in construction, I'm in a medical business, I'm a chiropractor, I'm a doctor, I'm a You know, there's the perception that you've got nothing interesting to kind of say or present on, on social media or on newsletters or whatever. What are your thoughts there?

Alex: It's a good question. I think, again, it comes a little bit back to what you're solving for. Are you solving for thought leadership? Would you like to start speaking at conferences as a way of winning business? And therefore it is just a matter of sharing thoughts on the industry, sharing news and technology developments or whatever it is.

In which case, you can do something as simple as a, an industry roundup or a local newsletter with events in that industry sharing what's [00:12:00] occurring, or you can create a small community on the back of that in your geographical area as a way of meeting people and, and sort of building thought leadership,

etc. If you're trying your business. Then it really comes back to asking the question first and foremost, How are people already finding your service and buying your service or product? And is content actually the right lever to do more of that? And a lot of the time it actually isn't because if you look at an industry like healthcare or aged care or even construction to an extent, although there's far more construction content creators.

Now you often find that your target customer might not even be on a LinkedIn, might not even be on a Twitter if you're serving healthcare professionals or otherwise. And so, yeah, I think it always just starts with what am I actually solving for? Other examples of people achieving. What I want to [00:13:00] achieve via content?

If so, how do I do it? But if not, then, you know, it's not always always a cure all, and I think it's become a very in vogue thing to do just about everyone, but ultimately it's not always the best possible thing that you could be doing.

Allan: agree. One of the things that I've found is I've been continuously surprised by some of the niches that exist out there. And I think particularly if you've got a niche offering something that all can benefit from. can be a little bit niche. I think it's incredibly powerful from a content perspective.

Like, for example, I recently found out there was a fountain pen community. Who'd ever thought there's a community around women who want to naturally go gray and maintain, you know, not have to dye their hair or whatever. And I mean, in every space, there are influential creators who create content, who are just obsessed with that particular thing and then [00:14:00] really go deep into it.

So switching gears a little bit success on, specific platforms like LinkedIn or Twitter versus say newsletters. How do you think about that whole ecosystem? you leveraging them off each other? Are you thinking them of them as completely separate media assets? What are your thoughts there?

Yeah,

Alex: I guess there's two ways you can do it. You can start on multiple platforms at the same time, or you can start on one platform first, and once you've conquered one platform, move over to other platforms. My view is that if you're starting, it makes sense to focus on one platform first.

The reason for that is each platform has their own nuances with the type of content, the time that you post, how you sort of interact on the platform, so on and so forth. And so it ended up being quite a learning curve for any one [00:15:00] platform. And similar to if you're a small business and prioritizing three different marketing channels at the same time, you're probably not going to crack any one of them.

I definitely recommend focusing on one platform. For me, that was. Building on Twitter first and the beauty of building an audience on one platform first is you've been doing it for six months, you have a body of content that you can A, see what is highest performing out of all that content and then B, simply repackage it and send it over to the new platform in very much the same way as you were on the first platform and it's not really a lot of incremental work.

But. It allows you to then focus on the packaging and nuances of the new platform. So I've very much thought about it in an incremental way as it relates that's for social platforms. Ultimately, as a creator, you want to get to a point where you are [00:16:00] across multiple different social media platforms.

And the simple reason there is that any social platform can de platform you. the algorithm can change rendering your business or your followership irrelevant overnight. And this has happened time and time again with different creators, which leads me to the next point around newsletter, which is that anyone who is posting content on social media should be building a newsletter list.

Why? Because you own a newsletter list. That means that at any point in time, the people on your list you can communicate with And no one can take it off you. It's not owned by a social media company. And so, really, the core goal of building on social media is to build a newsletter list. And what that looks like is, A, having all of your calls to action on your profile, but also at the end of every piece of content that you're posting, ensuring that your [00:17:00] linking off to your newsletter and trying to grow it as much as possible.

Yeah, this is very much the playbook that's been used by a lot of creators very effectively. And just the scale of social media platforms now and the number of social media platforms now means that there's never been a better time to build a huge email list very, very quickly. this is fundamentally important.

If you're someone who, you know, is considering writing a book or is actually building a business on top of your internet presence. There's been plenty of examples of creators who have built lists of 500k plus and just getting astronomical book advances on the back of that. So it's a very sort of proven pathway and something that.

Anyone posting online should definitely consider.

Allan: I totally agree. It's funny. newsletters sort of, were. Kind of declared dead a few years ago, [00:18:00] kind of emails dead, you know, no one reads emails and all of that sort of thing, and they've sort of had a renaissance now internet marketers back in the day were all, you know, All about email.

Then, like I said, a few years ago email newsletters were declared dead but now they've had a real resurgence, especially with Substack and Ghost and some of these other platforms that make it easy that enable creators to create newsletters. And I 100 percent agree because newsletter is an owned asset, whereas you're a tenant on other platforms on Twitter, on LinkedIn on all of those sorts of platforms.

There's a lot of talk right now that LinkedIn, there's a real opportunity to grow your presence on LinkedIn. And particularly if you've got a B2B audience what are your thoughts been on LinkedIn? What are some of the keys to LinkedIn growth and what have you been saying that works and what's the opportunity right now?

Alex: Yeah, definitely. Across social media platforms, this has been the last 10 [00:19:00] years. There always seems to be a platform which has underpriced attention, meaning relative to other platforms. The supply demand dynamic is such that if you're posting on that platform, you're going to get more reach and you're going to just grow faster and a bigger audience.

And that's definitely been the case for LinkedIn over the past 18 months. It is likely starting to tail off a little bit with just so many more people getting into the personal branding game and just a lot more content, but it's still certainly there. Before that it was Twitter and obviously the short form platforms have gone bananas including TikTok and YouTube Shorts over the last few years as well.

For LinkedIn, it's quite simple as far as, as what works. There's probably three, four things that people should think about when they start posting on the platform.

Number one being just topic selection. So, [00:20:00] I always advise folks after they've chosen a niche that they've chosen to post about, go and find five to ten examples of people in that existing niche who are posting high performing content and start posting.

Compiling a list of topics that you know perform really strongly. There are a few other ways of doing this. You can go to a platform like YouTube and type in a creator that you know is posting about similar topics to you. You can then search for their most popular videos and again, get an idea of What are the topics that really resonate online for people?

What types of questions are they thinking about in this niche? And therefore, if I'm going to post, I'm going to set myself up in the best way possible for a high return on effort,

essentially, when I'm posting. So, you want to get away from [00:21:00] playing the guessing game with what you're posting. Every time you post, it should be, I know this topic has performed well, people are interested in this topic, therefore it has a really good chance of succeeding.

So that's number one, topic selection. Number two is related to copywriting, and that's just writing the headline. David Ogilvie, one of the greatest advertisers of all time, had a great quote, which is that once you've written your headline, you've spent 90 cents of the dollar

on your entire advertisement.

And therein lies one of the biggest secrets and most important things about advertising, which is Getting people to actually read what you're doing.

And you cannot do that without a great hook. And so, to be able to do that, compiling a swipe file, which is essentially a document filled with examples of [00:22:00] hooks that have led to very high performing posts, is absolutely essential and will really help write high performing posts successfully.

To go a step further than this, it is so important that I recommend people actually write the hook for the post based on hooks that have worked. And when I say hook, I just mean headline. The first piece of text that people will see when they read a post. Write that before you write the remainder of the post.

Because it is that important. And of course we're assuming here that you would like your post to get reach, have resonance, etc, so on and so Thirdly, it's a boring one, but consistency. I

think expectations and motivation are intricately linked. In other words, motivation is a function of expectations.

If we go in saying to ourselves that it will be a two month journey and we'll have 100, 000 [00:23:00] followers. We are probably setting ourselves up for failure.

But if we say this is going to be a 12 month exercise that I'm following and I'm going to post consistently for 12 months before assessing the performance of how it's going, then your motivation inherently is just going to be a lot stronger to see it out and you'll actually set yourself up to succeed because.

That's the amount of iteration and learning it takes to get good at basically anything, and certainly no exception for posting online. So that's the third one, and then lastly, thinking about the actual format of the post is really important, so on LinkedIn there's been different types of posts that perform well, there's been These sort of infographics recently, which is, sort of looks like a, you know, a cheat sheet that you'll see of different advice about a given topic and people seem to really like that format.

Video is becoming more popular on the platform. It [00:24:00] changes very, very, very, consistently and the key is just asking. At the moment, what are the content formats that are performing best and how can I replicate those to the greatest extent possible? And so that's, fourthly content format. And the other one would be, and unfortunately this is the case more and more, as there have been a lot more people on platform, we see sort of a lot of cross engagement or it's almost cross posting where people We'll get in small engagement pods.

So you'll have three to five other people that you share your posts with, and then they'll comment on your posts and help your posts get more and more visibility. And that certainly doesn't help because you can think of it as every time you post your content, you have a certain number of nodes in the LinkedIn network that are connected to you and your followership.

Okay. When 3 5 other people come and comment on your post, they come and connect all [00:25:00] of their

notes to your post and therefore more people see the post overall. And so, that's also really important. With those 5 things, if you do it consistently for 12 months, there's no question marks around whether it will work.

Because it will work and it has worked for basically everyone that's stuck with it for that amount of time. And yeah, it's really just sticking with it and knowing that it can work.

Allan: I'm with you. I totally agree. What are your thoughts around getting help with team members to help with commenting, with writing some of the content and all of that, because pumping out content seven days a week, whether it's on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever. It's definitely a lift for a lot of business owners who are still busy with other stuff.

They're not like necessarily full time content creators and all of that. So what are your thoughts around getting help with writing the content and putting that together? Or do you think you've just got to do it yourself? Like, what are your thoughts [00:26:00] around that?

You can do it any way. I've seen it work basically any way. People hire ghostwriters, people send voice notes to an assistant who then packages up the content, shares it online. They'll write, personally, maybe one to three posts a week. It's really a function of the time that you have available and how important it is to your business.

I think if you decide it's something that is important enough and it's driving results based on a short period of experimentation, say a month of time, ultimately it's something you make time for and allocate resources to. I do think the more I've, the more I've seen it is hard if you are a strong writer, if you do have good points of view on a topic.

It is hard to outsource that. And so having some sort of link where you're at least in the pipeline of producing that content is quite important in my view. [00:27:00]

I've seen it work well. And in fact, a lot of how we do it in our team is we'll often come up with ideas. I will have someone in my team do the bulk of the writing filling out those ideas, and then I'll add the last 10%. I'll edit it to our style and let it go out. So I find that.

leverages my time well. The other thing is we have a copywriting style guide where our team knows how to write as me as well. So, it is definitely my ideas. It's definitely got my touch, but a lot of the heavy lifting is done by the team as well. So I found that works quite well. So, Dan Marel, who I met up with in Kelowna calls that the 80, the 10 80 10, so the, there's 10% done upfront by you, 80% is done by your team, and then you add the final finishing touch with the last 10%.

So I found that works quite well with moving people to your newsletter. Because I know a [00:28:00] lot of these platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn particularly penalize you for putting in a call to action or a link at the end. How do you think about that? Like, how do you get people to move to your newsletter without getting penalized for adding back links and links out of the platform?

Alex: Yeah, for sure. So it's very simple. The platforms like to keep people on the platform, and

so when they see an external link to your website or your newsletter, they can penalise the reach of your post, and that obviously affects the number of people that will join the newsletter. So, typically on both of them, what you do is include, rather than in the main post, You will include the call to action in a comment underneath the post.

It's important on both Twitter and LinkedIn at least to not be the first comment on your own post, because that indicates the algorithm [00:29:00] essentially that you're the first one interacting with your content, not someone else, and therefore it's probably not that interesting. And so waiting at least for a few comments to come in on both Twitter and LinkedIn.

of the posts before including it is important. The other thing I've seen work quite well and that I do regularly is actually updating the main post after 2 3 hours with a link to your newsletter. That tends to escape the initial penalty that those platforms will give and therefore you can still retain a lot of the benefit of sending people over to the newsletter.

Ultimately, the other cool thing which People underappreciate and often get wrong is you should think of your profile on these social platforms as a landing page. And what do you do on a landing page? You set it up for conversion rate optimization. And what tends to happen with conversion rate optimization is [00:30:00] It goes down when you give people too many options on a website.

Pretty obvious, you have lots of different actions someone could take, they are less likely to take the one specific action that you'd like them to take. Or you're not speaking directly to the person that comes to your landing page, in this case profile, and therefore they don't see the benefit from you.

Giving you their email. And so it's been hyper clear on what your value add is and Being really simple. So including just you know, one link to your newsletter including it under your sort of featured section as well and Being just very intentional about what action you want people to take when they come to your page

Allan: think that's, that's key. Thinking of your profile page as a landing page on social media, because a lot of times the landing page, the profile page is just some [00:31:00] silly photo and, Hey, I'm a, business owner, I'm a father, I'm a this or that or whatever. And not really much, much thought given to that. So I think that's an important point.

Let's switch gears a bit. So like I said we connected in Canada and Victoria. We were among, almost a hundred super interesting people. What were your biggest takeaways from that event? What were some of the big ideas that inspired you?

Alex: Yeah, I mean, get in more rooms with interesting people, number one.

It's, I think in our world more and more when we're so chronically online,

it's so noticeable when you, get in person and build genuine relationships. But no, that, that's extremely obvious. But phenomenal, from a guy called Matthew Dicks, who is one of the world's preeminent storytellers.

And as I found out during the conference, there's a competition called Moth Storytelling, which is held mostly in American cities, as I understand it, and Matthew has the [00:32:00] most competitive wins out of any other storyteller on the circuit. And so in storytelling circles, he is literally number one and does consulting for major, you know, Fortune 500 organizations, etc.

And that's it. It is unbelievable when you have all of these topics online that have so much artificial

complexity and what I mean by that is you have something which in reality is simple like dieting or what to do in dieting. There's probably three to four steps that you need to take to do an effective diet but you just need to do it consistently.

but you have hundreds of thousands of businesses built around dieting, and tens of thousands of different methods as to how you can diet etc. And what is incredible is when you get in a room with someone at the top of their field and they can spend an hour with you and distill the essence [00:33:00] of a complex topic, or otherwise made to believe complex topic like storytelling, it's mind blowing.

Into three to four actionable points that you can actually go away and start using and be, you know, a 20 percent storyteller and for me, the biggest takeaways from Matthew's talk was beginning every story with a location and an action. What that does is it allows your audience to immediately see or visualize themselves in the picture that you are creating.

And by doing so you activate more parts of their brain and get them to be a lot more connected to what you're saying. So that's absolutely fundamental. Thinking about things like stakes and how you introduce stakes throughout a story. i. e. why should someone care? Why does the story actually matter? Why should I listen until the end?

What is the sort of open loop that's

been [00:34:00] created in this story that I have to know? Absolutely brilliant takeaways from hearing Matthew speak and something I've started using a lot in my own content. The other massive thing and You alluded to it somewhat at the start, Allan, but it was the best run event I have ever been to in person.

And it set a new bar for how I think about in person interactions. We were really lucky to have a guy who's colloquially named as the Friends Billionaire, and his name is Nick Gray. He's

based in Austin, Texas. He sets up regular networking events or cocktail parties. He's written a book called The Two Hour Cocktail Party, which basically includes a playbook for how you can make any in person event the best event that anyone has attended.

And I got that feeling from the start when I walked in, you know, I had that familiar feeling walking [00:35:00] in, oh there's 30 people I don't know, this is going to be another awkward in person event where I have to introduce myself to everyone and it's just tiring, but it was nothing of the sort, there were a huge amount of people.

Icebreakers, there was an opportunity to speak to everyone really early on in the event, which ended up setting the tone for the remainder of event and just making everyone so open and so positive some in their approach to conversations. And I think that was a really beautiful thing. I think lastly, there was a great conversation, well a couple of great conversations I had with two men sort of in their mid thirties, early forties, who had both sold companies for two hundred and four hundred million dollars. And about both of those conversations is that this Very crippling feeling so many of us have that insecurity is limited [00:36:00] to people that aren't, capable

and limited to those who can't go ahead and achieve things in life.

But the more and more time that I've spent with exceptional people, the more and more I see that those who do the biggest things, They don't not have insecurity, they have all sorts of insecurity, but they just figure out how to manage that insecurity and succeed in spite of that insecurity. And that was just so, so striking because we put these people on a pedestal

all the time, but fundamentally they're people that have insecurities, but they've just proceeded in spite of those insecurities.

And I think therein lies, again just the value of getting in rooms with people that you feel lesser than,

quote unquote, because all of a sudden you'll see very quickly that you actually might not be lesser than them, and you're probably underestimating what you can do [00:37:00] yourself.

Allan: I noticed that too that, that was a really good observation. I mean, people who are just titans in their, industry battling the same sort of things that everybody is, anxiety, insecurity. Even depression in some cases and you think of these people as being superhuman, but, you know, they're dealing with the same stuff.

And how they got to their levels of success you, you kind of alluded to that as well. It's simple in almost every case, like nobody had done anything insane. Like, we talked to Greg Eisenberg and he's like, yeah, look, my playbook is I start by building an audience. I convert them to a community and then I sell them a product.

That's my playbook. And I just deploy that over and over. And I think so many times whenever I hear a complicated plan and like I was I was speaking to a couple of members of my team around, we were putting together a plan for a project and. it was a complicated plan and I'm like, I [00:38:00] don't think the plan needs to be complicated whenever a plan works out, it's simple and the fact is that scaling it will add complexity to it.

So complexity will often come from scale and you don't need to add additional complexity in the beginning. It's usually. whatever it is, whether it's building muscle, whether it's a weight loss, whether it's building a business, whether it's growing revenue, the plan that's going to work is going to be pretty damn simple.

You mentioned Nick Gray, we've had him on as a guest on the podcast before, Nick Gray. So check out that episode. He's And awesome resource for introverts, particularly who want to be able to host an event, a gathering or whatever, and do it in a way that's very systematic.

So, I found his content quite useful. And then back to story I think that is going to be the superpower of people going forward. We talked in the beginning how AI, software, building business is going to be easy. The thing that's going to be unique that AI cannot do is your stories. And that's something [00:39:00] that uh, I decided I'm going to get much better at it as a result of spending that time with Matthew Dicks and hearing some of his storytelling techniques.

I think in my speaking, in my podcasting, in my writing, storytelling is going to be a much, much bigger focus. I always knew it was important. I always did it, but I never was very intentional in learning it and studying it. So now I'm very much doing that. I think that's going to be Incredibly important. Couple of other things that I mean, I'll share a few of my takeaways. So, Greg Eisenberg, who I just mentioned, talked about LinkedIn again, very much touching on a lot of the same ideas that you mentioned, meaning, hey, post seven days a week, every 24 hours answer comments very quickly, especially as soon as you post to try and get some of that traction.

Patrick Campbell, I thought his session was really interesting. He talked about thinking about what losses You're accepting and what losses you're no [00:40:00] longer going to accept. So really thinking about being intentional about some of your goal setting. And often we think about our losses as, Hey, I'm going to get back to that or whatever, but it's okay to accept some of the loss saying, you know what, I'm never going to get better in that area, so I'm going to put that aside intentionally.

But these are the areas I'm no longer going to accept losses in, and I'm going to go all out in those particular areas. So I think that was a really good takeaway. Think mentioned something where he used the phrase Teflon for tasks. I'm Teflon for tasks. So I'm not going to let any tasks fall on my plate because that's what your team is there for to really build around those things.

my last takeaway was from Ayman Abdullah. So he talked about basically, A good segue for Teflon for tasks. He goes, the things that you don't delegate are a dream and vision of your business, the vibes that you're going to have, the hiring of your [00:41:00] executive team. How are you going to allocate your tasks

capital and then ensuring the survivability of your business. So they were a few takeaways that I've got from Eamon and we're going to have him as a guest on the podcast pretty shortly as well. But he was a really good resource. I thought that had great ideas.

Alex: Totally, yeah. So many great ideas. I think just one sort of thought on the delegation. There's this, leverage discussion across social media that occurs and tends to be a rhetoric that I found mostly comes from founders that are, or CEOs that are at, you know, level 10 and can very often afford to, or have the position where they can actually go and delegate.

Because they're no longer, the business has grown to a point where they can no longer be doing everything. But I think the unfortunate thing is that there's also a long period before you get to that point where you can

afford to delegate and [00:42:00] you've learnt the skill to be able to do the core function of the business, etc.

Where you actually need to be doing the thing and I think there's this. Which relates to what we're talking about here as far as the power of getting in rooms with people that have done these things and really seeing the full suite of examples of how it can be done. But so much of the rhetoric around building companies is limited to Five to 10 iconoclasts as far as Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, et cetera.

And it very often isn't reflective of the reality of entrepreneurship. And I think it's just one of those things again where it's really important to think about sequencing and what comes first and when you actually need to be thinking about leverage and scale and things of that nature. But all in all, definitely agree with the insights there and so many valuable speakers that were in attendance.

Allan: so I attended [00:43:00] that conference and then I attended another author get together in, in Nashville and they were pretty, pretty close together. And both conferences really reiterated for me the incredible importance of being in person. with high level people the level of and there's just no comparison between that, those two events for me.

And then other events I've attended to where it's kind of just open to anyone. And, it's not even just the ticket price, but just the level of people in the room and the thinking around that. And just, you know, Rubbing shoulders with people at a high level, I think, is incredibly important.

I would recommend to anyone in business who wants to really level up to pay to be in the, room, in those kind of events, in those kind of conferences where you're going to rub shoulders with incredible people, because you will walk away. Inspired, you'll walk away with ideas and you'll walk away with connections as well.

So [00:44:00] these are connections that would be very incredibly difficult to do any other way or even online to get their attention because these are people who are really busy. They've got, Big businesses, they've got a lot of gatekeepers between them and you. So if you email them or whatever, you're likely to get an assistant who's going to be gatekeeping.

And unless you have some incredible story or whatever, it's going to be hard to get in front of them. But I think if you can get in the room in some of these kind of events incredibly valuable.

Alex thank you very much. You've been uh, very generous with your time. Where do people connect with you? and get in, touch with your content?

Alex: Yeah. Thanks Allan. Yeah. Faster than normal. co is my website and all my socials are connected to that. So yeah, I would love to hear from you on the, newsletter if you're interested.

Allan: Awesome. Thanks, Alex. And we'll link to those in the show notes.

Alex: Thanks for having me Allan.

Allan: My pleasure.

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