How to Talk About Hard Things

0:00From Entrepreneur Media, this is Problem Solvers, a show in which entrepreneurs do what entrepreneurs do best, solve unexpected problems in their business. We were completely wrong. And I'm just like, it's not selling. It was like, we have to start from scratch. I'm Jason Pfeiffer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine.

0:22My friend Paul Kicks has written a book that is absolutely incredible. But also, as I said to him, the reason we are talking is because though all of that is important and compelling, it is not usually the fair of problem solvers, which is a... No. No, no, it is not. For reasons you'll hear in just a moment when he explains his book. But the reason we are talking about it, aside from that, it's a great book and you should know about it because it's important. But also because what it has forced Paul to do is engage with and write about and talk about very complicated, difficult subjects. And entrepreneurs have to do that.

1:05You cannot exist in the world. Even if you are running a business that does not engage with complicated, difficult subjects, even if you were just out there selling pizza, something will happen in the world and you have to engage with it. You have to have conversations, sometimes very public ones, marketing, social media, sometimes just private ones with your customers or your clients or your employees. And the question is, how do we have conversations that are real and human about very difficult things. This is something Paul has had to think a lot about. Because, well, let's introduce Paul. I am Paul Kicks.

1:46I am a writer and author. And you are author most recently of? The author of You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live, The 10 Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America Forever. And I'll let Paul explain that book in a moment. But first, I also want to tell you that Paul is just one of the greatest writers and communicators I know. He is an excellent, excellent reporter. He's written a number of very impactful features for Entrepreneur Magazine, and also he teaches writing. So he is in the business of telling people exactly how to be good communicators. So, okay. So this book arises out of two things.

2:23first off my own fascination with the civil rights movement and specifically with what I thought and still believe to be the most pivotal spring in the whole of the 20th century, which was the spring of 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama. Because before that spring, nothing in the previous 100 years would have suggested that Black people and white people were equal. The Emancipation Proclamation is signed in 1863, and effectively, like, it doesn't matter. Black people are second-class citizens. The civil rights movement starts, and they're basically, they lose for the first, like, seven years. And then something happens in the spring of 1963 to alter everything.

3:08And the everything there is sponsorship of civil rights legislation that then becomes the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Martin Luther King Jr.'s own martyrdom in 1968 and what I think is a new life for his country. It's the rise of the Black middle and upper class. It's the ability for people first like Shirley Chisholm and then like Barack Obama to ultimately gain the presidency. And it's even my ability as a white man to marry a Black woman in a former Jim Crow state like Texas and to today raise our three kids on a shaded street where we are not harassed for who we are.

3:46Did you notice how without any prompting in the very beginning of explaining this book, Paul also pivots into explaining his own relationship with it? Because of course, anyone who is listening to him or particularly watching him speak might think, well, what does this white guy have to say about the civil rights movement? And he wants to acknowledge that. He wants to help people understand his perspective and his entry point into this subject. And that's something that did not necessarily come naturally to him. But Paul, like all of us in our own way, has had to spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage in difficult subjects.

4:26This is something I had to learn along the way of working on this book. It is also something that I've had to learn in the last three years, because I moved from somebody who has worked at a media company to somebody who's been on my own. I'm my own sort of entrepreneur. And so how I thought about this sort of coincided with how I was trying to lead my own life and form my own business and try to get it thriving in its own way. What Paul is referencing there is that he used to be an on-staff magazine editor. Now he's on his own and figuring out how to make it work like everyone else. So Paul and I sat down to have a conversation about how he has learned to talk about the subject matter in this book and how anybody, entrepreneurs, writers, doesn't matter, can engage in challenging subjects as well.

5:08Because again, like I said, we all have to do it and Paul is doing it. So that is the subject of this episode of Problem Solvers, all coming up after the break. It is finally warm out. You're going to go outside, move around, enjoy, and you need fast, wholesome, convenient meals to energize you and save you time. That's why you need Factor, America's number one ready-to-eat meal kit, which can help you fuel up fast with ready-to-eat meals delivered straight to your door. Factor's fresh, never-frozen meals are ready in just two minutes, so all you have to do is heat and enjoy. Factor offers meals to fit a variety of lifestyles.

5:47For example, if you're looking for calorie conscious options, you can try delicious dietician approved calorie smart meals with around or less than 550 calories per serving. And if you need an extra boost of energy to support your wellness goals this spring, try protein plus meals with 30 grams of protein or more. With 34 plus chef prepared dietician approved weekly options, there's always something new to try. So head to factormeals.com slash ProblemSolvers50 and use code ProblemSolvers50 to get 50 % off your first box. That's code ProblemSolvers50 at factormeals.com slash ProblemSolvers50 to get 50 % off your first box.

6:29All right, we are back talking with my friend Paul Kicks, author of Most Recently, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live, 10 Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America. It is a fantastic book. I am literally holding it in my hand right now. It is weighty. I'm going to drop it on a desk. There it is. You can hear it. Boy, I made more rattling than I expected. Okay, let's get into it with Paul about how he has learned through the writing and talking about this book, about how to engage with really difficult subjects. Really what I think it comes down to is something that you and I have talked about in the past and something that this podcast has talked about in the past that I think we can talk about in greater detail right now, which is that which scares you is actually the thing you need to say out loud.

7:12To come to this book in 2020, at a time when the Black Lives Matter movement was happening, at a time when there was a lot of discussion about should a white man be able to tell a story like this, I decided in first the proposal and then ultimately the prologue to lean into my own very personal story, which has to do with my family, which has to do with the fact that I am the head of a Black household and have been for almost 20 years. If I don't say that right off the top, I'm just some other white dude in a long line of them who has told civil rights stories. And there's nothing wrong with that.

7:52Like Taylor Branch's books are phenomenal. If you ever want to read his trilogy on the civil rights movement, please do. But you can't necessarily pull that off today in a way that he could have in the 1980s. You have to be more thoughtful about it. And I think rightfully so. I think it's a good thing that we are more aware of identity, of cultural appropriation, of who should be telling those stories. Do we take it too far sometimes? Yes, but that's probably an argument for another podcast. What I will say is that I had been for the majority of my career, somebody who had just been just the facts, ma 'am, sort of reporter in that I was never going to put myself in a story.

8:30There was no point. And because of the circumstances of my life, I'm like, I have to do it this time. It's basically the only way I could tell this story. And it's also faithful and true to the reality of the situation. I became obsessed with the Birmingham campaign because I had three kids. We have a daughter and then twin boys. And when they were born 12 and 13 years ago, I was like, I've got to do more than like, I'm, I'm the, again, I'm the head of a black household. now. I need to learn more about this. And that's where my obsession with the Birmingham campaign really began. It was just like, I'm reading these books.

9:04I'm fascinated by this stuff. This is amazing what they were doing. But flash forward to 2020 and what was happening in that spring. Well, specifically, I decided to include something that was deeply personal to my family. My wife grew up in the neighborhood next to George Floyd in Houston. She had friends that went to the same high school as George Floyd. She had cousins that went to Yates High in inner city Houston, which is all to say that when George died, we did not shield our three kids from the coverage of his death in the ways that we had previous with all the previous black men who had been killed by cops and whose cell phone camera footage or body cam footage had appeared on CNN.

9:45We all sat together and we watched George die. And my boys, my twin boys in particular, had a lot of questions about it. And there were a lot of tears. There were a lot of times where one time my son Walker ran from the ruin in tears and was like, why do they keep trying to kill us? Because it was a season of sort of unending footage of George. And then there was Jacob Blake. I don't know if you remember Jacob Blake, Kenosha, Wisconsin cops shot him seven times in the back while his three kids screamed from the back of his car. So it was a really tough time, the latter half of 2020. And coming out of that, Sonia and my kids just felt despondent.

10:19They didn't feel that there was really an America for them. And Sonia, my wife Sonia and I were like, well, what can we do to sort of buoy them? And we decided on a book project that very quickly became a family project. And that family project was you have to be prepared to die before you can begin to live. Now, why do I tell you all of this? Because I share it in the book. I say the thing that scares me, which is I'm going to tell you about my own life in a way that I've never done it before. And so when you talk about brands that need to do this or entrepreneurs that need to do this, it is actually your vulnerability.

10:50that makes, that helps you connect to others. It is actually your flaws that are the things that others take strength in. Because when they see you coming out of something that is difficult, or not even coming out of something that's difficult, when they see you just admitting that your life is not Instagram perfect, it's kind of like, oh, thank God. Because you know what? Neither is mine. And I can't tell you, like I've done some pieces now for you that have, where I've started to open up more and more, the amount of emails I get for those pieces far outweigh any of the things that I am like more quote proud of that are like deep, you know, months long investigative pieces or anything like that.

11:31Because it's like, I'm saying some is like, look, as an entrepreneur, I've struggled with this. I've struggled with a tremendous amount of self-doubt. I put, I wrote about in a, in a, in a story I did for you. And just to see people say, you know what? I'm in the exact same spot. Or sometimes they're like, you know what? I was in that spot six months ago and here's what helped me. This might help you. That was just like, it was just people, you just see the kindness of people. You see the generosity of people. And again, there's this sense that like, life is effing hard, man. And sometimes like, if you can just say, it's hard, I'm going to try to find a way forward, but I don't know what that is.

12:08That's actually not a position of weakness. That's actually you just being honest. And in honesty, I think is a lot of strength for brands. First of all, I didn't know that you were getting the kind of responses that you were from those pieces. So I'm really glad to hear that because they deserved it, but also not surprised because I've had a similar experience to you where I have had a career where mostly I wasn't writing about myself in any way. And you'd spend months on something and you'd put it out there and like, basically nobody would respond to it. You know, people read it, but they didn't write you about it.

12:42And then I would do things that That included me or about experiences that I had that were relevant to entrepreneurs and drawing a line between what I was experiencing and what I know other people were. And then the responses just poured in. And I think that, you know, you and I have crossed that line of from focusing on just telling things that were not about us to revealing parts of ourselves to the public and we're rewarded for it. But a lot of people, I think, are not across that barrier yet. And they might worry that inserting themselves seems self-indulgent or that sharing something about themselves opens themselves up to more personal criticism, attacks, something that there's too much risk or too much self-focus.

13:34And I wonder what you say to someone who is concerned about that. I would first say it's not unfounded. I mean, there are a-holes everywhere, including on the internet. So they're going to find you if you put yourself out there. I have talked with other entrepreneurs in this sort of storytelling space that I'm in. And I would say, especially for women, they can just get, I mean, the harassment that women in particular will get for this. And almost always from men, almost always, though there are sometimes some very catty women who will go after, perhaps a bit envious of somebody, of another entrepreneur who's had some success.

14:11So yes, that's going to happen. However, and I'm curious to know if this has been the case for you, it's like 99 to 1 in the opposite direction. It's like the sheer number of people who say, thank you, or I'm glad that you put words to something that I've been feeling for a long time. I mean, you don't have, I mean, look, when you're in a crisis, if you're a brand in a crisis communication sort of moment, that's a time where I would actually argue that you should lean into the hard truth because by establishing that hard truth, you cut off journalists first and foremost, journalists like myself from getting to reveal that, which then sort of dunks on you again, right?

14:53So like, say the thing that's bad before the journalist can say it about you. And suddenly you're on a little bit of higher ground, right? Yeah. I'll say before you say the next thing, what you just said reminds me a lot of a conversation that I had a few years ago on this podcast with Frank Blake, who was the CEO of Home Depot at the time in which they were hacked and there was a big data leak, which is something, of course, that has happened to many companies. But this was back at a time in which those things were still relatively new and they got a lot of attention and they were PR disasters.

15:29And Frank watched another large company before Home Depot got hacked. He watched another large company go through that and remain very tight lipped, not talking about it. And they got absolutely destroyed both in the press, but also consumers who had lost trust in the brand. And so Frank drew up a game plan for what to do in the event that Home Depot got hacked. And then Home Depot did get hacked. And the game plan was basically over communicate with everybody. And so he, from the very beginning of that was doing exactly what you were saying. They were very open. We are looking into this. We do not know what happened.

16:13We do not have the information, but we are going to overwhelm you with what we know. And that's exactly what they did. They communicated with customers. They communicated with the press and they did it relentlessly. And as a result, what they found was that trust in Home Depot actually went up because of the communication and because Frank himself as the leader was willing to be out there and open and vulnerable as a leader. So anyway, there's an example of what you're describing. Another great example, Domino's Pizza, 2010, 2011, absolutely in the tank, like a trading at like five bucks or something like that.

16:55Everybody says the pizza is garbage. Oh, I remember. New CEO. Do you know this story? Yeah, I, I, yes. Keep telling it. It's a great one. Okay. New, is he, well, I don't, I'm going to try to recall as much as I can. I hope I'm getting all of these small details, right? But I'm just going to, as like caveat emptor, I may not be getting all of the really tiny details, right? But I'm going to go ahead and go with the story. New CEO comes in, J. Patrick Doyle. And they had like, Domino's had been like all these hidden camera videos and just like your pizza's trash. That's basically what every consumer is saying.

17:26Yeah. And they once put like a Domino's pizza in, I think, I think this is right. It put a Domino's pizza in like a pizza hut box. And then suddenly those same people were like, this pizza is so much better. And it was just because it was pizza hut pizza, same trash pizza. So J. Patrick Doyle is like, we got a problem. And it was one, of course, ingredients. And it was one of like, actually the work of the pizza. Like they had just let it go to absolute trash. There was a reason the consumer said it was trash, but he also, in some of his first ads in that period of like 2010, 2011, he's like, let's air, like let's air the hidden camera videos.

18:03Let's show how bad it is. And so they did. And at the end of those 30 second spots, you see Doyle like come back to the camera and he's just basically like, look, I'm really sorry. I'm new. I'm going to do everything in my power to make Domino's a powerhouse. Just hang with me. We're going to make the pizzas a lot better. And then their next run of ads are like, here are some of the hidden camera people who hated our ads or who hated our pizza six months ago. It's six months later. Let's do another hidden camera round. Again, hidden camera. They don't know they're being filmed. They're like, Hey, you want to try this pizza?

18:34And they do. And they're like, Oh man, this pizza is suddenly a lot better. So now Domino's airs that right now. It's proof of concept that what they're, what they're trying to do is working, right? Like the work that they're putting in is itself working just with, just with ingredients. Right. Yeah. I think it's something like, had you invested in Domino's at its nadir, you'd have something like a 3000 % return today. And some of that is an improvement of pizza. Some of that is like business stuff, just like the way that they actually expanded once they improved pizza. But I would argue a lot of that is story.

19:07I would argue a great deal of that is honesty. I would argue a lot of that is just J. Patrick Doyle getting out there in front of America and saying, you know what? We effed up big time and I'm sorry. And I'm gonna do everything in my power to make it better. People love that. People love it when you say, I'm sorry, man. I screwed up. Like this is on me. It wasn't even technically on him, but like the fact that he's owning it, this is on me. and I'm going to make it better. People love that. They'll root for an underdog like that. That's why Rocky is... My kids and I, my twin boys and I, I was talking about a minute ago, we still love Rocky.

19:43We watch Rocky all the time. What is Rocky? It's just an underdog guy. That's all it is. He's just trying to make a better life for himself. He largely fails. By the way, he largely fails throughout everything he does. It's true. But people love Rocky. It's true. As you were telling this, I was pulling up some old articles about the Domino's thing just to get some exact language. So some actual quotes from the CEO. This is a company that had built the whole brand around fast and reliable delivery. And we realized that everyone in the world who wanted fast, convenient pizza was already buying from us.

20:15And the people who wanted a great pie simply were not.

20:21We had somehow created a situation where people liked our pizza less if they knew it was from us. That is rough. And then here's some of the consumer reviews. By the way, just to emphasize the point, he's telling the press this, right? Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, those were public statements from the CEO of Domino's. And he also said, so these were real customer reviews that Domino's just put up on a Times Square billboard. Microwave pizza is far superior. Worst excuse for pizza I've ever had. the taste of its crust is like cardboard i mean it's incredible it's incredible that they did that they put it on time square i didn't know that

21:10but it was so good i mean it's so bold it's so bold it's so bold it's so good and it's like exactly what you should do yeah and it worked and it does yeah just to show you just to show you the there's the payoff here is so Bloomberg back in 2017 ran a long, deep piece about this and how it worked. And the headline was Domino's atoned for its crimes against pizza and built a nine billion dollar empire. There it is. Pretty good. There it is. Yeah. And again, some of it like let's rethink the pizza. Some of it. OK, now how can we thoughtfully expand? I would still argue most of it is Domino's honesty and then the storytelling they did around that honesty.

21:51Yeah. So Paul, let's talk about one other thing, which is it's, we've talked mostly about making, getting personal, making it personal, being okay with that vulnerability. But another part of it is language and the language that you use and the words that you use. And I'm curious how you have thought about that for your own work and the insights that you have for others. So I think the first thing you have to acknowledge is that the world is ever changing and you need to just be sort of culturally aware of where you find yourself in that moment and then respond accordingly. So like for this book, again, I chose to lead the book with my own story because basically like for any black person like my wife who comes to this, like, why should I read this book?

22:37They flip to the back. They see some white dude. Why should I read about Martin Luther King? All right. Well, I'm going to tell you right in the prologue. I'm gonna try to hook you right away, right? Because I'm aware of the broader cultural conversation that's going on, again, around appropriation, around who gets to tell whose story, all that stuff. So let's just address it right away. But once you have, I would say that once you have that understanding, then I think it's actually a question, you use the word bold, and I like that word, because a lot of times when I see brands doing stuff. They are very like weak.

23:17They do not say clearly what it is that they mean. Budweiser is a great example of this right now. Budweiser with the trans spokesperson. Actually, I'll jump in here for a quick explainer to that reference, although at this point who probably doesn't know it. So in early April, Bud Light, not Budweiser, Bud Light partnered with a trans influencer named Dylan Mulvaney to promote a social media sweepstakes it had running. And this very quickly kicked off a huge backlash among conservative activists and then boycotts. And the company seems to have been completely unprepared for this. So they responded, as Paul says.

23:54In a very mealy mouth way where they didn't know exactly what it was they wanted to say. So it's like like then they ran an ad immediately after that that was they brought back the Clydesdale and it's completely impossible. The Clydesdale is just like stomping through St. Louis. And it's like, you hear about American values. Like what, what are you even talking about right now? What is, what are you saying? So what's the solution there? How would I advise Budweiser? Well, what I would say is kind of like, look, if you're going to put this person out there and say, this person is our new spokesperson.

24:26Great. Then just simply say, we represent an America that is ever-changing. And just in the same way that our beer has always strived to stay current with that ever-changing America, here's our new spokesperson. And then if people don't like it, you can even acknowledge that. You can say, we realize some of you may not like that. We realize we may be upsetting some of our core base. What we're doing here is simply trying to acknowledge that this is also who we are. Not this is who we are, but this is who we also are looking to try to reach. We're not trying to abandon you. We know who you are.