2268 - Proven Strategies for Entrepreneurs to Write a Transformative Book with Tandem Services Inc's Jennifer Crosswhite

0:05Hey there, thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, influencers, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt-in required where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100 % inbound in your industry over the next six to eight months with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to upmyinfluence.com and watch my free class on how to create endless high-ticket sales appointments.

0:51Also, don't forget, the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you.

1:05with us right now it is jennifer crosswhite uh jennifer you are a book coach you are the owner and ceo of tandem services you're found on the web at tandem services inc and that's i n k.com well jennifer it's great to have you well it's great to be here i'm excited to talk about stuff today helping people get books out there and increasing their influence with a book it's going to be a great conversation. Yep. There is some big, big, big value markers and authority indicators that you have. If you got a book, excited to have that conversation. Before we talk about that, Jennifer, can you tell me just something about yourself, like what you've been doing for fun, what you're into lately, geeking out on that has nothing to do with work?

1:49Folks, maybe something that folks might not know about you that you've been enjoying lately. Well, I got back from vacation just a couple of weeks ago and I spent my vacation at home working on the garden in my backyard. So that sounds divine. Tell me all about it. I don't know how great it was. I was doing battle with like the, this grass that gets in your weeds, you know, your, your planting beds and it's just insidious and trying to like get it out there. I did actually see a Amazon ad for a flamethrower. I don't know about that. I didn't go that far. Yeah, that's, we had to do that out West when we had those big plants that would turn into tumbleweeds.

2:28I was like, the only way to, you just have to blast them with a, you'd carry the big propane tank and you'd have a hose with a thing and light it up. That's what we did back in the day. Yeah, I know you're right. Grasses are tougher because you can't use the same kind of weed stuff on them. I've got that same thing going on in my mulch beds right now. So thank you, by the way, to our listener for joining us on Garden Talk. What do you have going on in the garden? And by the way, two weeks doing gardening, I think, would just be such a joy. It was, you know, it's so different because we spend most of our days in front of a computer doing things where you don't see a big difference, right?

3:13Especially something like a book. That project, it's going to take you a while. But you can go out and spend an hour in your gardening bed, and you can see a difference right away. You can tell if you've gotten those grasses out of that planter bed, which I'd had the planter beds for a couple of years. So the grasses had really gotten themselves in there. And so I had to yank them all out. And originally I was going to put vegetables in there and I decided that might be a little too high maintenance for me. So I got some pretty native plants to the area that will bloom and grow and hopefully attract, you know, the bees and the butterflies and all that kind of stuff.

3:49and also not be so high maintenance. So hopefully I'm saving myself some time in the long run. That's a good medium to get into. Well, Jennifer, let's talk about why someone in 2025 should get on it about having a book if they don't have a book or if it's been a while, they need to get going on the next book. Can you maybe just kind of talk about, first off, let's talk about who you are and what you do. And then if you could just kind of launch right into why books are so important for thought leaders, founders, CEOs, leaders of all stripes. Sure. Well, I'm a book coach and editor. I worked in traditional publishing for years, worked with one of the big five publishing.

4:32Then I went out on my own. I'm also an author myself, so I get what it's like being on both sides of the desks. And I love helping entrepreneurs, thought leaders, coaches, consultants take their knowledge and put it out there and create a bigger impact. When you are working one-on-one or even one-to-many, there's only so far you can go. But I like to tell people a book can go around the world and impact people you will never meet and do things you will never have any clue that it's actually doing. It makes an amazing amount of impact and increases your influence in ways you cannot predict. I always tell people, think about it like a$10 business card.

5:09It costs you about 10 bucks for the copy of your book. And so you can hand that out to people and they can learn so much about you and your thought leadership and what you're trying to accomplish. It gives you authority. It introduces you to people that you wouldn't meet otherwise. And it just it just is a great addition to your business in a lot of ways that you just can't get any other way. Yeah. And here's the I suspect that you have a lot of good news for folks that have always wanted to write a book. And I'm guessing we're probably going to talk about AI a little bit here. A little bit. Yeah.

5:46Yeah. And let me tell you, and I'm hoping that, Jennifer, you can coach us on, you know, the scope at which or the application at which we use these tools and kind of where it fits in. Can I just, yeah, give us a state of the union of where we are for producing a book today in 2025, given the advanced tools that we have access to now. Well, I mean, it's really a great time. It's never been a better time because in the past, when you only had traditional publishing as your option, they were the gatekeepers. But now there's no gatekeepers. The readers are the gatekeepers, and they're ultimately should be the ones who are the gatekeepers who decide if your book is worthy of reading and talking about and sharing and all that kind of thing.

6:31And so being able to reach them directly is a great advantage. Something like AI, I tell people, think of it like a junior research assistant. It's a tool and you want to give it the grunt work. Let it do some of the research for you. Let it do some of the fact finding. Let it do some of the marketing copy, some of the areas that you're not strong in, but don't necessarily trust what it hands you. You know, that old saying, trust, but verify. Definitely verify what it gives you. just as if you were working with a junior research assistant, you wouldn't necessarily, you know, take everything they say at face value.

7:07You would fact check it, but you would give them the grunt work that's not in your wheelhouse. And so allow it to do some of the things that will save you time and help move you forward on the things you're really good at, which is your message, your thought leadership, your way of saying things, your way of looking at the world. No bot or tool is ever going to be able to replace that. All that you want it to do is help you enhance your ability to get that out into the world in a faster and more efficient way. Yes, yes, yeah. Well said. And that's exactly the analogy I use. It's just, it's a pretty brilliant intern, super hardworking, but they don't know what you know.

7:48And here's the challenge though. They will sound like they know what they're talking about. And so So if, and I think we saw this a lot in the early days of AI. I think a lot of people were like, oh, cool, copy, paste. And then everyone on the outside was like, ooh, cringe. That's pretty bad. And listen, I think one of the biggest things with a book, it's not, and I'd love your take on this. It's not about just cranking out 120 pages of content. And I suspect, Jennifer, that one of the hardest things is what stays in the book, right? It's not so much about, oh, how am I going to come up with 120 pages?

8:35Get out of here. You're not in middle school. It is not hard to fill up 120 pages if you've been doing what you're doing for any length of time. It is more about how can I distill this down into the most impactful, most resonant, most helpful advice and the stories that go into that so that I can achieve great things with this book. Is that your experience? I'm kind of speculating there. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. One of the things we always want to talk about is what is your goal for this book and who is your audience? when we know that we sort of reverse engineer and we need to create the book that has the best structure that's the most impactful that provides the best transformation for your ideal reader so that they're gonna take this book and go oh my gosh this is exactly what I need and it's fantastic but it does take working on that structure what you leave out is just as important as what you include.

9:33And my job is to help you figure out what that is and to help hone in on, hey, you need more of this or, hey, that's a rabbit trail. We should save that for another book. And having that insight and that perspective on what's going to make your book the most effective structure, that's kind of the unique special sauce that I bring to the process. All right. Well, let's let's give some for for let's assume, Jennifer, that folks that are listening to us right now, they might have a book in their head. They're like, I probably have a pretty good idea of like what I would want to say. Like, what are the next steps that you would recommend in maybe helping to make that a reality?

10:19and again, naturally, sure, they can have a conversation with you and you can kind of handle everything, but let's empower folks. So at least what I'm hoping is I can make, or I can help someone to become the world's greatest client, potentially for you or a book coach because they've just really done all of the groundwork ahead of time. Absolutely. Well, I always tell people, get it all out of your head. So whether your favorite method is a whiteboard or a Google Doc or whatever your favorite method is, just start doing brain dumps. You know, everything. Don't edit. Use this as a brainstorming time.

10:56Just all the ideas. What do I think I might want to talk about? Put it all down there. Take a couple days just as you're thinking about things when you're driving or in the shower, you know, where you get all those great ideas. And then just put them all in one place and get it out of your head. And when you think you don't have any more, great. That's you're done with that first step. Then your second step is to really look at those ideas and start kind of grouping them. How do they sort of naturally group together? Highlight different colors, circle them, star them, whatever works for you. And start seeing how these things might naturally sort of group together.

11:29And then you're starting to actually build a table of contents or an outline. How, you know, they're essentially the same kind of thing. And you start seeing how these ideas relate to each other and you kind of start doing some rough organization. That is one of the best steps you can take. Many, many people start, they just open a Google doc and start typing. And that's really not the right place to go because you don't know where you're going. Get it all out of your head, start grouping some things together and get a little bit of structure first. I like that. It'll get you way down the road faster.

11:59Yeah. I've, I've seen that, uh, exercised. I mean, you could even do just sticky notes, Like, you could tell yourself a pack of sticky notes, right? You know, a thought put up on a whiteboard and then you're like, okay, there now, you know, get to a point where you've got like, you know, I don't know how many I'm, you know, kind of ideas or topics. I mean, it could be a ton of them, but, but eventually like they're going to start to coalesce together. Like you're going to see patterns here and then hopefully Jennifer, a natural flow. Can, can you talk about the flow of a well-written book? Yeah.

12:36So one of the things we really need to spend a lot of time is the beginning of the book, right? If you're not hooking your reader at the beginning, they're going to lose interest. They're going to put it down, you know, on all the retailers. You can do the look inside where you read the first part of the book. And so we really want to establish what is your authority for writing this book? What is this your experience? How did you come about this? What do you, why should someone listen to you? But you also need to remember, even though you want it to be about you, it's really not about you. It's about your reader.

13:08And so why would your reader, what is their pain point? Why are they picking up this book? What transformation are they looking for? Now, you can use your own life as a perfect case study, or perhaps you have clients that have been a really good example of this, but use the power of story. We love story. We love hearing about people, how people have been transformed. We love these great makeover shows, right? And so you want to start bringing that in at the very beginning so readers know what kind of experience they're going to be in on and how this is going to help them change their life, solve a problem, address a pain point.

13:42And so be very, very conscious of who your reader is and how they're going to move through this transformative process and this journey that you're going to take them on. Mm-hmm. Jennifer, who should work with a coach like you and who's probably not well, like they're probably just going to need to just go the DIY route, you know, maybe watch a course, watch a bunch of videos, you know, maybe just kind of work more exclusively with AI. Like, how do you know when someone's really ready for, I mean, other than budget. Right, right. And budget's a concern, right? Yeah, what are the big indicators?

14:19Hey, listen, this is actually a pretty big deal. And let me ask the question in the reverse. It's like, who should not be DIYing this? Like, are you kidding? The potential you have? Why are you cheaping out on this and turning this into a full-time job for yourself? Exactly. You're making this way too hard. All right, I'll let you address that issue any way you like. Yeah, I mean, it's really true. I mean, think about a business owner, you're a coach or a consultant or a speaker. your time is incredibly valuable. Likely writing is not your, in your wheelhouse writing for a book, right? You might produce a lot of content in a lot of other ways, but a book is a unique type of, of product.

14:59It's different. It has a different structure and it has to do some different things. You could spend the learning curve on that's pretty significant. You could spend a lot of time learning that, but what is your time worth? And so boy, when you work with a coach, you are cut, it's the shortcut, right? You are cutting that time curve in half. And so if your time, you think about your hourly rate that you bill out at. I mean, you start thinking about that and you're talking about spending 60, 80, 100 hours working on a book. Now, all of a sudden, you have to realize hiring someone to help you with that, that's going to be a much better budget concern than spending your time on that.

15:38And that's just a time thing. That's not even talking about the lost opportunities of working with your clients and moving forward with your own business. So I think for most entrepreneurs, you have to really think about it as the opportunity cost. What are you missing out by having to learn this whole new skill set that you might only use two or three times? And so having someone come alongside and help you with that is much better. Now I tell people who want to DIY it, this is for people who have a lot of time on their hands. This is something they really do want to learn. They want to learn the craft.

16:08They're interested in it. This is going to be something that's maybe a side hustle or something they're going to do for a longer period of time and they want to learn all the ins and outs because there are a lot of different parts to it, then sometimes people will actually hire someone for the first book and then learn all the things and then go and learn to do it themselves for the other products. So think about the time investment and the cost of your own time. I think that's a good boundary for that. Yeah. Jennifer, what does it look like working with you? I don't know if you have different levels.

16:38I mean, like, like if someone's never worked with a book coach, like how do you structure that engagement? Yeah, absolutely. So when you work with a coach, we usually decide up front, how, how long your book is going to be and how long we're going to work together. It's usually four to six months. We meet a couple of times a week. We meet over zoom for about an hour. Every time you'll have an assignment every time of how many words I want you to give me by the next time we meet. So I have time to review it. The nice thing about working with a coach is you have someone holding your hand as you're working through the process.

17:11Usually we start with the structure and the big picture first, then we funnel down into the actual writing. So you're never alone. You have someone that's figuring out the process for you and telling you, yes, you're on the right track. No, you're not on the right track. That really helps you avoid any dead ends and going off rabbit trails and heading on the wrong road and all those things that cause you to waste a lot of time. It's a much more efficient process. uh well jennifer to our friend that's been listening to our conversation um where do they go from here um you know because obviously they're listening because they're interested in this topic but um yeah uh i i don't know if you have resources what you'd recommend if they if they want more jennifer crossway in their life yeah so my tandem services uh website as you said tandem services inc i-n-k like the old-fashioned inc um i have a resource page on there there's all sorts of free resources.

18:05You don't have to opt into anything on there if you want. You can download it. Those will get you started. If you want a DIY, there's a lot there that'll help you. If you get into it and you're like, wow, this is a lot, there's places to reach out to me on there as well. And I'm always happy to have a conversation with someone about what that might look like for them. Your website is tandem services, inc.com. Hover over resources and recommendations. You're going to find a lot of good stuff there. Also too, if you want to browse through Jennifer, through a lot of the work that you've done in the past, you do both fiction and nonfiction.

18:43Are there any that you're like, oh yeah, I do a lot of this. And if you are writing this type of book, you definitely come and talk to me. Is there anything in particular? Yeah, for sure. I work with a lot of coaches and speakers because I always tell speakers, If you're speaking and you don't have a book, you are leaving money on the table. You absolutely need to have a book like yesterday. So I work with those folks a lot who have a lot of, normally they work with more one-on-one or small groups, and they're really interested in increasing their impact and making it a bigger than they can actually do themselves.

19:17So those tend to be the folks that I work with the most. All right. Well, Jennifer Crossway, again, your book coach. You are the owner and CEO of Tandem Services, your website, Tandem Services, Inc. with a K. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks so much. I enjoyed it.

19:41Thanks for listening to The Thoughtful Entrepreneur Show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2 ,000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

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