2402 - Transforming Conversations into Concise Books with The Skinny’s Ben Heuertz

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0:44Visit PodVerified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Ben Hirads. Ben, you are the founder of The Skinny Platform, and you're found on the web at theskinnyplatform.com and writeaskinny.com. We're going to talk about our friend that's listening. What's a skinny? We will talk about that. Ben, before we get into that, first off, thank you for joining us. Yeah, thank you for having me. Yeah. And before we, I always love just kind of geeking out with our guests, you know, about the things that they're passionate about when they're not at work.

1:24and tell me what you do when you're not at work. Yeah, so I haven't gotten to do it in a few months because I'm here in Chicago and not a big fan of running in the cold, but this past weekend I was in Phoenix, Arizona and got to run on some awesome trails, up some, not really mountains, but get some elevation. The views is incredible. So I'm really looking forward to springtime and start running outside again. You know, I was just doing some thinking about this. I'd love your perspective on this. I think that there are those of us who pride ourselves on, you know, consuming, you know, input and output.

2:01And there's just like you're consuming so much. We're creating so much. And sometimes we can wear that as a badge of honor. But I know for me that that for me is generally a fast path to burnout. And I have to force myself to unplug running. I do rucking with walking. And, you know, when I do that on a regular basis, and I very intentionally said, no, I could be fiddling around my phone, I could be doing this, doing that. But when I unplug for that hour, I do about an hour and 20 minutes every morning. But that recharges me in a way that I am so much more on when I need to be on. I'm sorry to be talking about me.

2:52Ben, I don't know if you have some thoughts on this topic. No, absolutely. I think that's the key part of what I said is running outside. Because like on a treadmill and stuff, you're still going to have earbuds and you're going to be listening to a podcast. you're going to see the notifications on yourself on your phone but yeah tv might be playing up in the corner they got exactly they got cnn or fox news going non-stop with all that drama especially if you can do it out in nature out in a forest preserve or something then yes that's where i really feel the recharge because at least for me i get kind of mesmerized looking at the trees and i forget i'm running forget i'm doing and that's probably the best way i've learned to kind of turn the work brain off of while I'm doing that.

3:37Trying to, you know, it's that emotion of awe, you know, like this morning, you know, they're kind of annoying around our neighborhood, but the deer are beautiful. I say annoying because I battle with them frequently. They keep eating my bird seed as much as I try to spray hot sauce on it and stuff. I cannot get those deer. They are persistent. Anyway, I saw them this morning and they were beautiful. And, you know, it's just like in that moment when I'm experiencing that love of nature, I'm not thinking about, you know, chaos. I'm not thinking about, you know, the social media arguments or whatever at all.

4:17And that truly does make me a better person. And Ben, sorry, I yapped so much over your experience, but I'm so grateful that you brought it up. And, you know, to our friend that's listening, go for a run, go for a walk. Yeah, get outside. Yeah, I love it. Ben, tell me about Write a Skinny. I think this is brilliant. Yeah, I'm excited to talk about it. And I always love sharing it. really the breakthrough here, or I'll start high level and go into what we do a bit differently. We're quote unquote ghost writer, but we never really write a word. We talk about as writing through conversations. So we work with entrepreneurs, consultants, advisors, and we realize that a lot of them are great at talking and not so great at writing.

5:13So we built everything we do around having conversations, kind of just like we're doing here. And what really was our breakthrough was the skinny concept. And this came from a book, I believe it was called Smart Brevity from the Axios people, whereas you don't have to say all the information that surrounds a topic. You don't need all the context, because typically if someone's reading the book, they know the concept. They know kind of the situation around it. They've done other stuff, other research on it. So we design all our books to be read in about one sitting. So our average read time for a book right now is about 42 minutes.

5:55And one that kind of gets to the Pareto principle of books, 80 % is something you've heard before, something you've done before, something that's just like theory your examples. And then 20 % is the value. So we just want to focus on that value piece. But then also books have not really changed, but how people consume content has changed drastically, as we all know. And it keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter. And so this was a way to take kind of the traditional format, which I'm a big reader. I love reading. So I want to keep books around, but to kind of match where people are in terms of consuming content.

6:37I was chuckling because when I was on your website, you had a mock-up or you had a book here and right on the cover of the book, I thought this was hilarious. It says, you know, on the cover, it says, read time, 25 minutes. And I have to tell you that as a consumer, I saw that and I'm like, I love it. You know, that's perfect. you know, for like, it's particularly if it's, you know, maybe a nonfiction topic where I don't need, you know, it's almost like a lot of, you know, the beauty of podcasts is general media tends to be a mile wide and an inch deep. Podcasts generally tend to be an inch wide and a mile deep, right?

7:22You can really drill down into a particular type of topic. And that makes sense for a book, You know, I don't need the 101. And a lot of times it's just filler, you know, and now you're wasting my time. I'm like, I already know this. Yeah, this is for babies, you know, or whatever. How many times have you read the first couple chapters, put the book down and never came back to it? Yeah. Everyone has kind of that stack of books that they started and never finished. And what's the value of kind of writing a book, putting your experience, your knowledge out into the world if it's not being consumed or driving towards the outcome you intended for it?

8:02Yeah. And just because you write one book doesn't mean that you can't write another one. Ben, I was just thinking about this. there was like a meme I saw and, you know, someone was looking at the runtime of a long movie. It was like 210 minutes or whatever. And they're like, Oh, forget that. But then they're looking at a TV show that is like, you know, 12 episodes, all 45 minutes long. And of course the runtime for that can, you know, is what six hours of, you know, I knew someone else could do the math for me. But, but they're looking at like now that I can do, you know, it's just the way our brains operate.

8:37I imagine you see something like that in this. Yeah, we've had cases in kind of both ways. One where we take a bigger book and then we write the skinnies about kind of the important sections in it. And those sections add up to kind of that full book. But what we've also done is write a skinny where it's kind of the synopsis, the summary of an entire process. and then we're doing follow-up skinny books on kind of each individual section for that deeper dive and that really really allows the author to be super targeted with how they use it because they can give a synopsis out to a potential client or prospective client that they're talking to and now all of a sudden they have that foundation a common vocabulary that they can build off of And really what we're going for is kind of that clarity and consistency.

9:33That's what books create for a lot of entrepreneurs. Because once people are able to engage and see your content, now you're not starting at zero, you're starting at one. And it just makes things that much easier, that much quicker. Let's talk about all of the benefits you get from just having a book. Just get a book done. What do you see as kind of the potential before and afters? Yeah, so I think the big one that's overlooked has nothing to do with the output of the book. What I've seen and what we do in our process is forcing people to reflect on their experiences and mean what they say, because it's going down on paper.

10:22this is permanent, it's going to be out there. They have to mean what they're saying. We've seen that have huge impacts. Like one person we worked with, we did all the interviewings, we locked down the outline, locked down the content of the book, and then he disappeared for two months. We didn't talk to him. And we were like, holy cow, we screwed up here. We did something wrong. But then he came back after those two months and he said, hey, I repositioned my whole business, rebranded. They had been in business for 35 years before that. And he took a whole new pivot, just because he was forced to think about what he was doing and how he was approaching these things.

11:00So that's one that I don't think a lot of people talk about with the with books, because it's not anything to do with the book at all. The second one is that clarity that I was referenced earlier. And we've seen this come in kind of two ways. One very clear example, we've seen with a sales consultant that we worked with, his sales cycle went from about three months down to three to four weeks after having the book, because when someone would come in the door, he would hand them the book. And now all of a sudden, like I said, rather than starting at zero, they're starting at one. They got to see an inside look to how he works, what the process is like, who he is, because it contained a lot of personal stories and his experiences.

11:50And he's been crushing it ever since, frankly, because rather he cut his sales time by two thirds doing it. Yeah. If you want an extra kind of plus one with where a lot of your future clients are going to be coming from, and that's AI, if you have a book, I'm sorry, but AI is just going to perceive you to be a little bit more authoritative. just simply because you went through the effort of like, it's funny. It's like, you know, again, someone could write, you know, 10 blog posts. And guess what, my friend, you pretty much have a book there in the skinny format. You can do this. Ben, I'm in. How does it work?

12:38Yeah. So one thing you just mentioned, there is actually a project that we're working on right now is turning someone's blog into the book. So with that, it's a super quick process. We've also turned people's podcast episodes into books. So our process starts with what we call story mapping. This is what is the goal you want for the book? And this can be leads, it can be shortening your sales cycle, it can be getting on stages to give keynotes. And then we work backwards from there. Okay, if that's the goal, who's the target audience to achieve that goal? And then what is the journey you have to bring them on as a reader to achieve that outcome.

13:19So the whole lens we look through is the hero's journey, which a lot of us learn about in middle school, high school. And it's a very simple storytelling strategy. But what a lot of people do wrong is they put themselves in the hero's shoes. Well, we want to put the audience in the hero's shoes and bring them on a journey to whatever outcome you're working towards. From there, we get into a pretty traditional writing cycle or editing cycle, I should say. We actually hire a lot of journalists rather than writers because they're used to quick turnaround times. And so from the completion of these interviews, we get a rough draft of the book within about a week.

14:05So we move very quickly. And And yes, we do leverage AI for that early drafting process just because it's a quick start. But then it's all humans from there. It's all conversations. You're talking to people, giving feedback directly. And then kind of a key point in the process, and this is a cool one because it's when it becomes real for a lot of people like, oh, wow, I actually wrote a book here. It's just a simple feedback group. Getting five people together, read it, give their thoughts. and I always say it needs to be five people that love you enough to be honest about it because you do get a bit of an echo chamber you get so familiar with the content there's going to be blind spots yeah uh but this part of the process is always my favorite because coming out of it like you can just feel the energy of the person like they went through this process they had some sort of transformation and they're thinking because they were forced to reflect and then coming out of it, this is when they're like, holy cow, it was absolutely worth it.

15:09All right. So now once you have a book, you can get it on Amazon. You can get it anywhere. Is that right? Yeah. So we work with independent printers and distributors. Right now, we pretty much only do digital distribution. So Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target's website, Walmart's website, anywhere online where books are sold. We do all formats as well. The audio book, paperback, ebook. My thinking is that the in-store books is way, it's prohibitively expensive for most people. And I forget the stat, but something like 87 % of books are sold online, not in stores. Yeah. So once again, that last 10 yards is so much more work and may or may not be valuable to you.

16:04But there's so many other things that you can do with your book adjacent to the work you're already doing to make things far more profitable, improve your conversion rate, shorten sales cycles, get way more opportunities, media opportunities, etc. Yeah. One interesting thing I saw with one of the authors we worked with recently, he just sent a copy out to everyone in his CRM. And just from that simple act, closed 10 deals. Yeah. Just sending it out. I love it. All right. So Ben, the website, writeaskinny.com. What do our friends do from there? Yeah, so by the time this episode comes out, it'll be updated and there'll be three frameworks that people can go download and do themselves.

16:55The first will be finding your niche. This is all of these frameworks are stuff that we do with authors and exercise. This one takes five minutes. It gives you everything you need to do it. All you have to do is ask a couple people one question. It'll take you 10 minutes. The second framework that will be up there is your elevator pitch. So how do you take that niche you have now and tie it to your value? And then the third one here will be finding the theme of your stories. So what are the key events that you've gone through, the key experiences personally or professionally, and how to find the theme that connects them all together?

17:41Very critical. To do all of that groundwork first, rather than just like, oh, I have an idea. So, Ben, thank you so much. Great conversation. WriteASkinny.com is the website. And what's the skinny platform? So that's the publishing company. That's our imprint. Got it. Got it. Got it. Got it. All right. The website, writeASkinny.com. Ben Hirats. Ben, thank you from Chicago. Rhymes with Pirates. Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me.

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