One Big Idea 1 - Strategic Foundations for Business Growth: Navigating Relationships, Advanced Tech, and Brand Integrity

0:03Welcome to the thoughtful entrepreneur. You asked for it. So we made it happen. Every Friday, we're doing something a little different. Instead of one long conversation, we're packing in four of them, four experts, four big ideas, all in about the same time it takes to drink your morning coffee. We call it one big idea Friday. And the format is simple. I asked each guest one question, and they bring their single best idea. idea for business leaders who want to grow without the noise. No fluff, no rambling, just the thing they actually want you to remember. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it.

0:44And with our next one big idea, Tom Martin in New Orleans. Tom, it's great to have you. You are the founder and president of Converse Digital. You're found on the web at conversedigital.com. You work with a lot of marketing agencies, and you are the author of the book, The Invisible Sale, Painless Prospecting for Professionals. Tom, it's great to have you. I would love to hear your one big idea. Thanks. It's good to be here. So the big idea, The Invisible Sale was all about how do you capture the buyer, potential buyer who's at the moment of need, they're searching for a solution. So it's very SEO and content oriented and chat GPT oriented.

1:27But the big idea today, I believe, is what I call the invisible bond. And understanding the invisible bond helps you deconstruct a scenario that we all see, whether it's in business development, whether it's just in corporate America. You have two people. They basically have the same idea. They talk or they share the same idea. And one person, it's like they never open their mouth. Nobody hears them. The idea doesn't gain any traction. Everybody forgets about it. The other person, it's like the equivalent of coming down a mountain with stone tablets, and it's just like, oh, this is the greatest thing in the world.

2:03The idea captures attention. It captures momentum. It spreads throughout the company or it spreads throughout the world if they're a thought leader. And unfortunately, we misunderstand that dynamic. People think that that either just, well, it just happens. Some people get lucky or whatever, or they will attribute it to just how loud the person is, the self-promoting person, et cetera. The truth is, that's not it at all. What it comes down to in a nutshell is that it really doesn't matter what is being said. It matters who is saying it. And who is saying it, that's the invisible bond. The people who have built the network of bonds between themselves and others, and there's two types, they're strong and weak.

2:47The people who've invested that, they understand how to build those bonds of likability, credibility, trust. They de-risk themselves. It's reputation in a nutshell. They de-risk themselves, which is what makes it easier for people to get behind that idea, to feel confident sharing that idea. And it's all about, like I said, two styles of bonds. They're strong and weak. Strong bonds are the people who are going to be, you know, to steal Seth Godin's idea, that's your first 10 customers, or that's your boss and your boss's boss, or somebody in the company who's just really well thought of. Those are the people that if they get behind your idea and they say, I'm willing to publicly support this, that's going to get that early momentum.

3:30That's going to give other people a signal that is, well, it's safe to support this idea or this person. But what's really interesting is that that's alone not enough for success or adoption. The people who are really good at getting their ideas adopted at scale, when you look at them, what they've done is they have built an enormous network of weak bonds between themselves and others. Might be people in another division, another department, another part of the company. If, again, if you're more like a thought leader type person, it's just, you know, people within the network, people who run conferences, people who believe in ideas and spread them.

4:05And they have this incredibly large network of pretty weak bonds, but that is the activation tool to get that idea out there. And the people who are consistently most successful, the people who get promoted, the people who get the raises, the people who start companies, the people who get keynotes at famous conferences and get paid lots of money, those people, if you look at what they do, they have done an outstanding job of building a core set of people, places that they have a strong bond with, that those people believe in them. They trust them. They say, I'm going to I'm willing to go out and publicly support your idea, even if I'm not completely sure it's going to work.

4:48And then they compound that trust with this network of amplification from this very, very large, weak bonded network. The two together is what transforms somebody from just, hey, I'm a person with an idea to I'm a person with an idea that you can feel safe supporting. And that translates into adoption, buying, selling, influence, all of it. And we both know those are the people that tend to be the most successful in our world and really any aspect of corporate America. Quick tip on how you would recommend forming all of those bonds in advance before you put your big thesis out and hope that you've got a network to support you.

5:34Yeah, first and foremost is researching who those strong bonds should be with. I mean, your obvious ones are your bosses or your boss's boss. But if I was in a corporate environment, I would look and say, who are the people that people look up to in this company? Whether they're directly in my division or department or not, and begin to build strong bonds with them through, hey, go have a cup of coffee, get to know them. Check in with them periodically. Be helpful to them. Like what are they looking for in their world? How can you be of service to them? And how can you help them? How can you move through that likability, no trust, credibility pathway?

6:14And then on the weaker bond side, it's just, again, it's to be out there. You know, so many people that they know the people they work with, but they don't know anybody else in the company. Be that Pied Piper who's out there meeting people in all the different parts of the company, who's even if you're an introvert like me, like go out and be sociable and just meet people. And you don't have to build super, you know, super strong bonds. You're not going to invite each other to your kids' weddings. But if you see each other in the in the lunchroom, hey, man, hey, Josh, how you doing? How's it been?

6:46You might read an article and think, you know what, that Josh guy over there in accounting would love this. And it could be a professional article, could be a personal article, maybe you like to smoke meat, and you're into barbecue. And I find of cool, you know, I sent it to you. It's just making those little deposits that move people through that likability, credibility and trust cycle to where when you bring that idea forth, or when you bring your your opportunity, the thing that you want to get momentum behind, they know who you are, they they find you trustworthy, they think you're credible on whatever idea or topic that you're you're espousing.

7:26And most importantly, they feel like it's a low risk decision to publicly support whatever it is you're trying to get support for. Because that at the end of the day is the analysis we all go through. We're all the human brain is designed to reduce risk. And if you can be the least riskiest person, the chances that people will adopt your ideas will support them will buy from you, etc, goes up exponentially. And that's the part people forget. They truly believe that persuasion and influence happens in the moment, when in fact, it's simply a product of work that was done days, weeks, months, and years in advance, building up and investing in these invisible bonds, that when the moment comes, you can call on those bonds, and those bonds are what will transform your idea into success.

8:22Tom Martin, you are the author of the book, The Invisible Sale, Painless Prospecting for Professionals. And you are found on the web at conversedigital.com. Thanks, Tom. Thanks for having me. With our next one big idea, it's Chris McShanig. Chris, you are the CEO and founder of Virtual Teammate. You're found on the web at virtualteammate.com. Chris, you and I were chatting just a little bit before we got going. I'm really excited for this topic. So please do share with us your one big idea. Thank you, Josh. It's a privilege to be on your podcast today. Yeah, for me, you know, I've experienced in virtual assistant market for many years, placing well over 3 ,000 virtual assistants.

9:06But I really believe we're in an inflection point. And we're transitioning from really a service-based work model. I'm sure all of your listeners have heard about virtual assistant companies and the benefits of those from a labor arbitrage and cost arbitrage. But really where I see this is we're an inflection point to technology enable. I think where AI, and that's what we're doing at Virtual Teammate, really amplifies your virtual teammate, driving productivity, margin expansion, and scalable growth, right? Because I believe that the best thing we can do is enable folks leveraging the power of technology to achieve more and focus on their highest and best for you.

9:40So it's not about a VA company or just delegating to a person. It's about enabling a person and that really defining a platform of human plus AI execution to scale. Because I think we all had experience leveraging teammates. And, you know, in the last 10 years, we've gone from 5 % of our workforce remote to now well over 50 % of our workforce is remote. And, you know, some of those are in the States, but a large majority is starting to grow outside of the US. And, you know, at Virtual Teammate, we're really focused on how do we bring that virtual remote team member and enable them. And we're building solutions and working with a lot of businesses to really embrace AI and enable and empower their virtual teammates or their folks within their office to achieve more.

10:26So, Chris, are you saying that then, I mean, so obviously I think a lot of leaders, and I'll just kind of advocate for other leaders who are very interested in running lots of experiments. businesses, you know, using agentic AI, using AI solutions. And then I think, you know, one stress point might be from a lot of leaders is I feel like a lot of leaders or founders, especially at the SMB level, feel like they are the ones that are responsible for teaching and ensuring that their teammates, both maybe domestically and virtually, are AI literate. and they're leveraging all of the best available tools.

11:09But if I hear you correctly, Chris, your teammates are already coming in schooled in AI. Is that right? Correct, yeah. So we have teams that are experienced of really building out the AI workflows and the experience. And so kind of moving from that labor-based model to more of an AI model, right? And so for me, it's about building a workflows platform where human talent and intellectual automation combined to deliver scale and outcome-based execution for our clients. And so that's where our folks have the capability experience. And we've leveraged AI tools internally. Now it's about helping our clients leverage AI tools within their business.

11:48If you were to talk to, again, talking to a room of business founders listening to us right now, and you were to give them a couple of pieces of advice, maybe without necessarily hiring you, that sort of thing, But they want to do a better job, you know, rather than just say, hey, everybody, go use AI tools. What might be some ways that might be a little bit more effective that might not feel threatening, that actually might be a huge net positive for our organizations? Yeah, I think great question, Josh. And so for me, it's about what are the outcomes you want to drive? Are you looking to drive productivity improvement internally?

12:29Secondly, are you looking to use it to grow growth, so from a sales and marketing perspective? So really clearly defining what your outcomes are, your outpost-based responsibilities. Then looking at what's the structure you need to put in place? What are the tools you want to bring to bear? And then the third being, what are the people that you need to enable that? I think quite often we start kind of in the middle and we say, I've got these great tools. I just want AI. Well, but what are the outcomes? What are you looking to do with the AI? Is it to improve internal operations? Is it to expand your view and out into the business?

13:01And then looking at what are the right people and what's the right mix? Because as I mentioned, you know, our teams have shifted in the last 10 years. So they're not just here physically in your office, but what I like to refer to as they're here, near, and far. Here in your office, near, maybe working within the same geographical space in the US or Canada or wherever your listeners are. And then far, leveraging teams like myself. and then bringing that together because, you know, the definition of a team is a group of individuals working towards a common goal. And so it's really about how do you form teams, but you've got to really clearly articulate to get engaged and what are the outcomes we're looking to drive.

13:36Then we define the structure and then the people. And so we work very diligently with our clients to kind of help them through that process. Well, Christopher McShanig, your website is virtualteammate.com. when somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do? You know, if they are interested in expanding their team, both with virtual teammates and, of course, virtual teammates that come in AI literate. Yeah, great, great question. So for me, I think the best thing is book a strategy call. I love having these conversations with clients because, you know, we have, I think in the U.S., around 33 million businesses.

14:18about 30 million of them are small to medium-sized businesses, and they're struggling, right? What does AI mean for me? What can I do? How do I do it? How do I get going? And so I'd love to have a strategy conversation with them and just kind of understand where their needs are today, and then we can kind of put them on that path to really get them to success and embracing not just AI to replace people. You know, we talk about not replacing, but enabling your teammates, whether it be in your office, near, you know, or be remotely leveraging our teammates to really help kind of force multiply. Because our goal is, I want your listeners and businesses and our clients to focus on the highest and best value use of their time and then delegate and leverage our teammates to really do the rest.

15:00Christopher McShanig, founder and CEO of Virtual Teammate, found on the web at virtualteammate.com. Chris, thank you so much for sharing your one big idea. You're welcome, Josh. Thank you very much. And it's so interesting. I'm only Christopher when I'm in trouble. So hopefully I'm not in trouble today.

15:19with us right now, Bryce McBeth. Bryce, you are the founder and CEO of Reap Commerce. You're found on the web at reapcommerce.com, and you're the co-founder of Neurograph, found on the web at neurograph.io. Thank you for joining us and sharing our next One Big Idea. Bryce, it's great to have you. Please share with us your One Big Idea. Thanks, Josh. Well, I guess my one big idea is that data does not lie, but it can gaslight you. And so my premise here is that marketers are just bad analysts. And I would say actually analysts are bad analysts. And so it's not necessarily their fault. It's kind of the data that's presented to them.

16:04A lot of data and marketing, everything's marvelously measurable, but nothing really that's presented on its surface really is super telling. So an example of this, I'd like to just shift out of marketing for a second just to kind of paint the picture. If you've ever read a book like Freakonomics, you know, talked about this case study of no child left behind, right? Like there is these teachers were incentivized to help try to improve the education system and get kids to make better grades. And in fact, in the following years, after this initiative was launched, grades did improve. But when so on the surface, it appeared that the program worked.

16:42But when you go a step further and peel away the layers of the onion, what you end up finding is that the teachers were so incentivized that they cheated on behalf of the students to get their grades up. So the kids weren't actually getting any smarter. The teachers were finding a way to rig the system to get it to work. So I find that a lot in marketing where this data that we're using becomes very self-fulfilling and only addresses things at a surface level. Just in its most simple form, an example would be conversion rates. Most brands will hearken data about their conversion rates. But if you really look at it, the conversion rate for new visitors versus repeat visitors is drastically different.

17:24just like it's drastically different when they're coming in from like a paid media versus organic or if they're landing on the blog, for instance, I find that a lot of blog-driven traffic doesn't convert well at all. So could give a whole keynote on that. An example that sort of inspired this for me was I had my own e-commerce business and my team kept telling me that my average order value was$800, that most people spent about$800. And I'll tell you, Josh, like I couldn't remember any one client that spent$800 with me. So I went and looked at the data myself and I literally went through manually and looked at a bunch of orders and found that about 70 % of my orders were people buying piece good items like furniture.

18:10So you're talking about a$300,$400 order for most orders. Whereas a few orders that really made the majority of our revenue were people outfitting an entire business and spending$10 ,000 to$20 ,000 during the order. So in fact,$800 was an average, but it was reflective of not any one person that was actually on my website. So I had to dig through and figure out what the common trends were between these two distinctly different groups were that was not apparent just by running average-based reports. And I think a lot of marketers do fall in that trap where they're looking at Google Analytics or Triple Whale, whatever their source data is, even Shopify for that matter.

18:56That data can be extremely misleading, and it's critical to get into the weeds and segment the data a lot more granular. Yeah. So in our final kind of 30, 45 seconds here together, what's the solution? Like, how do we get better data without kind of tainting the experiment, as it were? Yeah, well, so I think you're asking for an example at some point when we talked last. And I'd say like, you know, the key is in segmentation. And it's hard to know exactly how to do that. You kind of have to go create a theory and go prove or disprove it. But if you take a simple, just as an example, you take a simple report, like a landing page report through that you can typically get through Google Analytics or GA4.

19:44But instead of most people just look at like either the bounce rate or the number of times that those pages are served as a landing page. But if you look instead at the session key event rate on the far right for the top landing pages during a period and look at the lowest conversion rate, that usually gives you your best ideas for conversions. Then you go a step further and segment that. Just as an example, you can segment it for females on mobile devices. pick a state, any state, and see how the numbers change, then compare that to males on desktop. And again, this is just an example to show you how these different sort of polar opposite groups of people may behave completely differently.

20:30In your case, many of those stats may be similar, but that's an example of like how you can start to dig in to better understand. If you just run a gender report, half the people may be male, half the people may be female. That doesn't give you anything actionable to go off of. You really have to segment the data and get after it. Bryce, your websites, Bryce McBeth, your websites are reapcommerce.com and neurograph.io. Real quick, what would you recommend people do when they come to visit you? yeah so well so it has a lot to do with where they're stuck and typically people are stuck these days with attribution or better understand their customer and that's exactly what that's what we're here for so NeuroGraph specifically gets into personas all the things that we just talked about including their behavioral analytics so that's something we could certainly take a look at if that's something that they're interested in and better understanding the different groups of people that were on the website.

21:33Yeah. Bryce McBeth, again, ReapCommerce and Neurograph.io. Bryce, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh.

21:44And with our next one big idea, we've got Paige Arnoff-Fenn. Paige, you are the founder and CEO of Mavens and Moguls. Congratulations on 24 years. Your website is mavensandmoguls.com. Paige, thank you so much for joining us. And please share your one big idea. Well, thanks, Josh. My one big idea is that you do not have to be a famous celebrity today to be a brand. And if we learned anything during the pandemic, it's that your online presence is more important than ever. A lot of people think you have to be Taylor Swift, LeBron James, Beyonce to be a brand today, and that's just not true. A brand is a promise of a consistent experience, and you just literally don't exist unless people can find you online.

22:44um what what great brands have in common is that they own real estate in their customers brain so that every time a prospect has a problem that your product or service can help them solve that they think of you first so you have to be consistent don't spread yourself too thin Pick your platform. I think the best brands know who they're reaching and they have a few core messages. They're not trying to be everything to everybody. You want to pick one or two things that you do better than anybody else, better than your competition and reinforce that in everything that you do. AI is the buzzword of the day and everybody talks about artificial intelligence.

23:36but I think the AI that really matters today is authentic interactions. What is it about your origin story that stands out? What is it about your strengths, your weaknesses, your war stories, the good, the bad, the ugly, that you can share that makes you that valuable brand in your customer's brain? So what is it that you can do after listening to this today? If you're with me and you believe that you're a brand and not a commodity, commodities compete on price. You don't want to be in that box. All you need to do is do a quick communications audit. Go into Google, put in your name, put in your company name, find out what messages pop up.

24:27Are you telling a consistent story? Can people find you? Do they remember you? you can do some quick and dirty market research. Talk to people, a handful of people who know you from different situations. Are they on a board with you? Do they know you from work? Do they know you from a hobby? Are the same words coming up? So if I can leave you with one last important message is that you only have one chance to make a great first impression. Make sure you're a brand that stands out and that you own that real estate. If people, if you don't make a great first impression and people have to find you again, it's going to take a lot more time and a lot more money.

25:16So be that compelling brand, have the words and pictures to tell your story so that people come back and they trust your brand over and over and they tell people what a great brand you are. Paige Arnoff-Fenn, your brand is Mavens and Moguls. Your website is mavensandmoguls.com. Paige, very quickly, if somebody goes to your website, what would you recommend they do if they want more Paige in their life and how would one engage with you? So I've got a lot of great content. It's all free on the site. I've got articles, I've got podcasts, I've got videos. So by all means, feast at your own, you know, there's just a ton of free content there.

26:02And if you want to stay in touch, you can find me on LinkedIn or get in touch through my website. And I'd love to continue the conversation. Paige Arna Fenn, founder and CEO of Mavens and Moguls, found on the web at mavensandmoguls.com. Paige, thank you for sharing your one big idea. Thanks, Josh.

26:26With our next one big idea, it's Katie Gutenberg. Katie, you are the founder of Digitally Enhanced Marketing. You're found on the web at digitallyenhanced.co. I love all of the work that you do, Katie, because you help your audience, you help your clients invoke AI in a very human way within our organization. So I'm so excited for your one big idea. Katie, I'm going to give you the stage. Thank you so much, Josh. And thank you for letting me nerd out with you and your audience about this. But yes, what I have been so lit up, so passionate about lately is that everyone is trying to use AI to do more, work harder, work faster, and they're using it to try to help their businesses.

27:18I believe that using AI to just be more productive is not going to help you. Effective AI needs to be a true extension of you, your business, your ethos, why people choose you guys. And so that's what I've been really lit up and helping people figure out. So what I see so often in today's day and age, like I said, the conversation is so much about speed, productivity, how to do more, try these tools. Everyone's yelling at you about like what you need to be doing, how you need to be doing it. If you're not doing it, you're getting left behind. So I see people kind of adopting it in or choosing not to.