EntreLeadership - #81: Jay Baer—Why Smart Marketing Is About Help not Hype

Episode Date: October 6, 2014

How do you make your product or service shine in today’s oversaturated, ADD-addled marketplace? Jay Baer, best-selling author of Youtility: Why Smart Marketing Is about Help not Hype, joins our podcast to show you how to cut through all the clutter. As a bonus, we’re giving away 50 copies of Jay’s book and a quick worksheet (http://res.cloudinary.com/test-entreleadership-com/image/upload/v1412363934/vzyynw3ct4kwgoz2x2l8.pdf) to get you started on a smart marketing campaign of your own. Stay tuned! http://www.entreleadership.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Charismatic, passionate, as integrity, humble, servant, faithful, inspiring, persevering, positive, flexible, driven. This is who we are that call ourselves leaders. Helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Coming to you from the Music City, this is the podcast of leaders by leaders and full leaders. I'm Ken Coleman. We'd love for you to connect with us on Twitter at Entree Leadership

and at Ken Coleman. You can also email us podcast at Entreeleadership.com. We have a fantastic podcast coming up for you today. Our feature conversation is with Jay Bear, the bestselling author of Utility, Why Smart Marketing is about help, not hype. And T's, we're going to give away 50 copies of Jay's bestselling book, Utility, after the conversation. So you want to Tune for that. That's right. I did not stutter. We've upped our game from five free books to 50 free books. Thanks to Jay and his publisher. Stay tuned for that. And we're going to go from the Big Shot bestselling author. And we're going to take you into Main Street as we talk with the owners of the Purple Guys, Jill and John Schram. Incidentally, they happen to be Entree Leadership Master Series alums. And you're going to really be encouraged by this conversation.

And also, I'm really thrilled here to announce the winners of Dan Pink's book to sell as Schumann. Now, if you're just kind of catching up, we offered five free books of Dan's best-selling book, the latest one. And here's how it works. We ask you to tweet a short phrase. And this particular phrase was the at-ontre Leadership Podcast sold me. And I want to just give a shout out real quick to our five winners.

Dan Colbert, Christopher Battles, Elmer Buton, Juan Cologne, and Trent Newman. gentlemen, congrats on winning the books. And folks, stay tuned. We want to keep giving away more books. And as I said, we're giving away 50 copies of Jay Bear's best selling a book, Utility, later in the podcast. I want to mention very quickly, we announced last podcast, a brand new event, Entree Leadership Summit. This is going to be an unbelievable few days out in Southern California. The website, Entreleadership.com slash summit.

Dave has asked his good friends, John Maxwell, Patrick Lencioni, Rabbi Daniel Lap, and Dr. Henry Cloud, and our team to join him. And it is going to be really exciting. In fact, we haven't even announced this publicly. Our podcast audience, the only people have heard about it. And I've got to tell you, the response, Eric told me, was unbelievable, people wanting to know. So again, Entreeleadership.com slash summit to get the details there. And of course, our Entre Master Series, All Access, our Entry Leadership One Days. anything you need to know about our events and the great content there to encourage you,

Entreeleadership.com. All right, folks, excited about a new segment where we take articles, information, things that are happening, and we try to apply them to the conversation that we are having on this podcast and also to your realities. We call it in the news. I saw a recent article on Forbes.com by Joshua Steinmey. It's entitled, What? What is content marketing?

And this is very, very relevant to the conversation we will have on this podcast with Jay Baer in utility. So let's define content marketing. The Content Marketing Institute, an online resource for information on everything content marketing, defines the phrase content marketing as this. Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing viable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and acquire. a clearly defined audience with the objective of driving profitable customer action. In other words, your target audience.

Stimie goes on in the piece to say that if people want to consume your content rather than avoid it, that is the smell test, right? If you're putting out content that you think is valuable and you think your audience wants to consume, but they actually aren't consuming it and thus finding it valuable, then it's, It's not good content marketing. Stimey cites in this Forbes.com article. This is great. I don't know if many of you've seen the Volkswagen

2014 Game Day commercial. Now, this article was written about a week ago, or middle September. And at the time on YouTube, and it had 18 million plus views. So it's already passed the smell test. People are finding it valuable because they are watching it.

And so Stimey goes on to ask us, is this an ad, this game day commercial, or is it content marketing? He says it's both and he's absolutely right. Why? Well, I just mentioned it. Very simple. If you've got 18 million views on anything, people find it valuable, even if it's just entertaining. Well, Ken, you know, it's just a fun commercial. Yes. That's been consumed 18 million times. Thus, try to compute the branding dollar, the branding dollar, the branding value alone on a viral piece like that. It's unbelievable. And here's, I just want to pause here for a second because, listen, you have to ask yourself at times,

am I trying to get branding, or am I trying to get an actual sale? Because many times it's the branding that will give you the leads that hopefully you can convert to the cell. Don't get all caught up and trying to do everything. What is it to you really need to do? So this is a great piece. By the way, I want to tell you again, the name of the article,

if you want to look at the whole article, it's what is content marketing on Forbes.com, Joshua Steinmey, the author of the article. He gives five content marketing examples that I want to roll through really quick, I think will help you. Number one is an infographic. These are generally long, vertical graphics that include statistics, charts, graphs, and other information.

So this is an example. Inphagraphic is just straight up value. Think about it. People are out there looking for helpful, reliable, relevant content. An infographic can do it. Secondly, a webpage. Now, I want you to go with me on this because Stimmy does a nice job here in defining what he means by a web page.

Not your company website. per se, but what about a specific website, maybe within your company website? A normal web page and a web page that is content marketing are very different. Stimey sources the beginner's guide to SEO from MOS, a provider of SEO related tools and resources. Listen to this. This free website has been viewed millions of times bringing countless customers to Maas.

So the idea is, what can you give away for free as far as information? That's a website that's very easily shareable, very easily access. and beyond. You can just do a simple web page within your website. Incidentally, if you want to offer like a free PDF or something like that on your website, same idea there. Something that is shareable, easily consumable,

and it provides terrific information. Third is podcast. Hello. You listen to the Entree Leadership podcast. There's a reason. We are providing new value, and it's free. That's huge. Create a podcast. Doesn't have to be

the world's greatest production value, but if it has content that helps people, there's some content marketing. Videos. Gary Vaynerchuk just exploded when he began to do YouTube videos about his family's wine business. And finally, books. And by the way, not just a published book, you could self-publish something or you could do an e-book. My goodness, you can go on Apple and iBooks and you can create your own e-book. You've got talented technology people, designers, graphic designers, could create an e-book. I said this. I'm a published author. My book one question came out last April. It has been more of a brochure than anything else for me. A brochure about who I am, what I believe, why I ask questions,

why I love doing interviews. It's a brochure. So final thought here. And again, I can't recommend this article enough. What is content marketing? You really need to do a deep dive on this. I'm giving you just an overview here by Josh Steinme. Final thought here. He says, why do we do content marketing? Here's simple four reasons. You ready? Awareness. Customer. may not be aware that you have a solution. Research. When customers know about a solution, they look for research. You can help in that. And by the way, if they research and they use your stuff for research and they like your research, now they've trusted you, why wouldn't they buy from you? Third is consideration. Once the customer starts comparing different products, they know what you

stand for or what you're about. Finally, people want to buy. Customers make their decisions, then they move forward. And you can provide value all the way through those four steps. So anyway, just a quick thought there. Content marketing really matters. And you've got to figure out how to do it because the big conversation we're having on this podcast is with Jay Bear. His book, Utility, I love the subtitle, why smart marketing is about help, not hype. Because so much in 2014 is about hype. Think about every walk of society. Hype here, hype there. We have reality TV stars. who are multiple millionaires worth hundreds of millions of dollars based sheerly on hype.

You help people? You're going to win. All right, there's our first in the news, Eric. The article, what is content marketing by Josh Steinmey on Forbes.com? Check it out. I know it will really help you. Folks, I've told you about it. Jay Bear, this book, Utility, Why Smart Marketing is about Help Not Hype, was put on my desk.

And I've got to tell you, the title sucked me in. And I dove into the book and said, we've got to have Jay on the podcast. And we got him set up. And he is the president of Convince and Convert. Social Media and Content Accelerator. This book, a best-selling book. This guy understands digital marketing to help people. And thus the title.

Here is the conversation with Jay Bear. Well, Jay, I want to get right to this book and what it's about. For those who have not seen the book, Utility, why smart marketing is about help, not hype. Tell us what you set out to do with this book. Why did it burn a hole in you to the point that you wanted to write a book called utility? What does that mean? Y-O-U utility, and people try and look that up online and don't put the Y-O-U in the front. They won't find it. That's right. The reason I wrote the book, and marketing is hard. It's harder today than it was yesterday, and it's going to be harder again tomorrow.

Consumer behavior has changed. Technology has changed. Competition is higher than ever, especially for attention. And I looked around and said, you know, the old way of doing things just doesn't work any, whether they're entrepreneurs or larger brand. The same problem, which is how do we break through, click, and watch, and subscribe, how do you win in that game? And there's a lot of advice out there. Right.

If it was easy to be amazing, everything is the answer. And I looked around and I said, you know what people are amazing and start being useful? And once I sort of sort of thinking about that concept, I sort of see examples of utility everywhere. And the definition of teen, boy, that's good. It's marketing with so much intrinsic and inherent value that if you said, hey, would you kick in a couple dollars for this?

People would say, yeah. You know what? I actually would. It's marketing that people cherish. That's right. Or ignore. Absolutely. More so ignore these days. Absolutely. Now, I want to stay here for a minute, Jay, because that's a wonderful statement. This idea that marketing is so

valuable or so useful that people would pay for it. And I think at first blush, you hear that statement, you go, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I really believe in my product. I really believe in our mission. I believe in our services. So much, I just want to shout it from the mountaintop. And that's not inherently bad. And we'll get to that a little bit later. But what you're saying is marketing that is so useful that people pay for it is ultimately you're giving value, not a tagline, correct? Explain that. What does marketing that is useful look like? The problem with most marketing today is that it's about product and services. That's right.

And your products and services are not that interesting. One of the key, and I use that word, intention, mission. That's right. And I'll tell you, I think you'll appreciate this. The very first time I ever started getting my head around the utility, this is exactly how it happened. Karen, we're up there at hockey camp, and we were in BAMP. There's lots of, in restaurants, there's a lot of tax. But there's only one taxi driver in BAMP who is a utility.

And that's taxi mic. So what this guy does, he doesn't, you know, try to advertise himself as a taxi driver. Once a quarter, he makes the where-to-eat a regular eight-and-a-leven sheet of paper that he creates on a laptop and hands it out. So when you're in BAMP, you'll see this. It's a very yellow, bright yellow paper. Wow. And I grabbed one, I said, what is this? Paddyo, he's like a one-man trip advisor, one-man Yelp.

And he has a map of downtown on the front. He kind of know where these different places are. And then right on the front cover, it says, Taxi-Mike. So 105, get your in all night, and then you've got it in your pocket all night. We've got a map of downtown. It's got this directory. It's portable. And at the end of the night, when you need a tax, here's my man, right? That's right. I love that. He's not talking about his telling a bigger story.

Now, would you pay for that if somebody said it was on a guidebook? That is a brilliant story. Jay, I want to stay here. This is so good because I'm thinking about the taxi thing. If you go to a new city, we have a lot of business leaders that are traveling all the time, Jay. And you go to a place like that, and you'd love to know a couple great haunts to go get a great meal or something like that. And yet when you think taxi, you're never thinking taxi is your first four or five answers. If we were playing Family Feud, they wouldn't be a top answer, right? I'm going to call a taxi.

But because this guy has put this out there, he has – I want you to talk about the trust he created, where normally you wouldn't trust a taxi guy to tell you a great place. But talk about how he's created trust in that very simple guide. Well, information, and especially information that is radically transparent, right? Where he just put it all out there. It's just listed. It's not, here's my recommendation for best sports. That's right.

So his transparency is almost by being comprehensive. But you said the magic word. Nothing else matters. And today, in an environment where everybody's phone, so they have access to all the world information in their pants, people can look up stuff whenever they want, and they do. they constantly look comes out. You can't hide the truth about your company.

If you have some customer service problem or a bad product or an employee that goes off the rail, you can't hide companies do by getting out. I mean, look at Domino's Pizza, right? Everybody knows Domino. Here's Domino's. That's right. Now, not so much.

That's their entire strategy. And since they move to that position, they've had eight transparency and honesty builds trust. Boy, that is so true. I want to read a quote, Jay, and have you talk about it because this is a wonderful bow on part of this conversation that we're having. It's from Joe Chernoff. It's from the book. And Joe's the vice president of marketing of a cloud back-in development company called Kenvi, if I'm saying that, correct? Kinvey, I think you said. They say it. Kenvey, all right. We don't want to butcher that. Here's the quote, and it's right on line with this. This is from the book, folks, utility.

If you create something that somebody would pay for, but you give it away, not only are you building trust, and a debt of gratitude, but you shock them into sharing it. They share not only the asset itself, which is inherently valuable to the brand, but they share the fact that they are surprised that a brand would just give it to them and not try to sell them along the way. Boy, he is so right about that. And the key to that, product essentially, courage. To create, that requires...

Now, I want to fast forward into the book, because we can't cover the entire, book utility here on this podcast, but there's some wonderful stuff I want to get to. And I want to do a Cliff Notes version, Jay. I'm going to tee you up, and I want you to help our listeners understand what you're doing in the book because we want them to get the book and dive deep here. But let's go to part two of the book, and you lay out three facets of utility. We've been talking about the book and what it really looks like, and you say there are three facets. Let's start real quick. I'm going to tee up with Chapter 4 and the first facet of utility, and that is self-serve information. We've been

kind of talk a little bit about that, but what do you mean by self-serve? Well, as smartphone penetration in the U.S. is upwards of 70%. Mobile data usage doubled last year in the U.S., doubled in one year. So today, there's no barrier to research. There's no friction to learning. Your customers are hyper-researching things. 70% been made. Wow.

They can't figure out any more answers. Then they actually, because the amount of information and self-serve, information right now. I guarantee you you do not. All right. Second facet. Radical transparency. I love this. What does radical transparency look like? Yeah, so it wasn't any good. Now it's better. It looks like a taxi mic saying, here's all the different restaurants in Banff. And here's what I say. It's from McDonald's in Canada, which has this program called Our Food, Your Question, where you can ask

McDonald's any question that you want, and they will answer it. You know, people ask all kinds of crazy stuff about food quality. Some people beat up on McDonald's, and, you know, these questions are not in a way from those questions. 30% include who they call the skeptrogram. Wow, that is really good. All right. And the third facet is real-time relevancy. Unpack that, Jay.

Well, you are better end of useful Columbia Sports inside, and they have a mobile apple here in Indiana with a buddy, and we wasn't in the Navy. But, ordinarily, they would have been... I love that. I want to follow up there on story. because we have a lot of different people listening in here today, Jay, and maybe they're going, man, this is absolutely right on, this is what I need to do, but I'm a little bit stuck in figuring out how to make our story bigger

and thus be able to create the value we've been talking about. How would you recommend they get unstuck on this? Yeah, you really have to train out of the funnel mindset that says we have to give people things that culminate in a sale. I'm going to tell you something, folks. I rarely do this, but I'm a stock. stop the conversation and make Jay repeat what he said because I believe it's tweetable, and I think it is absolutely chock full of value.

Jay, I'm going to set you up again, but what I heard you say is we are surrounded by data, but we are starved for insight. Is that right? Did I say that right? That's exactly right. Oh, people, listen to me, write that down, tweet it, give him credit on Twitter. Jay, what's your Twitter handle? We're going to get this out there right now.

Thank you, sir. It's at Jay Bear, J.R. That is incredible, but I'm not just trying to get you some retweets, folks. I'm trying to help you. Jay, that was absolute gold. Let's keep going. I needed to pause and give that out. Okay, I want to move forward in the book. Chapter 8. I love this chapter. And again, we don't have time to cover it all. But again, give us a Cliff Notes version here. Because the title of the chapter is, map customer needs to useful marketing. And that last answer, you ended. You said, hey, make sure you're regularly talking to your customers. And this is a wonderful setup here. How do we map customer needs to useful marketing? What's that look like? One of the key is not putting in the wrong weapons all the time.

I see this every day, especially amongst small business and entrepreneurs who say, hey, Jay, we need a blog that blank, blank, blank, or we need a podcast, that blank, blank, or we need an infographic. We need to do, figure out what the gold is, and then figure out. Oh, that is good. All right. Now, going forward, Chapter 11, make utility a process, not a project. Boy, this is valuable.

How do we begin after we do what you just said? We figure out the gold and then come up with the mine, right? And then how do we make this something that is so ingrained in the culture of our engagement with our customers that it is a process? Again, it requires you to sort of run counter to human nature. I talk about utility all over the world and do presentations about this concept and workshops and things like that. And so often say, hey, we're really excited about this utility concept. we want to make this a part of what we do as a business, figure out how we can make marketing that's really useful.

I'm enthusiastic that people are enthusiastic. That's not necessarily the best way to company or your business or your sole proprietorship, but it's not likely because the one thing I've discovered 25 years of marketing is that inspiration doesn't respond to meeting requests and schedule growth, like a lake, mind marketing, say, how can we make it more useful? That's right. And at some point, at some point, it's the really great idea. All right.

So I want to wrap our conversation around this because this is so good. And folks, again, the name of the book, Utility, that's Y-O-U, Tility. We've got to talk about keeping score. It's the last chapter of the book. And as you open the chapter, you just basically say, look, if you're going to make this more than just a kind of a cool concept and make it a process like you just told us how to do, then you're going to have to measure it. And I want you to just break it down how we measure it. And then I want to let you just take that answer and move into this idea of sharing metrics, because I think that's really powerful.

Yeah, eventually somebody, whether it's you or somebody else in a company, is going to say, is this, when you try and figure out whether something worked, after you've already started it, it's like PINC, and I see people make that mistake all the time. They do something and then they say, hey, how do we know whether this is working? tricks to you before you started because you could have put tracking in place, things like that. It's very hard to measure in arrears. In terms of utility about sharing metrics, there are categories of metrics.

There are lots of individual measurements, but there's four categories of metrics. Anybody read this, click on this, watch this. Depending on what kind of utility it is, and depending on what kind of company you are, you may not be able to use all four of those categories, right? So if you're an e-commerce company, it's much easier to build an online utility and say, do the shelves, there's a hole there. That's right. So sometimes the trail goes cold when you go online plus offline.

but when you sit down and think about, hey, did you use our mobile app? How much licorice do you buy? Yes, that is good. Good, good, good stuff, folks. And again, Chapter 12, after you've gone through this book, really unpacks what Jay just laid out very quickly and efficiently for us. Last question for you, Jay. I love this, folks, because I knew we were going to talk about the book. I think this book is absolutely a must read for people who believe they're doing work that matters.

And every one of you are doing work that matters. So you've got to dive into this. But I emailed Jay prior to our interview, and I said, Jay, what's something new outside the book? Something that you're being challenged by, you're excited. And he said, Ken, I'm really excited about content and encouraging entrepreneurs, first-time entrepreneurs, fear this idea of maybe doing something. Even you're not a first-timer, but you're stepping into something new. And Jay, I want you to share your head and heart on that.

You know, every training recently I want to tell you, I'm just take a minute here to tell you my actual. I had wanted to start my own marketing services company for a long time. but I didn't because I was scared. And what are we going to do? A marketing guy for a corporate time, my best friend, my wife's sister, I highly recommend it. It's great for Thanksgiving. Yes.

So we were at the time. He came down suddenly with the very next day after he was diagnosed. I walked into my company corporate job. You know what am I really out for me? I can go get a job with somebody else. And so I walked in. I quit. I've never worked for anybody else.

another day and my life did that night and I just wrote a you look at risk and when you look and name your fears. He is Jay Bear, the book is Utility, that's Y-O-U-Utility, why smart marketing is about help not hype and it is

a fantastic read chock-full of goodness that will help you men and women do your work better. Jay, we really really appreciate the book and we really appreciate you spending time with us today We're better for it. My pleasure.

Thanks for having me. He is Jay Bear. Folks, I cannot recommend this enough. I think this is a must read. And so we want to give you more information at our website, Entreeleadership.com. This is free. We put a summary together of three chapters with huge to-dos for you.

And they are on the website in a PDF form. It's absolutely free. You don't have to give us anything. We just want to give it to you. And so this is perfect. We want to keep adding value. to you. Eric, the producer and I got together. We're like, five books is not enough. The Twitter universe is going nuts when we ask you to tweet. And I'm starting to feel bad that we're only

giving five books away. So I said, Eric, I said, let's ask the author and the publisher if we can get 50 books. And I love his dad. He said, why not? That's what he said. Why not? So we asked, and they said, yes. So 50 books, this podcast. Are you ready for this? Very simple. Get ready to write this down or tweet it as you listen. Here's all you got to do to qualify. Since this is all about help not hype you tweet this the at entree leadership podcast helps me the at entree leadership podcast helps me and eric here's what i want to do we've done random drawings before can we do the first 50 the early bird gets the worm i want to put some incentive out there for people now we'll go back to random drawings but this week this is what we're going to do because i want to honor you

people who are hardcore and spreading the word so that's what we're going to do this is going to be great fun. Well, folks, we're excited about another new segment we're bringing to you this podcast. We love entrepreneurs. It's a part of our name. It is you men and women entrepreneurs who solve problems and give great solutions that add so much value to the people you employ and the people you provide solutions to. I recently ran into two former Entree Leadership Master Series alums here in our offices. I got to know them from Kansas City. They're Jill Schram and John. Shram, co-owners of the Purple Guys. I love their story so much that I asked him if I could sit down with him. And this is our very first installment of Entree leadership on Main Street.

Well, it's great to have Jill Schramm in the studio with us. This is a great story, folks. I'm so excited about it because Jill is here in Nashville with her husband, John. They are the co-owners of the Purple Guys. This is a great story. And so take us back before you were The Purple guys. Thank you so much for having us. We started the company in 2001. We were minority owners in another IT business, but we wanted to be the majority owners. We wanted to own the whole company. So we made a decision after four years that it was time for us to move on and do something else. So resigned on the 10th. The next day is 9-11, and we launched our company October 7th of 2011. And the company was called Versant. We do IT support for small and mid-sized businesses.

So, you know, Versant was a name that was a made-up name and hard for people to remember and hard for people to spell and people said versont, versent. But our company logo, when we had the company make it for us, was purple. Everyone picked it in purple, but we weren't really using it as a branding tactic at all at the time. And all of our

technicians, they all wore logoed shirts. And after about, I don't know, maybe a year and a half, I said, John, it would be hilarious if we ordered purple shirts and had them logoed and had the guys wear these purple shirts. Our customers were like, hey, the purple guys are here. Right, sure. If you've an IT question or computer question,

and asked the purple guys. Kind of transitioned our brand, and we reversed the purple guys in Kansas City for a while, and then transitioned completely. And like our website is purple guys. Our guys all wear logo purple attire. And you'll never see my husband John anywhere. You could see him at Costco or at the pool. He's got purple everything.

You just kind of made what appears to be a snap decision as we hear the story. You know, you kind of said, I like the purple logo. Yeah, it was just, we had purple pens that we gave out. But we weren't using it as brand. I just was like, I think that would be funny. And here's the point I want to make to our entrepreneurs out there. Sometimes we overthink and we stress. We're trying to grow a business.

We're small business. And we're always thinking about what the edge is. And sometimes we don't just act. I guess is what I'm saying is there's a difference between thinking all the time and just acting. You know, we'd had the purple pens and some other things that we had always done with our customers. But nothing caught on like the brand identity of the purple guys. It's like we own everything in Kansas City. So no other businesses, anytime they do something purple, they assume it's us.

And here's what I want to focus on is that you just kind of made a decision. It ended up working. Customers see your guys show up in purple shirts and they just say, well, the purple guys are coming because purple is a distinct color. It stands out a little bit. How long before you all realized, wait a second, we've got a real brand thing here and made the decision to change the name of the company. That's what I want to know. It probably took us a year or so to transition the name completely. We knew we were heading that direction, but we didn't want to just drop it. You know, it's interesting. I could be standing in line at Starbucks in Kansas City, and, you know, I got my purple purse. I might have purple shoes on, and someone will turn around and say, hey, you must really like purple. And then it gives me an opportunity to say, well, actually, I own a company called the Purple Guys. Then they say, what do you do?

I love that. I mean, I've gotten, we've gotten customers that way. And you really have begun to carve out this natural organic identity in Kansas City. area. A couple things that come out here is simplicity, listening to your customers. What have you guys learned? I'm putting you on the spot here, but what have you learned as you look back about that simple name change as to how it grew your company? I guess, how do you quantify in this conversation the value of making the name change, the value of the brand, the purple guys? Well, you know, sometimes one of the things I think we learn from that is that sometimes the simpler

things just work better. And I also think that you've got to have a little bit of whimsomizing. in humor and sort of everything in life. Oh, great word. Whimsy. You just kind of can take yourself too seriously. So we've been able to do a lot of really creative things around the color and just purple. I mean, I think it's just a little bit fun.

Like, it makes you smile. And I think that it was just one of those things that, like, really hit home with our customers. And also, you know, then for a lot of the people who are our prospects in Kansas City who get some of our drip marketing, et cetera, like they might not have remembered Versant, but they'll remember purple. Oh, I promise you that. I want you to talk about your early involvement with Entree leadership. You all came, you and John, came to the very first Master Series events.

Take us back to that. I actually, I think I heard it on the radio. And in my car, an advertisement for the Entree Leadership Master Series. And I was like, that sounds awesome. You spend so much time working in your business and not as much working on it. And to unplug and really take a chunk of time and focus on it, I think is really important. So we went and I just thought it was great, had an opportunity. to meet Dave and his wife Sharon

and actually his daughter Rachel and his son Daniel were there. But I thought, you know, one of the things that was really fascinating and great for us is to have a chance to interact with his team members who were down there. One of the things that was really great about that is we made some really important decisions about the future of our business

on that trip. And, you know, just as far as what did we want to do long term and we had a partner in the business at the time who we were both like, I don't know if that's the we want to take long term. And so it was really great time.

It was really valuable, yeah. Yeah, and this may be a dovetail off of what you just said, but if you had to single out an area or one thing that Entree leadership has helped you all with your business, how have we added value? I think that a couple things. I think for John, I think it was a lot about, you know, accountability for yourself. And I think for us as business owners, I think that that was a lot of it. It's like really making the decision that if you have some.

thing that's that's not working is not in the best interest of anybody, not the families that, you know, or the employees that we have or any of our team members or for us or our family. I mean, this is our, this is a family business. We own this together and this is, you know, what pays our bills. And really taking action, I think, was the biggest thing, just in the stories Dave told and some of the curriculum. And, you know, sometimes it's having a fierce conversation or whatever it is. But, you know, I think that's our biggest takeaway.

It empowered you to kind of make some tough decisions. Well, this is great. Well, thank you so much. for having us. Well, I want to say to you all, thank you for your example. I think that our audience is better for this. I want to mention their website. Purpleguys.com, John and Jill Schramm.

Thank you so much for hanging out with us today. Thanks so much. That, again, the Purple Guys founders, husband and wife, Jill and John Schramm, love, love, love what they are about and what they are doing. And really fun to hear how Entree Master Series helps them. And I'll just mention very briefly if you want to learn more about. Entre Master Series. Entreeleadership.com.

It is not too late to get signed up for our latest Entree Leadership Master Series event, November 9 through 15. November 9 through 15 here in Nashville. Come to the Music City, enjoy some great music, some great food, and hang out with our team and the other Eagles that will be joining us. November 9 through 15, it is going to be a fantastic week. Entreeleadership.com or you can call AAA 22 piece, Entreeleadership.com,

or call AAA 22 piece to get all the information you need so you can join us for our latest Entree Leadership Master Series. Well, leaders, that is going to do it for this episode of the Entree Leadership podcast. Let me just tell you this. We appreciate you. We'd love to hear from you. Podcast at entreleadership.com is the email address.

You can tweet us at Entree Leadership at Ken Coleman. I want to know more from you about what you want and what you need. Well, on behalf of our producer, Eric Anthony and the entire Entree Leadership team, thank you for listening. We will talk with you again very soon.