Noob School - From Counterintelligence to Conversions — Bill Rice on Smarter Lead Gen

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

I’m thrilled to welcome Bill Rice to Noob School for Episode 151 — joining us over Zoom to talk about how counterintelligence thinking, data-driven marketing, and AI are reshaping lead generation and business exits.Bill’s one of those rare people who’s walked serious, structured careers in two very different worlds. He started his professional life as a U.S. Air Force officer running counterespionage and information-warfare activities — an experience that sharpened his analytical approach to patterns, risk, and human behavior. From there he moved into entrepreneurship and marketing, founding Kaleidico and later Bill Rice Strategy Group to help companies build predictable lead-generation engines. Over the last 20+ years he’s focused on fintech and B2B clients, building scalable sales systems and teaching teams how to convert marketing into reliable revenue.In this wide-ranging conversation we dig into:How lessons from counterespionage translate to modern marketing: spotting patterns, validating signals, and avoiding confirmation bias.Practical frameworks Bill uses to build predictable demand-generation for fintech and SaaS companies — what to measure, what to automate, and where human judgment still wins.Real talk on AI: what founders should actually expect from AI today, how to integrate it into content and outreach without losing product-market fit, and cheap experiments that move the needle.Preparing a business for acquisition: what buyers look for in lead-gen systems and the operational readiness that increase valuation.If you run a startup, lead a sales or marketing team, or are thinking about scaling (or selling) your business, this episode is full of tactical steps and thought experiments you can use tomorrow. Pull up a chair, grab your notes, and let’s learn how strategic thinking, data, and a little military-grade pattern recognition can make your marketing less messy and more profitable.Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.co I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends#salestrends

New School. Welcome back to Noob School. This is episode 151. We're going live on the computer today. We're on Zoom. And we really want to talk to Bill Rice because he's an expert in generating B2B leads, using clever tactics to generate B2B leads. And when I heard about him and the fact that he was willing to be on the Noob School,

I thought to myself, you know, how many sales reps have we talked to that get hired somewhere? They say, well, you don't get any leads. You have to go to LinkedIn and just look around, you know, and type in a bunch of stuff and try to find some. And, you know, we can teach a salesperson to be pretty good at sales, but it really helps to start with, you know, at least someone who's somewhat interested. And so that's really what we're here to talk to Bill about. So, Bill, thank you so much for joining us today. Hey, I appreciate the opportunity. And thanks for having me remote.

Sure. Next time you've got to come to Greenville. How about that? Hey, I love it. Actually, I'm getting ready to do some backpacking. And I'm going down to Kentucky, which is where I grew up. Oh. There's some really nice places over in your neck of the woods that I wouldn't mind doing a little hiking.

Well, there are the Blue Ridge Parkway and the Pizka National Forest. there's a lot of good places that are pretty close to here. We're only about 45 minutes from, you know, the mountain area. So I have to help some time. So that gets me to my first question. You grew up in Kentucky. I did, actually. I grew up.

Actually, my family is still down there. I grew up in Lexington area, Mardstown and Kentucky. And so, yeah, at the heart, I'm a southern boy. But I say often, I'm not sure how I got this. far north, but now I'm up outside of Detroit. But I did time in the military, and so I've literally lived coast to coast. But yeah, that's where I came from originally. Excellent.

You know, you can move back, you know. I go down frequently. And like I said, I'm getting ready to go down there and do a little backpacking. We don't have nice mountains like we do down in Kentucky. So, yeah, I go back there frequently. Okay. So you grew up near the Lexington, Kentucky area. Where did you go to school?

So I went to, in Lexington, I went to Lafayette for high school. And then that's when I left Kentucky and headed to the Air Force Academy, which then started my kind of entry into the Air Force from there. But yeah, that was, that's how I exited Kentucky. And yeah, still got a hard for it. But yeah, that was a fun experience. I was ready to get out, though. I was one of the, I've always been a little bit of a wandering soul. So once I graduated from high school, I'm like, I'm getting the heck out of here and see you in the world.

Yeah, good for you. And that's a good way to do it. So you went to the Air Force Academy. And how is that experience? I love it. I mean, you know, just from a, you know, as an entrepreneur and business leader, and, you know, I attribute that to a lot of my early leadership skills and training. And, you know, through that process, it's more than just school. You know, you're learning to be an Air Force officer and there's a lot of leadership.

There's a lot of different experiences that build your confidence. I mean, I did jump school. You know, I learned to fly there. Did all kinds of sort of crazy things along the way. But it built your confidence. So you, you know, you knew and I knew from there that I could accomplish, you know, most anything. And, you know, if you had some failures along the way, they were pretty good at, you know, hitting you in the face. and telling you to get up and keep moving forward.

So yeah, so you learned how to deal with failure too because, you know, when they put you in that group, you think you're, you know, kind of hot stuff. And then you get there and you find out that, you know, everybody is hot stuff. And so it gives you a sense of competition and confidence and learning to deal with some failure and maybe not always being, you know, the best in class.

So those are all good lessons there. That's good. Now, does everyone learn to fly at the Air Force? Academy? Back in the day, yes. I mean, most of us, if you were pilot qualified, went to pilot training, which I did. But now that's quite a bit different. You know, the world's changing a little bit. The amount of, even I ran into this, you know, I didn't ultimately get, as we call it, a weapon system because we were drawing down our, you know, our pilots and airframes. And so, you know, we don't need quite as many planes and quite as many pilots anymore. So now, especially with

the addition of Space Force, there's quite a diverse set of sort of careers and jobs and things that you do beyond just flying. But yeah, when I was there, we were in the early stages of transitioning from just, you know, being a feeder for pilot training. Yeah, so it's a lot different now. But back of the day, that was kind of its primary purpose. Okay. So what year would you have graduated? I graduated in 92. Okay, so all right. You're about 10 years younger than me. That's cool. So you didn't, we weren't going to be a pilot. So where did you get slotted into? Yeah. So I went in. I went through pilot training. It didn't complete that program. And then, you know, as the Air Force and the

military goes, like once you're in, they kind of, you know, they have their time with you. And so if things don't work out. You got to go find a new career field. So I went down to personnel and they said, hey, here's some things going on. I was like, oh, I want to be a combat because again, I was like, I was, you know, I wanted to do crazy things. I was young and I wanted to be a combat controller and they're like, well, we don't have any slots for that. So I ended up wandering into a smaller group called Air Force Office of Special Investigations. And so anybody of our age, well, we'll know the, you know, The $6 million man. Yeah.

That's what he was in. Yeah. It was a lot less sexy than the show. But anyway, I went into there and went into a smaller sort of subset of that and did counterintelligence operations. And that's where I did the balance of my career was in intelligence. And it really kind of started the thread for kind of, I always say it's the thread that led me to where I met right now. But one of the things that was going on at that time was there was the early stages of the Internet coming online, believe it or not. And so a lot of what we were doing in Intel operations, we were watching the enemy, so to speak, move some things onto the Internet and do some things on the Internet as a part of sort of their espionage tradecraft.

And so as counterintelligence, we started moving and trying to figure out how to be. to move some of the things that we did onto the internet and see how we could use that. And so that was kind of my phase of developing some of those early intel operations that took place on the internet or leveraged the internet. And then as I left the Air Force, I went through, as we call it, the revolving door into some of the three-letter intel agencies. And my specialty he was helping to build information warfare centers. But all of that was really, I break it down to some core skill sets around pattern recognition and sort of building systems to leverage those patterns.

So, you know, a lot of our practices came out of signals intelligence where we were looking for certain activity that indicated things were going on or things weren't going on or so-and-so was connected and so-and-so. And that eventually, kind of long story short, was closely related to kind of what we do in marketing, particularly online, is really looking for those patterns of behavior and then doing things and creating systems to turn those behaviors and practices into attention and audiences and then ultimately leads. And so there's a little bit of a subtle thread there beyond just my curiosity and wanting to do new and different things all the time. Right. So you were in Air Force Intel, but that would have been like 95, 96, 97, right around there. And that's just when the Internet was starting to start. Yep, we were just early, early stated. I mean, we're playing around with, you know, Internet stuff.

It was the early days of Netscape. IRC chat was all the rage. We spent a lot of time in IRC chat, which means nothing, but there were there were things before Slack that kind of looked like Slack. Yeah. And so, yeah, we did a bunch of interesting things. Yahoo was very popular then, right? Yahoo, yep. Yeah, and then ultimately when I left Intel, I went into kind of stumbled into financial services because we all have to translate what we do.

And so I kind of sold myself as an Internet security guy. and started working with a financial services company, which kind of ended me up in fintech. But we built one of the early internet banks, internet only banks. And then that from there, I went from internet security to marketing. And the funny thing is, excuse me, back then we were operating on the internet. but most of our marketing was done initially with a company called Bank Rate, which a lot of people will probably know Bank Rate. If you go online, you're looking for mortgage rates and stuff like that.

You'll see rate tables and stuff like that. But back then, what Bankrate did was they listed lenders like us, an Internet-only bank, in newspapers. And then they listed the URL. So people would come from newspapers to our internet site and then they would apply for a loan. And then in the middle of that sort of stint with, you know, with building that bank, up came a company called, again, a little company called Lending Tree, which is always a fun story because everybody knows who Lending Tree is now and you go there and you put your information in

and a bunch of lenders will call you. So we called them and we're like, hey, it sounds like, you know, you are generating leads on the internet. We'd like to buy, you know, the home equity leads because that's primarily what we lended from you. And they said, yeah, we'll send you those starting Monday. We'll start faxing them to you. And so we're like, we don't have anybody here to get faxes. We want to pump it into the computer, so to speak. But what they were doing is they were taking information.

People would fill out a web form. and then they would turn it into a PDF and then they would fax it because everybody they sold leads to didn't have the internet or didn't have the computers. So it is amazing kind of where we come from. And that was all pre-Google.

Like you said, Yahoo. You know, it was all pre-Google. Towards the end of that venture, actually, before we ended up selling it to private equity, I'll never forget. One day one of our developers came into my office, And he said, hey, because we didn't have laptops. He's like, pull up on your screen, this URL.

And so I typed it in. And up on the screen was just a white screen with a box in the middle of it. He's like, yeah, you can put whatever word in there you want. And it'll dynamically create a directory for you. So which again was search engine results. But back then, we equated it to Yahoo directory. And I'm like, why would you do that? Like, it's already on Yahoo directory.

But anyway, that changed our whole. world in marketing at that point. Yeah. Well, that's fascinating. You were very, I think it's very fortunate that you got in. Probably, unfortunately, you didn't become a pilot because you wouldn't have gotten into the internet at that time. Yeah.

There's only a few, there's only a limited number of people who were like professionally into the internet as it came out. And like the government could help promote pushing you into. to it. So that's very cool. So now that you've had, you've had several exits. You've helped start build companies. You've exited companies. You're now, your site is bill, rys strategies.com. And that's where people can find out more about what you do, particularly strategies to get B2B leads, right? Yeah, exactly. I mean, we spend a lot of our time now helping, you know, B2B. I have another agency that does B2C, but, you know, primarily doing B2B.

And one of the things that I've always done with the companies that I've worked with and everything is a lot of times when you're doing business to business, and I think a lot of the folks that listen to this show, you know, there are technologies companies and you're trying to, you know, reach out to people and get business. We always start from a position of thinking everything has to be cold outreach, where you just, you know, just barraging people with phone calls or emails. And I didn't really start from that world. I started from a business, you know, a B2C world in which we were, you know, generating content, building audiences and sort of pulling in, literally, inbound leads. And so when I went to the B2B world, to me it just made sense to

to start by building an audience that I could then pull from and let them filter into me. I also never really liked cold calling. So this is a lazy way of doing this. And so that's what we teach, right? We start with the ability to build an audience for B2B, largely, as you would imagine, that starts on LinkedIn. And LinkedIn has changed a lot. You know, I used to, even in the early days of B2B Legion, you know, I called LinkedIn a ghost town for resumes.

But they've embraced content. They've improved their algorithm. So anybody that wants to generate leads for their company, just simply going on to LinkedIn and posting and talking about what you do, you don't even have to sell, right? Talking about what you do. talking about the types of use cases. I'm a big fan of the problem solution, talking about the problems that your customers have and the solutions to those problems.

Just by having that conversation in public, you will start to generate an audience and you will start to build some basis for inquiries. And that happens at two levels. If you are a salesperson, tired into a company, hopefully your executives and your founder is doing that because that works the best. People love to hear founders talk about what they do.

And then that makes it easy for you as a salesperson. When you're doing cold outreach, they already know about you or they've seen your founder. But even if you're an individual contributor, go ahead. And if your founder or your executive is going to retreat to the corner office and you're responsible for a quota, you go ahead and do it. And there's no reason for you as an individual salesperson within a company not to talk about the industry that you're in, the problems that that industry is trying to solve and the solutions that you can present.

And just doing that on a regular basis, you'll be amazed how many people reach out to you proactively and say, hey, it was interesting that post. I'd love for you to talk to me more about, you know, this or that. And so that's the starting point. I think that's a good starting point. And that's about as far as I've gone, you know, with my business, which is Sterling Sales. It's a sales coaching business. And I do a lot of social media and all these podcasts.

And sometimes people will contact me and say, we'd like to talk to you, John. I'm like, really, you know, why? We've been watching you for eight months. And now we think we're ready. Yeah. And so I think the more they see, it makes it more comfortable. You might be the one who can solve their problem. Yeah.

I mean, I think the other part of that is, too, like, I mean, outreach still has, you know, a central role in that. And so once you've built, you know, that content on your LinkedIn profile, the next thing that's really productive is simple outreach. And you can do this with sales navigator or you can do it, you know, just by searching in LinkedIn. But then we're a big proponent of connection campaigns. So going out and connecting to people in a very, a very important. very transparent way. Like, I never hide that I'm sales. You know, I'll reach out to so and so, and I'll say, hey, John, you know, I notice that you're in this role and you're in this industry and you're the type of person that we help. And this is the types of problems we solve. I would

love to connect with you. And so I see too many people trying to be shady and like, hey, John, I notice, you know, you're in Greenville, South Carolina and like, I got a friend there. Like, we should connect and be friends. You know, everybody sees through that and nobody likes to, you know, connect and then be hit with the sales pitch. But if you do it up front, it's okay if they don't connect with you. They're not offended. You don't create any bad blood.

But if they do connect with you, then there's probably some interest there and that'll continue to mature. So that's the second piece. And then you can take that alongside of. I always do these in parallel. Once you've identified that, I'll go to. to Apollo or Rocket Reach or something like that and I'll get their email. And in parallel, I'll try to have an email conversation as well. So I'm going to do some cold outreach, but I'm going to do that

email. And again, I'm a big fan of, you know, fully being transparent what I'm doing. It's like, hey, I reached out to you on LinkedIn. You know, I thought I'd give you a little bit of more information, you know, via this email about what I do and how I might be able to help you. just wanted to see if there's any interest. So that kind of works together. And then a lot of times that'll go unanswered. But as you continue to post on LinkedIn or if they get that email or LinkedIn, they're going to go look at your profile. They start to see all that content that you've done.

It really validates that you're more than just the run of the mill, you know, salesperson with the quota. It's like, okay, this is a salesperson that's a thinker that's innovating, you know, that's got an opinion that could potentially help me. And then so you become a little bit more of a valued consultant than just a straight quota-carrying salesperson. Yeah. Well, at that point, would a possible next step be, let's say we're going to reach out to them once a month or once every two months?

Would it be like, here's a white paper we did or here's a something, some kind of content of value or just leave it alone? Yeah, no, I love that. I mean, I, you know, I'm a big fan of having a CRM, right? So the bigger that database is, the more valuable you are. Even if for whatever reason, you know, you change roles and go to a different company or something, chances are you're probably going to stay inside that industry. So I think that's the other thing that people forget younger salespeople. You know, back in the day, we used to say salespeople were as valuable as the Rolodex. Well, that's now your CRM, right? So there's a lot of folks inside that CRM that should be. able to yield for you for many years. So in order to do that, though, you have to stay in contact with them. So, you know, setting something inside of there, even automating it, more and more we can automate. We can use AI. There's a couple of things that I would do. One, I would at least automate the schedule so that I know, you know, John's going to pop up in front of me, and it's going to tell me I need to do something with John. And so I'll either manually with that email,

just pick something out of my sales collateral deck and say, hey, John, I was thinking of you today. I ran across this new piece of information or sales collateral that our marketing department did, and I think this may be something you might be interested in or you should take a look at. And again, people won't be offended by that. They're like, oh, he was thinking of me. Like, again, a thoughtful, considerate salesperson, not somebody just trying to open my pocketbook. And then the other approach that I'm using more and more, and again, this can be used at scale to some degree,

is pulling in AI. So a lot of the folks that you're probably going to be reaching out to, even if they're not active in social media, they're probably an executive or you're trying to get to that executive level. So it'd be quite a bit of information out there. And used to we do Google searches and you have to look through everything and synthesize it and see what's good and bad and try to. I figured it'd take you hours.

Well, now you can just go into something like perplexity, and you can just say, hey, I'm getting ready to reach out to John Sterling. You know, find everything you can about this and help me write a follow-up email. And it'll go out there and find everything about John. It'll figure out the last three podcasts that he did. It'll figure out the types of things he talked about. And then it'll look into, again, if you give it a little bit of context, it'll look into what you do as a company. and it'll say, okay, I think John might be interested in this thing. So here's an email.

It'll even help you write the email, right? Here's the email, and you can send that out. So starting to bring AI into that. So what used to be a three-hour process to have one conversation with John potentially and have to do that with 100 other people in your database, you can probably spend, you know, five minutes a lead and have a pretty personalized follow-up for each of those, you know, 20 you do for the day. Yeah. And so what would be your preferred AI tool? So for research,

I love perplexity. Because it's like I said, it's kind of like a search engine on steroids. And it has the AI mixed into it. So it feels like a blend of, you know, Google and chat GPT working together. A lot of folks use Gemini. I haven't spent a ton of time with Gemini. But, you know, that's probably reasonable. But I personally use perplexity for research. And then when I'm writing emails or even creating sales collateral, because sometimes I don't want to wait on my marketing department, I just want to put something together,

put it in a Google Doc, and link to it and send it out. I'll usually use Claude because it just seems to write a little bit better than chat GPT. So that's a really good one. The other thing, the other tool that I use a lot, if you're serving a particular industry, there's this lesser known tool called Manus, M-A-N-U-S dot I am, I think. I think it's a Chinese company. So you might be a little cautious of that.

But what it's good at doing is kind of a hyperversion. I think perplexity actually does this now, but kind of a hyper version of the Google alerts. So you can set up a task in there that says, hey, you know, I'm, you know, my market is fintech and I want to know or have you alert me or give me a daily brief on the hottest things in blockchain, AI, you know, give it a couple concepts. Yeah. And literally every morning, it'll go out there. It'll do its thing.

It'll run all its different queries. It'll do all its AI. And it'll come back with like a beautiful little briefing that tells you everything that's hot and new in that industry. And then what I'll do is I'll read that in the morning. I'll grab a few leads out. And if it's relevant, I'll say, hey, I noticed this was going on. Are you guys thinking about it? Yeah.

You know? And that's a great, great conversation, Oprah, just to see some hot trend that your market has probably seen and is probably thinking about. And just the simple one, I'm a big fan of the one-liner emails. It's like, hey, I saw, you know, this thing. I'm wondering, are you thinking about this? Or what do you think about this? And just leave it open into question. Like there's no sale there.

It's just like, hey, I'm curious. I want to ask you a question. A lot of people will answer a simple question. And then usually that can turn into more, right? Yeah. Yeah, I've got a really smart friend and he'll call me and leave a voicemail. He'll say, hey, Sterling, I got this idea. I thought of you, you click.

He's hangs up. I'm like, I've got to know what that idea is now. Yeah. Yeah, I think sometimes we overwork, you know, I do a lot of email and that sort of thing. Because like I said, I never love the cold phone call. But I do, I think we overwork emails. Like you'll see people, they'll write like the world's greatest, whatever. They'll try to dump everything they want to say into the email, just like some people.

get on the phone and want to say everything before they even take a breath. Yeah. And I think it's really important to just like give them that teaser. Just like I try to teach and I do it myself. If I'm going to send an outreach email or an email that's, you know, a follow up or unexpected, it's not like part of a transaction or I'm not doing next steps or recaps or something like that. I try to constrain it to two lines.

It's like if I can write a two line email, there's a good possibility that they're going to open it. They can glance at it. They're going to read it, whether they've meant to or not, because it's only two lines. And a lot of times, they'll give you a quick response. Yeah. I mean, when I see an email and it's like a little bit too long, I don't read a word of it. No. It's just too much. Delete. Yeah. I used to, when I was training guys on my team, you know, a lot of times they would say, hey, you know, I'm thinking about sending this email. And they bring it to me. And I'm like, so many times I would say, I didn't read it. And neither will they, so go back and shorten it.

Well, I've got to ask you, we've been using a tool for some, my own company and some of my clients are using copilot.a.i. So not Microsoft, but another tool, co-pilot AI. Do you know that tool? Oh, I thought you were talking about

the Microsoft one. No, I don't think I've played with that. Copilot.coma.com.com.com. You should take a look at it. I think it's the first thing I've seen that it's kind of, you have to set it up, obviously. But it's using AI, you know, some pre-populated messages, LinkedIn Navigator, you know, some AI tools to respond. But basically, once you give it the addressable market you want,

it's just hitting those people trying to get them to connect. And once they connect, then I get alerted. And then that's when you kind of take over and do it on your own. Yeah, I love it. You've got to be playing in this space. You got to, I tell all the salespeople and marketing folks that I work with and that I coach and stuff like that, you have to be playing with these tools. Like, I mean, you just, I mean, otherwise you're going to be irrelevant because the AI, and it's, I think it works. And there's two particular ways that I think it's really important and why you should be playing with it.

Right. So one, people don't love it when I say this. But if you have played with these tools, you'll realize that if you make your living, typing on a keyboard, pretty soon you're going to be out of a job, right? It's going to be the more creative people that survive. It's going to be the people that are guiding the AI, that are having the AI, you know, do that tedious work, which then creates more value for you, right? Because now it's not like how fast can I type, because the AI is going to do the type. it becomes how creative am I. And then the second component of that,

particularly for sales leadership, is you can spend, you don't have to spend as much time on reports and pulling through the data and all that. You can let AI do that. And then for that margin that it gives you back, spend time with your people, right? Spend more time training,

spend more time coaching. And so get back to the people to people. So let the AI do the AI stuff. let the, I always say, you know, let the systems work the leads and let the people talk to people. And I think that's what AI is going to give us back. And the people that are going to, that are really going to be top performers or are going to be the people that figure out how to leverage that. And then do something productive with that extra margin from productivity. Well, I agree with you 100%.

And I think some sales managers almost want to punish the salespeople and say, you got to call. call like I did. You got to do whatever. And I really want my salespeople having conversations, lots of them, with people that might buy our software. I mean, I don't want them cold calling people who don't want it. I just assumed they never talk to those people. Right. So AI can help with that. And I think that's the right mindset. I think too often, you know, we get too enamored with, you know, putting in the reps versus, you know, I, you know, I, I would. want to be as efficient as possible at getting to the, you know, to the nose. And if I don't have to waste any time getting my nose out of the way so that I can spend time with the yeses. And there's

so many different, you know, ways to do that so that you can have your sale, your expensive sales talent, spend more time. You know, there's everybody resisted calendarly and schedulers. People want to have control over their time. They want to schedule a meeting with you versus you interrupt them and try to force a sales pitch down their throat, right? So scheduling tools, AI to write coherent emails. A lot of salespeople I've worked with are horrible writers. Their emails look so unprofessional. So let the AI help with that, right?

Again, let them do the things they're good at, which is building relationships, having conversations, telling stories, you know, being likable. That's the good salespeople, those are their skills, not, you know, not dialing for dollars. Well, let me ask you a couple quick questions, and then we can finish up, but this is, this has been great. What is, what's your favorite book of all time?

Oh, favorite book. I'm a big reader. So I have been asked a couple times, like, hey, who would you recommend? So a lot of times, because I read a lot, I do make, like, recommendations to folks based on, you know, what they're thinking about or talking about. But if I were just to just generally for a salesperson, say, hey, what book would I recommend? I like some of the classics like Sun Su's Art of War. I was always, you know, you can go through there.

It's got like little sort of proverb type things. And you can always sort of apply that to business. And of course, I was a military guy, so I kind of like that. So I feel like that's a fun, easy read that every time I pop it up, open, you see something that just feels like I can apply it in my sales journey. Did you all study that book in school? Oh, yeah. We did all the classics, you know, John Stuart Mill, Clausewitz, you know.

So, yeah. But that's, that always seemed to, it's a small little book. It's got it, like I said, I probably got it sitting. Oh, I do have it sitting right here. So it's a tiny little book. You know, and it's got a couple little. bookmarks. Those are my some favorites. But it's an easy read, you know, so a lot of people don't like to read. So it's, yeah, there's a lot of little gems in there. That's a good one. And then

what's your favorite word? Word. Hmm. I would probably answer it two ways. One, I think curiosity has always been kind of like a mantra for me. But I'll give you two words. And this is more of a philosophical one, but there's this amorifate that Ryan Holiday, people may be familiar with him, he's a big stoic, but it's embrace fate. So I've always been a big fan. I had a couple sort of, you know, twist and turns in my life and, you know, just being content with what fate gives you and moving forward. So it's kind of two words, but embrace fate and just, you know, pick yourself up by your bootstraps and keep moving forward. And don't worry about like what, happened. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I love it. At that moment of when something doesn't work, I love to think,

you know, so where are we now and where are we going from here? I love it. That's all you can do, right? That's exactly. That's exactly what I always tell. Even like with my kids and stuff, I'm like, don't worry about what happened or who did what or whatever. It's like, here we are. What are we going to do going for? Even when I'm working with clients, I always like, the first question I say is like what are the raw materials that I have to work with? Like I don't care what you don't have. What do we have and what can we make out of it? You know, and so yeah, you're spot on. Same philosophy. I found that's interesting too. Same for you. I'm sure. You take on a new client is they typically want me to start like training the salespeople and

which is fine. But I'm like first I want to establish where we are. You know, what are we doing now? what we'd like to do? You know, what are these big goals that we have? And it's easier said than done. Sometimes, you know, an owner's not exactly sure yet. They're just kind of doing it. And do you do the same thing? Do you kind of level set when you start?

Yeah. I mean, one of the things I bring into, and I talk a lot about, you know, when I've been on podcasts and stuff, especially if I've been with somebody that's been in the military, one of the things I didn't learn until I got out for a while that hit me later that was such an advantage I felt from where I came from and the type of leadership that I learned was that in the military, you were expected to lead and get results with the team you were given. So so often, you know, when I'll go into a new client, they want to like, you know, get rid of this or get rid of that or they wish they had this or whatever. I was like, the military, like, you

showed up, second lieutenant, dropped in. You got a team. and you were expected to deliver certain results. And there's something valuable about that. So I kind of approach clients the same way. It's like, okay, this is the team we've got. Let's figure out how we can put people in the most productive place and how we can get each of them to contribute to take up or take up some slack or pull a little harder

in order to get that whole team to kind of work together. So to me, I always, I try immediately to get the client less focused on what they wish they had and get more focused on like because usually you have good stuff right or you can make something um better out of what you have if you just start with that constraint um so yeah i'm the same way let's just look at what we got um and we'll make something better out of it um and last last funny question what's your what's your favorite band? My favorite band is probably a tight tie between Metallica and ACDC.

So I was my parents' nightmare in the basement, which is where my bedroom was. And my dad used to bang on the floor with his foot. But yeah, I'm a heavy metal guy. ACDC. I've never, ACDC would be mine. And, golly. Did you ever get to see him in Connolly? concert? I did see. I've never seen Metallica. Fortunately, they're both touring, but I did see ACDC once in concert.

And they're, yeah, it's amazing. So many of those bands are still touring. And they're like 70 years old, right? Yeah. Yeah. It is amazing. It is amazing. And, you know, and they, you know, I think, I think, I think, I think, I think Angus was like the little brother. Yeah. And so they've been, they've been, you know, doing. this since he was what 12? Yeah, isn't that crazy? It's just crazy, crazy. All right. So in terms of going forward, if folks want to talk to you or get some content from your website, what's the website and how could they reach you? Yeah, kind of two of my favorite places, the point people, Bill Rice Strategy.com is where you can kind of see everything that I'm doing from the strategic perspective. You want to talk to me about, you know, your

particular organization and that sort of thing. So that's a great way to connect with me. And then if you just want to read about what I'm sort of focused on or where I think the puck is going, so to speak, I have my executive brief. And I actually always, you know, most of my companies were relatively small. I never had the funds to have a chief of staff. But I always wanted like that little brief to tell me everything that was going on. And so I created that with my newsletter. letter and you guys can kind of share in once a week with everything that I'm following by subscribing to my executive brief.com. Well, good.

Well, thank you for being on the podcast. It was fascinating to hear your journey and kind of how you pivoted when you went into the intelligence part of the Air Force and how that affected your life so positively. It's a great story. And I'm going to sign up for the newsletter. And I'm going to check it out. and maybe I'll ping you back with my thoughts every now and then. Awesome.

Yeah. Yeah, I would appreciate that. And I appreciate you guys bringing me into the studio remote. And then hopefully we'll get down there sometime and see you guys in person. Please, please do. I'd love to be your hosting, Greenville. Awesome. All right.

Take care. Thank you. Thanks, John. Bye-bye.