The Learning Leader Show With Ryan Hawk - 015: Noah Fleming – How To Create Enduring Customer Loyalty

Episode Date: May 15, 2015

Episode 015: Noah Fleming – How To Create Enduring Customer Loyalty   I love discussing how we can all better serve our customer base.  The best way to create and grow a thriving business is to create customer loyalty.  Noah Fleming is an expert at accomplishing this task.  He goes into detail on this topic in this episode. That’s just one reason I had an awesome time interviewing today’s guest on The Learning Leader Show. Noah is a marketing expert. As a thought leader in strategic marketing and customer loyalty, Noah helps clients dramatically and rapidly increase sales, multiply profits, and maximize customer value.   Welcome to Episode 015 with the Marketing Expert, Noah Fleming   Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher Radio.   The Learning Leader Show “Show me your friends and I’ll show you your future.” – John Wooden   Some Questions I Ask: How do you create customer loyalty? What made you pay so much money for a mentor? How are you affiliated with Seth Godin?  He seems to like your book… Do you think it’s better to go the traditional publishing route? Or how about all of the great self-publishing options out there? What is your why? What are your goals?   In This Episode, You Will Learn: About Seth Godin telling him to “Ship It” A giveaway for YOU, the listeners.  Listen to the end of the episode and Noah offers something for free to the first listeners who write to him Specific Goal Setting Practices The importance of loyalty How anyone can do what Noah has done How to become a better public speaker Why it’s so important to invest in yourself Continue Learning Go tohttp://noahfleming.com/ Read “Evergreen” by Noah Fleming Follow Jason on Twitter:@noahfleming   You may also like these episodes:   Episode 001: How To Become A Master Connector With Jayson Gaignard From MasterMind Talks   Episode 002: How To Take Over And Set Bigger Goals With Chris Brogan   Episode 004: How Todd Wagner (and Mark Cuban) Sold Broadcast.com To Yahoo! For $5.7 Billion   Did you enjoy the podcast? I love discussing how we can build loyalty with our customers.  Noah has mastered this vital skill.  I loved this episode.  I’m proud to say that Noah has become a friend.  Who do you know that needs to hear this?  Send them to The Learning Leader Show!   Episode edited by the greatJ Scott Donnell   Bio: Noah is a marketing expert. As a thought leader in strategic marketing and customer loyalty, Noah helps clients dramatically and rapidly increase sales, multiply profits, and maximize customer value. He is the trusted source for coaching and consulting to thousands of owners, executives, and individuals. Noah is the author of the Amazon #1 bestselling book in Sales, Marketing, and Customer Service –EVERGREEN: Cultivate The Enduring Customer Loyalty That Keeps Your Business Thriving. He’s an expert blogger for Fast Company Magazine, and a regular contributor to The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Section. Noah has been routinely quoted and mentioned in publications like Forbes, The New York Times, Reuters, and more. Noah has taught master classes on retention for the popular website, Mixergy.com, a site dedicated to interviewing company founders and industry experts, such as Gary Vanyerchuk (author of “Crush It” & “The Thank You Economy”), Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Groupon founder Andrew Mason, among hundreds of others. Fleming has conducted webinars on retention for audiences of C-level executives for sites like Vindicia, an online payment company responsible for processing over $4 billion dollars annually in recurring payments. Fleming’s Vindicia webinar had the highest pre-registration the site had seen in years, and listeners proclaimed it was one of the best they had ever heard. He’s delivered powerful ‘how-to’ workshops at the Subscription Site Insider Summit in New York City & most recently San Francisco where Subscription Site Insider Editor Minal Bopaih said, “he knows exactly what you should be measuring on your site,” and Nicole Rodriguez of MarketingProfs.com proclaimed, “I look forward to implementing the tactical advice he gave on improving our members’ experiences while boosting renewals.” More recently, Fleming delivered the closing keynote to over 400 information publishers at the Society of Information Publishers Association’s (SIPA) 36th Annual Conference in Washington, DC. SIPA’s President Robert Brady said, “At our 36th Annual Conference, we wanted to give our members an equal dose of immediately useful information and the confidence to put it to use. Noah Fleming’s closing keynote, which emphasized the critical importance of retention, gave us all a number of strategies that we could begin using right away. All of our members found the talk entertaining and useful. I recommend him highly.” Fleming is also member of Alan Weiss’s Mentorship Program & Growth Cycle®, two highly respected and world-renowned programs dedicated to the refinement of advanced consulting skills, and one of only 36 people who are globally recognized & accredited by Dr. Weiss as a Master Mentor.  

It's the same thing that applies to any entrepreneur, any business owner, any leader, is that we need to be constantly figuring out where can I improve, how can I get better? And again, I just think that's really the beauty of life is learning new skills, learning new things. You know, if you're stagnant and not growing, then you're dying, right? I want to be constantly trying to go to a new level. Are leaders born or are they made? Our host, Ryan Hawk, believes that leaders can be made through determined, focused work on learning the art and science behind the makeup of other successful leaders.

Now it's time to inhale knowledge and exhale success. You're listening to The Learning Leader Show with Ryan Hawk. Hey, welcome to The Learning Leader Show. I am Ryan Hawk. Our guest tonight is Noah Fleming. Noah is a thought leader in strategic marketing and customer loyalty. Also the bestselling author of the book Evergreen, Cultivate the Indoor, during customer loyalty that keeps your business thriving.

We get to a lot of interest in things with Noah's story. He talks about the relationship with his family and how that set him up for his career, as well as great goal-setting tips and things he gets into, and a cool Seth Godin story. I think you guys are really going to enjoy it. Without further ado, it's Noah Fleming. Here we go with Noah Fleming, as I introduced earlier, and really, really excited Noah to have you on the show.

obviously, you've done a lot of dynamic things, specifically being a marketing expert, you know, customer loyalty, helping clients dramatically and rapidly increase sales, multiply profits, maximize customer value, you know, you've seen your bio. But I'd like to give the floor to you to announce yourself to the guest and the listeners here on the Learning Leader Show. Sure. Well, thanks, Ryan. Thank you for having me.

Thanks for that wonderful intro. Basically, you kind of summed it up. I do strategic marketing. I work with, I work with really a whole mix of different clients. I work with entrepreneurs. I work with small to medium-sized companies, and I work with some much larger organizations. I don't really specialize in one particular industry. I work really across the board.

I'm working in B2B companies right now. I'm working in B2C. I'm working with clients in Singapore. I'm working with clients in Ontario and Canada and just about clients everywhere. So it's a good time. Since 2005, I've worked with approximately over a thousand entrepreneurs, solo professionals, and business owners. So I've certainly got around, had a lot of experience and had a lot of fun times. So when you get into a business and you're hired to help them grow, where do you go first?

How do you say, do you have to identify the problems or where are you going first in order to help them? Great question. Sometimes you have a buyer, a decision maker, a business owner that has a specific problem, a challenge that they need to solve. Another time, you have companies that want to take things to the next level. They've got momentum. They're doing well. And so they're investing in themselves. They're looking to make dramatic jumps, dramatic improvements to go to that next level.

So I'm working with one company right now that's absolutely crushing it. They're doing it phenomenal. But they brought me in around October, and there was no real kind of set, determined, challenge, or problem they need to solve. It was just we want to do things better, faster, more innovative, more unique, more interesting. And so we've been working together now since around that time, and they've been doing exactly that. We're having fantastic success.

They're trying new things. They're failing. But some things are hitting the nail on the head, and they're succeeding, and they're doing well. so it's really cool. So you also wrote a bestselling book or I've seen it on number one best selling book on Amazon for sales, marketing and customer service called Evergreen, cultivate the enduring customer loyalty that keeps your business thriving. Obviously, that's an interesting title to a lot of businesses because, you know,

you study multiple businesses and some of them are really good at acquiring new customers, yet they struggle to keep them. And it sounds like that's your sweet spot. That's really where you try to help your clients that you work with. Can you expand a little bit on that? Yeah, I think there's a couple different kind of components at play there. First, you have the companies that you mentioned that they're actually pretty good at marketing. They're pretty good at driving customers through the doors.

They are able to split test things and they're able to try new things and they're able to convert new sales. But then they're really terrible at keeping those customers. And so what they do is they continue to focus on just simply driving more customers through the doors. So I help those clients, I help those types of companies really figure out how do we build this concept of loyalty? How do we really maximize the value of that customer so they continue to do business with us so that they continue to give us referrals so that they give us a word of mouth? Now, then you have companies that aren't that good at marketing. And so there's a challenge there for them to really learn who their ideal customer is and then how to attract them. And then you have really kind of transactional companies that, you know, they just don't really care one way or the other.

They drive people through the door. And if you continue to do business with them, they'll be happy. But if not, you know what, they're just going to keep pumping people in. I find the greatest kind of companies are the ones that are really looking to fix all three of those situations. They're looking to build great relationships with their customers, great relationships with every client. But again, it really comes down to maximizing the value of those customers to, you know, to how do I say this politely? But to build a great relationship, but also to extract maximum revenue from that customer, but to build a great relationship at the same time where they do love you. They do want to tell others about you.

They are truly loyal customers. So when I study businesses, I've found, and I've obviously read a lot of things about the great businesses do such a phenomenal job of treating their own employees with respect, that that behavior then helps those employees treat their customers with respect and care about them. So when you go into these businesses, are you studying how their culture is and how they treat their own employees? Is that a big part of what you do as well? That is often a huge part of it. So there's a big misconception around the term customer loyalty. And this is something I've been trying to really kind of blow to the water. But the phrase itself, for a guy that's got this phrase in his book title, I actually

dislike the term customer loyalty because what it implies is that it's up to the customer to be loyal. And what I find in many companies is there's an expectation that the customer should be loyal because they provide, you know, great service or they think they've got a great product. So it's the customer's duty to be loyal to them. But back to your question, I find that's so true, right? Employees are really the key to great customer relationships. Employees are really following the path of, in small companies, for example, it all starts with

the owner. It all starts with the key leaders in the way they treat customers because that all trickles down. So just to give you kind of a tangible example of how that works, I work with a lot of companies in the restaurant industry. And one of the things you find is that servers and waitresses are really interested in tips. And so when they see somebody coming in with something like a group on or a discount, they immediately believe that that customer is a deal shop, or that customer is somebody that's not going to tip them well. And so there's a certain attitude that's portrayed to that customer. They're treated differently. And so I've worked with some clients to actually

really change that perception, to help them understand that every client deserves an opportunity to be treated like a great customer. Every client needs to be given that opportunity to, you know, to tip well and to show that they can be a loyal customer. But there's this perception in the staff and the employees, you know, that they're different. So I think, again, I've kind of gone off topic there, but going back to your original question, absolutely. I mean, employees are the key to where it all really starts. It seems like it's focuses on having positive intent instead of negative intent, meaning

in your mind frame of how you view other people, right? You assume the best as opposed to some people who assume the worst. And that, I think that type of culture begins with the leadership group or the leader of whichever companies you're probably working with. I think that's absolutely right. You assume the best, but then I'm the first person to tell you that not every customer is worth keeping. You know from reading my book, I dedicate quite a bit of time to saying, you know what,

there's some customers we have to get rid of. Even Tony Shea from Zappos in his own book said that some customers need to be fired. There are customers that are rude, that are racist, that say sexist things to your employees. And again, this goes back to your original question, that's where leadership needs to step in and say, no, you know what? We respect our employees more than that, that you're a customer that's no longer welcome here. You're no longer welcome to give us your business. And so, again, we're kind of taking that concept of customer loyalty and we're kind of flipping it around. There's not an expectation, but there's a lot of things that need to happen there.

And the customer needs to act appropriately as well. Yeah, absolutely. I've seen that. It seems like the leaders of the businesses, when they fire a customer, what it that does for their own employees is, I don't even know if you can quantify it, but it's huge for them for them to say this, you know, my boss or the leader of our company was willing to not accept this person's money because they treated me poorly. Wow.

Like I feel, you know, I feel really good about working here because of that. You can quantify it because you can start to look at things like employees. turnover, you know, the cost of training new employees. And companies that are going to stick with the customer all the time, because, you know, the, the old motto says the customer is always right, well, they're going to have higher turnover. They're going to spend more time searching for new talent. They're going to spend more time training that talent. And so you can quantify it. So there needs to be, there needs to be that respect, not just for the customer, but also for your employed. So I think that's a, you know, it's an interesting topic and it's a great place to start

our discussion. Yeah. I didn't expect it to go here. I actually wanted to get to your, I wanted to get to how you've gotten to this point, right? There's always pivotal moments in people's lives. And I'm curious to learn the story to how you became basically an entrepreneur helping other people do better in their work. So where did this start? You know, where did it come from? You know, what's your background? Well, my background is I went to school. like most people. And, you know, my parents always, always extolled the virtues of an education. But my father always suggested that I go out there and I write my own paycheck because he had worked in a factory his whole life. And he, you know, when I would be waking up to go to school growing up, he would just be getting home from the midnight shift.

And so it was one of those things he always said to us that his paycheck was determined by someone else. My paycheck could be determined by me. So fast forward years later, I got my university degree and I went out into the corporate world and I realized really quickly that I wasn't cut out for the corporate world. But I also realized that I was very good at working with businesses to help them improve their marketing. It's what I went to school for. I had been doing it on the side already. And so I realized that I could take that and I could probably turn that into a business. And so that was in 2005.

And then I've spent the last, I don't know how many years ago that is, but I've spent the last 10 something years. And, you know, I've really, I've really spent that time building a company and building a business around what I love to do. And it's just grown. And so, again, it started with really small companies, people that I knew, you know, friends in the business, to working with larger companies, to writing a book, to this point where I'm at now. where, you know, I'm working with companies all over the place.

I'm keynoting at various events. I'm speaking all over the place. And so it's just, there's a real kind of trajectory there where I've just continued to build on what I'm really good at and what I'm really passionate about. Did you leave a job to start your own business or were you doing it on the side initially? I was, during my years of university, I always had the entrepreneurial bug. So I was always doing things to make money. You know, I was one of the kind of original power sellers on eBay where I was selling

products that I had created. I was selling information products that I created that were really kind of cheesy to look back on. But they, you know, when my friends were going off to work at bars and restaurants during university, I was waking up at 7, 8 in the morning and I had already made what they were going to make working that whole day. But then I got my degree and I decided now is the time I need to step away from the silly stuff because this is in a career and I need to go into the corporate world. I need to get a career.

And I just realized probably literally my first day that I had made a big mistake. And so I started to really try and figure out how do I make my exit here. And so I think that's a big learning point for people is that people get stuck or people give up or people jump from one thing to the next. I've been focused kind of on the same mission now for that entire time. And so, you know, I haven't jumped from one thing to the next. I haven't been swayed by new kind of too good to be true opportunities or things that have promised me an easier route. I've just sort of stuck it out and done the work and have built it to this point.

And so, you know, here I am. And now I'm at another level where now I've got these new plateaus and these new areas where I need to take the next step. I need to go even higher. I need to go further. I need to learn more skills. I need to develop, you know, new talents. And that's, again, I just find that's what life's all about.

So you're focusing, obviously you're a leader and you're focusing on learning. What are those specific things you want to learn skills in order to go to that next level? Well, I talk about this a lot. Wherever I am interviewed or wherever I am speaking, it often kind of goes down this road. but I live in just outside of Windsor, Ontario. And so Windsor, Ontario is a, is the home next to Detroit where we had the big three for many years. But now these two places are very economically depressing. I mean, you know, the factory model is gone and those jobs aren't coming back.

So one of the things I'm talking about right now, I'm talking to a lot of youth in this area is that you need to you need to carve your own path, but more importantly, you need to invest in yourself and you need to invest in your own growth. So again, I talk about this everywhere I go. If there's a new skill that I need to learn, that's something that I need to get better at, A, I'm either going to do it a lot and I'm going to practice and I'm going to do the hard work, or B, I'm going to invest and get the help that I need. So whether it's a coach, whether it's a mentor, whether it's attending a seminar or a workshop or just to give you, you know, a small example. I don't do a lot of online video, but I would like to do more online video.

But it's not something I'm very comfortable with. It's not something I'm very good at. And the only way I'm going to get good at it is if I do it. And so, you know, the first hundred videos are probably going to be not that good, but eventually they will get better and they will get better and they will get better. And so it's the same thing that applies to any entrepreneur, any business owner, any leader is that we need to be constantly figuring out where can I improve, how can I get better. And again, I just think that's really the beauty of life is learning new skills, learning new things. You know, if you're stagnant and not growing, then you're dying, right?

I want to be constantly trying to go to a new level and whether, you know, that I apply that to so many different things personally. and professionally. So you talked about the fact that you're willing to invest in yourself. I completely agree and that you've done that in your past. Share a little bit about how you got started and, one, the amount of money you invested to get a personal mentor, one of the best really in the world probably. And I'm, I just, I love to hear that. I've heard it before, but I'd love for this audience to hear the story about you investing

in yourself. Sure. So, so as I was telling you, you know, I was kind of bumbling along in this. consulting practice. And I knew that it was something I was good at, but I wanted to do a lot better. And so I had been reading books by Alan Weiss, who's written 50 books on consulting. You know, he's kind of considered the godfather of the consulting world. You know, if you're in the consulting practice and you haven't heard of Alan Weiss, you're not really in the consulting practice. And so I wanted to see, you know, how can I take my business to the

next level? And I realized that I needed to get better at consulting. I needed to get better at dealing with clients, I need to get faster at getting to the core of their issues. I needed to get better at helping them solve challenges. I need to get better at writing proposals. I needed to get better at those early preliminary discussions with them. So the easy route would have been to keep doing what I was doing to buy Allen's books. You know, 10 bucks here, 15 bucks there. I can read how to write a proposal in, you know, how to write a million dollar proposal or

million dollar speaking. that's the easy way, and that's the way that most people are going to do it. But then I realized that I could take it a big step further, and I could actually get, you know, directly involved with Alan. To do that, there was going to be a significant expense, but to take, to have him be my personal coach, my personal mentor, that's where there was a significant investment to become a part of his community, which I think there's about, there's thousands of consultants all around the world. We meet once a year at a mentor summit that Alan puts on.

It's a great community of like-minded people that are all striving to get better. And so I spent a lot of money to work directly with the guy. And, you know, it's very similar in my own business that I get clients that said, yeah, you know, I was reading this book on customer loyalty or this book on maximizing value, but then I wanted to work with the guy. And so you were the guy that kept pop. popping up. So here we are. And so it was very similar to my own experience. There was a significant investment, you know, of thousands and thousands of dollars, plus thousands of dollars spent on

external things like travel costs and attending meetings and, you know, but I think that's all part of your growth is having the faith and having the ability to make those investments in yourself. I think too many people are afraid to do that. Too many people are willing to buy a car or get a mortgage because they trust they will pay it back. Well, I apply that to my own development. I should be able to trust that I'm going to pay back an investment in myself. And so that's how I kind of approach it. And if I need to use credit to go to a seminar or to extend my coaching, that I will, you know,

because I trust that I can make those payments back and I trust that I'm going to be able to do that very similar to the things that I've, you know, I use the example of the car in the house. Yeah. Now, the caveat of all of that is if you're broke or if you don't have a lot of money or if you don't have a lot of credit or, you know, it means not feeding your family, then, you know, feeding your family is always number one. Paying the real mortgage, right, is always number one.

And so you can do things like you can bootstrap startups. and you can do things for low cost or you can make small investments in yourself. I know I'm talking a lot here, but I don't discredit the investment in a book, even if $10 or $15 is all you have because we all know the old kind of quote that leaders are readers, right? And so that to me too is an investment in yourself, taking the time to read that book, taking the time to implement what you learn. But I think if you want to go further, then you need to find the ways that are really

going to amp things up for you. And for me, the books were kind of cursory. They were good, but I really wanted to take it into overdrive, to put it into almost warp speeds. And so to do that, I needed to take much deeper investments in myself where there was some risk added to it. So you spend thousands and thousands of dollars to have Allen be your personal mentor. Was at that time, did you have to use credit? Did you have enough money in order to do that? or were you risking or like you said, were you willing to really invest because you thought you would be able to get it back? I again, I used some credit.

I used some cash. But again, I just saw it as such, you know, this is an investment in my business that I have to make. So a lot of companies will have to make capital investments in things like infrastructure or new equipment. Whereas solo entrepreneurs, somebody working out of their home office, somebody that's that's, you know, dealing in terms of expertise or offering assistance where they're not having to invest in inventory, then they have to make investments in other ways. And so for me, that's where these kind of investments make sense. And so those are kind of my, you know, very similar to a restaurant buying a new oven because they need the new growth or building a new patio. I want to make those

investments in my own company as well. So I got you. So, so. So. So. I got you. So. So. So. So. you make that investment. What is that like? Is it a weekend? Is it is it a day? Do you fly down? Do you go to his house? What did you do? Well, I did a, again, I wanted to I wanted to also work with other like-minded people, people that had that same sort of viewpoint as me that they could improve their business. They can improve their company. So I did a couple of things. First, I worked with Alan directly in a, in a mentoring capacity. And then I did something which he was calling a growth cycle. It was very similar to like a mastermind on steroids where a group of four or five consultants would meet four times a year, you know, top level consultants, but really the top experts in their field. We would meet four times a year at different locations all over the U.S. or Canada, beautiful spots usually, you know, fantastic hotels, fantastic food, but then really intensive masterminding

days, getting to the core of each of each other's challenges or opportunities and really helping each other take things to the next level. CEOs, for example, I work with a lot of CEOs that are involved in mastermind groups and different peer clubs. It's the same thing, right? They've typically invested quite a bit to be a part of those groups, and they're taking that same step. They want to be with like-minded individuals and peers that can really help take them to the next

level. That reminds me of John Wooden's quote, show me your friends and I'll show you your future. That's kind of the part of the genesis for why. I'm doing this, this podcast, to meet great smart creatives like yourself. And that really reminds me of that. It's a great quote. And I think it's so true. One of the most powerful things that has come from all of this is that I'm still,

even though I might have, I might be in a new mastermind group now, the people that I had originally work with, I'm in contact on a daily basis. We help each other on a daily basis. I've got three people right now that I can instantly call or text or email. And if I'm going to see a client and I have a question or if I'm doing a proposal and there's possibly a better way to say something or if I'm just struggling with anything, I can call

in any of these people and I know I'll have literally world-class advice in the next two minutes. And that's all the stuff that, again, that investment was such a great investment to make just to build those relationships. I want to transition a little bit to family now. I know your dad's very successful. And my, you know, I have a great relationship with both my parents and my, they've, they've had a fantastic marriage. It showed me what a great marriage should be.

But in addition to that, my dad has had an incredibly successful career. Somewhat similar to what your dad does as a senior level of VP at a big company. And, but with that, he still works really, really hard to instill into me and my brothers that, you know, we couldn't just take the easy path and he's not just going to take care of us because of his success. So it was really saying, hey, you need to, not the exact words that your dad said is write your own paycheck, but along those lines that you're going to have to work to do this. And you're going to fall down and you're going to have to find a way to get back up without the help of other people. How does your dad influence you in that regard based on his success?

I think it's very similar. I mean, one key thing I've learned from my father is certainly work ethic, right? I mean, here's a guy who started on the shop floor of a factory and he spent my whole childhood there is everything I remember about growing up like I said was him coming home from that midnight shift or him or when I got home from school him leaving to go to go to work so I just you know seeing him go from the shop floor literally to the top of one of the biggest steel companies in the world has been really inspirational so seeing that work ethic seeing him follow it through but also passion he's so passionate about what he does. He loves what he does. He's he's on the top of his game and every morning he loves going

to work. And so it's the same thing. I want to love what I do. I can say probably without a, you know, a doubt in my mind, though, that if I was struggling or if I needed assistance, I'm sure my father would pick me up. And, you know, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I think there's a problem with that when, you know, it becomes, it becomes a crutch for somebody to do nothing. Exactly. Yeah, I mean, I fully get heavy support, but also sometimes, you know, it can be helpful to make sure that, you know, your child has to figure it out. I'm sure you're experiencing these things as a father of a young child. I know that you want to be there to help, but you also know that they do need to figure things out in order to help prepare them to be successful when you're not there, you know, and they're on their own. So it's that really odd, tough part of being a leader from a father perspective. Yeah, I mean, as a parent, my parents took me through university. You know, they paid every dime of it. And I have dozens of friends where that wasn't the case.

I have dozens of friends that 10, 12, 13 years later are still paying for their university educations. But, you know, these are things that I will take on that I want to do for my children. And so these are things, you know, my kids are just toddlers right now. But we're already socking it away because these are the things. that my parents have done for me that I want to do for them. And the interesting thing about it are these are things that didn't happen for my father. My father had what he would say probably was a tougher childhood where things weren't

really handed to him at all. And so I think that's a lot. That's probably where he developed a lot of that hard work ethic. You know, he didn't get a ride through university. He didn't get a ride through his college education. And so he always came up through life saying these are, you know, what he didn't get were things he wanted to do for his children. So it's just, it's interesting. I think everybody's different. I think everybody has different viewpoints and understandings on this, but I think

it, you know, it's interesting for sure. That leads me to think of goal setting. You know, you have goals obviously to take care of the, you know, continuing education of your children. What are some of your, you know, short-term as well as long-term goals for both personally and professionally? I'm curious. Oh, that's a really great question. You know, I want to write a new book every year. I want to write a book once a year. I loved the process of it. I loved doing it the first time.

So that's a new goal for me is I want to do that every year. I want to maintain or even increase the amount of discretionary free time I have with my children. So, you know, it's easy for me to work. a lot harder. It's easy for me to find more opportunities to be away from home. It's harder to turn away some of those opportunities or it's harder to, you know, to take some sacrifices because I want to have that time with my family. And so that's certainly a goal for me is to is to at least maintain or increase the amount of discretionary time that I have. you know, I think there's probably kind of extrinsic, external things that everybody would like to have.

But for me, it's really about, you know, just maintaining what I'm doing right now, maintaining this lifestyle. And again, looking for ways to increase that, looking for ways to spend more time with my wife and my kids and my brother and my sister-in-law and my parents and my nephews and nieces. And, you know, I think that's, that's to me what life is all about. Everybody's got different goals. You know, there's people that want the, want the mansion and the Ferraris and the Lambos. And I'm not going to tell you, I might not take it. But, you know, it's just not something that's that's on the radar for me right now. I live in a small town in Ontario, like I mentioned.

This is a really small town. I mean, I'm in a town of 20,000 people. the next biggest city is Detroit. So there's always opportunity for me to move or to pick up my business and move somewhere like Toronto or even move somewhere in the U.S. But this is a life that me and my wife are pretty happy with right now. And so if we can maintain that and just continue to build on that, I think we're going to be happy. That's really great.

I was reading some about you. And I think there's a lot of listeners, a lot of people that have a book in this. them or maybe multiple books or they want to write a book, but they think the process is too hard. And I read that you had dinner with Seth Godin and you had said, you know, man, Seth, I wish I could write a book like you. And apparently he responded to you and said, you know, if you write one, I'll read it. And so I thought that was an interesting story. And also I was hoping you would share a little bit about the book writing process because I feel like I've talked to a lot of people who have that in them, but they don't ever fully do it because they just think it's too hard or too

time consuming or they're just busy with life. So talk about that a little bit. Sure. So the story with Seth Godin is, it's pretty accurate. I actually had dinner with him in Chicago and it was, you know, we had a great dinner and Seth was his usual self telling great stories and great lessons and there was great learning. And at the end of the dinner, he pulled out a, he pulled out a pen from his pocket and he tossed it on the table to me. And we were sitting at a table with a kind of like a craft paper that covered the table where you could write on it and you could fiddle on or whatever. And Seth said to me, okay, you know, what's the one thing, Noah, that you're going to

go home and do? What's the one thing that you're going to go home and ship from everything we've talked about over dinner? And he said, write it down. You know, I want you to write it down and rip off the paper and take it home and do it. And so then there was a point where I'd sent, where I mentioned to Seth, like you said, I said, you know, gee, I wish I could write books like you. Like, you know, he's written, he's going on his 20-something book or whatever.

And that was his comment. If you write one, I'll read it. Three or four years ago, a book was not something that was even on my radar. And then I just, I realized that I had things I wanted to say. I had, I had content that I wanted to share. I had things that I had been doing that I thought were interesting. And so, you know, to me, writing a book wasn't that difficult. It wasn't that challenging to do.

There's books, there's courses, there's people that can help you do this. But it's a very, you know, it's, if I can make it as simple as it sounds, you need a great, you need a great idea. You need a book proposal. You need an agent. And then you need a book deal. And then once you've got all that, you need the willpower, need the determination to follow it through and write the book. Because at that point, you're contractually obligated to write the book. So for me, it was just.

again, a matter of learning how to do this, learning from others. So investing in books from Amazon that taught me how to write a book proposal. Michael Hyatt, who's a New York Times best-selling author, had a course on creating a great book proposal. A book proposal, sometimes I know people that are, you know, spending a year trying to get their book proposal done. For me, again, it was a matter of sitting down and doing the work and focusing on it and writing it and getting it done. And so I got it done in under a month. And, you know, a month, including time to raise my children and to make dinner and to have time with my wife and to run my company. So it's not something that is impossible to do.

You start with a book proposal and then you find an agent. To find an agent, there are resources you can go to and you need to pique their interests. Sometimes you can get an introduction. Sometimes you can go to networking events where there's agents or book events. and you can meet one, but you just need one of them to say, I like your proposal. I'm willing to represent you. And then what they do is they take your proposal to the publishers and they try and sell it. And so I approached about, I think, 12 agents.

I had three that said they would like to read my proposal. I had two that offered to represent me. I picked one from the two. He took the book. We worked together to, sorry, he took the proposal. we worked together over the next week or so to make a few tweaks to make a few adjustments. And then he took the book and attempted to sell it. We had two offers within a month.

And we picked the best one that we thought was right for me for a first book, which turned out to be Amacom, the American Management Association. And the rest is history. So, you know, there's not a lot to it. There's a lot that we allow to get in the way of not doing it. So if somebody's got a book in them, somebody's got an idea for a book, by all means, You know, I would say do it because you can do it and you know you can self-publish if you want. I was going to ask you about that because I you know there's a lot of that lot out there now.

James Altisher and others who are big time influencers are talking a lot about self-publishing and really giving step by step on how to do it so that you can skip some of the process that you just talked about. I'm curious to get your take since you went the other route that I guess I could say the traditional route. what are your thoughts on that versus self-publishing and why one would be better than the other? Well, I'm going to be really transparent about why I did that. I did that because I learned that in the corporate consulting world, the traditional published books still carried a lot of weight. There was a lot of merit to having a commercially published book, and I'm still seeing that. There are guys like James and Seth Godin who are doing a lot of self-publishing, and I am a firm believer that. if you have a great idea and you have something and you need to get it out to the world,

then you need to do that. But if there's a reason for you to self-publish, which for me, I did believe at the time there were, sorry, to commercially publish, if there was a reason to do that, you know, then I would go that row. But I don't think there's any really pro or con to either way. If you have a great idea, you should get it out there by all means. Look, we, the key to I think all of this is that we can all probably agree. that unless you're writing 50 Shades of Gray or the next Harry Potter, writing a book is not

going to make you a lot of money. What a book's going to do, it's going to allow you to share your ideas and to share your intellectual property and to give that to others as a gift and to allow people to take your knowledge and implement it and to use those skills to grow or to do whatever. And so, you know, it's really kind of a personal choice. And for me, it was it was part of a strategy decision that this was something I needed to do for my business. And probably it helps build credibility. I would assume, has your, I mean, I know you try to limit your work because your discretionary time is so valuable to you.

But has it either upped your fee or up to business for you since it's come out? Well, again, going back to my mentor, Alan Weiss, Alan will tell you that the, the commercially published book is still the gold standard of credibility. Yeah. He will tell, you know, this is kind of one of his classic lines is that in 2015, this is still the gold standard. And so I would agree with that assessment. I would, but again, to go back to the self-publishing route, I would also agree that we've now seen so many examples where, you know, the bar has been set by self-published authors.

I just think, again, I really think it's a personal preference. I will probably, there's no doubt I'll self-publish things this year. I have no doubt that I will, but I'll also probably try and sell another book traditionally. Yeah, I'm just very curious because I've read so much about that. And I'm obviously collecting a lot of information based on meeting a lot of really, really smart creatives, like I said before. And I'm going to have basically a book full of information of other people's ideas that I can then try to incorporate in my day-to-day processes. So that's why I really study and like to learn about the book writing and publishing process. Yeah, I think the big key to all of it is that whatever route you choose, if you're doing it to make money, you know, it's not going to pan out the way you want it to.

It has to be, as much as I said, there was a strategic element to me doing it this way. One way or another, I would have published this content. I would have shared this material with others one way or the other. whether I'd got the book deal or not, these were things that I wanted to share with people that I would have put out into the world that I'll still put out in the world in various formats in different ways. So did you get a big advance for it? I got a decent advance for a published for a first-time author in 2014.

Okay. What are the ranges, I mean, from a first-time guy? I can't even put a, can't even guess. I can, from from colleagues, friends, and personal experience, I can tell you that I've heard of advances ranging anywhere from, you know, $2,500 up to $40,000. Okay. Again, I think, you know, your J.K. Rowling and Seth are probably going to garner a pretty big, a pretty big advance. For a guy like myself who's coming up with a first time commercially published book, the advance was decent. But the other thing I know is that a lot of publishers are offering to give in advance,

but they also want the authors to commit to buying a certain number of books. Right. And so you're essentially, you know, committing that at least they're going to get their print run and you're going to essentially give that money back to them to buy books. Now, that's not a bad thing because if you're writing a book, you should be giving that book away as much as you can, as often as you can, to everyone that you can, you know. And also we probably are selling them when you go and have speaking events or that or you're maybe substituting your fee for purchasing books. I'll do both.

You know, but I'm never going to shy away from giving a book to somebody if they, you know, if they can't read it or their prospective clients or they want to read it or I think they could use it. I ordered, I've got a palette of 500 books that I ordered of my new book Evergreen. And within the past month, I've probably sent out 160 copies. You know, again, on my own dime, you FedEx them, there's an expense to that. But it's part of the cost of doing business, but it's also because you want to get your message out there. And you want people to read this. You want people to enjoy it. And so that's what you do.

You know, if you write a book, you should be thinking about how do I give this away to as many people as possible? I love it. It's great. It's great. No, I really want to be respectful of your time, man. So I really appreciate you coming on here. You've given so much great content just in this time together here. And I would encourage everybody to, if you haven't read it yet, read Noah's book, Evergreen,

just has a chock full of great, great knowledge that, like I said, his intellectual property that he's shared with us. And it's really, really good. If Seth Godin's Pub in your book, you know that there's great material inside it. So I would encourage everybody to go check it out. and, you know, feel free to pop other work that you're doing right now. Well, Ryan, why don't we do something for your listeners? Would it be okay if we did a giveaway of a couple copies?

We'll say, you know, why don't we say something I've done on other podcasts, but why don't we say the first three listeners that email me? Okay. Noah at Noah Fleming.com. There's one M in Fleming. First three people that email me, I will give them a complimentary sign copy of Evergreen. all they have to do is email me. Again, it's first come, first serve, but it's going to be the first three.

Wow. Awesome, man. Thank you. I really appreciate that. That's a great offer. As soon as this gets released, I can bet that you're going to get a lot more than three emails. So I really appreciate that offer for all the listeners.

Thank you very much. And I think I'd like to do this again because I actually had a lot more to get to, but I understand that people have short attention span. And so we'll cut it down here and probably pick it back up another time. Maybe as you finish your next books and it sounds like you're going to write a book a year, hopefully. Happy to do it again, Ryan. Awesome.

Well, thanks, Noah, and talk soon, man. All right, take care. This episode of The Learning Leader Show is over, but we have plenty more to keep you locked in until next time. Head over to Learning Leadershow.com for more information and to request your favorite entrepreneur, CEO, world-class athlete, or anyone else that inspires you. You can also talk to Ryan directly by reaching out to him on Twitter at Ryan Hawk 12. Thanks again, and we'll see you next time on The Learning Leader Show.