Make More For Yourself with Yanik Silver and From Expert To Influencer with Jane Anderson

Ten years ago, Yanik Silver looked at his life and asked himself, “Am I truly happy?” The answer was no. Yanik was making a lot of money doing a lot of good health for people and had a great reputation that space, but he didn’t feel like that was the end all of what he could contribute. That started the process of founding the Maverick1000. Yanik talks about his interesting evolution on teaching about how you can profit and make more for yourself or your business while making a difference in the world and having some fun in the process. The irony of personal branding is that it’s not even about you, it’s about communicating the value that you bring to people. Jane Anderson is a personal branding expert. She shares some key skills to attract new clients, increase sales, and leverage your personal brand to become an industry leader.

I’m so glad you joined us now because we have Yanik Silver and Jane Anderson here. Yanik is the Founder of Maverick 1000 and Evolved Enterprise. He’s also a top author. You’ve probably seen him. He hangs around an interesting crowd, including Sir Richard Branson and many others. Jane Anderson is also just an amazing personal branding expert. She’s a leading authority in Australia and around the world and she’s a top author and speaker.

Listen to the podcast here

Make More For Yourself with Yanik Silver

I am here with Yanik Silver who redefines how business is played in the 21st century at the intersection of more profits, more fun and more impact. He’s the author of several bestselling books including Evolved Enterprise. He’s also the founder of Maverick1000, a private invitation only global network of top entrepreneurs and industry leaders. This group periodically gets together for breakthrough retreats, rejuvenating experiences and impact opportunities. Yanik was named one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s Top 50 Favorite Online Market Influencers. Welcome, Yanik.

I appreciate it.

I’m surprised that you and I actually haven’t met because I’ve been to a lot of the functions. We know a lot of the same people. I went to Joe Polish’s Genius Network and I know I watched your interview with him and Sir Richard Branson. I know that Branson’s a big influencer of what you’ve done. I was watching some of the videos. You talked about how much he’s incorporated fun into what he does and I can see that’s a big part of what you do. Just a little background of how you got to this point because I know you’ve reinvented yourself a little here and there. Can you just give you a little bit of background?

The quick story is I started off in the online space, the digital marketing world back in 2000, which I actually thought I was late to the party as I had friends who I’ve met through there who are getting started in ’93, ’94. It’s actually one of the best times and I had this little idea at 3:00 in the morning for something called Instant Sales Letters and they are sales letter templates. All of the sudden, that turned into my first million-dollar product in gross sales in and they’re like, “How did you do that? Could you teach me how to do something like that?” That then reinvented myself, helping other people take their expertise and their content, helping them get that online. About eleven years ago, I looked at my life and I’m like, “Am I truly happy?” That’s pretty simple question, but the answer was no. I was making a lot of money, I do a lot of good, helping lot of people, I had a great reputation in that space, but I wasn’t totally happy. I didn’t feel like that was my end-all of what I could contribute. That started this process of these Maverick group of companies. All about how do you make more for yourself, for your business. Make a difference in the world and have some fun in the process and that’s been this very interesting evolution. We can probably talk a little bit about that and how that’s continued on.

I’m interested in Maverick1000. What exactly do you do there? You gave a little bit of background, but can you give some more?

It originally started as Maverick business adventures and the thought was we’d go off on these crazy adventures, combine it with some cool business sessions and have some great entrepreneurs there and there might be some charity element to it. I thought, “This would be my end-all. I love doing that and about $400,000 in, my wife’s like, “What the hell are you doing?” I’m like, “I don’t know exactly, but there’s something here.” It forced me to look at my big why and the why wasn’t am I creating a big adventure travel company because that wasn’t it, but that there is something else. That’s where we shifted and I said, “I’m going to continue doing this. There’s got to be something even bigger.” Now, our mission is changing the way business is played and it’s become much more of this collective network around the world of these leading entrepreneurs, people with big voices and platforms and world-class experts. Then we get together for different retreats for still unique experiences. There’s been a much more of an emphasis on our own evolution, on the evolution of our business to make an impact. How do we collectively make an impact in the world? Then as a byproduct, the fun comes out.

You are in definitely a pretty impressive group. Mitch Russo, actually introduced us awhile back and I know that he worked with Tony Robbins. You’re in with all those people. When you’re with such high-level performers, how does that impact what you think and what you do? What was your first initial a-ha moment when you were around some of them? Did some of that rub off on the fun from Richard Branson and what did you get from some of those guys?

I look at it as these puzzle pieces along the way that has been contributed to this framework that I’ve developed a couple of years ago called Evolved Enterprise. It’s all about how business can make a difference in the world. How you get customers to want to buy more, become part of something bigger. Your team is aligned in a greater mission and there’s much more purpose about what you do. All of these pieces came together. There are known people like Richard who’s very well-known and then more under the radar, people like Ari Weinzweig who cofounded a company called Zingerman’s and a guy named Chip Conley who had the second largest boutique hotel in the world. Then guys like Tony Hsieh from Zappos. All of them had these parts on me. I continue learning from every one of those kinds of icons and influencers, but also the members of our team or our members themselves. I think they all have something to contribute when you put incredibly smart people together and Richard by far, has definitely been one of my biggest business heroes and I’ve learned so much from him just observing him.

The way that’s the way that he reacts when he’s not in the spotlight or not on stage. It’s interesting to see some of that stuff carry over. You mentioned the fun and that is absolutely just part of his life, 24/7. It’s just the way that he carries himself and makes things just more entertaining, more whimsical. Just not taking himself too seriously. We do a trip every year at Necker Island and the last time we did a Q&A interview. It was all about impact. Our teams got these mermaid tails, got one for me, one for him. They had walk to him and like, “Here you go,” no questions asked essentially. I know he just tried on that mermaid an outfit. He’s like, “We have to go for real.” He takes off his shirt. I’m like, “I guess we do.” I take off my shirt. We had that relationship, but that’s the way he is in his everyday world and it’s contagious to be around someone like that.

Joe Polish has got a cute sense of humor too and all those guys. They are what they are. They don’t put up these fronts and it’s fun to be around them to learn more. It inspired me. I’m writing a book on curiosity and I was listening to some of the stuff that you were talking about. In some of your talks, you were talking about the cosmic alarm clock and how we can hit some news or decide if we’re going to do something about it. That resonates with what Mel Robbins has said and others have said. There are people who just exist and then there are people who live and decide to do more and you’ve obviously decided to do more. I wonder how we can get that and package that and teach people how to do that who fear doing something more.

The cosmic alarm clock you brought up is one of my favorite concepts. It’s this idea of if you look at what people that have kids are reading this or have been around nieces and nephews and so forth and their teeth that come out at some point and you can’t hurry that along. I remember my daughter, she’s the younger one and my son had already lost a couple teeth by this point and she’s like, “I want a wiggly tooth.” More because she wanted the money from the tooth fairy. She’s a little more money-driven than the older ones, but regardless she’s was like, “I want a wiggly tooth.” It happens in that right time and I think all of us experience these moments. It’s like the universe is going to bonk us on the head repeatedly, sometimes escalating higher and higher, harder and harder. For me it was that $400,000 bonk on the head was enough to be like, “What are you doing here?” When I was talking to one of my friends, we had lunch, for him it was like a $3 or $4 million bonk on the head. It can come financially, it can come health-wise, it can come relationship-wise.

Sometimes they’re very traumatic things that become these alarm clocks and other times they’re like little quiet moments where you have this nagging little voice just like, “There’s something more.” If you’re not feeling fully alive, if you’re feeling a little depressed, if you’re feeling frustrated, those are indications that you’re not truly following your path. Then it’s up to us to go do something about it. I believe that following your heart is frequently scary, but it’s never wrong. You can point to times when you said, “I’m going to go do this.” You didn’t even have maybe a logical reason you’re going to do to do this, but in the end with an elevated viewpoint, you’re like, “That was the right move.” or it’s set up something else that you never would have gotten to without going that direction.

Maybe your daughter was pushing the water down the river. Maybe she could have changed the flow by trying to get the money in a different way. You quoted Rumi, the poet that says, “What you seek is seeking you.” How do we find what seeking us?

I’ll give you some day-to-day type stuff and then bigger picture. It’s wild with our group. We have definitely a lot of high-achievers in our group and people I’ve talked to a lot. I’ve seen this conversation shift over the years. We just put on a summer camp for entrepreneurs and I asked everyone in the room, we had 120 people there, I’m like, “How many of you meditate?” It was like 80% of the room raised their hand. I’m like, “It’s super impressive.” I would’ve asked that about five, six years ago. Maybe it would have been about 20%. Things like that are ways that when we get still, when we practice mindfulness, when we practice just paying more attention to our feelings, even paying more attention to our body. I’m an advocate for her for meditation. That’s been a daily practice for me for about four years. I’ve been doing it long enough that I’ve been seeing the benefits of it. In those moments you’re just more attuned to what’s coming at you. There are a lot of scientific evidence about growing more just bigger connections between the two hemispheres. There are a lot of actual scientific data about it as well. If you do something like that, it’s powerful. Something like that is a huge one.

In general, like in the bigger picture, it’s pretty easy. I look at your heart or even joy and it’s like your GPS. What brings you joy is what you can be following. Joy is not just happiness, because happiness can be very fleeting. Happiness is an ice cream sundae and it feels good when you’re eating it Joy is feeling you’re fully utilize. This was what you were designed for, what you were meant for. There’s a deeper level of happiness that comes with it. I look at a pain so we’ve talked about getting bumped on the head by the universe, like pain becomes our guard rails and joy is like the driving force that we’re attracted to and it’s almost like allurement. That continues driving us forwards and then the tighter the guard rails are, it’s been more and more of you’re in alignment with your head, which is your business sense, your reasoning and your logic and your heart, which is the impact side of things. How do you serve the greater good and then what’s your highest purpose? When you get all that in alignment, then you can flow through that incredibly easily.

I’ve had so many people talk about the importance of a lot of the things we’re talking about, mindfulness and meditation. You deal with a lot of topics that just in the few clips I’ve watched from just some of your talks that are important in a lot of the courses I teach because I teach a lot of business courses for a bunch of different universities. Some of the things you discussed I wanted to talk about because they’re in your book. A lot of business courses deal with transactional versus transformational businesses, but you go one step further to transcending and I’m curious what you mean by that.

I talked about moving from transactional to transformational to even a transcending company. Transactional is what it sounds like. It could be selling an onion for $0.05 less than the other person that sells an onion and you’re trying to create a brand that has people engage with that brand and then you can charge more for your onion. Then at the transformational level, I look at it as the identity of everyone associated with the company changes in some way. Then at a transcending level, you’re almost changing what business is about. A good example of that, I have eleven different impact models that I talked about it inside the Evolved Enterprise and one of them is called empowered employment. It’s this idea of can we hire people that might be looked at as a disadvantage but actually gives us a competitive advantage and drives everything.

One of the companies I highlight in there, they’re called ULTRA Testing and they do quality control testing between cross browser platforms in different IOS systems and so forth. What they do is they hire people on the autism spectrum scale. Stereotypically, I guess is people in that spectrum are more detail-oriented. They are okay with repetitive tasks and so forth, but that’s like a perfect job description for who they need to do that testing. That takes what could be a disadvantage and turns it into an advantage. It gives them a reason to compete in the marketplace in a whole different way. We started using things like that. You can’t have an inferior product or service. You can’t use that as a crutch, but if you have a great product or service and then you add these impact elements and especially this idea of moving to a transcending level, then you can thrive in and grow that way.

Another example empowered employment is a purse company and all they’re doing is they hired people with the average age was 88 and they hired them to do the hand stitching on the purses instead of farming it out to Asia or somewhere like that. They walked into a nursing home and said, we’d love to hire all the senior citizens here who knew how to do crochet. Then that turns into a great story that they can share. They actually called them the Purlettes. Their average age is 88. It’s pretty amazing when something like that and you start using your business. I truly believe business can be the greatest leverage to make a difference in the world because of our distribution, our voice, the supply chain. A way that we can change the world through that and through the people that we communicate through our team members, to communities that we serve. It’s an exciting time.

[Tweet “Business can be this greatest lever for making a difference in the world.”]

There are so many people that are getting attention for some of the stuff they wrote. Mackey’s Conscious Capitalism got a lot of attention. A lot of people are trying to find ways that they can be profitable yet still be a business and still do good things. I found some of the stories that you shared. The ones you just shared are awesome. Then you had a few others that I heard you talk about Toms shoes or FEED, Lauren Bush. Can you share those two stories because I thought those were pretty inspirational?

Toms has probably become one of the biggest for this idea of social impact or triple bottom line or for- benefit businesses or we call them the enterprises. What I love about Toms is a couple things. One is the fact that they’ve grown so fast. I got a chance to talk to Blake, the Founder of Toms. What he will always point to is the number of shoes that they’ve given away. Their model is you but a pair of shoes and they give a pair away to a child in need somewhere around the world. He’ll tell you that he never ever expected it to grow so big. Now, it’s turned into more of a logistical distribution issue than anything else. They were able to use this very simple formula, the buy one, give one to grow what they’re doing. It’s a great story that consumers can share. We talk about transformational companies. This one is a transformational business in certain ways because it changes the identity the person who buys it. They are more connected to this altruistic state. They feel like they’re connected to others when they see the little Toms logo on shoes and other items because of that connection. They also got some flack. They never thought they’d get the space.

They’ve got some flack because you’re taking away business from local communities, the shoe sellers in these communities by giving away shoes. You’re altering the economic conditions there. One of the things with Evolved Enterprises is you’re actually going to get received increased scrutiny because there’s more transparency than ever. The best company in the world takes that as feedback and evolve their practices. Also have the benefit of being given this benefit of the doubt that they have people that believe in them and that they’re willing to let them make mistakes and come out the other side. What Blake and the team decided to do was actually open up factories in different parts of the world. I know they had one in Haiti that they built that was making these shoes and now they’re able to provide local jobs and economic stimulus for the people of Haiti. That’s one way that they countered that and looked at that. The other thing that I’ll point out, Diane, that’s really interesting about that when I talked to Blake, we’ll talk about number of pairs of shoes given away. When I talked to him last, it was 35 million pairs of shoes. In there, I talked about an impact score board, which is exciting. As a business, we can reverse engineer, what is the impact score board that we want to have that then our team and our customers can focus on and as a byproduct of that we’re profitably delivering with our product and services.

That was the picture of the tree you had on your talk that I saw.

The tree was for FEED. That’s Lauren Bush‘s company.

That’s the same as keeping track of how things are going.

Keeping track of the impact that you’re able to make and then and seeing that direct impact in different ways. For FEED, it’s a bag and then one bag would feed a child for a year. They have different versions with the bag. They were showing the different countries around the world that the FEED program is known, involved in, the number of meals given, the number of kids supported. It was a very interesting way to graphically show that impact scoreboard.

Both of those are just such great examples. You’ve also raised money through your group. The Maverick1000 group. You’ve raised over $3 million, and what do you do with that?

We have two things. One is we take a percentage of every members dues so we actually put it into an impact fund. The impact fund is trying to figure out some way to create a ripple of impact beyond just having a check to a nonprofit. Throughout the years we’ve worked with a lot of great nonprofits and we will not only give them seed money for a project, but we’ll work with them to actually use our brain power and talent and entrepreneurial connections and resources halfway further along something that you’re doing and put that to use. The one that we’ve worked the most with is Virgin Unite, which is Branson’s family charity. They bring together different groups, different nonprofits, different organizations, different foundations into the same room and apply entrepreneurial thinking. Our latest project is all about the ocean. We’re very actively involved in this 30% by 2030. Protecting 30% of the ocean by the year 2030. We’ve had a couple of meetings with this woman named Karen Sack who runs Ocean Unite, who is an offshoot of Virgin Unite. Looking at, “How do we make it a win for the business?” It has to be a win for everyone. That’s the thing with the Evolve Enterprise and providing more impact than what you do. It’s not just a check or it’s not an expense on the books.

There are a lot of data coming out now that the consumer buying behavior is changing. People want to buy from companies that have a purpose or an impact behind what they do. They’re willing to spend more or the same in many cases or that the team members, especially millennials want to be involved in a company that has greater purpose and mission behind what they do. Using that kind of data to help companies and brands, how do we associate with the ocean which as I started to get to know what’s going on there, it’s imperative. It’s responsible for one out of every two breaths of air that we breathe just from the oxygen that’s created from it. Then there are all these different issues facing the ocean from plastics to micro plastics to increased acidification, increased temperatures and so forth and over fishing. There are a lot of things going on. Business can be this greatest lever for making a difference in the world. How do we align business interest alone with the impact interest? That’s where we’ve been focused on.

My brother used to be a fisherman in Hawaii and he was saying that we’re seeing much more shark attacks because they were fishing so much that the sharks had to go in more to get more food because they were taking their natural source. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but that’s what he thinks. It’s interesting to see some of the impact that it has outside of what you don’t even think the next level. I found it interesting about the millennials because I agree that they are very focused on making a difference. That’s why I think this is all helpful for increasing innovation by working on all these things that you’re working on. That’s what led to my interest in talking to you because I’m working with some of the same things with curiosity and trying to get people to make an impact, to do something else and to know that what we seek is seeking us and we just got to figure that out. I loved having you on the show, Yanik. It was so interesting and I’m sure a lot of people want to know how they could find your book and your work. Do you have some sites or information you want to share?

I blog occasionally at YanikSilver.com. Then the book is at EvolvedEnterprise.com or on Amazon.

This was so much fun. Thank you so much, Yanik.

Thanks, Diane. It was fun.

From Expert To Influencer with Jane Anderson

I am here with Jane Anderson who is Australia’s leading business growth mentor for personally branded businesses. With more than twenty years’ experience, she has worked with more than 30,000 people and building trust and influence in their business and brands. She is the host of the number one ranked iTunes podcast, The Jane Anderson Brand You Show and has been featured in Business Insider, Sky Business, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and the list goes on and on. She’s been nominated three times for the Telstra Business Women’s Award and authors of five books. She’s written so many books. Her latest is Expert to Influencer: 12 Key Skills to Attract New Clients, Increase Sales and Leverage Your Personal Brand to Become an Industry Leader. It’s so nice to have you here, Jane.

Thanks so much for having me.

You’re welcome. I always love to have guests from Australia because you all have such beautiful accents. I have to admit I was stalking you a little bit trying to find out more about you. I watched a lot of your videos and you do some great stuff. I love the personal branding thing and I noticed that you deal with a lot of people who are like me who have their name as their brand. Free branding advice for interviewing you. That’s a challenge for people. If you mess it up, you’ve messed up a lot of things because it’s your name, it’s your brand. What is the biggest mistake you think people make when they’re trying to brand themselves with their own name? Is it always a good idea to use your name?

I’ve worked with personally branded businesses since I was fourteen years old. I always loved this concept of personal brand, but I didn’t think at fourteen the companies that I started work with, I was always drawn to wear personal brand with family names. The mistake that people make, the irony of personal branding is that it’s not even about you. When I say that is that you’ve got to have clarity about who you are for sure, but unless you can communicate the value that you bring to people, then you just look cocky and arrogant and narcissistic. We have a show here in Australia called Kath & Kim and there’s a character in there who says, “Look at me.” In Australia, we have a problem which is the tall poppy. It’s not cool to stand out, to put yourself out there. That’s why I love going to the US. Sometimes have to get my US fix because I get a bit frustrated with the Australians where we go, “Nothing’s broken so you’ll be all right or I’ll fix it. It would cool.” I love the passion that Americans have around building their brand and finding a way to contribute their knowledge, their conversation. There are two things, one is that if you’re building a personal brand is that we go into monumental calls about being terminally unique. We try to be so special and amazing. It’s not necessarily about being famous, it’s being professionally famous. You don’t want to be walking through airports and signing autographs and all that stuff.

I think it’s about knowing who you work with, who you add the greatest value to and not necessarily even making it about you. It’s a challenge because for those who are turning over say a revenue, most of my time is with those who are turning over a revenue of about $500,000 and we take them through to the million-dollar mark. In their case we actually have to shift the mindset over into humility is that we actually go, “This isn’t even about you anymore. This is about your audience, the problems they have. Having empathy and understanding for them and then being able to put your insights into and whether it’s content, podcasts, writing blogs, and videos, whatever it is so that people can learn.” I think the other thing too, that I see a lot of it is that there’s an opportunity for businesses and organizations.

I spoke at a conference which was for promotional products and for the people that work in those businesses, is to get more involved in the term I call edu-marketing, educational marketing, because otherwise you’re just spam. You just spam people with ‘Buy my stuff’. If you can educate people on things how to run a great trade show, how to grow your business. Then you are the expert. People connect with people. They buy from people they know, like, and trust. The way that social platforms are set up is that it’s designed to connect with people, not necessarily to connect with the business. People want to connect with a human being. It’s definitely most untapped resource that’s sitting within a business. If someone hasn’t capitalized on that as well as working with putting your name.com. The short answer is you don’t have to build your name.com, but there are other ways around it.

Do you ever change from being your name and then think it’s got to be more than that you got to go to the next level? For example, if I’m writing books and doing things and it’s just too complicated to just have it be about that you want to build a brand, how do you go to that next step?

It will generally be around the $750,000 mark. When someone’s building to about that revenue, that’s when we say, everybody’s practice or business is different, but that’s generally the revenue that I’m looking at doing something like that with them. What we’ll do is we’ll break off that component of their IP. They then become the rainmaker for that business. That’s when we split. We’ll keep their name, but then we’ll focus on let’s look at what it is that you’re doing. Do we create a license of all your IP? Do we trade license people who are using it? Do you keep rolling it out? Do you bring in contractors who are delivering your IP? We’ll break the brand off and then their focus is then to purely just continue to be that rainmaker. They’ll continue to speak, continue to write, but they’ll be building in the capability of the people who are rolling out their programs so their focus shifts.

I’ve interviewed so many famous people who have used their name or they do a lot of co-writing, coauthoring with other people. Simon Sinek, for example I had his co-author on my show recently and I’ve had a lot of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad group. They’d spin off on all these things. It’s fun to see these brands can take off and become just so big. The people, when you talk to them and what they had in mind originally, a lot of them are surprised. They had no idea it was going to get to this level. How much of it is luck? How much of it is timing? There are other factors. Aren’t there other than just being super bright like they are?

I said this to a group that I’m working with at the moment of female experts that I mentor in a leadership program. What I love about this game, this game does not discriminate. It doesn’t matter what background you’re from, it doesn’t matter whether you grew up with the financial resources. Years ago, you had to get a publishing deal. You had to have the money for PR, all that stuff. This, you can do with nothing. You set up your YouTube, you set up your social media and just set up MailChimp. You can build your list. Everything you can do with no money. All it comes down to is bloody hard work, but real empathy. Empathy and understanding of whose problem do you solve. The challenge that is out there is that you’ve got these YouTube sensation rock stars that are entertaining, but you have to be able to have some way to solve people’s problems.

You can be fascinating, but you’ll be staying on YouTube. You won’t be called into an organization to identify how to create a cultural change program. How to come into a government department and drive innovation and change to create the government of the future. It can be big stuff, but it could be working with moms who are just trying to be able to set up their own businesses. The good news is you don’t have to be a rocket scientist. Although I coach a lot of doctors who have done doctorates and their challenges is they’re saying, “Are you kidding me? I’ve just spent years at university and your quoting my research. You’re not actually doing the research and now you’re earning more than me?” There’s that insight. I run my Expert to Influencer Program with universities and research institutes particularly for women in who are in academia. They’re working in academia but they’ve often got a consulting business on the side. How do we take that amazing research? Here we get to hear it from the horse’s mouth, so you’ve got an even bigger advantage. It doesn’t discriminate, but you’ve got all the resources available to you that everybody else has.

[Tweet “Everything you can do with no money. All it comes down to is bloody hard work but real empathy.”]

The other thing too is having a system and a process or someone who’s done it. Then having a structure or knowing those benchmarks like I was mentioning about the revenue targets. I’ll prescribe something completely different to someone who’s generating a revenue of about $150,000 versus someone who we got a client at the moment doing $1.5 million. He’s operating in nine countries. He’s rolled out programs to 5,000 people. We’ve got a different strategy. You have to have someone who can work with that expertise.

I’m just thinking of the people who have been on my show. I have a lot of speakers, consultants, authors, CEOs. It goes across the board the different types of people. A lot of people are trying to build their lists. What I get a lot of and everybody knows you’re supposed to give something of value otherwise you’re spamming them. They give you the ten top things that you didn’t know about this. Let me give you a free a video about that. If you’re getting a lot of that, you get so many people giving you a lot of it, so many people don’t have time to even open half of this stuff. How do you build a list when people are just like, “I don’t want more of this, I know they’re giving me something, but I don’t want them to email me unless it’s something good?” They stopped opting in. I know a lot of people who don’t opt in like they used to.

It’s two things. One is you’ve got to create more face-to-face experiences. I think what’s happened or what I see is people are asking the same things is I’ve tried this thing. If you’re a lead gen expert and that’s essentially probably the heart of what I do is help people get that list moving and working. In the book that I wrote, Expert to Influencer, there are twelve skills that will help you to get that lead gen and to build that list. Wanting to get belly-to–belly, get out with people. The challenge though is that my mentor, Matt Church, who’s created Thought Leaders Business School here in Australia, he’s built some of the biggest personal brands over the last 30 years. He says, “I used to think that we were in the business of ideas. Now, we’re in the business of experiences.” At the end of the day, I can get anything out there that I want. However, if you can create an experience getting belly-to-belly is, what do you do to invite people to come to stuff that doesn’t cost a fortune. I’ve got a client who’s an ex-global HR director for an automotive company that everybody would know what that company is if I said it. He’s in Japan, he’s in Melbourne and he’s in New York. I said, “You connected all these people on LinkedIn. Why don’t you book a restaurant, reach out?” Just say, “Do you want to come and have a drink? Come and have lunch. I’ve put together whether it’s lunch or dinner or drinks and come out.” People want to connect. We are so disconnected now that we’re digital is you actually have to get more face-to-face with people.

That’s challenging. Your customers are abroad. If you have an international database and you want to expand. I know that you said that you had to build your own brand later more after helping people and how challenging it was for you. Even if you’re super extroverted and you don’t mind talking to people and there are so many things you’ve got to do. What was the hardest part for you?

The irony is that when I first started my business, I actually started under a different brand because I’d worked for so many personally branded businesses, I was like, “I can’t put myself out there.” I’m good at making someone else look good, but when it came to me and I thought, “This is ridiculous.” I’ve done this for so many years and here I am hiding behind a brand. This is so silly. The biggest mistake I made was even though I naturally sit in a supportive role, I don’t naturally sit in the space of putting myself out there. I do it because I do it to help the people I serve. The biggest mistake that I made was that I had positioned myself using a different brand, trying to hide, hoping that nobody would see me but still want to buy. It sounds so stupid because I did a marketing degree and I’ve done it for so many years with everybody else. When it’s you, it’s so confronting. I have total empathy for people who go through this experience and going, “You want me to do what?”

It’s very challenging to put yourself out there because there are so many people who are willing to criticize everything. You get on these social media sites, you’re going to get haters and it’s a little bit easier if you’re Harpo, than if you’re Oprah. You just suck it up and your name backwards and then if you weren’t her, people would know. Now, that everybody knows who you are, it’s a challenge because there’s just going to be that vulnerability that you get. Don’t you think?

You are putting yourself out there but you also have to have something of value to say. I find the biggest gap, particularly if I’m working with women, is if there are challenges around their confidence. The first thing I’ll look for is how much IP they’ve built. If they haven’t built any IP, then that’s the problem. We have this impostor thing and I don’t know if I’m that good and maybe I can’t put myself out there because maybe what I have to say isn’t that great and isn’t relevant. It comes back to you. Have you done any work? If they haven’t done any work, then they’ll fizzle out quick. If you want it to be sustainable and you have to be able to stand in conviction, stand in front of a camera, take a photo of yourself or have photos done of you. Then you come up against yourself in this game, it will find every corner of who you are and challenge every part of it before you get the value that you bring.

It is challenging because a lot of people want to do speaking and consulting, so they write a book and go, “I write a book. I’ll make a lot of money off this book.” They don’t realize that you don’t make a lot of money off the books usually. It’s a definite a foundational thing to be an expert. Do you recommend that they write books? What do you think of the self-publishing, hybrid publishing, me the publisher thing? It’s so changed these days. What’s your impression of that?

To write a book is the ultimate positioning activity which will get you in front of an audience, which will get you the consulting gigs. It’s the top of that funnel. I think the biggest challenge I see is a lot of people write the wrong book.

What’s the right book?

The right book is writing the book for your future, not your past. The ones that go, I’ve written this great book,” and they’re a business consultant, and I’ve written a book about their post-traumatic stress disorder. Do you want to be in front of stages talking about posttraumatic stress disorder? The first challenge is working out what the right book is to write that will be the best positioning activity to help you to be able to get in front of those audiences and will be commercially smart enough to create the revenue and the income that works. That’s the first thing. The other thing too, with a book is it’s often the door-opener. One of the things you talked about was getting email addresses and lead gen. A book is a great tool to be able to use that. A book costs you $6, $12 or whatever. It’s hard to get an email address out of people. If you’re working in the business-to-business and corporate space, I work with type fairly tight tribes so we’re not necessarily looking to become the next Simon Sinek.

We say, the book is a great tool to be able to find a way to get something tangible in front of people. Everything’s digital now. We work a lot of agile methodology. For those who are growing their business and are starting out, I will say, I don’t think we’ve got to the book that is the $750,000-big business book. We just start out with this book and what we would call it a program book as opposed to your entire life’s work book. Let’s say for example, they’re an expert in resilience and leadership and they’re delivering programs in corporate around resilient leadership. We go, “Let’s start with that and just see what happens.” What happens is out of that they either identify that that is definitely their life’s work and is there big work, in which case that could end up being the book and it needs some reinvention to make it bigger. In which case we might go to a big publishing house. We might go to Wiley or something like that, or it may stay as what we call a program book and we just say, “That’s just part of what you do. Let’s talk about the bigger book.” This bigger book is the book that takes you to a million-dollar plus it goes to publishing houses.

[Tweet “The right book is writing the book for your future, not your past.”]

I think the question that I always have for people is, what stage of growth is your business at now? Are we actually ready to make that decision and then we want to take that bigger book until we hit the $500,000 a month and then work out, is that the right decision to make? You can still self-publish and get distributors obviously and get your book into bookstores, in the airports and you can still pay for all the PR and all the light boxes in the airports. There’s no need to necessarily go to a big publisher. For those who do a lot of personally branded type work, if you look at this in the US, Larry Winget and Suze Orman and they have their faces on the covers of their books. Typically, a big publisher won’t do that because you might change your hair color or you might look different. That means a whole lot of rework and rebranding. If you intend on building and taking a lot more control over your brands, then by all means self-publishing. If it’s business-to-business market, tackling airports, sometimes the bigger publishing companies can sometimes be the better option. The short answer is everybody’s different. It depends on the goal you’re trying to achieve.

Larry’s been on my show and he’s got a great look with this cowboy. I’ve had most of his buddies, the best hall of fame guys have all been on the show and they’re all great. They have wonderful books. I think when you get to a certain point, you’ve got this under a formula, you know what the next thing is and they’re such great speakers and that backs up everything. Those guys are on cruise control because they’ve done it. I’ve had a few people tell me they wish they thought about what came next after the book. About the webinars that they needed to have or the next level of training that it leads to and then there’s a whole marketing plan of what to do with themselves and that’s what you help them with. I think that a lot of people need help with it. It’s stuff you don’t know what you don’t know and you have to be around people like you and other consultants who’ve done this stuff. You do a lot of work in Australia. Do you go outside of Australia to help people and where do you go?

I tend to do a lot remotely. However, if I’m traveling I get to catch up with a few people. For example, I’m working with clients in the Middle East at the moment and a lot of clients are global anyway. They’re always running around everywhere. The beauty of technology is what we can do online. Occasionally, I’ll still do a trip somewhere. For example, I’m going to the US and I’ll be in Dallas. I’ll be there for the National Speakers Conference. I do tend to make that trip every year and I’ll tend to catch up with people so to make the most of that trip. It’s always a great opportunity too. Often, I’ll do some strategy sessions or get clients started or maybe we’ve started with them and we’ve got a few things on the way and it’s just so nice to connect in person. Most definitely and every country is a little bit different in how this stuff works. The principles are very similar. Fortunately, I’ve got others that I’m seeing in San Francisco while I’m there. I’ll go to San Francisco and Dallas. I’ll see others in New Zealand. My clients create my holidays for me too, which is nice, “Where do you live? I haven’t been there before.”

The NSA speaker event makes me think of Verne Harnish who was on the show. Of all the talks he gave, that was the most stressful one to give. Giving it to that whole group. Have you given a talk to that group?

What I hope to do is based on the work that I’ve established. I’ve already got a lot of case studies but some more international case studies. There’s nothing more daunting than to speaking to your peers.

He’s got great skills and just like you. I’m sure everybody the first time they do it, that has got to be stressful. I hear it’s such a great meeting. They need to have it over in California or something. I’ve had a lot of people on my show who are from here from Tom Hopkins to Sharon Lechter and Larry Winget. They are all great experts and you think that you’ve got to be in California in New York and all that, but Facebook would be more of a hub for that type of thing. Everything you do is fascinating. I appreciate you sharing all this because I think so many people can benefit from this. I think they’re going to want to know first of all, how can they get your book? You mentioned that you can learn some stuff in your one book. How can they reach you or find your information?

The Expert to Influencer book I wrote, I actually created a diagnostic and I’ve had about two and a half thousand experts go through it. I started to get some great data. They’re welcome to jump on there. If you go to the Jane Anderson website, Jane-Anderson.com and if you scroll right down the bottom you’ll see it says the Lead Generation Indicator. It’s down the bottom. Equally, if you sign up on the website, you’ll get a link to it anyway and you can access it. It only takes three minutes to fill out and you get a full seven-page report on exactly where the gaps are in your lead generation activity for you as an expert. I’m on Instagram so you find me, @the_jane_anderson. On LinkedIn I’m very active on LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s probably my main home and there’s Twitter and Facebook.

Thank you so much, Jane. This has been wonderful. I enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you very much for having me.

Thank you so much to Jane and to Yanik. I really enjoyed having you the show. I hoped you join us for the next episode of Take The Lead Radio.

About Yanik Silver

Yanik Silver redefines how business is played in the 21st century at the intersection of more profits, more fun, and more impact. He is the author of several best-selling books including Evolved Enterprise.
He is also the founder of Maverick1000, a private, invitation-only global network of top entrepreneurs and industry leaders. This group periodically assembles for breakthrough retreats, rejuvenating experiences, and impact opportunities (to-date raising over $3M+) Yanik was named one of Entrepreneur Magazine’s top 50 Favorite Online-Marketing Influencers.

About Jane Anderson

Jane Anderson is Australia’s Leading Business Growth Mentor for Personally Branded Businesses. With over 20 years’ experience in she has worked with over 30,000 people on building more trust and influence in their businesses and brands. Her clients include Virgin Australia, Lego, Ikea, Rio Tinto and Origin Energy. Jane’s blog was recently voted in the top 25 branding blogs globally and in the top 30 branding gurus in the world. She is the host of the number 1 ranked iTunes podcast “The Jane Anderson Brand You Show” and has been featured in Business Insider, Sky Business, Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Jane has been nominated three times for the Telstra Business Women’s Awards, and the author of five books including her latest “EXPERT to INFLUENCER: 12 Key Skills to Attract New Clients, Increase Sales and Leverage your Personal Brand to Become an Industry Leader.”

Important Links:

• Maverick 1000
• Evolved Enterprise
• Yanik Silver
• Evolved Enterprise book
• Zingerman’s
• Chip Conley
• Zappos
• ULTRA Testing
• Conscious Capitalism
• FEED
• Blake Mycoskie
• Lauren Bush
• Virgin Unite
• Ocean Unite
• YanikSilver.com
• EvolvedEnterprise.com
• Evolved Enterprise on Amazon
• Jane Anderson
• The Jane Anderson Brand You Show
• Expert to Influencer: 12 Key Skills to Attract New Clients, Increase Sales and Leverage Your Personal Brand to Become an Industry Leader
• Rich Dad, Poor Dad
• MailChimp
• Expert to Influencer Program
• Matt Church
• Verne Harnish – previous episode
• Tom Hopkins – previous episode
• Sharon Lechter – previous episode
• Larry Winget – previous episode
• Jane-Anderson.com
• Lead Generation Indicator
• @the_jane_anderson – Instagram
• Jane Anderson’s LinkedIn
• Jane Anderson’s Twitter
• Jane Anderson’s Facebook

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• Dr. DianeHamilton.com
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