--:-- Ryan Hanley: Hello everyone and welcome back to the show. Glad to have you here. We have a tremendous conversation for you with John Davids. He is the author of *Marketing Superpowers* as well as the founder of Influicity. This is such a dynamic and wonderful conversation. If you're an entrepreneur, if you're in growth mode, if you are a business owner, leader, if you're looking to grow your business, you are going to love this conversation. John is dynamic and we hit it off immediately. This conversation goes fast and furious, and you're going to get a tremendous amount of both high-level insights as well as on-the-ground tactics that you can use in your business today.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Before we get there, I want to introduce you to two new free resources that I recently put out. The first is the announcement of my latest book, *The Civilized Savage: From Mediocrity to Mastery in an Age of Cultural Conformity*. I am co-authoring this book with Chris Paradiso. If you pop your name and email into thecivilizedsavagebook.com, I'll have a link in the description. You will get a guide to the 29 historical individuals that we highlighted as civilized savages and their favorite quote. This resource is going to get your brain spinning, get your mind going. I highly recommend you jump over and grab that and just follow along with the journey as we look to launch this book in the next six months.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Additionally, I put out a free guide, an ebook, a resource, 40 pages long, *Seven Ways to Make Better Decisions Using AI*. My belief is as leaders, as entrepreneurs, we have to get out in front of AI and use it for more than just marketing language and emails. We can use AI to make better decisions, to get more positive outcomes out of decisions we make. This guide breaks it down both at the high level, as well as tactical checklists and walkthroughs. We break down exactly how you can use different resources like Perplexity, OpenAI, or whatever AI resource you use to make better decisions. Go to ai.ryanhanley.com to grab that for free. Also, we'll have the link in the show notes if you want to use that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, I love you for listening to this show. I love you for being here. Let's get on to John Davids. Let's go.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: John, dude, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show. I love what you're doing and the topic of your book. It's obviously near and dear to my heart being a former CMO and creating a lot of content myself. So just a pleasure to have you here and interested to learn more.
--:-- Jon Davids: Ryan, I'm so excited to talk about marketing, growth, performance, all the mistakes I've made, hopefully people can learn from. Yeah, man, let's get into it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: One of the things that I saw just in researching you coming on the show, you had a vein of content around this idea of "burn the boats." I think that I go both ways on that. I often get stuck in that place. I hear people from both sides. They say, "Hey, burn the boats, go all in on something, don't give yourself that exit or out." And then I've heard from people that I have as much respect for who say, "You've got to have a backup plan. It's about staying in the game. Go all in on something, but always know that if that doesn't work, you have something you can fall back on." Am I right in taking your stance as more "go all in, burn those boats, don't give yourself an out"? Or where do you fall on this?
--:-- Jon Davids: Yeah, I think you have to know yourself really well. From a super young age, I remember I was doing something when I was like 16, 17 years old and I was doing an interview for a school newspaper or something. My stance at that point was, "I know what I want and I'm going to do it." I was always super entrepreneurial minded. The idea that I would try something but then maybe end up at a nine-to-five made me sick to my stomach even then. Today I could never do it, but I'm in a whole different place now.
--:-- Jon Davids: I think you have to really know yourself. If you're somebody who wants to do the corporate thing or the entrepreneurship thing or the solopreneur thing or the investor thing, whatever you want to do, the most important thing is don't get influenced by other people or by what you see on social media. The dumbest thing I see is when you ask someone about their intention, what they're doing, and then you peel the onion two or three layers deeper and you realize it's because of a book they read last week or because of a YouTube video they saw. Guys, you don't make life decisions that are going to take up decades of your life based on something you read last week. You have to know yourself. And then, yeah, if you want to go all in on something, I think to a certain extent, it does help to get rid of that parachute and just jump and trust that you're going to land on your feet.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: My life experience has taken me down that path that you just described. Every time I found myself in a place where I was unhappy or unsatisfied or just didn't feel connected to the work I was doing, it was always because that was a safe option or an option that I thought was the status I was looking for, that was what I thought I had to do.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'll give you an example. I was the Chief Marketing Officer for a technology company inside the insurance industry. We built this whole secondary brand as a way to build community. Everything was great. Then I had a bit of a falling out with the CEO. Six days after I put on this 815-person conference—it was like a highlight of my career—six days later, I got fired. I was in a place where my status in that industry was on the rise. I took this position at a company that I knew wasn't a good cultural fit. I didn't particularly care for the product, but the company's brand had this status. It was like, "To be the CMO for that company, and the money." It wasn't what I wanted to do. It wasn't bringing me passion, but it felt like this safe option that also increased my status. It was a mess from day one. Every minute I was there, I was not engaged. I felt friction. I couldn't wait to get up in the morning and start going. This was like dragging myself into the job.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Getting into the deeper part of that, if you're working with an entrepreneur or someone comes to you and says, "You've had so much success. How does someone figure out that this is the thing they should go all in on?" How do you actually get to that place where you're not just watching some Instagram video and going, "I want her life" or "I want his life"? How do you start to figure out what that thing really is?
--:-- Jon Davids: So many decisions that we make are in retrospect based on status. That leads to so much unhappiness. The years just go by. I have friends, I'm sure you do too, who are lawyers and doctors and doing all kinds of things that look great on the outside, but then you talk to them and it's like, "Yeah, I really just wanted to open a store where I can sell baseball cards. That was always my thing." And it's like, "Why didn't you ever do that? You're 46 years old. Why didn't you do that when you were 32?" Those are the saddest stories to me.
--:-- Jon Davids: My version of that, and I could totally relate to that moment you described—I'm sure it was heart-wrenching when you got fired after you climbed the summit—my version is that for the first 10, 12 years of my real business career, I was just mesmerized by the Silicon Valley tech-ification of the culture. All that mattered was raising capital, having a startup, hustle culture. How much did you raise at what valuation? Being in Y Combinator. All those things have value for some people in some areas of life, but by and large, they have no reflection of business success. That's a phenomenon of the last 20 years. People who built $100 million companies 50 years ago never raised from Sequoia Capital. That wasn't part of the culture.
--:-- Jon Davids: Once I got out of that in retrospect—and it's totally cool because I actually did accomplish a lot in that time that helps me today—I wonder how many people are going through their 20s and maybe their 30s just doing something, going through the motions because they think that's the way to do it. Fortunately, with the benefit of hindsight, I can call it out pretty quickly. I hope there are people out there calling it out for their younger selves, looking back and saying, "Hey man, maybe you shouldn't be doing this. And here's why."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Do you think that you need that time? When I talk to people who seemingly are really dialed in—I'm 43 years old—the people that are really dialed in, late thirties to early forties, a lot of them share this story of earlier in their career, they didn't make that big entrepreneurial leap at 23 and start learning how to code and build all these things. They made this decision and said, "I think I'm supposed to be here." They had to grind through those years of being unsatisfied, feeling what it's like to be the low man on the totem pole, not feeling like you're heard in meetings, having a boss that dictates your life to you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: As much as I would love to go back and tell my 25-year-old self, "Hey, once you learn how to sell insurance, take that and go build your own thing. Don't wait a decade to do that." I ultimately did found my own startup and I exited from it, but I was doing that at 38 years old. I don't know that I could have done that at 38 without the previous 15 years of highs and lows, being fired, situations I loved, situations I hated. Do you think that time is necessary? Or do you think you can still get to a great place if you don't take this path of understanding what it means to be completely unsatisfied with your work?
--:-- Jon Davids: To answer the end part of that question, I think there are way too many people and way too many signals in our culture that give the illusion that people have things figured out when they're 18 years old. If you don't have everything in order by the time you're 22, you're lost. Your 20s are a time to make a thousand mistakes that you look back on in your 30s. I turned 40 last year. Looking back and realizing all the stuff that happened and what you learned from it—I do think that's totally normal and fine. At some point, probably in your early to mid-30s, you sort of pick things up and get on a path where you're happy.
--:-- Jon Davids: I would say two things based on what you just said. Number one, adversity, hardship, grinding, getting fired—all that stuff happening, especially in your 20s, is awesome. You want the adversity. You don't want to be fragile. You don't want to break down and crumble when bad stuff happens because whatever bad stuff you think is happening in your 20s, believe me, worse stuff happens in your 30s and 40s. Great stuff happens too, of course, but you want to have that anti-fragile shell that does not crack under pressure. You get that by hard grinding so that when the time comes where stuff gets really hard, you're like, "This is fine. I've dealt with this." My employees will come up to me and say, "Oh, there's a problem with this client." And it's like, "That's fine. I've done that 15 times. No problem."
--:-- Jon Davids: The other thing is the experience you have can actually relate to stuff that happens later on, even if it's not the same problem. But there's one thing you said that I want to crack into. It's okay to deal with stuff and to be in an industry where you're having to eat... Can I swear on the show? [Laughs] Okay. It's okay to eat shit. That's fine. As long as it's the shit that you don't mind the taste of. I say to people, do the stuff where the good stuff you love and the bad stuff you don't mind that much. That's basically the greatest stuff that there is in life.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I couldn't agree with that more. I think finding a space that you want to be in, a shitty position in the right space is so much more productive to your career than a better position in a space that you really don't have any interest in. I've seen so many friends who, now in their mid-thirties or early forties, are finding who they are, finding what they want to do, breaking out. That's wonderful. But they spent a lot of time and they find themselves a little more behind the eight ball because they took a position that sounded good, that made mom or dad happy or their friends happy, or they thought they could get a better girlfriend because they took this position. They could tell people, "I'm a VP here" or "I'm a managing director of this." But they hated it. The career wasn't what they wanted to do. Even some of them made great money, but all that time they were completely disinterested in the topic. Now when they make that transition, they feel like they're almost starting from scratch.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Equally, I have friends who took crap jobs seemingly, started at the very bottom of the barrel, worked themselves up in spaces. Even if they're now starting their own thing, they have all these connections, this network, this experience in the space, and they can really make it their own. I agree with that. If you've never had a really terrible boss, how do you know how to be a good boss? If you've only ever moved into positions where you felt comfortable or it was easy, if you've never been in that position where the guy looked at you and you just knew they couldn't stand you, you don't know how to grow from that or what you would do better.
--:-- Jon Davids: It's so true. You just reminded me of something. When I was in college, I got a business degree, but I also got a music degree. I was a musician growing up. In college, we had this one session where we had to pair up with four other people and write a song and perform it. There were so many people in the class complaining, "Oh, my partner doesn't know how to write this. I'm in a group that's not as good as me." At the end of the session, the professor said, "Guys, if you're complaining about the fact that the people you're working with aren't exactly jiving with you, you have to understand that's the whole point of this project. You have to learn how to deal with the crap, with the politics, with the personalities." It's not that the people who are most successful have the perfect team, the perfect boss, the perfect customers. It's that they have the agility to deal with everything. That's why they rise to the top.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's the number one vein of questioning that I have with team members who get into one of those situations where they start complaining about everybody. "Tammy doesn't listen to me, and John just does whatever he wants, and Steve's making comments on Slack that I don't like." I say, "Wait a minute, let's just take it back. If you have problems with all these people, you think that they're all jerks? Or maybe there's something you do or the way you frame how they approach you that is actually causing the problem." Too often, we always want to put it out on other people. "I'm doing my best. Why don't you understand? Why are you treating me this way?" Most often, the case is something I'm doing or some way that I'm framing or not hearing someone or not communicating what my expectations are.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: When you're talking to early-stage entrepreneurs, I see this very early. A lot of times entrepreneurs, their first few hires are friends. At the beginning, it's great. Then six months comes around. The struggle becomes real. We're addressing real problems. Now all of a sudden we start to have friction. How do early entrepreneurs start to communicate their message? What are some of the exercises or mental models that you use to reframe yourself in those early challenges and communicate that down to the team?
--:-- Jon Davids: I've made a lot of mistakes there. I was at a dinner last night and someone said, "What's your framework for hiring?" I think I've gotten better at it over time. Some mistakes I made early on, and a lot of people struggle with this, is they become very, very friendly and they think about work as a family. Then the problem is you're not going to fire your sister or this woman that you hired that feels like a sister to you. I do think it's imperative as a boss to have some separation. Yes, I want to be nice, but more importantly, I want to be kind. If this is not the right job for you, it is unkind of me—put aside the fact that it's bad for business, bad for profit, bad for customer—it's unkind for me to waste the next year and a half of your life when I know that this is not a job that you're going to thrive in. You're not getting promoted. There's no path for you here. It's really unkind.
--:-- Jon Davids: That approach puts you in a mindset where you can do your job. If you've got friends and you hear these stories about a guy who fired his mom, that kind of stuff does happen. I've had to have some very unpleasant firings. I've also had to have some unpleasant quittings where people are great people. They like me, they like the company, but this is just not the path they want to be on. Separating it out and not trying to be the nice guy or the nice gal, and instead really take your responsibility seriously as a leader, is where you have to start. If you don't have that mindset, it's really hard to do the job.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I just did a solo episode for the show a couple of weeks ago all around Jordan Peterson's eighth rule of his *12 Rules for Life*: "Tell the truth, or at least don't lie." In that video, I told a story about one of my very early employees at my company. She was wonderful. She was a driver. She was Type A. She was actually my first employee. For the first employee, she was a monster. I could just dump tasks on her and she got them done. It was amazing. I was like, "God, if all my employees were like her, we're going to be great." In the early days, we were. Then as we started to grow and we ultimately got to 27 employees at our peak, her communication style broke down. She was overbearing. She didn't stay in her lane. She tried to take on this boss role in departments that weren't hers.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The mistake, and what I talk about in that episode, is that I never had the hard conversation. I didn't want to lose her productivity. I liked her one-on-one as a person and thought she was a good person. As entrepreneurs, one of our superpowers often tends to be that we see opportunity in everything and everyone. I always saw all the good things about her and didn't have the guts to sit her down and say, "You're wonderful at these things. You're really struggling with these, and we need to work on these things." Ultimately, I had to let her go because she just created too many problems. In her exit interview, she literally said, "I didn't know these were problems." Some of that is exit interview talk, but I think there was some truth in there. Think about how you can lose an A player simply because you didn't have the guts to tell them the truth about the places they needed to improve.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: She was our head of operations. Ultimately, she started to step into sales, step into service. Those department heads were like, "This isn't your place. What are you doing here?" She thought because she had been there for so long that she knew everything about the company. Long story short, I could have cut that off very early and I just didn't have the guts to communicate it. That was a lesson. I don't make that mistake anymore. But I lost an A player on my team simply because I didn't communicate with her properly.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I want to spin that to your book and the topics in your book. How are we as entrepreneurs—tons of entrepreneurs listening to this show, tons of business leaders, a lot of small business owners who will be the face of their brand, the one creating content, the one sharing messages—we've talked a little bit about entrepreneurship in general and internal communication. I'm sure some of what you talk about in the book can be applied internally. But I found the best way to get rid of those conversations was to build such a strong brand around the company that my employees either bought in or bought out. How do we start to do that? What is that first step? Where do we start to look when we say, "I got this project. I have this product. I have this service I want to deliver. I know I can do it. I'm burning the boats. I'm going all in. Now, how do people know what I'm doing?" Where do we start there?
--:-- Jon Davids: I love the angle you're taking with this. I've done a bunch of podcasts and talked so much about the book, but the angle you're going in with is that the marketing superpowers—and I'll tell you about the book in a second—talks about how to build a brand so good that getting customers feels like magic. The other side of that is getting employees feels like magic too. Getting team members, getting suppliers. When you understand marketing superpowers from a customer-facing side, yes, it helps with revenue, but it helps with everything else. I can tell you so many offshoots.
--:-- Jon Davids: The book is called *Marketing Superpowers*. The theme of it is that I spent the last 10 years working with over 20,000 influencers, content creators, YouTubers, people like Kim Kardashian, people like Mr. Beast, and thousands of others that you've never heard of because they're super niche. In that time, I've studied and gotten down to the grain of what makes these people so magnetic. How do they build audiences? How do they build communities? We took all the lessons and that's what we do at my agency, Influicity. We help brands build customer communities.
--:-- Jon Davids: What it comes down to is what I call the Movement Formula. You have to have a unifying belief. One singular belief that your brand, your message, is based on. Number two, faith builders. Faith builders are all the things that bring faith to your beliefs—studies, data, testimonials, books that have been written, events that happen, experts. You mentioned Jordan Peterson. He's a phenomenal guy. He has such a movement. He single-handedly forklifted this movement of his with the books and the study and everything he does. Awesome examples there. The third step is action. When you get people to believe something and have faith in it, there's got to be some action. In the case of a business, it's usually "buy my product," "use my service," "sign up to my newsletter," whatever that is.
--:-- Jon Davids: There are a hundred reasons why that gets customers and that is the foundation of building a 10, 20, $30 million business and up. How does it help with employees? It helps because when you have this movement, it attracts other people. In my own business, I make a lot of content. I'm the face of my brand, of my agency, Influicity. We have people emailing us all the time saying, "I'd love to work with you guys. I love what you're doing. I love the kind of stuff you do with clients." We don't even have to post on job boards because people come in and they understand on day one: you either get it or you don't. You have to drink the Kool-Aid. If it's not for you, that's cool. But if it is for you, we're like the best in the world at what we do. When you have that, it gives you such an unfair advantage.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I was just at a conference this week. One of the topics that came up was in the insurance industry. One of the major topics was hiring. A harumph went around the room. "It's so hard to find good talent." I was sitting on a panel and I just said, "I'm probably alone in this. I don't understand what you're talking about. I literally don't get what you're saying. You're saying it's hard to find talent? There are good people literally dying to find a place that they can connect to." At our agency—I had a digital national insurance agency, my career has always been in the businesses I built inside the insurance industry—I said, "We didn't spend money on hiring. We didn't go out and get a single recruiter. We had a 100-person waiting list." That's not a joke. At any given time, we were between 90 and 110 people waiting to apply for a job, literally just on a wait list. We would send them an email every month about the available positions. We'd say, "Hey, we have a new account manager position opening. Everyone who is interested in an account manager position, reapply because now it's open." People would come onto that list, reach out to us, and sit on that list for six months. When a position would become open, they would apply for it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This audience of people is looking at me and I can tell they're like, "This guy's full of shit. This is all just marketing gobbledygook." I explained, "Do you know why? Because we had 347 videos on our YouTube channel for our insurance agency. People knew exactly the type of work we were doing. The individuals that didn't want our style of business simply didn't apply because it was obvious the way that we operated." This was a kind of masterminding thing with 125 people. 120 of them did not understand what I was saying. Why do you think that is? I struggle with this. This is a very honest question, not rhetorical. Why is it that so many business owners who have so much faith and belief in what they do do not prioritize talking about how their business operates at all? They act as if that means nothing. They don't do anything for recruiting until the moment they need someone, and then they try to go a hundred miles an hour from zero. I want to say I was shocked, but I really wasn't, at just how much they could not connect with what I was saying. Why do you think that is? And for those who are listening going, "All right, I'm sold now," what can they start doing there? How does that start to work?
--:-- Jon Davids: I'll tell you exactly why that is, because people completely misunderstand and undervalue brand. Brand means something. Brand actually means everything. The problem is that brand means a lot at the very beginning and low end of the market, and it means a lot at the high end of the market. Everybody in the middle—which is like 90% of us—don't understand how brand works. So let me break down what I mean by that.
--:-- Your brand, when it's done right, is the most powerful thing. You're describing it perfectly—the fact that you can say "we had hundreds of videos." And by the way, I love that you're talking about an insurance company, because people think when I talk about this stuff, I'm just talking about makeup and fashion and cars. This is not for passion projects. Most of our clients at Influicity are insurance, banking, construction materials, home builders—because those are the ones that really need to build brand.
--:-- Having a brand where people hear your name—when you mentioned Jordan Peterson, I know exactly what you're talking about. I know the vibe. I get the life message. I totally understand the brand. Someone like that doesn't need to run ads saying "hey, here's what I believe in." No, it's magnetic. If you know it, you just know it. There are so many personality-driven brands in our society. And everybody in the middle is just focused on "what can I do today to drive a dollar of revenue tomorrow?" So they never invest in their brand. "Why would I spend seven hours making video content for YouTube? What's that going to equate to in dollars?" We see this across the board.
--:-- Now, where do people really understand it? They understand it before they ever start a business, when they have the luxury of spending one, two, three years going hard on YouTube, making that podcast, getting big on TikTok. Then they realize, "Oh my God, I actually have a fan base, a following, a community. My brand means something." And then at the very high end of the market—Nike, Starbucks, Tesla—of course they all have brands because they have multi-billion dollar budgets. But everyone in the middle, the people that really need it, just never invest in their brand. That's why they don't get it when you talk about it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How do you get past that with your clients? "I'm not good on camera" or "I feel uncomfortable talking in front of people." Because when I share my story and do a lot of keynotes, oftentimes they want me to talk about sales and marketing and things I've done. I like those topics—they're core to who I am—but I've shifted a little more towards... how do I want to say this? I've never met an entrepreneur and had them complain about tactics. It's always "I wasn't good at communicating with my team," "I didn't build a brand early enough," "We didn't see this market pivot coming," "I wasn't able to—my health wasn't in the right place." Those are the things you hear about from entrepreneurs. The tactical stuff figures itself out.
--:-- They get so caught in the tactical aspects—how do I look on camera, what camera am I using, what platform should I put this on—and they never actually engage in the work. How do you push them to get past these? I think to people like you and I who are so comfortable being on camera, it may feel very trivial. But it would be dishonest to say this isn't a real issue for people. How do you start to push them past that point?
--:-- Jon Davids: There are all kinds of limiting beliefs. Some of them are legit—like you actually just don't want to be on camera. And some of them are completely made up in your mind. The thing I would say, first of all, is you can make content in all kinds of form factors. You can speak on stage, you can write long form or short form, you can do audio. There are 100 ways to communicate your message. People who say "I don't want to do that in any form whatsoever"—that's just a self-limiting belief that you don't actually think you have any value to give. Because if you thought you had value to give, you'd put it on paper, you'd put it on audio, you'd figure it out somehow.
--:-- The other piece is that a lot of people who don't have natural abilities have figured out their own way, and people love them for their quirks. Look at Jordan Peterson—he's a good example. By any standard measure, he's not a good speaker. He's very hard to understand. He's very slow. Look at someone like Ben Shapiro, who has one of the biggest podcasts in the world and speaks a mile a minute about such complex things. If you tried to do that on daytime television, it wouldn't work. By the same token, if you tried to take someone used to doing four-minute videos and have them do a Joe Rogan-style interview, they'd be like "I can't talk for three hours." A lot of this is just finding the format that works for you. If you're really good at short form or long form, figure out what your thing is and commit to doing it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Guys, please listen to what Jon just said. Take this in. That is the core of getting past this hurdle. Rewind the show if you need to listen to it again. This is the core. I couldn't agree with you more. There's no answer. This is the part I think people get hooked up on—they think it has to be the way you do it or the way I do it or the way their favorite candle maker influencer does it. They figured out the way that makes sense for them.
--:-- I'll give you one example. I follow this guy on Instagram—I always forget his name because I just follow his handle—but he talks about finance issues while he's walking with this upshot. Everything about the way he does the video technically would be considered wrong. If it's raining, he's just talking. You can hear the background. Sometimes it's windy. But his topics are two to three minutes long while he's on a walk. Everything about it is wrong, except they're phenomenal. He gets thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of views. If you were to technically tell someone how to do it, you would never tell them to do it this way. Rewind that section—this is so good.
--:-- Alright, so we've gotten them past that. They've figured out their way, whatever their way is. How do they actually start to create some influence? How do they actually start to grab people? Let's keep it in the context of a small business owner—someone who does plumbing or has a bookstore. Not some big, crazy influencer brand. How does an everyday business owner, once they've gotten past this thing, start thinking about framing how they create content?
--:-- Jon Davids: I'll answer that in two parts. First, mindset. You have to set yourself up from the beginning to understand the expectations. In the second chapter of *Marketing Superpowers*—and by the way, you can get this free at marketingsuperpowersbook.com, the first four chapters are up there for free—I talk about this concept of the Axis of Influence. I say you need basically two things to have any level of influence: you need reach, and you need KLT—known, liked, and trusted. You've got to have some amount of reach, and people have to know, like, and trust you. Effectively, it's a matter of getting up the axis.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: For you guys listening at home, I'll have all these links on the show notes page. If you're listening on iTunes or YouTube, just go to the description.
--:-- Jon Davids: Once you understand how influence grows mechanically, you've got to set yourself up for the long term. Don't think "I'm going to post four videos and evaluate myself." No. You're going to post a hundred videos and then evaluate yourself. Or write a hundred blogs. Talk to anybody who has a successful podcast like yourself—they've done hundreds of episodes. Joe Rogan started making content in 2008 or 2009 with 2,000 listeners. Now he gets 11 million per episode. It takes time. Expectation setting is so important.
--:-- Number two: think about your ICP—your ideal customer profile. Talk to one person. If you're a plumber serving suburban homes, generally it's a mom, a dad, and young kids. Look at your last 50 customers, your last 20 customers. If I'm just talking to Becky on Smythe Street, what does Becky want to know about? She wants to know how to get the hot water going a little faster. Maybe she just turns this cord and all of a sudden that gets the hot water—she doesn't have to call me for that. That's the kind of stuff Becky wants to know. I'm going to make content like that every single day. And I'm going to get all these people, just like that finance guy you follow because he's making content as he walks. Literally, the next time you're on a job site, pick up your iPhone for 14 seconds and just film yourself doing something. That's how you start making content.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: How produced do you think it needs to be today?
--:-- Jon Davids: Today, in mid-2024, it's actually better if it's less produced. That's the trend we're in. Think about the content Alex Hormozi was making when he first started. I knew Alex back in 2016, 2017. It was literally him in a white room—like he was making a hostage video. And that popped off. That's the kind of stuff that's coming back—the raw content. The guy sitting in the driver's seat of his car because he's got 30 seconds of quiet while his kids are out playing soccer. He picks up his iPhone and starts making videos. The technology we carry in our pockets is good enough to make the content. That's the trend we're in. Now, if you've got fancy studios like you and I do, cool. But you do not need that. That's not a barrier.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: The best part is, if you saw everything outside the frame, you would not think it's fancy. Since the podcast started to pop off about six months ago, all I really did was put some lights up and frame it a little better. People ask "Where's your new studio?" and I'm like, "It's literally in my unfinished basement." If you saw everything outside the frame, it's not that sexy. It doesn't need to be. I think people look at what Chris Williamson is doing—epic backdrop, panning shots, cuts, all these things—and they think "I can't do that, that's a million dollar production." You don't need it. You look great, you sound great, you've got the cool little light. You can get those lights on Amazon for like 25 bucks that create the colors. It looks amazing and pro.
--:-- Jon Davids: Dude, I'll give it to you. You want it? Yeah, please. I've got my iPhone up and one camera that cost me 400 bucks—it's a Logitech face cam. The lighting you see behind me? There's like six lights. I think it was 130 bucks at Home Depot. It took me a weekend. You're 100% right—you do not need to spend a lot of money on this. We're in the golden age of making content.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I completely agree. I like to talk about these things because I feel like these little barriers, once people get past them, you see this snowball effect. But it's that first push and all these fears—"I'm so worried people are going to think I'm unprofessional." 500 million people viewed a guy drinking Ocean Spray on his longboard on his way to work with a song, and now he's a celebrity. There was nothing about that video that was professionally done. He's literally just longboarding. I always forget his name, but people remember that video. That guy had been creating for a long time. If you go back and look at his history, he was a creator. That video just captured him as a person. Now he's got brand deals, he's investing.
--:-- I know we're spending a lot of time here, and I have a couple more things I want to hit on. But I know a lot of people that listen to this show are so interested in these topics and want to up their creation game, but they get caught on these little early things. Is there anything else you'd put in this category of real obstacles that are easily hurdled over if we just get our mindset right?
--:-- Jon Davids: Dude, it's all up here. [points to his head] There's so much of it—"Oh, I don't have the lighting. I don't look like a Diary of a CEO." All these totally limiting beliefs. What you have to tell yourself is that the stuff you're seeing out there that works—the next thing that works is going to look totally different. Make that your North Star. To your point about the guy on the surfboard—he was making content.
--:-- I have a really big audience on LinkedIn. I was making content on LinkedIn for about a year and a half. I had people DMing me saying "John, are you okay? Why are you writing on LinkedIn every day? Is everything okay?" It took me about a year and a half to get to the point where I had that post that hit 200,000 views. That was my takeoff. People think "Oh, you post something on LinkedIn now and you get 500 likes." Yeah, guys, because I spent two years honing my craft and getting good at it. It just takes time.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I couldn't agree more. I've built two different YouTube channels for two different agencies in the insurance industry. One I didn't own and one I did. They've done over half a million views in a year. For the insurance industry, talking about "what is general liability insurance," that's a decent number of views because it's insurance. I get people all the time—particularly in that space and other small business owners—who reach out and say "How did you do that? I want to do this. Who else has done it?" And I'm like, one, and this is real, no one else has done it ever in the insurance industry. The reason is exactly what you described. No one wants to survive The Dip—Seth Godin wrote the book, right? They love that initial burst. "Hey Jon, you're creating videos now, that's awesome!" And we get all this little buzz. Then that seventh video gets a tenth of what those first couple got, and you're like "It doesn't work anymore. It's broken. Video is not for me."
--:-- What advice can you give to people to help them get through that dip period? That period where the initial buzz fades—it always looks the same. Every chart when I look at people's YouTube channels, it's this ramp and then this line that just comes down. They always quit in that spot. How do you help your clients get through that lull in growth?
--:-- Jon Davids: My version of that is the line "Oh, they changed the algorithm. I've been shadow banned. I'm not getting the likes I used to." No, your content is just shit now. And it wasn't before. Even with the audience I have on different platforms, I still spend two, three, four hours crafting a piece of content because I want it to be at that level of quality. It doesn't just happen automatically. Even when you get to the point—I don't care if you're Taylor Swift, Kim Kardashian, or Oprah—you have high points and low points. Think about the ego hit it would take if you were number one on the Billboard charts and your next song was number 72. You might think that's embarrassing. I'll tell you why it's not: no one is sitting in their room going "Oh my goodness, this person finally came down." They just don't notice. If you were number one and now you're number 70, people think you're just taking a break. No one actually has it in for you. The ones that do are losers. Don't worry about them.
--:-- The way I go into it with clients—fortunately, our clients are generally mid-size or larger companies, so they have a little more appetite for this. But if you're new to this, you've got to set yourself up for the failure before it happens. Here's a concrete example. When I make a podcast, a YouTube video, or write a post for LinkedIn or Twitter, my mindset going in is: "Okay, if no one sees this, cool. I'm glad I did it because I learned something. If 20 people see this, great. If one person DMs me and says 'Hey, I really liked that,' that's awesome. If a thousand people message me and a million people see it, that's called gravy. That's not the expectation." You need to go into it with the mindset—the line I use is "Do it because you're selfish. Do it because you want to do it for yourself. Everything else that happens is just bonus."
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That is literally what I say to people when they ask me why I do the podcast. I live in Albany, New York. It's a great place to raise kids. It is not a bastion of innovation, high growth, high achievement. It tends to be a place where people come after they've had those things and want a quieter life. So many of my buddies are like "Why do you do this podcast? Why do you waste your time on that? You could be golfing." I love golf, but I do this instead. They ask why. I say "Dude, I get to selfishly have these amazingly intelligent people from all different walks of life."
--:-- I just had Dr. Tom Mayer on the show a couple episodes ago. He's the head of the NFLPA—the director of medicine for the NFLPA. He's worked with every major retired athlete and helped them through things like post-concussion syndrome. I had concussions in football. So here's the selfish point—and I know I'm probably talking too much, but it's my show.
--:-- Jon Davids: I love it, man. Keep going.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I get to do whatever I want. Selfishly, when you do these things, you're talking to one of the guys who knows as much or more about concussions in the entire world. He's dealt with this his entire life. I had three concussions my senior season of football. I had a football scholarship and I lost it because of that. It's always in the back of my mind. I did my senior thesis in college about concussions. So I got to have a conversation for free with a guy for an hour who has all the knowledge on this topic—something I think about and worry about every day of my life. That's why. Now it turns into great content. People who've been in sports message me saying "I got a concussion in baseball or basketball." That's wonderful. It builds the brand. But to your point, find that selfish thing you want to learn.
--:-- Guys, go back. This is the kind of stuff that gets you through this. I'm so glad you're here coming off this conference. I'm so fired up on this topic. I know we said we'd go 30 minutes. We're way past that.
--:-- Jon Davids: No, man, this is awesome. Let me add a piece to that. The secret is—I've done 140 episodes of my podcast. The majority of it—we're doing okay in the charts, but we're not a number one podcast yet. Check out *Making It with Jon Davids* if you like that kind of stuff. The reason I have that podcast and the longevity of it, even if I have three listeners, is I get to have conversations with people I would never have an excuse to talk to. I have a very famous television personality in the business category coming on in two weeks. I just want to have a conversation with him. If nobody listens, I couldn't care less, because I get to do that. When you have that kind of passion and excitement, people are glad to listen because it's magnetic. People can't stop listening when they hear that passion.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This is the part, guys. People that believe what Jon believes follow him, listen to him because they like the way he asks questions, the way he frames topics, the type of people he brings in, how he presents information. Then they go "Well, geez, if Jon is so good at podcasting and I love the way he thinks about things, I might actually want to work with him. If this is the way he thinks, he actually thinks like me. We might be good partners to work together to get my brand to the next level through his company." That's marketing. That's the whole thing.
--:-- This is the part I couldn't get through to anyone during that conference. I want to get your take on some words I think are a little overused—authenticity and transparency. When you do those things from a place of good, from a place that's real to who you are, employees self-select in and self-select out. Customers self-select in and self-select out. People wonder why I had one of the lowest cost of acquisitions in the industry when I was growing my agency. It's because we created so much content that people literally just chose us. They knew who we were. If no one knows who you are, you have to pay to get in front of them to tell them.
--:-- Coming back to my question: a lot of people I see who do the work but never get the lift—they're trying to be something they're not. "I like Jon. I like the way he does his thing. I'm going to do it like him, even though it's not actually my native style." How do you think about these words and where do you put them on the value chain of actually creating?
--:-- Jon Davids: You're singing my song right now. I created content starting in 2013. It wasn't until 2018, 2019—really like COVID, 2020 or 2021—that I really started to get good and saw the return. I look back at the early stuff. I was trying to be Gary V. I was trying to be Ryan Seacrest. I was trying to talk like this. I didn't know what I didn't know. My training was just trying to be all these different people. Was that sustainable? Was I believable? Of course not. I'm never going to be as good as the person who is that person. No one wants reheated leftovers. Second of all, it wasn't true to who I am. I am only myself. I am only passionate about the things I'm interested in. I'm only going to want to talk about things I want to talk about over the long term. The podcast I do, the content I write—it's stuff I selfishly want to do. The passion comes through. I'm not faking it. When I sit here with you right now and I'm interested, my arms are moving, I'm loving the fact we've been going 52 minutes—this is amazing. I just enjoy doing this. That's what comes through. That's what people have to remember. Don't try to do something for status or because that's how someone else does it. Be yourself. It might take a year or two years to fall into that perfect groove, but that's the only way to do it.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This has been phenomenal. The book is an obvious purchase. If you're in a place where you want to take it next level, look into Jon's business. We have a couple of questions we end the show with. I think we're in a good place to get to those questions. The rule is answer them however you want. These can be short or long, however you like. I like to end with these questions because I think it gives everyone a good framing for who you are and helps them better understand if you're someone they want to connect with, follow, or be part of their community.
--:-- First question: What standard belief, what first principle, do you refuse to compromise on? What's that one thing where everything could be going crazy, it could be in your best interest to break it, but you just won't?
--:-- Jon Davids: That's changed over time. Where I am right now, I'm so glad that I make decisions—and I sound like a broken record, but it's true because it's core to who I am. I refuse to make decisions based on what somebody else might think would be the right or wrong decision for me. And I mean anybody else. When you set yourself up to do something because of what Sally in high school might have thought of you, or because of what your neighbor thinks—"Oh, this is cool, you should drive this car"—all those decisions are completely irrelevant and useless. No one gives a shit. No one cares. No one's watching you. You could accomplish all this stuff and no one cares. By the way, about the good and the bad—I wrote this book. It's a huge accomplishment for me. I don't expect people to be applauding me on the street because I wrote a book, even though that was cool for me. And if I didn't write the book and it was embarrassing—"Geez, I tried and I failed"—no one cares about that either. Do not make decisions about status ever. Make decisions based on what's best for you, best for your family, and best for your own waking moments. When you're falling asleep at night, it makes you feel okay that you made this decision.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Absolutely. I love that. Couldn't agree more. What is a commonly held myth about success or personal development that you strongly disagree with? Something out there that just isn't real or is overblown?
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That any of the nonsense that you hear about like Elon Musk and Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos means anything. It means absolutely nothing. You can't reverse engineer the success of somebody who had, by the way, a one in a billion success. And look at everybody else who is ultra successful. Look at the guy who's making $200 million a year or has a net worth of $400 million that you've never heard of who, by the way, has a totally separate path for success than what Buffett and Bezos say. All these stories, it's cool. It's nice entrepreneur porn. It means nothing in reality.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm listening to Walter Isaacson's book on Elon. I'm listening to it on tape. You can't recreate his life. There's nothing that that guy does that's applicable.
--:-- Jon Davids: Well, you said a one in a billion human being and it's amazing. I think we should protect him. I think he's wonderful. It drives me nuts when people hate on him. Obviously not perfect, but I think we have to take the good with the bad without brilliant it is. But these are one in a million people.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: That's such good advice. And by the way, it's not one in a million, it's one in a billion. Because we're talking about like six or seven people. But not only that, if the thing you want is money, cool. There's a million ways to make money. You can make lots of money without copying Elon Musk. It's just not applicable to your life.
--:-- [Discussion shifts to final question]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: This one, last question. Take this wherever you want. Do you have kids?
--:-- Jon Davids: I do. Two kids.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: So you can give your kids one piece of advice, one idea, one concept, one quote, just to hold in their mind as a framework, a foundation, a thing that allows them to be the best version of themselves. You just get one and then you can never give them another piece of advice ever again. What's that one core concept that you would implant in their mind that you think could grow and blossom into allowing them to be whatever it is that they want to be?
--:-- Jon Davids: Do what makes you happy. Happiness is the goal. The reason I say that is because everyone's going to have trials and tribulations in their teenage years and your twenties. You can't skip that. Everyone's got fights and friends and whatever happens. But ultimately, especially when you get in your twenties and thirties, making decisions based on anything other than, "Hey, this is going to make me happy," I love the good stuff. This gets me up in the morning. This gets me running in the morning. And the bad stuff, I don't mind that much. Yeah, it's crap, but I don't mind it that much. And it makes me happy. You are going to be so thrilled with your life in 10, 20, 30, 40 years when other people who have money, have status, have a nice car, have this, but are just freaking miserable every day of their life. You are going to win if you optimize for happiness.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Jon, it's been such a pleasure having you on the show. I've loved this conversation, tremendously valuable. Guys, you're going to have to go back and listen to it twice. The stuff that Jon has shared with you are core principles to getting to where we need to be with our brand. I don't honestly think we can survive today without a brand. We have to.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: I'm going to break my own rules. I'm going to ask you one more question.
--:-- Jon Davids: Okay, man.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Because this is important. And since it's my show, I can break the rules because I'm the boss. Last question I have for you: Do you need to have both a business brand and a personal brand if you're an owner or an out-front person of that company? Do you need to have both?
--:-- Jon Davids: My quick answer is grab the book. I talk all about that. Grab *Marketing Superpowers*. The quick answer is the best brands, the most authentic brands, the ones that survive the test of time, are when it truly is the brand of the founder. So to say you have two different brands or the brands are somehow not connected in some way? No. The ultimate would be one single brand. Now your brand doesn't need to represent the business in every capacity. The stuff I talk about, the stuff people know me for, I tell founder stories, I do business breakdowns. The thing I sell is marketing services. I can help you go from 10 million to 50 million. I know how to do that. But am I talking about that 24/7? No. I'm talking about other stuff that is interesting to me and attracts like-minded people. But ultimately, I'm the same person. I'm not wearing two different hats based on my brands. That's the reason to go get the book, my friend, so you can learn exactly how to do that.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Jon Davids has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for coming on the show.
--:-- Jon Davids: Loved it, Ryan. Thank you.
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Let's go.
--:-- [Music begins - rap verse]
--:-- Ryan Hanley: Make it look easy. Hey, stand up guy, boom, 10 toes. Big body pull up in a range roll. I can chase the whole game when I say so. I pull up, shut it down. Yeah, they know. Running this game ain't a thing for me. I never switched to no change in me. The only thing changing this season.
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