--:-- Host: Today's guest on the podcast is Ron Tite. Ron is a speaker, an author, and the CEO of an agency, Church and State. Ron was named one of the 10 most creative Canadians. And in general, he's just a funny, good guy. We spend a large portion of this episode talking about the speaking business, but our beliefs around leadership and storytelling and sharing ideas in the context of the speaking business, something we both have a great deal of passion for. We also talk about Ron's new book, *Think Do Say*, and the core message within that book around helping people and organizations share their story and their message with the world. It is my great honor to bring you the wonderful, the tremendous Ron Tite.
--:-- Host: One of the things that I thought was most interesting when I was preparing to speak to you was really your focus on an intentional inclusion of comedy into your work. I'm super interested in that because intrinsically I am not a funny human being. I'd love to say that I occasionally can drop a self-deprecating reference that will get a few chuckles, but I am not intrinsically funny. So I'm interested in, is that something you've always been interested in? Is it something that you've had to work at? And where does that come from in injecting comedy into your work?
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah, I think there's two perspectives there. One is injecting the insights and perspective of a standup comedian, the business of standup comedy and the craft of standup comedy. I think that's one whole area of thing that brands and leaders can follow and entrepreneurs can follow. There's great lessons there for people. And I know that world because I spent 20 years as a standup comedian. I was on the road, I toured, I did corporate shows, and I hosted a show called *Monkey Toast* right up until just a year and a half ago, I guess, or two years ago, before we had our son. So I've been involved in comedy and I know that world really well.
--:-- Ron Tite: The second part is the inclusion of humor into material, into speeches, into writing. I think there's two reasons. One is that comes naturally. That's how I see the world. I'm always thinking of what is funny about this situation, what is the unique angle of what other people would find humorous. I think why I do that and maybe why I have an entrepreneur's brain is that if you see a toothbrush just as a toothbrush and you only see it that way and you only use it for brushing your teeth, that is kind of a metaphor to how most people see the problems in business. It's like, we've always done it this way. This is the only way you can solve that problem. That's it.
--:-- Ron Tite: The second you can look at it from a humorous perspective, you're actually showing somebody that's like, "I know you only see it from this angle, but what if you saw it from this angle?" And they go, "Oh, I never thought of looking at it from that angle before." And when they laugh, they prove that they got it, that they actually had the ability to see that toothbrush from a completely different angle. By showing them, "Look, you just laughed. You proved that you can see this from another perspective. Now I'm going to show you the perspective I really wanted you to see it from. And this is the important one. And this is the serious one. And this is the strategic one."
--:-- Ron Tite: In speaking, laughter is really powerful because it's disarming for people. It's a great unifier for an audience who's like, "You got that, I got that. We're all in this together." And you get to see it from another perspective, which is the power. So it's not the laughter that I want, but it's the silence that follows the laughter. But if I don't have the laughter first, I never get to that more poignant silence.
--:-- Ron Tite: There's also a really functional aspect there. I don't know if you remember this, Ryan, but in kindergarten, when sometimes the teachers would say, "When the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut," right? And everybody repeated it. The reason that worked was because everybody says it, and then afterwards, it stops. And if you give it a beat, there's silence. So the functional aspect of using humor in a speech is after they laugh and you let it die down, they're waiting for the next thing. And it's silence that you've got them. And that's when I can deliver and I can take them where I want to take them. I can go with another joke and build it even more. I can take them and be really direct. I can be like, "Why are you doing this? You got to read the writing on the wall here." Or I can be thoughtful, or I can be emotional. But it's in that moment of silence that power within a speech.
--:-- Ron Tite: The same thing in writing. For books, there's so many of us who write books and we think they're the most unique thing on the planet. The reality is they're just not. So we have to make them more unique. I think humor is a way to do that. The trailer for my book that just came out, *Think Do Say*—the subhead is "How to Seize Tension and Build Trust in the Busy, Busy World." That maybe doesn't sound so unique. So in the trailer, I didn't talk about the content of the book. I just said, "Finally, a business book that doesn't mention Apple, even once." I just thought that's an interesting, humorous insight that may do exactly what the book wants them to do, which is use tension and build trust.
--:-- Host: I want to dive into this looking at something from a different angle. Basically what I heard you say is people look at a toothbrush from a certain angle. And your point is, "I really want you to come in from this angle over here." If you were to take them right there, right to that spot, maybe there wouldn't be as much attention given to the angle you want them to look at it from. There may not be as much trust built. There may not be as much belief built there. So what you do is open them up to the possibility that there are other options first, and then you take them to the direction. Walk me through that thought process a little bit from the psychology standpoint, because that's really interesting to me.
--:-- Ron Tite: You spoke about building trust and being open first off. Humor has a great way of doing that. One of the very first things I will do—there are two types of openings in comedy and in speeches, though people don't refer to it this way: there's the cold open and the warm open.
--:-- Ron Tite: A cold open is like *Saturday Night Live*—that opening sketch is literally called the cold open because it just starts right when the show begins. A warm open is when a host comes out and is like, "Hey everybody, how you doing? Hey, it's Tuesday. What happened the other day?" I will only use a warm open. If you look at a TEDx talk, a TEDx talk is a cold open—boom, you start.
--:-- Ron Tite: Why I like to do a warm open is I use something that's funny in that warm open—something I just saw, something I just read, something that just happened in the room, something the last speaker said. If I can make something funny right out of the gate that I obviously could not have written before, then there's a huge amount of trust. The first thing I think is, "That was kind of funny, and there's no way he could have written that before. Oh, this guy is present. He's here. He's not calling this in. He's not reciting the same script he's done 400 times." So right out of the gate, humor builds trust.
--:-- Ron Tite: Secondly, it gives credibility. If I can make something funny about the breakfast they just ate, then it gives me comedic credibility because they're like, "That was kind of funny and he obviously hadn't written that before. So he's just naturally funny. It's okay for us to laugh at the later stuff, which maybe are his more rehearsed bits." So you build up that trust, you build credibility.
--:-- Ron Tite: Let's say I open with a story. The second they laugh, I know that I've got them because they have seen it from that other angle. I'll actually sometimes use a line at the beginning of the speech, something like, "But that's not why we're here." I'm that direct with it. "Yeah, you're laughing, but that's not why you're here." And in that moment of silence, they're like, "Oh, where's he going with this?" But they've already opened their minds to seeing other opportunities.
--:-- Ron Tite: I'm not a PhD in psychology, so I don't know why that is. I think if you lead with the business example going, "Hey, you're salespeople and the elevator pitch is dead," that's the line people default to because you haven't given them any reason to prove they're wrong. As an agent, we see this in pitches. People go like this [crosses arms] and go, "I don't know. I've been in this business 30 years." When someone says that, I basically mentally pack up my things and leave. I'm like, "All right, we lost that pitch." That's because that's somebody digging their heels in and going, "No, you don't know my job. You don't know what I go through. Trust me, I've been in this business 30 years. I know the elevator pitch is the only way to sell."
--:-- Ron Tite: If I can show them the sales process from a comedic angle, they're like, "I never thought of it that way. And he's actually right. It's actually pretty funny when I see it that way." So I've built up the trust. I've built up the credibility. And then when I deliver the thing that I really want them to do, I think they just like me more and they trust me more. So they're just more open to hearing it, as opposed to starting with, "Who's this guy that my boss brought in to speak to us about this thing? Here's another yahoo telling me I should change the way I work."
--:-- Ron Tite: I get it. They've been fed a bunch of bullshit for years by senior management, by other speakers, by thought leaders, by people who are removed from the reality of what they do. I just want them to show that I see it from another angle, and so can they.
--:-- Ron Tite: I'll also justify it. For example, many people will say, "You have to embrace failure." I can say that as long as I tag it with, "And I know, I know, it's so easy for me to say it from the stage. It really is. But let me give you a practical, realistic implication of this." Because I have a business, because I'm an entrepreneur and I have an agency with global clients, they just trust me. I go, "I get it. It's really easy to say. It's not as easy to do." But that only happens because I've opened them up with the comedy first.
--:-- Host: It's interesting. In my own speaking career, I had to adopt a warm open pretty quickly because I was 28 years old trying to teach insurance agents about digital marketing. You want to talk about arms folded? "Sonny, you don't understand. We've done it this way for 100 years" mentality. Try telling independent insurance agents that they should sell insurance online when you look like you're about 18 and you haven't even hit 30 yet. Early in my career, I learned that if I didn't yank these guys in quick, get them laughing, get them thinking that I'm not here to impact them or tell them the way things should be and that they've done it wrong—despite the fact that they're all probably millionaires for the most part—that went over bad.
--:-- Host: I had people literally walk up to me after presentations way early in my career when I just went up there and started hammering on people. Guys would walk up to me and say, "So I make $400,000 a year. You're telling me that I'm doing something wrong?" And I'm like, "You want to make five?" That didn't go so well.
--:-- Ron Tite: That's a great lesson. I think so many of us, when we approach problems like that, we present our thinking as if it's the only way, instead of presenting it like it's another way. One of the best examples is that Yellow Pages is still in business. I think 65% of Yellow Pages revenue in Canada still comes from the book. There are still consumers who look at the Yellow Pages, who see an ad, and who order a pizza. So we can't flip the switch on anything. If you're a $400,000 insurance salesman and you're making $400,000, maybe because of your ecosystem, that's totally cool. This is not the only way to do it, but you should look at it from another perspective. Maybe eight of you will want to try that perspective because the current approach isn't working for you.
--:-- Host: I can testify from a lot of hard beats that connecting with them very early and bringing down that wall is of the utmost importance.
--:-- Ron Tite: That shoulder, that arms crossing thing—there's another great lesson in comedy. Any great comedian knows you never ignore the reality of the room. If you're in a comedy club and somebody yells out, "You suck," everybody heard it. It's your show. You have to address that person. You have to call it out and respond and interact. So when I see somebody in a room with their arms folded going, "Who the hell is this guy? What's he saying?" I go straight for them. I go, "You're not buying it, are you? I know, I see the look on your face." Then they will open up a little bit because now I've called them out. I will consciously then look to that person because the first thing I need them to do is just like me. That's it. So I can't ignore the reality that there are people who think it's bullshit. I go to those people and I get them on side right away.
--:-- Ron Tite: In comedy, there's an active heckler and a passive heckler. The active heckler is the person who says, "You suck." In a business meeting, the active heckler says, "I disagree with your budget forecasts, and here's why." You can engage that person. You can debate that. In comedy and in business, the far more dangerous heckler is the passive heckler. The passive heckler in a comedy club is the person who doesn't even know you're on stage. They're consumed with their phone. They're talking to their buddies. They don't even know they don't like what you're talking about. In business, the passive heckler is the person who doesn't say anything in the meeting and then kills your IP in the hallway.
--:-- Ron Tite: In both cases, the first thing you need to do is get them paying attention. They can disagree with you, but they first have to hear what you're saying and understand what you're saying. In a comedy club, I would walk right up to the person who's standing beside them so they know I'm right there. Or I would point to them and make a comment that would get them listening. In a business meeting, you go, "Hey, Mary, you haven't said what you think of this proposal." You get Mary on the record so that even if she disagrees with it, at least she's on the record for what she disagrees with, allowing you the opportunity to change it or fix it or address her concerns.
--:-- Host: I used to do a little bit when I knew I had either an early morning audience or an audience right after lunch when people had maybe been away from their phones and were trying to check during my session. I would do a bit about what it looks like when you stick your phone in your crotch and start playing with it because you're trying to hide it from me under the table. I had this little sketch where I'd have the phone down on my crotch. I had different versions of it. By attacking that, I'd say, "Just pull it right out and hold it up in the air and text. I don't care. At least I know what you're doing. It's all good." But it took me a long time to get to that point where I was willing to do that.
--:-- Host: Just very tactically, I'm interested in what size audience would become too big to do crowd work like that. If you're 100 people, 200 people, are you still going to move out into the crowd? Obviously, if you get into the thousands, it's probably more than you can really handle. But I think sometimes it's almost even more difficult to do it if it's 10 people because it's so intimate. I'm just interested in your take.
--:-- Ron Tite: I think it's more about the physical makeup of the room for me. I just did a speech on Monday for 650 or 700 people and I totally did crowd work. I didn't care. If it's a massive room and the stage is elevated a little bit, sometimes it's just not physically possible to leave the stage, go into the crowd, and get back on stage without ripping your pants or something. If it's possible, I think even with a thousand people plus, 2000, 3000 people—I've done a thousand people where I went into the crowd. The reason you can do that is because they're actually not watching you on stage at all. The whole crowd is watching you on the video screen. As long as the camera can follow you into the room, you can do it. Sometimes I look at the crew and say, "Hey, I might go into the crowd, so be prepared with the lights so you can pick it up on camera."
--:-- Ron Tite: I came up with a bit where I was going to go into the room before the speech started. I saw a guy that was really tall. The bit was something about me being short. I literally went to the camera guy and said, "I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to go in. I think the visual of me standing beside this guy who's like 6'9" is really funny. If you can just frame the shot near the top so you actually cut his head off, I think that's really funny if he's so tall he's out of the frame." In doing that, I turned and faced the camera because I knew where it was, so I was looking at the camera. You have to act like a TV anchor. You have to deliver to the camera in a really large room because that's where most people are watching you—on screen.
--:-- Ron Tite: What I love about the size of a room like that when you're on iMag is that everybody thinks, "Oh, 4,000, 5,000 people, you need to play it really big." No, it's the exact opposite. You play it really small because everyone's watching you on camera. The only thing they see is you from the waist up. You can cock an eyebrow and somebody in the last row will see it. It's such a joy to perform to a room that size because you can play it really intimately.
--:-- Ron Tite: There's a great line from Bill Clinton when Elvis Costello asked him on his show, "What did Bill Clinton learn from playing jazz that he applied to politics?" The line was, "I learned that when you're playing to one, you play like you're playing to a million. And when you're playing to a million, you play like you're playing to one." I think that's so true for speaking.
--:-- Host: That's really good.
--:-- Host: It's funny. I think a lot of people who don't speak professionally don't realize how versatile you have to be to consistently perform. I had back-to-back shows where I had a 400-person audience and the mics went out. I had to yell and be animated. I had to project over 400 people for almost 60 minutes with no audio. Then the next show was about 700 people with iMegs. Now all of a sudden, you're bringing yourself all the way back in. It was a dream that the screaming one was first and the iMeg one was second because I could save my voice a little on the second. But it was really interesting.
--:-- Host: I'm hearing you talk about how before you go on stage, you're setting up, you're scanning the crowd, you're finding the guy who's tall so you can set the shot, and you're talking to the crew. To perform really well, it's these details. As I got into my career and had to put it on pause as I took the CEO job here at Metabolic, I probably got paid to speak for about 10 years. It wasn't until maybe the latter third of my career that I really started to understand that yes, the content is important, but the content from you to a bunch of people—it's unique points, but the content is the content. Then it's the little details you're discussing. You're not saying, "I got this great thing in the middle where I talk about content marketing." You're saying, "Hey, there's this little detail where I want to stand next to this guy and cut his head out." I feel like far too often we get so consumed in the thing that we forget about all the edges where things are really interesting. Those little details on the edges are what define our differences when we present our product. Over the course of my career, speaking is where I've seen that stand out more than in other aspects of my life. But I think it transcends.
--:-- Ron Tite: I think mistakes give us the opportunity to do that. This is the difference between somebody who gets it and somebody who doesn't. Somebody who gets it goes, "The mics went out?" When you told me that the mics went out in front of 400 people, the first thing in my brain was, "Oh, what an opportunity." The first thing the group is going to say is, "The mics went out and that dude still killed it." And he used that to do a thing. It then becomes the thing to talk about.
--:-- Ron Tite: I was doing a speech in Niagara Falls to 800 people. I came out and realized after the first 15 minutes that my fly was completely down. Fully. Zipper, boxer underwear exposed. Some people who don't speak that often would freak out and lose their mind. The first thing in my brain was, "Oh, this is gonna be good." I just embraced it. I went to the front row and said, "Has my fly been down the whole time?" Everyone in the front row was like, "Mm-hmm." I said, "Your job as the front row is that if a speaker comes out and their zipper is down, you tell them." Then I just improvised some bits about what the rest of the audience was thinking. "I'd love to understand what he's talking about, but I can't move my eyes from this gaping void in his crotch." Every mistake, everything that goes wrong is such an opportunity to kill it even more than the crowd would ever expect you to.
--:-- Host: It's so funny. I love these stories. I don't get to speak to speakers as much as I should.
--:-- Host: I had the night before—I carry zit cream. If you get a zit, you want to try to relegate it. It's this big red thing on your face. The night before, I put some on. It was an afternoon thing, so in the morning I put some zit cream right here to make it go away so it's not a big red flashing light. I figured I'd wipe it off just before I left the room. Well, nope. I completely forgot. So I have this big splotch right here of white stuff. No one says a word to me. I go out, I'm talking to people, I'm getting set up with the crew, I'm getting mic'd up, I'm talking to them about what I'm going to do on stage. The whole thing is an hour's worth of pre-work, probably 25 different people speaking face to face with me. No one says a word about this big white spot right here.
--:-- Host: Finally, I made my point and the crowd reacted. I kind of turned a little to give them a breather. I looked and they had a still they had taken on the iMeg. I could see that I had the zit cream. It was like a Twitter thing or something. I could see it right here. So I stopped and came back. I asked the audience, "Do any of the women in the audience—or men—have a compact, one of those compacts with a mirror?" They gave me the compact and I'm doing this whole thing where I'm washing it off, licking my finger, going like this, and talking to them about whatever. I can't even remember what I was talking about at the time. But that took this presentation—which I would love to say was good—and everyone started busting my chops the rest of the time. Now we're like bros. The whole audience is bros because now they're like, "What kind of zit cream is it? How many zits do you get? Why are you getting zits?" Right? All this stuff.
--:-- Host: What it did—and this is just to reiterate for people who don't speak at home and are kind of following along—it unhardened their brain. It softened their brain. It became very porous. Now that you've let your guard all the way down, like with your fly thing, everything you said after that I bet they were way more receptive to. I bet they retained it more. That's what I found. I don't want to call them mistakes, but things happen. Whenever there's an instance like that, everything after that seems to really stick in the audience's brain afterwards. It's very interesting.
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah, it's an opportunity for you to show that you're a pro. The worst thing you can do is fall apart.
--:-- Host: All right, well, we've talked—I could talk about speaking all day. It's literally my favorite thing in business to do. But there are some things with your book and some of your other work that I wanted to talk through with you in the second half of our show.
--:-- Host: In your first book—*Everyone's an Artist*? Yes, *Everyone's an Artist*. You had a line: "People no longer vote with their wallet. They vote with their time." I'm assuming you also mean their attention as well, or at least if that's part of it. If it's not, please correct me. I would really love for you to dive into that a little bit because I don't think there are a lot of people who, if you say that to them, they're like, "Oh, yeah, that makes sense." But they're not really grabbing hold of it and embracing the power in that statement. I'd just like you to dive into that a little bit.
--:-- Ron Tite: I mean, before, the transactions were pretty easy, right?
--:-- Ron Tite: I mean, before, the transactions were pretty easy, right? You didn't have to vote. You didn't have to choose to spend time with things. There wasn't much selection. So you didn't choose to watch commercials. You didn't choose to look at ads. You were fed up. And based on that ad, then you chose with your wallet. You said, "I vote for Toyota" or "I vote for Lexus" or whatever, which I think are part of the same kind of company. But anyhow.
--:-- Ron Tite: So then when the media landscape completely changed—and people have talked about this kind of ad nauseam—but now I don't have to watch that. Whether it's software plugins that allow me to have no ads, or whether I'm skipping ads, or whether I'm PVRing stuff, or whether I'm choosing to go to cable or to streaming services that have no ads. So now I get to choose which things I spend my time with. In order to get to the point where I have to decide what my wallet is going to purchase, I first have to vote with, "I would like to pay attention to this message. I would like to seek out this message. I would like to choose to watch this message."
--:-- Ron Tite: People think that skip ad button in the beginning of pre-roll, when it counts down like, "You can skip this ad in five, four, three, two, one," what typically happens? I do this, I'm sure you do. We see that come up and we're like, "How fast can I—is it down to zero yet? Can I skip it now? Can I skip it now?" We've got our mouse hovering over the little part where we know it's going to say "skip ad" and we click right there. The second it hits zero, we're clicking to get out of that.
--:-- Ron Tite: People think that's just a mechanic or a tactic within pre-roll, but it's not. Skip ad exists in every piece of business communication. You get on stage, you do a speech, there's somebody going, "Can I skip this now? Can I skip this now?" You send a pitch slap email on LinkedIn, they're going, "Skip, skip, skip." You're putting content in front of them that you say is really great. You're putting a white paper in front of them, all that stuff. Every single last bit of it.
--:-- Ron Tite: I think people are chasing tactics and they're going, "I hear that Facebook is really great, so we need to invest some of our money into Facebook ads." No. I mean, yes, sure, fine. But if you don't look at the stuff you're putting on the platform and say, "Is this good enough and interesting enough and relevant enough and compelling enough where someone would choose or would seek it out?" then they're just going to go skip ad, skip ad, skip ad.
--:-- Ron Tite: There are people like, "Oh, our big strategy for the year is we're going to now start to invest in Instagram stories." Nothing makes my blood boil faster than that. Not because the platform or the media choice isn't appropriate, but because more focus has been put into the distribution mechanism than into maintaining the quality of the thing that you are distributing. That's the hard part. It's the risky part.
--:-- Ron Tite: It's pretty easy to look at a media plan and go, "Yeah, those numbers make sense. I like the CPMs on that. Checks out. Sure, spend $2 million in that area." It's another thing to go, "Should it be blue or should it be red? I don't know. Let's debate this." I think it's so much easier to say we're going to try something new, to approve a media plan or a tactic, than it is to say, "Do we really want to change the tone of our language? Do we really want to change the messaging? Do we want to change the art direction?" That's the part that wins the battle for time, in conjunction with where it is.
--:-- Host: This actually is a perfect segue into something that I found in an interview that you did. In that interview, you said, "People have forgotten how to play the long game." This is in context to your new book, *Think, Do, Say*. Everyone who's listening, how you get a hold of Ron, how you find him, and links to his website and his books and stuff will all be in the show notes. Or you just Google *Think, Do, Say* or go to Amazon, you'll find it. Coming out in October, which this should be released before then, so pre-order when you can.
--:-- Host: "People have forgotten how to play the long game and we're chasing short-term tactics. We're trying to game the system. We've lost the organic pursuit of success." There's two things in there that resonated with me. One, I completely agree with your short-term tactics thing. That's like a psychosis that many people have. But the idea of people having forgotten how to play the long game—there feels like there's an assumption that at some point they *were* playing the long game. I'm interested in your take on that. And then I really want to know this idea of the "organic pursuit of success," what you kind of mean by that statement. I like it, I'm just super interested in it.
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah. I mean, your first question of the long game: have they forgotten? I think so. But I think you raised a good point and a good insight. I don't know whether they've forgotten or whether they just refuse to do it. Maybe they always did, but it's more obvious now because everything is new. Whether it's Moore's Law with an 18-month time frame for computing power, or whether it's just the natural life cycle of platforms and tactics. It'd be an interesting thing: is there a Moore's Law for advertising tactics? That every 18 months there's going to be a new platform?
--:-- Host: Moore's Law for advertising is 18 seconds.
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah. So I think it's because, as per our previous point, it's really easy to play the short game. Within advertising, there's either acquisition or retention. We know that when you want to play the short game, when you want to meet those quarterly numbers and you need to drive call response or click response or whatever, there are always tactics you can do. You can do a buy one, get one. You can do a price savings. You can do a "never before" sales event. You can do all those things that dial up the urgency, and you do it at the cost of long-term brand affiliation. You get your little bump in calls.
--:-- Ron Tite: The problem is that stuff is like crack. You get a little bump, and you go, "I just want another bump. I just want another bump." But the bumps are getting harder and harder to get. And I've never done crack, so I don't know, but assuming this happens, the crack starts to wear off faster and faster. So I think that's what happens: you don't play the long game, so you just chase these short-term things. You're in this constant panic cycle of new things, new things, new things, because you need the short-term tactics to pay off since you've never invested in the long-term tactics.
--:-- Ron Tite: There's no greater difference in this than the world between Apple and Dell. I used to be the creative director on Dell for many years. Apple will never do a price reduction. You've never seen that ad. They have focused on building products—and I hate using Apple as the example—but they would never do that. Whereas Dell, we looked at the short-term numbers. We would look at the ad and go, "That ad delivered so many calls, or a cost per click at $75 or at $12, whatever. How do we do that again?" It was like, "Oh, we reduced the price. We made the computer bigger." We just started chasing those tactics, and they became more and more difficult. So that's what I mean by the long game.
--:-- Ron Tite: The organic pursuit of success is that advertising—and I don't remember who said this, somebody did—advertising is a tax. It's just a tax on the stupid, or it's a tax on shitty products, or it's a tax on services that aren't as good as they say. If you organically build a product that is phenomenal, if you organically develop customer service over time that you hone and you perfect and you deliver and you never stop, you just try to make it better and better and better, word gets around. It just does. And people trust it. Then when you lead with messaging, people trust your messaging because they know you put so much time into the product.
--:-- Ron Tite: I see this with speakers a lot. People are like, "I'm not getting the speaking gigs, so I need to develop the website. I need to change my speaker reel. I need to do all these things." My first question is, "Did you look at the product?" Maybe it's not that you're not tweeting relevant stuff, but it's that the product sucks. That's why you're not getting booked. So double down and fix the product first. In speaking, gigs get you gigs. The only way to do that is to kill it on stage. Every second you're not focused on improving your product—on your research, on your preparation, on your customization—every second you're not doing that and doing those other things means you're weakening the product.
--:-- Ron Tite: I think that has to happen organically. That takes time. That takes patience. That takes flexibility. That takes a little bit of failure. All those things. If you just make it better every single time, then that will happen.
--:-- Ron Tite: I do something in speaking where some people go, "I've got a whole new speech." And I'm like, "Really? You sat down and you wrote an hour of new material and now you're going to deliver it for the first time at a conference?" This is my world of comedy. Nobody does that. Nobody writes an hour of comedy and then performs it for HBO in the first take. No way. What they do is they develop bits along the way. They'll do old bits, old bits, old bits. "Here's a new bit that I'm working on, selfishly." And then pull it back. Over time, the speech changes over the course of a 12-month period, as opposed to doing the same speech for 12 months, stopping, writing an entirely new speech in one sitting, and then perfecting it. That's not any way to do it. It's organic. It happens every single time out, every single day.
--:-- Host: You know, some of the best speaking advice that I ever got, and I think this applies to just about any business, was modularizing your bits. I think a lot of times we think of presentations or speeches or whatever you want to call what we do on stage as this whole thing is *the* thing. Actually, it was our shared friend, Marcus Sheridan, who sat me down. He followed me at a gig one time and he said, "Which one of those pieces did you swap in or out for this particular event?" And I was like, "I have no idea what you're talking about." And he said, "What I'll do is I have nine modules. If it's a 30-minute presentation, I'll take three of those modules. If it's an hour, maybe I'll be able to fit seven in. Then I'll do another hour the next day and swap two of them out and two of them in. I can build a new module and it's a whole new speech because by adding one new module or just rearranging the modules, I've added."
--:-- Host: That completely changed my career when I did that. That was a game changer for me because I could be laser focused on one part of the presentation that I felt wasn't working, instead of trying to rework the whole presentation every time. In saying it back to you, it seems silly that I thought that way. But until he had shared that with me, I had never thought about it.
--:-- Host: I think the same thing goes on with our business. We think, "Well, this isn't working, so I have to flip this thing over. Now instead of tweeting, I'm going to go Instagram stories and I'm going to be this thing. I'm going to start doing SEO work or whatever the heck people want to do." Instead, it's just, "What is the one little piece that isn't working? Let's spend some time and really fix that piece and let everything else be what it is." That was a game changer for me. It has transcended even now that my work in life is more as an executive than it is a speaker. I apply it to what I do every day here. It's huge.
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah, I think there's another way to look at that. I take the same approach, but I also add a layer to it, both in leadership and in speaking. I am a certain type of leader with our team here at the agency. The reason I am that type of leader is because of the successes and failures I've had in 25 years or whatever in this business. All those other people that I led or that I followed, all those other people subsidized the leadership that I now have.
--:-- Ron Tite: Just as on stage, every audience where I tried out a new thing that maybe didn't work, those audiences subsidize the delivery of the great material that the people get to hear today. So what are they doing for the next group? What are they doing to pay it forward? What are the current team doing to subsidize the leadership traits that I'm going to have for the next generation of people that I will lead? That is a very selfish thing, and I don't communicate it that way. But I know in speaking that if I do 95% of the speech, which is gold material—great stuff, they love it, it's relevant, it's funny, it's insightful—then there's 5% that I don't know how it's going to go because I'm exploring new things. It may suck. And it's okay because 95% of it is gold. The 5% that sucks, A, they don't really notice, but B, I think that's okay because that's them paying it forward to the next group. I'm going to find something in the stuff that I think might suck that doesn't, and that becomes another piece which is more relevant or more interesting for a future audience.
--:-- Ron Tite: With the team here, we're going to try some things out from a process standpoint, from an innovation standpoint. We're going to try new software. We're on Slack now and this may suck, but let's just try this out. That's them subsidizing the leadership traits for future generations.
--:-- Host: Slack doesn't suck. It's amazing.
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah, no, I'm well with you on that point as well.
--:-- Host: I will say that the way I kind of look at it is, you had talked about someone taking a whole new hour and bringing it out to a paid gig. That to me shows almost a lack of respect for that audience because you're not delivering material to them that you know guaranteed is going to hit. I think that delivering something over and over and over and over and over again, the exact same way, also shows a lack of respect for the audience because it says, "I'm not willing to evolve my material as the world changes."
--:-- Host: I think what you just described to me is the sweet spot. Whether it's 90% or 98% or some percentage of your material being new, it says, "Look, I'm going to make sure that you get what you paid for in either the time or the money that it took for you to sit in the seat that you're in. But I'm going to have enough respect for you to say, 'I'm going to give you something a little new.' And there's a chance it's going to be terrible, and that's just kind of the price we pay. But I'm going to have enough respect to both give you something worthwhile and give you something a little different too."
--:-- Host: I think that speaks to your process about the warm open. What it shows me is that, and I hope people listening at home take away from this, is that as someone delivering—whether it's speaking or if you're the leader or whatever—having respect for the people, for the audience, call them clients, call them whatever you want to call them, is of the utmost importance. We can't demand respect from them if we're not willing to give it first.
--:-- Host: When I see leaders fall apart, when I see speakers fall apart, salespeople, marketers, it's that they don't have the 180-degree respect. They want it for themselves. "Look at this great piece of content that I created. Why don't you sign up for my newsletter? Why aren't you sharing it? Why aren't you hiring me?" You can tell when you really dig into it, what's missing isn't the quality of the work. It's not the insights. It's the fact that that work didn't display respect back to the audience in which you were providing it to them. I think the way that you described that was spot on.
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah, I think too, that people—and we see this with clients as well, or with leading people—you actually think you want to show respect by claiming that you know more than you do. In speech form, you go in and you're like, "So this is your sales process," and you try and use their terms and all that kind of stuff, as opposed to never ignoring the reality of the room that you're an outside perspective. Just go like, "I actually don't know what you go through on a daily basis. I maybe have an idea. I have a superficial understanding of what you do, but there are things I'm never going to appreciate that you have to deal with. Why? Because I'm an outsider. And there's some value in having an outsider. That's why not all my things are going to be exactly as they are for you in your daily life."
--:-- Ron Tite: For us as consultants to our clients, we're the agency for Walmart Canada, the social and digital agency for Walmart Canada. I actually don't know. I can't appreciate what somebody working in the camera department at the Dufferin Mall Walmart goes to on a daily basis. I'm never going to have that insight. So I shouldn't sell my ideas as if I'm the all-knowing organization that does. We should frame our perspectives as saying, "This is an outside perspective. And you need that outside perspective. But this is your responsibility to call us on it, or to agree, disagree, or to add some color to it so that we get it better."
--:-- Ron Tite: There's this belief like, "They don't know my business." No, that's the whole point of hiring an outside body: we don't know your business. We can understand your business, but we'll never know your business to the extent that you know your business. And that's exactly why you hire us.
--:-- Host: Guys, if you are looking for a speaker, I highly recommend Ron. I'm part of one of the foremost speaking Facebook groups. How I ever got invited into this group, I don't know. I feel it has been a generous gift to just voyeur it most times. I do add occasionally to the conversations, but mostly I just read the insights of tremendous people. Ron is one of them who consistently shares his own thoughts and beliefs and experiences with that group. I find it incredibly valuable. I can tell you that if you're looking for a speaker, you cannot miss with Ron.
--:-- Host: Also, his book, *Think, Do, Say*, is coming out in October. Make sure you pre-order it. Ron, it's been an incredible pleasure. Where can people—the best place to get at you if they're just looking for more information?
--:-- Ron Tite: Yeah, it's just Ron Tite everywhere. It's just R-O-N T-I-T-E. Twitter, at Ron Tite. Instagram, at Ron Tite. ron.com. And the agency is churchstate.co.
--:-- Host: Awesome, man. Thanks so much.
--:-- Ron Tite: Thanks, Brian. And thanks everybody for listening. I really appreciate that. We are in a battle for time. And thanks to all your listeners for choosing to spend it with us.
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