Blair Enns Interview | Author of "Win Without Pitching Manifesto"

you wrote the blog post. It was a little risky and then people really responded well and then at some point, a couple of years later, that's the genesis and the basis of the book, yeah, and there was something that prompted you to write the book and then something happened. . in your life personally professionally because I have ideas for books but I haven't taken them step I haven't gotten past the tipping point on that, yeah I'm pretty happy with the books I haven't written over the years and I remember when I became consultant for the first time I felt the pressure of publishing a book.

In the first years I published a book, it was self-published. He charged a thousand dollars per copy and someone asked for it. I would print it with my laser printer, package it and ship it, and that was it. a very detailed instruction book in the days when I didn't know, many of you know, I mean, it was helpful. I'm sure it was helpful to the people who bought it, but I do think about the advice I was giving them. 15 years ago the advice I give now would be quite different, so I published a small how-to book in the early days that forms the framework of my consulting practice and then I didn't do it and I did it again.

I felt the pressure after a couple of years and I see other people who are new to any profession, they have some kind of specialized business, they feel the pressure to publish a book and I always say that what a friend of mine told me is like you. It's not necessary, you just need to have something to say, you need to have a point of view and if you don't have a point of view there is no point in publishing your book, there are so many books with lists available to do this. do it, do it without a point of view and that's what I think in the world of content marketing or knowledge marketing or whatever you want to call it thought leadership, the biggest challenge right now is that everyone is publishing and a lot of people lack a point. point of view, so I'm really glad I waited until that book to get a solid point of view.

Yes, it seems like in the consulting space the manual is to write a book to establish your credibility and your expertise and Yes, you resisted that for a moment and then formed this book. Now I was asked this question, so it's been six and seven years since you wrote the book and it was published and it's sitting right next to me, here, what has it been like? Writing the book changed you personally and professionally. I'm not sure how it has changed me personally. Like seven years later, I'm actually still surprised at how happy I am with that book.

Uhm, I'm not going back. I've never sat down to reread it. I skimmed through it from time to time because someone asked me something about it, but I'm glad you know it's good. It is in its fourth edition. Now continue. Sales have always been stable. and they've been steadily increasing, so even seven years later, sales have been steady as a ship, but slowly rising um and my goal when I wrote that book was to write a timeless book that would seem timeless if there was nothing in it actually, that would become obsolete at any moment and my full intention is for that book to outlive me.

I wanted to publish it long after my death and that doesn't seem like it. I wanted to write it and then how has it changed? Like I accomplished that goal, I wrote that book and just so you know, that puts a lot of pressure on the books that are coming after this one and I have one that should be out already and I keep coming back and making it better and I'm doing it, I even stopped to talk about the date because that's just creating unnecessary pressure on me and I tell people who feel pressure to write their first book, they think that's pressure, so the follow-up wait is a sophomore.

Album true, true and I think the reason I feel so much pressure is because I'm very happy with that first book mm-hmm, so I'm also happy because I have such a long time horizon for this. I'm pretty. It's okay that this second book takes months, even if it ends a year late, I don't think it will be that long, but even if it ends that late, it is vital for me, a friend of mine said before. She died, she was a novelist, Blair said, you can't stop publishing her, she published a novel and in the end, about a year later, she showed up on the doorstep with a new version of the book that she had rewritten, basically rejecting all the editor's advice. changed the title spent her own money to print it and gave it away and had printed hundreds of copies for friends and said this is the book she really wanted to write so when I asked her to do a first pass of the

manifesto

she put it away. telling me Blair, you can't unpublish, you can unpublish, so if you want to write a timeless book, you need to do it right if you're writing a current book, that's much less important if you're writing about technology, yeah, that's your You should act fast and release it to market quickly, but those are not the books I'm interested in writing, they're not really relevant to my audience.

I mean, I could write a timely book on the technology of business. development, but other people would do it better than me, well, you already preemptively answered one of washi Tosh's questions, who asks you when the price book will come out and it will come out when it's ready, yes, indeed. I set four dates, it will come out on this day and then I told people that I'm not fast. I'm not talking about dates. The book is called pricing creativity. A guide to making profits beyond billable. It's being published by Rock Bench, who published my first book and is a great publishing partner.

David C Baker, owner of that imprint, is a friend of mine, so I get no pressure from my publisher. I get pressure from readers and that's okay, it's a good healthy pressure, but it will come out when it comes out and it will be good, it will be something I'm very proud of and this is all one more thing I'll say about It will be the only price book in the world which is priced according to the principles of the book, so you're saying it's going to be very expensive, there will be very expensive options from that book, and then there will be less expensive ones. options mm-hmm well, you know, I'm going to bring you something about the book and an idea there and this is a quote from your site the peculiarities of the creative personality that make it difficult for people to sell in an idea business, can you?

Explain what that means, yes there are a few of them, but the most important one is that creativity is really and some people might argue against this, but I follow the example of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the

author

of Flow, and I think that a second book is called creativity, so he studies happiness and creativity and we talk about a state of flow. He coined that term and says that creativity is not the ability to write or draw, that is what he refers to as personal creativity. Creativity is the ability to see to see, it is the ability to provide perspective. to problems seeing things that others cannot or looking at things from angles or perspectives that others, for whatever reason, cannot see, so if that is your strength, if you are a creative person, then by nature you feel attracted by the problem you don't have. previously solved you get bored easily because strength is seeing things differently and solving new problems and problems that others can't really solve or don't look at the same way you are constantly looking for something new and different that is the hallmark of a creative personality, an expert, on the other hand, is someone who benefits from observation and repeated applications, so to develop deep expertise you need to study the same types of problems over and over again to start seeing patterns, as well that this idea of ​​creativity and experience is almost as if a creative expert is almost a paradox, maybe the idea is a paradox because this duality of being creative, being open to bringing your wonderfully enlightened perspective to address different problems is what is at work. disagreement with your business's need to focus and that conflict or paradox or duality, whatever you want, however you want to frame it, is at the heart of most creative people's challenges with sales and another issue would be the idea.

Producers and marketers look at the market and say, “Hey, no one is doing X", so your challenge is production, so I see the opportunity in the market. I see the hole. Now I have to figure out how I can put together the resources to build something, hire people, etc., to serve that market. This is how marketers think about business. The other end of the perspective is a producer who says I know how to do X, so "I'm going to launch a business doing which I just described 99% of the design companies and design based companies on the planet these people see themselves as designers and I love designers and they say I want to make a living designing for a company. .I'm going to open my own design company and I hope there are enough people out there that there is a big enough market to pay me what I need to be paid so that you can reach sales from a producer's point of view. challenge of our producers is marketing and the challenge of sellers is production and if you are selling, if what you are producing is really if you have a deep personal attachment to if you see yourself as an artisan now you are an artisan producer of What you sell, in our case ideas and advice, what you sell is very personal to you, so if you get rejected, it's a personal rejection, so that's another layer that makes sales difficult for the creative person.

Well, how do you do it? Yes, I see myself as a craftsman, someone who is passionate about doing what I do and even thinks about myself. I'm just saying that as an artist, this is the perspective that a lot of people in the design field see themselves as reconciling those differences and that paradox that you mentioned because I understand that I see the problem, it's very clear. The way you described it, so how can I get over that? You know that at the very beginning or at the highest level, you should ask if your art is your business or if it should be a hobby.

That's no and there is no writer. Yeah, I mean, it's a personal thing. Answer until you decide. I've known a lot of principles of agencies or owners of other creative companies, design companies, etc., who decided to close it down, go get a job and paint mm-hmm and I can think of a few principles that I now know and that are. people who may be having difficulty in our program, where I think they would be better off getting a job and having their artistic needs met somewhere else, so that's a question and that's a question for which there is only one appropriate personal answer. for you and me.

I'm not suggesting that there is some kind of standard answer for anyone and after that it's really a matter of sacrifice because you know the first question of focus, so to be an expert you need to focus because you need to accumulate the benefits of solving the same type of problems. over and over again but the focus is that it's at odds with your personal need for creativity it's what you really need to trust you need to trust me or these these words I'm about to say and you need to Trust yourself and you need to trust that the next point is true and that the point is that your fear of walking away from all these really interesting things that you could do is unfounded because the world is so big that you are thinking about the right things.

Now you are a generalist, well you could work for anyone who does any type of work well and the possibilities are really inspiring, but in business terms that is really limiting, so you have to trust that when I say you choose a door, you are yours, the metaphor. I use, I think I talked about this in a book, in the book: you're standing in a room full of doors and you're a very creative, creative, curious, problem-solving person, you want to know what's behind every door, so you structured your business. that you can open all the doors and I'm behind you and I tell you no, you need to choose a door, you choose a door, you walk through that door and you never look back and your hesitation is that you think it's on the other side of that door there's a boring one gray and empty room where you will surely die of suffocation, but that is not what is on the other side of that door.

What is on the other side of that door is more doors, more and more doors, and no more doors. doors that you could never imagine that put you in a really calm world, it's a beautiful world RIT, it's like you crawl inside. I'm asking you to crawl into a crevice or a niche, right? and your thinking looks so small in there, so cramped in there and you and you walk in there and it opens up like Narnia, you need to trust that there is a rich and diverse world where you can express yourself creatively on the other side of that niche positioning and, if you can , if you can, but you really believe in it, then you're going to be fine, well, I mean, you're like preaching to the choir because I fully believe in that, there's a lot of things that I come across in terms of how designers view the work that they do, I think some of them feel guilty for charging money for somethingthat they really enjoy like yeah, you know there's a hobby of mine, like I like fishing, I like salmon fishing and for someone to charge someone to do what I love seems like a strange concept. but I love in the book how you talk about one of the motivations you can think of for charging more is to provide better customer service and I love that it helps people realize that because the nature of the creative person is They try to give more of themselves to overdeliver and conflict arises when they feel they are taking advantage of something they have designed.

They themselves, yes, so my trick is to always charge as much money as clients are willing to pay and more. , and that way when they call me and I love it, you're what you say about the phone test, like if they call you, are you happy? to answer it or not, yes, so I try to be in that position, so intellectually I totally understand what you're saying and you know I'm not conflicted in that way, but emotionally I get the feeling that people are holding on very tightly to this. idea that your art is everything and specializing is going to kill your creative soul, charging money is going to make the whole process cheaper, you are going to value what you do as a creative human spirit.

I mean, how do you respond to that? I mean, give me your tough love coach talk here says something that will really wake you up now you might want to listen closely because what Blair is about to say is really important. Many of us have this zero-sum idea around money in the economy, so some One of the guilt people feel about charging a lot of money is the idea that if I have a dollar, someone else lacks the right. I can only have a dollar from someone else if I take it from someone else, but if you stop and think about the people in your life that you know, think about what they are like there, and realize that most people make money by helping to other people, very few people you know make money by taking it from others or taking advantage of people, I mean, granted 1 One third of the world's economy is currency trading, where a billion dollars of currency is traded every second and not It adds no value to the planet, almost no value, so I accept that there is a level of parasitic money generation in the world and it is not limited to just currency trading, but it is a big thing.

I mean, we could get into this macroeconomic question of quantitative easing and all the money that the government prints, not just the US government every month, and what's happening there, and I went down. That rabbit hole when I was trying to understand money in research for this book so we could get into all of that, but the point I want to make is that you realize that money is made by helping people and that you really need and you need to understand that. Wealth is created through trade and you are selling what is known as a non-rival asset, which means that if I sell to you, I have in hand my beautiful Estelle fabric fountain pen that I just bought on my last trip to Spain and that I could sell. you this pen Cris and then you would have it and I wouldn't have it but I could sell you an idea and then you have the idea and I have the idea of ​​who so not now, no one lacks anything and you have given me money and You have given, by selling you the idea, I have created value for you and let's say I have charged you $10,000 by voluntarily paying me ten thousand dollars, you are recognizing that I am creating more than ten thousand dollars. in value to you, then trade is what makes the world go around trade is what wealth is what makes population growth curves go down wealth is what lifts people obviously it lifts people out of poverty but it's all these other social issues and that and I'm not a libertarian, I don't think the market solves all problems, but we actually create wealth just through trade and you have to recognize and understand that you guys are willing to give them money even if they prefer Paying them less because they are handing over that money is a recognition that you are creating more value for them than you are capturing for yourself.

Basically, you're capturing some of the excess value you're creating for the customer and you don't need to understand it. and you know a lot of people are intuitively working in the economy at that moment, but you're creating what's known as a double thank you moment where you hand the work to the client, the client says thank you, the client hands you the check, They say thank you, each one is thanking each other and acknowledging that this was a worthwhile transaction and that we would both do it again and I want you to look at the checkers and all those dollar bills or whatever your currency is and think. of each individual dollar bill as a certificate of appreciation, so the more value you create in the world, the more value you should be able to capture for yourself and you should see the value, the economic value that you are capturing for yourself, as a measure of how much value you are creating for others in the world.

I love it. Double thanks. I mean, that's pretty incredible. I thought you were going to say double thanks. They thanked you for the work because you have done something wonderful. the other thank you is an awesome check I wrote to pay him for his services, so that was great. I have a bunch of business questions for you, maybe we can do this more of a lightning round and then I started to address the three questions. I left the audience, okay, okay, so what is your business model today and what is the average engagement size? What is your minimum level of participation?

Yeah, that's a big use of that term, so the business model is we're a full training company. I went from a solar consulting practice to launching some training programs and quickly realized that you can't have a productized services company and a custom services company in the same business, so I had to choose one over the other for those of you who might be curious about a productized service. is when you take a product, service, or product feature that your company has previously provided on a custom basis and turn it into a standard, fully tested, supported, and marketed product.

Personalized service is when you provide products or services in a flexible way that can be easily tailored to meet a client's specific needs and it was really my exploration of the topic of value pricing that made me realize I really wanted to be a consultant based at value prices, but I felt like, given where I live, I couldn't really afford to do that. I couldn't do it properly because I live in such a remote place as a roommate. I wanted to charge based on value, so I would have to have these more open commitments with a smaller number of clients and I needed to be able to say yes.

I'll be on a plane. I'll be there the day after tomorrow and that's very difficult for me, so I went the other way completely productive. Now we're a training company and I just have to do it, so I was. a trainer in this training business and I have left my classes. I have two private clients left and in four or five months I will no longer be a coach, we have four other coaches in the program that do the training, so everything is done through the distance that you can travel through the program it is completely self-directed, you can do it in a peer group with a virtual classroom with other independent creative business owners led by a coach or you can do a private class where we Classes are only for people in your company and are usually for larger organizations or more distributed, so right now those are the three different ways you can follow the program and that's what we are, we're a training program, okay?

Minimum commitment level The minimum commitment level is $5,000 for the self-directed program or $500 per month if you want to fund it for 12 months and the minimum commitment to the program is one year. I have created a curriculum that continues in perpetuity so my vision is and you will come you will join the program and you will like the Hotel California you will visit but you will never leave there we will provide you value until the day you die it is now that probably not it will happen but that's the goal there is a correct curriculum as long as you want to stay in the program but actually there are two years of core curriculum but your minimum requirement is one year so you show up you sign up for one year and then we ask you to come back for a second year after two years, if you want to go deeper into some topics, that's what we start doing in the third year.

Well, here are my quick business questions. Yes, how many books do you sell a year? What is the average I can do? 100 150 a month, so what is that, whatever, whatever, it's 12 time, yeah, and growing up three years, eight years, people in the world who are going to count and those who can't. I'm the middle end, okay, there it is, how are you? I am currently raising awareness and I love that in your discussion about your own business you two had to make the difficult decision of being a consultant or productized business. Yes, they are following their own advice and I can see that all over their site. you follow your own advice you write a lot and establish your expertise that way you have chosen a nation you are the expert for whom there is no replacement I'm curious now in the 21st century here we are in 2017 what are they?

What are you doing to raise awareness? I mean look at your conversion funnel. Yes, I'm looking at how the customer journey reaches you and then ultimately expands and makes a purchase. So what are you doing to raise awareness for many years to come? I would write. I wrote once a month and then last year, the year before, I think it was last year. I did a writing experiment every week and now my writing goes to other places, so it's changed over the years, you know, I get bored or we experiment with things, but it's 2017, the focus is raising awareness .

I'm launching two podcasts, one pretty soon here, one closer to summer and then there's the pricing book that's about to be published and I'm talking a lot and then once. Once the price book is out in the world, I'll be back to writing a few more a little more regularly on the site's blog. Okay, so you only post your writing and thoughts on your site? distribute through a medium or some other format. I've experimented a little bit with the medium and posting on LinkedIn and other places, but it's mostly on our site, okay, yeah, you know, that's how I see it, so there's a wind without launching into the wider world. things that we put out into the world for free and then there's the end of the gate, the paid gate in the inner circle and very consciously over the last two years and over the next two years, I'm bringing more and more content to Behind That Wall , since our awareness is pretty good in most of the English speaking world, right now awareness and traffic aren't really an issue, so we sigh.

I feel like the people who pay us every month or every year, We are part of our family and they are part of the in-group like we are part of the conspiracy that we are the Illuminati, the Illuminati and I feel like as time goes by I want offer more value to those people and spend less time trying to get people to the top of the fun who are taking care of themselves now and really our focus is really the people who pay us money, we need to take care of them and feel like they make them feel . as if they were special, so now we are doing the same events.

I only do events like I'll do, someone else taught a talk somewhere else, but to create a winning event without

pitching

, which we do one or two a year. We're only available to people who are in the program now and that's in person, yeah, okay, yeah, we have an annual no-show summit that's available only to companies that are in the program. We did the first one last year in Vancouver, this one this year. It's in October in Toronto and we do a couple more meetings, etc. throughout the year in different locations, but they are only available to the people in the program, so that's just part of putting a lot of the valuable stuff behind the wall and making it available only to the family, well, speaking of That, how big the inner circle is right now, how many people are in that group, there's a little more or less than 80 companies in the program.

April 24 is when the next program begins. we are already onboarding some companies for that program, that period of the program, okay and how big is your team right now, we are four, soon we will be five here and then one, two, three, four trainers distributed, so we are in eight about to be nine, so four in the office and then the rest remote, yeah, I see, so it's a little bit split, yeah, that's right. We live in a small town in the mountains in the middle of nowhere with less than a thousand people, so how? that's remote, oh my god, talents are a little hard to come by, yeah, I think this makes sense, why mask it well?

I think we alreadyyou said, but how do you scale your business right now? How do we scale? Do you know the most important thing about scaling a high-service product business and if you, if your listeners want to go to YouTube and search for my talk that I did at Bound last year, it's called price, the customer, not the work. I started that talk talking about the differences between a product business and a productized service business, a personalized service business, and they're very different, so how do you scale a privatized service business? The most important thing you can do and what we're probably focused on now is retention, retaining people year after year because retention is proof of correct value delivery, so the better the job you do to Deliver value to your current customer base, the less reasons you will give them to move forward and the less you will have to sell on the other.

It ends well, so it's wise and smarter to work on keeping the clients you have rather than chasing new ones. Yeah, I mean, I would really love to be in the place where there are only three program periods, onboarding periods per year in two of them. We typically sell the new capacity that we reserve and I would really like to be in the place where we sell our capacity, It's like constant managed growth, there's not a lot of sales pressure. Then we sell out every time and if you want to get in you have to get in line pretty early, that's the kind of business I'd like to build and I'll only be able to build that business if we offer services. incredible. value for the people inside and we're three years in and the retention year was pretty low at the beginning and it's pretty good right now, but it's not like that.

I want to get closer and closer to 100% perfection knowing that I will never get to 100%, but the goal is to get closer to that and then what is the way out for you? Are you thinking about a way out? My way out is death, really yes. I mean, I'll do a talk that I did several times in recent years, it's called the house, it's called the five, no, man. I'm not blank, but it's basically all five. Imagine this fictional world called Blair topia, and with Blair's hope, all creative businesses thrive because they have to live. I call my laws and my luck the five restrictions and the first restriction for all companies to be successful because they follow my laws like the laws of physics and the first law is no way out.

I tell you, okay, imagine a scenario where you mention that you are writing your business and you will never be able to sell and you will never be able to retire now just think about that for a minute what are the implications of that and we do some exercises on that briefly but if only Do you think about that if I said yes because if I had the power to do this to you, Chris and all your listeners, I would invoke that power. I would wave my magic wand and say you invoke my ability so that you can never sell your business and you can never retire, and if you had to face that limitation, there are so many things you would do differently in terms of how you run your business and how you live your life. , and especially as people get older as they get into their 50s and certainly their 60s, I see it as soon as you start having one eye on the exit, you stop making the tough decisions correctly and then you fool yourself. yourself and you keep working really hard to trick yourself into thinking when one day I'll get this right or one day there'll be a reward and then I and I'll just do it and then it'll be in the last five years that I'm not going to change too much, right? and you can see it, you can see it, so if you commit to the idea that you're never going to sell and you're never going to retire, it's going to be transformative and I, I, mela, I wrote a 3,000 word blog post about that just a year ago. couple of years, it's called a dead-end mission and I'm me.

I am determined not to sell this business and I will not retire and it is the most liberating decision I have ever made. It's amazing and now you're making me rethink my approach here, but it's a lot. Now I think we have about three minutes left, so I'm going to throw out these last little questions. Okay, yeah, okay. I think you already answered this CGM question, but in case you're tuning in, do you have any new tips? I think you've already given a lot of new advice in this conversation, you've already said what some business and learning resources are.

Do you recommend, of course, winning without a launch system, but yes, something else? I just finished reading Peter Thiel's book Zero to One, which I think this was published in Zero to One notes about startups and building the future. I think it was published in 2014. It's a really easy read. I think I may need a few more weeks to think about it further, but I may be the only one. The best business book I have ever read. Oh, okay then, and this one's line is a little awkward, so let's see how you want to respond to this one.

This comes from a groundhog root. I hope I said well. How to get clients to start? building agencies, how to get the first 20% of clients, yeah, so you think you hear those words win without launching and you think you know that as far as I'm concerned there's no moral issue around launching, it's a function of the free market economy. You know, people cry when you say that you know it's written in the rules because the buyer has all the power in the relationship, but you don't know it. I know a lot of people get outraged when other companies submit proposals and that's a prolific, there are alternatives to submitting, such as agreeing to work for free to build the portfolio or with a deep discount or a 100 percent money back guarantee, but I I would suggest you do it anytime and you are committing some type of fee. that they charged you because you want the work to build your portfolio expertise, your only obligation is to tell the client correctly, so tell the client to listen, normally we would charge you twenty thousand dollars for this, but we are new, I really like this project .

I would love to have it in my wallet. If I did it for you at half price, would we have a deal to work together or something? So the mistake is not in discounting or even making it free. The mistake is not having that open and direct conversation with the client about what his intentions are. We have five core values ​​in our company and one of them is saying what you're thinking and that's another limitation. Blair Topia of the five restrictions, if I could wave the magic wand every time you are dealing with a client or potential client, just say what you are thinking, take a minute to think about how you would phrase it nicely, but say what you want.

You're thinking because many of your sales problems arise from the fact that you're not saying what you're thinking. Are you thinking no? You're saying yes. You're holding it back. You are repressing it. but you're allowing all this emotion to build up and then creating all these problems for yourself in the future, just say if you're thinking, do you have resources for how someone can learn to say what they're thinking? Because I love that idea and practice. that myself, but do you have any resources that people can refer to in an article about Afghanistan called it's called gentle cruelty, that's the name of our core value.

Well, maybe it's called tell what you're thinking, so if your listeners are going to win without showing calm and in the search, there are about one hundred and twenty thousand words of free advice on the website, including a free version of the

manifesto

that you can read online if you don't mind clicking through to the search window, say what you're thinking or be cruel. you'll find it I'm Blair ends and you're listening to the future the future is presented by me Christ the show is edited by Stuart Schuster many thanks to Adam Sanborn for composing our theme song to subscribe to the future podcast visit us on iTunes Stitcher or Google Play while you're there use the solid and leave us a review.

Your feedback will help guide future programming and help us with our rankings. I can't get enough content. You got lucky. We are already finished. 150 episodes on our YouTube channel just go to youtube.com/americancasinoguide