PABLO GONZALEZ
Providing value and building relationships have always been linked to each other, and no one knows it better than Pablo Gonzalez. The inventor of The Relationship Flywheel joins Jordan Levin in a conversation that’s all about building relationships. Pablo talks about his beginnings in the construction industry and what he learned about providing value to people when his brother passed away. Pablo discusses leveraging relationships for value with Jordan. We are also treated to a next-level discussion on the Relationship Flywheel and how it impacts your life.
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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST HERE:
PABLO GONZALEZ
I have a special guest, Pablo Gonzalez. I’ve known Pablo for several years now. I wanted to get to know you a little bit more, understand what you do and what makes you thrive. Thank you for being here.
Jordan, it’s an honor. I am somebody that greatly appreciates the opportunity to be on somebody’s stage. I don’t take it lightly. I hope that I make you feel like you did the right thing by giving a ton of value to you and to our friend that’s reading this.
Community is the greatest value you can give people.
Let’s give a quick little synopsis of what Pablo is all about in the past. You want to help people. What does that mean?
I’m somebody that, based on my life experience, has been lucky to been formed as very relationship-driven. I’ve always valued relationships more than I value transactions. At the end of the day, who I am is somebody that committed to the idea that I know that there is some value that I have that I can put out into the world. While I’ve always had these great expectations of myself, both internal and external, I never subscribed to the path that I thought people were telling me I needed to take to get to those expectations. I feel fortunate to say that I’m someone that has found a way to marry the wanting to achieve big things, wanting to fulfill my destiny and these expectations with this approach to it that allows me to do it in a way that I’m using my superpower to serve.
The way that I’m using my superpower to serve is what is going to get me to that final outcome of expectations that I expect. At the core of it all is this idea that everybody has value. There’s a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that every man I meet is in some way my superior and in that, I can learn from them. The better we get at seeing the value in people and communicating that value to the right person that needs it, the better we’re all going to do as a society. I’ve been able to build a business in life based on that concept. I’m a very self-actualized person that wakes up with energy every single day because I’m working on stuff I care about. I feel that I am serving at my highest capacity.
Building Relationships: The advice of buying your time, going the educational route and into corporate, and trying to get a long career was, at one point, the best advice you could give somebody. It just so happens that something called the internet has come around.
That’s a lot of information, but the biggest thing that I’m getting from that is society always puts a number or an item on what we do and what we’re supposed to be doing. For example, going to college, you need education, type of things like that. We’ve always grown up with the education aspect, but although it seems that we start to learn, there’s a lot more to learn. How can we educate other people on that there’s more to life than being at the desk 10 to 12 hours a day, sitting in front of the computer and taking orders from the employer? Whereas actions are allowed, but you are not allowed to be who you are. We tend to get trapped into that mindset. The next thing you know, 15, 20 years later, you’re like, “Now, I can go do this.” That’s not a bad thing, but you have to pocket a knife. It is time to make that change. You got a wonderful job of seeing that, expressing that and showing that to everybody.
I’m also lucky to be of this age and be living in the United States of America and all the environment that surrounds that. The advice of buying your time and going the educational route and going into corporate and trying to get a long career was, at one point, the best advice you could give somebody. It just so happens that something called the internet has come around and we are in the third lifecycle of this social media life cycle. The barriers of entry to information, access, mobility, starting businesses, and serving people have drastically been reduced. Somewhere in that is this thing that I believe is going to have to make us consider it all very differently. We are now in an age in a time where we can have way more relationships than we’ve ever had.
I call it relationship scaling. We can scale relationships in a way that was never feasible before. Mine and yours is a relationship. I know your brother. He introduced me to you several years ago. You and I put some content out every once in a while, you and I, even though we’ve never met and we’ve spent on the phone twice, have gotten to know each other a little bit better and it’s facilitated this. Probably now you got a notification about a high school friend of yours that you haven’t talked to in ten years and it’s his birthday, so you can send them a happy birthday message. All these things that are happening that allow us to keep up with, nurture, and maintain more relationships than we’ve ever had before have completely transformed our society on a personal level.
The business world is still lagging behind on this idea that we live in this digital culture. That is a personal digital culture. How do you implement this into business? It has created a giant opportunity for those of us that are astute enough to realize that’s what’s happening and that there this time of opportunity where if you can serve 10,000 people, you have a good business. The ability to serve 10,000 people now that the internet is where it’s at is accessible to people with drive, vision, and with the determination to stick to a vision and iterate through until they get it right.
You have much more value to offer other people than you give them credit for it. You just have to look for it.
What I’m thinking about is the perfect example of what you said is even with the pandemic, it’s their whole push, if it’s heightened now with the pandemic, we were doing that before, but in a pretty circular like, “We came with a goal where everybody started reconnecting with everybody.” I reconnected with somebody that I used to work with at one of my previous company, several years ago. We hit it off great because we had mutual respect for each other at that time. We have seen each other on Facebook. We started talking and reconnecting because we both have a show. We’ve started bouncing ideas back and forth. I’m like, “Let’s give it another avenue of communication.” What I’m curious about is, what was the a-ha moment that got you into this whole relationship aspect of that?
It’s been a couple of a-ha moments, Jordan. I grew up relationship-driven and able to create relationships. I moved around three continents before I was nine. It made me into this kid that always was like, “How do I belong? How do I make friends in school? How to make friends with other people?” Up until my early 30s, I used that gift, this ability that I came with and that I naturally bought into. I used it to serve myself. In my early 30s, I got involved with the young professional groups for charities. I started this young professional group for Habitat for Humanity. I started a couple of other young professional groups. I got on the boards of multiple charities.
At some point, as I aged into my early 30s, I started going through this issue where before I could always connect with guys like you and me of our age. Once I started being forced into intergenerational relationships because I was on the boards of these charities, the most influential people in town or on the board of charities and they’re typically much older than me. Women, men, I had nothing to talk to them about. It was this realization that connecting with people, starting a conversation with someone is not about you. It’s about how you can serve. The first a-ha moment was this idea that my Jim Carrey shtick of being able to do Ace Ventura whenever I want has a shelf life. If I want to continue to build great relationships, I need to find a way to be of service to people.
The most established people in society, that’s how they got there. Once that happened, I fully bought into that. I went into the world to network in that way. Things started opening up. I got into a Top 20 Under 40 in Brickell Magazine, and then my brother passed away. When my brother passed away from pancreatic cancer, 1,200 people showed up at his funeral. At that point, when I was seeking this whole, like, “How can I provide value to people? How to make relationships?” I realized community is the greatest value you can give people. This showing of 1,200 people to our church made me think, “I never identified as Catholic anymore, but there’s no way I can leave this community because it provides such a resource during our darkest times that helped us get through this stuff.”
“It continues to help us get through everything that we’ve gone through with my brother’s passing.” This idea that my brother, if 1,200 people showed up to his funeral, every single one of them that came up to me would tell me, “Your brother’s a guy that lights up a room, that brings people together, and that makes everybody feel comfortable.” I never saw that in him. I always saw my older brother as like, “If Bert did this, then I don’t want to do that. I got to do this.” He was always like an anti-North Star. The big realization was people around you have much more value to offer other people than you give them credit for it. You just got to look for it. I immediately was like, “What else am I missing?”
Building Relationships: All these things that are happening that allow us to keep up with and nurture and maintain more relationships than we’ve ever had before have completely transformed our society on a personal and business level.
I was on this path. I knew that I wanted to provide value. I knew the community was a value. I knew everybody around me has the most value to offer for everyone else. In my career, I had plateaued. I had gotten acquired. I had this green building consulting company. I got acquired by my biggest client. I won in house as Director of Sustainability for Hospital Developer. At a certain point, I was like in a hole without a career path. I was getting handsomely compensated, but I wasn’t growing as a person. My CEO got invited to speak on a panel about smart cities. He decided, last minute, he didn’t want to go. It’s like in 45 minutes, “Pablo, go drive to Downtown Miami. Find parking and show up to this panel.” I’m like, “You know what I’m talking about.”
I get there and it’s in front of the Economic Development Agency of Miami called the Beacon Council. I share the stage with the head of Latin America for Cisco Systems and the head of the Smart Cities Initiative for the World Bank, and me, who felt at a dead-end in my career in my early 30s. When I come off that stage, there was a line of six people deep waiting to talk to me. As I was talking to everybody, I was like, “Everybody here thinks I’m more important than I am. What’s happening?” At this time, I care enough about influence and befriending people that I’ve studied the brain. I know that the brain justifies what it sees. If you’re on a stage and people are in an audience, the people in the audience automatically attribute extra value and credibility to whatever you’re saying.
They’re like, “They must know what he’s talking about because he’s there and I’m here.” It’s the same reason they tell you don’t believe everything you see on TV or don’t believe everything you read in an email, because when you’re consuming something, you give it this value. On top of that, being on stage with these people of a certain ilk made me guilty by association. I saw that trick and I’m like, “If I’m trying to provide value, value is community and the way that you can do this is by sharing the value people have, then what I need to do is leverage stages and put people on a stage to showcase their value to people that are seeking it.” That’s what set me on this journey. It got amplified when I realized that content. What we’re doing right now is there are stages everywhere now.
Be a kingmaker than a king.
That panel was a stage. This live stream is a stage. The show that you’re going to make afterward is a stage. Whatever Instagram little clip that you clip of us talking becomes a stage. An email list and blog is a stage. I think of text intros as a stage. It’s how you can turn things into a stage so that when people receive it, you are validating somebody’s superpower to somebody else that you think is useful for. Once I got those pieces together, that’s what brought in the whole concept of this relationship flywheel, which the three tenets are value, relationships, and content. In the middle of it is the stage where you can showcase it all and it all goes around.
That is fair because you took these negative situations. What I’ve noticed in my career in alignment, you see these things and there’s no turning back. You keep pushing forward. You clear that one hurdle, and then the next thing comes up and you’re like, “I’m struggling with this, but I got to know how to collect this.” It’s part of a web of so many different avenues. We’ll put in the fact that we are in line to be able to choose all these different avenues that allow us to receive and produce our message and capture that audience who wants to receive that information. Keep in mind, that person needs to be open to want to receive that information. Not everybody wants to receive that information. I hear people talk about Garry Vee like, “I heard you’ve met him. You hung out with him. I like his stuff.” You have some people who don’t like his stuff, but he’s telling it like it is. He doesn’t care what people think. That’s what you have to think about, is not everybody is going to like what you have to say and that’s okay.
You brought up a couple of good points there. One is the subject of alignment is one that I find to be integral to long-term happiness. For me, what sent me on this journey, Jordan was this idea that from the outside looking in, it looked like I was successful, but I internally felt like I was falling upwards. I felt like I was leaving a lot of meat on the bone in my career and in the things that I learned. I spent fifteen years in construction. I can’t explain to you anything about construction except for the concepts of green building and some things about contracts. I don’t know how to build anything. I felt like that was wasted time because I wasn’t passionate about it.
When I took this big leap, which is when you and I met, when I decided to leave my construction career and go be VP of Business Development for an eCommerce software, I had this conversation with my dad. My dad’s like, “I walked away from being offered $130,000 a year and to take over the business development division of a new construction company that was coming to town with a great reputation, great culture, all this stuff.” My dad’s like, “That’s the move you got to make, not this risky startup move.” I told him, “This isn’t about what you see on paper, dad. This is because I know something is missing in my life and I need to test myself to know if I’m going to find it from within or I need to settle on this thing. I’m not ready to settle on it.”
Ever since, I’ve been in this space of alignment, which to me is a four-step process, it’s figuring out what your superpower is, what you’re good at that you love doing, then figuring out how to use that to serve other people, you hear that in my story as well. Once you figure out how to serve other people with it, you figure out how to monetize it in an authentic way. In a way, that doesn’t feel like it’s cheapening. My superpower of making people friends with each other. At first, when I was trying to build a business around people like charge for introductions, have a paying mastermind, I’m like, “That doesn’t feel genuine to me.” I had to keep iterating through it.
Once I hit that, which was this Relationship Flywheel service, and I got one client that it’s worked as a home run, build and scale a business around it. If you’re building and scaling a business that’s based on you using your superpower to serve as a thing that drives the business, I wake up so energized. I leave no meat on the bone. I’m ready to eat. I’m doing stuff that I never thought I was capable of doing in the world of discipline because I’m so into what I’m doing that putting in the work, putting in the discipline, and working 60, 70 hours a week feels like fun. Alignment is super key. The key to finding it is seeking it. I know a bunch of people that I’ve listened to Gary Vee. I happened to listen to Gary Vee for the first time right before that conversation with my dad. I was at a Green Building Conference.
Building Relationships: The brain justifies what it sees. So, if you’re on a stage and people are in an audience, the people in the audience automatically attribute extra value, extra credibility to whatever you’re saying.
I was talking to this developer, trying to get his business. I’m like, “What podcasts do you listen to?” He’s like, “This guy, Gary Vee. Have you heard of him?” I’m like, “No, I’ll check him out.” I didn’t like him at first because I don’t like the Jets, but as I listened to his message, I realized two things. Number one, everything that I’ve been saying of leading with value in a way to create a business is what this man is doing and he is an unquestioned success story, alpha male. This isn’t Mr. Hippie guy that’s saying it. Two, at the time, he was talking a lot about this idea that the people around you that care about you the most, their priority is for you to be safe and for you to not suffer.
When you are in growth mode and you are seeking something, the people that love you the most are sometimes not aligned with your priorities. It’s coming from a good place. They’re giving you the best advice that they have to give, but if you’re trying to grow and someone’s trying to keep you safe, you are headbutting on what your priorities are. Being able to say, “I love you. Thank you for trying to keep me safe, but I’m going to do this other thing. It doesn’t mean that what you’re doing is wrong. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. It doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate everything. I need to do this because right now, this is my priority and they differ,” was everything in my ear when Gary Vee got into my life.
That last portion is on point because I’ve been there. As an example, I used to live in Miami back in 2004, 2005. I got booked for Target. I was doing this overnight management trading program. Everybody kept saying to me, “Don’t go into retail.” I moved to Miami to go work for Target. I wanted to be in Florida. I wanted to be close to my brother. I used to have a printing company. I sold the printing company and everybody’s saying, “What the hell are you doing?” I’m like, “It’s me. I’m searching for something. Let me find it.” That didn’t work out. When I got my real estate license, everybody was like, “Why are you doing this real estate thing?” I went and did it anyway.
I had this conversation with my dad. I remember him saying to me, “Jordan, go get your personal training certification.” This was before I was even in Miami. It didn’t make sense to me. Sure enough, I did the real estate thing. That didn’t work out. I moved back home in Michigan. Next thing I know, I got my personal training certification. Right there, I thought, “I’m doing what I want to do and I love it.” It’s been a pleasure. I’m doing it for many years now. I got CrossFit gym. That puts me in alignment that is found with this passion. If I’m working 50, 60 hours a week, I don’t care. It doesn’t feel like a job to me. Now that I think about it, I think of this in that sense. That’s what brings me joy and fulfillment, a lot of it.
I see you as a guy that has a passion for growth and bettering yourself. What better profession than to own a CrossFit gym? You are putting people through micro-challenges every single day that forces them to change their mindset and surpass it. You have used your love for that to serve other people with it. You’ve built a business around that. It makes perfect sense to me. I think it’s great.
I did not think of it that way, but the way you said that was absolutely perfect. I love it. Let’s go back. I believe you started out in construction. What are you doing do to focus? I’m curious how you transitioned this whole thing.
I went to the University of Florida. I graduated. I got a job at a career fair. That was this like executive and training program for a Fortune 500 construction company. It was the early 2000s. The world was under construction. I was debating between that and a sales job with Pepsi Bottling Group. My parents were like, “Construction is the safe career. Take the safe route. You want to be a manager, not a salesperson.” I’m like, “Done.” I remember in that program, I was going to have to move around 2 or 3 separate times because you learn everything in operations and they move you around. I remember being in that interview and them saying, “Are you willing to move to California?”
You may call it unconventional, but everything we do is from iteration.
I was like, “I don’t care. I’m done with Miami, but if you can start me in Miami and then move me somewhere, then my mom won’t be mad at me.” They started me in Miami. I was in this program. This is supposed to be like a three-year program. About a year and a quarter into it, the VP of the West Coast hears about me because my division manager, the guy that was grooming me, was a great storyteller. I forged a great relationship with him. While they’re all in their exec training and he’s like, “My new manager in training, Pablo Gonzalez.” He does the sales job. I drive up to eat dinner with the VP of the West Coast from a phone call. I drive up three hours to Orlando. I meet with them at 7:30. By 10:30, I was like five scotches into it with him.
Eleven days later, I was living in California. I take over Orange County. I serve as Assistant Manager in this riverside location. I then take over the Orange County division, all under two years. At 25 years old, I’m managing a $15 million business with around 100 employees. I grew that to more of like an $18 million business, with about 130 employees. We started the first-ever paint division in the entire company out of there. I became a green building expert while I was there because we started this partnership with GE about high-performing homes. The moment they launched that, I went up to the VP and I was like, “I love sustainability. I’ve never been more pumped about anything. I want to do this.” They gave me the opportunity to head this thing regionally while I ran my division and then I was able to break off from that.
The world ended in 2008. At that point, I became a green building expert and I thought, “I’ve popped the top on what I want to do here. I don’t want to be an operator in construction. I want to be this green building person.” Green building, at the end of the day, is best practices construction. It’s building something that’s going to take as little to build. It’s going to last as long as possible and is this cheap to operate and it’s comfortable to be in. That’s what green building is. I was going to start this green building company in California, consulting for green building in California. My dad went golfing with some man that was developing the first green high-rise in Miami.
He was talking to him about me. My dad called me up right afterward. He was like, “You can be 1 out of 200 yahoos and So Cal doing this or you can come back to Miami and be the guy. This man, Bill Holly, wants to take a meeting with you.” I come back to Miami. I cut a deal with this guy. I did his consulting work. Plus, he gave me office space, plus access to those commercial realtors as lead generation. Two years in, I have my biggest client and my biggest referral source competing to buy me out. I ended up taking the safe route and going in-house as director of sustainability for this hospital, university developer. I become Director of Sustainability. A couple of years in, I had it dialed in.
I’m not working very hard, but I’m looking for ways to add more value. That’s when the stage thing hits me. The first thing I did after that stage thing happened to me was, I reached out to this developer in Coral Gables that was building a high-rise across from UM on top of the Metrorail station. People in Coral Gables don’t want to high-rise because it’s a high-income, low-density residential area. Nobody wants a high-rise in their backyard. It’s on a Metrorail station across from the University of Miami. It’s something called transit-oriented development. I knew that they were incentivizing public transportation, which you and I both know Miami desperately needs. I reached out to this developer who every contractor in town was trying to get the business from, but I didn’t call him about getting the business.
I called him, I said, “I got these groups of young professionals that I want to teach about transit-oriented development. I want to have a panel conversation about it, put you on stage with a politician on the board of one of my charities and the land use attorney that knows a lot about the subject. Let’s talk about how much we need this stuff.” He says yes. He shows up. It’s a small event. One week later, he’s in the office talking about, “Are you guys going to bid on this $60 million project or what?” We backdoored this whole process. That turned me into a business developer in the construction world. At that point, I didn’t shut up about this idea of value-added business development through stages. That was my language at the time. That’s when I met the gentleman that I ended up pairing up with to be the VP of business development for the eCommerce company.
I took the opportunity. I was like, “If I can take this community creation thing from a local scale to a digital scale, I’m cooking with grease. I can figure out if I can scale this thing.” That’s what happened in that year. The partnership didn’t end up being right, but everything that I wanted to do in local events, I was doing on Zoom call in 2018 and then repurposing that content to feed the front end of the beast. At that point, end of that year, I realized a partnership wasn’t right. I said, “I’m happy that we did this. I learned a lot. I feel like I took a company that was a dumpster fire and set it up in a nice position.”
I was out on a limb. I decided to snap the limb off and build the airplane on the way down. Since early 2019, I took a 90-day purposeful pause to detox and figure out where I want to be in ten years and reverse engineer. I booked four conferences during that time. I started going conference to conference talking about, “This is what I learned. This is what I’m thinking about doing.” In that 90-day period, I came back with 450 new contacts that I have on a spreadsheet. That was my new list that I created in hand-to-hand combat. It was 450 iterations of, “I’m thinking about this.” They’re like, “What about this?” I’m like, “I’m thinking about this. What about that?”
Building Relationships: Finding out what works and what doesn’t work is the name of the game. Keep what works, move on with it, and release what doesn’t work, and learn from it. There’s really no other way.
It was iterate. By July, I got my first client when I was selling community. It was how to create an online community for him that he could turn into recurring revenue and parlay it with a mastermind and make some content out of it. By the end of 2019, I was talking to this JWB Company that was looking for a better way to get leads. Instead of having a webinar, “How do we create a show about your clientele that educates, inspires, and entertains them? How do we leverage that platform in a way that allows you to build these key relationships that you’re trying to create and nurture, create a whole bunch of marketing content, and have this giant feedback loop with your clientele that tells you how to serve them in their own words?” That’s where I’m at now.
That’s incredible because you took everything that you did in that construction. You applied it to the eCommerce stuff for a couple of years, then you’re like, “Ninety days, what’s next?” You reverse engineered the whole process. That’s what I’ve been learning, to do something. You have to think of where you want to go, backtrack, and then you could start building out those steps and taking those learning experiences. The fact that you get one out and started talking about it, all of a sudden, you’ve got this content and email lists and whatnot. That’s the opposite. Not a typical way of doing something with defense. It literally proved your point of the whole relationship community aspect of it.
If you take a step back before that, it’s using stuff that I was learning by volunteering into my career and then implemented that into my career, into business development from there onto eCommerce, then from there start a business around it. Jordan, what I found is that the curve is exponential. As long as you’re seeking those steps that we described, finding your superpower, it may take you 37 years. It took me 37 years. After that, it was like, “How do I serve others with it? One year. How do I monetize it? Five years. How do I build a business around it big time? One year.” It’s not an equal thing. You may call it unconventional.
Everything we do is from iteration. You were not born good at motivating people. You have consistently refined your message and your practice at it and that’s what’s gotten you here. Now that you’re starting a show, you’re not born good at it. You’re going to be much better in a year than you are right now, but you’ve got to start, iterate, and talk to people and get feedback and whatnot. At the end of the day, to me, the content game is a way to create infinite iterations. I used to have to go and volunteer for a charity for a year, to then be the head of a committee, to then have two events a year where I get an opportunity to introduce people on stage and run my circus. Now you can do that in five minutes on Clubhouse. People show up and you get that iteration and the feedback from our people into what I’m saying. “Am I bringing value? What’s the feedback I’m getting?” That’s what the internet represents to me. It’s this giant feedback mechanism that has taken away the friction to that.
Know who you’re going to serve, then understand what they need.
There are so many lessons to learn from this. To be able to speak about it, especially as somebody who puts a treaty on it, that’s incredible. You know how hard it is for people to take that step. The biggest thing is we need to try. That’s one of the things that I’ve learned through the years of my speaking. For me, everything is more of a challenge to be done because I’m not going to see the human thing, so I got up and I’ll use my sixth sense in these types of situations and buckle down and be okay where I need to go. That’s what I’m trying to do by teaching people to try things, keep going up. “Would you try one thing? Did it work?” “Yes.” “Did it not work? Why did it not work?” There you go.
It’s finding out what works and what doesn’t work is the name of the game. That’s it, and then keeping what works and moving on with it and releasing what doesn’t work and learning from it. There’s no other way.
Keep trying. My motto has always been, never take no for an answer. I live by that. That’s the way I get by. Pablo, it’s been a pleasure. I’ve learned a lot from you. I hope we can do this again soon.
Jordan, can I give you the formula of the relationship flywheel so that you can implement it?
Yes.
For me, turning a content stream into a relationship flywheel is approaching it from that value, relationship content, like intersection. The idea is, one, you know who you’re going to serve, then understands what they need. Whatever you’re doing, your solution, your gym, your speaking career is one part of what the people that you’re trying to serve needs. They also have a whole another ecosystem around the stuff that you’re solving. Once you realize that and you have the humility to understand you’re only part of the equation, take inventory in the people that you’re serving your network and anybody that’s at arm’s length that you can reach with a message of how you can put them in front of the people that you’re trying to serve.
That is the value piece. I know that you’re trying to, at the end of the day, bring in people into your gym and getting you on stages to speak, tell your message, and motivate people are part of it. There is an intersection of event organizers or people that have platforms that want to learn about fitness and want to know about that type of stuff. Within your community of CrossFitters, I’m sure there are people that specialize in other motivational aspects, financial planning, growth, whatever. Understanding that you can serve with the rest of your clientele and then starting a cadence of the value piece being live streaming on LinkedIn and Facebook. The subject is this. You’re already doing that piece. You’re already finding a valuable thing to talk about with someone and inviting your audience.
Once you are in front of that audience and you are hosting somebody, there are three relationships to pay attention to. You pay attention to the relationship between you and your guests. That is that key relationship that you’re trying to grow, be it an event organizer and you’re trying to find out what’s the best way that speakers and gym owners can get out of their event or why their event is so good. What got them into talking about it? It’s the whole, like, “How can I help you? What’s your superpower? Who can I introduce you to?”
You’re driving that conversation. You’re putting their value out to the world. You then have a relationship with the people in your audience. Anybody that’s in your audience, talk to them as their one person. I think when we’re on TV, we’re thinking that we’re on a stage in front of a group of people, but the likelihood of our friend that’s reading this or will read this episode in the future, they’re probably by themselves at their desks. It’s not you guys or you girls. It’s you. Friend that’s reading, I hope that you’re getting a lot out of this right now. I’m talking to you. It’s that, and then consistently showing up like that, you’ll build that rapport.
Building Relationships: You’ll never start a conversation with anybody. You can only hope to catch up to the conversation happening inside their head and then join it.
That starts becoming this like one-to-many rapport building that you’re doing, where everybody that join you are going to feel like they got an hour of your time, instead of you taking an hour with like the 60 people individually. There’s the relationship between the audience and the guest. Once you start incentivizing and including the audience, if I’m interviewing you, I’m like, “If you’re reading this right now, what can I ask Jordan that I haven’t thought of right now? Let me talk.” A great way to do this is on Zoom webinars because you also are getting people that are opting in and are captivated in and it’s like less friction to contribute, but then you’re taking the questions and not just asking the question. You’re phrasing the question as an introduction.
“Jordan’s with us on this show. He’s a gym owner in Michigan who’s hearing impaired and he’s a motivational guy. He’s got a question about, in your event, how do you think about this?” You phrase that as a question. When you’re on the stage, you’re driving, be conscious of those three relationships. One to guest, one to audience, and guests to audience. Try to be facilitating those relationships so that they’re growing, and then you take that interaction. What we’re doing right now, which I’m going to teach you to do at some point when we got some time together, but you take this call and you turn this into your branded YouTube show like you’re doing, the show that you’re doing. The ten best minutes part for YouTube so it’s shorter content, the five best back and forwards between you of learning moments and you recontextualizing, or me telling an interesting story for Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
The five best questions from the audience where you’re including the person’s name in the question so that they’re all getting a piece of that stage and making it onto all the other micro stages. You turn it into an email for your list of, “Today, we learned this from this person.” You expand that into an SEO-optimized blog. You take the best one-liners like, “I’d rather be a kingmaker than a kingmaker.” You make that into a quote card. You don’t learn anything without iteration. You make those things into quote cards. You’re taking this like one seed of a relationship that you’re building and now you’re building three relationships. On top of that, you’re planting that seed in twenty different pots in six different ecosystems and they’re able to be watered.
As long as you’re doing that, you’re asked for guests that you want on the show. It matters less about audience and more about, “I’m making all this marketing material for you. It’s about you.” You start getting better guests with more value to offer. You get more audiences and more relationships that you’re enabling. The more audience and relationships, the more questions that you’re getting that you get to repurpose to contextualize exactly what the value you have to offer to all these different people. It then turns into a flywheel. It keeps feeding itself. All of that stuff serves as the nuclear reaction at the center point of your business and your life that’s going to continue to attract people.
Anybody that’s out here, if they want to know more, they take the next step. If they saw the Instagram clip, they’re like, “Now I want to download the podcast.” If they liked the podcast, “Now I want to tune in live.” If they tune in live, then they’re like, “I want to ask a question,” They make it onto the content. They’re forwarding the piece where they made it onto their friends, which then gets another friend on. When you were posting it on LinkedIn or Instagram and you’re tagging them, people that follow them see it. They start opting in. It adds and adds. That’s the key to all of it, was understanding that the super connectors in society are the people that meet somebody, find out what they’re about, and then go introduce them to their network. We can do that all in one swift interaction of creating content, repurposing it, and blasting it out. You’re introducing people at scale and creating relationships when you’re not even around.
That’s a wonderful summary of that. It makes sense. There are a lot of moving parts, but it helps us out of one big move to this.
When you walk into a room full of people, you’re walking into a bookstore because you can learn from anybody.
It took me three years to get to the point where I can do it for myself. You are taking the first start. The first start is recorded conversations with people that you think have value to offer other people that you know. As long as you’re doing that and you can post them raw wherever you want, on Facebook, on YouTube, on your podcast, you can publish it. As long as you start doing that, you’re starting to develop your stage and this library of content that you can use whenever. You start being guilty by association with intelligent people that have value to offer. My move was the Gary Vee move.
My move was to be like, “This is what I got to do. I’m going to go pitch doing this to somebody else so that they foot the bill for me to build a machine underneath me.” That’s my service. Once I started executing it for a company, then I was able to invest instead of taking home that profit, invest in my team and now I have that machine pointed towards me. I have a machine that I cannot just serve one client. I can serve many clients and I can continue to build. My part of it also has the added benefit that I’m also the face of the content of this amazing company. That’s opened up a whole other door by myself. I now have my stage and their stage. It’s becoming an exponential flywheel.
In all of that, I believe you have a book that you’re working on, too.
My buddy Andrew Izumi from Conversion Publishing, he’s already been brought on. The check has been cut. We have the structure of the book already in place. We’re writing it now. Hopefully, that’s done in the next 90 to 120 days.
That’s the thing. You’ve got all this content. Putting it all together, it’s complicated, but it’s easier because you have all the information. You’re taking all of those learning experiences. Somebody was on a different podcast. The guy was saying that the people that are on the podcast he’s interviewing are the mentor when he’s the mentee. I’m learning from you. You, being the mentor and me the mentee, or vice versa.
If you take to heart that whole, “Every man I meet is in some way my superior. In that, I can learn from him,” quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson, when you walk into a room full of people, you’re walking into a bookstore. You can learn from anybody. A conference is a library. To your point, the documentation of it, the content of it, now that I’m writing this book, I have a ghostwriter helping me do it, but I don’t have to tell him everything. I can send him this interview and be like, “Take this story that I told Jordan about, like my progression, and make that into a chapter.”
Once you start creating the pillar content, which is either you recording yourself speaking, or you recording yourself talking to other people, that is an asset that will never go away. You can always use that in the future. You can turn that into multiple other things, be it a book or a magazine, or use it for ideas for your blog or for your email lists. It’s this recontextualization. The context is important. I see these different contexts as different languages. Some people speak Instagram. Some people speak blog. Some people speak podcasts. I speak podcast. I’m learning stuff as I’m doing other things because I have full-on ADD.
For me, the invention of the audiobook and podcast has been a game-changer for the way that I learn. The idea is that in the more languages that you’re publishing, the higher chance you have to reach the person seeking, because there’s only a certain amount of people seeking in one language, then there’s a certain amount of people seeking in the other. Adding that context and making it native to the platform that you’re distributing it on increases the ability to catch up to the conversation happening in someone’s head. I like to say that you’ll never start a conversation with anybody. You can only hope to catch up to the conversation happening inside their head. Join it then you can chart a path together. Everything is context.
That last bit of the summary of that whole content portion, that opens it up a little bit for me in what I’m trying to do and what my next step is going to be with that. I’m very thankful to be able to have you on this show. We’ll be able to play around with that and move forward.
Jordan, I know that you’ve reached out to me for some advice. The best advice I can give you is to keep going. I finished the story of Pixar, which is Creativity, Inc. In chapter two, they talk about, “For all the dedication we put into the artistry and the design of things, nothing matters without the story.” What you’re doing right now is the perfect path. Whatever microphone you have doesn’t matter. Whatever design and context you can put into your social media points don’t matter. Keep doing it. Keep listening to the feedback. In time, you’re going to build these capabilities to make it better, but this core piece of content that you’re creating right now, that’s never going to go away. I’m now at the point where I have everything I do, every call that I record, I send it to my team. They edit it, they repurpose it or whatever. I’m really close to getting to the point of having a team going over old content and recycling, like the Gary Vee thing. This is an asset that you’re creating. Keep creating this asset and keep iterating. You’re doing great.
I plan on doing that. That gives me more motivation. Go build your team of, “I just want to help people.” We started with that and we’re ending with that. That’s absolutely perfect. This is fabulous. I hope we can continue this conversation at a different time. I like to do it maybe in a year. Let’s revisit and do this again. We’ll see where we are both at about that.
The goal is in a year to be embarrassed of who we were a year ago. That’s how much we’re going to grow. Let’s do it. I’m looking forward to it.
Thank you again.
You, too. I appreciate you.
IMPORTANT LINKS:
Building CommunityCareer VolunteerismContent CreationCreating ValueProviding ValueServing OthersJon Dwoskin – Business Coach/Author/Speaker/Podcaster – The Jon Dwoskin ExperienceOne-On-One Care: Listening To Clients’ Needs With Mike Pizzi
