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Finding a Unique Voice for Thought Leadership | Chris Clews | 220
Pop Culture in Thought Leadership
An interview with Chris Clews about becoming a full-time Thought Leader using 80’s pop culture as message.
Today’s guest is Chris Clews, a speaker, marketing consultant, and author of What 80s Pop Culture Teaches Us About Today’s Workplace. Chris takes us on a journey from having 23 years in corporate marketing to being a Thought Leader spreading his message using 80s pop culture to connect with audiences in ways they will retain.
Three Key Takeaways from the Interview:
- How to move from a corporate position to independent Thought Leader.
- When to make the move from your day job to Thought Leader.
- What you need to do to test your Thought Leadership early on.
Have you discovered your unique voice in thought leadership? Who is your target audience? Thought Leadership Leverage can help you find your voice and present your content in a long-term, highly precise campaign that will increase the public awareness of your brand. Find out more.
Transcript
Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast. Today, our guest is Chris Clew. Chris is a speaker, a marketing consultant and the author of the book What 80s Pop Culture Teaches Us About Today’s Workplace. He grew up in Maryland, quintessential child of the 80s. He has it’s relatively new into the speaking world. And what I love is in his bio, they provided me with a quote from the great Ferris Bueller, which is like, Who’s pretty fast? If you don’t stop to look around once in a while, you could miss it. So as another child of the 80s, I welcome Chris aboard. Thanks for coming on board today.
Chris Clew Thanks, Peter. I’ve been really looking forward to this, so I’m super excited to be here.
Peter Winick Great. So this is this would be fun. So now you’ve been at this for how long, Chris?
Chris Clew Well, technically, I’ve been at it for almost just around two years. But I left my corporate job at the end of June, so technically, you know, full time.
Peter Winick At about nine month clip. Okay. So this is interesting because I want to talk about that journey a little bit. So you so you did the corporate thing that was working out pretty well. And then you started to sort of pre-launch right. And test the waters instead of waking up one day and just saying, take this job and, you know. Yeah, but I think that’s an age movie, actually. I think I’m on fire.
Chris Clew Yeah, I think you’re right. Actually. I think we go from 9 to 5.
Peter Winick Maybe, or. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, 80s trivia, we could go nuts. So tell me about it. Sort of. You wake up one day or there’s things bubbling or whatever, and you say, I want to move from being a marketing consultant to X. Yeah, so let’s start there. How did that sure coconuts fell on your head.
Chris Clew I spent 23 years in corporate marketing and I did. I do have a huge passion for marketing. I do love marketing, but a couple of years ago, say, you know, my mid-forties, I started to think, is there something else out there for me? And I do a lot of reading. And I was reading Thoreau, and he says, The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Yeah, I think I don’t know the exact year he said it, but if I’m wrong, it’s somewhere in the 1830s, I think well before the Industrial Revolution, well before people were sitting in cubicles, he was already thinking this way that the mass of men Lee lives a quiet desperation. I felt like I was having a little bit of quiet desperation at that moment. Sure. And if you take it up to the 80s and 1983, The Outsiders came out and Johnny Cage said that I still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. So there are these two quotes out there, this quiet desperation and the still you still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want. And I started thinking about this really, really hard. It kept kind of coming up and bubbling up to the surface for me. I was watching The Breakfast Club and Thunder says Screws fall out all the time. The world’s an imperfect place. And I thought, I’m in an imperfect place right now. What am I going to do to fix it? How can I fix it?
Peter Winick Okay.
Chris Clew I. I don’t know a lot, but I know two things really well. Business in the 80s, and I put them together and created an article What the Breakfast Club teaches us about the workplace. And I put it on LinkedIn and I woke up the next day and people from all over were commenting on it, how much they liked it. And I thought, Wow, maybe I have something here. So I wrote one on Ferris Bueller and work life balance, and that one went really well and I decided to put a book together. So I was still working full time and I was doing this at night. So I would, you know, I’d go to work, I’d go to the gym, come home and eat dinner around 10:00 at night. I’d work till about 2:00 in the morning on my books. I’d get up at six and go to my full time job.
Peter Winick And so did you ever think this was, Hey, I’m doing this and this could become a thing? Or you just sort of followed it, right? So it just sounds like you were throwing some stuff out there. People were intrigued and you just you just let go and went with it is when it evolved.
Chris Clew It was a two part. It was two part. There are two parts to that. So the first part was, yes, it evolved. The second part was, as I saw little pieces evolving, I started thinking, How can I make this move a little faster?
Peter Winick Sure.
Chris Clew I built a website and positioned myself as a speaker. I’d been on stage a lot as a kid. I’d done a lot of stage work as an adult. So get comfortable up there, position myself as a speaker. As I said, the first book started going and I would use my paid time off from my job to go speak at conferences that hired me.
Peter Winick So I want to push on that for a minute. So you knew from life experience that you enjoyed the stage, right? Because that the stage is not for everybody, right? The stage for some is the scariest place in the world. Right. But you knew based on life experience, you kind of dig that. That wasn’t really part of your responsibilities as a corporate guy. But you knew from previous work that you like the stage. What, if any, research did you do to realize like, wait, there’s a whole thing called paid professional speaking, which is sort of the corporate version of, you know, the high school play or something. How did you figure that out?
Chris Clew Yeah, that’s a great question. So I was actually in the process of doing this and I kind of knew about it because as a marketing person, as a head of marketing, my responsibilities were varied. And one of them was the conferences and events. So I knew about hiring speakers. I knew that there were paid speakers and I thought this would be a really interesting. Place for me. I had I thought I had some pretty cool content. I’d been on stage before, and so I had a couple of the things on the checklist that you need to make sure that once somebody said, Hey, we’d like to bring you into our conference. I understood that. I understood that the how the sausage was made, so to speak, and so.
Peter Winick So I want to I want to ask a couple of questions there. So now let’s put on your marketing hat, because one of the things in our we’ve had a couple of conversations over the last month or two get to know you a little bit. You shared your books with me. I love the whole 80s concept and not so much because that’s the time period that I grew up. But the world doesn’t need another speaker. The world doesn’t need another motivational guy. You know, there’s a lot of it and it’s incredibly competitive. And what I like is you put on your marketing hat and said, how do I differentiate? How do I differentiate this product? Me Chris the speaker dude who is good on stage to differentiate it from all the other boxes of cereal on the shelves and talk through that because you could have done, you know, you could have picked lots of different lanes. But one is, you know, you love the 80s and how did you know that anybody would that would even resonate as it from a speaking perspective?
Chris Clew Yeah So I’m a pretty laid back person in general. I always have been. And so you’re right. I looked at the space and I knew from hiring speakers that there were just a couple of categories that most speakers fit in.
Peter Winick Yeah.
Chris Clew And I’m a pretty I like I said, I’m pretty laidback. I like to be relatable. I think it’s pop culture is relatable. That’s my style. And I don’t want to I never wanted to go up on the stage and say, Hey, you can let me show you how to be like me. That’s not my thing. My thing is about let’s talk about something really fun, really unique, really relatable. And at the end of all of this, hopefully what happens is you’ve learned a little bit. You take that information, you retain it, and you take it back to your workplace and you use it at the situation that’s appropriate. And so that was my goal all along. How do I create content and create a personality that resonates and is written about and is relatable? Because I think a lot of times I’ve been to a lot of conferences like you and you hear a lot of information, but how much you actually remember, how much do you actually apply and associate with the things that you heard? And so that’s where the 80s pop culture comes in. If I can if I can get up on stage and talk to people about inclusion, for example, and use it in the context of chunk and forth in The Goonies, then when that opportunity presents itself in the workplace or even in your life, by the way, if it presents itself in your life and you have that opportunity to be inclusive and you think about it, it hits you, well, wait a minute, chunk and slot inclusion. There’s that moment where hopefully you’re able to tie the two together.
Peter Winick Sure. And there’s a little bit of shaking up the expectations, right? So if I am an attendee at a conference and you’re marketed as the 80s guy, right? So immediately you sort of smile. Right? Right. It’s not, you know, versus not that inclusion is not an important topic, but hey, we’re going to give you a 45 minute lecture on diversity inclusion in the workplace. You sort of mindset is set for, okay, all right. This is, you know, whatever but fun, engaging, nostalgic, but you’re not stimulating those emotional pieces. So I think there’s a little bit of a big switch and a good way of getting me excited about doing something nostalgic and fun for my adolescent. But there’s actually you’re extracting leadership lessons, life lessons, sales life lessons, business lessons in a creative way. So how did you then because right now, if we’re taking this in a linear way, it’s a hypothesis. Hey, this might be fun, right? Yeah. How did you then test it? Because the real world might say, Yeah, maybe not so much.
Chris Clew Yeah, that’s a that’s a great question as well. So I took opportunities to get on stage for free.
Peter Winick Okay.
Chris Clew And, and I was able to test it in that format. So I was able to go to some smaller conferences, some smaller events in my local area. And I said to them, Hey, listen, I have this idea. I’d really like to have an opportunity to speak about it. I’ve got this interesting idea. And as soon as I say the idea of 80s pop culture in the workplace, almost everyone said, Cool, we’ll find a spot for you. That sounds really.
Peter Winick Interesting and you start your day job.
Chris Clew At this point, I start my day job.
Peter Winick Okay, cool.
Chris Clew It’s not my day job.
Peter Winick So my day checks are coming in. Foods right down the rabbit.
Chris Clew Yeah, exactly. Yes. Yes. I wasn’t in that that terrifying spot yet. It was its day slash evening job because it was, you know, a 12, 14 hour job a day. So I was yeah, I once I said that, then people thought, this is interesting. I’ve never heard this before. To your point about being unique and different, I’ve never heard this before. And so it was up to me to be ready and prepared to deliver it in a way that was intriguing. That was fun, that was relatable.
Peter Winick Okay.
Chris Clew And I call it like a laughing.
Peter Winick If you’re enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you’d like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave us a review and share it with your friends. We’re available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps as well as at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com forward slash podcasts. So let’s move for a minute from you’ve created this the brand because I think. In my work with my clients, it’s about creating. The platform is a big piece of what we’ve done, what we do with our clients, and it’s a way to differentiate. You’ve branded yourself as these guys love it right now. You have to go out and let’s talk about it because most speakers love to talk about the craft, right? The power of being on stage and the emotional feel and the connection. And I’m not discounting that for a moment. Right. But now you’ve got to sell that stuff, right? Yes. So now you have to. So let’s go through what you need to do. You have to productize it. You have to figure out your market. You have to figure out your pricing, your competition, your outreach. How did you because you didn’t you weren’t one of these guys that fell from the sky. And. Well, he you know, he won the Olympics or he was a fighter pilot or he’s got a New York Times bestselling book. You’re marketing dude, right? And you’re out in this vast, incredibly competitive space of keynote speaking where there’s some people that have done some crazy, amazing things, their name brands, etc., etc.. And here’s a little old Chris go. And you know, like my hero fire, Look at me. How did you go about marketing? How did you actually go about getting the first, let’s say, half a dozen engagements?
Chris Clew Yeah, that’s another great question. Yeah, you’re right. The stage part is easy. The whole idea of Tupac, all eyes on me, you know? I mean, that’s like a whole. That’s a that’s an easy that’s the easy part. You know, you want to be on stage.
Peter Winick Time out. If you’re under 40, Google that you see it’s not the number.
Chris Clew Yeah.
Peter Winick All that crap.
Chris Clew So yeah, you have to take that approach. So yes, the reality was the good news was that I had the marketing background, so I didn’t know how to market, but I had to figure out what it was that I needed to market. So I was lucky in a sense that I had a friend, Kristen Hager, who had a small boutique speaking agency. She had she saw what I was doing on LinkedIn. I knew how to position my brand. I knew that I needed to get the ideas out there, these workplace lessons with ladies out there I started doing on social media and I started tying that back to, Hey, by the way, I talk about this on stage, I’m a speaker, blah, blah, blah. And she saw what I was doing and said, I really like what you do. And tell me a little bit more. I think I can help you on the side here. I can’t take you on full time. Sure. Because you have a full time job, but I can give you some ideas.
Peter Winick Okay.
Chris Clew Well, in the process of that, I was also building out a website listing myself as a speaker, which I knew was a really important thing because when I hired speakers in the past, I always looked for their website. I wanted this website not because I needed to see the best website in the world, but I needed to know that they were active and I needed to know that they had their content out there and that people were paying attention to it.
Peter Winick But you also needed to be able to share it with others in the decision making process. So I’m thinking, bring it in. This dude. Yeah.
Chris Clew And that was the easiest way to do it.
Peter Winick Yep.
Chris Clew So I was lucky in the sense that I had hired speakers in the past. So I think what it took and b, I had somebody who said, Hey, I want to give you a couple of tips here. I can take you full time, but I’ll take a couple of tips and then see I had the marketing background and experience. So actually the first gig, the first case I got, I was on LinkedIn scouring LinkedIn for heads of partnerships, heads of programs, heads of conferences and events. And I came across somebody who was the director of events for an event company.
Peter Winick Okay.
Chris Clew And better 75 events a year. And the reason I did that is because I had worked with their company before in the past, and I went to an account rep and said, Hey, this is what I’m doing and I can I send you my book, my first book? And he said, Yeah, I’d love to see it. He I call him back and say, What do you think this is? I love this. What are you doing with it? I said, Well, I’m speaking. He said, I said, You have somebody I can talk to. This puts me to the right person. I pitch to her. She gives me a few people in her in her stable to speech, to pitch to, and a couple of them took me on as a speaker at their conferences and I was off and running. And that was that was really how I did it. It was grinding it out. It was, you know, looking for the right people. It was going on LinkedIn, scouring to find the right people. But it was also everybody needs somebody to help them. And I had somebody.
Peter Winick So fast forward to the point where you’ve got enough of a pipeline or enough confidence or enough whatever to say, you know what? I’m out of here. I’ve got this is going to work as a full time thing because, you know, it could have went one path of sort of an interesting hobby and maybe get a handful of gigs a year, but keep your day job. But apparently that trajectory happened and is still happening, clearly. So what was that like? Did you have specific metrics in mind that said, if I book X gigs a month for the next five months in a row, then I’ll do it. Or how did you decide when you would make the leap?
Chris Clew Wow. So I think it was more when my mind was made up and that I was ready to make the leap. It wasn’t necessarily about how many things I had lined up. I did want to make sure I had the proper tools, I should say the proper pieces in place. Sure. Obviously had the website.
Peter Winick Yeah, I had.
Chris Clew The book willing to be a manager and help me with speaking gigs. She was ready. When I was ready, I had the second book. It was it was to my publisher Now, the first book I self-published second had a small independent publisher before I had the second book with the publisher. So now that’s going to happen. That’s going to launch in the fall. And so I had these pieces in place and I told my. Off. Once I have these, I need to go there. Need hesitation. And the week that I had finally had all three of those place pieces in place, I put my time in. I didn’t waste any time. I said, This is it. I’m not going to make any excuses. I’m not going to figure out what else. I’m going to go do it.
Peter Winick Well, so let’s talk about that, because I’ve seen too many people say I will launch when the website is perfect or this next speech is perfect, or so there is this combination of doing some of the things that you did in testing the marketplace, which is so so from a risk mitigation standpoint, it wasn’t like total randomness. But there’s also another piece that says, well, just now is the time. My gut tells me, my intuition tells me there’s some logical things that I’ve done to to be able to to get here. And you just got to dive. What is the mix from a business perspective of your bookings coming from bureaux versus Direct? Because sure, for someone new in this space, I want to talk about that because that’s a trend that’s changing a lot.
Chris Clew Awesome. So if I can just go back for one second just because I want to relate it to an 80s movie real quick. So you talked about the aging.
Peter Winick What do you get when you.
Chris Clew Talk about the idea of when is it time, When are you ready? So the movie Ghostbusters, did you know the three main Ghostbusters get fired from their jobs as professors at Columbia University? They don’t know what to do, but they have this this this thing that they haven’t tested and they get asked to go bust, bust their first ghosts, and they’re sitting in the elevator and Venkman says, you know why? We’re each one of us has carried an unlicensed nuclear accelerator on his back. And so here they are out there testing something in in real life, they haven’t even tested it in the lab. And so as they get ready to go, Spangler says, there’s definitely a very slim chance we’ll survive. And Beckman says, I love this plan. I’m excited to be a part of it. Let’s do it right. I think that’s the whole idea of like kind of ready go risk, right? At some point you have to say, I strap this nuclear accelerator on my back. I haven’t tested it, but man, if I don’t go do this at some point it’s just going to sit here. And so I think.
Peter Winick Ghostbusters is proxy for good to great, right? So you’re competing with Jim Collins on that. So it’s good.
Chris Clew Really? Okay. Yeah. So, yeah.
Peter Winick I’m just another myth to bust, I guess.
Chris Clew Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so, I mean, it’s also about, you know, getting fired can be the best thing that happens to you. Sure, sure. The whole other thing in there. So getting back to your bookings and I would say right now, about two thirds of actually three fourths of my bookings are coming through my manager and then about a quarter are coming through me. So that’s roughly where it is right now.
Peter Winick So when you say your manager, what is it? Explain that. Because there’s typically people are booking direct CEO searches, etc., etc., and then there’s bureaus, either your exclusive or non-exclusive you with a bunch of yours. Explain the manager relationship.
Chris Clew Yeah. So Kristen Hager of the Haggar Agency, she has a very small boutique agency. And so she what she’s doing is she’s on the phones each day with her contacts. She’s has the, the event opportunities coming into her. So she’s actually going through them and saying I think that Chris would be a good fit here so and so it’s a good fit there. She’s doing a lot of the legwork that I was doing for six months.
Peter Winick 17 Okay. So she’s actively doing our okay. So I just want to make sure. So let me clarify. That is highly unusual. Yeah, right. So normally and it’s working, so it’s awesome. But normally getting listed with a bureau is a very passive thing to do, right? Because most bureaus and all times to my bureau friends out there, but most agents aren’t going to take a beginner speaker and actively do the outreach. So they’ll put you on their side. They’ll throw you out there for a pitch here and there, but they’re not going to really push, push, push. So you’re in a very fortunate situation there. As we start to run out of time, I would suggest 80s trivia, but I’m going to lose. So I don’t know it’s sort of there’s someone out there now that’s you 2 or 3 years ago maybe they’re thinking and they’re not direct competitors. Let’s just say they’re the 70s guy. What would you say You were the 90s guy, God forbid, right? It’s the grunge guy. What might you suggest? That they do this in a similar manner to what you’ve done and what might they do different than what you’ve done to try to achieve some level of success?
Chris Clew Yeah, that’s another great question. I would say similar in terms of similar, I think what you need to do is you need to figure out how long ever runway you need, number one, to make sure that you can give this the time that it needs to.
Peter Winick Work, because having the bankroll to do it.
Chris Clew Yeah, the bankroll. Yeah. I mean, let’s be honest. You need the finances to try to make this work.
Peter Winick Yep.
Chris Clew The side hustles. That’s a great thing because you can drive Uber. There’s a lot of things that you can do to sustain yourself. You need to make sure you have that runway. That’s really, really important because speaking is not like setting up a storefront and then having a product to sell.
Peter Winick Right, Right.
Chris Clew And then somebody buys it. They like the product and all sudden you’ve sold 15,000 of them in a year.
Peter Winick Yeah, it doesn’t work before.
Chris Clew It doesn’t work that way. I think we everybody knows that. So you’re you are the product, you’re content is the product. That’s a much tougher sell. Then my $10 widget that I have. Yep. That’s what happens. So I think the runway is very important. And that’s rule number two is set goals and stick to them. You said it earlier. Well, I’ll do it when and I’ll do it when. Okay, Now I’ve done this, but then when this happens, I’ll do it. Set a few goals right at the beginning and say, when I’ve hit these marks, I’m going, right. Don’t stop. Because once you say when or if you’re not going to go. And third is I think the biggest thing for me is that if I think about this in the context of time, we all kind of start with a passion or a hobby or an interest. Sure.
Peter Winick Sure.
Chris Clew And our lives take up the bulk of our time, whether it’s your job, your family, If you put all those three things, those three things together, there’s a really small window of hours that you have in your day to do other things. If you find that most of that time is being taken by a hobby or an interest, they’re passionate you love. You might want to take a look at that. Whatever that is.
Peter Winick And I love it at this. Well, this has been awesome. I really appreciate your time. Any last life changing Aids quote? I’d be remiss if I didn’t ask.
Chris Clew Well, you took my life moves pretty fast. I think that’s a really good one. Okay. And I do think that you still have a lot of time to make yourself be what you want by Johnny Cade in The Outsiders is a really, really a really, really important one. And if I if I could do one more because I think there’s an important one with leadership that also comes from the outsiders. And there’s a there’s a scene where Ponyboy is talking about a girl who is with the socios, which is the kind of the rich gang, the greasers. And he says, it seems funny to me that the sunset she saw from her patio and the one I saw from the back steps is the same one. Maybe the two different worlds we lived in weren’t so different. We saw the same sunset. And I think that’s a really important quote for leadership. Remember, no matter how high up you go on the ladder in the corporate world, the speaking world, wherever it is, there are people below you who are seeing the same sunset.
Peter Winick Exactly.
Chris Clew Just remember that we all see the same sunset. And if you keep that in mind, you’ll treat everybody exactly the same.
Peter Winick Well, awesome. Thank you so much, Chris.
Chris Clew This has been great. Appreciate it. Thanks, Peter.
Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our Web site at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com to reach me directly. Feel free to email me at Peter at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.
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