Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 13 – Pete Weissman

Peter Winick

Struggling to grow your thought leadership business? Want to learn a few tips from those who’ve been where you are – and succeeded? Then listen in!

This week’s guest is Pete Weissman, is an award-winning speechwriter, speaker and communications director with nearly 20 years of experience supporting leaders in the White House, United States Senate and Fortune 100 companies. He gives us a deep dive on his experiences growing a thought leadership business, and talks about how he started out in thought leadership.

Pete’s talent for speech-writing and speaking led him to amplify his impact by diversifying his offerings, focusing his audience to a specific client base, and addressing a very specific need within those organization. In this episode, he shares his expertise on how to chart the path for this evolution in your own business and how to find your niche.

If you’re just starting out in thought leadership– or even if you’ve got a few notches on your belt – this is a great episode for learning more.

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick and welcome to Leveraging Thought Leadership with me Peter Winick, the CEO and founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And today my guest is my good friend Pete Weisman from Thought Leader Communications. Welcome, Pete.

Pete Weissman Thank you, Peter. Great to be with you.

Peter Winick Great. Let me give everybody Pete’s official introduction because it’s actually really interesting. So Pete Weisman is an award winning speechwriter. He’s a speaker and he’s a communications director. For the past 20 years, he supported leaders in the White House, the U.S. Senate and Fortune 100 companies. He runs an interesting firm down in Atlanta called Thought Leader Communications. And that firm provides speechwriting, thought leadership and strategic counsel to companies, foundations and associations. And Pete specializes in helping senior execs become recognized as thought leaders in their field. And he studied journalism at Washington And Lee, he was born in South Florida. And of course, he was a high school speech and debate champs. I’m not going to attempt to arm wrestle him verbally today, although maybe I might, and spent three years in the West Wing of the White House. Not the show, but the actual White House worked in the Senate and then moved to Atlanta to work with the chairman and CEO of Coca-Cola. So welcome aboard.

Pete Weissman Thank you, Peter.

Peter Winick Great. So full disclosure, we have worked together, right? And we have been friends for we just talking actually almost five years. So.

Pete Weissman That’s right. Hard to believe.

Peter Winick I think I know you longer than you know your children and you know me. What is it? I know my wife.

Pete Weissman So we do go back. Yeah, you go back.

Peter Winick And one of the cool things about our relationship is we’ve moved from sort of client consultant relationship to things that I love to do is we’ve actually collaborated with other clients bringing both of our skills to the table, and that’s always been fun. It’s been a lot of.

Pete Weissman Those have been some fantastic projects with book authors, CEOs, Folks have really stepped up their profile and influence. Always great to talk with you.

Peter Winick Great. Thank you. So why don’t we start with, you know, again, this is about Leveraging Thought Leadership and how you scale your business and all that. You’re a great example and case study of that. So could you give us a little sense of sort of. You know, Pete world circa 2013 and then maybe slowly take us through the transformation, our evolution to where we are today in 2018.

Pete Weissman Sure, sure. So after I left the Coca-Cola Company, when the chairman and CEO retired, I hung up my own shingle and I was Pete Weisman Communications. And I was a speechwriter for hire. And I was really fortunate through a lot of recommendations and referrals to to get hired to write speeches for executives and authors, folks who had some type of high stakes presentation that they needed to bring in some outside help for. And that was going along fine. But there were a few things going on that made me want to really pivot my business. One, The type of help that I wanted to provide people was much more strategic. And with a single speech, you know, kind of a one off speech that I assist someone with, I really can’t help them. You know, I can help them win the night and win the conference, but I really can help them achieve some of their bigger long term goals. Many of them are change agents in their field and they need help articulating that at larger and larger conferences and forms of media over a couple of years. So I knew that if I just stayed.

Peter Winick But that’s. But let me let me just interrupt you for a second. But that’s not a weakness of yours. It’s a function of the business model, right? So if you retain to hire somebody to write a speech, by definition, that’s a somewhat transactional relationship.

Pete Weissman Exactly. It was often one and done and they were a lot of fun and they were very lucrative. I work with some incredible people who remain clients today. But the business model was really structured as, okay, what’s your speech here? In my writing samples, Here’s the price, let’s do the interview. I’ll give you the draft and we’re kind of done. And, you know, if you have something else in six months or a year, I’d love for you to come back to me. So that was a fine business model for what it was. And there are plenty of people who make a good living doing just that. But I had bigger aspirations to be able to serve people with a deeper and longer relationship. I can do a lot more over the course of several speeches, and I can actually help you figure out where you should be speaking and what action steps you should take to garner more media interest or more industry attention. So there’s a lot more that I could offer, and I wanted these deeper, longer relationships and thought leadership was really the space that I wanted to work in. And just a little bit of background throughout my time working in Washington DC and in the news media and in politics, I saw that there were certain people who were just the go to experts of their field. They were the ones that I went to. They were the ones that that politicians wanted to stand next to. And I was fascinated by how they did this. So I spent about a decade studying them and kind of reverse engineering, and I came up with a model of what they were doing that was different than other leaders who might have been just as smart and doing work. That was just important. But I realized that there are certain things you can do in a certain order to really raise your profile, your influence and your impact. And that became the larger offering that I wanted to bring people.

Peter Winick So let me sort of unpack that a little bit. Old model is you write the speech and you’re doing it. You’re somewhat humble at the highest levels of a typical speechwriter. You’re working with CEOs of Fortune 500 and hundreds of leaders in government. I mean, you’re not chugging it out at the at the, you know, local chapter of the Chamber of Commerce or something. So you’re sort of top of your game there. But even there, you’re going at it going. Yeah, not necessarily a satisfying I would like as I would like. So you had to expand the way that you approached the market so that you can do all the other things that you wanted to which were beyond the scope of the speech, this being strategic, this, this having a methodology, having a process. Right. So that was a process. Yeah.

Pete Weissman And this was this was one of those spots where you really helped me. You looked at my whole process at all the work I did upfront, even before I started writing a word about a client speech or working on an outline or first draft, and you said, You know, Pete, I’m looking at your model and you’re doing all this McKinsey level strategic analysis on the front end that the risks of this audience, who else is going to hear the message? What’s going to become the sound bite, all this high level analysis and thinking on the front end. But then you’re just selling a speech and you said in more polite terms, you should flip that and. Give away the speech but sell the strategic thinking. And that became the foundation for my new business model. And around this time, I switched the name of my company to thought Leader Communications. So that one, it was not just about me as one person because we become a firm and it was important that people see us as a firm, but that the focus was on communications for thought leaders and not just. Speechwriting or one offs?

Peter Winick Well, I think the other thing you did at that time, if I recall correctly, that was interesting, is you put the methodology out there. So one of the things that happened when we worked together is you clearly had a methodology. You weren’t just some, you know, winging it sort of guy. You’re very methodical. You had a process, you’d refined it. It worked, but nobody saw it. It lived only between your ears. And part of what we came to terms with is let’s show the world that you have a methodology about how you go about all this stuff that you do on the front end that isn’t necessarily scribing, right? Not the speechwriting part. But without all that, that’s what made you special, is that you do all that strategic stuff up on the up front and then you move to the next step and then you move to the next step. But once you sort of put it that methodology out there and positioned the firm to not be the show, what changed is not just the look and feel, but what you know. Fast forward a couple of years and what’s different now.

Pete Weissman Everything changed. So people came to me with higher level, bigger needs that could be satisfied over a long term, and that required more than just one speech. And it also affected the pricing because they knew they weren’t shopping for a commodity of a single speech of 2000 or 5000 words. It’s going to be delivered on one night and put away. They were now looking for an entire thought leadership campaign with a series of speeches and placement at venues and amplifying it and creating action steps and building coalitions. So I became, you know, a source for a much higher level, valuable and impactful offering, and that was transformational. And you know, Peter, I just wanted to follow up. You mentioned that we put the model online and folks can see that on my website. It’s diagnose design and deliver. So I used to do all of that kind of in my head. They weren’t aware of all the work that went into it. And now we’ve actually broken it into three discrete steps and folks will hire me for the diagnose phase and I’ll figure out what they really need. Sometimes they don’t even know that they need it. I mean, they think they need a strategy and a speech and a content plan. But it turns out that the executive is perhaps uncomfortable as a speaker and they also need coaching or media training. So that diagnosis allows me to figure out everything it’s going to take for them to reach their goals. And at the end of that first phase will issue a report or a conversation, and they can take the recommendations and run with them on their own. They can use other resources. They can hire us to do all or part of it. But now we’ve really delineated the value in each phase that we bring them instead of selling kind of one speech and you’re done.

Peter Winick So I love it. And now you’ve got a higher price point, longer term engagement. I think you’ve also commoditized or commodified yourself where when I’m if I’m a buyer looking for, you know, my CEO needs a speech, I might look at you in five other sites. The way you come across is different than a typical speechwriter of, Hey, I’m a speechwriter and here’s the five CEOs I’ve worked with. And, you know, here’s a clip. And, you know, rinse, lather, repeat. You’re coming at it in a much more consultative way. And I think it serves you well in terms of it’s differentiated you from the pack and probably allowed you to win engagements that you might have been in a bake off or had to compete on price, God forbid, or something along those lines.

Pete Weissman That’s exactly what used to happen. It doesn’t happen anymore. And what’s interesting now is I compete with really huge global PR firms, but they don’t have the expertise to deliver what the client wants. And gosh, all of my big clients have major global firms on retainer, but they still come to me because of that niche expertise.

Peter Winick And that they’re paying a premium for. So that’s awesome. That’s the transformation. Life is good now. And not that it wasn’t good before. Yeah, but like, tell me a bit because, because you’re, you’ve got a bit of an entrepreneurial streak and a bit of a creative streak as well. What are the other things that you’re doing to get get your name out, get the message out, get the content down. I mean, we talked earlier today before we got online here about a masterclass that you just did. So tell me other ways that you’re packaging and getting the content out there and what that does for you.

Pete Weissman Great. So my economic buyer is someone who works in or runs the communications function of a large organization. It’s a company. It’s a foundation. It’s an association. And they need.

Peter Winick Let me pause you there for a minute because I’m always delighted when someone could clearly articulate who their buyer is with such precision. Because oftentimes when I’m talking to authors and thought leaders and speakers, I hear things like, so many people could benefit from this, or everybody needs this, but, you know, and you’re evolved enough in your business and in your thinking to know, jeez, 99.9% of the world couldn’t care less who you are or what you do, and that’s okay. But you focused everything you do on that corporate buyer that you identified really, really nicely and.

Pete Weissman And it’s interesting. And it took a while to figure that out because the person I’m actually serving is usually the CEO, the chairman, the president, the dean. You know, they have the highest role leading the organization. But the person who’s calling me, the person who’s signing the agreement is it’s usually an SVP of communications or a chief, sometimes a chief marketing officer. They need to help their boss. And the stakes are very high. The margin for error is very small, and they’ve got to move quickly. And to them, bringing in an expert who specializes in this space is the safest path to be. You know, there’s the old saying, probably outdated now, but nobody got ever, ever got fired for hiring IBM. That’s kind of the space we’re in. If you’re executive needs to become a thought leader, if your organization needs to drive change in the field. Thought leader communication is the specialist firm in that.

Peter Winick So you have two constituencies that you have to satisfy that have very, very different needs, right? So you have the SVP who might be a little risk averse, who’s of service to their CEO, who wants to get this done well and also not mess up in front of their boss or put someone in front of their boss that their boss thinks is suboptimal? That’s number one. And then you first have to do a great job for the CEO or the leader.

Pete Weissman Exactly. I build a lot of trust with that head of communications who is my direct economic buyer. I know what they’re going through. I’ve worked for them. I’ve hired outside communications consultants. I’ve managed them. I know the ways the relationship can go wrong, so they know I’m coming at it, understanding their perspective and what’s really important to them. I’m trying to reduce their risk. Show them that this is going to be successful. They can feel safe putting me in front of the CEO, and that means I make a number of commitments. Like I’m not going to share something with the CEO that I haven’t shared with you. First, I’m not going to turn around and criticize you or your leadership when I’m sitting with the CEO. That’s not what I was brought there to do. I’m not there to try to take over whoever your internal or external PR department is. I have no interest in general PR work either.

Peter Winick So let me pause again there. So I want I want folks to notice that the degree that Pete knows his clients, their fears, their needs, their struggles, and then the client, meaning the economic buyer as well as the client being the user in this case. If you can’t articulate the pain points, the struggles, the issues and all of those things that your clients have, you need to stop and figure out how to get as proficient. Is it in it as Pete is? Right? Empathy. Confidence. Trust. Do you even know what’s going on in their head? Do you even know what you need to do to make them successful? I find again, a lot of people are so focused on their own content and methodologies and all that other sort of stuff, they’re not thinking about the risk profile and the struggles and the issues and all that, because it’s really risky to bring someone on board to put in front of your boss that doesn’t perform well. That’s not a fun place to be, particularly in a corporate culture.

Pete Weissman And one of the other big entry points that I’ve identified for my ideal clients is when there’s a leadership transition. So a new executive is coming in. There’s often a desire to help raise that person’s profile, to help them better articulate their vision of change, to make sure, you know, maybe they were the CEOs for a few of those who moved up to be CEO. Right. They need to show competence and an ability to communicate at a much higher level and exercise some different persuasive skills. And that’s a natural point where they want to call in kind of an outside expert who knows the best practices across different industries to provide customer support to the CEO. So I also know that leadership transitions, those are folks when I see a change coming in a company, I’m proactively reaching out with a very personalized email message or LinkedIn note to the head of communications who’s about to have a new boss who wants to make this easy and reduce their risk.

Peter Winick So again, kudos to you because that’s the next phase is you’ve got a pain point that’s clearly identified or a particular point in time where it’s more likely that they’ll need your services, leadership transition, etc.. And again, you know, ask everybody else, can you identify the other pain points and or times whether that’s a product launch, whether that’s a change in market conditions to case a change in leadership. Do you know what those times are? Because it’s not only about you and your content, it’s what is it that’s going to increase the demand from a client that might be outside of the things that you’re looking at? So you’re doing things to monitor, you know, ABC Corp or whatever. Just hired a new CEO. Hey, that’s sort of cool. That’s a higher probability time frame for you to be able to get into the door. So there’s some proactive things you’re going to do there. But let me go back a step, Pete, so I can hire you to write a speech. I can hire you to do larger platform development and ongoing work like you talked about. What are the other ways and I touched on the Masterclass. I don’t think we got there. Other ways that you’re deploying your expertise, your knowledge, your content to the world.

Pete Weissman Sure. So you can bring me in. If you’re a company and you’re having your communications retreat or your annual retreat or a function or meeting for your high performers, you can bring me in to teach them either better communication skills, things like how to write a soundbite, how to be a better presenter, or how to think and communicate like a thought leader. And as a matter of fact, we’re going to be doing a program with a Fortune 50 company later this year where they’re bringing in not just the communications team and some of the PR experts, but business unit heads. So they begin to think in the context of communicating at a higher level as thought leaders. But I’ll go back I’ll go back to the master class. So I have had a lot of luck speaking at communications conferences, especially in executive communications and speechwriting, because those are the those are my peers, first of all. And many of my friends, I’ve been doing this for about 15 years, starting with speechwriting conferences in DC. But those are the people who know when their boss or their CEO needs to perform at a higher level. They need better ideas to share. They need to communicate it more effectively. So I speak at conferences to teach them some of the things that I teach my clients with the hope that they will one day when they have that need, think of me to bring me in. And that has really evolved over the years. I used to give kind of, you know, fruit speeches as many of your clients and the folks you’re interviewing do, because you just want to get in from the right people. And that has evolved to giving paid press conference sessions at communications conferences. So now we’ve got a group of people who’ve paid extra just to get this focused attention on my area of specialty thought leadership communications. What’s nice about the pre conference is it’s a self-selected group. These people really have an interest in it and they have a need for it. But because it’s at the beginning of the conference, I’m going to be there another day or two. I have time to talk with them, meet with them, figure out some plans. So I’ve spoken in Montreal, in D.C. and other places at these three conferences. And one of the nice things about it is I don’t need to fill the room. People are already there.

Peter Winick I love it. So let me unpack some of the wisdom in that. So again, highly targeted, right? You’re not going to accept every invitation, right? You’ve moved it from free to paid, although you probably would still do some free events if it was in a target rich environment, I imagine. And you’re not making the mistake of doing what I would call a drive by. You come in, you do your hour or two hour slot and then boom, you’re gone. You’re carving out the time in your schedule to be there so that if it’s a two day event and you went on Monday morning and I saw you and I’m intrigued now, it’s, you know, lunch that afternoon or the cocktail party that evening. And there’s the dude I saw up there that was pretty smart. I want to go talk to him, as opposed to he just flew off to the next thing. Right. So you’re making yourself available and the conversation that you’re starting with those people I’m imagining is pretty rich because they already know who you are, what you’re about. And unless you know you did something silly on stage, you’ve proved that you’ve got the goods right. You’ve got the expertise. Just by being invited to that event and being able to get up and articulate what you do and how you do and all that other sort of stuff.

Pete Weissman So I’m going to use one of my tools here, which I call Show your 3.0, which is when you’re trying to articulate A thought leading B, you start with the one point out how it was done in the past, what the old model was, why it made sense. Then you switch to 2.0, which is present day. This is the way it’s done. Maybe it’s how retail operates or how health care functions. And then you say why today’s model no longer fits is becoming less sustainable with each passing day. And that’s why we need version 3.0. And there you lay out your vision of the future and how it needs to be structured, why it needs to be changed, and why it will be better. So just to apply that to the recap you shared, 1.0 was I gave free paid free speeches to our target audience. Then I started giving paid speeches to an even more focused and targeted audience. Now I’m kind of in 3.0, and on March 1st, I held a master class here in Atlanta, and we had six people fly in from eight states to spend the day with me on the what, why and how thought leadership and this was this was an impressive group. We had industries, you know, pharma, petroleum, retail, health care. We had three universities, including a top 30. We had insurance, we had a government agency, we had an education foundation. We had, let’s see a medical association. And we had three Fortune 100 companies represented and three Fortune 100 companies represented, all of whom, you know, this was not piggybacking on someone else’s conference. This was coming to Atlanta for the leadership launchpad. And the way I put that together was I partnered with a peer who has an incredible network among the executive. Communications Committee, and we put this program together. And then he reached out to his network, and that yielded a large number of people flying in to take this course. But my goal with this was to be the opposite of transactional. My goal was to build a community. So before they ever came to Atlanta, I did a half hour call with every attendee, so 16 people to understand why they were coming, what they wanted to get out of it. And that allowed me to begin to build a relationship with them, to customize the presentation. So we’d come to a certain slide. And it’s the problem that Joe mentioned, and I’ve got his quote or his comment on the board, one of the one of the fellows from a university who is trying to reposition the university’s reputation said we’ve about PR our way through this as far as we can. Now we need to do something else. And that’s something else we both tackled was thought leadership. So people saw their own quotes, their own names, their own challenges throughout the death. They felt if it felt really relevant to them right when they came to Atlanta, we had a cocktail party the night before. Everyone, you know, made nametags for everyone. We did a dinner the night before, and then afterwards I did a free phone call one week later. Ask Pete anything. You know, anyone who wants to jump in and ask a question, you’re stuck here. You’re trying to explain.

Peter Winick That was that with the group. Or they can call you individually.

Pete Weissman That was the group that was the.

Peter Winick Focus of the group reconvened. So you basically sort of tried to capture that essence of community that you always get when you’re in person and let’s all huddle and you probably use some sort of web based something, whatever. And they can not only ask you questions, but bounce off of each other and you keep that sense of connectedness. That’s brilliant. So very clear.

Pete Weissman We’re going to do we’re going to do another one. Three weeks after, in a sense, three weeks after. And there are other ways folks could take this. You create a private Facebook group, you could create a LinkedIn group. You could use a lot of web based tools. But for me, you know, I’m going to be doing this for 20 or 30 years. I these people have already invested time. I invest in their success and they may not need anything now, although several of them were working on proposals and contracts, which I’m excited about. But I want to be a resource that they can turn to as they change jobs when they go elsewhere.

Peter Winick And you want you want to keep engaged and in contact with them, not just for the short-term visits. The other thing I would observe is you’ve always been thoughtful about playing the long game, right? So, hey, if you don’t get pick up an engagement right now, you know, just statistically that, you know, three years from now, one of those people will move to another company and have a new CEO and it will all pay dividends at some point.

Pete Weissman It’s a it’s a long game, Peter.

Peter Winick Yeah. So let me ask you, as we start to wrap up, give yourself some advice, meaning talk to Pete 10 or 15 years ago, what would you tell not that you’re not young but younger. Pete Weisman to do today. So someone out there that sort of first coming into the game, they’re smart, they’re talented, they’re qualified, but they’re struggling maybe a little bit with the business side of this whole thought leadership world. What would you tell them to do less of or more of?

Pete Weissman Well, a couple of things. Defining yourself is in the beginning is really hard. But it’s so important if you hang up your shingle as kind of a jack of all trades. You’re really going to have trouble connecting with the target clients you need to reach. Got it. And so. So figure out the space that you want to be in. I would say be industry neutral. So a lot of people, you know, used to work just serving travel agents. I think that business is probably going away or just selling ads in the Yellow Pages.

Peter Winick For those of you under 40 Google travel agent.

Pete Weissman Or yellow or.

Peter Winick Yellow Pages for that matter, right?

Pete Weissman I can work. You know, people say, well, do you specialize in a certain industry? No, I want to work across every industry because there’s change in every industry. There are folks I can help everywhere. I would say. Think about not maintaining jobs or gigs, but building a relationship for life. So I have clients who have changed jobs two and three times, and I’m there to help them and cheer them on and support them. And, you know, they do the same for me. And that’s a relationship. And sometimes I can help them when they land a big corporate gig and sometimes I can’t. But that relationship will endure no matter what happens. And that’s incredibly satisfying. And so don’t you go to a conference. Don’t look at it as you know, how many calls can I schedule or think about the long game?

Peter Winick That’s fantastic. Well, I am so glad to have had you on today and to share some of your successes because it’s been an amazing transformation that I’ve been privy to be a part of in some small way over time and watch your work unfold and the business evolve and the cool projects that you’re working on and the fact that we get to do a couple of projects together here and there is always fun, but how do people find you? They just show up at your door late at night with a snack, or what’s the best way to find you?

Pete Weissman Best way to find me is my website which is thought leader communications.com.

Peter Winick Well thanks again. And I would recommend that people reach out to Pete if you are one of the folks that are he’s identified very nicely that he can help or be targeted and if not he’d actually probably take your call anyway if he could be helpful. So thanks so.

Pete Weissman Much. For what? Thanks so much, Peter.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at Peter at Thought Leadership Leverage dot com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.