Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 28- David Burkus

Peter Winick

A lot of people experience a critical disconnect between authors and publishers. Publishers are trying to sell books to bookstores, while authors are trying to sell books to an audience – and the right audience may no longer be primarily made up of people who use brick-and-mortar stores.

Dave Burkus is an early stage venture capitalist with a hands-on background in technology. An entrepreneur for over fifty years, he formed and managed successful businesses in the entertainment and software arenas, and is a respected technology industry leader and spokesperson.

In this episode, he discusses launching his new book, “Friend of a Friend,” and talks about how he built his speaking business, curated his network, and found success. If you want tips on driving business growth, this episode is a great place to start.

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, this is Peter Winnick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us today on the podcast, Leveraging Thought Leadership. And today my guest is Dave Burkus. Dave is a best-selling author. He’s a sought after speaker. He’s business school professor and he was named on the Thinkers 50 as one of the world’s top thought leaders. His new book has just been released recently. It’s called Friend of a Friend. And we’re gonna talk to David today about his. interesting path in the thought leadership world and what he’s observed and what’s he’s doing. And I think we have a lot to learn from David. I’ve learned a lot from him over the time I’ve spent with him over last couple of years. So welcome aboard, David. Thank you for finding the time for us today.

Dave Burkus Yeah, Peter, thank you so much for having me on.

Peter Winick Great, so book, speaking, teaching. What else can we say there? Lots of stuff.

Dave Burkus I mean, it’s probably even in that order too. That’s pretty good.

Peter Winick but it changes every time. So you’ve got a new book that you’re launching, although people never launch old books, so I guess that’s redundant, right? Tell me about what, now this is not your first book, correct? Correct. Right. So give me a sense of what you’re doing to make the book a success, right, in terms of your network and all the things that you’ve, you’re practicing what you preach, I hope, here, so tell me what you are doing to make this book make it rock.

Dave Burkus Yeah, so I mean, I think probably two big things. The first is that and this is sort of an underappreciated lesson until I had a couple under my belt. Everybody says this and you always go, yeah, sure. Well, I can do better. Probably the best thing that you do when you launch book number three to help it is that you have book number one and number two, right? Because you meet connections, you grow your own network. People begin to sort of trust you as an author. Your friends migrate over, et cetera. So that’s probably the biggest one. The second is so the book, to give you a rough idea, the big idea in the book is that networking shouldn’t be about meeting total strangers and having the perfect elevator pitch, it should be about understanding the network that’s already around you. And so we do that by diving deep into some super nerdy but practical and applicable network science principles, one of which really helped with planning out the book. It’s this thing called the majority illusion, right, which is the idea that if you can connect to the most connected people in a certain industry, the blogs that they all read, the publications are on the podcast, they always super connector.

Peter Winick Super connectors, influencers, whatever the word may be, yeah.

Dave Burkus If you can connect to them, then you don’t need to be everywhere. You can look everywhere without actually being everywhere. And so that’s what we’re doing. We’ve got three very specific verticals that we’re going after. This first one, and for the next couple of months, is very much on career, jobs, career advancement, et cetera. I feel weird saying this ahead of time. Then we’re gonna pivot into the sales world and do what we can to be everywhere in that world. And the goal, again, isn’t to be everyone all at once, it’s to be specifically go after specific verticals so that we appear everywhere without actually having to be everywhere so we can stay safe.

Peter Winick So let me pause you for a second there most people launch a book and are not as succinct and focused when they talk about their launch and targeting verticals and the timing etc so let me go let me sort of pull back there because i think there’s a lot to learn how did you how did you decide what those three verticals were when did you decide them and how did that influence the content, and then we’ll get to the launch part.

Dave Burkus Yeah, well, I should say the biggest thing I did was learn by not doing it the first two times, right, that this is probably what we need to do. I think, you know, there’s a couple different mentalities when you’re writing a book, when you writing a nonfiction book, right? Like I hear some good friends of mine will say that you don’t write the book you want to write, write the books that your audience wants to read. So you almost have to start with audience. I have kind of intellectual ADHD. I bounce around to a couple of different topics, right? So creativity was the first one, management was the second one, now it’s on networking. So you can’t really do that. So you have to do the next best thing, which is as you’re writing it, pay attention to, okay, where are my polling stories in? From what industries, from what sectors, where? Where are these principles going to be useful and then remember them? And actually, you know, the biggest struggle for me was I knew career sales and a couple of other verticals. The publisher publishers kind of only think, I think, for about the six months after a book launches. Right. So they were very much the sales teams, the marketing teams and all that were very much just thinking the career thing. And that’s the reason that one came first. I’m excited about it. But also, like people looking for jobs don’t have as much money to buy a book with as do as do sales reps. So wait, let me-

Peter Winick So wait, let me let me go the good way. You’re unpacking so much stuff here. This is amazing. So first of all, there is a disconnect or a misalignment between the author and the publisher. There’s several, but the one that you mentioned is the six month piece, right? So publishers tend to treat books in a seasonal way. You have the spring release, you have a fall release. And then, you know, if your book’s releasing, let’s say in May, by October, they’re no longer thinking about that, right. That’s yesterday’s news, whatever you as the author should be thinking about. It sounds like you are. sort of amortizing the investment you’re making in the book in terms of your time and your energy and effort over at least a multi-year time frame, or at least three years, that your book’s not going to go.

Dave Burkus The best piece of advice I got on this is actually from Daniel Pink, who will talk about it, like he used to be a speechwriter and he’ll talk about like campaigns. When I launch a book, that’s my stump speech. That’s what I’m starting it though, at the pancake, you know, the Fireman’s Pancake fundraiser in Iowa. And that’s what we’re taking all the way to the convention, right? And I kind of think the same way and just like a campaign, you go after different interest groups, et cetera. The thing you have to learn about traditional publishers and I love them. I love my editor. I love the house that I’m with. This is not like a plug for any other hybrid business model. But the thing you’ve got to learn about traditional publishes is that they still consider their customers to be bookstores and their sales reps are targeting bookstores. You know, there’s one guy.

Peter Winick Just for some of our listeners out there under 35, you can Google what a book story is. They used to be really wonderful places to spend an afternoon and browse and all that. Now they sell candles if you can find them, but anyway.

Dave Burkus Right, but a lot of them still have a model where there are sales forces that are calling on the store managers at bookstores. A lot of publishing houses, there’s like one or two people assigned to Amazon, to all of Amazon.

Peter Winick But again, back to alignment, I mean, quasi snarkily, you don’t really care about bookstores. Who are your customers, David? Who are the people that you care about?

Dave Burkus Right, no, that’s exactly right, right? So just to kind of close the loop on this, so if they’re defining their customers as bookstores, what’s the number one thing the sales rep needs to know? What shelf does it go on, right, so you’ve got to pick one. Well, if you think you’ve a message that resonates with multiple different audiences, your best bet is usually, okay, What’s the one that I’m going to get synergy with the publisher will start there. But then we’ve got to take the show on the road and go after these kind of other verticals. So that’s the reason that it’s targeted a bit more like that, that I say, OK, my audience for this book is a couple of different verticals, and I know what I’m doing for the next two years, even if I only get support for the next six months.

Peter Winick No, and I love that. So once the sort of publishing universe labels that book, whatever career or finance or sales, even though it’s applicable across multiple niches, they don’t know how to do that well. So I love the fact that you’re aware enough to go, yeah, okay, I’ll get a run to that for six months, and then I’m gonna force it on the other side. I think the reality is, if you look at the best-selling business books is, that’s all I know as well as non-fiction. I don’t anything about. fiction or any literature, et cetera, but from a business perspective. the best-selling business books of the last 10 or 15 years could easily have been repackaged and rebranded as self-help books 15 years ago. So if you think about listening skills, emotional intelligence, a lot of Dan, you mentioned Pink’s work, et cetera. It’s about positioning, right? And I think you have to make a decision to say, here’s where I’m going. So you’ve got your first niche, you’ve picked that niche. What else are you going to do? So let me fast forward you a little bit. Let’s say it’s whatever, six or eight months from now. and you’ve killed in each of the three niches that you’ve defined, the book is only the entree, right? So you’ve got these three niche markets that you’re going after sequentially, so you’re not diluting the focus. How else can you serve them? How else or how else can they support you?

Dave Burkus Yeah, so I should say that’s probably closer to a year in terms of how long it’s gonna take. And again, the goal is once we define them, then we figure out how can I appear everywhere at each one sort of sequentially. If you do it right, and I actually still don’t believe I’ve done it perfect, I think I’d get closer to what perfect is every time. Yep. then that kind of propels the media attention, the resonance, the word of mouth, all that kind of stuff, that kind puts it into orbit. And then depending on how well you do, that’s how long of a sort of long tail of residual stuff that you have. For me, the predominant revenue generator is speaking, going to conferences and delivering that same message. A couple reasons for that. One is I have a six-year-old and a four-year old, so consulting where I’m gone for multiple nights at a time does not appeal to me right now. It will in future, but it’s just not the right timing. But then there’s a couple other things you can do, but all of that, I think, comes after you get into orbit as you’re sort of coming back down in this long tail. And if you if you do it OK, that tail is about 18 months. If you do well, that’s a little bit longer, three or four years. If you there are some folks, I mean, good to great will never stop selling. Right. It’s a perennial seller, strength finder, et cetera. So there, if you do it perfect, like they did, then. then that’s the model. And like you’re good, you’re actually in orbit, you’re not crashing down to the Pacific Ocean and launching a new one next time. We’re really abusing the launch analogy here, but hey.

Peter Winick Yeah, I know. Yeah, we’re beating it a little bit.

Dave Burkus We’re beating a dead metaphor.

Peter Winick That metaphor. Oh, I like that. I guess I just got schooled by the professor. There we go So let’s try to bring to life a new metaphor, maybe so you’ve got these markets and the sort of the bigger money for you is not necessarily in the Revenue coming from the book, but it’s increasing the awareness that these different markets have for you so they can bring you into keynote

Dave Burkus Yeah, yeah, for my model, yeah. I compare it, the analogy I use for a lot of folks is most non-fiction authors are like rock stars, not that we demand no Brown P&M’s or whatever, but I mean, you don’t make that, musicians have a record deal, we have a book deal, that exists to get the song or the message out there and make your money when you go on tour. There are, there’s authors now that are experimenting with running online courses and workshops and sort of more come to me from home things. And we’ve experimented a little with that. It’s not, it just doesn’t have the level of revenue and the level scale that does traveling around, taking that message into keynotes and what have you. And then if you’re not in that model, there’s the consulting model.

Peter Winick All right, so let me push back on that, because in my work with authors, thought leaders and speakers, it’s actually a little bit of the opposite, right? So speaking is the least scalable business in the world. You can only be in one place at one time. The good news is you’re doing that for a high ticket, right. So on a revenue generated for our basis, it’s great. But what I find is oftentimes the greatest speakers out there. And when I say greatest, meaning they’re really resonating with an audience, the message is hot, they’re on point. They’re creating demand. and they have nothing to supply, right? So you go into, you know, company X and you kill it for a keynote, they’re going, wow, that David guy’s brilliant and everything that he said about networks and friend to friend and all that sort of stuff. How do we take on more of that and teach our organization to do that, right, whether it’s assessment tools or video-based training, et cetera, figuring out that enterprise play, to me, that’s where the big money is. That’s where we help our clients make the most money out there. And again, our model is, okay, let’s look at what you’re doing on the speaking side. figure out how to go between 5 and 10x that in non speaking revenue. How do you how do you do that with yes?

Dave Burkus Yes, but I think a lot of it depends on what you want. So for me, like the idea of having employees and having other people, all of that terrifies me, right? I have one part-time assistant in what, I mean, like you said, speaking, you’re absolutely right. There’s only 365 days at a year, and realistically, you can only stay married and have a good relationship with your kids with far less days on the road, right, than even 365. Presumably, it’s a high-ticket thing in that that ticket price keeps coming up over time. And then you come to that point. If you want to build a business that is bigger and more sustainable, then you’ve got to flip to like I was saying, the consulting model where that’s the entry point, the book and the speech are both the entry points to sort of more backend stuff. Possibly, I mean, I- Amazing, right, possibly. The amazing thing to me is that you can also stop there. Sure. Right, and if you say enough is enough, like if you know that, you can build a model where that is enough to sustain everything else that you’re doing, and so you don’t necessarily have to scale, right? Use a small giant approach versus an enterprise. Sure.

Peter Winick What I would say with the employee piece is there are lots of ways to be creative today in terms of various partnerships and licensing and all these other things that don’t require I think everybody’s worst nightmare is to have eighty employees or something cuz you say oh my god I’m the worst boss ever I don’t wanna deal with that I like the freedom most thought leaders are a little bit more creative maybe introspective whatever they don’t want the routine and the rigidity and the obligations that come with that there are a lot of ways structure. relationships with talent that you need to support you, whether that’s marketing talent or sales or instructional design or whatever, there are ways to do that.

Dave Burkus No, that’s true. It’s still more, I mean, this is why I thank God for people like you, right? It’s more connections that you have to manage, whereas I think what most of the sort of net thought leader space, what we want is a Peter. Like, I don’t want employees not because I don’ know how to do, like, how to withhold income taxes. Like, there’s software that can do that. It’s the number of relationships you have. Yeah, exactly. Right, and so if you can go, okay, who is my COO and they’re not even an employee, they’re a partnership that then is gonna handle the rest of the organization, then that’s huge, right. So yeah. Got it. So.

Peter Winick How important is it for you when you’re thinking through where you’re going? I know given your location, right? You and I have talked about this in the past. You’re in Tulsa, Oklahoma, which is the hotbed of something, I just don’t know why. How do you develop these relationships with all these amazing thought leaders from around the planet and sort of stay connected with them at the levels that you do? Because I find that amazing. Yeah, it’s either San Francisco, LA, New York, whatever. uh over southern California maybe is where people tend to cluster in this universe but you’ve proven that that’s not necessarily so

Dave Burkus Yeah, well, what I like to say, by the way, is that Tulsa makes the top 25 most populated cities in America possible. Thank you. If there weren’t, if there, if they weren’t more than 25 cities, there wouldn’t be a top 25, right? So there you go. No, I mean it’s a combination of a couple different things. So one is I think technology allows us to Stay connected to the sort of in the book I would call them weak endormant ties people, you know, but you don’t need to be next to all the time You just need to see a couple times a year, etc So it makes it possible in that I secretly think that in terms of writing and in terms Of I mean the job of a thought leader is to think yes Right is to come up with said thoughts to then bring to the community to lead them in

Peter Winick Yes, it’s not called regurgitation leadership, right, which is.

Dave Burkus Right exactly and I think that’s easier done in a scenario where you can get some solace and some space right and some people find it possible to do that and still be in that big city for me it’s just like um yeah I don’t I don’ I just don’t um I like space I like green things I like really low cost of living um all of them so yeah well but I mean to go on the cost of living thing so what’s interesting about the world of this whole business space is that There aren’t cost of living adjustments, right? There are there’s sort of set. I mean, if you speaking, there’s sort of said tiers of fee, even in consulting, they’re sort of set containers, et cetera. And they’re not based on where you’re from. They’re based on the value that you’re providing. And so it travels further when you’re in that area. And what I just make a point to do is that the money you save on the cost of a living side, some of that has to come back into a travel budget. So, you know, you all of this mentioned I’m in twice to four times a year, depending on the city. Either because I’m speaking there and then I’m going to stretch it out into another day and reconnect people or I’m making a deliberate trip there for that reason. So that’s a lot of it is it involves some level of travel to do it. But I think that balance of I can be busy and running around and communicating that cluster and then I can withdraw when it comes time to write a book and be in that solace and that silence that I need person.

Peter Winick and it’s obviously working. That’s awesome. So as we start to wind down a little bit here, you’ve shared a lot of interesting stuff with us today. What are the things that you would recommend to David Burkus, minus 10 years, that’s listening now. The younger, assuming there is such a creature. But someone out there that’s thinking about it, starting to write, they’re creative, exploring this. At some point, you sort of have to dive in. This is not a linear career trajectory. I guess you’ve got the teaching piece, which is a lot more logical in terms of progress and all that. But jumping into the space. and saying, I want to do this, I wanna be a thought leader, I wanna an author, I wanted to be a speaker, what would you tell that person?

Dave Burkus Yeah, the teaching piece just makes the transition easier. But you’re right, there is a jump. I think, ironically, to hear this from the guy that lives not in New York, LA, San Francisco, Chicago, what have you, is I think there’s two communities that you need to get deeper embedded in. One is the community people that are already in that space. So for me, that was writing for publications and reaching out to the other writers. That was running a podcast before it was cool to reach out and get to know a lot of people. In that space, I remember we would book like, it’d be a 25 minute podcast, but we’d book an hour and I would end up chatting and picking the brains of all of these people that I wanted to learn lessons from. And then the other is the who community that you’re gonna target. I think, you know, what I said was this very deliberate, we’re going after sort of these three verticals. You need the one, you need to specifically be. You know, I bring this message to this group of people. If you’re going to have any sense of progress or even penetration into that market, you can’t just be nobody. You can’t be Tony Robbins right away. You have to just go, OK, who is what is the one niche that I’m going to appear to be popular and influential in? And then you grow from there. So I think those are the two communities. You have to really be deliberate about knowing the community people who are further down the road than you in that space, but also the community people who consume the knowledge that’s not.

Peter Winick No, that’s well said. One of the things that we work with our clients on is we might have a client that’ll come to us and say, oh, here’s my thing. This is great for everybody. And I’m like, okay, we don’t have a marketing budget for everybody, so we have to find the somebodies that are the most likely to benefit from what you have that we can find cost-effectively, that we service efficiently, right? And then build from there, because, you know, again, the Tony Robbins comparison, if you will. It’s great to compare yourself to something like that, but he’s been at this game for 30 years and has a database and a following and all that other stuff. Most people don’t.

Dave Burkus And how did he grow it? One subject and one vertical at a time.

Peter Winick Yeah, and it was also consumer, not B2B, which is a different game. Well, that’s true. So great stuff. Any last words of wisdom? Oh, I not last like you’re going to die. You’re gonna die tomorrow. I know, right?

Dave Burkus Like, what is my last lecture? I don’t know, I mean, I guess the biggest thing is don’t neglect that community of people that are already doing it. Not all, I means, if you wanna be in this space, you already need to know what everybody else is saying. But truthfully, you want to have that relationship because the thing that continues to weird me out, amaze me, flatter me, and that I’m incredibly gracious for is how much a community of support it is. Authors in particular, it’s the most non-competitive space I’ve ever seen. Nobody ever says like, well, don’t read that because then you won’t have the $14 to buy my book. And even keynote, no, and when you’re speaking at a conference, like there’s gonna be another one next year. So we’re all incredibly generous. So don’t neglect that. That’s a powerful, powerful tool for you to use.

Peter Winick Well, I think you’re 100% right. I think that there are a lot of these sub-communities of authors, and you’re involved in some, I’m involved in, et cetera, where they’re incredibly supportive to one another, even though theoretically they might be competitors by some ridiculous definition. But if you can be incredibly generous and help out your fellow authors and thought leaders and share the knowledge and help promote one another. That works better than most PR that you can buy, quite frankly.

Dave Burkus Yeah, no, exactly right. And I shouldn’t have ended that with a credible, powerful tool you can use because you’re also gonna have to contribute to it. But if you do, being a part of that and the referral network and the support network and even the idea network that you tap into because you are involved in it and generous and giving to it, is that’s gonna benefit you and your career more than any other tool or tactic we could talk about.

Peter Winick Awesome. So how do we, how do we find you? So I happen to be in Tulsa, and I just, I just wander, just wander.

Dave Burkus Just wander around screaming until I hear you. There’s not a lot of us here. That’s probably won’t help it. It is a city of like a million people. So it’s going to take you to that strategy. Probably the best place to find me is actually, I mean, if you’re listening to this, the best way to find is the show notes for this episode on your site, right? Because you’re going to link to davidberkus.com and the book and all that sort of stuff anyway. But like that’s the one where if you’ve been listening to this you’re gonna find the most useful entry point for all that. So if you listen, go to the show for that episode.

Peter Winick Well, thank you, David. You shared a lot of great stuff with us today, a lot of things for people to think about. And best of luck with friend of a friend. I know I’m going to see that on the bestseller list in the days to come.

Dave Burkus Yeah, no, thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me

Peter Winick To learn more about thought leadership leverage, please visit our website at ThoughtLeadershipLeverage.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.