Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 45 – Tim Sanders

Peter Winick

There are a lot of ways for to be successful as a thought leader. You can write, speak, advise, and training, among other ideas. So, how can you find your strengths? How can you discover what the market wants from you?

Tim Sanders, CEO of Deeper Media Research and author of New York Times Bestselling book, “Love is a Killer App,” has done it all. Today, Tim sits down with Peter to discuss sticking with his gut on the title of his book, some advisory thoughts for businesses going through transition, and places where thought leaders should be willing to take risks.

If you are transitioning from business leader to thought leader, this episode will help you understand your new marketing needs. Listen in as Tim talks about the differences between being an indirect or a direct marketer, and why you should be careful collaborating with gatekeepers. Show the love and listen!

Thought Leadership Leverage can help you gain credibility and connect you with speaker’s bureaus. Find out how!

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 Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. I’m really excited to have with us today, Tim Sanders. Tim has been in this space for quite some time, 15 plus years. He’s the CEO of Deeper Media, which is a research and consulting firm. He’s author of five books, including the New York Times bestseller, Love is the Killer App. He’s had an amazing professional career prior to, or I should say business career prior to the speaking world. He was an early member of Mark Cuban’s executive team at broadcast.com, was involved with that company from their IPO through their acquisition at Yahoo. And then he stayed on at Yahoo and just an all around interesting, fascinating, smart and fun guy. So Tim, thank you so much for spending some time with me.

Tim Sanders Hey, glad to be with you, Peter.

Peter Winick Cool. So I’ve known, we’ve known each other for quite some time, right. Since back in the, the love is the killer app days. Not been afraid to shake it up because I think people forget that when did that book come out in 13, 2003, 2004.

Tim Sanders It came out on Valentine’s Day 2002.

Peter Winick probably not coincidence. But I think love was not a word that was often used in the business world, probably still isn’t. But going back to the Stone Ages of 16 years ago, you’re probably more likely to hear the F word than the L word.

Tim Sanders Yeah, that’s a good summary. And at Yahoo, I was able to talk about share the love, show the love be the love with clients and it resonated because if you know those times 2000, 2001, those were the Halcyon days for the Silicon Valley. So we really embraced that concept. When my agent took this to New York, you can imagine some of the publishers gasped. Fortunately, there was a division of Random House Crown Publishing that liked it. that even as we got close to publication… they kind of kicked around new titles. They said, hey, could we make Caring is the Business Plan work as a title? Because that might be less offensive to, you know, 58-year-old businessmen who have a sphincter factor of nine when they hear the word love. And I said, no, we’re gonna stick with it. And furthermore, my wife said no. If we don’t keep Love is the Killer app, we’ll never be on the cover of Fast Company. That was the ironic thing is that’s exactly what did happen is after 9-11, Alan Webber and Polly Labar at Fast Company thought that Love is The Killer app would be a great Valentine’s Day cover story for Fastco, so we stuck with our guns. Here we are today. It still sells. It’s got a million copies in print around the world. And every day, or at least every week, I’m contacted by some 30- or 40-something-year-old person who read this when they were much younger, and it made a big impact on how they think about culture and leadership.

Peter Winick Yeah, and I don’t want to spend too much more time on this, but one is the love word was so radical. The other thing is killer app wasn’t really a concept then, right? We forget in 2002, nobody had an iPhone, right. So today the app world is a very, you know, we live on our apps. We’re always downloading apps. Everything’s about an app, but sort of the foresight here is pretty cool.

Tim Sanders Well, thank you. There was a book called Unleashing the Killer App by Chunky Mua and some other tech guys in the mid-90s. And they were saying, you know, there’s going to be this way, this thing we use the internet for that will make the internet indispensable. They always call those killer apps. The thing that makes the new thing go mainstream. And what they were talking about was email. So for all of us, email was the killer app. So in leadership, I believe love was the breakthrough strategy that made high touch leadership go mainstream. And to this day, we still believe in high touch, regardless of how high tech a world we live in.

Peter Winick Awesome. So love is the breakthrough strategy. So cool. So let’s get to the business side here. So you move from a stellar career in the corporate world, IPO, acquired by Yahoo, which was the hottest thing ever at that point in time. Everybody forgets there was a pre-Google era, right? But we’re both have enough gray hair to realize that that was the AOL Yahoo days when they owned the world, right. And then you moved into this world, right? This world of content and thought leadership and speaking and all that. So why the hell did you do that? Why did you? leave the corporate world to go do this sort of crazy thing.

Tim Sanders So I was networked with a very big literary agent in Dallas. I was still at broadcast.com working for Mark Cuban. I had been giving a little presentation around town to whoever would listen on behalf of broadcast about the future of the world with the internet. And I had a lot of themes. The internet’s gonna make the world transparent. It’s gonna the world a place where we can find or buy anything we want. And I also said it’s gonna be a place where love is rewarded. because we will gravitate to people that are good human beings. Anyway, this agent was told by a buddy of hers, you should go see this guy, he’s crazy. This is back Peter when I wore sunglasses when I spoke, I had long hair. It was crazy times. She comes up to me after this presentation to 30 real estate agents. She’s like, darling, you’ve got a book in you. You’ve got big book in you. I said, well, I really don’t get it. She talked to me over time and she says, look darling, I’ll find you a writing partner. You can write it over the summer. This point of view will shake things up. And so, sure as shootin’, we put a proposal together. She recruited Jean Stone, who’s written many important business books, to be my writing partner, and we embarked on this little part-time project called Love is the Killer App. I was just named the Chief Solutions Officer at Yahoo when this book came out. I used Vacation Days Peter to do a little mini book tour.

Peter Winick In today’s vernacular, this was your quote, you know, your side hustle, right?

Tim Sanders It was a side hustle, and it was a site hustle really because I wanted to help people outside of Yahoo and broadcast get this message, because I was passionate. Anyway, I come to work the day after Fast Company releases that February issue with me on the cover, and my voicemail has 20 messages on it, no joke, and they’re all speaker bureaus, talent agencies for speakers, and they were saying, our client HP wants to hire you to speak at Open World in New Orleans in three weeks. What’s your fee? Next message, next message. I write them all down, I go to my boss at the time, one of the founders, Jerry, and I say, what do I do? And he says, how many more vacation days do you have left? Use those days, take these gigs. At the time we were coming back from the dot-com crash, he’s like, it’s a good PR thing, it’s good message on behalf of Yahoo, talk to me when you run out of days. I ran out of day in about a year-ish, and it was accelerating the requests. So that’s when I managed to negotiate by 04 to go part-time. So I was halftime Yahoo, halftimes speaker. And by 05, I jumped the shark and said I got to just do 100% speaking because I loved it so much. And that’s what I published my second book. And then I’m off.

Peter Winick And speaking was your first business side of this, right? So the book you made some money on, obviously, because the book was a runaway success. The next piece is speaking. So you got your speech, you’re out there. And in those days, the agents pretty much controlled the business, right, in terms of deal flow and probably 70, 80% of it, whatever. So now you’ve got.

Tim Sanders And to this day, just so you know, they still control the good business. Even today in 2018, there are more people that can go direct to a speaker, but they all have one thing in common. They don’t have much money. If you’ve got serious money to spend on a speaker. You go through a bureau because your bureau has leverage over the speakers and the speakers provide more value and behave better. So it’s interesting is that as long as I’ve been doing my career, the one thing hasn’t changed. If you want the top end of your fee, you’re going to get it from a bureau. If you want to negotiate for your fee life, you’ll get a direct lead from your website.

Peter Winick Right. But I don’t think it’s a binary world. I think it is about having a portfolio.

Tim Sanders Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I definitely have a portfolio mix of direct business that I do and bureau business. But again, I’ll underscore this. Even though my direct business is probably 65% of the volume, my bureau business is 70% of the profit.

Peter Winick Got it. So let me take that one piece further. So if you’ve got two products in the marketplace, a book and a speech, that is one operating model. But then you start to sort of unwrap that and everybody does different things, but you’ve consulting and some other things. Tell me about the other ways that I can pay you for your wisdom and time and knowledge.

Tim Sanders What I’ve been doing for the last few years is advisory work. I want you to think of that as a very high-level consulting business. But what I do is I partner with companies, usually the owners, as their advisor. They’re usually going through some type of transition. My favorite one is they’re looking to sell the company as their exit strategy. And I become their advisor on the best company to buy you, the best terms to sell. the best way for you to lead your team on the transition so you don’t lose your top talent and get sued by your new owner, and then how to maintain production through the change. I’ve been gravitating towards that. I had a mixed bag of consulting work I would do around management and leadership over the years, but I quite like this because it’s the cutting edge of change. If you think about it, Peter, seven out of 10 business plans that are shopped for investment capital, seven out 10, getting bought. is the exit strategy. So believe me if you work somewhere in your life for more than 10 years, you’re going to be at a company that got bought. I know I have and people aren’t prepared for it. So I’ve been doing some advisory work there but here’s the major thing. The reason why Peter is because it’s connected to my writing and my speaking. What I’ve kind of figured out after doing this for a long time is there’s a lot of ways for us as thought leaders to get paid. We can get paid to write, we can get pay to speak, we can pay to give advice, we get paid to build things, I call that consulting, the traditional model now. And we can paid to provide training services. I’ve done all of those over the years. I’ve crystallized it now pretty much, almost all speaking, and anything I do outside of speaking must be synergistic to speaking. So it must provide me insights or research that on the platform make me more relevant to my audience.

Peter Winick Let me pick that apart a little bit in a good way. So you can’t start by writing with a blank slate and by speaking, it gives you an opportunity to learn different industries and understand different things, right? Because to be a good speaker, you don’t just show up at a client without doing your homework and talking to them and understanding their business challenges and struggles and their growth plans and all that sort of stuff. But when you get to the advisory level, it’s a whole different level of insight depth. You’re far deeper under the hood if you’re helping a company figure out who to sell to or how to sell. And what I’m hearing you say.

Tim Sanders Yeah, you’re in the machinery. You’re just in the machine. You’re deep into it, right? And it fertilizes you. Let me give you the analogy Tom Peters gave me years ago when I left Yahoo. He said, son, don’t ever forget about fresh cut flower syndrome. Says, write that down, fresh cut flour syndrome. I said, what’s that? He goes, that’s when a business person stops being a businessperson and starts to become a performer. Thank you for watching. Have a great day.

Peter Winick Yeah

Tim Sanders And the minute they start becoming a performer, it’s as if the flowers have just been cut and put in water and eventually

Peter Winick Exactly.

Tim Sanders He says, show me a speaker on the circuit who hasn’t worked at a real job other than their speaking business for 10 years and I’ll show you a person who’s completely out of touch and the audience will see.

Peter Winick Yep. So that’s where I was going with you. So by doing the advisory work, you’re gaining insight that you can put into your writing, right? You can put it into your speaking unit. You can’t disclose anything, obviously, proprietary from the company, but you’re learning different things. What are the top challenges that a company has in looking at as an exit? Is it the human capital side? Is it technology side of it, whatever? And it’s a nice machine there because one feeds the other, feeds the others, and you’re basically turned research, which is normally a cost center. into a pretty cool profit center if you look at it from that perspective.

Tim Sanders That’s right, and the way I think about it too is that I find something that’s interesting to me. Change is always interesting, but the being bought, the being-bought transition is super interesting because I just think it’s such a contemporary phenomenon of starting a company to sell one. But on the other hand, Peter, I also say I’ve got to keep a foot grounded in technology advances. And so up until last year, I was mostly serving on advisory boards for tech startups. I did a video tech startup, I did. a couple of cloud services startups. But over the last year, I’ve started to join Bitcoin startups or cryptocurrency startups. So right now I’m on the board for two different cryptocurrencies. That is an eye opener on fast moving change and the emotional challenges that still come with being on the bleeding edge. So anyway, advisory work has been great for me. It is a profit center for research. But here’s the other takeaway though. I’ve learned to start saying no. The training business is out there to tax you every last dollar. And what I mean by that is that there’s a lot of companies who are gonna contact you if you publish books and speak a lot, and they’re gonna say, hey, you know, for X hundred thousand dollars or whatever, we’re gonna help you develop this incredible training course and we’ll only charge you a sliver to deliver. And this training course will amortize, do you like that? You know exactly what I’m talking about when I say that. Very much. And it will amoritize and it will go out there and it’ll create passive income. And they talk to you about how, you know, you need to get out of the active income business, says the speaker, because you’re going to grow old. And it’s very seductive, Peter. And I’ve lost a quarter million dollars chasing that model. I don’t do that anymore. So.

Peter Winick Well, but let me push back on that, Tim, though, because in all fairness, we help a lot of our clients go there, not in the sliver to deliver a business, but figuring out how to take their content and put it out there in ways that don’t require them to be in the room, whether that is assessment tools or video-based learning or whatever the case may be. I still think that is a viable market. I don’t like the idea of $250,000 experiments for anybody. I think there are ways to do that.

Tim Sanders Well, it wasn’t. It was $550,000 experiments. You know, you’re absolutely correct. There are people that can do very well with direct marketing. So let’s just kind of get down to brass tacks here. So what the training business is for us is a direct marketing product, okay? It sells to the extent you sell it. So you’ve got to be really good at direct marketing, so I’ve got buddies like Shep Hyken up in St. Louis. He does great with this model, okay? He builds training courses. He makes money every month on training courses, but he is a very committed direct marketer. I’m not, I’m an indirect marketer, but my brand is indirect marketing, right? I’ve never actually gone on socials and said, hire me to speak, believe it or not. You have to say, buy my training program a lot if you’re gonna do that, and some people are really good at it. Gary Vaynerchuk explained it to me this way. It all depends on your mix of asks in your marketing. So between your newsletter and your socials Thanks for watching! What you do on platform, if you only make an ask one out of 20 times, and it’s a soft ask, you’re going to get your ass kicked in direct marketing. You just are. You’re not going to perform. You’re going put the money up front and it is never going to advertise. That’s me. I’m about a one out 20 guy. He says, but if you’re a one of a four guy, it’s different. You’re gonna be a great direct marketer. Now, Grant Cardone is a good example of that. You’re gonna turn your audience a little bit but not like uncomfortably. and you’re gonna be okay with that. It just really depends on your mindset and the analogy I always use is my son. And he hates it when I use this analogy, but it’s just so darn true for those of you that have kids. So he worked at Apple, he left Apple and went to Hulu, left Hulu decided to be a freelancer because he’s great at graphic design. But what he discovered in a few years that is that the problem with being a freelencer is you dang well better be a good direct marketer or you’re going to be out of work most of the time. He was a good service provider. So what does that mean? That means he’s finishing college now and he’s going to get a corporate job where he gets marketing work given to him to do because that fits his personality much like the single model of working as a speaker and mostly relying on bureau relationships. That’s my model. So it’s a good distinction, but people can do it. You just have to be that one out of four.

Peter Winick So, I mean, you define your model nicely where you don’t want to have, you know, a hundred people working for you. You don’t wanna be the CEO of this big monstrous organization that has all…

Tim Sanders I don’t want to have a person working for me. I have a zero employee. Seven freelancers that work for me, and 11.

Peter Winick Right. And part of our process when working with clients is to not only understand their goals, but their strengths and weaknesses. And I don’t want to develop a strategy for somebody that’s awesome, except it really looks like a job description for something that they would either not be qualified for, or quit if it was a job that they took. So I think being self-aware enough to say, listen, I want to do my own thing. I want my freedom. I want to be sort of the one-man show and I want be able to put together the network of freelancers to support the various needs I have to run the business. And by the way, I want to have fun with what I’m doing. There are others that say, you know, no, I do want to be the CEO of something and want to build something and all that. I think that’s really just part of knowing yourself and understanding this side of it.

Tim Sanders Yeah. Here’s the way I think about it. You know, the mindset is you’re either a lifestyle business owner or you’re a growth business owner. Really important, okay? So I’m a lifestyle business owner, and what that means is that I support my lifestyle plus retirement investment. So it’s like every year when I look at my P&L, I say, did I make enough to cover our lifestyle? And it’s a good lifestyle, and it’s improving as time goes by. And is there enough of a surplus to put away what would look like a strong 401k? investment every year and if it is I’m happy with that business. So as a result, even though I’ve been doing this full time since 05, the business today in 2018 is probably 30% less size than it was at my peak in 2005 when every bureau always recommended me, million seven that year in gross income. But I’m okay with all of this because again, it supports my modest lifestyle desires and my phone doesn’t ring all the time and I don’t have the complications of all of that. Now, some people… They don’t want that, so I mentioned Gary V. before. Gary Vaynerchuk is a growth-oriented business owner. That’s why he has 800 employees now. He’ll have 2,000 employees in five more years. He’s creating a legacy. He wants to create opportunity for other people. That’s what growth-orientated business people, they think a lot about creating opportunity. I’m a lifestyle-oriented person. I deliver opportunity from my work directly, but it’s just a choice we make. But I got to say this is that You know, Chef Heiken, I mentioned it before, he and I were having a rather interesting conversation around training over dinner. You can imagine how he responded to what I said earlier because that’s not his experience. You make a decision about how much you wanna travel and that decision largely anchors how much want to invest in passive income. He made that point to me very directly. My greatest health risk is thrombosis. I’ve traveled almost 10 million miles. in my career, my cardiologist is like, oh my God, you’ve made a serious sacrifice to run a lifestyle business, right? So anyway, you make a decision. If you don’t want to travel as much, I think you should have a passive income stream. If you if you don t mind traveling, then maybe the lifestyle business is right for you.

Peter Winick Yeah. No, I love that. You have also been and continue to be creative and are always sort of trying new things. So you know you have your core. You’ve got your speaking and your writing. And I don’t want to dwell on failures per se, but let’s call them experiments. You’ve dabbled in lots of other things. And tell me, and you could give an example or two if you’d like, but what are the things that you think about to say, you know, I’m willing to take some risk here. And it’s not a bet the house risk, but some of time, energy, money, resources. and I’m willing to experiment. And then by the way, more importantly, which I think is the harder piece, this is when I’m wiling to kill this sucker. If it doesn’t do X, I’m gonna bury it. Because I’ve seen you launch things that have succeeded wildly and some other things that flame out after six months. So tell me about sort of your risk profile.

Tim Sanders That’s a really good point. So what I kind of think about is I take on things that interest me that I believe there’s a big market for. I’ll invest significant time in developing those. So usually it was like a book, right? I published my most recent book, 2016 Deal Storming. it’s about how to use problem solving to land really big multi-million dollar deals. What happened, Peter, was I was gonna write a book on creativity for salespeople, just a really simple book about how to be more creative as a salesperson because that’s something I think of myself as being. And my publisher convinced me, nope, nope. We’re gonna make this the followup to the Challenger sale. We’re going to take your creativity and focus it around a repeatable process and more importantly, focus it at the enterprise software market. They’re like, trust me, it’s gonna be a big book. Well, guess what? It wasn’t because it was a niche book. And what we found out really quickly is that a lot of people said, oh, deal storming, really interesting concept, Tim, but I don’t close multi-million dollar deals. So the process isn’t really right for me. And I had to shut that thing down.

Peter Winick That’s fascinating because I loved the book. It was a great book and I enjoyed being at your launches here in New York and all that. And it was phenomenal. But I think your point is exactly right. What percentage of the universe are in sales? Okay, we know what that number is. Well, what percentage of that percentage are actually closing, whatever, seven, eight, nine figure engagements? Probably a really small percent. So even though it was probably the best in class book. the total market size was not anything near what Love and the Killer app could be.

Tim Sanders Exactly. Well, let’s look at that. So the advance for Love is the Killer app and the advance for DealStorming were just about the same. So Love is a Killer app is going to sell a million copies over say a 15-year period. DealStorming is going sell 30,000 copies over a five-year period, maybe 40,000 over a 15 year period. That is a 25 to 1 difference, right? And what that came down to is we hit a really specific niche. we addressed a problem senior leaders didn’t think they had and that’s really important too. But the last issue was is that what we didn’t know is that on the sales conference circuit, which I’ve done a lot of talks on sales conference, they don’t want technicians that have a process because it will conflict with their sales process. Boy, did I find that out. So it’s like, yeah, I still speak at sales conferences as a motivational speaker because That’s what they book. So anyway, that’s a situation where. We let a big book advance blind us to the original vision, and that was a book on creativity. And you look up now, Peter, you see a guy like Josh Lincoln, a friend of mine, he did 160 speaking gigs last year. Let me repeat that. He did 160 speaking gig. His current fee is $35,000, okay? What does he talk about? Creativity. Why? Because that’s the most popular topic, like innovation, on the entire lecture circuit. So, I made a decision to pivot away from that large market because of a big offer to go towards a niche market. And I try to warn people all the time, you know, be super careful about collaborating with gatekeepers because they don’t know what they think they know. And they have a check to write you or an opportunity to give you and you’ll go their way.

Peter Winick Well, and in the case of the advance, there was a little short-termism there versus looking at a three, A, you didn’t trust your gut and B, you weren’t looking at it necessarily over a three to five year horizon of where the opportunity on the book is sure you would have loved to sell a hundred thousand books, 200,000 books, et cetera. But the real money for you wasn’t doing a hundred speeches based on that book. But if the market for that wasn’t there, you sort of lost on that side. and I…

Tim Sanders That’s a good point.

Peter Winick even though you got a big advance, it was still probably a net loss because the total revenue for you would be advance plus 100 speeches.

Tim Sanders Right, no, that’s exactly right. So the way I think about it now is that every project that you take on around a significant piece of content, whatever that is, a book, a speech, whatever, intellectual property development, it needs to be at least a $2 million business. So I’ve gone back and thought about the six things I’ve done since I left Yahoo that I would call IP projects, and all but two of them. Four out of six meets that criteria, two don’t. And the two that don’t, surprisingly, the majority of the income was the book advance. So the long tail, the long tale of speaking wasn’t there. So, you know, I mentor a lot of people that are transitioning from business to writing speaking. And so I tell them a lot. I say, your speaking career starts with awareness about what the market wants from a speaker and it goes from there. It doesn’t start around what you find interesting, what you think the opportunity is based on. No one’s talking about this and everybody should be. You’re just going to end up. building a niche and doing six talks a year on it, right? You need to know.

Peter Winick You’ll be right-

Tim Sanders Exactly, right? So now I’ve got a finger on the pulse. I can tell you the exact percentage of requests that innovation gets out of the pie every year in the corporate lecture circuit. And this is not super scientific, but let’s just say it’s about 55 to 60% of the market. Leadership has gone from 25% of market to probably 6 or 7%, about the same size now as change management or dealing with adversity. So it’s just changed. And you gotta go with the market so for those listening here If you’ve got some point of view or business experience or whatever that synchronizes with any element of innovation and creativity and dealing with disruption, head that direction because for the foreseeable future, that’s the most valuable content on the lecture circuit.

Peter Winick Well, and the only thing I would add to that is that’s correct today, but don’t make that bet and say, and that’s where I’m going for 10 years without constantly doing a pulse check.

Tim Sanders Yeah, yeah, because it’s been going on for three or four years, right? It’s like the leadership thing. The leadership thing was happening at Full Steam when I joined. And then after 08, it starts to dip because this new generation comes along and says, I don’t want to be a leader. I merely want to be wealthy.

Peter Winick Yeah, exactly. I want to collaborate. Cool. Well, Tim, this has been…

Tim Sanders I don’t want to be accountable.

Peter Winick Yeah, no, that’s no fun. Well, this has been great, Tim. You’ve compressed 15 years of, 16 years of wisdom in under a half hour here. So that’s not an easy feat, but I thank you for sharing your take on publishing, distance learning, writing, advisory, all of it. And I think the key thing for me is really, there is no one right path, making the right choices, right, for you from a lifestyle perspective, as well as an ROI perspective. So thank you, thank you for sharing everything today. Good stuff.

Tim Sanders Yeah, just consistently look at your business like a business and you’ll make the best decisions. Well, thanks so much.

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.