How Humility and Hard Truths Shape Authentic Leaders In this episode, Peter Winick interviews Paul…
Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 9 – Charles H. Green
To be a great thought leader, you need the trust and respect of your clients. Shaping a positive reputation is critical to success in the content business, and we’ve got a very special guest who can tell you how to build yours!
On this episode, Peter is joined by “The Trusted Advisor,” Charles H. Green. Charles is the founder and CEO of Trusted Advisor Associates, and he’s passionate about crafting insights and ideas in ways that are memorable, and that allow people to change.
Listen in as Charles discusses the power of trust and how to create it in business. He also tells us how building trust translates to more sales, improved relationships, and better clients. Listen in as he explains why so much of his content is free, and how free content pays big dividends to his business as a thought leader.
Charles also gives his advice on successfully licensing content for long term success, and shares tips he’s learned from licensing his content. This episode has tons of great tips about building your brand, producing great thought leadership products, and focusing on your customers. It’s one of our best!
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 episode nine of Leveraging Thought Leadership With me Peter Winick. I am the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage and today I am delighted to have with me Charlie Green. Charlie is coauthor of the Trusted Advisor, which if you do not have that book, go out and get the book and actually get five of them and give them to anyone that you know that works for you is on your team family. It is. I think it’s mandatory that that book be one of the top 5 or 10 business books that anybody has today, even if the book didn’t exactly come out yesterday. So that’s a that is an authentic ringing endorsement as you get I was a big fan of Charlie’s before I. I got to know him. So welcome Charlie. Let me give everybody your official bio. So you the founder of Trusted Advisor Associates, you’re passionate about crafting insights and ideas in ways that are memorable and allow people to change. Beginning right now, your focus is really on the commercial relationships and where trust plays there. You’ve got an MBA from Harvard and an undergraduate degree in philosophy from Columbia, and then then it says, and I also drove a New York City taxi part time in college. So to things some of you might not know what a taxi is, Google that it was before there were app, there were yellow things. And every other you know, every other word was mother. You can figure out what the other word was. And was there a connection between philosophy and Taxi Driver?
Charles H. Green None that I ever figured out.
Peter Winick And then then you went on to become a consultant and you built Trusted Advisor Associates starting in 1997. And you and I have known each other for quite some time. Why don’t we start with tell us, number one, the target audience that you have for audiences, and then how easy is it might be a set up, a question, how easy you make it for them to give you as much money as possible to consume your content in as many formats and modalities as is logical.
Charles H. Green Okay. That’s actually a good question. First of all, thanks for having me on, Peter, and good luck with the series here. I think it’s great. Let’s see, what was the first part of that question that was focused on the second.
Peter Winick The first part is your target market, right? Who’s the ideal current client place based on, you know?
Charles H. Green Yeah, we the book the Trusted Advisor, which was the genesis of what we do at Trusted Advisory Associates, started off with work that my partner Rob Gelfand and I did at Deloitte. And to some extent that set the pattern. 60% of our clientele these days is in professional services, mostly large companies, secondary gaps in financial services, corporate staff functions and B2B sales for complex, tangible and intangible products and services. So the commonality let me just.
Peter Winick Pause you there for a moment, though, Charlie, because oftentimes what I find are people that are experts like yourself sometimes don’t realize when they’re putting out things that are actually worthy of pausing and stopping. So Charlie didn’t hesitate. Between professional services, financial services, B2B, complex sales. He knows who is clients. All right. So if I came to you and said, Charlie, hey, I’ve got this, you know, opportunity for a multi retail restaurant chain or a fast-growing high tech, you might say, Me okay. But you know where I really rock is professional services, financial services and complex sales and the B2B.
Charles H. Green So I would probably go further and say, Nope, but let me find you somebody who can love it. Great. Yeah, I take your point. You should answer questions directly, like the one that Peter asked. If you don’t know, you say, I don’t know. But if you do know, say it.
Peter Winick And the nightmare answer to that question is Will trust is so broad in general. Of course everybody could use this exact excellent. So. Exactly. I love that. Sorry to interrupt you there. So keep going. So that’s your target market And how can they well, which is your content in whatever format it is?
Charles H. Green Yeah. I think what we’ve I like the way you put it. How do you make it easy for people to do that? And the answer is at least my answer. You give away a time and you answer the phone to everybody you have. I just got off the call, off the phone, you know, ten minutes ago with a guy who is probably never going to be a client, but we spent a great hour on the phone talking about cool stuff, gave him some ideas. He gave me a couple of ideas. And the truth is, if you do business that way, you know, engage with people who seem to be kind of interested in what you’re doing it. You don’t know where it’s going to end up. I think the world of sales is far too covered by people who insist on being efficient about the sales process. They focus on qualifying leads and, you know, not wasting your time drilling dry holes. I just think that’s wrong, at least for what we do engage with. People obviously don’t end up drilling a lot of dry holes, but we way over our. To make the dry holes. Right.
Peter Winick And there’s a line there where I’m sure if that gentleman called you back and said, can we do this call every Friday afternoon? Because I love that there’s a line there. Right.
Charles H. Green So there’s a line, although I’m not even sure it’s that, you know, there comes a point when it’s obvious to both that, you know, this is not a good use of our time. But, you know, everybody’s afraid of people tapping out their content or getting something for free. The truth is, if what you have can be given away in a phone call and one phone call and you don’t have that much to begin with. So we’ve got, I think, about a thousand blog posts at this point, a hundred articles, a dozen E books, you know, 30 video things.
Peter Winick And those are things that you’re giving away. So let me there’s two schools of thought there and I’m with you. But one school of thought says put it behind a paywall. Don’t give away your stuff. You know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, a thousand blogs is, you know, whatever, thousands of hours worth of labor and then the news and the e-books, etc.. Right. I’m with you. I think the more you give away, the more you get. And the example I use, you know, Covey didn’t write The Seven Habits and only talk about five of them until you wrote him a check. Right. So, you know, there’s no surprises there. And I imagine, you know, in your work and I’ve read so many of your blogs and I get your newsletter all the time and I love the books. Is there anything you’re holding back? It’s something I get if I pay more.
Charles H. Green No, there really isn’t. And so think about that. Well, you know, I’m 67 years on the planet at this point. I had 20 years of management consulting. I’ve had almost 20 doing this. Guess what? I know stuff. I’ve turned around. I see patterns. And it’s not like I’m holding a discrete piece of information that I only give away for money. The value that I provide and most people in my situation, due to the value we provide, is taking all the stuff that we know and being able to bring it to bear on the very particular person or individual or company that you’re talking to. So it’s perspective and you can’t give that away.
Peter Winick I mean, so the value, the primary value extraction is not at the theoretical, is it the applied? What is that? So what does trust mean for me in my business today? And if I’m a managing director of a professional services firm, and how do I teach my newly minted associates to be more trustworthy?
Charles H. Green There’s kind of a there’s kind of a Heisenberg Principle thing here. If you try and extract and some down and put it down on paper, the thing evaporates. You know, how do I become trusted? Will tell the truth, listen to other people, behave in a principal way. Yawn. What the hell does that mean? Well, now let’s talk about what that means, and then you can make it real for somebody.
Peter Winick Got it? Got it. So you’re giving a lot of stuff away. So now by giving it away, obviously, I mean, I would imagine at this point you don’t need to spend all that much effort on building the brand in the brand awareness. You’re sort of the king of trust, if you will. People know who you are. They know your work. Now let’s get to the point where I’ve leaned in and I fit one of your categories. You are running complex sales in a, B to B, right? What? What can I what can you sell me? So I’m in. I read a blog. I saw some videos. I’ve been following you online. I had a great call with you. Now what?
Charles H. Green Well, mechanically, we offer several services. Most of what we do is workshops from day to day to, to date, you know, customer and so forth, workshops keynotes, some video products, some coaching. That’s sort of the narrow thing. Now, if somebody is looking for stuff that doesn’t fit into their if they’re or I’m sorry, I forgot to mention, we also have some cell phone-based video instruction product. If what people are looking for is a transformational consulting project. Now, that’s not really us. If what somebody is looking for is scaled up coaching, that we’re not really set up to do that. So that I think, is kind of the narrow version though. But if you can be helped by those things, you know, that’s where the fun starts. Then you begin having a conversation and those lined up remarkably well once you begin to talk to people.
Peter Winick Got it. Got it. So you know that you’ve got the workshops and you’ve got those can be customers could be said and. Talk about the outcomes. How clearly can you articulate to me, assuming I’m a quasi skeptical, maybe fan, right? I read your stuff, I fit into the buyer profile and now tell me what? Okay, so I get a Charlie this, you know, there aren’t too many antitrust people meaning? Meaning that are in the against camp of. I’d like to build more deception in my organization. But what’s the ROI on this program? How does this benefit my organization.
Charles H. Green And that’s a great question and it’s that’s a dialog we often have and people approach it in a very mechanistic way. What are the metrics that we can expect to see out of it? Well, unfortunately, other than top line revenue, which I can virtually guarantee you’ll see go up. That one’s actually very tricky because the how do you measure a change in somebody’s psychological shift from being product centric to client focused? Those things happen in an instant. You know, you ask the right question in a situation, do you know when to stop talking and when to start listening? How do you measure that stuff? How do you measure a shift? Worse yet, how do you incent someone to be unselfish? It’s a contradiction in terms. So what we really end up in having a dialog about saying, well, as you just said, Peter, everybody and nobody’s antitrust, everybody agrees us and benefits, Well, let’s go through those benefits. If people if your clients trust you, for example, let’s run down the list and see if you nod your head, they will buy more quickly from you. They will refer you to other people. They will put up less price resistance. They will give you more information. They will be more candid with you. They are more likely to do repeat business, run down the list. And we do this as part of our, you know, part of our workshops as well as part of our sales discussions. And people end up nodding their heads. And you can then say, well, how do you want to measure that? And honestly, we have yet to find the client, right?.
Peter Winick So it sounds like you’re getting alignment around. Yes, This is critical. Yes, this is important. What the painting the picture of what the world would look like once they are sort of more fluent in trust or understanding how to develop. And then you sort of put it on them to say, well, you tell me how to measure, right?
Charles H. Green Or Yeah. And the truth is, my point is that the metrics question is a distraction. You can there’s another way to do that. You can say, why don’t you do a before and after test? Why don’t you six months or eight months or ten months after rigorously go through and ask all your business development people, for example, of the X million dollars that you sold in the last 12 months, how much do you attribute account by account to having participated in this workshop? Get a dollar number and that will allow you retroactively to do an ROI. Now we actually have one client that did that and they came up, you know, they didn’t believe the number. And I said, we’ll cut in half then if your numbers, whatever you want, write massively great number in any case. But it’s not the point. The point is, if you really just stop and think about it, the value of having a trust based relationship is so self evident.
Peter Winick Let me go back into modalities here and you didn’t mention, but I believe you might have this in your repertoire as well, licensing as well, and some assessment tools. We’ll talk about that for a moment.
Charles H. Green Yes. Thank you for reminding me. Yes, indeed. The assessment tool. It’s called the TCU or Trust Quotient like IQ and IQ. It’s based on a thing called the trust equation that we wrote about early on in in the trusted advisor. It’s a simple four factor model for describing and assessing trustworthiness. About 70,000 people have taken it. We it’s a 30 bucks a person retail. You take it online, you get your answer in five minutes. It’s 20 questions. You get a 15 page report out that not only assesses your trustworthiness, but much more importantly, what the components of it are, where your strengths are or your weaknesses, how you compare with lawyers, for example, or defense contractors. It’s a fascinating way of making concrete what most people think of as being kind of squishy, soft.
Peter Winick So let me on the business side of that. So let’s talk to our audience here. So my math is not off the top, but let’s say you had 70,000 people and it’s 30 bucks each. That smells like 2.1 million or something to me if my math is right. But so that’s a lot of money, right? I’m assuming every time they do it, you’re not manually tabulating things, answering phone calls, compiling reports. That’s an automated that is an asset that you build once and sell multiple times every night, if correct?
Charles H. Green That is correct. And yeah, that’s exactly right. We invested a fair amount to make it pretty and make it automated and make it, you know, robust and, you know, data safe and all that stuff. But yes.
Peter Winick Great. And in the assessment world, just to sort of point out like anything else, there’s good and there’s great. And what I mean by that is, you know, you could walk to the whatever, the makeup counter Bloomingdales, and they’ll say, Charlie, you’re complete. You’re a summer. No science, no anything is just sort of throwing words out there for sale. Right? Not that that’s you’re going to the makeup counter, Bloomingdales often, but it’s what I can come up with this afternoon. Sorry, but yours is a validated model. Right? So there is there is underlying gravitas there where not only can I learn about my favorite subject me, but then I can compare me to exactly. So in the hopes that I can, you know, continue to suffer from the Lake Wobegon effect and be better than average in everything I do. But that’s powerful, right? Yes. So the assessment one, that’s a nice chunk of passive income. Tell me about the licensing that you’ve done and maybe some that have worked great. And if you’ve done anything in licensing where you’ve scraped your knee, that’s okay to share as well.
Charles H. Green Well, let’s see. I mean, my business model and trusted Advisor Associates, my firm of which I’m CEO, is we do not have any employees. Everybody is a 1099 relationship. And I think that’s increasingly not uncommon. I don’t think any with the exception of maybe two people, we are not even everybody’s first primary source of income. We’re one of several. I think that’s what you’re talking about. When you say licensing, we have an agreement that they you know, they deliver programs that I’ve designed over the years. I get a piece of each one they deliver. And that’s worked out reasonably well. It’s not easy. I guess what I’ve learned, yeah, there are two ways to do this. And for example, Franklin Covey, my better known competitors, Steven Marconi Jr is not a fabulous job of I don’t I don’t think I’m being unfair here, doing a fairly standardized program with a tremendous upfront brand creation image much better than I have. Yep. And what you get when you buy a Franklin Covey program, not just the trust stuff, you get a finely honed, fairly standardized testing program. What you get when you buy a program from us, it’s going to be heavily influenced by the person delivering it and by the persons to whom they are delivering it. We hire mostly ex consultants, typically people in their 40s or 50s who are finding a second wife as a trainer. And I had to learn this over time. It’s you can’t take stuff like trust and cannot in my opinion. What you can do is get good people who are in sync with what you’re trying to teach. Teach them all the basic concepts and principles and ins and outs and turn it loose and trust that they’ll do a good job.
Peter Winick So and there’s different places in the market for different things. So, you know, Covey’s Stephen m r Covey’s speed of trust. He’s got a great derivative product of that that’s in a box, right? That’s literally a box set piece. It’s a few hundred dollars, totally different experience or set of expectations one should have. When you buy that, then bringing in, you know, a 45 year old ex. Exactly. McKinsey or whatever to come to talk to a senior team and take them through an experience that it might have. It’s we’re using the same word, but a different experience. So that’s the licensing to individuals that then go out and have the rights in limited fees or whatever to push it out there and be done licensing at the at the corporate level where you have, you know, internal train the 23 and.
Charles H. Green We have an okay, I’ve come to the conclusion that’s a good thing. We should make that available. And not hard to do, especially for a larger client. The one thing that we’re very careful about is quality control. So we make the license fee itself relatively, you know, non massive. It’s fairly I won’t say trivial, but it’s not it’s not going to break the bank.
Peter Winick Right.
Charles H. Green We want them to be incented beyond a certain level to do it themselves compared to having us do it. So it’s like 20% of what it cost, you know, seat by seat or even less. The one thing we insist on is nobody’s going to run out with our name on this product and do it unless we have trained them thoroughly. And so that means sitting down with them, having them participate in the session and having them deliver with us watching coaching and some periodic refresher stuff. So quality control is very critical.
Peter Winick And then, you know, the temptation there is to lower your quality standards, right? To get more market share, which could come back to bite you if the quality at the level that it’s being delivered at isn’t there. I mean, I assume your hope is anytime you’re out somewhere on a plane and somebody says, yeah, you know, so so-and-so Mary from my company put me through that. He certified that you’re not cringing to say. And it was horrible, right like that. You know that the expectation where the expectation is and what the outcome of that that situation is and.
Charles H. Green That has happened on occasion. I have heard from a few people who’ve taken something and they say said, you know, within that that that that I hate that. And I know I say we got a QC problem and you recall that was the one thing I didn’t want to have happen. So we need to talk. Yep.
Peter Winick Yep. Got it. So let’s recap quickly. So you’ve got obviously you do keynotes when you mention that keynotes, workshops, assessment tools, licensing others to deliver the product licensing organizations there. So it’s a mix of revenue that only you can do, right? So the, the role of Charlie in a, in a Charlie keynote can be played by anybody else, right almost That was arranged in advance with the client. Right? But the assessment tool, you don’t have the quality control programs if you whether you sold 50 of those today or 500, you know the outcome is going to be excellent. Some pluses and minuses around licensing and such. Yep. Anything else that you mentioned? Does I think of videos on a on a phone or an app or something? You don’t tell me about that.
Charles H. Green Yeah. Video. Video is obviously the growth area for everybody. It’s one that we’re, we’re still struggling with. My colleague and you and I created a 29 module video series which we think is great. And for most clients it is great. But it’s that’s that one’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to sell video. You got to figure out exactly what use is it? Is it for there? There are some uses for which 60s is a little too much and there are some uses for which it really needs to be ten minutes and it’s an art to it. Besides all the mechanics and running video programs and so forth, there’s an art to figuring out what need you’re trying to serve.
Peter Winick Yeah.
Charles H. Green And you know, we’re still sorting through all that ourselves.
Peter Winick Yeah, that’s interesting because it’s, it’s, you know, the, the, you know, the sort of look at what’s happened in video, you know, that the 18 minute Ted talk was revolutionary because now I don’t just spend seven hours to read a book. I can watch, you know, 18 minutes And now it’s like when you tell somebody can sit and watch a video for 18 minutes, they will stare at you blankly as if you ask them to read your piece. Exactly. And so there’s a Goldilocks problem there. Can you really teach? There are certain content concepts that people can get at a certain level in 90s 100 and 20s, you know, certain things is just that’s just not a reasonable expectation. So it’s putting the right, the right content in the right format, the right modality, and then figuring out what your value prop is to sell it. Because imagine if the video could border on. You mentioned earlier all the stuff that you’re building to get away to give away. And the video could be on that fine line. Is that a marketing branding piece? Is it a product?
Charles H. Green And that’s right. And you know, we’ve got some of both. We have some, you know, one minute trust tapes that we give away. Those are anyway, I guess for a minute still. And the other ones are we charge for and you’re right it’s a it’s not a clear line.
Peter Winick Get it So but there’s so many different modalities and things to experiment with everybody’s you know, talking about apps now that’s sort of the next wave and other ways to get content out of there in different ways. Yet the other thing that you touched on, which I think is interesting is level of customization or standardization. So the assessment tool, if I came to you and said, I want to take it, but could you add three questions around, you know, the impact of the mood or sleep cycles And trust us, I’m going to go know my assessment. This is what a measure is. This is what it does. It doesn’t do those things. So sorry, I can do that. Versus in a workshop. If I said to you, Hey, my folks are really struggling with these civic type of things, you can come up with some sort of a scenario based learning and charge accordingly for that. So I think that’s part of the issue.
Charles H. Green I think the most important thing we do on the workshop side is make sure we understand. Who’s in the room, what business they’re in, what their issues are, where they’re coming from, what they’re worried about. That’s the ultimate customization. Not tweaking your product, but, you know, addressing your product to fit who is in the room with you.
Peter Winick Got it. So let me ask you to give some advice, if I could. So you’ve got, you know, New York Times bestseller, world renowned speaker. You’ve I don’t know how many hundreds of thousands of people or tens of thousands you’ve spoken to or how many countries. But you’re one of the top 50 orders in in the universe today. And then you’ve got the business underneath it. So if I’m the young Charlie, right, so it’s you -20, 30 years ago, way back when. Right. But the up and coming Charlie today is regardless of what the domain expertise is what might you words of wisdom would you give that person is we’re landing the plane in 2 minutes or 3 minutes, not crash landing. So we’re not in panic mode. Yeah. Yeah. Well.
Charles H. Green You know, I would say something you’ve said before, too, which is play the long game. Behave in the way that you would like to look back and see that you did. Don’t scramble for the short thing. You know, adopt some principles and live by them. Pass up the occasional low hanging fruit because it’s tempting and but you know, it isn’t the right thing to do. And trust that if you do that, you will end up much better off than if you’d scrambled for every little cut corner on the way there. I didn’t do this because I’m a principle wonderful person. I just did it. I don’t even know why I did it. But it’s how I did it was to develop a set of principles and behave in that way, particularly when it comes to selling and business development. You know, just focus on the right thing for the client.
Peter Winick Well, I think there’s two brands there. So one is it’s absolutely the long game. I agree. 1,000%. This is not a get rich quick business, period. It’s just is not it’s an amazing business. It’s fun. I would say that. I don’t know anyone that does it that doesn’t love what they do. But the other piece is, is that sort of the principle piece that you mentioned, whether you get that deal or not or that phone call that you mentioned earlier with that person, there’s value in that for you. And the value might be that person talks to somebody else in three years and says, you know, absolutely is just a good guy. I had a nice conversation with him and it was pretty clear that I wasn’t a buyer. Blah, blah, blah, you know, whatever it is. But the takeaway is he’s got a positive brand impression of you that maybe tipped the scales down the road. I mean, you can’t always measure these things, obviously, but those things come back.
Charles H. Green There’s no question. I remember here’s a here’s a word analogy. This is like the ballroom dance business in the following way. The people who buy ballroom dance lessons, more than half the time, they clipped out a newspaper and three lessons for 25 bucks at Fred Astaire or something. And it’s been sitting under a magnet on the refrigerator for a year and a half, and they finally decide, Yeah, today’s the day. That’s how this works. Yeah, you become aware. I mean, people become aware of you and there comes some trigger point over which you have very little control. And that’s when they come in. So instead of tweaking the trigger point when they’re going to lift the magic, be out there, play the long game, do the right thing, and trust that if you do that, all those connections that you talked about will eventually accumulate and it’ll work for you.
Peter Winick Yeah. And I would add to your Fred Astaire analogy is I always find the hardest part of this side of the business side of content is the supply and demand, right? So theoretically, the thought leader, the expert always has the supply. That doesn’t mean you have that keynote available on May 7th in Scottsdale. You always got supply, right. The question is, when does somebody meet demand for trust? Right. This isn’t I’m looking out my window today. It’s snowing. So the demand for salt for the driveway is up today and probably will be pretty high in July. That’s predictable, right? But you don’t know as the expert when the demand kicks in. And so you always have to be sort of top of mind. And I love what you’re doing with the blogs and the video minutes and all those sort of things. So I’m so grateful to have you on today. And I made it a point. I wanted you to be one of my first ten because I was a fan before friend and get the book.
Charles H. Green Well, thank you, Peter. It’s an honor and thank you for saying all those nice things. I do appreciate it and I wish you well on this venture. I think it sounds great.
Peter Winick Great. Thanks so much, Charlie. And we will talk again soon.
Charles H. Green Very well. Take care, Peter.
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 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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