Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 108 – Will Bachman

Peter Winick

Episode 108 of the Leveraging Thought Leadership Podcast with Peter Winick and our guest, Will Bachman

Being an independent consultant is complex. Making the right business decisions can be a confusing process, so how do you get started – and how do you make sure you stay on the right track?

Our guest in this episode is Will Bachman, Founder and CEO of Umbrex, the first global community designed to connect top-tier independent management consultants. Will also hosts “Unleashed,” a podcast focused on helping independent professionals grow and thrive.

Listen in as we discuss best practices for running a podcast, great ways to increase awareness for your brand, and how running a podcast is a great way to stay up-to-date on innovation within your industry. Will’s #1 tip: podcasts are a lot like writing a book, but in public!

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. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Wil Backman. He is the founder and CEO of Umbrex. He’s a former McKinsey trained management consultant, been running his own practice since 2008. He’s got a weekly podcast which is really good, called Unleashed How to Thrive as an Independent Professional. His core work, which is which is an interesting niche, is working with independent consultants and professionals, and he has an umbrella organization to help them drive business, but he uses a lot of content and thought leadership to get the message out there and attract the right folks into the tribe. And I’m glad to have them on board today. So thanks for coming on board. Well.

Will Bachman Yeah, it is great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Peter Winick My pleasure. So tell us a little bit about your core business and then we’ll get into sort of your use of content and thought leadership as a way to help that business grow and thrive. Sure.

Will Bachman So I left McKinsey and Company 11 years ago now in 2008 to start my own independent consulting practice. And soon thereafter, I was really Broke Tribes by Seth Godin and felt the need to myself have a tribe and connect with other independent consultants because really, well, I knew how to do some consulting. I didn’t know how to run a consulting practice. How do you work? What should I charge? How do I find an accountant? And so I started connecting with other independent professionals, and that grew over time. It was helpful to me and other people seem to find it helpful. And that eventually evolved to. I’m Rex. We we’re the first global community connected top tier independent professionals with one another and the business model as we help clients find the right independent consultant for their project needs.

Peter Winick So this is sort of a network model, right? So you’ve got the consultants on one end and then folks that need consulting services on the other. Tell me a little bit around what folks tend to struggle with. I have some hypotheses here. When they leave a world renowned firms like McKinsey, where they’re awesome at what they do, they’re super smart. They know how to solve the problems in order to serve the client, etc. But there’s this whole other world of stuff that they don’t need to touch that is critical when you go out on your own in terms of finding clients, building, scoping. Tell me about that sort of transition for the folks in your network.

Will Bachman Sure. I’d say for those three categories of what a consultant does in the people that I work with, I struggle with two of those. So the three categories are actually delivering the work that there’s finding the work, and then there’s all the infrastructure to support it. So most of the people that in on bricks, they were at a top tier consulting firm. They’re fantastic at delivering the project. But when the with the kind of branding and the support of a big factor people struggle with how do I generate leads now as an independent, how do I find opportunities? So and then the other piece is just the firm infrastructure. How do I do accounting and PowerPoint and research and, you know, an insurance broker and just all that.

Peter Winick Technology, travel insurance, all that, all the fun stuff that we all need to do.

Will Bachman Which is essential. You can spend 20, 25% of your time on just kind of the infrastructure of running a practice. So we help people with that as well.

Peter Winick Got it. So now tell me about you have an interesting business model. So on one end, you get a connector supply and demand. It’s a marketplace. You got to find the right folks, have the right criteria to be service providers under the umbrella of Barella. And then you’ve got to find the clients. Now let’s dive into because this is an interesting piece for me and I think for a lot of our listeners. How does one use or how do you use content and thought leadership and all those things to attract either of those constituents that are critical to your business?

Will Bachman Well, I often talk to members about this. I think it’s important if you want to separate yourself from being a commodity project manager or it to where someone’s calling and asking for you. In particular, you want to establish a thought leadership platform and where you’re creating content. For one, it’s just a reminder advertising. If you’re creating some content on a regular basis, it’s a way to just remind people that you exist, because often it was probably the client out there who would love to hire you, but they’ll just frankly forgotten about you forgot your name. So to remind people and also tell people in the community was it’s a great way, for example, to build relationships with people. If you’re creating content by, say, interviewing someone either for a blog or a podcast, or to really create relationships with that person as well as learn about your industry and stay current. So I recommend people that are kind of what their focus is to think about creating some kind of thought leadership platform.

Peter Winick So specifically, how do you go about doing that? Because you’ve done a nice job at it. What is that? What does that look like?

Will Bachman Well, and for me, it’s you know, if you think about kind of return on investment, for me, that the podcast that I do unleashed is really I don’t think about. In terms of a short-term return on investment, of course, for sure. I think it through that piece is really about building relationships with often with independent consultants and learning myself. It’s so you know, I have learned a tremendous amount by having a chance to interview over 100 people. And I think doing that gives you the right to have a conversation with someone that if you just had like to spend an hour on the phone with me, most would say I’m wrong. I would spend an hour on the phone with me and make a podcast and chance to promote what right or wrong or a bit more minimal.

Peter Winick So basically, let’s have that same conversation. But here’s the other benefits, right? We can create some content. I get it out to a platform. So it really serves both purposes, but there’s more value to the guest because it’s a podcast, not just to folks chatting away and eat up an hour of my time. Right?

Will Bachman And then to answer your question, you know, it’s giving me a chance to build relationships with independent consultants who then I’ve collaborated with on actual project opportunities and beyond the benefits through some people have told me, Hey, that podcast that we did, you know, over a year ago, it’s now kind of like one of the top results from my name for what’s here. And then they’ve reached out to me and said, Hey, I heard you on that show. So even though it’s not a benefit to me, I have some benefit to address as well, raising their profile.

Peter Winick Interesting. Interesting. So you’ve done 100 episodes. What are the sort of best practices I hate to ask. A consultant for best practices is going to be here all day. What are the condensed version of the best practices of running a podcast for you for the purpose of increasing awareness for your business? Let’s keep that the specific question.

Will Bachman Well, for purposes of increasing awareness. So number one, start to remember this, right? If you’re not doing it at all, then look at it. So start now. And number two, do it on some regular basis. So if you can only handle it monthly. Okay. I’d say it was probably a good one to shoot for the benefit of doing it on some regular basis is that it’s always the easiest thing to not do. Right. So if I have something I want to know, I gotta carve out some time this week and then it becomes a habit and then it becomes something that you don’t even notice that you’re doing. So start making a regular habit. And then what I recently learned from Mark Metro, who has humans to Top 100 podcast, is create some micro content. So take a one minute snippet, make a short run at an Instagram video and put that out there to help raise awareness. Every podcast posted on LinkedIn and so forth. But when you post it, don’t just say, Here’s my latest conference episode, How to make a conversation when you post on social media. So invite a question like, Hey, here’s something that we talked about on this test. What do you think?

Peter Winick How do you give a little a little teaser snippet? Cool. So can you give us whether you’ve been doing it for a while and I love what you said earlier. This is not something that you can measure on. Okay. So I just did that podcast. I created X dollars for like, you know, in value for that 48 minutes of my time. Doesn’t work like that. But can you give some specific examples of value that has been created for you and your organization and the consultants in your network as a result that you can attribute to the podcast?

Will Bachman Sure. So I’m sort of doing something a little nontraditional in that I’m really focused with on bricks, on building a community. So I’m not interviewing potential clients typically. So it’s not direct benefit. But there’s been a half a dozen situations where a client called me and I was able to staff someone on a project with them, someone who I had interviewed. And I was able to say, Look, I know this person and here’s an episode. You can listen to them talk with me before you reach out to them and interview them. So it kind of gave me a lot of credibility in that person that I’m not just introducing some random person. I don’t know.

Peter Winick So that’s interesting. So let me ask on that. So normally the process might be a client comes to you, I need a consultant that, you know, has done this, that and the other thing. Whatever supply chain in Asia or whatever. And you say, great, I’ve got this guy Charlie over here and you send him their CV or whatever, and on paper it all looks good. But I think I think there’s something really, really interesting to say, Well, here’s their CV and all that. But by the way, listen to this hour of them talk because it really shows how someone thinks, what their perspectives are. It’s a nice little way to sort of eavesdrop on who they are and what they’re about with that sort of with that lens.

Will Bachman Yeah, I think that’s right. It gives them credibility to do that introduction that we’re doing and, you know, think beyond just that is what we’re working with within Brex is really trying to create a community. So it’s even if we create value for members that we don’t capture, that’s a win for us. So it also helps introduce members of Umbrex to the other members of our community. And for us, that’s a win. Even if I’m not getting like a financial benefit from it, I get personal. Satisfaction out of it.

Peter Winick Got it. Well, and it’s creating, like you said, sort of another touch point for the community. Another reason because I’m assuming you’ve got top quality consultants in your network that could find gigs elsewhere. Right. So there’s competition on both sides that you need to make sure that you’ve got a nice pipeline of talented consultants to do the fulfillment side of the house.

Will Bachman That’s right.

Peter Winick Good. So what are the other ways that you have or are considering using content and thought leadership to increase awareness of the brand to drive the business? What are the. Because we have a lot of clients that we work with that are consultants and such that are experimenting or have experiment that we’re thinking of experimenting with thought leadership and content as a way to differentiate, drive the business. What are other things that you’ve dabbling with?

Will Bachman Well, other things that I’ve done is for umbrella members, we run professional development events three times a year. A couple in the US and one in Europe. So often content that we use in those in those events kind of emerges from the podcast, from discussions I have with people. I’m also developing a course for people on how to thrive as an independent professional. And that’ll be largely drawing from a lot of material from all these podcasts.

Peter Winick So the quote I’m assuming is distance. So you have physical events in different geographies where you have a concentration of folks.

Will Bachman That’s right.

Peter Winick And you’re bringing them in and it’s sort of a gift to the community, some sort of a development day for consultants. Right. So they’re going to learn or be exposed to something that’s of interest to them.

Will Bachman That’s exactly right. We do those. We kind of charge to cover the costs we see as it. But yes, that’s right. And then I’d say I’ve actually myself had a few projects with clients where they called me and just to do my own work and my staff and someone based on my knowledge of this space as well as some things that I’ve done, like I did a session on how to conduct expert interviews and I did another session on how to, you know, how to use resources online to be more efficient at work and so forth. So I’ve done some planning for clients based on it. And what I’ve heard from other folks as well is just that it’s, it’s a corpus of work that you can show people but just burns your credibility and doing some kind of thought leadership so that you’re doing I think is fantastic of helping enable that with your clients.

Peter Winick Got it. So how do you decide then? So doing an in-person day in different cities, that’s pretty intense to do. It gets expensive and there’s a lot of work that goes into that, etc.. How did you decide what sort of buckets of content would work? Well, digitally so that you can get it out there to more people more often and all that sort of stuff? What was the decision making process underneath that to say, this module here or this segment would work? And conversely, these would yes.

Will Bachman So the online course that I’m developing is on how to set up your farm, how to set up your firm as an independent professional. So that’s based on conversations with a thousand people over the past several years. Okay.

Peter Winick And that’s obviously focused on the consultants that are just in that transition state, exploratory state, etc.. Obviously, sort of the one on one for them would be, geez, how do I set up my firm? Right? So it’s a nice problem that you’re answering for them early on.

Will Bachman Yeah, that’s exactly right. So and part of that also with the podcast was originally I thought, okay, I’m going to write a book based on my own experience. And I sat down and I cranked out a couple chapters before that was really right. You know, another way to think about the podcast is to write a book in public over a period of time, a page at a time, kind of haven’t done a lot of 150 episodes. It’s really a way to gather information over time. And that’s, you know, that eventually might make its way into a book. But I’m planning at first to put it into a course. And now that I’ve done enough, I’ve had enough conversations to understand where people’s pain points are. And I’ll be able to structure the structure of the course. And a drawing from a lot of these interviews that I’ve done.

Peter Winick Got it. So you’re basically sort of forensically writing a book or doing it. You know, the byproduct of each of the podcasts is also, you know, whatever, ten pages in a book or whatever the math turns out to be. Yeah. So from an efficiency standpoint, that’s pretty good, particularly if you don’t really love writing. I mean, a lot of people don’t realize that the process of writing a book, some people love it, most don’t. You know, most find I was just talking to somebody earlier today and she was talking about sort of the by the time you get the 14th revision on the manuscript, she hated her book, which is not.

Will Bachman Fun. Yeah. And even if you do enjoy writing, it’s often hard as a professional to actually carve out the time. Sure. And by the way, one tip occurred to me that I should have mentioned earlier, asked about tips would be create some kind of subscription list to your podcasts so people may be subscribing on Stitcher or iTunes or Overcast. As to whether they get their podcasts. It’s nice to have some kind of email list where you’d send out maybe some bonus content or just to remind people what episodes were that week. So I think that you have something like that. Yeah. I have one on the page for my site so that people it’s really going to remind people, even if they don’t listen, every episode kind of reminds them about what’s going on. So if they do see an episode that they’re interested in and then if you’re creating some content in the future, you have some people who have opted in permission marketing stuff that you have opted in and want to hear from you.

Peter Winick Got it. When you have to, you have to meet them where they are, right? In terms of where are the folks that you’re trying to reach, looking for information. So the more modalities you have that line up to the way they consume content, the higher the probability they can find you?

Will Bachman Yeah. And I don’t expect someone to listen to every episode of my show, but there might be occasionally some episode that really is particularly relevant to them. So having an email list, they can just see, here’s this episode, I really want to make sure I download. So I would recommend that to everyone to have to have some way that people can do a quick sign up on your website.

Peter Winick Got it. And you know, you mentioned that again, you get to a point where you’ve got a podcast, it becomes an information management issue, right? So you’re not going to you know, when you do your first 5 or 10, you’re going to read. Yeah. When I spoke to so-and-so two weeks ago, blah, blah, blah. But ultimately you don’t. So what are you doing from a curation tagging, whatever, so that, you know, when you’re in a real life client situation or working with one of your consultants. Wait. I know. I talked about that with somebody. Let me go find that, retrieve it and send it to you. What? What’s the process you use to manage the information?

Will Bachman Yeah. So I’ve been getting a transcript made of every episode and that’s all set up for download on the website, which so then I have a full text corpus of all the interviews that that’s searchable, helpful. And then I’ve been I hired someone to kind of edit those down into a more readable 700 word Q&A version of the episode. So I publish those as well on LinkedIn and Medium, so that’s probably not a great answer. I think people who who have more time or could hire someone to go through each episode and think about what categories or tags or something. So there’s certainly more to be done. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t claim to be best practice there, but those are the steps that I have.

Peter Winick Well, but if you transcribe them and at least at a minimum, if you have an inkling that there was an issue that you talked about, you can at least search it or find it. I mean, it sounds like that will probably mature and evolve over time.

Will Bachman Yeah. I mean, the way Tim Ferriss wrote one of his books was he basically took the temperature and sat down with transcripts. And that was what inspired me, which was to get transcripts of all these to somewhere I can sit down with a couple thousand pages of transcripts and see what the gems are in there. Yep. And I mean, the other thing that’s seems kind of simple and straightforward, but I recommend just having some kind of tracking shoot. Like I use a Google sheet that I share with my audio engineer to just list the episodes and keep track of them because pretty quickly we have a queue of episodes and it’s not clear what stage they’re in. Right. Transcript. Have you published what the number is? So we have five. It’s not a big deal, but let’s start that early. Just some kind of tracking system.

Peter Winick Yeah, no, I agree because I mean, there’s more to it than hit record in terms of the behind the scenes stuff and the scheduling and the engineering and getting out on all the different platforms and all that stuff. But you got to have a good team to help you there. So this has been great. Well, as we start to land the plane here, give us. So let’s say there’s somebody else out there and they might be in a similar space or not to you, but something in the professional services space and they’re thinking, maybe I should do this, maybe I should. In terms of blogging, podcasting, you know, getting good content out in order to differentiate and build their brand, What would you what would the advice be that you gave to that person or maybe the person as you two years ago, actually?

Will Bachman Yeah. So I would treat this as not as business development, although it’s an okay outcome if it happens. But I would treat this as relationship building and getting smart yourself. So almost every independent professional, I think has some reach where they could be doing a podcast or a blog. Let’s say that you are interested in connected cars. Well, start with CEOs of startups of different connected car companies. If you’re interested in retail, well, go and interview CEOs or marketing leaders at a bunch of start up retail luxury brands. So almost anyone could do that. And if you’re not training into business development, I think that’ll come across that you’re truly interested in what they’re doing and helping each other. Visibility Street This is sort of a ten year ROI and not A11 quarter ROI, and five of them is just start. But my friend Paul Miller recently did a did a short article about how you help someone have a podcast from start to online in one hour. So it doesn’t need to be a big, long project. Just start recording. You can get online if you prefer, but the only way to get good is to do a few hundred bad episodes. And that’s kind of those are the ones that I’m working through, right? So just start.

Peter Winick Starting and be consistent. So that’s great advice. I appreciate your time and I appreciate you sharing because you’ve actually been using content leadership in a really unique way to drive a business that’s quite different. So I appreciate your coming on and sharing that with us with us today. Thank you so much.

Will Bachman Peter. Thank you so much for having me.

Peter Winick My pleasure. 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.