Why Content Is Always King

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Episode 115: Mark W. Schaefer

Why Content Is Always King

In this episode, Travis talks to successful business owner, speaker, mentor, and best-selling author Mark W. Schaefer. Over the years, Mark has been helping entrepreneurs establish themselves in today's competitive market. His best-selling books have reached out to various business owners and strategies to grow their business through marketing and social media.

Mark and Travis talks about various techniques to help business owners in their goal of becoming successful. Mark used his experience to teach the lesson of preparing yourself and your family for the jump to becoming an entrepreneur. He also emphasized the importance of being flexible and be open to new marketing techniques and strategies that you can utilize in your business. He also shares his virtue of being humble as well as giving yourself every once and a while the recognition and praise that you deserve for the hard work you've been doing. These and so much more are what you can learn from this episode of the Entrepreneur's Radio Show.

TRAVIS: Hey, it's Travis Lane Jenkins, welcome to episode 115 of the Entrepreneur's Radio Show, a production of rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com where each and every week I connect you with rock star entrepreneur that explains their journey to success and what's been the key principles to finding a high-level of success as an entrepreneur. Now today I'm going to introduce you to the brilliant Mark W. Schaefer. Although before we get started I want to remind you that there's three ways that you can take these interviews with you on the go, through iTunes, Android, or Stitcher. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com and click on the link right there on the menu bar for whichever platform that you use to listen to the podcast. And of course those links will take you directly to the podcast where you can subscribe to the show if that's something that you want to do.

Now that we've got that stuff all out of the way, what do you say we get down to business? Without further ado welcome to the show Mark.

MARK: I am delighted to be here.

TRAVIS: Man, we're going to have some fun today. So, would you mind giving the back-story of how you found success and what brought you to today?

MARK: Well, I've been very fortunate that I've had wonderful experiences in my life that prepared me to take on a lot of different challenges. I worked for several decades in the corporate world. And a lot of people and natural entrepreneurs, rightly so, kind of have an attitude that, "I can't work for the man. I just can't work in that kind of structured environment."

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TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: I never really had that. I had a high tolerance for the bullshit.

TRAVIS: You're talking to one of those people too. I didn't--

MARK: I looked at it this way Travis. I thought, you know what, part of my pay is dedicated towards tolerating bullshit. It's just part of my job. And the reason that I didn't strike out of my own earlier was that honestly, I was afraid I would not know when to stop working. And isn't that something that's awesome. God, I'm not concerned of a lot of people and in some ways Travis it turned out to be true.

TRAVIS: It's a common problem, right?

MARK: It's a common problem, it really is. Anyway, so I had lots of great experiences. I got to work globally and work on global teams, and product launches. I got to work in kind of an entrepreneurial R and D kind of setting within a big company. And then I just kind of got the bug. And I started doing things on my own. It just started out small, kind of doing different consulting things. And then I ran into a personal situation where the company wanted me to move to Switzerland and I had family ties here in Tennessee, and didn't really want to move. And I said, "You know, it's time to do something else." So, I started teaching, I started my own business, I actually started consulting with a lot of entrepreneurs and startups. And I never looked back.

TRAVIS: And so, how smooth was that transition, because typically if you've been in the corporate world for a while and it sound like you had been, you really climb the ladder and you're making some pretty good money. How do you make that transition from making pretty good money to eating what you kill, and how smooth was that transition?

MARK: That's a really key question because that's something that I see that a lot of people overlook. And when I made this decision I basically said, "Can I be broke for 2 years?"

TRAVIS: I like that.

MARK: And one of the key life transitions for me here Travis was at that point I had my kid's college education paid for. They were old enough, I was financially solid enough that I could take a little risk, that I could grow the business right and not be in some desperate place. So, just from a lifestyle perspective, from a point in my life. I had a lot of the big debts accounted for. And so it was a good time for me personally to try something new. The transition, I was smart about it and I was patient about it, and I didn't have a sense of desperation. It really worked out pretty well and it's funny because shortly after I started the new business I saw this article in the New York Times that talked about five ideas for making this transition and starting your new business. And almost by luck I had done a lot of those. And it's some of the things we've already talked about looking at the finances very rationally. One of the things I've also suggested is starting to do some teaching. Because teaching provides a little bit of income on the side. Also




provides job leads, new opportunities. And it's something I had wanted to do anyway. I had started to do some teaching on the college level anyway. And so I just kind of fell into some of those things. And the transition went pretty well I think. My timing was good and my message resonated with a lot of people.

TRAVIS: So the teaching does several things. It obviously positions you as an expert because you really need to know what the heck you're talking about in order to teach it.

MARK: Yeah.

TRAVIS: And like you said, it is a great way. It's kind of a lead magnet, right?

MARK: Yeah, it really is. And I was fortunate enough to be teaching in an MBA program that attracted mid-level managers from big companies.

TRAVIS: Nice.

MARK: And so even today I'm getting connections, calls from people who might have taken my class 2 or 3 years ago and said, "I remember you, and I remember how effective you were. And I still think about the things you've taught us. And I'm finally in a position where we could really use your help. I'm in a position to hire you." So that worked out well.

TRAVIS: Yeah. I like that because I went through the same process. My very first business I told my wife, I said, "We're just going to have to prepare for me not to make any money for a couple of years, but we're just going to have to be okay with that." And I was very young at that time and we just eliminated going out to eat, we eliminated all the unnecessary stuff, and we just did without. And that gets harder and harder to do the older you get, right? I made that jump when I was 25 and a lot of people, the older they get, the more afraid they are of making that jump unless they have managed to save some type of nest egg like it sound like you had.

MARK: I like what you're saying Travis is that this was really a family decision for you. And I think that's important because the spouse suffers right along with you. And I was fortunate in that my wife was very supportive, very understanding, believed in what I was doing. And as luck would have it, it turned out to be luck. I didn't think it was luck at the time. But one of the things that I was kind of counting on was that my wife had an income too.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: Well, I think it was about a year, maybe 18 months into my business she lost her job. But it kind of coincided with that 2-year bump where things were starting to go really well and I needed help. So she started helping me with the business, and kind of came on board with the business. So, I didn't think it was a lucky thing at the time but as it turned out it worked really well because she's become a very, very important part of the business. I couldn't do what I do without her. And the tone of the business certainly would be different if she hadn't lost her job.




TRAVIS: Right. There's nothing wrong with serendipity meeting hard work and preparation, right?

MARK: Yeah, that's exactly right.

TRAVIS: Yeah, good stuff. I went through the similar thing. So the first year I just poured my heart out and made a lot of mistakes, didn't make a whole lot of money. I think we did something like 125,000 gross revenue. But that was a business that had a lot of cogs, cost of goods sold. So what that basically means that I netted virtually nothing other than some great experience. But every year we doubled. And then 100% and then some years 200%, and then 400%, and I brought my wife onboard. She was working at a bank and one day I called her and I said, "Hon, I just can't handle this thing anymore I need you to come give me a hand." So very similar trajectory, I completely understand. So that success, you get beyond those 2 years. When did business really start scaling for you?

MARK: I had a similar experience when I look back at the numbers of where I started I thought, "Boy, I was really gutsy to stick that out." Because it build in exponentially almost just as you experienced. But literally, I really had to have a shift in my perspective. I have to have a shift in my lifestyle for 2 years. And if you don't have your family prepared for that then you are bound to fail. And unfortunately I was just coaching a young man who didn't do that. He was one of these situations where it was like, "Screw you, I'm leaving this job. I'm starting out on my own." He wasn't ready. He hadn't worked nights and weekends to get something going. He didn't have any potential customers kind of in the bag. He didn't have a plan. He didn't have any structure. He didn't have the financial resources. He didn't think it through. He didn't have the buy-in for his spouse, and he crashed and burned, and went to a very, very stressful period. And my recommendation to him was you're not ready. You've got a family to feed and you need to find work right now and get any work that you can. And do the nights and weekends thing, and get ready like most people do.

TRAVIS: Right. What I come to realize some years later and I'd really be interested to see if you view it the same way. Those first couple of years where actually me putting down roots and building a deep root system. I didn't realize it at the time. But I was building a deep root system. And once that root system was established my business was able to take off. That doesn't mean that I didn't have challenges along the way. But once we established that root system it was able to flourish. Do you agree with that?

MARK: Yeah. I really love that analogy. And when I taught to young people, not necessarily young people, it's just people who are starting out and trying this for the first time. What I tell them is that you have to go through a period where you learn how to be a business. And I have a friend who's an entrepreneur and he said something very wise. He said when I started business, "The tone of my business changes every 3 months. And the reason for that is when you're starting out, an event like bringing on an important new customer can radically change your business. Bringing on a special new talent as an employee can radically change your ability and your focus. And one of the things I learned was I had a very solid idea, I have a very




solid business plan when I started my business, and had done some preparation, had done some research. But when I got into it after about 6 months I realized there were aspects of this that I hated to do. I was bored and I didn't really know it until I got deeply into it. And so I had the shift, I had the pivot. And like I said I brought on some new customers who were asking me to go with different direction. And it was a direction that was probably more suited for my talents. So, I think those are the roots that you're talking about that certainly happened to me too.

TRAVIS: Right. So, transition me to how does that this path that you're going down. How does that lead to writing the book, and tell us about the book.

MARK: Well, I think at the heart of what I do, my elevator speech is basically I'm a teacher. Literally, I'm a teacher at Rutgers University. But in my consulting, in my speaking, what I blog. And also when I write my books, I see that is all opportunities for me to take these decades of experience that I've had and this wonderful education opportunities I've had and help people and share it with people. It's so rewarding. And I find that when I just trust and give away my information, give away my content and my advice, that builds trust, that build authority and it attracts people to me in a way that they want to hire me. The new book is called Social Media Explained. And it solves the problem for me and also for many of my customers. Because what I find is that even though social media marketing, you would think would be fairly mature by now, it's been around 4, 5 years. Many businesses are still struggling with the same questions, the same problems. How to do I measure this stuff? How do we get started? How do I find the time for this. And I think there's also some fundamental misunderstandings about what this stuff can really do. So, over a period of years I kind of generated this workshop to get people started in a very logical way in a way that fits most company cultures. And I kind of turn that workshop into a book. And it just explains social media and how it fits into business unlike anything that's out there. It's easy to understand, it's fun to read, it resonates with people I think on a psychological and sociological level, not on a techie, geeky level, not on a numbers "I'm going to scare you into doing social media."

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: It's basically. "Look, here's what's going on." Here's the psychology behind social media, here's how people are building relationships through these new connections. Doesn't that make sense to you. And I've got an amazing response to the book. And what has surprised me a little bit is not only our entrepreneurs and business people who are just starting out on this, really loving the book, but even experienced people are loving the book and they're buying it bulk for their customers to say, "Here, this is really going to help you understand this."

TRAVIS: Well, you know, something interesting about you writing the books. Now, first thing I want to clarify before I make this statement. So you create a workshop, and then from that workshop you create a book. Did I understand that right?

MARK: Yeah, in this case that's exactly right. In this case that's what happened. And think about it this way. Let's say you give a talk about something that you're passionate about and




you give a speech to a local industry group, or to your chamber of commerce, or wherever your networking. If you record that speech and get it transcribed through some crowd-sourcing thing or something, you probably have 30,000 words. That's a book.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: A full-sized hardcover book is probably, 60-65,000 words. So, if you can give a speech about a topic that you're passionate about and have that transcribed, that's a good-sized book. And for me, it helps me get clear, it helps me become concise. By giving this workshop over and over again, I get feedback from people, I get questions from people that help me create better content. And then it kind of gets to a point where, "Okay, I know what I'm going to write about." Before I wrote the book I also floated some of the ideas on my blog. And that was very interesting because people would say, "Hey, that's really a great blog post, those are great ideas. Here's some more ideas." Well, guess what, those ideas showed up in my book too.

TRAVIS: I like that.

MARK: Basically crowd-sourced content.

TRAVIS: Exactly. One of the things that I was going to say beyond what you're talking about is I think writing is more of an important skill set now for especially thought leaders and business owners that really want to teach. You really need to teach to understand the importance of writing. And I want to bring this by saying, "I'd always had a natural ability to convey a message. Although I never put the time and effort in writing, into learning how to write. And not necessarily writing according to my English teacher, but some of the most brilliant people out there that have written really great things, Gary Halbert and other stuff like that. I started writing on topics that I've generated 30, 40, 50 million dollars off of. So you think that my depth of knowledge would be as deep as it possibly, could be, right? And as I started writing on these topics I got to where I knew them at a level of intimacy upside down the writing and editing process is something happens there.

MARK: Yeah.

TRAVIS: And it evolves you in a way that is hard to put to words. But it floored me that I had newfound discoveries of something that I generated so much revenue off of. Have you experienced that same thing?

MARK: Oh absolutely. And I also want to add here before we flesh out these ideas that I do think it's something for businesses to consider, the idea of not necessarily just writing but creating some sort of content that helps people and teaches people. And if you're not a good writer it could be videos. If you're not comfortable in front of a camera it might be a podcast, a podcast like you're doing right here. You're creating wonderful, valuable content that helps establish a voice of authority for you and creates value for your customers. I think there are different ways to create content. If you don't enjoy writing there are other options. But to answer




your question I do agree with you that writing is very important to me. It helps clarify my thinking. It almost like codifies where I want to go and what I want to say. And let's say you're coaching somebody or you're teaching somebody. If you write about it first, it forces you to think, "What are the important things I want to convey. If I had to boil this down to 3 points or 5 points, what would they be?" So, it helps me in lots of different ways. And also, probably the most important thing is it's for me personally, it's a very, very important marketing tool because people are attracted to my content.

TRAVIS: Right. And the writing applies to everything. It's the intros and the outros of the show that you're creating. It could be the script on a video, it could be the auto responders. In this day and age if you want to reach a large group of people and teach, you're going to have to learn some of those writing skills. And you'll find the new piece of you and a new level of understanding that I don't know of any other way that you can reach. And you can take those ideas and reflect them on paper. A lot of people don't realize that sometimes a well written, let's say, 3, 4, 5-page document could be edited 120 times.

MARK: Sure.

TRAVIS: Most people don't know that. You can take content in blocks and move it down to where it's flowing properly. And it just allows you exactly what you were talking about, codify your thoughts and it kind of move things down. And I just can't say enough about that.

MARK: Yeah. Just think about the difference between-- it's not just content but it's content that moves, it's content that's being shared and is being discussed. Think about the power of that versus advertising. And I'm not saying there's not a place for advertising. Absolutely there is. But if you take out an ad and say, "Well look, we've got the best sandwich in town. Or we've got the best service in town, the best whatever." And if you're creating content that people enjoy, and they tweeted, or they share on Facebook, or they comment on it. And they're saying, "Look at this, this is something I believe in, this is something I'm learning from." And they're spreading it. You're not spreading it through an ad, you're having organic advocacy for what you are doing because you're helping people and you're sharing content with them. It's a very powerful opportunity that we have today that we didn't have 5 years ago.

TRAVIS: Right. And so, what happens is instead of talking at them you're talking to them.

MARK: Well, hopefully you're talking with them.

TRAVIS: Yeah, that's what I mean, engaging. Because I've gotten very cynical about so many things that come on TV these days because it's just broken down to the lowest common denominator and almost everything is talking at you. And it makes me very selective about the things that I spend my time watching because of the quality of content that is available on-demand these days, right? One thing that really was interesting to me is the fact that you studied under Peter Drucker.




MARK: Yeah. That was quite a highlight of my life.

TRAVIS: Wow. I know there's probably a vast majority of things they you learned. But what was some of the most compelling things that you took away and applied in your career?

MARK: Well, I was very fortunate, and for some of your listeners if you're not familiar with the name, Peter Drucker, he's a legend. And he's one of the best-known authors and business consultants in history. He wrote the very first book on management and really looked at management as a discipline. But he's also written amazing books on marketing, and on strategy, even human resources. And so I got to take classes from him over a period of 3 years. He was more or less at the end of his career at that point. But he would lecture about his books basically. He would have one class, one semester devoted to studying his books. So we would read his books and then he would lecture about his books. So, it was really an incredible opportunity. I think one of the biggest lessons I learned from him is that he taught through the case study method. So, in addition to teaching about his books he would also introduce very, very detailed business case studies. It's one of the famous ways that they teach at Harvard. And so we would, dig, dig, dig into these case studies, and many of the experienced business people in these classes would have the tendency to want to solve it. They want to solve the problem, they want to have the answer, and he would just beat us up relentlessly on that. And he said, "What makes you so arrogant that you think you know more about the people in this case? Your job as leader isn't to have all the answers, it's to have the right questions." And he just beat that into us to the point where it really became part of my DNA. And I think this is what really helps me a lot as a business leader and as a consultant. Because if you can go into a complicated situation and not try to necessarily solve the problem right away, but to ask the right questions, to dig deep, to find the root causes, to have your clients almost solve the problem themselves by finding the answers. That is a lot more effective in the long term than going in and thinking, again, as Professor Drucker used to say, just having the arrogance to think that you've got all the answers.

TRAVIS: Excellent point. Very few people spend the time doing that.

MARK: Yeah. I think in some ways it's almost un-American.

TRAVIS: How's that?

MARK: Well, the American way is to go in and be the cowboy. You're coming in with the guns blazing, solving the problem, having all the answers. And that's not necessarily the collaborative style that works best in a business, especially if you're coming in as an outsider like I do very frequently. And also, I'll just throw in here Travis since you brought up Peter Drucker, that he wrote a book and I was so fortunate that this is one of the books that he discussed in his classes called Entrepreneurship and Innovation. And for your listeners, if you haven't heard of this book I think it's the best book ever written. And one of the gifts that Professor Drucker have is he could take incredible complexity and distill it down into its essence, into the simplest, more

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understandable terms. And I think that's what he does in this book. And I love it, it's one of my favorite books. So if you haven't heard of that one check it out.

TRAVIS: What was the name?

MARK: Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

TRAVIS: Okay, Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

MARK: And he talks about innovation as a process. And I think that's a really important concept as an entrepreneur. You've had a series of ideas. You started a number of different projects and businesses. And so, maybe it comes natural for you to have a process for discovery, a process for innovation. And what Professor Drucker talks about in this book is how do we institutionalize that in our companies. And I think that's important.

TRAVIS: Now, it was a learned process for me and it was learned through lots of errors, lots of desires to want to eliminate as much of the learning curve and take the lessons. Unfortunately, I've had to learn some lessons several times. And as I got older I got better. Because through frustration I got better at not re-learning the same lesson. And as I stood back-- I'd build my first business to a level to where I didn't constantly have to be in the business. And that allowed me to shift and start looking at systems and what I was missing. And through that came systems for evolving. And it just happens over time. And also, now I made a big mistake, I was a terrible student in high school. I was young and I knew it all and didn't want to listen to anybody. And although I realize the mistake that I made right around 21 years old. And I tried to undo the poor decisions of being a poor student at school by reading as much as I possibly could. And so I made a commitment to constantly read self-improvement and self-help books that taught me skills. And that's really what turned it around for me and gave me the insight in my first book was Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. Well, that was actually my second book. My first book was Psycho-Cybernetics, but the lessons of our forefathers even from the 1800 and early 1900 are still extremely valuable lessons that I think a lot of younger people misperceive as old advice. And it's the nucleus of what makes you successful. Do you agree with that?

MARK: Yeah, it's funny because I'm reading a book right now that is one of the best books on entrepreneurship I've ever read. So let me describe somebody and see if you can even guess who it is, who this book is about. This is a guy who is basically kind of a creative genius. He had this intense focus and this vision. He was relentless. He was very difficult to work with--

TRAVIS: Steve Jobs?

MARK: It sounds like Steve Jobs.

TRAVIS: It does.




MARK: He drove his people into the ground. It was his way or the highway. He was so obsessed with quality and design...

TRAVIS: Henry Ford?

MARK: ...that he would spend money on his product knowing he's going to lose money because he thought he just wanted to put out the best product possible. And this was an entrepreneur that created his business around 1920. It was a guy named Walt Disney.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: And I'm reading a biography of Walt Disney and you look at what he went through, how he created this business, how he pushed his vision. And you think, this is as fresh today as it was in 1920. In fact, it sounds like some crazy Silicon Valley startup.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: If you look at what this guy did. And he would through crazy parties for his employees and it's just like it was coming out of the business pages today.

TRAVIS: The only thing that gives those books away is the slight change of vernacular that they use then.

MARK: Oh sure.

TRAVIS: But other than that, like you said, it could've been written yesterday. So, there's so much incredibly brilliant advise looked over because it's old. And that's a huge, huge mistake.

MARK: It is a weird thing about our culture is that there is this obsession with newness.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: And some referred to a blog post i wrote that it was 2 months old and said, "This is really relevant even though it's an old blog post." And I'm thinking, "Holy crap, come on. My thinking as a shelf-life more than 2 months." But that is certainly a characteristic of our time. And I think we need a balance because some of the fundamentals that we can learn about, reading about Henry Ford, or Andrew Carnegie is another businessperson that I think is pretty interesting, or Walt Disney. I think there's inspiration there. But I also think we need to be open and flexible to the new ways of creating businesses, and new ways to ignite our ideas. I'm absolutely inspired and energized by how millennials are creating businesses today using the tools, using their social media connections to create value in amazing new ways that weren't available to me when I was their age. And I think it's amazing, I think it's wonderful. It's an incredible time to be in business.




TRAVIS: Oh, it really is. And so when you say people should be open to the new ways, are you speaking specifically to using the new social media platforms to gain audiences?

MARK: I think that's part of it. Let me give you an example. I met a young lady in New York a few months ago. She was 26 years old. And I think if you look at what she's doing it just will blow apart any paradigm you might have about creating a business from 5 or 10 years ago. So she's 26 years old, she does not have a college degree. She's never taken a class in business. She has created 3 businesses, one is a restaurant, one is a line of clothing, and one is a company that publishes children's books. Seemingly there is no focus, there is no direction, she doesn't have experience, she doesn't have the business education, and she has created three successful businesses. So you dig deep and you say, "How is she doing this?" And if it was just a one-off I'd say, "Okay, maybe she got lucky." But I'm hearing these stories over and over again, and I asked her, "How did you learn how to do this?" She said, "I Google it."

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: "If I don't know how to do something I Google it, I learn, I solve the problem and move on." I said, "How did you finance this?" "Kickstarter. I don't need a bank. All I need is a good idea, vision, passion, and hard work. And I can find the money to make this work." "How did you find all these amazing employees who are helping you?" "Well, through my social connections. I have friends at Microsoft and Google, these are their day-time jobs and then at night they put in time to help me with my online projects because we're friends and they're passionate about what I'm doing, and they want to share in my success." I hear that time after time, story after story. I met last year at South by Southwest a young guy. He was absolutely broke, living in a small, one bedroom apartment in Belgium, had an idea for a business. He had no assets, no college degree, but he had a great idea and he taught himself how to code. And he created this business. And in 18 months he got $3 million in venture capital, move to San Francisco, and his business was recently bought by a beer company. I can't remember what it was purchased for. But the guy's 23 years old now and he's a millionaire using tools and business connections that were unavailable 5 years ago.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: So that's what I mean. We have got to look at the opportunities and be open to the new paradigms for business and see how it might relate to what we're doing, or what new opportunities it could create.

TRAVIS: I completely agree with you. The ability to scale a business is much easier now than it was several years ago. I completely agree with you. You had kind of preempted one of my questions earlier. I want to see if you have anything else to add to it. I was going to ask you what book or program made an impact on you related to your business that you would recommend. And one of them was the Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Do you have any other books that you'd add to that list?




MARK: Well, there've been a lot of different books. And curiously, the books that have the biggest impact on me aren't necessarily the self-help books, or even the business books. It's history books and biographies. It's books about businesses, and transitions, and biographies of business people and entrepreneurs. And even political leaders that really teach you how to navigate the world. And how to be effective in a very complex environment.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: I do like Peter Drucker's books an awful lot. They have a very big impact on me.

TRAVIS: One specific book of his come to mind for you that you'd highly recommend?

MARK: Well, it's the one that we already talked about, the Entrepreneurship and innovation.

TRAVIS: Okay.

MARK: And his books on marketing and management are very, very famous and should be on any business bookshelf.

TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree. Let me ask you, what's one of your favorite tools or pieces of technology that you've recently discovered, if any, that you'd recommend to other business owners and why would you recommend it?

MARK: That's a great question and I'm going to give you a very surprising answer.

TRAVIS: I like this.

MARK: I have a podcast of my own called The Marketing Companion, and we do it twice a month. And I'm fortunate to have a partner in podcast, he's a super, super smart guy called Tom Webster. And our podcast is dedicated to our marketing and marketing ideas, and technology. And so we decided to do a podcast on marketing life hacks. What are the tools and what are the technologies that we use most to become more productive. And one of the tools that both of us used almost more than any other technology and it seems so simple is Microsoft Excel. And I know that people, they're looking for the sexy new tool, what's the greatest social media platform, or some customer discovery platform. But when you think about it, you can really do a lot towards running your business on Excel. And the thing is so darn powerful that even someone who's an expert is probably only using 10% of what the thing can do.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: And Tom and I both use it in very, very different ways but that is a technology that it's not new, it's not sexy, but I use it every single day.




TRAVIS: I do too. I use it to aggregate data and help me catch trends that are going on within my business.

MARK: Yeah, and today, business more and more is all about math.

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: It's about looking at the data and seeing there's opportunity in the numbers. What did you expect to be there that's not there. What pops up that says, "Oh, that's kind of interesting, maybe we ought to do more of that."

TRAVIS: Exactly.

MARK: And again, I know it's not the technology you would expect me to talk about but I think it's the truth.

TRAVIS: It is what it is.

MARK: It's the platform I use every day.

TRAVIS: Yeah, it is what it is. That's why these things aren't pre-planned because I want people to see whatever it is that works for them. I think there's nuggets of wisdom and everybody's advise that is accomplish things, and are teaching and inspiring others to do the same through their own business, or platform, or whatever their effort is. One of the question that I had for you is what quote would best summarize your belief or your attitude in business?

MARK: Well, I'm not a "Rah, rah" kind of guy. I'm not the type of person that surrounds himself with inspirational posters and stuff. But the one mantra that I guess think about the most that I most kind of wedded to I think in my approach is that I don't want to be too tied to past accomplishments. You have to keep looking forward. I always get concerned when I see someone's profile on Twitter or LinkedIn and it starts out with the word "former".

TRAVIS: Let go.

MARK: What the hell are you doing now, baby? What can you do for me today?

TRAVIS: Right.

MARK: Okay. You're a former newscaster, former athlete, former beauty pageant winner or whatever. Well, that is not going to do me a lick of good. It's mildly interesting. So what is coming next? And I think there's two lessons here, number 1 stay humble. Don't think that you have all the answers, keep learning and be open. If you're taking a position that you're the expert, you're the guru, you have the all the answers, you're going to be missing all these




amazing stuff that's going on with the millennials right now. All these new business opportunities, all these new ways to create new businesses. So that's number one, stay humble. Don't pontificate about your past and make that define who you are today. And the other thing is I think the pace of business changes so fast I think it's fine to celebrate what you've done, celebrate your accomplishments, and then get right back down to work and say, "How do we keep improving? How do we innovate? Let's keep looking forward. Let's serve, let's listen, let's understand our customers better than anybody else. Respond to them faster than anybody else. And keep the momentum going.

TRAVIS: Yeah, I completely agree. Hey, let me ask you, we're getting close on time. How do people connect with you?

MARK: Well, it's pretty easy. My website is called businessesgrow.com. And I figured nobody could really spell my last name Schaefer, there's so many different ways to spell it. But maybe they could remember Businesses Grow. So if you can remember Businesses Grow, there's tons of free stuff on there. I've got videos, and podcasts, and blog posts, and white papers, and case studies. There's lots of different ways to connect with me. You can find my Twitter connection on there, my blog, my Facebook connection. So everything is pretty much in that one place, businessesgrow.com. And it's a lot of fun to kind of thumb through all the stuff I've got there and see what might be interesting.

End of Interview

TRAVIS: Thank you so much for that. Remember that you can find all the links to the books and resources mentioned in the show in the show notes. Just go to rockstarentrepreneurnetwork.com. Now before I close the show today I want to read a quote from Tony Dorsett, and the quote reads, "To succeed, you need to find something to hold on to, something to motivate you, something to inspire you." This is Travis Lane Jenkins singing off for now. To your incredible success my friend, take care.

http://www.businessesgrow.com/

http://www.businessesgrow.com/





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