- 4 days ago
Zeb Lowe sits down with Rick Grant to unpack why “more content” isn’t the answer and why clarity, authenticity, and narrative structure matter more than ever. They dig into what actually makes content stick, why audiences are tuning out polished but hollow messaging, and how brands can define thought leadership without sounding like everyone else.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn:
Good content is memorable and impactful.
Stories are more effective than bullet points for retention.
Simplifying messages helps break through content noise.
Authenticity is key to effective communication.
AI can be a valuable tool for content creation.
Thought leadership is accessible to anyone passionate about their knowledge.
Understanding your audience's journey is crucial for content strategy.
Leverage personal experiences to craft unique narratives.
The basic brand promise is foundational for effective messaging.
Helping others is the best way to establish expertise.
Related to this episode:
Rick Grant Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickgrant?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name
The Power House podcast brings the biggest names in housing to answer hard-hitting questions about industry trends, operational and growth strategy, and leadership. Join HousingWire's Zeb Lowe every Thursday morning for candid conversations with industry leaders to learn how they’re differentiating themselves from the competition. Hosted and produced by the HousingWire Content Studio.
Here's a glimpse of what you'll learn:
Good content is memorable and impactful.
Stories are more effective than bullet points for retention.
Simplifying messages helps break through content noise.
Authenticity is key to effective communication.
AI can be a valuable tool for content creation.
Thought leadership is accessible to anyone passionate about their knowledge.
Understanding your audience's journey is crucial for content strategy.
Leverage personal experiences to craft unique narratives.
The basic brand promise is foundational for effective messaging.
Helping others is the best way to establish expertise.
Related to this episode:
Rick Grant Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rickgrant?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name
The Power House podcast brings the biggest names in housing to answer hard-hitting questions about industry trends, operational and growth strategy, and leadership. Join HousingWire's Zeb Lowe every Thursday morning for candid conversations with industry leaders to learn how they’re differentiating themselves from the competition. Hosted and produced by the HousingWire Content Studio.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Welcome back to the Powerhouse Podcast. Today, I'm joined by Rick Grant, a man that has been shaping mortgage and housing content for decades, a trade journalist since the 90s, founder of multiple industry publications, conference planner, and a content and PR strategist for lenders, vendors, and fintech.
00:17Rick and I discuss why good content matters, where most LOs, agents, and leaders go wrong, and how AI fits into this space without turning everything into generic noise. We'll talk about how to build thought leadership that sounds like you, not like a template, and how to use AI as a force multiplier instead of a shortcut that backfires.
00:35If you're posting on LinkedIn, sending email campaigns, or trying to build a brand, this one will be part therapy session, part masterclass. Rick's been watching what works and what flops in this industry for decades.
00:57All right, Rick, thank you for joining me.
00:59Zip, thanks for having me. It's good to see you.
01:01Good seeing you as well. I've been looking forward to this conversation for a month or two now, because we're here to talk about content, good content, why it matters, and what professionals should know about that and what they should be thinking about as they go to create content.
01:19But before we dive into it, can you unpack a little bit of your background and your journey through the industry? I mean, you started off, you were like a trade journalist back in the 90s, right?
01:30That's right. That's right. So in 1997, I got my first job in the industry writing for National Mortgage News in New York for Mark Fogarty, one of the best editors I have ever worked for.
01:40I worked for there for about half a decade. I got recruited over to CBS to run their financial services and engineering verticals for Office.com back in the day.
01:50And then Mark recruited me back to run Mortgage Technology Magazine, which, oh, that was so much fun. I really love that.
01:59I did a few other things. I wrote for Janet Hewitt at Mortgage Banking, another fantastic editor, and Paul Jackson at Housing Wire.
02:07I was a columnist for you guys for about 18 months.
02:10So me talking to Housing Wire about content is kind of like the student coming back to the master, because this is what you guys do every day.
02:19You do such a fantastic job. And this podcast series, by the way, Zip, I really like what you're doing with this.
02:24So I hope you keep that up.
02:26Thank you. Thank you. I'll do my best.
02:28Yeah, well, you're doing great.
02:29I mean, these days I do a lot more of private writing for companies, PR, thought leadership, helping executives say more clearly what they think so the industry can understand how smart they are.
02:42I think what's important, we've got to lay the framework to some of the deeper dives that we'll get into in this conversation in a minute.
02:51But like I said, we're here to talk about content, good content, and before we can really explore how to make that work, the thought process behind that, it's important to kind of lay out the value prop for good.
03:05I mean, why does good content, why does that actually matter?
03:09Why is good content actually important?
03:11We can talk later in a few minutes about what good content is versus is not and how to get there, but I would love to hear you share your thoughts on why good content matters.
03:24Well, it's a great question, and here's what I think, and I may not be the smartest guy that you're ever going to meet, but in my opinion, the stories that we tell are the only damn thing we ever remember.
03:36I mean, we don't remember the bullet points in the ads, right?
03:40We remember something that happened to someone, especially if that someone was us, you know, and it's always been this way.
03:49From the time that we were back in the caves talking over the fire about, you know, how we survived the day and where we found fresh water and what dinosaurs to avoid.
03:59Just kidding, we didn't live with dinosaurs, but maybe saber-toothed cats or whatever, right?
04:03Those were stories.
04:05Archaeologists have been studying those ancient caves for 150 years now.
04:09And in all that time, they have never found painted on one of those walls anything that looks like a PowerPoint slide.
04:17They just didn't use them, right?
04:19They used pictures of animals in action.
04:22They told stories, right?
04:25Yeah, so just yesterday or the day before yesterday, I was having a conversation with Diego Sanchez, our president, and I was talking to him about the importance of story, the importance of narrative.
04:37And even if this is, one, I 100% agree with what you're saying.
04:41I was talking to him about the scientific data that backs that up, right?
04:47If you want to retain information, if you want to communicate information, if you encode that into a narrative, if you encode that into a story, your audience will remember, they will understand that information exponentially better than if you give them what you just said.
05:04That was my example specifically.
05:08I said, if you give someone a one paragraph, four or five sentence, very, very short story, and you encode it with, let's say, 10 words that you want people to memorize, or you give them a piece of paper that has 10 bullet points of those same words, and then you have them try to white-knuckle memorize that list versus read the story a couple times, they'll remember the words of the story much quicker, and they'll retain them far longer.
05:33Yeah, and we're trained like this from earliest age.
05:39Mary had a little lamb.
05:40Its fleece was white as, you know this.
05:42You don't even have to think about this.
05:43You know what this is, right?
05:45Snow.
05:46So it's the same thing.
05:48It's the only way that we remember things.
05:50If you talk to a memory expert, someone whose job is to help you retain more of what you learn, they'll give you tricks like the memory mansion.
05:59You heard of that?
05:59You go in your mind, and you pretend you're walking through a house, and you're seeing the things you have to remember.
06:04Why?
06:05Because the brain is an analytical machine.
06:08It takes in all the sensory data, and I shouldn't talk about this because I'm not a neuroscientist, but I've read a lot to study how I work.
06:15We take in all the sensory information, and then our brain, super powerful, can make a decision.
06:21Do we fight?
06:22Do we flee?
06:23Do we negotiate?
06:25What do we do?
06:26How do we survive this situation?
06:29That's what our brains are primarily designed for.
06:31They're not designed to be a database.
06:33We can't store a bunch of stuff in there.
06:36All we can remember is the story about how Joe faced a similar situation and got eaten by a saber tooth.
06:41So we don't want to do that.
06:43We want to do something different.
06:44And I feel like it permeates at every level in our industry from the originator to the real estate agent, all the way up to the leadership level where one of your primary responsibilities, no matter where you're at in the industry, is to educate.
06:59And people pay lip service to telling stories.
07:03Storytelling is a marketing buzzword, but it's really quite astounding how rarely proper storytelling techniques get applied, especially through written content and through social content.
07:20That's something I wanted to ask you about.
07:22Like if you're looking at what's kind of flooding LinkedIn and email inboxes these days, what is your assessment of the current content marketing landscape?
07:35Do you think quality is better, worse, or has it found a different way to suck the same amount?
07:41Well, it's certainly not the same amount, right?
07:45So I got a good friend back in Pennsylvania who's a water quality expert, and he goes and tests stream water and stuff.
07:52And what you're asking me to do is what's the quality of this stream of consciousness that's coming to us in all this marketing stuff?
07:59And in a fire hose, you can't get a sample because it knocks you down, right?
08:03That's what we're dealing with.
08:04It's just an extension of more barrage of information hitting us at all angles at all times of day.
08:12It's incredible.
08:13And AI is just making that easier.
08:16And in the old days, when I started, I started a podcast in 2005.
08:22Nobody was doing it back then.
08:23So naturally, I won a national award for podcasting in 2006.
08:26And everybody thought, oh, wow, you must be really great.
08:28And I said, no, I'm just the only one doing it, right?
08:31When you're the only one marketing, pretty much anything you send out there is going to be better than your competition.
08:38But when everybody's throwing crap out there, all of it, now whoever's receiving that has to act like a tuner, right?
08:45You remember the old communications model, so sender and receiver.
08:49And we always just assume, well, the sender spits stuff out and the receiver is going to catch it.
08:52Not today.
08:53Today, we're all tuners, and we can tune what we want to catch and what we want to ignore.
08:58We have to.
08:59It's a survival response to all this crap, right?
09:03So now, the question of quality becomes much more complex because it can't just be good content.
09:11It has to be good content that talks about the problem that your buyer has so that they will tune to that channel and hear it.
09:20And then it has to be clear enough that they understand your value proposition so that they can enter a conversation with you that, if you're lucky, will result in a relationship, which is the only thing that's ever resulted in a sale, right?
09:33So this barrage of content has actually created a much more challenging scenario for content marketers.
09:41And the answer, ironically, is to go back to the beginning.
09:49Simplify.
09:50Simplify your stories.
09:52Make not children's books, but something so simple, so easy to understand, so easy to remember that it breaks through all that noise so that when you finally have someone in the buy zone, they get the message.
10:07They understand the value proposition, they engage.
10:10Yeah, I think people a lot of times – and again, this is every level, from the leadership level all the way down to the boots on the ground.
10:17Part of the – one of the main reasons that people are told to market and educate themselves is so that you are seen as an expert in your area, right?
10:29And so what happens a lot of times is whenever people are thinking about that, they're not really thinking about the audience, the person engaging in the content.
10:36They're thinking about how can I frame this so that I can make myself seem like an expert.
10:41And they overcomplicate their message because their message is really secondary to their ego.
10:49And I don't mean it in a negative way.
10:51It's just like they were told, you do this so that you are seen as an expert.
10:55It's like, well, so I'm doing this.
10:56I need to make sure that I'm seen as an expert so I will overcomplicate the scenario.
11:00I will overcomplicate the story.
11:02Therefore, or as a result, you end up losing your audience, losing your client.
11:08Yeah, and you hit it perfectly.
11:10In the old days, we used to call that the proletariat shuffle.
11:14So we put ourselves right in the place of the receiver and we help them.
11:20And it's, again, a simplification.
11:22It's a return to an easier time.
11:24How do you make yourself look like an expert?
11:26You actually help the people that you're trying to talk to, right?
11:31If what you say to them actually helps them, then you are an expert.
11:34If it doesn't, then you're just a lot of hot air and you're talking.
11:38You're taking up their time, right?
11:39So whenever we focus on ourselves and like, well, I've got to look really smart, we're
11:44defeating our purpose completely.
11:46We need to look at our prospect and say, what's hurting you?
11:51Where's the pain, right?
11:53And then if we don't know how to fix that, the best thing we can do is refer them to someone
11:57who can and build that relationship.
12:00But if we can, then we have to say, look, let me tell you a story.
12:03And we tell them how we've helped somebody else with this very same problem.
12:07And we leave it.
12:08The thing that's so ironic and so wonderful about teaching other people, especially in
12:14the B2B space, is we go in to try to teach them how to do what they need to do to succeed.
12:20And as soon as an executive with buying power hears enough to realize that we actually know
12:24what we're talking about, they quit learning and they say, okay, okay, okay, you do it.
12:28I get it.
12:30You handle it.
12:31I understand you know it.
12:33So, I mean, there is no downside to being useful to someone in your target market.
12:40No downside.
12:42Go out there, help them.
12:44And the worst case scenario is you don't have what they need.
12:47You refer them and somebody else refers you and it all comes back around.
12:51I'd like to talk to you a little bit about voice, tone, and your experience working.
12:58With clients and helping people find their message and their voice and their tone so that
13:03anyone listening can kind of apply that directly into their content creation and marketing efforts.
13:10Whenever you're creating content, everyone knows that authenticity is paramount, right?
13:16You want to be human.
13:18And ironically, most people are afraid of actually doing that.
13:25And so this weird thing happens where people are either inauthentic or they try to be authentic
13:33that gives off a very weird, like humble brag voice.
13:38And so let me ask you, so how do you explain to clients and what thought exercises can good listeners do
13:49where they help, you know, where they can kind of gauge where they're crossing that line
13:54from kind of professional to being forgettable?
13:59Right.
14:01Okay.
14:02All right.
14:02That's an excellent question.
14:03And we can start with what we remember.
14:07We tend to remember people that impact us, people that give us information that changes
14:14the way we think or see something in our world.
14:17That's what we remember.
14:18Oh, yeah.
14:19I was with him when I figured this out, right?
14:21So that's what we're shooting for.
14:24But here's how we get there.
14:25And this is where a lot of executives fall short.
14:28And it has nothing to do with marketing or experience or anything else.
14:32It has everything to do with self-confidence.
14:35They go through their day every day and they make these decisions and she tells them what
14:38to do and them what to do.
14:39And he tells her what to do and everybody does what they're supposed to do because they're
14:43in a position of authority.
14:45But then when they get ready to talk to somebody about marketing or sales or a journalist, somebody
14:50in the media, all that confidence disappears and they try to figure out who do I need to
14:55be?
14:55Who am I supposed to be right now?
14:58And I always stop them and I say, no, no, no, no.
15:01We're talking to you because of who you are now, not who we think you're supposed to be
15:07or who you think you're supposed to be.
15:09So stop all that and talk to me like you would talk to one of your prospects, somebody that
15:16you want to help.
15:17How do you talk to them?
15:18Now, when I was doing podcasting, this was funny because I'd interview an executive and
15:23I'd always ask, so tell me about the company, what you're doing or whatever.
15:26And the first time they would always repeat the marketing, it's just like the marketing
15:30department had written it for them.
15:32Well, Rick, we do this and this and this and this and this.
15:36Okay, thanks.
15:37And now I ask them a few other questions.
15:38I'll come back to it.
15:39Well, no, but tell me again what you do.
15:42And they'll say, well, Rick, we do this and this and this and this and this.
15:45But the third time I'd ask him, and I have to wait a while, third time I'd ask him, they
15:49would say, Rick, look, Rick, it's not that hard.
15:51Okay.
15:52This is where we're at.
15:53This is who we help.
15:54This is what we do.
15:55And that passion made great podcasts.
15:57But I had to fight my way through all of the positioning and stuff to get to their real
16:04voice.
16:04That's why when I do thought leadership writing for people, I'd record everything.
16:08Because I'll think about what they say and I'll go, ah, that's the story.
16:12But it's only when I go back to the transcript and see how they string words together and what
16:17stories they tell, can I find their voice.
16:20And everybody has one.
16:22I mean, when I was a young writer, I thought, well, I'm going to develop this great voice.
16:25I'm going to be great.
16:26No, everybody's got a great voice, right, about what they're passionate about and what
16:31they understand.
16:33So my job is to get to an executive and say, look, relax.
16:37I don't care.
16:38Does it take whiskey?
16:39What?
16:39Does it take the forest?
16:41What?
16:42How can I get you to just chill and tell me what you know?
16:46And once they do that, oh, man, great stuff comes out.
16:49So that also pressing those executives.
16:53So what do you do?
16:54And that third response of, well, listen, Rick, it's not that hard.
16:57That ties back to what you talked about earlier with simplification, right?
17:00Right, right.
17:01And authenticity and simplicity.
17:04And that leads into, actually, you'd said this before about working with executives and
17:09leaders that the most important stories that leaders are telling are the ones that they've
17:14been telling informally for years, but they've never documented.
17:17So that's how you help them.
17:20Let me ask you this, though.
17:21So if someone isn't working with you, but they, from this conversation, like, I know I
17:28have these stories to tell.
17:29How could the person that is not working with a professional writer, how could they begin
17:36to unearth their own stories to tell authentically?
17:40Yeah, okay.
17:42So 10 years ago, I would never believe I would be giving you this answer now.
17:47But I am, because the new AI tools we have are so, so good at breaking through all the
17:56exterior stuff and getting us to just talk to them, that they're a tool I think every
18:01executive should use.
18:02I have a good friend, Scott Shang.
18:03You may know Scott.
18:04This guy is brilliant.
18:07And he'll dive into AI, and he'll work with it all weekend until he figures out how to
18:12talk to it so that it can give him what he needs.
18:16And he's built these tools, custom chat GPTs, that are like, find your life's mission or
18:22your life's vision.
18:24And the AI asks you questions and talks to you like a therapist until it gets you to admit
18:30what you really want to do.
18:32And I've done it.
18:33It works.
18:33It's amazing.
18:35And then you tell it.
18:37And then you can tell AI, good.
18:38Give this back to me.
18:39Give me this summary.
18:40But in my voice, because you know my voice now.
18:42We've been talking all weekend.
18:44How would I say this correctly?
18:47And it will.
18:48It'll give you good stuff.
18:50So it's just a little ROI, right?
18:52Because I think that, I mean, if you're paying attention to it and you read enough of it,
18:57the AI-generated content has a very specific voice.
19:01Actually, it has two voices, I feel.
19:03One is polite and organized and grammatically correct.
19:06And then the other is this weird faux thought leadership voice where it's a bunch of one-liners.
19:12A lot of people think so-and-so, one line.
19:16But I don't see it that way, next line.
19:18The industry is telling you something to, no, one line.
19:21But the industry is wrong, the next line.
19:23I'm the one that's speaking the truth.
19:24You know, like it's like, okay, you're not saying shit.
19:27I don't know who's saying that.
19:29So, and it all just leads to this sameness, right?
19:33This disease of sameness, this AI slop.
19:36So, but what you're talking about is just a, still using AI, but instead of like having
19:40chat write a post about the need for first-time homebuyer education or permeating the myths
19:45of the 20% down payment, whatever.
19:48Treat, chat, or any LLM that you, you could be clawed, whatever.
19:52But treat it almost as a, as a slight therapist, right?
19:57To, to, as a series of thought exercises that could take, I don't know, half an hour,
20:02an hour over the course of Saturday.
20:04And then you can, they can understand your voice.
20:08And then from there, then you start feeding it in prompts, basically.
20:11Yeah.
20:11And you may need a guide initially to help you talk to the machine, but using AI the
20:17way 99% of marketers are using it today is like buying a fast car and then calling your
20:23friend and say, Hey, let's take this car out for a spin.
20:25Do you want to steer or do you want to push?
20:27Right?
20:27No, we don't, we don't push the car.
20:30The car has an engine.
20:31The car has electronics.
20:33It can do all that.
20:34All we have to do is put a finger on the wheel, right?
20:37That's what AI is.
20:38If you're lazy and you just go to AI and say, uh, give me a thousand blog posts that
20:42I, you know, it'll do it.
20:43It'll spit it out, but it'll sound exactly like everybody else.
20:47It'd be filled with emojis and M dashes and a bunch of crap that humans can now see at
20:52a glance.
20:52We're, when it comes to the sensory part, we're great.
20:57All right.
20:58We can't see as well as an Eagle, right?
21:00We can't hear as well as maybe our dog or smell as well as some animals, but all together
21:06we can take a look at something and instantly know whether that's good for us or bad for
21:11us, right?
21:12Whether that's helpful or not helpful, whether that's human or AI.
21:15And as soon as somebody realizes that's AI crap, well, now you've lost authority.
21:21You've lost trust.
21:22You've lost, you've lost credibility.
21:24You've lost everything it takes to make a sale or build that relationship.
21:29That's expensive, man.
21:30That's, that's costly.
21:31You can't do that.
21:32What you've got to do is say, look, AI, you, you are my indentured servant and you
21:38will do whatever I tell you.
21:40And I'm going to teach you to think like me and talk like me.
21:43And AI laughs because it's never going to think like us.
21:45It thinks like us and a million other people smarter than me, right?
21:49A bunch of all those people thinks like all that, but it's just worthless fluff unless
21:54it can understand what we need.
21:56And if we can drive it like a performance machine, not like a search engine or a quick
22:05way to get something drafted.
22:07I mean, when I first started, my artist friends in particular said, oh my God, run from AI,
22:12Rick, stop it, block it, whatever you have to do, do not give it any power or credence.
22:17And I, you know, I hadn't made a decision one way or another, but I didn't really care.
22:22So they said, well, one day it's going to do all your writing for you.
22:26And I told Scott Shang that I said, that's stupid, Scott.
22:29It won't.
22:30So Scott got me on the phone and went to one of my repositories with a bunch of my blog
22:34posts.
22:35He trained AI to talk like me, write like me in that moment, and then told it to write
22:42a blog post in my voice.
22:43And I thought, oh my God, oh my God.
22:47Okay.
22:47I can't just be the old backstory writer anymore, right?
22:51In the back room, right?
22:52Now I have to be a communication strategist.
22:55How do we use that?
22:56How do we, where do we use that?
22:58How do we deploy it?
22:59And which of those million stories AI can kick out for us today is the one we need to be using
23:05on this particular target market at this particular moment in time, because it matters.
23:10It matters what story we tell where.
23:13And so that's pretty much what I do now and help leaders get the confidence to just be
23:19themselves with their experience.
23:20You'd be surprised.
23:21The thing I hear most often from leaders is, well, I don't know anything that everybody
23:25else doesn't know.
23:26I'm like, that's so wrong on so many levels, because everything you know that somebody else
23:32knows, you see differently through the lens of your own experience, your own background,
23:37and your own current situation.
23:39You cannot, none of us can see the world the same way someone else does.
23:44It's always going to be unique.
23:47So leaders need to lean into that uniqueness and say, this is what I see.
23:52Now, will that appeal to everyone?
23:54No, it'll only appeal to the people right in your narrow target market who have been looking
23:59all week for someone who thinks like that, who can help them.
24:03And when they hear that, they go, damn, that's the guy I should be calling.
24:07And they call them.
24:08It's not hard.
24:10It's not rocket science.
24:12It's use the tools we have to tell the stories that are going to get engagement and build
24:20that relationship.
24:21Because if you don't have that relationship, you have nothing, nothing.
24:25Everything depends on that.
24:27And we know that in our market, our industry does trillions of dollars worth of business
24:31every year, trillions.
24:33And yet, if you go to a conference, you'll see that overall, we're very small.
24:37We're not a big group.
24:39And when somebody brings in a solution, the first thing those people ask is, well, who
24:44else is using this?
24:46Who do I know that trusts this?
24:49Right?
24:50Always, always.
24:51So you have to tell those stories.
24:53Yeah.
24:54Yeah.
24:54And I'd go back to what you were saying earlier when I said ROI, using the LLMs and to find
25:02your voice.
25:03Because all this is predicated on you having a unique and authentic voice in the first
25:07place.
25:08And when you don't know, you can't guide it, you can't program it if you don't know what
25:13your own voice actually is.
25:17And that, it doesn't, not like the old, you and I are both writers, right?
25:21And so finding your voice as an author, we're not going, you know, this isn't some, you
25:25know, conversation about trying to write the great, next great American novel.
25:29We're trying to supplant Faulkner as a great American, you know, author.
25:33But if you want good results, it's possible.
25:37And if you put in just a little bit of time up front to really help hone your voice.
25:43And I think that a lot of people don't understand the downstream implications of that in their
25:48over, just in their overall marketability and their overall communication skills, even
25:54verbally, right?
25:57Finding your voice, fine tuning that voice and using the tools that are, that are
26:01available to help you do that in a way that, like I said, you and I have been writing old
26:05school for a very, very long time.
26:07And the only way to be able to do that in any capacity was just to just pump out words.
26:13Do it all the time.
26:14That's right.
26:14Do it all the time.
26:15Do it all the time.
26:16Do it all the time.
26:16And you don't have to do that now.
26:18And so you have people that are not quote unquote trained writers and, you know, just had gone
26:23to school for it.
26:24And you can, you have access to an, like an unimaginable wealth of, of possibility.
26:31That's just not just previously assumed unavailable.
26:33And one of the things that you said, going back to the, the voicing was that you, you
26:38need to be, I can't remember if you read this or I heard it from you, but you need to be
26:42human, you need to be an expert and you need to be passionate.
26:45Those are the three core elements of a, a good and effective voice.
26:53If someone is again, wanting to fine tune their voice or hone their voice, how do you, how
26:59do they go about making sure that they are, that all three of those elements are
27:03included in what they're, and what they're putting out in the world?
27:07Well, that's a good question.
27:08And I always tell people when they're podcasting with me to relax because there's only three
27:12things they need to bring and you brought them right.
27:14They need to be a human.
27:16Don't tell me the marketing speak.
27:17Don't tell me what they told you to tell me.
27:19I don't care.
27:20None of my listeners care, right?
27:22Two, they have to know their stuff and they wouldn't be on the show if they didn't, right?
27:27You've been there, you've been around.
27:28And third, you have to be passionate, but I add, you have to be passionate about helping
27:34the people on that are watching this podcast, right?
27:37If you're just passionate about what you do and maybe you're a skydiver and they're like,
27:41oh, that's cool, but that's way out of my world, right?
27:44But if you're passionate about helping the people that came to this show because they
27:47were looking for solutions or insight or answers or things to think about or a place
27:52to start even, then that is going to carry through, right?
27:57So the first two basically take care of themselves.
28:01As long as they don't give me a bunch of marketing speak and as long as they are talking about
28:06something they know about and I'm careful to make sure they are just like you do with
28:08me, that's fine.
28:10The third is, how can you be helpful?
28:13How can you help the people that are listening to this now, right?
28:16So I run a PR firm.
28:18I do a lot of writing.
28:19I do a lot of ghost writing.
28:20Me telling people to use AI and train it to talk like them and then use it a lot is
28:25counterintuitive because it's like, well, Rick, you're losing business.
28:29Yeah, but there's only one of me and there's thousands and thousands of guys.
28:33How many can I really help before I'm dead?
28:35And I'm already close to that, right?
28:37So this is the best thing we can do.
28:41It's not just true for me.
28:42It's true for all of us.
28:43We can only really impact personally a fraction of the people we can reach with these new technologies.
28:48So if we're going to reach them, let's help them.
28:52And if we help them, it's all going to come back.
28:55It's all going to benefit everyone.
28:57It's going to be great.
28:58And once an executive starts thinking like that, they're like, oh, well, Rick, that's actually easy.
29:03Yeah, yeah.
29:03All this stuff is easy.
29:05It's not hard.
29:06We've overcomplicated it.
29:08You get in there.
29:09You figure out how to help.
29:10If you're a CEO or you're a CMO or you're some C-suite, your job is to help everyone in your organization under you succeed.
29:19Because if they succeed, everyone succeeds.
29:22If you're on the sales side, your job is to make sure that everybody that you talk to out there knows that you're in the business of helping them and help as many as you can.
29:30And that way you can tell the four stories.
29:32There's only four stories that any company needs to tell.
29:35Origin stories.
29:36This is where we came from.
29:37This is why we're here.
29:38This is why it matters to us.
29:39Two stories about what we do.
29:40Everybody does this.
29:41It's like tips, tricks, how to get started, what to do, all that stuff.
29:46Three stories about our successes, our press releases, our new hires, all that.
29:50And four, the most powerful stories of all, stories other people tell about our success.
29:56So we have to help them tell those stories.
29:59Make it easy for them to do that.
30:01And they will.
30:02And then we win the game.
30:03This game is not that hard.
30:06It's not a hard game.
30:08Business in general.
30:10Even mortgage lending is not a hard game.
30:12It's a little complicated because you're competing with so many lenders for the same deal, thanks to the CFPB teaching them to apply with more than one lender and all that noise.
30:19But once you get the app, the game is the same.
30:24Move it through the process smoothly, efficiently.
30:28Stay in communication all the way.
30:29I was just talking to Laura last year about this.
30:31She runs Worthy Performance Group.
30:32She's a brilliant trainer.
30:34And she built the process because, as James Clear says, right, said it so good, we don't rise to the level of our goals.
30:44We fall to the level of our systems.
30:47Right?
30:47Right.
30:47So make it easy.
30:49Make an easy, repeatable system and then grease the wheels and let it run.
30:53How do you – when it comes to content, messaging, marketing, thought leadership is just a major buzzword and that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people.
31:08And that can be difficult to do when you have an industry at large that revolves around such short-term news cycles.
31:18How do you – how do you help – how do you, one, how do you define thought leadership in terms of content and messaging?
31:29And how do you help others – how can others step out of whatever their frame that they currently think thought leadership is into what thought leadership actually is?
31:40All right.
31:42That's an excellent question.
31:44I used to think that thought leaders were these executives way up there in the clouds and we could get to them and understand what they think.
31:52It would all make sense to us.
31:54But then I realized this game isn't that hard.
31:58Everybody can be a thought leader, right, if they're passionate about what they know and they share it in a way that helps other people.
32:06Problem is that they're afraid to use their own voice.
32:08They haven't been taught that they are enough as they are and let that out.
32:13And we see this – we see this so often with our female executives who've worked in our industry, toiled hours and hours in the back office to build things, and they finally get up into the C-suite and some of them have trouble talking about what they know and how good they are.
32:32I think that's criminal.
32:33I got a daughter in my 20s, and that's why I love people like Molly Dowdy, who's working to help women own that space because they deserve it, right?
32:44But men, too, often don't have the confidence.
32:47And they're like, well, Rick, I don't know what to talk about.
32:49Content marketing sounds important, but I don't know what stories to tell.
32:52Like that is so easy, okay?
32:54That's the easiest thing because the stories that we want to tell about us, that's only one of those four types, right?
33:01Stories about our success.
33:03All the other stories are designed to answer the questions that your prospect has as they move through the buyer's journey.
33:10So if we have an avatar, this is the person we want to sell to, this is the person we need to help, and we do the buyer's journey.
33:17Some people say it's four steps, five steps.
33:19I have seven steps.
33:21At each stage in that journey, they have certain questions that must be answered or they will not move to the next step and culminate in a relationship, buying and then recommending you.
33:32So we have to answer all of those questions.
33:35And how do we do that?
33:36With content.
33:38We do it with blog posts and status updates and stories.
33:41And so once you know who you're trying to help and what their decision-making process is, you have all the content ideas you need.
33:50They're all right there.
33:52Now we just have to tell those stories, right, in one of the four ways.
33:56Maybe it's we tell it through an origin story.
33:58This is why we built this company, to answer this question.
34:01Or maybe it's stories about our success.
34:03This is how we help someone else.
34:05Or stories about what we do.
34:07Well, let me explain how that works.
34:09You do this and this and this.
34:10You do it with us.
34:11You do it with someone else.
34:11We love to do it.
34:12We're passionate about it.
34:13Do it with us.
34:14Once you get all those stories out there, now it depends on who you try to reach.
34:19Now in the trades, this is the B2B side.
34:23So here we're looking for partners.
34:24We're looking for B2B clients.
34:26We're looking to recruit, right?
34:27We're looking to add people.
34:29So the stories that we tell them have to walk them through the same buyer's journey.
34:34It's a little different for them than for the others.
34:37But once you see it, it's all right there.
34:39It falls out.
34:41These are the stories we got to tell.
34:42Let's get them done.
34:43Let's get them written.
34:44Let's train our executives to tell this story from the podium effortlessly without thinking about it.
34:51Let's make it a nursery rhyme.
34:52And they do it every time.
34:54And it works.
34:55It works.
34:56I got one last question for you because you've shared a lot of really valuable information, a lot of, I guess, insights, actionable insights that people could take away and start implementing immediately.
35:08But if you've got – if someone's listening right now and they realize they've been posting, they've been creating content, but they're – either they know or they're realizing that their content doesn't really sound like them anymore.
35:21It's what we've been talking about.
35:23It's the templates and the borrowed ideas and all that stuff.
35:26What's the – there's a lot of things that we talked about that they could do.
35:29Tomorrow morning, they're going to course correct.
35:32What's the first move that you would recommend that they do?
35:37Here's what I would do.
35:38And this is because I talked to a lot of executives who've kind of lost track of their basic brand promise, their basic mission, right, which is a formula.
35:50We exist to help this type of person who's struggling with this type of issue overcome it so they can enjoy this kind of benefit, right?
35:56That's it.
35:57It's always the same.
35:58We didn't even talk about how we do it with products.
36:00That's not even in there.
36:01It's just those three things.
36:03So get on ChatGPT or Claude or whatever you want to use and say, here's my website.
36:09Here's my LinkedIn.
36:10Here's what we do.
36:11Tell me what you understand about my business.
36:14And it'll tell you, oh, you do this and this and this and this.
36:17All right?
36:17And then tell it, as a CEO that's going to go give a major presentation to a major trade group in my industry, how do I tell this story?
36:27What are the soundbites that I need to know to explain what I do?
36:31And then when you get those soundbites, then do some more work on each of those because every soundbite is a whole story.
36:38It's just – it's the doorway to an entire story that you are eventually going to have to tell.
36:45Once you – and it doesn't have to be AI.
36:48A good marketing person can help you with this.
36:50It's helpful if they're third party so that they're objective.
36:53They don't know all the stuff you've been doing for nine years.
36:57They just know what they've seen on your website and say, these are the ten differentiating elements in your story that I don't see anywhere else.
37:08So, Mr. Executive, talk to me about that.
37:12Why this?
37:13Why that?
37:14How this?
37:14How that?
37:15And talk and talk and talk and write and think and tell that story until it rolls off your tongue effortlessly.
37:22Now, many executives will say, well, Rick, I already do that.
37:24We've done that for years.
37:26But in too many cases, that's a story that's been written by the marketing department.
37:31It comes over.
37:33Those guys are great.
37:35I prefer to keep marketing involved in finding customers that match what we want to sell.
37:40I don't like it when marketing tells us what we have to sell, right?
37:44The leadership, the company leadership has to decide this is who we want to help.
37:49This is the problem we want to help them overcome.
37:51This is the benefit we want them to have.
37:54That basic brand proposition, that brand promise, it unlocks everything else.
38:02Excellent.
38:02Well, Rick, I really appreciate you coming on.
38:04I'm going to have to get you in the beginning.
38:06So we have a lot to talk about in the future.
38:10This has been really informative, and I just always enjoy talking to you and picking your brain.
38:15It was great, Seb.
38:16I look forward to it next time.
38:18Yes, sir.
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