Develop Your Leadership Skills

Episode 916: Develop Your Leadership Skills, with Kevin Kruse

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Develop your leadership skills and start your roadmap for success. Join Kevin Kruse and learn how to develop your leadership skills.

Kevin Kruse is the Founder and CEO of LEADx, offering the world’s first leadership trainer and coach powered by IBM Watson. Kevin is also a New York Times bestselling author of nine books including Great Leaders Have No Rules: Contrarian Leadership Principles to Transform Your Team and Business.

So if you want to develop your leadership skills, start it today by listening to Kevin’s advice in this podcast episode.

develop-your-leadership-skills

What you will learn from this episode about how to develop your leadership skills:

  • How Kevin first discovered the power of leadership, and how that lesson became the focus of his book Great Leaders Have No Rules
  • Why the ubiquitous “open door policy” actually causes more harm than good, and why “closing your door and opening your calendar” is the key to empowering those you lead
  • How to develop your leadership skills with the help of the first AI-powered leadership trainer, Coach Amanda, developed by Kevin and his team
  • Why every time Kevin wants to start a company, he starts a podcast and then turns the content of the podcast into a book first
  • How being a nine-time bestselling author positions Kevin to be an expert and trusted thought leader, and what strategies he suggests for people wanting to write a book
  • Why Kevin strongly recommends launching a podcast for anyone wanting to move into thought leadership, and what advantages a podcast can allow you to leverage
  • Why focusing on adding value for your audience will help you grow your business exponentially
  • How to use, reuse, and repackage your content to be able to share it across many different channels
  • How Kevin learned to define success not as a number but instead as the freedom to spend his time how he likes
  • Why you need to develop your leadership skills to find success for your agency

Resources:

Additional Resources:

 

 

Develop Your Leadership Skills: Full Episode Transcript

 

Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.

 

Good morning, Onward Nation. I’m Stephen Woessner. But before I introduce you to our very special encore guests today, I want to share some additional context around Kevin Kruse and why I was so excited that he said yes to come back for this really special encore conversation first. It’s been a couple of years since Kevin and I have had a chance to get together to have this type of conversation, you know, with you and for you.

 

It was way back in episode 126 of Onward Nation. So I certainly encourage you to go back if you haven’t listened to 126 with Kevin, I certainly encourage you to go back and learn more about his path, his journey, rock solid, amazing story. And now we’ve just had this incredible pre-interview chat and I want to share this additional context again.

 

What? I was super excited when he said yes. And then he completely blew me away during the pre-interview to all the cool things we’re going to talk about, for example. So he’s the founder and CEO now of a company called Lead X. And here’s why. That’s super interesting because this is his sixth company in the last 30 years.

 

So on, just that ended up itself. Awesome. But then let’s peel that back a little bit further. You’ll hear Kevin kind of walk us through this piece in this recipe as to how he’s built his companies over time, because I think it is super, super smart. For example, every time he decides that he’s going to, he’s written nine books, by the way, every time that he decides, hey, you know what?

 

I’m going to launch and build and scale this company. He writes a book first because that book cements into place the thought leadership that then that company is built upon. 

 

So that book essentially develops that if you want to call it top level awareness or top of the funnel activity, whatever sort of marketing name you want to stick on that, but he’s planting his flag first around a particular topic, then building a company around that thought leadership, which is amazing.

 

So we’re going to walk through that recipe and why he feels so strongly that every business that he’s ever started, like why he’s followed that recipe, then taking that further, connecting the book into the business top line, top end of the funnel, and now using a podcast as a way to build future books. So this is not whether you like podcasts, whether you like books or whatever sort of, you know, cornerstone content.

 

You feel sort of drawn to you fine. Or wherever your gifts and talents are fine. But I think this conversation is going to be super, super helpful about how to create leverage, how to create one piece of content, leverage it across these multiple channels, multiple platforms like we talk about, and then build a great, successful business in the process.

 

So with that said, without further ado, welcome back to Onward Nation, Kevin. 

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Kevin Kruse’s Introduction

 

Steve. And that’s quite a wind up. It’s great to be back. Well, it’s like I could go on forever. I’m like gushing over everything that you’ve done because what you’ve done is super impressive. So obviously I kind of give some broad strokes there. Before we dive into, like really, really deep into some of the strategy and tactics and so forth.

 

Let’s start with your book. You know, your latest book entitled Great Leaders Have No Rules. Let’s break down maybe a couple of the big takeaways out of your book for business owners. And then and then we’ll slice that apart kind of more on the strategy side. So let’s start with great leaders who have two rules and a couple of the biggest takeaways in your opinion.

 

Yeah. Well I think the biggest takeaway was, you know, I had started a couple companies when I was in my 20s and they crashed and burned, and there were a few reasons, but one of them was I actually didn’t realize the value of leadership and leadership boil down is just influence. So it’s self leadership and, you know, getting your butt moving and doing what you want to do.

 

It’s leadership, you know, at home and with those around you. And then of course, it’s leadership at work. And if you realize leadership is influence, you realize it’s a superpower because all of a sudden, you know, if you can influence your team members to do a certain thing, that’s great leverage. If you can influence, you can lead your customers, lead your clients through the journey that you want them to go on the buying journey that is tremendous.

 

If you can lead partners into working with you in different ways, that provides a lot of value. But even after I discovered the power of leadership, a lot of people told me things that just aren’t true anymore, you know? And it’s the classic stuff. And so this book was about old leadership ideas that don’t work anymore. So I say, you know, close your open door policy, have no rules, be likable, not liked, crowd your calendar.

 

You should play favorites. You should show weakness. You should share everything, including your salaries. And I even have a chapter called lead with love. So it’s a book that’s about. Hey, this stuff really matters and will make a dramatic change whether you’re leading at home or in a small business or big business. And a lot of what we’ve been taught is just dead wrong.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: The Open Door Policy

 

So that’s sort of the genesis of the book. So what really stood out to me there is like attacking or confronting some of the normal paradigms in leadership, right? That’s right. Absolutely. A lot of those old practices, they all started from a good place and worked at one moment in time. But even take the idea of the open door policy, well-intended, you know, facilitate communication, solve problems quickly in this day and age.

 

Well, the obvious problem is when people are coming through your proverbial open door all day, you don’t get any work done, but it’s not healthy for them either. Marshall Goldsmith has written a lot about this. He says if people are bothering you all day without meetings, did you hire the wrong person? Did you not train them?

 

Did they not have the tools they needed? Or worse, do they not have the psychological safety to make a decision to solve a problem and maybe be wrong? Like maybe this is a signal that, you know, you’re doing something wrong if they need to run everything by you, first. And of course, I don’t say, like, slam the open door completely shut.

 

But the idea is, you know, move it to office hours, you know, close your door, open your calendar. Maybe your office hours are, you know, every day after noon. Or maybe it’s just one hour a day, or maybe it’s only on Fridays. But the idea of this open door policy that’s got to go because we’re not getting our deep work done, our strategic work done, and it’s creating this dependency among our direct reports that just isn’t healthy.

 

Well, it’s impossible to be in quadrant two as Stephen Covey. So brilliantly outlined in seven Habits of Highly Effective People. If our door is a revolving door, right. That’s right. That’s exactly right. And you know, most of us don’t have physical doors anymore on our space, but whether it’s someone tapping you on the shoulder in an open office environment or someone hitting you with that slack message or, you know, some other device, to stay in that quadrant two, you’ve got to have uninterrupted time.

 

Otherwise everybody’s going to put their priority into your to do list instead of you working on your priorities. So this is one of the things that really blew me away in our pre-interview conversation. And I just want to kind of check my notes and make sure that I got this correct. So like when you’re describing your book, hear this again. 

 

This is like paradigm shifting. This is really like making us sort of question the leadership norms. Then I think about the business model behind lead acts. And, and I think, wait a minute, did I really understand him correctly when he said that it is AI technology? That is like the first robotic leadership executive coach? Like, am I tracking you with that?

 

Yeah. I mean, it sounds crazy, but we were working for two years in stealth mode and a ridiculous amount of money, and we trained the IBM Watson supercomputer, the AI computer, to be like a management trainer and coach. So, you know, anyone who wants to be a better manager, better leader, you can just, you know, you download this app and we call our coach, Amanda.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: An Interactive Experience

 

That’s just our branding for the Watson machine. And it will do everything from, you know, leadership starts with self-awareness. So it starts with a personality assessment and reveals your personality. It’ll train you, how to delegate, how to do one on one meetings, and how to give feedback. And it’s not boring, you know, e-learning, it’s like you’re messaging a friend, back and forth, and she’s got a personality.

 

Usually use emojis, make jokes and you get these. So it’s a whole interactive experience. As if Coach Amanda was a real person. And you can also ask her questions like one of the most popular questions that are asked is, how do I tell someone that they smell? That’s actually one of the most frequently asked questions of Coach Amanda.

 

And you can even set goals with Coach Amanda, and she’ll check in with you each week to see if you’re making progress on your goals. So it’s it’s, we’ve just launched after two years of stealth mode. We launched, late in, in 2018, and it’s, it’s tremendous. I mean, you know, we’re getting a really good reaction.

 

And of course, we’re doing new releases and new content all the time. Because the more people talk to Amanda, the smarter she gets. Wow. Okay. So what is the interface with Amanda? Is it an app on a phone? Is it? This is, yeah, it’s, iOS app. Android app or a website like you can take a coach, Amanda, with you anywhere.

 

Wow. It is. And is it text, audio, both her videos? How does it work? So the primary interface is what we call a conversational interface. So it’s like you’re texting someone on your phone. Okay. But, coach Amanda has built in over a thousand microlearning videos, book summaries, webinars, curated podcasts, articles, and more. So if you wanted a five minute video on email management, she could give you a five minute video.

 

If you wanted to listen to an interview with John Maxwell or Ken Blanchard, you could find that and trigger that and just have an audio experience, you know, for half an hour. So there’s a full content library behind her. Amazing. And, and I think if I heard you correctly and the little bit that I know about IBM Watson is the fact that every, every dialog, every question, every whatever they’re there’s that ongoing learning.

 

And so, so like today, she’s not as smart as she’s going to be. Three months are now just because of all the additional queries in those three months. Right. Yeah. That’s right. And that’s, that’s, an interesting thing and a challenging thing when it comes to AI because the, you know, the more someone uses it, the smarter she’ll get.

 

But you need people to ask those questions and fail for her to get smarter. So it’s like the mistakes of today will empower the people of tomorrow. And, we’ve done, you know, thousands of questions so far, but we certainly have a way to go. She’s not quite as accurate as, if you like, asking your Alexa device a question or something, but she’s getting there, so we’ll definitely be there by the end of this year.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: From a Book To a Company

 

Wow. So let’s go back to what I thought was just a really smart strategy. When we were talking before, hey, Stephen, every time I go to launch a company, I write a book first. So then let’s talk about the strategy behind, you know, from book to company with great leaders have new rules like how is that sitting out on the front end of lead acts.

 

Yeah. And just to just to clarify, Stephen, so up until about, a year, year and a half ago, whenever anyone would ask me like, hey, I want to be on tour, I want to start a company like you’ve done. I would always say the first thing you need to do is write a book. And that’s what I always did with my other companies.

 

More recently, I say, you need to start a podcast, and then in a year to 18 months, convert some of that content into your first book. Because I think podcasting has some extra advantages and some faster impact. You know, you don’t have to wait 90 days or one year, however long it takes you to write your book.

 

But the idea of the book was always the same. I mean, the root word, you know, in the word authority, the root word is author. And whether it’s as simple as, you know, you’re on a sales call or doing a presentation instead of leaving a business card behind, you’re leaving your book behind. It makes a big difference on your closing rates.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Lead Generation to Authority

 

The book itself becomes a lead generation tool, especially if, like I publish both traditional with traditional publishers and independently, I do both. But the real advantage if you self-publish is you can stick your, your, you call them reader bonuses. They’re really lead magnets. So, you know, you open up the front of your book and it says, hey, as a thank you to all my readers, you can download the free workbook that accompanies this book. Just go here. 

 

And so immediately, all these people that are finding your book on Amazon, even if they don’t buy it, but they do that look inside, they see your lead magnet, they’re going to your website, they’re putting their email into your form. And now you’re building up your database of people who are naturally interested in your topics.

 

They were looking at your book on your topic. So, you know, the book idea is everything from lead generation to just authority. Along the way. And I did it, you know, over and over again. I even, you know, mentioned the pre-interview. I had a company that I grew from, zero to about $15 million a year in revenue, and I did that for years.

 

And it was a niche. It was developing custom pharmaceutical sales training programs. Very niche. I mean, there’s probably only 50 to 100 buyers in the world. First thing I did was I wrote a book, you know, the handbook for pharmaceutical sales trainers, and it looked like a regular book. And it was, you know, big like a regular book.

 

And people would just call me and say, hey, I heard you’ve got the Yellow Book. Everybody’s talking about the Yellow Book. And we went to people. And any time someone got promoted into that role, you know, that decision making role, they would need help. Like, how do I do this job? Oh, you need a copy of this handbook.

 

And they call us. And as they’re brand new in their role here, we are being the savior, teaching them how to be successful, building that relationship, giving them a free gift, the book. And then, of course, you know, down the road, leveraging that relationship for sales. But that’s instant credibility for you, right? It’s like an incontrovertible truth.

 

That’s what a book represents. It’s well, if Kevin’s written a book, then clearly he has expertise. Clearly he knows what you know, what I need and what the industry needs and maybe what my customer needs. I mean, otherwise, he wouldn’t have written a book, right? So why should I trust him? Yeah. Yeah, you definitely make you stand out from everybody else.

 

And it is difficult to stand out these days, that’s for sure. Well, and, you know, I mean, writing a book. Yes and I definitely want to talk about your system and why you’re so bullish on podcasts. Then book because, you know, there’s some efficiency and so forth there. But at its core, I mean, writing a book isn’t easy.

 

Yeah. I mean, you know, you’ve done it nine times. So it’s obviously familiar to you. But for most people it’s, you know, most business owners have an aspiration of wanting to write a book. And it’s hard. It’s hard to get, you know, your thoughts concise and well planned out and actually deliver value to the reader and so forth.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Putting The Works into Your Book

 

That’s also Onward Nation makes it an excellent strategy, because so few people do it and do it well. Kevin’s done it nine times and that’s what really makes him stand out. So not only have one book, but nine. Of course I need to talk to him right? Yeah. And I think that’s right. I mean, I think, I do think writing a good book is hard.

 

I always say, like, I hate writing. I like having written, you know, in the past ten. So I agree. I agree with that. I think for anybody who’s trying to do the, you know, their speaker, their coach, their consultant, if you have any amount of financial resources at all, then you know, you could find and work with a ghostwriter, a co-writer, something like that.

 

There’s ways to get it done without you being the person, you know, to put the words on the page. You know, one other trick, though, to this is even now, having written nine books, I don’t think I can write a book I don’t like. I would freeze if I sat down and said, okay, today I’m going to start writing my book.

 

However, if you think about it as if it’s like, okay, most books have about ten chapters, right? And if I can create, if I could take one chapter or each chapter and break it down into like five sections, five topics in the chapter, well, then you’ve got 50 chunks and you just think of those as like 50 blog posts or 50 articles.

 

And you know what, Stephen? I can write a blog post. I actually can write an article. I believe I can do that. In fact, it takes me about two hours to do that. So once a week I can write a 750 word-ish article. And as long as I know the outline and I’ve just created, you know, one fifth of a book chapter, and then the next one I would go on, it would be the second part of that book chapter.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Be Consistent and Committed in Your Book Writing

 

But in my mind, I’m just writing a blog because I’m just writing an article in one year. If you’ve done that for 50, you know, 52 weeks, you’re going to have a big book. You could have a decent size book in half a year. So, I mean, that’s another kind of trick for people who think like, well, I could never write a book.

 

Or if you’ve ever written a blog post or done an interview, you know where someone’s interviewed you about something. Then you can do it week by week, article by article. So that’s a great way to break the recipe down into some of the building block ingredients. It’s just about being consistent and being committed and then realizing that nobody sits down to write a 50,000 word book like all 1 in 1 fell swoop.

 

They break it down exactly like Kevin just suggested and were really, really smart. So let’s take that piece there and let’s move that into your bullishness of podcast equals books. So tell us more about that strategy. Because I’m sure that’s going to really raise some eyebrows in a good way with Onward Nation business owners. Yeah. So so right.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Scaling Leadership

 

So I’ve modified my advice. I mean now I think the single best first thing that anybody could do to build their business is to launch a podcast. And I say that for a few reasons. Now, there’s a trick to it though. You want your show, you want to do an interview show and who are you going to interview?

 

You’re going to interview your target audience, your buyer. And the show needs to be about whatever they care about, not what you care about. So, for example, with lead X, you know, we’ve got this AI, coaching bot. So, you know, one angle, like what would come naturally to me and what I’ll, what our few competitors do is, oh, we’re going to have an AI show we’re into artificial intelligence and all that.

 

Well, our buyers are directors of management training and big companies primarily. They don’t think about AI when they’re not paid to do AI at work. So if we did a show like that, we might attract investors. We might attract employees someday, but it’s not attracting our buyer. So, you know what? What we’ve just launched is called scaling leadership.

 

And so it’s me interviewing the heads of leadership development at banks and at hospitals and all these things. And what it’s doing is immediately, I’m now getting my emails returned and my phone calls returned, by people who have. I said, hey, do you want to see a demo of Coach Amanda? They’d be like, I’m busy.

 

I know this is. I’m out of here. I say, hey, I’d like to interview you for my podcast. They’re like, oh, this is interesting. And so one, you’re breaking through and getting smart and building relationships with your buyers. Like from week number one. The second thing is that content, let’s start with just the podcast itself.

 

It will attract, like, bees to honey, all the other buyers because, again, if I’m, it’s really hard to fight for attention these days, but we are all curious about what our competitors are doing. So if I’m at a bank running training and all of a sudden I hear that my, my, our competitor bank will be my counterpart over there just revealed the top three ways to have awesome training in a bank environment.

 

You better believe I’m going to listen to that episode, because what are they doing that we’re not? Or are we better than them or not? So it’s just like an incredible magnet for other leads and brand building. But Stephen, as we talked about earlier in the show, the real trick, I mean, you know, the last time I was on, we were talking about productivity.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Publishing Valuable Posts

 

And so, I’m a nut about it. And so the leverage, you know, what I do is I start with the audio interview and that goes out as a podcast. I take the audio, I get a transcript, and I lightly edit it, and then that gets released as an article. Now, right now I am writing for Forbes.com. So I have the, you know, the benefit of being able to put things on Forbes.

 

It gets some extra eyeballs, but whether you post it on LinkedIn or medium or your own website, it doesn’t matter. Now you’ve got an article asset building up, you know, content on your website. You do a few tricks. You’ve got search engine optimization, you know, benefits. And then you take that text article and you chunk it down for all your social media feeds.

 

So now on all the channels, you’ve got the pull quotes from that article that are now and again, you’re not I’m not talking about I or entrepreneurship. I’m talking about hashtag leadership. And so anyone out there that’s interested in leadership is now seeing valuable social media posts, not, hey, aren’t we great? Don’t you want a robot coach? But like, hey, here’s how you create great leaders.

 

By the way, brought to you by a great robot coach. And so the podcasting angle, if you do it right, if you interview your target audience, you brand the show like about what they’re trying to achieve. So I don’t know if I’m, you know, whatever, whatever it is. And I like industry niches too, Stephen. Like, you know, niche riches in niches.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: How To Leverage Your Content

 

So, you know, if I’m, I don’t know if I’m, let’s say I’m a website designer or, you know, interactive designer or brand consultant, and, and my specialty, I’ll just stick with the banks with small banks, community banks, really small banks. I would literally launch a podcast that would be like, I can’t think of a good name for it, but like, you know, marketing your community bank success or something like that.

 

And I would just interview all the community bank people that I can who are in charge of bringing customers into a bank. And the final way you leverage this content, and this is very powerful is once you’ve done, say, five interviews, it shouldn’t take that long. You put that into a white paper or an e-book. So it’s like lessons learned from the top five, you know, bank marketers or in my case, the elite leadership development, experts, you know, case studies, benchmarks, you know, average, you average.

 

What they’re all doing, what they’re all spinning. And people just eat that up. So again, instead of your email and be like, and I’m sure everybody gets these, it’s not just me. Like, hi, my name is X. My company does this. Do you need some? It’s like, hey, my name is Kevin. Would you like this free benchmark report on how all your competitors are kicking your butt and what you do?

 

They’re like, oh, yeah, I’d better have that. Okay, go fill out this form and you can have it. Well, what is first, what is super, super smart about this entire strategy? Several things one, how you create leverage. One thing becomes many things. That’s smart. Second is none of that was about you or Lead X or coach Amanda. It’s all about the audience and your guest and adding value to both of them.

 

Right? Yeah, that’s exactly right. It’s your stuff will ooze in any way or they’ll, they’ll they’ll get to it. But that’s big like this is how you’re Lead X, you’re marketing overnight. I had a previous well, the one around pharmaceutical training. I mentioned it. You know, it wasn’t that we were talking. We were doing a book about the power of e-learning or how to, you know, do technology based training the right way.

 

How can you be successful as a pharmaceutical trainer? And we would talk about scheduling and doing, you know, soft skill stuff, which we didn’t do. It was a complete good, valuable resource brought to you by X, you know, and it makes all the difference in the world. Well, and there are some really, really great nuggets too in this overall strategy.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: How To Reach Out to Prospective Buyers

 

The first one that you shared with us and maybe, maybe there’s we can go a little bit deeper here and what your experience has been. But when you’re reaching out to, you know, hopefully who are going to be prospective buyers to come on to the show, you’re not getting no’s because you’ve really changed the game here.

 

You’re no longer Kevin, the founder of this company looking for a new account. You’re a journalist. You’re in front of a media channel, a media company. You have now an audience that that guest would like to be in front of, right? Yeah. That’s right. And I mean, I’ve never had any problems with, like, credibility issues at all. If anything, you know, maybe the first person before your show has launched and you can’t point to anything yet.

 

You know, maybe that’s where you’re going to have to call in a favor or really explain or ask ten people to get the one. Yes, but once you even have one show, one article that you can say, hey, I’d like to interview you, blah blah blah. Here’s an example of how I just interviewed Jane Doe. They look at it, they see, wow, this is good, legit stuff.

 

Kevin’s going to interview me like a journalist. Of course, that’s an easy yes. Yeah. And absolutely. And so Onward, I also want to highlight this third piece that Kevin pulled out, out of his strategy words. One episode. Then he gets a transcript, transforms that into an article, either his website, LinkedIn, Medium, whatever transforms that into written content.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Creating Additional Content

 

So captured the audio, which was an interview with one of his prospective buyers. Transform that into written content, then sliced and diced that into many, many, many smaller pieces of micro content across social. And then and then did a compilation of five episodes into an e-book. So not only is that creating additional content, because I hear this from business owners all the time, and my guest is you do too, Kevin, about how, oh, I just don’t have the time.

 

How can I create this stuff? And geez, how could I have all this content? Boy, you’re producing all these things every time I turn around. Kevin, there you are being helpful. How do you produce all this stuff? He just gave you the recipe Onward Nation. Super smart. Kevin. Well, Steve. And not to go even deeper on this, but I will like what you said is like you just leverage it.

 

It’s not like I’m everywhere only, but I’m very efficient with it. But here’s the better thing. You can keep it short. Your listeners, readers, they like short. Not long. So it’s better to be short. And then if it’s short, you’re not asking someone to sit down and let you interview, you know, a three hour interview or even hour, you could do it in 30 minutes if you just ask your buyers these questions, share with us one of the biggest mistakes you’ve ever made, or a lesson learned, or a time you almost got fired.

 

So you start with like, what’s their biggest mistake? And lessons learned. Second, what are you doing these days that’s working out really well? So they’re now sharing a current best practice. And then third, what are you excited about in the future? What are you keeping your eye on about the future? So now they’re going to talk about a trend, a futuristic trend.

 

So this might be a 15 minute 20 minute, you know, podcast interview with them. And yet can you imagine if you had your direct competitors and every week, you know, you were getting insights into how they screwed up, what they’re doing well right now and what they want to do next year. I mean, it’s really, really valuable stuff.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Networking During a Conference

 

Absolutely. And think about like, well, maybe there’s a conference, maybe there’s an industry event, maybe there’s something. And now you’ve compiled all of these using your word insights, like you’re collecting primary research. Next time they need a keynote, somebody does the general session or they need a breakout speaker. You’re the person because you have collected all of this data in the trenches.

 

You’re the one with the thumb on the pulse or whatever metaphor you want to use, because you’ve collected all the stuff you’re the expert in. And so you’re going to now get an opportunity to share from stage your smarts, which you collected through this process that Kevin just outlined. And that is biz dev in its finest form. Right?

 

It absolutely is. And if you just gave me the idea, instead of going to a conference and doing the pre emails like, hey, we’re both going to be here, let’s have a cup of coffee or can you have lunch? Let’s buy dinner. What if you did the interviews at the conference? Amen. You’ve got all your prospects at this conference.

 

And if you reach out, say, hey, I’m the host of this and such show, hoping we can grab 20 minutes in a quiet corner so I can have you on my show. You could probably hang out, you know, ten interviews at a conference and it doubles as your networking as well. It’s stunning that you mention it.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: The Dream Prospect

 

So a friend of mine is a host of incredibly niche podcasts and is an awesome podcast. And she did exactly what you just described. We call it the Traveling Roadshow. And so she goes to a conference where her best prospects, I mean, talk about like a fish in a barrel strategy, right. And so she sent out emails to her top prospects and said, hey, this is me.

 

I’m the host of I’m going to be here. Then I’ve got 12 openings and they filled in and all, excuse me. She had 20 openings, 20 openings for interviews, and they filled in less than 12 hours. Wow. Yeah. That’s great. And these and these are people who are exactly as you just described, the perfect buyer, the dream prospect.

 

And without having that media company that journalist sort of strategy, she would have never gotten an app at. But she did because she was smart, just like you describe. It’s brilliant. It’s super, super smart. This you are just you are just laying down the strategies and space here. This is just so awesome. So I know that we’re quickly running out of time here.

 

And I want to ask you some other questions outside of thought leadership and creating content. So, you know, one of the things that I wanted to ask you was your definition of success. But the reason that I want to ask you that is because oftentimes that’s a really hard word for business owners to sit down and define for themselves.

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Defining The Word “Success”

 

So being able to hear that from a mentor like you, in this case, somebody who’s been there, somebody who’s built six companies in 30 years, that hearing your definition might serve as a guidepost and it might resonate with some of our Onward Nation business owners. So, Kevin, how do you define the word success? I mean, for me, Stephen, it just comes down to having freedom with my time.

 

I’d like to use my time as I like, you know, so to me, you know, you’re you’re successful. It’s you don’t have to set the alarm to go to a boss and do things you’d rather not be doing. And I think, I mean, it’s fairly direct, but there’s some subtlety. It’s like, I think there were earlier times in my career where I define success by a number, whether it was an income number or a net worth number.

 

And when I would hit the number, it didn’t always feel so good. And, part of it is because, you know, it was a stressful job or I didn’t like it, I was doing it for the money, and I couldn’t actually say that I was spending my time how I wanted to spend my time. So I got pretty clear on that.

 

I mean, usually you need to, you know, have a certain amount of income or net worth to spend your time like you like. But to me, success is just freedom to to spend your time as you like. Love that. This has been such a great conversation and a powerful way to kind of close this out too. But before we go, before we actually close out and say goodbye, I know we’ve talked about a lot here, and it was just like back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, which was awesome.

 

You know, before we go and close out, any final advice and anything you think we might have missed and then please do tell Onward Nation business owners, the best way to connect with you, Kevin. 

 

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Develop Your Leadership Skills: Final Advice and How to Connect with Kevin

 

Yeah. I mean, the party advice is just sort of it’s not exactly from the book, but, you know, I say like the title is that great leaders have no rules.

 

Start by applying that to yourself. What rules? Maybe we have? They’re actually limiting our life. And whether that’s a rule around, well, I can’t start a business till the kids are out of college or I would never do business in that way or with that person. Just challenge the rules. It’s okay to have standards, okay to have values.

 

And it’s okay to think it through. But if you have a knee jerk reaction to something that came from somewhere, that could be a rule you could, do without. And I guess, Stephen, I would just say for anybody who’s interested in the book, it’s available everywhere online bookstores or go to no rules leadership.com. For information online.

 

And if anybody wants to, do a free trial with Coach Amanda, just go to LeadX.org. That is so awesome. Onward. No matter how many notes you took today or how often you go back and relisten to Kevin’s words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do, he just mapped out a brilliant thought leadership biz dev model for you.

 

Please take it, apply it, and accelerate your results in Kevin. We all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day, and I am grateful that you said yes for a second time to come back to the show for this incredible encore, to be our mentor and guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level. Thank you so much, my friend.

 

Thanks, Steve. This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.

 

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