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avid C Baker - The Business of Expertise, 2Bobs Podcast - David C Baker author of The Business of Expertise: How Entrepreneurial Experts Convert Insight to Impact + Wealth
David chats with Jon Leon Guerrero and Pete A Turner examining various elements of expertise. Things like "Vertical" (specific to a maker) vs "Horizontal" (more broadly applied expertise). Get David's book Here https://amzn.to/2Ywk4zM He also discusses the benefits of establishing specific expertise...but also, quickly pivoting off of that brand when the market sends a signal. David also has a fantastic podcast with his buddy Blair Enns called the "Two Bobs Podcast." You'll want to check it out! |
Haiku
Googleized Knowledge
We expect to find answers
Do experts have more
Similar episodes:
Kriss Duggan https://youtu.be/1py32NMknX8
Jeremy McKane https://youtu.be/7XGJ5nKII4U
Bing West https://youtu.be/O9TcDVcypsQ
Join us in supporting Save the Brave as we battle PTSD. www.savethebrave.org
Executive Producer/Host/Intro: Pete A. Turner https://youtu.be/mYoUxRJzXcA
Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev
The Break It Down Show is your favorite best, new podcast, featuring 5 episodes a week with great interviews highlighting world-class guests from a wide array of topics. Get in contact with Pete at www.peteaturner.com www.breakitdownshow.com Interview, new podcast episode, experts, expertise.
Googleized Knowledge
We expect to find answers
Do experts have more
Similar episodes:
Kriss Duggan https://youtu.be/1py32NMknX8
Jeremy McKane https://youtu.be/7XGJ5nKII4U
Bing West https://youtu.be/O9TcDVcypsQ
Join us in supporting Save the Brave as we battle PTSD. www.savethebrave.org
Executive Producer/Host/Intro: Pete A. Turner https://youtu.be/mYoUxRJzXcA
Producer: Damjan Gjorgjiev
The Break It Down Show is your favorite best, new podcast, featuring 5 episodes a week with great interviews highlighting world-class guests from a wide array of topics. Get in contact with Pete at www.peteaturner.com www.breakitdownshow.com Interview, new podcast episode, experts, expertise.
Transcription
Pete Turner 0:00
Hey everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the break it down show. A today's show is guy named David C. Baker who joins john Leon Guerrero and I and he wrote a book called The business of experts how entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact plus wealth. So David is a pro on expertise. And I thought it'd be interesting in this time of question expertise, and you know, who really knows what your evidence isn't as good as my evidence and cite your sightings and peer reviewed things and COVID-19 all these different things to have a guy talk specifically about expertise because it's timely as hell.
Hey everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the break it down show. A today's show is guy named David C. Baker who joins john Leon Guerrero and I and he wrote a book called The business of experts how entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact plus wealth. So David is a pro on expertise. And I thought it'd be interesting in this time of question expertise, and you know, who really knows what your evidence isn't as good as my evidence and cite your sightings and peer reviewed things and COVID-19 all these different things to have a guy talk specifically about expertise because it's timely as hell.
Pete Turner 0:00
Hey everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the break it down show. A today's show is guy named David C. Baker who joins john Leon Guerrero and I and he wrote a book called The business of experts how entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact plus wealth. So David is a pro on expertise. And I thought it'd be interesting in this time of question expertise, and you know, who really knows what your evidence isn't as good as my evidence and cite your sightings and peer reviewed things and COVID-19 all these different things to have a guy talk specifically about expertise because it's timely as hell. And I know you do that. Look, one thing I want to say to you today, I read the book, I think it's fantastic. I know it's worth your time. If you're at all interested in expertise and business and that sort of thing. It's right on topic for who you are. It is the number one bestseller in business consulting on Amazon. So if you click the links in the show notes, not only will you be helping out David, you'll also be helping out the show because we get a little taste of that. It's a couple of things. But that's one of the ways you can support the show. So, David is going to pay the bills by giving us some fantastic insight into expertise. JOHN and I are going to do our job and ask questions. And we would ask you to either share, or share the show, tell your friends and maybe click on these links. If the books are relevant to you. Yes, that would be a big help. Okay, the next thing I want to say to you is hope everybody stays healthy and happy. It's the weekend when the show goes out. So I want to make sure that everybody's looking out for one another, and social distancing and all those kinds of things. We have some exciting shows coming up next week. I can't even wait to tell you. But for the right now, let's just go ahead and dig into this. Let me say one more thing to you save the brave, save the brave.org. Get that save the brave button and push it and if not that charity on top give charity as a gift. Simple as giving a gift card you go in, you pick $1 amount, buy the gift card, send it off to your friends email, and then they can go to over 1.8 million charities and drop that money to wherever they want. want it to be if they want to donate towards the who or they want to donate towards dogs with three legs, whatever it's going to be there'll be a charity out there and you will have given them the power to give the gift of charity. All right, everybody, take care Have a good weekend. Here comes David see Baker,
Unknown Speaker 2:14
lions rock productions.
Unknown Speaker 2:19
This is Jay Morrison. This is Jordan Hussey Dexter from the offspring naked nice Sebastian yo says Rick
Unknown Speaker 2:25
moron Stewart COPPA This is
Unknown Speaker 2:27
handy somebody there's a skunk Baxter Gabby Reese is Rob bell.
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:30
This is john Leon gray
Pete Turner 2:31
and this is Pete a Turner.
David C Baker 2:35
Hey, this is David C. Baker and you're listening to the break it down show.
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:41
And now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:47
Yes, indeed, David C. Baker is the leading authority on positioning, reinventing and selling firms in the creative and digital space. He's also the author of the business of expertise, how entrepreneurial Experts convert insight to impact and wealth. He sets businesses up to be future proof which we will discuss and he sets businesses up for successful sale or merger or to acquire other properties strategically, all very interesting stuff. David, thank you for joining us.
David C Baker 3:15
I am very glad to be here. And and you're one of the first people in the world that said entrepreneurial correctly. That is a very hard word to say. So thank you. Good start.
Pete Turner 3:24
So is the word brewery and rural this does ours. They really get tricky.
David C Baker 3:29
And nuclear, we've understood God to say as well
Pete Turner 3:33
nucular.
David C Baker 3:36
Good, we've gotten all of those terrific. Yeah, we've offended offended half the audience now what do we go Where do we go to offend the rest of the audience? Right.
Pete Turner 3:44
So I was reading through the book and the book is called the business of expertise. I was reading through the book and going through the story and you know, I'm an entrepreneur, obviously, the show you a part of the show is that we do production. We help companies build podcasts, and it is because Because the market is emerging, it's really tough to make your expertise be distinct. Anybody can start a podcast, anybody can. But can you do it? Well, can you do it professionally? And it's so it's tough to do that. But then you also have to become a bit of an expert in all of the, you know, like any entrepreneur, marketing, PR, I mean, just constantly keeping the production going forward and getting better. How does one, make their expertise stand out in a market that's exploding, but not well defined?
David C Baker 4:29
Yeah, you know, when we think about the barriers to entry, we're sort of initially excited because there are none. Anybody can do anything. And then we realized that anybody can do anything. And so there's a lot of a lot of noise as you were saying, I think it has mostly to do with having a very clear point of view. I have this exercise that I try to encourage people to do, and it's I just call it drop and give me 20 and I say okay, pretend that I'm smart. Just for the sake of this exercise, and pretend that I know a little bit about your industry. But we're sitting next to each other in a plane. And I asked you to tell me some things I don't know. So I know something about your industry. And I'm smart enough, I want to have a bunch of aha moments, I want to have 20 aha moments and an hour thing that I didn't realize. So and that's the biggest mistake that I think leaders entrepreneurial leaders are making is that most of the insight they put out there, whether it's a blog or a podcast, is expected. It's it's ignored. It's not that people are trying to put lists together stuff that's not going to offend anybody. They're scraping, they're not digging deep enough. And that's because they're too broad. They're just the more you focus your efforts, the more you can come up with insight that other people are not saying I think that's the key and all that because the world's been legalized. So we have this expectation as consumers that we can find answers to any question almost immediately and almost free. So information is not as unique as it used to be. So we have to dig much deeper for our information to stand out. That would be what I would say to that.
Jon Leon Guerrero 6:11
How important is delivery? And I asked this question because I often run into experts who clearly are a top in their field.
And their ability to articulate their ideas is a stumbling point. And is it is it something that just bothers me or how important is it to actually polish your pitch?
David C Baker 6:37
I think it's important, maybe not polished that might be a little too far but to make sure that your own communication style is not a barrier to people hearing and maybe sticking to the right mediums, the ones that are good for you. Some people are fantastic at writing and not so much at speaking getting professional I'll help isn't are we at the point in this world where leadership requires communication? That wasn't necessarily the case. You know, 30 years ago when leaders were struggling to even migrate to using email. And at that point, we discovered that so many of our quote unquote leaders could not actually articulate a sentence. Well, now, we certainly can't hide behind that. So yeah, I don't, I never seen any study on it. But I just can't imagine effective leadership without effective communication in any setting. You
Pete Turner 7:30
bring up a good point back in my corporate days, I remember one of our I worked in CD groups. So there was like, 17, CEOs, and oh my gosh, everybody had titles. And one of them said, if you're responding immediately to emails, I want to know what you're doing every day. Because the information was moving too fast. And he was from an era when things move slower. And so just expertise go stale, even if you're great at what you do, if the market has moved even 20% away from that. model and has, you know, iterated into a different space? Is that person still an expert witness expertise become something else?
David C Baker 8:09
Right? I think it goes stale really quickly. I hope I'm not wrong on that point. But I, especially because we're such copycats out there. It's so easy to pick up a thought or read something that inspires an article. And there's just all this lemming like copying of everybody. And you can't even worry about that stuff. Because one of the one of the keys to being an expert is to be very public with that, which means that you are opening yourself up to the possibility that people are going to copy you a lot and there won't be any lasting difference between your expertise and their so the key is just not to even look at the folks who are following you. But simply keep reinventing yourself and that period of time, that cycle of reinventing yourself seems to get shorter and shorter. Shorter I keep hoping that I'll get to this plateau where I've learned enough and then I can just relax a little bit but it just hasn't it just hasn't happened. I keep coming up with topics where I think, geez, I need a I need to have a carefully thought through point of view on this topic because it keeps coming up and I don't have one yet. So what do I do I say, Okay, this is what I'm going to write on in the next couple of months forcing myself to think through it so yeah, it's just uh, but that's what's fun about it, right? I I love the rush of, of constant constant potential to be embarrassed as an expert is what keeps us on our toes.
Pete Turner 9:35
Well, that's good. And sometimes your expertise is too far afield though, right? Like so a lot of times you'll hear say, Here he'll things said that you're like, oh, let me put my expertise in here. Like we talked about fight or flight, but we often forget free right? emotional intelligence is a tour. You know, it's a nom de jour right now. I get everybody. Everybody loves to talk about that. But they don't talk about CQ cultural intelligence or They talk about building a culture when all the academics don't talk about creating a culture, they talk about different things to approach these things. So if I was going to talk about culture, it's easy for me to be 15 steps ahead. And people can only handle eight steps ahead or 10. And so it's hard to find that spot so that your expertise is consumable. I think,
David C Baker 10:22
Ah, that's a really interesting point. I was picturing this person who's leading a race, but if he if he gets too far ahead, then you can't follow that person anymore because you can't see where he or she is gone. But you have to keep ahead, but not too far ahead. That's a really interesting point i that shows up in vocabulary doesn't, doesn't it because if we don't have a shared vocabulary is very difficult to communicate deep concepts. So slowly, introducing new vocabulary and explaining it in the course of your thinking and writing and speaking is important, but you can't be too far ahead. That's a I'm going to write an article on that, I don't know if I'm going to credit you for the idea. Come on. That's my expertise. Yeah, that's right.
Pete Turner 11:06
If I'm not mistaken, I'm on memory here. I believe the Korean guy that was running the UN for a while said, I tried to lead by example. But nobody followed such an interesting way to get such a, that there's so many elements in that I always struck by that, like, were you eating? Or you know, did you need to slow down, go back to the pack, and work on something there. It's really and that's, that's where leadership and expertise kind of blend across.
David C Baker 11:31
Yeah, or maybe his expectations were too grandiose. Maybe he thought he could change the world when he should have been thinking about a higher possibility of simply changing his friends and his family and his co workers and so on. That's where we have to concentrate and then and own the impact we have around those closer to us. And whatever happens beyond that, I think is just pure gravy, and we've got to be Gratitude, very grateful for any additional influence we have. But I, I want leaders and thinkers to be focusing on how they can be real and impactful and influential with the people closest to them, rather than you've had this happen, right, where you're at a conference and you meet somebody that you've admired from a distance, and they turn out to be kind of a jerk. That's, that's not really what the world needs. Right. So I like the idea of radiating outward and having fewer and fewer expectations, the further out you go.
Jon Leon Guerrero 12:32
You think, based on those expectations, do you think that our ability to consume expertise is improving at a rate that's similar to how quickly innovation happens? In other words, are we smarter at absorbing the information of experts than we were? You know, just a short time ago, not even a generation
David C Baker 12:56
ago. I think that's true. I don't know I think that's true. But I think conversely, we're not contextualizing that absorption of information like we should. So there's too much mixing our personal and our work lives without learning something at work, and then figuring out how to think about it, how to place it in a broader general context. So we need to have really deep deep trenches, in our work lives, but we need to be full of looking at every possible distraction in our personal lives so that we have a very broad perspective there. So I do think there, we're better at absorbing the specific but I don't know if we're better at contextualizing that and making sure that it makes sense that it can be globalized that, that it's gonna, it's going to be true for a long time. That's a it's an interesting question.
Jon Leon Guerrero 13:52
Well, I think what I was thinking and I appreciate that insight, because that's a bigger topic, but I think more specifically or more simply, I was thinking about how we have access now to the thoughts and ideas of business leaders, and it comes at us faster. So it seems to me that we may be getting better at understanding what Steve Jobs Bill Gates, big business innovators are up to, and making it hit a little closer to home, or are they better at translating those ideas for us?
David C Baker 14:25
And how do we even decide which ones to listen to? Because we have an endless source, I look at all the podcasts that I subscribe to, and I sit down to mow the lawn and I sometimes get overwhelmed because I'm not sure where to start catching up. I've started to get to the point where I try to trust certain authors or experts. And I don't care so much what they're talking about. It's just that I trust them as people and so I'm going to pay more attention to them. I'm thinking of an author like a Dan pink or somebody like that who's written on a broad variety of things. objects. So I'm tending to follow individuals more than particular topics. I don't know if I'm getting led off the right on off the safe path here. But that's just my own way of coping with all that extra information.
Pete Turner 15:14
There are so many experts nowadays, like we almost have to find a new word to define it. It used to be if you had a PhD, your knowledge is unassailable. That is not the case anymore. I mean, how many people who are experts in the food and supplements and workout industry have no have no letters behind their name or in front of their name? You know, and it doesn't mean that they're not an expert, but it is the bar again for being an expert is so low, it's really hard to expert shop, you know, and you can get overwhelmed and if you don't market your expertise in a way that's consumable, you know, someone I don't know you just it's, it's challenged that I think we all struggle with, like what you can watch to quote unquote experts give opinions on TV and the They'll be diametrically opposed. And there's no way both of those things can be 100% true.
David C Baker 16:05
There's just no way. It's almost like expertise has become a modern form of religion where each one is claiming to be accurate. I don't know what to do about that. It's difficult and I, I don't, I don't have better words, though. I'm tired of the word guru. I'm really tired of the word thought leader, but I don't have a better suggestion. So I just kind of try to do my thing. Try to be authentic, try to admit where I'm not absolutely sure. keep taking risks always be slightly ahead of my skis, but not so far ahead. That I'm flipping and over and, and, and just trusting the results of that over time. If I'm and listening to not listening to the feedback I get in the marketplace, because all of these experts, whether they're real or not, are getting great feedback or they wouldn't keep doing it. It's more of the quality of the people who are giving me that feedback. That that's seems more important to me than the actual feedback,
Pete Turner 17:02
even the term authenticity and losing its authenticity. Like, because everybody manufacturing authenticity, everybody's trying to be authentic. And you know, it's one of the things that I'm often told like dude is so authentic, I don't try to be authentic, I try to be me, which I guess is authenticity. And if they perceive it as being a value, great, and if they don't, then then shame on me for being too authentic. But yeah, all of these words. Yeah. And then and then someone will pick a word that everybody likes. And the next thing you know, we're on to that next word. We don't use ramping up anymore. We barely see peeling the onion. These terms go out in and out of Vogue. It's it's
David C Baker 17:42
funny. Yeah, in the world that I walk in more than any branding is no longer the favorite word. It's now storytelling, right? And I, I keep wondering, okay, what's going to be next so I can just buy that domain and then sell it for 100,000 when that hits, but I haven't been able to do that yet.
Jon Leon Guerrero 17:58
Well, Oregon Don't sell it, hang on to it. Because I think what allowing you to be an expert is that we used to turn to religion to answer the questions that we didn't know the answers to. And now we feel I think, like answers are so accessible to us that we can get them. And for some reason, we're looking to the folks who are willing to be an expert, and then raise their hand when they say, Well, I'm not an expert at this one. So and I think that vulnerability is something we value now more than ever.
David C Baker 18:34
Yeah. vulnerability is a better word than authenticity. I think, I think because people are so they're getting so immune to any sort of advertising or marketing because it's so misused. I think they're drawn to people and one of those ultimate tests of, of peacefulness, or personhood is whether somebody is vulnerable. So tell me genuinely about who you are, I decided, so when I'm antsy I need to write. That's kind of how I cope with anxiety. So I think it was Saturday or maybe it was Sunday, I wrote, I was in my wood working shop. And I was intending to do some woodworking and I couldn't do it. So I sat down the laptop and started writing a note to my people, the people that I've been in touch with for years. And then I said, Oh, this doesn't I'm not sure I really need to send this. I sent it to a friend and said, Is this too vulnerable? He said, I'm not sure it might be let me sleep on it. And I'll let you know. The next morning. He said, No, this is just the right balance, send it, you'll be glad you did. So I just took his word for it. I sent it. And it was just a human recounting of some of the things that have been a part of my life and what I've learned from them and where that's taking me and it really touched people because I just didn't try to protect that. I didn't try to protect the story, so to speak. I just told them exactly who I was. And at that moment in time, I just didn't really care about spinning the story in a particular way. I think that's what people are looking for in some ways.
Pete Turner 20:05
A lot of times we use illustrations to show things you talk about a beautiful mind in the book, you do overlapping triangles to reference entrepreneurial pneus. And expertise. Do you think in the pictograms and these kind of things, or do you have to have that design for you? How do you I mean, obviously, you're a creative guy, you're doing woodworking and in your shop and everything, how do you work with that part of the illustration process,
David C Baker 20:32
I think in those images, but I fail very badly at executing them. I actually I bought a book recently about how to draw in 10 hours, it seems hopeless, I have to send the book back, but I will sketch them out on an iPad and I'll send them to my Illustrator. And in this case, this was a freelance illustrator in New York, and he can somehow just get in my mind and picture exactly what I had in mind and I I just find I wasn't actually going to illustrate the book or have the book illustrated, but it just made sense that next book that's ready to go to press now even has has about double the number of illustrations. I just find that people like the fact that it helps them picture things, back to the whole notion of infographics that I've been heavily influenced by that. When you think about how USA Today, decades ago, when they came on the scene, what really separated them from all the other news media was their use of infographics, I think that really is why that caught on back then for sure.
Pete Turner 21:30
The other thing is when you use infographics, you know picking the right graphic, we love a Venn diagram, but we rarely use an Euler diagram. And Euler is such a powerful way to express something especially in the entrepreneurial world, you know, where, you know, as an entrepreneur, you've got all of these different hats, and a van just doesn't cover all that stuff. Do you ever use that kind of a tool when you try to describe the craziness that comes in the entrepreneurial skill set?
David C Baker 21:58
No, but you've got me very curious. So the simple answer is no. But now I have to go learn about that. That sounds sounds interesting. Is that something you you folks use in your work?
Pete Turner 22:07
I use it as an illustration quite a bit, just because so an Euler basically is a bunch of events and a bunch of unconnected things, you know, that you have to keep track of. And so there'll be a circle, what an octagon, you know, other things, and sometimes they overlap. But it just gives you a bigger picture as opposed to they're really focused Venn diagram. But I found it to be a powerful tool because you know, someone who's like in the podcasting world, one of the things that coach and this is like, a three way fan is you have to keep track of the audience, the guests, and the show and what those things all need. simultaneously. There are other things you have to do that really don't do any of those things. So it's part of the mind share, but it's really not interconnected with that little Trinity. You know, hey, this is Pete a Turner from lions rock productions. We create podcasts around here and if you your brand, or your Nobody wants to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me. I'll give you the advice on the right gear, the best plan and show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable. That's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown, show calm, let me help. I want to hear about it simultaneously, there are other things you have to do that really don't do any of those things. So it's part of the mind share, but it's really not interconnected with that little Trinity, you know?
David C Baker 23:27
Yeah, that's very interesting. I do use different mind mapping software, I find that it helps me clarify what I'm thinking. And then usually because of that helps me be able to explain a concept to somebody else, like if I'm explaining to a consulting firm, what your service offerings look like, and I draw it out for them and they all of a sudden the light goes on in their eyes. So maybe teaching people how to draw not like artists, but to illustrate their thinking should be a key component of our elementary education, I would think.
Jon Leon Guerrero 23:58
See, I think the Euler diagram is really good at confusing people. were perfect moment.
Yeah. translation of the expertise because that's how Pete things. But when the two of us are discussing concepts, we don't tend to have a hard time getting a point across each of us to the other. So how much of expertise is knowledge in it in it in a field and how much of expertise is the ability to collect knowledge and then pass it off to others to motivate them to do things? Yeah. And I find that the smartest people are the ones who pull in all kinds of information and they find the patterns and the connections between them. Those are the people that I am most interested in listening to.
Pete Turner 24:49
I wanted to transition. You talked quite a bit about positioning in the book. And so I want to get into this because a lot of times I one of my big things is deterrence. where the work is right? Like if you're going to write a book like, Oh, I have an idea. Great. Let's map your idea. Oh, that's kind of hard. Can we talk about my idea, some more you know. So trying to position ourselves with these things is important. And then also positioning yourself in the marketplace is important. Talk about positioning.
David C Baker 25:19
One of the things that I talked about in the book is trying to translate the our understanding of need in the marketplace, that is what people are losing sleep over with some sort of a mathematical model. We know that if we have way too many people that want to buy from us, then there's probably so much opportunity this is going to attract a lot of competitors. And in the end, we'll all be a little bit too interchangeable with each other. But if we don't have a big enough market, then we might not have enough opportunity to play. So there's this mathematical model that I discovered in professional services. It doesn't apply to other spaces necessarily talking about lawyers, engineers, architects, consultants, and Go on. So as you picture yourself standing at a place where you haven't made that tight positioning decision yet, and you're walking forward, looking at the little traffic light deciding if you've gotten to the right place and can stop or not, the light is red, red, red, it turns green, when you enter that zone where you might be entering that right space for your positioning. And at that point, there are generally 10,000 prospects and about 200 competitors, you can keep walking, and anywhere in this space where the light is green, you're probably safe. But at a certain point, the light turns red again, when you have entered what would be a market that's not big enough for you. And at that point, there are about 10 competitors and 2000 prospects. So you have to think about where you are in there, because you probably can't lock up more than one one and a half, maybe 2% of that market. So the model I was trying to get across in the book was just to give people some sense of how tightly position they should be, without being so tightly positioned that they didn't have enough opportunity.
Pete Turner 27:07
I gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. And then later on in the book, you also talk about vertical versus horizontal expertise. And there's some more of those similar thoughts, at least the way I grabbed it, but again, you know, you're the expert. So I'm going to shut up and help me understand distinguishing between vertical and horizontal expertise.
David C Baker 27:25
Sure, so vertical expertise comes from addressing a particular vertical market, which is why we call it vertical expertise. So vertical market, we maybe it's doctors, or maybe it's dentists, or maybe it's retail stores or whatever it is, you know, the broadest vertical would be b2b and b2c. So most people choose a vertical expertise because it's so much easier to identify your prospects and then approach them but there are a lot of firms that have instead of a horizontal expertise, which is defined as a service offering or a demographic focus. So they do something for, let's say, ageing consumers or for millennials or for companies that are growing at a crazy rate. And all of the prospects that fit within that category span many different verticals. So that would be a horizontal expertise. People usually choose that one because they like the variety that comes from it. They get to learn the insight of lots of different industries. There's usually no conflicts of interest between clients. And they're a little bit more immune to an economic downturn. But the big challenge was a horizontal expertise is identifying those prospects so that you can address them.
Jon Leon Guerrero 28:42
Yeah, that's tough when you are discussing topics so broad, and when you don't have a because vertical expertise also gives you a pinpoint accuracy at what you're getting across. And when somebody is target for that, you can identify fight a lot easier. So what about for those of us who have, let's say, a podcast, like ours, which is about fascinating people doing interesting things. If we're operating with a product that is so broad, what do you think we ought to do to? To attract an audience and then train them to understand the broadness?
David C Baker 29:25
Mm hmm. Right? what you just described is a very typical horizontal expertise. And you can see immediately the challenge of trying to attract the right people to it, what firms usually do, whether it's podcasters, or log writers or whatever, is they they try to think of the vertical industries that would find this message, particularly interesting. So maybe it's not factory workers. Maybe it's not Uber drivers. Maybe it's people in some sort of medical innovation field or whatever, I'm just making this up. And you would secretly target those people to get the word out early and then expect it to spread from there. So you're looking for early adopters in very specific vertical markets. But you don't tell people that you are targeting those vertical markets, you just use that as sort of a behind the scenes scenario to get traction in the early days of a venture like that. Interesting. So are there instances where getting traction in a particular vertical can hurt you and others if they are viewed by prospects as unrelated, then definitely, that would be the case. So I've always just kind of smiled at myself when I think about somebody who was a medical doctor owned a medical practice and also owned a funeral home and decided to save money on business cards and print one on each side of that. That'd be confusing to them. marketplace. So as long as it's not confusing to the marketplace or look self serving, it can be fine. But the test you apply is, let's say that, that your primary entry is through a website. So when a prospect comes to your website, would How would they feel? What would they think if they saw that vertical called out specifically? Or if you want to call out two verticals or three verticals in the same place? Do they see a connection between them? If they don't see a connection without any explanation, then it's probably not a good idea to be public about that.
Pete Turner 31:33
And maybe don't save money on your business cards. Of course, I say that I have a friend that is a client, and he has five business cards. And you all of them, it's it's like, What do I do?
David C Baker 31:49
Yeah, that's exactly the point. Right? It's okay to have five of them but not to give anybody more than one I, the way I picture that in the book, and I'm trying to kind of make live firms that just cannot make a firm positioning decision. I tell them that what they're doing is they're driving around town and an unpainted white set fan. And before they get to the prospects office, they pull over two blocks away. They go to the back, pull open both doors, and they flip through the magnetic signs, there's 12 of them in there, they pull out the magnetic sign that most closely resembles what this prospect wants to see. They slap it on the side of the van, and they keep driving to blocks. And what I'm urging people to do is positioning is to paint the darn van and quit trying to be different things to different people. That's a core element of positioning. I'm sitting quietly and letting that hit home. Think about your spouse maybe at home and without anybody else there and repairman comes up and you have Comcast painted on the side of the van versus Comcast. crawled with chalk on the side of the van like you could just your gut instinct is so different when you see that that's the message we're sending when we don't boldly claim who we are. When you think about a restaurant, a restaurant has a neon sign that they have used for 30 years that identifies the type of cuisine the name of the restaurant that never changes. What does change might be the daily specials. And that's okay, but not the cuisine. That's the specialization decision you're making.
Pete Turner 33:29
Yeah, that's, that's, that's fantastic. When you make that choice, how do you pivot off of a position if, you know it's, you know, the numbers aren't lining up, you know, the 10,000 versus 200 you know, balance is wrong and you're like, I think we have to reposition now. Now you're like, I've got to go repaint this van and Earl Scheib is dead.
Jon Leon Guerrero 33:49
Haha, yeah.
David C Baker 33:54
Well, hopefully, you don't have to make that decision too frequently. I use it Used to be that you could make a positioning decision that would last for 10 years nowadays, I think it's more three to five years. Okay. And it, it kind of depends on which of those two metrics, number of prospects or number of competitors is off the charts is wrong, because those send very different signals. So let's say that you focus on marketing for manufacturers, and you decide to test that and you want to see 10,000 prospects and 200 competitors. Well, there are only about 20 competitors, as it turns out, and there are millions of prospects. So what's that signal send? The signal is that this is an unsophisticated marketplace where the decision makers within manufacturers don't really care if you specialize in what they do. And we know that because they're mainly they're using firms that don't specialize because there just aren't that many specific competitors. So there are lots of different signals you have to read in that market. Before you make that decision,
Jon Leon Guerrero 35:01
is it elementary for me to be amused that we have the leading authority on reinventing and, and positioning in the creative and digital space and people's often Earl Scheib reference?
David C Baker 35:13
Ah, yeah. Yeah. Well, but you know, what a great positioning decision you, you said that word. And I immediately thought of a $200 paint job or I don't know what it was. Yeah, whatever. Sheep probably wouldn't last the kind of paint job you do if you were going to sell your car to somebody who wasn't a family member.
Jon Leon Guerrero 35:32
Well, we knew exactly what that guy did.
David C Baker 35:35
Right? Yeah, perfect positioning.
Pete Turner 35:37
Yeah. And you probably even thought of that slogan like, I'll pay in any car 9999 right. And then it went up to 199 and everything else but that's just the next thing. So when first off people should go to your website it said, David, see Baker calm, nice and simple. And you can be followed easily on Twitter, you respond, you're engaging that kind of thing. So Everybody, you know, definitely check out the book and go and look into what David does, because it might help. I know it helps me reading the book as someone who's trying to figure this podcast business out, you know, it's anytime I can put new information or new perspective in my head, it's, it's a powerful thing. So for sure, thank you for that. What are we missing? What are we not asking you about? You're like, I wish these guys would ask me about chapter 27.
David C Baker 36:27
Except there is no chapter seven, but that would have been a good question. Yeah. No, I this has been a really interesting discussion. I I just want to kind of say, well, while your listeners are, are still tuned in that, you You two are really good interviewers, and you, you've read the book, you've come up with thoughtful questions. So this is and that isn't always true for the I think I've been on 190 podcasts over the last two years. And so you're treating your listeners really well. I just want to say Say kudos to you for that. I appreciate it. It's been a really interesting discussion.
Pete Turner 37:04
Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks. I appreciate it.
Hey, tell us about your podcast.
David C Baker 37:10
So it's called to Bob's it's a play on the office space movie. Remember the two badass consultants in that? Yeah. So that people always calling us that he's he's not a he's a friend the other Bob is a friend but a largely a competitor. But we do this together. So it's just a conversation every two weeks and comes out every second Wednesday. It's it's actually the number one podcast in this very small creative marketing space, but we just have a great time. It's been it's been really good for our businesses, and it's forced us to try to stay ahead of the curves. I I like the fact that you guys are in the podcasting space and you're helping lead clients in that because I just, I just think it's a fantastic space. I I had no idea that that a podcast could be this. Good for My business and yeah, it's been amazing. Yeah, just amazing. You
Pete Turner 38:04
bring up an excellent point like you have someone who's competitive on the show with you. There's a lot of that fear, you know, Mike, like, no invite them on your show. These are, you know, whether they're potential clients and you're doing a very very soft approach of giving out free expertise here. Or Yeah, you have experts come on because you guys are exchanging value you're exchanging influence and and you really can't harm each other. You're they're working in a collaborative space now your your, your peers, other than competitors, they're not adversaries, you guys are both doing right and you're both getting rich from it. So you know,
David C Baker 38:38
okay, let's do it. One, one plus one equals three. It's it's had hasn't hurt. It's helped both of our businesses for sure. It's not a zero sum game. So I really believe in that approach.
Jon Leon Guerrero 38:48
And didn't we all love when we finally saw on the stage together, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. So I think you know, along the lines of the vulnerabilities I think that that, that consumers want that. We want to see history, these are being led by people who don't mind Joining Forces.
David C Baker 39:10
And there's also some drama associated with it and and this feeling like, oh, they're grown up, maybe we should pay more attention to being grown up as well. Maybe we don't have to be competitive all the time. It's not a zero sum game. Maybe we can indent new markets and expand there. So yeah, so many great thoughts about that.
Pete Turner 39:29
What's your other unexpected value that comes from doing the podcast like obviously your business grows that kind of thing, but what's like something that really enriches you?
David C Baker 39:38
Well, it's more I don't know if this enriches me, but it keeps me from going insane. That's I suppose a benefit. I don't have to answer the same question. 400 freaking times I can just say, hey, go listen to this episode. Really good. We put a lot of effort into it. I appreciate that. It helps me be a more efficient advisor. I like likes the fact that I'm planting the seed with 10s of thousands of people with every month that most of whom will never hire me. And I'm completely fine with that. But when they do have something that they that I might be able to help with, I'm usually in the conversation, even if I don't get the work. So it's just in terms of an ROI. It's hard to imagine anything more effective than doing a podcast if you do it well. And by doing it well, I mean, you're intelligent, you're prepared, the audio is good enough, you know, all that stuff. This is gonna
Jon Leon Guerrero 40:33
end up in the show, but would it be okay with you, for us to quote us saying, I had no idea what a benefit to my business doing a podcast would be?
David C Baker 40:42
Oh, absolutely.
Jon Leon Guerrero 40:44
Yeah, absolutely. Because that's a great sentence. And I think there are a lot of business leaders out there who could who could definitely benefit who just don't see it. Yeah, for sure.
Pete Turner 40:58
Yeah. The thing I wanted to say is It's a lot of work. And let's not forget that like to be that prepared to continue to make the show interesting and better all the time. There is a huge ROI. But that doesn't mean it's free. Like there is a lot of work to maintain a professional podcast.
David C Baker 41:15
Yes, absolutely. And the early fear I think people have as if they'll run out of topics to cover. And we've not found that to be the case, we end up with way more than we can ever cover. But it is easy to fall into certain patterns into certain ruts and not keep reinventing yourself and, and and maybe a green with each other if you have a co host too much, instead of just articulating a slightly different point of view and fighting for that kindly and respectfully. So yeah, absolutely. I agree.
Pete Turner 41:45
How do the two Bob's deal with the editorial choices then
David C Baker 41:48
we actually let our producer do that. We feel like we're too close to it. To make those calls after every recording and we don't ever do a recording over. We do. Light editing will compare notes and say Is that good enough? You know, we can't ever really trust our judgment. So we just let the producer act certain parts of it or say to us now we can't go with that episode in one week talk too much about our relative spouses. And he said if you want to stay married, you can't do that one. So we rely on his advice.
Jon Leon Guerrero 42:22
That's funny cuz now I just have a boxing tournament in his front yard. And Oh, there you go. Okay, you learn
Pete Turner 42:27
acquiescence. Anytime we can, john and i want to take our shirts off because as middle aged men, we think it's hilarious.
David C Baker 42:35
Right, and everybody else is covering their eyes and hiding the children
Jon Leon Guerrero 42:40
offering sunblock, but I do also want to say to our listeners, because we've digressed a little bit, want to remind everybody that we're talking right now about the business of expertise, which is your fifth book, and that there are four of them that you actually put your name on. So listeners should go out and and seek out the book the business of expertise. How entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact and wealth. But there are three others that you can find that are also terrific and you'll find them at your website. David C. Baker calm.
David C Baker 43:12
Yes. And thank you guys. It's been really fun and interesting to speak with you. I appreciate you having me on the show.
Hey everybody Pete a Turner, executive producer and host of the break it down show. A today's show is guy named David C. Baker who joins john Leon Guerrero and I and he wrote a book called The business of experts how entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact plus wealth. So David is a pro on expertise. And I thought it'd be interesting in this time of question expertise, and you know, who really knows what your evidence isn't as good as my evidence and cite your sightings and peer reviewed things and COVID-19 all these different things to have a guy talk specifically about expertise because it's timely as hell. And I know you do that. Look, one thing I want to say to you today, I read the book, I think it's fantastic. I know it's worth your time. If you're at all interested in expertise and business and that sort of thing. It's right on topic for who you are. It is the number one bestseller in business consulting on Amazon. So if you click the links in the show notes, not only will you be helping out David, you'll also be helping out the show because we get a little taste of that. It's a couple of things. But that's one of the ways you can support the show. So, David is going to pay the bills by giving us some fantastic insight into expertise. JOHN and I are going to do our job and ask questions. And we would ask you to either share, or share the show, tell your friends and maybe click on these links. If the books are relevant to you. Yes, that would be a big help. Okay, the next thing I want to say to you is hope everybody stays healthy and happy. It's the weekend when the show goes out. So I want to make sure that everybody's looking out for one another, and social distancing and all those kinds of things. We have some exciting shows coming up next week. I can't even wait to tell you. But for the right now, let's just go ahead and dig into this. Let me say one more thing to you save the brave, save the brave.org. Get that save the brave button and push it and if not that charity on top give charity as a gift. Simple as giving a gift card you go in, you pick $1 amount, buy the gift card, send it off to your friends email, and then they can go to over 1.8 million charities and drop that money to wherever they want. want it to be if they want to donate towards the who or they want to donate towards dogs with three legs, whatever it's going to be there'll be a charity out there and you will have given them the power to give the gift of charity. All right, everybody, take care Have a good weekend. Here comes David see Baker,
Unknown Speaker 2:14
lions rock productions.
Unknown Speaker 2:19
This is Jay Morrison. This is Jordan Hussey Dexter from the offspring naked nice Sebastian yo says Rick
Unknown Speaker 2:25
moron Stewart COPPA This is
Unknown Speaker 2:27
handy somebody there's a skunk Baxter Gabby Reese is Rob bell.
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:30
This is john Leon gray
Pete Turner 2:31
and this is Pete a Turner.
David C Baker 2:35
Hey, this is David C. Baker and you're listening to the break it down show.
Niko Leon Guerrero 2:41
And now the break it down show with john Leon Guerrero and Pete a Turner.
Jon Leon Guerrero 2:47
Yes, indeed, David C. Baker is the leading authority on positioning, reinventing and selling firms in the creative and digital space. He's also the author of the business of expertise, how entrepreneurial Experts convert insight to impact and wealth. He sets businesses up to be future proof which we will discuss and he sets businesses up for successful sale or merger or to acquire other properties strategically, all very interesting stuff. David, thank you for joining us.
David C Baker 3:15
I am very glad to be here. And and you're one of the first people in the world that said entrepreneurial correctly. That is a very hard word to say. So thank you. Good start.
Pete Turner 3:24
So is the word brewery and rural this does ours. They really get tricky.
David C Baker 3:29
And nuclear, we've understood God to say as well
Pete Turner 3:33
nucular.
David C Baker 3:36
Good, we've gotten all of those terrific. Yeah, we've offended offended half the audience now what do we go Where do we go to offend the rest of the audience? Right.
Pete Turner 3:44
So I was reading through the book and the book is called the business of expertise. I was reading through the book and going through the story and you know, I'm an entrepreneur, obviously, the show you a part of the show is that we do production. We help companies build podcasts, and it is because Because the market is emerging, it's really tough to make your expertise be distinct. Anybody can start a podcast, anybody can. But can you do it? Well, can you do it professionally? And it's so it's tough to do that. But then you also have to become a bit of an expert in all of the, you know, like any entrepreneur, marketing, PR, I mean, just constantly keeping the production going forward and getting better. How does one, make their expertise stand out in a market that's exploding, but not well defined?
David C Baker 4:29
Yeah, you know, when we think about the barriers to entry, we're sort of initially excited because there are none. Anybody can do anything. And then we realized that anybody can do anything. And so there's a lot of a lot of noise as you were saying, I think it has mostly to do with having a very clear point of view. I have this exercise that I try to encourage people to do, and it's I just call it drop and give me 20 and I say okay, pretend that I'm smart. Just for the sake of this exercise, and pretend that I know a little bit about your industry. But we're sitting next to each other in a plane. And I asked you to tell me some things I don't know. So I know something about your industry. And I'm smart enough, I want to have a bunch of aha moments, I want to have 20 aha moments and an hour thing that I didn't realize. So and that's the biggest mistake that I think leaders entrepreneurial leaders are making is that most of the insight they put out there, whether it's a blog or a podcast, is expected. It's it's ignored. It's not that people are trying to put lists together stuff that's not going to offend anybody. They're scraping, they're not digging deep enough. And that's because they're too broad. They're just the more you focus your efforts, the more you can come up with insight that other people are not saying I think that's the key and all that because the world's been legalized. So we have this expectation as consumers that we can find answers to any question almost immediately and almost free. So information is not as unique as it used to be. So we have to dig much deeper for our information to stand out. That would be what I would say to that.
Jon Leon Guerrero 6:11
How important is delivery? And I asked this question because I often run into experts who clearly are a top in their field.
And their ability to articulate their ideas is a stumbling point. And is it is it something that just bothers me or how important is it to actually polish your pitch?
David C Baker 6:37
I think it's important, maybe not polished that might be a little too far but to make sure that your own communication style is not a barrier to people hearing and maybe sticking to the right mediums, the ones that are good for you. Some people are fantastic at writing and not so much at speaking getting professional I'll help isn't are we at the point in this world where leadership requires communication? That wasn't necessarily the case. You know, 30 years ago when leaders were struggling to even migrate to using email. And at that point, we discovered that so many of our quote unquote leaders could not actually articulate a sentence. Well, now, we certainly can't hide behind that. So yeah, I don't, I never seen any study on it. But I just can't imagine effective leadership without effective communication in any setting. You
Pete Turner 7:30
bring up a good point back in my corporate days, I remember one of our I worked in CD groups. So there was like, 17, CEOs, and oh my gosh, everybody had titles. And one of them said, if you're responding immediately to emails, I want to know what you're doing every day. Because the information was moving too fast. And he was from an era when things move slower. And so just expertise go stale, even if you're great at what you do, if the market has moved even 20% away from that. model and has, you know, iterated into a different space? Is that person still an expert witness expertise become something else?
David C Baker 8:09
Right? I think it goes stale really quickly. I hope I'm not wrong on that point. But I, especially because we're such copycats out there. It's so easy to pick up a thought or read something that inspires an article. And there's just all this lemming like copying of everybody. And you can't even worry about that stuff. Because one of the one of the keys to being an expert is to be very public with that, which means that you are opening yourself up to the possibility that people are going to copy you a lot and there won't be any lasting difference between your expertise and their so the key is just not to even look at the folks who are following you. But simply keep reinventing yourself and that period of time, that cycle of reinventing yourself seems to get shorter and shorter. Shorter I keep hoping that I'll get to this plateau where I've learned enough and then I can just relax a little bit but it just hasn't it just hasn't happened. I keep coming up with topics where I think, geez, I need a I need to have a carefully thought through point of view on this topic because it keeps coming up and I don't have one yet. So what do I do I say, Okay, this is what I'm going to write on in the next couple of months forcing myself to think through it so yeah, it's just uh, but that's what's fun about it, right? I I love the rush of, of constant constant potential to be embarrassed as an expert is what keeps us on our toes.
Pete Turner 9:35
Well, that's good. And sometimes your expertise is too far afield though, right? Like so a lot of times you'll hear say, Here he'll things said that you're like, oh, let me put my expertise in here. Like we talked about fight or flight, but we often forget free right? emotional intelligence is a tour. You know, it's a nom de jour right now. I get everybody. Everybody loves to talk about that. But they don't talk about CQ cultural intelligence or They talk about building a culture when all the academics don't talk about creating a culture, they talk about different things to approach these things. So if I was going to talk about culture, it's easy for me to be 15 steps ahead. And people can only handle eight steps ahead or 10. And so it's hard to find that spot so that your expertise is consumable. I think,
David C Baker 10:22
Ah, that's a really interesting point. I was picturing this person who's leading a race, but if he if he gets too far ahead, then you can't follow that person anymore because you can't see where he or she is gone. But you have to keep ahead, but not too far ahead. That's a really interesting point i that shows up in vocabulary doesn't, doesn't it because if we don't have a shared vocabulary is very difficult to communicate deep concepts. So slowly, introducing new vocabulary and explaining it in the course of your thinking and writing and speaking is important, but you can't be too far ahead. That's a I'm going to write an article on that, I don't know if I'm going to credit you for the idea. Come on. That's my expertise. Yeah, that's right.
Pete Turner 11:06
If I'm not mistaken, I'm on memory here. I believe the Korean guy that was running the UN for a while said, I tried to lead by example. But nobody followed such an interesting way to get such a, that there's so many elements in that I always struck by that, like, were you eating? Or you know, did you need to slow down, go back to the pack, and work on something there. It's really and that's, that's where leadership and expertise kind of blend across.
David C Baker 11:31
Yeah, or maybe his expectations were too grandiose. Maybe he thought he could change the world when he should have been thinking about a higher possibility of simply changing his friends and his family and his co workers and so on. That's where we have to concentrate and then and own the impact we have around those closer to us. And whatever happens beyond that, I think is just pure gravy, and we've got to be Gratitude, very grateful for any additional influence we have. But I, I want leaders and thinkers to be focusing on how they can be real and impactful and influential with the people closest to them, rather than you've had this happen, right, where you're at a conference and you meet somebody that you've admired from a distance, and they turn out to be kind of a jerk. That's, that's not really what the world needs. Right. So I like the idea of radiating outward and having fewer and fewer expectations, the further out you go.
Jon Leon Guerrero 12:32
You think, based on those expectations, do you think that our ability to consume expertise is improving at a rate that's similar to how quickly innovation happens? In other words, are we smarter at absorbing the information of experts than we were? You know, just a short time ago, not even a generation
David C Baker 12:56
ago. I think that's true. I don't know I think that's true. But I think conversely, we're not contextualizing that absorption of information like we should. So there's too much mixing our personal and our work lives without learning something at work, and then figuring out how to think about it, how to place it in a broader general context. So we need to have really deep deep trenches, in our work lives, but we need to be full of looking at every possible distraction in our personal lives so that we have a very broad perspective there. So I do think there, we're better at absorbing the specific but I don't know if we're better at contextualizing that and making sure that it makes sense that it can be globalized that, that it's gonna, it's going to be true for a long time. That's a it's an interesting question.
Jon Leon Guerrero 13:52
Well, I think what I was thinking and I appreciate that insight, because that's a bigger topic, but I think more specifically or more simply, I was thinking about how we have access now to the thoughts and ideas of business leaders, and it comes at us faster. So it seems to me that we may be getting better at understanding what Steve Jobs Bill Gates, big business innovators are up to, and making it hit a little closer to home, or are they better at translating those ideas for us?
David C Baker 14:25
And how do we even decide which ones to listen to? Because we have an endless source, I look at all the podcasts that I subscribe to, and I sit down to mow the lawn and I sometimes get overwhelmed because I'm not sure where to start catching up. I've started to get to the point where I try to trust certain authors or experts. And I don't care so much what they're talking about. It's just that I trust them as people and so I'm going to pay more attention to them. I'm thinking of an author like a Dan pink or somebody like that who's written on a broad variety of things. objects. So I'm tending to follow individuals more than particular topics. I don't know if I'm getting led off the right on off the safe path here. But that's just my own way of coping with all that extra information.
Pete Turner 15:14
There are so many experts nowadays, like we almost have to find a new word to define it. It used to be if you had a PhD, your knowledge is unassailable. That is not the case anymore. I mean, how many people who are experts in the food and supplements and workout industry have no have no letters behind their name or in front of their name? You know, and it doesn't mean that they're not an expert, but it is the bar again for being an expert is so low, it's really hard to expert shop, you know, and you can get overwhelmed and if you don't market your expertise in a way that's consumable, you know, someone I don't know you just it's, it's challenged that I think we all struggle with, like what you can watch to quote unquote experts give opinions on TV and the They'll be diametrically opposed. And there's no way both of those things can be 100% true.
David C Baker 16:05
There's just no way. It's almost like expertise has become a modern form of religion where each one is claiming to be accurate. I don't know what to do about that. It's difficult and I, I don't, I don't have better words, though. I'm tired of the word guru. I'm really tired of the word thought leader, but I don't have a better suggestion. So I just kind of try to do my thing. Try to be authentic, try to admit where I'm not absolutely sure. keep taking risks always be slightly ahead of my skis, but not so far ahead. That I'm flipping and over and, and, and just trusting the results of that over time. If I'm and listening to not listening to the feedback I get in the marketplace, because all of these experts, whether they're real or not, are getting great feedback or they wouldn't keep doing it. It's more of the quality of the people who are giving me that feedback. That that's seems more important to me than the actual feedback,
Pete Turner 17:02
even the term authenticity and losing its authenticity. Like, because everybody manufacturing authenticity, everybody's trying to be authentic. And you know, it's one of the things that I'm often told like dude is so authentic, I don't try to be authentic, I try to be me, which I guess is authenticity. And if they perceive it as being a value, great, and if they don't, then then shame on me for being too authentic. But yeah, all of these words. Yeah. And then and then someone will pick a word that everybody likes. And the next thing you know, we're on to that next word. We don't use ramping up anymore. We barely see peeling the onion. These terms go out in and out of Vogue. It's it's
David C Baker 17:42
funny. Yeah, in the world that I walk in more than any branding is no longer the favorite word. It's now storytelling, right? And I, I keep wondering, okay, what's going to be next so I can just buy that domain and then sell it for 100,000 when that hits, but I haven't been able to do that yet.
Jon Leon Guerrero 17:58
Well, Oregon Don't sell it, hang on to it. Because I think what allowing you to be an expert is that we used to turn to religion to answer the questions that we didn't know the answers to. And now we feel I think, like answers are so accessible to us that we can get them. And for some reason, we're looking to the folks who are willing to be an expert, and then raise their hand when they say, Well, I'm not an expert at this one. So and I think that vulnerability is something we value now more than ever.
David C Baker 18:34
Yeah. vulnerability is a better word than authenticity. I think, I think because people are so they're getting so immune to any sort of advertising or marketing because it's so misused. I think they're drawn to people and one of those ultimate tests of, of peacefulness, or personhood is whether somebody is vulnerable. So tell me genuinely about who you are, I decided, so when I'm antsy I need to write. That's kind of how I cope with anxiety. So I think it was Saturday or maybe it was Sunday, I wrote, I was in my wood working shop. And I was intending to do some woodworking and I couldn't do it. So I sat down the laptop and started writing a note to my people, the people that I've been in touch with for years. And then I said, Oh, this doesn't I'm not sure I really need to send this. I sent it to a friend and said, Is this too vulnerable? He said, I'm not sure it might be let me sleep on it. And I'll let you know. The next morning. He said, No, this is just the right balance, send it, you'll be glad you did. So I just took his word for it. I sent it. And it was just a human recounting of some of the things that have been a part of my life and what I've learned from them and where that's taking me and it really touched people because I just didn't try to protect that. I didn't try to protect the story, so to speak. I just told them exactly who I was. And at that moment in time, I just didn't really care about spinning the story in a particular way. I think that's what people are looking for in some ways.
Pete Turner 20:05
A lot of times we use illustrations to show things you talk about a beautiful mind in the book, you do overlapping triangles to reference entrepreneurial pneus. And expertise. Do you think in the pictograms and these kind of things, or do you have to have that design for you? How do you I mean, obviously, you're a creative guy, you're doing woodworking and in your shop and everything, how do you work with that part of the illustration process,
David C Baker 20:32
I think in those images, but I fail very badly at executing them. I actually I bought a book recently about how to draw in 10 hours, it seems hopeless, I have to send the book back, but I will sketch them out on an iPad and I'll send them to my Illustrator. And in this case, this was a freelance illustrator in New York, and he can somehow just get in my mind and picture exactly what I had in mind and I I just find I wasn't actually going to illustrate the book or have the book illustrated, but it just made sense that next book that's ready to go to press now even has has about double the number of illustrations. I just find that people like the fact that it helps them picture things, back to the whole notion of infographics that I've been heavily influenced by that. When you think about how USA Today, decades ago, when they came on the scene, what really separated them from all the other news media was their use of infographics, I think that really is why that caught on back then for sure.
Pete Turner 21:30
The other thing is when you use infographics, you know picking the right graphic, we love a Venn diagram, but we rarely use an Euler diagram. And Euler is such a powerful way to express something especially in the entrepreneurial world, you know, where, you know, as an entrepreneur, you've got all of these different hats, and a van just doesn't cover all that stuff. Do you ever use that kind of a tool when you try to describe the craziness that comes in the entrepreneurial skill set?
David C Baker 21:58
No, but you've got me very curious. So the simple answer is no. But now I have to go learn about that. That sounds sounds interesting. Is that something you you folks use in your work?
Pete Turner 22:07
I use it as an illustration quite a bit, just because so an Euler basically is a bunch of events and a bunch of unconnected things, you know, that you have to keep track of. And so there'll be a circle, what an octagon, you know, other things, and sometimes they overlap. But it just gives you a bigger picture as opposed to they're really focused Venn diagram. But I found it to be a powerful tool because you know, someone who's like in the podcasting world, one of the things that coach and this is like, a three way fan is you have to keep track of the audience, the guests, and the show and what those things all need. simultaneously. There are other things you have to do that really don't do any of those things. So it's part of the mind share, but it's really not interconnected with that little Trinity. You know, hey, this is Pete a Turner from lions rock productions. We create podcasts around here and if you your brand, or your Nobody wants to figure out how to do a podcast, just talk to me. I'll give you the advice on the right gear, the best plan and show you how to take a podcast that makes sense for you that's sustainable. That's scalable and fun. Hit me up at Pete at breakdown, show calm, let me help. I want to hear about it simultaneously, there are other things you have to do that really don't do any of those things. So it's part of the mind share, but it's really not interconnected with that little Trinity, you know?
David C Baker 23:27
Yeah, that's very interesting. I do use different mind mapping software, I find that it helps me clarify what I'm thinking. And then usually because of that helps me be able to explain a concept to somebody else, like if I'm explaining to a consulting firm, what your service offerings look like, and I draw it out for them and they all of a sudden the light goes on in their eyes. So maybe teaching people how to draw not like artists, but to illustrate their thinking should be a key component of our elementary education, I would think.
Jon Leon Guerrero 23:58
See, I think the Euler diagram is really good at confusing people. were perfect moment.
Yeah. translation of the expertise because that's how Pete things. But when the two of us are discussing concepts, we don't tend to have a hard time getting a point across each of us to the other. So how much of expertise is knowledge in it in it in a field and how much of expertise is the ability to collect knowledge and then pass it off to others to motivate them to do things? Yeah. And I find that the smartest people are the ones who pull in all kinds of information and they find the patterns and the connections between them. Those are the people that I am most interested in listening to.
Pete Turner 24:49
I wanted to transition. You talked quite a bit about positioning in the book. And so I want to get into this because a lot of times I one of my big things is deterrence. where the work is right? Like if you're going to write a book like, Oh, I have an idea. Great. Let's map your idea. Oh, that's kind of hard. Can we talk about my idea, some more you know. So trying to position ourselves with these things is important. And then also positioning yourself in the marketplace is important. Talk about positioning.
David C Baker 25:19
One of the things that I talked about in the book is trying to translate the our understanding of need in the marketplace, that is what people are losing sleep over with some sort of a mathematical model. We know that if we have way too many people that want to buy from us, then there's probably so much opportunity this is going to attract a lot of competitors. And in the end, we'll all be a little bit too interchangeable with each other. But if we don't have a big enough market, then we might not have enough opportunity to play. So there's this mathematical model that I discovered in professional services. It doesn't apply to other spaces necessarily talking about lawyers, engineers, architects, consultants, and Go on. So as you picture yourself standing at a place where you haven't made that tight positioning decision yet, and you're walking forward, looking at the little traffic light deciding if you've gotten to the right place and can stop or not, the light is red, red, red, it turns green, when you enter that zone where you might be entering that right space for your positioning. And at that point, there are generally 10,000 prospects and about 200 competitors, you can keep walking, and anywhere in this space where the light is green, you're probably safe. But at a certain point, the light turns red again, when you have entered what would be a market that's not big enough for you. And at that point, there are about 10 competitors and 2000 prospects. So you have to think about where you are in there, because you probably can't lock up more than one one and a half, maybe 2% of that market. So the model I was trying to get across in the book was just to give people some sense of how tightly position they should be, without being so tightly positioned that they didn't have enough opportunity.
Pete Turner 27:07
I gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. And then later on in the book, you also talk about vertical versus horizontal expertise. And there's some more of those similar thoughts, at least the way I grabbed it, but again, you know, you're the expert. So I'm going to shut up and help me understand distinguishing between vertical and horizontal expertise.
David C Baker 27:25
Sure, so vertical expertise comes from addressing a particular vertical market, which is why we call it vertical expertise. So vertical market, we maybe it's doctors, or maybe it's dentists, or maybe it's retail stores or whatever it is, you know, the broadest vertical would be b2b and b2c. So most people choose a vertical expertise because it's so much easier to identify your prospects and then approach them but there are a lot of firms that have instead of a horizontal expertise, which is defined as a service offering or a demographic focus. So they do something for, let's say, ageing consumers or for millennials or for companies that are growing at a crazy rate. And all of the prospects that fit within that category span many different verticals. So that would be a horizontal expertise. People usually choose that one because they like the variety that comes from it. They get to learn the insight of lots of different industries. There's usually no conflicts of interest between clients. And they're a little bit more immune to an economic downturn. But the big challenge was a horizontal expertise is identifying those prospects so that you can address them.
Jon Leon Guerrero 28:42
Yeah, that's tough when you are discussing topics so broad, and when you don't have a because vertical expertise also gives you a pinpoint accuracy at what you're getting across. And when somebody is target for that, you can identify fight a lot easier. So what about for those of us who have, let's say, a podcast, like ours, which is about fascinating people doing interesting things. If we're operating with a product that is so broad, what do you think we ought to do to? To attract an audience and then train them to understand the broadness?
David C Baker 29:25
Mm hmm. Right? what you just described is a very typical horizontal expertise. And you can see immediately the challenge of trying to attract the right people to it, what firms usually do, whether it's podcasters, or log writers or whatever, is they they try to think of the vertical industries that would find this message, particularly interesting. So maybe it's not factory workers. Maybe it's not Uber drivers. Maybe it's people in some sort of medical innovation field or whatever, I'm just making this up. And you would secretly target those people to get the word out early and then expect it to spread from there. So you're looking for early adopters in very specific vertical markets. But you don't tell people that you are targeting those vertical markets, you just use that as sort of a behind the scenes scenario to get traction in the early days of a venture like that. Interesting. So are there instances where getting traction in a particular vertical can hurt you and others if they are viewed by prospects as unrelated, then definitely, that would be the case. So I've always just kind of smiled at myself when I think about somebody who was a medical doctor owned a medical practice and also owned a funeral home and decided to save money on business cards and print one on each side of that. That'd be confusing to them. marketplace. So as long as it's not confusing to the marketplace or look self serving, it can be fine. But the test you apply is, let's say that, that your primary entry is through a website. So when a prospect comes to your website, would How would they feel? What would they think if they saw that vertical called out specifically? Or if you want to call out two verticals or three verticals in the same place? Do they see a connection between them? If they don't see a connection without any explanation, then it's probably not a good idea to be public about that.
Pete Turner 31:33
And maybe don't save money on your business cards. Of course, I say that I have a friend that is a client, and he has five business cards. And you all of them, it's it's like, What do I do?
David C Baker 31:49
Yeah, that's exactly the point. Right? It's okay to have five of them but not to give anybody more than one I, the way I picture that in the book, and I'm trying to kind of make live firms that just cannot make a firm positioning decision. I tell them that what they're doing is they're driving around town and an unpainted white set fan. And before they get to the prospects office, they pull over two blocks away. They go to the back, pull open both doors, and they flip through the magnetic signs, there's 12 of them in there, they pull out the magnetic sign that most closely resembles what this prospect wants to see. They slap it on the side of the van, and they keep driving to blocks. And what I'm urging people to do is positioning is to paint the darn van and quit trying to be different things to different people. That's a core element of positioning. I'm sitting quietly and letting that hit home. Think about your spouse maybe at home and without anybody else there and repairman comes up and you have Comcast painted on the side of the van versus Comcast. crawled with chalk on the side of the van like you could just your gut instinct is so different when you see that that's the message we're sending when we don't boldly claim who we are. When you think about a restaurant, a restaurant has a neon sign that they have used for 30 years that identifies the type of cuisine the name of the restaurant that never changes. What does change might be the daily specials. And that's okay, but not the cuisine. That's the specialization decision you're making.
Pete Turner 33:29
Yeah, that's, that's, that's fantastic. When you make that choice, how do you pivot off of a position if, you know it's, you know, the numbers aren't lining up, you know, the 10,000 versus 200 you know, balance is wrong and you're like, I think we have to reposition now. Now you're like, I've got to go repaint this van and Earl Scheib is dead.
Jon Leon Guerrero 33:49
Haha, yeah.
David C Baker 33:54
Well, hopefully, you don't have to make that decision too frequently. I use it Used to be that you could make a positioning decision that would last for 10 years nowadays, I think it's more three to five years. Okay. And it, it kind of depends on which of those two metrics, number of prospects or number of competitors is off the charts is wrong, because those send very different signals. So let's say that you focus on marketing for manufacturers, and you decide to test that and you want to see 10,000 prospects and 200 competitors. Well, there are only about 20 competitors, as it turns out, and there are millions of prospects. So what's that signal send? The signal is that this is an unsophisticated marketplace where the decision makers within manufacturers don't really care if you specialize in what they do. And we know that because they're mainly they're using firms that don't specialize because there just aren't that many specific competitors. So there are lots of different signals you have to read in that market. Before you make that decision,
Jon Leon Guerrero 35:01
is it elementary for me to be amused that we have the leading authority on reinventing and, and positioning in the creative and digital space and people's often Earl Scheib reference?
David C Baker 35:13
Ah, yeah. Yeah. Well, but you know, what a great positioning decision you, you said that word. And I immediately thought of a $200 paint job or I don't know what it was. Yeah, whatever. Sheep probably wouldn't last the kind of paint job you do if you were going to sell your car to somebody who wasn't a family member.
Jon Leon Guerrero 35:32
Well, we knew exactly what that guy did.
David C Baker 35:35
Right? Yeah, perfect positioning.
Pete Turner 35:37
Yeah. And you probably even thought of that slogan like, I'll pay in any car 9999 right. And then it went up to 199 and everything else but that's just the next thing. So when first off people should go to your website it said, David, see Baker calm, nice and simple. And you can be followed easily on Twitter, you respond, you're engaging that kind of thing. So Everybody, you know, definitely check out the book and go and look into what David does, because it might help. I know it helps me reading the book as someone who's trying to figure this podcast business out, you know, it's anytime I can put new information or new perspective in my head, it's, it's a powerful thing. So for sure, thank you for that. What are we missing? What are we not asking you about? You're like, I wish these guys would ask me about chapter 27.
David C Baker 36:27
Except there is no chapter seven, but that would have been a good question. Yeah. No, I this has been a really interesting discussion. I I just want to kind of say, well, while your listeners are, are still tuned in that, you You two are really good interviewers, and you, you've read the book, you've come up with thoughtful questions. So this is and that isn't always true for the I think I've been on 190 podcasts over the last two years. And so you're treating your listeners really well. I just want to say Say kudos to you for that. I appreciate it. It's been a really interesting discussion.
Pete Turner 37:04
Thank you. Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks. I appreciate it.
Hey, tell us about your podcast.
David C Baker 37:10
So it's called to Bob's it's a play on the office space movie. Remember the two badass consultants in that? Yeah. So that people always calling us that he's he's not a he's a friend the other Bob is a friend but a largely a competitor. But we do this together. So it's just a conversation every two weeks and comes out every second Wednesday. It's it's actually the number one podcast in this very small creative marketing space, but we just have a great time. It's been it's been really good for our businesses, and it's forced us to try to stay ahead of the curves. I I like the fact that you guys are in the podcasting space and you're helping lead clients in that because I just, I just think it's a fantastic space. I I had no idea that that a podcast could be this. Good for My business and yeah, it's been amazing. Yeah, just amazing. You
Pete Turner 38:04
bring up an excellent point like you have someone who's competitive on the show with you. There's a lot of that fear, you know, Mike, like, no invite them on your show. These are, you know, whether they're potential clients and you're doing a very very soft approach of giving out free expertise here. Or Yeah, you have experts come on because you guys are exchanging value you're exchanging influence and and you really can't harm each other. You're they're working in a collaborative space now your your, your peers, other than competitors, they're not adversaries, you guys are both doing right and you're both getting rich from it. So you know,
David C Baker 38:38
okay, let's do it. One, one plus one equals three. It's it's had hasn't hurt. It's helped both of our businesses for sure. It's not a zero sum game. So I really believe in that approach.
Jon Leon Guerrero 38:48
And didn't we all love when we finally saw on the stage together, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. So I think you know, along the lines of the vulnerabilities I think that that, that consumers want that. We want to see history, these are being led by people who don't mind Joining Forces.
David C Baker 39:10
And there's also some drama associated with it and and this feeling like, oh, they're grown up, maybe we should pay more attention to being grown up as well. Maybe we don't have to be competitive all the time. It's not a zero sum game. Maybe we can indent new markets and expand there. So yeah, so many great thoughts about that.
Pete Turner 39:29
What's your other unexpected value that comes from doing the podcast like obviously your business grows that kind of thing, but what's like something that really enriches you?
David C Baker 39:38
Well, it's more I don't know if this enriches me, but it keeps me from going insane. That's I suppose a benefit. I don't have to answer the same question. 400 freaking times I can just say, hey, go listen to this episode. Really good. We put a lot of effort into it. I appreciate that. It helps me be a more efficient advisor. I like likes the fact that I'm planting the seed with 10s of thousands of people with every month that most of whom will never hire me. And I'm completely fine with that. But when they do have something that they that I might be able to help with, I'm usually in the conversation, even if I don't get the work. So it's just in terms of an ROI. It's hard to imagine anything more effective than doing a podcast if you do it well. And by doing it well, I mean, you're intelligent, you're prepared, the audio is good enough, you know, all that stuff. This is gonna
Jon Leon Guerrero 40:33
end up in the show, but would it be okay with you, for us to quote us saying, I had no idea what a benefit to my business doing a podcast would be?
David C Baker 40:42
Oh, absolutely.
Jon Leon Guerrero 40:44
Yeah, absolutely. Because that's a great sentence. And I think there are a lot of business leaders out there who could who could definitely benefit who just don't see it. Yeah, for sure.
Pete Turner 40:58
Yeah. The thing I wanted to say is It's a lot of work. And let's not forget that like to be that prepared to continue to make the show interesting and better all the time. There is a huge ROI. But that doesn't mean it's free. Like there is a lot of work to maintain a professional podcast.
David C Baker 41:15
Yes, absolutely. And the early fear I think people have as if they'll run out of topics to cover. And we've not found that to be the case, we end up with way more than we can ever cover. But it is easy to fall into certain patterns into certain ruts and not keep reinventing yourself and, and and maybe a green with each other if you have a co host too much, instead of just articulating a slightly different point of view and fighting for that kindly and respectfully. So yeah, absolutely. I agree.
Pete Turner 41:45
How do the two Bob's deal with the editorial choices then
David C Baker 41:48
we actually let our producer do that. We feel like we're too close to it. To make those calls after every recording and we don't ever do a recording over. We do. Light editing will compare notes and say Is that good enough? You know, we can't ever really trust our judgment. So we just let the producer act certain parts of it or say to us now we can't go with that episode in one week talk too much about our relative spouses. And he said if you want to stay married, you can't do that one. So we rely on his advice.
Jon Leon Guerrero 42:22
That's funny cuz now I just have a boxing tournament in his front yard. And Oh, there you go. Okay, you learn
Pete Turner 42:27
acquiescence. Anytime we can, john and i want to take our shirts off because as middle aged men, we think it's hilarious.
David C Baker 42:35
Right, and everybody else is covering their eyes and hiding the children
Jon Leon Guerrero 42:40
offering sunblock, but I do also want to say to our listeners, because we've digressed a little bit, want to remind everybody that we're talking right now about the business of expertise, which is your fifth book, and that there are four of them that you actually put your name on. So listeners should go out and and seek out the book the business of expertise. How entrepreneurial experts convert insight to impact and wealth. But there are three others that you can find that are also terrific and you'll find them at your website. David C. Baker calm.
David C Baker 43:12
Yes. And thank you guys. It's been really fun and interesting to speak with you. I appreciate you having me on the show.
