RHS 008 - How to Play the Long-Game with Ron Tite

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Not available in all states. Today's guest on the podcast is Ron Tite.
Ron is a speaker, an author, and the CEO of an agency, Church and State. Ron was named one of the 10 most creative Canadians.
And in general, he's just a funny, good guy. And we spend a large portion of this episode talking about the speaking business, about our beliefs around leadership and storytelling and sharing ideas in the context of the speaking business, something we both have a great deal of passion for.
And we also talk about Ron's new book, Think Do Say, and the core message within that book around helping people and organizations share their story and their message with the world.

It is my great honor to bring you the wonderful, the tremendous Ron Tite. One of the things that I thought was most interesting when I was preparing to speak to you was really your focus on an intentional inclusion of comedy into your work.
And I'm super interested in that because intrinsically, I am not a funny human being. I'd love to say that I occasionally can drop a self-deprecating reference that will get a few chuckles, but I am not intrinsically funny.
So I'm interested in, is that something you've always been interested in? Is it something that you've had to work at? And where does that come from in injecting comedy into your work? Yeah, I think there's two perspectives there. One is injecting the insights and perspective of a stand-up comedian, the business of stand-up comedy and the craft of stand-up comedy.
I think that's one whole area of thing that brands and leaders can follow and entrepreneurs can follow. There's great lessons there for people.
And I know that world because I spent 20 years as

a standup comedian. And, and so, you know, I was on the road and I toured, I did corporate shows and, and hosted a show called Monkey Toast right up until just a year and a half ago, I guess, before, or two years ago, I guess, before we had our son.
And so I've been involved in comedy and I know that world really well.

The second part is the inclusion of humor into material, into speeches, into writing, you know. And I think there's two reasons.
One is that comes naturally. That's how I see the world.
I see the world. I'm always thinking of like, what is funny about this situation? What is the unique angled, what other people would find humorous? And I think why I do that, and maybe why I have an entrepreneur's brain is that if you see a toothbrush just as a toothbrush, and you only see it that way, and you only use it for brushing your teeth, that is kind of a metaphor to how most people see the problems in business.
It's like, we've always done it this way. This is the only way you can solve that problem.
You know, that's it. And the second you can look at it from a humorous perspective, you're actually showing somebody that's like, I know you only see it from this angle, but what if you saw it from this angle? And they go, oh, I never thought of looking at it from that angle before.
And when they laugh, they prove that they got it, that they actually had the ability to see that toothbrush from a completely different angle. And so by showing them, look, you just laughed.
You proved that you can see this from another perspective.

Now, now I'm going to get, I'm going to show you the perspective I really wanted you to

see it from another perspective. Now, now I'm going to get, I'm going to show you the perspective I really wanted you to

see it from.

And this is the important one.

And this is the serious one.

And this is the strategic one.

So there's a couple of, you know, in speaking, laughter is really powerful because it's

disarming for people.

It's a great unifier for an audience who's like, you got that, I got that. We're all in this together.
And you get to see it from another perspective, which is the power. So it's not the laughter that I want, but it's the silence that follows the laughter.
But if I don't have the laughter first, I never get to that more poignant silence. There's also a really functional aspect there, which is, I don't know if you remember this, Ryan, but in kindergarten, when sometimes the teachers would say like, when the hand goes up, the mouth goes shut, right? And everybody repeated it.
And at the end, the reason that worked was because everybody says it, and then afterwards, it stops. And if you give it a beat, there's silence.
So the functional aspect of using humor in a speech is after they laugh and you let it die down, they're waiting for the next thing, and it's silence that you've got them. And that's when I can deliver and I can take them where I want to take them.

I can go with another joke and build it even more.

I can take them and be really direct.

And I can be like really direct and say,

you know, like, why are you doing this?

You got to read the writing on the wall here.

Or I can be thoughtful or I can be emotional.

But it's in that moment of silence

that power within a speech. And the same thing in writing.
It's just, I think, you know, for books, there's so many of us who write books and we think they're the most unique thing on the planet. And the reality is they're like, they're just, they're just not.
And so we have to make them more unique. And I think humor is a way to do that.
The trailer for my book that just came out or is just coming out, I was like, I'm not going to, you know, it's think to say when the subhead is, you know, how to seize tension and build trust in the busy, busy world. And that maybe, as I said, that doesn't sound so unique.
So in the trailer, I didn't talk about the content of the book. I just said, finally, a business book that doesn't mention Apple, even one.
And I just thought that's an interesting, humorous insight that may do exactly what the book wants them to do, which is seize a tentative and build trust. Yeah.
So I want to dive into this looking at something from – so basically what I heard you say is people look at a toothbrush from a certain angle. And your point is I really want you to come in from this angle over here.
And if you were to take them right there, right to that spot, maybe there wouldn't be as much attention given to the angle you want them to look at it from. There may not be as much trust built.
There may not be as much belief built there. So what you do is open them up to the possibility that there are other options first.
And then you take them to the direction. Walk me through that thought process a little bit from the psychology standpoint because that's that's really interesting to me yeah it's you know um uh i will certainly you know that you spoke about building trust and and then being open first first off and humor has a great way of doing.
So one of the very first things that I will do, there's two types of openings in comedy and in speeches. People don't refer to it this way.
There's the cold open and there's the warm open. So a cold open, do you know, have you heard of these terms before? Am I just talking inside pool? No, no, you're doing good.

So the cold open is like Saturday Night Live. Like that opening sketch is literally called the cold open.
And because it just starts, right? Like the show starts and you just go right from when the show begins. And so the warm open, though, is when a host comes out and is like, hey, everybody, how you doing? Like, hey, it's Tuesday.
What happened the other day? And so I will only use a warm open. If you look at a TEDx talk, a TEDx talk is a cold open, right? Like, boom, you start.
So why I like to do a warm open is I use something that's funny in that warm open, something I just saw, something I just read, something that just happened in the room, something the last speaker said. And so if I can make something funny right out of the gate that I obviously could not have written before,

then there's a huge amount of trust. Because the first thing I think is, that was kind of funny, and there's no way he could have written that before.
Oh, this guy's present. Like, he's here.
He's not calling this in. He's not reciting the same script he's done 400 times.
So right out of the gate. Humor builds trust.
Secondly, it gives credibility because if I can make something funny about the breakfast they just ate, then it gives me comedic credibility because they're like, that was kind of funny and he obviously hadn't written that before. So he's just naturally funny.
So it's okay for us to laugh at the later stuff, which maybe are his more rehearsed bits. And so then, so you build up that trust, you build credibility.
Then, you know, let's say I open it with a story of whatever. And the second they laugh, I know that I've got them because they have seen it from that other angle.
And I'll actually sometimes use a line. If it's the beginning of the speech, I'll use a line, something like, but that's not why we're here.
Like I'm that direct with it. Like, yeah, you're laughing, but that's not why you're here.
And that's in that moment of silence, like, oh, where's he going with this? But they've already, they're already open. Their minds are already open to seeing other opportunities.
And so, I mean, I don't know, I'm not a, you know, a PhD in psychology, so I don't know why that is. I think you're just, if you lead with the business example going, hey, you're salespeople and the elevator pitch is dead, the line that people default to, because you haven't given them any reason to prove them that they're wrong and they do this.
And as an agent, we see this in pitches. People go like this, right? They cross their arms and they go, I don't know.
I mean, I've been in this business 30 years. And when someone says that in a visual, I basically mentally pack up my things and leave.
I'm like, all right, well, we lost that pitch. That's because that's just somebody dare heels in and going, no, you don't know my job.
You don't know what I go through. Trust me.
I've been in this business 30 years. I know the elevator pitch is the only way to sell.
So if I can show them the sales process from a comedic angle, they're like, I never thought of it that way. And he's actually right.
It's actually pretty funny when I see it that way. So I've built up the trust.
I've built up the credibility. And then when I deliver the thing that I really want them to do, I think they just like me more and they trust me more.
So they're just more open to hearing it opposed to starting with, who's this guy that my boss brought in to speak to us about this thing and you know here's another yahoo telling me i should change the way i work so i think that's that's really quick because i i get it right like they've been fed a bunch of bullshit for years by senior management by other speakers of you know and thought leaders and whatnot and people who just who are removed from the of what they do. And I just want them to show that I see it from another angle, and so can they.
I'll also, sorry, just to add on to that, I'll also justify it. But, you know, like, for example, many people will say, you have to embrace failure.
And I can say that as long as I tag it with and i know i know it's so easy for me to say it from the stage it really is but let me give you a practical you know and realistic implication of this and you know and i think it's like because i have a business because i'm an entrepreneur and i i have a number of things going on and an agency with global clients, they just trust me.

They go, like, I get it.

It's really easy to say.

It's not as easy to do.

But that only happens because I've opened them up with the comedy first.

Yeah, it's interesting.

So in my own speaking career, I had to adopt a warm open.

You know what, Ryan?

I'm just going to shut a door here.

Hold on a second. There we go.
Sorry. I hope you're editing this or if you're not that your listeners just had a three second break.
We will we'll probably edit that part out. So in my own speaking career, I had to adopt a warm open pretty quickly because I was 28 years old trying to teach insurance agents about digital marketing.
And you want to talk about arms folded, Sonny, you don't understand. We've done it this way for a hundred years mentality.
Try telling independent insurance agents that they should sell insurance online when you look like you're about 18 and you haven't even crossed 30 yet. So early in my career, I learned, you know, if I didn't, if I didn't yank these guys in quick, get them laughing, getting them thinking that I'm not here to, to, to impact them, or I'm not here to just tell them the way that things should be and that they've done it wrong, despite the fact that they're all probably millionaires for the most part um you know it that that went over that was bad i mean i had people literally walk up to me after presentations this is way early in my career when i just went up there and started hammering on people and uh and i had guys walk up to me and they're like so i make four hundred thousand dollars a year you're telling me that i'm doing something wrong and I'm like you want to make five no I mean it's're like, so I make $400,000 a year.
You're telling me that I'm doing something wrong? And I'm like, you want to make five? No, I mean, it's like that didn't go so well. So that makes sense.
Well, that's a great lesson, right? Like I think so many of us, when we approach problems like that, we present our thinking as if it's the only way instead of presenting it like it's another way. But there's a I think one of the best examples is that yellow pages still was in business yeah you know I think the numbers are 65% of yellow pages at least in Canada 65% of the L pages revenue still comes from the book there are still consumers who look in a yellow pages who see an ad and who who order a pizza.
And so we can't flip the switch on anything. And if you're a $400,000 insurance salesman and you're making $400,000, yeah, maybe because of your ecosystem, that's totally cool.
Cool. This is not the only way to do it, but you should look at it from another perspective.
And maybe 80 of you will want to try that perspective because the current approach isn't working for you. Yeah.
Yeah. So I can, I can testify from a lot of hard beats that, that, that connecting with them very early and kind of bringing down that wall is of the utmost importance.
Oh my gosh. I mean, I just, I've, that shoulder, that, that arms crossing thing is there's another great lesson there in comedy, um, which is any great comedian knows something called, you know, you never ignore the reality of the room.
So if you're in a comedy club and somebody yells out, you suck, everybody heard it. Everybody heard it.
And it's your show. And so you have to address that person.
You have to

call it out and you have to respond and get in and interact. So when I see somebody in a room with their arms folded going, who the deep is this guy? What's he saying? I go straight for them.
Yeah. And I go, you're not buying it, are you? I know.
I see the look on your face. and then they will open up a little bit

because now I've called them out.

And I will consciously then look to that person. And because I think the first thing I need them to do is I just, I need them to like me.
That's it. So I can't ignore the reality that there are people who think it's bullshit.
And I go to those people and I get them on side right away. In comedy, there's something called, there's an active heckler and a passive heckler.
And the active heckler is the person who says, you suck. And in a business meeting, there is the active heckler, which says, I agree with your budget forecasts, or I disagree with your budget forecasts, and here's why.
And you can engage that person, and you know what they, they don't like the line item that's been associated for distribution, you can debate that and anything else. In comedy and in business, the far more dangerous heckler is the passive heckler.
The passive heckler in a comedy club is the person who doesn't even know you're on stage. They're consumed with their phone.
They're talking to their buddies. They got something else.
They don't even, not that they don't like what you're talking about. They don't even know you're there.
And in business, the passive heckler is the person who doesn't say anything in the meeting and then kills your idea in the hallway. And in both cases, the first thing you need to do is get them paying attention.
You need them at least, like they can disagree with you, but they first have to hear what you're saying and have to understand what you're saying. So in a comedy club, I would walk right up to the person who's standing beside them so that they know that I'm right there.
Or I would point to them and make a comment that would get them listening. In a business meeting, you go, hey, Mary, you haven't said what you think of this proposal.
And you get Mary on the record so that Mary can, and even if she disagrees with it, at least she's on the record for what she disagrees with and allowing you the opportunity to change it or fix it or address her concerns. Yeah., I did, I had a little bit when I knew that I knew that I used to do early, when I could tell I had either like a early morning audience, or an audience right after lunch, when people had kind of maybe been away from their phones.
And we're now trying, we're going to check during my session that I would do about what it looks like when you stick your phone in your crotch and you start playing with your phone because you're trying to hide it from me under the table. So I had like this little thing that I would do, a little sketch, and I'd have the phone down on my crotch.
I had different versions of it, but like by attacking that, like, and I'm just saying, just pull it right out and like hold it up in the air and just text. Like, I don't care.
At least I're doing you know like it's all good yeah that's awesome who's texting and um and uh and but again it took me a long time to get to that point where I was willing to do that I guess just very tactically I'm interested in like what size audience would become too big to do crowd work like that like if you're 100 people 200 people are 200 people, are you still going to move out into the crowd? Obviously you're, if you get into the thousands, it's, it's, you know, it's probably more than you can really handle. But obviously if you're in, I think sometimes it's almost even more difficult to do it if it's 10 people because it's so intimate.
And I've just seen that from both directions. I'm just interested in your take.
Yeah, I'll do, I think it's more about the physical makeup of the room for me, not because like I just did a speech on Monday for, I think it was 650 or 700 people. And I totally did crowd work.
I wanted to ride in. I didn't didn't care.
Um, and so if it's a massive room, um, and the stage is elevated a little bit, like sometimes just physically not pop, not possible to leave the stage, go into the crowd and get back on stage in a way where you're not ripping your pants or something. Um, I think if it, if it's possible, I think because even if a thousand people plus 2000, 3000 people, um, you know I've done 1,000 people where I went into the crowd.
And the reason you can do that is because you're typically an iMac. Like you're actually – they're actually not watching you on stage at all.
The whole crowd is watching you on the video screen. And as long as the camera can follow you into the room.
And so if you know, sometimes look at the crew heads up like, hey, I might go into the crowd. So be prepared with the lights so you can pick it up on camera.
And then if I'm talking to somebody in the room, like I actually, I came up with a bit where I was going to go into the room and it was like before the speech started. And I saw that there was a guy that was really tall.
And I did the bit was something about me being short or whatever it was. I literally went to the camera guy and I said, I'm going to do this thing.
I'm going to go in. And I think the visual of me standing beside this guy who's like six, nine is really funny.
So if you can just frame the shot near the top, so you actually cut his head off. Like, I think that's really funny.
If he's so tall, he's out of the frame. And I, and so in doing that, I turned and faced God because I knew where the camera was.
And so I was looking at the camera. So you have to act like a TV, like an anchor.
You have to deliver to the camera in a really large room because that's where most people are watching you. They're watching you on screen.
What I love about the size of a room like that too, when you're on iMag, is that everybody thinks like, oh, 4,000, 5,000 people, you need to play it really big. No, it's the exact opposite.
You play it really, really small because everyone's watching you on camera.

So the only thing they see, they don't see the stage.

They only see you from the waist up.

So you can cock an eyebrow.

Yeah, you can cock an eyebrow and somebody in the last row, they will see it.

So it's such a joy to perform to a room that size because you can actually play it really, really intimately.

There's a great line from Bill Clinton when Elvis Costello asked him on Elvis Costello's show, what did Bill Clinton learn from jazz, from playing jazz, that he applied to politics? And the line was, yeah, I learned that when you're playing to one, we play like you're playing to a million. And when you're playing to a million, you play like you're playing to one.
And I think that's so true for speaking. Yeah, that's really good.
That's really, really good. It's funny, you know, I think a lot of people who don't speak or or in any capacity like that um how versatile you have to be in order to consistently perform um i had back-to-back shows where um i had a 400 person audience where the mics went out and i had to yell to them and talk about like being animated i mean literally i had to project over 400 people for almost 60 minutes there was no audio I mean or that way they just wouldn't have been able to hear me and to an iMeg about it was about 700 people but they had the iMegs and it's and now all of a sudden you're like bringing yourself all the way back in now it was a dream that it was the screaming one first and the iMeg one second because then I I could be I could save my voice a little on the second, but it was, it was really interesting.
And I think, you know, I'm hearing you talk about how before you go on stage, you're setting up, you're, you know, you're scanning the crowd, you're finding the guy who's tall, so you can set the shot and you're talking to the crew and to perform really well. It's, it's these details, in my opinion, like as I got into my career and though I've kind of had to put it on pause for a while, as I've taken the CEO job here at metabolic, you know, I probably, you know, I got paid to speak for about 10 years.
And it wasn't until maybe the latter third of my career that I really started to understand, yes, you're you're the content is important. But the content from you to, you know, any a bunch of people, you know, It's, you know, a unique point, but the content from you to a bunch of people, it's unique points, but the content is the content.
And then it's the little details that you're discussing. You're not saying, well, I got this great thing in the middle where I talk about content marketing.
You're saying, hey, there's this little detail where I want to stand next to this guy and cut his head out. And it's, I feel like far too often we get so consumed in the, the, the thing that we forget about all the edges and where the edges are, where things are really interesting.
Those little details on the edges are what make me, I think what really defined our differences when we present our product. And I feel like over the course of my career, speaking is where I've seen that stand out more than in other aspects of my life, but I think it transcends.
Yeah, I think, I think, you know, mistakes give us the opportunity to, to do that. And this is the difference, I think, between somebody who gets it and somebody who doesn't.
So somebody who gets it goes, the mics went out?

Like when you told me that the mics went out in front of, how many people was it?

400.

So 400 people.

The first thing in my brain was, oh, what an opportunity.

Yeah, it was fun. Like, oh, wow.

Because the first thing the group is going to say is the mics went out and that dude still killed it. Yeah.
And he used that to do a thing and it became, then it becomes the thing to talk about. So I was doing a speech in Niagara Falls and to, I don't know, 800 people or something like that.
And I came out and realized that after the first 15 minutes, my fly was completely down fully zipper boxer, underwear, exposed kind of, you know, thing. And, um, some people who maybe wouldn't, who don't speak that often would, would freak out and they out and they'd lose their mind and they're all

nervous and flustered and they can't believe they did it. The first thing in my brain was, oh, this is going to be good.
And so I just embraced it. And I went to the front row and I said, has my fly been down the whole time? And I was like, mm-hmm.hmm I said your your job as the front row is that if a speaker comes out and their zipper is down you you tell them and and and then I just went off and just improvised some bits of what the rest of the audience was thinking like I'd love to understand what he's talking about but I can't move my eyes from this gaping void in his crotch." And I think it's just such a great opportunity.
Every mistake, everything that goes wrong is such an opportunity to kill it even more than the crowd would ever expect you to. Yeah.
It's so funny. I love these stories.
I don't get to speak to speakers as much as I should. But I had the night before I carry zit cream.
If you get a zit, you know what I mean? Like you want to try to relegate it as much as you know, it's just a red thing on your face. So that's the night before I'd put or whatever I put some it was an afternoon thing.
So the morning I'd put some zit cream right here just to kind of like have something go away. Just so it's not like a big red flashing light.
And then I figured I just, before I left the room, I'd wipe it off. Well, nope, I completely forgot to do that.
So I have this big splotch right here of white stuff. And no one says a word to me.
I mean, I do. I go out.
I'm talking to people. I'm getting set up with the crew.
I'm getting mic'd up, I'm talking to them about, you know, what I'm going to do when I'm on stage. I mean, the whole thing is like an hour's worth of pre-work, probably 25 different people speaking face to face with me.
No one says a word about this big white spot that's right here. So finally, I turned, I have the, I did this, like, I made my point in the crowd reacts and I kind of turn a little, I kind of show them maybe my back just a little second to give them like a breather.
And I look and like the, they had a still that they had taken on the iMeg, like they hadn't, whatever. I can see that I had the zit cream.
Let's just put it that way. Like, or it was like, no, it was like a Twitter thing or something I could see right here.
So I stopped and I come back and I I asked, I asked the audience, I was like, who do any of the women in the audience or men, you know, have a have a compact one of those compacts with a mirror. So then they give me the compact and I I'm doing this whole thing where I'm washing it off.
And I'm licking my finger and I'm going like, and I'm talking to them about whatever I can't remember what I was talking about at the time. But like, that, that took a, you know, that took this presentation, which was, you know, I mean, I would love to say good.
And then everyone's like, asking me what, you know, busted my chops the rest of the time. Now we're like bros, right? The whole audience is bros.
Cause now they're like, what kind of Zit cream is it? How many Zits do you get? Why are you getting Zits? 40, you know what I mean? Like all the, you know, all this stuff, but, but what they're're also doing and this is just to reiterate and maybe just for people who don't speak at home and are kind of following along still um what it did was it made that it's almost like it's it it uh unhardens their brain it softens their brain it becomes very porous at that point they're like now that you've like let your guard all the way down like with your fly thing everything you said after that I bet they were way way more receptive to and I bet they also retained it they retained it more um and that's what I found in the biggest like I don't want to call them mistakes but like you know things happen whenever there's something like that an instance uh a situation everything after that seems to really to really stick in the audience's brain afterwards. It's very interesting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's an opportunity for you to show that you're a pro, I think.
Yeah, and the worst thing you can do is fall apart, I think. So, all right, well, we've talked, I could talk about speaking, I could talk about speaking all day.
It's literally my favorite thing in, in, in business to do. Um, uh, but there's some things with your, with your book and some of your other work, um, that I wanted to just, just some questions that I, that I found that I wanted to, I wanted to talk through with you.
You're kind of in the second half of our show. So, um, in your, um, in your first book, um, I'm trying to find where I want to go first.
So in Everyone's an Artist, you had a line. I think it's Everyone is an Artist.
You had a line. People no longer vote with their wallet.
They vote with their time. And I'm assuming you also mean their attention as well, or at least if that's part of it.
And if it's not, please correct me. I would really love for you to dive into that a little bit.
Cause I don't, I don't think, I think there are a lot of people who if you say that to them, they're like, Oh yeah, that makes sense. But they're not really grabbing hold of it and, and, and embracing the power in that, in that statement.
And I just like you to dive into that a little bit. Yeah.
I mean, before the transactions were pretty easy, right? I mean, you didn't have to vote. You didn't have to choose to spend time with things.
There wasn't much selection. So you you didn't choose to watch commercials.
You didn't choose to look at ads. You were fed them.
And based on that ad, then you chose with your wallet. You said, I vote for Toyota or I vote for Lexus or whatever, which I I think are of the same kind of company.
But anyway, so then when the media landscape completely changed and people have talked about this kind of ad nausea, but now I don't have to watch that. I mean, whether it's, you know, software plugins that allows me to, you know, have any ads or whether I'm skipping ads or whether I'm PVRing stuff or whether I'm choosing to go to cable or to streaming services that have no ads.
So now I get to choose which things I spend my time with. And in order to get to the point where I have to decide what my wallet is going to purchase, I first have to vote with, I would like to pay attention to this message.
I would like to seek out this message. I would like to choose to watch this message.
And, you know, people think that, you know, that skip ad button in the beginning of pre-roll, like when you like accounts down, like you can skip this ad in five, four, three, two, one. What typically happens, I do this, I'm sure you do, we see that come up and we're like, how fast can I, is it down to zero yet? Can I skip it now? Can I skip it now? We've got our mouse hovering over the little part where we know it's going to say skip ad and we can click right there.
And so the second it hits zero, we're clicking to get out of that. And people think that's just a mechanic or a tactic within pre-roll, but it's not.
This is skip ad exists in every piece of business communication. You get on stage, you do a speech.
There's somebody going, can I skip this now? Can I skip this now? You send a pitch slap email on LinkedIn. They're going skip, skip, skip.
You're putting content in front of them that you say is really great. You're putting a white paper in front of them, all that shit, every single last bit of it.
And I think people are chasing tactics and they're going, I hear that Facebook is really great, so we need to invest some of our money into Facebook ads. No.
I mean, yes, sure, fine. But if you don't look at the stuff you're putting on the platform and say, is this good enough and interesting enough and relevant enough and compelling enough where someone would choose or would seek it out, then they're just going to go skip ad, skip ad, skip ad.
And there's people like, well, our big strategy for the year is we're going to now start to invest in Instagram stories. Nothing makes my blood boil faster than that.
Not because the platform or the media choice isn't appropriate, but because more focus has been put into the distribution mechanism than into maintaining the quality of the thing that you are distributing. Because that's the hard part.
And you can't win the – well, it's the hard part part it's the risky part right it's it's the part you you i mean it's pretty easy to go and look at a media plan and go yeah those numbers make sense i like the cpms on that and checks out and sure buy you know spend two million in that area um it's another thing to go should it be blue or should they red and i don don't know. Let's debate this.
And I think it's

so much easier to say we're going to try something new to approve a media plan or a tactic than it is to say, do we really want to change the tone of our language? Do we really want to change that messaging? Do we want to change the art direction? And that's the part that wins the battle for time in conjunction with where it is.

Yeah, this actually is a perfect segue into something that I was – I found an interview that you did. And in that interview, you said, you know, people have forgotten how to play the long game.
And this is in context to your new book, Think, Do, Say. Everyone who's listening, how you get a hold of Ron, how you find him, and links to his website and his books and stuff will all be in the show notes, or you just Google Think Do Say or go to Amazon, you'll find it.
Coming out in October, which this should be released before then. So pre-order when you can.
People have forgotten how to play the long game, and we're chasing short-term tactics. We're trying to game the system.
We've lost the organic pursuit of success. There's two things in there that resonated with me.
One, I completely agree with your short-term tactics thing. That's like a psychosis that many people have.
But the idea of, I guess, for people to have forgotten how to play the long game, there feels like there's an assumption that at some point they were playing the long game, and I'm interested in your take on that. And then I really want to know this idea of the organic pursuit of success, what you kind of mean by that statement.
I like it. I just – I'm super interested in it.
Yeah, I mean your first question, the long game, have they forgotten? I think so, but I think you raised a good point and a good insight. I don't know whether they've forgotten or whether – I don't know.
I just – whether they just refused to do it, and maybe they always did, but it's more obvious now. But because everything is new, whether it's Moore's Law that it's an 18-month

timeframe for computing power, or whether it's just the natural life cycle of platforms and

tactics, it'd be an interesting thing, actually, that is there a Moore's Law for advertising

tactics?

That every 18 months there's going to be a new platform. Yeah, Moore's Law for advertising is 18 seconds.
Yeah. So I think it's because of our previous point that it's really easy to do that.
It's like we're just going to play the short game. And so within advertising, there's either acquisition or there's retention.
And we know that when you want to play the short game, when you want to meet those quarterly numbers, and you need to drive call response or click response or whatever, there are always tactics that you can do. You can do a buy one, get one.
You can do a price savings. You can do a never, you know, it's a sales event.
You can do all those things that dial up the urgency, and you do it at the cost of long-term brand affiliation and you get your little bumping calls and the problem is that stuff is like crack because you get a little bump and you go i just want another bump i just want another bump i just want another bump but the bumps are getting harder and harder and harder to get just as and i don't i've never done crack but know. I'm assuming this happens that, that the crack starts to wear off faster and faster.
Right. Um, but so I think that's what happens is that you don't play the long game.
And so you just chase these short-term things and you're in this constant panic cycle of new things, new things, new things, because you need the short-term tactics to pay off because you've never invested in the long-term tactics. And there's no greater difference in this than the world between Apple and Dell.
And I used to, you know, I was the creative director on Dell for many years. You know, Apple will never do a price reduction.
You've never seen that ad. They have focused on building products.
And I hate using Apple as the example but um but you know they would never do that whereas Dell we looked at their short-term numbers and that we would look at the ad and go that ad delivered so many calls or a cost per click at $75 and or at $12 whatever and how do we do that again it was like oh we price. We made the computer bigger.
And we just started chasing those tactics and they became more and more difficult. So that's what I mean by the long game.
The organic pursuit of success is that advertising, and I don't remember who said this, somebody that advertising is a tax. It's just a tax on the stupid or it's a tax on shitty products or it's a tax on services that aren't as good as they say.
And that if you organically build a product, that is phenomenal. If you organically develop customer service over time that you hone and you perfect and you deliver it and you never stop, You're just trying to make it better and better and better.
Word gets around. It just does.
And people trust it. And then when you lead with messaging, people trust your messaging because they know you put so much time into the product.
And I see this with speakers a lot where people are like, I'm not getting the speaking gigs, so I need to develop the website. I need to change my speaker reel.
I need to do all these things. And my first question is, did you look at the product? Maybe it's not that you're not tweeting relevant stuff, but it's that the product sucks.
That's why you're not getting booked. So double down and fix the product first, because in speaking gigs, get you gigs.
And the only way to do that is to kill it on stage. And this every second, you're not focused on improving your part product and your research on your preparation on your customization.
every second you're not doing that and doing those other things means you're weakening the product. And so I think, but that has to happen organically.
That takes time, that takes patience, that takes flexibility, that takes a little bit of failure, all those things. And if you just make it better every single time, then that will happen.

I do something in speaking where some people go like,

I've got a whole new speech.

And I'm like, really?

You sat down and you wrote an hour of new material

and now you're gonna deliver it

for the first time at a conference?

This is my world of comedy.

Nobody does that.

Nobody writes an hour of comedy and then performs it for HBO in the first take. No way.
Does not. What they do is they develop bits along the way and they'll do old bits, old bits, old bits.
Here's a new bit that I'm working on selfishly and then pull it back. And over time, the speech changes over the course of a 12-month period, opposed to doing the same speech for 12 months, stopping writing an entirely new speech in one sitting, and then perfecting it.
That's not any way to do it. It's organic.
It happens every single time out, every single day. Some of the best speaking advice that I ever got, and I think this applies to just about any business, was modulizing your bits.
I think a lot of times we think of presentations or speeches or whatever you want to call what we do on stage as this, the whole thing is the thing. And actually it was our shared friend, Marcus Sheridan, who sat me down.
He followed me at a gig one time. And he said, which one of those pieces did you swap in or out for this particular event? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about.
And he's like, what I'll do is I have nine modules. And if it's a 30-minute presentation, I'll take three of those modules.
And if it's an hour, maybe I'll be able to fit seven in and then I'll do another hour the next day and swap two of them out and two of them in. And then I can build a new module and it's a whole new speech because by adding one new module or just rearranging the modules, I've added, and I think both in speaking, that completely changed my career when I did that.
That was a game changer for me because I became, I could be laser focused on one part of the presentation that I felt wasn't working instead of trying to rework the whole presentation every time, which in saying it back to you seems silly that I thought that way, but until he had shared that with me, I had never thought about it. And I think the same thing goes on with our business, right? Like we, we think, well, my, this isn't working.
So I have to flip this thing over. And now instead of tweeting, I'm going to go Instagram stories and I'm going to be this thing.
And I'm going to start doing SEO work or whatever the heck people want to do and whatever your job is. And instead, it's just what is the one little piece that isn't working? Let's spend some time and really fix that piece and let everything else be what it is.
It that was a game changer for me. That was an absolute game changer.
And it has transcended even now that my work in life is more of just as an executive than it is a speaker. It's I apply it to what I do every day here and it's, it's huge.
Yeah, I think, and there's another way to look at that, right? That's that. So I take the same approach, but I also add a layer to it both in leadership and in speaking.
So I am a certain type of leader with our team here at the agency. And the reason I am that type of leader is because of the successes and failures I've had in 25 years or whatever in this business.
And so all those other people that I led or that I followed or whatever, all those other people subsidized the leadership that I now have. And so the current people, just as on stage, every audience where I tried out a new thing that maybe didn't work, those audience subsidized the delivery of the great material that the people get to hear today.
And so what are they

doing for the next group? What are they doing to pay it forward? What are the current team doing to subsidize the leadership traits that I'm going to have for the next generation of people that I will lead? And that is a very selfish thing, and I don't communicate it that way, but I know in speaking that if I do 95% of the speech, which is gold material, and this is great stuff, and they love it, and it's relevant, and it's funny, and everything that's insightful, then there's 5% that I don't know how it's going to go. Because I'm exploring new things, and it may suck.
And it's okay, because 95% of it is gold. And the 5% that sucks, A, they don't really notice.
But B, I think that's okay because that's them paying it forward to the next group. Because I'm going to find something in the stuff that I think might suck that doesn't.
And that becomes another piece which is more relevant or more interesting for a future audience. So, you know, and the team here, we're going to try some things out from a process standpoint, from an innovation standpoint, whatever, we're gonna try new software.
We're on Slack now, and this may suck, but let's just try this out. That's them subsidizing the leadership trades for future generations.
Slack doesn't suck.

It's amazing.

Yeah, no, I'm – well, with you on that point as well, I will say that the way I kind of look at it is, you know, you had talked about someone taking a whole new hour and bringing it out to a paid gig. And that to me shows almost a lack of respect for that audience because you're not delivering material to them that you know guaranteed is going to hit.
I think that delivering something over and over and over and over and over again the exact same way also shows a lack of respect for the audience because it says I'm not willing to evolve my material as the world changes. And I think what you just described to me is the sweet spot, whether it's 90% or 98% or some percentage of your material being new says, look, I'm going to make sure that you get what you paid for in either the time or the money that it took for you to sit in the seat that you're in.
But I'm going to have enough respect for you to say, I'm going to give you something a little new. And there's a chance it's going to be terrible.
And that's just kind of the price we pay. But I'm going to have enough respect to both give you something worthwhile and give you something a little different too.
And I think that speaks to your process about the warm open. And what it shows me is that, and I hope people listening at home take away from this, is that I think as someone delivering, whether it's speaking or if you're the leader or whatever, having respect for the people, for the audience, call them clients, call them whatever you want to call them, is of the utmost importance.
We can't demand respect for them if we're not willing to give it first. And that to me is the thing when I see leaders fall apart, when I see speakers fall apart, salespeople, marketers, it's that they don't have the 180 degree respect.
They want it for themselves. Look at this great piece of content that I created.
Why don't you sign up for my newsletter? Why aren't you sharing it? Or why aren't you hiring me? And, and you can tell when you really dig into it, what's missing isn't the quality of the work. It's not the insights.
It's the fact that that work didn't display respect back to the audience in which you were providing it to them. And, um, I think the way that you described that was spot on.
Yeah, I think too, I think that people, and we see this with clients, right, as well,

or with leading people, that you actually, you think you want to show respect by claiming that

you know more than you do. And in speech form, you go in and you're like, so this is your sales

process, you know, and you're trying to use their terms and all that kind of stuff. Opposed to never ignoring the reality of the room that you're an outside perspective.
And just going to go like, I actually don't know what you go through on a daily basis. I maybe have an idea.
I have a superficial understanding of what you do. But there are things I'm never going to appreciate that you have to deal with.
Why? Because I'm an outsider. And there's some value in having an outsider.
And that's why not all my things are going to be exactly as what they are for you in your daily life. For us as consultants to our clients, we're the agency for Walmart Canada, the social and digital agency for Walmart Canada.
I actually don't know. I can't appreciate what somebody working in the camera department, you know, at the Dufferin Mall in Toronto, the Dufferin Mall, Walmart goes to on a daily basis.
And I'm never going to have that insight. And so I shouldn't sell my ideas as if I'm the all-knowing or we are the all-knowing organization that does.
But we should frame our perspectives as saying, this is an outside perspective. And you need that outside perspective, but this is your responsibility to call us on it or to agree, disagree, or to add some color to it so that we get it better.
But there's this belief of like, they don't know my business. No, that's the whole point of hiring an outside body is we don't know your business.
We can understand your business, but will never know your business. No, that's the whole point of hiring an outside body is we don't know your business.
We can understand your business, but we'll never know your business to the extent that you know your business. And that's exactly why you hire us.
Guys, if you are looking for a speaker, I highly recommend Ron. I'm part of one of the foremost speaking Facebook groups.
How I ever got invited into this group, I don't know. I feel it has been a generous gift to just voyeur it most times.
I don't even – I do add occasionally to the conversations, but mostly I just read the insights of tremendous people. Ron is one of them who consistently shares his own thoughts and beliefs and experiences with that group.
I find it incredibly valuable, and I can tell you that if you're looking for a speaker, you cannot miss with Ron. Also, his book, Think Do Say is coming out in October, make sure you pre order it.
Ron, it's been an incredible pleasure. Where can people like the best place to get at you if they're just looking for more information? Yeah, just Ron tight everywhere.
It's just ron t in-t-i-t-e twitter at rontite you know

instagram at rontite uh ross.com um and the agency is churchstate.co awesome man thanks so much

thanks ryan and thanks everybody for listening i really appreciate that we are in a battle for time

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