Going against the flow. Does that open up any opportunities for you? Does it allow you to be creative? Don’t be stultified by the notion that says you’ve got to find a way to to follow everybody else and be like everybody else in the crowd. I mean that that to me sucks the life out of you. It sucks the creativity out of you. You can’t breathe in the crowd, you just can’t. And so how can you be creative and innovative and launch a startup if you think like everybody else and that’s part of the problem. Yeah.
Thomas Green here with ethical marketing service on the episode today we have Ro Osing. Roy welcome. Thank you very much. I’m grateful that you invited me to be here with you. I am grateful for you too. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do? Yeah. So I’ve, I’ve been around business for over 40 years. Um I started out as a, as a systems analyst and I ended up as president and chief marketing officer of a large telecom company in Canada where I had the opportunity to work with some pretty amazing people to actually grow the data and internet business to a billion in sales in a relatively short period of time, albeit that was when, you know, the whole data scene was erupting quite frankly.
Um but we can talk about the challenges and so forth that that that entailed because clearly it was a challenge. So I’ve I’ve sort of been that sort of guy for my life getting involved in in things that needed transformation. So I’m kind of like if if I could describe myself in one word, it would be breakaway. I’m a breakaway dude that doesn’t like tradition necessarily always questions it very uncomfortable with the status quo, looking for edge, looking for things that need to be done differently in in business particularly. And then I learned that it it applies so well to personal development and what people expect out of their lives and careers. And so I guess I spent my whole life trying to to to veer away from the momentum that’s been created by wrote and the saddest quo uh into finding opportunities um that that are there if we would only look for them.
And so I’m a breakaway different guy. I applied that concept. I applied it very early in my career. I apply to my my personal life, I apply it to my grandchildren. I am known as the audacious papa and that’s very strategic, done on purpose. And so I can tell your listeners that the sort of things that we’re gonna be talking about today, they can trust they work because I did them. This is not textbook stuff. It’s simplicity personified. That’s my world and hopefully I can excite some of your listeners to try some of the stuff and reap the benefits, that’s who Roy is. Thank you for the introduction, what would you say you’re a contrarian. Absolutely. On the contrary, in fact, in fact going against the flow, I found to be one of the biggest sources of opportunities because if it is it is being different, I mean my mantra is be different or be dead. I’ve written seven books around that concept and it’s all based on that stepping out, not stepping in, blending, not blending in.
And so contrarian Ism is actually one of the things that I discuss with clients as representing an opportunity, a way to be different. Now Contrarian IsM does have its limits and I’m not asking people to do things that are not necessarily legal, but I am saying there are degrees of freedom within which one has available to them. If only they would step out and say, hey, the herd’s going west, what would happen if I went east instead of saying the herd’s heading west, let’s find out what they’re doing, which is the benchmark copying model, which I absolutely find repugnant. I think there’s way too much copying and not enough creativity in the world today. Um, and one of the reasons for that is we teach kids and, and adults to color inside the lines. We don’t teach them to be contrarian. Well I’m a contrarian guy, love it, love the idea would you say that’s because of your personality or because the because of the results that you get from being a contrarian.
Yeah, I know it’s got nothing to do with personality and my personality adapted basically to what I discovered I needed to be, to be successful and drive, um, a billion dollars worth of sales in terms of results. So this is all performance related stuff. Like being, being audacious in and of itself is a ridiculous notion unless you can link it to results and I’m extremely results oriented obviously, um, as as described by my background, I have achieved some, you know, pretty interesting things and I’ve learned that it takes certain things to get you there. And one of the things and by the way, there’s no silver bullets here, right? There’s a whole bunch of little mini audacious moments that actually gets you to where you need to get to and one of them happens to be considered what being a contrarian would do for you going against the flow? Does that open up any opportunities for you? Does it allow you to be creative? Don’t be stultified by the notion that says you’ve got to find a way to, to follow everybody else and be like everybody else in the crowd.
I mean, that to me sucks the life out of you. It sucks the creativity out of you. You can’t breathe in the crowd, you just can’t. And so how can you be creative and innovative and launch a startup? If you think like everybody else and that’s part of the problem. We’ve taught people to think like other people, I’m over generalizing okay because there’s one or two or three or four or five or six people that don’t fit that, But for the most part, if you look at the bell curve, most people fit under that big, huge part of the bell curve. And so my view is that we can move those guys, you know, a couple of points to the right, wow. Just imagine what would happen in terms of performance. It would be rocketing up. So yeah, the genesis is if it’s not performance based, I don’t want to talk about it, we’re not here to be cute and weird and sexy. We’re here to get results and I’ve just figured out how to do it by being weird, cute and sexy. That’s how people describe you. Right? I don’t know that just came out. I haven’t had breakfast yet. So you know, that just came out of hunger I suppose.
Although it reminds me of a earl nightingale, either principal or quote, which is The 95% of, let’s say businesses get average results. Um, and so if you want average results, then you just have to act like the 95% and you know, that speaks to your contrarian position you referenced before. We recorded that. There’s some stuff in textbooks which are based on theory and not practice. Would you like, Do you mind clarifying? I guess what the, what the main shall we say myths are around what you what you should, I mean, it’s um it’s it’s it’s not the textbook think I call it textbook thinking and what I mean by that is thinking and behavior. That’s driven by what the book says, what the theory says as opposed to observing that and doing what actually works in the trenches with frontline people with internal politics bias Nous, you know, all that kind of stuff, which cannot be formula Rised, Okay, it cannot be formula ries, that stuff be more influenced by that.
The practical aspect of what the solution might be, as opposed to be being solely driven by what the textbook says. It’s not that the textbook and let me use an example. Leadership is a classic. Okay, there are, I don’t know billions of books on leadership and it’s not that they’re wrong necessarily. It’s just in my experience, they don’t go far enough, they do not go far enough to define what constitutes a standout, knock your socks off, mind blowing leader that captures the hearts and souls of people in an organization and why do you want to do that? You want to do that? Because you have to execute? Why do you have to execute to dr Superlative performance. It all goes back to that. Okay, so my my learning is it Superlative performance does not have its genesis in wrote textbook thinking, it’s helpful, but it does not determine success. There’s a lot of other silly little things which we can talk about that actually are much more influential.
Like for example, even I never use regression analysis to do a forecast whatsoever. I never use different. My my formal degree is in mathematics and computer science. I’ve never used differential advanced differential equations to solve any business problem. I mean what what it taught me is how to solve problems. Okay, that’s true. But in terms of the actual content not particularly helpful. And so I ran into people with Mbas who actually believe that that if they behave like solving a case studies would imply, then that will make them successful and earn them six figures. Well, I mean help. I mean I got I got no time for that, but seriously it’s like, you know, it’s a neat platform to have but never believe that it’s going to make you successful. There’s a lot of other things that you need to do with that as a platform to be successful to stand out, be visible, be remarkable, be different. Be contrarian, get noticed and get rewarded for that.
Nobody talks about that. That’s what I talk Well, um I’m really interested Tina to know what you think about this point because I was going to ask you about the definition of audacious leadership, so what that means to you, but from my perspective, I’ve had a fair number of people come on the show talking about leadership and the I would say the new consensus is that the old way of, let’s say shouting at people to get them to do what you want is the consensus is that that’s gone, that’s done now. And that the new leader is more like a servant leadership. So, you know, more of a mentor than someone who’s going to tell you what to do. So firstly, what does audacious leadership mean? And what do you think about that approach? I’ll start, I’ll answer reverse. First of all, I believe I believe that the that the notion of servant leadership is the right notion, the whole command and control paradigm, if you will of the past has been out for for years, by the way, this is not and this is not a new conversation.
I mean, the people that have suddenly discovered servant leadership, I mean, where the hell have they been for the last two decades? Right. I mean, my discovery was the key thing to ask people is how can I help? And it occurred to me that, but by virtue of asking that question, you’re really putting yourself in a position of serving them, trying to make their life easier, trying to knock down barriers, trying to trying to grease the skids inside an organization. And again, why would I want to do that? I would want to do that because if they can perform their function better, they can execute my plan better. And guess what happens when they execute better. It all goes back to performance. So this discovery for me, this is not a remarkable insight, right? That’s part of the textbook issue I have, right, this has been so obvious for so many years for people like myself that have spent most of their time in the trenches with frontline people, a president of a company spending their time with frontline people to do what, learn what they do, learn the issues, they have learnt the problems that they have executing the strategy and trying to help them.
So how can I help? Is basically it, the audacious piece thomas comes into, How do you do it? Okay, so that’s where the textbook stops, right? So so honor and salute servant leadership, I call it, How can I help leadership? Um but the the audacious piece which by the way, is defined in my in my lexicon by words like bold, um unheard of um fearless, risky, all of those things off the wall outside the lines, that defines how you actually get the job done. And it’s really simple, it’s really simple and this is why it’s not covered by academics. This is not, this is why it’s not covered by um kind of like the pundits and the reason it’s not covered is they’re not aware of it, Why aren’t they aware of it? Because they’ve never run a billion dollar a year company. Okay, so this whole thing is rooted inexperience, right? Like mind blowing leadership concepts that are audacious one of which is higher for goose bumps?
That’s an example. That’s one of my audacious ways of recruiting the people you need in the organization to take care of customers, earn their loyalty, retain their business and improve your performance. So the question becomes is what is hiring for goose bumps? Would you like to know? I’d love to know its, that’s silly. Come on. I mean this is so this is so easy. So it occurred to me early on that that you know, if you actually apply some logic to this whole customer loyalty thing as opposed to formulas for retention, which is what a lot of people do. It all comes down to earning people’s trust and what is that based on that’s based on having a great relationship with them, taking care of them doing what they want without sacrificing the needs of the company of course, which is easy to do. Uh and so it occurred to me that we need to hire people with those capabilities with the N eight understanding and willingness to serve Homo Sapiens started out with that notion, if you can’t, if you don’t love people love humans, how on earth are we ever going to execute a strategy based on building strong customer relationships?
Now, I know you’ve never heard anybody talk like this doesn’t surprise me, right? So I came up with this idea. He says, well how will I know if I’m interviewing somebody for a job in my organization, how will I know whether or not they actually have in their D. N. A. A desire to serve people. So I came up with this with this um this question say oh by the way as president I would sit in on interviews with frontline customer service people, I would sit on interviews with internal auditors, I would sit in on interviews for marketing professionals and that’s just what I did because my job was to put my fingerprints on the organization. We can talk about delegation later. I’ve got a different spin on that too. Anyways so I came up with this question. The question was really simple. So I look at you in the ST thomas do you like human beings. And of course the first thing you do is sit back a little bit because you’ve never been asked that question before probably and if you had yeah it’s kind of weird and so but you’re interested in.
So of course what you would say is yes Roy of course I do. So then I would just follow up with you and say well good tell me a story that would show the fact that you love human beings. Now this is where it separates the people that are playing the game for from the people who really get it. And so one or two things would happen right? Either one the person you know didn’t really like humans but they were playing the game. And of course, you know that in the answer, you feel like, you know, cold like a fish for heaven saying the person that got it and actually does have the ability would tell you a story, the warm story with passion and emotion that would just kind of like, oh my God, what would it do? It would give you goose bumps. So what I concluded is I’m going for the people to give me goose bumps. My whole organization was taught that, okay, Like I’m assuming, I’m assuming you can think, I’m assuming that you can, you know, you, you know that I can teach you the basis of the business, but what I can’t teach you, I cannot teach you how to love people.
And it’s important to me that you do, I can teach you how to smile, right? Oh, hi, how you doing? You know the grin guy, You can teach people how to grin, but you cannot teach them how to love people. And so we launched this. Well, I gotta tell you, my fellow executives thought I was a little off the wall, No kidding, I completely reinvented our recruitment process around and it wasn’t just customer service because you know, and if you can’t provide, if you can’t care for your fellow employees, how on earth can you care for your customers? And so the whole notion had an internal perspective all all carefully contrived to drive behavior to the outside, which is where eventually we had to go and so that’s an example of what I would consider to be an audacious move because I mean nobody did it. It was absolutely unheard of before and in on in retrospect.
Yeah, that fits into my audacious bucket nicely and there’s many more of those around it. I mean one of the, one of the things I learned is oh my God, we got to do a lot of these things, able to do a lot of these small things concurrently. Um not to confuse people but to do them in a way that people welcomed them. It was easy for them to sort of get into the, to the flow and momentum of doing these kind of crazy things and just sit back and watch and say how can I help, how can I help, how can I help in the workplace? And um you know over time it was quite effective. The challenge I had though is in the telecom world, we were moving from a voice uh centric mode of operation into data. So we had to, we had to change the company, we had to change the culture, we have to change the people because what you need in an internet world is completely different than what you need in a voice world. And so at the same time and all of this got going on in a way it was kind of an advantage that all these little audacious moves.
We’re defining the new culture that we needed brilliant. It worked. It totally worked and we looked back and said wow we’re at a billion in top line revenue. What the I have to ask, Do you love human beings and do you have a story about it? Do I love human beings? Yeah I do. I I um I’m not so sure though that that I’m I’m tolerant enough. So deep down see I have this kind of like strategic bent so I sort of know where we need to go with this stuff. Um but when it gets right down to it it’s easy for me to ask how can I help? It’s really easy and it’s it’s easy for me to follow up on that and it’s easy for me to kind of put in motion the sorts of things that we need to do to kind of answer the question. Um And so I’m not so sure that I was born with the D. N. A. Even though I preach that we need that but I must have had something going on that was leaning me that way. And the problem is when you when you’re asked the question and you have to go introspectively it I mean and you can ask people that are just like their diabolical human being lovers.
But when you ask them this question that you asked they they trip a little bit just like I am and I I guess I feel that way. I know it’s important and yeah and we did it consistently well. Um but I did have some thoughts during it because I wanted to ask the best possible question, you know maybe about introverts or maybe about database people. But you were specifically talking about customer service orientated people and therefore, you know it’s a it’s a great question to ask because you need people in that role to love people and you know you wouldn’t necessarily be applying for a customer service role. I don’t think well. But but it it also applies like if I were if it also applies to every other position in the organization because you have that whole internal supplier and customer relationship thing going on right? For example marketing serves sales. The sales guys don’t get what they need for marketing.
There’s gonna be an execution problem. Right? So the ability for marketers to actually serve salespeople is incredibly important to drive good sales results. Absolutely. And then you go back and look at the people in HR. They have customers too. One of whom is marketers are the market is a marketing organization getting what they need from HR in terms of support. Okay well if the people in HR hate human beings, chances are there’s gonna be some slip slip ups. And so that same question, do you like humans. I asked of everybody because everybody has a customer in in business and actually in life, right. I have a customer. My wife is my customer. My sons are my customs, my grandchildren are my customers. My job as the patriarch of the family is to help. How can I do that? It’s the same issue, same flow to it as you would do in an interview with the customer service people. In fact, I would, I would say that the organizations that just apply this to customer service, they get found out.
They get found out because at the end of the day there’s going to be a service screw up. Okay. And when the customer service person has to reach back into the organization to get it fixed and they run into roadblocks, the customer puts that on customer service and says that’s on you. Right? So you’re lying to me. You’re lying to me that you care while it could be that the service rep of course cares. But everybody behind her doesn’t give a ship. So boom, you’re done. There you go. The number that you used about your startup of being to a billion dollars. I think you said that kind of number is not within most people’s reach. I would say as owners perhaps. So what would you say? I want to know what business you were in at the time, But also what would you say is the biggest driver of that number? Well, yeah. So the business was data. The data and internet business in the telecom world at a time when um it was just taking off and we were trying to move from dial up the 1.5 megabit service.
So you know that’s a while ago. Okay. But we are also trying to drag ourselves out of, I mentioned this earlier, trying to drag ourselves out of voice and to be um highly nimble competitive organization in a brand new business, in a brand new market space. And so when we started um yeah, we did, we weren’t at zero revenues. Okay. Full disclosure. Because we, the data world had existed, albeit it was, I would call it embryonic. So yeah, we had a little bit of a run rate, but I mean it required a big push to get it to where we need to get to. We didn’t have, we didn’t have a billion in mind. Okay. I mean, people ask me, well, did you start out with the billion? No, we knew that the opportunity had to be significant. We knew that in order to satisfy our shareholders, we needed to perform in an order of magnitude way. And if we didn’t, we would probably run into some competitive issues that could harm ourselves in the long run. So we knew that that the step function, The vertical piece was significant, but we didn’t know whether it was a 10 million or five million or a billion.
We just, that was observed in retrospect. So we knew that had to be order order of magnitude and that in and of itself drove us to the audacious kind of like strategic imperative, just the notion that it was so big and I apply that I applied the same thinking any startup, it’s not about the billion, it’s about how big do you want to be. And this is my first question I asked them when we do what I call my strategic game planning process, which by the way I had to create myself. That’s another piece of audaciousness because the planning experts at the time wanted me to spend all my time on developing swats instead of figuring out how to execute this puppy. So I had to build myself a planning process based on execution, which is kind of kind of like perverse in a way when somebody says well what’s your planning philosophy? I said, I say my plan is to execute, let me show you how I can do that. And so I developed the process that’s around three questions one, the first one starts with how big do you want to be because I believe the nature of your growth objective and I tell us to start up Presidents, the nature of your growth perspective or objective drives and determines the character of your strategy if you’re at zero when you want to grow too 150 bucks That you can get there with a certain kind of strategy, but if your if your objective is to go to $10 million 24 months as opposed to $150,.
that’s going to require a completely different strategy. And that’s how I started out the rest of the world doesn’t do that thomas. What they do is they create a strategy, drive out some numbers, they’re not happy with the numbers so they change the assumptions driving the numbers, which inherently changes the strategy. And then you say, okay, done boom. Well, is there any wonder why those results aren’t achieved? You can’t do it that way. I mean the numbers should drive the nature of the strategy. And so that’s what, that’s what I do with with people particularly startups. Tell me figure it out. How big do you want to be in 24 months? And by the way, it’s not about five year plans. Five year plans are absolutely meaningless because the fourth year of a five year plan never shows up. And yet we hockey stick the thing to say, well if we don’t get it, don’t get what we need in the first three years, we’ll get it in the fourth year. So by having a short time horizon on your planet drives you to execute and it drives you to stay on performance like every week. So that’s how that’s how we start the whole process is with that.
It’s an extremely important question and it leads to the second question, which I asked, where are you going to get it from? Okay. So let’s say that your revenue objective is to grow by $10 million 24 months. As the answer to the how big the next question says, where are you, where are you going to get the revenue? And this is a question of choosing customer targets that have the latent potential To give you the money? And it, it’s, it’s a tough question because ideally right again, with my execution hat on, I want to get all 10 millions from a single customer. That makes a job real easy. Not likely. That’s going to happen. Okay. But it starts out there. I said, okay, what if you have to get it for to tell me you’re to customers and we go that route. We don’t start out with tell me the market because that’s mass market thinking and we know that mass markets don’t exist. They don’t nobody, no two people ever have the same latent potential to do anything. They don’t think the same. So we try and come up with One or two or three, not 25 26, but about a confined number of customer groups.
Let’s call them customer groups or people groups to give it a little more humanity than segments. Market segments kind of third person. That’s another example of what textbooks do, they don’t call them? People groups, they call them market segments. So we come up with that. So now we have, we’re going to get 10 million, We’re going to get the 10 million from these three customer groups because we’ve studied them. We know they have the latent potential. The final question is the killer question. It says, how do you intend to compete and win in those three groups? And that’s the whole competitive thing. And so, you know, this is where you run into custody companies that say, well, we’re the best at, we’re the market leader at we’re better than blah, blah, blah. You know, all these, I call it claptrap because it doesn’t mean anything. These sorts of competitive statements are meaningless, right? And they don’t inform the organization to do anything, right? Because they’re so vague. So I had to create this concept called the only statement. The only statement is really simple and it goes like this. We will compete and win by being the only ones that fill in the blanks, right?
The only ones not not the best right, not the leader in, not the premium supplier of because all that stuff is not audacious. It’s confusing. It obvious skates the real purpose, which is to provide clarity so that when we open our mouths and talk to a customer and say you should do business with me because guess what comes out the only statement because we’re the only ones that do something. And so we spent a lot of time creating that only statement. And when we do it, then we put the answers to those three questions together and that’s the game plan. That’s what we did to move ourselves along every year. And that’s what we try and do. That’s what I try and do with with young people who have this, these great ideas about starting businesses. We go through that and with particular emphasis on the third question, like there’s so many people who want to start a business, but they don’t have, they’re not only at anything, they’re not creating uniqueness, they’re not creating differences right there. Technology driven.
And they believe that technology will actually sell the idea and make them a millionaire doesn’t work that way. And so I would say to them look at if your idea isn’t unique, if it’s not unique in terms of satisfying a compelling, relevant benefit to somebody that you want to target, then stop. You need to think about this a little more. Don’t waste your money because all you will do is fall into the 50% of the organizations that die within 36 months. That’s all you’re gonna do. You’re gonna be part of the statistics. And so, you know, we did that, that became a natural thing for us. And man, I got to tell you this is this is not yesterday’s news. I mean, I wrote the first be different or be dead in 2009. And these ideas were really different, then they’re still different now. What does that tell you? It tells you two things. First of all, they withstand the test of time that tells you about the, about the resilience of the ideas and the notion.
And it also describes the mediocrity that’s going on out there about creating organizations that execute in favor of customers. That’s what it teach you. That’s why I’m doing this stuff. Let’s change the conversation. Let’s get away from that. Let’s get away from perpetuating mediocrity into, into being contrary and trying little things that, that your front line people will honor you for and when they do that, they execute profusely and your performance goes up. Sorry, I slipped into that bit of philosophical thing, but I can’t help it. It’s just like, it’s just like so frustrating to me because, you know, the sorts of things that, you know, and by working with with young companies, it’s, I see it and nothing has changed. So maybe maybe through having these kinds of kinds of conversations we can and maybe more, maybe we do this again in a different venue or whatever, but I don’t know, we just gotta keep banging away at it, I think to try and and get some attention a bigger part of the attention span so that people actually try some of these things.
One of the things I get back is, Yeah, but Roy my boss doesn’t believe in that. How can I do that? And I acknowledge that that’s a that’s a major challenge. But I also will say that there’s a whole lot of things you can do to be different to be audacious within your frame of reference. Why aren’t you doing those? Why are you blaming it on the fact you don’t have a good boss. I don’t let people off the hook thomas. No there’s gonna be 100 100 and 50 ideas why they shouldn’t do the right thing. I’m not willing to listen to that. I’m not going to be your your your dude. That’s gonna be the pastor to say oh you have poor baby, you know. No get out there and do like high standards. I think high standards is a good thing. But before we because I really like the concept of the only statement I do want to ask you about whether you make a distinction between that and the U. S. P. Or whether it’s one and the same or I was thinking that possibly the U. S. P. Is perhaps not implemented. And that’s why you called it. The only statement but your thoughts what’s the USP unique selling proposition?
Well I’ve seen some of those but but that they don’t they don’t speak to. Why should I do business with you and not the other guy. I’ve not seen one that speaks to that Okay not one. So I mean in words they should be okay. But um no, I’m not. I’m not there. Plus I would say to you that um If you did find one that is binary because that’s what the only statement is. It either exists or it doesn’t exist. And I’m not seeing a unique selling proposition that actually passes the binary test. But if I did, the next thing I would do is I would go up the chain and look at the organization’s strategy. Okay. And see what it says. Because if it doesn’t say that, then I would say why do you have a unique selling proposition that doesn’t have its roots and genesis in the strategic game plan of the organization? So you see, because what happens is particularly salespeople, they’re struggling.
They need it. They want it. Okay. And if if they can’t get it, if they can’t be informed of it from the strategy statements of the organization, they invented themselves. And sometimes that gets you into dysfunction. Okay. So you know, there’s a couple of things going on there for me, um not just, you know, the characteristics of the statement and doesn’t fit to fit the profile of the only that’s one piece. The other pieces, like I always look up, right? I will look up to the strategy and say what’s it telling me to do? Is it telling me to to do what that unique selling proposition says. And if it if it’s silent on that, my question to sales is why are you doing that? Let’s have a look at that to make sure that we’re home um Or fic with the strategic intent of the business, right? And that you’re not inventing something. And it’s I’m not being mean to sales. I mean hell we all do that. If we can’t get the direction we want we’ll go and try and figure it out ourselves. Of course You know that has the potential for creating if you have 10,000 people in your organization which I did that that could create 10,000 moments of dis continuity and dysfunction.
You just gotta be careful if calling the only state if crafting the unique selling proposition is all about really crafting An only statement. I’m your best friend. If it’s not I’m not your best friend. I think the intent is there. So I for every client of our business I always ask what your USP is because it’s a an encouragement to get people to think about what makes them different than any other business that’s out there. So what is what is it that only you do that no one else does. Um And the wording of it is obviously you can’t be unique er or unique kissed its unique meaning. There’s no one else out there that does it. But what people give as an answer to the U. S. P. Is doesn’t fit that. So you’re reframing it slightly and probably going to get a much better answer by calling it. The only statement I would imagine. Well it’s so by the way um please feel free. I’d like to see some of that.
Send send me some of two or three that you’ve got from people. And let me let me take a look at them. I don’t mind doing that and give you my views. But the intent of only and this is what what people will say is so difficult about the exercise is exactly what you said. It’s to give it the edge and to force clarity, force clarity and not allow ourselves to get away with saying we’re, you know, our unique selling proposition is is that that we provide unique technology in the blah blah blah. Because sometimes people will define it with repeating words etcetera etcetera. It’s it’s not that. The other thing is it’s it’s the unique selling proposition is generally what you think your unique at. And my challenge is always to say so what and who cares I don’t care what you think. I want you to tell me what you’re getting from customers. Because the only statement has to be true. It has to be relevant to what people care about and I’m gonna come back to that and and it has to be um compelling.
Those are the three criteria of the only state And it’s and it’s exceedingly difficult to put together and I say to people look at it, let’s get it about 80% right. And let’s go work with it because you have to test it. So the other thing I say, the sales guys and give me the USB thing is okay, Let me see the results of testing it with customers. Did they tell you you’re lying or did they tell you you’re absolutely true? And so we spent a lot of time testing are only statements with our front line people with customers and we end up quite frankly having to to adjust and modify and, and by the way, it’s like it’s organic, right? It doesn’t exist forever because you get people the bad guys coming in eating your lunch and you’ve got to, you know, move and so on and so forth. You gotta gotta do this sort of thing. And so it’s got to be alive all the time. I’ve not seen, to be honest with you actually, I’ve seen some bad only statements and it’s because people have tripped on the only maybe maybe they’ve read my stuff, but they do a terrible job of it right.
In other words, I’ve seen some only statements that claim companies are are the only ones that do something that is totally irrelevant. An example is we have a radio station in Vancouver that advertises themselves to be the only ones that provide traffic and weather on the tens, but we also have a traffic and weather station, a station that only provide traffic and weather every minute of the day. And so the organization that uses only to say they do it every 10 minutes is completely irrelevant. And I’ve, I’ve actually written the owner of the company is that I really like the way the fact that you’re using only. But the problem is you’re, you’re only something that, that’s something that’s completely irrelevant because because your competitors doing it 24 7, I mean it’s just so you know, there’s a lot of rules and I would ask and urge people watching her listening in, go to my website, go to the blog of search for the only statement and read this stuff like it’s all there.
It explains what it is the only that we’ve created. What are the rules, What are the things you need to, you need to look out for. It talks about aspirations and intense exactly what you said. I’ve got no intention. I got no time for intentions because unfortunately intentions are aspirational. They do not degenerate into actions and actions are what we need not intention. Don’t care about intention. Absolutely don’t care about them. I’ve written a lot about the, about the stupidity of aspirational mission statements, right? That that actually inform nobody of anything and it’s all going back to the original part of this conversation. It’s all driven by my concern to get better results. And that’s only only driven by executing better. So all of this stuff from only statements to goose bumps that always it has one intended outcome and that’s to perform better. And it’s just I’ve discovered that it works. So I’m not that you won’t find the only statement in the textbook.
I know you’ll find now that I understand what unique selling proposition is. You, you won’t find Roy’s only though, I’m sure you can find it in a textbook somewhere, I’m sure of it, but I don’t know. I don’t think so. Google it. If you google it, you’ll get me. Yeah, I don’t mean your one. I mean, I mean the U. S. P. 10 the U. S. B. Yeah. Yeah, I’m sure you will. What are your goals? My goals? Really simple because I’m a simple guy. I hope I’ve I’ve made that clear. My goal through through this is I mentioned it earlier is to change the conversation to have these conversations about what we need to do differently, to run businesses to be more successful to have happier lives because this stuff applies two individuals in their life seeking differences and not blending in and being experimental and and and so, you know, I say, what I’d like you to do is tomorrow do one thing that is really different that you’re uncomfortable with and give up something that you are comfortable with.
Let’s start there right, get get going baby steps, nano inches, I call them nano inches worth of progress. Get an inch of progress fast, That’s an animal’s just do that. So my, that’s my goal is to keep banging away at this stuff. I’ve got probably 30 Podcasts planned over the next 90 days And it’s all driven by on May the 31st. This book will be out to bookstores, right? And so what I’d like to do is is have, it’s not an unknown commodity when people see it. I would like people to be interested enough in the ideas that we’re talking about to go to go get a handout. This is a handout, right? You can, you can go like this thomas and you can pick okay, one page. Many people I associated over my career were major complainers and they didn’t understand that there was a significant market opportunity in piste off customers.
Alright. We talked about stuff like that. So that’s my goal. Try to raise awareness and excitement in trying to change the conversation. That would be it. Great question. Thank you for that, wow. Um equally great answer. So, and I’m very interested in the book. You’ve got a customer here, so, um, but is there anything that I should have asked you about today? Um well I have, I don’t know that, no, first of all, I really enjoyed it and and thank you for for opening up basically the essence of of what I’ve done and what I’m doing and what I want to do, I will make an offer if you want to hear a special offer for your, for your guests or for your listeners and your audience. I have a special offer that I would, I would like to give you if you’d like to hear it, go for it. Okay, So, um, the offer is called Pay Audacious Forward. So this is Audacious. The book, right, Be Different or be Dead. And so what I would like to do is offer anyone who’s interested um, this, if you buy a copy of this and by the way, you can buy this from me personally now because I have advanced copies as an author.
So I have access to this. Nobody can get it out of bookstores now, but you can get it from Roy anybody wants to buy one of these. I went for a friend or a leadership colleague or something like that. Right? Somebody that they, that they, that they trust and admire and they wanted, they wanted, they think they could, they would value that if they do that, then what I will do is I will give that person a free copy of Audacious just and I’ll sign it and make it personalized. So it’s buy one for a colleague, get one free signed um by myself. Hopefully with some meaningful words that will resonate with them. Um, and all they have to do is get ahold of me at my gmail address Roy dot oh sing at gmail dot com and we’ll make it happen. I mean, I don’t have a huge logistical strategy to deliver this stuff. We’ll figure it out on the run. That’s planning on the run. That’s what I stand for anyways. And I’d be really happy. I’d be really happy to provide people a couple of books you shipped to the UK or no. Sure.
Okay. I’ll ship anywhere. It’s just money somebody’s going to pay for it. Exactly, depends on how much you want it. Where do people go if they want to buy the book? Well, you can start out by going to my website um www dot be different or be dead dot com. Be different or be dead dot com is my website. And there’s a click, there’s an icon there say called Roy’s Books. If you click on that, you’ll see this book and and it’ll tell you where you can go to. Preorder the book. Okay? So that’s one sort of thing and you’ll see the other books I have as well because I’ve got seven of them in total. Same thing. So many books and another printed version. If they want to talk to me about the the audacious Audacious Forward, just send me an email we’ll figure it out. Figure out a way to get the books to you and I will change the conversation. I bet you can thank you for being a great guest today. Thank you very much for, first of all being a great host. I think you did a great job, and also I’m seriously grateful to have a chance to that the talk to the people you trust, who are your listeners and viewers.
I appreciate that. Well for all the listeners, please review the links in the description and Roy thank you very much. You’re welcome.