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Hey everybody, this is John Corcoran and welcome to the Smart Business Revolution podcast episode number nine. In this episode, I talk with entrepreneurs Hollis Carter and Johnny Andrews on how they are revolutionizing the publishing industry and showing others how they can become best selling authors so let's get going. Welcome to the smart business revolution podcast your source for how to grow your small business without working 24/7. And now your host with a revolution, John Corcoran. Hey everybody, this is John Corcoran and welcome to the smart business revolution podcast. Thanks for joining us. Today I'm going to be talking with Hollis Carter and Johnny Andrews who are the founders of a training program for aspiring authors and also they are the co-founders of Velocity House publishing partners which is an innovative new publishing company that focuses on publishing Amazon Kindle books. But first I want to tell a quick story and also send a shout out to a podcast listener. So there was this folk singer by the name of Rod Rieguez who put out a few albums in the late 60s in the early 1970s. Many producers at the time, music industry executives were certain that he was going to be the next big thing. I mean bigger than Bob Dylan, bigger than Elvis Presley, that'd be those who name it. He was that talented. Unfortunately the albums that he put out, he only put out a handful of albums were a complete flop in the US and the guy like completely faded into obscurity. But it turns out he actually became huge in another part of the world and he had absolutely no idea that it was happening. Now if this sounds familiar it might be because this story was told in the movie searching for Sugar Man which won Best Documentary at the 2013 Oscars which wasn't that long ago as I'm recording this. And the movie is told as kind of a mystery so I don't want to give it all away. But the lesson behind Rod Rieguez, the musician, is he came up at a time when there was little connection between artists and fans. There was a wide gap, there was little interaction except at concerts, little connection. There were fan clubs where you can mail away in six to eight weeks, you get a picture of the mail. But that was about it. And that was only really for the larger artists. Now today you can exchange your messages with your favorite artists on Twitter and Facebook. And this is true for businesses as well and authors and speakers and other content producers and entrepreneurs. It's a much tighter loop between the buyer, the customer, the fan and the content producer and the business on the other side. So for Rod Rieguez for 30 years he had no idea that he had this fan base and they had no way of communicating with one another. His life would have been completely different if he had connected with this great audience he had in another part of the world. So now what does this have to do with today's guest, Hollis Carter and Johnny Andrews. They have started two companies, both of which are based on the Amazon Kindle. And they basically have a training platform where they show aspiring authors how to sell their books on the Amazon Kindle store. And they're working on the new world assumption I call it that Rod Rieguez unfortunately was not able to take advantage of, that there's a much closer link, a tighter loop between the content creator, the author, the musician and the other end of the spectrum, the fans, the buyers. And now there's so many more tools to communicate between these two that you can know your audience, your buyers, your customers, your clients a lot better than you ever could. So we talked about this new world in this interview and how authors can establish that closer relationship to their leaders and how entrepreneurs can learn from this. And then finally, just before we get the interview started, I want to congratulate podcast listener and reader Chris Osborne. Chris is originally from the UK and he's a photographer and a videographer. And he's lived all around the globe. He currently is based in Northeast Thailand. And he's done a lot of work and business in Hong Kong and he became a bit of an expert. So he created an online community and resource where people can learn about how to set up a business in Hong Kong. So if you're interested in that, you can check it out, it's at Hong Kong company hub.com. And you also can check out Chris at Chris Osborne.net. So really excited for Chris and appreciate him listening to the show and I'm happy to share that. So any of you are listening, I love hearing from you. You can go to smartbusinessrevolution.com and click on contact, or you can tweet me at John Corcoran or call me if you have suggestions or feedback, I love hearing it. So now let's hear from Hollis and Johnny. All right. So welcome everyone. This is John Corcoran and I'm very pleased to welcome both Hollis Carter and Johnny Andrews, the co-founders of perfect publishing system and velocity house publishers. So welcome both of you. Go on. Awesome. Thank you, Travis. I'm so glad to have both of you guys here. So I wrote a blog post a couple of days ago about eight interesting entrepreneurs who were really kind of inventing new categories of businesses, in my opinion, that were really innovative and I kind of defined it as businesses that weren't possible a few years ago and I included what you guys are doing in that group. So, but tell me a little bit about it because you are a publishing company focused primarily on publishing through the Amazon Kindle store and you also have the perfect publishing system which is slightly different, which shows people how to use those tools in the Kindle store. But you're publishing in a very different way from traditional publishing and what you're doing is really, I would say, frightening and threatening to the traditional publishing industry. I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth. But tell me what makes you guys so different and what you're doing so different and so interesting. Cool. I like the word threatening really. That's quite cool. I've always seen myself as kind of a mild-mannered fellow, so to be called threatening, I think is quite powerful and cool. But, yeah, what we're doing that's majorly different is, well, if you look at how the traditional publishing industry has operated for, you know, what are we on hundreds of years now, they basically operate on a domination and control kind of business model where they owned everything. I mean, they owned all the distribution channels. So if you wanted to get a book into the hands of readers, you know, there was a gatekeeper and those gatekeepers had, you know, rules and prices and all this other stuff and it would typically take any individual, you know, just years stacked upon years to be able to get out there. Well, because of what's happened with technology, I mean, the entire industry literally overnight, maybe not overnight, but maybe over the course of a couple of weeks when people notice, it literally went from castles on a hill to a button. And so that's one of the big reasons why major publishers are frightened, you know, obviously not just of us, but just of the industry in general, because it is a complete and total shift in how everything works and the barriers have been removed. And now, I mean, as you probably have seen, it's like, you've got like millions of these authors flooding into the market and it's this huge opportunity for everybody. And what I love the most about it is literally we're watching history repeat itself in terms of all of a sudden, the barriers come down and all the people that want to get their message out come flooding in. And it happens in such a way. So you have people like John Locke, you probably read about him, you know, the first guy to do a million sales on his Kindle books, Amanda Hawking, the young adult vampire authorists who did all sorts of fun stuff. Well, those are sort of like the first people, the first wave through this opening and what happened after those people was like, oh, wow, we can do this. But now the industry is equalized again, because they're all on the same footing. So it's like you have now million of self published authors, many good, many bad, you know, all probably deserving of a shot, but the problem is now how do you get eyeballs on the books? And so once again, we come around to the exact same problem that we had before. And that's kind of where we come in, is that what we do, yes, it's all about putting that book out into the marketplace, but even more importantly than that, it's about having the right book delivered to the right people in the right way quickly, hence the name velocity else. We're all about the speed of the thing. And you know, that's really what we focus on is getting those eyeballs to those titles so that we can sell a lot of really good stuff to people who want it. And what Johnny's bringing up there is kind of what publishers had missed out on is what we really focused on bringing to the market is the fact that, you know, up until a point in time, their biggest asset was a printing press and putting books on shelves, and that's about as far as the marketing went. Everything else is just kind of naturally snowballing where, you know, we might be classified as a publisher because we put the continent, but really our marketing, you know, our goal is marketing, when we decided to do this, we said, and I'll give you the kind of background story in a second, but it was like, we're not going to be the ones producing this content. We're going to be the ones ensuring this amazing content and makes it out to the world and we can fill that gap so that the people who have this quality content can do it their best that they don't have to focus on, do I have a good cover? Do I have a good title? Is my keyword SEO ranked in my book correctly? You know, they don't have to worry about stuff, they can focus on trading the most valuable content they can and kind of act as the bumpers on the bowling alley, as you say, for us to ensure that the content is delivered within context. So I'll give you a quick little snippet story of how it was all born. Essentially, John and I had met in a bar a few years ago, and I don't know what happened. We're just about all great companies that are birthed. Yes, I totally am, you know, we met in a bar and we started talking, did a few little things here and there, and then about a year ago, I started talking to them, how I'm looking to get into some new stuff. I've always been just really able to do business with a lot of success with different online businesses that was ready for something new, and he had basically figured out how to become his own self-published author from everything from vampires to how to live debt free and wealthy, can I say? And when he showed me these screenshots of his book, Sitting Above Steve and King and sitting above James Patterson and all this stuff, I was like, well, you're probably onto something there, and so we decided to turn that into a business, and the first thing we did is document the process in which we were following here, which actually was much more in depth than I'd ever imagined from the testing of the items that are going up. You know, if you were to look at someone who's focusing on running advertisements on Google, that's like an interstate highway with a bunch of cars flying by and you're hoping to get a quick look on your billboard, where Amazon is more like this Walmart, where 300 million people put their credit card in and they walk in, everything they touch, they buy. And so the whole different ecosystem, so we wanted to ensure our books were the best ads for our content, and we basically created an eight-week course that would allow people to take their quality content and spit it out and have the marketing and actually see results in very soon after we put that together, we ended up having, I think, something like 3,200 people who've been through it now, and many of them have been able to quit their jobs, even cool stories like the mother daughter crew who now do cookbooks full-time. They've worked with them, right? Yeah, I was actually on a call with them a couple of minutes ago. They're great. Yeah, so we're able to set that up and allow people who have great content to follow the system, not have to sign publishing deals and do all this jazz, and in about eight weeks they could be up and running and hopefully quitting their abs and doing what they love. Obviously, it depends on people following the steps. But something else was born out of that is that we saw that we could take the knowledge that we're seeing from the birds I view of running this, having this big forum of active users and a lot of books of our own and start publishing the people who already had big platforms and didn't have the time to go through the course and could bring the kind of value and the niches that we picked that we wanted to be involved in. So now we took the traditional publishing model and said, "How can we flip this upside down to meet where the market is now?" and we actually do an even partnership with our authors where we basically split everything down the middle. And all they have to do is produce the content and help promote their book and we actually go through and finish the whole process and make it a fine-tuned machine from the cover title description to how it's ranking on the internet, to where the traffic is coming from, setting up a launch schedule, but most importantly, most authors up until now would sell a ton of books and then never get to communicate with their audience ever again because they didn't have any form of communication. We focus on this whole concept of more than books. So anyone buys a book that is published by Velocity House, they know they're going to also get additional content. So a great example of that is we did a book called Pure Fat Burn and Fuel, which was a diet book that talked about some really cool concepts in health and we had cooking videos on the back end and all you had to do was put in your email and now we can use that to let the author develop a relationship with its readers where if you bought a book off a shelf, chances are you'll never communicate with that person unless they find a way to get onto your relationship list. So we actually manufacture the process of producing a relationship that can go on for a long time and that's where the gold in this whole structure is, is developing long-term relationships between the authors of the content and their fan base and making sure that they don't have to worry about it, they just have to do what they do best. And that's the other big thing, oh sorry, that's the big thing with the end. The people who are not clear on how that works, that's like creating a website that you drive people to using the book, correct? Yeah, exactly. Like a page on a website that's specifically for those people who have bought the book so it's like this secret little kind of community that only those who choose to take the action can do it. So when you have folks who go in there, A, they know they're going to get great stuff and B, they're really raising their hands twice. One, first, they bought the book and second, they say, wow, I really like this. I think I'm going to take that next step and go see some more cool stuff. And so we always make sure that there's like, you know, tons of content for them to get to and also, I mean, you can't deliver everything in a book. So when we give away all the cars and the Lear jets and things like that to the billions of people, we have to find a way to communicate with them. And by that, it means videos. Exactly. But that's more code. Yeah. And but it is like kind of a new world that people who might just want to produce, I think about the fact that a big, you know, crazy factory knows that most people who read these spindle books, about 75% of them are reading them on their iPad in an app. Well, we had to go out and buy all these devices so we can look at our books and optimize so that if you're reading it on your app on your iPhone or if you're reading it on your iPad or if you're reading it on your Kindle, grayscale versus your Kindle Fire, you know, there's all these different ways that people are consuming the content and we have to make sure our formatting and our optimization is right for it because you're not just printing a book between two covers. Now you're putting it onto potentially, you know, hundreds of different systems in ways that can be perceived and, again, optimize that and make sure that, you know, people are consuming the content in a way that it's going to be smooth and easy for them and they're going to enjoy the experience. Yeah. I'm interviewing Guy Kawasaki in a couple of weeks who just wrote a book on self-publishing and it's a tremendous amount of work for someone who's an author who maybe even has a, has a job and is doing this on the side but wants to publish something. What recommendations do you have for someone like that who has a book that they are passionate about that they want to get out there? How do they go through this process? Oh, man. That's the first thing I recommend is don't. And let me define what I mean by that is people have certain skill sets, like this is one of these things that I've been in the writing community since, you know, this bunch of wheezed eye-goat and I've seen this kind of recurring pattern a lot of times is that writers and artists, and I'm just speaking toward fiction at this point, but writers and artists like that tend to focus on their craft to the complete exclusion of the sort of logistic business nature of everything. And so what I really recommend to folks is to find somebody who can help you. And I'm not like, and I truly, I'm not saying this is like some, hey, raving endorsement to come flood our page with, hey, help, no, I'm saying this because it's true and it really needs to happen like this is find somebody, even if it's a family member or someone who can kind of help with those other pieces of it, because you've got your cover, you've got your title, you've got your descriptions, all of these things, this is all marketing. Even if the book is art, it still comes down to marketing. And if it's non-fiction, it's exactly the same thing. And so just, you know, focus on what you're good at, obviously, you know, there's lots of great advice out there, what is it, J.A. Conrad, I think he's a Chicago author, I should probably meet him one of these days, but he has a wonderful blog out there with tons of great information on it about this kind of thing. But you really just want to focus on systems and building that audience, whether it's fiction or non-fiction. And if you don't know how to do these things, the learning curve can oftentimes be somewhat daunting. And so get a little help or, you know, find a path. Sorry. Johnny, so how did you go about it? Were you writing when you said a little while ago or how I said a little while ago that you were working on this? Were you doing your own books or are you kind of stumbling through the process yourself or were you working with others? How did you first get into this? I first got into this, like I said, I've been writing for a long time, but I've also been doing this online marketing stuff for many years. And so I was, it's all about where a person is when they come to this new environment. Rather than mentally with their skill sets and their experience, because someone on the very beginning of this, it's going to be, there's a learning curve. Yes, you absolutely can't do it, but it takes time. Where I was on this is I was already, you know, I've been sort of, I guess you could say, ninja trained in the fires of online business beforehand. And so I, you know, when I saw this concept and I said, okay, this is raw. This is new land. This is fun. Let's take what I know and apply it. And so it took a couple of years. So I've been, I've been leveraging the candle platform as a business model since 2008, just by myself. I never told anybody about it. It was real quiet. And the reason it was quiet is because it was failing miserably. Well, the key to a lot of this is the reason we ended up partnering up on this is something that I've tried to make like a mantra within our businesses, only do your stupid human trick. Like, and that's what our authors do or the marketing people to do is if there's something that just comes so naturally, it doesn't take a lot of effort and you find it fun. That's what you need to be doing. Or when I first talked to Johnny about this, he was doing everything from writing the content to marketing the content that felt like this chaotic jumble of stuff that is still producing a result. But figure out if we could systematize that, it would work well. And as we were talking about before, that's how we kind of came up with different roles and responsibilities that we had to reach the success that we wanted. And I knew where my trick was I had this large network of people I've met over the years that were very smart and had really good content, but my kind of marketing that well. And I wanted to put them through the system that they took Johnny three years of being himself up to learn and trying to really define that. So I think the key is don't try to go out it alone, but do what you do best and find other people to help you in those other places because you can sit on the internet watching hours and hours of YouTube videos on how to format your book. Or you could spend that time producing better content for your book while someone off of you know, say, you answer something, did that for cheaper, like it's key is division of labor and mental energy because those switching costs can be quite expensive. If your goal is to be an author, be an author, focus on that, your goal is to be a marketer to focus on that. And you know, basically to bind that up, a lot of people will end up getting our course because they want to be an author, but then they will give it to say their brother who just tried to do it from business one doesn't know what he's going to do for the next two months. Say, Hey, I'm writing this book. Here's a set list that may be able to go through it. And I think that's much more bound to success and someone who's going to try to do both things at the same time, mental switching costs. Yeah, it certainly makes sense. I mean, we're moving from a model, a traditional publisher where there are hundreds or dozens at least of people working on different tasks to one person or, you know, it makes sense that it's at least two or three. But you talk a lot about this documenting the systems, which I love that because I don't know if you both read the EMIF by Michael Gerber is one of my favorite books. Of course. It goes in depth into the whole lessons about documenting systems. So can you unpack that a little bit? What you did? Did you just create Google Docs? Did you sit down over a weekend? Did it take weeks and weeks to put it together? How did you do it? Well, the main course actually, the way that I typically go through this stuff is once we decide, okay, this is it, we're absolutely going to do it. So I sat down and created what I'd like to call sort of a master list of everything that happens, like each element within the process, which begins with knowing who your target audiences and things like that. And so from there made, and I've been building these documents actually for quite some time because, you know, as you said, there's a lot of chaos that looks like chaos on the outside, but it's very much organized and orchestrated because it's, you know, it started crazy and then it got documented, boiled down, systematized. And so I've been sort of building this stuff for a little bit. And then when it was time to really release the information, I just went super in depth, created, you know, videos, you know, PowerPoints, MP3s, just basically everything that a person could need in order to be able to kind of replicate this process. And a big part of the documentation is that Johnny and LA saw that we both followed stuff in a different way. And then as our team grew, everyone needed to learn it a different way. So we figured people who wanted this course probably the same thing happened. So we just wanted to make no room for you to be confused or have to draw their own conclusions or have a type of content they couldn't consume. So I know that for each step in this, basically, eight steps is there's like, you know, this one video that you watched through to the overview, but at the same time, we like having the PDF of bullet point checklist to go through and find a checklist very convenient. And then also a big area has been collaboration among our team and all the authors who were following this system. So you know, we've got a really active form of people in here that are all helping each other out and doing some cool stuff there. Cool. It sounds like what you did first was you created the perfect publishing system. And then you went on and created velocity house in that order. Did you have velocity house in mind at the time when you're creating a perfect publishing system? Velocity house became the official manifestation of what we were doing. So when this started, we'd already been publishing books. And so publishing company seemed to be like a natural, you know, it was kind of already there. It just hadn't been official. And so we just made it official roughly at the same time that the course came out. Okay. And so I mentioned earlier that what you're doing, or in my opinion, was inventing a new business category. But would you agree with that? I mean, or do you think that this is really what you're doing in terms of velocity is basically just a publishing company using new tools and new platforms? Or do you think that what you're creating, what the end goal might be, is really publisher is not an appropriate term to describe what you're creating? Right. Well, actually the way I described it to a lot of people is a publisher is something that the Homer Simpsons of the world, you might not have the in-depth knowledge of what we're doing kind of stomach and understand, meaning that, you know, we're taking some of the good content and pushing it out to the world and selling a bunch of books, where our main goal is really to sell a lot of books, yes, but to build a large, passionate following for each of our authors and market their books, the actual book sales is almost irrelevant to how strong and passionate the following that we're able to build for these authors. And I'm really focusing more on the marketing and doing that whole waiting recipe thing of going to other the pockets, going to be not to where it is. And a lot of that takes some future thinking and I guarantee our goals and traditional publishers goals are very, very different in how we want to achieve these things. And that's actually a good segue, what does the response been, have traditional publishers reached out to you? Yeah, definitely emails here and there from major publishers and stuff, but we're just kind of doing our thing and staying focused and not really getting distracted by that whole corporate world and things like that. Right. Now, I know for you, Hollis, skiing is obviously a high priority for you. And I assume that Johnny's got, I don't know much about Johnny, but I assume you have passions as well. But tell me a little bit about that, about how you've structured this company to create kind of an optimal work-life balance. Yeah. I mean, skiing definitely is kind of my biggest priority. It's nice when you find something that centers you that well and it's kind of yours in zone. Some people are running, some people it's what, for Johnny, it's making popsicles. You know, everyone's got their thing and I find it very important for me to perform at the level I need to, to have as much time to do that. So it's been pretty amazing to structure a business around that where I can get on ski in the day and work in the evening. I do have all smell, fair amount of time, traveling and stuff, but I always work in my ski time and keep that as a priority because it helps balance out everything as we go along. And with the tools of the internet, it's not too hard for us to all get on Google hangout. And we still try to meet up every now and then, but for the most part, we can accomplish everything virtually. We don't have an office or anything like that. Everyone works virtually, the whole team goes spread out and it seems to work out almost more efficiently. There's less distraction than in an office in a way. And Hollis, you and I were talking about this when we met originally a week or so ago. You've hired something like 14, you have 14 full time writers, is that right? So yeah, it's basically, like I said, everything's virtual and so we've been able to have, based on how many books are in the system, a team of ghost writers, editors, interns, and people working based on the sales volume we have of people who are publishing their content. And I know pretty much right out of the game, they go, "Oh my gosh, we need about 14 writers just to handle this volume." But the great part is we posted a Craigslist ad about getting writers for potential publishing up in the first book they had to do for free in order to prove themselves to about a 100 page book they needed to rewrite. And we probably had 80 applications within the first day. Oh, it was crazy. It was absolutely insane. Like I've never seen a response like that to an ad before. It was like they were waiting for us to post it. It was amazing. There's a lot of maybe frustrated writers out there looking for some avenue to get through. At least seven. And how did you wade through all that interest? And now that they're working for you, how do you monitor them to make sure, train them and monitor them and manage such a large and such a diverse workforce? You mentioned Google Hangouts. Well, honestly, the person to answer that question is not on the call. And like I said, we all do our stupid hearing trick where Johnny's architecting these plans and I'm meeting the new group. We have an operations manager who basically is responsible for watching the status of these books and keeping the communication between the authors and the writer's points smoothly. And we have like key performance indicators and things like that. When we first started, I mean, I'll be perfectly honest, it was like ridiculous because we did obviously didn't plan on having that kind of response initially. And so what immediately needed to happen literally with the 24 hours of getting our first group of applications was I actually worked the operation manager, created this, I guess you could call it sort of a litmus test to make sure. So what we ended up doing was screening out, you know, the people who obviously wouldn't qualify for what we were looking for, who didn't either maybe have the skill sets or the determination or and this is a big factor is the ability to work independently and still produce a result. A lot of people need that, you know, hey, you know, there's a guy next to me doing what I do and that's cool. There's nothing wrong with it, but we're just looking for that specific mindset of someone who can get it done, even if they're by themselves in like a basement, you know, bungalow kind of thingy and it's still the great stuff to do. We had to create an entire system for buying that purse and we had to do it fast. So we've been working with it and tweaking it out and making it happen ever since. It's amazing how fast it's grown for you guys. Well, I don't want to take up too much more of your time. I did want to ask, are there any authors that are that you're working with right now that you can reveal that that you have books in the hopper that are coming up soon that are going to be interesting? Yes. So the biggest niche that we're trying to get into is I recently went to a conference I spoke at called the awesomeness test. It was kind of new industry to me, it was this whole personal development, got into like meditation and all the stuff that kind of fell on the woo-woo category and I just fell in love with it. I loved it and we're looking at a company called Mind Valley and they publish the like CD courses and things like that for pretty much all the major people in that industry and we're now working in conjunction with them to make sure that like the best authors and content producers in the different healing networks and stuff are going to be coming out and that's probably the one we're most excited about right now and some really cool ones of the health and fitness space as well. Cool. All right. So where can people find out more about you guys? What websites and whatnot? Yeah. So we have a, you're also called Perfect Publishing System.com and great thing to do there is you can put your name and email in and on that page we've got, Johnny actually does regular webinars that go on about two hours to really help people who submit their questions, get those questions, answer about publishing. There's a couple of really good reports we've put in there but basically if you get on that email list, we keep you up to date with all the stuff that we're learning as we go along on this crazy adventure because you know, once you give us a learning process for us too and we use that newsletter to really help people understand what's going on and where we're going. Cool. Well, great. Thanks to you both to taking the time to talk to me. It's really interesting what you're up to. I'm really interested to track it in the months ahead and see where you guys are a year from now. Who knows? Okay. Yeah. All right. Thanks guys. No, thank you. Thank you for listening to the Smart Business Revolution podcast with John Corcoran. Find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com. And while you're there, sign up for our email list and join the revolution. And be listening for the next episode of the Smart Business Revolution podcast. (dramatic music)