919: Talk about your business with CLARITY (and simplicity!) w/ Garrett Dailey

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Hey, what is up?

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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and we have got an incredible guest with us here today to kick off the week what's gonna be a really exciting week here on the show.

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Today's guest I'm telling you we are all going to walk away from today's episode because this guy's brilliance touches on so many things that is directly relevant to every single one of our businesses.

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So let me tell you about him.

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His name is Garrett Daly.

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Garrett has spent the last decade working with, in or on startups.

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He's been the director of operations for the boutique design firm that did the brand for Morning Brew, which is a huge global email newsletter that I'm a big fan of.

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He's been the chief of staff for Idea Market and he was the founder of Ion Enterprises, a design agency.

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Currently he's the co-founder of Lucid, a consultancy that helps you grow your business with clarity.

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And I'm not just gonna tell you about Garrett's bio here today, because here in the intro, I want to confess to all of you publicly that when we came across the work that Garrett and Lucid are doing it's right there at the top of their website and we just said we need to invite Garrett on the show.

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The top of their website, the big headline, says it's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it.

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How beautifully simple is that and directly appropriate to all of us.

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I'm super excited about this.

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I'm not going to say anything else.

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Let's dive straight into my interview with Garrett Daly.

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All right, garrett, I am so excited that you're here with us today.

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First things first, welcome to the show.

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Thank you for having me.

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Heck, yeah, you have a lot to live up to, because I think the work that you do is so brilliant in so many ways, and I know there's so many cool backstories as to how you've gained the perspectives that you have today.

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But first things first, take us beyond the bio.

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Who's Garrett?

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How'd you start doing all these things?

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Oh boy, let's see.

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So I grew up in a relatively unpleasant rural town in North Carolina and the options were basically join the military or go to college.

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So while my dad was a special forces guy and my mom begged me not to join the military, I was like, okay, well, I got to go to school to get out of town, right, I went to school late.

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In between that time I got a couple of sales gigs.

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Gigs, you know, I worked at a movie store at the mall in town and got pretty good at doing sales and ended up getting invited to do uh sales on a hair straightener kiosk with a bunch of israelis.

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So we sold like three, four hundred dollar hair straighteners and basically I made a bargain, uh in process which is like if I get into school I'm never going to do sales again.

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So I went to school for marketing and really just wasn't a huge fan of the process.

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I ended up I think it was there for three semesters before I dropped out to start a business with a buddy of mine.

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We did somebody I used to do sales with, so we did.

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My first business was a valet trash for multifamily housing, so the people in your apartment complex that take the trash out.

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And it was cool doing that because I got to do basically everything from start to finish.

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You know, come up with a brand, build out the website, sales proposals, a lot of market research and outreach.

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We did exclusively cold stuff.

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So we were like showing up at people's apartments with little dollhouse trash cans.

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We filled up a candy and put our brand on stuff like that.

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We got through about a year of it before we realized.

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Neither of us were particularly passionate about trash Moved out west.

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It's about when I started writing.

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So I was like somewhere, living in a like a motel on it in between Colorado Springs and Pueblo, waiting for my buddy's house to close that we're gonna live in, and I started writing a lot of philosophy, so was in Colorado doing random stuff.

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I was doing a lot of brand and marketing for, like, a vape delivery startup that one of my friends from college did and really was just focused on writing at the time.

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So eventually I end up at the working at the Tesla factory in Reno and my writing had started to pick up quite a bit.

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So I had a relatively well-read blog at the time called Master Self, which you can actually see my Reno license plate I still have from there, and in the process we got into like a lot of I don't know.

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I was primarily focused on posting content on Twitter.

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There were a lot of people writing at the time, so I was doing like designing like Twitter headers for people and we ended up building a small media company called Ion Media, where we had like eight to 12 micro influencers Some of them were writers, some of them made video content.

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We did a lot of like multi streamed group podcasts back when that was really hard to do so back before we streamed anything except take stream inputs and stuff like that, and we ended up like writing a book as a group as well as putting on like a 32 speaker digital conference.

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And at this point I was kind of kind of realized like there's nothing happening in Reno.

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I've got to go where the action is.

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So I moved back to Raleigh and at that point I was like I'm gonna do this point, got a job at Paradigm, which is that design agency that I used to work at.

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So from there, that was kind of the thing that took me from being more of like a freelance designer to being really good.

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There's a lot of process and stuff I learned working there.

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But the thing that struck me that I was really I didn't feel like we did enough of was focusing.

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Basically, we do these exercises called sprints with clients and I realized that, if you know, normally they ran for an hour.

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If we doubled them and did them for two sometimes longer, but at least two hours the quality of the results that we would get was a lot higher.

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And that's just.

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They didn't want to hear it.

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That wasn't how we did stuff.

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So I ended up starting my own agency, ion Enterprises.

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I was still running with the Ion team at this point and really honed in on this idea of like if the more we can really understand the deeper components of a brand, the mission, division, the values and a relatively lengthy series of exercises that I develop the higher quality the end results are.

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So I was doing this for a while.

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I probably branded website and ended up getting into pitch decks and stuff maybe 60 companies or so while I was there and in between there one of my clients was a company called Idea Market that hired me as their chief of staff.

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I started out, I think, doing like 30 social graphics for them and they loved it and I was like, well, we should probably do some more stuff.

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And they brought me on to do more stuff.

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Eventually the founder's like, just, can you just build me a design department and build me a marketing team?

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So I was liaising with the dev team, I was designing product features.

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I had a couple a couple, I think two designers under me and I had four or five people on the marketing side that I was managing.

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It was pretty awesome and that was the first time I got to work on a pitch deck.

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So we ended up raising 600K from a company called Maskio and we had raised a million before I came on and that really ignited my love for pitch decks.

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That just is probably one of my favorite things in the world the storytelling component of that simplifying things down probably one of my favorite things in the world the storytelling component of that simplifying things down.

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So somewhere in the middle of my tenure at IdeaMarket I realized we were going to run out of money and that there was a.

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We had some issues with the model of the platform.

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So I told the founder I was like, hey, I don't think the math.

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You should cut me and cut the marketing team and dump the budget into dev and see if you guys can pivot, because it'll at least buy you some time to hopefully raise another round.

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So I left in march of 22 and at the time I had a, an idea for a social media platform that I've been working on for a long time, and I was like, okay, well, I, I know a little bit about raising, I know a little bit about some of this other stuff.

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So I went, went and built out an app prototype in Figma with all the screens, all the features, stuff like that.

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I brought on one of the guys that I worked with at Idea Market he's a really good friend of mine to do a lot of outreach to content creators.

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So the platform is called Gravity, which is a social media platform for content creators that allows them to own their own content, so you don't run into issues like YouTube adpocalypse or people getting deplatformed and losing access to their following stuff like that.

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Started raising.

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For that.

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We got as far as an offer in five pitches which I'm pretty proud of that fact right around the middle of 2022, which, if anyone remembers what the raising environment was like then, it was very, very bad.

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So it's all the VCs ran away for like a year and a half, so I didn't really like the terms of the offer, but I was pretty happy with how far we'd gotten.

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I was like, okay, I should probably go back to just focusing on like pitch as a service and just become amazing at this, because in the future I'll, you know, probably end up raising at some point.

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So I decided to move to austin um, both because there's more of a startup scene.

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Like raleigh, the startup scene is nearly non-existent and the founders that are there are all fighting over a very small pie.

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Um, whereas austin I had come out in uh 2020 and I really liked it.

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I didn't realize how awesome it was here at the time, but I just liked it and I needed a change.

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So I came out to Austin, kept plugging away the design agency and somewhere in the process last year I realized there are certain components of things that I wanted to do more of with the design agency that don't make sense in the context of a design agency, like digging more into the strategy, the big picture stuff and really just communication overall.

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And in January of this year I started Lucid.

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I brought on my co-founder, brian Schuster, who he had been an advisor for Gravity.

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He and I had also worked on a company called Macro together.

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He was their head of growth at Macro.

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It's a smart contract auditing firm and we just love working together.

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He ended up doing solo consulting and I referred four or five people to him.

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They all closed and went through and ever loved working with him and it seemed that we had perfectly sequential services.

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So I asked Brian if he wanted to team up because we had been doing some back and forth stuff for a couple months.

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He was like, yeah, we started Lucid in January and the reason it's called Lucid and all of that is actually to fix some of the branding and messaging things that I ran into, with Ion being largely very difficult to pitch, which we could get into at some point if you want, because I can explain some mistakes that I made.

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But yeah, basically pivoted from doing more labor-based services to straightforward consulting.

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We still do a lot of stuff with pitch decks, but really our focus is on simplifying what typically are very technical products, working with technical founders to make it easy for them to communicate, sell and grow what they're working on.

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Yes, I love that overview for so many reasons, garrett, but I guess two things I want to call out right now is one I love me a good nonlinear story, and I'm going to call out that when we tune into podcasts, I feel like everything sounds linear.

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Listeners might be hearing this saying well, garrett, it sounds like one thing led to the next, but I know because I've experienced it on my own journey is that you had no clue what the next step was going to be.

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It only sounds that way in the rear view mirror, but huge kudos to you on the fact that you leverage each of these steps to build upon and towards something else.

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So I love the way that you illustrate that story that you've gone through yourself.

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And then the other thing is I love that I think it's the one theme and it's why I called it out at the top of this episode is that keyword simplicity.

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It just seems like you bring so much simplicity to the things that you do.

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Not only I'm gonna call this out really early on in today's episode.

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From a design perspective, your stuff is just beautiful the fonts you guys choose, literally everything, the white space, everything about your business is just, first of all aesthetically beautiful.

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But secondly, it's so simple and if we go back speaking about your nonlinear journey all the way back to writing about philosophy, I want to get inside your head, garrett.

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How did all of that play into?

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Because I'm a big believer that there's seedlings that are showing in what you do today.

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How did even those experiences play into the way that Lucid does business?

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Yeah, so that's a wonderful question.

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I'm glad you asked.

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With Ion, ion I actually pitched, and this is part of why I pitched it but I pitched Ion as business philosophy and design because I really, really think there should be a formal field of business philosophy.

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And if you, I won't go too deep down this rabbit hole.

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But at one point in history every field of study was just called philosophy, right, like math was.

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You know, pythagoras was doing math and for Pythagoras math was like this weird ritual sacred kind of endeavor and then it got split off into the Pythagorean theory and like this weird ritual sacred kind of endeavor, and then it got split off into the Pythagorean theorem and trigonometry and all this stuff.

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But everything at one point was called philosophy, because it's just the, the people that discover things were just pursuing an understanding of the world, and so my theory was if you had a better philosophy in companies and ideally you would get this earlier on then the end result would be better.

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And I did actually quite a bit of research on this while I was doing ION and it turns out that if you look within an industry and this is an industry that people generally like, so for example, like cars, it works.

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If you look at like insurance or financial stuff, often it doesn't show up as much, but in industries the top ranked company will generally outperform their competitors by 10 to 20% on average if they have a clearly articulated philosophy which is a crazy thing to say.

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But I've looked at probably a couple dozen industries and my favorite example of this is pizza.

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If you look at all the pizza companies I'll give you the abbreviated version of this the number one pizza company is Domino's.

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They make at the time that I did this, probably two years ago, something like eight hundred thousand dollars per store per year on average.

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They have a really well articulated philosophy.

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It it's very like hyper masculine, very like patriotic looking.

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It's red, white, blue.

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It's very mechanical.

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It's very tech focused.

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So they invented 30 minutes or less.

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They invented the car with the pizza oven in it.

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They have stores that you can't sit in.

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It's very focused on efficiency, right, and their key word is dominate.

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That's the center of their whole philosophy is dominate.

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The industry Pizza Hut is not as clearly defined.

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They make about $50,000 less per store per year on average.

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They have this vague kind of feeling of like warm, you can sit in the restaurant.

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It's friendly, it's family oriented.

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Little Caesars is like, I think, $100,000 less than Domino's or something like that.

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It's just franchising, that's their whole thing.

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And Papa John's at the bottom they make, I want to say, like $200,000 less than Domino's.

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It's kind of vague, but it's like better ingredients, better pizza.

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So their articulation of their philosophy gets progressively more vague as you go further down.

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However, if you go all the way down to 21 or 20 on the list, you have Mellow Mushroom, which most people if you're not on the East Coast, you've probably haven't been to, but if you get the chance, it's the best.

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Mellow Mushroom for some reason makes a million dollars per store per year on average.

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So they make more than the difference between number one and number four on that list.

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Above dominance, right and Mellow Mushroom has, for some reason, one of the best articulated philosophies of any company that I ever looked at.

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They have a central concept, which is be mellow, which means be mellow with the environment, so they are very sustainability oriented.

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Be mellow with the ingredients, so they use like organic and naturally sourced stuff.

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Be mellow with the people.

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All of their stores are designed differently.

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They'll have local materials in the buildings.

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Uh, you know they're situationally appropriate.

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So, like there's one in north raleigh that has it's very high end, but they have like a big buried statue of poseidon in the backyard, and the one that's downtown is more of the old school, it's got these big silicone mushrooms in it, it's nuts, and all their menus are designed by local artists, right, so it's just a whole different thing.

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They can charge much more for pizza.

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Their pizza is much better and they just crush Domino's who's optimizing to make the most per store, right?

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That's a crazy observation, and so I figured, if you looked at these things and you tried to break down what is it makes people better, and you can see some people that you know I was really inspired by, like Simon Sinek or Jim Collins, who really have tried to study this as an idea.

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There is some correlation between having a really well articulated philosophy and a clear mission and vision and values.

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That correlates with success.

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So I'm really passionate about that.

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And something also I think about writing about abstract stuff like metaphysics or epistemology, all these philosophical things leads towards the need to be clear in your communication, because so much writing not just philosophy but other fields is intentionally dense or people don't really understand what they're talking about.

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They use this academic jargon and I don't think most of the stuff needs to be as complicated as it is, so you can kind of pick, pick up a thread off of that where you'd like.

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But I hope that kind of answers the question yeah for sure, and it actually it.

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It's one of my favorite quotes of all time.

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It's an Albert Einstein quote where he said if you want to impress someone, make it complicated.

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If you want to help someone, make it simple.

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And you just threw in two of the big words that I really want to attack there, which is dense and shoot.

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I forget, oh, jargon.

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Those are the two that I really want to go into because you obviously work I mean, you work in the B2B space and you guys specialize in companies between $1 million and $10 million in revenue and seed to series A startups, and so I'm going to throw all of them under the bus right here right now.

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Garrett, because, gosh, as someone who hosts a podcast, I receive at least 20 pitches a day for people who want to come on the show, which is awesome.

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We're super appreciative to get as much interest as we do.

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But, garrett, they all sound the same, they all use the same.

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I think they're picking from a piggy bank of, like, revolutionary, innovative.

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You know they all have the same words.

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What's going on in that marketplace?

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Why are we, as business owners at all levels I'm not just going to pick on them why is it that we're all picking from the same words that we think either sound smart or sound impressive, or make our businesses sound so revolutionary and innovative.

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Where have we gone so wrong?

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People don't legitimately understand what words mean, legitimately understand what words mean, and you can see this when you see words like innovation, synergy, democratizing, disruptive, revolutionary right.

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We use words that other people use as a way of showing that we're part of the group, that they're in right, which is why industries have their own jargon Doctors have it, lawyers have it, startup founders have it Everyone's got it.

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But when you realize that there's multiple forms of communication that are going on, which is I am trying to explain something, I'm trying to communicate the value of something, which are not the same things, right, teaching and selling are two different modes of communicating.

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Or I'm trying to signal in-group membership.

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You realize that communication is not this monolithic thing, right, and I think, especially for founders, a, you should never you may have to, especially if you're talking about VCs show some amount of like in-group jargon to indicate that you're there and you should be there.

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But, realistically, most people screw up because they try to explain, instead of communicate, the value of something.

00:20:17.876 --> 00:20:29.744
And you can think about the difference between teaching and selling is, if you're talking to somebody who wants to learn from you, if you're like selling an info product, then yeah, you should be educated, right.

00:20:29.744 --> 00:20:43.244
But if you're talking to someone that needs to understand why they should give you money, your job is to really stop explaining what it is and instead explain how it benefits them.

00:20:43.244 --> 00:20:47.763
And that's where, like an easy takeaway for everyone here that you can use for basically everything.

00:20:48.204 --> 00:20:50.150
If you expanded this out, it would be a pitch deck.

00:20:50.150 --> 00:20:56.932
If you push it down, it's a one-liner like the one on my website problem, pain, solution benefit.

00:20:56.932 --> 00:21:01.028
Right, it's hard to grow your business when you don't know how to talk about it.

00:21:01.028 --> 00:21:02.721
That's our first line on the website.

00:21:02.721 --> 00:21:02.961
Right?

00:21:02.961 --> 00:21:05.188
Problem, pain it's hard, it sucks.

00:21:05.188 --> 00:21:08.939
Solution benefit Lucid helps you grow.

00:21:08.939 --> 00:21:11.525
Talk about your business with clarity so you can close more deals.

00:21:11.525 --> 00:21:19.800
Right, that focuses more on the person that you're speaking to, which is really important.

00:21:19.800 --> 00:21:20.382
Right.

00:21:20.682 --> 00:21:31.519
What most people screw up is they start talking about themselves, they start using big words to indicate that they're smart, and at this point, you've already chosen to focus on something other than the person in front of you who really needs to hear.

00:21:31.519 --> 00:21:32.986
You understand me.

00:21:32.986 --> 00:21:40.431
You're indicating empathy, right, and you're an expert who can help me, which is indicating authority, right, If you want.

00:21:40.431 --> 00:21:42.375
Somebody wants to read deeper on this.

00:21:42.375 --> 00:21:48.192
The StoryBrand guy, donald Miller, talks about this at length.

00:21:48.192 --> 00:21:51.801
He's among the greatest communicators on the planet, in my opinion.

00:21:51.801 --> 00:21:53.391
But yeah, that's.

00:21:53.391 --> 00:22:05.031
I think people don't understand what their job is when they open their mouth, and their job should be to indicate that you can solve problems for people that are willing to pay you for the solutions to those problems.

00:22:05.854 --> 00:22:10.104
Yeah, I love the way you articulate that for all of us here today.

00:22:10.104 --> 00:22:15.272
Garrett, I want to ask you this question because I always think about I have the coolest job in the world as a podcast host.

00:22:15.272 --> 00:22:20.025
I just think about the listeners and I'm like what are wondering If they could be here and ask you a question.

00:22:20.025 --> 00:22:21.248
What would they ask you?

00:22:21.248 --> 00:22:26.509
Just knowing that our audience is both entrepreneurs and a heck of a lot of entrepreneurs all over the world.

00:22:26.509 --> 00:22:29.528
And the question that we always get from people is well, what do I do with it?

00:22:29.548 --> 00:22:36.635
Whether we're talking about video marketing or social media or, in this case, we're talking about words, we're talking about messaging and positioning in a marketplace.

00:22:36.635 --> 00:22:42.881
You gave us that real life example of pizza places and I love that, even though you threw in Papa John's towards the bottom.

00:22:42.881 --> 00:22:45.782
Papa John's needs more loving, but it sounds like they need to be less vague.

00:22:45.782 --> 00:22:47.724
What do we do with this stuff?

00:22:47.724 --> 00:22:50.987
When we figure out our messaging and positioning, where does it go?

00:22:50.987 --> 00:23:05.758
How do we make sure that it actually gets to the masses, so that you and I, as people who just eat pizza, we know what Domino's stands for, versus I don't actually know what Papa John's stands for what do we actually do with that messaging and positioning?

00:23:05.837 --> 00:23:11.596
The easiest way to look at this is there are three.

00:23:11.596 --> 00:23:14.981
If I was explaining like your, you could call it a funnel.

00:23:14.981 --> 00:23:15.864
I would call it more.

00:23:15.864 --> 00:23:21.890
I used to use the term orbit right, and this is the difference, maybe, between actively and passively marketing.

00:23:21.890 --> 00:23:24.519
But if you're doing content marketing, it's more passive in nature.

00:23:24.519 --> 00:23:27.358
But there are three layers to your orbit.

00:23:27.358 --> 00:23:33.883
Let's as a visual metaphor, let's pretend you have a planet that you're trying to get aliens to show up at right.

00:23:33.883 --> 00:23:39.021
Somewhere out in space you have UFOs which are unidentified future opportunities.

00:23:39.021 --> 00:23:42.136
These are leads that don't know you exist, yet you don't know they exist.

00:23:42.136 --> 00:23:43.842
They're out there somewhere, right?

00:23:43.842 --> 00:23:53.789
First, you have attraction, which is how are you getting them to get any indication that you exist If?

00:23:53.830 --> 00:23:59.201
you put content out for any length of time, someone's eventually going to find it.

00:23:59.201 --> 00:24:05.032
You could think about when they sent out that probe that they just shot into space that has all the information about earth and how to find it.

00:24:05.032 --> 00:24:07.338
For aliens that's attraction.

00:24:07.338 --> 00:24:27.324
So you're putting content out and when you do this, you should focus on primarily indicating with your content, I solve a specific type of problem for a specific type of person, Meaning I understand your pain, right, I understand the problem and I have authority to help you solve that problem.

00:24:27.324 --> 00:24:33.711
You can do this by making content that's based around common problems that people in your ICP have.

00:24:34.131 --> 00:24:36.654
Icp for everyone listening if you're not familiar is ideal.

00:24:36.654 --> 00:24:43.806
Customer profile and I usually break that down as ICP squared equals person times problem.

00:24:43.806 --> 00:24:50.939
So the person that you're trying to help you have to have information about them and the problem that they have you have to have information about.

00:24:50.939 --> 00:24:54.473
When you put those together, you have a really clear way to target.

00:24:54.473 --> 00:25:05.731
For example, if you know that a person is 30 and works in tech, makes 300K a year, where do they go to dinner?

00:25:05.731 --> 00:25:09.982
You don't know, because you only have the person and not their problem.

00:25:11.171 --> 00:25:14.718
If you have a person who is hungry.

00:25:14.718 --> 00:25:17.523
Do they go to McDonald's or a Michelin star restaurant?

00:25:17.523 --> 00:25:21.959
You don't know, because you don't know anything about the person, right, but you know their problem is they're hungry.

00:25:21.959 --> 00:25:40.201
So you need to have the intersection of the problem and the person and those things combined into allowing you to make a good problem statement, which is the hook, more or less so, if you ever see a TikTok video you may not stay on the video, but it certainly catches you at the front end when they say something like have you ever had this happen to you?

00:25:40.501 --> 00:25:42.311
Don't you just hate it when your ads aren't working?

00:25:42.311 --> 00:25:47.269
That hits you because, if you're the person that video is made for, they've hooked you.

00:25:47.269 --> 00:25:54.211
So when you're putting content out in the attraction phase, you're trying to hook someone with a problem and pain.

00:25:54.211 --> 00:25:56.493
Pain is what calls us to act.

00:25:56.493 --> 00:25:56.854
Right.

00:25:56.854 --> 00:26:01.278
If you put your hand on the stove, you will take your hand off the stove because it hurts.

00:26:01.278 --> 00:26:05.323
If you're a person with no pain receptors, you put your hand on the stove.

00:26:05.323 --> 00:26:07.684
You'll just keep it there, right.

00:26:07.684 --> 00:26:19.150
So pain is actually a good thing, and there's something that I call twisting the knife, which is the perfect example of this.

00:26:21.732 --> 00:26:24.544
The one ad close that ever happened to me, the best ad I ever saw.

00:26:24.544 --> 00:26:28.576
I'm like scrolling on Instagram at eight o'clock in the morning in bed.

00:26:28.576 --> 00:26:31.971
I'm just like hanging out on the weekend and I see an ad that says are you a creative agency owner who hates paying your taxes?

00:26:31.971 --> 00:26:33.714
I said yes, that's me.

00:26:33.714 --> 00:26:34.777
Where do I sign up?

00:26:34.777 --> 00:26:37.663
I signed up for this company's called Collective.

00:26:37.663 --> 00:26:53.359
I actually didn't enjoy their service very much I'm not a member anymore, but that was the best ad I've ever seen and I talk about it all the time because that ad identified me the person at the time, a creative agency owner, and my problem, which is I hate paying my taxes Right.

00:26:54.230 --> 00:27:04.509
So they put out something that I found it twisted the knife, because at eight o'clock in the morning, when I'm on Instagram in bed, I am not thinking about paying my taxes right.

00:27:04.509 --> 00:27:08.200
And it called me to action because I clicked on that ad and signed up.

00:27:08.200 --> 00:27:11.058
So that's kind of what it looks like when you're doing this right.

00:27:11.058 --> 00:27:12.615
That first layer is attraction.

00:27:12.615 --> 00:27:14.738
That second layer would be interaction.

00:27:14.738 --> 00:27:17.479
So how do you get them to do something with you?

00:27:17.479 --> 00:27:27.207
In this case, their call to action was click here and figure out how to stop doing your taxes, and traction is what I would call the third stage, where somebody is engaging with you.

00:27:27.207 --> 00:27:28.432
So how do you get them to engage?

00:27:28.432 --> 00:27:28.974
At that point?

00:27:28.974 --> 00:27:31.608
It's there's a signup process they perform on the website.

00:27:31.608 --> 00:27:34.272
There's some other parts of their funnel, but that's in a nutshell.

00:27:34.272 --> 00:27:36.154
That would be how you activate this stuff.

00:27:37.036 --> 00:27:47.497
Yeah, garrett, I want to ask you this because I think you have an unfair vantage point and which, in turn, you have an unfair advantage because you're not in the stuff of these businesses every day.

00:27:47.517 --> 00:27:53.201
I think that's where we, as entrepreneurs, we really get bogged down is we live inside of this stuff, we're so close to it.

00:27:53.201 --> 00:27:57.176
That's why I've always loved that concept of you can't read the label from inside the jar.

00:27:57.176 --> 00:28:03.750
So obviously, working with people like you and bringing Lucid in for any company gives them that outside, that external perspective.

00:28:03.750 --> 00:28:05.979
But where does it even begin?

00:28:05.979 --> 00:28:20.090
Because I'm sure it's a combination of asking the right questions and getting past that bogged downness that we all face as business owners and whether it's the business owner itself or a C-level executive that we think the certain way that we think.

00:28:20.090 --> 00:28:31.797
How do you get them outside the box to take that 30,000 foot view and say, hold on, let me not think about this in my day-to-day, let me think about my customers, let me think about what we actually stand for and our values.

00:28:31.797 --> 00:28:33.461
How do you begin that process with them?

00:28:34.529 --> 00:28:47.577
Yeah, so typically not always depends on the project, but typically what we do is something like eight to 10 hours of consulting and we have a process of four sprints that I've developed over the course of probably the last four or five years.

00:28:47.577 --> 00:28:51.941
Stuff that some of it came from when I was working at that design agency.

00:28:51.941 --> 00:28:57.644
Some of it I developed at my agency and I slowly took pieces, added them in and cobbled something together.

00:28:57.644 --> 00:29:07.818
But in that process, the most important part, which is a little bit it's, it's I guess it's twofold Part of it, is you need to have a second person to talk to.

00:29:07.818 --> 00:29:17.260
So us being there, brian and I, because we both have been on either side of this problem, both being founders and consultants we get that.

00:29:17.790 --> 00:29:27.511
But also there's a concept in design thinking called diverging and converging thought, which, in the design method this is basically the two core components, right?

00:29:27.511 --> 00:29:43.656
First you have to do diverging thought, which is brainstorming, spitballing, throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks, and in that phase you're just coming up with ideas, you're just spitting things out without judging, which is important.

00:29:43.656 --> 00:29:49.095
In the second phase, you're converging and you're only judging, you're only cutting things.

00:29:49.095 --> 00:29:52.355
Everything's bad, there's only stupid ideas, until you find something that works.

00:29:52.355 --> 00:30:06.438
The problem when you're doing this yourself is you're trying to diverge and converge at the same time, which is basically not possible to do, so you end up doing exactly nothing and you sit there and just, oh I should really come up with something right, which is like writer's block.

00:30:06.438 --> 00:30:21.252
So having a structured method to go about thinking about these things, with people that understand the position that you're in, and have a process that you can go through to think through this stuff, is really important.

00:30:21.252 --> 00:30:32.037
And even when I you know, coming up with the one-liner that you saw on the website, that more or less is the product of three years of working through the design agency and failing to figure out how to explain that simply.

00:30:32.037 --> 00:30:47.218
But even when I was coming up with the one-liner, it involved me sitting down with my roommate who's a very experienced sales guy and he knows enough about what I do to give context for like four or five hours and we just ran through it and then we finally got it.

00:30:47.337 --> 00:30:52.700
And when you get something right, especially with regards to branding or messaging, you should feel it.

00:30:52.700 --> 00:30:55.913
It's like chills down the back of your neck or like a light bulb moment.

00:30:55.913 --> 00:31:05.213
That's how you know that it works, because you're getting an emotion out of the thing and that means that you're going to elicit emotion from your ideal customer, right.

00:31:05.213 --> 00:31:28.403
So, being able to go through that and also I know what the natural things that people are going to want to do are, which is, oh, I'm going to just take the first thing I came up with, or I'm going to use a bunch of industry jargon, or I'm going to say, oh, our values are innovation and synergy and teamwork and a lot of generic stuff, like I look for what lights people up when they say it.

00:31:28.529 --> 00:31:42.335
I'm looking for what elicits emotion from the founder that we're working with, or the co-founder, whoever's on the team, and I want to pull that out of it.

00:31:42.335 --> 00:31:42.817
I want to be able to.

00:31:42.817 --> 00:31:54.866
It's weird because there are other ways you can go about brand, but I guess the way that I try to do this is like we're pulling something out of the soul of the founder, because when you put that out and communicate that, people that resonate with that part of yourself will resonate with you.

00:31:54.866 --> 00:32:15.153
And this is probably different if you're a later stage company where you have hundreds of employees and you've been established for a while, but for early stage brands, the founder is, unfortunately or not, an inseparable part of what the company is and you should lean into the essence of that person, because that spirit that they have makes it work.

00:32:15.153 --> 00:32:24.373
So being able to identify the parts of what the founder is saying that lights them up, that's clearly something they care about, that they're willing to suffer for through the process of being a founder.

00:32:25.316 --> 00:32:30.176
That's the kind of stuff that I'm looking for and I know how to see that and I sometimes we don't know how to see that ourselves.

00:32:31.019 --> 00:32:32.402
Yeah, really well said.

00:32:32.402 --> 00:32:36.134
And actually, garrett, I want to publicly thank you for your transparency.

00:32:36.134 --> 00:32:52.926
I think that's so important is that you just called out that even something as simple as that headline that I bragged about at the very top of this episode and you've leaned on because it does so succinctly show what your company does you just so transparently shared with us that that was years in the making.

00:32:52.926 --> 00:32:59.000
I feel like all too often we add something to our to-do list and we think, oh, I'll just sit down on my computer and I'll just bang that out real quick.

00:32:59.000 --> 00:33:02.453
But it's not real quick and there is a process when my head goes.

00:33:02.453 --> 00:33:07.798
For years I've always asked friends of mine, entrepreneurial friends, where I'm just like I have an idea, can you play red team?

00:33:07.798 --> 00:33:15.978
And I love you talking about diverging ideas and converging and really using that red team, green team to measure these things out adequately.

00:33:15.978 --> 00:33:19.482
But it is that process, so I love hearing the way you think about that.

00:33:19.844 --> 00:33:23.209
I will also publicly say that I knew we'd be short on time here today.

00:33:23.209 --> 00:33:26.878
So, listeners, we're going to be inviting Garrett back for an Action Saturday episode.

00:33:26.878 --> 00:33:27.922
You can be rest assured.

00:33:27.922 --> 00:33:38.080
But, garrett, before I let you go, I always love asking this question at the end of episodes, and I never know which direction you'll take it in, because you have such a wealth of knowledge and we only scratched the tip of the iceberg here today.

00:33:38.080 --> 00:33:41.355
But what's your one piece of advice, what's the one takeaway?

00:33:41.355 --> 00:33:43.654
Knowing that listeners tuned in from all around the world.

00:33:43.654 --> 00:33:50.862
Today, at all varying stages of business growth, we've got seven and eight figure entrepreneurs that tune in, as well as a heck of a lot of entrepreneurs.

00:33:50.862 --> 00:33:54.681
So what's the one thing you hope everyone walks away from today's episode with?

00:34:04.470 --> 00:34:05.271
episode with when you get feedback.

00:34:05.271 --> 00:34:07.896
You're gonna go and do stuff and you're not gonna be very sure what exactly you're doing.

00:34:07.896 --> 00:34:13.574
When you get feedback from people, the thing that everyone says is the thing that you should be focusing on.

00:34:13.574 --> 00:34:22.858
So for me, it was realizing, after however many testimonials I got, that the one word that showed up over and over again was clarity.

00:34:22.858 --> 00:34:27.797
And when it clicked for me that that was clarity, that was what became the branding for Lucid.

00:34:27.797 --> 00:34:32.815
Is what if I went all in on making the company centered around the company?

00:34:32.815 --> 00:34:33.496
That gives you clarity?

00:34:33.496 --> 00:34:37.753
Right, that is the thing that made it make sense.

00:34:38.135 --> 00:34:50.657
So you're trying to find that central concept that has an emotional component to it, and it's going to come from engaging with your users or your customers or whoever you're working with.

00:34:50.657 --> 00:34:59.641
They're going to tell you what it is and, in that vein, whatever it is is not what you think it is.

00:34:59.641 --> 00:35:02.152
It doesn't really matter what you think it is.

00:35:02.152 --> 00:35:06.592
It matters what it needs to be for the person that you're serving.

00:35:06.592 --> 00:35:08.876
So be cognizant of that.

00:35:08.876 --> 00:35:10.782
Try and be as egoless as you can.

00:35:10.782 --> 00:35:15.961
You have to have quite a bit of ego to be a founder, obviously, but with regards to what you're doing.

00:35:15.961 --> 00:35:20.221
It does not matter what you think it is, what it's going to be, that's a different thing.

00:35:20.221 --> 00:35:22.956
But how you're presenting it is not about you.

00:35:22.956 --> 00:35:24.320
Don't talk about you.

00:35:24.320 --> 00:35:34.601
Talk about the problem that people have, the pain that they're in and how you're going to help them solve that pain and get a benefit That'll solve everything for you.

00:35:35.349 --> 00:35:42.253
Woof Garrett, I'll tell you what in 900 some odd episodes, never has that been the advice that a guest has chosen.

00:35:42.253 --> 00:35:56.143
It's super powerful and it's actionable for all of us and I think it's a really unique perspective that, because we're so in it, we don't often take the time to stop, pause, ask for that external perspective and then take it into account.

00:35:56.143 --> 00:35:57.715
So huge kudos to you.

00:35:57.715 --> 00:36:06.498
I know that we are teasing so much about the brilliance of the way that I'm also going to call out your design background, everything, like I said, it's just beautiful.

00:36:06.498 --> 00:36:15.496
Not just the words that are on there, but everything about the way, even scrolling down your website, the way that you guys tell that story of clarity, of business growth.

00:36:15.496 --> 00:36:17.221
Listeners are going to want to check it out.

00:36:17.221 --> 00:36:18.590
So drop those links on us.

00:36:18.590 --> 00:36:20.153
Where should listeners go from here?

00:36:21.255 --> 00:36:27.990
Yeah, our website is lucid consulting so it looks like lucid consulting, but the dot is before the ing.

00:36:27.990 --> 00:36:30.677
So yeah, check us out on there.

00:36:30.677 --> 00:36:31.820
There's a link on there.

00:36:31.820 --> 00:36:34.594
If you want to book a free call with us, I'm happy to talk to you.

00:36:34.594 --> 00:36:36.579
I am not a high pressure salesperson.

00:36:36.579 --> 00:36:43.659
I took an oath years ago to get out of my shitty hometown to not do sales anymore, so that's why I do pitching.

00:36:43.659 --> 00:36:47.512
It should just be stuff that sounds good.

00:36:47.512 --> 00:36:48.534
We help solve problems.

00:36:48.534 --> 00:36:54.561
If that works for you, we will have happily help you do that I love that, garrett.

00:36:54.641 --> 00:36:55.322
honestly I really do.

00:36:55.322 --> 00:36:58.733
As someone who's never taken formal sales training, I'm right there with you.

00:36:58.733 --> 00:37:04.114
Just have real conversations and if you can solve someone's problems, it's a match made in heaven for both parties.

00:37:04.114 --> 00:37:05.297
So I love that attitude.

00:37:05.297 --> 00:37:06.960
Listeners, you already know the drill.

00:37:06.960 --> 00:37:17.282
We are making it as easy as possible for you to find Lucid, which is Garrett's business at lucidconsulting Lucidconsulting You'll find that link down below in the show notes.

00:37:17.282 --> 00:37:21.074
Wherever it is that you're tuning into today's episodes, you can click right on through to that link.

00:37:21.074 --> 00:37:32.873
We're also linking to Garrett's personal LinkedIn If you just want to reach out to him and thank him for coming on the show, or you just want to tap into more of his advice and wisdom and have one of those conversations with him to see where his expertise can guide you.

00:37:32.873 --> 00:37:34.115
So don't be shy.

00:37:34.115 --> 00:37:35.880
Scroll right on down through to the show notes.

00:37:35.880 --> 00:37:41.077
Otherwise, garrett, on behalf of myself and all the listeners worldwide, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

00:37:42.079 --> 00:37:43.260
Thank you so much for having me.

00:37:43.260 --> 00:37:44.443
Thanks everyone for listening.

00:37:49.969 --> 00:37:52.684
Hey, it's Brian here, and thanks for tuning in to yet another episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.

00:37:52.684 --> 00:37:55.518
If you haven't checked us out online, there's so much good stuff there.

00:37:55.518 --> 00:38:04.744
Check out the show's website and all the show notes that we talked about in today's episode at thewantrepreneurshowcom, and I just want to give a shout out to our amazing guests.

00:38:04.744 --> 00:38:13.518
There's a reason why we are ad free and have produced so many incredible episodes five days a week for you, and it's because our guests step up to the plate.

00:38:13.610 --> 00:38:15.577
These are not sponsored episodes.

00:38:15.577 --> 00:38:17.155
These are not infomercials.

00:38:17.155 --> 00:38:20.661
Our guests help us cover the costs of our productions.

00:38:20.661 --> 00:38:31.612
They so deeply believe in the power of getting their message out in front of you, awesome wantrepreneurs and entrepreneurs, that they contribute to help us make these productions possible.

00:38:31.612 --> 00:38:40.119
So thank you to not only today's guests, but all of our guests in general, and I just want to invite you check out our website because you can send us a voicemail there.

00:38:40.119 --> 00:38:41.449
We also have live chat.

00:38:41.449 --> 00:38:47.500
If you want to interact directly with me, go to the wantrepreneurshowcom, initiate a live chat.

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It's for real me, and I'm excited because I'll see you, as always every monday, wednesday, friday, saturday and sunday here on the wantrepreneur to entrepreneur podcast.