0 (2s):
Lights that spark Fire Nation JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs On Fire brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network with great shows like the shakeup today, we'll be focusing on how to leverage business tectonic shifts to leap frog our competitors, to drop these value bombs. I brought Nathan Gwilliam into EOFire studios. Nathan is a serial entrepreneur who created and sold three digital ventures. He is the host of the Monetization Nation blog podcast and YouTube channel. He created and ran Adoption.com. And as a TEDx speaker and foundation, we talking about those tectonic shifts today and why they're so important for you to truly understand.

0 (45s):
We'll talk about capturing and retaining the attention of our customers, passion marketing, and so much more. When we get back from thanking our sponsors in today's on-demand digital world, our ideal customers have more good content and products to choose from every hour. Then they could consume in a lifetime being good as no longer. Good enough. The solution? Passion Marketing. Download your free passion marketing ebook to learn how to become a top priority for your ideal customers. At PassionMarketing.com. Hiring can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but when you post a job on ZipRecruiter, their matching technology finds these qualified candidates for you and invites them to apply.

0 (1m 25s):
So while other companies give you too many options, ZipRecruiter finds you the needle in the haystack. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire. Nathan say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful. That most people disagree.

1 (1m 46s):
Hello, Fire Nation. It's so good to be with you today. A lot of business experts teach that we need to figure out what the Goliath in our industries are doing and copy that. Or a lot of entrepreneurs believe that's what we should do. And I think we should do exactly the opposite. I think of the story of David and Goliath. Goliath had a huge advantage. He had, he was stronger and bigger and had better armor and a better sword and shield than David had. And if David had taken Goliath on, in a direct hand-to-hand combat, David probably would've lost. And David took Goliath strength and turned it into a weakness by doing exactly the opposite.

1 (2m 28s):
He showed up without armor and he kept his distance and he didn't take a sword and he was able to stay away. So that Goliath strength with that sword could not be used against him. And from a distance where David could move a lot faster than stay safe. He was able to sling those rocks and entrepreneurs can do the same thing. We can find the tectonic shifts, those things that are changing in transforming the business landscape and do things differently than the Goliath in our space. And when we, when we think differently and come at it from a different angle, we can get a competitive advantage because generally those Goliath cannot move as quickly as the entrepreneurs can in adapting to those tectonic changes.

0 (3m 18s):
Oh, I love this message that you're sharing and I love the way you shared it, which is within a story. So thank you for that. I think it just brings so much more visualization and emotion into the equation, which is fantastic. And that is what I want to talk about because as you heard Fire Nation during the intro, we're talking all about how you can leverage these business tectonic shifts that are happening right now in the world, so that you don't just, you know, move up in line with your competitors, but you literally leap frog them. So let's start by just breaking down business tectonic chefs, what are they and why are they so important for Fire Nation to know about? So think

1 (3m 58s):
Of tectonic shifts in the world of geology, right? You have two tectonic shifts. There are two tectonic plates that move against each other and where that happens. There's massive destruction like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, but also where those tectonic plates are moving against each other. We can have massive growth such as mountain formation. And the same thing happens in business. We are constantly surrounded by these tectonic shifts that are transforming our business landscape. Think historically of the tectonic shifts. We've all seen such as the shift from bricks and mortar business models to internet business models, or think of the shift from yellow pages to search engines or the tectonic shift from, from a desktop computers to smartphones, right?

1 (4m 45s):
We're surrounded by them and they fundamentally change how businesses operate. And it generally takes the big companies a lot longer to identify and adapt to those and the entrepreneurs who can quickly identify those fundamental tectonic shifts and can leverage them, can receive a huge competitive advantage over those competitors who have a lot more resources than they have

0 (5m 11s):
Agile Fire Nation be fast, be a first mover. So key for so many reasons. And one thing that Fire Nation does love Nathan, they love real-world examples. So give us some specific examples of these tectonic shifts that have happened recently, and maybe even a ways in the past. I mean, you mentioned a couple of them like with the yellow pages and, you know, with the search engines and all these different things, but what are some other ways that we can really relate to this and be like, you know what, wow, I might not even have known that shift was happening, but now that we're talking about it, I see it

1 (5m 46s):
A relatively recent one was Uber. Think about how dominant the yellow cabs were in, in the people transport industry, right? And, and they just dominated. And they had all of the resources. They very easily could have leveraged the tectonic shift of mobile devices. I remember back going to one of the most important business meetings in my life. I was in London. I was there for an investor meeting and I was standing on a curb in London and trying to hail a cab to get to my meeting. And I stood there for literally a half an hour and hundreds of taxis went by me with people in them.

1 (6m 32s):
We're headed to go pick someone else up and I couldn't get anybody to stop and pick me up. I started freaking out and I wasn't going to be able to get to this meeting. And, and that was just one of many problems that I dealt with with taxes. I remember taxi drivers, taking obscure routes to get places I'm wondering if they were just adding distance and going the long way so they could charge me more. Or I remember taxi drivers charging me a lot more than what the meter said. I owed. And I had no way of knowing that. And there was always some extra fee. There were all sorts of problems with taxis. And Uber came along when there was this tectonic shift to mobile devices and they created an app that literally solved every problem I was dealing with what's axes and they completely disrupted the taxi industry.

1 (7m 23s):
And that's a great example of something that happened today, where they leverage a tectonic shift and, and dethroned, the Goliath, the giant that was, that was in their industry. Let's

0 (7m 35s):
Be honest, Nathan. It is a loud, busy saturated world. And it always will be. I mean, it's just the reality. I mean, when I launched my podcast back in 2012, everybody was like, there are so many podcasts. How are you ever going to stand out? And now, you know, I talked to everybody and they're like, oh my God, when you launched, there were like no podcasts. Cause you know, everything in the past just seems like it was, there was nothing and everything in the present seems like it's everything. So no saturation, loudness, craziness. It's just going to always be present in our lives, but capturing and retaining the attention of our customers in a world that is full of these distractions, it's tough and is always going to be a challenge.

0 (8m 19s):
And it does kind of feel like it's one of these current tectonic shifts as we are being bombarded by all size ways, shapes and forms. Talk to us about this.

1 (8m 30s):
I remember when I built my first website, adoption.com and it felt like customers would spend 15 minutes going through adoption, not common and all the different content and features that we had in figure out what was relevant to them. But it feels like people don't do that anymore. It feels like with the millions of different websites that are out there, people will give me maybe seven or eight seconds. And if they don't find what they're looking for and I don't their attention in just a few seconds, they're gone and often they're gone forever. And I call this the attention deficit disorder that, that our customers have today. And, and with every extra hour or every extra dollar that our ideal customers have, it feels like they have a thousand great or, or a thousand good things that they could do with that extra dollar or hour.

1 (9m 22s):
You know, Amazon has 350 million products and there's 48 million podcast episodes out there. And you know, there's, there's more content created every hour on Amazon than I could, or on YouTube than I could consume. You know, in a year there there's so much, there's so many good choices that being good is not good enough anymore. And I have to figure out how to make my business a top priority so I can stand out above those other good

0 (9m 56s):
In Fire Nation. That is one of the issues is how do you stand up above some of those other amazing options? And you know, one thing that I was kind of thinking about Nathan, while you were talking about Amazon and these other areas is it's always important to read the reviews and look at the one and two star reviews. Like what are people complaining about consistently about these products and services that maybe you're into and how can you bring something to the table? That's solving those problems that they're having in finance. You want to be talking about this and more when we get back from taking our sponsors are going to be going into Passion Marketing and some other shifts that are happening in this world and how you Fire Nation can benefit with that knowledge, we'll be right back.

0 (10m 37s):
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0 (11m 20s):
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0 (12m 0s):
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0 (12m 42s):
So Nathan we're back. And as we were talking before the break, we're gonna really be focusing now on Passion Marketing. This is something that you have made the focus of your business, and it is something that's Friday. She can really take and run with base of everything we've said today. So what is passion marketing? So Passion Marketing is identifying what our ideal customers are most passionate about. What are those? We call them level 10 passions. What are those highest level passions that drive the lives of our customers? And then we build our entire business, our, our products that our services and our marketing messaging and our social channels and our content, everything around those level, 10 passions.

0 (13m 25s):
And I I've done this for consulting clients over the years, and it's a very successful strategy. You look like a genius, but the core strategy is just finding what our ideal customers are really passionate about and then building everything around them, Build everything around them. And that's the focus of Passion Marketing Fire Nation is you need to draw on what moves their emotions, what gets their pulse to move quicker. And you do have some examples of when you've actually leveraged Passion Marketing. So talk about those. And then of course, you know, let's, let's be honest, it's time to brag a little bit about the success you've had.

1 (14m 4s):
Sure. One story that I loved was was for a media company located in Utah and they have a newspaper and a TV station and a radio station. And, and they were focused on, on this market of Utah. And at the time there were just a few million people who lived in Utah and there was a new CEO that was hired for this organization. And his board gave him the mission of reaching hundreds of millions of people with light and knowledge. That was his objective. And he knew there was no way, even if he reached a hundred percent of the people in Utah, that he could ever reach hundreds of millions of people with light and knowledge, it was impossible.

1 (14m 51s):
And he hired me and he said, Nathan, your top priority is to figure out the strategy of how we're going to achieve this goal. How are we going to reach hundreds of millions of people with light and knowledge, and then execute that strategy? And so I was blessed to be able to work with that. It was a very fun project and I loved working with that CEO in that team. And we started off by bringing in a focus group of their ideal customers. And we used an exercise that Toyota developed is the five whys strategy exercise. And you basically ask them why they would use the product or service, and then whatever they answer, you ask them why to that answer five times.

1 (15m 33s):
And when you get to the bottom of that to the fifth, why you've usually found the core reason why people do what they do. And then you take those level five answers and you, you turn them into passion statements, passion statements usually start with, I love, I want, I need, I am that something negative. It might start with I hate or such and such sucks. And so we did the focus groups for this media company and we found the level 10 passion statements, and they were things like, you know, I want a more loving marriage and, and they were very different than the focus of the social channels and the, the marketing messages that had had been the primary focus overall.

1 (16m 24s):
I remember the person who had been running the social channels for that company didn't even follow the social channels for that company, because they were taking all of the messaging on all of the different topics and pushing it all through one channel. And when you push everything to everybody, you know, 90% of what you're pushing out, nobody's going to care about. They only care about a small portion of what you're publishing. And so once we found those passion statements, we redid the strategy of that organization. And we started building marketing channels based around those passions. And then we started creating content around those level 10 passions, and then pushing the level 10 content into and through the level 10 passion channels.

1 (17m 9s):
So you're taking the, you are getting people to sign up in groups around what they cared most about. Then you're creating the content and pushing it out, just the content they cared about to the people who cared most about it. And we went from less than 100,000 social followers to more than 110 million social followers. And they reached that after I left, as they continue to execute the strategy and they reached more than 40 million comments likes and shares per month, they told me afterwards, the un-met trick told them they had the most engaged social channels of any publisher in the world. And it was all by focusing on passion, marketing,

0 (17m 52s):
Fire Nation, all focus on Passion Marketing. And these are the types of stories that you should be listening, that Nathan's having the success with. And then saying, how can I apply this to my business, to my life, to the marketing that I'm doing to the business that I'm running. So let's talk about tectonic chefs. I mean, we're going to keep with this theme, cause we've been talking about it this entire episode, because this is what's happening in the world today, Fire Nation. So what are maybe one or two other shifts that are happening and how can actually businesses recognize and leverage these specific shifts?

1 (18m 27s):
I love it. I think there's three most important tectonic shifts that I like to talk to people about. And the first one we just talked about and I think passion marketing is the most important first tectonic shift because we we've got to get our core foundation, right? We've got to make sure our products and our messaging and our marketing channels are all aligned around that passion. Once we have that, I think the next most important tectonic shift for us to address is credibility marketing. 25 years ago, when I started my first business, the way marketing seemed to work as businesses would buy as much advertising as they could get their hands on.

1 (19m 8s):
And then they would use that advertising to tell the world how awesome they are and that strategy really doesn't work or doesn't work very well anymore. The vast majority of our ideal customers don't trust what businesses say about themselves. And so if we spend our marketing dollars, our advertising dollars, trying to use our voice to tell people we're amazing. They're not going to believe us. And so businesses over the last few years have made this tectonic shift to credibility marketing and credibility marketing, including a bunch of sub strategies, such as influencer marketing or reviews, marketing, or word of mouth marketing or customer success, story videos.

1 (19m 51s):
And, and we get these other credible voices to communicate to our target audience in a way that's more credible than us saying at ourselves. And so I think that's the second most important tectonic shift. And that's probably the most important tectonic shift happening today, but we can really only leverage that once we have passion marketing taken care of. And then I think the third most important tectonic shift happening today is, is the shift to recurring revenue. And I'm to a spot in my career where I will not start a new business, unless it has a recurring revenue stream at the core of it, you look back at all of the major companies and what they've been focusing on, especially during the pandemic.

1 (20m 34s):
And it feels like so much of their focus is on recurring revenue. For example, look at Disney. They've had decline in most of the revenue areas of their company, except for one. And that one area is Disney plus, which is a recurring revenue stream. And it feels like that is a tectonic shift that all of the leading players are leveraging various well

0 (20m 60s):
Fire Nation. That is what's going to happen to your business over time. You are going to see shifts. You're going to see cycles. You're going to see things emerge and things detract. Keeping your finger on the pulse of these shifts is absolutely key. So Nathan, I want to give you the mic now share with Fire Nation. The one key takeaway of everything that we talked about here today. Also give us a way that we can connect with you, that we can work with you, that we can learn from you, that we can consume more of your contents because Fire Nation, Nathan's actually a partner here of entrepreneurs on fire for the next couple of months. We're doing some really cool things together. So listen to this person, take action on his calls to action.

0 (21m 41s):
You will benefit as a result. So Nathan take it away.

1 (21m 45s):
One of the ways we can identify and leverage tectonic shifts in our businesses is to be able to follow content and media channels that are talking about these tectonic shifts. And we learn what other people are doing in their industries. And then we apply it in ours. And so if, if people want to do that, they can follow the Monetization Nation Blog at monetizationnation.com, the Monetization Nation podcast, or YouTube channel. If they need help implementing their monetization strategy or their specifically their passion marketing strategy, they can learn about my consulting services at monetizationpartners.com.

1 (22m 30s):
And if they specifically want to learn more about Passion Marketing, they can download a free ebook at passionmarketing.com

0 (22m 40s):
Fire Nation, a lot of great ways to connect with Nathan here. I definitely encourage you to take advantage of following what he's doing, consuming his content, reading what he's putting out into the world. You will benefit as a result because you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with NG and JLD today. So keep up that heat. And if you want to head over to EOFire.com and just type Nathan in the search bar, the show notes page will pop up with all the links we've been talking about here today, as well as all the links that Nathan just mentioned. What was that last link Nathan, that find is you can go to download that book,

1 (23m 18s):
passionmarketing.com,

0 (23m 20s):
passionmarketing.com. And of course everything, Monetization Nation, Fire Nation, the podcast, the blog follow it. I've been on. I've been a guest on the show. It's a great show. I had a really enjoyable conversation with Nathan on that. And I just want to thank you Nathan, for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your fire with Fire Nation today, for that we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side.

1 (23m 44s):
Thank you, John. And thanks for the fabulous difference you're making for entrepreneurs like us.

0 (23m 49s):
Hey, today's value bomb. Content was brought to you by Nathan and Fire Nation. Over the last decade, I've interviewed more than 3000 of the world's most successful entrepreneurs. And I have created a revolutionary 17 step roadmap to your financial freedom and your fulfillment. I put it all into my first traditionally published book. The Common Path to Uncommon Success personally endorsed by Seth Godin and Gary Vaynerchuk. The Common Path to Uncommon Success is the step-by-step guidance that you need to achieve the lifestyle of your dreams. Visit UncommonSuccessBook.com and you can order your copy today.

0 (24m 29s):
I'll catch you there, or I'll catch you on the flip side in today's on demand digital world. Our ideal customers have more good content and products to choose from every hour. Then they could consume in a lifetime being good as no longer. Good enough. The solution? Passion Marketing. Download your free passion marketing ebook to learn how to become a top priority for your ideal customers at PassionMarketing.com. Hiring can feel like trying to find a needle in a haystack, but when you post a job on ZipRecruiter, their matching technology finds these qualified candidates for you and invites them to apply. So while other companies give you too many options, ZipRecruiter finds you the needle in the haystack. And right now you can try ZipRecruiter for free at ziprecruiter.com/fire.