21 Authors, One Book: How Autobahn Built Rock Your Business With Brandon Pipkin

Transcript

Eric Jorgenson: Brandon, welcome to author hour. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. Glad to be here. This is a this is a cool book and a unique one, so I'm excited to kind of get the back story on the book and how it all came together. Would you introduce for us Rock Your Business?

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah, absolutely. So the Rock Your Business story starts with Jonathan Slain, who wrote a book in 2019 with his co-author, Paul Belair. The book was called Rock the Recession, and if anybody is old enough to know what happened in 2020, you could say that Jonathan and Paul, when they printed the book in 2019, were prognosticators. The thing is that recessions, if you understand economic cycles, you know that there's always one coming. It's not a matter of if, it's just a question of when. They happened to get very lucky on the timing, unfortunately, with a global shutdown a few months after they published the book. That book is kind of a defensive position, defensive perspective for a business. How do we protect in downturns? Fast forward to 2024, Jonathan has built a team, Autobahn Consultants recognized that there are a lot of smart people that have done some really cool things and wants to share some additional wisdom that we've gained working with 30 plus clients every year for the last several years on how to build a strong business. And Rock Your Business is the amalgam of 21 voices and our business experience and what we know about creating a strong business in times of growth. So you can say that this is the offensive perspective on how to build a great business.

Eric Jorgenson: Cool. So you've got the offense, you've got the defense, it's kind of like that pairing of books like everything they teach you at Harvard Business School and everything they don't teach you at Harvard Business School. That's right. These two books contain everything you need to know. So is the 21 co-authors, these are all consultants with Autobahn or this is like a broad network of people that he knows? Yeah, this is a, yep.

Brandon Pipkin: Every one of them is connected to Autobahn. So Paul makes an appearance again and he's in the book. One of the people that Paul helped sell his business, George Homan, George is also in there as a co-author. So he's not an Autobahn employee. He had a very successful exit, but because we connected to Autobahn, helped him do that, we included his story in that and it's a great story of how business owners can successfully exit.

Eric Jorgenson: Very cool. This is a cool model for a book. I don't see nearly as many of these as you might think. Once you kind of hear it, you're like, oh yeah, that makes a ton of sense, especially when you have a team or a network like this where you're trying to really showcase everybody's expertise and you want to understand the views of a bunch of different stakeholders.

Brandon Pipkin: That was exactly one of Jonathan's thoughts was, hey, I can write this book, but I've never sold a business to a Fortune 500 competitor, but Jim has. And I never ran Nike, Bayou, Mexico football division, but Rafa has. And Jonathan wanted to also use it as a pattern for our companies to show this is one way to build great culture. It's to have an enormous project. You know better than anybody what a project it is to write a book. You make it so easy and still with that, there's a lot that goes into writing a book. So let's do something really cool, an enormous project all together, get our voices all in this together, and it can serve as a pattern for our clients as to what they can do as well.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Okay. So, so given that you've got a really unique kind of writing process and book structure here, let's, let's dive in and like teach us how this happened, how this worked. This seems like, you know, more logistics than like creative, a creative session in the woods. Right. How did you sort of organize this? Yeah.

Brandon Pipkin: Well, you made that easy. This will sound like a plug for Scribe here, but you made that really easy. So Jonathan leaned on his experience from the first book and knew that bringing in somebody like you would be really smart. And that was the starting point. So we got on with the writer at Scribe. He interviewed the coauthors of each chapter, which was really helpful, especially because for instance, my chapter is coauthored with Deb Dixon and Tessa Reich. So we, and I paused on Tessa's name cause I always say it wrong, but so Tessa, Deb and I wrote the, I speak German. I spent two years in Germany and Switzerland. So I read it as Reich, but not how she pronounces it. So I should know my coauthors name, huh? And how she pronounces it. So the writer at Scribe interviewed each of the coauthors for each chapter, which really, I think adds a lot of richness to the book because it wasn't the Deb put her thoughts in, then I put my thoughts in, then we refined them. It was a free flowing conversation where we could play off of each other and where we pushed back against each other and we challenged each other's experiences and added additional thoughts to it. And then on the backend, the writer at Scribe cleans that all up, turns it into something coherent. Then Jonathan wanted to take it a step further and get the audio book done. And one of the thoughts was, well, do we have AI do it? It'll be quick. It'll be easy. And we are AI forward at Autobahn and we're helping our clients be out of AI forward. But then the thought was, well, that's not authentic to who we are and why not have Rafa read it and tell his experience in his voice? Why not have each person do the same thing? So there are 21 distinct voices. We have our South African crew. We have a couple from Mexico, Spanish speakers. We have Jonathan's Midwestern nasal, as he calls it. So a lot of different accents and a lot of different voices in there. So there was a lot of logistics and Kelly, who is a personal admin for Jonathan extraordinaire, really pulled a lot of this together, as did Catherine Slain, who also authors one of the chapters.

Eric Jorgenson: I like that approach. I mean, I generally counsel people like if you are building, if you're writing this book to build trust, it's worth, you know, especially with your personal expertise, it's worth doing it in your personal voice. But what an undertaking to, you know, get 20, 21, 22 people all contributing with their own unique accent. But it makes sense. Tell your own story. And you're giving any reader a really rich sense of who Autobahn is, a really broad and deep kind of look at the team. That's exactly what we hope for.

Brandon Pipkin: And yes, tying it to trust is a perfect tie in right there. I have a buddy, Roberto, he's written a few books. And with his first book, he was wondering, do I read this? Do I have some professional read it? I said, Roberto, you've, you've got to read this. This is your life's work. And he said, yes, but my Italian accent, it's so thick. Will people understand? I said, dude, that is your strength because that is you. That is your personality shining through. And that's what this book is all about. And people love an Italian accent, right?

Eric Jorgenson: You know, like top, top accents.

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah. Italian is the language of love. Forget French, Italian is the most beautiful.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's smooth. It's gorgeous. You know? Yeah.

Brandon Pipkin: We were at a restaurant years ago and Roberto was talking to the maitre d'. He said something that was the most beautiful phrase I'd ever heard in my life, regardless of the language. And it was in Italian. He came back and I said, Roberto, what did you just say to that person? I just heard the most beautiful phrase I've ever heard. He said, to the maitre d'. What was I talking about with the maitre d'? I said, yeah, what were you talking about? He said, I ordered a table for three. And he said, well, tell me, tell me what that phrase was. Trente vente and whatever it was. I said, if ordering a table for three is the most beautiful phrase I've heard, this is the most beautiful language.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah. No wonder you go to dinner for six hours a day, you know, that's the, that's the experience. That's right. So how did the sort of creative process work? You know, did you, did, was there challenges in navigating the visions of, of all these different folks? I mean, even upstream of the, the logistics of all sort of contributing to a manuscript, how did you agree on, on the scope of the project and who would do what, how it would feel and you know, what, what role each person would play?

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah, that's a really insightful question. And that caused, it takes me back to 2024 when we first started discussing this project and I had forgotten some of that groundwork that needed to be laid as we thought through what does this look like? Jonathan and Catherine did a great job of figuring out what the chapters may look like based on the expertise within the team and what each person brings to the team with their unique voice and experience. And then they helped prompt with some thoughts as to what we might want to include in our chapter. And then it was really up to us based on perspective, experience, looking forward what this book might do to figure out how this might come together. And then it really took shape in those interviews as we just got live, which again is, it's such a fantastic process and it was one that I didn't appreciate. I wrote a book in 2011 and back to what you and I talked about before we jumped on, I'm an amalgamator. I'm a collector of great ideas and great thoughts. So I interviewed 21 millionaires to find out how and why they did what they did. And then I tell their stories. And it was tough enough in that process to get everything together and pull out what parts of their interviews do I want to include, what parts of this are rich enough and valuable enough for other people. And that was an activity on my own, listening to these recordings and trying to pull that out. How much richer was it with co-authors in the moment to have that live experience together? It really brought things to life.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. And it's extremely helpful to have, as you pointed out, somebody who's sort of a neutral third party who's doing the work to synthesize all these different ideas, create coherence and consistency and style and language and reading level throughout the whole book. Make sure there's not a ton of redundancy. You know, it is hard to do, especially when you, you know, you're all contributing a bunch of different things. Even if you got the outline really well laid out, you know, it's even as one author over the scope of an entire project, it's really easy to have like style drift and stuff like that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Pipkin: And, and as you say that, it's also reminding me that this is a great pattern for what we at Autobahn do when we facilitate forums, group meetings, team meetings, etc. We're facilitating, we're pulling ideas together, we're reflecting what we hear and synthesizing it into something coherent.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. There's a lot of value that can be gained from that. And it's just, it's so helpful to have a bridge right between, you know, the author or the subject matter expert who's so close to the material. Like it's very easy to lose sight of what, how little the audience knows when they're new to an area and have someone who can sort of translate, land those analogies, bring things down to earth a little, close the knowledge gaps and spot them sort of as you, as you skip over them. But that process of like putting down on paper, these things that you say and do all day, every day that you've been doing for decades, it's just so easy to forget, you know, step six of 100 and then people feel lost, you know, for 93 steps after.

Brandon Pipkin: The curse of knowledge. It's the standard speech class where build me a peanut butter and jelly sandwich step by step. And no matter how many steps people try to think through and include, there's always missing steps. And so if you've seen this, they have somebody else try to build it based on somebody's instructions and all they can follow are the instructions that they're given.

Eric Jorgenson: I've seen that. And I've also built software products and watched users try to use them. So you know, it's a similar, it's a very similar experience. You've seen it. Yeah. You've seen it firsthand. Yeah. So we're, we're only a few months out from the initial publication of this book as we record it, but I think it's helpful to, to sort of in this, maybe thinking from 2024 or thinking from, you know, your, your launch mid 2026, what are the hopes for this book? Like what is the, what was the prize that made you all willing to go on this journey? Cause it's not, you know, even with help, it's not no work, you know, it takes, it takes time. It takes commitment. It takes a little bit of, you know, self-coaching through, through your doubts and getting this out into the world. What are you hoping the impact is that the book will have?

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah. I'm going to take the long way around the barn and reiterate for the audience who probably understands this, writing a book is like beating your head against the wall, I think at times. So the first book that I wrote, I thought the hard part would be getting in touch with the people I wanted to interview. Then I thought the hard part would be synthesizing their stories into something coherent. Then I thought the hard part would be framing it around those stories. Then I thought the hard part would be publishing it. Little did I know the hard part was marketing it and getting it out into the world so that it could have an impact like I wanted it to. And so what I've told people is something I heard from another author, which is don't write a book unless you feel compelled to. But when you can't not write the book, that's a perfect time to write the book. So I give that as pretext to the answer of what do we hope that this accomplishes? You're right, writing a book is a huge undertaking. Even with 21 people rowing together, it's still a huge lift. And I didn't even see half of what Yaz did on the back end to market this and pull the graphics together, what Catherine did to synthesize things. I didn't see any of the real lift that went into that. So what was the goal that inspired us? What was big enough? We have a real passion to help businesses scale and avoid the pitfalls that come with scaling. We really want business owners who have poured their blood, sweat and tears into their businesses to get that ideal exit that they've dreamed of and that they deserve after working 14 hour days for years and years on end. And now go and spend time with your family and the important people in your life. You've built something great. Let's hand it off to somebody else. And there just aren't a lot of books that address the market that we do. How do you grow from $50 million to $500 million? We also wanted it as a great calling card that we can send to prospective clients and demonstrate thought leadership. So we now have two books that we have in the marketplace. In addition to that, I now can take my chapter on sales and go do keynote addresses on it or half day workshops on it. And others can do the very same thing with their content. So it's a great way to produce additional content, additional connection, additional opportunities.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's a great segue. So how I imagine with, you know, 20 people and as your second book, you've got a pretty well understood playbook for how you're going to sort of integrate this book into a bunch of the other, you know, sales, marketing, trust building, evangelism, exercises or workflows from Autobot. So what are some of the ways that you're you're already or intending to deploy this book?

Brandon Pipkin: We have this really cool thing we call a PAV and we send it to clients. It's a box that has our two books in it and an automatic video player. So you open it up and it says, welcome to Autobahn and it's Jonathan and some others speaking on this video. And invariably we find it makes a splash. People appreciate the packaging. It's unique, it's different. And parents find that their kids love to play with the box. And so it gives us some stickiness there. What does PAV stand for? Just as I said it, I was wondering myself, it's one of those acronyms you use and then you forget after a while what it is. It's I'll look it up, I'll get it for you later. But it's.

Eric Jorgenson: No, I was just curious, like that's I've seen only maybe one or two of those and they are really cool. I mean, they're very unique and you can totally see how, you know, if they arrive at an office, people kind of huddle around the desk and be like, what is this thing? Yeah, it's pretty, you know, it's pretty slick.

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah, yeah. So that automatically gets us conversations, gets doors open for us. We've been on several podcasts, we've been on TV promoting the book. So that exposure, of course, adds to our credibility. We now have the logo and the footage to put on the website and to show that we've got brand authority. We also use it to send to existing clients to reinforce the thought leadership. And as mentioned, we're going to take this on the road and now we'll do keynote addresses and we'll be able to recommend to people based on that challenge you're having, read chapter five, that challenge, chapter seven. We address it there.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I like that. I mean, it's really. I imagine many authors sort of listening a little envious that there's 20 other people helping to promote the same book, right? You can be a lot of places at once on a lot of stages, meet a lot of people and all sort of funnels back.

Brandon Pipkin: It's exactly right. And think of the great opportunity I have, too, because I'm leading most of the communications and sales efforts. I can bring Rafa's message without having to have experienced all that Rafa has. I can bring some of Jim's message and I can promote that to bring them into the conversation and bring the credibility so that the client knows those are the people I want to be working with.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah.

Brandon Pipkin: Very interesting.

Eric Jorgenson: Is it is it part of your is do you use it more for maybe like new, new attention, new opportunity generation, or do you use it more to kind of, let's say, deeper in the funnel to like build trust and sort of convert from attention to decision or commitment?

Brandon Pipkin: Top of the funnel.

Eric Jorgenson: Top of the funnel. Yeah. Yeah. Are you putting anything into well, how many books are you giving away for free? Are you trying to sell at events like. Yeah. Let's do that. The nitty gritty playbook. Yeah. Yeah.

Brandon Pipkin: We're giving a lot of them away. We have a list of might be hard pressed to get the right number, but 100 or so VVIPs in our network that will all get a book. And I think a handwritten note to go along with it. I am sending it in those PAVs for prospective clients. We take them to events and we give a few copies away at those events as giveaways and promos there. And then the audio book, we have a QR code at the end of our presentations, sign up, and here's the free audio book that you can grab. So it's a really good lead magnet, attention getter, and a great way to provide value to people after a conversation as well.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's a great idea. That kind of digital conversion. It's amazing. Even if you sell a lot of copies through Amazon, you don't necessarily build an online relationship. You don't necessarily get an email. You don't necessarily get a follow, which makes it really hard to kind of keep those touch points up. And so like closing all those loops, either through something in the book or something on the presentation or giving away the other formats to gain an email, and then you can add a ton of value in followups, right? Like how have you applied it? Sharing additional case studies, bonus chapters that make the final book. There's a lot of stuff you can do if you establish that ongoing relationship. So I think that's really smart.

Brandon Pipkin: And back to your earlier point of authors who may be envious. So when I wrote my first book, 21 Questions for 21 Millionaires, everything was on me. All parts of it. Imagine how fantastic it is for me this go round. And this is one of the reasons I love partnering with Autobahn and being connected with Autobahn is that now Yaz does all of that marketing. She creates the QR code. She connects it to HubSpot. She takes care of all of that. So if anybody out there, independent author, you're wondering, does it make sense to connect with other businesses and to maybe not go lone wolf all the time? Hell yeah, it does. It has been a game changer for me.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, even in an industry that I feel like is probably primarily solo, solo entrepreneurs, like most of the coaches I meet or consultants, a lot of time they're just kind of doing it for the independence. What was the best unexpected thing that's come of the book being out in the world so far? I know it's only been a couple months, but sometimes it's very hard to anticipate what your favorite thing about the book is going to be.

Brandon Pipkin: That's a great question. You should start a podcast. You're really good at these questions.

Eric Jorgenson: I really, I can't not start a podcast, which is a fallout of me. They just grow like hair. It's crazy.

Brandon Pipkin: How many do you have?

Eric Jorgenson: I mean, two to three, depending on how you, how you define it.

Brandon Pipkin: Holy moly.

Eric Jorgenson: I'm going to have to find out what those are.

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah, it's fun. Yeah. Right. Look, you're a polymath. You have a lot of different interests, a lot of things that you want to explore.

Eric Jorgenson: They're a lot of fun, you know, you're hanging out, why not record it? Share with the world. Preserve it for future generations.

Brandon Pipkin: Bingo. That's how I feel too. Preserve that story.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Yeah. What a privilege to be alive in the era where we're, you know, we're training the LLMs. It's unreal. By recording ourselves.

Brandon Pipkin: If you're not sure how to turn off the training of the LLM, anybody reach out, we'll help you do that. Yeah. So best unexpected thing. I'm of course going to use some recency bias and some myopia because I'm sure 20 other people would answer it differently than I'm going to. And for me, I'm flavoring it with a recent conversation we had about what is the keynote that we're going to build around this and take this out, the message out to the world. So I'm really excited about this presentation that we're building and the impact it will have on people and how it will help them recognize the roadblocks that they've just been living within their business, that they don't need to live with those, that there is a path forward. And I'm so excited for them to walk out of that keynote breathing easy and having answers to their questions. A lot of things in business are seemingly complicated and they are because there's so many different moving parts to it. And that's where the 21 authors come in really handy. Because with this amount of people having done a lot of cool things, we have the answer to a lot of different problems in business.

Eric Jorgenson: And I'm excited to share that with audiences. Yeah, it's very cool when you can kind of feel that impact in person, right? Like I get a lot of really nice notes from people who've read the book, but there's something a little different about like meeting them or talking with them or watching the sort of the transformation happen, which, of course, that makes your makes your genes happy. That makes sense.

Brandon Pipkin: And that's where I'm built to play. I am built to be with an audience. Workshops, keynotes just lights me up. So, yeah, that that in particular is my jam.

Eric Jorgenson: Brandon, you've written two books now or yeah, yeah, you've written two books now. Very different context, very different time periods. What advice do you have for authors, an author who is sort of on the fence? They feel like they have a book in them that's gestating, but they haven't really made the leap to commit to the project yet. Turn it into, you know, something with dates and time allocated to it and resources. What do those conversations look like for you? What do you tell them?

Brandon Pipkin: So back to the earlier point, write a book when you can't not write the book, when it just is so front and center. If you have ideas percolating and you're not committed to it, keep letting them percolate, keep amalgamating and just keep collecting thoughts like you and I do. Keep them on your notepad, keep them somewhere. And how blessed are we to live in an age where we have the LOMs that can aggregate things for us and turn it into something beautiful and wonderful? So just keep aggregating your thoughts. If you're to a point where you're starting to think to yourself, maybe I should get started, but I don't know where. So if you've progressed beyond, I think I have a few ideas and you start amalgamating, start collecting them and progress to the point of, okay, I think I need to get going, but where do I start? Make a freaking mess. Sit in front of the computer, start typing stream of consciousness, or turn on the LLM or turn on the dictate function in word, whatever works best for you and just puke. Just start. We know that the best way to overcome writer's block is to just be bad. So just get the crap out there knowing it's not going to be great. It's not going to be your perfect work. It's not going to be your final work. Just keep moving forward and getting the information out there and you're going to figure out how to clean it up and make it better. I loved what I heard from a journalist who said, I looked back when I was in college on what I wrote in high school and thought, how could I have been so bad? When I first got into the workplace, I looked back on what I wrote in college and thought, how could I have been so bad? I looked back mid career and thought when I was first in my career, how could I have been so bad? And now I look back at what I wrote six months ago and think, how could I have been so bad? I look at authorship that same way. You're not going to write your magnum opus right out of the gate, something that is the finished project. So just start writing. And that's the beginning point.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I love, I love that. That's a right in line with the kind of nobody ever needs to see your first draft. We call your first draft, the vomit draft. So we're very on brand with like what you, what you laid out there. And it's just, it's easy to forget that your first draft, you're comparing it mentally with everybody else's 20th draft, right? That's all you've ever read. When you read a book, you're seeing something that dozens of people have worked on and there's hundreds or thousands of hours in motion. And yeah, of course you, you just put a sketch down. It's not going to be a, not going to be a finished Rembrandt yet, but the beautiful thing about books is you can keep working on them until you're proud of them.

Brandon Pipkin: And that's exactly right.

Eric Jorgenson: You know, just get something that you feel like represents the very best of you.

Brandon Pipkin: That's right. And don't over-engineer it to the point where the book itself has to be perfect. So work on it, get it to a point and then recognize this does nobody any good sitting on your computer. Yeah. Your message needs to be shared with the world. So get it out there. And my first book, I thought I had it so cleaned up. I had gone over it 15 billion times. I had a professional editor go over it and I still found errors after they send it back to me and I cleaned it up two or three more times and I print it and I get it in Kindle and I get it on all the print versions, et cetera. And then 10 years later, my buddy's reading the book and he goes, Hey, do you want a list of the errors? And I was thinking to myself, there aren't any. Like you, you think you found something. And he sent me back a full page of 15 to 20 things that just made it through somehow and heaven bless the process. It's never going to be perfect. Get it out there.

Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it is. It is remarkable and, and sometimes tough to remember. Like, yeah, there's thousands and thousands of people can read it and there's still like a typo in there that one person will notice. It's, it's just crazy how it works. Like the, the mechanics of the process, even people that are, you know, trained professional experts of the year. Now we've got the, you know, AI proofreading and everything. It's still, it's just funny.

Brandon Pipkin: Still things are going to make it through.

Eric Jorgenson: Yep. Yep. And probably you're the only one who's going to notice or at least be bothered to your point about like, you know, you can't help anybody can't help anybody from the drawer, so it's exactly right there. And you'd be amazed at how, at the impact that the books have had, even, even books that you wouldn't consider like perfectly written or polished or erudite or whatever. You know, you want it to represent you well, but you know, it's certainly better to just get it out in the world and let the readers decide. Brandon, where should people follow you? Find you tag along, grab the book. What's the, what's the best way to have an ongoing relationship with you?

Brandon Pipkin: Yeah. Follow us on LinkedIn, Autobahn consultants. I'm there as well. Brandon Pipkin on LinkedIn. I would recommend you follow some of the coauthors like Hudson Shank who wrote, he and Jonathan wrote the chapter on AI. HUD is a really good voice to be listening to when it comes to how to use AI and not just as a bolt on within a business, but really how to redesign your entire business around AI so that you make faster decisions. Workflows run smoother. Your go to market motion is smoother. I would follow Catherine Slain on LinkedIn as well. She is a former pediatric ICU doctor turned our academic officer and who leads our thought leadership at Autobahn. And she puts out so many great articles, especially for business owners or general thought leadership on personal development. So that's the first place you can get the book at amazon.com. To your point, we don't know who buys it from there. We don't get to interact, but that's a great place to get the book or send me a note and I'll send you the audio book. So I'm at Brandon at Autobahn consultants.com.

Eric Jorgenson: Send me a note if you're interested and I'll send you the audio book for free. Awesome. Thank you, Brandon. And the book one more time is rock your business, navigating the road from 50 million to 500 million and beyond the main listed authors, Jonathan Slain. But don't be confused. 20 other people contributed to this book and you get a little bit slice of all of their expertise and wisdom is a really cool concept. Thank you so much, Brandon, for coming on and teach us about the book and how it happened. Appreciate you. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it, Eric.