Dorie Clark: Entrepreneurial You

Transcript

[0:00:33] Charlie Hoehn: You’re listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. I’m Charlie Hoehn. Today’s episode is with Dorie Clark, author of Entrepreneurial You. It’s no secret that the world of work has changed. We’re shifting toward a more entrepreneurial, work from wherever you want, economy. But now, there’s a big problem, how do we actually make good money doing what we love? You might have incredible talent and great ideas but figuring out how to get started or developing multiple revenue streams or even bringing in a steady flow of clients can be a daunting prospect. In this episode, Dorie will provide you with a blue print for professional independence, with insights on how to build your brand, monetize your experience and extend your reach online. She also shares success stories of entrepreneurs, from consultants and coaches and podcasters, to online marketers and bloggers, who have all generated six and seven figure incomes. And now, here is our conversation with Dorie Clark.

[0:02:06] Dorie Clark: As I got to know more people in the entrepreneurial community, I would start to hear about friends and colleagues that were doing these, like, outrageous things like, you know, one friend had a two-million-dollar launch and then another friend had a three million dollar launch and I’m like, “What are they doing that I’m not doing? I need to learn this right now!” And so I decided that I was going to learn it because I’m a very persistent person and because I had started my career as a journalist, I decided, the best way to do this was take on a book project that would teach me all of the entrepreneurial secrets. You know, the kinds of things that I think a lot, in the past, a lot of people have not talked about or maybe they only get talked about behind the closed doors of a, you know, multi-thousand dollar course and I wanted to learn them, understand them, see what really worked and what didn’t. Try them for myself, make myself the first Guinea pig and then write a book that could hopefully create a roadmap for other professionals to learn from and help them become more successful in their own business. So that is what I did with Entrepreneurial You. For a long time, I had just clung to a very traditional business model. In the sense that the work that I did was, you know, kind of traditional, fee for service work. I built up a good business, speaking, consulting, coaching, writing books, I do some business school teaching. Those are all great things and that’s actually pretty diversified in terms of revenue streams, the thing that I had not done was really going to online courses or other areas that were internet leveraged. And that was the difference, it is not impossible but extraordinarily hard to make multiple millions of dollars, being a fee for service provider. I mean, you only have so much time and people are rationally only going to pay you so much money for what you do. What you need is scale in order to be able to really dramatically increase your income. But I had kept away from online marketing. Largely because in the early days.

[0:04:22] Charlie Hoehn: Got a residue to it.

[0:04:24] Dorie Clark: It got a little bit of a residue of sliminess or creepiness and I did not want that to taint my brand because, you know, I’m speaking to major corporations you know? I write for our business review, I teach for the few good schools of business that do. I wanted to be a blue chip provider, not somebody that was selling you Viagra or telling you to wire money to Nigeria, I just didn’t want to get associated with that. But what I came to realize was that I was needlessly letting the “bad apples” cloud my estimation of what the channel could offer by way of possibilities . There were real ways that serious, honest professionals with integrity could leverage online marketing and online courses to do good things. And so I realized, I needed to get with the program, I needed to learn about that and harness that. And I think that’s an area where a lot of other professionals can really stand to grow and educate themselves as well.

[0:05:27] Charlie Hoehn: Right. So let’s talk about the “good apples” that you learned from in this book? Who are some of those people?

[0:05:34] Dorie Clark: Yeah, in terms of people that I interviewed for Entrepreneurial You, there were so many really smart, wise people that I talked to. I mean, they’re very interesting stories as well, I mean, for instance, there was a guy that I profiled named Danny Iny who is a friend of mine who lives up in Canada and he, you know, in many ways, watching his success was one of the spurs. He had done this launch for which I had, you know, been a partner and helped promote a little bit. And he brought in, I think it was 2.3 million dollars from the launch, just outstanding. And so I really wanted to understand his process. Also, I think when we discussed success in our culture and specifically how people make money, oftentimes, it’s just kind of fast or surface level understanding where it’s like people chest thumping about how much money they made. I really wanted to go deep about specifics in terms of people’s business models, in terms of what they had tried before and didn’t work, what they tried and did work, so that we could get a sense of what people are actually doing. And he told me a story that I loved which was about how he actually got to where he is now and it turns out that he had originally, years ago created an online course and had been this terrible failure, rather ironically, it was called Marketing That Works. So it became even more ironic because he sold one copy of this course and he said, “That’s like the worst fate because if you sell zero copies, you can kind of lead away but if you sell one”, it was just like, for six months of his life, he was building this thing for one guy and he said, if you actually just average out how much time he spent, how much money he made, he was basically working for about six months for 17 cents an hour! And so for years, he didn’t want to touch online courses, it was just like “Oh god no”, he had PTSD. Finally, he just – he felt that the format was too promising to give up on and so he’s like “All right, I’m going to try it again”. But he was obsessed with making sure that he was not going to be in this situation again where one person bought it. He implemented a change which I think really made all the difference for him and this is certainly something that’s become a best practice in online course creation as well which is – He decided he would run a pilot first before launching the course fully. The next go around, he reached out to his audience and he said, “Hey guys, I am thinking of creating a course”. Note, that he had not done it yet. “Thinking of creating a course, here’s what it would be, if you were interested, I’m going to do a pilot, you can get in at a discount if you sign up for it but in exchange, I’d like your help and your feedback in telling me what you like, what you don’t, what you want to see more of, et cetera”. That is powerful because A, you get to have a quick pulse of whether people are interested at all. If zero people had signed up, he could have just walked away at that point, you know, maybe wasted an hour or two instead of six months. Number Two, it gives you a way to co-create the course so that you’re not just all in your head, this is what people need to know. You’re actually responding to what your audience is asking for. Which means, you’re going to have a much better product and Number Three, when you finally do launch it more publicly, you are going to feel a lot more confident because this thing has already been run through, it’s already been vetted by real people and so you have a pretty good sense that it’s going to work in the marketplace after having gone through those steps. He did that. That course actually was successful and it enabled him to realize, you know, this was not like some brilliant great strategy that he cooked up, it was really just a way to cover his downside but it turns out in retrospect, it was a great strategy. Because it gave people a methodology, it’s one that I have borrowed and used to avoid getting too far in and wasting time and money on online courses, which I think is a real problem and concern for people. It just makes it safer for people to experiment.

[0:09:51] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. You’re speaking to a topic that’s near and dear to my heart because I went through the same thing that Danny did. Not on that bad of a level of like only one customer are participating. But, it was bad enough where I was like, I don’t know if I want to do that again.

[0:10:08] Dorie Clark: Was it an online course Charlie that you did?

[0:10:10] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, it was. I built a course called land a job you love. It did reasonably well but for the amount of time and effort I put into it, I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do that again”, it was just a lot and I did it poorly and the ironic thing is, when I’m advising clients, I tell them to do what you just suggested but I did not follow the advice that you are giving right now.

[0:10:36] Dorie Clark: We’re always the worst students of ourselves.

[0:10:40] Charlie Hoehn: Exactly, do what I say, not what I do. Yeah, it’s the truth. And so I spent months building this thing based on what I thought I’d learned from years of conversations that people, what I thought they’d want, and then I rebuilt it because I kind of mailed it in the first time and I realized it sucked and it just ended up being a sunk cost sort of – I was so committed at that point that I just kept pouring energy into it and by the time I got out, I was like, “That was exhausting, I’m not going to do that for a long time or maybe ever”. So this is already getting me excited. Tell me actually, having gone through this process, well first, let’s talk about you. Are you now confident that you could have a seven figure launch if you wanted or have you had one?

[0:11:27] Dorie Clark: I have not yet had a seven figure launch but I am learning and implementing and so, what I did was after having all of these interviews, I spent January and February of 2016 interviewing 50 plus, very successful, six, seven, eight figure entrepreneurs. I then set about doing two things with the rest of 2016. One was writing the book and the other was simultaneously trying to put into practice what the book has taught me. I made myself the first guinea pig. As part of this process, I launched a pilot of my online course which is called Recognized Expert, teaches successful professionals to become recognized experts in their field. In April, I did a 40 person pilot of Recognized Expert, in September of 2016, I did a launch to my own list and then actually in March of 2017, I did my first joint venture or affiliate launch for it. I have been working through this process. Often times, it takes multiple launches to really get up into the stratosphere but for 2016, if we look at calendar year 2016, compared to calendar year 2015, simply and exclusively from implementing the strategies that I learned from doing the interviews and writing entrepreneurial you, I was able to add an additional $193,000 to my bottom line in 2016 compared to 2015. It made a demonstrable difference in my own business.

[0:13:07] Charlie Hoehn: Good for you, congratulations.

[0:13:10] Dorie Clark: Thank you.

[0:13:10] Charlie Hoehn: What are you charging now versus what you charge previously? Was it primarily a change in how you communicated with your customers?

[0:13:21] Dorie Clark: The biggest driver of the increase in the bottom line was the creation of the online course which was something that I hadn’t done before. The recognized expert course, I did – the pilot was at $500 for people and the fully baked course when it launched, it was and is at $2,000. Since then, I also did a kind of vision experiment as well, a live event, small mastermind day for people. Those were the new areas that I added to my business. Now, I’ve been continuing to work on that and grow that in 2017 and have continued to experiment with different models. For instance, some things that I’ve done this year, Recognized Expert is this very extensive flagship course. You know, it has a high price point, it has 40 plus hours of material, it’s pretty substantial. I also experimented with doing smaller, more targeted low dollar courses. I created a $100 course called Be More Productive which is about my special productivity methodology and I also created a course called the Rapid Content Creation Masterclass. That’s priced at $200. I launched and did both of those in 2017 and also experimented even more with high dollar live events including a one day business model intensive and I have an event coming up which is going to be a two day mastermind retreat. For all of those things, these are experiments but really interesting experiments that have been adding a dollar to the bottom line.

[0:15:02] Charlie Hoehn: That’s awesome. All right, well, congratulations again on that, that’s great.

[0:15:06] Dorie Clark: Thank you.

[0:15:07] Charlie Hoehn: For the person who is listening at home, who might be thinking, “Gosh, Dorie writes for the Harvard Business Review, she’s a professor at Duke, she’s got all these things and she interviewed all the experts. I’m not like that, I don’t have an audience, she does”, what do you say to them before we dive into the content from your book? Just in case they’re doubting that they can do this?

[0:15:30] Dorie Clark: Yeah, absolutely. Well first of all, I lived in Boston for 17 years and the first thing that you learn is that you know, the Harvard brand is much less impressive than people might think, you know? Every single person in Boston went to Harvard and you just eventually become completely inured to it. You’re like, “Uh whatever”. I think that anyone, that’s like, you know, “That’s like credentials I don’t have”. No, really, you can do it, believe me. What I will say is that some of the credentials that I have amassed are useful but they are credentials that anyone can get. Really, the deal is, I advise people early on, if you are starting out in business, it is a really good idea to over index on trying to obtain social proof. Meaning, that’s a term borrowed from psychology. Just the markers of credibility that you have. This is a really good investment because it gives people a reason to listen to you, this is actually kind of a foundational principle that I teach in the Recognized Expert course. We live in a busy, frenetic world, there’s a lot of options, there’s a lot of things vying for people’s attention, you want very quickly, to give people a reason where they say, okay, well she seems credible, I’ll pay attention to this, rather than them just writing you off because they kind of cognitively feel like it’s too difficult for them to evaluate whether you’re credible or not. You’re a perfect example of this Charlie, I mean, early on, you did a great job by doing these extensive internships and volunteer projects for people like Ramit Sethi and Tim Ferriss which are well-known names in the business world. As a result of having worked with them, it makes it very easy for people to say, I know these people, if Charlie’s good enough for those people then clearly, working with him is a good idea, he’s good enough for me. You just always want to have a bias in favor of making it easy for the person to say yes to you or say yes to listening to you. Building social proof is an important first step but literally, any of the things that I’m talking about, you know, any regular person who at least has the basics of western society, you have internet access and a laptop or whatever. Yes, you can do it.

[0:17:50] Charlie Hoehn: Interesting. I fully agree with you with the social proof and there are numerous ways to do it but that’s not as much what this is about really. What do you say to the person who is like, “I don’t have access to a big audience, I don’t have access to customers, I don‘t have a list, I don’t have any of this stuff. Can they do it too?

[0:18:12] Dorie Clark: Yeah, in fact, in Entrepreneurial You, I actually stage the chapters in a very deliberate way because there are some techniques that I don’t actually advise for people who are just starting out. Something like having like a large scale live event for instance. If you’re suddenly like, “You know what would be cool? Why don’t I get 500 people in a room and I’ll charge them $500 a piece and that’s a lot of money”. You know, that is a terrible idea. I don’t feel like I’m in a position to organize something like that at this point. You need to have a really – if you want to be convincing a large number of people to do something, especially if it’s at a higher price point, you know, more than a few bucks or whatever. You need to have a really large list in order to be able to build that. Otherwise, you are going to kill yourself trying to beat the bushes to get those people in a room. That is not the place that I would advice as a starting strategy. Work up to that once you built your list. There are many other strategies that are 100% doable for people even with smaller list sizes. For instance, I’m a really big fan of – if you’re just starting out, start by consulting or coaching. Those are things where it doesn’t matter if you have a list of 10 people. If you have people who are interested enough and believe in you enough, just say yeah, I like listening to this guy. Then perfect, you can get a coaching engagement. It’s not something that requires you to have a big thing. In fact, there’s a story that I tell in Entrepreneurial You, about a guy named Michael Parrish DuDell who actually wrote, he’s most famous for having written, the book that goes with the TV show Shark Tank. He started a few years back, his own consulting business. He realized something which I think is both smart and critical. He realized that, you know, the stuff that he was going to be consulting on, you know, writing and content creation and stuff, he was good at that. He had plenty of experience with it, he knew that if he could get the clients, he’d do fine. What he realized was, he had never sold anything before, he wasn’t sure he could get the clients. That was the critical part that he knew could derail him. He set himself a challenge and he said, “You know what? I really want to be an entrepreneur, I really want to do this but I need to light a fire under myself”. And so he gave himself a deadline and he said, “I am going to get my first client within a month”. “I’m going to give myself a month, I’m going to go all in, I’m going to do everything I can to beat the bushes and get a client. If I can’t manage to do it by putting all my effort in for a month then I’m just going to give up. I’m going to give up on the dream, I’m going to go get a job because this is the skill you got to be able to sell”. Sure enough, by putting that pressure on himself, he was actually able to land three clients for himself within the first month. I think for a lot of people, sometimes we build it up, we say, “It’s so hard, you know, I don’t know, maybe when… happens, maybe after…”. Instead, if you just say, “You know what? I’m going to give myself a month.” “I’m going to get a client, you know, I can do this”. Even if it’s you know, some friend of yours who pays you 25 bucks, that is okay, that’s a client that you know, you’re not going to make a living with 25 bucks, that’s not where you’re going to stay. The important part is getting started, the important part is getting that first client because then you realize what it’s like to get a client, then you realize, you know, what the relationship is like and you can go from there and refine things and get better. But, you have to start with some momentum and so, I think coaching or consulting is a really great early entry point.

[0:21:47] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I think that is such a helpful reminder to people as everybody starts somewhere and just the exchange of money, it doesn’t matter what the specific value is but the exchange is enough and that is validation. I think that’s great. Let’s sink our teeth into the book itself. Talk me through the big takeaways in this book. Six months from now, if somebody listens to this podcast, I want them to be able to say, Dorie changed my life with this one idea, what is that idea?

[0:22:20] Dorie Clark: Well, I think that one of the big ideas in the book, there’s a lot of different specifics because I really tried deliberately, Charlie, to create a smorgasbord for people because I know that when it comes to revenue streams, there are some things that are going to be right for some people and not for others, I mean, right now, I have eight different income streams but even I am not doing all the different things that are in the book. You know, I don’t have like a video blog or something for instance but – so I wanted to give people options and you know, very detailed roadmaps that they could choose the things that work for them. But something that I feel like is an important underpinning is actually, just making clear that the concepts in Entrepreneurial You are not just for people who are full time entrepreneurs. I actually really make a case that even if you work in a day job and it’s one you love, it’s one that you never want to leave, it is still a very useful thing for you to create a side income stream for yourself and in fact, that could be not just helpful fallback, not just a good way to make some extra money but also, a way to really surprisingly advance your career at your day job. For instance, I profiled this guy named Lenny Achan in the book and Lenny actually started his career as a nurse and when I met him, I was doing some consulting work for Mount Sinai Hospital in New York and when I met him, he was the head of communications which is not at all what you would imagine a position that a nurse would logically go into. It turns out, the reason that he was able to get there was that in his free time, just out of personal interest, he’d gotten really into smart phone apps and he decided he was going to teach himself, he was going to figure out how to create and launch some apps. He developed a couple and put them out there for sale and eventually his boss found out about it. You know, calls Lenny into the office and Lenny’s like “Oh no, what did I do? Was there a policy? What does he think? Does he think I’m misusing company resources?” That wasn’t it. His boss said, “Lenny, I hear you’ve been developing some smart phone apps”, and Lenny said, “Yes, it is true”. The boss said, well, “We need someone to run social media for the hospital and I think it should be you”. He gave Lenny this position and Lenny did such a great job at it that eventually, he got more and more things added to his portfolio. Eventually he was running all of communications for the hospital. But that was this massive opportunity and this massive promotion that came as a result of something that he had cooked up nights and weekends. Never even thinking that it would necessarily apply to his day job but it gave him the unique skillset that turned out to be exactly what his organization needed.

[0:25:29] Charlie Hoehn: Author Hour is sponsored by Book in a Box. For anyone who has a great idea for a book but doesn’t have the time or patience to sit down and type it out, Book in a Box has created a new way to help you painlessly publish your book. Instead of sitting at a computer and typing for a year, hoping everything works out, Book in a Box takes you through a structured interview process that gets your ideas out of your head and into a book in just a few months. To learn more, head over to Bookinabox.com and fill out the form at the bottom of the page. Don’t let another year go by where you put off writing your book. That’s great. It really sounds to me like this is almost like a chicken soup for the entrepreneur soul in that it’s really inspiring, it talks about a lot of the – that there’s upside in trying these things that it’s not just for people who want to go live on their own and have their own lifestyle brand or whatever. It’s for anybody who has an itch who wants to give it a shot, right?

[0:26:39] Dorie Clark: Yeah, that’s exactly right. In fact, in the last chapter of Entrepreneurial You, I actually talk a lot about the benefits of entrepreneurship, notably, that it can be whatever you want to make it. If you love your day job and want to keep it, great, you can just do this little thing on the side, keep it there. But it gives you a kind of optionality that I think is really powerful. I tell a story in Entrepreneurial You of a woman named Natalie Sisson and Natalie grew up in New Zealand, just had a lot of wonder lust and loved travelling, wanted to do more of it and so she launched this business and it was called The Suitcase Entrepreneur. So she ran a blog and did online courses and things like that teaching people to be location independent entrepreneurs and it was a cool lifestyle. For six years she was on the road, she was living in all these different cities, Barcelona and Los Angeles and everywhere in between. She visited 70 countries and it was amazing but in 2015, her father got sick and she came home to New Zealand to be with him and about four months later he died and she was able to be with him during that time and she said that it really woke her up to realize that she’d always been a huge fan of entrepreneurship and she had installed the freedom that entrepreneurship allows you. But she had only been thinking of freedom in one way which was the freedom to travel and see the world which was great. It was really exciting but when she came to realize was that freedom could mean a lot of things and when her father got sick, she realized if she had been working abroad prior to starting her business, she’d been working in England, if she had been in a regular job she would have had two weeks’ vacation, she maybe could have seen her father once before he died.

[0:28:40] Charlie Hoehn: Maybe.

[0:28:40] Dorie Clark: Maybe exactly. New Zealand is a long way and the fact that she just had the ability to move back, to be with him, to still run her business, to be okay and have that flexibility was extraordinarily powerful and kind of hammered home for her in an entirely new way what that freedom meant and so I think that the great thing about having an entrepreneurial lifestyle, whether it’s your fulltime thing or a part time thing, is that it just gives you more options about the way that you want to live your life.

[0:29:10] Charlie Hoehn: Oh that is such a beautiful story, thank you for sharing that Dorie. I mean you are totally right, all the conversations we have about entrepreneurs and the freedom that it provides you is always in the breath of, “Well, you can travel the world if you want”. You can just get on a plane and leave anytime you want from an almost indulgent point of view but really it is the freedom to make the decisions that you want to make in any area of your life including the hard times. So that’s really inspiring and motivating and that’s really I think what’s at stake here when people are considering should I give this a shot or not, right? Like why does this really matter because you are able to live life on your own terms whether things are going well or things are not going so well, you have more control.

[0:30:04] Dorie Clark: That’s exactly right, yes.

[0:30:07] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so I love that there are so many – it’s clear that there is a ton of stories that are distilling these principles in the book. Do you have a personal favorite story in the book or one that really seems to resonate most with your readers?

[0:30:25] Dorie Clark: Yeah, there is a lot of really wonderful ones but one of the stories that is a personal favorite of mine that I’d like to tell because I think it’s something that just about everyone who is been involved in entrepreneurship has experienced is a story about a woman named Stephanie O’Connell. Stephanie moved to New York with a quintessentially New York dream which is that she wanted to be a Broadway actress. She was a singer and did theater and when she came to New York she did get some acting gigs but what she really quickly learned was that the city was extremely expensive and it was going to be hard to make it work. So as part of that, basically it was part of getting her own house in order financially, she started this blog and she called it The Broke and Beautiful Life and it was her way of essentially recording her lessons learned and trying to share with other people some of the tips that she had come up with about how to save money and how to just make it work in the big city. But after a while, she realized that she was getting a lot of positive feedback about the blog and she started thinking that maybe this could be something. So she kept exploring it more and more and the great news, the happy part about this story is that Stephanie today is really successful. She’s turned herself into a millennial personal finance expert and she has been on national TV. She writes regularly for US news and World Report and other publications, she’s really made it but I think what has been the secret to her making it is that everybody experiences this time where they are all excited about doing whatever they are doing in their entrepreneurial venture. You know they’re, “Oh we are going to make it big” and the problem is that the way that they define success is like the ultimate success. Like, “Oh success means I am going to be on Oprah” or “Success means I am going to sell a million copies” or “success means I’m…”

[0:32:33] Charlie Hoehn: Oh you are saying all the things that make me cringe right now.

[0:32:37] Dorie Clark: Yes, you know, “Oh I am going to have a million followers” you know whatever it is and of course, those are things that take so long. It will take a years to happen.

[0:32:48] Charlie Hoehn: And they are arbitrary for the most part. It’s like a million, it’s just a word you know? It doesn’t mean anything to you. It’s just this bench mark that’s insane like that’s what’s so pressuring about it. It’s not grounded in anything but it’s a big number.

[0:33:03] Dorie Clark: Right, yeah but it’s this ego metric. But people, they don’t have any way of looking at success beyond that. And so, of course, they get it six months in, they get a year in and, “Oh, Oprah hasn’t called and I have 5,000 followers not a million followers and so this sucks and I am going to quit” and so often that’s what happens and I think what Stephanie illustrates really beautifully is the importance, if you are going to keep going, if you are really serious and you’re going to do this you need to understand how to celebrate the small wins and develop intermediate metrics for yourself. That enable you to see the progress that you have made and so when I was asking her, “How did you persevere? How did you stay moving forward with this?” she said, “You know, I remember the time, and it was the first time that an influencer that I respected retweeted one of my posts” and something like that is so small and yet it can be, if you really take it in fully, it can be so significant that someone thinks that your ideas are worth sharing. Where she told me, “I remember the time after blogging for free for so long that someone actually reached out and offered to pay me for one of my blog posts” and we’re not talking $10,000. It’s more like 20 bucks but when somebody says, “Your work is worth something” those are the moments we have to savor because it is a clue. It’s a glimmer that we are on the path to success and those are the things that if you really listen to them, if you really take them in, it gives you the courage and the strength to keep going even when things take longer than you might want or wish.

[0:34:51] Charlie Hoehn: Oh that’s so good. It’s making me think of a few things. I actually personally, and I think I got this idea from Ben Casnocha, is keeping a folder in Gmail that you label like ego stroke. So every time I get a nice email, I file it in there or any success I have I put it in there and you’re totally right. I have been keeping that folder for myself for close to a decade now. I don’t visit it often but every – I’ll look through it a couple of times a year. Just as a reminder that, “Hey you’ve got a lot of positive things that have come about from doing your work and they should be acknowledged and one of the things that I actually tell authors that I speak to when they launch their book, I tell them, “You need to put on your calendar a celebration of some sort” like getting together with friends. Don’t have it be a ridiculous like, “I am going to sign some books and do a reading at the bookstore”. You can do that if you want but have it be something special that you acknowledge to yourself. Actually I shouldn’t say that’s a ridiculous thing. It is a legitimate thing but I do think you should have something where your personal friends or family or your community, you celebrate with them and it’s meaningful to you and not just purely something for your own vanity but something that is fun and feels like a real victory to you and I know people –

[0:36:30] Dorie Clark: Yeah, I am actually doing that. You’re right, yeah. I have taken your advice Charlie. I have a couple of good friends here in the city, Jenny Blake who is a fellow author who wrote the book Pivot and we have another friend named Petra Colbert who has her first book coming out next year and it’s sort of a sweet tradition but we have started this tradition of taking each other out to dinner for these things. So when Petra got her book deal, Jenny and I took her out to dinner. And so next week, my book Entrepreneurial You launched a few weeks ago, but it’s been this mad capped tour but we made a date and so next week, Petra and Jenny will take me out to dinner as a celebration for the launch of Entrepreneurial You.

[0:37:14] Charlie Hoehn: Oh my god, I love this. This is my favorite thing from this interview. That’s so good because if you just have a few friends who are always there to celebrate with you on the victories, I mean one of the biggest complaints I hear from entrepreneurs is like, “You know it’s a lone wolf game. It’s lonely at the top of the mountain” or whatever, but that’s so smart to build that in with your friends and I don’t know Petra but Jenny is awesome. She has a huge heart and a great person so that’s really great.

[0:37:48] Dorie Clark: Yeah, well actually you should know Petra. Actually this is such a Charlie Hoehn topic. Her book is called The Perfection Detox so I think you’d love it.

[0:37:57] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I will definitely check that out. Yeah, we’ll have to have her on as well. I had Jenny on, actually this is a side note but there’s some technical difficulties with her recording. So we’ve got to shoot it again I guess, but in any case, this is awesome and I know your book has only been out for a brief period of time and I was commenting before the recording that “Wow, you have a hundred reviews”. I didn’t think that that was the right book that we were going to be talking about. I just assume that book had been out for a year or two based on how many five star reviews it had. So I’m curious, have you had any readers reach out to you and say, “Wow I implemented the ideas and the principles in your book and I’ve used them and this was the result”.

[0:38:43] Dorie Clark: Well I have not had – I think in many ways we haven’t had time for them to really fully use them yet because it’s only been out for three weeks as we’re talking but I’ve certainly had a lot of readers reach out and say how much they enjoyed the book and that it had, in many ways, transformed their philosophy or their understanding of their business model and I think that that would be leading to some concrete changes down the line which is really gratifying for me to hear. I am so excited for people to be able to apply some of these strategies and hopefully it can make them a lot more money and bring them a lot more impact in the world. That’s really what I would like to see.

[0:39:24] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. I am curious Dorie, I know you added close to $200,000 to your own income, to your own salary from the principles and stuff that you learned in this book but how else has this book shaped you and affected you?

[0:39:41] Dorie Clark: Yeah, it’s been a really great process for me because it wasn’t until I actually started writing the book that I realized that in many ways the works that I have done so far, this is my third book, really had formed a trilogy. I had thought of them as three separate disparate concepts but I came to realize that no, actually they’re the same thing. This is the process, this is the entrepreneurial process and life cycle. So my first book was Reinventing You which is about how to reinvent yourself into the career or the job that you want. My second book, Stand Out, is about how to become a recognized expert in your field and then Entrepreneurial You is about how do you actually make money, how do you make a sustainable thriving living with multiple income streams from doing it. And so being able to really feel like I have hopefully created works that enable people, from start to finish, to build up the professional life that they love and is fulfilling and meaningful to them is something that I am really excited about.

[0:40:51] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, that’s really cool. Looking back, seeing the thread going through all of your books that is really fun. And before we wind things down I am personally curious, do you have anything in the book on subscription model, annual subscription as a business model?

[0:41:09] Dorie Clark: A little bit. I don’t have a section about like the Birchbox type product model where people subscribe and get a thing in the mail but I do have a section, a chapter where I talk about online communities and what makes for good online community and one of the pieces that is often very successful and desirable piece about it, is that it’s a reoccurring revenue stream and so therefore is predictable passive income which is the holy grail.

[0:41:41] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah. That, to me and I’m sure to many others, is the most attractive model. I know each business model has its own pros and cons and that one can be particularly difficult but I think that over the last 10 years that one has appealed to me more and more as I’ve seen that this can be a high priced commitment. That you just have your members commit to you once a year and then they’re in it with you for the year and so it’s really you’re in it together. And especially if you have an application process where you get to know them and you’re like, “Hey this is a person where I would actually I won’t mind having to be with”, then you can have relationships built as you are doing your business and only serving the people. And I’ve seen this work with a bunch of entrepreneurs as well that they’re like, “This, women in particular actually they say, this is the model that really works for me”. This is the one that fits best with my personality and after trying a whole bunch of others, they were like I need that relationship, those high communication type business models. So I know that you have a quiz that can help people figure out what type of entrepreneur they are, maybe what type of business model fits them, am I right in saying that?

[0:43:04] Dorie Clark: Yeah, it is actually not a quiz so much as it is as sort of an ungraded self-assessment but yes, that is totally true Charlie. Thank you, I do have the 88 question Entrepreneurial You, self-assessment that helps people think about how to apply these concepts about creating multiple income streams to their own business. So if folks would like to get that, they can download it for free at dorieclark.com.

[0:43:35] Charlie Hoehn: Dorieclark.com, I am going there now because I want to check out what this quiz looks like. I want to make sure it is easy to find of course, oh yeah. I mean it is the very first thing, right?

[0:43:46] Dorie Clark: It is easy to find.

[0:43:49] Charlie Hoehn: Yes, it comes up right away. Awesome, very cool. And you do speaking as well.

[0:43:55] Dorie Clark: That is one of the eight income streams that is correct.

[0:43:58] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, so actually before I let you go, I’m curious. We talk to a lot of authors who want to become speakers, do you have a quick and dirty recommendation for them on how to get started doing that? Because you’ve done a ton of speaking.

[0:44:13] Dorie Clark: Yes, I have many recommendations and in fact in Entrepreneurial You, we have a whole chapter on how to get started as a professional speaker but I will give you some highlights. So Number One, the best way to become a speaker ironically is not to go straight at it in terms of, “Oh I am going to hunt down these people who book speakers” the best way is to create a lot of content and make them want to come to you because their hackles go up, you know? Anyone who books speakers if someone comes to them, they’re just like “Ah!” you know? They want to feel like they’re in the position where they are choosing you and to a certain weird extent, it’s almost like you are devaluing yourself by coming to them and even if you are great and qualified, it makes them look a scants. So if you could become a content machine and create relevant content in places that they are reading and looking that is the best. Next, also a very good option is cold call stuff is really tough. I am not going to say it doesn’t work and in fact, I have a section in there about a guy named Grant Baldwin who actually did succeed with cold calling but the thing to know is that it’s about a one in a hundred success rate.

[0:45:24] Charlie Hoehn: So you are saying there is a chance.

[0:45:26] Dorie Clark: There is a chance, that’s right. So if you are a successful professional, odds are, you have better things to do with your time but I mean if it’s like your thing in life like, “Oh my God I have to speak”, okay it can work. It’s just very, very depressing. The odds are long with it but something that is a better bet is, if you want to be proactive and take some action is to research very meticulously, LinkedIn is very good with this, specific conferences that you are interested in. And then figure out who your connections are that have either spoken there before and can recommend you or who are somehow involved in that organization whether it’s a company bringing people in and maybe you know someone who works at the company or if it is an association that you might know, someone who, let’s say they are on the board or they used to be on the board or something. If you can get that warm introduction and if someone else has recommending you, then that is a really good way in as well. Those are the ways that I would suggest to break into speaking.

[0:46:25] Charlie Hoehn: I love it and I have found that to be true with myself as well. What have been the pieces of content that you’ve created and where that have generated the most speaking gigs for you?

[0:46:37] Dorie Clark: Certainly books are great of course. I know you’re a book fan so yes, it is a 100% true that having a book is probably the greatest credibility tool when it comes to impressing conference bookers because you know it’s like, “Well hey, if you have written a 200 page book about it you’ve probably know something about it”.

[0:46:58] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, I mean how do they find your book? That’s the thing, do you send it to them? Or because that goes against obviously reaching out and you want them to feel that they are coming to you. So how do you ensure that they discover your book?

[0:47:13] Dorie Clark: Yeah, so honestly actually sometimes people really do do searches on Amazon for instance. That is one way but much more commonly, it’s just the ways that you would be marketing your book in general. So for instance, I blog regularly for the Harvard Business Review but at the same holds true for any publication that people have heard of and that shows up on Google. If you are blogging for publications that have a decent readership and your title, your topic, your keywords are things related to the conference theme, odds are it will come up in search and it may peak their interest. So if it’s a publication that people read, you know, in my case like HBR, they might just come organically across it because well, they are an HBR reader and they see it and, “Oh look here we go”. But this is where search engine optimization can be really useful as well because even if it’s a less well known publication, if you are writing really frequently and really consistently about whatever your theme is, whether it’s about reducing conflict or it’s about delegating your team or it’s about being resilient or whatever, if you are constantly writing about that, you will begin to place highly for those search terms and so often times people who are putting together programs, they might say – I mean this is not uncommon at all, people might say, “Well you know we need a speaker about resiliency”. And they’ll be like, “Okay damn if I know” and so they do a Google search and see who comes up who has written a lot of things, in credible publications that they have heard of and then say, “Oh well this person seems to know something. Let me check them out”, and so they might go to your website or if you have a book, they’ll go look at the book and that’s often what it takes to seal the deal.

[0:49:01] Charlie Hoehn: I love that. I found it to be totally true and I think that’s really smart. I never thought of doing that where you look at, “Okay these are the conferences I want to speak to” or speak at and looking at the words that are associated with them and writing on those topics and only doing it obviously if those are topics that you are interested in and that you can speak to but that is really smart and I can attest, would you say – I mean this would be my recommendation, if you are going to write online and you don’t necessarily have a blog, you don’t have a contributor account at Forbes or whatever, I think the lowest hanging fruit is to consistently write on either LinkedIn or Medium.

[0:49:49] Dorie Clark: Yeah, I think that’s a very good strategy.

[0:49:51] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, cool. Well that was all, this has been really great, super valuable. I bought your book while we were talking.

[0:50:00] Dorie Clark: Thanks Charlie.

[0:50:01] Charlie Hoehn: So I am excited to read it and yeah, this was a fantastic Dorie. Apart from taking your assessment is there any final challenge that you want to give to our listeners?

[0:50:13] Dorie Clark: Well I would say that for any author or aspiring author, we all know that books are not sadly necessarily the way, on their own, that you are going to get rich right? Authors are the definition of the kind of people that can benefit from having a backend and from having multiple revenue streams and so what I would leave people with is really the challenge, just like Michael Peiris Dudel. If you have been thinking about something for a while but you haven’t taken action, maybe you give yourself a challenge and say: “You know what? I am going to give myself a month and I am going to do something. I am going to book my first client. I’m going to launch my first podcast. I’m going to give my first speech” and even if it is not a paid speech, even if it is just getting started by saying, “Hey, my brother is in the rotary and he’ll let me speak to this group” whatever it is, the first step to get the momentum that’s how we can get things going with multiple income streams. Sometimes it really just comes down to getting some kind of movement which then creates a force onto itself. So I hope that people will get started one way or the other.

[0:51:26] Charlie Hoehn: Yeah, the challenge is just to get some momentum and it doesn’t have to be a lot but it is so much easier to go from one to 10 miles an hour than it is to go from zero to 1 mile an hour. So if you can get going just a little bit, you can start going really fast shortly after. So Dorie this has been phenomenal. Thank you so much. Everybody should go to dorieclark.com, sign up for that assessment and get your book. Thank you.

[0:51:57] Dorie Clark: Thanks so much Charlie. Take care.

[0:52:01] Charlie Hoehn: Many thanks to Dorie Clark for being on the show. You can buy her book, Entrepreneurial You on Amazon.com. Thanks again for listening to Author Hour, enlightening conversations about books with the authors who wrote them. We’ll see you next time.