Welcome And Guest Setup

Tom DuFore 0:01

Welcome to the Multiply Your Success podcast, where each week we help growth-minded entrepreneurs and franchise leaders take the next step in their expansion journey. I'm your host, Tom Dufour, CEO of Big Sky franchise team. And if you've ever wondered how to become a best selling author or how cultural shifts impact your business, then today's episode is for you. And I know those two might not seem like they go together, but our guest today is Michael Drew, who's a publishing veteran who's helped 131 books hit major bestseller lists and co-authored a book called Pendulum that talks about these cultural tides and shifts that swing like a pendulum. Now, Michael has launched 104 consecutive books onto national bestseller lists and has over 1,000 number one Amazon titles. Michael has been marketing books for his entire career, perfecting his skills at such respected publishers as Bard Press, Entrepreneur Magazine, Longstreet Press, and Thomas Nelson Publishers, among others. He has mastered the intricacies of publishing and is always adapting his methods and processes to match today's fast evolving industry and media landscape. You're going to love this interview, so let's go ahead and jump right into it.

Michael Drew 1:22

It's great to be here. My name is Michael Drew. I own a couple of businesses, promotebook.com and bookretreat.com.

Tom DuFore 1:31

Well, one of the things we wanted to talk about was certainly some of what you do and the work that you've done and really the accolades of the number of books you've helped become bestsellers over the years. I always like to start with a little bit of an origin story. How do you wind up in this kind of a situation?

Michael Drew 1:49

Total transparency. I am a high school dropout. When I was 17 to 18, I decided to run away to Washington State with a girl and sell drugs on her bridge, was pretty good at it. And uh decided that I didn't need to do that, didn't have you didn't have actual abuse or anything at home, and came back home to Utah. Met another young lady while I was managing her Burger King, and we got married, and she said I was too smart to manage the Burger King, had to get another job. And so I got a job at a company called Executive Excellence, which at the time was a division of the Covey Leadership Center before it merged with Franklin. So you talked about uh 97, 98. So I worked there for three months, became the number three salesperson within the organization. And that's only significant because the number, then the number one, two, and four and five salespeople had all been there for five or more years. And I was this young 18-year-old kid who was suddenly bringing in all this new revenue. And so renewals and subscriptions. And so then the merger between Franklin and Covey occurred. They became Franklin Covey. And the executive editor of the magazine, Ken Shelton, who is the self-prescribed ghostwriter for Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, was basically gifted the magazine by the late Stephen R. Covey as payment for that ghostwriting or ghost editing of Seven Habits. And so at that time, Ken came to me and he said, Hey, Mike, we publish all these great authors in our magazines. Why don't we start publishing their books? And as a young, naive 18-year-old, I'm like, yeah, let's do that. That sounds like a lot of fun. And so we did, and I failed miserably, but I learned everything that I could about setting up a publishing company from client acquisition to editing to distribution to PR and promotions, just learning the entirety of the thing. And one of the things that occurred was in getting distribution, I was able to get us out of a distributor called NBA, National Book Book Network. And our rep within the distributor, they had over a thousand publishers, and so you had reps that would represent 20 or 30 publishers at a time that would then take those publishers' books to the sales reps who would then take it to the retailers. Our rep was a legendary name in the book publishing industry. Her name was Miriam Bass. She was the first woman to be a buyer for a retail chain. A buyer is someone that makes the decision on how many copies of a book that a chain is going to carry. And but at the time I met her, she was the publisher rep for our company and also a publisher rep for another company out of Austin, Texas, called Bard Press. And so after working there in the publishing division for about a year, Miriam came to me and said, Hey, there's this guy, there's this public company out of Austin. Bard Press was looking for someone to come and run their marketing department. They just came off with this huge success with a book titled Nuts, South Westronian's Crazy Recipe for Success. And they'd like to interview you. And so Miriam had made the connection. So there's this young kid in Provo, Utah, who's smart and talented, maybe bring him in. So Ray Bard, the underbard press, interviewed me and he hired me. And the first thing on the job, Ray Bard said to me, Michael, we publishing business authors, where authors want more than anything else in the world is to be a New York Times bestselling author. What I want you to do is go figure out how the New York Times bestseller list works. And so then as a young 19-year-old, I'm like, yeah, I can do that. And so what I literally did, no joke, is I called the gentleman at the New York Times, John Wright, and said, Hey, I'm Mike Terra Work for Bard Press. Can you tell me how the bestsellerist works so we we can promote our books onto your list? And he laughed at me and said, no, but keep calling back and we'll we'll we'll stay friends. I called Jackie Blaze at USA Today, same conversation. Called Bob Hughes at Wall Street Journal, same conversation. And but like, cool, I started talking to those folks. And the first book I worked on for a Bard was a book titled The Wizard of Ads, actually, secret formulas of the Wizard of Ads by Roy H. Williams, who's known as The Wizard of Ads, owns the fourth largest ad agency in North America for buying radio. And based on the conversations I had at the bestseller list and working with Roy to leverage his platform, we were able to promote the book to number one on the Washington Journal and number three on the New York Times bestseller list right out of the gate. And so that first campaign gave me a lot of data information in terms of how the list functioned and worked, and I had the relationships that I was building out the list. And that became the first of 132 now consecutive New York Times, Washington Journal, USN Today, and Success Magazine bestsellers.

Reverse Engineering Bestseller Lists

Tom DuFore 6:01

That's amazing. Well, certainly getting to 132 consecutive bestsellers on one of these really premium or premier lists doesn't happen by accident. So I'd love for you to maybe share a little bit about your book that you wrote and maybe even some of the content, because that's what intrigued me to bring you on anyway. And then I found out about all these amazing other things you're doing here. Share a little bit of that story.

Why Culture Moves In Patterns

Michael Drew 6:26

I mentioned my first New York Times bestselling author, Roy Williams. Like I've worked with other people, Gary Keller and Ivan Meisner and Dave uh Linniger at Young Brands and a bunch of other folks. And Roy was my first bestselling author, and he became my marketing mentor. And she owns, like I said, the fourth largest ad agency in North America. And I moved from publishing ultimately after being in publishing for five years over to owning my own marketing agency, promoting books. We wanted to give our clients a competitive advantage, right? And so the best way to be able in marketing advertising, to be able to give your business owners a competitive advantage, is to be able to predict the future. Well, particularly we're not soothsayers, we're not religious folks that are, you know, somehow channeling from the universe some idea about the future. Rather, as marketers, we're more of scientists. And we know that in science, everything is patterns, right? Chaos theory states that their patterns are larger than the what the mind can comprehend. And uh it wasn't that we had supercomputers and we could actually start seeing those patterns like the weather and and and other things, right? And so we knowing that we said, well, it's not true in all science. There's got to be a pattern in the way that culture or society changes ideology, right? You can't be static all the time. It has to change. And marketing and advertising are always done in non-intimate environments, one to many, right? So non-intimate, you and I are having a conversation that's in intimate. Your audience are having a non-intimate engagement, although their their mirror neurons are firing and it feels intimate to them, it's not intimate, it's not intimate. To us, it's an intimate conversation. And so advertising, good advertising and marketing folks know exactly that. How do you take messaging into a non-intimate environment to get the mirror neurons to fire within the customer base to be able to emulate intimacy to be able to get them to be able to respond or react? And so when you're looking at that, it's not a one-to-one conversation like we're having, it's a one-to-many. And so what you're looking at then is cultural movements, movements of groups of people, not individuals. So it doesn't mean that we aren't individuals within the collective, but when we look at the data, we can see that the collective, the group, the whole, the culture moves from one ideology to another. Roy was talking to Dr. Nicholas Grant, who was in charge of the psychology department at the University of Texas in Austin, and he was saying, you know, it was 2002, going to 2003, and he said to Dr. Grant, you know, this feels like a lot like 1963, all over again only in reverse. And Dr. Grant said, Yeah, well, actually, there's some books you should go and read. Books by Faith Popcorn, The Pope Report, a book called The Title of Generations by Strauss and Howe, The Force Turing by Strauss and Howe, and a number of other books. And so um, Roy and I went out and we we read those books. Now, Roy is a strong evangelical Christian. And when we when he was reading the books, when I was reading the books, he noted that he was in directional agreement with the hypotheses that were being created within this content, but he disagreed with the exceptions that were made. So Strauss and Howe make exceptions for their cycles based on large events like the Civil War. We would note that that wouldn't make sense, that something like the Civil War should be reflective of a cultural ideology, not an exception to. And the other problem with a lot of the futurists of the day is that they were very North American-centric. They weren't Western society or Eastern society, they were American-centric. And what we know in science, and again, good marketers, good advertisers were were also data geeks, right? We know that you have to have enough data points. And so it takes about a thousand years of data to be able to really have an idea of how a group would work. So, as an example, your the work is Strauss and Howe, it goes back 300 years, right? So it's in it's incomplete, and it's also North America-centric. And so it it misses all of the other data. And so what we did is we came up with a hypothesis and we went out to disprove that hypothesis, which we want a good scientist does. And so the problem with Strauss and How is that they didn't go out to disprove it, they went out to prove that hypothesis. And so we went out to disprove that hypothesis. And the hypothesis was that society does move like a pendulum, and that we as human beings always take a good thing too far, right? We know that as marketers, psychology is a really big part of what we do. And we know that that is part of the human condition, that we always, if we find something good, we want more of that, more of that until we take that too far. And so what we we hypothesized was that there would be one ideology that would be taken too far, and then the response of the youth to that ideology would create a swing towards the other ideology until that thing went too far. And again, the youth stopped that. That's why we call a pendulum. And so what we said is we believe that there is a cycle of me and a cycle of we. And neither is good or bad. They're both good until taken too far. And so we look at what we call the tipping point, neither direction, where it's year zero. And it the cycle moves up. So let's say we're me. The values of a me are about individuality. It's about freedom and self-expression, doing and being who you want to be, believing that you can be bigger than what society says that you can be. And it swings up until it hits its zenith, at which point, when we start taking things too far, we look at a me cycle that where the individuals are pompous, they're fake, they're phony, they have taken the beauty of individuality and made it into something so fake that it's not believable. And the youth of society become the gravity that pulls it the other way. And the youth then become the momentum up into the we. Now, we is about community, it's about society, it's about doing what's best for society as a whole. In a me, it may be about going to the moon, but in a we, it's about going across as free and giving that poor homeless guy something to eat until we take we too far. And when you take we too far and you suffer the iniquities of that, then we uh we're a society that is highly regimented and highly conformed, and we attack the other people who don't agree with our value set. In fact, once we hit about 10 years up into the we to about 10 years down, so the middle 20, a microcycle of what we call witch hunts, because literally every witch hunt in the history of the world has occurred within a 10-year time frame around the zenith of a we. And so um literally, like we thought this would be a directional research that we we did, and we didn't realize how absolutely precise in groups human beings are. And so you've got the the the me versus the we. We are currently we're currently in a we. The we started in 2003. 2023 was the zenith, so we're currently in the middle, we're three years in the the downturn of the Wii, but we're still in the 20-year microcycle of the witch hunt. And we'll be moving down until we hit 2033, when we'll see alpha's emerge in literature and technology. 2038, we'll see alpha emerge in music, and then the youth that were in the minority in that downswing will hit the zenith and will start becoming the becoming the majority, the value set of the new me will become the the value set of the majority of Western society until, again, we take me too far. The the value of this for us is as business owners, as marketers, if we know where we are in the cycle, we know where we've been and where we're headed, we know what the values of our customer base and our employee base is going to be. We know what's going to be motivating and driving them. And that allows us to get out in front in terms of products, services, messaging, and other things uh in terms of understanding what how businesses run. Now, obviously, there's bigger cultural implications of that, but that was the reason and impetus for the research that we did.

Tom DuFore 14:35

Well, very interesting. Well, then certainly your findings seem applicable to helping figure out, okay, which books to publish or how to market and things to be talking about. So share a little bit about that.

Michael Drew 14:48

An example that I would that I would give is that as we moved into a me, we went from a plastic phoniness in the in the or as we moved into the we, we moved from a plastic phoniness in the previous me. So if you think about the zenith of the past me was 1983, right? So when when you think about 1980, you think about the 80s, they call it the plastic 80s. You think about the movie Wall Street, you think about it, it was kind of a plastic time frame. Michael Jackson had his biggest album in '83, December 83, actually, but it was 83 called Turler. You can think about, you know, that every king has to have his queen. And in 1983, uh, there's this woman who said that she was living in a material world and uh she is a material girl, right? You know, Madonna became successful at the zenith of that cycle. If you think about it from a principal development standpoint, Tony Robbins had his biggest hit in 1983, right? Teaching business people and professionals that they could be bigger and better than who they were, right? And 84 is when Seven Habits came out, and just a number of these things that you can think about that would be part of that me cycle happen around the around 83. Well, then as we start heading down, and you think about 10 years down, 10 years before the fitting point, it would have been 93. And 93, if you think back to 93, you'll think about American Online, which was the purveyor of the internet, contrary to what Al Gore said. You can think about the grunge movement, you can think about gangster rap, right? You could think about the fact that these folks are singing music about what it's like grunge was about growing up in middle America suburbs and how crappy life was. You can think about, you know, nirvana, you can think about nine-inch nails pre-hate machines from 1988. That's kind of a purveyor of that. You can think about Jeremy by Pearl Jam, which was 94, all right. Kind of talking about things that we would see with Columbine and other things later on, but just kind of talking about like what it was like growing up in in the suburbs when you didn't get the attention as a kid. And then of course, you think about Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre and Ice Cube and Ice T and MWA and all those bands from the late 80s into the early 90s, those rap groups, and they're talking about the same thing, only what it's like growing up in the ghetto, right? So it's about the the values of a we, which is what the the youth is talking about in from 2003 on. It's about being real, Ron, relevant. It's like, what is it like growing up in these places? So the the youth of society is rejecting the pretense of the me as we move towards the we, and you can start to see these values take place. Now, the pre when we move from the previous we to the last me, so the last me started in 63, we uh the we last we before that was 2363. You could see this same kind of movement. So as we move from from that me into the the we and the value set of the we things that we would do in marketing, direct response marketing, promoting that we're that we can make you bigger, better than who you are, and we're gonna we're gonna sell you on on sales funnels and all of these things that that that were part of that direct response and me mindset. This thing started working less and less well. Some of the things that Roy and I started doing with our clients is we replace things like UVP, uh unique value propositions with statements of what we stand against. UVPs are really good for a me cycle when it's about what makes you unique in a Wii, it's not about what makes you unique, it's what values do you share with other people. Specifically, in a Wii cycle, we we build groups and communities based on what we stand against. And if you think about that, like Netflix put Hollywood Video and Blockbuster Video out of business through marketing that was all about what they stood against. So before they had Netflix.com, they used to mail you your DVD in the mail. And their their promotion was we stand against late fees. We stand against waiting to watch the movie that you want to watch, right? Because that's what everybody had the experience of with Block Western Hollywood. Like you go in, you couldn't get the movie. And so one of the things that we started doing was replacing movie peas with statements of what we stand against. And so we saw on average an increase in gross revenue for all of our clients, Royce and mine, by 26%, just doing that one thing. Because when you change the it from a using teacher statement of what you stand against, that then permeates throughout the company culture, permeates throughout the messaging within your marketing and advertising and all of those things. So these are just some examples of how to leverage one ideology over another to be able to give a competitive advantage.

The Me Cycle And We Cycle

Tom DuFore 19:31

That's brilliant. And hopefully the business leader that's tuning into this, I mean, this was like a mini master class here on how to be thinking of going up a level to really be thinking from a bigger picture, say culturally, how are things going and how should that messaging be applying, not just looking within your industry or amongst your direct competitors or businesses that might be similar to yours. So this is brilliant, brilliant information. And thank you for sharing that. And real quick, what's the name of the book and titles for someone who says, That was great. I'd love to dig more into that. Perfect. And we'll make sure we link that in the show notes as well. You do this book, you do this research, and you have the 132 best sellers list books, which is an impressive number when someone hears that, at least to me it is, when I hear that. And so talk maybe how you use that information or applied it to your own business growth or the success you've found.

Messaging That Wins In A We Era

Michael Drew 20:33

So I guess back up. One of the things that happened when I left being a publisher to try my own marketing agency is that I had I had a kind of a rude awakening. The first year out, I put seven books out of seven books on the New York Times bestsellers list. But as a publisher, my my roles and responsibilities were exclusively around the book and book promotion and I and the industry stuff, and I didn't worry about anything else. What I understood, but didn't really think about when I started my own agency was that my clients weren't hiring me to be a bestseller. They had a belief that if they were a New York Times bestseller, that it would do some things for their business, whatever that is for their business. And that something isn't something that I had to worry about as a publisher. My objective was how do we sell enough books within the time frame, leveraging the author's platform, and to have them and have those reported and counted as the bestsellers. Like that was the exclusive thought process that I had. Well, in the first year after I left being a publisher, I put seven books on the bestsellers, and a couple of my clients weren't happy with me. Not because I didn't deliver exactly what I said I would deliver, but because I failed to understand that what they wanted was something different than what I what I had promised them, which was the growth of their business and their platform. And so what that had me realize is that, and what I had to do is become a student of thought leadership platforms, business platforms. And so I became a very close student part. That was the research on pendulum that Roy and I did, pendulum theory, because that gave me models and systems for the cycle that we're in, which will be different when we're in a meeting, to contextualize how to build platforms. Because a platform, at the end of the day, for a thought leader is about building community, it's about building groups. It's not direct response selling. It's not about having a hot commodity that people want, having a better product. It's about selling ideas. And ideas are about relationships. Like what's the difference between Remax and Keller Williams have worked with the CEO of both? They have different values and different ways of presenting. They're both selling in real estate. They're both helping you sell a house, right? So they're obsessively doing the same thing. Why, why go with one over another? Because their values are different. How they present it is different. How you build a relationship with either is going to be different, right? And so when you build a platform, right, you're looking at how do you build community around the ideology of that thought leader. And so I had to become a real student of building movements, right? Which again is what pendulum is about. It's about understanding move uh cultural movements and how to be able to work within and leverage to ride the waves, if you will, of what's going on and to get out a little bit ahead of the curb curb on that. And so when I did that and I started researching and understanding platforms, what I had to do was make sure that the book objectives were met while meeting the business objectives. And so ultimately, what my agency does is 58% of what we do every year is run best-seller campaigns. Most of what we do is build platforms, right? The book is just the best-seller campaign is just the sexiest thing that we do, but it's all aimed back at the business objective of the entrepreneur or business owner themselves. And so part of what we do is learn and understand the industry of the client, learn and understand the business, learn and understand the the client base. And then yeah, penicillum becomes leverageable because we can now take what we know from that business, and that industry, and what we know where uh about where we are culturally within society, and then be able to adjust from there. It's a little harder actually to you would think it'd be easier to start off off new and leverage pendulum stuff. The the benefit of having a pre-existing business is that there's data, right? So we can say we know what's at what's been working, we can see what's not working, and we can then take the knowledge base about pendulum and then be able to test and refine and optimize an existing business because the data and the audience exist to be able to be able to do that.

Tom DuFore 24:41

Wonderful. Well, Michael, someone that ends up listening into this is likely to say, you know, I love what you're saying here. Maybe I'm interested. How can I learn some more? So, how can they get connected with you and learn about what you're doing?

Michael Drew 24:53

From a publishing standpoint, I've got two websites. Somebody who's got a big enough audience platform to want to be a New York Times US of the Day success bestseller would go to promoteabook.com. Like I try to keep things simple, straightforward, promoteabook.com. PRO M O T E A B O K that C L M. If you're a business owner, startup, entrepreneur, if you're less than about three million in gross revenue and you want to use a book and write a book to build your platform, but you're not quiet at the point where you can run a bestseller campaign. We've got bookretreat.com. I've been able to work out a model where I could extract a book out of anybody and help them build a platform or or or grow their platform, leveraging that book. We do a retreat in Guatemala a couple times a year. We also do what I call platform in a box. So bookretreat.com goes into that. If somebody is really interested in platform building, which is bigger than either of those things, then they can email me at michael at promote a book.com. M-I-C-H-A-E-L at P R O M O T E A B O O K dot C O M.

Tom DuFore 25:56

Excellent. Well, thank you, Michael. And this is a great time in the show. And we make a little transition and we ask every guest the same four questions before they go. And the first question we ask is have you had a miss or two on your journey and something you learned from it?

Michael Drew 26:08

I mentioned it at the at the beginning. My my first miss wasn't a miss, was when I first started opt and publishing, right? I didn't know what I didn't know. And I had to go figure it out, right? So one of the things that I learned is that that success happens through failure, right? So you've got to you've got to go out and try and fail and try and fail and try and fail until you figure it out. So one of the learnings that I have was how to fail efficient, uh, efficiently. One of my clients, Rich Hirstensen, wrote a book called The Zigzag Principle. Highly recommend that, that talks about how to model out failing efficiently. So that would be the first thing that I failed at, so to speak. I would say it was was failing my way to success. The other is to not give up. A few years ago, three years ago actually, the Wall Street Journal used to have a bestseller list and they stopped publishing that list. And it was rep it represented about 80% of my revenue. And so instead of like, you know, trying and giving up, it's like, cool, there is now a hole in the market space for a business publication to have a bestseller list. And so Bob Hughes, who worked for me, used to compile from 1998 till 2008 the Wall Street Journal Bestsellers list. And then when BookScan took over at Wall Street Journal, he came to work for me. And so we had experience not only running bestseller campaigns, but actually compiling the list. And so we started reaching out to different business publications and finally settled in and worked with Success Magazine to be able to launch a bestseller bestseller list with Success Magazine and help them get that launched. And so we're actually helping build their platform, the platform at Success, because now they're the premier business list in the in the industry. And so, you know, there's a point of if the world gives you lemonade, or gives you lemon, make lemonade. Actually, there in um nature, there's no such thing as a lemon. Lemons are mad-made, so it's not quite right. But the idea of this life gives you lemonade, make or give you l gives you lemons, make lemonade, is what we did. We're like, cool, there's a problem here. Let's go figure out how to solve that. And we are able to solve it and be able to build something bigger than what we had uh had before.

Tom DuFore 28:11

Oh, fantastic. Well, thanks for sharing. And let's talk about the other side a make or two, a highlight.

Michael Drew 28:16

I mean, certainly my own book uh would be a highlight of my career with Pendulum and making it a bestseller and all of that. I think I I mentioned the work we I did on Stuart Formulas, the wizard ads, at the beginning of my career, that opened me up and and my my uh tree as a business owner. Roy Williams said to me, oh, I think it was good 15 years ago now, we were in New York City at Book Expo America, and we were, which is the largest trade or used to be the largest book trade conference in the world. It's not been going since um the pandemic, but we were walking the streets after the expo, and he said to me, Michael, the uh winners and the losers in life are determined when the teams are picked. There are two teams that are searching for your success. The first team are those that select you to be on their team, and the second are those you select to be on your team. And I would say that I've been chosen by the most brilliant minds of the uh the most brilliant men and women on the planet to be on their team. And I have I feel like I've done a really good job of putting together a great team of brilliant minds uh as well. So I think that that the work I did with uh Ray Bard and Roy Williams at the beginning of my career, Ivan Meisner, who's my second best-selling author, folks like that really mentored me and and gave me an opportunity. I think it was a huge win to be able to go and serve them at the beginning of my career. And then I've had some pretty big, you know, books. I did Power Records, Secrets of the Millionaire Mind. I've done The One Thing by Gary Keller, Marshall Goldsmith's What Got You Here, Won't Get You There. Of the top 10 bestselling business books of all time, I've got four of them. So, you know, I feel pretty good about the work that that we've done. We've sold over 60 million books. We've helped our clients collectively generate more more than several hundred billion dollars in new revenue. We've we've done some pretty good work. I like to observe that if we sold 60 million books and the average book takes four hours to read, we've had the we've impacted people to the tune of 240 million hours, which boils down to over 30,000 years of human time in books in books read. So that's where I feel really good about the work that we've done.

Tom DuFore 30:21

That's fantastic. And let's talk about a multiplier to multiply yourself professionally, personally, or organizations you've run.

Bestsellers Versus Real Business Growth

Michael Drew 30:30

So I think the the greatest multiplier that that I would have is the idea of focusing on on relationships. So for for my business, I deal with high-quality folks, and all of my clients come in from referral or from speaking on stage. So if I'm on a stage like this or a live stage, which I do quite a bit, then it's me talking one to many. And that is a multiplier of me sharing my voice, right? A platform literally means something that you stand on to have your voice heard above the crowd. Like it historically, a stage would be a platform. Politicians and missionaries would stand on soap boxes to stand above the crowd to be able to have their voice heard over the crowd. And so for me, that concept of platform is the multiplier. And so whether it the platform is working with relationships that I have in supporting them and serving them so that they can share what I've done with other folks at their level, or being able to build my own platform and speak on stages, virtual or or real world stages, has allowed me to amplify my voice.

Tom DuFore 31:40

And the final question we ask every guest, Michael, is what does success mean to you? One of my clients' name is Garrett Government.

Michael Drew 31:47

He was actually my first client in Utah. He um has a philosophy that he calls soul purpose. Garrett uh is a financial advisor who actually had a has had a second career as a financial advisor and comedian. He did a comedy tour. He's got a he's got a show on Amazon Prime and it's kind of fun. Anyway, he's got a philosophy for financial investment that we call soul purpose. And the idea is that you should only invest in businesses that are reflective of your sole purpose because if you're investing in a company that is reflective of your sole purpose, then you'll it'll be close enough to you and to the things that you know and desire that you'll pay attention to know if they've got the right CEO, the right marketing plan, the right financials, the right operations, the right production, whatever it is. And if you don't, uh if it's not part of your sole purpose, you'll not pay close enough attention to not potentially lose a lot of money on that investment. I agree with with Jared in the way he applies it, and I apply it a little bit differently. I believe that we're all born with a sole purpose, that that that sole purpose is not given to us for ourselves, but for our service of our fellow man. So my sort, my sole purpose is not given to me for me, it's given to me to serve you and to serve your audience and to serve my clients. And and so I believe that we're all born with that sole purpose. And my sole purpose is to help people find, test, and amplify their voice. And that's what I'm what I'm here to do. And and I I've really been able to do that with my my clients, but my the way that I define success is I I want to be able to impact the world in a measurable way. And we know if you want to make a change in any organization, doesn't matter the size of it, that you need to get 3% of that organization to change and to buy into that change. Just 3%. You don't need to change more than that, because that 3% who are bought into that change will sell it to the rest of the organization. So my objective is to impact 3% of the world through helping my clients sell any product or service or event at 997 to USD or more. Right. And so that means about 460 million people worldwide to be able to accomplish that goal. We're certainly well on our way to being able to accomplish it. So that's how I define success for me.

Tom DuFore 33:58

Well, and as we bring this to a close, is there anything you were hoping to share or get across that you haven't had a chance to yet?

Michael Drew 34:04

I I think just harkening back to what Roy said, which is that your success is dictated and predicated upon your two teams. Whose team are you on, right? And secondly, who are you putting on your team? Make sure that you're on the right people's teams and that you are being put on, or that you've got the right people on your team.

Rapid-Fire Lessons Plus Definitions Of Success

Takeaways And How To Connect

Tom DuFore 34:28

Michael, thank you so much for a fantastic interview. And let's go ahead and jump into today's three key takeaways. So takeaway number one is when Michael talked about his book, Pendulum, and how he and his co-author found two cycles that culture and business and all of these patterns tend to flow through: the cycle of me and the cycle of we, and that these are 40-year swings each way, and that it's an 80-year cycle in total. Takeaway number two is when we think of these cycles, what does that value mean to you as a leader or for marketers? And to me, what it said is you've got to be making adjustments based on which cycle you're in. And he talked about how he made adjustments for his clients in the marketing business he ran and saw a 26% increase in revenue. And he said that the unique value proposition is great for a me cycle. And then being clear on what you stand against is what is great in a we cycle. Takeaway number three is when he talked about it being so critical that he found its sole purpose, and it's to serve others through helping them find, test, and amplify their voice. Thought that was a great takeaway. And now it's time for today's win-win. So today's win-win is when he talked about a make that he had, and he mentioned it again right before we ended the episode. And he said, there are two teams in your life that set you up for success in the direction you head. And he said, the team who chooses you, the people who choose you to be on their team, and the second are the people you choose to be on your team. So I thought that was an interesting way to look at it. Whose team are you on? Whose team are you a part of, maybe for you to reflect and think about? And then who are you choosing to be on your team that you're leading? I thought that was just a great way to close out the episode. And so that's our episode today, folks. Please make sure you subscribe to the podcast and give us a review. And remember, if you or anyone you know might be ready to franchise their business or take their franchise company to the next level, please connect with us at BigSkyFranchise Team.com where you can schedule your free, no obligation consultation. Thanks for tuning in, and we look forward to having you back next week.