70: How You Can Grow Your Businesses With THIS Podcast Interview Strategy
Behind Their Success: Ep 70
Tom: [00:00:00] You think about how you got your best clients, your best team members. Heck how I got my bride, right? My wife, 15 years ago, I didn't do the perfect funnel and Facebook ads. No, it was from a personal introduction and then conversations. Hello everybody. Welcome
Paden: to behind their success podcast. Today we have on Tom Schwab.
Tom is the godfather of podcast interview marketing with over a decade of experience, helping brands from fortune five hundreds to top consultants. Tom knows how to turn conversations into conversions. He believes you are not one subtle way, but one conversation in your business. Tom, welcome on
Tom: behind their success.
Payton, thank you so much for having me. And it's when you say the godfather of podcast interview marketing. I just have to smile. I think that means I've got a lot of gray hair and a lot of mistakes that I have made and teach to other people. We talk about funnels and [00:01:00] everything like that, but more than anything today, I think we're all one conversation away.
Right? You think about how you got your best clients, your best team members. Heck, how I got my bride, right? My wife, 15 years ago, I didn't do the perfect funnel and Facebook ads. No, it was from a personal introduction and then conversations. Yeah.
Paden: Yeah. I love that. So Tom, tell us a little bit about your business and how all that works.
Tom: A lot of it came from inbound marketing. So my last company was HubSpot's first e commerce case study. I'm an engineer by degree, so I'm always looking for systems and processes. So as I built that last company up, people would say, well, how'd you do it? I'd say guest blogs, but they don't work anymore. So this was probably about 2013, 2014.
And I started to think, huh, I bet you could use podcast interviews the same way, right? Get into that audience, get the know and trust. And so we started to [00:02:00] test it. It worked really well. I did a cheesy little PDF in a course that I never took out of beta because people said, I just want you to do it. So we started interview ballet in 2015.
It's hard to believe it's been 10 years. And that first few years I give my elevator pitch. And people would stop at the end and say, what's a podcast, right? And it's really started to take off about 2019 with podcasting. And now it's, it's not so much about the medium. It's about the message, right? This idea that most businesses know if they get introduced by the right person.
If they get to talk with the right people that they can convert business, right? That used to be done at the country club, at the rotary club, flying from place to place. Now you can do it on targeted podcast interviews. Yeah.
Paden: Yeah. That's great. Yeah. And that's obviously what you're talking about there is the idea of what got me into doing my [00:03:00] podcast.
I didn't really necessarily have a whole lot of plans for it other than some people I knew and respect that were already doing it and doing it at a high level. And I'm like, well, They're doing it. Maybe I should, I mean, not, not much more went into that. I mean, it is great market. It is great for positioning me as an authority.
And it's a lot of things that other entrepreneurs definitely could take it.
Tom: Yeah. One of the things I always ask clients when they come to us, it's like, why do you want to do podcast interviews? And because just doing the interview, that's an ego thing. People want the results from it. And I'll never forget one client came to us and he's like, because.
I invest like Warren Buffett and I think I should market like Warren Buffett. And I'm like, what does that mean? And he's like, well, Warren Buffett said he would never invest in anything that he didn't understand. And he's at the same way in marketing. He said, for decades, I've been chasing this elusive SEO algorithm and I've got to do [00:04:00] this.
I've got to do that. He's like, I never understood it. I just kept throwing money at it and it didn't work and he's now, he's, I want to do things that I understand, right? I know that when I talk to clients that are prospects, they become clients. So he's like, I understand podcast interview marketing.
That's why I want to invest in it.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah. And for a person like me, that's in a tax, wealth, profession, services space, that's yeah, it's perfect for me, right? When people look, I, I'm the same way. I feel like I can get current prospect, talk to him. I can build trust and rapport and a lot of times we end up working together.
And the podcast platform, right, just allows me to do that at scale and build an audience. And every week they'd show up and it's that constant top of mind, right, kind of marketing.
Tom: It's also the trust over attention, right? Because as a high level CPA, right, it's not like you can just compare everybody, right?
It's not like buying a computer where it's okay. What are the [00:05:00] products? What are the specifications? No, it's a trust thing. It's like, I trust them. I believe in them. We have common values. Those are the things that bring people in. Products are sold, but services are bought. And if somebody will just hire a CPA because they saw a Facebook ad or their picture on a bus as it went by, right?
They're probably going to hire the next one with the next bus that goes by. And it's the idea that we don't want just more leads. We're optimizing for profits and that comes from giving value to the right people.
Paden: Yeah, it's where you have the ability to really target through like podcasting and build that relationship, not transactional
Tom: relationships.
Paden: And like in my space, that's huge. I can get a lot of transactional clients if I want to, but that's not necessarily what you want a business on. And it's not really that fun to work or for me, it's not, and not that satisfying. I'd rather have that loan. Long term relationship.
Tom: Yeah. There's a difference [00:06:00] between chasing a transaction and building a business.
Right. And businesses are built on long term client value. And every time I get an email that says, we can help you get 200 leads this month. And it's like, I don't want 200 leads, right? I want five good ones. Well, it's this idea that I don't want it. This big sales funnel, give me a sales cylinder. If I need three clients this quarter.
Give me four great people that I can talk to and I'll close three out of four. I don't want to have to hire seven sales development reps to, to deal with all of these leads that it wastes their time and my time.
Paden: Can you
Tom: give
Paden: us this kind of high overview of just your journey and what you've been through?
Tom: I was an engineer by degree, graduated from the U S Naval Academy, ran nuclear power plants, right? I learned systems and processes and operations, and then I went and worked in the corporate world. Sold, had my own distributorship [00:07:00] and I sort of learned marketing more by doing than anything. So later in life, I went back and I got my MBA in marketing.
It was one of those things where I wanted to do it. I honestly learned more from my grandfather about marketing than the MBA. And it was, he could have told me that marketing was about having a conversation with people that could be your ideal clients. And so I forgot that and got too excited with the tools, the shiny objects, the metrics, the, the analytics.
So over the gray hair that I have, there's a lot of. Mistakes that I made, and I try to publicly share them because in the Navy, we used to joke that you shouldn't learn from your own mistakes. That's painful. Learn from somebody else's, but like an example was early on in my last business, I called it my pay per click addiction because it was just like a drug addiction, right?
I'll throw in [00:08:00] 10 today and Oh, boo, great. I feel great the next day because I got a customer or a lead, right? Well, right? Well, wrong. The next day, if you want a bigger hit, you got to throw more money in that. And it always just like everything, it, it, the pie isn't as high anymore. Things get more competitive and ads and SEO, whatever it is.
And so all of a sudden you start throwing more and more money to it, getting less and less out of it. But if you realize if you go cold Turkey, man, that withdrawal is going to be really bad.
Paden: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah. I love it. Love a couple of points you're making there. On the ad spend thing, you talk about that, it's you're right.
Like ad costs, just like by definition, long term have to go up and you're getting more and more crowded. If you're just building a business, all transactional hits like that, and not necessarily building brand, you're right. You're stuck in that warfare and you're stuck in that low fighting war for not being able to really differentiate yourself.
You're [00:09:00] not gonna be able to do premium pricing, all those kinds of things. Cause you never take the time to actually build a business, a brand that means it and you're just.
Tom: Yeah. I heard somebody refer to it as there's two types of businesses. There's missionaries and mercenaries, right? You're a missionary, right?
Yeah. Yeah. You were there at the beginning. You'll be there at the end. You love what you do, who you serve, the accounting, all the rest of that. That's who you are. Right. And then you've got the mercenaries that will come into any market while there's profits there. But as soon as the profits go down, they leave also.
And you can see that. And, uh, a client made this comment and I thought it was perfect. He's like, you know, I've been doing this for a long time. I'm going to keep doing it for a long time. I'm not like the people. Two years ago that were a DEI expert, then they became a crypto expert. And now they're an AI expert, right?
They're just chasing the money, the transactions. And it's like, [00:10:00] no, the missionaries are the ones that have the gray hair, have the stories, know the history, and it'll be there for the future.
Paden: Yeah. And it's, I love the analogy there. And you talk about the missionary and the missionaries are the ones that have been through all the ups and downs of the markets for all the years.
What I thought of was like. Real estate agents. You see that all the time, right? Like the market gets great and you know, your aunt becomes a realtor and everybody else becomes a realtor. And then just like in 2021, everybody becomes a realtor. The market goes out and all the realtors that joined in the last two years all burn out of the, out of the market.
And you're just left with those same people that have been through those real estate markets over and over that survived those. And they're the ones with the experience and the value and the ability to actually bring a lot of value to.
Tom: I, I the, what I thought you were going for. The other one is, uh, in finance, right?
If all you've ever seen is a bull market. Everybody's smart, right? Everybody's a genius in a bull market, right? I want to [00:11:00] see the guy that has, or gal, that has, has done it through the bear markets, has done it through the recessions, right? Tell me what I don't know. And so with that, it's like, I love podcasts just because.
I learned from other people and it's a, it's a great way. I think a lot of business owners are audible learners, right? We're on the go. The studies say that 70 percent of podcasts are listened to sped up. We got lots of things to do. Yeah.
Paden: A hundred percent. I was, yeah, I'm a guy that's at least one and a half on all my podcast books.
Um, the funny thing is. Jokingly, I was reading a book a year or two ago and it was on like 2x speed. And it was the Ruthless Elimination of Hurry was the book I was reading on. I shared that. Yeah, no, I get the iron. That's awesome. The other thing you're talking about is a lot of people learn from you don't want to learn from your own mistakes and learn from others.
Yeah, I, the quote is like a fool. A fool never learns. A smart person learns from their own mistakes and a wise [00:12:00] person actually learns from other people's mistakes. Right. That's the ability to. Actually, be humble enough, look around, ask questions, and make sure you're not running into the same walls as them.
Tom: If you want to call it God or life, whatever, they're very just, we'll keep giving you the test until you pass it. Yeah. So it's like, you've got to learn and move on. And also I look at it as like, there's cycles, right? All right. You can say, what did we learn in the last recession? How am I going to apply that this recession?
Right. So it's like trying to prepare for those and not just driving in the rearview mirror of what was working. But hey, what, what has changed in the world now, where do we need to go? And I think today with AI and heck, even some of the things that are happening, happening on the political side, right?
We're seeing as much change, I believe, as we did. In during the COVID times, right? I think AI is changing the world faster than anybody knows. And we'll [00:13:00] only look back just to wow.
Paden: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And I'll like, you know, I really started getting into, obviously getting into the AI space, but like learning about it, playing with it, say about two years now and.
Yeah, the first time somebody sees chat GP, GPT is like the first time they're like, Oh my God, I didn't realize it does this, you know, to me, it always amazes me how long it does take like business and humanity to like start implementing that stuff in their daily lives, like still today. Very few people actually interact with AI, but now at this point, it's getting to, you know, it's on all your Apple iPhones.
It's on every, you know, very soon, everybody's going to be interacting with it constant.
Tom: Yeah. The data shows that 10 percent of searches today are done on. AI with chat, GPT, right? I'm a
Paden: hundred percent. All my searches. I don't Google anything.
Tom: And Google is losing that, right? And still there's people talking about, well, SEO, right?
We've got to do more on SEO. Well, guaranteed, right? If you're [00:14:00] number one on search engine. That means you're at the bottom of the page because even Google is showing AI and paid ads then down there. And I think it's almost like the yellow pages of trying to optimize for SEO. It's like that was yesterday, not tomorrow.
And so a lot of our clients are talking about LMO, a large language machine optimization. What can you do to make. ChatGPT, your best referral source.
Yeah.
Paden: Yeah. And the, you know, the amazing enough, a lot of it is creating content. Yes.
Tom: And
Paden: I realized here a couple of months ago when I started asking perplexities, typically the AI tool I use and asking it about me.
And now that I've done enough podcast interviews and put all this content out there on the internet. It knows so much about what it does, Mike, you can ask it questions about me. And I'm like, wow, that was a pretty
Tom: good answer. It's so interesting. And we always hypothesized on it. We, we work at the company agent AI and they're doing a lot with this.
And we [00:15:00] started to see summer of 2024 where interview valet was getting referrals from chat GPT, right? We'd ask a prospect. How'd you find out about us? And they'd say, well, chat GPT recommended. Yeah. And then we started to hear from clients and agent AI, they told us that they believed it was due to share a voice, right?
How much is people talking about you as opposed to others and then sentiment, right? Is it positive, neutral, or negative? And then in November of 2024, chat GPT started to show where they were getting the sources, right? You can click and it's going to be Wikipedia. Amazon, if you've got a book, your own website, and then Peyton, like you said, it's long form, collaborative content.
That's what it loves because they realize you and I talking here.
It's
real. This isn't AI rehashed. Yeah.
Paden: Yeah. I get so much content. They can actually learn from this whole, yeah, long form conversation. Yeah. [00:16:00] It's. And that's, there's some of that stuff is just trying to think about like where any of that is going in the future.
It's, it's, it's mind boggling really to think about all about a lot of that. And you combine that with blockchain and whip three stuff. And it's like, I have three young kids. 30 years from now, we probably can't even describe what
Tom: there's a lot of problems in the world, but I still believe there's no better time to be alive, right?
What, what we're talking in right now, relatively free and 10 years ago, president of the United States didn't have this. We get frustrated now because the internet connection on the plane to AI is slow. Yeah, not that it doesn't work.
Paden: It's just, it takes like three seconds. That's nuts. And you're right. And I hear a lot of people talk about, yeah, AI and all these different things, changes, of course, you talk about the political landscape is, yeah, I mean, every day there seems to be some major news story of something that's going on.
I'm too, I'm optimistic. I really think, yeah, we got [00:17:00] unreal problems, but I see technology is going to come in and save the day like it always does. And humanity, usually they mess up a ton of stuff, but we usually eventually.
Tom: And I'm excited for, if you want to call it the democratization of everything.
Paden: Yeah. With my blockchain and there's so much stuff there. Yeah.
Tom: Even from the standpoint of here, I'm in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I used to have to say, well. You know, I could reach so many more people if I lived in Chicago or New York or something. It's like, no, no matter what market you're in, you can do this.
And then the other thing that I think is changing really quickly, it used to be people could buy attention, right? So you had all of these influencers that everybody paid attention to, and now it's just noise. So I think it's the practitioners That people are listening to, right? The influencers might get the attention, but the practitioners are getting the trust and they're the ones that are getting the business.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ever. I don't know if you ever [00:18:00] listen to Alex Ramos. He talk a lot. Yeah. Business guy. But yeah, he talks about, you know, two different type of like content creators. There's like entertainers and then there's educators. Entertainers certainly are going to have the much bigger following, the much bigger, uh, presence because well, they reach a lot more and you know, a lot more people are interested in, in entertainment, just generally whatever specific thing you're talking about.
Uh, but you're right. Like the, the educators have probably much, much smaller audience, but with that, they are actually able to monetize that. And like a person like me, yeah, I build an audience, but I really need like a hundred great customers. And that's really it. And so like being able to message and be very specific and finding those hundred great customer is what I'm trying.
Tom: Yeah. And it's interesting. It's not that you have to have a huge number of followers in order to monetize it or a huge amount of traffic. Uh, it was interesting HubSpot recently came out and said the traffic on their blogs is just [00:19:00] down drastically. And lots of people are seeing that, right. Just because their traffic is down, their stock price still went up.
Right. Because their profits are going up. They're not making it off of clicks and page views, right? It's just they're, they're following the right metric, which is the profits. They're not optimizing their company for views and clicks.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah. Those are vanities, right? Vanity metrics, right? And it's obviously everything being equal, a bigger audience would be better than a smaller audience, but.
Yeah. There's plenty of people making seven plus figures on the internet that have 200 followers and you know, every one of the posts gets likes because they are speaking to a very specific niche.
Tom: And you talk about learning from your mistakes. I remember early on, I was on a podcast and at that time it was the biggest podcast that I'd ever been on.
It had like 40, 000 downloads per episode. Right. And I went on there. I think I got three or four leads from it. Huge audience, [00:20:00] not my audience. And they were more aspirational entrepreneurs, right? They wanted to know how to make six figures in six seconds with six hacks. Shortly, shortly after I'm on another podcast and the host.
Tells me I get a hundred downloads per episode and I'm like, that's okay. I'm here. I think it's a great audience, right? Half of that audience became leads. And I think a third of them became clients, right? And it's this idea of, do we want to go fishing in the ocean? Because there's a lot of fish there. Or if I can show you where there's a.
Barrel of fish that you could just go over and pick them out of there. It's like one sounds a whole lot easier to me.
Paden: Yeah. I love that analogy. Uh, you know, earlier you were talking about Warren Buffett. I, I'm actually a bigger fan of his right hand man, Charlie Munger rest in peace, but he talks about anything I invest in.
I want to be like a fish in a barrel, but I want to drain the barrel of the water first. [00:21:00] Nice. And the whole idea of that is like, play games. You have. Outsize advantages, right? Like you, you should be playing games that you know how to win and win, win big. And a lot of his philosophy was like where he made a lot of mistakes is when he had those gray arts.
And they see, he would say that I didn't swim big enough at it. Right. It's, but it's finding that they would, people like Warren Buffett and Charlie, they will sit on the sidelines for years, piling up money. And that's what Warren's doing currently. He has hundreds of billions of dollars in cash sitting around waiting for the next market to explode.
And they set their weight for that fastball pitch right down the middle. And then they take that big swing. They act bold in those situations. And that's how it
Tom: is. That's a great analogy there too, of picking the game you want to play in. You have all the
Paden: advantages at. Yeah.
Tom: Yeah. If you're four foot 10, don't go into the NBA, but you could make a fortune as a jockey, right?
Yeah. Or as a
Paden: limbo person.
Tom: Yeah. It's [00:22:00] something like that. And it's the same way, like in, in marketing where people are like, well, I'm going to outspend my biggest competitor on SEO or paid ads or something like that. It's like, good luck. Right. Or me, I'm going to be a tick tock influencer, right? I've looked in the mirror.
I am not somebody you want to see, you know, TikTok dance, but I can compete against any of the big agencies because I can talk directly to the client, right? They can get to know, like, and trust me. So I think it's using your, your unique advantages there to play the game that you can win.
Paden: Are you looking for a new tax experience?
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I'm Peyton Squires. I'm a CPA and owner of WR Tax [00:23:00] Planner. We work alongside entrepreneurs and high income earners, helping them pay the least amount of income taxes, both legally and ethically. We have saved our clients hundreds of thousands of dollars through specific strategies, and we guarantee we can find multiple tax saving strategies that your current tax preparer hasn't.
If that interests you, head on over to the contact page at paydonsquires. com. There you can fill out a contact form and get a call book to see what it would look like to have WR tax preparers on your team. Question for you, Tom, um, you know, kind of looking back over your career. The definition of success, like how would you say that your definition of success has maybe evolved through your career?
Tom: I wish I would have enjoyed the process as I was going. It was always, I'll be a success when, right? And you know, uh, where you are at 30 is more than what you have ever dreamed of at 20, right? [00:24:00] And it's still at 30, it's like, well, I'm not there yet, right? With the business, right? That, that first time you make the first sale, you're so excited, but then it wears off.
You hit a million and it's like, well, yeah, I'm not a, uh, a unicorn now. Something like that. So I think enjoying it and celebrating the wins as I went. Uh, a friend of mine, a fellow entrepreneur, uh, we were friends since high school and all of a sudden he got cancer of the bile ducts, same thing that Walter Payton had years ago.
And you know, he got sick between Christmas and New Year's and he was gone by St. Patrick's day. We never know when the end line is, right? So don't wait till the end line to finish. And that's one of the things that I've been trying to do the closer I get to the end line. Hint, we're all getting closer to the end line.
So that's what I'm trying to do. And especially to set the example for our team or our clients, my [00:25:00] title is chief evangelist officer. Right. It's CEO, but I've got friends that are CEOs of publicly traded companies. I do not do the same job, right. And I just look at it as my job is to evangelize for the category for our company and for our clients.
Yeah.
Paden: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's yeah. That's great. So another interesting question for you and well, just kind of talking about, they're just kind of enjoying the ride, you know, I'm, I'm the same way. I'm getting into my late thirties, forties, I'm going up on me quick and yeah, I mean, I think we're, I would say where I've been the, I would say the worst ad in my kind of career.
Yeah, I've done great. I've grown businesses and fought and done a lot of stuff there. It's not enjoying the ride, right? I know I could have experienced a whole lot more joy in the process. Like you can be joyful and successful at the same time, right? Like, doesn't it have to be this grind and it's like, Hey, I'm going to take this all on and that kind of feeling.
And I spent way too much time in that type of [00:26:00] mindset. I had a great guest on here on a while back and he's like, you know, making money should be super boring. You should get your business set up, making money should be boring. And then you go have all your adventure and fun and the rest of your life, right?
Like your business set up so great that it's boring and printing money. And then you can go have your adventure in your other life, because many entrepreneurs, they get all their excitement and stuff from their business. Gyrating and doing all this wild stuff and creating chaos. And cause they're so addicted to a lot of that stuff.
Tom: I had a friend that we used to quit to each other, right? Cause when you, when you signed the front of the check, it's like, you can't quit. Right. There's nobody to quit to complain to. So it was, it seemed about, you know, twice a year, right. It was that day that accounts receivable was high and taxes were due, and you can't complain to your team, you can't complain to your spouse.
So we'd call each other and, uh, we'd vent and it'd be like, I'm going to quit. I'm going to go get a job and do this and all the rest. Sell everything and
Paden: disappear.
Tom: That's right. I'm going to show up for 40 hours and do [00:27:00] just enough not to get fired. And we'd let the other one vent. And then we'd use that line from, I think it was from, um, one of the mob movies.
Of this is the life we have chosen, right? That you don't get out. It's like, you always could do that if you wanted to, but this is the life that we have chosen and there's good parts and there's bad parts to it. And, uh, it's just hard to see that sometimes.
Paden: Yeah. And I, you know, I love what you did there.
The important thing is to not try to do all this stuff in isolation, right? That's been huge in me and a lot of my growth, even the last, say I'm in part of the, part of the mastermind groups that the last three years has been very enthralling because I got in that group. And when I first got that group, I was intimidated.
Now, it's me more teaching other people, but when I came in there, like it was, I'm like, Oh my God, all these guys have real businesses and I'm just a nigger doing my thing. And, but it's like walking in rooms that do intimidate you. People full of, full of people that are
Tom: smart, probably the best room for you.
I love, uh, [00:28:00] masterminds. I love peer groups. I'm in a couple, uh, like Entrepreneur's Organization is a great one. They always say you're supposed to surround yourself with great people. And too many people are like, Oh yeah, I've got to have a mentor and somebody that's ahead of me. It's like, you need people that are at the same place as you, peers that are shoulder to shoulder.
And it's important to have people that are behind you, right? Mentor some people that are in the EO Accelerator, right? They're trying to get to a million. I learned more from them than they learned from me, right? Because the questions they ask force me to think, Oh yeah, I need to be doing that better too.
You think about the worst punishment that you can give somebody is solitary confinement, right? In most countries, that's cruel and unusual punishment.
Paden: Can't do it.
Tom: And what do we do as business owners and entrepreneurs and even, you know, self employed? What do we do? We put our heads down and we'll just work so hard at this.
We put ourself in that isolation when there's people around that would help you that already know the answer. [00:29:00] Um, but you've gotta ask.
Paden: Yeah, there's probably someone in one phone call, they can help you skip five steps and you're just setting their head down, you know, I'm gonna figure all this stuff out.
And we went through all that, but went through all those faces, , so yeah, I, hundred percent,
Tom: I even say the best copywriters. Are your clients, right? Cause I can remember early on, uh, a client said Sinatra only sang. And I said, what does that mean? And he's like, well, Sinatra was a hardworking guy. He was a smart guy, but he realized he only made money when he was performed.
So he said, I want to just be the performer. You take care of everything. Another guy said, I love working with interview ballet because you let me be the guest and you take care of the rest. I'm like. Oh, that's good copy. I'm taking that for
Paden: a tagline, right? Yeah. And yeah, that's, yeah, that's great. As entrepreneurs, 80 percent of the stuff you're doing is really has zero or has almost no impact on business, right?
And revenue [00:30:00] and just general 80 percent of your tasks. And it's just constantly focusing on that 20. And then when you get moved to that 20, there's 80 percent more there that you can say. It's just constant.
Tom: I think society and maybe marketing, whatever we talk about it is. It's not telling you that it's this hustle culture.
It's the grind culture. I can remember somebody came to me as a prospect and they said, I want to do a hundred podcast interviews this month. And I'm like, why? Oh, because it'll be massive exposure, right? Well, so is streaking, but it doesn't mean it's going to help your business, right? Let's find the four podcasts that are going to make a difference, right?
And do better podcasts. Do more with your podcasts, right? This idea of just hustle, hustle, hustle. It's the people that are selling, selling what you're buying. That are telling you to buy more. I
Paden: think it's really a focus and a extreme focus this year is quality over quality. Cause I am, I'm a hundred percent a guy that, that will [00:31:00] work all day long.
It's like for my benefit and whatnot. Right. I'm not afraid of hard work. That doesn't mean that hard work is great, but it needs to be combined with the right and the right activities. Right. And it's always trying to parse out one activities you Yeah. And like perfect. You know, you guys are a perfect example of that.
You guys have a service that allows you, like myself to just walk in almost like a surgeon, right? A surgeon walks in with their hands clean and they just put gloves on 'em and then they start doing the stuff. They're not doing anything else to prep, right? 'cause their money making seal is that surgery.
And that is really what. 99 percent of the time.
Tom: You were talking about that 80, 20, and I learned so much from our clients. So we work with a lot of professional servants, clients. And I remember Dave Acho from Detroit, he runs a very high level executive search firm, and he was the one that taught me more is not better.
Better is better. And I was like, coffee cup. Yeah, I'll send you a, I'll send you a coffee cup. This is [00:32:00] attributed to Steve better is better. And he's like, if I gave you the seven. Billion resumes that are on monster. com right now. Does that help you? I'm like, no, that overwhelms me. He's like, if I could bring you the three people that would change your business and introduce those to you, would that change their world?
I'm like, yes. And he's like, that's what it is. And so much of it now is just more and more hustle, hustle, hustle. And the, uh, the visual that I always have in my mind is that person sitting in the rowboat. Pulling on one oar and they're just pulling harder and harder going in circles. And it's just like hustling isn't your problem here.
You're working hard enough. I just need to go in a different direction.
Paden: I, uh, going back to Warren Buffett, he has a quote. I literally just read it yesterday. I was reading a book called The Dow, Charlie Munger. But he says, it's not about how hard you row. It's about what boat you're. And his whole thing is like, went to, I think, [00:33:00] Harvard Business School or whatever it was.
And, uh, there's another guy in his class, smarter him, all these different things. And that guy got into like the steel business, which, you know, at the time in the forties or whenever that was, fifties, business scrapers, you know, Warren went into the financial business. And if you know anything from the forties to today, the financial business exploded.
And that's what he talks about. It's like, I rode a work harder, smarter than me, but you know, I rode a wave that guy, no matter what he did, he could.
Tom: Yeah. And it's, uh, like going back and it's like, are you driving based on the rear view mirror or in the future? Right. If you think the steel industry is going to come back to what it was in World War II, maybe you're right, but, uh, I'm not betting on it.
Paden: So one more, one more question here for you, Tom. So looking back, going back to the beginning of your Oscar, if you can go back and give yourself one piece of advice, what would
Tom: that be? I'm going to put it in two sentences. Relationships are the ultimate currency and your [00:34:00] only true asset is your reputation.
The inflation hits everything except relationships and relationships grow with time. And then also assets, I don't know, fires, earthquakes, whatever, they can take those, they can wipe them out. But your reputation that you have, that's that's your asset that will always be there. And you're the only one that can protect it.
Yeah.
Paden: Yeah. Reputation. And I, I wouldn't even have more. It's just like your skillset too, right? Like, as in, you know, always investing in, you know, your reputation and I think part of that is your skillset, right? I don't know why we keep talking about Warren Buffett because you mentioned him in the interview, but he talks about that.
He's like, you know, inflation. You want to, you want to avoid inflation? He's like, come a doctor in a small town and like the best, or an attorney in a small town and be the best attorney. And inflation will never touch you because like people have to do those services. You're the guy that does it. And you know, you're the best at it.
Like inflation never will touch you. It's if you had the skillset and the relationships, it's that [00:35:00] same cliche that your inner network is your net. Well, Tom, man, this has been a fantastic conversation. What is the best way people can kind of connect with you, get to know more about a business interview, ballet, or
Tom: anything?
Payton, thank you so much for having me on, you know, uh, I'll make it easy. Just go back to interview valet with a V dot com BTS for behind their success. Right. I'll put all my information there. My social media, it's an assessment we have, you know, questions. Will podcast interview marketing work for you?
Uh, I read a book. I, I read it. I also wrote it called podcast guest profits, how to grow your business with the targeted interview strategy. You can get it on Amazon or you can get a free copy there, and then I'll put my calendar scheduling link, so if anybody wants to talk about, hey, how could they leverage targeted podcast interviews to grow their brand and business?
All that will be back@interviewvalet.com [00:36:00] slash bts. Awesome, Tom. I appreciate you coming on. Anything else you want to leave for
Paden: the listeners?
Tom: Well, thank you for what you do, right? I, I always say being a guest is easy for me, right? Because you tap into somebody else's audience. It's almost like showing up at a party, right?
Peyton, you ran the party and I get the benefit from showing up and you're now what, over 70 interviews, most podcasts die within the first 10 episodes. Right. So thank you for your consistency and your effort.
Paden: Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And, uh, having guests, you know, your caliber makes my job. When I got good guests, you know, just got to tee up questions and shut up.
So appreciate. Uh, well, guys, it's got a bunch of great value here from Tom's are a great company to, uh, definitely check out and, uh, we'll catch you next time, guys. Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help [00:37:00] us build this and reach more people as we're trying to accomplish our goal of help creating more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs.
You can follow us on social media by searching for me, Payton Squires, or going to paytonsquires. com. On the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.
