[upbeat music] You have advantages of making the product because guess what? You're making the product. You're not hiring someone to make the product. It's your product. The disadvantages are...
There's a sign near me, [chuckles] and I see it all the time near the, one of these, like, outdoor gyms. It was like, "Only you can make it happen, so make it happen." And I'm like, "Oh, my God.
Like, is that, like, a promise or a threat?" Right. This is the whole reason I wanna do this podcast [chuckles] with you, Jeff. So how do you scale yourself?
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That is Kaizen, K-A-I-Z-E-N. Thanks, House of Kaizen. [upbeat music] Jeff, thank you so much for joining me.
We've talked a few times over the years, and then when you reached out recently, I was like, "Let's just do a podcast." Oh, it's great to be here. I'm glad, I'm glad that's all it took. [chuckles] No, because you're...
I feel like you're like a kindred spirit of mine. You c- sort of went first in, in some ways. I think we might be similar ages, but, uh, we'll get into that later.
But you'd, you know, worked as a journalist all your career, and then you went on to, you know, I forget how many years, like, a, a dozen years you were at The Chronicle of Higher Ed.
Yeah, so it was about almost, like, 16 years. Yeah, 16, 17 years- Sixteen years. -as a journalist, yeah. Yeah. And so... No, but a- at The Chronicle of Higher Ed. Yep. Yeah. Yeah.
So it was 16 years at The Chronicle of Higher Ed- Oh, wow. -forest editor, and then probably a couple more years in daily newspapers before that. Yeah. And then you set off on your own before, you know, being...
We'll talk about whether you're, like, a creator or like... Someone called me a B2B influencer the other week, and I wasn't sure if they were being insulting or not. Yeah, creator sounds better, doesn't it? I don't know.
I think both are kinda creepy and weird. But let's... So you set off on your own before it was, like, a popular thing. Was that a choice or a necessity? Uh, it was a little bit of both.
I was, you know, The Chronicle editor usually lasted about four years, which is- Yeah. -exactly what I lasted. Mm. As four years.
And I wrote a book in twenty thirteen called College Unbound, which was around the future of higher education.
And it was really meant for students and parents, but suddenly colleges and companies that sell into colleges were asking me to come speak to them about the future of higher ed.
And so I saw this market out there that didn't exist. And at the same time, LinkedIn came to me, and they were looking to build up their vertical in higher ed and get more people in higher education using LinkedIn.
And at that time, they started something that they called the Influencer Program at that time, where you would essentially write for them, for free, of course, but then they would blast your content everywhere.
And that was really how I built this really incredibly large, now six hundred thousand followers on Link, uh, that enabled me to get connections to people in both higher ed around the world, but also in businesses around the h- around the world that were selling into higher ed.
Yeah. So I mean, at the time, I mean, you... I think this is always... It's something no one, like, talks about.
Like, but as you go higher and, like, and assuming you succeed in the publishing industry and media industries, like, the opportunities narrow.
Like, and I, I have this theory that at least in the business realm, there's gonna be more people like you and I than, like, in the sort of consumer, creator, influencer realm who are typically younger, right?
And because it rewards experience, but also just the necessity of the reality of this, these industries, and maybe it's different with, like, you know, higher ed, is, you know, the models are premised on, like, replacing folks [chuckles] as they get older with way younger people who, by the way, are cheaper.
Well, it not only rewards experience, but it rewards knowledge- Yeah. -and contacts and networks, right? And so I think I had a decision to make after I stepped down as editor of The Chronicle.
I could go try to be an editor of another newspaper- Right. -or magazine, but you know what the market was like in twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen, and, you know, almost the same as it is today.
And I had this deep expertise in a- Right. -in a market that was growing in terms of higher education, not only in the US, but around the world.
So I could go and try to do that somewhere else or take my expertise and, more importantly, my contacts in higher ed and try to expand that into a whole new business. So talk to about how you ended up then...
And it's always iterative. You know, you try many different things, but made it into a business, right? Because it's one thing of saying, "Well, you, you can go a lot of different directions."
Once you have established a, a reputation, and you h- like you said, you have all that, those, that expertise and that knowledge and also, most importantly, probably those contacts.
There's a lot of things you could do, right? But how did you end up deciding that, that this was the path to take? Well, I think it was iterative, as you said. I...
So I wrote this book, and I was asked to be s- you know, to give keynote talks at events.
And suddenly I started, as I was doing those keynote talks, you know, the businesses that I was doing the keynote talks for or people at the conferencesWould come up to me and said, "Okay, well, what else do you do?"
And it was kind of a question I didn't have an answer to. So I'll, I'll never forget, I spoke at a conference and Steelcase Education came up to me.
Steelcase, which is, you know, big furniture maker, like Herman Miller, came up to me and said, you know, "Do you do other things around higher ed?" And I said like, "What?" And they said, "Well, what do you wanna do?"
And that's where, you know, we came up with the idea for webinars and dinners and salon dinners and other events, in-person events, that didn't really exist in this market ten-plus years ago.
So it was really iterative in a way that we tried out with one or two sponsors that came to me who were interested in trying new things that they couldn't do with legacy media.
So obviously, The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed and Higher Ed Dive, which came along later on, and there's a number of B2B publications in the higher ed space, but they all were, at that point, still doing traditional advertising.
Maybe sponsorship of some events, but they weren't doing a lot of virtual events. They certainly weren't doing dinners and white papers, you know, sponsoring white papers and things like that.
And so I started to just try out a bunch of new products that weren't very popular, at least in the higher ed space, but were popular in other parts of media in terms of other industries. Yeah. That's super smart.
And I think it's always when you start small, you've gotta figure out the things that your larger competitors can't or won't do, right? And there's a lot of different reasons.
There's things that don't make sense at scaled models. If you have seventy-five or a hundred and fifty mouths to feed, you miss a lot of opportunities because the idea is they're, they're not big enough for you.
When you're one person, those opportunities [chuckles] are big enough.
The other thing that you also can't really compete against those legacy players or those big players in terms of, like, if somebody wanted thousands and thousands of leads, I told them, "I'm not the right person for you."
Right? But if you want to narrow cast, you wanna reach a specific- Yes. -group. So people would come to me because they wanted to reach a specific group of presidents or vice presidents at a university, right?
People who were making buying decisions for their products.
That's what they came to me for because they thought, like, but if they just needed thousands of leads for some new marketing plan that they were doing, I wasn't the right person for them. Right.
And so I, I wasn't really competing in that way- Yeah...or Inside Higher Ed or other things.
And it's also, I mean, a lot of times those things look good on spreadsheets, but there's like, it's not like there's some chaff with the wheat. It's like mostly chaff, and there's some wheat in there.
And so I think the opportunity when you're, you know, smaller and assuming that you do, you know, reach the influential level is that you can offer the wheat without much chaff at all.
Some people, they just want things to look good on spreadsheets, and that's always an advantage.
If you have, you know, the bigger your net, you're gonna pull up more things from the sea, like [chuckles] all sorts of things. Um- Right.
Brian, something we've talked about before is that I was both the content creator and also in some ways the salesperson. Right.
And there was a little conflict in that sometimes I think that I sometimes, you know, as a journalist sometimes struggled with.
But the thing that I was able to provide is because I knew what presidents and vice presidents at universities, again, people making the buying decisions, what they wanted to read.
Because, for example, when I would do white papers for a Workday or a Steelcase or a Salesforce, I don't do product white papers, but I was doing white papers and research reports on things that would be read by people on the other side.
As an editorial person, I understood that.
As somebody who went out and met with these presidents, somebody who was speaking to large gatherings of influential people in higher ed, I also have a B2C audience of parents and students coming into the higher ed system.
I kind of understood what was needed out there, wherein again, in traditional media you have this, you know, you have this bright line between the newsroom and the people who are selling these products.
And the people selling the products are just, they don't really kind of know what people on the other side really want or need.
And so I think that was also a unique advantage for people like us who really are both the salesperson and the content creator at the same time. Yeah.
I mean, I wrote about sales last week, 'cause now I've been doing it for three years, and you know, it was something I had never done before. Mm. I'm sure you were the same, right?
Like, we were on the other side, like literally at Digiday it was the other side of the- It was the other side. The dark side as some people in the newsroom would call it.
Sienna, the office manager, sat like in the middle, and then you either went right or you went left. And you know, I think it provides a different perspective in like the way...
I always say this to people when they ask about sales is like I would not do it the way you might imagine sa- like quote unquote "salespeople" to do it.
Like, because your advantage is that you are not a quote unquote "salesperson."
Like, your advantage i- is your expertise, your audience, and product focus, and I think it's a tremendous, can be tremendous leverage because the reality at sales is hard.
The reality is if you're just imitating other salespeople, you'll become very transactional, and what people will value from you is actually entirely the opposite.
You know, because they, the, the people who really get it, I think, the, the- they want the fact that you have, you know, not just a network and things like this, but you have real expertise. Right.
And you're able to bring that to these conversations where I think a classic salesperson would have to talk to somebody on the team at the sponsor.
They'd have to go back to the newsroom or whoever's producing the content. It would be this long back and forth, which also, by the way, increased the, the length of these engagements, right?
Where I'm able to kind of say, "Okay, yes, we can do this. This is how it's going to look." We could create campaigns and move them much more quickly than I think many of these legacy organizations can move. Yeah.
So walk me through the sort of stack. I mean, you write books, right? But I, which I'm like, I'm amazed that you have the bandwidth or, I hate the word bandwidth, that you have the time [chuckles] to, to write books.
Which I've already used once or twice, so you really hate that word now. Well, you know, like, but we're still... I don't know if we're-- I consider myself post-journalism at this point.
I'm like, I've sold too much to still be a journalist. I have to hand in... There's no membership card, but-Or there's nowhere to hand it in either. Do you consider yourself still a journalist?
Yeah, I guess I, I consider-- I, I, I kind of walk both lines sometimes. I, 'cause I still contribute a lot to, uh, outside publications. Uh, so I still consider myself a, a writer.
Uh, maybe a journalist is probably, like, the wrong word 'cause it's more opinion- Yeah... journalism that I'm doing. You know, most-- I don't really write classic news stories anymore.
So if you see me in the mainstream press, it's gonna be more on the opinion page than it would be on the- Right... news pages, for example. Yeah. Kinda similar. I feel similarly.
I've been described as an analyst or something like that [chuckles] Yeah, an analyst. Like- That means I write a report. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I have a strong point of view on, on things.
So in terms of my work, I have-- I, it, they really fall into three buckets.
One is I have an academic appointment, so I'm a professor of practice at Arizona State University, which gives me kind of a, a purview on what's happening in colleges and universities within one of, you know, the biggest universities in the US.
The second bucket is writing and speaking, so that's a combination of book writing.
I have a, I have a book that came out in twenty-twenty from Simon & Schuster called "Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions," which is mostly sold to high school parents and college counselors, so it gives me this huge B to C audience that I really didn't have before.
And then I write for various other publications and speak at conferences and things like that.
And then the third bucket is this creator bucket, and that includes a, a podcast, includes a newsletter, a free newsletter that comes out every other week that both to a subscriber list as well as on, on LinkedIn.
And then there are various other products kind of underneath that umbrella, which includes a, what I call the Next office hour. My newsletter is called Next, so that's my webcast that comes out- Mm-hmm...
about once a, once or twice a month. It includes salon dinners for the B to B audience. It includes white papers and infographics, events, things like that.
So it's really a cam-- You know, people come to me because they have a campaign that they wanna do.
And again, I'm not doing product white papers or product webinars, but we're really thinking or what are the big issues that the people that you wanna sell to are interested in. Yeah.
And so how do they all-- how do you think about them all working together and what jobs they do? Like, I always think of as like, well, what is the job it does?
Like, for instance, like, I have a podcast I, other than this one that I do, called People Versus Algorithms. It's completely unmonetized, which drives me nuts, which you can tell in the podcast if you ever listen to it.
But- Yeah... it's d-- it's more difficult to monetize than this podcast- Yeah... which is sponsored, I should say. Yeah. Well, in terms of- I'll read the ad later. You don't have to read it, Jeff.
But you can if you want. Well, you don't g-- I, I guess I could, right? But you can. Um- I might have to be paid for that, though, but. [chuckles] Okay. No, you're not reading it.
[laughs] So I think of the jobs to be done both in terms of the-- but also in terms of, you know, what is the content piece of this as, as well.
And so as I think about the stack, there are people that will come to my office hours, right?
Thousand plus, fifteen hundred, h-hundred plus, mostly who come through my newsletters and other marketing to those lists, who may never do anything else with me.
But then those people might then download a white paper, and that then creates yet another lead for a sponsor.
So to me, as I think about the funnel, at the top of the funnel, we have this more broadcasting, both through the white papers and through the webinars, that then come down to much more of a narrow casting, which might be an event, an in-person event, which we will sometimes do to only fifty to a hundred people, or the salon dinners, of which we might do twenty-four, up to twelve to twenty-four a year, where we might only have fifteen people at a table.
So- Yeah... that gets down to the very narrow cast. And as I tell, as I tell the sponsors, you know, we're thinking really of this as a political campaign, so we wanna put a new idea into the world, right?
So, you know, student engagement or student experience, right? There's a lot of discussion right now in higher education about improving the student experience.
So if we think about the customer experience in the retail world, it's now about improving the student experience in the higher ed world. It's not a term that people really knew in higher ed.
Nobody know who is really responsible for the student experience.
So we might create a, a campaign which we did for AWS, for example, a series of white papers, webinars, and dinners or Workday the same way, where we did something around the future of work and, and what do colleges need to do to prepare students for the future.
And again, broadcasting at the top and then eventually getting down to the key people they wanted to meet at a university, which might be a president or vice presidents through these dinners. Right.
[gentle music] So you have, like, a highly monetized bottom of the funnel of, like, college presidents and provosts, and I'm not sure what a provost does, but they s- they probably have budget decisions.
It sounds like a great... It's, it's a great title though, isn't it? [chuckles] It does. As long as they have budget decisions, they'll, they'll be at the dinner, right?
And then you have a consumer audience that you monetize lightly. It's bigger, right? Like a h- Much bigger, right? Yeah. It's much bigger, right?
Well, so a hundred and twenty plus thousand, who subscribe to the newsletter between, uh, LinkedIn and, and the, and my subscriber list, but that's a free newsletter.
But they come to me for many other reasons, and including buying books at the end of the day. And that's an audience that right now I'm trying to figure out what to do with, uh, right?
Because I think many creators, they may not have a B to C and a B to B audience, and that's kind of the- Mm-hmm... challenge that I'm facing now is I have this bifurcated audience.
The content, and this goes back to the content question you asked, the content overlaps both audiences, but it's somewhat different, right?
A parent of an eighteen-year-old is looking for different content in a newsletter than a vice president of enrollment at a college or university. And so trying to create content for both of them.
So what I'm trying to do through the newsletter or through the podcast is can we take contentAnd maybe tweak it a little bit for the parent and, and tweak it differently for the vice president for enrollment, because, you know, we've been talking about scaling offline.
That to me is the only way you scale, is to kind of create content- Yeah... once and then use it in five or six different ways. Yeah. I wanna get to that, but it reminds me of something. Dmitry Shishkin has this- Yeah...
have you ever seen this user needs? Yes.
'Cause like, you know, basically, I think a lot of times in journalism, we just think about, you know, we go away in like the back room and create some wonderful little package for people and stuff like this where, you know, it really needs to be...
You need to think about like what is the job that the audience segments are trying to, you know, accomplish? What, what's the job to be done here?
And it's completely different if you're a parent of an 18-year-old who's, you know, looking, figuring out their college than if you are that provost, I guess, at the college.
Well, and also how am I going to keep those parents engaged beyond the admissions process, right? Yeah. So how do we keep them engaged into college and post-college?
So a lot of my writing is also about how is my kid gonna go to college and not sit in their dorm room all the time and play video games, right?
How are they gonna engage in, in courses and the residential life and so forth? And then how are they gonna get a job afterwards?
And so how-- to me, how I think about that consumer audience, it's kind of nice 'cause it does renew every year.
You have a new crop of high school juniors and seniors, but you also wanna keep them longer in your ecosystem throughout college and post-college in terms of that consumer market. Yeah.
And so you didn't do-- I mean, when you started, it was pre-Substack, right? So like- And I never actually used Substack at all. We, so we are- Yeah...
our backend system is, is HubSpot, so we have a pretty powerful CRM, so we know a lot about our audience. This is something that I i-installed an instance of HubSpot about two or three years ago.
I have a project manager who really works heavily on that piece of it, and we have a lot more understanding of our audience now than we did, you know, two or three years ago when I was on MailChimp, for example. Yeah.
And that is, like an interesting decision. I mean, Substack is... Stopped talking about Substack as much as I had, but, like it's fine. It does a job, and I...
You know, the job that it is, you know, it's most geared towards is someone who wants to build a mono business that is just around subscriptions, and those are not people, I would guess, with very high value people in their audience that...
'cause you can't differentiate, you can't segment the audience. Like, it's not made for, like, your use case or really honestly, like, my use case going forward because, yeah, it's just not meant for that.
It's meant for more of, like a broader quote unquote "creator" to me. Um- Right.
And, and, and, and the other thing that, you know, more powerful CRM does for you is it helps you with these other products, for example- Yeah... around like the webinars and the dinners.
And I know people now in my ecosystem and how they've interacted with me and h- why they've interacted with me, which when I'm putting together dinners or when I'm sending...
when I wanna figure out this next book and who am I gonna send it to and who are those, uh, influencers and things like that, it makes it much easier to do that because we just know so much more about them. Yeah.
And, and that-- it's funny 'cause that's where I'm focused too is, I mean, I call it like my VIP database, right? It's a Google sheet. Um, I haven't graduated to [laughs] but it sounds better though, right?
I mean, whatever. What is... Like most things, FT-- like SBF was running FTX off of Google Sheets, so, you know. Right. [laughs] That's true. It's fine. I mean it is. I, I mean, it's not for a, a sole proprietor, right?
Oh, you gotta be- Having a pretty powerful CR-CRM is not inexpensive. Yeah. It's a big cost. And so- But, but I think- Right...
what you, what you got at is, you know, I think the kinds of discussions that you have as a consumer publication is different from a B2B publication. But even if you are a scaled... Like the... It's totally different.
Whereas like how you distribute your content, you know, the ESP or whatever. To me, it's like, okay. Sure. Like, I mean, like, I don't mean it.
Like, before, like I would be like obsessed, like with what's our CMS and stuff like this. I honestly, I could care less. Like, as long as it works, that's great. As long as I, I need...
The database is the business at the end of the day, and not a database is not like a bunch of email addresses.
A database is a bunch of records that you have been able to attach information to, and then you can activate them in segments in order to like achieve business goals.
Like, that's what the business is, not like a mass of Gmail addresses.
And, and this becomes even more critically important in determining like, not only those segments, and again, I have this B2B and B2C, but how are we gonna treat them differently?
So the B2B might be more of a sponsorship model, where the B2C, one of the things that we're thinking about is, you know, introducing a new newsletter or a new podcast for the B2C audience, and maybe doing that as a subscription-based audience- Yeah...
through a subscription-based business through a, a beehive or something like that. And that's the other thing about, you know, moving to, you know, a CRM like HubSpot.
We don't have to necessarily deliver, you know, the email newsletter through that. That could just be the backend system, right? Which is again, what most of the publishers would do.
This is hard though, I think, for a lot of sole creators to kind of figure out. Right. And this gets back to your scaling piece that you wrote this week, right?
Like what do you do yourself and what do you have other people do? Yeah. Tell me. [laughs] Because I don't know. I haven't quite- Right now, the answer- It sounds good, but I haven't quite figured that out yet. Yeah.
So [laughs]... my answer is everything. You could read between the lines of that. The director's cut of that is like, I have too much I'm trying to do at once.
I, I have a friend- Because I think that is the biggest problem of... Look, the biggest advantage is always the biggest weakness. Like, the biggest advantage of a quote... We need a n-new term for these creator business.
But the biggest advantage is you have advantages in the sales process because, like you're making the pro- You have advantages in making the product because guess what? You're making the product.
You're not hiring someone to make the product. It's your product.
You have more advantages because it's tied to you as like a person, and there's all these advantages.The disadvantages are, I-- there's a sign near me, near the, one of these, like, outdoor gyms.
It's like, "Only you can make it happen, so make it happen." And I see it all the time, and I'm like, "Oh, my God," like, is that, like, a promise or a threat?
Like, because if something's gonna happen, you have to make it happen, and that does not scale. I mean, at all. Forget about Google scale, like [laughs] it doesn't scale to, like, having, like, a sane life sometimes.
It doesn't, and, and I, I think that's a struggle that I have, and probably many of us, uh, have.
But as you talked about in your most recent, um, newsletter, in terms of around this idea of the system and creating that system and deciding what is really core and, and what is the context.
Uh, I have a friend who works for Deloitte who talks about this all the time. Yeah. Like, decide what your core is, and then everything else around it is context.
But I think core is something about what am I uniquely qualified to do- Yeah... or what do I really need to do? Because, as you said, my name is attached to it.
So I could have a, you know, an executive system manage my calendar 'cause that's not core, right?
I could have a bookkeeper, I could have a designer, I could have an event planner, I could have an audio and video production coordinator.
I have all these people, you know, in my network and on my team, but there's other certain things that I feel like I have to do either because I wanna do them or I have the, the expertise.
And that just took time, to be honest with you, Brian. Okay. [laughs] It wasn't something on, on day one, right, that I decided, "Okay, I need these five people." A-and then finding those people also took time.
This has been an eight-year journey to get to the point that I got to. Yeah. But do you do the sales? I do the sales.
I've, over time, brought in people to do sales on a short-term basis, to do business development on a short-term basis.
And sometimes they have helped increase capacity, or they have introduced me to new businesses and to new companies that I wouldn't have known otherwise.
The problem with that, of course, is that they go and sell it, you still have to produce it. Yeah. And so, right, they just go off and they go off and sell something else, right?
So there's disadvantages to having somebody else do the sale because they might supercharge it too much- Yeah, no... at some point, and they m- Right? No, but I was just [laughs] sorry, I was just, like, a little...
'Cause it's funny, I think the biggest problem of doing sales when you actually have to do the stuff that you're promising is that I think I would be a much better salesperson if I didn't have to actually do the stuff that I was saying [laughs] that I would do 'cause I would be like, "Yeah, we'll do that.
Yeah, we'll do that." But I'd be like, "Someone else is doing it. It's fine. They'll figure it out." Well, and the other thing about this business is that you're gonna be working with these people constantly, right?
So again- Yeah... it's not because you're smaller scale, and so you wanna make sure that you're in sync with each other in terms of your goals. And- Right...
are they nice people, and do you actually wanna work with them? So in some ways, I actually like doing the sales because I get to know the people I'll be working with and decide, you know what, is this really worth it?
Yeah. There are some clients that I've talked to over the years that I'm like, uh, I don't really wanna work with them. They're gonna be, they're gonna be difficult to work with.
And I really do try, after I make the sale, to go back to the old, as you were talking about, your old office, right, where you walked in and you walked to the right or to the left, right?
Like, after I make the sale, I do try to, like, create, recreate that little barrier between the editorial piece of this because I don't want these to be product white papers or product- Sure...
webinars and things like that. Because, again, my feeling is it doesn't really help the sponsor either 'cause no one's gonna watch them. For sure.
And, but you also, I'm sure, you have some added leverage in that that, like, a regular, like, a client manager wouldn't have. You know what I mean?
Like, people are contracting with you, you have a long track record in here, and, you know, I, maybe it's different. Like, I just find that I'm blessed with wonderful partners, first of all.
But secondly, like, it does help in that process in some way, I find. Maybe I've just gotten lucky.
But yeah, that's definitely one of them 'cause I also, I think, just from a very just business model standpoint, you can't have a transactional model if you're gonna be a solo or nano publisher.
I'm trying to make ma-nano publisher a thing. I, I like that, a nano publisher. [laughs] Okay, yeah.
And that is because, like, if you're transactional, like, you cannot have 100 clients that are, you know, doing, like, 10,000. Like, you can't. It's impossible. You would have to build up too big of an infrastructure.
It would kill your margins, and it would also drive you into an insane asylum. And so the interests are completely aligned beyond the, you know, this is my name and stuff like this.
It's, like, aligned on the just straight business front that you need to have strong partnerships. You're gonna have to grind through a lot of transactional deals. And let's face it, we're all in business.
At some point, we could say, "Well, we don't do anything for less than..." [laughs] and they would be like, "Okay."
The other thing that I've had to deal with as a sole proprietor that I didn't have to deal with when I worked for the big publication, would love your thoughts on this too- Mm-hmm... is exclusivity. Mm. Right?
So there are a lot of competitors selling into higher ed. They're selling, you know, big ERP systems or- Mm-hmm... they're selling retirement packages or whatever it is.
And so sometimes you would have some of these companies come to you and say, "Okay, well, let's put together a program." And then they said, "But we don't want you to do this for any of our competitors."
And, you know, when I worked for The Chronicle or, you know, most of these other publications will have competitors advertising or doing things with them- Yeah... in a way, right?
But they see you differently than that, right? They see you as this... You're more of a voice, you're more of a person. Yeah.
And I really push back on that because obviously, also, it's gonna limit your ability to, to really sell, you know, broadly into the market. Yeah.
I think that's true, and I think a lot of, again, it's like the greatest strength, greatest weakness sort of thing because I think from the client side, the leverage that y-you get on the, the individual level with, with these nano publishing brands is they wanna align themselves with your view and, and your reputation, right?
And, and it's not that different than on a institutional brand level. But it's tied to a person, right?
And so-I think a lot of times clients almost wanna maneuver it, and I don't mean it in, like, a bad way, into almost like a endorsement, right? Like athlete...
Like, you know, like the endorsements that, like, athletes do or something like that. Right. So you're not gonna have somebody do an endorsement for Under Armour as well as Nike, right? Right.
And I think that's what their, right, that's what their point of view is. Yeah, LeBron James is not gonna-- Yeah, he's not gonna be doing [chuckles] like both, like, Coke and Pepsi. Right.
Like, that just was not gonna happen.
Whereas I think these businesses are somewhere between that sort of endorsement model and, like, a just straight advertisement model with all these disclaimers that like, you know, "We have nothing to do with this.
We have no idea w- who these people are." [chuckles] And so I think that's where, look, every media business and probably every business has tension, and that's just the tension in these kind of models. Yeah.
The other thing, Brian, about, uh, scaling that I found is that it's finding other content partners, uh, especially nano, other n- people who wanna get into nano publishing who have an expertise that aligns with yours, right?
So for example, I co-host a podcast with Michael Horn, who has this expertise in K through 12 education, teaches at Harvard Business School, worked with Clay Christensen, brings in this whole other aspect to our podcast that I wouldn't have alone, and by the way, we share the duties of the podcast a-as a result.
And that's a podcast that also has evolved over time to now where we could get Salesforce and Dell and Google to sponsor us taking the podcast to campuses, where we do events on campuses where we record the podcast.
So that's another example of scaling, where finding other people who can really help you out on the content level- Yeah... and then evolving those products over time. I love that.
I think a lot of times it gets hard with splitting money. You know what I mean? Like, I love the idea- I do. Yeah... of collaboration and stuff like this, but it gets messy when... And maybe I'm just greedy.
I don't know. I don't think I am. But maybe. I've not ruled it out, Jeff. [chuckles] Well, I think you have to find the right partner, right?
And, and I guess I've got- No, you- I've gotten lucky in finding a, a good partner for my podcast.
I know, but, but I mean, but that's another, again, it's another, like, complication, 'cause lots of things that, like, are good on, like, paper, but, you know, there...
So like for instance, like, I think that a lot of the future of just business in general is gonna be people who are each their own LLCs and, and come together for, for projects or for certain things, but maintain their overall autonomy.
Because this idea of an all or nothing, that we're all Uber drivers or project product managers at Google just doesn't strike me as right. And there has to be something between. And, like, I was very attracted during...
I mean, I was living in Miami, so I was attracted to, like, the Web3 stuff and DAOs for that reason, and then I'm like, "That was not it."
But there's gotta be something in between this old, out-of-date corporation model and the idea that we're all just, you know, freelancers that are pretending that we're, like, entrepreneurs.
Well, and I think I agree with you on there. During the pandemic, I talked to a number of people about creating almost a cooperative- Yeah... a liquid workforce.
And that was the problem we kept running into, is that some people wanted to work more, some people wanted to work less, some people wanted time to write books or teach or do whatever.
And at some point we were like, "Okay, well, this will never work because our, our, you know, what we want at the end of the day is not aligned." Right. So how do you scale yourself?
[chuckles] This is the whole, this is the whole reason I wanna do this podcast with you, Jeff.
[laughs] So I, I think I scale myself by finding what is really kind of not my core business and hiring either part-timers or contractors for that. So I mentioned that earlier, right?
Project managers, exec-my executive assistant, bookkeeper, designers, event planners. Things that I'm either don't wanna do or can't do, uh, I think is one of them.
So then I'm focused on the relationships more than anything else. Second is producing content that then could be cut in multiple different ways.
So the podcast could produce stuff for the newsletter, could produce stuff for a newsletter focused on the B2B audience and as well as the C2C audience.
I'm really fortunate to have strong referrals for both my B2C and B2B business, so I don't also have to really pay to acquire an audience, which really helps me.
Like, most of my business development is really inbound stuff that comes to me from my speaking and other things.
And so I get to choose on a daily and weekly and monthly basis how much I really need to scale up to serve that, uh, audience. Oh, so you mean, like, on sales, like you're not-- You do a lot of inbound? Yeah.
Most of it's, most of it's people coming to me. Most of it's inbound? That's amazing. Yeah. Most of it's coming to me and people saying, "Oh, we saw you did this for another company." Oh, yeah, yeah.
"We are interested in something like that." Yeah. That is a- That's what I mean. Yeah...
that is, that is a sales trick that everyone should use, is, like, the way you sell something is by doing it, and then people see it and they say, "I want one of those."
Because if you go out and you're-- Like, you can paint the most beautiful picture in the world, but it-- People won't get it, and they won't b- Well, maybe they'll believe you or maybe they won't believe you until they actually see it in action.
Like, I just saw- Well, the other thing that's important is th-this is why relationships are important, because what's- Yeah...
happened now, I've been doing this for years, many of these people have gone on to other companies, and they would get into their new company, and they would discover they have a problem, and they would say, "Hey, Jeff, how can you help us with this?
Very similar to what you did at our last company," right? So the relationships matter because they know what I can do and how I can do it.
And so when they move on, then they call me, and that creates a whole new set of clients for me every year.
So every year I'll have a set of clients that move from year to year, and I'll have other new clients that come in. Yeah.
[upbeat music]And this is why I think a lot of journalists have not made the leap who could have made the leap into whatever we're gonna call this creator space, nano publishing or whatever.
And I see this all the time, this idea that like you, oh, just outsource sales to like some third party, you know, agency and stuff. It's not gonna work. Like it's- It's not gonna work.
I mean- It's not gonna work, and you, it- you're doing yourself a disservice. You cannot run a business, in my view, if you are not product and revenue focused. Like, you just cannot.
And I've seen companies that are purely revenue focused, and the person running it had no idea that the product sucked, and that's a bad situation.
And- But Brian, you and I both know that the traditional journalists are just uncomfortable with that. And maybe the advantage I- Can't get over it [laughs]... right?
Maybe the advantage I had is because I moved up to be the editor. Right. As editor, I was involved in a lot of business conversations- Yeah... especially with our sponsors and our advertisers.
So it just became natural to me- Right... after I had left. Yeah. I, I- Now, if I was just a reporter moving into this, I think that would have been a lot more- Correct. Yeah, and I think that's it.
I think that is the... And that's what I looked at immediately as a competitive advantage, you know, when I was going on. 'Cause I heard people were like, "Well, you need to find, like, a business partner."
I'm, "Really?" I'm like, "That seems like I don't know why you're saying that to me. [laughs] Like, why do you think I'm so incompetent?" Like, and then I started getting a little bit insulted by it.
And but I looked at it, I was like, well, I know a lot of the clients personally. I, like, did, like, approximately a trillion events and stood on stage in front of them and saw them at cocktail parties.
Like, and didn't mean I wasn't, like, an editor, but that's the reality is the higher... You know, when you're an editor, you, you're closer to sales than, you know, you are when you're a reporter.
Like, it's just, that's how it, it goes. Like, and, you know, that's a tremendous advantage of having that comfort level. But I always counsel people who wanna do this stuff on your own, like, do not outsource sales.
Like, you might not feel, like, uncomfortable with it, but, you know, too bad, so sad, because if you wanna, like, take this path, you're gonna have to start to get comfortable with all kinds of things, [laughs] you know?
That I don't know, I'm not, like, comfortable with the idea of not knowing that, not knowing how much money I'll make next year. I'm guaranteed to make $0 next year. That's not comfortable.
But, you know, that's, to me, that's just the trade-offs and, that you have if you're gonna go down this path.
Well, and if you outsource business development, of course, and sales, you're gonna have to figure out a compensation scheme for those people anyway, which by the way, is only gonna cut into your ability to actually produce this stuff.
This goes back to our earlier conversation with- Yeah... at the end of the day, somebody has to actually produce all this work.
I also think that, you know, as a journalist and as an editor, you're naturally inclined to be a salesperson in some ways because you're able to summarize, you're able to analyze, you're able to story tell. Yeah.
There's so many similarities between the two. There's so many- Yeah... there's so much crossover that I- Yeah... I've been, like, surprised.
I mean, I sort of knew, but like, I've been surprised just how many of the skills translate. Like, and I think I wrote a little bit about it in that. Like, I would always think about it like being a reporter.
When I'm interviewing someone, there's almost two tracks of, like, thinking, where you're listening to them and you're totally engaged, but there's a different part of your brain that is taking what they're saying and figuring out how it fits into, like, the story and stuff like this.
And, you know, when you're listening to someone, and this is, I think, the advantage journalists have, 'cause I think that's just second nature to journalists, I'm guessing. And some of this could be historical, right?
Because I think that, again, talking about when I worked in newsrooms, we always thought those salespeople, right, they don't know how to do their job. Yeah.
They go on those great junkets that we never got to go on, right? They get to leave at 5:00, right? All that stuff. Yeah. We- And so they have- I think they have day Friday during the summer except for editorial.
Exactly. [laughs] Exactly. Right? So- Oh, that's nice. [laughs] We had a pretty negative impression of them, and so I think that when journalists leave then, they're like, "Well, I'm not gonna do that.
That's not, like, what I got into this business for." Yeah. But I mean, this is a different path. That's why, like...
And, and that's why I think, you know, a lot of people have been drawn to the Sub Stack model, even if it doesn't necessarily completely make sense to me to, like, what field they're in.
Because, look, it makes sense for a lot of areas, particularly when you can convert. You can get it super lean, and there's a lot of, like, success there.
But the reality is, the idea that you're gonna build an audience and make money off of, like, you know, 6% of it is, it doesn't make sense.
Maybe it makes sense if, like, you've not been on the business [laughs] side, but I don't think many people are business-minded would be like, "Yeah, okay. Yeah, c- definitely only make money off of 6%."
I think this also goes back to identity.
You were a- you asked me earlier how do I define myself, and I think that most people who leave either daily journalism or whatever kind of journalism they're in, they just have a hard time letting go.
Like, everybody I've talked to about what I do and how they can do it, they're like, just, they like, "Jeff, but I just can't let go of being a journalist." That's the hard part.
And I'm like, "Well, journalism has changed in a way. Like, do you really wanna be part of that anymore?" But there's a lot of people, especially our age- Yeah...
right, who still believe in legacy media and wanna be part of that legacy media even though, as we all know, it's dying. Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's why I, I, again, just to go back, like, I think that a lot of people, like, are co- and I see it across, it's beyond journalism. I've talked with a lot of people about this.
It's, you know, not many people are gonna shed tears for the middle-aged guys out there. But, you know, there's a lot of people, particularly with how the economy is going, who have got caught in between to some degree.
I mean, I don't think I totally did, but, like, you get caught in between in a lot of...
And it's always happened in publishing, I just think it's spreading to a lot of different areas where, you know, there's, there hasn't been, like, a set career path, I feel like, for a while.
But particularly as we enter, like, a more with less era, there are fewer of the next job. Do you know what I mean?
Like, I always say, like, when I, like, left Digiday, like, I didn't even, I didn't talk to anyone [laughs] for another job. I don't know, maybe they're int- But I mean, I wasn't looking for one.
But, like, uh, you know, the reality is, and I think it's gonna be the case for a lot of people across a lot of different fields, is that path, there is no path.
Like, make your own path in a lot of cases.And it depends on what sort of, like, you know, level you are. There are jobs out there, but, like, nobody wants to go backwards. No.
And right, you're not gonna get the salary or the compensation that you got in the previous job. And I just think there's fewer of them, right? There's just fewer- Right. That's what I mean... managers, right?
There's fewer editors, CEOs, assistant editors, vice that. Like, whatever titles there are, there's fewer titles- Yeah... and they're getting paid less. Yeah. I was an editor for a long time, right?
But, like, the hardest job is making the stuff every day. Like, I can say this with... Now that I've, like, I've sold, I've edited, I've reported, it's the hardest job. It is the hardest job.
And the reality is, a lot of times, I always say that about podcasting. I think Bill Simmons actually stole it from.
It's like when you sort of get tired of writing 'cause it's a total grind, you can always do podcasting, right?
'Cause, you know, you just have- It's so much easier to produce a podcast than write a newsletter, in my opinion. Mm-hmm. Writing every day- It's hard... or three times, it's hard, hard, hard. It's hard.
And then by the way, throw books on top of that, Brian, and then you're really- Yeah. Then it gets really difficult. No, thanks. [laughs] That's why I was wondering why you're doing that to yourself.
I can barely keep up as it is. But yeah, and I, I think, you know, look, the future to me, broadly speaking, is gonna be a lot more doers, and there are just fewer jobs in that process.
You know, I was talking with someone at a former place I, I used to work a, a couple places ago, and I was saying when I was there as a reporter, I would sit in the, the news meeting and I would go, it was this massive table, and I would go around the table mentally, and I would identify people about whether they wrote stories or wrote emails asking where a story was.
And, like [laughs] there was more people who were writing emails about where a story was- About where the story was than there were reporters... than writing the stories.
And of course, as someone who was writing the stories, I was outraged by that. But then I became the person writing emails asking where stories were. And so you were not as outraged. Then I was like- Right...
these people are very important. No, we just had fewer though. I mean, that's what I...
That was my bet, like, at Digiday where I was like, "We're gonna be super thin on the editor level because I have a lot of confidence that I can cover a lot of ground.
And I would rather utilize scarce resources on the hardest part." I mean, without... There's nothing to edit without, without people out there, you know, reporting and, and making great content.
So I, I was always like, "This organization's gonna be built around the people [laughs] who are writing stuff, not around the people who are managing people who write stuff."
But the people who write stuff, obviously, you know, I started out as a daily newspaper reporter- Yeah... down in, uh, Wilmington, North Carolina.
Had a New York Times owned paper there, and I had to produce a story every day, two on Friday because you needed something for the Saturday paper and the Monday paper. Yeah.
And by the way, you always had to be working on a weekend piece. But boy, does that really put you in a mindset of learning how to write and research and tell a story with speed.
And so that has come to be really helpful right now as I'm working with multiple clients on multiple projects, is that you just learn where you know how to speed yourself up to, to get this stuff done. Yeah.
And that's why, I mean, I've heard this from a lot of people- Again, that's why journalists, I think, are perfectly aligned for doing this work. Yeah. And I, 'cause, like, that's why I encourage, like, journalists.
Sometimes I think journalists give themselves, like, too hard of a time because if they do leave journalism, they start to realize just how unbelievably productive [laughs] they were compared to...
I remember talking with a friend of mine who left journalism a-as a reporter and editor and went to, like, work for, like, an ad agency. He was like, "Oh my God, I, like, run circles around everyone." Yeah.
And by the way- Like-... come to academia and you'll really see about the, the need for speed. So what is your ambition for the enterprise?
And that, I mean, like, I had a drink with a guy, like, the other week, and he was like, you know, his grand question at the end, he was like, "How big do you want this to be?" I'm like, "I have no idea."
[laughs] I'm like, "I don't..." I think one of the challenges of... And I ask that because I think there are a lot of opportunities to build, you know, nice- Lifestyle businesses...
yes, lifestyle businesses that people in Silicon Valley use as a pejorative, and I'm like, "I don't understand that. Like, it sounds pretty nice [laughs] to me."
But the, you know, the knock is, like, are you building any enterprise value? Or I go back and forth about it. Like, I'm not, it's not- I mean, I, I go back, yeah.
I, I, I mean, honestly, I go back and forth about it too. I mean, I, there were many times over the last couple of years that I wanted to just build another big business, a-another chronicle of higher education- Right...
or another, or Politico within higher ed or something like that. I, I've come around to the fact that I have a pretty good life right now. Uh, I have a lot of flexibility. I like what I do.
I have the flexibility to do what I wanna do kind of when I wanna do it, and that's fine.
I understand that people who are looking for multiples of something, say, the lifestyle business, you'll never be able to sell it, and you'll never be able to make money on it, but that's fine by me, I think, at this point, because I'm not quite sure I wanna copy all the...
As you grow, you're gonna end up copying and having a lot of the problems that legacy media have today. Yeah. And, and how do you avoid that?
Um, and you have to have staff, and you have to manage people and things like that. I, I actually not managing people every day, uh, it gives me a lot of freedom. I'm glad you say that.
That makes me feel, that makes me feel a lot better 'cause it totally aligns with how- Right... I think. 'Cause in some ways, I've, like, thought, I'm like, "Well, I could easily go..."
I mean, like, you know, I've obviously, I'd like, I don't know, like 40, 50 people, like, working in my group. But I'm like, I don't know if I really wanna go back to that. Not- nothing against those people.
It's more- No, I, I love having the people, but you have to write performance reviews again then. Yeah. You know, you end up spending all your time in meetings and, like, talking.
And, like, as much as, like, I don't like some days, like, waking up at 7:00 a.m. being like, "Oh boy, time to make the donuts. [laughs] I gotta turn out 1,200 words. I got zero, and I got until 10:00 a.m."
You know, I think that there is a lot to be said about for the sort of flexibility and the ability to have to deal with a lot of that stuff.
And, and at some point, look, the ideal is if you have to make that decision, right?
It means that you've reached a point where you have the gift of being able to make that kind of decision, which is great, I look at.Yeah, I mean, that's the way I look at it now too, is that I could, I could decide to grow if I really wanted to, but I don't have to.
And I think a lot of people have persuaded me over the years as, "Jeff, why do you wanna copy something that you, in some ways, ran away from?" Yeah. Or that you didn't run to after you had, you know, the opportunity to.
So I think that's a lot of this. I'm really... You know, I have two kids. Mm-hmm. I, I get to travel a lot in this job, and I get to really, you know, have my own hours and so forth.
And so I, I kinda like this business as it is. So right now, I'm under the thought is, how do I kind of sustain it and continue to do the things I really wanna do and reach the audiences I wanna do?
So there's, there is strategy around that, but the strategy's not to grow for growth's sake. Yeah. And I think it's very easy to get... Maybe I'm just speaking for myself.
It's easy to get, like, pulled by what people are, like, talking about on LinkedIn or Twitter, whatever they're called, X now, in that you almost feel, like, pulled by them into saying, "Oh my God, I should be doing this.
I should be doing that. I should be... Oh my God, these people are, like, they're adding all these people, and they've got offices and stuff like this." And I'm like, "Wait, that sounds terrible."
Or people compare you to other industries. Like, I don't know how many times people have said to me, "You should be the Morning Brew of- Oh, God... higher education."
[laughs] And so at some point I'm like, "But I don't wanna be that." Yeah. [laughs] I mean, I'm thrilled with what they've done, but, uh, that's not necessarily what I wanna do right now. Yeah.
Well, that's a great example, and I saw Austin a, a couple weeks ago, but unbelievable job of, of, of what, um, he and Alex and the entire team there have done.
At the same time, it's become a grind like any other media business because they ha- they, they got the big deal, you know, they still own half it. I assume they still do. They had to do a ton of stuff.
They've spun up tons of B2B verticals. There was a creator network. There were courses, and, like, the company, you know, I... over the pandemic, it probably became like three or four times the size it was.
They did the, we got a massive office [laughs] thing, which is always a death knell. Never get the fancy offices. Never get space. [laughs] Fancy offices are always a big mistake.
Next thing you know, you're, you're out there, you're saying, "We got su- we're subleasing some office space." [laughs] Subletting. Oh, it's bad. Now you're competing against all that WeWork space that's gonna come out.
Yeah, exactly.
So yeah, no, I think it's important to sort of strategically tune out [laughs] a lot of people or just, you know, not allow yourself to try to chase what other people sort of want rather than what you want or something.
Not to be all like, uh, kumbaya about it, but... No, I think it's also just like, right, what, what you really want out of life, and there's different stages to this company too.
I-- my, my position right now is very different than it was eight years ago when I started it. I have teenage kids now. I, you know, I had young kids at that time.
Pretty soon they'll be out of the house, and then maybe I think differently about what I want out of this company.
I'm also, you know, early f- you know, I just turned 50 this year, so maybe I think differently about, you know, how I kind of ease into retirement eventually. So I think there's an iterative process to that.
Oh my God, you're talking... I just turned 50. You're, you're easing me into retirement? Then again, I am in Florida. [laughs] I've already eased myself. [laughs] You're, you're already retired down there.
Well, I'm up writing newsletters at 7:00 AM. Find that offensive. Hey, I'm up at 5:00 writing newsletters. Oh, okay. Well, geez. [laughs] I beat you by two hours. [laughs] Yeah, I'm still asleep by then. Awesome.
The spin... Uh, last question is on, on the membership front. You know, and when you started, it wasn't as, as subscriptions membership. It wasn't as popular. What is your... What are your thoughts on that?
I mean, you, you mentioned considering it, particularly for a segment of your audience, and we, we had talked before about this 'cause you have different audience segments, right?
And particularly in any kind of B2B business, you have a segment of your audience that is extraordinarily valuable to sponsors, right?
Because they basically wanna have commercial conversations with people who can buy their very expensive software products. Oftentimes, at the end of the day, software is what runs modern businesses.
Those come at a very high price point, and there's only a certain number of people who actually make that decision. We have much, much, much greater numbers than just those people 'cause there's very few of them.
Do you see, like, subscriptions as a way to make money off of that segment of the audience that you can't necessarily monetize with your B2B programs? Maybe. I think that I definitely need that reoccurring revenue.
Um, right now, those, uh, those people are incredibly valuable to me in other ways, right? They still come to other events and things like that without paying a subscription, so they're still valuable to me.
But they do wanna be part of a community. That's what I'm trying to figure out now.
Is it less about the monetization of them but more bringing them into the fold in terms of a community because they are paying a subscription, and they wanna hear what I'm saying, and maybe we could create other products with them.
So it's a challenge that I'm now dealing with and, and something that I'm thinking about. But the other problem is I'm in a space where there are a lot of memberships.
There, you know, everybody who works at a college belongs to an association with a membership. There's other companies out there that offer memberships around specific topics.
Even in my B2C audience, there are a number of people who are independent counselors who offer memberships to help their kids get into college. And so what is my unique selling proposition into that?
Is it around a certain topic? Is it because of who I am?
I have to figure that piece out because otherwise to do memberships just to do memberships, I don't think, at least in my space, makes sense because there's a lot of competition. Got it. Okay, cool.
Well, Jeff, thanks so much. I'm glad we finally got to do this. I'm glad too. Hopefully it'll become a recurring feature. Thanks, Brian. Awesome. Thank you.
Thanks for listening, and thank you to Jay Sparks for producing the Rebooting show. If you have a podcast that you're considering making, you should check out Podhelp us and what Jay can do for you. Go to podhelp.us.
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