Using Psychology to Build a Better Business with Julian Garsdean

Joe Casabona: Are you a Field of Dreams marketer, someone who thinks if I build it, they will come? I was for a long time. Sometimes it feels like I still am. That’s why I was excited to talk to Julian Garsdean. He blends psychology and business in a way I haven’t seen before to help business owners stand out and sell more. As creators, we can learn a ton from addressing the six basic needs in our own content and products.

Listen for these top takeaways. One: businesses aren’t just transactions. They are run by people for people. The sooner you realize that the sooner you’ll connect with your potential customers. Number two: establish your identity. Being too general means you’re not connecting with anyone. Doing a deep dive into your identity and the persona of your customers makes them relate to you more. Number three: the key to negotiations is, you guessed it, understanding the needs of the person on the other side of the table. Do that and you’ll be able to quantify your value in something other than numbers.

This was a great interview. I know you’ll enjoy it. If you want to hear Julian and I talk about how to establish your authority by giving everything away for free, sign up for How I Built It Pro and the membership over at casabona.org/join. You can find all of the show notes and everything we talked about over at streamlined.fm/320. But for now, let’s get to the intro, and then the interview.

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Intro: Hey everybody and welcome to How I Built It, the podcast where you get free coaching calls from successful creators. Each week you get actionable advice on how you can build a better content business to increase revenue and establish yourself as an authority. I’m your host Joe Casabona. Now let’s get to it.

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Joe Casabona: All right, I am here with Julian Garsdean, the CEO of Invictus Motus. And I’m really excited because we’re going to be talking about psychology principles. And this is really I wish I knew more about this… Let’s just bring Julian in now. Julian, how are you?

Julian Garsdean: I’m doing well, Joe. Thank you for having me.

Joe Casabona: Thanks so much for being here. When this topic came across my desk, I got pretty excited because this is not something in 350 episodes, between the numbered and not numbered episodes, not something I’ve really talked about on the show. I was a hard science major, you know, software engineering and so we always viewed the soft sciences as not real science. And now that I need to market and convince people that I’m worth hiring, I really regret that.

So I’m very excited to have you on the show. And I just want to dive right into it. Where is the overlap between Psych and business, psychology and business?

Julian Garsdean: You know, you hit it right on the head. Especially for individuals who have majored in essentially hard sciences, we look at business these days as so transactional. You know, there is a product or service and there’s $1 value attached to it and, you know, the revenue is essentially the scoreboard and everybody’s looking at it so mechanical, whether it’s from an operational standpoint or just a simple sales standpoint.

But what we really hone in on and see at the core of it, really beyond the surface is business doesn’t exist without the human element, right? Business is an extension of humans, so to speak. So you have, on one hand, an individual that’s identified a potential need in the market or has a passion for a particular product or service and wants to make an impact. And on the other end, a prospect or a candidate that might benefit from it.

So the product and the service is just essentially the modality to connect two parties or more together through the means we call business. The transaction really is a part of it but it’s really not the whole thing. And if we look at what goes on in that process, most of it is based on psychological influences, particularly honing in on adding value.

You know, we hear about these value-based approaches, a human-centric approaches to business, solving problems. And these problems what do they typically generate? They generate pain points for companies who are made up of individuals or opportunities that need to be further capitalized on or exploited. So realistically at the core of business lies psychology given the businesses is a derivative of human psychology. Business wouldn’t exist without it, so to speak.

Joe Casabona: I love that. And it makes perfect sense. I mean, as we record this we’re less than a week from… Not to put this in time, I guess but I do it all the time so it doesn’t matter, we’re less than a week from WWDC, right? And one of the questions or one of the things I constantly hear about Apple and how they position their products is what’s the story? What’s the story behind this?

With the Apple Watch, it became about life-saving, health metrics. In the last WWDC keynote, they had letters from people saying, “Your watch literally saved my life.” So now they’re getting ready to release this VR thing, and again, all the Apple pundits are asking, what’s the story? What’s the connection? How are they going to make us feel about this device? So it’s not necessarily just about, you know, services or actual emotional stuff, but about technology products too, right? We want to feel a certain way about our phone or watch our microphone, because that’s what makes us buy, that’s what moves us.

Julian Garsdean: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. When you talk about particularly consumer products, what are you really buying? You know, most times we’re buying an identity, something that resonates with us, something that resonates with our story resonates with, you know, potentially with our pain points, with the opportunities that we want to take advantage of potentially. So it is spot on.

People tend to connect with people more than they do with products. You can have a fantastic product, if it doesn’t appeal to the masses, if it doesn’t touch on those particular points that are meaningful or impactful to them, it can be a go nowhere. Oftentimes, we see a lot of products in the market that you’re wondering, how did this even make it, you know? They really understood how to resonate with their audience particularly. So it’s certainly people connecting with people and the impact that these things could have.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I love that. I always took a very Field of Dreams approach. Like, if I build it, they will come. I built this thing I know it’s good because I know I’m good at stuff and so you should get it. But that doesn’t make anybody feel anything, right? How many times did I just say “I” there? I should be saying you. “Hey, I’m a podcast coach, right? So you are spending too much time on your podcast. Wouldn’t you like to spend more time with your kids? If you hire me, I will guide you through the process of spending less time on your podcast so you can spend more time with your kids.

Julian Garsdean: Spot on. Spot on. I have a saying that resonated with me a long time ago. It says, Don’t fall in love with the product or service, fall in love with your audience. And if you do fall in love with your audience, you’ll really know how to put forth, you know, your best foot to best serve them. And when people on the other end see that and feel that, it makes the transaction that much more smooth, that much more pure.

Joe Casabona: That’s such a great point to move to. Because I think, especially in the creative economy, we’re trying to build audiences ideally… I mean, I’m trying to make a living. So I want to build my audience so that I find enough people to buy my product or service so that I can support my family. That is, again, a very me-centric approach. But we want to be able to connect with our audience.

And when you get in front of the microphone or the camera or whatever for TikTok, I guess it’s the camera for TikTok too, you really do want to forge that connection. You don’t just want to… I’ll give you an example. I was following a person on LinkedIn for a while. And their videos, their short-form videos, honestly, if you had told me that it was like one of those AI-generated videos with a synthesized voice, I would have believed it. Like just very cold, emotionless, regurgitating facts. I bad. I felt worse after watching those videos.

I mean, in our pre-show we were talking about like the six basic needs and some of the psychology principles. How can we use those to create better content and connect with our audience? How do we fall in love with our audience and make them fall in love with us?

Julian Garsdean: Absolutely. We can talk about, you know, maybe six or seven fundamentals I think that would be beneficial to any audience, you know, those who are architecting a startup versus those who are already in the midst of it and scaling, whether it’s a small business, a solo artist or entrepreneur.

Big fundamentals is I think it’s really important at first you establish an identity. Part of that identity is you don’t want to be a jack of all trades. You don’t want to be speaking to generalities, especially, in your domain. You’d like to take deep dives for a reason. There’s a lot of substance underneath the surface that people want to explore. And they can go anywhere for vague or general information.

So in any business, you certainly want to establish an identity. Understand, hey, what problem am I trying to solve? You know, it’s a very different approach than most people would take is, hey, I’m already coming up with a vision or a position and I’m imposing it on the market for whatever reason, that may be driving them. But I really think that the beginning of that is identifying what is the problem I want to solve, what is the impact that I want to make.

From there, I know that will lie… It will tie very closely to what your passions are, perhaps, what is a compelling vision for you, what stance do you want to take, what do you want to bring forth to the market of value? And from that, taking the human-centric approach in all of this is saying, well, who’s going to be impacted the most by this or who do I want to impact the most?

You move over to understanding your audience. What audience do I want to appeal to? And from there, you know, using principles of psychology, of course, because we’re talking about now, you know, a human-centric approach and connecting with people is, how do I impact these people in the greatest manner or the most quickly? And you start looking at, well, what are fundamentals of human behavior? What are humans really looking for at their core?

I learned this a little long ago from a seminar of Tony Robbins that I watched. He’s famous for putting these things into perspective. And he said, well, there are fundamentally two major drivers. There are six basic needs that humans usually undergo. And there are two of them that, you know, typically fall the strongest for the masses.

Now, every individual has all of these six needs. However, you know, usually, your two most pronounced really shape your identity are how you act on the day to day basis. Unfortunately, in the world that we live in the reality is the need for significance and the need for certainty, which means… You know, and not to say that these are negative things, but these are usually the most pronounced in business, per se.

Everybody wants to feel like they are somebody, you know, they have a contribution to society, they are able to do something meaningful, they can establish a legacy and make an impact. And the need for certainty is everybody loves some sense of structure, knowing what’s coming next, they have a sense of direction, you know, when things are stable, we tend to be the most comfortable. But then, in retrospect, you know, when things are stable, we also tend to be the most complacent. So we have to be careful for these things.

Now, we look at the third need here which is the need for variety or the need for uncertainty. You know, as Tony Robbins puts it, variety is the spice to life, right? We like to have different things on different days. Know what you’re going to eat day in and day out, per se, or what you’re going to do. And it’s the same tas… You kind of can grow a little bit mundane. But we only like the surprises that we enjoy. We don’t like surprises that may throw a dent into our lives or causes some sort of pain.

Outside of that is the need for growth. People want to feel like they’re growing. And there’s a constant evolution. You know, growth is progress. Progress is motivation. We don’t necessarily have to perfect something out the gate, but we want to know that we’re making meaningful strides towards it. It keeps us in the race, so to speak, so that when we can see that…

Love and connection. We all want to feel that we’re a part of something. We want to feel loved with deep meaningful relationships and connections. That can be either in the workplace, with other people, and so on. Just a sense of culture, a sense of community.

And then last one I want to touch base on here is contribution. You know, how do you give back? What is the impact that you want to make? You know, what is something that we hold near and dear to us we may be good at that we think we can teach the world and contribute to somebody else, pass the torch, have them take it to a different level, so to speak, but leave our impact on the world with something or skill or something that we’ve been able to acquire over the course of our careers or over the course of our experiences as humans.

So those are essentially the six basic needs. And those can be architected into a business by really, you know, implementing them when you understand your audience. Who is it that I’m trying to serve? What are there certain needs that may be driving these folks’ behavior? And how can I help bridge the gap between my product and service and the fulfillment of those needs?

So touching base on the first two large principles, I would say, for any entrepreneur or anybody that’s really trying to make it in the world of business is understanding your identity, taking the human-centric approach by understanding your audience. And your audience may be your employees, it may be your viewers, it may be your stockholders, your shareholders, whoever it might be.

You know, in this case, for the folks that you serve on your podcast, it’s going to be acquiring the audience, you know, more so. So by understanding them, first, you’re able to bridge the gap between the dialogue that you’re trying to put forth, between the product or services that you’re trying to present and really hitting on those. So that’s how the six basic needs would tie into those fundamentally, two principles that I just spoke about. We can go on through the next set of, you know, four or five of them, if you like.

Joe Casabona: I think this is a really good place to really dig in, right? Because the two things you said here are intertwined. Understanding your audience, you need to establish an identity to know who you’re… It’s kind of like a cycle, right? Like, you want to establish your identity so that you’re attracting the right people, and it’s the people that you understand.

To give a concrete example of this, Dickie Bush came on this show. I don’t know if you’re familiar with his work its Ship 30 for 30. Obviously, doing great things and really killing it in business. He’s a little too hustle-culturely for me. He and the people in that culture say things like, You gotta wake up at 5 am and work for two straight hours. I’ve got three kids. If I wake up at 5 a.m, I will be lucky to get a half hour to myself to do whatever.

I’m not his audience, right? This is the identity that he has as a… I think he’s in his mid-20s. I’m in my late 30s, I have a family and so my identity closely aligned with that. And the people I’m going to attract, I’m going to say, “Hey, like running a business with kids is really hard, and you’re killing it. And if you want to kill it a little bit more, I can help you automate and save time because that’s how I manage to run a business with three small children at home.”

Julian Garsdean: Right. I can totally relate actually to both. When you’re in your 20s you have more time for yourself. You have the ability to be selfish, your responsibilities most typically—this isn’t for everybody—your responsibility is really to, you know, foster care and nourish the progression of yourself as an individual and as a professional. So you’re not necessarily holding the weight of a family and other responsibilities.

But I’m a big believer that, you know, be firm in your vision and the identity essentially, the destination. Who do you want to become at the end of all this journey? Or who are you striving to become? Or what are you striving to build? Be rigid in that vision, but be flexible in the approach. There’s no blueprint or cookie-cutter approach to success.

I know guys who don’t turn on till midnight. I was one of them, actually, for a very long time. I didn’t start working till midnight because in the daytime I was in maintenance mode, you know. And by the evening when everything settled down, and I can have more time to myself, that’s when I was able to push my businesses forward. There definitely is no cookie-cutter approach.

I would caution young entrepreneurs from being overly rigid. But I do see the benefit of discipline. Not to take away from anything in the discipline. That you are going to have to carve out time as an entrepreneur or as a sole business owner or as an artist, you’re going to have to carve out time to master your craft and to push your business forward. Sometimes, you know, for folks that’s five in the morning, and again, sometimes that could be midnight as long as you’re getting it done. I think whatever is most conducive to you will work.

Joe Casabona: I really like the “be rigid in the vision but flexible in the approach.” Because again, you know, you see… you know, if you go on Twitter or LinkedIn, you see a “Do you want to be successful? Here’s what you got to do?” And what they’re really saying is here’s what worked for me, right?

Julian Garsdean: Absolutely.

Joe Casabona: But people are tapping into this need for significance, right? “Oh, well, Dickie Bush and Justin Welsh, they’ve done significant things. I want to be like them.” And then the need for certainty. “Oh, this thing worked for them and so it’s definitely going to work for me as well.” I’m gonna say, right, I’m gonna guess here, as long as you’re establishing your identity, you need to determine what your approach is going to be to inspire and connect with your audience. Because you do need to do that in a certain way to… Oh, what’s the word I’m looking for here? Significance inspires certainty. Make them feel like you can give them that. Does that make sense?

Julian Garsdean: Absolutely. You certainly want to be able to relate to the folks that you’re speaking to, you know. And I take this audience-centered or human-centric approach as the primary driver for everything I do. You know, and I tell my directors oftentimes is you can give the most profound lecture in English to an audience that speaks Mandarin and you can pride yourself on the quality of substance and the value that you’ve been able to add. But if your audience only speaks Mandarin and you’re speaking English, they’re not going to understand it—it’s as good as fallen on deaf ears there. So you really want to know who you’re speaking to, and how to best relate to them, and how to send a message that will closely resonate and make an impact there. So that’s just kind of the classic example that I use.

Joe Casabona: I love that. Before I became an actual good teacher, you know, you can go on Rate My Professors to see the good scores. So I’m not just making that up. But before that, I was teaching my mom how to use a computer. And I said, “Oh, just right-click on that icon.” So she like moved the whole cursor across the screen and clicked and nothing happened. I’m like, “You gotta right-click.” And I’m just yelling the word “right click” at her. And she’s like, “I moved to the right and I clicked,” and I’m like, “That’s not what that means. Just right-click.” And I’m like, “Oh, there’s the second button there. Press the other button.” So I really resonate with if you’re speaking Mandarin or if your audience only speaks Mandarin. My mom didn’t speak computer. I knew what right-click meant. That’s really interesting. I think that’s really cool.

So when you said “establish identity,” I thought of a few people. And these people, some of them are gonna be polarizing, right? But one is Tucker Carlson. This guy has an identity. Maybe he’s like that in real life. Maybe. But the point is he has this persona and he has inspired millions of people to basically just take whatever he says at face value. I would say that’s on the extreme end of things, right? I guess, how seriously should you take this identity? How far should you take it? Do you always need to be on, I guess is another way to put it, if you’re trying to build and connect with an audience?

Julian Garsdean: I think it really depends on what you’re in it for, you know? What is the identity really built on? Is it, you know, adding value? Is it on some folks, you know, love to build an identity on un segregating people and being extremely polar, like you said, you know, taking a one-sided approach and defending that to the death, and they build an audience?

If we just talk about general marketing, the more relatable you are the wider audience you have the potential to capture. Now, that doesn’t mean that you should go after everybody, so to speak. You can pick a particular segment and try to relate and resonate with them. I’m not a big fan on taking a polar stance, generally speaking, you know? I think objectivity, particularly in business is very, very important.

I think you can learn a lot from folks that take an opposite stance from you, right? Everybody has levels of logic at a certain position that justifies their perspective so to speak. So I take polar stances potentially on certain particular topics. But in the overall business domain, I tend to gravitate away from that. You don’t know what you don’t know essentially, right? We can all speak from experiences here. We can all speak, you know, textbook, should we need to refer back to something. But you really have to go through the motions of particulars to be able to speak on them. I tend to be as objective as possible in my dialogue, in my analysis, and in my approach.

Joe Casabona: I like that. Because again, I think you need to… You know, I’ve been told by people who are writing, you know, I use maybe too many hedging words, I just use one right there. Maybe. I’ll say kind of or usually or likely. And I’ve been told that if I use too many or any of those words that I am softening my position. I’m really trying to take a more balanced approach. But like you said, I think taking the polarizing topic or the polarizing approach sometimes, or maybe just taking a strong stand, a stronger stand sometimes helps you stand out. But keeping an open mind is what helps you become a better business owner.

Julian Garsdean: Absolutely. That’s spot on. Everybody wants to speak to somebody, especially a leader or an authority on a topic that has a degree of confidence. When you’re questioning yourself with the maybes and the what ifs so to speak, and these kind of words, there is kings in the armor, you know?

Joe Casabona: Mm-Hmm.

Julian Garsdean: And everybody’s looking for that certainty, especially if you’re the authority figure. That’s a good way to go back to a psychological need for humans, is they’re asking you a question or they’re going to you to get answers on a particular topic. You know, it’s like going to visit a doctor and he’s looking at an X-ray, and he’s looking at me. That could be something fatal. I’m not sure, you know, well, what am I here for?

Joe Casabona: Right.

Julian Garsdean: If you’re not the person to tell me or the one to find out and further investigate, if you are not sure, I’m certainly not sure, right? As I mentioned earlier, you’re gonna want to take polar stances on particular topics. You’re gonna be just that passionate about. But it goes back to what are you in it for and what is the audience that you’ve identified that you want to impact? Because in retrospect, it may bring an audience closer and it may deviate an audience further. So that comes back to your identity. Who do you want to be? What kind of impact do you want to make? Who do you want to resonate with? Not to say that you can speak the generalities either and be a jack of all trades. I shy away from that also, right? A friend to many is a friend to no one, as the old saying goes.

Joe Casabona: I like that. That feels like a politician is probably a friend to many, right?

Julian Garsdean: Right.

Joe Casabona: But again, I think this is great. Connecting with your audience is.. Wes Keo calls it a spiky point of view, right? Share your spiky point of view because that will resonate more with people than just saying, “Well, you know, I guess if you want to record your podcast with Zoom, that’s okay.” Versus like, “Never record your podcast with Zoom unless you want it to sound like crap. I guess if you want to sound like crap record with Zoom.” Right?

Julian Garsdean: Right.

Joe Casabona: Like that’s right one of my spiky points of view. I want to pivot here because along with connecting with people in your audience, these basic needs and main drivers can also assist you in negotiating. And I know that a lot of my own clients and students come to me and they’re like, “How do I get a sponsor? How do I know if I’m charging enough? You know, they offered me a free product. Is that good enough?” It’s not. Unless you can like pay your rent with whatever free product they give you, it’s not enough, right? So how can we leverage some of these principles when it comes to negotiation?

Julian Garsdean: So talking specifically about the industry that you’re in and looking for sponsored content, potentially bringing sponsors to the table who may have some sort of offering for you to attract more visibility to their audience, we can take a deep dive as to how to best negotiate potentially with them, or an angle or an approach that one may take to have better legs to stand on. And I know that you’ve interviewed Justin Moore before, and he really dived into this particular topic and touched base on the three points. I think that would be an immense value to your users.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, for sure. I’ll link that episode in the show notes. You can find everything at streamlined.fm/320. But yeah, he says, you know, brand is either looking for views or direct sales. So like, that’s direct ROI. They’re looking for brand awareness. So it doesn’t really matter how many people are viewing, but they want other people talking about them. Or content repurposing. Which you can have no views and no downloads and they just want you to create the content so that they don’t have to hire somebody to create the content.

Julian Garsdean: That is spot on. We can even take a deep dive into the psychology a bit behind that. And if you really see what a brand is looking for, they want more eyeballs on them, more ears so to speak, more clicks to their website. So they’re really looking for that attention. Now, unfortunately, for solo entrepreneurs or artists just getting started, you know, when a brand is coming to really judge you on a direct sales, they want to see an established audience. There’s no question.

So you go into the game already knowing that I’m gonna put as much content as I can out there if I don’t have eyeballs already on me, if I haven’t been, you know, related to a significant endeavor before that’s put me on the map and I’m gonna make the sacrifices. It is not a journey for the faint of heart nevertheless. So if you’re going in it to jump into your first, you know, few dozen podcast episodes and you don’t have the audience, it’s gonna be very hard to get a deal by a company that’s looking for direct sales, right? Views for them and an established audience, so to speak.

Now, speaking to that point is understanding why the other person is on the other end of the table here, what is the purpose for them being here? You’re getting an offering for something, or you’re picturing an offering. What is it that they want? What are they looking for? Is it the direct sales? Is it the brand awareness? Is it the content repurposing that Justin alluded to?

Now, understanding this is very much like understanding your audience, right? We spoke about this already in the realm of business, understanding your employees, understanding your clients. This is another entity at the table that has a purpose for being there. So understanding their why, taking it back to the fundamentals. Why would they want to work with me, what are they looking for, and, you know, how can I fulfill them?

So if they’re there for direct sales, you can rest assured that you probably have an audience that is widespread. Or engagement. You know, sometimes they look for an engagement. You may not have to have the biggest audience, you know, and I know this from the fitness realm where you can see fitness influencers have millions and then you see deals get pitched to those who have maybe in the hundreds, thousands, or the tens of thousands because the engagement is there, the demographic that they’re really targeting is there, that’s been honed in on. So understanding why they’re at the table to begin with negotiating with you is gonna be really important.

And building rapport and how building rapport is essentially selling your story, right? The negotiations is very much a sale. You’re really trying to sell your value, you’re trying to sell your position and trying to extract something in return. So where it can’t be quantified numerically, like when we talk about the amount of engagement you have or the wide audience that you may have already with you, you want to be able to add the value somewhere, you know? And the closer that you can get to this value add that is most relatable to the motivation of the entity or the person on the other end the more you’re gonna be able to see success in your negotiations.

Julian Garsdean: So, building rapport, you know, really selling your story. At the end of the day, people really resonate with other people. We’ve mentioned that people really resonate with stories. Showing the value that you’re gonna bring forth. If it’s brand awareness or even content repurposing, showcasing that creativity. What makes you unique and what makes you stand alone from everybody else? Because you can guarantee, you know, and the bigger the deals get the more people go knocking on their doors trying to pitch them all sorts of things.

So back to your identity, you know, who is it that you are, and what are the problems that you’re trying to solve, and what are you trying to bring forth, and how much value does that add for them? And like all sales and like all negotiation, everybody tries to pitch from their perspective. But on the opposite end, you have somebody essentially most of the time thinking, what’s in it for me? What’s in it for me?

So instead of imposing your position is understanding what the position is on the opposing end and trying to get closer to that. It’s very much the principles of the sale. Knowing what you’re willing to bend on, what you’re willing to stand firm on, and really having a reality check. Where am I in this game right now? Do I have the ability to make these demands? Do I have the position to be able to make these demands? And taking that approach, just understanding the context of the transaction or the negotiations that you’re in.

Joe Casabona: I think that makes so much sense. You know, my pitch has got a lot better when I went from, “Oh, I can talk about you here and I can talk about you there, and I love your product” to “Hey, if you want to reach the kind of people I’m talking to, if you want me to create great content, great video content for you that you can embed on your website to show people how small business owners like me use your product, this is why you should go with me.” Right?

I think it really goes back to, if we kind of look at these six principles, contribution, how do you teach people? We all have something we’re good at, right? So I just want to relay a story from a recent sponsor. It took a long time to negotiate because they had some terms that I didn’t really want to agree to. So like you said, like I wanted to stand firm on some things, I was able to bend on a couple of other things. And then it was really important to them that I actually tried their product and used it and told a personal story around me using the product.

And it’s probably one of the best ad reads I’ve ever done. If you’ve listened to those episodes that were sponsored, I talk about how like, I hate running, but I’ve been waking up to run because it’s the only time that I can do it, right, with the hectic day and how their product helped me recover after doing an early morning run so that the whole rest of my day wasn’t just me lying in bed because I was so tired or whatever. I’m probably not running right if it ruins my whole day. But that’s a conversation for another time.

I really feel like that’s one of the best ad reads I’ve ever done because it was legit. Like they wanted me to use their product and they gave me talking points, but they were like, “Talk about it from your own… make it conversational.” And I think stuff like that is so important, especially because people on this show trust me—they’ve been listening to me for like six or seven years at this point. And a true endorsement is something that they wouldn’t be able to get from Joe Rogan probably, right? Joe Rogan’s not trying every… Joe Rogan’s not selling his own ads, he’s not trying every product that comes across his desk. He wants to read a script. I know that. And so I can sell, Hey, I’ll actually use your product.

Julian Garsdean: Absolutely. And particularly companies these days they really look for folks that are relatable, right? Otherwise, everybody would pay for a celebrity endorsement if that worked a hundred percent of the time. So they want the product to both be personable and because of such be relatable. Everybody, you know, goes to the pitch immediately. And we spoke about that.

You know, Alex Hormozi, I’m not sure if you’re familiar with him these days, he’s profound business owner and marketer, and he really talks about the pain is the pitch, right? The transactional element at the end of it, at the end of dialogue, particularly in sales. That’s very short. It’s, Hey, are you, you know, essentially breaking down the price and you ready to pay for this?

But you have a relatable dialogue, understanding the pain, unveiling those pain points. And it could be for a company too, right? You spoke about my audience is small business owners, right? Now, what does that mean to them? Are you guys relatable to it? And the more information that you would have on the opposite part in the negotiations is I noticed that you only cast, for example, you know, 3% of your audience is that. However, small businesses still employ the most individuals in the United States to date. So are you really missing out on a relatable audience here that I can connect to, etc.

So understanding that relatability is key, and presenting yourself as incredibly relatable and being able to tell a story, particularly in today’s day and age will really, really give you the edge.

Joe Casabona: Yeah. Inauthenticity? I think that’s a word, right? Being inauthentic it’s so obvious. I don’t know, have you seen Instagram ads or Facebook ads where it’s like a celebrity endorsement, but it’s very clearly a cameo, right?

Julian Garsdean: Yeah.

Joe Casabona: Like, you went to cameo.com and you paid a celebrity 50 bucks or whatever to read this. That is just like, I will never use a product where someone uses that tactic. Like, it’s so very obviously fake and it kills me.

Julian Garsdean: Right? Yeah. It’s too robotic, it’s too generic. People are a lot smarter these days and particularly because everybody’s knocking on the door trying to sell something, right?

Joe Casabona: Mm-Hmm.

Julian Garsdean: The more authentic that we feel it is, the more social proof essentially, the organic social proof essentially that it has, it allows us to trust the brand more. And brand trustability is realistically everything. That’s the part of business that you can’t put a price on, right? That’s what gives the business its goal.

Joe Casabona: Yeah, absolutely. And I know we’re coming up on time here. But for members in the Pro show I’d love to talk about building that trust through oversharing. Julian, I’d love to get your take on just kind of giving away information for free in the pro show, which you can sign up for over at streamlined.fm/pro starting at five bucks a month or 50 bucks a year.

But for now, I’d love to wrap up with a couple of pieces of actionable advice. So let’s say someone listening to this, maybe they have a podcast, maybe they have an established YouTube channel, but they want to take it to the next level, what would you recommend the first couple of steps they take are?

Julian Garsdean: First few action items. I love this, by the way. I don’t think anybody should walk away from anything without having some action items that can make an impact for them moving forward. You know, again, understand who you are and what impact you want to make. Adopt that human-centric approach. Now that you want to make that impact, what audience are you really catering to? Where does this audience hang out? How could you learn this audience essentially better than they know themselves and understanding their pain points and their goals, both the opportunities there and the liabilities that they face?

And then getting a reality check, right? It’s really important. You gotta understand where you really are at this stage of the game and where is it that you want to be and seeing what the deficits might be there. You know as Tony Robbins says, developing a map from where you stand to where you want to go can be an acronym for a massive action plan, right? What are the things that are gonna drive the buck forward and get you closer to that destination?

And never let perfection impede progress, right? Never let perfection impede progress. Doing something and learning from that dealing is better than you taking a standstill and being in your head and never really getting started or feeling stuck. And thereafter measure everything that you can, right? It’s easier to manage things when you can measure them. Am I doing the right thing? What were the consequences, good or bad, from what I’m doing right now? And let me do more of the stuff that works. So being able to measure what you can, setting realistic goals and milestones for yourself.

And being adaptable and resilient. I can’t stress this. This is probably the most important take I can give to anybody starting a business or getting into the world of entrepreneurship. You have to learn how to be resilient and adapt. Again, be rigid in your destination, but be flexible in your approach.

And anticipate that you’re going to fail, okay? That’s the most important thing is this is a lifelong journey in entrepreneurship. There is always a next level. There’s always something new that you’re going to have to learn. Take that time in your journey to skills stack. Just keep acquiring the skills that in time will exponentially move you forward. What is it that I’m missing that makes me more effective, more value, more unique, that creates a bigger story around me? Learn how to focus on those, those skills that you need to acquire to really drive the buck forward faster.

Joe Casabona: Lots of great advice there. I will list these out as well in the show notes. I was writing them down. Understand who you are. Where does your audience hang out? Get a reality check. Never let perfection impede progress. Measure everything you can. Be adaptable and resilient. It’s funny that you mentioned perfection because maybe some keen-eared people will have heard that I shuffle poker chips at my desk, right? It takes six perfect shuffles to get the stack of poker chips back to its original order, right?

Julian Garsdean: Wow.

Joe Casabona: So if you have red and green chips put them in separate stacks, shuffle them six times, and they will be back to organized as red and green. I shuffle poker chips every day. It’s just like that’s my fidget. I will get the perfect shuffle a few times in a day, but my percentage is probably low. One sticks, one falls maybe. I mess it up a little bit. But I don’t let that stop me from shuffling poker chips. So I think never let perfection impede progress is applicable and fun in poker chips even more important in business. Because perfection is rare. And if you only waited for perfection, you would never do anything.

Julian Garsdean: So spot on. Entrepreneurship is a journey, and the destination are really… they’re milestones or goalposts for you. And it is the progression that you’re looking for. And it’s never going to be perfect, you’re always going to have a problem, and you just hope for better quality problems in entrepreneurship, right? But yeah, understanding that it’s never going to be perfect and you’re going to just have to keep trucking forward. And the better that you are at acquiring skills and becoming more adaptable and taking failures as opportunities to get better and better, you put yourself in a more probable position to succeed. You know, you shuffle poker chips on the daily. Now the probability of you getting it right is monumentally greater than me taking a shot at it right now from my experience and where I stand. That’s what we’re hoping to become, just better versions of ourselves, day in and day out.

Joe Casabona: That’s a great point to end on, Julian. This has been fantastic. If people want to learn more about you, where can they find you?

Julian Garsdean: You can find me on LinkedIn most particular. I don’t have a whole lot of content out there right now, but plenty to come.

Joe Casabona: Awesome. I will link to that and everything we talked about in the show notes over at streamlined.fm/320. If you’re a member, be sure to stick around because we’re going to be talking about some fun stuff about building trust by oversharing in the pro show. If you’re not a member, you can sign up over at streamlined.fm/pro. But Julian, thanks so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Julian Garsdean: Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure to be here.

Joe Casabona: And thank you for listening, thanks to our sponsors. And until next time, get out there and build something.