Making Conversations about the perfect book Count with Mike Capuzzi
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Leading Conversations | Telemarketing & Telesales Training | Lead Generation & Account Management using the Telephone
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What I loved about meeting you, Mike, was that you have been able to encapsulate what business owners can be shouting about in their expertise. Because Small is beautiful. 100 page books for business owners to write that tells people what they do and how they can help. Where did that idea come from? Is it from writing yourself?
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It came from a couple of places. Obviously, writing myself has been a big part of it, but I would say, believe it or not, I used to do a web TV show. Maybe like 2010, 2011, I used to go to a local studio and it was professionally produced and it was called Three in Three, and it was three ideas in three minutes. And so I would record these short, very pithy, very focused little web TV shows. People love them, no lie. And this was back when I would travel more, I'd go to conferences and events. I literally got stopped. I was stopped at the airport. Someone stopped me and said, hey, I've seen your people travelling to a conference. And they saw me at conferences, they would say they loved it. This whole idea like, hey, only three minutes and I got three really good ideas. So I've always appreciated the power of highly focused pithy, which means short and sweet content. And longer content has its moments. There are times when you need to write longer content, but I think in this day and age, people just prefer it. So, yeah, the kind of books that I want to write, that I encourage many business owners to write, a 1 hour book, a book that takes about an hour to read is perfect for getting that message across.
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It's easily digestible, isn't it? And what I love about the three ideas in three minutes is kind of, well, highly suggestible and it's enough to create that curiosity, isn't it? It's the adventure that you don't know quite where that's going to lead you when you start having those ideas. So when you're dealing with a business owner who is going, I can't write a book, what could I talk about? What do you say to them, Mike?
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I try to dispel the myth and mysticism, if you will, of what it means to be a book author, because I think a lot of people think it's a lot harder, a lot more work, a lot more challenging. And only special people can be book authors, right? You're helping people in your business. So whether you're a doctor, a dentist, a consultant, whatever, chances are you're helping people. And chances are you're having conversations and conversations that count, right? So it's not a big step to take those conversations and how you help people and just put them in a book format. And Wendy, listen, I know you're a fan of short books because I know your book "Making Conversations Count" was a shorter book. These types of books are ideal for most business owners. Now, this is not about being a New York Times bestseller or...
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Featured in Forbes!
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Right? It's not about that. Maybe it turns into that I'm working with a client right now who I think will eventually have that kind of book. I know she will. She's building such an amazing business. So her first venture into book writing was a little ebook, which a lot of people do. But she came to us after a lot of research and said, you know, I love this idea. I'm not ready to write the big, hard cover book that I want to put a lot of money into making a New York Times bestseller, but I want to write a real book. And these little short books that we publish for clients, again, it takes about an hour to read, so it's better for the reader and for the author. It's a lot less time and stress to write.
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My own experience of writing a book, Mike, was very much that. I'd got 30 years of material floating around, either on scraps of paper or in archived files on the computer. And it wasn't until you started to go, well, how do I help? And what can be the end result for the reader to make it worth their time and effort to read it? And the material quite often is sitting around the place. It's just a question of compiling it into something that is readable.
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I agree.
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Do you coach and help people with that kind of process?
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Yeah, we do. And again, the beauty, Wendy, is the more focused the content can be. It is daunting to write, let's say, a 300 page traditional business oriented book. There's a lot that has to go into that, and oftentimes it's a very wide range of content. In my experience, and I don't know if you agree with this or not, but especially as I get older, I prefer much more focused content on exactly what I'm looking for. And I would prefer to maybe read three 100 page books that I can pick and choose versus having to wade through and trying to find the nuggets I'm looking for in a 300 page book. So I think focus, it actually makes it much easier for the author. So let's just take a dentist, for example. Rather than writing a general book on dentistry and keeping your teeth healthy and oral health, maybe she writes a book just on, let's just say, teeth whitening, for example. Just something very focused that only certain people are interested in. And again, by being focused, obviously the reader is going to appreciate it, but I just believe it just makes it that much easier, Wendy, for the author to curate that content, which she probably has all over the place, and just say, hey, I am just writing a short book on teeth whitening. Not everything else, just this. And it just makes it that much more simple, if that's the right word, because it's still work, but it just makes it that much more simple for the author to get his or her thoughts together and on paper.
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I think you're right, Mike. It needs to be uncomplicated, doesn't it?
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Yeah.
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I mean, we're talking about short books, but the same can be said for an ebook. It's likely that if you're in a generalist field of expertise, you could have ten blogs, ten pages long. There's already your 100 pages. It's small chapters. If you were to read a ten page blog that was in a book, that would take you an hour overall. So what's, that a seven or eight minute read every day to actually just take some really important information on that one piece of topic. It's actually a great way to curate the content to deliver the books. And you've done that without even thinking about it.
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And oftentimes, Wendy, what happens, and I've seen this happen more than once, it definitely happens for me as I'm writing these short books, is that as you're going through that process, it even brings you, the author, more clarity on your business, your service offerings, your product offerings. You see new opportunities, you see maybe some holes. So, yeah, just that effort of looking at it a bit differently. And we have a very, you know, I coach our clients on a very specific short book formula. So there's certain things that we really highly suggest, a certain flow and certain sequence. But when they go through that process, oftentimes, even though they're an experienced business owner, new things pop up because they're actually going through that process.
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Interested to know then, Mike, how many of them do that process from the very start going, I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to come up with a hundred pages in a book that's highly focused and then go through the process and go, well, actually, I've got about another half a dozen topics that I could create six more short books. Or do I just take the plunge and do a big book? That's got to be something that you see right?
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It's not everybody. I'd love to say all of our clients everything because it's planned and they're keeping to the timetables. We have several and by the way, we call our short books, we call them Shooks. So a shook is a short, helpful book. That's our brand of nonfiction business book. So we have several multi shook authors, and once they go through the process, the one time they're like, wow, I see the power of this. I tried to do that in the beginning. So when we're working through the initial phases of their shook. Typically, I can see if this should be maybe there should be two or three, we should break it up even more. And again, the nice thing about that is obviously it's easier on the reader, but it also allows the author to market his or her shook's in multiple ways. Now, rather than just marketing one book to one kind of target reader, now they have three target readers and it gives them even more opportunity.
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It's greater clarity as well, isn't it? In terms of being able to be specific to an audience. And that's something that we see and we read a lot, isn't it, in marketing is to be consistent but not to be too general in serving all because you end up serving nobody. So it kind of reinforces the shook methodology, doesn't it?
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Yeah. Again, I think in this day and age, with the fact that there are short tweets and short tik tok videos and all this stuff, which I really don't know a whole lot about, but my kids do same attention spans are shorter. You and I were talking earlier, it's amazing about multitasking. Can we do this, that and the other thing. So the power of giving someone we're talking a traditional paperback book, they jump on a plane and let's say New York City, and by the time they land in Chicago 2 hours later, they're done the book. And hopefully that book has encouraged them then to take the next step with the book author. Because all of our shooks, Wendy, are marketing tools. They're direct response marketing tools, meaning they are trying to elicit a response from that small percentage of readers who really want what you have.
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What examples can you share in shooks that have hit the shelves and you've seen that play out?
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Many of our shook authors are Main Street type business owners. So we have probably about two thirds of them are the local business owner, who I always say just wants to be five mile or five kilometres famous in their community. They want to be known as the dentist, the physician, the insurance agent, whatever it might be. And then about a third of our clients are more global, what we call worldwide authors. Like myself, I have a worldwide audience. You would have a worldwide audience. So you have clients and followers all around the world. So what's really cool, Wendy, is to see the local business owner publish a short book and then use it in his or her community with tremendous success. And we've seen example after example of this, where by just simply publishing the book, putting it in their office as a display, offering anyone who comes into their place of business a free copy, exhibiting at local events. A very smart strategy for a lot of local business owners, Wendy. And this is the story I'll share to your question is, for example, go back to it. Ironically, he's a dentist, a longtime client of mine who unfortunately has since passed away. But he was a very unique type of dentist, and he was a dentist that doesn't use mercury or fluoride in his practise. It was a very holistic approach to dentistry. So he had a very unique dentistry offering and he wrote a Shook about the dangers of mercury, which is the typical malgams they put in your mouth. Anyway. So you would think the type of person who's interested in this type of dentistry, they're probably health oriented, more fitness oriented, they're worried about their health. So when he published his Shook, he went around to his community and found, like, the health food store owner, the yoga studio owner, the chiropractor, anywhere where people with health that were interested in health would be hanging out and just put a little display with his Shook to take a free copy. And within the first month of doing, I think he did like he did a lot. I think it was like six or ten what we call strategic partnerships, where he just put his book out there and within the first month, Wendy, he had three new patients. People come in and then become patients, each worth a couple of thousand dollars to him. So that's the power of not only being a published book author, but leveraging it in unique ways to get it in front of your ideal target reader.
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So the question for listeners is, if you have a notion of being an author, what is it that you want that book to do for you to be able to help the people that you help?
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Yeah, I say in my own short helper books, it's all about how can you serve the reader? What does that reader want? What does he need? What is he looking for? And working together, we uncover that with our clients. What is that thing they're looking for? What's that goal they want to achieve? And you write a short helper book around that.
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And just because it's a business book doesn't mean that it can't have some story to it, because I think it's like podcasting. What we're doing now is storytelling, isn't it, in a different form. And when I wrote my book, I used examples and stories and relayed memories and examples of things just to put some context to the content. And I think that allows you to have some personality to a business look as well, which I think is possibly a fear business owners have is, how can I write this if they don't feel particularly confident writing anyway?
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Yes, that's a great point, Wendy. That's a great point. I'm glad you brought that up, because, again, a lot of people do have this mistaken notion that, again, you have to be this world class writer. I've got to be the next Shakespeare, the next big thought leader. And again, that's not the kind of book we're talking about here. It is a conversation that counts in print. And I always stress, too, when I'm talking to prospects and even our clients, I would much rather you focus on personality versus perfection. There's no such thing as the perfect book. I don't know if you wrote one. I know I have never written a perfect book. There's always a mistake to be found. There's always something you would like to change.
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I've got to do version two because things have changed, too.
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Yeah, right. So get it out of your head that I'm going to write the perfect book. Matter of fact, right before we got on today's call, we had to do an edit for a client because there was a word that was wrong and everyone missed it. And we were like, oh, we got it. We had so many people reviewing it, and we just found it afterwards. So focus on personality and our perfection means let your personality, that's what's unique to you. That is what makes people either want to be attracted to you or maybe repelled. And that's okay, too. You're not meant to serve everybody, right? It's the people that you're meant to serve. They're the ones you want to read the book, write the book for them and bring out those stories. I always say write like you talk. Again, this is a conversation that counts in print, so it doesn't have to be literary perfection. I think a lot of people it doesn't mean it should be shoddy, but I think people appreciate authenticity, and that me to you feel, and that's what I always encourage.
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It is about being quite conscious that you are writing to a reader.
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Yeah. And again, I would say you don't want to overdo it. There's always a balance, in my opinion. But I do think it's important to think of these shorter books that we encourage people to publish as conversation starters. It's not meant to teach the entire thing about whatever it is you do really meant to allow that... again, that focus. So I think the more we can just dive in there and help people with a very specific thing, the better off you are and the better off your readers are.
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Well, you make a good point there, Mike, actually, because I am known as the queen of conversation, as you know, telemarketing trainer and expert on starting conversations. So as a written author myself and it's a great place to start a conversation if you're networking. You've got a copy of your book, you talk about the book rather than yourself. And I think this is what you can overcome some of those feelings in approaching for the coldness is you're giving something without asking for anything in return, other than you just hope that they would read it and get some value from it. So if you think about when you're ringing somebody on the phone to introduce yourself, you want to really be presenting that same value to people. How better than to just encapsulate it into a printed book and to be able to hand it without any expectation.
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Again, you bring up a great point, Wendy. Another one of my famous mantras is the ability of having a book focused or a book centric marketing strategy definitely is a game changer. So whereas most business owners are talking about their services, their products, like ad nauseum, when you have a book and lead with the book as a giveaway, as a first contact, it changes. So again, since I'm just talking dentistry today, whereas most dentists will be like, hey, here's our Practise, and we do fillings, we do this. It's very traditional.
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They have some lovely smiles.
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Exactly right. They're very traditional. That's what they do. Versus our dentist client who said, hey, get my free book. I'm looking at it right here. Are your teeth toxic? It's right over to my left. That was the name of his shook. Are your teeth toxic? It changes. Now, again, not everybody is going to get that type of marketing. Not everybody wants to read a book. But Wendy, I will tell you, people who read books information gatherers tend to be more affluent. They tend to be better clients. Not across the board, but more heavy on that. People who are readers tend to really be the kind of client most of us would like to have.
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Well, I think I've got a new strap line for you then, Mike, because I would say that shooks are for seekers.
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They are. I love it. It's actually really good. Shooks are for seekers. They're seeking information. Again, they have a problem or they have a goal they want to achieve, and a short, helpful book will give it to them in about an hour.
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I love that because I don't know anybody who hasn't got an hour spare. If they really, really want to know about something.
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And even if they don't, even if it takes them two or three times, they pick it up, they read 20 minutes before they go to sleep. Again, it's not a multi week venture.
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I think it was Brad Sugars that came on the show and he sort of sets people the challenge of 52 books a year. You can read a book a week.
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Right. So if you were to say that a shook is possibly the equivalent of three books.
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A book would be three shooks.
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Yes. One book, three shooks. Yes. Can you imagine if you've got like a 100 and I'm trying to do the math really quickly. 56?
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Something like that. Yeah, right.
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That's an awful lot of seeking, isn't it? That's like one every two or three days that you could be just learning. I'm the same. I like to read. I've just had the knock at the door and my daughter went Amazon again.
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I had two deliveries this weekend.
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What is it this time? And actually, I'm just going to show you now because it's Matthew McConaughey's green lights. And it was John Barrows that recommended it to me on a recent Zoom call. We were just having a natter, not about anything in particular, and that came up and I just did the Prelude on Amazon to sort of get a feel for it. And I thought, I can read that with his accent, no sweat. So it's come today. And my daughter said, It's a good job you haven't got a fetish for shoes, because we would run out of space.
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Well, you can do the same thing with books. I've got a collection myself. I'm like, oh, boy, I think I got four printed books this weekend, Wendy.
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Yes. I told myself that I was moving house and not allowed to buy anything, but books have been the exception to the rule.
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I hear you.
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I don't think there's any harm in learning. And there's got to be something to be said for even encouraging our younger generation. And if you are a business owner and you've got a family and you can say that you've written a book, that is going to have an impact and a wider impact, not just on the business, but in the people in your family. And aspirational for our next generation, who, as we were saying earlier before we came on, maybe don't do as much.
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So to that point, my oldest daughter is going to be a senior at college this year. Literally four years ago, almost at this very day today, she was going into her senior year of high school and she was home for the summer. Of course, she was working at a local veterinarian's office. So an animal doctor, she loves animals. And earlier that year, we had just rescued our first dog. So my entire life always sort of went to a dog breeder. I've always had dogs, but went to a breeder and got a dog. But that year, after a German Shepherd passed away, we rescued a dog, went to a local dog rescue and great dog. She's a great dog. So that summer, before my daughter's senior year in high school, we were sitting around, I think it was July 4 weekend for us. I was trying to encourage, what are you going to do this summer besides work? To make a difference, to add some value. So we came up with the idea and she jumped on it, of publishing a book about dog rescues. And we did a different type of book. Wendy we did what they call a compilation book. So my daughter and I came up with the idea. She led the effort. And we found 26 dog rescue owners, my daughter being one of them. They each wrote a chapter. So rather than having to write an entire book, now they're just writing a chapter about their dog and the dog rescue experience. And how it changed their life. That was on 4 July, July 4 weekend 2018, by Labour Day here in the United States, which is in September. So like three months later, the book was done. It was called Dog Joy. She raised like $6,000. So all the money raised, we donated to the dog rescues in the book. And what we didn't expect to have happened, what happened was she got a tonne of local publicity. She was interviewed for all the local newspapers. She was featured in a local, like a real magazine. I live in the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area. So she was featured in a regular, like, a magazine for 30 people to watch who are under 30. And then she used it as part of the college application process and got into every college with scholarship. She had people universities offering her scholarships. One dean wrote a letter back to her, hey, I would love to have an author in our freshman class. So this is what it means to be an author and the lives you can change. And she was 17 or 18 at the time that she did it. Polly could have done a lot more since she embraced it, but didn't embrace it as much as she could have because she went off to college. But that's the power, and I think any young person can do something very similar. And again, we raised a lot of money, hopefully changed some lives. I thought. We thought that was a very cool story.
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I think that's a brilliant story, Mike, because I know as well that lots of listeners are business owners who are going to be going, I can get my son or daughter to do that. I'm going to sow that seed with them. Because it's that kind of self motivation, isn't it, that actually makes you stand out from the crowd of other applicants, whether that's going for an application at college or going for a job interview. I think it's an absolutely fantastic idea.
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And we didn't go into it. Wendy, with that in mind, we were just like, hey, this is Summer project, it'd be cool to raise money. But again, maybe in the back of my mind, I had it could be a differentiation point for her in the application process. Interestingly enough, a very well known marketer, about two years after the book was published, asked me to do a training for his business owner group. And I did a training, something like how to get your son or daughter into any college of their choice. And I went through step by step how my daughter did it. So if anyone's interested, let me know. I have that training somewhere. It was just a zoom recording and I think a lot of it could be a process that's easily repeatable by a lot of young folks.
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Maybe one step further would be to take it to colleges and see if the colleges would embrace it as a summer workshop.
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Well, it's funny you say that, too, because I was a guest speaker via Zoom the first time, really, when COVID was at its max, and then more recently for a professor at a university in Mexico. And he was teaching a graduate course on business. And he found me through one of my shooks on Amazon and invited me to be a guest lecturer. And then I guess I was good enough that I was brought back as a second time and in real time, I said, listen, why don't you guys.. and I said, we'll publish it for free or help you for free. There's the class. You've got 20 students, 30 students. Each of you write a chapter, and there's a short, helpful book on a specific topic. He hasn't done it yet, but it could be part of a college project, a high school project.
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I think it's anything that we can encourage our next generation to get involved with. It always gets a round of applause from me, Mike.
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Mike this is the part where I have no idea what's coming next, but it's a conversation that you recall as having changed your life in some way, shape or form. So what was it all about?
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It is a distinctly profound conversation because it really did change my life. And it's in the business context. It wasn't a personal one. It wasn't something like that. So it was in 2007, wendy and I don't know if you've ever heard of a gentleman, he's big internationally, but he's got a huge following in the United States. His name is Dan Kennedy. Dan is a world famous marketer copywriter, probably has written 30 or 40 books. Huge following, has helped so many people. He used to do big conferences and all this. Well, in 2007, he was speaking at a conference, and I'll cut to the chase as quick as I can, but long story short, I won a contest that he was sponsoring. There was three winners to be announced, and I happen to be one of the three winners. And what the winners won was a lunch with him because he was at this conference and he was going to break away and sit down with me, the three winners, and have lunch with him, which is a big deal for the world I was in at the time. Turns out, Wendy, the other two people who won did not show up for that lunch. So it was me and Dan Kennedy. This would be like you and Matthew McConnell, literally. He's that profound in the business world that I was in. So we're in this.. he's got to this event. He's speaking at his event. He has lunch. We're in a hotel where I remember it was like the basement of the hotel. We have lunch. It's just he and I sitting, and I had met him once before. He knew of me, but he didn't know me, so I was kind of star struck. I gave him a really nice gift. We were talking, and towards the end of that, whatever it was, 45 minutes lunch, which, again, just one on one, there was a product I had created for myself before I went into book publishing. 100%. I was a marketing consultant. So I created this cool little product that allowed you to add handwriting and hand drawn doodles to your marketing collateral. At the end of our lunch, I wanted to bring it out and get his feedback on it. So I remember at the time, it was like a software product on a CDROM. I remember sliding the CD Rom across the table, and then I had a little print out of these doodles and stuff, and I said, hey, Dan, I came up with this thing. I explained it really quickly. I said, what do you think? And Wendy, I can just remember he lit up. He's like he went from sort of this kind of like, oh, I got to get this lunch over with. Just being amazed by this. I even have the picture. I grabbed the picture with him, and he had a smile on his face. Little did I know that was the start because he was so enamoured with this product and this thing that I created. He announced it to his world, and it blew up and made me literally a very international name in his world. We sold tens of thousands of seats of this thing that I created. It's still alive. It's called Copy Doodles, and it's now a website where you can go in and get these doodles. But, Wendy, I can't tell you, after that, I was speaking on stages. I was in books being featured because I created this really cool thing that marketers could use, and it was all because Dan Kennedy and that lunch, in that conversation.
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Oh, my goodness! So was it a one course, two course, three course lunch?
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I think there was a salad. Yeah, it's probably three courses.
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I'd have been pitching that at the starter.
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Oh, my. Well, again, I was sort of like I didn't know what I had. I thought it was cool, but I was like, Is this too corny? Would a guy like this think this is corny. Interestingly enough, I mean, I spoke with him a couple of times. He and I went to his we became I wouldn't say friends, but much friendlier. I actually did a consulting day with him at his home a couple of years later, and all we talked about was copy doodles and yeah, if you Google copy doodles, you'll see it still it's all over the place still.
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Isn't it interesting, though, because what strikes me from that whole situation was almost being held back for fear that it wasn't really anything.
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Yeah, just like our authors.
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Yeah. So you knew you were onto something, but it's kind of that fear of rejection from somebody that you really, truly admire.
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Yes.
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It's make or break, isn't it? And then you know that your time was running out. So it was like now or never.
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Yeah. And by the way, Dan Kennedy, I have it over here. He featured my daughter's book and he had a newsletter ... a print newsletter. So something that went out in the mail, I'm looking at it. He featured my daughter's book Dog Joy. He sent a cheque for $1,000 out of the blue to support the effort because he's a big horse rescue person. But that's how much of a fan the relationship tightened, all because of that conversation.
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That's incredible. It's actually given me goosebumps.
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Yeah, it's very cool.
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It's like my strap lines. I always say this. You just never know where a conversation will lead. You just have to be brave enough, don't you?
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Yeah.
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Well, I didn't know Dan Kennedy, but I feel like I know him a lot better.
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There's some more books, by the way, he's got some excellent books online. So when you're ready to buy a couple more books, check out, Dan Kennedy.
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I always encourage listeners to reach out to guests. So where's the best place for them to find you.
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With your okay I'll give two places. I mean, my main website is mikecapuzzi.com. Our publishing company is bitesizedbookscom. I put it out there. Wendy if anybody hears this and is interested in how my daughter did this, I have that training somewhere. I'm happy to put it up on a server and let people download it. They can just reach out to me. There's forms on my site. And then, if it's okay with you, I actually wouldn't mind giving some of your listeners or all your listeners the opportunity to read three of my Shooks for free online. The magic of short books, the magic of free books and the magic of shooks. The digital version, which you can read on your phone or on your computer, it's hidden on my website. So if you go to Mike Kapuzi.com Magic, you'll be able to get the links for all three of those shooks, and hopefully you'll read them and be inspired to write your own shortcoming book.
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We can never have enough authors, and I'm always looking for an excuse for a little bit more shelf space. Mike, it's been a delight. Thank you so much for all your generosity. It's been great speaking to you.
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Wendy, thank you for the in-depth questions. I really do appreciate them. Thank you very much.
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I turn business owners into book authors by leveraging the power of short, helpful books that are fast to read and easy to write. Author of The 100-Page Book | Business Book Coach & Publisher
2 年Thanks Wendy! Enjoyed being on your show!