Neal Schaffer, Author & Marketer | Writing The Book On Influencer Marketing

Thank you for joining me on the success story podcast where we speak with incredible people, mentors and leaders unpack their story and offer insights based on how they built themselves up to who they are today. Today I'm speaking with Neil Schaefer. Now, Neil Schaefer is an authority on digital transformation, sales and marketing, but he's also the president of his own organization, PDCA Social. He teaches the digital media to executives at Rutgers University, the Irish Management Institute and the University of Yvaskila, I think that's right. Well, you know it. Yeah. Nobody gets finished. That's good. I'm glad. That was a, that was a tongue twister. And obviously, you know, being a marketing and sales executive, he is heavily focused on social media brands, social selling, and he just released his fourth book, Not the Plug It, but I think it's something that we can talk about in this sort of relevant to the audience. The age of influence, the power of influence to elevate your brand. So Neil, thank you for joining me. I really appreciate it. And it's going to be here. Yeah, no, it's great. So let's, to start off, just give us like a little bit of, you know, your background where you came from and how you got to where you are today. Sure. You know, we all have interesting stories to tell. We always say anybody can write a book about their life. So I've got them in Southern California and, you know, I don't know how many of you remember when Steve Jobs passed away. There was this video of him doing a graduation speech at Sanford University and he was all about connect your dots of your past, which will tell you who you are and will lead you to your future. So as I connect my dots looking back, right, since you asked me the question, so I grew up like a punk rocker in Southern California, very anti-authoritarian, but also intellectual. I also had, I lived in an area where it was mainly Asian Americans. So I was already going to high school birthday parties where I was the only one that was not speaking Chinese, for instance. So when I went to a small liberal arts college called Amherst College, I went from Southern California to conservative New England with colored hair and, you know, there I started learning Chinese and I did my junior abroad in China and everything was hunky-dory until they had something called the Tiananmen demonstration. So I'm literally in the middle of all this and it was really sort of like a wake up call that I want to do something that can in some way contribute to world peace, but to really like help people. And for me, that was sales in an international environment where I could meet people and every person I could meet, there might be a way I could help them. This was my thinking, right? So we had pulled out a China at that time and it was hard to believe, but Japan was booming. So senior year college, learned Japanese. I went out there Christmas break to see a Japanese friend that I met in China during that junior abroad and said, I'm going to work in Japan and I'm going to land the job and I did. So I graduated and I spent my first 15 years in Japan and I started in finance for various reasons, but I really had the extra do sales and within a few years I was able to basically launch our Chinese sales operations for this Japanese company in technology and semiconductors. So yeah, so the first 15 years of my career were primarily B2B sales, often launching markets from scratch. So I did that for the semiconductor company in China. I did it for a Canadian startup out of Ottawa in software out of Japan for all of Asia and then I helped another company in high tech there. So I always thought that sort of punk rock, I always wanted to do things my way, very entrepreneurial and it turns out that I was able to do, I was like a country manager, regional VP of sales. I was able to have my own little territory and basically have my own company within a company which I really, really enjoyed, right? So I learned all about business through doing that because even though I was sales, I had to wear a lot of hats. Oh, we're going to go to a conference, we need to do marketing material, we'll do it, right? But really it was just meeting people, you know, my father, he's like, you know, you want to go to university to do two things, you want to learn how to communicate well with people and you want to learn how to communicate with people from lots of different backgrounds because that's who you're going to meet in the business world. So that business experience was just tremendous and this is all before social media. So I don't want to go too far, but yeah, that's sort of my background before social media. Are you ready for the second decade of my career? Well, no, yes, yes, I do want to dive into the second decade of your career. I want to understand one thing because I think it's interesting and I can understand where you're coming from, but for somebody who's listening, when you said your punk rock background, you go to China and you see like, it's like your anti-establishment in the States is obviously not, you know, the experience is going to China, you're going to see much more establishment in China, especially with like, you know, Tiananmen Square. But how did saving, you know, saving or not saving, that's the wrong way of putting it, doing good for the world, how does that translate into sales? Because if I was, if I was not in sale, I am in sales and I understand that true sales and being authentic and delivering things that you believe in can do exactly what you're saying. But the average person that is not in sales does not correlate saving the world to somebody who's in sales. So I just want to unpack that one piece before we go on because it means a lot to me and it's probably a lot to do with what you do now, just that mindset. So I don't want to say, yeah, I don't want to say like I'm an anarchist and not sort of punk rock, right? I just, you know, I sort of have a distrust of, you know, authority and I would question when people would order me to do things. I think that's easy to think about it. So China for me, I mean, it was a new culture and I wanted to be respectful of that culture and I was a student of the world. So, you know, when I was there, yes, it was a communist country and although at that time they actually were opening up to the world. It was the first time they were opening up to the world with Deng Xiaoping. Actually, it was very different then because people really wanted to talk with me. They wanted to know more about the United States. They wanted to know how much it cost to live there, what salary they could get if they moved there. Very different from today's China, which is almost gone back to being not as open as it used to be. Let's just put it that way and using technology to really, to really follow people online and do whatever they do. So I don't do much business in China needs this to say. What I did realize that at Tiananmen and I would go there, I would join demonstrations as a photographer and I'd be at the front line and I would just sit down in Tiananmen Square and I just have like tens of people all around me asking me questions about democracy and the Western world. What I realized that sales, I wanted to be on the outside engaging with people and I believe that sales is that unique role that does allow you where everybody else is in the office if we ever go back to office after the pandemic. But sales people are on the front line and they're meeting people and they're engaging with people and they're socializing, which I really liked. When I look around, I do more marketing in sales today, but when I look around, I go in any restaurant, any building, anywhere, the park, whenever I see a soccer goal or whenever I see a light fixture in a restaurant, someone convinced someone to buy that. Even around me was done because there was a qualified professional that was able to make that sale. When they made the sale, I do believe that they were doing it to help their client, that this is the best product, best product, whatever it is. In our own way, and I'm not saying that all salespeople are like this, just like in any profession, you have the good in the bad. But I believe that the really good salespeople are really passionate and I was from all this sort of background that I have. When I joined the sales team, I mean, it became part of my life. I would like, one time when I was selling Semekner's in China to a big trading company, after the negotiation, we were having a beer together and the guy goes, are you like on the board of investors for this company because you almost sound like an investor? And that was my approach that when I'm in sales, I talk to the CEO, I talk to the shareholders. That's who I'm working for, right? And so in a weird way, I didn't listen directly to my managers, but I wasn't listening to the top boss. And you're the most important boss. Yeah. And if everything I do is aligned with that, no matter what middle management was in my way, that might be misleading me for whatever political reason, what have you. And I mean, sales just like any other organization, you have a lot of that. If I was being true to that, then I knew that I would be successful and I would be able to weather any internal storm because these do happen in corporate America. 100%. Yeah, so that was really the thought process, really simple thought process. So I had to work for a company where I believe in the product. I love it. I wasn't just going to do sales for anyone, but it really is, there's a science to it, but there's an incredible art to it because everybody you engage with is different. They all have different issues. You need to be able, I was trained like in social selling, a solution selling, spin questions what have you. It's all about understanding their needs and delivering a solution and it's like, if we don't have the solution for you, I'll tell you, right? And maybe I'll introduce you to someone who does because then I know that that person's going to introduce me to a lead later on. So, you know, I did write this book about influencer marketing, not the fast forward, but a lot of those concepts actually come from B2B sales where you had to work with the whole ecosystem partners to get leads, you know, to build relationships that would lead the leads, to get introductions internally to help get intel that would help you, you know, close a deal, whatever, right? So yeah, sales and marketing are a lot closer than a lot of people think in many ways. I love it and I love where you're heading because I think I think I'm very much in alignment and as you walk through how you built out your own company and why you're focusing on influencer marketing and I think your background and sales as well, it'll start to make a lot of sense, like the sort of the lessons and the things that you preach about influencer marketing and brand and whatnot and why I think it's important for everyone. But anyways, okay, so let's go, okay, so that's for, okay, next decade, what's next, I guess, where are we now? You're still selling or are you working at the event? So big life event got married in Japan and then five years after we got married, how do baby girl decide to raise her in the US? So 15 years after living in Japan, I'm back in the US and for the first time after, you know, basically doing the job remotely, going back to Asia two weeks every two months, after we have baby number two, it's sort of time to take some time off and help my wife and help her raise a kid. So, and enjoy the joy of being a father. So I did part time consulting for that company and then I was in the job market for the first time in the United States where all of my network was in Asia, right? All of my professional network at least. So at this time, it's like, how do I build a network? It's like, you know what, I'm going to check this LinkedIn thing out. And I realized as a business tool, this is back in, I'm going to age myself here, right? This is back in 2008, right? Nobody was, not everybody was on LinkedIn and when they were, it's like, why would I connect with someone that I don't personally know that I can vouch for? It's like, no, it's a tool. There's so many ways to use it if you, if you put trust in expanding your network. So I became really active, I became a really open networker, I was helping other people just through LinkedIn messages and I started blogging and I ended up getting my job. It was, you know, it was my dream job of like, you know, director of BizDev and APAC for technology company, but then we had the Lehman Brothers grass. So this passionate person who would do anything and everything for the company he worked for, three and a half months after they hired me, they pulled the plug, right? And that was the first time I had always been the one leaving companies. That was the first time someone pulled the plug on me and that's when it's like, you know, I need to create something that no one can take away from me because of how past I am. And that was my brand, right? I realized. I'm going to create a really, really robust personal brand. I'm going to keep blogging. And as I kept blogging and it was just about LinkedIn and this is like I said back in 2008, my wife says, you know what? If you don't find a job, why don't you like write a book or something? And I, you know, I thought a bad idea. Yeah. Well, you know, in 2009 is probably going to replicate a lot of what, 2020, 2021 is going to look like. People that graduated in that year, they couldn't find jobs, right? Or they had to do free internships for a year. Unfortunately, I think for the next year or two, as we enter undoubtful, you know, undoubtfully went to recession. It's going to be a similar thing. So while I did interviews, I wrote the book and as I was writing the book, I was doing a lot of networking locally here in Orange County, California, I live in Irvine now. And people would start to reach out to me and I started getting invited to speak. And then after I started speaking within the course of two weeks, I had four companies locally here reach out to me saying they wanted help with social media. They didn't know what they didn't know. They just wanted my help. And I, I do not have an agency background because I have a B2B sales background, but I do have this consultative selling approach. So it's like, okay, what do companies need? They need strategy, they need education. So I launched a consulting company. This is January 2010. So this is outside the second decade starts now, I've been doing this for a decade. But, you know, when you put yourself out there, right? And this is how influence is created. You are a content creator, I had a blog, you put yourself out there. I was very open networking, my content starts to appear in Google, I've all sorts of people coming. I start to speak locally, I then start to speak nationally, I start to consult with businesses, I start to get referrals, right, from my happy customers. And once you get out there, it just continues to go and go and go and go and expand if you do it right. And you know, since then, I've spoken, you know, I'm considered like, you know, this global expert. So I've spoken, you know, on four continents, more than a dozen countries, I teach at records, business school, I teach executives also in Ireland and every two or three years in Finland. I just wrote my fourth book. And you know, that notion about being true to your customer and serving them has that concept that I learned in solution selling has served me very well because everything I do is about that. Every blog post, every book I write, I am thinking about who my customer is and I'm speaking to them. So there's a lot of ES out there in social media, right, and everyone's vying for influence. I don't really care about that because I'm laser focused on my end customer and if I can make them happy, I know that I'll, you know, I'll be able to continue to grow with them. So yeah, and you know, I never started my own agency, I was a consultant, but I had one company in particular, said, Neil, we love the strategy you built, we just don't have the resources to implement it, can you do it? So let's say, pick you out, right. And now I do, you know, I'd say in addition to sort of consulting an agency, I do what you call fractional CMO. So half a day a week, two hours a week, I'll go into an office here, primarily local businesses here in Orange County, and on their CMO, right, a lot of startups. They have experienced people, but they're not experienced enough, maybe they're too junior, I'll go in and give my helping hand and actually train and teach them. So yeah, it's a variety of things I do. I really enjoy the fact that every day is different. I enjoy, you know, when you go out on your own, even if it's just a side hustle, whether it's $50 or $100, when you get that and you realize you did it on your own without a company behind you, it's an incredible feeling, right? Just incredible. So with every, you know, big transfer I get or check I get in the mail, it's just an incredible feeling. And there's just so much potential. There's always too much to do, so many people to help. And, you know, even with this COVID-19 pandemic, the beautiful thing is that I can continue to do everything I've been doing and people just need more help, right? Yeah. So, you know, if you are reading more blog posts, they're opening my emails, they're, you know, listening to podcasts, it's a fantastic time. So, you know, for all you listening, it really comes down to what are you an expert in? What are you passionate about? Start to create content around it. If it's, if you like to speak, do a podcast, if you like video, do YouTube. If you, you know, like to write, then, then do blogging, but that's, I believe that's where the action is going to be. And I believe those people are also going to be hot items for companies to want to hire as well, because they have a built-in following, a built-in community, especially, especially if you're in sales, right? People still want to hire you because you have a rolotex, but now you're building a virtual rolotex, right? Yeah. People really like you for who you are. And those are the people that are going to become your customers in the future. So I love, so I think that the way you've done this is the way that you should do it. Like you just focus on what you love and you put it out into the world and that's who your target customer is and you don't care about all the other noise. So I see, you know, you mentioned everybody's trying to, you know, have influence, be an influence. And not everybody, I think that some of the wrong people are trying and some of the people that should be aren't trying, but that's another point. But why do you think that people have such a hard time just focusing on what they know and what they love when they start to create content? And they just sort of go with the, I don't know, garbage to be quite honest. Yeah, you know, social media can be overwhelming and you can be influenced. I mean, we know, you know, fake news and influence and elections. We're all influenced by what we see. So I, you know, this may be a shock to a lot of people. I don't go through my news feeds. The only news feed I go through is actually Instagram and I'm pretty selective as to who I follow. With the rest, I just go in when I need to. I'm primarily looking at my notifications and maybe I'll check out what a friend's doing here or there, but I'm not there on the feed, letting Facebook, you know, tell me what I need to see or letting Twitter tell me what I need to see. Because if you do that, you, you're going to tend to see very opinionated content when you're the other or a lot of provocative content. So I just stay away from that. And I think that really it comes down to just a very, very, and I realized this at the beginning when I was consulting with companies, just a very, very strategic approach. What are you trying to do? Or in the words of Tim Ferris or one of my favorite podcasters, Pat Flynn, he uses this quote a lot. I'm going to give them both credit. What would success look like? So if you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to try to become more influential, right, or build a side hustle, what would success look like? Okay? Because that's going to pave the road as to what now do I need to do to get there? And when you think about it that way, all that other garbage, that noise just goes away. It's you and your internal battle to get yourself out there, right? And inevitably, no matter what you choose, it will come down to content creation. So you better pick something you love to do. Because if you burn out, if you start a podcast two months later, you ran out of fuel. That was two months wasted, right? So you have to think, this is something I want to do. At least give yourself a 12 month plan. And it's cool. We change careers. It's totally cool. In fact, I encourage it, right? Maybe you'll go back, but you know, you don't, varieties of spice alive. You don't have to stick with the same thing for 30 years. But if you're passionate, you're up 30 years worth of passion and you then go for it. Yeah. I love that. And the quote you just said, like, find what success means to you. Is that like your, your, so you're basically saying like not to summarize Tim Ferris or I can't, I don't remember the other gentleman, but like if you, if you aren't defined in how you're creating the content and you don't have that set path, then you won't see the outcome that you want, even it, like, I see a lot of people just put stuff out there and not have purpose for putting stuff out there. And I think, you know, I've fall victim to that as well sometime. So is that define what success is? Is that like your North Star metric that you'd like to achieve if everything goes well? Or would you just say, just start and figure that out as you know? Well, let's put it, let's put it this way, okay? Let's put it in the sales paradigm. So in Japan, we all had to learn this methodology that you can apply to any job you do called PDCA. And it's actually the name of my agency, PDCA Social. And it was created by the Godfather of Quality Control, Professor Edwards Deming, like in the 50s. But it's this teaching that Japanese companies took the heart and they became, you know, world class manufacturers in the 80s, you know, so into it or what have you. So PDC is really simple. If you're going to have an experiment, right? You want to try to measure, you want to know if you're, if you're going to do an experiment and life is one experiment, trying to build influences and experiment, what are you going to do? You're sort of going to figure out, well, I want to achieve this, well, how do I go about achieving that? Well, if I do this, if I do A, B and C, I think I can do that. So then you actually create the plan, you do according to plan, you check, and then you're always going to be optimizing this never-ending circle chisened, right? So you're in sales, right? Okay. You have a zero pipeline. What are you going to do? You're not just going to randomly do stuff. You're going to put some thought in who's our target audience, who's our target customer, who are our competitors doing business with, you might do some online reading and try to, you know, get some more intel, do some LinkedIn searches, but you're first going to probably build a target list, then you're going to go on the target and see who you know that might be able to introduce you. You're going to have a process, right? And then you're going to have a pipeline that says, okay, now I know that if I have 30 people in my pipeline, I'm going to get calls with five of them, I'm going to be able to submit proposals for three, maybe I'm going to close one. And the average value of closing one is like $5,000. Like, okay, well, I need to have like 360 deals in my pipeline in order to achieve my annual goal, unless that annual, you know, sale value goes up. So I'm very process oriented and that's why I love sales. And I also love sales because I see the results of my efforts in terms of a sales amount. So every salesperson has a process and or you should have a process. You should have the good ones too. Yeah. I mean, the sales process, we don't talk about a marketing process, but we do talk about a sales process. That's why I think that all of you listening that are in sales should get this immediately. It's all about that for whatever you do in life, okay? Whenever I want to buy something, I always get three quotes because I know my clients do that with me and sell it out, right? Yeah. It's the process, right? That does everything I do. So if you want to try to build influence, you're not just going to have has to be create content. What is the content that whoever I want to influence is looking for? It's a number one question. And a lot of bloggers, I have a blog where I have 20 or so guest contributors for 25 every month. I'm not going to say names, right? And I'm not going to say if they're past or present, but I have a lot of bloggers who do not who think that this is going to be a great blog post, but it never gets any views. And I know why? Because they didn't do keyword research. They didn't understand what people are searching for in Google. And just by changing a few different keywords, they can align themselves with people actually search for in Google. But one of my top performing blog posts, it's going to sound really stupid, but what is LinkedIn and how to use it? And when I first started doing keyword research, I was doing all this blogging about LinkedIn. And I'm like, okay, how many of these tools? And it's like this was like a top 10 search keyword related to LinkedIn. I'm like, are you kidding me? But you always got to remember, especially when you've been doing this for a while and you're an expert, there's always people just starting, right? There's always beginners. And sometimes you need to dumb down that message to adapt to them. So I know I said a lot and we sort of went a little bit off topic, but I like it. It's very good. But it's all, it's strategic and it's process oriented. And if you do it that way, I think that you'll be able to better stick to that original plan and then get to that, that, you know, that circle of, of never ending Kaizen. And that's really where the magic happens. Just like in sales, as you optimize your sales process, the exact same thing. And that's very good. And thank you. So the only, the, the one last thing I have, like a couple, like life insight questions, but I want to ask you just about your book. So the last book you put out, age of influence, the power of influencers to elevate your brand. How can influencers elevate your brand and are influencers right for every brand and can influencers hurt a brand as well? So let's just the spectrum of influencer marketing because you wrote a book on it. So like just a couple, like, you know, I don't know, key takeaways that are like the highlight of the book, the highlight rules that digital influences everywhere. And influencer marketing has been going on for centuries. We used to call it celebrity endorsements. So when you see Shaquille and Neil advertise a Buick, try to fit himself in one. That's a celebrity endorsement. What we're finding is that digital influence, because it's everywhere with social media, you know, 20, 30 years ago, there were like three TV stations. There was one major national newspaper. Everybody pretty much watched the same TV shows and read the same news today. It's all over the place. And I talk to people like in their 50s and 60s, like I don't understand, I don't even recognize any of these YouTube stars on TV commercials now because everybody's influenced by so indifferent. And the viral YouTube video that you saw yesterday is probably very different than the one that I saw. So now with this, we have new celebrities that have been born. So I consider like the Logan Pauls and, you know, the Charlie of TikTok fame. These are celebrities. When you're on a TV commercial, you're a celebrity. But between them and people that have 500 connections, a thousand followers, there's a lot of people that have some digital influence. So let's say you have 5,000 followers on Instagram. And let's say, you know, you get 10% of people to engage with that. That's 500 engagements. If you yourself were to put out a blog post and then boost that on Instagram or on Facebook, that would cost you money to get that sort of engagement. And guess what? This person's getting an engagement from an audience that trusts them and that probably has an interest in them because of what they're posting. So because of this fragmented audiences that exist in digital today, it is wise for businesses because we don't trust advertisers. We, you know, the minute we see sponsored, we sort of want to tune it out, but we trust people. So businesses will never be able to compete with people. In fact, Mark Zuckerberg even said, we're always going to get priority to, you know, to people rather than businesses. And that's just the way it works. And we just trust people more than businesses. So with all that in mind, if businesses really want to get word of mouth out about themselves in social media, right, organic social, you're not going to be seen in the newsfeed because it's paid a play, paid social, you're an advertisement, everyone's doing it, costs are going up, collaborating with influencers, not necessarily paying so on Instagram, right, to, you know, paying them $5,000 to post a photo, but, you know, working with people that actually already like no interest or brand. So instead of trying to find someone that's never heard about you, try to actually find people that use you, go in your email database, go in your followers, go in your customer database, go in your partners, work at ecosystem, right? In sales, if you have an ecosystem that exists, if these people are on digital, they're influencers. So there's an argument and I'm working on my next podcast that is probably going to be on this topic of influencers for sales people. But that's, you know, it's, it's the same concept. So it can tremendously help brands, but if you work with the wrong influencer, yes, it can hurt brands because there's a lot of fraud out there and you could be wasting a lot of money and there might not be a cultural fit too. So I don't think the danger in terms of like brand reputation is huge, but you want to do your homework and most companies fail. I've had a lot of people read this book, they go, you know, at first book on influencer marketing, they rolled their eyes, we wasted so much money on working with influencers and then they realized they did it wrong because they work with the wrong influencers. So that's really in a nutshell. I think that marketers and everybody have been miseducated on influencer marketing. They've been misled. They read too many provocative blog posts about the fire festival and just all this bad stuff, right? Yes, there are people that game the system and yes, there are celebrities that will cost a lot of money, just execute only or cost a lot of money, right? But if you're homework and you do it right, it should be a line item on the marketing budget for any company in any industry. I love that. Yeah. No, I love it. The book just came out during the pandemic, published March 17th, right? But I'm a fighter like every salesperson, right? If I have to fight to build that pipeline of closed deals, if I have to like, you know, in Tokyo, the end of the quarter to meet my quota, I need to get that contract signed tonight, you know, meeting an engineer from Sony on a train platform at 10 p.m., right? Just to get that contract and then go into a kinkos to be able to fax that. I mean, this is old school. Yeah. So it's like, you know, I don't care what's out there. I don't care if it's a pandemic. There's so much we can do virtually and that's what I want to tell you all, whether you're in sales and marketing, now is a time to build and develop deeper relationships, right? We all have a lot of time. We're all at home. We all need help and we're all lonely. So this is a great time to be in sales and marketing. Is this this book, would this be the book, the age of influence, powers of influence, elevate your brand? Is that a book that somebody should read who's just trying to build out their brand? Or is there other types of, and obviously it's yours, so you're, that's fine. But I mean, like, is there other readings that people should go to, it could be yours, could be someone else's matter to me that they can sort of start. Yeah. You know, so I have, I have a podcast called Maximize Your Social Influence. So, which is all about building leveraging and monetizing influence and indigenous media. So that's obviously, you know, there's resources. This book is primarily for businesses because I, my, my average customer's business, but I started writing this book. One of the things that prompted me, one of the trigger points, was when I was guest lecturing at an MBA marketing class at USC here in LA. And the number, the number of questions I got, I got asked about influence and marketing at the end of a general social media marketing presentation really blew me away. And half of those questions were all about how can I become an influencer, right? Yeah. So that is a topic for a future book, for a future digital community, you know, a membership site that I plan to create. I do talk at the end of the book, why every business should try to become more influential? Because the more influence you have, the more other influences will collaborate with you. And then I talk about, there is a chapter on how to build your own influence. But I will say, if you were to read the book, you understand why businesses are investing more in influencers, and you can reverse engineer the process and understand what they're looking for when they're trying to identify influencers, so that you can sort of tweak your own process and strategy to fit in what they're looking for if that makes sense. So it's not directly, no, indirectly, I think it's going to offer your advice. And if you're in marketing, I mean, it's a no brainer, because when I talk about influence and marketing to, I spoke at a USC class, a different USC class a few weeks ago before the lockdown, and mainly they were 20s in the room. There was a TikTok star in the room that was a student that had a million followers on TikTok at the time. And they were like, you know, they understand social, right? They just don't understand it from a business perspective, right? Some of them have been successful building out that personal brand and becoming a celebrity. Some have done it intentionally. I think more, maybe not as intentional, but for every celebrity, there's thousands, about tens of thousands, or millions of people that are still trying to get there, right? And figure out what they're going to do. Of course. I think that, you know, because everyone listening is obviously pretty active in social and they get it. They follow influencers. I think it's going to be really, really good. And if you're a business person, it's going to be a really good business book to understand that concept and where budgets in marketing are going to go. Good. No, thank you. Okay. Just to wrap this up, one thing I like to bring out of everyone, one lesson, and this is not related to your past in particular, but one lesson, I guess it is. One lesson you tell your younger self, your 20 year old self, that would help you get to where you are today a little bit quicker. I would say execute quicker. I am what you would call. I forgot the name of the, you know, it's probably, hold on a minute here. Look it up. Yeah. Yeah. There is a journal that I got. I get lots of stuff sent to me in the mail, so someone sent me a journal and the jury, you know what? Yes, it's called project EVO, so I should give a shot, because they sent this to me. So project EVO.org, it's a journal, like a diary, but it's based on four different personality types, based on their own unique algorithm. So it's like, okay, I'll take the test. So I came out being the architect, it's like, you know, it makes a lot of sense. But if you plan things out too much, right? You never execute. Yeah. I tend to be more of a planner than an executor. That's why I'm always thinking, you know, move fast and break things. Move fast, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's famous book. Just do it. Just get out there, right? What can you lose? And I wish I had, I did a lot, right? But I just, I wish I had a little bit more of that mentality. I think I might have been able to do more. And part of this whole PDCA approach, right, is that not every experiment is going to be successful. And you may at some point say, you know what, it's impossible. Walk away, start a new experiment. And that would have helped me just accelerate everything I did in my life a little bit more. I love it. If you want to get in touch, where should they, where should they go find you? Well, I'm Neil Shafer, N-E-A-L-S-C-H-A-F-F-E-R, everywhere on social media. I have obviously my website, NeilShafer.com. My podcast is the Maximize Your Social Influence Podcast with Neil Shafer. And then you could find my book, The Age of Influence on Amazon or wherever you shop online. Awesome. You know, I want to, I actually, there's other things that I want to chat about. But let's, we'll have to do another one in the future sometime. Is there anything just like clothing, like closing thoughts of you wanted to bring up that, that we didn't get to touch on? Yeah, I, you know, we're talking about quotes, right? Yeah. The other two quotes are really guide me. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Wayne Gretzky, right? That's another explanation. And 80% of success is showing up, which is attributed to Woody Allen, who does not have the greatest reputation right now. But there's something he said for, for showing up for being there. And we have the ability to do it online. And the people who show up, get the business, right? The people who show up develop the relationships. So just get out there, a big world. There's a lot of people to meet, pursue your dreams. I, I talked to someone who was an alumni of my same college. He's like in his mid 20s and he wants to start a speaking business. And as, as he was talking, I'm like, do you have all the pieces? You don't, you don't need my advice. You need to go out there and not do it, right? And I feel when I talk to a lot of younger people, it's the same way. Just do it. But if you need opportunities to learn, you need to be in a job where you can learn. I think that's the other critical thing. If you're in a job that's a dead end, got to get out. Because if you can't learn, you're not going to grow. And it's, you're going to, you're going to reach your objectives a lot quicker when you're at a job where you can grow. So I'll stop with that. Good. Awesome. I appreciate it. Amen. Thank you for joining. I appreciate the chat. Thank you. It was fun. All right. Thanks again for joining me on the success story podcast. Thanks again, Neil, for joining. If you haven't already, please like, comment, subscribe. And you can download this podcast wherever you can download or stream podcasts. You can also catch it on YouTube. Share it with your friends, family, peers, coworkers. And if you haven't left this rating, please leave us a rating. Any rating is fine. Be honest, as long as it contains five stars, no problem at all. As always, have a great week, have a productive week, and we will speak again soon. Bye now.