Steve Gordon is literally the guy who wrote the book on how to write a book. He helps entrepreneurs write, publish, and promote their books in 90 days or less.
Gordon says when entrepreneurs write a book featuring their industry expertise, it elevates them above their competition and establishes them as authorities in their field. He also says a book turns the sales pitch into a “give” instead of a “take.”
“Your book becomes your best salesperson,” Gordon says. “Most people go out into the world and sell their ideas to people. It’s far easier to take your ideas [in a book] and send them into the world to sell you.”
Steve Gordon is a two-time entrepreneur and best-selling author of five books, including “Unstoppable Referrals” and his latest, “The Million Dollar Book.” He also hosts a podcast called “The Authority Builder,” featuring interviews with more than 200 world-class entrepreneurs.
If you’ve never considered writing a book on what you know about business, maybe it’s time, because Gordon says even if someone doesn’t become a client, your book and your ideas will go out into the world and do good.
Resources from the episode:
- Follow Steve on Facebook and Twitter.
- Listen to Steve’s podcast, “The Authority Builder,” here.
- For a free copy of Steve Gordon’s new book, “The Million Dollar Book,” click here.
- Connect with Steve Gordon on LinkedIn.
Share Article on Social Media
Transcript
The following transcript is not certified. Although the transcription is largely accurate, in some cases it is incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. The information contained within this document is for general information purposes only.
Speakers: Steve Gordon and Mark Wright
STEVE GORDON 00:01
So, what we teach our clients to do once they’ve written their book is now, to take that book; now it is your best salesperson. Most people go out and try and, you know, go out into the world and sell their ideas to people far easier if you take your ideas and send them out into the world and have them sell you.
MARK WRIGHT 00:24
This is the BEATS WORKING show. We’re on a mission to redeem work: the word, the place, and the way. I’m your host Mark Wright. Join us at winning the game of work. Welcome to BEATS WORKING winning the game of work on the show today, how writing a book can be the best sales tool for your business? Our guest is Steve Gordon, the guy who literally has written the book On How To Write A Book. Steve is a two-time entrepreneur, the best-selling author of Five books, including Unstoppable Referrals, and his new one, The Million Dollar Book. Steve also has interviewed more than 200 world-class entrepreneurs on the Authority Builder podcast. Building authority is really the secret to what Steve does when he helps business owners write a book, they or their friends can give perspective clients. It sets them apart as an authority in their field. And Steve says it also turns the sales pitch into a give, not a take. So, if you’ve never considered writing a book on what you know about your business, maybe it’s time because Steve says, even if someone doesn’t become a client, your book, your ideas will still go out into the world and do good. Oh, and don’t forget to check out the show notes. Steve has generously agreed to give BEATS WORKING listeners a free copy of that new book. It’s called The Million Dollar Book. Maybe it’ll work for you. All right. Here’s my conversation with Steve Gordon. Steve Gordon, welcome to the BEATS WORKING podcast. It’s great to have you here.
STEVE GORDON 02:00
Mark, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
MARK WRIGHT 02:02
So, Steve, you are the guy that writes the book or helps people write the book. And I think this is just such a fascinating topic. You have designed a business where you help people write a book so that they can become quote unquote an authority in their space but it’s also much more than that. It’s a marketing tool and, uh, and so much more. So, I can’t wait to dig in. Um, Steve, let’s start though with your early days, you, you have a background in the engineering field. So, take me back to your early career and how you got started.
STEVE GORDON 02:36
So, my, uh, my time in college was, uh, a confused time. I would think I had about 13 different majors. Um, and, for whatever reason, finally settled on, uh, on a degree in geomatics, which is this tiny little discipline of engineering that most people have never heard of and, um, graduated, uh, went to work for a small company. I was the 10th employee and didn’t know it at the time, but, um, I, I was hired as kind of the exit plan for the founder. And I don’t know that he had a timeline in mind, but I think he knew he needed you know, someone to come in and, uh, and so about four years later, I ended up taking over the business as CEO. I ended up buying it from him. Um, and, uh, yeah, it was great, fantastic training. I mean, running a business at 28 is both terrifying and, um, and, and it’s just a tremendous opportunity. So, I’m, I’m very fortunate.
MARK WRIGHT 03:37
So, Steve, what did you learn in those early days? Because a big part of what you do right now is really a creative form of marketing. Uh, how did you guys market as an engineering company? And what did you learn from that?
STEVE GORDON 03:49
Well, so that’s really where I started to get interested in marketing. Um, I didn’t have any training in school. So here, here I am, I’m, I’m, uh, leading this company and we’re not really doing much in terms of marketing. And we used to joke that well, it takes kind of five years to get a new client, you know, we were getting really big clients that were, you know, spending seven figures plus with us a year. So there was a depth of relationship that had to be developed, but we had no system. You know, I joke now. We do what most people, uh, do with referrals. You know, back then we just kind of hoped and some days the phone would ring and some days it wouldn’t. We had no idea what made one day different than the next.
MARK WRIGHT 04:32
Wow. That’s really interesting because today with the internet, I mean, it’s, you can, you can get so deep into the metrics and who’s actually clicking on your page and where they navigate on your page and all that stuff. But I’m guessing this is back before all of that fancy stuff was, it was in effect.
STEVE GORDON 04:47
This is, uh, just pre internet. So, I had been out of school for a year when we finally got email. Um, now I’ve dated myself and, uh,
MARK WRIGHT 04:58
Join the club. We both have gray hair.
STEVE GORDON 05:00
I know, I know. I like to pull that off and just say it’s really blonde, but it never works. Um, but, uh you know, and then early days of the internet, nobody really knew what they were doing there. And, you know, for us, it was how do we develop a process to sell very large engagements that are generally multiyear engagements. Um, some were, you know, lasted more than a decade, um, at a very high dollar amount and that requires a different sort of selling. A lot of that selling doesn’t happen online even today. Um, and so I, that really got me in into studying, what are the things we need to do to be positioned as the expert as the leader? Um, and I wish back then I had written a book.
MARK WRIGHT 05:51
Yeah. So that leads us to what you what you’re doing today before we get there though Steve I’d love to know what kind what kind of engineering projects did you guys do?
STEVE GORODN 06:00
So, we worked on lots of different things um probably about half of what we did was large scale residential development in Southeast Florida. So, putting very big houses on very small lots really close to the ocean and, uh, and then the other half we worked for, uh, a number of different conservation organizations, um, and, uh, we’re responsible for helping them acquire, uh, millions and millions of acres of, of, uh, land all over Florida.
MARK WRIGHT 06:33
So today you, um, are, are billed as a two-time entrepreneur, a bestselling author of five books. Um, was Unstoppable Referrals, was that your first book?
STEVE GORDON 06:44
That was the first one.
MARK WRIGHT 06:46
So, take us through how you got to the point of writing that book and what the takeaway is.
STEVE GORDON 06:51
Yeah, so I, I had started, uh, this company. I left engineering, started this company in 2010. And, um, I knew that if I’m going to be successful in consulting, all of the successful consultants I could see had written a book. I thought, well, this is something I need to do. I thought, well, I better work for a couple of years and get some experience and have some material. That’s probably good advice most of the time. And I, um, I tried to write a book twice, uh, around 2012 and failed miserably both times. Um, I did what most people do. They think this it’s going to take really long. They think they got to put everything in the kitchen sink into the book. I, I just couldn’t get them done and, you know, I’d get to a point where I look at it and go, I can’t publish this. This is not intelligent. And I happened to listen to a podcast, uh, where a guy who had written books for his consulting practice was describing his process. And, um, and I wish I could remember if I’ve looked for the interview. I can’t find it. I don’t even know who it was, but he described this method of outlining his book and I thought, well, that’s pretty good. Let me try that. So, I hold myself up in, in my home office at the time on a Saturday. I told my wife, I’m not coming out until I’ve got an outline. And about four o’clock that afternoon, I had the outline for Unstoppable Referrals done. It was based on some, some work that, uh, I’d been doing with clients that had been pretty successful. And, um, and so I started writing the next day. 35 days later, I had a finished manuscript that we published. Uh, I spent about an hour a day. We have four kids, so, and they were all kind of, you know, school age, some still in elementary school at the time. So, I’d have to get up at 4:35 o’clock in the morning. I’d write for an hour and then get the kids ready to go to school, and that’s how it happened. And, um, and so that was done in 30 days. We launched it later that year. And, um, and I, I just had tremendous support from a handful of people that I built relationships with. They shared it with the people that they knew. Some of them had email lists and they emailed it out and, um, and the book just took off. We had about 5,000 people get a copy in the first week or so and took us from a tiny little unknown one and a half person consulting firm in Tallahassee, Florida to all of a sudden, we’re getting inquiries from the UK and all over the US and Canada and all of a sudden we’re on the map and that’s the power of a book.
MARK WRIGHT 09:27
Um, I hope that I’m quoting this correctly, but I, I’ve heard it credited to Mark Twain, uh, having said I would have written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have time. And it speaks to the idea that, uh, concise, focused writing actually takes more time than unfocused crappy writing. So, it sounds like the problem that you had, uh, before you listened to that podcast, uh, was focus the issue that it just lacked clarity and focus?
STEVE GORDON 09:54
Yeah. I, I think that really is it. It’s, it’s focus and also, um, really being able to give the brain a, a roadmap to follow. And so now when we, we’ve adapted that original model and improved it, I’ve, I’ve since then I’ve written four other books and, and we’ve helped hundreds of people through the process. And what we’ve learned is that one of the keys to writing a book quickly is not allowing your brain to get off track and lose the trail, right? And that’s what was happening to me in those early books is that I didn’t have a really great roadmap for where I was going. And, and so it was unfocused and it wandered and, and it just wasn’t very good, but you can write a really great book in a short amount of time, if you do the right preparation, and so we’ve got a really specific process, we call it The Million Dollar Outline that is really the secret to how you create speed and a quality end product.
MARK WRIGHT 10:58
So, I have to ask you, I love learning from people like you, um, the, the, the advice inside the book, Unstoppable Referrals, for people who work in industries that rely on referrals for business. What, give me a top tip, Steve, of, uh, of what you wrote in that book.
STEVE GORDON 11:15
Um, you’re making referrals far too difficult for the people who really are your fans. Um, and I’ll unpack that a little bit. So, most of us have clients that really like what we do, and they probably would like to share us, but they also are extremely busy. You know, they might be running a business, or they have a busy family life or a busy job. They have a million other things, and one of my mentors, uh, guy named Dan Sullivan likes to say that, you know, always go into a relationship assuming that you’re number 21 on the priority list and that your job is to be so valuable that you work your way up, right? Well, so I assume in a referral situation that I’m at least 21 and probably further down the list than that, right? And so, it’s not that people don’t appreciate what you do. It’s the, you’re just not making the top two or three things. And if you don’t make the top two or three things, if referring you isn’t that important to him and it’s never going to be, then you’re not going to get them. So, you need to make the whole process easier. Um, the fundamental thing that makes most referrals hard done the old way is that what we expect is for a client of ours to go and do the very most difficult thing in that in business, which is to go and identify a prospect and convince that prospect to show up at a sales meeting. Like, I don’t know about you. I sell for a living, Mark. I only like to go to sales meetings where I’m doing the selling, you know?
MARK WRIGHT 12:53
Otherwise, it’s like, don’t waste my time, right?
STEVE GORDON 12:55
Right. And so, you’re taking people, um, you know, in the book, I call it your unpaid and untrained sales force. Like, this is the most challenging job in business. If you look at what we do with salespeople, we pay them a lot of money and we give them a lot of training, continuous training, but we’re expecting our clients to go do the same job with none of that and with really no incentive, nothing but risk on their part. If you mess up the relationship, that’s all downside for them. There’s zero upside, there’s no motivation. So, the, the, I’ll give you the, the, the secret that’s in the book. The secret in the book is to take all of the great knowledge and wisdom that you share with clients behind closed doors and put it into something, package it, and the, the. The grade A type package is a book, but you could package it. And I wrote that book long enough ago that, uh, we talked about packaging your knowledge and wisdom and audio CDs and in presentations and other things. But in the book, I said the best way to do it as a book, we have proven that now. We tried to coach people through using all those other, uh, those other formats, but the ones who wrote a book always did dramatically better.
MARK WRIGHT 14:09
That’s such, uh, wise advice, Steve. Because I know that even when I just want to do a basic connection of two people I like, and let’s just say I’m doing an email connection. Just that alone takes, it takes thought, and it takes time. It takes time that’s valuable to me. And so, I’ve always got one or two connections that I’ve said I’m going to make, and I get around to them eventually. But you hit the nail right on the head. That kind of interaction where you’re saying, hey, I want to introduce you to this person. I believe in this person. It’s just not a casual thing that you can just throw together in two seconds and hope that it works because you’ve got something invested in both of those relationships, right?
STEVE GORDON 14:49
Exactly. Well, and by forcing people to sort of do that work for you, they’re only going to give you the people that they’re absolutely 100% certain have an interest or a need right now. And in any given market, maybe that’s 3% of the people in the market. So, there aren’t a lot of those people, right? There’s probably another 45% that would be a great potential client for you at some point in the next 18 months to two or three years. And so, by forcing your clients to get to that degree of certainty because you’re asking them to do a high-risk thing, which is put somebody in a sales meeting with you, it’s really, really difficult to, to get a volume going of that. So, what, what we teach our clients to do once they’ve written their book is now to take that book. Now it is your best salesperson. Most people go out and try and, you know, go out into the world, and sell their ideas to people far easier if you take your ideas and send them out into the world and have them sell you. And that’s the power of packaging them up. And so, we’ll teach them to package the book and then go to a, go to a client and say, Mark, we’ve helped transform the way that, that lots of businesses have done referrals. If I’m saying it, I might, I might say it this way. You would say it and whatever, you know, whatever problem you solve for people, you know, and, and, and Mark, I’m on a mission to help every business that I can get in front of solve the referral problem, because 80% of business owners say that they get the majority of their business from referral and yet only 20% of them are doing anything proactive about it. And so that is if I’m Don Quixote that’s the windmill I’m tilting up against, and I need your help on my mission. That’s why I wrote my book. Now, I know that you know people that would benefit greatly from this book, and I’d love to sit down with you for 15 minutes and brainstorm who in your world we might be able to send this to as a gift from you. What do you say?
MARK WRIGHT 17:00
Hmm. Wow, so instead of you know, me saying, I’m going to hold you hostage and try to convince you to do something that you may or may not want to do. You’re taking the person out of the equation. You’re saying, here’s some ideas that I think would help.
STEVE GORDON 17:13
Exactly. Exactly.
MARK WRIGHT 17:15
That’s interesting. Um, one of our previous guests on, on the show, Kristen Graham, um, worked at, uh, Amazon, uh, for a while. She’s a, a word nerd and a communications whiz. And she said that, that was one of the geniuses of Jeff Bezos at Amazon is that, uh, he has a process whereby employees will write papers with no names on them and sometimes collectively to spell out an idea and to flesh it out and to try to sell the idea. And it takes the ego out of it. It takes the people completely out of it. And these ideas live in these presentation papers and Amazon has become so successful in so many different areas. Partly because these presentation papers are developed and those, those good ideas get taken and they run with it and the bad ideas get shot down.
STEVE GORDON 17:59
Yeah, absolutely.
MARK WRIGHT 18:01
Super interesting.
STEVE GORDON 18:02
Yeah. So, I mean, it, it just transforms the way you go about referring and, and, uh, and, and, and getting referred, um, and it, it puts you into a giving mode instead of a taking mode. You’re saying, I’ve got really great wisdom. I’ve made it easy to share. Let’s figure out how we can get it out into the world and share it. And if the people who get it want to work with me, great. I’ll be a great next step resource for them. But if they don’t, if they take that wisdom and they go do something positive with it, then we’ve done some good in the world.
MARK WRIGHT 18:36
So, Steve, when did you first realize that that was going to be your business model? Was there a particular moment or client and what was that like in the beginning?
STEVE GORDON 18:45
So, we, we really didn’t completely focus in on writing books for people until about the last two and a half years. Um, and honestly, I got pulled there kicking and screaming because we’ve been writing books for clients for, um, really since 2014. So, I guess about eight years now, um, that came out of clients that I had. I was doing marketing consulting and clients I had at the time. Some of them said, wow, I see the success you had with unstoppable referrals, could you help me write a book? I’ve always been thinking about it. And so, we did that for a couple of them that year. It was really difficult because we didn’t have processes or systems. I was trying to unpack how I did it at that point. Um, and we, we would continually every year we’d get a few people, you know, and, um, and I started noticing as we built a bigger sort of library of people that we’d help, uh, write a book that but even though it was a really difficult process at the time to take them through, the minute that they wrote the book, they took off. And so, we finally got to a point where we said you know, all this, all of the other things that we’re doing are great, but we’re not going to allow anybody to access any of that from us until they’ve written a book, because we know that that’s the thing that will give them real success. Let’s get this in the right order.
MARK WRIGHT 20:16
So, Steve, let’s talk about why writing a book is so um, is beneficial for businesses. I know, you know, I spent 35 years as a, as a journalist and I, I, I, I always remember when people were pitching guests to us and story ideas to us. If a guest had written a book that automatically sort of validated them as a topic expert and you know, let’s be honest, anybody can write a book today and anybody can publish a book. But I think still there’s this idea in our culture that, you know, if you’ve written a book, you’ve taken time and invested time and ideas to create this thing, and it kind of validates you, but what are some of the other reasons that writing a book is a good idea as a business tool.
MARK WRIGHT 21:59
Well, that that’s probably the most important, um, is the authority that it gives you. Um, but it’s really useful for a number of other reasons. So, one of the things that we’ve discovered in this is that for a business, particularly the, you know, the business owner to go through this process, we call it unpacking your IP. And we work with so many business owners who have a really great process for how they help people, and they, they transform people’s lives, but they have a really hard time clarifying it and communicating it. And I think that’s one of the real benefits of working with a company like ours, and we’re not the only ones, but, you know, getting with someone who can help you pull out everything that’s in your brain and then sort of shine a light on the things that, that appear to be really, really valuable. Um, I, in fact, I was on a call this morning with one of our new clients and helping him go through this process. And he said, you know, this has been the conversations we’ve had are almost worth the price of admission because I have such new clarity on how to communicate the value that we offer. Now, he’s going to end up with a great book that does that too, but that’s a big benefit once the book is written, and we’ve seen that, by the way. We’ve seen people who think they’re in a complete commodity business and they don’t know how they’re different. And we identify what’s different about their business. All of a sudden, they have a, a brandable process that they never had before. So, it’s huge.
MARK WRIGHT 22:31
If, if you can’t. If you can’t tell a prospective client why, what makes you different, right? What, what your value proposition is, you’re not going to stand out, right?
STEVE GORDON 22:42
Exactly. So now we put all of that into the book and in the book, so our, our approach is not to try and write a textbook that teaches someone how to do what you do, right? The best clients don’t want that. The best clients are interested most in transformation. They are, they’ve got an itch that they’re trying to scratch. They have a problem that they can’t figure out how to solve. There’s an opportunity that they really want to go and capture, but they can’t figure out how to get there. All of those are different ways of saying they have a problem, and they need a guide. And so, we start the book talking about the problem that person faces at the other end of that journey is the bigger, better future that they really want. And so, we paint a really great picture at the end of the book. And then in between they, we, in between the two, we connect the dots with. Your unique mechanism, the series of steps that you take someone through, that’s that brandable process that we extract. And now you’ve got a really great tool that demonstrates to people that you’ve given this a depth of thought. You know, the, the best clients don’t want to know how to do what you do, but they want to know that you’re the expert and you have a plan, and they want to see kind of what the plan is. They don’t want to just completely take it on faith. So, one of the really great advantages is when we work with particularly people who are in a, uh, an intangible service, all of a sudden that book takes that intangible service, and it makes it really tangible for people.
MARK WRIGHT 24:17
What do you say to business owners who may say, well, Steve, if I give all my secrets away in this book, um, you know competitors will take my ideas, you know you talk about IP. Um, what do you tell business owners who are reluctant to quote unquote, give too much?
STEVE GORDON 24:34
So, my, my sort of flippant answer is if you think you can give too much in 150-page book or even in a thousand-page book, then you’re really not that much of an expert. And, and I, I, I actually kind of mean that. I mean, if that’s all the depths that you have, maybe you shouldn’t write a book, but the people we work with have, they’ve been doing it for years, in some cases, decades before they finally decide to write their book. They have such depth of knowledge. They’ve forgotten more than we’ll ever put into the book. And so, I don’t ever think that that’s a real risk. Um, and could some like, I’ll give you with, um, my books as an example with Unstoppable Referrals, I know that people have taken that book and other than the 1795, they paid Amazon that I got a little piece of, they didn’t pay me anything and they’ve gone and made hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of dollars in referrals using that methodology. That’s fantastic. That’s awesome. It didn’t cost me anything. You know what? I got so much out of that book that if some people want to go do it themselves, that’s fine. Do it yourselfers are never your clients. The people who have looked at that and said, this is really great, but I want a guide. Well, those people who have pay for the house that I live in and put my kids through college and put nice cars in my garage. I’m doing okay. And if I have to give something away to do that, I’m okay with that.
MARK WRIGHT 26:14
Um, I’m guessing that personal stories are a big part of it because, you know, as human beings, that’s, that’s how we’ve transmitted information for, you know, millions of years is to tell stories. And I’m guessing that in your books, when people start to write out their successes as business experts that you focused on some stories because I wanna know if I’m gonna hire somebody to do a certain job that they’ve done it really successfully for others in the past, right?
STEVE GORDON 26:39
Yeah. Absolutely. And that can be challenging. So, we’ve helped people who are really expert at what they do, but maybe they’re moving out of a corporate environment where they develop this expertise and starting on their a, a consulting firm, for example, and they don’t have those stories. So sometimes you, you, you work without them. Um, they’re not essential, but they really do help a lot. Um, if, if you’ve got them and, and for the, the exact reason that you described, people want to see themselves reflected in the pages of the book. Um, and so having stories is great. Um, but again, I mean, we’ve got many examples of successful books that don’t have them. Um, and we work with a lot of professionals who are in professions where privacy regulations preclude them from sharing them. So, it’s, it’s never a deal breaker, but it’s a great advantage if you have them.
MARK WRIGHT 27:32
So, I’m just imagining business owners listening to this right now. Steve, what, what are some businesses that are best suited for, for writing these types of books. And then when you talk with these business owners, I’m guessing that you have to figure out what what’s the focus? What’s the takeaway? Where’s the gold?
STEVE GORDON 27:48
Absolutely. So, um, the businesses that really will benefit most from a book are those that are selling something that is, uh, meets one of these criteria. It’s either, uh, what we would call high ticket. In other words, people are paying them at least 5000 in the first year they work together and more likely they’re paying them five figures or six figures or seven figures. Um, so it’s got to be expensive. It needs to be complicated, something that’s a big hairy problem for people to solve. And usually if they’re spending that much money, it is. Um, in the example I give, I mean, I give a talk one time um, to a group of CEOs or 12 CEOs in the room of different types of companies. And one of them happened to own a string of Krispy Kreme donut franchises. Do you guys have Krispy Kreme up there where you are, Mark?
MARK WRIGHT 28:40
Oh, yeah. Dangerously close.
STEVE GORDON 28:43
Yeah, the best donuts in the world, and that guy didn’t need a book. He just needed a box of donuts and go stand on a corner and hand them out. He’s got all the business he’s ever going to want. Actually, he doesn’t even need to do that. They have such a great reputation. They just flip on the sign, hot donuts now, and they have a line, right?
MARK WRIGHT 29:01
It’s like moths to a flame, right?
STEVE GORDON 29:03
Right. So, but for a lot of us, we’re not in that kind of business. So, like, you know, we talked about my, my start in, um, in the technical world. No one woke up in the morning and got really excited to go buy the services that we were selling. Like we could do a product launch and we would never have lines like Apple had with an iPhone. And that’s describes the vast majority of businesses in the world. They’re generally service businesses. They’re selling something intangible. It’s not something that people necessarily want to buy, but they really need because it solves an important problem. That’s the, the really the, if you’re that type of person, you’re the perfect person to write a book.
MARK WRIGHT 29:41
So that business owner who’s listening, you know, what’s that big problem that you solve over and over and over for clients? That’s the gold, right?
STEVE GORDON 29:50
That well, that’s the gold. And then having a roadmap, we call it the yellow brick road. You know, I talked before about we start with that problem that they face. We want to take them to that really desirable end result, you know, the city of Oz. Well, and we connect it with the Yellow Brick Road. And that’s, it’s really important to share that because people want to see that vision of how they’re going to get there.
MARK WRIGHT 30:10
I have some friends who’ve written books and to a person, they have all said writing a book is the most difficult thing they’ve done in their life. Um, to a person, not one has said, you know, sort of like, it’s like living through a kitchen remodel. You, and people who choose to stay in a home when it’s being remodeled, they say, man, I’ll never do that again. But, uh, when we talk about the difficulty of writing the book, I’m guessing that people are completely relieved that they can pay someone like you to lead them through the process. So, I’d love to learn more, Steve, just about what that process is like, because, um, I know that you’re helping, uh, our founder, Dan Rogers at WORKP2P, um, write some material. And I was really shocked at how quickly you work and, and how, how fast the process is. So, take us through the whole process of, of how you do this?
STEVE GORDON 31:02
So, I, I hear that comment a lot. That it’s just the most difficult thing I’ve ever done. Um, I, I hear that from people who’ve written a book. And, then I’ll ask them, well, did you have a team? Did you have help? No, I just did it myself. You know, or maybe they had an editor they, they consulted with and so that’s usually the first thing that makes it really difficult is that you don’t have a team. And if you’re in business, you know that the way you make everything easier in business is you build a team and writing a book is no different. And so, um, and so I think that’s a, a big secret. And if you look at all of the most successful authors, the business authors, the bestsellers, they all have a team that helped them bring that book to life from day one. And so that’s, I think that’s a mistake that people make. And I think the other is the way that you approach it. So, one of the secrets to the speed that we’re able to create in our process is first how we organize up front, and that that comes back to how we build the outline. And there are some wrinkles and how that we how we do that, that that make it easy. And then the other is that, um, whether we’re guiding a client through it or we’re writing it for them, and we do both of those things. Um, we’re, we’re working with the brain instead of against the brain. And let me explain what I mean by that. So, um, a typical ghostwriter might meet with you for an hour and get things started. And then they might meet with you for a few hours the next month and a few hours the next month, and this process drags on forever. And the problem with that is you can’t remember from one month to the next what you said. And, you know, you’re, you’re, you’re forcing your brain to start over in every one of those sessions. And that’s the way most people will approach working with a ghostwriter. We don’t do that. We do it in three consecutive or four consecutive days, typically a Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday for two hours at a shot. And we, we eliminate all of that, oh, we’re starting over again and we’re wasting a lot of time. We just take all that out of the equation because we don’t have to do that. We leverage the way the brain wants to work, work for a little while, very focused, then take a break. Get some recovery, sleep on it, let the subconscious work, and then let’s get at it again. Now the subconscious has done its job, and we teach our clients that we’re coaching through the process to do the same thing. It was one of the things I learned from writing that first book in, in 35 days. I wrote for about an hour a day, every day. And if you’ve got a really great road map and an outline, and you, you write consistently for 30 minutes to an hour a day, you’ll get a book done in record time.
MARK WRIGHT 33:49
Steve, do you have an example of, like, a book that you wrote with or for a client that just absolutely blew up and was just an amazing source of new business. Um, tell me a story, uh, that, that fits that bill. I’m sure you’ve got more than one.
STEVE GORDON 34:07
We’ve got a lot of ’em. My, my favorite one is, uh, one of our clients, John Phillippe. He wrote this great book, uh, called, um, uh, Prospecting Hacks. And it’s all about these little hacks he has used to build his business and to find prospects. Um, fantastic book. And, uh, we have a, a launch process that, that we developed, it’s called the Inverted Viral Launch. And the, the goal is to go to the people who already know you, like you, and trust you, who are closest to, to becoming a client maybe, and create a buzz right at the very beginning with those people, because that’s how we’ll create some business results right away, that’s the goal. So, we let him know Friday morning, 8:15. That, hey, your books live on Amazon and he was already, he had, we, we coach our clients to put together, we call it a dream 100 list, put together a list of the hundred people that at the minute the book is out, you want to share it with these people because they might be perspective clients, they might be existing clients, they might be just your raving fans, let’s get it out to them right away. So he was ready with that. He sends out an email to all of those people and I think he had a couple hundred people on his list and it. And by 11:15 that morning, he’d sold about a hundred copies, which is great. It’s a good start, right? In a couple of hours. And one of the person, one of the people who bought a copy who was in his network and downloaded it on Kindle, hadn’t even read the book, but he knew someone who was opening up a new business in the Houston area where we’re John’s based. And, uh, he texted his, his friend opening the business and said, hey, you know, um, my buddy, John just wrote a book. I think you really ought to meet with him. And so, this guy who was opening the business emailed John right away. And, uh, and, and John responded and emailed him, said, hey, my, my buddy said, you just wrote a book, said we should talk. I’d love to meet you sometime. John said, well, hey, could I come over right now? And he went by the business, walked out at like 2:45 in the afternoon with a $38,000 contract. Now, that doesn’t have.
MARK WRIGHT 36:34
That’s just because, yeah, just because his friend said, hey, my buddy wrote a book.
STEVE GORDON 36:36
Well, it happened to be what it did. And this is really key. This this buddy of his knew what he did, right? But putting the book out kind of stimulated some thinking and elevated his authority. All of a sudden now, his buddy got to say, I know someone who wrote a book. Now, he might not have consciously thought that, but subconsciously, we know that that sort of thing is at play and it triggered it. And we see this again and again and again. Now, currently, John is our record holder at five and a half hours and $38,000 agreement. He went on, by the way, he told me, uh, we launched him in February, uh, by the end of March, he had done about $150,000 just from new business as a result of the book. And he’s, he was texting me and he said, yeah, I don’t think anybody’s read it yet, but it doesn’t matter.
MARK WRIGHT 37:35
Wow. That’s really interesting. Steve, I know the publishing industry has changed a lot. And as a journalist, I remember back in the day, publishing houses would sign authors to these big, huge contracts and they’d have publicity tours, and they’d fly them first class all over the country and they’d be on morning television shows and talk shows. And, um, and it seems like the industry has contracted a lot uh, since that time, and, and a lot of the money has gone out of the equation, but when you guys launch a book, take me through that process of how it’s distributed, where is it carried, how do you do those deals?
STEVE GORDON 38:10
Absolutely, and, and you’re absolutely right, the, the industry has changed dramatically, the traditional publishers, which used to help you market your book, no longer do that, except for the very top-level authors, you know, so if you’re an ex-president and you’re writing a book, you’re probably going to get a lot of marketing help from the publisher. If you’re a regular business owner, if you don’t have a big following already, the big publishers probably really aren’t that, that interested in working with you. You’re not going to get an advance either. You’re basically going to fund all the marketing and do it all yourself, right? Um, and so, um, so self-publishing now is really the way to publish. If you’re going to publish a business book, that’s designed to, to fill your pipeline, you want to self-publish it because you control the speed, you own the rights and we’ve, we’ve had clients who’ve written books with traditional publishers who’ve had to go back and the publisher didn’t have any economic interest in keeping their book in print because it wasn’t selling much, but it was critical for that client’s lead generation and they’ve had to go buy back the rights just so they could print copies.
MARK WRIGHT 39:21
Wow, cuz the publisher had the rights, then.
STEVE GORDON 39:23
They, the publisher had the rights. Yeah. So, um, so the way that we do it is all of our clients own the rights to their book. We publish probably about 90% of our clients through Amazon. They have a great publishing platform. You mentioned Amazon earlier. Um, they’ve done a great job. Um, we publish it to Kindle, to paperback and hardback. Amazon’s platform is all print on demand, so you don’t have to have, you know, a garage full of boxes of books. You know, you, you can order them one at a time if you want and, uh, and order them at a wholesale cost. There’s no big you know price break to printing them in quantity anymore. Um, and so it just makes it really easy to do this. Um, and, um, and so then when we launched the book, the first thing that we want to do is we want to take someone to Amazon bestseller status because it just gives that much more credibility and, um, and that’s a relatively easy thing to do. It’s not Um, it’s not a given, but it’s a relatively easy thing to do if you know how to do it. Um, and we have a
MARK WRIGHT 40:27
So, what does that exactly mean, Steve? Getting them to the bestseller status.
STEVE GORDON 40:31
So, Amazon, unlike the big bestseller lists where you’re going to end up spending six figures in marketing to sell enough books within a time window of a few weeks, you know, during the launch to get there, Amazon updates their bestseller lists every couple of hours. And they, they do it based on, um, the, the number of sales in a particular category of books. And so, if you’ve been on Amazon and look for books, you’ll probably notice that they have a few hundred categories and there are subcategories within the categories. And with most of our authors, we’re able to find a category where they could relatively easily become a number one bestseller. Um, you know, in a category that’s relevant for their book, and we’ve got a whole blueprint for how to do that, that we take them through. Um, so we want to do that first, and then we want to get it launched out to the, the, the broader marketplace. And we, I mentioned the name of our, our approach, the Inverted Viral Launch. It’s inverted for a reason. Most people think, to be successful, we’ve got to go big or go home. And they think, who are the million strangers I can get this book in front of? But, our goal isn’t to be famous, it’s to be rich, right? If we’re writing this for business. We want to use it as a tool to attract the right kind of clients who are going to come and pay us money. And for most of the businesses we work with, they don’t necessarily need a thousand new clients if they’re selling at a high ticket, like we talked about. They’re looking for three or 10 or 20 this month or this year, but they got to be the right ones. And so instead of taking that big shotgun approach, we want to be really laser focused on getting this to the people who can make the biggest impact on the business right away.
MARK WRIGHT 42:19
So, to the extent you’re comfortable, Steve, I’d love to talk about the cost, uh, like, how much does it cost to, to, to write one of these books? How much does it cost for the, the book, you know, per unit when you start to have them printed out? Uh, can you talk about that?
STEVE GORDON 42:33
Yeah, so let’s talk about the unit cost. That question comes up all the time. Um, you know, printing through Amazon with their print on demand service, a, a typical 100 to 150-page book, which is a really good sweet spot. If you’re writing a book for a decision maker, not so long that it’s going to be a big project for them. They can sit with a cup of coffee or two or a couple of beers and, you know, in a few hours, get through it. Um, that size book is generally going to cost. You, the author, if you buy copies, 3 to maybe $4 tops, um, in a paperback and, and maybe two, two and a half times that, um, in a hardback. Um, so it’s very inexpensive to buy copies yourself as the author. And then, you know, a lot of our clients will give them away. You know, they’ll mail them to, to uh, uh, you know, somebody that they’ve identified as a really great potential client. Um, so that’s how the, the cost works there and obviously you can sell the book for whatever you like. Everybody wants to know what’s the perfect price, you know, to price their book at. What I tell you is what, look we’ve tested. This really doesn’t matter. As long as you’re somewhere in what most people would consider the price of a book, which is about $25 or under, you’re fine. No great advantage one way or another. So, um, so that’s the first piece of that. The second you asked is like, what’s the cost to go through the process? Um, it depends on, on what sort of experience you want. So, one experience is where you write the book yourself with our guidance, using our systems and a whole team of people that are there to give you, uh, expert level feedback and support all the way through. Um, our team does all of the, the cover design and helping you with title and helping you publish it and market it and all that sort of thing. So that’s one type of experience and then the other type of experience is, having one of our writers write the book for you, where you’re the author of the ideas and they’re the, the writer who puts the words on the page. So, it’s still all 100% your material and your thinking and you’ve just got someone that’s, that’s helping facilitate getting that onto the page. Um, and that’s the other sort of experience, and that’s where we’ll interview someone, as I mentioned before. We’ll go through this interview process. Um, and then help them all the way through publishing and, and marketing. So those are the sort of the, the two experiences. And it ranges from, you know, on, on the low end, um, about 10 to $12,000 and on the high end, uh, you know, between 30 and $35, 000.
MARK WRIGHT 45:05
Mm hmm. Wow, that’s cool. Well, what a perfect name for your podcast, The Authority Builder, because, uh, that’s exactly what these, these books are doing. Um, you’ve got several hundred episodes in, in the, in the bank right now of your podcast, Steve. And I’d love to, I’d love to ask because it seems like more and more business owners are now understanding that podcasts are actually a great way to do much the same thing that your books do in terms of building credibility and authority in a space. Um give me some perspective on how your podcast has done that for your business.
STEVE GORDON 45:42
Absolutely. We actually look at a book and a podcast as two essential pieces to a marketing system. Um, and, and the third piece being a signature talk. And uh, and so the book is really the best tool we’ve ever found to establish a leadership position in the market and to generate leads. In other words, go out and find new people that have the problem that you solve and get them into your world. And the reason that it works so well is it’s really high perceived value and very low commitment to say yes to. And so, it gets people in, in the front door. The podcast is the very best tool to nurture those relationships. So, I mentioned before that only about 3% of people at any given time are at, in a position where they’re ready to make a buying decision today, and about 50% of the people in the market are never going to buy from you, right? Well, that leaves this 45 to 47% in the middle that are going to buy, but not today. And you need a tool that, that allows you to stay in front of them and nurture them and a podcast is great for that, because for a business owner, that’s got a million other things to do. It’s really easy to just show up and talk about what you do or to have an interview like this, to talk with somebody else and let them be the content where you’re just asking a few questions or do like our friend Dan Rogers has done and get somebody that’s super talented, like Mark Wright to do the interviews for him.
MARK WRIGHT 47:19
Thank you for the plug.
STEVE GORDON 47:20
All of that works. Okay. And, um, and the podcasts have a really great side benefit. They are a tremendous way to build relationship with the people that you want to do business with in the future. Um, quick story on an experience I had about six months into launching our podcast, I went to, um, a big marketing conference called Traffic And Conversion Summit out and happens in San Diego every year. One of the biggest conferences in the industry. I’m a nobody, I think anyway. I’ve written a book at this point, and I’ve got a podcast out and, um, I’m walking around and two guys come up to me in the hallway in the San Diego convention center, which if you’ve ever been there, it’s this enormous convention center. And they say, hey, you’re that Steve Gorton guy. Like, oh, we listened to your podcast. I don’t know who these people are. I’ve never met them before, right? They start relaying to me some stories that I had shared on an episode and talking to me like we were old friends. And that’s the power, you’ve been in broadcasting for a long time, I’m sure you’ve had this experience where you’re out in public and people feel like they know you, right?
MARK WRIGHT 48:31
And they’ll recount a story. Yeah. Oh, that time when you guys talked about this or that. Yeah.
STEVE GORDON 48:36
And that’s the power of the podcast to, to nurture and develop those relationships. And I always love when I’m, I’m in a sales conversation, somebody will get on, on zoom and we’ll be talking, and they’ll want to write a book and they’ll tell me uh, about this podcast episode that they listened to of mine from a year ago that they’d been remembering, and they’ve gone back and listened to this or this other thing. It’s like, we’re, we’re old friends. I’ve never met him, but we’re old friends and that’s really great.
MARK WRIGHT 49:01
And podcasts, yeah, also Steve, podcasts, sorry to cut you off, but podcasts, podcasts are a great way to have a very specific reason to interact with someone. So, you know a business owner who’s having trouble with this, we did an episode on that, whether it’s benefits or insurance or whatever. And let me send that to you. So, then it goes back to that thing that you said before, instead of you pushing your ideas on people who are like, let me help solve your problem. I think you might find some value in this. That’s really cool.
STEVE GORDON 49:31
Absolutely. It’s also a great way to connect with people. So, I’ve connected with so many of the top entrepreneurs around the world, New York Times, bestselling authors, um, people who, you know, arrange events for presidents and, and world leaders, all, all kinds of people that I never could have gotten access to if I’d just gotten on the phone and called. But because I was giving them a platform, they were excited to come and talk with me and people think, well, you have to have a huge audience for your podcast to get people, you know, big names like that to want to come on. It’s not the case at all. Most of the people who are at that level understand that there’s, there is value in a small audience. And even if it’s a small audience, I’m going to create a marketing asset out of this that I’m going to go use somewhere else.
MARK WRIGHT 50:27
Well, as we, uh, this has been super fascinating, Steve, as we, as we start to wrap things up, tell me about The Million Dollar book. Um, why you decided to write that and what, what we can expect from it.
STEVE GORDON 50:39
So, I wrote The Million Dollar book last year and, um, I, I wrote it really to, uh, to finish what I started with Unstoppable Referrals. Okay, so Unstoppable Referrals gives you a method for getting a lot of referrals, really high-quality referrals, but you need this information asset. You need something like a book and the book is the best way to do it and the, the roadblock people kept running into and being able to implement the referral processes. I want to write a book, but it’s really hard. I’m, I’m struggling with it, and I knew we had a great process. I wanted to put that out into the world, uh, cause I know it’s going to help people. And so, in the book, I lay out why you should write a book. If you’ve been thinking about it for a while, let me put you over the edge cause it’s going to do a lot of great things for you and for your business. And I lay out what needs to go into your book. So, as you’re thinking about the content, um, you know, we talk about the, that, you know, start with the problem and paint that picture of their bigger, better future and the yellow brick road. I go into a little more detail than we’ve been able to do today. Um, I talk about our outlining methodology and how to make that work. And then we talk about different ways to market and launch the book so that you get the sort of success that you want. So, it’s, it’s really all in there. Um, and you can take that and you can do it yourself. And, uh, I, I got a great text from somebody, um, about two or three months ago, who had taken an early copy of the book and they wrote their own book and they’re getting fantastic results and that made me super happy, you know, and then if you want to, you know, engage with us and get help and have a team to support you, there’s information in there about how to do that as well.
MARK WRIGHT 52:28
Yeah, it’s really interesting. See, this whole idea has such deep roots in just basic, uh, human thinking. I mean, I’ve got painters in the house today, our fridge slash freezer stopped working when we were on vacation in April, and it ruined the hardwoods in the kitchen. And then that led to countertops and cabinets and painting and sinks, and you name it. And it just made me realize that I could do a lot of that work myself. In fact, I probably could do most of that. Well, not the floors, but a lot of the work myself. But you get to a point in life, I think, where you realize that it’s a lot better to spend the money to have the experts do it because it’s going to get done way faster and it’s going to look way better on the back end. I mean, I could, I could wallow through the painting, but it would be months to get it to look like these guys can do in a matter of a few days. And that’s kind of, that’s kind of what you do, right?
STEVE GORDON 53:15
That’s it. I mean, you can certainly write a book yourself and lots of people have, and I know I have, um, you know, and, um, and that’s great for, for certain people and, um, and for others. They just really want a guide and a team and support because it’s easier for them. And um, and so we, we, we provide that when it’s, it’s right. Um,
MARK WRIGHT 53:38
Well, it sounds like you found your sweet spot. Um, Steve, you know, our mission is to redeem work, uh, you know, the BEATS WORKING podcast. Um, give me in your mind, um, the redemption that’s taking place when people decide to tell their story and decide to write a book. How is this work redeeming work in your mind?
STEVE GORDON 53:58
Well, I first of all, I love that mission when Dan told me that that that was sort of the terminology that he had settled on. I said that that’s just so, so good. Um, I’ll tell you how it is redeeming, uh, in not just writing a book is redeeming for the business. I think they get a lot out of it, but I think it redeems the work that they do. I think it, it provides, um, a, uh, a concreteness to the work that they do that, that maybe wasn’t there before, um, for a lot of our clients, they look at it and all of a sudden they’re, they’re able to see for themselves the body of their knowledge and wisdom now reflected back to them. Like they knew they had good stuff. They, they know they do good work and then to sort of see it memorialized in a book, I think it is really a special thing.
MARK WRIGHT 54:57
Yeah. I mean, because so many of these people literally pour their lives into these businesses, like literally, you know, and to have that, to have that come back as something concrete, as something that even their kids or grandkids could point to and say, wow, that was cool.
STEVE GORDON 55:14
Well, and, and, you know, we, we talk a lot about getting the business results from a book and, and that’s important, you know, business needs to be sustainable, but the, the thing that gives me the most excitement in what we do and that lights our team up is that we’re taking people who are just super expert at what they do. They, they really are helping people in a tangible way. They’re doing good in the world and yet they’re the best kept secret in their community or in their market and we’re helping them take all of that expertise and push it out further to help more people, and some of those people will do business with them, but some of them won’t, it doesn’t matter. It’s still creating an impact out there and you just never know. You just never know when the right person gets that book, and that’s the thing that they needed. They needed your wisdom and expertise and ultimately, as humans on this planet, I think we’re created to, to contribute in that way, and all in our own different way, right? Because we need all of these various expertises, you know, together, uh, to, to be able to do this. But it’s just a really great way to be able to multiply that impact in a way that you know, I mentioned that my first book went out to about 5,000 people in the first week. I couldn’t talk to 5,000 people in a year.
MARK WRIGHT 56:44
Yeah. Yep. You know, helping develop and find that unique contribution. I think that’s such a cool, cool way to redeem work. Well, Steve Gordon, this has been so much fun. Thanks for spending time with us on the BEATS WORKING podcast. If people want to get ahold of you, what’s the best way?
STEVE GORDON 57:01
Well, Mark, what I would love to do, if it’s okay with you, I’d love to give everybody that’s listening a copy of The Million Dollar Book.
MARK WRIGHT 57:08
Oh my gosh. Fantastic.
STEVE GORDON 57:11
So, um, we’ve set up a webpage. If folks go to milliondollarauthor.io/BEATS WORKING. They’ll be able to download a copy of the book completely free. Uh, we’ll have some other resources up there for them that’ll help them. And, um, I just want to help people get, get their book out. Um, I know it’ll do such tremendous things in the world.
MARK WRIGHT 57:35
Super generous, Steve. Thank you so much. And, uh, I know we’ll be in touch. Uh, I have no doubt our paths are going to cross again, but, uh, man, keep up the great work. And it’s been such a pleasure spending some time with you.
STEVE GORDON 57:47
Thanks so much, Mark.
MARK WRIGHT 57:49
I’m Mark Wright, thanks for listening to BEATS WORKING, part of the WORKP2P family. New episodes drop every Monday. And if you’ve enjoyed the conversation, subscribe, rate, and review this podcast. Special thanks to show producer and web editor Tamar Medford. In the coming weeks, you’ll hear from our Contributors Corner and Sidekick Sessions. Join us next week for another episode of BEATS WORKING, where we are winning the game of work.